New German Critique
#139, February 2020
Special Section: Alexander Kluge: New Perspectives on Creative Arts and Critical Practice
Special Section editor: Leslie A. Adelson (Cornell University)
NGC #139 crystallizes around Alexander Kluge’s electrifying essay “The Poetic Power of Theory” (2019), made available here for the first time in English. Kluge asks after the practice, sensorium, and storytelling that allow for resistance and the saturated heterogeneity of “second-order” experience in a world dominated by capitalist algorithms. Articles sparked by the international conference “Alexander Kluge: New Perspectives on Creative Arts and Critical Practice” (2018) illuminate related aspects of his multifaceted work. For Dorothea Walzer, Kluge’s use of commentary as “meta-genre” opens new perspectives on his relationship to Marx and Kluge’s practice of questioning even Marxist perspective itself. Tara Hottman explains how Kluge’s recent installations and exhibitions re-conceive montage technique, and how his “white cube” aesthetic creates experience better suited to the twenty-first century than “the black box of the cinema, the late-night television screen, or the Internet.” Revisiting Kluge’s relationship to the historical avant-garde and the aesthetic technique of time lapse with the aid of a Kluge film about Chicago in the 1990s, Sabine Haenni takes his use of the traffic “loop” and techno music as points of entry for rethinking both the cinematic genre of the city symphony film and trans-Atlantic “loops” of racial histories in capitalist regimes of vision, sound, and erasure. Additional articles afford new perspectives on theory, cinema, and literature in work by figures such as Aby Warburg, Siegfried Kracauer, Gregory Bateson, Christian Petzold, and Maja Haderlap.
Alexander Kluge's essay "The Poetic Power of Theory" will be available online without charge through April 2020 from Duke University Press.
Click here for the NGC #139 Table of Contents.