As reproductions that rely on cuts and the montage of individual shots, these collages and assemblages function as examples of Heideggerian Entbergen. ¹² More crucial, however, for my purposes here is the way in which they are analytical of the relationship between the picture plane (the archive) and what it stores. For example, the layers of carefully cut and arranged shapes in the collages by Kurt Schwitters—who considered the forms issued by the post office the “ultimate” form of reality and derived the sounds of his Ursonate from the (abbreviated) words on company signs and office letterhead¹³ --all point to the same supporting base, a substratum without which no archive could exist. Yet in pointing to it, these shapes also obscure that base at every step, making us wonder what is ground and what is image. At times, Schwitters even uses one of his own paintings as the supporting base for his assemblages, a procedure that is designed to thwart further our expectation that the supporting base, much like an empty canvas, could be conceived as a kind of virgin soil or grid on which an image comes to rest.

The irregularly “stacked” structure of the collages, a structure that ensures that their images are irreparably broken, not only progressively obscures its base, it also promotes individual elements on which new objects come to be fixed to the status of new (local) bases. As every element on the picture plane potentially becomes the local support for another, Schwitters’ collages refract and redouble the (unbroken) base plane with numerous (broken) rival planes, highlighting the fact that in an archive the relationship between the substratum, the archival base or medium, and what it stores is never simply a given. This has important consequences for our reception of these works, a reception that is never quite at rest as it moves constantly (and erratically) between images and text, base layer and surface, in a movement that resolutely resists contemplation. As Dorothea Dietrich writes in her discussion of Schwitters’ Merzbild 32 A. The Cherry Picture (1921), “the eye constantly shifts between deciphering a text and taking in an image, much the way the eye moves from the image of the cherry on the flash card to the identifying words underneath, and there shifts between the two languages only to move back again to the image. Our eye […] [moves, S.S.] backward and forward on a track between different reading options.”¹⁴

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Dietrich points out that this process, unfolding as it does over time, owes a debt to reading as the image is consumed like a text. However, we might claim with equal justification that the way in which our glance moves back and forth between the different elements in the work is more structurally similar to viewing a film.

Unlike John Heartfield’s photomontages, which, as Peter Bürger has pointed out, combine image and text linearly, in the way of ancient emblems, in Schwitters’ collages, the relationship between image and text is, for the most part, disjointed as images and words rarely seem to match fully.¹⁵ What this means is that while we can read the fragments of text that dot Schwitters’ collages, such a reading never manages to fully integrate the text with its image. Where linear reading presupposes concentration and the ability to “hold the line,” the broken surfaces of Dadaist collage, much like montage film, encourage a receptive mode characterized by distraction, a lack of linear direction, and repeated fading in and out. And here, precisely, lies their importance for the avant-garde elaboration of the (counter-) archive. Collages such as the Cherry Picture are archival in the way they focus on the relationship between the archival base and what the archive stores, hinting at the fact that the relationship between the two, their persistent interference, determines our ability to glean what the 19th-century archive aimed to store before everything else: contingent time. Beyond that, Dadaist collages such as the Cherry Picture refuse to endorse the most basic operation of the 19th-century archive, its conversion of garbage into documents. Dadaist Wort- and Bildsalad is an effort to create an archive where garbage would remain just that, garbage.

In their attack on the foundations of the 19th-century archive, Dadaist collage and assemblage mark a dynamic first moment in the development of a modernism to which the archive is key. Its late 20th-century incarnation, which I consider in the last two chapters of the book, is marked—in formerly Communist Eastern Europe—by the manipulations of the Stalinist era and the inertia that followed it and—in the West—by the social encoding of widespread amnesia through the commercial mass media. In the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, the media of technical reproduction which the historical avant-garde had viewed as so many emancipatory organs of a newly mechanized collective social body, were declared state monopolies—in the former Soviet Union, even the personal ownership of typewriters was regulated by the State—transforming the archivizing, collective social subject envisioned by the avant-garde (to everyone his camera) into the fragmented, archivized object of near-ubiquitous audio-visual surveillance.