Response to Distinguished Lecture

Abstract

Response to Distinguished Lecture Veronika Fuechtner Haakenson's lecture challenged all of us to carefully consider the place from which we are speaking. This resonated for me because my own university, Dartmouth College, was founded in 1769 on Abenaki lands by the minister Eleazer Wheelock under the patronage of the Earl of Dartmouth. Wheelock raised the funds together with his former student, the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, promising to Christianize Native American men. However, as Occom wrote, Dartmouth became quickly "too alba [white]," and those who it was intended to serve, did "never have much benefit of it."1 For almost two centuries, Dartmouth educated mostly Christian white men. It presents one of many examples of how the enterprise of the liberal arts in the US rests on a material history of violence and marginalization.2 This material history is inextricably intertwined with an intellectual history that encompasses colonial ideologies, theological antisemitism, the philosophical racism of the Enlightenment, and the scientific racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Universities and their scholars established, but also simultaneously questioned and undermined the tools of racist patriarchy. The reflection on what it means when these tools are used to examine their very creations must be part of any critical labor. Can the master's tools dismantle the master's house?3 Writing with livid clarity, the poet Audre Lorde didn't formulate this as a question. To her, they never could. Haakenson's talk addresses precisely this issue: How can the intellectual work of decolonization resist becoming a gesture of tokenism, or yet another form of "settler appropriation" as Tuck and Yang suggest? And I would like to add here: How can such intellectual work resist becoming another expression of a capitalist, neoliberal logic that establishes radical rhetoric in the mainstream as cultural currency, but contains its transformative power? Herbert Marcuse described so well how everything that starts as subversion will end up as a commodity, as radical chic.4 Think only of the Che Guevara T-Shirt worn by Prince Harry. Haakenson undertakes the work of decolonization for the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, for several decades now a very canonical field in US German studies—in fact at times seemingly the [End Page 355] only field present in ever-shrinking German departments. German studies in the US is often sold with the lights and shadows of Weimar Cinema, and the pensive walk of the flaneur, or even the flaneuse. So, how can we un-settle Weimar? How can we look up from the Asphalt and stop watching People—on a Sunday? How can we deal with what to us may be Weimar's other paradox? Haakenson described the first, historical paradox of the avant-garde with Jakobson and Stavrinaki as the push for "legalization of illegality" paired with the experience of the marginalization of the arts. But there is also the present paradox that has propelled an aesthetic conceived as subversive into the aesthetic of choice for German department websites and admission brochures. What are we selling, when we sell Weimar? And what would thinking another Weimar look like? Haakenson's talk provides answers by addressing the global circulation of visual references in Dada, as well as by bringing Dada into conversation with contemporary art, specifically with Adam Pendleton's brilliant unpacking of its colonial and racist baggage. But, as Haakenson makes clear in his reading, the work can't stop with pointing to this baggage and dwelling on the injustice of its weight. There is a possibility in the avant-garde once we consider its presentness, or as Haakenson writes, its "concern with ephemerality, iconicity, and time." Stephen Greenblatt has described how the viewer of a photograph senses the energy it extends beyond its formal boundaries, a "resonance" that makes its historical and situational context perceivable to the viewer.5 The relationship between the viewer and the photograph could also be described in psychoanalytic terms as an interplay of transference and countertransference. The viewer's imagination and photography's resonance not only speak to each other but condition one another and create a space that momentarily suspends the sense of progressive time.6 Pendleton's artistic...