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This essay examines Irmgard Keun's novel Das kunstseidene Madchen (1932) against the backdrop of Weimar-era discourses on the emancipatory potential of vision. While the narrative's thematization of vision has been productively analyzed from the perspective of feminist and film theory, less attention has been paid to its ties to contemporary discourses concerned with retooling a vision enhanced by new technologies like film into an instrument of emancipatory self-fashioning. As the article shows, Keun's novel reflects critically on these discourses by casting its heroine's sentimental journey in terms of an education in vision that leads to acknowledging the distance between the visual as a mode of inscription and the visible as a domain of perception. In so doing the novel delivers a critical commentary on contemporary discourses that located agency in a conquest of the visible attained by manipulating the visual.

This article examines the discourse on beauty, style, and fashion developed by Viennese architect and essayist Adolf Loos between the 1890s and the 1920s. Contrary to conventional understanding, it argues that Loos's critique of contemporary architectural and fashion styles should not be read as contributing to the discourse of lost authenticity and estranged identity, which is identified with Viennese modernism. Instead, this essay draws on Loos's passionate endorsement of contemporary fashion in order to reconstruct his optimistic vision of modernity, which he saw peopled by individuals whose identity is inscribed on a discursive surface and lacks the depth of metaphysical substance.

The story of how modernism came under fire from postmodern aesthetic practices in the 1960s and 1970s has often been told. At stake was the possibility of redefining the critical and political potential of art beyond categories that had governed aesthetic discourse for centuries. These included the aesthetic concepts of autonomy, representation, temporality, and narrativity as well as epistemological categories such as a stable self and self-transparent consciousness, linear time and teleological history, or universal morality and self-determining reason. The first wave of critics that read the rise of new artistic and philosophical discourses in Europe and North America as evidence of the end of modernity and the exhaustion of modernism soon found itself faced with intractable conceptual and methodological problems, however. Indeed, early endeavors to define postmodernism in contradistinction to modernism foundered on the conspicuous persistence of modernist concerns in postmodern art and literature. As it soon became clear, the attempt to demarcate epochal caesurae—postmodernism versus modernism, postmodernity versus modernity—remained caught in modes of temporalization and categorization that reproduced the problem rather than offering a solution. Perhaps the most glaring deficit of these early attempts was their failure to grasp the most fruitful tendency within postmodern thought, namely, its paradoxical sense of continuity and rupture with regard to the past; in particular, with regard to its modernist past.1