30161918(2)

Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner MüllerAuthor(s): Matthew GriffinSource: Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 426-450Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30161918 .

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Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Miiller

MATTHEW GRIFFIN

Independent Scholar

The visible Can be photographed

O PARADISE OF BLINDNESS

Heiner Miller, "Blackfilm"'

The ability of Heiner Miuller's images to elude easy co-optation by all political and aesthetic ideologies has persistently inspired and confounded critics, but only recently has the concept "image" begun to be considered as a key element in the analysis of the dramatist's work. Such a turn is due largely to critics' efforts to counter the increasingly popular view that Miller's work is ideologically suspect, recurring to the paradigms of a con- servative critique of modernity.2 David Bathrick, writing after Mtiller's death, seeks, for instance, to dispel the claims of, in his words, "a certain genre of critical writing about Miller," whose main characteristic is its "un- willingness to struggle with his images."3 Bathrick proposes instead that critics engage Miuller's "richly imagistic style of writing" as an antidote to such critiques of ideology in which "everything [is] read simply as philosophical or political allegory." The suggestion that we struggle with Miller's images, while timely, is not entirely new. Critics have, in fact, been attuned to the imagistic style of Miller's writing since, at the latest, Hamletmachine, whose initial stagings prompted Heinrich Vormweg to suggest that the ideal format for Mtiller's play would be the radio play, in which the "whole ab- surd, provocative array of images would be realized in the listener's imagination through the sound of language."4 The emphasis Vormweg places on language opens a third category alongside the two above, a category that can make us aware, moreover, of the affinity between questions of image and ideology. For it is-as one of today's most lucid theorists of the image W.J.T. Mitchell reiterates in his influential Iconology and in its sequel Pic- ture Theory-at the level of the image that language opens itself to questions of ideology.5 Discussions of Miller's verbal imagery will inevitably

Monatshefte, Vol. 93, No. 4, 2001 426 0026-9271/2001/0004/426 c 2001 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System



Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Miiler 427

lead, I propose, to discussions of the ideologies that inform his image-world, and, vice versa, these critiques of ideology cannot be kept separate from the intransigence of the linguistic sign.6

The turn towards the image in the Miuller literature is part of a broader phenomenon within the human sciences. This phenomenon is confined not only to literary scholarship but one rooted in the changing nature of knowledge in modern society.7 The "pictorial turn," borrowing a phrase from Mitchell, reflects not so much the emergence of a general theory of the culturally dominant modes of visual representation but an intellectual mal- aise at the heart of the imaginary.8 The image has become a central topic of discussion in the human sciences-in the way that language once was- as a kind of model or figure for other things, including figuration itself. In an era dominated by the "society of the spectacle"9 and amidst the myriad philosophical work concerned with, in Richard Rorty's words, "get[ting] the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphor out of our speech alto- gether"10 (e.g., Derrida's insistence on the visual, material traces of writing or Foucault's "scopic regimes" of modernity) it seems imperative when con- sidering Mtiller's imagery to also consider Mitchell's insistent refrain that "we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.""11

The lifting of the ban on the image as analytical category in the Miuller literature-in combination with a pictorial turn in Western culture-might make it seem that what we are dealing with here is really just a new twist on the old problem of language. And, indeed, Mtiller's work has often been read in light of discourses developing concomitantly around the new media and popular culture. Joachim Fiebach suggests, for instance, that the aim of the dramatist's work is that of "resisting simulation."12 My point here is not, however, to read this work as the reaction of a representative of old European (print) culture to the detriments of technological progress.13 The conflicts in Miuller's work lie elsewhere: his critique of modernity, as Dom- dey and Herzinger argue, is often an ersatz for loss of utopia, disappointed ideals. Consumer culture and Western politics increasingly become, it is true, Miuller's targets as early as the late 1970s: "Television / The daily repulsion," he writes.14 Mtiller, whose medium is language, is, however, attacking the society of the spectacle in order to get at its underlying ideologies. A concept of imagery is deployed in response to historical events and political conflicts. The extent to which this practice is grounded in the prac- titioner's insight into the ideological dimensions of his own project is the subject of this paper.

Look at Mtiller's images, beware of ideas, caution critics. But what does it mean to look at his images? To wonder about their relationship to language? To contemplate their relationship to history? How, in the first



428 Matthew Griffin

place, can we begin to perceive images as separate from ideas? My suggestion in the pages to come will be that in order to look closely at Miuller's images one should first examine the way the author speaks about images, the discourse he develops around the concept "image."

To think of imagery means thinking of imagery as an idea, and this leads to the paradox that when we think of imagery we are thinking of the idea of an idea. This is an idea implicit in thinking about images, since imagery itself implies, by definition, the idea of an idea. "Idea" shares the same root with the Greek verb "to see" and is often combined with the notion of the eidolon or visible image, a notion that is fundamental to ancient optics and theories of perception. Plato, in order to discern between idea and image, distinguishes between the eidos, a suprasensible sphere of reality (e.g., forms), and the eidolon, a sensible impression that provides a mere "likeness" (eikon) or "semblance" (phantasma) of the eidos. The use of "concept" or "notion" in the place of the word "idea" when discussing imagery accomplishes a similar function and helps to avoid confusion. If, on the other hand, we allow images and ideas to in- termingle, then we begin to talk about the way, in Mitchell's words, "we depict the act of picturing, imagine the activity of imagination, figure the practice of figuration": we then are dealing with the doubled images or "hypericons," whose subject is our conception of images.15'" Such figures include Plato's cave, Aristotle's wax table, Locke's dark room, Wittgen- stein's hieroglyphic, and Marx's camera obscura of ideology, as well as the proverbial mirror of nature. In Picture Theory Mitchell expands on the idea of the hypericon, calling it a "metapicture," which he defines as "a piece of moveable cultural apparatus, one which may serve a marginal role as illustrative device or a central role as a kind of summary image [...] that encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge."16 This blurring of the boundaries between image and idea is important in discussing Miuller's work because it tells us that the image is central-both as figure and as concept-to the thinking of all modes of representation, including theater.

Image is at the heart, too, of our thinking of ideology, since, etymo- logically and historically, ideology is a "science of ideas" in which "ideas" are understood as images."7 An ideology of images is also an icon-ology, combining icon with logos, image with word. Attempting to navigate this paradox situation, we can look to these two disciplines for scenes of encounter between image and ideology. From Panofsky's "primal scene" of his own iconological method (an acquaintance greets him on the street by removing his hat) to Althusser's description of ideology as a process of the subject's interpellation (the policeman hailing an individual on the street), iconology and ideology converge on the common ground of recognition- the point being not just to make the iconology, or the science of images, ideologically aware but to make the ideological critique iconologically aware.18



Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Miiler 429

Implicit in such an attitude is the sense that the objects of inquiry can themselves provide the terms of the critique, a notion which stands in stark contrast to the language of semiotics.19 Representational practices themselves should henceforth yield the critical idiom. The doubled image, the image whose subject is our conception of images, is my subject in this paper. Doubling both as figure and concept, the image provides an insight into the nexus of language, image, and ideology essential to an understanding of Miuller's work.20

I

The image is a recurring subject in Milller's work. In texts ranging from his early lyric poetry to his theater texts of the 1970s and eventually to more theoretical formulations in essays and statements from the early 1980s, Mtiller discusses the image and its relation to ideology. These texts can help us to consider the way in which the author's work imagines itself in relation its historical and aesthetic surroundings in the former GDR.

Among Miller's texts thematizing the image the most striking is the 1955 poem entitled "Images." Also noteworthy is the author's commentary to his play Tractor as well as his prose and interview remarks, which include an essay on Hans-Jtirgen Syberberg's film Hitler and an interview with another German filmmaker, Harun Farocki. The most significant elements of the theories of language and image developed in these texts are later elab- orated on by Mtiller in a 1991 interview about the influence of Walter Ben- jamin on his work.

In spite of the more than thirty years spanned by these diverse projects, their shared concern with the themes of language, image, and ideology make it possible to locate these texts within a single period in Mtiller's work. The publication dates of these texts, with the exception of the interview about Benjamin, fall within the space of less than a decade. "Images" and Tractor, both written in the 1950s, were first published by Rotbuch in 1974 in what was then the second volume of the Mtiller's plays Geschichten aus der Produktion 2. The prominent position given the poem-it is the first text in the volume-is a sign of the increasing importance of the category of image in the author's work as he reflects on and reevaluates his early writing, a process that he describes in his 1974 commentary to the play as a "feeling of failure" at "reading through old texts."21 During this period, Mtiller also comes to speak more and more in interviews and discussions about the image and its relation to his role as a writer. The theme of the image naturally overlaps with Mtiller's resistance towards producing assim- ilable images for the stage that one finds in his theater texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s. I am not, however, concerned with situating this pictorial turn within the conventional periodizations of his plays.22 It seems rather more helpful to think of the rise of the image in Mtiller's work in



430 Matthew Griffin

terms provided by Sue-Ellen Case, who sees in it the reflection of a "shift in cultural production from the collective to the commodified."23 Such a perspective raises the stakes on Miuller's imagery in its bluff with ideology. It tells us that the theories of language and image that Mtiller develops in the texts I intend to discuss are as fundamental to his own thinking of his work as they are to our thinking of that work's relation to ideology.

II

"Images mean everything in the beginning."24 So begins Mtiller's 1955 poem, titled "Images," in which the author discusses the role of the artist in resisting art's traditional complicity with society's dominant political ideologies. Attacking the view of literature as transparent vision and positive utopia, the poem imagines an art whose images are capable of exposing the ideological assumptions underlying a society's representational modes. Dubbed by critics the author's "most impressive poem" and "a motto of

Mtiller's work [...] comprising the author's experience and anticipating his progress," "Images" stands itself at a beginning in the author's work, pro- viding insight into a recurring theme in Miuller's work and creating a frame- work for a discussion of the author's use of images.25

Written in the period of disillusionment following the June 17, 1953 uprising in East Berlin, the poem reflects the mood of its author between socialist Aufbau and economic stagnation, two trends reflected throughout this period in the conflict between de- and re-Stalinization. Krushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes in February 1956, that is, briefly after the poem's composition, represents an acknowledgment of the reform hopes among the Eastern bloc countries; the Soviet Union's suppression of the reform movement in Hungary in October 1956, of course, quashed these hopes, repeating the recent events in East Berlin. The poem thus takes as its subject a moment in the history of class struggle when reforms stand to be initiated and past errors rectified in the course of communist revolution, but the means to achieving this end remain, for Mtiller, deeply problematic.

"Images" begins by describing a process of abstraction between the utopian "dream" and the reality: images "mean everthing" in the beginning because, Mtiller's text tells us, they are "enduring" and "spacious," that is, units of time and space characterized by their potential to give shape to utopia. This quality is, however, already limited with the phrase, "in the beginning," which tells us images are somehow limited, perhaps because finite-for, as the poem reminds us, "dreams congeal, take shape and disappoint." In an early draft of the poem, the dreams appear "worn out by soon to be," to which he adds, "Under closer examination they become more complicated, shrinking in the gaze's growing field of vision."26 The evacuation of the collective ideals of their vitality takes shape in the poem



Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Miller 431

as a crisis of representation in which the poet's impeded vision symbolizes the society's impeded progress towards the ideal: "No image can even contain the sky any longer. / The cloud, seen from the airplane: / Steam that obstructs the view. / The crane just another bird." Unable to reconcile the idea with the existing reality-Plato's definition, ironically, of the objective of the artwork-the image loses its ability to mean. Sky, cloud, and crane, all of which are conventional symbols from lyric poetry and, like the rose, generally stand for figural plenty, can only be approached, under such conditions, as abstractions from the real.27 The point for Miller is not to pursue the many possible interpretations of these symbols but to emphasize the divesture of the lyric image's claim to transparence. Art's ability to stand in for the real-its mimetic claim-becomes, as a result, closely aligned with questions of an ideological nature.

The denigration of vision expressed by the poem is typical of modernist art; it is the ideological counterpoint to the degradation of the subject's experience through what is perceived to be technology's ever more aggressive colonization of the symbolic order.28 From Marx's visual metaphor for ideology, the camera obscura, to Jameson's declaration that our era is characterized by the transformation of reality into images, vision is key to modernity's perception of itself: the threat posed by a dehumanizing industry comes to be summed up in the perils of vision. "The working class [...] has no ideals to realize," writes Miuller in a note attached to the draft of "Images."29 A paraphrase of Marx's early pronouncement on the intellectual's role as guide to the proletariat, the reference is unambiguous. The demise of the image carries in itself the antidote: the artist's job is to create utopia. The blindness of the working class extends only to images, ideals, not to reality. Written in the context of the author's attempt to create an aesthetic commensurate to the historical moment, the poem seeks to com- bine the prerogatives of Aufbau with those demands for the system's reform. New images must be made, implies Mtiller, whose poem is no doubt also a reaction to Die Sieben aus Ulkusan, a play which, in his notes, he calls "nine scenes (Bilder) from the life of today's apprentices."30

"Images" places in question the ability of poetry to produce images that are capable of articulating the rift between between the existing reality and the utopia. In the case of the poem's subject matter, the distance is too great. "Even Communism," writes Miuller, "the final image, always refreshed / Washed in blood again and again, everyday life / Doles it out in small change, tarnished, blinded by sweat." Communism, the "final" image, which after all other dreams have congealed in disappointment is "always refreshed" by the "blood" of its revolutions, seeks to be both image and idea, but the image of communism, its "everyday" appearance, has, like the sky, become "tarnished," losing its force of meaning. In "everyday life," the image or appearance of the idea becomes the negation of the dream, doling



432 Matthew Griffin

out in increments and gradually deferring a vision "blinded by [the] sweat" of the working classes. Reality exceeds the ability of "terror" (der Schrecken) to reinvigorate the ideal: everyday existence cannot justify the victims- communism has lost its lustre.

Mtiller wants to preserve the idea of communism, rescuing it from the stifling reality but also from the images of conventional verse. "Images" does so by proposing a concept of poetry capable of generating utopian images without taking recourse to the attitude of the "great poems," which the poem characterizes as "rubble, like bodies, long loved and / Now no longer needed on the road of the finite species with many needs" (GP2: 7). The "great poems" have neglected the "blood" and "sweat" of the victims; these poems, Miller writes, employing one of his favorite figures-that of parataxis-are "rubble," which is, switching to a more transparent simile, "like bodies, long loved and / Now no longer needed." The parataxis has the function of leveling the referential field and making grammatic "rubble" out of the line. The simile, whose task it is to assert resemblances, has the function here of rendering the "rubble" of the "great poems" as the "bodies" of discarded lovers. All this, in order that the author is able to place his destruction of the "great poems" in the context of mankind's progress towards universal history: "on the road of the finite species with many needs."

In the final verses of the poem, the author points to a hitherto neglected alternative: "Between the lines lamentations / on the bones of the stone luggers joy / Because the beautiful means the possible end of the horrors." The linguistic figures developed in the preceding lines around the "rubble" and the "bodies" indicate that the alternative to the "great poems" involves a breaking down ("rubble") and a breaking up ("bodies, long loved") of the conventional notion of the poetic image. The victims of the "tarnished" dream are not buried in the "rubble" of the "great poems," rather their "lamentations" come from "[b]etween the lines." The "stone luggers," a cipher for the working classes, who have borne and continue to bear the burden of "rubble" piled up by a literature consisting of "great poems," can, at last, feel "joy," because the "possible end of the horrors" is represented, as Miller writes, by the "beautiful."

Miller's recourse in the final verse of "Images" to the category of the aesthetic, "the beautiful," is based on a reformulation of Rilke's well-known verse from the Duino Elegy, "the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible."31 Rilke's characterization of the beautiful as the "beginning of the terrible" (des Schrecklichen Anfang) can be understood as a relatively straightforward rendering of the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition around the beautiful and the sublime, the latter of which is generally associated with the experience of terror to which both authors refer in their different ways. The category of the beautiful, whose function is to organize



Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Miiller 433

the individual's taste, has, for Rilke, the quality of a surface appearance in relation to the sublime. Muller, on the other hand, designates the beautiful as the "possible end of the horrors" (das mogliche Ende der Schrecken), replacing beginning with end and thereby contrasting his concept of the beautiful with Rilke's, which, as his oft-cited phrase "Poverty is a great splendour from within" (Armut ist ein grof3er Glanz aus innen) illustrates, is blind to concrete forms of terror.

In place of the image, Muiller posits the beautiful as that quality of an artwork capable of mediating between the beginning and the end of a terror for which there is no concrete image, that is, for which there is no place in the narrative of revolution. Beauty becomes possible at the moment when abstraction enters into the image, reasserting the unassailability of the artwork and constituting thus its reference to concrete reality, to the real. The beautiful is that aspect of the artwork that can not be assimilated. The abstraction of the image contaminates the purity of the "great" poet's vision. What differentiates, for Mtiller, the beautiful from the image is not just the tendency of the image towards beginning and end, its readiness to be assimilated into conceptual narratives, but rather the capacity of the beautiful to be a "possible end of the horrors" means that, in contrast to the image, the beautiful can withstand the process of concretization that takes place in the confrontation with the "horrors" which make up reality. This makes the beautiful a reservoir of utopia.

Genia Schulz is correct in comparing Miller with Rilke, because Rilke's poetry, which is generally considered to have introduced the abstraction of the image into the lyric, a genre, as I have said, from which one traditionally expects transparent imagery, is in many ways similar to Miller's approach in "Images."32 In his Sonnets to Orpheus, which belong to the same period as the Duino Elegies, Rilke seeks to develop a concept of language capable of expressing what he calls the "hidden equivalences of life that language always only arrives at circuitously." ("verschwiegene Aquivalente des Lebens, zu denen die Sprache immer nur umschreibend gelangt")33 Language, for Rilke, represents a "double realm" (Doppelbe- reich) of manifold relations, in which meaning cannot be determined; the reader of his work should rather become aware that his or her perception of reality is based on linguistic differences. Rilke himself described the aim of his own late poetry as the "most thorough realization of a higher visibility from a finite outermost viewpoint," ("dringenste Realisierung einer hi- heren Sichtbarkeit, von einem endlich aiuBersten Ausblick aus"), which would serve as a means to "to achieve [...] in turn an invisible." ("ein wiederum Unsichtbares [...] zu gewinnen")34 Rilke's poetic theory is per- tinent to our discussion of Miller's approach in "Images," because it describes an aesthetic that resists the false concretization of the image by emphasizing a linguistic multiplicity of meaning.



434 Matthew Griffin

What, however, distinguishes Miller from Rilke is, as I have men- tioned, the former's sensitivity to the "horrors" in the rift between the image and the real. MiUller, nonetheless, remains beholden to the beauty of revolution, to the ideal. From beginning to end, the objects that retain meaning-the sky, love, communism-do not fit into the image. The beautiful, on the other hand, retains a quality between beginning and end through its ability to fix meaning only fleetingly and to thereby make possible the evo- cation, appearance, and disappearance of images.

In the tension between the communist utopia and everyday life in socialism, art encounters ideology. Under these circumstances whatever connection may arise between the artist and society (the political) depends on the aesthetic. Miuller's position on art during the 1950s is perhaps best captured by his 1957 review of Guinter Grass's poems, in which the author attacks the notion that poetry can, as the dust jacket announces, "'present a new, clear image of a seemingly familiar reality.' "35 What can "ground poetry in today's reality," argues Mtiller, "[. . .] is the perspective of socialist revolution," a perspective without which "art can in fact only surrender to the industrial revolution." Miuller's point is that any poetry attaining to present a "'clear image' " of reality is not up to the task of matching "today's reality," since what is demanded by a critique of industrial conditions is that the "'familiar' " images of reality be shown as unfamiliar, in order to expose the false consciousness that has given rise, in the first place, to these images. For poets in the West, like Grass, this is a particular problem, argues Mtiller, who, explaining himself, returns to the airplane motif of "Images," stating that

[t]he average poem is fashioned in such a way that even a bicycle bursts its frame. Forms used today are too restricted to accomodate new facts (technical and others). These people write by electric light, listening to the sonic boom of airplanes flying faster than sound, but in their poems there is a permanent blackout, airplanes are enveloped by clouds. From time to time 'steel steeds' emerge from the fog, 'metal falcons,' or (first sign of progress) a tractor.

The problem, as Miuller perceives it, is that the "average Western intellectual" is "on the same economic level as the proletariat," but fails to identify him- or herself with this class, taking instead the more "comfortable" position of the "reporter," a "point of view" that can only be a "pose" when confronted with the reality of the "third industrial revolution."

When the author becomes an accomplice to the ideological mystifications of the ruling class, writes Miller, "[t]he poem becomes a transcrip- tion of barbarism." Gottfried Benn, whose poetry Miuller characterizes as the "last significant attempt to etch a mythos out of this point of view," was able to introduce "format" to his poetry, because "it sublates both barbarism and the pain of barbarism in its Hegelian double meaning."36 Poets




like Grass, on the other hand, who "desert the domain of the aesthetic," fail to achieve with their poetry even the "provocative quality that consti- tuted the meaning and function of early surrealism." Their images or pure visions of reality do not express the tension between the image and the real conditions of existence, the tension that is moreover constitutive of ideology. Such a use of images results, Mtiller adds, in nothing less than "rhyth- mically ineffectual strings of associations without structure," a "highbrow pornography." What poetry should do is to provide a space for the subject's experience, an experience that Mtiller, in the following formulation, makes programmatic for his work: "The function of poetry is to defend man against his banalization and transformation into an object." The notion that art's function is to fight reification is one that will inform Mtiller's aesthetic consciousness in the 1970s when-under the pressures of self-critique-his work becomes increasingly image-oriented.

III

In the 1970s, formal categories in Milller's work from the 1950s such as "poetry" and thle "beautiful" begin to coalesce in a more general theory of language. Prompted by the prospect of the publication of his work from the 1950s, Mtiller's renewed interest in the poem "Images" corresponds to his efforts to reassess his Marxist theory of art as defense against man's banalization. In his 1974 commentary to Tractor, for instance, he takes up again the theme that poetry must defend against reification: "The impossibility of catching the event through its description," begins the well-known passage that comes at a point in the play when the protagonist, a tractor driver, has been seriously injured by a land mine.37 The text describes the author's despair at being unable to produce a text adequate to the problems posed by the subject matter: "The truth is concrete, I'm breathing stones." "De- scription," in accordance with social realism's preference for heroic narra- tion, is judged inadequate for "catching," or, literally, "taking in the event" (Uneinholbarkeit des Vorgangs).

It is here that Mtiller first thematizes language, expressing his resistance to the material from the 1950s as a concern about the "incompatibility of writing and reading," "the exorcism of the reader from the text," and the "heartflesh" of "[p]uppets stuffed with words instead of sawdust." The inadequacy of description leads to the "desire for a language no one can read," a "language without words," capable of bringing about "the disappearance of the world in the words." In place, however, of the world become text, there is, writes Mtiller, "the lifelong compulsion to see, the bombardment of images (Tree House Woman), the eyelids blasted off." A language that resists the conceptualizing processes of reading is thus counterposed



436 Matthew Griffin

by the hegemony of images. The result is an artistic vision based on the artist's self-imposed blindness.

Mtiller's point in his Tractor commentary is that the "bombardment of images" from everyday appearances such as "tree," "house," and "woman" blinds one to the reality of suffering, for which the author chooses the image of "the gnashing of teeth, the burning and singing," a classical image of infernal suffering, but one that is also capable of evoking death in the twentieth century. Faced with the prospect of its inability to confront such horrors, literature, writes Miuller is a "slag heap." A blindness is hence necessary when the author confronts the impossibility of this situation, whose only recourse is dystopian, "[t]he extinction of the world in images." The result is a vision that resists the wish to see and need to create images that constitutes art's typical function.

The "extinction of the world in images," about which Miuller first speaks in Tractor, is an ongoing concern for the author in his theater work and a frequent topic in his interviews. In, for instance, the 1981 interview with the filmmaker Harun Farocki entitled "Intelligence without Experi- ence," Miller discusses the use of images to occupy the imagination, citing Disney's Fantasia as a "barbaric" example. Every child who has seen it, he warns, "will never again be able to hear certain music without seeing those Disney figures and images."38 The combination of Tchaikovsky's music and the film's cartoon figures might lead one to perceive Mtiller's reaction to the coupling of image and sound as nostalgia for the high modern.39 The distinction between high and low does not, however, adequately grasp the problem. What is "horrifying," for Mtiller, about Fantasia-and this also counts for the "horrors" that occupy the negative role in "Images"-is, he states, "the occupation of the imagination by clich6s that will never go away," a phenomenon whose aim he defines as "[t]he use of images to prevent experiences, to prevent the having of experiences."40

As an alternative to the "occupation of the imagination by clich6s," which one finds in a film such as Fantasia, Mtiller cites in the same interview the "torrent of metaphors at the heart of Elizabethan literature": "Here metaphors are constructed as a kind of visual protection against a much too rapidly changing reality," states Milller, "a reality that can only be dealt with and assimilated in this very special way. A world of images that does not lend itself to conceptual formulation is created and used to free the imagination and enable the having of experiences."41 Miller contrasts thus the image as "metaphor" with the image as "clich6": the one is capable of freeing the imagination, the other tends to inhibit it. By setting the music to images, the film occupies the fantasy, Milller argues, and "[y]ou miss out on the structures in the music," which means, he adds, "you experience the music in only one dimension": "That is actually the point I was trying to make with the metaphor," continues Miller,



Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Miller 437

a metaphor is irreducible, it cannot be reduced to a meaning, while the images in the Disney film are by their very simplicity immediately allegorical, and thereby capable of being reduced to meaning.

The function of the clich~-or what Mtiller, perhaps misleadingly, calls the "allegorical" image- can thus be said to be to render the semantic structures of music on a one-dimensional level. The metaphor has the function, on the other hand, of liberating the imagination from these structures. How and why this liberation through metaphor takes place is not, however, solely a matter of semantics. Metaphor becomes a key term in Miuller's work, as aesthetics and politics intersect, and the linguistic liberation from structures of meaning signifies the liberation from ideological structures.

In his 1980 essay "The Solitude of Film," a text which discusses the relation of cinema to collective memory, Mtiller thematizes what he sees as the positive, liberating use of images in Hans-Jiurgen Syberberg's Hitler, a film which constructs a surreal dream structure from the symbolic languages of German history.42 Miller is interested in the ability of the West German director to resist a conventional (i.e., Western) history of Hitler and the Third Reich and to activate the imagination for a dream, the dream of communism. This ideological context is essential to Mtiller's concept of metaphor, because it shows that the liberation to be enacted is not just from meaning, in general, but from the specific structures of modern, industrial society.

The essay, which begins with the narrator's description of his movement "upwards along a cliff with neither end nor beginning," seeks to con- vey the viewer's experience of the wall of images projected by the film. The vertical movement along this wall corresponds to a different notion of what constitutes the narrative structures of history and experience. "My way upwards is a way into the past," writes Mtiller, "the abyss beneath me is called future." Miuller uses a spatial model of history to replace the teleological model conventionally associated with a horizontal movement, arguing that "space has no direction in time." Syberberg's camera, with its non-linear movement, follows, according to Miller, "the movement of the dream ego tracing the FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS or, indistinguishable from it, time petrified in space before the searching eye." The film's interrogation of history thus involves a frozen time in which "forgotten" figures from (German) history can be recalled.

Mtiller criticizes the "colonizing" of history by a "forgetting" that "bears the name of Hitler," whom he makes an emblem of the forgetting performed by the colonization of dreams by mass culture. What is "occu- pied" here is no longer just the imagination, as in Fantasia, but utopia-a "territory, [...] the landscape of German history," whose "reconquest" requires a different approach from the Left's traditional response to the "exploitation of dreams," which has been, writes Miller, to "incapacitate"



438 Matthew Griffin

them, leaving the dreams to "degenerate into the reservoir of the Right." Syberberg's film is able to reclaim these dreams, according to Mtiller, because it "categorizes the Thousand Year Reich as an incandescent episode in the colonial history of the four-hundred year-old capitalist world war," a version of history that "ends the nightmare of class reconciliation which emerges as the dawn of fascism." By rejecting the victor's model of history, which places closure over the history of class struggle, Syberberg, writes Miller, "forces his material into the vertical: coffin lids are blown up like layers of rock." The explosion of history in the "vertical" in the film not only frees the dead, liberating the past from the ongoing "exploitation of dreams," but it also creates the conditions for the "[e]nd of the dream factory": "[a]lone with the screen," writes Miller, "the images settle into dreams." Miuller's position here corresponds to his position of more than a quarter-century earlier: the tension between "dream" and "image," which arises out of the process of ideological mystification, can only be resolved by freeing the images from the structures of ideology. Only then can they return to the utopian dreams.

What is new here is the emphasis on metaphor and language: "language," writes Mtiller, "as a charm against the gun aimed at the speaker." Syberberg's "digression" from normative history, his attempt to "charm" the murderer, embodies Mtiller's notion of what images should do. That it is the conjuring powers of "language" that makes this literally life-saving digression possible should come as no surprise, since when Mtiller speaks about art as a space for experience and history, he turns to the concept of metaphor, that rhetorical aspect of language capable of defending against the "extinction of the world in images" or, in other words, against the em- bedding of experience in ideological structures.

The metaphor differs, for Mtiller, from the conventional verbal or poetic image in that it rejects all claims to transparency; it does not pretend to stand in for and represent a reality, rather it is itself this so-called reality. Neither language nor image, his essay on Syberberg implies, is immune from metaphor, which first makes possible an understanding of the dialectic between words and images. With respect to language, metaphor produces images that cannot be reduced to familiar quantities or concrete realities, and, as for the images of reality broadcast, for instance, by television or film, attention to metaphor can expose the ideological structures underlying the audiovisual arts. Mtiller's remarks on language further illustrate how the theory of metaphor developed in his reflections on filmic images and their relationship to experience and history relates to his concept of theater.

In order to illuminate what he calls the "expressive" function of language, Miller in a 1981 interview uses a remark by Hiolderlin-perhaps by way of Adorno's treatment of Holderlin in Aesthetic Theory-on the function of drama at the time of Sophocles:43




Words should take effect, Hilderlin writes. Words are murder. A text has two levels of transmission: one is information, the other, expression. Expression is much stronger and words are much more effective here [in the GDR] than in the West because information is repressed. Here words aren't just a vehicle for information, you derive information from expression. This is a better situation for drama.44

In capitalist societies, Mtiller argues, information may not be repressed, but the flood of information has the same effect as censorship-it hinders experience and prevents history. Only language (a linguistic consciousness), which has the potential for what Mtiller calls metaphor, poses an alternative to the "bombardment of images" by media and advertising in the West. The perhaps most antiquated medium for human communication in the age of digital culture has alone the dialectical quality capable of conveying the contradictions inherent to the communication media, the interplay between perception and consciousness, experience and cognition.

To read Mitller's theater texts from the mid-1970s onwards under the aspect of the poetic principle of expression is to find the ideological movens of his thought. The world of images created in plays such as Gundling's Life, Hamletmachine, The Task, Quartet, and Waterfront Wasteland has the function of establishing metaphorical structures that resist the reduction of words and images to one-dimensional meaning. The theory of expressive language developed during this period is important for understanding his theater work during the mid-1980s when-as his collaborations with Robert Wilson and his own directorial efforts indicate -his work becomes increasingly preoccupied with creating a language of the stage devoid of ideological contour. From his wide-ranging thinking about images, Mtiller begins during these years to formulate a more precise theory of images.

IV

One of the main figures in twentieth-century philosophy whose work has been capable of showing how ideology is related to figures of thought is Walter Benjamin. His writings on art and photography provide a model for linking notions of linguistic expression with modern, industrial forms of cultural production.45 Benjamin's significance for Miuller is indisputable, and the direct references are numerous.46 Critics have often brought Miuller together with Benjamin, modelling the dramatist's philosophy of history on the latter's critique of historicism.47 It is, however, on the topic of images that an engagement between Miuller and Benjamin can be made most productive.48

In a 1991 interview with the critics Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, Miuller expresses the affinity of his theater to Benjamin's postulate-by way of Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"-that experience is not the



440 Matthew Griffin

result of conscious process but rather of shock, a position which has led his theater to be characterized, the interviewers note, as a "Theater of Hor- ror."49 What the interviewers want to know is how-at a time when "'im-

ages of horror' have become everyday [...] the video stores are full of them"-"can one relate such shock effects onstage today?"'5 Mtiller's reply has less to do with the differences between theater and video or the content of the image than with the role of the image as shock in structuring our everyday experience: "Every step outside the house is an experience of shock," states Mtiller, "and every jaunt across the street consists of thou- sands of shocks. That's why shock is an obvious prerequisite for perception."51 The images of the music video, in contrast to the television program, argues Mtiller, have the effect of breaking up the linear conception of time that is associated with conventional notions of history.

Mtiller is clearly interested here, as in the Syberberg essay, in a concept of history and experience that is best approximated by Benjamin's thesis from Konvolut "N (Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Pro- gress)" of the Arcades Project: "History breaks down (Zerfiillt) in images, not in stories."52 Benjamin theorized the relation of the past to the present, not as a temporal relation but rather as one based on images. Shock is the result, for Benjamin, of the crystallization of thought in the "monad," a moment of standstill that provides the historian with the "revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past."53 Benjamin calls the image capable of producing this rupture in the continuum of history a "dialectical image," a concept closely tied to language, as the following passage from Konvolut N asserts:

It isn't that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather image is that in which the Then (das Gewesene) and the Now (das Jetzt) come ito a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical-not development but image [,] leaping forth (sprung- haft).-Only dialectical images are genuine (i.e., not archaic) images: and the place one happens upon them is language.54

Benjamin's "dialectical image" is a complex concept whose stability has been the source of dispute amongst critics.5 Important, however, for our discussion of Miuller's theory of images, is that the image as shock appears as a function of language. For it is in the context of his discussion of Ben- jamin's theory of language that Mitchell's remarks on the primacy of the image in poetic theories of expression find their most elaborate exposition by Mtiller.56 "Language," explains Miller,

is very important in Benjamin. Language has almost a magical function, language as a conjuration of reality, not so much as its description. That's the




main point in the theater. Television has no language, no verbal language; it has to do more and more with a non-verbal language, that is, only a transmission, no more expression. Words don't play a role, only sentences or larger contexts, that is, information. Literature has to build up a resistance to this. This is a subject for Adorno-and one that also has to do with Benjamin: the more clear and understandable a text is, the less it has to say about the present. And the more difficult and dense a text is, the more information it contains. One has to extract this information, to find it oneself, only then does it become experience. The flood of images and information seeks to hinder experience. One can only stand so much, then a blindness sets in that, naturally, brutalizes-that much is clear.57

Mtiller's privileging of expression over description, verbal over non-verbal language, and literature over the transmission of information echoes his earlier remarks on metaphor as a kind of protection against the concretization of the image. The passage even contains a reference to a frequent theme for Mtiller: the "resistance" of literature to conceptual structures that can arise in verbal as well as visual arts like theater. What this passage, however, adds to our knowledge of Mfiller's theory of language as expression is the notion that in order for information to become experience, it must be first "extract[ed]" from the "flood of images and information that seeks to hinder experience." This process of extraction differs from the hermeneutical practice of interpretation, in which understanding is guided by principles of cognitive reflection. Expressive language is, by contrast, metaphoric language, and since metaphor, in Miller's words, "cannot be reduced to a meaning" a different model for Miller's concept of theater as expressive language must be sought.58

Borrowing the concept of image as monad from Benjamin, the author conceptualizes a theory of images and their relation to language that allows him to treat the image as a site at which experience can be inscribed in the subject as shock. Benjamin, who wants to activate the dead for the present, not leaving them to the past, imagines the present not only as transition but also as a "the now" (Jetztzeit), burst free from the continuum of events by a "Messianic cessation of happening."59 Miller, like Benjamin, is interested in the shock monad as a point at which the past can be reclaimed for the present. Here an image of the past is won, an image whose monadological structure requires one to receive, separate, and extract it to access experience.

Opitz and Wizisla are quick to relate Benjamin's notion of image as shock monad to Miuller's own concept of the image. "In your early text 'Images,' " state the interviewers, "a quality of image is implied that, if you will, also has monadological structure, and that in any case also touches on Benjamin's definition."60 The interviewers link this monadological concept of the image with a concept of allegory based on Benjamin's own reconfig-



442 Matthew Griffin

uration of the eighteenth-century concept of allegory as a one-to-one relation of parts.61 Miuller distinguishes his own use of images from the traditional use of allegory by emphasizing Benjamin's historical realignment of the concept in his study of the Baroque Trauerspiel. Allegory does not fix meaning, rather functions, Mtiller states, as a "signature, as something that one uses in the first place to point to something else."62

The confusion here between allegory and metaphor is not diminished by Mfiller's own often contradictory use of the two terms. There is, for instance, his oft-cited statement, "The author is more clever than the allegory, the metaphor more clever than the author," in which, as the interviewers tell us, metaphor clearly takes precedence over a concept of allegory bound to authorial intention.63 Miller's response, in this case, is to distinguish between the two concepts of allegory. Thus the "allegory" of the above statement is attributed to an example of a polemic against "the parables of Brecht, like Sezuan," which are not allegories in the Benjami- nian sense because their structures are calculated to bring the movement of meaning to a "standstill."64 Kafka's parables contain "more reality" than Brecht's learning plays, writes Miller in his 1979 essay on Brecht, "Fatzer + / - Keuner," because the parable for Kafka-and this is the essence of the Benjaminian concept of allegory-is "not oriented toward a movement (praxis), it is not reducible to a meaning, it is strange (fremd) rather than estranging (verfremdend), without a moral."

Two comments by Benjamin about Kafka's work interest Miller, as he explains in the 1991 interview. First, Kafka's work, in contrast to Brecht's parables, "describes very precisely gestures without a system of reference" and, secondly, it describes "mechanisms that are no longer valid for indi- viduals or not at all for the individual, only for the collective."65 These features, which constitute what Miller calls the "blindness of Kafka's experience," its lack of a system of reference, are "evidence" of the work's "authenticity."66 "Kafka's gaze is a gaze into the sun," writes Miller, which means that experience must be made, quoting Benjamin, as a process of extraction in the shock monad.

The explosion of the continuum, the bursting open of the historical moment through the shock monad, occurs, for Miller, when history is looked "in the white of the eye," which politics avoids by adhering to historicism ("[t]he inability to look history in the white of the eye as the basis of politics"). "Only the increasing pressure of authentic experience-as- suming that it 'rallies the masses'-develops," writes Milller, "the ability to look history in the white of the eye. This alone can be the end of politics and the beginning of a history of humankind." The liberation of the subject from structures that hinder "authentic" experience is a point Mtiller makes throughout the texts I have discussed here. From "Images," which posits a "possible end of the horrors" through the beautiful, to Syberberg, whose




film combines metaphor and expression, Miller's theory of images plays aesthetic accompaniment to his work's political and ideological concerns.

Contrary to what one might expect of an author exposed to the ascent of the visual media, the verbal core of his work's constitutive categories remains intact. The work returns again and again to metaphor as a means to explain his approach to language and art. Miller takes up, for instance, Getrude Stein's remarks on Elizabethan literature to illuminate the point that in expression it is a motion or movement of meaning that guarantees the subject's history and experience. The "power" of the Elizabethan text, writes Miller, is located

in the rapid change of meaning in language: 'Everything moves so much.' The change of meaning is the barometer measuring the pressure of experience in the dawn of capitalism, which begins to discover the world as market. The speed of change of meaning constitutes the primacy of metaphor, which in turn serves as a blinder against the bombardment of images.67

Metaphor functions here as resistance to the conceptualizing tendencies of a world perceived to be more and more image created at the cost of life's vitality. It is, for example, the presence of metaphor that makes the language of the Elizabethan poets distinct from everyday language and, in particular, the language of politics and commerce. Mtiller, citing T.S. Eliot's statement, "'The pressure of experience forces language into poetry,' " further finds a formula in which the relationship between metaphoric language ("poetry") and history ("experience") is charged with the utopia of Marxist revolution: "The fear of metaphor is the fear of the internal dynamic in the material. The fear of tragedy is the fear of permanent revolution." Meta- phor and tragedy, material and revolution-Miller's work thus unites expression with history, making the image the repository for the utopia of revolution.

V

The former East German dramatist's iconoclasm is, I have tried to show, never complete. His interest in images is always an interest in exposing the ideological mystifications that inform the modern subject's experience. The image, for Miller, is not a transparent copy of reality, but a complex representational structure through which a society or culture's values are expressed. That images, like words, are penetrated by codes and organized by social structures does not mean, however, that there is no difference, for Mller, between words and images. The difference can be approached through the category of metaphor. In the tension between the abstraction of the concept and the false concretization of the image, Miller creates an art that refuses to produce familiar images, leaving instead the recog-



444 Matthew Griffin

nition of the world by the reader-spectator to the semantic plenitude of language. What we further find in the author's discussion of metaphor is his use of the conflict between language and image as a focal point for concerns such as the hindering of experience and the loss of utopia.

To struggle with Mtiller's imagery and the role of metaphor in the author's work leads one to the scene of recognition between ideology and iconology. It is a scene that shows Miller composing images resistant to easy conceptualization. Marxist utopia, as a consequence, remains inviola- ble because undepicted, a reservoir against all its misrepresentations from the Soviet Union to Cambodia to the Eastern Bloc. To acknowledge that Mtiller's work has become ideologically suspect in our thinking of the relationship between art and politics in the aftermath of the Cold War is to address this work's legacy. It is also to address the legacy of ideology in a world for which globalization has apparently obsolesced the battle of ideologies. Rather than perform a conventional critique of the author's false consciousness, looking for "good" and "bad" images, I have as much as possible inquired into the way his work asks us to consider ideology. This has meant examining the way Mtiller speaks about images, his rhetoric. My examination of the discourse on imagery in Mtiller's work spans some thirty years and demonstrates that a theme throughout Mtiller's work is the complicity of imagery with the ideological structures that inform his artistic vision.

After 1989 Miller returns to the theme of image and ideology with special cogency. A combination of sadness for the loss of the GDR and recognition of his own declining health permeates his poetry from this period: "The world / Evades its description / All things human / become alien," concludes his 1993 poem "Blackfilm" (Schwarzfilm). "Blackfilm" is the product of the negative's overexposure-such film holds no image. In the twilight of ideologies Mtiller thus reconfigures Marx's key metaphor for ideology, the camera obscura, and finds a new figure for the way ideology inflects our perception of the world. Gone is the "dark room" in which a pinhole in one wall projects an inverted image of an external scene onto its opposite.68 In place of the inverted image is the absence of the image, or the "paradise of blindness" with which the poem begins. The absence of the photographic image leaves room for utopia: Miller seems to be sug- gesting that the best metaphor for the relationship between the artist and the political conditions against which his or her work takes shape is not the camera, but the overexposed film. The black film is itself a metaphor for the way metaphor works-"the world evades its description" means that metaphor does not act like the camera, capturing reality. Nor does its action mimic the inversion of consciousness in the camera of ideology. Metaphor's potential to produce images resistant to predominant political and aesthetic ideologies comes instead when the camera is smashed and the film is de-




stroyed. The camera obscura of ideology is thus never a camera lucida in Mti.ller's work, and in the usage Mtiller makes of such metaphors, there is no nostalgia for clarity. Miller strategically repeats this classical metaphor precisely to denounce the illusion of transparency. Film, overexposed-like the inserts of blackened frames in Godard's films, which Miller frequently praised for their Brechtian attitude-is a metaphor that reminds us just how complicated the relationship between image and ideology can be for an author whose work locates utopia in the nowhere where "All things human become alien."

'1Heiner Mtiller, "Blackfilm," 1993, A Heiner Miiller Reader, ed. Carl Weber. (Balti- more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) 235; first published in: Drucksache 7(1994): 257, and later as "Schwarzfilm," Die Gedichte: Werke 1, ed. Frank Hiornigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998) 275.

2That Mtiller's work might be ideologically suspect is a criticism that has dogged him from various political quarters since the 1961 banning of The Resettler and his expulsion from the writer's league. In the ensuing years his work continued to exist in steady confrontation with Party censors, whose positions are perhaps best articulated by Wolfgang Harich in his notorious attack of Miller's 1971/72 Macbeth ("Der entlaufene Dingo, das vergessene Floss" Sinn und Form 25:1(1973): 189-218.). The West German critic Michael Schneider later revived Harich's criticism of Mtiller's apparent nihilism ("Heiner Millers 'Endspiele,' " 1979, Der Kopf verkehrt aufgesetzt (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1981) 194-225; and "Bertolt Brecht und sein illegitimer Erbe Heiner Miller," Neue Deutsche Literatur 46:3(1998): 124-140). The real targets, however, of the present-day counter-assertions regarding the dubious ideology of Miller's work are the West Berlin critics Horst Domdey and Richard Herzinger, who, beginning in the mid-1980s, have placed Miller in a tradition of reactionary modernism and civilization critique that includes such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Jiinger, and Oswald Spengler. In contrast, however, to the accusations of decadence by Harich and Schneider, Domdey and Herzinger's work presents Miller as unabated Marxist, not as wayward fellow traveler. It is precisely this contradiction in his work-the clash, borrowing Norbert Eke's phrase, between apocalypse and utopia, between images of destruction and the ideologies of renewal-that has yet to be adequately addressed by scholars. (Horst Domdey, "Mythos als Phrase oder Die Sinnausstattung des Opfers: Henker- und Opfermasken in Texten Heiner Millers." Merkur 40: 447 (1986): 403-413; Domdey's essays are collected in Produktivkraft Tod: Das Drama Heiner Millers (Cologne: Bohlau, 1998); and Richard Herzinger, Masken der Lebensrevolu- tion: Vitalistische Zivilisations-und Humanismuskritik in Texten Heiner Miillers (Munich: Fink, 1992).

3David Bathrick, "The Provocation of his Images," New German Critique 73 (1998): 31-34 (31-32).

4Heinrich Vormweg, "Sprache-die Heimat der Bilder: Vorschlage zur Annaherung an Heiner Miller," Text + Kritik 73 (1982): 20-31 (22).

5W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

6The connection I am proposing here between image and ideology draws off the "critical-linguistic analysis" of Paul de Man, which seeks to unmask those "ideological aberrations" arising from that intrinsic tendency of all ideology "to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies." Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 11.

Literature and its relation to other modes of cultural production that characterize our modernity at the beginning of the twenty-first century cannot be thought without also thinking the image. (Indeed, almost all modern literary criticism can be read as an elaboration on and critique of the notion that the image constitutes a more transparent medium for the representation of reality than language.) This turn towards image, it might be argued, results from the changes writing undergoes in the last century, in particular, those due to the rise of the tech-



446 Matthew Griffin

nological media around 1900. Friedrich Kittler, in Discourse Networks, describes this epochal change as the breaking of the monopoly on representation held by language and the alphabet. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer with C. Cullens (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Gramophone, film, and typewriter are early incarnations of the many contemporary recording media that, not to forget the book, make up today the domain of literature and its study. The need for unmasking ideological aberrations-de Man's definition of the task of a "critical-linguistic analysis"-within the mechanisms of representation grows as the present-day incarnations (e.g., CD-player, TV/video/DVD, and word processor) tend to become more and more unified in the fiber optic networks that are now bringing the previously discrete media of television, radio, telephone, and mail into a single medium. The supposed transparency of such a medium could present the ultimate mystification. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Mi- chael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). On the epochal problem, see too Wlad Godzich, "Language, Images, and the Postmodern Predicament," Materialities of Communi- cation, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. W. Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) 355-370; and for the specific effect of the turn towards the image on theater, see K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, "Dimensions of Literature: A Speculative Ap- proach," Materialities of Communication, 45-69 (53-59).

8Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994: 13. 9See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(New York: Zone, 1995); and Jean Baudrillard, whose theory of a reality eclipsed by an all- encompassing simulation can be read as elaboration on Debord's work. I am thinking primarily of Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michi- gan Press, 1994); and, specifically, The Evil Demon of Images, 1984, trans. Paul Patton and Paul Foss (Sydney: The Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1988) 13-34.

10 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 371.

11 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994: 13; see, too, his "What Do Pictures Want?" October 77 (1996): 71-82.

12Joachim Fiebach, "Resisting Simulation: Heiner Mtiller's Paradoxical Approach to Theater and Audiovisual Media Since the 1970s" New German Critique 73 (1998): 81-94. This tradition originates in the Miller literature with Hans-Thies Lehmann, "Raum-Zeit," Text + Kritik 73 (1982): 71-81.

13This is Norbert Bolz's analysis of the famous line from Tractor about the "disappearance of the world in images." Norbert Bolz, Am Ende der Gutenberg-Galaxis: Die neuen Kommunikationsverhiiltnisse (Munich: Fink, 1993) 114.

14Heiner Mtiller, "The Hamletmachine," Theatremachine, trans, and ed. Marc von Hen- ning (London: Faber & Faber, 1995) 92.

15Mitchell, Iconology, 1986: 5. 16Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994: 49. 17 Cf. Mitchell, Iconology, 1986: 165-166. Destutt de Tracy first used the term ideology

in 1796, to designate a philosophic discipline as foundation of all sciences, a 'science of ideas.' Marx, having read de Tracy, used the term in his 1844-45 Paris Manuscripts for ideas and beliefs which were blind to the material conditions of their production. Ideology has also come to denote the name for any given system of ideas and their link to particular social classes, values, institutions, and power relations. Mitchell attempts to use both definitions, staging a critical encounter between iconology and ideology. David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan, "Image and Ideology: Some Preliminary Histories and Polemics," Image and Ideology in Mod- ern/Postmodern Discourse, eds. Downing and Bazargan (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1991) 3-44 (3); on this broader definition of ideology see too James H. Kavanaugh, "Ideology," Critical Terms for Literary Study ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2nd edition) 306-320.

t8Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology," Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 3; and Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)," Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) 127-186 (174).

19Barthes, who defines rhetoric as the "signifying aspect of ideology," makes the point




in "Rhetoric of the Image," that for the image, as for all signifying systems in society, the "common realm of the signifieds of connotation is that of ideology." Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985) 38.

20This paper originates from a larger project whose subject, the relationship between text and image in the theater collaborations between Heiner Miller and Robert Wilson, prompted me to reflect on the importance of the verbal image in Miuller's texts for the theater. My point there was to show that the encounter with Wilson's "Theater of Images" brought out an often overlooked aspect of the German dramatist's work, its sensitivity to issues of language, image, and ideology. Cf. Text, Image, Ideology: The Theater Collaborations ofHeiner Miiller and Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, forthcoming).

21Heiner Milller, Tractor, in The Battle, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: Perform- ing Arts Journal, 1989) 67.

22Critics have generally divided Miiller's work into three periods: the production plays of the 1950s and early 1960s, the classical adaptations of the 1960s, and synthetic fragments from the mid-1970s and 1980s. Cf. Uwe Wittstock, "Die schnelle Wirkungen sind nicht die neuen: Ein Portrait des Dramatikers Heiner Miiller," text + kritik (1982) 73: 10-19.

23Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 129.

24Heiner Miiller, "Images," Geschichten aus der Produktion 2 (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1974) 7. The poem reads:

Images

Images mean everything in the beginning. They're durable. Spacious.

But dreams congeal, take shape and disappoint. No image can even contain the sky any longer.

The cloud, seen from the airplane: Steam that obstructs the view.

The crane just another bird. Even Communism, the final image, always refreshed Washed in blood again and again, everyday life Doles it out in small change, tarnished,

blinded by sweat

The great poems rubble, like bodies, long loved and Now no longer needed on the road of the finite species

with many needs

Between the lines lamentations

on the bones of the stone luggers joy

Because the beautiful means the possible end of the horrors.

25Genia Schulz, Heiner Miiller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980) 169; and Carl Weber, The Battle, 14.

26Heiner Miller, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Ktinste, Berlin, typewritten manuscript page from folder titled "friihe Gedichte u. Entwilrfe, aussortiert 1989 ftir wissenschaft- liche Ausgabe": "Abgegriffen in Bilde," writes Miuller in the original, to which he adds, "Unter schairfern Blicken werden sie schwieriger, schrumpfen vor dem Wachsenden Sehkreis im Zusehn."

27The cloud and the crane are common figures in Brecht's poetry, for instance, in "Erinnerung an die Maria A." and, as Schulz notes (171), in "The Lovers," which begins with the verse: "Sieh jene Kraniche in grol3em Bogen! / Die Wolken, welche ihnen beigegeben / Zogen mit ihnen schon, als sie entflogen / Aus einem Leben in ein andres Leben" (Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Grofie kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, eds. Werner Hecht,



448 Matthew Griffin

Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Miuller (Berlin: Aufbau and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988-2000) 11).

28Cf. Martin Jay, "Ideology and Ocularcentrism: Is There Anything Behind the Mirror's Tain?" Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993) 134-146.

29Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Kiinste, Berlin, typewritten manuscript page, attached to aforementioned draft of "Images." The German reads: "Die Arbeiterklasse ... hat keine Ideale zu verwirklichen / (Marx)."

30In the same folder Miuller refers to a play, Die Sieben aus Ulkusan, which he calls "neun Bilder aus dem Leben der Lehrlinge von heute," and he names a figure "HR, Arbeiter im VEB, Berlin-Chemie."

31The verse from which Miuller borrows his formula reads: "Denn das Schine ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen, / und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmiht, / uns zu zerstoren."

32Cf. Schulz, Heiner Miiller, 172. 33 Rilke, Letter, December 16, 1923. 34Rilke, Letter, November 26, 1921. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926. Trans.

Jane B. Greene, M.D. Herter Norton. (New York: Norton, 1947) 264-267 (266). 35 Heiner Mtiller, "The Toad on the Gas Meter," Germania, ed. Sylvbre Lotringer, trans.

Bernard and Caroline Schtitze (New York: semiotext(e), 1990) 150-152 (150). 36Cf. "Gesprhch zwischen Johannes R. Becher und Gottfried Benn," March 6, 1930,

Berliner Rundfunk, an exerpt of which has been reproduced in Heiner Miuller, Zur Lage der Nation (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990) 98-99. "The inclination towards politics does not characterize poetry," writes Benn, "it is rather a characteristic of the class struggle. It's either chance or private fancy if it takes poetic form."

37 The entire passage reads: "The impossibility of catching the event through its description; the incompatibility of writing and reading; the exorcism of the reader from the text. Puppets stuffed with words instead of sawdust. Heartflesh. The desire for a language no one can read is growing. Who is no one. A language without words. Or the disappearance of the world in the words. Instead: the lifelong compulsion to see, the bombardment of images (Tree House Woman), the eyelids blasted off. Confronted with the gnashing of teeth, the burning and singing.The slag heap of literature in your back.

The extinction of the world in images" (Miller, Tractor, 67.). 38Mtiller, "Intelligence without Experience," Germania, 165. The English translation of

the interview has been abridged in Germania; for a complete transcript of the interview, see "Mich interessiert die Verarbeitung von Realitit." Heiner Milller, Gesammelte Irrtimer (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1986) 61-68, esp. 65-67.

39Mtiller's choice of Disney and his recourse to the category of barbarism, far from being haphazard, place his comments in a tradition of cultural criticism to which Benjamin's 1933 essay "Erfahrung und Armut" (Experience and Poverty) is, likewise, indebted; Benjamin uses here the figure of Mickey Mouse to describe a new type of experiential poverty brought about by the "unfolding of technology" in the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedeman (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972) 2.1: 213-219 (214). On the counter-tradition of artists and thinkers to which Benjamin, in this essay, gives the name, "new barbarians," see Burkhard Lindner, "Technischer Reproduzierbarkeit und Kultur- industrie: Benjamin's 'Positives Barbarentum' im Kontext," 'Links hatte noch alles sich zu entriitseln...': Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. B. Lindner (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1978) 180-223.

40 Miller, around the same time but in a slightly different context, expresses his concern about the brutality of such images when he states that "[a]fter these children have been watch- ing these cartoons for several months or years, all they will ever be capable of doing is what the market demands of them" (Germania, 186).

41Cf. MUller's remarks in a written interview elicited by Carl Weber: "The metaphorical function of the Disney film is to reduce the symbolic force of images to one meaning, to make them immediately allegorical. The imagery one finds in the early Russian cinema, on the other hand, is like the torrent of metaphors at the heart of Elizabethan literature. Here metaphors are constructed as a kind of visual protection against a much too rapidly changing reality, a




reality that can only be dealt with and assimilated in this very special way. A world of images is created that does not lend itself to conceptual formulation and that cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional metaphor. This is what I try to do in my theater" (Hamletmachine, 138). The similarity in phrasing makes it plain that Miller is transcribing from the Farocki interview, although his characterization here of metaphor as "one-dimensional" is in contradiction to his use of the concept in the earlier interview.

42Mtiller, Germania, 100-102; see too Hans-Jirgen Syberberg, Hitler: A Film from Ger- many, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), and Susan Sontag, "Syberberg's Hitler," Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980) 137-165.

43Adorno's remark bears on Miller's concept of expression in language: "Subjektive Erfahrung bringt Bilder ein, die nicht Bilder von irgend etwas sind [...]; so und nicht anders wird Kunst zur Erfahrung vermittelt. Kraft solchen Erfahrungsgehalts, nicht erst durch Fixie- rung oder Formung im tiblichen Verstande, weichen die Kunstwerke von der empirischen Realitit ab; Empirie durch empirische Deformation. Das ist ihre Affinitait zum Traum [...]" (Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973) 133.) Miller's Benjamin reception is no doubt also based on the author's reading of Adorno.

44Mtiller, Germania, 52. 45 For Benjamin, the camera is both the real manifestation of ideology and an expression

of the "historical life-process" capable of bringing about its end (Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968) 224.

46Important for Miller's reception of Benjamin is the latter's thesis on Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus," whose task, writes Benjamin, is to "awaken the dead" and "make whole what has been smashed" (Illuminations, 257). Miller's 1958 prose text, "The Luckless Angel" (Germania, 99), responds to Benjamin's text. For further discussions of Angelus Novus with respect to Miuller's concept of history, see Francine Maier-Schaffer, "Utopie et Fragment: Heiner Miller et Walter Benjamin," Etudes Germaniques 48 (1993): 47-64; Frank M. Raddatz, Diimonen unterm Roten Stern: Zu Geschichtsphilosophie und Aesthetik Heiner Miillers (Stutt- gart: Metzler, 1991) 174-184; and Erdmut Wizisla, "Gltickloser Engel: Der Angelus Novus als literarischer Gegenstand," Nomen, Texte, Stimmen: Walter Benjamin's Sprachphilosophie, ed. Thomas Regehly with Iris Gniosdorsch (Stuttgart: Akademie der Di6zese, Rottenburg, 1993) 155-172.

47 Cf. H.-D. Kittsteiner, "Walter Benjamin's Historismus," Passagen: Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des neunzehnhten Jahrhunderts, eds. Norbert Bolz and Bernd Witte (Munich, 1987); Fritz Iversen and Norbert Servos, "Sprengsitze: Geschichte und Diskontinuitit in den Sticken Heiner Mtillers und der Theorie Walter Benjamins," Die Hamletmaschine: Heiner Miillers Endspiel, ed. Theo Girshausen (Cologne: Prometh, 1978) 128-138. See too Moray McGowan, "Marxist-Postmodernist-German: History and Dramatic For in the Work of Heiner Mtiller," Socialism and the Literary Imagination, ed. Martin Kane (New York: Berg, 1991) 125-146; and Heinz-Dieter Weber, "Heiner Mtillers Geschichtsdrama: die Beendigung einer literarischen Gattung," Der Deutschunterricht 43:4 (1991) 43-57. Also of interest is the audi- ocassette Den Pessimismus organisieren: Heiner Miiller liest Walter Benjamin, Hamburg, No- vember 4, 1990, ed. Jan Linders (Berlin: Alexander, 1991).

48Horst Domdey's remarks on the productive engagement with Benjamin's non-linear, image-based, and materialist theory of history is essential to understanding Mtiller's "Bild- konstruktion," or use of imagery. Horst Domdey, Produktivkraft Tod (Cologne: B6hlau, 1998) 122-125.

49Heiner Mtiller, "Jetzt sind eher die infernalischen Aspekte bei Benjamin wichtig: Gesprich mit Heiner Miuller," Aber ein Sturm weht von Paradies her: Texte zu Walter Benjamin, eds. Michael Opitz and Ermut Wizisla (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992) 348-362 (355). A genealogy of the category of shock in theories of memory and consciousness discussed here might start from Benjamin's "Central Park," lead back through Freud's trauma studies in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and to the turn-of-the-century study by Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

50Mtiller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 355. 51 Muiller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 356. 52Benjamin, "Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts," Gesammelte Schriften

5.1, 570-611 (N 11.4).



450 Matthew Griffin

53Benjamin, "Thesen zur Philosophie der Geschichte," Gesammelte Schriften 1.2, 703. 54Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 5.1, 578 (N 2a.3). Background to "dialectical image"

is provided by Thomas Weber, "dialektisches Bild," Historisch-kritisches Wiorterbuch des Marx- ismus, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Berlin: Argument, 1997) 703-714.

For discussions of Benjamin's "dialectical image" see Ackbar Abbas, "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images," New German Critique 48(1989): 43-62; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989); Anselm Haverkamp, "Notes on the 'Dialectical Image' (How Deconstructive Is It?)," Diacritics 22:3-4(1992) 70-80; Bet- tina Menke, "Bild-Textualitat: Benjamins schriftliche Bilder," Der Entzug der Bilder: Visuelle Realitiiten, eds. Michael Wetzel and Herta Wolf (Munich: Fink, 1994) 47-65.

56Romantic and modernist writers assimilated mental, verbal, and even pictorial imagery into the cult of imagination in a process about which Mitchell has the following to say: "This progressive sublimation of the image reaches its logical culmination when the entire poem or text is regarded as an image or 'verbal icon,' and this image is defined, not as pictorial likeness or impression, but as a synchronic structure in some metaphorical space [... ]. [T]he distinctive modernist emphasis is on the image as a sort of crystalline structure, a dynamic pattern of the intellectual and emotional energy bodied forth by a poem" (Iconology, 24-25).

57Mtiller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 356. 58 Miiller, Germania, 166. 59Benjamin, Illuminations, 261 and 263. 60Miller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 359. 61 In the interview, Miller turns tables on "metaphor" and "allegory," assigning to al-

legory the qualities that had defined metaphor in his work from the early 1980s. This reversal is no doubt due to the influence of Benjamin's categories.

62 Miiller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 360. 63 Miller, Germania, 125. 64Miller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 360. Another example of Benjamin's prejudice against

metaphor can be found in his surrealism essay, in which he selects Aragon's distinction between "image" and "metaphor" in Traiti du style over Breton's better known definition of the surrealist image as the juxaposition of "two distant realities" ("The First Surrealist Manifesto," Surrealists and Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970) 16, 24), in order to discuss, with Aragon, how the dependence of metaphor on pre-existing notions of resemblance renders it incapable of reproducing anything but the accepted order of things (Reflections, 191). Benjamin assigns to the image-and this brings us back to his concept of allegory-a disruptive, destructive quality that cannot be channeled into precon- ceived correspondences.

65Mtiller, "Jetzt sind eher...," 357. 66 Mtiller, Germania, 125. 67 Miller, Germania, 126; Mtiller is referring here to Stein's 1935 essay "What is English

Literature," which appears in her Lectures in America. Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932-1946, eds. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: The Library of America, 1998) 195-223 (204).

68The famous passage from The German Ideology reads: "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (London: International. Publ., 1970) 47.



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