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DRAFT PAPER NOT FOR CITATION OR QUOTATION
When the Medium Became the Message:
Kandinsky, Scheerbart and the Invention of Media Politics
Todd Cronan
[slide] This is a graphic of the economic context for my discussion today and it speaks to what I take to be
the profound disconnection between the avant-garde aesthetic-politics I will describe here and the actual
politics of the moment. The top 1% income share remained remarkably stable and remarkably high in
Germany between the years 1890 and 1914 at around 17% (with the top 10% around 37-39%). (By
comparison, the US in these years held roughly the same averages. And if we compare it with the US
today we are just above that number!) Beginning in 1915 things changed dramatically with the top 1%
taking between 19.5 and around 22.5% in 1919. And then the bottom fell out (or rather the top fell out)
and between 1925-1933 the top 1% saw their income share drop to 11%. (By comparsion today,
Germany’s top 1% stands at around 10% and ours around 19%, this near doubling has been consistent
since around 1985.) Part of my point is to gesture how this disconnect defines something like the
contemporary period but that it was fully emergent in the modern period and finds its aesthetic-political
expression in now celebrated writers like Walter Benjamin and artists like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, who I
come to at the end of my discussion.
[slide] Wassily Kandinsky contributed three texts to the Blaue Reiter Almanac of 1912, including
a major theoretical statement “On the Question of Form” [Über die Formfrage].1 The “Question of Form”
was intended to accompany and continue the line of argument raised a few months earlier in On the
Spiritual in Art and to provide more concrete examples for the broader theoretical claims raised there. I
will consider two of those examples, one on the difference between letters and lines and the other on a
related account of the difference between a dash and a mark and then turn to the wider response to
Kandinsky’s claims and their unremarked political implications. Kandinsky held the “Question of Form”
in high regard, referring back to it in his later writings more frequently than any other of his texts
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including On the Spiritual in Art. He also produced an alternate version of the essay for Russian readers
in 1919 called “Little Articles on Big Questions.”
The question raised in the title was summarily answered by the author: “The question of form
does not exist.” Why? Because it is “not form (material) that is of…importance, but content (spirit).” Form
is nothing but the “external expression of inner content” and for every artist and every group, the inner
content is different. For every artist and every group “their own form is the best, since it best incorporates
what they are obliged to communicate.” Because all forms are equally valid expressions of different inner
contents Kandinsky was in a position to resolve the major stylistic debate between realism and
abstraction. Or rather there was no debate to be had, because the forms of realism and abstraction were
identical in their inner content. It is “of absolutely no significance whether the artist uses a real or an
abstract form. For both forms are internally the same.” Beyond every formal difference there remains a
single expressive content: “to hear the whole world just as it is.” To hear the world “as it is” should key
us to the special nature of Kandinsky’s Expressionism. Kandinsky’s account at once privileges the artist
as the necessary vehicle of the expressive life of things, and as ultimately superfluous as an empty vessel
for the spirit.2 And while Kandinsky rarely evinces any interest in the artist’s creative intentions he is
centrally concerned with how works of art induce a broad range of affective experiences in the beholder.3
When asked whether he painted his inner life Kandinsky snapped back that the “desires of the artist…are
irrelevant….I have no desire to paint my own psychic states, since I am firmly convinced that they cannot
be of any interest or concern to others….It is preferable that people I do not know should plaster my
[artistic] stall with all kinds of misleading labels{, thus providing new sources of experience.}” 4 Analyzing
the nature of these experiences was his basic theoretical task.
[slide] At the center of “On the Question of Form” Kandinsky provided a set of brilliant and
confounding examples to explain the nature of spiritual expression based on the study of alphabetic
letters and grammatical marks. He asked the reader to consider the text he or she was reading not as a
matter of signification—what do these letters, as part of a word, mean—but rather as a thing. Here is
Kandinsky: “If the reader of these lines looks at one of the letters with unaccustomed eyes, that is, not as a
sign [Zeichen] for a part of a word, but as a thing [Ding], then he will see in this letter, apart from the
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practical purpose created by man…another bodily form, which independently produces a specific
external and internal impression.” Kandinsky is drawing a formative distinction between signs that bear
meaning and those that make an impression or impact, suggesting how a particular arrangement of lines
and colors function both on the level signifying sense and in terms of their physical and psychological
impression on the reader.
Continuing the example he shows that there are two autonomous elements in every letter. There
is the letter’s “overall appearance,” which can be variously characterized as “cheerful,” “mournful,”
“striving,” “defiant,” “ostentatious,” “and so on.” But beyond this overall sense of the letter, there are the
letter’s individual lines, which are “bent this way or that.” These individual lines also produce a specific
“internal impression” such as cheerful, mournful, striving, defiant, ostentatious, and so on.
Kandinsky interrupts the discourse on letters with a crucial and perplexing proviso. He warns
the reader not to worry that “this letter will affect one person in one way, another person in another.”
“Every being” [Wesen], he observes, “will produce a different effect upon different people.” So while I
might see the letter “K” as defiant with a hint of remorse, you might see the same letter as jaunty but
insincere. And the same problem emerges in terms of the beholder’s response to a picture. Every picture,
when construed as a thing and not as a signifying entity, will inevitably “produce a different effect upon
different people.” Why? Because if what we’re responding to when looking at pictures are lines and
colors “with their own life,” a life beyond what the artist intended them to mean, so too does every
viewing body contain a life independent of every other. What makes my body mine is that it responds
differently from yours when looking at the same set of lines and colors. My body has a particular size,
shape, viewpoint, history and memory, that constitutively differs from every other one, and because of
this variety of facts I experience “K”s (or pictorial compositions) differently from any other viewer.
[slide] At this point in the text Kandinsky drops the thought but picks it up in his second
contribution to the Blaue Reiter Almanac, “On Stage Composition.” Here, Kandinsky’s aim is to show
how artists instinctively know when they have achieved perfect form for their inner content. They feel an
undeniable vibration in their soul. The artist’s task is to relay that vibration to the beholder. He reiterates
one of his basic musical metaphors from On the Spiritual in Art: “Color is the keyboard. The eye is the
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hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings….The artist is the hand which, by playing on this or
that key [i.e., form], affects the human soul in this or that way.” 5 The vibration that occurs in the artist,
once it finds its proper material form, causes “a virtually identical vibration in the receiving soul.” But
there’s a problem. Because the viewer’s soul has many strings, when the hammer falls it can set off
unintended notes. This imprecise response he describes as the “excitation of ‘Fantasy’ in the receiver, who
continues to exert his creative activity upon the work.” The danger of this kind of “collaboration” or
“Mitwirkung” between artist and viewer is that the viewer’s reactions can “drown the original sound” to
such a degree that “there are people who are made to cry when they hear ‘cheerful’ music, and vice
versa.” But even if the “individual effects of a work of art become more or less strongly colored in the
case of different receiving subjects” that does not mean that the “original sound is destroyed.” The
original sound continues to “live and work…imperceptibly” on the beholder and he assures the reader
that over time “every work is correctly ‘understood’” and that in “every man without exception a
vibration [is produced] that is at bottom identical to that of the artist.” Excess nervous vibration will
slowly die away and the pure tone will ring out unaltered by the viewer’s particular affective response.
[slide] But Kandinsky had an even larger problem to contend with than the imprecision of the
artistic hammer on the soul. Our affect system responds to everything in the environment. In his 1911
query “Whither the ‘New’ Art?,” he described the “world” as something that “resounds by tone, color,
and line.” Here is the key phrase: “Every object, regardless if it is natural or made by human hands is a
being” that bears “its own effect…‘Nature,’ i.e., the ever-changing external environment of man,
continually sets the strings of the piano (the soul) in vibration, by means of the keys (objects).” We are, he
says, “constantly subject to psychological effects.” Artworks, like any natural object, generate unlimited
affective responses. For Kandinsky, these effects were essential to the expressive life of art—as though a
work of art was an intense and concentrated instance of generalized affects—but he also feared that
treating a work of art like a natural thing would make its expressiveness so various as to make it empty. 6
Kandinsky’s solution was to see how individuated responses were “incidental,” while shared
responses were essential. He provides an example in his account of letters. While it is the case that the
individual lines that comprise a letter might be “cheerful,” the whole letter can nonetheless register as
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“mournful.” Which is to say, the first element, the overall appearance of the letter, will always subsume
the second, the bent or straight lines that make up the letter. It is the individual lines that stimulate
individuated affect response and those responses are inevitably sublated into the experience of the full
letter. Just as individual response is subordinated to the shared collective response of beholders, so “such
a subordination of individual elements” of line and color occurs in every “drawing, sketch, and picture.”
What should be clear is that while Kandinsky emphatically wants to erase those individuated affects
generated by particular viewing bodies, he just as emphatically wants to preserve those affects which are
not individuated but are shared by bodies in general. So while a singular affect is “incidental,” a shared
one is the key to the “inner life of forms.” At no point does Kandinsky explore another option: that those
beholder responses, whether individual or shared, are not what constitute the work’s meaning. In other
words, Kandinsky is committed from first to last to an account of the work of art as something generated
by the beholder’s response, however broadly conceived.7
At the center of Kandinsky’s aesthetics lie two core issues: on one hand, an account of line and
color as expressive entities, as “beings with their own life”; on the other hand, an ongoing and insistent
emphasis on the beholder and their response to the work of art. John Golding has helpfully formulated
Kandinsky’s dual commitments: for Kandinsky lines and colors are “nouns, objects, substances in their
own right,” while, on the other hand, “Kandinsky’s consciousness of the role of the spectator…separates
him sharply from Mondrian and Malevich.” Mondrian and Malevich’s shared hostility or indifference to
the spectator has not been adequately recognized in the literature. Criticizing Arnold Schoenberg’s Three
Piano Pieces Mondrian said, “‘Silence’ should not exist in the new music. It is a ‘voice’ immediately filled
by the listener’s individuality….The new spirit demands that one should always establish an image
unweakened by time in music or by space in painting.” And Malevich made an ontological distinction
between works open to the changing temporality of viewer response, and those that exist out of time:
“Each thing determined by social conditions is temporal, but works arising from sensations of art are
outside time….; regardless of the changes in social life works of art are immutable.” For Kandinsky, it is
the exact reverse: what is immutable is the socially generated affective response, while the form of the
work of art is mobile and transitory.
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At the conclusion to his discourse on letters Kandinsky drew together the two sides of his project.
“Only one thing is of importance,” he affirmed, “that the letter has an effect.” The effect is twofold. On
one hand, a letter “produces an effect as a sign having a particular purpose,” on the other hand, it
“produces an effect” not as a form but as an “inner sound,” which is “completely independent” of the
form. He underscores the latter point by stating unequivocally that signification and the “inner sound”
are unrelated. There are two competing and ontologically separate “meanings” occurring in every work
of art. And this aesthetic doubling mirrors the even more basic doubling of meaning that exists within
every object in the world. He asks the reader to “look at any object he pleases on his table, even if it is
only a cigar butt [in an ashtray].” Within the cigar butt “the reader will notice at once the same two effects
of body and soul, form and content.” With the right attitude even the cigar butt tells us that we live in “a
cosmos of spiritually affective beings.”8 It is this question of attitude towards the thing that captures the
fundamental commitment of the affective politics that emerges out of Kandinsky’s art and writings.
But in what way is the “inner sound” of a thing, an object’s “own material life”—something that
is by definition without signification—a meaning? Put another way, if it is not the artist intending to
mean something by his forms, but the points, lines, colors and planes that “bear agency,” then “meaning”
becomes a rather extravagant matter of lines, colors, cigar butts, rocks, trees, and bodies expressing
themselves in ways that supplant any human mode of meaning-making (at this point you can begin to
see the brilliance of the Kandinsky project in its capacity to be a media theory, an object-oriented ontology
and an affect theory all at once, and to show the identity of all their claims). Because any and everything
are potentially meaningful, Kandinsky insists on meaning as a matter of one’s “attitude” to the world,
one that crucially requires that we give up the attempt to understand, express or communicate with one
another and rather to respond affectively to the vibrations generated by people and things. If we can
inhabit the right attitude toward people and things, an attitude responsive to the “inner life” of things,
the problem of communication is solved by bypassing it entirely.
[slide] Following on from his discussion of the letter, Kandinsky enters into a related account of
the abstract components of picture making, this time based on the difference between a grammatical
mark and a material one. The example bears on the ontological difference, as he sees it, between a dash,
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which helps to articulate meaning, and a mark, which does not. A dash, he says, “used in the right
place—as here—is a line that has a practical and purposive significance.” He then wonders what would
happen if we lengthen the line a little? If it appears in the same place, both the “sense of line” and “its
significance is retained.” And yet, he adds, its sense is subtly different. The surplus of lineness provides it
with an “indefinable Färbung” and its grammatical significance is slowly put in doubt. What happens
then, he asks, if a dash is put in the wrong place, “(as in this—instance)”? At this point, the mark loses its
strictly practical purpose—it no longer functions as an obvious grammatical character—but it is also not
purely expressive, because it is still framed by a discursive context. “As long as this or that line remains in
a book,” he explains, “the practical or intentional element cannot be definitely excluded.” Once the dash
has been released from its intentional setting, as something that means, or rather allows meaning to
emerge in a text, then its expressive purpose surges into view. How, then, can a signifying dash become a
non-signifying mark? He explains: “Let us put a line in a setting that is able to avoid completely the
practical-purposive” and place it on a canvas. It is at this point, when the dash becomes a mark—as it
emerges on a canvas and not in a book—that “the spectator, no longer the reader” is forced to take a
different attitude toward the line than the one solicited when he encountered it in a discursive setting.9
So what does it mean to respond to a work as a spectator and not as a reader? What it does not
mean, is that we respond to an artist’s expressive intentions, even if those intentions remain outside the
constraints of practical, discursive communication and are better suited to lines and colors on a canvas.
When the reader becomes a spectator, his “soul is ready to experience the pure, inner sound of line,”
what he further defines as “a line that functions as a thing…that leads its own material life.” Kandinsky
assumes that we are always and at the same time readers and spectators of the world, but those two
things occur along separate ontological axes. A line, he says, is “just as much a chair, a fountain, a knife, a
fork, etc.” but it is also, like those practical things, a sensory thing with its own inner life.
So what role does the artist play in all this? If lines and forks have their own “material life,” then
what does the artist’s life matter to it? It is the artist’s role to organize, to compose, to form lines into
pictures, to make forks and knives into dinner-settings. Why, we might wonder, don’t these things fall
into their own order, the order they have now as dictated by the benign hand of nature? Nature,
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according to Kandinsky, requires the artist to complete her unfinished compositions. The majority of
mankind is woefully distracted by the changing spectacle of their emotions and by the practical demands
of life; mankind is deafened by noise. “Empty noise is the gravedigger,” he writes in “On Understanding
Art.” Individual beholders are distracted by the noisy play of affects produced by bodies and things
within and around them. We are fixated on those fleeting responses to things, the noise of which prevent
us from hearing the ground bass of the world spirit. For Kandinsky, the difference between artist and
public is unbridgeable: “What for the artist is a very difficult, crucial, and serious matter…is for the
public simply a means of introducing diversity and excitement into a life that is quite alien to art.” 10
Kandinsky was clearly anxious about the appeal to diversity of response as the path to meaning. The
bourgeois beholder was driven by “diversity and excitement,” what he earlier described as the general
problem of affect: every work of art “will affect one person in one way, another person in another.” In
order to avert this potentially abysmal regress of mutually exclusive responses, Kandinsky sought out
more permanent and lasting, what he construed as deeper forms of expressive communication. If
Kandinsky was unsatisfied with an art founded on the “diversity” of affect, then he looked to unchanging
affects that were putatively verified by contemporary science. It was there, at the crossroads of “emotion
and science,” that Kandinsky formulated his postwar aesthetic project. But what Kandinsky simply could
not imagine was a form of expression, what is called autonomy, which took no account of the beholder’s
response as the source of its meaning.
As I noted earlier, Kandinsky published a condensed and revised version of the “On the
Question of Form” for a Russian audience in 1919 and other aspects of it found their way into his 1920
“Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture.” [slide] Before I come to the Program, I want to consider a
questionnaire that accompanied its publication. The questionnaire reveals something of the literalism
with which Kandinsky pursued the study of affective response both in Russia and at the Bauhaus in the
1920s where affect analysis was first canonized as the solution to a wide range of aesthetic, and more
significantly, political problems. Here, Kandinsky expanded the discussion of letters and lines to include
an account of shape:
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Have you noticed in yourself any kind of feelings (whether pronounced or even undefined) after
contemplating…elementary or complex drawn forms (for example, a point, a straight line, a bent
line, an angular line, a triangle, a square, a circle, a trapezoid, an ellipse, and so forth…)? ...How
does…a triangle seem to you—does it seem to move, and if so, to where, does it seem wittier to
you than a square; is your feeling about the triangle similar to your feeling about a lemon; which
is closer to the singing of a canary—a triangle or a circle; which geometric form is closer to
vulgarity, to talent, to good weather, and so on and so forth. 11
He asks a similar set of questions about color:
which color is more like the singing of a canary, the mooing of a cow, the whistling of the wind,
of a whip or of a human being, [which color is more like] talent, a storm, disgust, and so on.
Of course in a general sense Kandinsky is right to say things like “red is warm” and “blue is cool.” And in
a very general sense, the sense that science can achieve, there is a real but loose correlation between color,
line, medium and affect. It’s so loose and so general as to be uninteresting from the point of view of any
question of artistic meaning. But then again, there’s nothing loose at all about Kandinsky’s vision of the
relation between form and affect and there’s nothing loose about those [slide] scientists today appealing
to the use of fMRIs to understand what happens to you when you look at a Renoir or listen to Katy Perry.
[slide] Kandinsky, like many scientists today, wants to see the correlation between the colors we paint
our walls, and the effects they produce, and the colors that appear in paintings and their effects on
beholders. This would I think explain the general telos toward architecture and film within the Bauhaus
and after. But paintings are not walls. After all, we’re not interpreting the paint color in this room, but we
do in front of a Kandinksy, or at least we should. Kandinsky’s ambivalence affect is reflected in the way
he leads his students to the answers he seeks. Presumably none of his students would have come up with
lemony, canary triangles or purplish whistles of the wind, without the master’s suggestion. Those
suggestions might point to Kandinsky’s lingering but unsustained belief in the centrality of intended,
rather than actual, effects.12
These matters are finally taken up in the 1920 Program. He begins the Program with a seemingly
straightforward assertion of the artist’s aim to produce intended effects: “The purpose of any potential
work of art is to produce some kind of effect on man.”13 If the work is always aimed at the production of
effects, then it seems to follow that artist is thinking about those effects when he makes his work. But
Kandinsky temporarily breaks the logic of his claim when he writes “As he creates the work, [the artist]
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gives no thought to what its effect will be or whether it will have any effect at all.”14 It is difficult to
square this claim about the artist’s indifference to audience response with his primary claim about the
production of effects. The next sentence reiterates the first claim but from the viewer’s perspective: “On
the other hand, we see, hear, perceive a work of art only in order to experience its effect.” It is at this
point that Kandinsky reconciles the competing claims of artist and audience by asserting his more
fundamental commitment to actual effects as the unstable ground upon which intended effects can occur.
The “artist must analyze the viewpoint of how media are reflected in the experience of the person
perceiving the work.” That Kandinsky was confused about his priorities—to both intended and actual
effects, artist and audience—speaks to the complexity of his project, one that could not settle, at least not
for long, on either actual or intended effects as the exclusive source of meaning. It was a confusion that
was quickly cleared up by his colleagues and rivals at the Bauhaus who clarified the relation between art
and audience and who turned Kandinsky’s poetics of medium into a medial politics that remains in force
today.15
The core of that Bauhaus project emerges with Kandinsky’s claim in the Institute Program that
“to investigate any art in theoretical terms, we must use the analysis of the media of this art as a point of
departure….We know, for example, the powerful and invariable effect of different colors (proven by
experiment): red (in a color bath) increases the activity of the heart, which is expressed, in turn, by the
acceleration of the pulse; blue, however, can lead to partial paralysis. Facts such as these,” he concludes,
“have great importance for art.” (It bears noticing that these ideas are the same as those that appeared ten
years earlier in On the Spiritual in Art, only now authorized by “science.” There he spoke of the
“facts…[that] prove that color contains within itself a little-studied but enormous power, which can
influence the entire human body as a physical organism….In general, therefore, color is a means of
exerting a direct influence upon the soul.”16) Marshalling these “facts” in order to produce dependable
and reliable affective responses was at the center of the Bauhaus mission. And what Walter Gropius,
Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin all share is a view about the connection between media and affect.
Moreover, they share a view about the irrelevance of the artist’s intentions outside of their capacity to
master these affects and deploy them in the production of political results.
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[slide] Published in Der Sturm in 1914, Bruno Taut’s Expressionist manifesto “A Necessity”
[“Eine Notwendigkeit”] whose title is meant to evoke Kandinsky’s “inner necessity,” calls for a new form
of building that is “not only architecture, but in which everything—painting and sculpture—all together
will form great architecture and wherein architecture once again merges with the other arts.”17 The new
artist “has to incorporate all possible structural forms into his work just as we find them expressed
in…the compositions of Kandinsky.” To draw the arts together and break down the traditional
boundaries between them was of course one of the primary aims of the Bauhaus. One of those old
boundaries was the belief in the artist as agent of social improvement. It is only when “every thought of
social intentions” are removed from the work that the new collective art can arise. But it’s not just that
Taut rejected social intentions, he was disinterested in any intentions beyond those generated by media.
[slide] Paul Scheerbart, in his influential treatise on Glass Architecture (1914), dedicated to Taut,
and which became a basic text for the Bauhaus generation, made the equation between material
properties and political results absolutely clear. The famous opening section of the book entitled
“Environment and its influence on the development of culture” announces the key claim of Scheerbart’s
medial politics:
In order to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced, whether we like it or not, to change
our architecture. And this will be possible only if we free the rooms in which we live of their
enclosed character. This, however, we can only do by introducing a glass architecture, which
admits the light of the sun, of the moon, and of the stars into the rooms…through as many walls
as feasible, these to consist entirely of glass—of colored glass. The new environment, which we
thus create, must bring us a new culture.18
Scheerbart’s equation of culture and glass rests on the prior assumption that “social intentions,” or even
what an artist attempts to express with or through glass, are insufficient to generate cultural change.
Benjamin followed Scheerbart when he described the “glass-culture” of modernity. This is a standard
claim of media studies and versions of it range around film, television, video, internet, twitter or, more
generally, screen cultures. For McLuhan or Kittler just as much for Scheerbart, the point is to say that the
medium produces the person. According to Scheerbart, “A person who daily sets his eyes on the
splendors of glass cannot do wicked deeds.”19 [slide] The idea was further literalized with Taut’s use of
Scheerbart’s phrase “Colored glass destroys hatred” inscribed along the entablature of the 1914 Glass
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Pavilion at the Cologne Werkbund exhibition. Taut also put the matter in reverse: “Stone houses make
stone hearts.”20 Or in Scheerbart’s phrase (it also appeared at the Pavilion): “Brick culture can only do us
harm.” It is the culture of materials that produces the human culture that inhabits it. Adolph Behne made
the point in more extreme terms in the first major article on Taut. Speaking of Taut’s early functional
work Behne observed how “Every fulfilled function has become for Taut a lever to obtain a new man. The
inhabitants have everything at hand and the architect has the inhabitants in his hand through
functionality. All art is ultimately human sculpting [Menschenbildnerei]. Architecture is simply the
strongest and most visible”—the latter claim will of course emerge as a central one made about film. By
arranging his materials in specific ways the architect is able to “sculpt” the unaware inhabitant by virtue
of the affects stored within his media. [slide] I want to at least gesture here to the current high status of
Scheerbart and Taut’s work and writings in contemporary art. Here are a range of projects—[slide] Josiah
McElheny’s being the most high profile—which explicitly situate themselves in dialogue with Scheerbart
and Taut’s glass architectural ideals. Artist Robert Indiana sums up the basic import of Scheerbart’s
project: as a “utopian artist, Scheerbart was most fiercely concerned with making the case that social
reality and its outcomes are primarily determined by the constructed environment.”21
The human sculpting potential of media was literalized by Scheerbart in his aversion to what he
thought to be the contagious qualities of brick. “Brick becomes rotten….It produces moldiness....In the
vaults of brick houses the air is impregnated with these bacilli: the architecture of glass has no need of
vaults.” [slide] Scheerbart and Taut’s brick-phobia was immortalized in the saying, penned by Heinrich
Zille and then quoted by Moholy-Nagy, Adolf Behne, and Richard Neutra that “You can kill a man with a
dwelling just as surely as with an axe.” It is an idea further literalized in Mies van der Rohe’s 1922 Glass
Skyscraper Project where he positions the deadening brick structures as huddled around the pristine
glass structure, as though gasping for breath from the life-generative light reflected off the towering glass
surfaces. For Mies too, at least at this early moment in his career, the morally advantageous or deleterious
effects of brick or glass were not a product of the architect’s intention but rather a set of facts inherent in
the materials themselves which were arranged by the architect. While the architect orders the materials,
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he does not fundamentally alter their nature; rather he allows his materials to be what they are, he
releases the trapped energies stored within them.22
So what happens when there’s an actual shortage of materials? Material shortages during World
War I made even Taut’s counterfactual utopia at the Cologne exhibition seem a distant fantasy. [slide]
Taut channeled his energies during the war into writing a series of extraordinary treatises, the second of
which Alpine Architecture, was conceived as an homage to Scheerbart, who died in the fall of 1915.
Divided into five parts Alpine Architecture comprises a sequence of drawings of utopian structures built
among mountain landscapes. With the decline in architectural production Taut shifted his emphasis
away from master architects and toward a Gothicized Volk who were able to generate an architecture
from an irrepressible need to build. This shift from architect to Volk, also involved a rhetorical shift in
Taut’s materialism. While Taut retained the belief in materials to generate subjectivity he added to that
object-based materialism a corresponding materialism of labor. Building the alpine cathedrals requires all
of the efforts of humanity. “The Impossible is so seldom required of Man,” he cites Goethe as saying.
“The costs [for building these new Alpine cathedrals] will be colossal…and what sacrifices [will be
required of all]!” But unlike the sacrifices that sustained the war, these architectural forms were not made
in the name of “power, murder and wretchedness.” Works made without regard for profit produce,
through the material act of labor, a society that has no need for profit. Alternately, making architecture
for profit, or any practical purpose, leads to a violent society. “To concentrate upon practical matters is
boring,” Taut reflected. “Children who are bored, fight—and nations make war, i.e., they murder, lie,
steal—therefore, architectural projects are of supreme importance!”23 [slide] Taut’s most explicit
statement of his aims appears in the caption to plate 16 of Part 3 of Alpine Architecture. Here he calls on
the “PEOPLE OF EUROPE! FASHION FOR YOURSELVES A HOLY ARTEFACT—BUILD!”:
Yes! Impracticable and without profit! But has the useful ever made us happy?—Profit and even
more profit: Comfort, Convenience—Good Living, Education—knife and fork, railways and
water-closets: and then—guns, bombs, instruments for killing!...Boredom brings quarrelling,
strife and war: lies, robbery, murder and wretchedness, blood flowing from a million
wounds….Preach the socialist idea: “…Get organized! and you can all live well, all be well
educated and at peace!”—As long as there are no tasks to be done your preaching will echo
emptily….Harness the masses—for a gigantic task….A task whose completion can be felt to have
meaning for all....—Boredom disappears and with it strife, politics and the evil specter of
War....There will be no more need to speak of Peace when there is no more War. 24
14
Utopia through work, work sets one free. This is what Rosemarie Bletter has described as a kind of
“occupational therapy”; by averting boredom work averts war and work itself emerges as a “living
symbol of peaceful social cooperation.”25
Taut, like others in his generation, presents a special and categorical blend of optimism and
pessimism. He is pessimistic about the fate of humans to alter their situation by virtue of their actions
(“social intentions” are inherently reactionary), and optimistic about the combined power of media and
all-consuming labor to make the changes that human agents fail to bring about. It’s important to see that
architectural design, or the traditional problem of form, has nothing to do with Taut’s materialism.
Consider, for instance, the seemingly central debate about function. If Taut came to see in 1929 that “The
first and foremost point at issue in any building should be how to attain the uttermost utility”—that is, he
came around to the exact opposite position from his wartime work about function—then it’s important to
see how his view of labor and materiality doesn’t change in the least. Far from tempering his view of the
affective and subject-producing nature of media, [slide] in Modern Architecture of 1929 Taut reiterates
the claim, now within a strictly functionalist context:
If everything is founded on sound efficiency, this efficiency itself, or rather its utility will form its
own aesthetic law....The architect who achieves this task becomes the creator of an ethical and
social character; the people who use the building for any purpose, will, through the structure of
the house, be brought to a better behavior in their mutual dealings and relationship with each
other. Thus architecture becomes the creator of new social observances. 26
Although I cannot elaborate this point here, I would suggest that Taut’s functionalism here is of an
entirely different order from the seemingly related projects of Le Corbusier or J. J. P. Oud, but not Mies,
Gropius or Moholy-Nagy, because for Taut, functionalism was never a matter of either structural clarity
or beautiful design, but rather a commitment to function as a matter of generating subjectivities through
media.
How should we describe Scheerbart and Taut’s vision of the political? This is of course the core
question Benjamin raises in his unfinished book on Scheerbart entitled “The True Politician.” As Taut
sees it, the problem with contemporary society is that it is obsessed with Gemütlichkeit. Railways and
bathrooms, education and hospitals, mark a society not only bored with itself, but, as though out of sheer
15
boredom, at war with one another. We “should not call it architecture,” Taut writes “to provide a
thousand useful things, homes, offices, railroad stations, market halls, schools, water towers, gas tanks,
fire stations, factories, and the like.”27 [slide] The stakes of Taut’s psychological or attitudinal socialism
are made explicit in The City Crown (1919), a text which inspired many of the basic claims of Gropius’s
Bauhaus program of a few months later. Here is Taut:
Both the poor and rich follow a word that resonates everywhere and promises a new form of
Christianity: Socialism….Socialism, in its non-political sense, means freedom from every form of
authority as a simple, ordinary connection between people and it bridges any gap between
fighting classes and nations to unite humanity. If one philosophy can crown the city of today, it is
an expression of these thoughts.28
Let me be clear that from my perspective, Taut’s real utopia was not glass cathedrals on mountaintops
but in imagining the problem of capitalism as the problem of hierarchy and authority of how we see each
other, to see capitalism as a matter of domination rather than exploitation. To bridge the “gap between
fighting classes” one need only make an appeal to man’s innate resistance to power and authority. It was
Scheerbart’s ideal, cited by Taut, to see “Kings walk with beggar-men…artisans with the men of
learning.” To break down the spiritual barrier between classes, to have the beggar walk arm in arm with
the king, was Taut’s utopia. [slide] It was also Gropius’. Thus Gropius’ famous call to arms in the
Bauhaus program: “Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an
arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!” Which is to say, neither Kandinsky, nor Scheerbart nor
Taut nor Gropius, nor Moholy had much interest in ridding the world of either kings or beggars. It
wasn’t a matter of rich and poor, but of how the rich and poor treated one another, their attitude toward
one another, a question of tolerance and intolerance, about the “arrogant”—not economic—barriers
between them. For Scheerbart and Taut the problem was class ism, and the solution to that problem was
class respect. Class conflict, apparently, was a bourgeois idea.
Moholy-Nagy drew all the right conclusions in the The New Vision of 1928: “Not only the
working class finds itself in a [sad] position today; all those caught within the mechanism of the present
economic system are, basically, as badly off.” “At best the differences [between rich and poor] are
material ones,” Moholy wistfully explained. Moholy offered his unique brand of anarchist analysis: “The
revolutionist should always remain conscious that the class struggle is, in the last analysis, not about
16
capital, nor the means of production, but actually about the right of the individual to have a satisfying
occupation, a life-work that meets inner needs, a balanced way of life, and a real release of human
energies.” As I am suggesting here, none of these claims should be construed as either Marxist or
Socialist—both of which rely on intending agents—but rather a matter of biological determinism.
Adolf Behne summed up the anti-classist impulse behind the new architecture of affect. For
Behne, the materialism of medium and the materialism of labor are sufficient to rid the world of the
idealism of social reform. Behne describes the new regime in his review of Scheerbart’s Glass
Architecture:
It is not the crazy caprice of a poet that glass architecture will bring a new culture. It is a fact!
New social welfare organizations, hospitals, inventions, or technical innovations and
improvements—these will not bring new culture—but glass architecture will….Building with
glass! This would be the surest method of transforming the European into a human being. 29
If Behne neglects to include “education” among the chief social ills of modernity he did not fail to include
“welfare organizations” and “hospitals” as malign generators of negative affect. In his role as managing
director of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst Behne made clear that they “did not aim to put through small
reforms, calculated for the day, by compromising with officials.”30 Socialism was not a matter of “laws,
paragraphs, force, and regulations.” And while a socialist scheme of government can be “manufactured
with paragraphs” it would be utterly devoid of the essence of socialism. As Gropius put it in his essay for
the Arbeitsrat exhibition of “Unknown Architects,” “ideas die as soon as they become compromises.” (It
is as though Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder of 1920, an attack on the German
commitment to “no compromise,” was written in direct response to the affect politics at the Bauhaus.31
This is a point—the conflict between two avant-garde politics—I obviously cannot develop here, but it is
nonetheless at the center of these concerns.) Gropius insisted on a “clear watershed between dream and
reality, between longing for the stars and everyday labor.” 32 But the real watershed was not between
dream and reality but between two kinds of politics: dreaming as politics and “social intentions.” “Build
in imagination,” Gropius declared, and rather than “permit any compromises” it is preferable to
“accomplish practically nothing.”33 My argument has been that the Expressionist and Bauhaus artists
were never actually satisfied to accomplish nothing. And my aim is not to suggest that uncompromising
17
and imaginative architecture is misguided, but rather the opposite. It is to say that the Bauhaus
generation never really conceived of their forms in imaginary or, autonomous terms. Imaginative or
dream architecture was for Scheerbart, Taut, Behne, Gropius, Moholy and Benjamin an explicit mode of
materialist politics; it changed culture without any set of beliefs or agents having to do it themselves.
Humans, after all, are fallible in ways that media never are.
[slide] Taut made his politics clear when he observed how “One might…see a connection
between the synchronous erection of the Crystal Palace and the Communist manifestoes of Marx and
Engels.” It is also the connection Benjamin saw when he declared that “to live in a glass house is a
revolutionary virtue par excellence.” Glass walls not only figure but materially generate a politically
transparent world. Benjamin describes this virtue as a form of “moral exhibitionism,” one that we “badly
need.”34 The morality he describes here is post-humanist—it is the first to “liquidate the sclerotic liberalmoral-humanistic ideal of freedom”—and like others in his generation, it is one “without any kind of
pragmatic calculation.”35 Benjamin concludes his study of Surrealism with a rhetorical question: “How
are we to imagine an existence oriented solely toward Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, in rooms by Le
Corbusier and Oud?”36 [slide] And while he presupposes the answer negatively, we might have no
trouble imagining that existence at all. It may even be the one we have. Better: there is no correlation at all
between the shape of one’s room and patterns of consumption that occur there, between the glass of one’s
walls or the glass of the camera lens, and the subjects who engage them.
Epilogue
The greater our despair—the closer we are to the gods. The gods want to compel us to
draw ever closer to the grandiose. And the only means they have to achieve this is—
misery. Only misery can give rise to great hopes and great plans for the future.
—Scheerbart, The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention (1910)
In glass we lay our souls and capture yours, they fly to this mystery of creation, which
knows no back or front but sparkles from all sides, ever anew, like moths to a flame. Be
captured! “The more thou art a prisoner, the more wilt thou be freed.” Being captured is
painful. But pain is the creator. Each new creation hurts.
—Bruno Taut (1921)
18
The contemporary literature on Scheerbart—which is amassing at an unprecedented rate, largely under
the impact of Benjamin’s canonization—systematically dodges the problem of violence in his writings.37
To those that find Scheerbart’s unflinching vision of the religious transcendence through pain, a
metaphysics of suffering, unsavory, he will be defended for his humor and fantastic utopian visions. For
those that want to marginalize him as an early representative of science fiction, he is affirmed for his
seriousness, his concrete engagement with contemporary realities.
J. J. P. Oud, writing to Behne in 1921, offered the most sober, if unpersuasive, assessment of the
Scheerbart phenomenon. “I have read Scheerbart’s writings with delight and interest,” Oud told Behne.
“But doesn’t the way Taut uses them exceed their intended meaning? They seem to me an ironic poetic
fantasy that can only be taken metaphorically.” Oud was right to see Taut as someone who took
Scheerbart at his word, stripping it in the process of its humor and fantasy. Then again, Taut’s vision—
the one that shaped some of the basic aims of the Bauhaus and beyond—cannot be so cleanly separated
from Scheerbart’s. As much as one might wish to share Oud’s attitude, to safely store glass alpine
cathedrals on the shelf called “fantasy literature,” it is untenable. It would be safer to say that Scheerbart’s
vision—the identification of media with meaning and skepticism surrounding human meaning-making—
is the one that defines the humanities today.
1
Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” in Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and
Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 235-57.
2 Kandinsky makes clear that what the artist expressed, what emerged from the artist’s “inner necessity,” was
the expression of the world and not the artist’s sense of it or feelings about it (a kind of pseudo-Hegelian
claim). Heinrich Wolfflin was making this point at nearly the same moment as Kandinsky in his introduction to
the Principles of Art History (1915). “Raphael’s pictorial edifices,” Wolfflin explained, “are not...to be attributed
to an intention born of a state of mind: it is rather a question of a representational form of his epoch.” Wolfflin
gives an example to make his point: “French classicism of the seventeenth century rests on another visual basis,
and hence, [even] with a similar intention, necessarily arrives at other results.” Like Wolfflin, Kandinsky’s
work cannot be adequately described as expressionist. Nonetheless, there is some ambiguity around
Kandinsky’s basic aims. There are, for instance, rare instances of more conventional, if still hedging,
expressionist-type claims: “The creator of the work is subject to an exclusive, instinctive, and peremptory
desire to express himself in the form peculiar to his art” (Complete Writings on Art, 457).
3 So when Kandinsky says “inner necessity” the stress securely falls on the necessity, rather than the inner, an
idea made clearer with his claims that the artist is “obliged to communicate” and “forced to give expression.”
4 Kandinsky, “Autobiographical Note,” in Complete Writings on Art, 345.
5 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 160.
6 After raising the specter of open-ended beholder responsiveness, Kandinsky attempted to close it down by
declaring the beholder’s individuated response “incidental” to the work’s primary effects.
7 The beholder’s response not only mattered to Kandinsky, it was identical with the work’s meaning. The
“purpose of any work of art is to produce some kind of effect on man,” he explained in his “Program for the
19
Institute of Artistic Culture.” It was Kandinsky’s ambition to describe and master those effects in the most
precise terms available. In “On the Question of Form” he sought the unity of “emotion and science” and at the
Bauhaus, in league with heat-monitors, color-baths, and texture tables he could—or he thought he could—
determine the “exact psychic effects that form produces upon the individual” and to instruct others in the
deployment of those effects.
8 The thought recurs in Reminiscences of 1913. “Everything ‘dead’ trembled. Everything showed me its face, its
innermost being, its secret soul…not only the stars, moon, woods, flowers of which poets sing, but even a cigar
butt lying in the ashtray, a patient white trouser-button looking up at you from a puddle on the street, a
submissive piece of bark carried through the long grass in the ant’s strong jaws to some uncertain and vital
end, the page of a calendar, torn forcibly by one’s consciously outstretched hand from the warm
companionship of the block of remaining pages. Likewise, every still and every moving point (= line) became
for me just as alive and revealed to me its soul” (Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 361).
9 One potential hurdle remains. If the picture contains figurative elements, then a line can still be understood as
“as a means of delineating an object.” The viewer and the painter must give up the desire to see lines as having
“the purpose of indicating an object.” Only when they emancipated from their servitude toward objects can
lines be experienced “exclusively [in terms of their] purely pictorial significance.” Once again, “significance”
might be exactly the wrong word to describe the nature of the pictorial mark.
10 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 36.
11 Kandinsky, “Questionnaire” (1920), in Experiment 8 (2002): 157-60.
12 This key distinction is discussed at length in my Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
13 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 457.
14 Ibid.
15 It bears noting that the Constructivists never publicly criticized Kandinsky’s political tendencies, but only his
putative embrace of “spontaneous creativity” (as Varvara Stepanova put it). To say Kandinsky was politically
naïve would be an understatement. Take his infamous attack on materialism in chapter three of On the
Spiritual in Art. “Politically,” he said, “these inhabitants [of the lower division of the spiritual triangle] are
republicans or democrats. [They read the leading articles on politics in the newspapers.] Economically, these
people are socialists....[They] support their ‘convictions’ with a wealth of quotations (everything from
Schweitzer’s Emma to Lasalle’s Iron Law and Marx’s Capital, and much more).” As the editor of Kandinsky’s
complete writings notes of this passage, “Apart from the obvious reference to Karl Marx…the other works
Kandinsky cites here may cause the reader some puzzlement.” That is, neither Schweitzer nor Lasalle wrote
books with those names and the editor cannot find anything that resembles them. And this is the only mention
of Marx in the 925 pages of his writings. Simply put, Kandinsky was about as politically disengaged as anyone
in his position could have been. Which is not to say that Kandinsky’s works were not embraced for political
purposes, far from it. As I am arguing, Kandinsky’s claims became the core of a political program that found its
fulfillment in the works of Expressionist architects, The Bauhaus and aspects of the work of Walter Benjamin.
A brief précis of the case against Kandinsky at the INKhUK is in order. “Kandinsky’s psychologism,” a
1923 report explained, “radically conflicted with the views of those who defended the material, self-sufficient
‘Object’ as the substance of their work.” By November of 1920 the Working Group of Objective Analysis had
begun a campaign to oust Kandinsky from the INKhUK. “Down with Kandinsky! Down!” Nikolai Punin
exclaimed, “Everything in his art is accidental and individualistic.” Varvara Stepanova lamented that
Kandinsky’s “method of work…has reached the ne plus ultra of spontaneous creativity….Everything is
transformed into an elusive emotion….We, formalists and materialists, have decided to launch a schism by
founding a special group for objective analysis, from which Kandinsky…[is] running away, like the devil from
incense.”
16 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Complete Writings on Art, 160.
17 Bruno Taut, “A Necessity” (1914), in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine
Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993), 126
18 Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, trans. James Palmes and Taut, Alpine Architecture, trans. Shirley
Palmer, ed. Dennis Sharp (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1972), 41.
19 Scheerbart, quoted by Herman Muschamp, in Hearts of the City: The Selected Writings of Herman
Muschamp (New York: Knopf, 2009), 41.
20 Taut, quoted in Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s Vision: Utopian Aspects of
German Expressionist Architecture” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1973), 218.
20
21
Robert Indiana, in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader, ed. Josiah McElheny and
Christine Burgin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 158.
22 The inclusion of glass in the domestic sphere will make every home a cathedral. Scheerbart describes the
festive qualities produced by the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals suggesting that this quality is
“inevitably inherent” in the glass and therefore “its effect on the human psyche can accordingly only be good”
(72). In the past this festive quality was thought to be a product of the larger religious significance of the
structure, but for Scheerbart that was to misunderstand the significance of the cathedral. It was the glass itself
that produced the religious sensations, not the other way around. “The new glass environment” stripped of its
religious décor, he declares in the final section of the book, “will completely transform mankind” (74).
23 Taut, “From YES!—Voices of the Workers Council for Art,” in Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor
H. Miesel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 175.
24 Taut, Alpine Architecture, 125-26.
25 Bletter, “Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s Vision,” 436-37.
26 Taut, Modern Architecture (London: The Studio, 1929), 9. David Watkin correctly sees this view as an
example of “architecture as essentially a socially manipulative force” (Morality and Architecture Revisited
[London: John Murray, 2001], 47). Despite Watkin’s astute analysis of the problem of morality and form, he
motivates it in precisely the “socially manipulative” way he deplores. While Watkin diagnoses a crucial
problem of modernist formalism, he mysteriously reasserts the more fundamental biological claims about form
through his appeal to perceptual aesthetics.
27 Taut, statement for the “Exhibition of Unknown Architects” (1919), in Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich,
The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times, ed. and trans. Christiane
Crasemann Collins and George R. Collins (New York and Washington: Prager, 1962), 138.
28 Taut, “The City Crown” (1919), trans. Ulrike Altenmüller and Matthew Mindrup, Journal of Architectural
Education (2009): 126.
29 Behne, “Glass Architecture” (1919), in The Architecture of Fantasy, 133.
30 Behne, “Unknown Architects” (1919), in German Expressionism, ed. Washton Long, 202.
31 Vladimir Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Moscow: Progress, 1964).
32 Gropius, “New Ideas on Architecture,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture, ed. Ulrich
Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 46.
33 Ibid., 47.
34 Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1978), 180.
35 Ibid., 189. See K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes
Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).
36 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 189.
37 I consider the issue of violence in Scheerbart in my review, “The Meaning of Pain,” of Scheerbart’s
Lesebéndio: An Asteroid Novel in Radical Philosophy 185 (May/June 2014): 64-65.