Multiplication: Modernity, Mass Culture, Gender in the United States, 1910-1933

这个项目探索了20世纪初的美国大众文化，并密切关注其跨大西洋的循环和影响。它回应了这样一个事实，即20世纪10年代和20年代的大型舞蹈时装剧对整个工业现代性具有象征意义。这些超有组织的娱乐形式和泰勒化的大规模生产体系之间的对应是显而易见的，并构成了从1910年代开始的许多大众文化理论方法的恰当起点，可以说，最终形成了西格弗里德·克拉考尔在1927年提出的令人信服的“大众装饰”概念。克拉考尔和其他评论家在前后被认为是现代性的核心标志的东西，在这个项目中被称为乘法美学。这意味着，大众文化不再主要是转型的引擎，也不是竞标的引擎，它无疑也是如此，而是专注于一种似乎纯粹机械和模仿性的大众文化生产力。与最近强调多元化和多样性为其核心原则的开创性大众文化理论(Makropoulus)不同，该项目旨在评估和重新评估倍增的创造潜力。在这样做的同时，它也回应了这样一种倾向，即把‘好的’(颠覆性的、多样化的、多元化的)流行文化和‘坏的’(重复的、盲目的、自满的)大众文化并列在一起，并默默地将这种并列与性别属性并列在一起。值得注意的是，乘法连同随之而来的过度、积累和增长(而不是进步)因素，往往被描述为一种女性化的品质。它延续了大众文化“作为女性”的评价，同时也使之复杂化(惠森)。该项目将分成三个子项目。SP1将关注在重叠的综艺和电影创作领域中倍增美学的表现，并密切求助于女性机构--舞者、演员、导演、编剧和角色，她们都以实施和适当的倍增技术的方式利用装饰性。SP2将探讨现代主义身体文化的多重机构，并从它们在体育、体操和舞蹈领域的展开到现代主义实验性诗歌的展开。SP3将一方面利用摄影和图形文化中的身体图像的唤起潜力，另一方面利用现代主义剪贴簿的媒介。所有三个子项目都将探索到目前为止很少受到学术关注的材料，并将这些读物与对20世纪初大众文化批评的开创性文本的重新评估联系起来。

This project explores US-American mass culture of the early 20th century with a close attention to its trans-Atlantic circulation and repercussions. It responds to the fact that the big dance revues of the 1910s and 20s gained emblematic significance for industrial modernity at large. The correspondences between these hyper-organized entertainment formats and the system of Taylorized mass-production are obvious, and constituted an apt point of departure for numerous theoretical approaches to mass culture from the 1910s onward, culminating, arguably, in Siegfried Kracauer’s compelling concept of the ‘mass ornament’ formulated in 1927. What Kracauer and other critics before and after recognized as a core signature of modernity, is addressed by this project as the aesthetics of multiplication. This means to regard mass culture not primarily as the engine of transformation and outbidding that it indubitably also is, but to focus on a mass-cultural productivity that seems purely mechanical and imitative. In contrast to seminal recent theories of mass culture that emphasized pluralization and diversity as its core principles (Makropoulus), this project aims to valorize and reassess the creative potential of multiplication. In doing so, it also responds to the tendency to juxtapose a ‘good’ (subversive, diverse, plural) popular culture and a ‘bad’ (repetitive, mindless, complacent) mass culture and to tacitly assign this juxtaposition with gendered attributes. Significantly, together with its attendant factors of excess, accrual, and growth (rather than progress), multiplication is often characterized as a feminized quality. It perpetuates and simultaneously complicates the assessment of mass culture ‘as woman’ (Huyssen). The project will branch out in three subprojects. SP1 will be concerned with the manifestation of the aesthetic of multiplication in the overlapping creative spheres of variety and film in close recourse to female agency—dancers, actors, directors, writers, and characters who all make use of ornamentality in ways that both implement and appropriate techniques of multiplication. SP2 will look into the multiplicatory agency of modernist body cultures and trace them from their unfolding in the arena of sport, gymnastic and dance into modernist experimental poetry. SP3 will engage with the evocative potential of body images in photography and graphic culture on the one hand and the medium of the modernist scrapbook on the other. All three subprojects wil explore material that has up to now been afforded little scholarly attention and correlate these readings with reassessments of seminal texts of mass-cultural criticism of the early 20th century.