Elias Cannetti’s analysis of the inflation in Masse und Macht corresponds quite precisely to the global devaluation of meaning performed through Dada texts. Canetti asserts: «Was geschieht nun bei einer Inflation? Die Geldeinheit verliert ganz plötzlich ihre Persönlichkeit. Sie verwandelt sich in eine wachsende Masse von Einheiten; diese sind immer wertloser, je größer die Masse wird.» [17] This loss of meaning, identity, and signification is not only an economic problem, but also erodes the identity of every individual in a mass society: «Der einzelne fühlt sich entwertet, weil die Einheit, auf die er sich verließ, die er sich selber gleich achtet, ins Abgleiten geraten ist. Die Masse fühlt sich entwertet, weil die Million entwertet ist.» [18]

Great wealth diminishes in the inflation and identity becomes dissolved in the same way as the promises of signification and meaning collapse in Dada poetry. The orgiastic, unstoppable growth of the zero becomes the apparent foundational discourse of the twenties, and it is astonishing that Richter, as a former Dadaist, is able to visualize in Inflation this process and produces a restabilized image of economic processes in the early thirties in his movie Die Börse. As Dirk Verdicchio and Urs Stäheli have pointed out, this movie tried to display a functioning economic system and thus to create trust in the stock exchange. [19]

However, a concrete agent is also here not indicated. Nonetheless, the phantasmagoria of economic processes is compensated by a continual use of anonymous hands that function as the visible mediators in the economic exchange. [20] Although Adam Smith’s invisible hand resonates in this display, the hands become concrete indices pointing towards agency in the system. Hands become agents, something that becomes apparent in the German, where «die Hand/the hand» resonates in the word for to act, namely «handeln». [21] Of course, these hands are structural abbreviations and metaphorical gestures, but this visual strategy departs from the Dada aesthetics in which every agent was excluded, and thus Richter is able to show in Die Börse an economic situation that remains stable and does not run out of control like a Dada manifestation.

Arndt Niebisch promovierte mit einer Arbeit über die Störungsästhetik des Dadaismus und Futurismus an der Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, ist Assistant Professor für European and German Studies an der University of North Carolina at Greensboro und habilitiert sich an der Universität Wien im Bereich der neueren deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Zu seinen Publikationen zählen die Monographie Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde, die Edition der wissenschaftlichen und technischen Schriften Raoul Hausmanns sowie zahlreiche Aufsätze zu Autoren wie F.T. Marinetti, Franz Kafka und Jules Verne.