Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Andreas Huyssen. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 368 pp.

Review by Anders Troelsen

15 February 2016

It has always been an intellectual pleasure to embark upon a new book by Andreas Huyssen.  Miniature Metropolis is no exception. In this book the reader is presented with a string of sensitive close readings of texts situated at the intersection point of the modern metropolis, modernist literature, and new media. There are not only the usual suspects performing on the urban scene such as Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Siegfried Kracauer, or Walter Benjamin but also, for instance, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, and Theodor Adorno—and Huyssen’s approach is not exhausted in well-known tropes such as acceleration of life, condensation of time, and space, perceptual disorientation, stimuli protection, multiplication of perspectives, anomie, montage, and others. As “one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism” (p. 2), the “urban miniatures”—as the minor genre is baptized by Huyssen—are typically texts that provide no detailed descriptions of urban sites, but are trying to come to terms with the unstable and indirect human relationships of the metropolis and with the new visual media such as photography or film. The goal can be pursued in different ways, for example, by resorting to an oneiric imagery, and it can sometimes go together with a longing for a prelapsarian language.

In this vein, literature is simply denying its own premature declaration of death. Without adapting the techniques of the new visual media and without sharing the utopian potentials attributed to them, “urban minatures” often confront or dispute them, reasserting their own differential and language’s ability to conjure up the transitory urban life, thus insisting on their own literacy in a kind of stubbornness, Eigensinn. Some of the analysed texts are seen as exercising a kind of sabotage on the threshold between word and image, others as applying a kind of “remediation in reverse,”scrolling backwards a development in which the novel is swallowed up by the film just as the painted portraiture is replaced by photography.

The exchanges within the triangulation of metropolis, media, and modernism are often rather oblique. Warfare conceived as the telos of modernism is projected into the city by Jünger, the trenches of the Great War being replaced and metamorphosed into barricades of class struggle. In Kafka’s urban maze of unreadable dependencies, phenomena of extremely fast motion and sudden arrest and standstill are read as corresponding to new media forms: early silent film’s accelerated distortion of reality being a kind of distraction, photography’s deceleration a sort of (positive) attention.

Huyssen is offering subtle interpretations of Benn’s Rönne novellas, analysing them one by one, and he is showing how Robert Musil welcomed the challenge of new media and drew inspiration from Béla Baláz’ film theory that stressed the disruption of ordinary scale perception and the boundary between the human and the not human by, for instance, the isolated framing of close ups.

In his treatment of Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße, Huyssen undertakes to “to read One-Way Street in terms of a structure of absence, the absence of the pictura” (p. 149).  Huyssen thus observes how the Trauerspiel author and theorist of Baroque allegory is opposing the triumphalism of the visual by only offering the inscripito and subscripto of the tripartite structure of the emblem, that is, the textual elements, not the pictura.

In a stimulating way, Huyssen is applying the concept of Durchdringung (interpenetration) to some of the phenomena described in the texts—a term coined by the architectural theorist Siegfried Giedion in 1928 (pp. 17–18). As a champion of modernism, he demonstrated how steel, glass, and ferroconcrete enabled architecture to abolish former borders between inside and outside, public and private, above and below, fixed and fluid space. This notion lends itself to be expanded in a way so that hierarchic models of experiences are weakened on all levels. An example is the film’s tendency to equalize human beings and material things.

Huyssen sets up a trap for himself by treating Adorno as the coda of the trajectory he has traced. The question offers itself too easily: Is the author somehow identifying himself with Adorno, the German expatriate who in Minima Moralia renounces explicit theoretical cohesion and rejects ontological essentialism? Huyssen is no refugee, and he is certainly not claiming a status like Adorno. There is no doubt that Huyssen to some degree affiliates himself with positions associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He clearly admires Adorno, but, inspired by some features of his writings, Huyssen does not succumb to the more eccentric ones.

At any rate, Huyssen has written an exciting book, replete with striking and illuminating formulations. I have just one major objection. The texts analysed certainly have common features—that is a premise for the book—but it is difficult to see a common denominator or even a Familienähnlichkeit (a familiy resemblance) that could connect the very diverse texts analysed to something like a genre, which seems implied in urban miniatures. The span of the texts—including for example Jünger and Irmgard Keun—seems too wide to justify such a designation.