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The technique of collage is not strictly aligned with the transgressive forces of the avant-garde; it can just as easily serve the most reactionary and conservative desires, and this fact is brilliantly illustrated in at least one story about the invention of that most politically charged form of collage, photomontage.1 In Courrier Dada, Raoul Hausmann recalls that in the summer of 1918 he was vacationing in the small town of Heidebrink and noticed on the walls of almost every home "a color lithograph depicting the image of a solider in front of a barracks. To make this military memento more personal, in place of the head, one glued on a photographic portrait. In a flash-1 saw instantly-one could make a "tableau" entirely from cut-up photos."2 What is remarkable about this story is not Hausmann's sudden insight that one could do photomontage-this technique was inevitably being developed by many3-but rather the anonymous practice of these unknown families who not only cut up photographs of loved ones but interpolated them into ideological fantasy. The shocking power of this gesture is rooted in the reality of the photograph and the power of mass media to concentrate and amplify ideological fantasies.
The mass media of the early twentieth century had grown vastly in scope and power, and it was a major force constituting the modem nation-state. Benedict Anderson maintains that the newspaper structured the time of the nation, allowing people who had never met, who more often than not had conflicting interests, to imagine themselves as part of a single, abstract entity to which they owed allegiance. The colored lithograph functions as a fantasy of this national unity as well. The image of the brave and erect soldier standing before the barracks is essentially a cartoon, a mere paper tiger unless a family sends one of its sons to stand in that place of fantasy. However, that colorful but abstract image creates a place and models a nationalist desire, and the actual inclusion of the photograph makes it something more-it interpolates reality into the fantasy. W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that military recruiting posters are so powerful, in part, because they can be reproduced "in millions of identical prints, the sort of fertility that is available to images and...