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

这个项目探讨了世纪初的美国大众文化，并密切关注其跨大西洋的流通和影响。它回应了这样一个事实，即20世纪10年代和20年代的大型舞蹈讽刺剧对整个工业现代性具有象征意义。这些高度组织化的娱乐形式与泰勒化的大规模生产体系之间的对应关系是显而易见的，并构成了20世纪10年代以来众多大众文化理论方法的恰当出发点，可以说，在齐格弗里德·克拉考尔（Kracauer）于1927年提出的令人信服的“大众装饰”概念中达到了顶峰。克拉考尔和其他批评家在此之前和之后所认识到的现代性的核心标志，在这个项目中被称为增殖美学。这就意味着，大众文化不应该首先被视为变革和超越的引擎（这一点毋庸置疑），而应该关注一种似乎纯粹机械和模仿的大众文化生产力。与强调多元化和多样性作为其核心原则（Makropoulus）的大众文化开创性理论相反，该项目旨在评价和重新评估多元化的创造潜力。在这样做的时候，它也回应了将“好”（颠覆性的，多样的，多元的）流行文化和“坏”（重复的，盲目的，自满的）大众文化并置的趋势，并默认这种并置具有性别属性。重要的是，加上其附带的过剩、积累和增长（而不是进步）等因素，倍增往往被描述为女性化的特征。它使大众文化“作为女性”的评价永久化，同时也使其复杂化（Huyssen）。这个项目将分支为三个分项目。SP1将关注多样性和电影的重叠创作领域中的多元化美学的表现，并密切依赖女性机构-舞蹈演员，演员，导演，作家和角色，他们都以实施和适当的多元化技术的方式利用互补性。SP2将探讨现代主义身体文化的倍增机制，并从它们在体育、体操和舞蹈的竞技场中的展现到现代主义实验诗歌中。SP3将一方面参与摄影和图形文化中身体图像的唤起潜力，另一方面参与现代主义剪贴簿的媒介。所有三个子项目将探索到目前为止还没有得到学术关注的材料，并将这些阅读与对世纪早期大众文化批评的开创性文本的重新评估相关联。

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.