Dr. Susan Morrow

Research Project

Politics of Movement: From Expressionism to Carl Schmitt

My project focuses on dance as a poetological model in the early 20th century—particularly Expressionist literature and dance—and its connection to Carl Schmitt’s model of authoritarian politics in Staat, Bewegung, Volk: die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (1933). This constellation is complex and troubling: Schmitt’s treatise offers disturbing legitimation for the Nazi Party’s claims as a “movement”, whereas Expressionism was vilified under National Socialism. My aim is to reveal what Schmitt took to be at stake in National Socialism’s self-characterization as a movement through its comparison with models of movement in dance and literary practice, from Carl Einstein’s “Brief an die Tänzerin Napierkowska” (1911) to Rudolf von Laban’s movement notation system (1928) and Mary Wigman’s Deutsche Tanzkunst (1935). I am particularly interested in the way a vitalistic model of movement in dance displaced an older European model of dance as a mechanical art around the same time that cinema faced criticism by Bergson as a mechanical technique of producing motion. I am similarly motivated by an interest in the way an earlier aesthetics that understood ‘Lebendigkeit’ as an effect of artistic techniques gave way to an opposition between life and technically produced movement. A final interest concerns the tension between the vitalistic rejection of technical movement and the revival of a late 17th-century project that had originally been linked to dance’s own technicity: the project of creating a system of dance notation (chorégraphie) comparable to that of music.