Fredric Jameson on Alexander Kluge's Notes From Ideological Antiquity

As part of our new Radical Thinkers set 12, a collection of 4 classic works of political theory, we've recently republished Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt seminal study of the limits of Habermasian liberalism, Public Sphere and Experience.
Alongside being one of the most influential German theorists of the past 50 years, continuing the Frankfurt School legacy, Kluge is also world renowned filmmaker. His early films were pioneering examples of the New German Cinema movement, and influenced the later generation of German directors of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Margherita von Trotta.
In 2009, Kluge set out to put to film Sergei Eisenstein's plans to produce a film of Marx's Capital. The result was a 9 hour epic entitled News from Ideological Antiquity. To celebrate Kluge's work today we're making a commentary of the film by Fredric Jameson available on the blog.
Marx and Montage
It is always good to have a new Kluge, provided you know what lies in store for you. His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquityâsome nine hours longâis divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. [1] Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisensteinâs 1927â28 project for a film version of Marxâs Capital, whereas in fact only Klugeâs first part deals with this tantalizing matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on Capital, whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a half-year period.[2] And at least some of these people know that he was enthusiastic about Joyceâs Ulysses during much the same time and âplannedâ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies about the Capitalproject as well. Yet if Eisensteinâs notes for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned into ârealââthat is to say, fiction or narrativeâfilms, it is only fair to warn viewers that Klugeâs ârealâ films look more like Eisensteinâs notes.
Many important intellectuals haveâas it were, posthumouslyâendorsed Marxism: one thinks of Derridaâs Spectres of Marx and of Deleuzeâs unrealized Grandeur de Marx, along with any number of more contemporary witnesses to the world crisis (âwe are all socialists nowâ, etc.). Is Klugeâs new film a recommitment of that kind? Is he still a Marxist? Was he ever one? And what would âbeing a Marxistâ mean today? The Anglo-American reader may even wonder how the Germans in general now relate to their great national classic, with rumours of hundreds of Capital reading groups springing up under the auspices of the student wing of the Linkspartei. Kluge says this in the accompanying printed matter: âThe possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished; and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be directly shaped by human consciousnessâ.[3] That Kluge believes in collective pedagogy, however, and in the reappropriation of negative learning processes by positive ones, in what one might call a reorientation of experience by way of a reconstruction of âfeelingsâ (a key or technical term for him): this is evident not only in his interpretive comments on his various films and stories, but also in such massive theoretical volumes as his Geschichte und EigensinnâHistory and Obstinacyâwritten in collaboration with Oskar Negt.
All of these works bear on history; and of few countries can one say that they have lived so much varied history as Germany. Balzacâs work would have been impossible without the extraordinary variety of historical experience encountered by the French, from revolution to world empire, from foreign occupation to economic reconstruction, and not excluding unspeakable suffering and failure along with war crimes and atrocities. Klugeâs stories, or anecdotes, or faits diversâsome thousands of pages of themâdraw on a comparable mass of historical raw material.
But history is something you have to dig up and to dig in: like Klugeâs heroine Gabi Teichert in Die Patriotin, who literally gets out her spade and frantically excavates, scrabbling for clues to the past in bones and potsherds. And not necessarily in vain: in another film, the knee of a German soldierâs skeleton testifies and tells some âusefulâ war stories. Indeed, News from Ideological Antiquity has its own share of zany or even idiotic momentsâa pair of actors reading Marxâs incomprehensible prose aloud and in unison to one another, a DDR instructor explaining âliquidityâ to a recalcitrant pupil, and even a kind of concluding satyr play in which the (rather tiresome) comedian Helge Schneider plays a variety of Marx-inspired roles, complete with wigs, false beards and other circus paraphernalia. For as Kluge tells us, âwe must let Till Eulenspiegel pass across Marx and Eisenstein both, in order to create a confusion allowing knowledge and emotions to be combined together in new waysâ. [4]
Meanwhile, on a less jocular level, we confront a sometimes interminable series of talking headsâEnzensberger, Sloterdijk, Dietmar Dath, Negt and other authoritiesâas they confront the typical Kluge interview, part prompting, part leading questions, part cross-examining his own witnesses. We glimpse a weird project of Werner Schroeter, in which Wagnerâs Tristan and Isolde is acted out through the conflict on the bridge in Battleship Potemkin (âthe rebirth of Tristan out of the spirit of Potemkinâ); along with excerpts from operas by Luigi Nono and Max Brand, not to speak of the classics. We see a short by Tom Tykwer on the humanization of objects, sequences on the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and, on a lighter note, an evening with Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Many film clips and stills are interpolated, mostly from the silent period, and dramatic graphics from both Marxian and Eisensteinian texts make it clear that the intertitles of the silent period could be electrifying indeed, if resurrected in bold colour and dramatic typography. It is Klugeâs own version of the Eisensteinian âmontage of attractionsâ (this filmmaker might say âof feelingsâ). Viewers unaccustomed to his practices may well find this an unbelievable hodge-podge. But they too can eventually learn to navigate this prodigious site of excavation: not yet a full-fledged and professionally organized museum, this is an immense dig, with all kinds of people, amateur and specialist alike, milling around in various states of activity, some mopping their brows or eating a sandwich, others lying full-length on the ground in order to brush dirt from a jawbone, still others sorting various items into the appropriate boxes on tables sheltered by a tent, if not taking a nap or lecturing a novice, treading a narrow path so as not to step on the evidence. It is our first contact with ideological antiquity.
Eisensteinâs version
Among the more recognizable fragments is, to be sure, that ânew work on a libretto by Karl Marxâ, the âfilm treatiseâ which was supposedly Eisensteinâs next project after October, the alleged film ofCapital. As always, Eisensteinâs notes are so many reflexions on his own practice, past and future; characteristically, they re-read his own work as a progression of forms, like progress in scientific experimentation. There is no point leaving this narcissism unacknowledgedâit is the source of much of the pedagogical and didactic excitement and enthusiasm of his writings; but we do not necessarily have to accept his own assessments of his career, especially since they varied greatly throughout his life.
Here, for example, he will read his work in terms of abstraction: as the progressive conquest of abstraction from Potemkin through October to the current project. (We might have preferred him to characterize it as the enlargement of his filmic conquest of the concrete to include abstraction, but never mind.) Predictably, we move from the rising lions in Potemkin to that âtreatise on deityâ which is the icons/idols sequence in October. [5] These moments are then to be seen as essay-like vertical interruptions in a horizontal narrative; and this is precisely why the EisensteinâJoyce discussion is irrelevant here.
Commentatorsâand not only Kluge himselfâhave fastened on the jotting, âa day in a manâs lifeâ as the evidence for believing Eisenstein to have imagined a plot sequence like that of Joyceâs Bloomsday. [6] Later on, they note the addition of a second âplot lineâ, that of social reproduction and âthe âhouse-wifely virtuesâ of a German workerâs wifeâ, along with the reminder: âthroughout the entire picture the wife cooks soup for her returning husbandâ, the unspecified âmanâ of the earlier sequence having logically enough become a worker. This alleged routine cross-cuttingâto which one should probably add the day in the life of a capitalist or a merchantâis being ruminated at the very same historical moment when, as Annette Michelson points out, Dziga Vertov is filming Man with a Movie Camera. [7]
It is true: âJoyce may be helpful for my purposeâ, notes Eisenstein. But what follows is utterly different from the âday in the life ofâ formula. For Eisenstein adds: âfrom a bowl of soup to the British vessels sunk by Englandâ. [8] What has happened is that we have forgotten the presence, inUlysses, of chapters stylistically quite different from the dayâs routine format. But Eisenstein has not: âIn Joyceâs Ulysses there is a remarkable chapter of this kind, written in the manner of a scholastic catechism. Questions are asked and answers givenâ. [9] But what is he referring to when he says, âof this kindâ?
It is clear that Kluge already knows the answer, for in his filmic discussion of the notes, the pot of soup has become a water kettle, boiling away and whistling: the image recurs at several moments in the exposition (Eisensteinâs notes projected in graphics on the intertitles), in such a way that this plain object is âabstractedâ into the very symbol of energy. It boils impatiently, vehemently it demands to be used, to be harnessed, it is either the whistling signal for work, for work stoppage, for strikes, or else the motor-power of a whole factory, a machine for future production . . . Meanwhile, this is the very essence of the language of silent film, by insistence and repetition to transform their objects into larger-than-life symbols; a procedure intimately related to the close-up. But this is also what Joyce does in the catechism chapter; and Ulyssesâs first great affirmation, the first thunderous âyesâ, comes here and not in Mollyâs closing words: it is the primal force of water streaming from the reservoir into Dublin and eventually finding its way indomitably to Bloomâs faucet. [10] (In Eisenstein the equivalent would be the milk separator of The General Line.)
To read the rest of the artlcle visit the NLR website.