"Insult" by Enrico Ippolito
English translation by Michael Sandberg
"Together" by Simone Dede Ayivi
Many struggles are now becoming visible. And many self-motivated people motivate me, in turn, to address problems. Unpaid activist work is a double burden. The work is exhausting and looking the imbalances one sees squarely in the eye is demanding. But unpaid activist work also has its own compensation. It helps me to escape powerlessness. Swallowing something down certainly avoids the immediate fury—but it leaves me helpless and alone, and I really just can’t with that.
It’s necessary to connect many different struggles. Because then it’s suddenly about a better life for everyone. There’s always something to do. This is overwhelming. But there are also always people with whom one can do it together. And that empowers!
Working on a translation project of this scale has been a tremendous honor. We are humbled both by the opportunity to work closely with some of the most important, emergent German-language authors of our time, as well as by the broad scope and intersectional nature of this literature whose value extends well beyond the discourse of German Studies scholarship.
Precisely because we believe that the value of this literature lies in its ability to circulate outside the confines of the German language, this translators’ introduction is meant to provide crucial context and gloss vocabulary for readers unfamiliar with the specificities of this content. As both editors and translators, we offer these interjections in recognition of the immense labor of our many contributors, whose input and diligent annotations have furnished both impetus and material for the current introduction.
Early twentieth century Northern European cultures were fascinated with systems of energy and their breakdowns. During this time of intense electrical innovation and the development of psychophysiological sciences, energy was understood to pervade all of life – be that in electrical wiring, sound waves and light, or the nerves of the human body. In this conceptualization, observation of life and its processes could no longer be considered as separate from the energies it sought to examine; observation was embedded in an energetic fabric. Ultimately, observation from an inherently and perpetually fallible position found its expression in the category of the “breakdown”; the category expressed cultural and aesthetic concerns about the body’s embeddedness in a wider system of energy. Taking psychophysiology and emergent electrical networks as historical contexts, this dissertation examines how predominantly visual media in early twentieth century Modernist and Expressionist works in the German and Scandinavian contexts used the category of the “breakdown” to probe the intractability of the observer from larger energetic systems. My dissertation provides three reevaluations of canonical figures in the German and Scandinavian contexts: August Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Robert Reinert. In each, the breakdown of autonomy and critical distance became the a priori of expression, resulting in an exploration of cyclical narrative forms. In these looping structures, failures to critically distance one’s self from electrical infrastructures engendered their own production of nervous and electrical energy; the attempts to produce distance generated energetic excesses that were ultimately contested and/or refunctionalized by the system from which they arose. These works thereby present a critical theory of affect in the era of electric media – and its lasting relevance to today.
