Avangardism And The Technique of Collage

The technique of collage is not strictly aligned with the transgressive forces of the avant­garde; it can just as easily serve the most reactionary and conservative desires, and this fact is brilliantly illustrated in at least one story about the invention of that most politically charged form of collage, photomontage.

In Courrier Dada, Raoul Hausmann recalls that in the summer of 1918 he was vacationing in the small town of Heidebrink and noticed on the walls of almost every home “a color lithograph depicting the image of a solider in front of a barracks. To make this military memento more personal, in place of the head, one glued on a photographic portrait. In a flash–I saw instantly–one could make a “tableau” entirely from cutup photos.”

What is remarkable about this story is not Hausmann’s sudden insight that one could do photomontage–this technique was inevitably being developed by many –but rather the anonymous practice of these unknown families who not only cut up photographs of loved ones but interpolated them into ideological fantasy.

The shocking power of this gesture is rooted in the reality of the photograph and the power of mass media to concentrate and amplify ideological fantasies. The mass media of the early twentieth century had grown vastly in scope and power, and it was a major force constituting the modern nation­state.

Benedict Anderson maintains that the newspaper structured the time of the nation, allowing people who had never met, who more often than not had conflicting interests, to imagine themselves as part of a single, abstract entity to which they owed allegiance. The colored lithograph functions as a fantasy of this national unity as well.

The image of the brave and erect soldier standing before the barracks is essentially a cartoon, a mere paper tiger unless a family sends one of its sons to stand in that place of fantasy. However, that colorful but abstract image creates a place and models a nationalist desire, and the actual inclusion of the photograph makes it something more–it interpolates reality into the fantasy.

W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that military recruiting posters are so powerful, in part, because they can be reproduced “in millions of identical prints, the sort of fertility that is available to images and to artists. The ‘disembodiment’ of [the] mass­produced image is countered by its concrete embodiment and location as picture in relation to recruiting stations (and the bodies of real recruits) all over the nation.”

In Mitchell’s example, what makes it concrete and individually effective is the singular location, but the families Hausmann observes go much further by hanging the image in their home and then inserting the photographic portrait of their son. There is something eerie in this gesture, since so clearly the lithograph is a fantasy, its unreality unwittingly unmasked by the inclusion of the photographic medium that concretizes and particularizes not only the image, but shows us how the fantasy image has done its work and found a real stand­in for the colorful but two­dimensional soldier now given a real face.

While the state could simply print up any number of such images, they would only become meaningful as disparate and much less docile humans took their places. Though many critics repeat Hausmann’s story, no one has reproduced the mementos he found. While what he saw might have been simply a local phenomenon, more than likely they were examples of reservistenbild.

These nineteenth­ and twentieth­century mementos are fantastic, colorful, and playful massproduced posters, often in ornate frames, celebrating patriotism and military service. Often they were explicitly designed to include a personal photograph, leaving a space cut out for the individual’s photographic portrait.

It is this complex play of colorful fantasy and stark blackand­white reality that makes Hausmann’s example and the reservistenbild phenomenon so telling, for it is a perfect synecdoche for the essential operation of ideology in which a fantasy structures a reality. Photography is an essential element in this, for it offered a new kind of alibi for ideology in its seeming objectivity.

André Bazin brilliantly captures the unprecedented effect of photography in the first years of the twentieth century, observing that it created a uniquely objective representation of the world that did not depend on the intervening subjectivity of the artist. Overcoming both psychology and the mark of the hand, it seemed that light­sensitive films recorded an absolutely objective index of whatever passed before the lens.

He maintains “[t]he aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities.” For Bazin, this aesthetic power lay in the photograph’s ability to cut through or wipe away the very ideas through which we see the world. In a flight of lyricism, he extols this: “It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child.

Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled­up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love” (15).

Bazin is hardly alone is worshiping the photograph as the technological triumph that wipes clean our window on reality. Photography would lay bare not only the world, but ourselves, and Bazin distinguishes the portrait in oils from the snapshot, explaining that “photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption,” and so the family portrait is no longer an idealized impression of pigments suspended in oil, but rather “the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny” (14).

Essentially, Bazin is correct about the tremendous truth­force of photography, and in this Roland Barthes would agree, observing that the astonishing force of photography is that “which no realist painting could give me, that they were there; what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.”

However, what both Bazin and Barthes have in mind here are actual photographs in a kind of pristine state, without commentary or connotation. In this particular insight, both neglect all the ways that this power is then framed and manipulated, called upon but mediated by frames, borders, sequences, captions, or, in the example of Hausmann’s humble, homemade image, inserted into the very grit and grime of human fantasy.

Barthes develops a much more nuanced view of the photograph as it appears in the media, and in his essay, “The Photographic Message,” he observes that illustrated magazines and photographs in newspapers are quite a different matter, and his subtle analysis distinguishes the denotation of photographs (their unblemished ontological status–they were there) from the complex layers of meaning, framing, directing that force–connotation.

“From this point of view, the image–grasped immediately by an inner metalanguage, language itself–in actual fact has no denoted state, is immersed for its very social existence in at least an initial layer of connotation, that of the categories of language.”

Nonetheless, the photograph thus takes on a mythological function, underwriting the truth of the connotations and languages loaded onto it: its unique ontology always remains underneath its manifold possible meanings, a finger pointing to some incontrovertible denotation–“the photograph can ‘confirm,’” observes Barthes (30).

Hausmann’s observation of the patriotic family pasting together their memento is thus a kind of sentimental and brutal allegory of the far more subtle and utterly pervasive operations of the mass media as it deploys image­texts.

The families used the photograph to confirm the patriotic fantasy in a gesture of staggering conservatism, and so their gesture is identical to the mass media itself, in which cadres of professional editors, writers, and photographers stitched together the images, texts, frames, sequences, headlines, and slogans–underwritten with the confirmation of photographs–which organized and disseminated the nationalist jingoism and paranoia that would stoke the fires of World War I and after would abet the rise of fascism and the lunacy of the Cold War.

Hausmann and other Berlin dadas grasped exactly the power of the mass media to project a reality, and they responded to it by creating collages that would use many of the same techniques, though amplified, stripped bare, and unmasking the ideological operations of the media from which they drew their source materials.

Georges Hugnet neatly sums up the relationship of dada to the fully­realized world of print media defining modern everyday life, suggesting that dada only amplifies and exposes what is already going on: “As though one day, a Monday for example, the Cadum baby had come down off his billboard to jostle you in the bus.” In short, “Dada was born of what it hated.”

Of course, the Cadum baby was jostling people, as such advertising images, illustrated magazines, and advertisements blanketed cities with illustrations, photographs, and texts that demanded constant attention. The image­texts of the newspapers and illustrated magazines gazed on an emerging world of industry and consumption, celebrating the might of heavy industry and presenting a cornucopia of both luxurious and laughable goods for sale.

Both Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch would rework this mass media into the most formidable and iconic collages of the Berlin dadas. The fantasy, absurdity, and banality of consumer capitalism became sinister in the brutal reality of World War I and the privations in Germany during the Weimar period, and along with other dadas, the work of John Heartfield would culminate in montages that turned the ideologies and techniques of media and nationalism inside out.

However, unlike Hausmann and Höch, Heartfield’s work would come closest to the mass media, exceeding its polish and achieving staggering circulation for the times. Heartfield’s earliest montages, in collaboration with George Grosz, had something of the same spirit of improvisation and folk­art response as Hausmann’s bourgeois mementos.

The painter, Grosz, had already been sending “care packages” with absurdist anti­war messages. One of Grosz’s friends recalls the contents of a package he received at the front in 1916: The parcel contained two starched shirt fronts, one white, the other flowered, a pair of cuffs, a dainty shoehorn, a set of bags of tea samples, which, according to hand­written labels, should arouse patience, sweet dreams, respect for authority, and fidelity to the throne … Glued on a cardboard in wild disorder were advertisements for trusses, fraternity song books, and enriched dogfood, labels for Schnapps and wine bottles, photos from illustrated magazines–arbitrarily cut out and absurdly joined together.

The contents are striking, for the clothes of a bourgeois dandy and the patriotic messages attached to the domestic rituals of the tea suggest leisure unavailable to those at the front but enjoyed by their rulers, while the advertising imagesreveal aworld of shallow consumer pleasures. For Douglas Kahn, “The trivia enclosed from the home front acts to trivialize the decimation at the front by displaying what exactly the fighting is meant to preserve.” (23)

Heartfield and Grosz met in Berlin and began working together on montages; they are often credited with the invention of photomontage techniques. The two began creating an entire series of postcards that carried similar anti­war messages, and seemingly these managed to pass through the mail to the front, for the censors were unable to understand this emerging visual photomontage form as they would have plainer slogans or statements.

Even more interestingly, “they resembled photomontaged postcards and carte visites circulating during that time, usually glorifying the war or Kaiser, and reminding soldiers they were fighting for the wife, kids and country (incl. truss and dogfood) back home” (25).

The inability of the censors to recognize the anti­war messages suggests the emerging visual languages of photomontage and collage techniques were already a part of the mass media itself, and its subversion by dada artists was not so much an outright invention as a tactical response.

Heartfield’s most enduring, politically committed collages would come well after the war, during Hitler’s rise to power. These would not have the anarchic dada playfulness typical of Raoul Hausmann or Hannah Höch. Instead, Heartfield was refining and developing all the most sophisticated techniques of the montage from the illustrated press, but in the service of critique rather than propaganda.

The first years of the 1930s in Germany saw a chaos of political mass media on the streets where the poster, the sandwich board, the newspaper, and the illustrated magazine were the major arenas of campaigning. On the left in particular, innovative graphics were the visual embodiment of a potentially communist modernity and looked to both American advertising and Soviet propaganda for models.

In her analysis of photomontage in the Berlin campaigns of 1932, Sabine Kriebel observes: “Pictures reveal sidewalks strewn with electoral propaganda, cluttering up the gutters, littering shop fronts–the political battle literally underfoot. Aggressively large visual propaganda was plastered on housefronts near the Potsdamer Platz and illuminated at night.

Advertising copy regularly vied with political slogans in these public spaces–‘Vote Hitler!’ contended with ‘White Teeth’ for the attention of the passer­by.” Developing unparalleled and powerful montages, Heartfield would influence later artists and advertisers for generations and force the Nazis to compete in similar visual styles.

Working for the leftist magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), Heartfield created images that circulated some 500,00 copies a week–a staggeringly large audience. These cover illustrations often became posters as well, sometimes blanketing the streets of Berlin. Strikingly, Heartfield abandoned his earlier, more ragged dada collages and disjunctive assemblages, choosing instead to exploit the power of the photograph to undo ideological illusions by gesturing at repressed realities.

The power of this work comes from its insistent incorporation of Nazi images and slogans, and it produced tremendous critical frisson as the ideological fantasy clashed with a repressed and brutal reality. In this, it matters that the words and gestures of fascism are countered by the truth force of photography, despite the obvious though masterful manipulations performed by Monteur Heartfield, as he often called himself.

Perhaps Hitler’s most iconic image was his fascist salute, incorporated into both spectacular rallies and rituals of everyday life. This mechanical gesture performed the ethos of unity and ambition, a seductive image of violence and triumph. For an October 1932 cover of AIZ, Heartfield begins with Hitler himself, offering a rather limp version of his signature gesture. There is no doubt that this is Hitler, captured in a real moment, and not an artist’s fantasy.

Behind him in the seamless montage stands a photograph of a fat man in the dark suit of a capitalist. This faceless figure dwarfs the puny Hitler; into whose saluting palm he thrusts a handful of money. Hitler’s claim that “Millions stand behind me!” is neatly printed between the two. The image clearly shows the diminutive dictator as the face of capital, his backers not masses of Germans, but a corpulent industrialist’s money.

Heartfield’s cover is not simply a photograph, and it does not unambiguously capture a real moment. Rather, it uses photographs to gesture at a hidden reality, and much of its force depends on the denotative force of the photograph to confirm, and yet this is not unrelated to the family pasting a picture of a son into a patriotic scene.

The photograph of Hitler and the slogan are ready­made propaganda that Heartfield has gone to work on. He has not made up the Nazi gesture, photograph, or the slogan, but recontextualizing them, he drags them against the grain into a reality they would suppress. Perspective plays a clear role, as the montage makes the capitalist a looming figure.

Thus the ready­made photographs and slogans are transformed into a critical statement that urges us to read against the grain, to consider a different truth. For Sabine Kriebel, Heartfield’s montages are not simple conformations of some obvious and unquestionable truth. (After all, millions of poor Germans did stand behind Hitler, though certainly that wasn’t the whole truth.)

Kriebel observes that “Heartfield offers us, in his own words, a helpful nonpejorative working definition of visual propaganda, namely the circulation of a particular set of ideas to the widest possible audience. Take out the references to revolution, and it could be confused with advertising” (97).

Sabine Kriebel underscores the contexts of advertising and the Nazi propaganda machine, comparing Heartfield’s montages with those circulating in the Illustrierter Beobachter, a weekly put out by the Nazi party, and making use of dozens of cover montages and photographs in illustrated stories.

For instance, on a July 1932 cover, we see a very different montage of a saluting Hitler with the perspective exactly the reverse of Heartfield’s. Here, a medium shot of the leader fills the page, making him an imposing figure. He gazes out over a montaged long­shot of adoring troops, figures tiny and uniform in comparison with their leader.

The caption reads, “On Towards the Hour of German Destiny.” Forced by the polish and reach of the left and the commercial press’ far more nuanced use of photographs, they struggled to compete. The Nazis were trying to use these techniques of photography and advertising to promote their vision.

Yet the balance between truth­force and what Barthes names connotation becomes clear when Matthew Teitelbaum observes: “When consumer objects, industrial images, and political leaders are enlarged in scale and placed in the foreground of a composition, for example, their importance in the pictorial narrative is underlined.

The compositional device of dramatic foregrounding provokes the viewer to re­think the relations between objects, to re­establish a hierarchy of correspondences. In this sense, among others, montage practice is about radical realignments of power.”

Comparing Heartfield’s montage of Hitler’s salute with the cover of the Illustrierter Beobachter perfectly reveals this staging of power, and it is perhaps the key to understanding the critical force of montage and collage techniques. Manipulating scale, context, and relations, the collage artist rearranges reality without ever giving in fully to the fantastic.

No matter how fanciful or unlikely the arrangement, the readymades or photographs nonetheless ground the whole in an unquestionable reality, even if that reality is simply the mediascape of words and images that constitute the modern every day. Working with the photograph in particular, Heartfield’s montages would take advantage of this power to disclose the relations between the Nazi regime and capitalist interests, clearly emphasizing the larger power of the latter.

Just as the reservistenbild’s perspective would always subordinate the small photo of the individual solider to the larger fantastic iconography of the nation, so Nazi montages would show Hitler as a large, heroic figure. Heartfield’s montages would use inverted perspectives to show the true dimensions of fascism and capitalism. Thus the politics of montage are largely a matter of scale and proportion, and critical collages create powerful maps to complex, hidden relationships.

Finding a scale to gauge relative forces, montage’s critical moment is often made by reversing the scale of any particular understanding of the world, making large what a particular politics would repress and making small what it would celebrate.

Working with photographs, but also with the illustrations and texts of mass media and propaganda, the dadas largely rejected romantic and expressionist identities. Their practice was less art and more a work of revealing. In Courrier Dada, Raoul Hausmann writes that “photomontage,” applied both to literal montages and more diverse collage works, was “a term translating our aversion to playing the artist, we considered ourselves engineers (and from this came our preference for work clothes, overalls), we claimed to construct, to ‘take up our work’” (42).

This machine aesthetic expression resonates with Bazin’s evocation of the camera, with its objective mechanism, “the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.”

For Bazin, “the objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility, absent from all other picture­making” (13). In their montages and collages, the dadas didn’t invent a world, they merely went to work on what they found, arranging it, presenting it.

Abandoning the mark of the hand, the filters and projections of subjective vision, their collages carried profound critical force, even when they assumed fantastic forms. Their material was the world, even if that world was made up of the unreal images circulating in magazines and posters, propaganda and advertising. Though the monteur would alter proportions and associations, the work is always charged with a current of reality, the constant whisper of affirmation that this is the truth of the world itself.

The montages John Heartfield made for AIZ were not primarily works of art hung on a gallery wall or seen only by a few cognoscenti, and should always be thought of first and foremost as attempts to intervene in a moment of crisis.

Something of their seamless polish, as well as their wit and immediate legibility, comes from their work as political interventions, and for this Heartfield abandoned his more radical and fragmented early work. His earlier montages made in collaboration with George Grosz brought together more varied materials, chaotic juxtapositions of newspapers, illustrations, photographs, and texts; in all, a larger number of elements, and their arrangement always emphasized the seams of the collage method of cutting and pasting.

Heartfield’s decision to work primarily through the photomontage rather than more varied collage techniques at moments of crises suggests a powerful distinction between the two modes. This distinction is not only a question of the primacy of the photograph, but also the modes of using not only photographs but all ready­made materials in all kinds of assemblages.

Assemblage can emphasize either the fragments (the moment of cutting) or become far more seamless, relying on the consistency of meticulous pasting (montage) that all but erases the perception of the individual fragments. Indeed, the difference between these two moments not only helps to understand Heartfield, but becomes a major dividing line between surrealism and dada generally, and perhaps of collage itself.

Unlike earlier art movements which tended to be defined by the development of a particular and recognizable style, both dada and surrealism comprise dozens of materials and modes, from performances and poetry, to manifestoes, paintings, photographs, and more. In what sense can we compare Heartfield’s late photomontages to the far more fantastic work of Hannah Höch or even the anarchic performances at Cabaret Voltaire?

Rosalind Krauss asks this question of surrealism in an attempt to cope with its myriad modes, and rather than trying to reduce surrealism to a particular sense or operation, she looks for a broader field that might offer a truly dialectical synthesis of its literary and visual productions.

For Krauss, what unites the projects of surrealism is not a particular visual style or a broader thematics, but its relationship to a world of mass media and its most modern form, the photograph and the caption. Writing about the vast scope and number of surrealist journals, she argues that “one becomes convinced that they more than anything else are the true objects produced by surrealism.”

Following Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Krauss concludes that surrealism is itself “art­after­photography, namely, the illustrated magazine, which is to say, photograph plus text.”

Like dada then, Krauss suggests that surrealism is best understood through the broader context of mass media and its profound effects on perception and the question of reality. Indeed, one might grasp the illustrated magazine as either a chaotic and deceptive form or a radical way of arriving at truth through profound juxtapositions.

While Siegfried Kracauer was critical of the new form, seeing it as a “snow storm” of irrational confusion, Benjamin was typically more optimistic, seeing especially in Soviet examples the possibility of dialectical truth in the new form.

For Krauss, there is a distinction between dada’s use of the image­text and the ways the surrealist employed it, and she observes that “in dada montage the experience of blanks or spacing is very strong, for between the silhouettes of the photographed forms the white page announces itself as the medium that both combines and separates them” (106).

It is fascinating that Krauss turns toward the ground of collage here to make the point, for it is more forcefully articulated as the cut–the ragged edge of each fragment that tells us it was pulled from another source and another context.

Krauss formulates this quite clearly, however, when she maintains: “It is spacing that makes it clear–as it was to Heartfield, Tretyakov, Brecht, Aragon–that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested by interpretation or signification, which is to say, reality distended by the gaps or blanks which are the formal preconditions of the sign” (107).

The dadas tended to let the seams show. For Krauss, surrealist practice is more akin to the later interventionist techniques of Heartfield that erase this sense of rupture and fragmentation. She notes that the surrealist photographers tended to avoid collages in favor of more subtle manipulations like composite printing; that “[t]heir interest was in the seamless unity of the print.”

Thus, Krauss maintains: “Given this special status with regard to the real, being, that is, a kind of deposit of the real itself, the manipulations wrought by the surrealist photographers–the spacings and doublings–are intended to register the spacings and doublings of that very reality of which this photograph is merely the faithful trace.

In this way the photographic medium is exploited to produce a paradox: the paradox of reality constituted as sign–or presence transformed into absence, into representation, into spacing, into writing” (111–12).

Thus, while dadas playfully cut into the media world around them, reveling in the irrational juxtapositions and fantastic associations of their collages, the surrealists tried to represent those very same cuts in reality not as the world of the cutting artists, but ruptures in the real itself, discovered by the artists, not created but found.

This difference between the made and the found rupture might well be generalized not only to dada and surrealism but also to modes of using and presenting fragments throughout the century. To delight in the cutting, in essence to leave those traces of the artists cutting into the materials of reality is to suggest a profoundly subversive attitude toward the materials, which are almost always those of the mass media.

The cutting gesture is one of subversion and critique, an assault on accepted perceptions and representations, violently rearranging the media consensus. Though the artists might create profoundly dialectical illuminations, there is a sense that they have been produced rather than found.

The seamless image of rupture is something entirely different. The artist has not entered into it as a subversive, but rather more as a scientist, revealing what is there, even if what is there is a tremendous rupture or rift, a shocking image that might force us to reevaluate the reality in which we live.

Thus Heartfield’s early dada productions are those of the cutting subversive. However, faced with the rise of Hitler, Heartfield used the most seamless techniques possible, always trying to present his work not as the wild force of an artist’s rearrangement, but a shocking discovery of something already there, needing only the sudden gaze of the lens to manifest it to the public.

Perhaps another way to trace this distinction is through particular contexts of intervention. Dada was born of war protests, and its animating force would always be interventionist. If Heartfield, Tzara, Höch, and others chose to emphasize the moments of cutting or pasting, their works were always aimed at pivot points of power, where they sought to unhook the smoothly functioning limbs of a media­military­industrial aggression.

They saw the media most immediately as a battlefield for hearts and minds in an immediate struggle with life on the line. Thus the particular ruptures and irrationalities their work revealed were almost always profoundly political in the most brutal sense of the term.

The surrealists, most working after the war, turned their gaze inward, seeing the world around them as a psychic battlefield. If dada celebrated absurdity, its spirit was to drown out warmongering with laughter. It would be difficult to imagine Tzara or Heartfield agreeing with Breton’s idea of the most surrealist–read transformative–act as a man firing indiscriminately into a crowd.

For dada, that was just the logic of the state itself. The terrain of surrealism was not public protest but a profoundly inward meditation on the psyche itself revealed through uncanny moments of everyday life. The dadas lived in a world of random state violence and instability, and there was no need to break through a façade of normative sutures to reveal the potentials of the real simmering underneath; the sutures had already come undone.

Laughter and cutting satire seemed the most urgent weapons to deploy against a homicidal state madness propped up by an overwhelming sense of world­historical self­importance. The context of surrealism was Pairs, well after the war, and its terrain was the banality and seeming immutability of everyday life.

Surrealism sought to open the sutures of family, capital, and reason that knit together middle­class normativity, and to find poetic means to transfigure the world and the self. As Breton stated in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”

To do so, Breton more often than not chose the pose of the scientist, presenting works of art, poems, collages, photographs, and more as empirical evidence, the end results confirming the experiments conducted by the artists.

Much of surrealism’s rhetoric and its visual codes were drawn from the sciences, and even at its most militant, the journal La Révolution surréaliste was modeled on the scientific journal La Nature. Indeed, the self­portrait in collage, Automatic Writing, presents the artist as scientist, with Breton looking up from his microscope. Yet the real terrain of surrealism was never nature itself–as it would be for science–but the complex realities and the problems of normativity played out in an urban consumer culture.

The surrealists were among the first to fully exploit what Daniel Bell would later call the cultural contradictions of capitalism. While the smooth functioning of consumer culture would depend on a seamlessly regulated life of work stabilized by family life, advertising would attempt to unleash ferocious, undeniable desires, all concentrated in the powers of objects.

Advertisers eroticize even everyday objects, and the necromancy of the commodity endows them with powerful, seemingly supernatural forces that promise to transform or fulfill us, or, at the very least, trouble the smoothly functioning operations of family life and regimen of Taylorization.

The confluence of the supernatural, the erotic, and the commodity come together often in both surrealist art and in its best literature. Breton himself writes how the mysterious Nadja “enjoyed imagining herself as a butterfly whose body consisted of a Mazda (Nadja) bulb towards which rose a charmed snake (and now I am invariably disturbed when I pass the luminous Mazda sign on the main boulevards, covering almost the entire façade of the former Théâtre du Vaudeville where, in fact, two rams do confront one another in a rainbow light.”

Not satisfied with just the description, Breton illustrates the account with a photograph of this advertisement, “having the documentary impact of illustrative evidence” (qtd. in Krauss 99). Nadja imagines herself as a perfect surrealist object, the hollow, feminine lightbulb transformed by the addition of wings, a synthesis of the banal and the fantastic, while the phallic snake reaches for her and, presumably, she hovers unobtainable above it.

Breton is struck by her desire to incarnate the god of Zoroastrian light, Mazda, and is disturbed by the confirmation of the advertisement, which brings together the commodity object transfigured into supernatural and erotic power.

Though the ad plays on the still miraculously modern invention of electric light, Breton sees more in it, for the Mazda lightbulb and its advertisement now take on a frisson of the banal, the supernatural, and the erotic that define both a sign of modernity (electric light), but are figured not only as modern, but as an ancient, supernatural god now caught up with the mysterious Nadja and his encounters with her.

In this, the advertisement is disturbing but what seems like a cheap come­on turns out to be a confirmation of his experiences, and this is the critical moment of much surrealist collage and assemblage.

Taking the promises and fantasies of commodities and advertisements at their word, expecting that they really do objectify a world of profound erotic and psychic forces, and charting their disruptions, powers, and imbrications in the web of everyday life constitutes the critical force of surrealist assemblages and collages, indeed their fundamental relationship to urban commodity, culture, and media.

For this to function, the readymade is key, for the mysterious confirmation can only come from the chance encounter with the object, with something found, not consciously made by the artist. Advertising, the market place, and the mystery of the commodity are the terrain of surrealist objects, and it is still unclear if surrealism was critical or if it was simply operating on the cutting edge of a nascent consumer capitalism.

One could well argue that the surrealists understood the attempts of advertisers and window dressers to objectify mysterious and powerful desires in objects for the quite mundane purpose of turning a profit.

Johanna Malt observes that the ready­made status of surrealist objects is key to their practice, and “plays a role in the relationship of the object to the subjective expression behind it, but it also contributes to the uncanny power of the surrealist object, which often estranges the already familiar rather than offering an entirely new experience.”

Critics have formulated this strategy of surrealism again and again, but rarely connect it to the strategy of advertisers. In Fables of Abundance, Jackson Lears writes about the rise of advertising in America during the nineteenth century, the very model of capitalism and commodity culture that would be spread about the world in the twentieth century, and he observes that even early advertising is animated by a “balance of tensions–within the broader society and gradually within advertising itself–between dreams of magical transformation and moralistic or managerial strategies of control.

The recurring motif in the cultural history of American advertising could be characterized as the attempt to conjure up the magic of self­transformation through purchase while at the same time containing the subversive implications of a successful trick.”

Most commodities being advertised are either already banal, or soon will be, and so the advertiser’s trick is to make them resonate with our deepest, often unconscious erotic desires, endowing the object for sale with seemingly supernatural powers of attraction and the promise of transformations. Certainly some advertisements do work, disturbing us enough that we do buy.

In large part, this magic is caught up in the ready­made nature of the object. Since commodity fetishism means that the social ties between producer and consumer have been cut, the consumer does not know how the product was made, who made it, or under what conditions.

It appears whole and readymade into the world–a virgin birth–ripe for what Benjamin would call an allegory, since the object could come to signify anything to us through the complete occlusion of its origins. Both the advertiser and the consumer are free to make it mean whatever they wish through the magic spell of the commodity fetish.

The rapid and seamless incorporation of surrealist themes and tropes into advertising and studio filmmaking suggests that mass culture of entertainment, advertising, and surrealism were fundamentally compatible, and indeed could sell one another with little trouble.

In this, advertisers and marketers were at one in their insistence on the magic of the object, our ability to make of it a fetish not only of exchange value in Marx’s precise sense, but to load it with symbolically transgressive and transformative properties–but they stopped their pursuit at the cash register’s ringing bell.

The surrealists themselves went on further, taking that logic to its extremes without the profit motive to interrupt the investigation of what the readymade might mean, how it might become an occult force calling for transformations far larger than a mere purchase.

This cultivation and release of such repressed desire was thus a part of the media and consumer culture, but marked a fault line, a dialectical contradiction of Taylorization and Fordism, which created industrial and consumer goods by insisting on rationalized production and the standardized and banal misery of work.

The surrealists obsess over ready­made objects; their collages and assemblages cut with a critical edge, but only from the inside. They pursue what Baudrillard called the fatal strategy, and in a sense become the perfect subjects of advertising, ready to be seduced and transformed by almost any object they encounter, but no longer reigned in by either the demands of the Fordist work ethic or the sleight of hand at the cash register;

they instead demand that the whole world be transformed immediately and in every respect, just as the advertisers have been saying all along, and so, demanding the complete and immediate “resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality” (14) not simply for an isolated commodity, but for our entire experience.

In a sense, one might figure surrealism’s ultimate critical gesture as advertising for the total transformation of life rather than an isolated purchase, and while the force of this gesture is hard to feel within the confines of a modern museum or the gravitas of a heavy, glossy art book, surviving photographs and accounts of surrealist exhibitions suggest powerfully the shop windows of commodity capitalism.

In the first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Breton observes: “The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time” (16).

The potential for allegory animates both the ruin and mannequin. The romantic ruin was a space for fantasy precisely because its practical ends were suspended, and with just a few stones it could call out to an impossibly beautiful or dramatic past in no way checked by the banal or compromised uses and limits of everyday life.

The mannequin functions in a similar mode. It is a found object, made by an industrial process instead of the hand of an artist. Its very anonymity allows it to take on the potential of the marvelous. The mannequin also seems consistent with Breton’s later insistence that the beauty of the marvelous be “veiled­erotic, fixed­explosive, magic­circumstantial.”

The modern mannequin deceives the eye, its articulable limbs capable of striking different poses suggestive of motion, making the store window a tableau vivant. Profoundly eroticized as an available and utterly compliant sexual object, the clothes nonetheless veil its figure and repress its status as an idealized if sadistic sexual fetish.

This indirection and mild repression are key to Breton’s aesthetic, fueled by a particularly prudish delight. Breton’s final demand of the beautiful is that magic­circumstantial, that a surrealist experience of beauty is in part “a question of charms,” (15) and here again the commercial mannequin answers as a kind of contemporary fetish, seeking to cast on us the spell of the commodity in the fantasy of the window.

As a magic object of consumer capitalism, the mannequin is almost unique. Generally, the mannequin is not for sale, existing not as something to buy, but as a mass­produced object of fantasy supporting and articulating the commodities on and around it.

It is a blank figure, inviting us, seducing us to both objectification and identification as it casts a spell of desire, making all the promises for the commodity. Its perfect, abstract, smooth plastic surface is inhumanly flawless, its proportions fantastically graceful.

This calls out to us, suggesting that we might be transfigured toward this more perfect state if only we owned the clothes adorning it. In sum, the mannequin is our advertising ego­ideal, but somehow is also cut off from us.

Our fantasy of it, even when sadistic, remains unobtainable, something we can exercise only if we buy what it sells; after all, one isn’t allowed to purchase the mannequin from its store window. Surrealists appropriate the mannequin as a readymade, incorporating it into objects, assemblages, and installations that unmask commodity come ons, creating critical advertising for the transformation of everyday not through the purchase of a commodity, but as an act of figuring the marvelous.

The mannequin dominated the International Exposition of Surrealism in 1938. With both André Breton and Marcel Duchamp participating, as well as Dalí and almost every other major Parisian surrealist, the exhibition represented a kind of late, momentary consensus, all the more remarkable in that each artist agreed to prepare a female mannequin.

As visitors to the exhibition entered, they walked down a long corridor lined on either side with these commercial readymades prepared by the artists, a fantastic running of the gauntlet. In Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Lewis Kachur explains that despite the hundreds of other surrealist paintings and objects on display, it was the mannequins that made the greatest impression on visitors and reviewers, and they were often reproduced in newspaper photographs.

Behind each mannequin is a street sign, some actual places, others products of imagination. Placing each under a street sign, it is as if fashionable window displays have stepped out into the street. Kachur notes there is the suggestion of prostitution, as visitors passed though the gloom, using Mazda flashlights to investigate the particulars of each suddenly animated streetwalker, encountering a birdcage replacing a head here, a tangle of steel cable marking a cutting aura, or a body embedded with spoons there. Interestingly, the mannequins were not for sale, and their overwhelming effect was an attempt at Breton’s hope of uniting the real and the dream.

The surrealist appropriation of the ready­made icon of fashionable consumption certainly exposes how advertising and consumer culture work to incite desire and channel it into a purchase, and it no doubt succeeds in cutting away the moment of purchase that would mark a limit of that desire.

And yet unlike the dada appropriation of Nazi words and images that are unambiguously critical and intolerable to the fascist state, the worlds of advertising and fashion were untroubled by such surrealist practice. As Kachur goes on to explain, “the success of the mannequins assured that they would continue to appear in a variety of Surrealist forays in display … Dalí had mannequins both in the vitrines of Bonwit’s department store and in a World’s Fair pavilion.

Also in New York, Duchamp would utilize a headless mannequin in the bookstore window display for Breton’s Arcane 17” (67). Perhaps a large aspect of the surrealist critique is caught up in the frame of the artwork, the exhibition space, and ultimately other store windows.

These borders do much to contain whatever critical work their objects might do, in contrast to work like Heartfield’s posters and collages, circulating widely over a contested political ground. By and large, these two strategies of critique and the readymade would animate the developments in postwar ready­made art, with pop artists largely working with similarly institutional and commercial boundaries to unmask both advertising and the world of art with similarly fatal strategies that culminate in the institutional theory of art, while more engaged groups would attempt to pull art and critique out of the gallery and back onto the streets.

The critical force of collage is bound up with the ontology of its materials. In seizing the very objects of a system, be it media propaganda of fascism or the commodities of capitalism, the artist could change what might have seemed a given, uncontestable reality.

While the artists would more often than not lose the political wars, they could have semiotic victories. The critical use of ready­made materials by Heartfield failed to stop the Nazis, and the surrealist insistence on the marvelous did little to change the banality of consumerism and arguably became the house style of advertising.

Though the critical force of ready­made materials has animated almost every discussion of twentieth­century art and the use of the readymade certainly changed definitions of art, I would like to focus on a rather different element of critical practice and think of the force of critique not simply as interpretive contest.

Rather than thinking of collage as only a contest of meaning, I would like to consider it as a practice, an act that at least for the artists, and often as an inspiration toward others, would allow some to act in an unprecedented world of media.

To think of collage as a critical act is no longer to ask for merely a semiotic reading of a work, to assess a given collage only in terms of its success in disclosing a hidden connection or contesting an ideology. Instead, it is to think about how artists related and reacted to the vast ready­made culture of media and consumerism that defined everyday life in the twentieth century.

This too is perhaps the key question of mass culture. In a world saturated with meaning that constantly calls out with advertisements and entertainments, everyone, as Guy Debord points out, becomes the object of this constant media spectacle: “In all its specific manifestations–news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment–the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.

It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system.”

Debord’s devastating formulation emphasizes that our wall­to­wall media does not ask for invention or questions or even completion by its audience, but at most demands the confirming purchase. It is a hermetically sealed, total discourse that reaffirms prevailing conditions in every respect, and it is also monolithic and inescapable.

In J. R. Eyerman’s photograph for Life magazine, “3­D Movie Viewers during Opening Night of Bwana Devil,” the audience is defined by the shocking sameness of their faces in identical 3­D glasses, the monotones of black and white contributing to the effect and underscoring their conformity and passivity as mere spectators.

The practice of collage in part resides in its castrating prerogatives toward ready­made mass culture. Rather than remaining the passive object of overwhelming images, the artist takes up the scissors and cuts into this given world, rearranging it, making new meanings from it, and refusing what Debord called its “uninterrupted monologue of self­praise” (19).

As a practice, collage artists themselves transformed their own relationship to a ready­made world, and though their works might not have had the same effect on their audiences, or might have had limited audiences, or no audience at all, these practices allowed the artists to become subjects in a media culture, contesting and remaking meaning actively for themselves.

Debord maintains that the spectacle “has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it … The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.”

For Giorgio Agamben, the real insight of Debord’s statement is the emphasis on the power of the spectacle to replace reality, and it resonates deeply with Jean Baudrillard’s observation that media has in fact replaced space, overwriting and ultimately liquidating the natural world itself.

Indeed, Baudrillard begins his great work, Simulacra and Simulation, by retelling the Borges fable of a map made to the exact size of the territory, and he then goes on to observe: “It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory … that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.”

It makes great sense that the two great situationist artistic practices were the making of maps and collages, and it is precisely the relationship of media spectacle to the reality and the need of mapping a reality that speak to their sensibilities.

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Guy Debord and the situationists developed the avant­garde provocation, but were weary of the magic circle of art. For the situationists, surrealism failed by becoming mere art, hustled off the streets and into galleries and museums, and much of situationist theory would be devoted to worries about their own members becoming mere artists.

The hopes of the situationists were fundamentally revolutionary, and they put the emphasis on practice, even if those practices would be unnoticed by audiences or utterly ephemeral. They hoped to provoke “situations,” which really meant arranging or provoking encounters that demanded engaged and thinking subjects because the effects and meanings of the encounters would not be framed and managed within the approved confines of consumer capitalism.

As Debord put it in 1957: “The construction of situations begins on the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see to what extent the very principle of the spectacle–nonintervention–is linked to the alienation of the old world.”

The key was breaking the spectacle’s total grip, and to “draw him into activity by provoking his capacities to revolutionize his own life.” For the situationists, there were two major ways to do this, both deeply related to the critical gestures of collage.

Writ large, the group called for the dérive, its movements and effects taking place at the level of the city, while writ small these same aims were similarly at work in the practice of collage they named détournement. The situationists defined the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.”

Interestingly, this activity of drifting without any practical end through different neighborhoods could only take place in the densely built and populated confines of a city. With Marx, they dismissed the “idiocy of rural life,” and went so far as to mock a surrealist experiment in country walking, explaining: “Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else.”

While one could justifiably construe this as insular Parisian snobbery, there is perhaps a more compelling reason for rejecting nature as a terrain of revolutionary practice. Throughout situationist writings there is the odd paradox that they insist on industrial and media modernity, celebrating the potentials of automation to transform life and clinging to technologies of all kinds, and yet they denounce the alienations produced by these forces at every turn.

Yet escaping back to nature was no answer, and retreat to the country would make one simply irrelevant, unable to contest or shape an emerging modernity that would undoubtedly define life in a relentless future. Alone in nature, they felt the necessary forces of chance, encounter, and intervention were absent, leaving one unable to develop a revolutionary practice at all relevant to a world in which the only reality is media spectacle.

To rehearse the pose of romantics wandering the countryside would be nostalgia for an irrecoverable past, and they were certainly uninterested in the insular drama of poets testing their souls and sensibilities against a sublime landscape. The romantics saw in nature an expression of a spiritual reality, but the situationists saw it merely as the unformed and meaningless chaos of the untouched at best.

Or, even more likely, the situationist also saw nature itself as overwritten by the spectacle, as Debord puts it, “there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry” (Comments 10). Situationist practice was conceived on the terrain of city­spectacle; that is, on the ground of the readymade.

If we were to playfully suggest that Eyerman’s photo functions as an allegory of the cave for the society of the spectacle, the situationists hoped to get out of their seats, tear off the glasses, seize the projection booth, and cut up the film. Of course Eyerman’s photo could serve only as an allegory, for the situationists were witnessing in postwar Paris a complete rewriting of the city that would seek to rationalize and control–in short, to spectacularize–every aspect of life on the streets.

The needs of capital and political control sought to make urban life predictable and controllable, and the space of the city was continually refined to facilitate the circulation of cars and commodities. Thomas McDonough points out that “by the middle 1950s postwar consumer culture was making its visual mark in Paris as large numbers of shops and cafés modernized their fronts; older buildings began the process of restoration know as the ravalement des façades … Paris was gradually becoming the urban museum we know today.”

Additionally, networks of freeways and huge projects of gentrification were demolishing houses and neighborhoods. Just at the moment the city was remaking itself as the mirror of capitalism and media, the situationists called for abandoning work and drifting through the city with no other purpose than pleasure, adventure, and perhaps mischief.

There is a distinctly juvenile delinquent tone to this, as they call for streetlights that pedestrians can turn off, the exploration of abandoned buildings, and the use of fire escapes to stroll the rooftops. More seriously, as they moved through the city, they noted its “psychogeographic” emotional tenor, and then produced gorgeous collaged maps, such as Asger Jorn’s and Debord’s The Naked City.

Cutting into commercial maps, rearranging the fragments, they reclaimed this space as their territory, to be arranged for the cultivation of self and pleasure, and not simply a complex of capital. In essence, they hoped to radicalize themselves by wandering against the grain of rationalization, and in their collage maps, the city becomes malleable, something they can reinvent by cutting into it.

The practice of drifting and the collage maps that record and mirror the practice both radically cut into “the role of the spectacle to project an image of unification and homogenization over urban space” (McDonough 57). Remarkably, the situationists suggest that space and media are the same, and to affect one is to affect the other.

In their collage manifesto, “Methods of Détournement,” Debord and Gil Wolman explore the effects of readymade materials in collages, but they do not neglect to connect this practice to the dérive: “If détournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another.

Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really make it beautiful.” It is striking how the two key practices of situationists, collage and drifting, are completely interchangeable. One can drift through the media, remapping it and using it for new purposes, just as one would ultimately aspire to cut into the very life of the city to wrest it from commercial interests.

Though of course unable to practice détournement at this level, this very disorientation was the mode of the dérive and détournement. McDonough observes: “The dérive as a technique du dépaysement created moments of disruption in everyday life … in which the apparent homogeneity of the spectacle city was fractured to reveal the richness of possibilities offered by movement” (63).

Unable to détourn entire cites, the situationists turned to the media that increasingly constituted it anyway, calling for radical collages that would reanimate the entire culture: “The first visible consequences of a widespread use of détournement, apart from its intrinsic propaganda powers, will be the revival of a multitude of bad books, and thus the extensive (unintended) participation of their unknown authors; an increasingly extensive transformation of sentences or plastic works that happen to be in fashion” (Debord and Wolman 11).

Both drifting and collage make the passive object of the spectacle into an unruly subject practicing self­invention. This kind of individual practice has gone under many names, from the cut­ups of Burroughs and Acker to punk and later DIY (doit­yourself). Indeed, making cut­up novels, collages, films, or music often for small subcultural audiences, or no audience at all, was rarely spark for a mass movement.

Such a critique largely misses the real nature of such practices, which did not begin as attempts for political organization. Reading the accounts of collage artists, it becomes clear that such practices often begin a mode of reflection, survival, and understanding, often taken up during their youth as the only response they can find to the society of the spectacle.

Later, most of these artists would also be politically radicalized, but in a spectacular world constantly seeking to make everyone an object. Taking up scissors is first an act of individual self­defense, allowing one to both understand the forces organizing the life of the culture, and through scissors and paste to rethink it, to drift, to rearrange, to change the given psychogeography at first for oneself and perhaps later for a movement.

To think of the media spectacle not merely as so many entertainments or advertisements, but also as psychogeographies, spaces with specific affects, particular points of access or egress, forces us to think about mapping an understanding of ourselves, and this theme recurs often for postmodern collage artists.

Kathy Acker’s punk collage novels are visceral and challenging cut­ups of both literary history and contemporary media, but in her explanations of this work, she often begins with her own fascination with the narratives, characters, and figures she found around her, but also with her inability to reconcile these conflicting images.

In one interview, she suggests powerfully how her cut­ups began as a part of her earliest experiences as a reader, their thematics, and her own desire to find some way to make a life practice in the world: “The first books I ever read came from my mother’s collection.

My mother had porn books and Agatha Christie, so when I was six years old, I’d hide the porn books between the covers of Agatha Christie. They are my favorite models, the books I read as a kid. That’s why I originally became a writer–to write Agatha Christie­type books, but my mind is fucked up.”39 In part, Acker says in a number of essays and interviews that she couldn’t find within herself the authoritative voice celebrated by critics and nurtured by creative writing programs.

Instead, she wanted to find practices to manipulate texts. In Hannibal Lecter, My Father, Acker explains her initial struggles with identity in art: “Charles Olson said that when you write what you have to do is find your own voice, but it all seemed to be very big, almost God­like, and I found this very confusing. I couldn’t find my own voice, I didn’t know what my own voice was.

And I’m sure that’s where I started to write in different voices and started to deal with schizophrenia. This was behind it, was in a way a fight against the fathers, because they were very much my fathers.” Instead of looking inside, Acker began to drift through what she was reading and seeing, cutting in her experiences in a psychogeographic map of the spectacle that disclosed particularly the gender politics that went unremarked or uncontested.

Acker published her first book as a fictionalized autobiography, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, and in it she ironizes the idea of autobiography and disrupts authorship with the use of ready­made fragments from both the biographies of Victorian murderesses and fragments taken from the pages of True Confessions magazine.

Acker used collage extensively in her early novels, taking significant amounts of material from contemporary pulp novels, magazines, and canonical works. Like Burroughs before her, Acker articulated her project in terms of both objective critique and subjective reinvention. In her essay “Dead Doll Humility,” she explains the role of critique in plagiarizing pulp magazines and the importance of taking the fragments as readymades: “To copy down, to appropriate, to deconstruct other texts is to break down those perceptual habits the culture doesn’t want to be broken.”

Acker describes her collages as a process of self­invention. In the same essay, Acker also states that her use of collage was part of a “[d]ecision not to find this own voice but to use and be other, multiple, even innumerable, voices.” Almost anything that Acker happened to see or read could find its way into her work.

She would summarize the plots of films she saw on TV, rehearse and simultaneously revise the plots of Shakespeare’s plays or William Gibson’s novels. Almost all of these techniques are deployed in her second novel, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec.

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec makes a pastiche of historical fact and fictive imagination, jumping through time and genre, from nineteenth­century Paris to contemporary New York, historical biography to soft­core pornography and genre­fiction. The novel begins with the story of Toulouse as a sex­obsessed, deformed woman, living in a Montmartre brothel in the late nineteenth century.

A murder plot develops, which largely consists of cut­ups of Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party. Van Gogh’s daughter is actually Janis Joplin, who becomes the lover of James Dean. A complete summary of Rebel Without a Cause, including lengthy quotations from the screenplay, is presented in the midst of a long series of cut­ups that profile Henry Kissinger.

The final section explains America’s decline into “friendly fascism,” dramatized through cut­ups of non­fiction accounts of CIA plots and readymades taken from gangster films. Her Burroughsian analysis thus demonstrates that the CIA and the mob are interchangeable institutions of repression and social control.

The entire novel constantly plays with identity, as Toulouse Lautrec both is and is not the historical artist, and the actors in Rebel Without a Cause are and are not their fictional characters. This novel helped to establish Acker as a formidable postmodern writer, and over ten years after its publication it occasioned one of Acker’s most notable encounters with the establishment.

In Toulouse Lautrec, Acker included one of her early collage works, “the true story of a rich woman: i want to be raped every night!” Acker appropriated over two thousand words of this piece, almost verbatim, from The Pirate by Harold Robbins, the very sort of “pornography” she hid behind the covers of mystery novels as a child.

The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec collages a vast amount of material from the mass media, from books and films to music and biography. What Acker clearly recognizes is that such materials are the very stuff out of which people construct the meaning of their everyday lives, but she transforms the act of consumption into one of production.

However, unlike the shared mythologies or folk cultures of the past, these materials are now “owned” as commodities by their so­called authors. Acker explains: “The writer took a certain amount of language, verbal material, forced that language to stop radiating in multiple, even unnumerable directions, to radiate in only one direction so there could be his meaning.

The writer’s voice wasn’t exactly this meaning. The writer’s voice was a process, how he had forced the language to obey him, his will. The writer’s voice is the voice of the writer­as­God.” However, like a situationist on a dérive, Acker is engaged in something very different: “Decided that since what she wanted to do was just to write, not to find her own voice, could and would write by using anyone’s voice, anyone’s text, whatever materials she wanted to use.”

Like the material from pulp magazines such as True Confessions, Robbins’s work represents acceptable establishment pornography. Pirate itself is a lurid work of soft­core porn and improbable politics. The “pirate” is an anti­Semitic, Lebanese oil sheik who, unbeknownst to himself, is actually a Jew. He marries an American WASP (purportedly a sketch of Jacqueline Onassis), and fathers a daughter.

She grows up to be a PLO terrorist who plots to destroy her own father’s oil fields. In the section that Acker appropriates, Jordana is in the south of France. She picks up a younger black man at a disco and he takes her back to his room. In a scene of light S&M, he forces Jordana to snort cocaine as they engage in sex.

Acker includes this scene as a readymade, and almost in its entirety, making only a few changes. Unlike Burroughs’s cut­up method, Acker tends to present large sections of ready­made material, sometimes changing names or adding scenes, but more often leaving the readymade more or less intact. What gives her use of collage its power is the new context in which the fragment is presented.

In this particular case, the story is told by Toulouse as a “bedtime” story. Toulouse prefaces her recounting of the tale by joking with her companions: “If you’re nice to me and send me presents, especially money so I can get this trash printed … I’ll tell you another story.”

This is certainly a comment on the relationship between her own work and Robbins’s novels. Like Robbins, she knows that the tale is lurid entertainment, and she asks her listeners to pay for it. However, while Robbins makes millions from his pornography, Acker initially had to find the money to print her own books.

What makes Acker’s pornography different from Robbins’s, despite the fact that she uses the same text, is the new context in which she presents it. Robbins’s novel is a slick, narrative fantasy of wealth and privilege. Jordana’s life of wealth, leisure, and debauchery is presented as a pleasant fantasy. Acker transforms this blithe sexual fantasy.

She begins by giving her readymade a new title: “the true story of a rich woman: i want to be raped every night!” With this title, Acker asks her reader to consider the politics behind the S&M scene, which may now be read as a man’s dramatization of female desire as the internalization of patriarchal ideology.

Acker also changes the scene from the French Riviera to Times Square, and renames the character Jacqueline Onassis, making explicit Robbins’s roman­à­clef. Yet the racism coordinating the scene (the characters call each other “white bitch” and “nigger”) is Robbins’s, not Acker’s, invention. The politics behind this pulp fantasy thus become apparent. However, this is not to say that Acker simply dislikes Pirate, or that she takes a simplistic position of critique.

As she maintains in “Dead Doll Humility,” appropriating materials such as Pirate from her own life as a reader is a way of identifying the languages that inform her own identity: “Thought just after had finished writing this, here is a conventional novel. Perhaps, here is ‘my voice’. Now I’ll never again have to make up a bourgeois novel” (84).

Acker recognizes her own voice in Robbins’s novel, and this is where her work as a collage artist moves beyond objective critique and toward an investigation and transformation of identity. In The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, the same kinds of texts that Acker read as a child, that in part constructed her world and that of her mother, are literally present, one inside the other.

The literary equivalent of her own covert reading as a child is made explicit as Agatha Christie and Harold Robbins are joined together in the narrative. Acker considered her first three books, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula, I Dreamt I Was A Nymphomaniac, and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec as a trilogy about the dissolution of her own identity through an investigation of the voices that informed both her own identity and the culture at large: “When one first encounters the “I” in Tarantula, it’s the autobiographical “I.”

Then the “I” takes on other, nonautobiographical qualities and gradually the invisible parentheses around the “I” dissolve and the experiment in identity proceeds from that” (“A Conversation” 15). By destabilizing these boundaries, Acker was able to practice on the very materials that were interpolating her from her earliest experiences.

She has the courage and the will to take up the scissors, to make a new map of these images and languages that construct the culture, and to use them as a means of escape and critique, making for herself a very different psychogeography.

In her essays and interviews, it is striking how Acker consistently brings together traveling through spaces and text: “The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder.

So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream.” Acker’s critique of literature and her desire to find wonder mirror the very terms of the dérive and détournement articulated by the situationists. In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Acker maintains: “What I have always hated about the bourgeois story is that it closes down.

I don’t use the bourgeois story­line because the real content of that novel is the property structure of reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world­reality. My world isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their names” (23).

Like the city, ever more rationalized for the needs of capital at the expense of invention and everyday life, Acker finds the novel a space of rigid identity structured by the needs of control, and she contrasts this to earlier mythic literature: “And I like that landscape much better.

You’re allowed to just move, you’re allowed to wander. It’s like traveling. I’ve always envied men this and I can never travel being a woman. I always wanted to be a sailor, that’s really what I love” (23). As a psychogeographer, Acker created powerful maps of her own drift across canonical and popular literature and media, using scissors to sever ownership, to reveal hidden connections, and to craft a practice by which she could live in the world.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange that toward the end of her life she became a body builder–because for her, writing by cutting, copying, plagiarizing was never just about the final object, the property rights of the book, but about a physical journey in the dépaysement of wonder.

In the end, Acker made herself into the pirates she dreamed of as a child: “I am no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder” (Bodies 159). Acker’s experience, experiments, and profoundly feminist practices are recognizable in the work of Manchester punk, Linder.

Born in Northern England, Linder Sterling graduated from Manchester Polytechnic, trained in commercial graphic design, a trade she would never practice in any conventional sense. Instead, at the age of 18, she aspired to follow in the steps of the dadas. “I edited myself down to one name, Linder.

I still have my sketch book from 1977, and there I describe myself–with youthful certainty–as a George Grosz, John Heartfield, et al, who renounced the title of artists and preferred to describe themselves as assemblers and engineers.” In many respects, her youthful certainty was justified, though her “monteur.”

My thought was to follow faithfully in the footsteps of George Grosz, John Heartfield, et al, who renounced the title of artists and preferred to describe themselves as assemblers and engineers.” In many respects, her youthful certainty was justified, though her career would not be a response to the overtly organized fascism of Nazism with clearly drawn battle lines, but the more intimate and confused, if no less fascist, terrain of family, gender, capital, and power.

Diving into the emerging punk subculture of Manchester, Linder created powerful visual collages for fliers, fanzines, album covers, and her own extensive collages. Her work thus found an audience, and she herself became a performer, fronting the band Ludus.

Throughout her career, she made brutal and disturbing collages that link gender and consumerism, disclosing the repressed connections that fuel consumption and advertising. Like Kathy Acker, Linder’s cut­ups came through her own questions and confusions faced with the demands and contradictions of normativity.

Just as Acker brought together the respectable domesticated mystery and soft­porn mainstream novels, so Linder wanted to explore and drift across terrain with carefully policed boundaries and rules. In an interview describing the origins of her iconic commodity­bodies, she observes “It was like doing a peculiar jigsaw puzzle.

I had two piles of magazines–trashy men’s stuff and trashy women’s. I noticed that in both women were high profile. Men’s magazines were filled with pictures of women. And the invisible man was present by his absence. I was fascinated by the fact that I as a woman was supposed to be in all these worlds, I was represented in two separate male/female views of the world.

These montages became an explicit diary of my feelings at that time.” Making these collages as a young woman, Linder was using scissors and paste to cut through the culture, to make a practice that would allow her to remap the psychogeography of the spectacle.

In her series Pretty Girl No. 1, she takes a soft­core men’s magazine featuring black and white shots of a rather ordinary woman striking nude poses next to the luxuries of a middle­class home: the bar, the wall­to­wall carpet, the up­to­date furniture, the stereo. The most striking thing about this source material is its utter banality.

Rather than some ornate, overwrought fantasy, this is the pornography of the norm. Linder has collaged each of the 24 shots, always replacing the young woman’s head with an oversized domestic object ripped from an advertisement: an electric kettle, an iron, a clock, a television, a stove, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine.

The replacements are shocking, in part because the object always manages to seem animated, suggesting the angle of a head to match the posture of the body. Since the objects are mostly in color, they stand out against the black and white, drawing the eye, all but vibrating. Attached to the naked woman, the strategy of advertisers to make their commodities female sexual objects is clearly laid bare. Ads do conjure the naked willing woman, but they also repress her actual appearance.

Linder has made that body visible. Yet almost all the objects here are those of the domestic environment of women’s work: the stove, the teapot, the sewing machine, and so a woman is these objects, at least in the eyes of advertisers. She is not only the object of male desire, but she is also told to inhabit and desire this world herself.

The perspectives of men’s pornography and women’s lifestyle magazines seem antithetical, but her collages powerfully disclose the visceral connections, the seamless logic. In montages made for The Secret Public, Linder often took the bodies of more typically fantastic pornographic bodies, replacing their heads with outsized cakes or tarts.

The effect is similarly shocking, but also slightly different, in that the women are clearly seen as objects to be consumed, sexuality reduced to sadistic orality, all the more so when the occasional man to appear in these montages is equipped with a vagina dentata mouth, seemingly to devour the woman’s confectionary head.

Again, repressed logics are disclosed. The lifestyle magazines encourage the woman to master the domestic arts of cooking and baking, but there is something insidious in this as her accomplishments are part of her very objectification in both life and advertising. Moreover, the consumption of women’s images in pornography is mapped onto the most literal consumption imaginable, making evident a horrifying and all consuming gaze.

Producing these collages, Linder was no longer the passive subject of the spectacle, but instead a maker of questions and answers, working out for herself the demands of femininity and evading them with her castrating scissors.

Like Acker, she took the ready­made materials that modeled normative desire, laying bare both their logic and their horror. Perhaps the most striking visual element in Linder’s work is the face. The seat of intelligence and emotion is often, as in Pretty Girl No. 1, replaced with an object.

In this strategy, the subject is reduced to both desire for the object and is also made into just an object. In other collages, however, Linder uses the powerful shifts in scale to render the norm horrifying. She makes the face grotesque by simply amplifying the expectations of the norm itself. In one of a series of black­and­white self­portraits, the youthful Linder stares out over the corner of her eye, but her mouth is overdrawn with lipstick, smeared onto her face and teeth.

James R. Currie observes that messy lipstick is a sign of madness: “It’s not strictly speaking that the lipstick is messy that is the point; it’s rather that the lipstick and the lips are not aligned to form the conventional symbiosis–i.e., whereby the lips and their artificial color blend into one.

As a result, the lipstick looks like it has an autonomy of its own, as if before we see it it had been crawling slowly around.” Currie points out the inversion of subject and object, as the lipstick takes on a horrifying life of its own, as if the norm were colonizing and overwriting the face, making the person a mere object of its own force.

The gesture of gender normativity, being well made­up, is thus amplified to the pitch of a hysterical enthusiasm that negates the subject. The same effect is rendered through the use of collage in Red Dress, a series of photomontages.

Many feature Linder’s face in black­and­white close up, but full­color advertising mouths with glossy lipstick and white teeth are placed over her. The effect is similar, and even more powerful, as the mouth should signal normative desires, but is clearly an image pasted over, leaving Linder unable to speak, attempting to embody a terrifying ideal.

The frisson between the glossy mouth and the grainy head is intense, and it shows the artist’s struggle with normativity. Linder thus collaged not only what she found in the media, but also her own images. Yet these glossy mouths function much like the lipstick itself. Most of these collages depend heavily on the mouth being oversized, gigantic on the face, and always slightly askew.

As Currie observes: “The effect of the misalignment is to emphasize the quality of death. For the dead of course are always pathetically unaware of what’s being done to them. Madness and death–there’s a lot going on with lipstick.” Like Acker, Linder’s practices allow her to understand the forces and desires constituting normative sexuality but which the spectacle depends on, profits from, and yet always subtlety represses.

Through her collages, she became a subject in the very act of representing herself as an image of normative madness, but her comments show what a struggle this was. It would be a mistake to think of artists like Linder as cold analysts uninvested and unsympathetic with their material.

In this, I think, her work is far different than that of Heartfield, and perhaps closer to Grosz, who always represented the human grotesque in which he seemed implicated. Like Grosz, then, she writes about her practices with pornography in particular: “This was as much a political act as driven by my curiosity.

Pornography had its own debased codes, and my intention was to understand them. Not to ‘borrow’ them, and never to collude with them. But to understand them seemed and seems, important” (27). This self­understanding was hardly uncomplicated or even easy.

About the role of faces in her work, she remarks: “I had always hidden the facial identity of the women in most of my photomontage series, and so I determinedly obscured my own identity when initially faced with a camera. My mother once said, ‘we were too poor to be photographed,’ and there began my life’s fascination with the medium” (28).

Here Linder reveals her identification with the women represented in the spectacle, and her profound sympathy with them and her desire to create images that would never take part in their exploitation even as it would critique and disclose its code.

She also remarks on the role of class in the face of consumer culture, and the horror of never being able to meet the demand of the spectacle’s image. Linder’s work is thus a profound psychogeographical map of the contradictions animating the culture. Linder was trained as a graphic artist in the techniques and aesthetics of layout, presumably to find work as a technician of the spectacle herself, and one can readily imagine that she might well have found a job doing the complex cut­and­paste layout work that created the very lifestyle magazines she cut up.

The irony is the images of the spectacle are themselves discordant collages of elements, jostling one another on pages, on newsstands, the flicker of changing channels. It would seem that collage is the very mode of theworld in which we live. And yet, critical work by artists like Heartfield and Linder tends to reveal connections, fractures, and create frissons not readily visible in the culture itself, for although the culture functions through the practice and logic of collage, it goes to great lengths to frame, harmonize, and narrate its elements in what Debord called an uninterrupted monologue of self­praise.

The critical practice of collage is often one of opening the sutures, revealing the seams and hidden contexts, contents, and connections eclipsed by the ideological work of framing. This role of framing explains why collage itself is no critical guarantee, and how it is vital to observe the ways in which the material of the spectacle is presented, with imposed boundaries in genre, for instance, between the men’s and women’s material at the heart of Linder’s critical work.

Collage and Ideological Frames Lately, it has become fashionable to say that all collage has the disturbing and critical power of the kinds of collages I’ve been reading here in the critical tradition, but all too often the culture uses collage in the service of something much more like the reservistenbild.

In truth, without careful frames, harmonies, rhythms, or narratives, collages are profoundly demanding and disturbing, and the technicians of the spectacle know this, and at every turn try to provide them. Thus, for instance, while collage metaphors are key to the experiences and characters of many contemporary novels, none of those novels is itself a collage.

That novelists do not perform the practices of collage that are such central metaphors to their work makes a great deal of sense. There are relatively few collage novels to begin with, and those by William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, or more recently Raymond Federman and other experimentalists are quite illegible to the uninitiated.

However, artists working in visual or aural media don’t face quite the same barrier, and thus it is far more typical to find montages of ready­made images in films and television programming or sampling of all sorts in popular music. While novels invoke collage metaphors to reflect on the process of consumption and identity, visual and aural collages seem to more emphatically address the very nature of a mediascape that keeps us constantly surfing through a cascade of sounds and images.

In a 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker, William Burroughs connects the cut­up forms of collage to the experience of everyday life, “because cut­ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper … [b]ut subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut­up.”

For Burroughs, simply walking down the street was to be assaulted by a constant influx of images, “a juxtaposition of what’s happening outside and what you’re thinking of” (5). For Burroughs, the cut­up was a way to present this, but it cuts against the idea of art as shaping the external chaos of the world into meaningful form.

As Jean­Paul Sartre maintains in What is Literature?: “If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone’s face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things.”

Burroughs eschews this formal desire, suggesting in part that one power of collage is to provide an almost unmediated version of the raw experience of perception in a mediascape without the forms of art that condense, order, and unify.

Indeed, in cuts and collages, the things themselves often remain in an undecidable chaos, demanding of the audience something much like the work of the artist, for the art represents exactly the chaos of the mediated world. While Burroughs offers a utopian vision, his experiment suggests that the images, sounds, and inchoate mediascape is caught up with our own perception, and it is how we make meaning: “I’ll say, when I got to here I was at that sign; I was thinking this, and when I return to the house I’ll type these up” (4).

Thus the commercial sign, the walk, and the thought are cut­up together. There are two problems with this. Formally, we have traditionally called on artists to filter and form the chaos of perception for us. While we have a sense of it as the condition of our lives, we long for the simplifications and intensifications that narratives, melodies, perspectives, or frames bring to simplify and intensify it in a comprehensible meaning.

More troubling, since almost every color, note, and letter of our media is now owned outright, the meanings we make in our cut­up perceptions are no longer our own. I want to offer two examples that demonstrate both of these related points: “Revolution 9” on the Beatles’s (The White Album) and DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album.

Working just after the convulsions of 1968, the Beatles produced The White Album, perhaps their most difficult work, and certainly the one that provoked the greatest interpretive frenzy. The Manson Family poured over every nuance of the album, thinking it a guide to apocalypse, while many leftist critics denounced its obscurity and counterrevolutionary tendencies.

The album’s penultimate song, “Revolution 9” is both the longest studio track the band ever released and the one that has provoked the most outrage from fans. The track itself is a true collage, relying on the tape technologies pioneered by avant­garde experimentalists of musique concrète like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Jean Barraqué.

It contains samples of orchestral tunings and chords, Beethoven and Sibelius, snippets of conversation by the Beatles and others, vocals, noises of traffic, machines, football chants and other crowd screams, and of course, snatches of pop crooning and radio static. These effects were looped on tapes and then mixed together.

The whole is densely layered and much remains indecipherable to even the most devoted listener. It is quite simply a disturbing collage, difficult to listen to, and it is unclear how one should listen to it; some devoted fans delight in playing it backwards and searching for hidden messages. Though there are definite rhythms in the churning textures of the sounds, they aren’t the grooves of pop, and one can’t be lulled by such disturbance and chaos.

“Revolution 9” is not the first time that the Beatles turned to sampling techniques. The White Album is stitched together with such moments in the breaks between songs, and on other albums they had experimented with tape loops, running tapes in reverse, and other avant­garde techniques. However, in these earlier moments, the use of such aural collage and experimentation was subordinated to lyric, melody, and rhythm.

On “Revolution 9,” the cut­up performs the chaos of perception, and the organizing structures of melody, rhythm, and lyric don’t fully or forcefully contain the chaos: it is a true cut­up in Burroughs’s sense. This invocation of a mediascape of confused and relentless perception (thus the static, crowds, sports, and music samples) that is “Revolution 9” violates the pleasures of pop.

Though cut­up and collage are much the makeup of our mediascape and our perception, popular audiences find little pleasure in the most direct and radical manifestations of it, preferring invocations that gesture toward it as well­framed and contained metaphors or synecdoche.

In a performatively apt collage of his own, critic Devin McKinney writes that “Revolution 9” is like “Randall Jarrell’s famous comment on Whitman: ‘There is in him almost everything in the world, so that one responds to him, willingly or unwillingly, almost as one does to the world.’”

But of course art, and popular art in particular, is just what we turn to in order to make sense of an overwhelming world, to simplify it, intensify it, organize it, or tranquilize it, and “Revolution 9” intensifies without organizing, throwing us back into the very confusion popular audiences long to escape.

Whatever the merits or meanings of the Beatles’s forray into musique concrète, it is worth noting that they had total freedom to do it. To this day, no one has untangled all the samples that make up the song, and the Beatles were never called upon to account for their sources, nor were they sued for violations of copyright. The readymades of The White Album were simply the sounds of the world, the ready­made materials of art in a mediated age.

If Sartre following Heidegger provides examples of a face, a landscape, or the sea as the subject or art, those subjects must now include not only the raw but the cooked as well: the very sea of ready­made commodities in which we live.

Literal and radical collages of sound are some of the most frequently popular forms of collage that people encounter, and in particular, hip­hop has made audio collage the most important popular form of the past thirty years. Though there are many reasons for this, I want to highlight two aspects of this fascinating development.

Many critics have pointed out the power of popular music to inform our affects and identity. Indeed, Fredric Jameson writes quite movingly about this new status of music in our culture: “The passionate attachment one can form to this or that pop single, the rich personal investment of all kinds of private associations and existential symbolism which is the feature of such attachment, are fully as much a function of our own familiarity as of the work itself: the pop single, by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential fabric of our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous auditions.”

This invokes both the perceptual “mosaic” and cool style of McLuhan and the problems of commodity fetishism. We swim through a culture of sounds, taking them in insensibly, coolly, and they are thus woven into our experience and our identity quite irresistibly.

One of the most radical moves of hip­hop is taking the technologies of mass reproduction and turning them back on these sounds, using the turntable to simultaneously reproduce and produce at once. Thus, we can turn to our previous auditions as the productive force for new sounds, meanings, emotions, or identity–at least until we are confronted by the limits of the commodity, and then we find that in listening to ourselves we are owned.

DJ Danger Mouse confronts both of these truths, taking the cultural icon–The White Album–a ubiquitous artifact bound up for millions of fans and casual listeners alike with intense cultural associations and profound personal resonances.

Mixing new music from the Beatles album, Danger Mouse adds the vocal tracks of superstar rapper Jay­Z’s The Black Album with them to produce The Grey Album. Unlike the densely layered sampling of earlier hip­hop like that of Terminator X or The Dust Brothers, Danger Mouse emphatically uses relatively little from The White Album.

On most tracks, he crafts decidedly melodic and heavily rhythmic hooks that move to a funky but relentless beat, using usually two or three iconic samples from the Beatles album. The strategy is the very opposite of the maximalist “Revolution 9,” even though that song is itself sampled, for rather than presenting the chaos of the world, Danger Mouse simplifies, intensifies, and unifies the much larger and more varied sonic pallet of The White Album.

The unity of The Grey Album as a complete work is even more complete because Jay­Z’s signature flow holds all the tracks together narratively as well. Though the album is certainly an audio collage, it is remarkably unified and intense, offering the pleasures of the popular, the potential disturbances and dissonances of collage framed and organized by rhythm and narrative.

In this, the most popular forms of sampling are not unlike the deployment of collage in popular novels, invoking the complexities of the mediascape and the commodity, but carefully framing and unifying, controlling and limiting the most radical, castrating, anarchic potentials of the technique that would interrupt the pleasures of the audience.

Though popular collages like The Grey Album are profoundly enjoyable for just this reason, it is shocking in quite another way. It simply seizes both Jay­Z and the Beatles as readymades to be newly worked over, transformed, changed, not just consumed, but reproduced. However, thirty years after “Revolution 9,” copyright law has caught up with consumption, throttling the impulse to creatively reinvent new, unforeseen, or moreover unauthorized meanings with corporate­controlled readymades.

So while the corporations that profit and promote and advertise the construction of meaning through lifestyle shopping, more and more they also seek to control just what those lifestyles might look like and sound like and, ultimately, mean. As McLeod explains in Freedom of Expression, “[T]he Grey Album was yet another example of a creative work that literally had no place in this world; it was stillborn legally, even if it’s very much alive creatively.”

In the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin suggests that often critique and hope for transformation is found in memory that “flashes up at a moment of danger.” Perhaps the freedom the Beatles took for granted to create “Revolution 9” is such a memory, coming to us through The Grey Album, the slick pop production reminding us just what is at stake in the commodification of music and other intellectual property that would take away any real, tangible possibilities of entertaining and truly valuing our profound and cool relationship to pop culture.