Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art 9781501701900

Citation preview

Form as Revolt

Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new Englishlanguage books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of important German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/.

Form as Revolt

Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

Sebastian Zeidler

A Signale Book

Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, NY

Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the College of Arts & Sciences, Cornell University, for support of the Signale series. Publication has also been made possible by the generous support of the Department of the History of Art Publications Fund, Yale University, and by the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund, Yale University. Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zeidler, Sebastian, author. Form as revolt : Carl Einstein and the ground of modern art / Sebastian Zeidler. pages cm — (Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.)) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5017-0208-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8014-7984-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art historians—Germany—20th century. 2. Art, Modern— 20th century—History. 3. Einstein, Carl, 1885–1940. I. Title. II. Series: Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.). N7483.E3Z34 2015 707.2′2—dc23 2015032294 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

10 10

9 9

8 8

7 7

6 6

5 5

4 4

3 3

2 2

1 1

To my parents

The tale has often been told, with an inevitability of events and culmination, either melancholy or exultant. The conviction that it all had to happen is indeed difficult to discard. Yet that conviction ruins the living interest of history and precludes a fair judgement upon the agents. They did not know the future. —Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution

Contents

List of Abbreviations

xi

Carl Einstein: A Life

1

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

8

1. The Lost Wanderer

27

2. Sculpture Ungrounded

59

3. Cubism’s Passion

91

4. The Double Style

157

5. Private Mythologies

207

Acknowledgments

253

Notes

255

Copyright and Photographic Credits

297

Index

299

Abbreviations

K1 Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Propyläen, 1926) K3 Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1931), reprinted as Einstein, Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 5, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996) W1 Carl Einstein, Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 1, 1907–1918, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1994) W2 Carl Einstein, Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 2, 1919–1928, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996) W3 Carl Einstein, Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 3, 1929–1940, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996) W4 Carl Einstein, Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 4, Texte aus dem Nachlaß I, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992) DR Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907–1916; A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979) R Nicole Worms de Romilly and Jean Laude, Braque: Cubism, 1907–1914 (Paris: Maeght, 1982) Z Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, 33 vols. (Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 1932–78)

Form as Revolt

Carl Einstein A Life

The subject of this book is Carl Einstein, a writer, art critic, political activist, and art historian of the early twentieth century. Einstein’s life was one of the most eventful of the period, and his writings were among the most complex. Since neither his life nor his writings are familiar to most English-speaking readers, I will offer a précis of Einstein’s life here, and the introduction that follows will outline this book’s approach to his writings. On April 26, 1885, Carl Einstein was born, as Karl Einstein, in the provincial town of Neuwied in southwest Germany, halfway between Cologne and Frankfurt.1 He received a humanistic education at two gymnasiums, where he was introduced to ancient mythology, which left a powerful impression on him. For a time Einstein’s family prospered, but then tragedy struck. His father, Daniel, had had a successful career as a Jewish cantor and instructor in religion, which culminated in his appointment as director of a Jewish teacher’s college in Karlsruhe, near Stuttgart. But Daniel had to retire for health reasons around the age of fifty, and in 1899 he died in a mental asylum, probably by his own hand. Decades later, the combined impact of the death of his father and of the cosmology of the Greeks would continue to reverberate through the writings of the son. In 1904 Einstein moved to Berlin to enroll at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, which he left four years later without a degree. Still, Einstein had not been idle in his studies. The classes he took with Alois Riehl, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Wölfflin opened the world of philosophy and art history to him. Over the years

2

Form as Revolt

Einstein would read up voraciously on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and Wölfflin’s Basic Principles of Art History would always remain both a touchstone and a negative foil for his own formalist art criticism. For the time being, however, Einstein was pursuing a career as a writer. The first version of his novella, Bebuquin, or The Dilettantes of the Marvelous, was published in 1907 in Opale magazine by the writer and editor Franz Blei; it made him an instant celebrity in the literary world of Berlin. It must have been Blei, a connoisseur of French Symbolism, who introduced Einstein to the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and above all Mallarmé, whose Divagations would have a significant impact on the dozens of experimental prose pieces he went on to publish before World War I. Among the literary circles in which Einstein was now moving were the Neuer Club and the Neopathetisches Cabaret; it was likely here that, thanks to his acquaintance with the Club’s cofounder Erwin Loewenson and the writer Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), Einstein became enthralled, or still more enthralled, with the Romantic philosophy of Novalis and Schelling. Other interests at the time included the plays of Paul Claudel, the novels of André Gide, and, less obviously, Meister Eckhart’s sermons and the Outlines of Skepticism by Sextus Empiricus. In 1912, Einstein’s writing became politicized, suddenly and radically. The personal may have led to the political. Einstein’s girlfriend Maria Ramm, whom he married that year, was the sister-in-law of Franz Pfemfert, anarchist, pacifist, and editor of Die Aktion magazine. Pfemfert had founded it as “an organ of forthright radicalism” that stood “for the idea of a Great German Left,” and in the years before the war Die Aktion did become a base for writers and thinkers across the full range of the left-wing spectrum. Peter Kropotkin, Erich Mühsam, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Hugo Ball, and the young Walter Benjamin all published in it. Einstein’s contributions to Die Aktion read like aggressively political texts, documents of his deep immersion in a body of radical thought that ranged from the freewheeling anarchism of Gustav Landauer through the syndicalism of Georges Sorel to the left-wing socialism of Wilhelm Liebknecht, whom by 1915 he knew personally. The year 1912 was important in another sense; it marked the first securely documented visit by Einstein to Paris. It was likely during the several weeks in the city with his friend, the left-wing writer Ludwig Rubiner, that he became seriously interested in French cubism in general and Pablo Picasso in particular. He probably met the artist’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and so laid the groundwork for a friendship that would last a lifetime. Einstein already knew Max Raphael, a fellow renegade Wölfflinian, author of From Monet to Picasso (1913), and his most important interlocutor on modern art before the war. Einstein’s own efforts at art criticism throughout the 1910s were scattered and limited, however. Perhaps daunted by the topic, he had virtually nothing to say on cubism. As for the texts on the artists he did write about, a diverse group that included figures like Wilhelm

Carl Einstein: A Life

3

Lehmbruck and Arnold Waldschmidt, it is unclear whether they should count as art criticism or prose. The same cannot be said for the extraordinary book Einstein went on to publish in 1915. Negro Sculpture was at once an intervention into the contemporary theory and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistication of African art. It put Einstein on the map as a major critic in the formalist tradition and as an unusual kind of modernist primitivist. The topic would continue to fascinate him. A follow-up study, African Sculpture, was published in 1921, and in 1925 Einstein visited London to discuss plans for a much more comprehensive publication with the British Museum’s deputy keeper of ethnographic collections.2 When World War I broke out, Einstein volunteered for service in the army. By 1916 he was stationed in German-occupied Brussels, which was then the unlikely home of a wartime artists’ colony: poets like Gottfried Benn, another close friend, and art world figures like Wilhelm Hausenstein and Alfred Flechtheim were based there, too.3 Einstein may have been officially employed at the Germanoccupied Colonial Office; he was certainly using its library and regularly visited the Museum of Belgian Congo in Tervuren to study its collection of African art. But again politics interrupted Einstein’s cultural pursuits. As Germany was losing the war, her soldiers mutinied on many fronts. On November 10, 1918, a soldiers’ council was seizing power at Brussels, and Einstein took a leading role in its command. Einstein and his comrades imagined creating a republic of ex-soldiers and Belgian socialists in postwar Brussels. The dream lasted for all of one week. After the failure of the Belgian revolution Einstein returned to Berlin.4 He participated in the street fighting during the Spartacus Revolt in January 1919; by June he had joined the newly founded German Communist Party (KPD). On January 15, the day Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered, Einstein and his wife were temporarily arrested. On June 13, he was one of a handful of speakers at Luxemburg’s belated funeral. Throughout 1919 and 1920 Einstein would deliver speeches and publish pamphlets in support of a German councils’ republic, as well as invectives against the Social Democrat government. He cofounded or took over two journals of the radical Left: Die Pleite, which he ran together with George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and John Heartfield; and Der blutige Ernst, on which he again collaborated with Grosz.5 This is not to say that Einstein had now joined the Berlin Dada movement. The two journals never so much as mention the word Dada, and he only ever wrote briefly on the art. In an amusing photomontage, Grosz and Heartfield would spoof Einstein for his infatuation with cubism in the age of the avant-garde; conversely, he seems to have considered Berlin Dada’s “antiaesthetic” the negligible part of a project of political militancy. Finally, in 1922, in a much-publicized court case ripe with anti-Semitic undertones, Einstein and his publisher Ernst Rowohlt were put on trial for blasphemy for Einstein’s farcical play Bad Tidings. Both were sentenced to significant fines.

4

Form as Revolt

By the time of the trial Einstein’s political activism had already faded, and his art-world career had begun to take off. He was now visiting and temporarily living in Paris on a regular basis. He began to publish in Paul Westheim’s Kunstblatt and in Florent Fels’s Action. He got to know André and Clara Malraux, took cognizance of André Breton’s Littérature, was in touch with Amédée Ozenfant of the Esprit Nouveau, and maintained a regular correspondence with Kahnweiler. He wrote a short book on the painter Moïse Kisling, another personal friend. Plans for other books, on Georges Braque and Juan Gris, didn’t take off; but Einstein did write on Fernand Léger’s stage designs (partly inspired by Negro Sculpture) for the Swedish Ballet. In 1923 he paid a visit to the Bauhaus, where he met with Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. He may have received an offer of a teaching position; but if so, he never took it up. While he admired the art of Klee, Einstein had serious misgivings about the metaphysical bombast of Kandinsky and other Bauhaus figures. In the early 1920s Einstein met a number of Russian intellectuals and artists who were visiting or living in Berlin, among them Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky, Natan Altman, and possibly Vladimir Mayakovsky. Two avant-garde journals listed Einstein as a correspondent or prospective contributor: Lef, the organ of the Russian formalists and constructivists; and Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand, the trilingual magazine that El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg were running in Berlin. A posthumously published text, which at first sight looks like an aggressive manifesto for political abstraction, was probably written with Altman in mind and intended for Veshch’.6 But Einstein’s openness to the Soviet avant-garde soon degraded into hostility and contempt. The reasons for his change of mind are partly elusive, but it is certain that the political and the artistic were converging here. For one thing, Einstein always shared with Kahnweiler a cubism stalwart’s prejudice against abstraction; he was lukewarm on the work he saw at the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in 1922. For another, Einstein had been as enthusiastic about the October Revolution in 1917 as he was now becoming weary of its aftermath, about which he was harboring no illusions.7 In a letter of March 1923 he deplored the way in which in the Soviet Union Bolshevik censorship and the freetrade tendencies of the New Economic Policy were complementing each other. He also hinted at a conflict between himself and unnamed partisans of the conservative cultural policy decreed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Enlightenment. The occasion of the exchange is unknown (a KPD cadre briefing in Berlin?); but for Einstein it became symbolic of the failure of an entire project. Sometime in the early 1920s he was either expelled from the KPD or left it voluntarily. Years later, he would spend pages ridiculing Lunacharsky’s preference for “bourgeois” writers like Goethe, and he gleefully reported on Mayakovsky’s suicide.

Carl Einstein: A Life

5

In 1922 Einstein managed to obtain a contract with the respectable Propyläen Verlag for a survey of contemporary art from fauvism to the present moment. Over the next several years he worked feverishly on the manuscript, and his labors paid off.8 Published in 1926, The Art of the 20th Century established Einstein as a major figure in the European art world. It was a commercial success and went through two further editions (1928, 1931), many sections of which were substantially rewritten or newly added to cover the recent most art, including French surrealism and Picasso’s work from the later 1920s. In terms of its range and value The Art of the 20th Century is a book of extremes. Given its prospective audience, German art is well represented in it, notably the expressionists and the Blauer Reiter and Bauhaus painters. But Einstein’s writing on many of them is uneven, a mix of misplaced theoretical complexity, undisciplined digressions, and routine delivery, spiced up with scorn or hyperbole. His hostility to abstraction in general and Soviet art in particular ensured the sections on Mondrian, Malevich, and related artists were the low point of the book. That does leave the significant share, and it is a major one. Einstein’s chapter on the cubism of Braque and Picasso ranks with the best criticism the two artists have ever received. The years between 1926 and 1928 saw a drop in the quantity and quality of Einstein’s work. The dry spell ceased dramatically once he made good on plans he had been harboring for a while, and in 1928 moved permanently to Paris. He was awaited by a number of people he had got to know in the preceding years. Besides Kahnweiler, there was the young writer and critic Michel Leiris, who had recently married the dealer’s stepdaughter. There was also Braque, with whom Einstein became personally close, and who would serve as best man at his second wedding in 1932; and there was Jean Arp, who like Einstein was moving in the circle of Transition, the magazine run by Eugene Jolas. Soon, however, Einstein would have his own journal. Backed financially by the art dealer Georges Wildenstein, and possibly by the wealthy magnate Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, another friend and one of the most important collectors in the history of modern art, Einstein served as the cofounder, with Leiris and Georges Bataille, of Documents (1929–30).9 Short as the magazine’s lifetime was, it proved an immensely productive moment for him. The several dozen essays that Einstein published in Documents, Die Weltkunst, Die Kunstauktion, and in various exhibition catalogues, and the revised chapters of his survey, show him immersed in new or newly revisited theoretical resources: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Will to Power; Freud on sadism, masochism, and the death drive; the surrealists on automatic drawing; Hegel’s Science of Logic on the dialectic; and Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl on “primitive” theories of magic, among others. Einstein brought this material to bear on topics as diverse as the art of the nomads of central Asia and early Mediterranean bronze sculpture. Among contemporary artists, Picasso became the abiding focus; Einstein was clearly the driving force behind a Documents special issue on him. Between them, the flurry

6

Form as Revolt

of essays he published in the magazine and in the much-expanded 1931 survey chapter on the artist add up to an account of Picasso’s surrealism whose complexity has never been fully recognized and never surpassed. The same is true, in a different key, for The Art of the 20th Century’s rewritten section on Paul Klee. Read together with a Documents essay on Jean Arp, it describes an art of cosmology in which the origin of a world springs into being upon the death of its creator-god. For Einstein, that doubleness resonated deeply with his own childhood, and beyond that with modernity at large. Einstein did not become idle after Documents folded. In 1933 he cowrote the script for Toni, a film directed by Jean Renoir. He also helped organize a major Braque retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel, and the French translation of his book manuscript on the artist was published a year later. But toward the mid-1930s dark clouds were beginning to gather. The first years in Paris had been affluent for Einstein, complete with office and secretary in the rue la Boétie. But after the Nazi seizure of power his German bank accounts were blocked, and his employment prospects in the Paris art world were drying up. Einstein sold his library to the artist Kees van Dongen, and at one point his new wife, Lyda Guevrekian, had to support them by working as a seamstress. Moreover, Einstein was becoming isolated politically and intellectually. With one exception, he did not participate in the events that were hosted by the Paris-based German exile organizations; nor was he active in the Popular Front, perhaps because of an anarchist’s contempt for communism and social democracy both. His circle of friends was reduced to Kahnweiler, Leiris, and a few others. By 1935 Einstein had stopped writing on contemporary art. He retreated into the recesses of his mind, which expanded out into a vast and fractured landscape of art history and autobiography. He kept compiling notes for a project that at one point was going to be called a Handbuch der Kunst: a world art history of all ages and regions whose annotated table of contents takes up twenty-one pages of Einstein’s Werke edition. None of the notes got even close to a publishable state; all of them betray a restlessly roaming intellect unsupported by training in historical research. The other vast project Einstein was working on, and had been since at least the early 1920s, is in similarly fragmented condition. Known as BEB II, it is a massive collection of notes for an autobiography that to the present day have remained unedited.10 Some of these notes can make for an enthralling read, but their editorial status is problematic. Because of their preliminary state it is often impossible to tell whether one is reading the draft for a paragraph or page or the actual text itself, and to what degree it is fictionalized or autobiographical. Moreover, because of a number of disastrous archival decisions, Einstein’s original organization of his notes is now virtually irretrievable, and so is the overall plan for the book, should he have had one. This study will refer only sparingly to BEB II. In the late summer of 1936 Einstein abruptly left Paris for Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He met the syndicalist leader Helmut Rüdiger, and,

Carl Einstein: A Life

7

enchanted by the magnitude and enthusiasm of the mass movement he witnessed in the city, he went on to join the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI). Thanks to the military expertise he had acquired in World War I, and to his interest in strategy (Einstein was an avid reader of Sun Tzu), he soon became an officer with the Durruti Column, a legendary anarchist militia. At the Aragon Front, the Column was not only battling the nationalists but also organizing the collectivization of land. The experience of working and fighting together with Spanish farmers and with soldiers from many countries moved Einstein deeply. Strange as it may sound, this may well have been the happiest time of his life. Einstein had found what had eluded him in Brussels, and what he had seen drown in blood in Berlin: a collective of people forming up in a historical situation that was threateningly instable, but which for that very reason was also profoundly open. But the moment was not destined to last, and another event duplicated itself. In 1919 Einstein had spoken at Luxemburg’s funeral; in November 1936 he delivered a radio address that commemorated the death of Buenaventura Durruti. Between 1937 and 1939 Einstein fought in a number of major battles and was repeatedly wounded; all this time his wife was working as a military nurse. When the Spanish Republic fell, he fled back to France. His situation now changed from precarious to lethal. Einstein was temporarily interned as a Civil War veteran, then continued on to Paris. In 1940, he was interned again in a camp near Bordeaux, this time for being a German in France. In one of the camps he was briefly reunited with Max Raphael; they talked about art to pass the time. After the Franco-German ceasefire in June, Einstein either was released or managed to escape, whereupon he was now being hounded as a Jew. On the run in southern France, with his friends out of reach and no resources left, Einstein briefly found a haven with the Roman Catholic priests of the Sacred Heart at Lestelle-Bétharram. On or around July 3, 1940, having given up all hope to escape across the Pyrenees, he drowned himself in a river. After the war, Kahnweiler and Leiris arranged for a small memorial to be set up in a nearby village. It is dedicated to their friend, “Carl Einstein, writer and art historian, fighter for freedom.”

Carl Einstein An Introduction

Groundlessness as Ground It will be evident even from the compact CV I have just rehearsed that as the topic of a book Carl Einstein is both an embarrassment of riches and a daunting challenge. Few intellectuals in the early twentieth century had a life this compelling; few were as intensely committed to literature, art criticism, art history, political militancy, and philosophy as Einstein was at various points in his career. How to make sense of it all? In trying to answer that question, the literature has typically settled for one of two options. Either it has produced biographical studies in which Einstein’s commitments are comprehensively documented but not thought together, or it has cherry-picked them according to its own convictions. Einstein has been an anarchist to the anarchists, a Bataillean to the Batailleans, a Marxist to the Adornians, a bourgeois intellectual to the Brechtians, a writer to the Germanists, a critic to the art historians. This interpretive cacophony has gone hand in hand with chronological atomization. Treatments of Einstein the writer typically end by the time of World War I, after which he all but ceased to publish prose. Reading the literature on surrealism, one wouldn’t guess he had a life before Documents. Studies of his militancy have been as episodic as his own engagement in it, and the art criticism he was writing in the long spells in between is usually read without his politics in mind.

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

9

Still, the atomization is instructive, for it faithfully mimics the historical reality. Einstein was an enigma not just to postwar academics but to his own contemporaries. The reviews of Negro Sculpture and The Art of the 20th Century were equally numerous and uncomprehending. Even a close friend like Kahnweiler chose to remember their author not as an art critic but as a poet. In 1919, a journalist for the ultra-left Rätezeitung found a speech by Einstein baffling in spite of its straightforward topic (“The Political Responsibility of the Intellectual”). And in 1937, the veteran anarcho-syndicalist Helmut Rüdiger was dismayed to learn his new comrade was ignorant of the basic tenets of the CNT-FAI.1 These examples could be multiplied, but we can already discern a pattern. Some of Einstein’s acquaintances provided him with a source of income; others gave him new ideas, a political home, or access to artists and collections. But Einstein was always a man apart, and his project cannot be deduced from the company he was keeping at any one moment: his cubism wasn’t Kahnweiler’s any more than his anarchism was Rüdiger’s. The apartness, I shall argue, was by design. The contexts through which Einstein kept moving never grounded his texts. To the contrary, his perennial shifts from the one to the other worked to sustain their author’s groundlessness. In his wandering among the territories of literature, art criticism, and politics, Einstein was enacting as his life a modern ontological condition to which he was giving form in his work: that is the argument of this book. Like Einstein himself, it will use the notions of ground, origin, and causality synonymously. A ground is the firm fundament upon which you erect your project, say the economic base of your superstructural efforts as a Marxist critic. Alternatively, an origin roots your project in a specific era and location, as Africa did for the early twentieth-century primitivists. Causality in turn unrolls a chain of causes and effects over time, and so creates a stable temporal sequence, say of “modernism” or “the legacy of the avant-garde,” into which your project may then be inserted: as the latest link in the chain that responds to the penultimate one. What the three notions have in common, then, is that they enable, shape, and even prescribe a project by grounding it in an a priori condition, whether political, art historical, or temporal. And that is why Einstein rejected all three out of hand. So much so that in the notes on childhood in his autobiographical work BEB II he refused to recall his own origins: “Nobody knows his childhood; hence we lack the very elements of our own life, which thereby remains wholly unknown to us; whence such substitutes as the origin myth of the arch-ground, etc., the cosmogonies, etc.”2 Einstein’s childhood amnesia was postulate in part, but that only makes his point more programmatic. Whether it was Hesiod’s Theogony, his own autobiography, or the work of a contemporary painter (he had Paul Klee, childhood cosmogonist, in mind): according to Einstein, the staggering task of the work of

10

Form as Revolt

art is to unfold an entire world—but a world whose origin must be the originlessness of its creator. For the creator mustn’t rely on a ground to support that world ready-made. He is rather compelled to produce a new one from scratch, all while knowing it to be a substitute, since the real ground, assuming it exists, will forever be inaccessible to him.3 In Einstein, autobiography was only one of many examples of such groundlessness as ground, just as in the early twentieth century groundlessness was more than one person’s predicament. It describes a pervasive sense of ontological drift that set in when the era cut itself loose from tradition broadly conceived: from the traditio, the handing down, of genres of literature, conventions of building and art making, and templates of collectivity. In stating as much, this book argues implicitly that the artistic continuity that is still routinely perceived to extend from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth and beyond is false. Few art-historical illusions have been more harmful, or more influential, than the causal chains that descend down the branches of Alfred Barr’s tree diagram.4 This book puts the axe to that tree. It argues that to understand Einstein’s project is to discover the specificity of his era, and with it the contours of a different history of modern art: a history of groundless experimentalism, not of developmental problem-solving. Consider the clarion call that opened the cubism chapter of Einstein’s Art of the 20th Century: “Doesn’t history, conceived as a continuum of repetition, put creation into question—isn’t the preciousness of tradition the lifebelt of the uncreative? Repetition or invention—a decision was going to be made” (K1 56).5 Either artists, writers, and political activists choose merely to repeat the past by adding a minor update to an unbroken tradition, whether of modernist painting, the nineteenth-century novel, or social-democratic reform. Or they resolve to uproot themselves from that past, and go on to erect, as if from nothing, a new world upon the abyss of deracination: a world of painting ungrounded from nature and the nineteenth century, a world of experimental prose ungrounded from novel and narrative, a world of collective politics ungrounded from incremental reformism. That was the decision Einstein demanded, and countless contemporaries joined him in following it through. To be sure, the outcomes were not exactly uniform; they ranged from radiant utopianism to ruthless optimism, delicious paradox, and dark affliction. To give just a few examples, the most exhilarating and most literal expressions of groundlessness can be found in early twentieth-century architecture, whether at the level of the city or of the individual dwelling. Enabled by the daring use of reinforced concrete, the endlessly stacked and ramifying infrastructures of Antonio Sant’Elia’s designs for the futurist Città Nuova swept away the earthbound tectonics of Beaux-Arts architecture, so that “the earth as first principle and ground seems no longer to exist at all.”6 Meanwhile, the slender pilotis that lift the Villa Savoye up and away from its plot are key elements of Le Corbusier’s

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

11

design strategy: “to transform the land from ground into an equipotential datum, one among others. That effect critiques the discipline’s history of complicity in the metaphysics of land’s groundedness with all that that entails, from holy land to fatherland to my land.”7 But if groundlessness can be limitless sprawl or graceful suspension, a ride on modernization’s bullet or a harvest of its emancipatory boon, it may also be experienced as threat or purposely unresolved dilemma. Then, it will lead to attempts to retrieve, rather than to create, a ground or origin for modern philosophy and art; attempts that will be undertaken either in earnest or ironically. The first mood is represented by Heidegger’s exploration of the essence of the ground and the origin of the artwork in his eponymous texts.8 Max Ernst, by contrast, can stand for the ironist faction. In his Dada overpaintings the sedimentation of geologic strata echoes the pattern of the artwork’s wallpaper support. Here, in a visual double entendre, a retrieval (Wiederholung) of a prehistoric origin is thwarted by the origin’s repetition (Wiederholung) by the work’s material ground.9 Given this range, which will be extended further shortly, on which side of early twentieth-century groundlessness did Einstein come down? Which of its moods did his texts express, and how? The passage I just cited from his survey makes him sound like a boilerplate avant-garde optimist, but we shouldn’t forget the bafflement of his interlocutors. The manifestos of the futurists weren’t known for their incomprehensibility. Matters are more complicated, then; and that complication points to the uniqueness of Einstein’s project. It is caused by an oscillation in his texts between theory and literature, or, in my parlance, between discourse and writing. In Einstein, discourse states modern groundlessness in the mood of exhilaration, which writing then threatens to undermine. It will be practical to begin with a concrete example for this claim, using a topic that’s timely, urgent, and instructive. Einstein’s politics will be simmering away in the background of every page of this book. They have never been examined satisfactorily, and the following section is intended to sketch them in outline. But that sketch will be only half the task. Once I am done describing Einstein’s politics as discourse, I will be compelled to question their foundation in writing. At that point, when paradox has reached maximum pitch, we are ready for a summary of the scope and argument of the chapters to come.

Original Politics To understand Einstein’s politics properly, a few introductory remarks are required. Today, at least among historians of modern art, the ex-post-facto label “Western Marxism” is too often confused with historical reality. It can seem as though there was no Left before Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness

12

Form as Revolt

(1923); and that when that Left finally emerged, it was committed to a defensive action fought from the margins by the Frankfurt School: to a critique of reification rather than its abolition, isolated from the communist mainstream that might have brought it about. But Einstein’s political convictions, and not just his, were formed a full ten years and one World War before Lukács’s book, in an era when revolution, not resistance, had still been on the agenda of the Left—except, that is, when it hadn’t. For this was the era of the Second International, or, which to many contemporaries was the same thing, the era of a “crisis of socialism.”10 As I will argue in detail in chapter 1, for Einstein and his associates at Die Aktion that crisis consisted in the paradox that by 1912 European socialism seemed to be winning at last, only thereby to fail all the more thoroughly. The most vivid sign of the crisis was the fate of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), by far the most powerful force in the Second International. The SPD had achieved a sweeping victory in the elections and had become the largest faction in the Berlin Reichstag. But since all other parties refused to engage in durable coalitions with it, the moment of the SPD’s political triumph looked like the moment of its institutional defeat. To the mind of the left-wing opposition within the SPD and of the anarchists beyond its fringes, what was in the balance was more than a parliamentarian deadlock that might be resolved in future elections. The entire Second-International project seemed discredited. Variously referred to as gradualism, revisionism, or attentism (“wait and see”), that project was powered by the assumption that ultimate political victory was as inexorable as the steps toward it needed to be incremental. It was through the perennial pursuit of gradual reform, and only through it, that socialism would one day emerge from within capitalism. That sounds like a policy any 1960s Social Democrat could have underwritten; but the difference lies in the theory of history that was undergirding it: a severely determinist version of Historical Materialism which the Second International had inherited, not exactly from the young Marx, but from late nineteenth-century efforts at making Engels look still more scientistic than he had been. Taking their cue from Engels’s Anti-Dühring (1878), a number of SecondInternational thinkers had attempted to merge the HistoMat with a reductive version of Darwin’s Origin of Species in order to think political teleology together with biological evolution.11 The argument was rigid, simple, and efficient. As with the development of the species, so with the amelioration of workers’ conditions over the centuries: perfection was a gradual process—an evolution, not a revolution— and that was precisely what made it inevitable. The upshot, as Die Aktion never tired of pointing out, was that according to many Second-International leaders, political revolt was not even an option. Historical evolution needed to run its determinist course, and any willful intervention into it, say by extraparliamentarian mass strikes, had to be curbed. Workers could not be allowed to delude themselves

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

13

into thinking they were free-willed agents capable of making their own history, as opposed to merely enacting the law of its development.12 Left-wing opposition to this scheme of things had begun to gain traction in 1899 with Rosa Luxemburg’s attack on Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism.13 Most important for our purposes is the root-and-branch critique launched in 1911 by the anarchist Gustav Landauer in his influential Call to Socialism: “Where the Marxists are believers in development à la Hegel, there the revisionists are believers in evolution à la Darwin. They no longer believe in catastrophe and suddenness. Capitalism, they think, won’t flip over into socialism in revolutionary fashion; it will rather differentiate itself gradually and so become increasingly tolerable.”14 Landauer’s dismissal, not just of pseudo-Darwinian evolutionism, but also of Hegelian development, shows him willing to discard the HistoMat altogether, and with it all shades of Marxism: “That is why we hate [Marxism] from the bottom of our hearts: because it is not the description and science it claims to be, but a negatory, disintegrating, and paralyzing appeal to powerlessness, lack of will, acquiescence, to just letting things happen.”15 That was also Einstein’s stance. Traces of Landauer’s argument can be found in Einstein’s writings from 1912 on. There are, for example, his polemical dicta, à propos of the Reichstag elections, that “Darwinism is a thoroughly parliamentarian theory of science,” and that “socialism weakened its idea by allowing parliamentarians … to dissolve revolt into the primal slime of evolution.”16 There is his rejection of the HistoMat’s teleology, whether Bernsteinian or Leninist: “People were overwhelmed by the idea of ‘maturation’ and development. They trusted in the mechanical flow of economics to carry them swiftly to socialist paradise.” “Even the ‘revolutionary’ Marxists posit a fixated utopia that is supposedly the ‘goal’ of historical development.”17 There is Einstein’s claim that, on the contrary, a real revolution will “smash right through history and tradition.”18 And then there is this broadside attack on the SPD: “Social Democracy declared itself a conservative party from the very beginning, for it defined itself as a class party.”19 The last statement wasn’t motivated by a Dandyist’s disdain for ordinary workers; again, Einstein was a combatant in the Spartacus Revolt. Nor was he merely setting his sights on the inertia of the SPD’s right-wing labor aristocracy. Instead, rather than with a rejection of the working class we are dealing with a rejection of class as such. That rejection in turn is in sync with Einstein’s polemic against evolutionist and developmental models of socialism. For what is subtending all of Einstein’s political remarks is a full-blown ontology of time, one that includes political time but is not limited to it. For reasons that will become clear over the course of this book, Einstein resented all theories of human practice that conceived of temporal flow as a linear chain of causality according to which events that happen at one moment in time are merely the effects of earlier events. Whether revisionism’s evolutionary class struggle, Hegel’s

14

Form as Revolt

development of Spirit in history,20 the gradual formation of character in Goethe’s Bildungsroman,21 or art history’s tradition of ever-increasing naturalism: all of these models were equally tedious to Einstein for the way in which they defined time as a sequence of incremental causes and effects that extended from a punctual origin in the past through the present into a plottable future—from the dawn of class struggles to the ideal society, from the naïve adolescent to the mature protagonist of the novel, from the primitive efforts of African art to the perfect copy of nature in the Renaissance. That is why terms like evolution, heritage, tradition, and repetition were always used interchangeably by Einstein: because, ontologically speaking, they were all conservative terms in the literal sense. All of them described the conservation of an identity through history—the identity of a person over the course of their biography, the identity of Spirit through the march of the eons, the identity of art through the succession of styles—by anchoring it in an origin, and then plotting its development from seed into blossom. For Einstein, the offense here was not just the belief in historical progress but more fundamentally the belief in historical determinism: a belief that, motivated by a contemptible fear of novelty, emptied the present moment of its significance by relaying it back to some past. Hence Einstein’s rejection of the very idea of class. For the SPD to “define itself as a class party” was for it to be “conservative” “from the beginning.” It was for it to shrink from the challenge of groundlessness that was posed by any beginning worth the name: the challenge to define political identities anew from first principles. In that sense, even though few traces of Bakunin or Kropotkin can be found in his work, Einstein was indeed an anarchist. He was resolved to create a new world without an arché, without an origin to anchor it or a ground to prop it up. As he put it in his survey of modern art, Braque and Picasso had come up with an “image type that’s characteristic of the beginning twentieth century” (K3 117).22 Note the double entendre here: the beginning century was the century of beginnings. Contrary to postwar clichés about its alleged millenarianism, for Einstein, as for so many others, this was not the era in which history was finally ending; it was rather the era in which it could finally start: the era in which, so far from reaching its ultimate link, the chain of causality was breaking up for good.23 That conviction explains why Einstein became so deeply estranged from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s: because bolshevism had turned out to be just another archism, so to speak. “Poets in Russia are an impossibility, since the Marxist doctrine prevents and paralyzes the aptitudes and powers needed for poetry”; where “poetry” should be understood in the expansive sense of poiesis, or general creative production.24 Conversely, it explains Einstein’s proximity to the left-wing opposition within the Second International. To name just two examples here, what he had in common with Rosa Luxemburg, whose

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

15

writings he clearly knew well, and the young Antonio Gramsci, whose early texts he may or may not have known, was a model of history according to which revolution and evolution, originality and development, were fundamentally at odds. For all the obvious differences between them, in Gramsci, Luxemburg, and Einstein alike we find a theory of what might be called original events. Original events happen in historical intervals that open within consecutive time, interrupting its flow;25 intervals during which a map of relations—political, social, visual, biographical—is redrawn across the board of a bottomless ground. So long as the interval remains open, the delirium of experiment will displace the lockstep of gradualism, the novelty of invention the straitjacket of teleology. It is only after the fact that original events will be causalized again, when groundlessness is sealed over, the chain is relinked, and originality is reduced to precursorship . . . or to an infantile disorder.26 Novelty does not emerge in logical development, which tends to be confined to the domain of the similar; it rather comes into being in a visionary interval in which existence is initially disavowed; the work is proceeding by leaps, it is alogical and in opposition to historical heritage. The perspective of later observers will level out this conflict, the disconnected event will be approximated to historical precedent. (K3 114)27

In this passage from The Art of the 20th Century, the novelty Einstein has in mind is the emergence of a new visual world on the canvases of Braque and Picasso. But switch the focus from Paris to Petersburg, and what you have is the argument of “The Revolution against Capital,” Gramsci’s breathtaking essay of 1917. Gramsci was trying to fathom the significance of October as it was happening, and that significance seemed dramatic indeed. It disproved, not proved, the historical logic of Marxism as he knew it. After all, according to the prescriptions of political economy, the revolution should never have taken place in Russia at this time. For Gramsci, the fact it did anyway made it not just a revolution against Capital but against Marx’s eponymous book.28 At stake for Gramsci, as for Einstein, was the question of temporality, of how historical events unfold over time and how they connect. Are they lined up along a chain as so many causes and effects, the latter arising from the former by force of some inexorable logic? That had been the desiccated mantra of the HistoMat, which October now revealed as the pipe dream it was. Turning Capital into a Bildungsroman, Second-International socialists had been pledged to charting “the normal course of events”: “When events are repeated with a certain rhythm. When history is developing through a series of moments, each more complex than the last and richer in meaning and value, but nonetheless similar.” But then, Gramsci argued, to believe in gradualist development is to forget that it is “the collective

16

Form as Revolt

will,” which is “the force which shapes reality itself ”: “True Marxist thought has always identified as the most important factor in history, not crude economic facts, but rather men themselves and the societies they create as they learn to live with one another and understand one another.”29 In 1917 in Russia such a society was what Gramsci saw, neither developing nor ending, but beginning. In her epic account of the Russian Revolution in 1905, Rosa Luxemburg had said nothing different. A key concept in her political lexicon, also used by Gramsci and Einstein, was the notion of spontaneity.30 Spontaneity was Luxemburg’s term for a sudden, unpredicted eruption of political revolt that renders all determinist textbooks invalid. In a remark that would forever scandalize revisionists and Bolsheviks of all stripes, including the author of History and Class Consciousness, she insisted that “in Russia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat are ‘uneducated’, but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them.”31 To summarize Luxemburg’s argument in Einsteinian terms, the spontaneity of political struggles inverts their normal trade-unionist origin; it transforms the social ground from which they arise; and it thwarts all efforts by party cadres to stage-manage them by sorting them into basal causes and superstructural effects. “In every individual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical problem.”32 In Luxemburg’s revolution, spontaneity and development are opposed, for the consecutive linearity of events is displaced by a simultaneous reciprocity of causes and effects that expands at the speed of light across all territories of the lifeworld. Like May ’68, the Revolution of 1905 wasn’t the effect of a century of wage-labor struggles, since it wasn’t the effect of any one thing.33 Instead, an interval was opening in which a new society was unfolding all its dimensions at once: generally, locally, economically, politically, socially, materially, psychically—and visually, Einstein added, over a decade after he had spoken at Luxemburg’s funeral. When he called cubism’s achievement a “spontaneous realism,” his point was that Braque and Picasso had been pursuing in the studio the struggle to invent a new reality from scratch that she had witnessed in the street.34

Toward Zero Michael Hardt has argued that in Gilles Deleuze’s political ontology, negativity is a mere stepping-stone on route to positivity: “Only the one who knows how to wield a powerful negation can pose a real affirmation.” “The no of the total critique, the expression of an unrestrained negation, is liberating.”35 Leszek Kolakowski once made a similar case for the ambition of the Left: “To construct a utopia is always an

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

17

act of negation toward an existing reality, a desire to transform it. But negation is not the opposite of construction—it is only the opposite of affirming existing conditions.” Kolakowski used a simple example to explain his point. To tear down a building is an act of negation; to build a new one on an empty lot is an affirmation. But to tear down a building and erect a new one in its place is affirmation and negation at once. That is a major ontological ambiguity, which Kolakowski went on (not) to resolve as follows: “The Left is a movement of negation toward the existing world. For this very reason it is a constructive force. It is, simply, a quest for change. That is why the Left rejects the objection that its program is only a negative and not a constructive one.”36 In theory, the politics of affirmative novelty that Hardt and Kolakowski describe is a marvelous project. When Einstein insisted that, contrary to the stereotype of the bomb-wielding Ravachol, anarchism was a profoundly “constructive” endeavor, he too was endorsing it.37 Still, in the early twentieth century the project’s empirical realization proved a tall order. It is not just that Einstein was making his claim while sitting in the trenches of a civil war; not just that by the time of his writing the politics of constructivity was on the defensive. The problem was rather built into the project itself. It is very hard to renounce history, God, and the century-old traditions of social bonds and art making without having the act of renunciation seep into one’s own alternative to them. It is harder still not to settle for calling that seepage “dialectical,” and so to accept its negativity by declaring it unavoidable, or even reveling in it. One successful example, tremendously valuable for being so rare, is the extraordinary work that the Russian constructivists produced during their “laboratory period” in the early 1920s. Folding out from an empty center in all directions at once, or else maintaining a dynamic equilibrium around it, Alexander Rodchenko’s Hanging Constructions and Karl Ioganson’s tensegrity structures can stand as the purest diagrams of the original events observed by Gramsci and Luxemburg. These are miniature worlds nascent with burgeoning relations, volatile manifolds formalized throughout, suspended aboveground (Rodchenko) or self-supporting (Ioganson), cut loose not only from all earlier routines of art making but also from the violence inscribed in the act of their dismissal.38 Was Einstein the Rodchenko of art criticism, then? Minus the Taylorism, he certainly wished he was something like that; but the reality turned out to be different for him. It is intriguing that he should have planned to publish an essay in Veshch’, the magazine run by the most gifted student of Kazimir Malevich. Had Einstein been able to overcome his prejudice against nonobjective art, he would have recognized a kindred spirit in the sphinx of Vitebsk. For Malevich’s enigmatic ontology of “stimulus,” of an abstract, “groundless” vibration as the foundation of all form, matches Einstein’s notion of groundless originality well enough. Stimulus is the mobile prime mover, unseen and vacillating, that in the wake of its own disappearance generates the rhythm of shapes and colors in Malevich’s

18

Form as Revolt

multiunit canvases from around 1916. Whether that rhythm is constructive or negative, whether the visual relations it produces on canvas are cohesive or atomizing, and whether the atomization stands for the shared individual freedom of the units or for their antagonistic dispersal: these are the questions that Malevich’s paintings do not answer but raise.39 If the twin poles of early twentieth-century ontology were world building on one hand, nihilism on the other, and if these were represented by Rodchenko and Georges Bataille, then Einstein and Malevich were lodged right in between.40 Instead of being pledged to either construction or negation, their work gave form to the imbrication of the two. Here, nihilism wasn’t world building’s other but its affliction. The groundlessness on which the new edifice was being erected was at the same time rising up to tear into its fabric. What contour and chroma were for Malevich, syntax and semantics were for Einstein, which is why his work requires scrutiny not just as discourse but as writing.41 That is a demanding because unfamiliar task. Art historians tend to read criticism for the plot. We focus on what Clement Greenberg said about modern art but not on how he said it. We pay attention to what we rashly call “rhetoric,” of course, but not to the grammar and diction: we don’t submit “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” to a stylistic analysis that parses its sentences clause by clause. In Greenberg’s case that may not be required, but in Einstein’s it is literally of the essence. Few other critics of modern art started out as hard-core prosaists whose fierce devotion to linguistic micromanagement matched Raymond Roussel’s. In Einstein’s texts from between 1907 and 1914, adverbs and prefixes, conjunctions and appositions, are all given specific work to do: the surgical work of nihilism. To a degree, that work would slacken after the war, but it would never cease altogether. Einstein’s prose was both the template and the shadow of his postwar criticism and theory. By molding their linguistic routines, it kept stalking their political and philosophical ambitions. The result was a deep textual split. At the level of discourse, groundlessness was the promise of a new beginning. At the level of writing, it was the collapse of the project even as it was being proclaimed. It is this basic tension that’s responsible for the irritation felt by all readers of Einstein past and present. Even in a text just three pages long, white noise appears to be obscuring the thesis. The text seems to make the same point over and over again, to make it too elliptically or hyperbolically, or else to stray off topic altogether. In response to this grating dissonance, Einstein has been called a gifted polemicist, a brilliantly unsystematic thinker, or simply incomprehensible. These epithets are all equally wide of the mark. The error here is to mistake literature for theory, the materiality of language for the muddiness or passion of an argument. To make that point more specific, I will now switch interpretive registers, and examine groundlessness not as Einstein’s discursive ambition but as the structure

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

19

of his writing. My remarks may seem abrupt and fussy; they will be backed up by a fuller exploration in chapter 1. I have chosen a passage from Einstein’s Braque monograph from the early 1930s, since it demonstrates the tension in an instructively counterintuitive way. For at the level of discourse, the passage reads simply enough. Einstein is restating his Luxemburgian politics of creative originality in terms he had acquired through background reading in ethnography and the history of religion during his tenure at Documents. I will spend the first half of chapter 5 explaining that politics as discourse. For now, I want to look at the writing through which the passage articulates it. In actual fact, beyond the reality that has been fixated there subsists a sphere of permanent creation and metamorphosis, that is, of the enduring revolt against the imposed world picture; for everything mythic signifies the difference between man and given being. All our freedom is enclosed within this metamorphotic process.42

So what is specifically writerly about the passage? First and most easily spotted, there is Einstein’s tendency to pair up highly charged concepts into rigid oppositions: reality and creation, revolt and world picture, man and given being, and, less obvious but more ominous, freedom and its enclosure. Second, there is the presence of the verb “to signify,” which is a token of Einstein’s abiding concern with the question of meaning. In a vast number of Einstein texts, all manner of things and ideas are said to mean this, signify that, or to appear to be the other thing: bedeuten, bezeichnen, scheinen, auffassen, and heißen are recurring verbs. Third, the verb “to subsist” signals Einstein’s curious preference for a small family of adjectives, adverbs, and verbs that indicate duration: “permanent,” “enduring,” “persistent,” “constant,” “to subsist,” “to last” (permanent, dauernd, beständig, konstant, bestehen, dauern). These words are important for being self-performing, for not just describing but doing what they mean. Use “constant” constantly in a text, and you will produce a certain general bass, or general drone, that will carry even the most agitated argument on a calming wave of repetition. Switch out “constant” for “permanent” or “enduring,” and you will vary the drone without diminishing the sameness. Finally, these issues—the focus on meaning, oppositiveness, and repetition in variation—come together in Einstein’s penchant for the phrase “that is” or “that is to say.” Whether written out in full or in abbreviated form—as das heißt and das ist, or d.h. and d.i. (the English “i.e.”)—it occurs just a bit too often in his texts to be dismissible as a quirk. The habit even carried over into the French. Einstein’s Documents texts are replete with c’est-à-dire; in his essay on Hercules Segers, examined in chapter 4, he uses the phrase five times on just over three pages. The German conjunctive adverb also (“hence,” “that is”) will do the job as well, as it does in our passage.

20

Form as Revolt

Whatever its language and place in a sentence, whether at its outset or as an apposition within, the purpose of “that is” is always the same. It announces a shift in the modality of meaning from claim or statement to paraphrase. Everything in a sentence that follows after “that is” will make a preceding point by repeating it in other words. But note that by the same token the reverse also holds. Once an equivalence between the two parts of a sentence has been established, for the second part to paraphrase the first is for the first to become a potential paraphrase of the second. Hence the initial point is not necessarily amplified by the restatement; on the contrary, it may well be relativized by it. By equating two phrases to either side of itself, “that is” may turn a cumulative statement about the meaning of a project—artistic, political, philosophical, whatever it may be—into a noncumulative one about the meaning of meaning. The passage gives us a sense of the effect that’s achieved when these stylistic traits are combined. For Einstein to describe his project as moving within “a sphere of permanent creation and metamorphosis, that is, of [an] enduring revolt,” is for him to do at least three things with words. First, by calling that project a permanent creation, he defines it as an oppositive dyad. Permanency is a state of lasting sameness; as such, it is the opposite of creation, of the volatile generation of novelty. The implication here is that by creating incessantly you are actually betraying the project, since in practicing invention you are stabilizing its instability. Second, this first opposition is paraphrased by means of another that’s oppositive in just the same way: enduring revolt. Revolt is the enemy of an enduringness into which it will nonetheless turn if pursued in perpetuity. Third, Einstein sets up an inverted equivalence between these two opposites. Creation and revolt relate symmetrically as affirmation and negation, as the building of a new world and the annihilation of an extant one. But this opposition is also the ground of their sameness, for affirmation and negation are two values that will cancel each other out when added up. That sameness, finally, is reinforced by two synonymous adjectives: where creation is permanent, there revolt is enduring. Given all this, it seems no coincidence that Einstein’s German term for the “sphere” in which his project of creative revolt is unfolding should be Bezirk. A Bezirk is a territory whose limits have been drawn as if with a Zirkel, a compass. The Bezirk of permanent creation and enduring revolt is a circle, then, and it looks as though it might well be a vicious one: a circle of grammar into which words are summoned in order to chase each other’s tails. It would be comforting to consider our passage the result of a familiar modern exasperation, of Einstein acknowledging “the aporias of bourgeois revolt,” for example. I say comforting, because this interpretive approach still assumes the passage has a point to make. But that is precisely what is in doubt. For we cannot be sure exactly what we’re looking at here: a theoretical argument, however paradoxical, that’s vested with personal conviction; or a sheerly grammatical constellation that just looks like an argument—a constellation in which meaning unfolds

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

21

as an opposition between dyads, one of which paraphrases the other by repeating and inverting it. That is a very precise armature to deploy, and it is principally independent of the words that happen to be inserted into it. According to the rules of that armature, meaning—the meaning, in this case, of creation and revolt—is double, antagonistic, and reversible rather than single, unified, and cumulative. And, again according to the rules, to write that meaning is to write a movement between affirmation and negation and back again; a movement that, for all its agitation, indeed because of it, will acquire a certain constancy, since the combined semantic values of the dissonant words that are slotted into the armature will ultimately solve for zero. The oscillation between discourse and writing, between groundlessness as promise and as predicament, animates every page Einstein ever wrote. Either convictions, emotions, or political and philosophical concepts are reinforced by paraphrase, synonymy, parallelism, and antithesis: then we are on the territory of discourse. Or else they are merely processed through them: then we are on the territory of writing. To be sure, this is just a crude heuristic distinction. In Einstein, we will never encounter sheer discourse any more than sheer writing; instead, we will find them locked in a struggle for dominance. Discourse is trying to cut loose from writing in order to articulate itself; writing is tearing into discourse in order to pull it back into itself. The project as a whole is the movement between the two: between the promise of ontology and the nihilism of grammar, between the building of a world and its collapse into language. That movement is the form of Einstein’s theory of modernity, and every text is riven by its push and pull. Only close reading and looking will discover how the balance pans out. That is what this book endeavors to do.

The Wanderer’s Itinerary Since it is a long book that ranges widely between literature, philosophy, and very different kinds of visual art, it will be useful to provide the reader with a map that charts the road ahead. In chapter 1, which examines Einstein’s prose from the prewar period, we will find the young writer systematically deploying the writerly armature I just hinted at. There is a reason for his contempt for the Bildungsroman. Einstein’s life did not follow the normal modernist plot of high hopes dashed by a reality check and a descent into darkness. So far from ending up a nihilist, he actually started out as one. To his credit, that had not been the plan. Inspired by the Romantic philosopher Novalis, the young Einstein had sought to create a textual world of potentially infinite extension, animated by sensuous immediacy, structured by mathematical rigor. This ambitious project went spectacularly awry. The manner in which

22

Form as Revolt

Einstein defined himself as the origin of that world ensured that the poison of negativity permeated its fabric. What lends it its grating richness is the hostility that rages among its citizens, all of whom are so many autobiographical personas. The reason for their strife is that, whether at the level of the paragraph, the sentence, or even the individual word, the generative principle of Einstein’s prose was a fundamental ambiguity, or double sense, according to which, the moment it is set down on the page, any emotional state, political conviction, or philosophical claim must summon its opposite into being. This ambiguity was going to be a character trait of the lost wanderer, another Einstein persona. In the event, it became his authorial stance. The result was a prose as permanent creation or, which turned out to be the same thing, enduring revolt: a self-replicatory writing in which a syntactical sameness-in-variety kept feeding on lexical turmoil. Einstein’s textual world was flexible enough to absorb any number of contemporary cultural phenomena and political events, from Mallarmé’s poetic images through Simmel’s sociology of poverty to the German parliamentarian crisis of 1912. But it absorbed them only in order to have them tear into each other. For Einstein found himself writing from a position that, taking his cue from Novalis’s friend Schelling, he called an indifference point. In Schelling’s ontology, an indifference point is the neutral ground between two hostile forces. Schelling’s favorite example was the center of a magnet, where the forces of the two poles cancel each other out even as they sustain their mutual difference. In Einstein’s prose, the author position of the indifference point, by spinning forth ever new antagonistic personas, became the bottomless center of an expanding labyrinth. Finding himself trapped in a world of his own making, he took flight from literature to art criticism. That transition was the most important move Einstein ever made. It opened the solipsistic world of his prose onto the world of visual art. For while it is sometimes confused with discourse or writing, art criticism is actually neither of the two. As we saw above, discursive concepts are easily reduced to mere variables in a syntax; but the same is not true for the words that pick out the formal traits of a physical object. To the extent it is able to maintain a relation to that object—to the extent it resists devolving into ekphrasis—art criticism may, not disable writing’s pull, but redirect it. Then, the groundlessness of language will be converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art. Chapter 2 explores how the process of conversion got under way in Negro Sculpture (1915), Einstein’s first significant text on visual art. Its title seems to take us into familiar territory. But chapter 1 will have prepared us to understand that Negro Sculpture was not a primitivist manifesto in any of the shopworn modernist senses. It was rather the result of a unique encounter between a lost wanderer and a set of uprooted objects. So far from abandoning the groundlessness of literature for the origin of art, Einstein discovered the former in the latter.

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

23

I will suggest that groundlessness mattered in Negro Sculpture as both method and phenomenology. In his introduction, in a strategic embrace of skeptic philosophy, Einstein declined to anchor African sculpture in the causal chains generated by contemporary ethnography. In turn, in his discussion of the objects themselves, he unfolded a lost wanderer’s visuality of space. Some of the sculptures in the plate section of his book seemed to deploy as their formal structure in space the ambiguity that had split up his personas across a paragraph on the page. That ambiguity was now put to productive use. Einstein’s description of what I call an African sculpture’s aspect reversal demonstrated how these objects resisted causal models of viewing, whether of instant inferential vision or of a process-oriented ambulation. Thwarting contemporary models of site-specific sculpture, absorbing its own base into itself, Einstein’s African sculpture ungrounded itself from the context into which it had been abducted. It is in chapter 3, which considers Einstein’s writings on the cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, that this book enters the more heavily trodden fields of modern art. It does so in order to plow them anew. Today, after the joint demise of social art history and semiology, it is time for a full-scale reassessment of cubism, notably of its core period around 1911 and 1912. This book begins that revision by taking its cue from the best writer on the topic in the early twentieth century. For Einstein doesn’t fill a gap in the scholarship to date; he rather provides us with the tools to look at cubism in a wholly new way. Einstein extended his personal project into cubism by converting an ontological predicament into a powerful art-critical term. That term was Grundkontrast, or foundational contrast, which served him to describe how in their paintings Braque and Picasso “dovetailed the strongest possible representation of volume into the paradox of the surface” (K3 125).43 Cubism’s foundational contrast was a tension between space and canvas, representation and medium: between the effort of a painter to project a volume into a surface, and the resistance of the surface to that effort. The result of this push and pull was a unique visual form, a hybrid at once surface and space, which Einstein called an image-object (Bildgegenstand). A cubist painting then had this in common with an Einstein prose piece, that it was a world populated by phenomena that were split in two, whether by the materiality of grammar or by the materiality of paint. The exact way in which they were so split—the way in which a cubist image-object negotiated the foundational contrast—will alert us to a telling difference between Braque and Picasso. What I call the open cylinder was Braque’s device for generating image-objects that gently joined the opposites of surface and volume into a fragile unity. In turn, what I call Picasso’s hinge was a slice of sheer negativity that juxtaposed them absolutely. Nor were these just any image-objects. Often enough, as Einstein insinuated in some elliptical remarks on the cubist mandolin and guitar, they were actually

24

Form as Revolt

image-bodies. Cubism will turn out to have been something much more hallucinatory and obscure than the textbooks keep telling us: a groundless eroticism whose frankness still has the capacity to shock. Chapter 4 is devoted to Documents magazine, which Einstein cofounded with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. Again the territory is familiar, and again my point is to make it strange: by pulling Einstein out from under the shadow of his junior colleagues. I will explore how, as his purview broadened under Documents’ all-inclusive masthead, Einstein began to probe the history of art on the lookout for congenial personas. He discovered one in the seventeenth-century printmaker Hercules Segers. Segers’s stunning etchings prompted Einstein to compose a text that, written from a point of indifference, opened itself onto their bottomless vertigo. In turn, the art of central Asia attracted him because of the way in which certain ritual objects became both the map and the territory of an ontological nomadism. The lost wanderer responded to it with a catalogue essay that accompanied its objects with an impressively hesitant textual drift. The second focus of chapter 4 is contemporary; it considers Einstein’s copious writings on the work of Pablo Picasso in the later 1920s. In his protean postcubist oeuvre, was this artist building a visual world, or was he tearing one down? Against all odds, a number of recent Picassos seemed to encourage an optimistic answer. Because of their combination of the tectonic and the psychogram— Einstein’s terms for surrealist automatic drawing and the deductive composition of abstract art—they looked like tokens of a “formal animism” to him: images in which wild psychic events emerged from a productive inflection of sameness. But if delirious novelty stood for the creative share of Picasso’s work, there were enough examples for its destructive side, and Einstein wasn’t blind to them. In arguing Picasso’s oeuvre was riven by a “double style,” he was recognizing another fellow wanderer. I will show how Einstein tracked that doubleness both visually and theoretically: in the layout of Documents, which juxtaposed works by the artist on double pages; and in his remarks on the seriality of Picasso’s oeuvre, in which one painting appeared to summon its opposite into being, the way Einstein’s personas had in his own prose. That he should have called Picasso’s doubleness “dialectical” will prompt us to consider another déjà vu. A thinker who had already stalked Einstein’s Novalisean ambitions at world building in the 1910s now reappeared in his Picasso texts. According to the ontology of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the ground of all relations is a double negative, a mutual resentment between at least two parties. The same was true for the relations among Picasso’s Painters and Models at which Einstein was looking at the time. In finishing his thought, I will suggest that the dialectic that these paintings framed as a marital crisis spoke more broadly to a general problem of the early twentieth century: to people’s

Carl Einstein: An Introduction

25

inability to imagine the invention of new relations among themselves other than as the spectacle of hostile factions tearing into each other. Accordingly, this chapter will end on a skeptical note. What was the point of celebrating negativity at Documents, again? Since no positive project was ever identified as the negativity’s ultimate motivation, just how avant-garde was a rebeldom without a cause? The fifth chapter will attempt to provide a measured counterpoint to the endgame bleakness of the fourth chapter. Its final sections are devoted to Paul Klee, an artist who, because of his difference from Picasso, mattered nearly as much to Einstein. Klee became a focus of Einstein’s most expansive intellectual project: his theory of “the real.” Had he been able to assemble its ingredients between the covers of one book, that theory might have amounted to a Thousand Plateaus for the 1930s: a root-and-branch attack on instrumental reason that yet avoided the apocalypticism of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. It remains an impressive achievement even in its fragmentary state. The theory of the real was the final iteration of Einstein’s project of modern world building. In his terminology, the real is not a reality that should be either inhabited or critiqued; it is rather a reality that needs to be actively produced. That production gets under way through an act of ungrounding that Einstein called metamorphotic revolt: through the displacement of some extant condition by a creative transformation. Given his interest in ethnography, religion, the history of art, and more, Einstein’s metamorphotic revolt had many dimensions. It included ancient cosmogonies, which had creatively revolted against the natural lifeworld into which their inventors had found themselves thrown; sexual deviancy and tattoo, which revolted against the a priori anatomy of the human body; and a speculative notion of scientific hypothesis, which revolted against the limits of positivist verifiability. I will attempt to show how the slender yet durable bridge between this project and the art of Paul Klee rested on the pillars of content and form. In his cosmological imagery Klee seemed to be designing a world that ungrounded anthropocentric world pictures by radically equalizing all its inhabitants. Moreover, the equalization extended out to the viewers of the art. Taking a leaf from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Einstein referred to the structure of looking in Klee as “affectivity,” as the capacity of human beings visually to suffer their own decentering. The result of Einstein’s ruminations was arguably the best art criticism that was published on the artist in his lifetime. But the neatness of fit betrays the desperation of the author. It is a long way from Luxemburg’s report on the Russian Revolution of 1905 to Klee’s “visionary miniatures” of the 1920s, a time when the artist and his critic found themselves ungrounded in a bad way: not supported by a people, as Klee put it.

26

Form as Revolt

Einstein was alive to the predicament, of course, which is why I suggest in conclusion that he built it into the fabric of his writing on Klee. And so, as we leave the lost wanderer contemplating a persona’s self-portrait, this book ends by closing the circle of Einstein’s Bezirk. It hopes to have shown that the circle, while vicious, was wide enough to encompass much of the art and thought of an era in which its resident lived not a happy but an exemplary life.

1

The Lost Wanderer

Toward Infinity Throughout Einstein’s prose from the 1910s and the enigmatic notes he compiled while writing it, one finds him returning over and over again to an issue that moved him deeply: the issue of what he variously called an origin, ground, or essence. Einstein’s thoughts on the matter do not amount to a systematic argument; they are brief, elliptical, and sometimes rigorously coded. But they do state one of his most deeply felt convictions clearly enough. That conviction was that the origin of anything at all—the origin of a human adult in his or her personal biography, the origin of textual meaning in the real world, the origin of a given present in a historical past—is fundamentally inaccessible; and that this is so because at any one moment that origin is receding away from us as a causal chain whose links disappear back into the infinity of time: from a point A in our present on to A′, A″, and beyond. That is why, as I suggested in my introduction, for Einstein our selves and our work, our identity and our poetic meaning, are always precarious achievements built on a void, grounded in a fundamental groundlessness. Einstein’s conviction did not come out of nowhere. We can discern the diffuse but powerful presence in his work of a seminal phase of German Romantic philosophy that is associated with the names of Novalis and Schelling.1 Around 1800, these two thinkers went a decisive step beyond Kant and Fichte in declaring that human thought and experience unfold on a ground that is itself unavailable to them.2 For this is a ground that precedes both the Kantian subject and object

28

Form as Revolt

and the Fichtean I and not-I: it serves as the origin for the human cognition of the things in the world and the ways in which they take shape for that cognition; yet even as it does so, it also retreats away from them, leaving only traces of itself in the aftermath of its departure. “Every actual origin is a second moment,” Novalis had argued. “Everything that is, everything that appears, is and appears only on one condition: that its individual ground, its absolute self, precedes it, or at least must be thought as preceding it.”3 In turn, in his Freiheitsschrift Schelling had insisted that “there must be an essence before any ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality—how can we call it anything other than the arch-ground [Urgrund], or rather the non-ground [Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore, it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference of both.”4 Not only do versions of these arguments and their terminology recur throughout Einstein’s early writing, condensed into single apodictic sentences; we will also find them and their terminology structuring the very fabric of his prose.5 Modern science and Judeo-Christian theology, Einstein believed, had invented two stopgaps for sealing the void of the receding origin, and he felt compelled to reject them both: the scientific notion of causality, and its religious equivalent, the notion of God.6 “Causal thought,” Einstein argued in a short text on “The Problem of the Origin,” “is founded on individuation in the temporal sense, which is posited by the concept of the origin.”7 And that is why scientific causality must be dismissed. For, by positing an absolute beginning for the things in the world, it “individuates” history, reduces its complexity and open-endedness. Causal thought assumes the existence of a single point back in time from which a stable, meaningful history then projects forward as a linear chain of causes and effects all the way into the present. There, it grounds and so limits one’s self and one’s work, replacing the actual threat, and the real opportunity, of a groundless infinity with the fictive determinism of a restrictive identity: “In causal thought, man posits his own finiteness as norm.”8 The same was true for God, Einstein believed, and that belief was painful to him. His early notes include many pages of spiritual reflections. These too are coded in ways that will become apparent, but some of them are genuinely anguished. Still, while in the 1910s Einstein was reluctant to dismiss his existence altogether, even then God for him seems to have been the God of Meister Eckhart, the late medieval German mystic: an elusive, spectral nothingness who, like certain privative words in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry, withdrew his presence from the page the moment one summoned his name onto it.9 Not to accept this elusiveness of God, Einstein decided, was to settle for the consolation of an origin that was as coercive and unreal as that of scientific causality. The decision was not made in cold blood. Einstein’s resolve was based on a harrowing experience of personal uprootedness. When in the 1910s he tried to

The Lost Wanderer

29

remember his childhood in detail—not an intuitive thing to do for a writer in his midtwenties—he found he could no longer recall whether he had once believed in God, or whether even then the origin of his own origin had been just a word on the page of a prayer book.10 Decades later, this failure of memory, which may have been real, programmatic, or both, would draw Einstein to the childhood cosmogonies of Paul Klee: to an adult’s invention of a poetic origin for the present in the wake of his real origin’s disappearance into the past. But already in the 1910s, this severance from his own childhood compelled Einstein to make a case for human creativity as part of his renunciation of God as primal cause. “Creation never was,” he declared in a text called “The Treatise on the Word and the Cross”: “There is a God because we need the idea of a sheer, undiluted productivity.” But in reality, biblical “creation is just as inexplicable as any other kind of emergence, which oughtn’t be made to conform to retrospective reflection.”11 The Book of Genesis, Einstein was saying, is a causal origin story made up eons after the elusive fact. People find themselves adrift in the present at a point A; and to anchor themselves ontologically, to seal the abyss of temporal recession, they trace a line back to A”, calling it God. But they are paying a heavy toll in exchange for this anchorage: they relinquish their own originality, their capacity for producing a world, to the first link in the causal chain. In the process, they also relinquish any strong notion of emergence in general, of the wild, unpredictable mystery of a noncausal novelty. In his early writing, Einstein wanted the line not to terminate but to extend ever further in both directions. Instead of declaring the causal chain finite, he resolved to render human finiteness infinite. There was an ambition here, and there was a hope. The ambition was to create a poetic world that, rather than sealing off the retreat of the origin, would internalize that retreat as its very formal structure. The hope was that in this way an existential predicament would be converted into a creative project. The infinity that kept receding away from Einstein back into time would be transformed into an infinity that expanded out before him on the page, with the writer serving as the funnel between the two. Groundlessness would be turned into poetry, and the writer would be its origin. In a very important collection of notes for an abortive book project, “The Lost Wanderer,” Einstein went on to mull over the formal structure of the world he was going to build. He described it as a “mathematically self-enclosed fantasy, one grounded so universally and lawfully that it is a world ad infinitum; not a merely quantitative infinity, though, but one that presents itself to an infinitely different intensity and perspective (individual).”12 The terminology here is very specific; it is borrowed from the celebrated “Mathematical Fragments” of Novalis.13 In Novalis Einstein had found a kindred spirit: a daringly speculative world builder who, he too, had sought to confront the infinite groundlessness of being head-on.14 If the origin of human existence was ever receding away from it, Novalis had reasoned, then human thought and poetry

30

Form as Revolt

must themselves become infinite in response.15 How so? By converting a vertical threat into a horizontal virtue, so to speak. Instead of staring into the abyss of an infinite recession opening up underneath the things in the world, Novalis suggested we instead focus on the infinite lateral relations among these things; that we contemplate them in our philosophy, study them in our science, give form to them in our literature.16 It was in order to think this form that Novalis in his “Fragments” famously drew a parallel between language and mathematics.17 “Just like signs and words, numbers are appearances, representations kat exochen,” he argued. The world of language was like the world of number, and the world of number opened onto infinity. Let me read Novalis the way Einstein read him. Mathematics is a miniature world, a system of differences that relates all its elements through rules of reciprocal determination: 2 is 2 insofar as it is neither 1 nor 3. But while it is a finite system, mathematics is nonetheless able to capture infinity within this relationality; for anything that makes an appearance within the system makes it as an element that is precisely determined by the others, and be it as the infinity sign, the ∞. The world of number, therefore, is at once closed and unlimited, tightly structured but ever expanding. Needless to say, for a writer pledged to making Novalis productive for modern literature, significant adjustments would be required in the transition from mathematics to prose. In “The Lost Wanderer,” trying to bridge the gap, Einstein asked himself exactly what he was doing: “Isn’t this merely a confusion of words between fantasy and science? No, for fantasy must create pregnant, sensuous constructs—yet constructs that are mathematically typical.”18 “Fantasy” (Fantasie) is another technical term from Novalis, and so is the noun “fantastic” (Fantastik), it too used by Einstein, and about which Novalis had speculated thus: “If we had a fantastic in the manner we have a logic, the art of invention would have been—invented.”19 What Einstein and Novalis were getting at was this: a mathematically poetic world is neither like the logic of academic philosophy nor like the fantasy of Blue Flower Romanticism; it is rather both. Logic is a relational system at once perfect and inert; fantasy is a figment of the imagination at once searing and evanescent. Neither will do on its own. But if the two could be dovetailed, if logic and fantasy could be merged into a single “fantastic,” one would have the structure of a poetic world at one’s hands in which rigor would become inventive and be everywhere saturated with the contingency of human emotions and actions. Chance events, scattered reveries, dysfunctional obsessions, would no longer be beyond the purview of a system of form but would be brought forth by it, and joined up with one another into a single, self-supporting fabric. A new, fantastically rigorous prose would render human finiteness infinite on the page. And its author would be a kind of God, a God to whom his own poetic world, growing limitlessly, would present itself as if to “an infinitely different perspective,” as Einstein put it.

The Lost Wanderer

31

Comparatively Writing That was the plan, and it was an exhilarating one. Its failure was just as extreme. Being lodged at the bottleneck between two infinities is a precarious place to find oneself in. As the one passed through Einstein into the other, the groundlessness of the origin transformed itself into the groundlessness of textual meaning. That had been the idea in the first place; but in the event groundlessness turned out to be indistinguishable from arbitrariness, world creation indistinguishable from world dispersal, and creativity indistinguishable from solipsism. Worst of all, the only way for the creator to tolerate this disaster turned out to be to try and embrace it, grimly and gleefully, the smile of a humorist frozen on his face. A first glimpse of trouble comes into view in another passage from the “The Lost Wanderer,” which can stand as the young Einstein’s most important capsule poetology: Create laws of symbolism. But detached from religion. Merely formal, like mathematics. The means: grammar, rhythm, sound. A circle of similes. Sentence variations. Rhythm in the broadest sense. Composition of parts, sections, sentences into a coherence that will readily yield events that are contrapuntal, contrastive, now corresponding, now contrastive, etc. These options are to be implemented among all the elements.20

This is a rehearsal of the ways in which mathematics might be transformed into syntax, and once we are ready to examine Einstein’s writerly style in detail we will find it very illuminating. But for now we should explore how another, alien thought is intruding into the Novalisean project here. Its presence is signaled by two terms that play only a minor role in Novalis’s work: symbolism and simile. What is their significance for Einstein? According to the quote from “The Lost Wanderer,” symbolism is the name for the textual system itself; its laws will ensure that the poetic world is self-sustaining (circular), formalized throughout (“like mathematics”), and severed from the origin (“detached from religion”). In turn, simile, which relates two words by way of a comparison, will be the system’s basic building block at the level of figurality. This is a crucial point. Throughout Einstein’s prose and notes from the 1910s, comparison is a pervasive presence; in fact, it is an obsession, a fixed idea. It recurs over and over again, both as an actual simile (Gleichnis) and as so many cognates for it, whether these are nouns, adjectives, adverbs, or verbs: Gleichheit, Gleichung, Gleichgewicht (Equilibre), das Gleiche, (aus)gleichen, begleichen, geglichen, zugleich, gleich, gleichgültig, gleichsam, (gleich)wie. Where is this obsession coming from? Who made comparison in general, and simile in particular, the keystone of a theory of symbolism in literature? Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel did in his Lectures on the Aesthetic: in a chapter on “the

32

Form as Revolt

conscious symbolism of the comparative art form” (die bewußte Symbolik der vergleichenden Kunstform).21 Given that its significance for Einstein will turn out to have been fully on par with Novalis’s “Mathematical Fragments,” that chapter’s argument deserves looking into in some detail. By the time we reach the chapter, the general point of Hegel’s Lectures has been well established. Hegel had defined art’s fundamental job as the production of meaning; and he had suggested that meaning is produced by formalizing relations (Beziehungen), specifically, the relation between a general concept (idea, content) and some chunk of concrete reality (VA1 395).22 As is known well enough, to Hegel’s mind certain kinds of art are better at formalizing that relation than others. Classical art, whose paradigmatic medium is sculpture, is good at it; symbolic art, whose paradigmatic medium is literature, is not. What makes classical art good at it is that the relation it forges between concept and reality chunk is concrete, unique, and self-sufficient. To cite Hegel’s own anachronistic example (VA2 84–85), Christian Daniel Rauch’s marble bust of Goethe does not represent individuality in general, nor does it represent Schiller, nor is it incomplete. It rather represents Goethe, a concrete person: a unique relation between the concept of individuality and the matter of marble whose meaning does not exceed its own manifestation in the work of art. In symbolic literature, this perfect match is always in danger of unraveling. The danger is medium-specific. It is inherent in language’s basic technique of formalizing relations, which is unknown to sculpture. That technique is comparison (Vergleichung), a production of meaning that relates a word for a thing to other words for that thing. In his lectures, Hegel demonstrated the presence of comparison at the root of a number of rhetorical figures, notably allegory, metaphor, and simile, all of which he dismissed as unclassical for that reason.23 Why? Because poetic comparisons are principally open-ended, and hence threaten the uniqueness of the relation they are intended to forge; and because that openendedness is exclusively linguistic, and hence threatens the firm grounding of the relation in reality. The more words you use in order to compare Goethe to somebody else, the more you lose sight of Goethe himself. Or to take Hegel’s own example, when in the Odyssey Homer likened the enraged Achilles to a lion (VA1 533), at face value he did something quite similar to what Rauch did with Goethe’s bust: he fused the concept of frenzied strength with the empirical warrior by way of a comparison between man and beast. But unlike Rauch’s, the uniqueness of Homer’s relation is actually artificial. Strength may not just be symbolized by a lion but also by a bull, a horn (VA1 395), or by any number of other strong animals or their body parts. A fuller account of Achilles’ battle rage might have related the warrior to all of them. Yet Homer, unwilling to bury a concrete individual under a deluge of comparanda for him, chose to bring in the lion only. By restricting poetic meaning to a single relation of comparison,

The Lost Wanderer

33

Hegel’s Homer used language against the grain—used it as though it were classical when it is actually symbolic. Other authors were not so disciplined. Calderón de la Barca is one of Hegel’s examples for a “consciously symbolic” poet, a poet who will follow language’s innate pull toward comparison all the way. When Calderón refers to a ship as “a bird without pinions, a fish without fins” (VA1 528), his comparanda are so expansive they might as well extend to the entire animal kingdom. Moreover, they are partly self-generating; one suspects Calderón came up with the bird as a match for the fish rather than the ship. Put another way, the ship served him as the mere pretext for a poetic activity in which comparisons proliferate at the expense of the reality chunk they are supposed to make meaningful. The only limit to such proliferation is the poet’s ingenuity, his ability to come up with ever more extravagant comparisons; and the more of these he summons onto the page, the greater the distance he will put between his text and the real world. In conscious symbolism, therefore, meaning—relation—is “severed from external reality” (VA1 488), and is no longer the aim of the poetic activity but its starting point.24 Comparison becomes the formal engine for generating relations within a poetic world that are principally infinite if purely infratextual. That is why, according to Hegel, symbolism’s technique of choice is simile (VA1 526–39). Like metaphor and allegory, simile pivots on a comparison between things; but unlike them, it imposes no hierarchy on them: simile does not summon one word in order to elucidate another word. Where metaphor shifts one word to the other’s location, and allegory states one word in the other’s terms, there simile merely likens words, and its meaning fully resides in that likening: neither in the comparans nor in the comparandum but in the comparison itself. Simile is then the great poetic leveler. Everything counts equally, which is to say that nothing counts, for what does count is not any one thing but the relations among the words for things. That makes simile the perfect tool for the symbolist poet’s indulgence in comparison (Lust des Vergleichens; VA1 527), in a production of meaning that derives pleasure from the condition of sheer relatability.25 To Hegel’s mind, that indulgence comes at a heavy ontological price: the symbolist poet is creating one world even as he is disdainfully or despairingly cutting himself off from another. That disdain or despair will not be left behind at the threshold of the poetic world but will cross it in a more palatable form. The modern text will be suffused with the negativity that founded its autonomy in the first place. That is what Hegel is getting at when he states that the mind of the symbolist at work is “active, inquiet, and joy and pain in particular are not dead and static but are restless and mobile” (VA1 529).26 The poet, he is arguing, is experiencing a pain in the real world that his poetic activity will not so much relieve as transform. For while pain as stasis and death is not tolerable, pain as restlessness is; and conscious symbolism will give form to it as the restlessness of its comparisons. Some of Hegel’s examples for this transformation are from love poetry, including the Song

34

Form as Revolt

of Songs (VA1 530). When its author addresses his lover with an endless string of improbable similes—“thy hair is as a flock of goats, thy neck is like the tower of David”—their proliferation is intended to compensate for her actual absence in reality. Unavailable in one world, the body of the lover is comparatively disseminated throughout the other, transforming the unbearable pain of its absence into the pleasurable pain of its restless dispersal. So strong is the pleasure that the joy of reunion in reality will not come as a relief. In the passage I just cited, Hegel implies that, just like pain, joy too is intolerable as long as it is static or at rest. This is a crucial distinction: it is rest, not pain, that the symbolist fears, and rest cannot be relieved by joy but only by restlessness. But why should the symbolist fear rest? Because rest is not symbolic but classical. It is a settling down of meaning, the arrestment of a proliferation of multiple relations into a single, permanent relation only. That makes rest a threat to the indulgence in comparison; hence, whether in the world of language or in the real world, whether in joy or in pain, the symbolist will have no traffic with it. As Hegel tells it, a scenario is imaginable in which the lover returns—and yet, repelled by the prospect of peaceful (classical) tranquillity ever after, the author of the Song of Songs will slam the door in her face and turn right back to his text in order to preserve the inquietude of his mind. Which means that by rights Hegel ought have warmed to conscious symbolism, for it was germane to the core of his own philosophy. After all, what kind of ontological stance is it that tempts one to indulge in a restlessness that will dismiss any one thing in favor of the formalization of relations with ever new, ever different things? Hegel explains: it is a certain “need and power of the mind and soul, who will not be content with the simple, the habitual, and the plain, but who will instead rise above these in order to proceed to something other, to dwell within difference, to comprehend doubleness into a unity” (VA1 520–21).27 A movement from sameness to otherness, from identity to difference, from the tranquillity of the singular to the tensed unity of the double: a more familiar name for the restlessness of Hegel’s symbolist is the dialectic, the interminable movement of negation from one thing to another thing that is the very engine of Hegel’s ontology.28 Restlessness is dialectical because, unlike rest, restlessness is action. And in Hegel, the consummate philosopher of modern nihilism, any action, before it is anything else, is a negation: the negation of some extant state of affairs.29 Achilles killing Hector is a negation, and so is the symbolic poet’s moving ever on from word to word on the page, dismissing one for another as soon as it occurs to him. Uprooted from its grounding in a wordly referent, symbolism’s indulgence in comparison is the labor of the negative aestheticized as a form of writing. That is a bleak way of putting the matter, but it is exactly what Einstein got out of Hegel.30 Consider the argument of an essay he published in 1913. Its title, “On Paul Claudel,” is partly misleading. Its first half amounts to an ambivalent manifesto of

The Lost Wanderer

35

Hegelian symbolism, and it is not devoted to Claudel but to the achievement of certain unnamed “new poets,” clearly including Einstein himself, who took their cue from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Their work, we are told, is a sign for how “contemporary art is withdrawing to the autonomous power that is specific to it”; and that this autonomous power is a new kind of language: “a language that dwells within the poetic, within simile,” and which is no longer grounded in a “milieu”: “They believe that to the autonomous forms of the poetic correspond autonomous formal constructs which are as it were [gleichsam] specifically poetic from the start.”31 Note how in Einstein’s definition this new poetic world is a symbolist world twice over: both internally and externally. It is symbolist internally because its language is purely comparative; it “dwells within simile,” and this is its autonomy: it rejects any grounding of its figurality in a sociological milieu.Yet this language is not autonomous plain and simple. It is rather autonomous only as it were, only comparatively speaking: only insofar as it dislodges itself from its origin in reality. As in Hegel, so in Einstein: the autonomy of the poetic world consists in a severance of relations with an origin that is at the same time a relation of severance to it. And as in Hegel, so in Einstein: this founding gesture of severance will cross the threshold from the one world into the other. Comparison will be at once the outer boundary of the new poetic world and the internal form of the language of which it is made. And that form will be sheerly negative, which is to say dialectical.32 Witness the sudden appearance of a quote from the Phenomenology of Spirit in Einstein’s essay, which claims that “for Mallarmé, the poem had become a mystery of absolute language whose formula had been defined by the German Hegel: ‘a determinate being that is immediately self-conscious existence.’”33 What matters here is the presence of a technical term from German Romantic philosophy: the term “determination” (Bestimmung), which is one of the key notions of Hegel’s dialectic. To put it succinctly, in Hegel, just as in Novalis and Schelling, to determine what a thing properly is is to determine what it is not: any positivity is grounded in a more fundamental negativity, the being of any one thing is founded on its negation by some other thing.34 The same matter can also be stated slightly differently, which is what Einstein did when he defined the dialectic as “the constant comparison of opposites.”35 He was trying to think determination and comparison, Hegel’s dialectic and Hegel’s symbolism, together. His point was that to determine what a thing is is to compare it, negatively, with all the things that are not it, and which, in being different from it, oppose it. From this perspective, determination is a kind of negative simile, just as simile is a kind of negative determination. That is a very dark thought. We are inclined to think that simile is fundamentally a positive gesture; that comparing a thing to another thing or a whole crowd of them amplifies its singular empirical being by multiplying its poetic being. But, considered in terms of Einstein’s experience of groundlessness, comparison is as much a negative gesture as it is a positive

36

Form as Revolt

one. Since every comparison that’s added to a text will only work to unground it further from the comparans, both likeness and unlikeness can look like two sides of a single coin. That idea seized hold of Einstein, seeping into the poetic world he was trying to build. Let us enter that world by starting out with a curious essay Einstein published in 1911, and whose stated purpose is deceptively straightforward. Entitled “Paraphrase,” the essay claims to lambast those kinds of literature in which words unfold alongside, beyond, around, and in any case separately from the thing they are supposed to summon onto the page. This is a literature that, like the poetry of Hegel’s Calderón, will gladly lose hold of “an actual, obdurate thing, and instead use it as the pretext for an ingenious idea,” so that “everything is turned into simile, and the technique of mixing it all together is the tertium comparationis.”36 Einstein gives a fictive example for this misguided ingenuity, one inspired by the more adjective-laden varieties of the German expressionist lyric. An unnamed poet waxes about the way in which, “rather like a flag at half-mast, Miss Ludmilla Meiersen’s twilight soul sank into the rustling rust-red of the blood-soaked autumn; by which he intends to report on a good or bad action by this lady.”37 But according to Einstein, the poet’s report resoundingly fails. The woman’s psychology and the natural environment that serves as its setting are buried underneath a cascade of comparisons that keep informing us how things are like other things but not what things actually are. Miss Meiersen’s soul is like twilight, and autumn is like blood—very well, but what is her soul, and what is autumn (and what are twilight and blood)? Einstein’s fictive poet doesn’t tell us, but then, neither does Einstein himself. One after another, his essay exposes half a dozen failed poetic comparisons to ridicule. And then it stops. “Paraphrase,” it turns out, is nothing but a list of examples for what it denounces; it is itself the tertium of the comparanda for comparison that it keeps bringing in. As such, the essay does prove the sheer “extensibility of paraphrase, the endless coils of its relationality”: proves it performatively, by adding itself to its own list.38 In spite of its apparent forthrightness, therefore, Einstein’s essay is not a manifesto for a return of literature to reality; it is rather evidence that the road to it is thoroughly blocked. And in spite of the hilarity of its tone, the fact that “Ludmilla Meiersen” is a recognizable allusion to Maria Ramm, Einstein’s German-Russian girlfriend and future wife, tells us that personal matters are at stake here: that, whether according to Hegel on the Song of Songs or Einstein on paraphrase, it is because of the comparative nature of language that love poetry will lose sight of its origin in reality precisely by writing about it. Before we consider further examples, a few general remarks on Einstein’s early writing are in order. With the exception of his novella Bebuquin, Einstein’s genre of choice between 1909 and 1914 was the short prose piece, a dense text that typically runs over just three to five pages in the Werke edition. A handful of these stand out as especially significant for their scintillating but plotless referentiality.

The Lost Wanderer

37

They are brimming with meaning even as their narrative or argument is going nowhere. A typical prose piece describes the state of mind or worldview of a small cast of characters; usually one of them is the main focus, but others will make a brief appearance as well. All characters are males and bear only generic names: the paraphraser, the artiste, the snob, the mystic, the pauper, the man in revolt, the educated man. All are massively volatile subjectivities, in thrall to extreme cravings and convictions; one scholar has called them bachelor machines.39 And indeed, this much is true: the characters do not take to quiet reflection; they passionately long for, fervently believe in, secretly fear, cannot abide by, fail to grasp, haughtily renounce, cling on in spite of everything. And the objects of their obsessions are just as extreme as their feelings about them: violence, crime, freedom, necessity, being, nothingness, truth, values, poverty, parliamentarianism, revolution. What does this motley crew of characters, affects, and issues add up to? My suggestion is that they are the population of the poetic world that Einstein set out to design in “The Lost Wanderer,” and that this world turned out to be an autobiographical one, inhabited by a solipsistic multitude. Caught at the bottleneck between two infinities, one breathing down his neck, the other expanding on the page in front of him, Einstein in his prose split himself up into so many personas of himself: so many victims and cowriters of a restlessly dialectical prose.40 Let me gather some provisional evidence in support of this claim. First, the characters are repeatedly called “dialecticians”:41 they subscribe to a “view of life which will have everything develop out of the opposite and back into it again,” and so “will offer a counter-value to each value.”42 These values and counter-values include the characters themselves. As Einstein put it, italicizing the Hegelian term for emphasis, “they relate.” “Unproductive as they are, to their mind nothing seems to belong to their person, for they aren’t persons.”43 Indeed not. Einstein’s characters aren’t individuals but relational effects. That is why they keep popping up in one another’s essays: they need one another ontologically. So far from being self-contained subjects, each complete with his own psychogram, political agenda, or aesthetic theory, the characters are one another’s comparanda. That doesn’t disqualify them from being autobiographical personas; it rather makes them so many “infinitely different” Einstein “intensities,” as “The Lost Wanderer” had put it. Take the decorator and the mystic. The decorator is a poet who, like the young Einstein in his more exuberant lyrical efforts, will adorn (decorate) the object of his work with opulent metaphors and similes. The mystic, by contrast, is a Meister Eckhart figure who embraces the wordless asceticism of an ecstatic vision. Even so, or rather precisely because of this, like their author himself “the decorator and the mystic are paraphrasers; they’re just headed in opposite directions.”44 As I will demonstrate below, they are not the only ones to do so. For now, the important point to grasp is that the characters’ experiences and convictions, however extreme, are determined laterally, as dialectical differences among at least two personas, rather than vertically, as referential ties to a single empirical

38

Form as Revolt

subject: the mystic’s ecstasy is the decorator’s nonopulence; the decorator’s opulence is the mystic’s nonecstasy. Still, these are ultimately Einstein’s experiences, and as such they are grounded in their author; but only insofar as that author is the medium through which his own most fundamental experience—the experience of groundlessness—has propagated itself into the writing and there split itself up into a potential infinity of personas. For, and again like Einstein, all characters of the prose pieces are practicing symbolists. This is most obviously true for the writers among them: they are people who “produce poetry with absence, people for whom a simile drowned out the actual thing.”45 That said, the writers are symbolists only against their own will, since they share Einstein’s fascination with the retreating origin. That is why they keep trying to dig into the ground of the text in which they appear, why they themselves are trying to establish ties to a referent. But it is also why, like the author of the “Paraphrase” essay, they get hopelessly embroiled in relations of comparison in the process. Among numerous passages one could cite as examples, consider this one from the prose piece called “The Snob”: The snob hates the symbol and the chain of equalizations which it loops in wide circles [sc., around an empirical object]. He is but that chain’s variation and spectator, the coherence of its style is the fear to come across oneself, he is as unsymbolical, as unfaithful, as the blind eye of a mirror, which, like he himself, only lives through the kindness of things.46

Far more important here than the literary connotations—the mirror may have been borrowed from either Novalis or Mallarmé—is the symbolist figurality in which both the imagery and the character get swept up as the writing unfolds. For note that while the last sentence is telling us that the snob is unsymbolical, it is telling us that symbolically, namely, by means of a simile: the snob is as unsymbolical as the mirror. Another simile follows right after, then a metaphor, then another simile. Not only is the snob as unsymbolical as the mirror; he is also as unfaithful as it. The mirror itself is actually a blind eye, and that eye is rather like the snob. A cascade of comparisons separates the character at the outset of the sentence from the kindness of things at its end, returning him back to himself before he can reach them. What goes for things also goes for the origin: Einstein’s personas keep struggling with the groundlessness that summoned them into being in the first place. Take another passage from “The Snob,” and focus on its curiously repetitive incantatory structure. He hates the diatonic triad, the discovery of the origin. To him, the beginning must be the most doubtful thing. For him, the start does not mean symbolic determinacy but factual uncertainty, which is a bridge to all manner of reflection and doubt: a tightrope towards the arbitrariness of a taste.47

The Lost Wanderer

39

It will be helpful, if ultimately misleading, to know that a diatonic triad is a progression through the tones of a musical scale, say C-E-G in C-major; and that Einstein’s many intellectual interests included dabbling in Pythagoreanism and ancient Greek music theory. I say misleading, since, like the literary connotations in the previous passage, these culture-historical tidbits distract us from the figural work that’s being performed on them. Because the snob doesn’t hate the diatonic triad, not as such: he doesn’t hate the prospect of a musico-cosmological primitivism that might reground modern literature in the origin of an eon-old harmony of form. Rather, he hates witnessing how merely to invoke that prospect of an origin on the page is to see it diluted right away by the writing’s “chain of equalizations.” For note how the passage is spinning forth three successive nouns that synonymize—and so paraphrase, and so distance—that origin thrice over: “origin,” “beginning,” “start.” Ursprung, Beginn, Anfang. C-E-G. What the snob actually hates is seeing a singular point turn into a repetitive iteration, originality getting dispersed within a thoroughly uprooted symbolist text. Or to put this in the terms of a memorable double entendre from Bebuquin: Das Künstlerische beginnt mit dem Worte anders. Art begins differently with the word. The origin of art is the word “otherwise.”48

The Style of Nonessence That said, figurality will get us only so far, for our examples have made one fact abundantly clear: in Einstein, every word counts, but so does their order within a sentence or passage. That is why the prose pieces are so short. Writing them up must have taken a long time, and we should now look into how that time was spent. Certain patterns of word selection and arrangement have emerged already. There is a noticeable fondness for privative prefixes and verbs of negation (“unfaithful,” “uncertainty,” “to hate”); a tendency to group nouns into pairs (“reflection and doubt”); and an emphasis on what these pairs mean to a character (what they are “for him” or “to him”). We need to take leave of the personas for a moment, examine those patterns, and delve into the fabric of that style. For it is here, where lexis meets syntax, that a lot of the real action is taking place. In Einstein’s texts, the origin doesn’t just get diluted across figures of comparison; it also recedes within the grammar into which these are slotted. To understand this, it is important to realize that another word for “origin” or “ground” in Einstein is essence. It is a highly noticeable word, for it is given special status in his prose. Essence is sometimes put in brackets, sometimes in quotation marks, as though Einstein felt compelled to include it in the text, but only by bracketing it out of its regular flow. A passage from the essay on the decorator is helpful here; it offers an example for the procedure and states the reason for it. There, Einstein declared that paraphrase “rashly assumes the ‘essence’ is given, and

40

Form as Revolt

then goes on to meditate around and about a thing. It is all the same to it whether one believes in the ‘essential’ or considers it mendacious.”49 Essence, then, is what paraphrase—symbolism—cannot properly process, and around which it will unfold its comparisons instead. But what is essence, exactly? To answer the question, we should return to Novalis’s philosophical fragments, including a section that in the edition Einstein was consulting bears the title “Essence and Property.” In that section, Novalis had argued that the essence of a being (a person, a thing) is at once the most basic and the most elusive condition of its existence. Essence is what founds the negativity through which a being determines itself over against all other beings even as it itself is inaccessible to that being. An abstract issue, to be sure, but Novalis gave a helpfully concrete example for it: the human family.50 The being of a family’s members is defined by a series of mutually determinate negations that specify their individual traits or properties: a person is a child insofar as it is not a parent; a child is a daughter insofar as it is not a son.51 That said, apart from thus negating one another, all family members actually exist. But according to Novalis, it is precisely this most obvious fact about them—the essence of their being, conceived as a singular and positive condition—that cannot be got into proper focus by any of these individual determinations. “Of the essence only an exposition is possible. Essence as such is unavailable to cognition.” “Only properties can be opposed. Essence can only be determined negatively. It is that which is no property.” “It is the ground of everything—the ground of action. Its determination is a positive lack of all determination.”52 You may find out what you are relative to other people through the “action” of determination; but you cannot find out what you are, period. For to try and find out is to determine, and to determine is inevitably to see your essence receding away from you; for at least three reasons.53 First, it is to enter into a relation of opposition (Gegensatz) between two terms—yourself and your essence—and so to lose hold of the condition of singularity you are trying to grasp. Second, it is to enter into a relation that, since it is a determination, is fundamentally negatory, and so to lose hold of the positivity of your essence. Third, it is to lift up essence, which is supposed to be the ground of all individual determinations, right up in front of you as an object for such a determination, and so to produce the need for another ground, another essence, in its stead—to infinity. Essence, then, is an ontological chimera. But in Novalis, one of the most brilliant modern thinkers of nonessential being, it is a compelling chimera, perhaps a necessary one. And so it is in Einstein, in whose writing essence is both assumed and not assumed to be “given,” as the essay on the decorator had put it. Essence is the ungrounded ground of Einstein’s symbolism, the origin of a prose that it spawns in the wake of its own recession. The difference from Novalis’s example is that rather than with family members we are dealing with convictions, politics, and emotions; and that rather than with a discursive philosophical argument we are dealing with a literary text that has embedded the elusiveness of essence within the fabric of its

The Lost Wanderer

41

phrases and clauses. A final difference from Novalis, and one regrets understanding this the moment one understands it, is the cold, surgical ruthlessness of that embedding. First, though, how does Einstein’s nonessentialism work in practice? Again “The Lost Wanderer” provides some crucial hints. The wanderer was going to be a protagonist in a book, and Einstein described his role there as follows: “It is from his ambiguity that the nonessence emerges. The one ironizes the other. . . . The one will always contradict the other.” “He hurries now towards this, now towards that; he sees two things at once.”54 The wanderer never made it into either book or prose; instead, he became the authorial stance of his inventor. For what these elliptical statements are describing is a pervasive phenomenon that recurs throughout Einstein’s early writing. Let us consider it more closely. Nonessence (Unwesen) is the basic condition of textual meaning. It produces the division of one word into two words that emerge at once (zugleich); two words, moreover, that are opposed to one another even as they also have the same (gleich) semantic value. Over and over again in Einstein’s writing, this division is enacted by a syntactic constellation that extends across a passage of roughly one to three sentences in length. That passage is the basic unit of the prose; Einstein would later refer to it as the Wortfolge, or “sequence of words,” and call it the very reality of literature.55 In that sequence, two or more words of the same kind—nouns, verbs, or adjectives—are grouped into pairs. Typically, the members of a pair are hypersaturated semantically; frequently, the pairs are oppositive. Here, deployed as if on either side of an invisible division, two words dance around an absent essence of meaning like the algebraic signs of plus and minus dance around zero. The sentence on paraphrase from “The Decorator” that I quoted above can serve as a first, simple example, because its nonessentialism is actually selfperforming. Let me cite it again: “It is all the same [gleich] to it whether one believes in the ‘essential’ or considers it mendacious.” Belief versus skepticism, plus versus minus: two siblings, opposed and equal, have emerged right before and right after an essence that spawned them even as, thanks to the quotation marks, it has also been bracketed out of their reach. My reference to algebra is not meant to be a throwaway metaphor. In Einstein, mathematics and figurality did go together as planned. “Form is an equation [Gleichung],” the division of a “singleness” into “opposite directions,” he would declare in Negro Sculpture (1915), in a sudden digression on mathematics in a section otherwise devoted to sculptural space.56 Einstein was recalling the style of his own prose here, as well as the inspiration for its nonessentialism. Once again, that inspiration was Novalis. In his mathematical fragments Novalis had observed how “it is curious that as you resolve equations you will receive a − root and a + root, and that you will be able to determine which of them is valid only through the comparison with the given numbers.”57 An interested reader could take this to mean that the expression ±√ a formalizes the split of a single essence into an opposed pair. The

42

Form as Revolt

square root of 9 is either +3 or −3; or rather, it is both of them at once (zugleich): it is an equation (Gleichung) that produces a comparison (Vergleich) between two juxtaposed magnitudes.58 Nor is this all. What goes for sentences also goes for individual words and entire texts. An Einstein prose piece is a single, intricate equation in which words, phrases, clauses, and paragraphs relate as so many magnitudes of a system of semantic value that undulate around the zero of essence like the peaks and troughs of a sine wave undulate around its axis. To indicate the pervasiveness of that fact, I will list some of the ways in which they do so systematically before I consider specific examples. At the level of the individual word, privative prefixes like “un-” or “de-” negate the adjective or noun to which they adhere, and so generate a single term that’s divided along an invisible line as if into a positive and negative version of itself. Prefixes can also be made to interact with adverbs of quantity, as when it is said of a persona that “for him, history is wholly inessential.” Here, “wholly” and “in-” nullify each other as the plus and minus of an essence that is even spelled out as such.59 Their equivalent at the level of the clause are verbs like “to hate” or “to fear.” These are highly noticeable referentially because of their affective charge; but they actually matter relationally, in terms of what we will have to call their grammatico-ontological function, which is to deprive the object upon which the verb is acting of its being. It is at this specific level, rather than in some vague general sense of the autonomy or crisis of modern poetic language, that the work of Stéphane Mallarmé mattered to the formation of Einstein’s style.60 Comparatives and superlatives were another option: each of them is a word that’s derived from another word over against which it determines itself as its semantically amplified version. “Strongest,” for example, is semantically more valuable than “stronger” and “strong.” Quantitative prepositions and verbs get the job done, too: “at most,” “at least,” “to increase,” “to diminish.” A zero opposition may also be established between the subject and object of a clause, as when a character is said to “own nothing” or to “lack everything.” Within clauses and phrases, the conjunction “and” may link positive comparisons; often, these will be rote additions of synonyms. Or it will join up negative comparisons; then we are looking at chains of antonyms that subtract themselves from one another. Two clauses whose meanings actually correspond may be linked by a contrasting conjunction (“but,” “however”); two clauses that disagree, by a noncontrasting one (“for,” “and”). The list is not complete, but it will be enough to give a sense of the basic mathematics of the style of nonessence. Words can be slotted into it as needed. That said, the resulting prose is neither static nor sterile; it is a very productive endeavor. The Wortfolge is not a structure but a dialectic, one that, as Einstein put it in “The Lost Wanderer,” will “readily yield events” as the rhythm of “sentence variations” starts to unfold.

The Lost Wanderer

43

A first example: the opening passage of “The Snob.” The words that make up its ostensible topic—I will henceforth refer to them as glittering nouns—have a deceptively lofty, urgent, and familiar ring. They seem to address a well-known relativist deadlock between philosophical alternatives that animated early twentieth-century German intellectual life: the deadlock between a philosophy of the will, represented by Nietzsche, and the hoarily academic philosophy of value, represented by figures like Heinrich Rickert.61 And the passage does indeed address that deadlock; but it does so not discursively but grammatically: by grinding it through the mathematics of nonessence. We have no truth any more, the old needs and duties of the instinct have faded away. Desires hang hollow and in wide folds around emaciated things. One learned to understand obligation at the same time [zugleich] as will, and since one could will everything, we lost the values.62

Let us take this as slowly as the writing demands. First, a glittering noun is introduced, only to be deprived of its being: we have no truth. Then, another noun is summoned to form a pair with it: the instinct. That pair is at once oppositive and identical, for its members are comparable both negatively and positively. On one hand, the philosophies of truth and instinct are sworn enemies; on the other, they are both equally unavailable: we have no truth any more, and the instinct too has faded away. More precisely, what has faded away is a new pair of terms that has emerged within the second clause of the first sentence: needs and duties, two opposites that are said, incongruously, to belong to the instinct (think about it: how can an instinct have duties?). After a brief metaphorical distraction comes another opposition, this one between obligation, which by definition renounces all irrational impulses, and will, which by definition is impulse incarnate. In the final clause, that opposition is stripped down to the bedrock of grammar and quantity: “Since one could will everything, we lost the values.” The indefinite pronoun in the singular stands against the first-person pronoun in the plural; at the same time, the gain of everything as a potential object for the will stands against the loss of all values that might be so willed. Anonymous individuality versus the unified collective, Nietzsche contra Rickert: it’s a toss-up. More could be said about the passage, but we are still concerned with recognizing the basic moves. A second example, again from “The Snob,” will help us sort out pattern from noise. It is slightly more intricate, because it is self-referential. The snob is a writer, and the passage describes his style, which is also Einstein’s. The magic and the attraction of the style resides in its constancy. It will tolerate at most a new arrangement and illumination, but principally [grundprinzipiell] and inwardly it is determined by the faith in consistency and the unchangeable. A faith in which every fact, that is, all critical consciousness, will be consumed.63

44

Form as Revolt

The first glittering noun here is style. Two pairs of two redundant synonyms oscillate around it like plus and minus around zero: magic and attraction, which the style intrinsically possesses; and a new arrangement and illumination, which the style does not possess but rather tolerates. The constellation expands as a second noun is introduced. Faith is said to determine the style, hence forms a new pair with it that right away generates another one. According to it, faith determines the style in two opposed fashions: by way of principles, which are by definition objective, and by way of inwardness, which is by definition personal. Before we can pause to mull this over, faith splits up into two further pairs that relate to it in just the way the two initial pairs had related to the style. The first pair is affirmative and synonymous: this is a faith in consistency and the unchangeable. As for the second, negatory pair: even though the apposition “that is” tries to synonymize its members—invert their mathematical signs, so to speak—they are actually opposed. For this faith will equally consume two antagonistic schools of thought: positivism, which takes all facts for granted, and Kantian-style critique, which doesn’t. And with this, the passage ends. If we factor out the semantic overload, we are looking at a tautology that’s formed by a triad of synonyms: consistency and the unchangeable are the ground of constancy. This is the zero of the style, the flat axis of the sine curve. And yet, we are left with more than nothing, for our review of the passage has shown it to be powerfully self-generating. The style does indeed tolerate ever new “arrangements” of words into sentences, and ever new “illuminations” of concepts and affects from different angles. On one hand, since the latter’s total semantic value is nil, the style will preserve its constancy throughout: the constancy of nonessence. On the other hand, since all the glittering nouns are supercharged referentially, and since each of them, as soon as it is introduced, requires at least one other noun to either amplify it or cancel it out, the style will keep producing more scintillating prose. As “The Lost Wanderer” had demanded, there will be coherence, there will be rhythm, and there will be variation. Ad infinitum.

Eindeutig Zweideutig Just what would happen when the style of nonessence met politics? For that is what it did in 1912, when Einstein’s prose changed venues and subject matter in a dramatic fashion. He moved on from rarefied literati journals to Die Aktion, a leading late Imperial magazine of left-wing cultural politics. Founded in 1911 by the anarcho-syndicalist and pacifist Franz Pfemfert, Die Aktion was designed, in Pfemfert’s words, to become “an organ of forthright radicalism” that stood “for the idea of a Great German Left.”64 It did become that for a while, although initially the radicalism and the Left were broadly conceived. The authors Pfemfert managed to attract included such disparate figures as the aging Peter Kropotkin, Erich Mühsam, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Heinrich Mann, Georg Heym, Hugo Ball,

The Lost Wanderer

45

and the young Walter Benjamin.65 Exactly where within that range does Einstein belong? What was the politics of the style of nonessence? The question is urgent, since Einstein’s Aktion essays can make for a disturbing read. Gone are the symbolist navel-gazing and the disquisitions on will and values in the abstract; instead, we are looking at highly topical texts written in a militant tone. Both the topicality and the militancy are incomprehensible without some basic knowledge of German domestic politics circa 1912. The central issue here is parliamentarian politics in the late Empire, and that issue deserves a brief historical introduction. By 1912, the rise of the German Social Democratic Party as the largest and most powerful socialist organization in Europe had thrown German politics into a double crisis. This was a crisis, first, of parliamentarianism, for as the SPD kept making gains at elections it became a force to be reckoned with in the Reichstag; yet all parties to its right refused to enter into coalitions with it, which the emperor would not have tolerated in any case. That isolation made the SPD an outcast in the Reichstag; it also made it plain that the parliamentarian system inherited from Bismarck was bursting at the seams. Furthermore, the isolation made the crisis a crisis of social democracy itself, since it posed the question whether parliament was even the proper territory for the pursuit of socialism at all. For some time now, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, leaders of the SPD’s left wing, had been raising that question forcefully, declaring themselves in favor of large-scale mass strikes instead. Revisionists like Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky were disagreeing just as vehemently. Both crises reached their highest pitch yet in early 1912, when at the January elections the SPD became the strongest Reichstag faction for the first time in history.66 It seemed like a breakthrough victory, but was it that? The conservative coalition government remained in charge, and the continuing hostility of all other parties toward the SPD led to a perennial parliamentarian deadlock in which short-term tactical alliances were made and broken. Moreover, a great deal of politics was by now being conducted outside the Reichstag walls altogether, and this precisely because of the SPD’s prominence within them. In March 1912, for example, thanks to the secret collusion between industry magnates and the emperor, a major miners’ strike in the Ruhr area was suppressed by the police and army, followed by the systematic prosecution of participants.67 In the aftermath, the morale of the Social Democratic trade unions and their influence among workers in general were severely weakened. And that had been the strategic point of the collusion in the first place: to deal an extraparliamentarian blow to social democracy that would demonstrate its powerlessness outside the Reichstag to the voters, and so nullify its newly gained authority within it in the middle term. Put another way, what seemed to be in the balance in early 1912 was nothing less than the future thrust and territory of socialist politics. To some members of the Left, it became plausible to consider the electoral victory of the SPD its political defeat, and to believe that a parliamentarian socialism was a contradiction in

46

Form as Revolt

terms. That case was made by many writers at Die Aktion, notably by Pfemfert, whose essays provided a running commentary on events, and by none other than Wilhelm Liebknecht himself. In a chillingly dogmatic polemic published a few days before the elections, Liebknecht called them off before they had even happened. To his mind, the SPD’s imminent triumph would only “delude the people into believing Bismarck’s ‘Reichstag’ was actually designed to solve the social question.” If there was a purpose to the institution at all, Liebknecht insisted, it was not as a stage for gradual social reform but for the final showdown. Hence, in the coming months, he urged, “social democracy must under no circumstances and on no territory negotiate with the adversary”: “To negotiate with principal adversaries is to sacrifice one’s principle. Principles are indivisible; they are either preserved fully or sacrificed fully.”68 A week later, Pfemfert endorsed Liebknecht’s position.69 And Einstein? He too went along, or so it seems. In his Aktion texts of 1912 we find him echoing Liebknecht’s principled stance almost verbatim; find him lambasting a revisionist politics of compromise in the name of an inviolable “idea.”70 That said, Einstein never once mentioned the Ruhr strike or the “social question.” Parliamentarian politics was a matter of principle for him, but that principle was not grounded in political economy. Was it grounded in the antiparliamentarian anarchism of Georges Sorel instead? It is tempting, and troubling, to think so, given the violent language of Einstein’s texts, whose vocabulary is clearly indebted to the ideology of pure action Sorel had promoted in his Reflections on Violence (1908).71 In fact, at Die Aktion we seem to be looking at a dramatic Sorelianization of Einstein’s writing across the board. The snobs and decorators are explicitly dismissed, and a new group of militant personas invades the poetic world of the prose: figures like the unambiguous one, who feels an ominous compulsion to “act” arising in him; the man in revolt, who endorses an unspecified “fanaticism”; and the pauper, who seeks to improve his lot by “the only kind of action available to him”: a “crime” that he threatens to commit “coldly and without inhibition, suddenly without cue, transition, and premeditation.”72 In 1912, then, did Einstein turn from literary symbolist into political activist? Did he become the resident Sorelian at a magazine otherwise pledged to anarchosyndicalism (Pfemfert) or ultra-left versions of Marxism (Liebknecht)? A Sorelian, moreover, who was even more ready than his hero to dislodge violence from political struggle altogether, celebrating it for its own sake? And did this abandonment of the poetic for the political include an abandonment of nonessence as well, with the wanderer’s semantic ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) giving way to the militant sense of the unambiguous one (der Eindeutige)? The good news is that the answer to all four questions is no; the bad news is that the reality is nonetheless bleak. In Einstein’s Aktion texts, it is not the case that the poetic world got politicized; it is rather the case that the political world got poeticized. Solipsism trumped commitment, nihilism trumped partisanship. Bernstein,

The Lost Wanderer

47

Liebknecht and Sorel, the January elections and the Reichstag crisis, do not matter as positions and events on which Einstein’s writing comments but as semantic resources that it grinds through the mill of its syntax. In this, Einstein was no different from a number of other prosaists of the 1910s, including his friend Gottfried Benn and Robert Walser. As the Germanist Moritz Baßler has shown in a pathbreaking book, these writers were using some readymade discourse, say a piece of literary criticism or a description of a farmer’s market, as a “thesaurus” whose lexemes they assembled into “rhetorical catalogues.”73 Rhetorical catalogues are texts whose meaning does not depend on the original source of the thesaurus but on the way in which its words are newly connected in the prose, where they generate disturbing semantic effects. For Einstein in 1912, parliamentarian politics was such a thesaurus. The difference is that in the work of his colleagues the procedure led to a gently haunting arbitrariness (Walser) or an admirably artificial ecstasy (Benn), and that their texts typically came with a single protagonist and a rudimentary setting and plot. Einstein’s procedure, by comparison, was brutally rigorous, ungrounded in a single self, and unencumbered by vestiges of narrative. Politics provided a new range of personas and glittering nouns for the style of nonessence, and Einstein had a field day playing them off against each other.74 To make that point economically, I will examine a single representative passage. Taken from a text called “Political Notes,” it pretends to be a manifesto in two parts. The first paragraph claims to describe the identity of an implacable militant, the second the horse-trading ways of his decrepit adversaries, the moderate parliamentarian factionalists. I ask readers to take note of the presence of familiar motifs: at-onceness, comparison (in German, Vergleich can also mean “compromise”), and “the essential” that’s furtively tucked away in brackets in the second paragraph. That human being will make history who will offer more than just the equilibrium to an antithesis, who will swallow thesis and antithesis at once [zugleich], and leap over his own head. I don’t mean the original man, that most boring of all marketcriers, that unreligious one, who, fearless as he is, does not know we remain within God-abiding limits, but rather the life-giver, whose mouth opens like the cleft earth; the revolutionary as such. Contrariwise, it is the secret of all present-day struggles that they will infallibly end in comparison [Vergleich]—in the democratic compromise, in which always both ideas (the essential) will be blasphemically violated in mutual agreement. Where the human, and what moves humans, will be leveled out and disfigured. That, finally, is the meaning of parliamentarianism.75

The last sentence tells us expressly what the entire passage is actually about. It is not about parliamentarianism but about parliamentarianism’s meaning: not about which positions are being held, but about how they are being held. And the way they are being held is nonessentially.

48

Form as Revolt

Parliamentarianism’s fatal flaw, goes the second half of the ostensible argument, is its politics of symbolicity. The Reichstag factions are the snobs and decorators of politics; they always seek to negotiate, to compare notes with the enemy. This they do by reaching out to each other across the aisle that divides party lines: the aisle of political essence. Located to either side of it, the factions agree to violate— determine—one another’s “idea,” producing two nonessential kinds of politics as a result. By contrast, the man who will make history, goes the first half of the ostensible argument, is a fervent essentialist. He will not be content with seeing politics split up at once, zugleich, into thesis and antithesis, SPD and National Liberals. He will escape the deadlock of symbolist determinations that keep ungrounding him. Except that he won’t, goes the actual argument. For, as the passage makes abundantly clear, to try and be an essentialist in a world of nonessential prose is futile. In that world, essence is not a space you can occupy but a line that splits you up; and that goes both for the Reichstag moderates and for their radical adversary. Consider the progress—the Wortfolge—of the first paragraph. We are off to a weak start right out of the gate. Two deliberately vacuous metaphors define the history-maker, him too, as a comparatist: he swallows thesis and antithesis; he leaps over his own head.76 Then, with the second sentence, we are entering the land of nonessence. It is again a question of meaning; and unlike Liebknecht’s principle, but just like the “ideas” of the moderates, the meaning of the history-maker turns out to be divisible. Witness how he splits up into the original man, whom Einstein says he doesn’t mean, and the life-giver, whom Einstein says he does mean. That deessentializes not just the history-maker but also the new personas that are spawned in the process. Paired up with the life-giver, the original man loses his singleness, with the text sealing the origin the moment it invokes it in a manner familiar from “The Snob.” The life-giver for his part turns out to be another comparatist, defined as he is by a simile: his mouth opens like the cleft earth. At the end of the sentence, he is paired up with the revolutionary as such, which fatally compromises the latter, for as-suchness ought to be a singular, essential condition. As for the two characters who make a brief appearance in between, they relate as the peak and trough of the sine wave: the most boring of all market-criers (note the superlative), and the unreligious one, who knows neither fear nor God (note the triple negation). Leaving us with one more word to consider: the word “contrariwise” (hingegen), which has a crucial job to do. It serves as a hinge between the two paragraphs, relating them as one another’s negative comparanda: not as revisionist reality and militant alternative but as two hostile yet equal twins, spawned above and below the empty paragraph break of nonessence. And that is the meaning of parliamentarianism. It is one rarefied blend of frivolity, but it is also a desperate one, for at least it has the decency not to claim to pass judgment on German politics in 1912 from some imaginary vantage point outside of it. “He is able somehow to fit everything into the parliament of his subject matter, to de-essentialize it and to compare it,” Einstein admitted in his conclusion to

The Lost Wanderer

49

the “Political Notes,” à propos of yet another persona, the educated man. “Action is foreign to him, since he is too distracted and too differentiated for it.”77 Unlike the politics of militancy, Einstein is saying here, the prose of nonessence knows no extraparliamentarian sphere. Nobody leaves the Reichstag of the text: not the revisionist, not the Marxist, not the anarchist—and not the lost wanderer, either. Three years later, Einstein brought up his writerly ambitions in a letter to his wife: “No politics. Discussions about it have led people into misery; what with the desire to be right without being other oneself. A mutual violation of the same by the same [gleicher].”78 The argument is elliptical but familiar. Unlike politics, the great leveler, writing begins with the word “otherwise”; the best it can do is give form to the way in which so many political samenesses tear into each other. Even so, two months earlier Einstein had signed a postcard that Pfemfert was about to send to Liebknecht, who was then serving in the army.79 He is not known to have signed one destined for Sorel or Bernstein. Clearly, in real life, some political actors were gleicher than others; that is why Einstein and Pfemfert were associates in the first place. But the point is that it was only after the war, and then only occasionally, that Einstein was actually able to state as much in writing. The most harrowing demonstration of this quandary can be found in another Aktion text. Published in 1913, it is devoted to a character called the pauper.80 The pauper is the final persona of Einstein’s prewar prose; he is the wanderer devolved into full-blown solipsistic nihilist. Like the “Political Notes,” the text has an ostensible goal. It claims to be a politicoontological rescue mission. The true identity of the pauper as a revolutionary subject must be defined at last; and that involves resisting the efforts of social democratic reformism to improve his lot. For social democracy keeps asking all the wrong questions about him: “Behold how the pauper is not rich, how might he acquire property, how might the rich empathize with him?” The flaw of this approach, according to the text, is once more a politics of symbolism. First, social democracy compares poverty to wealth, thus defining it as nonwealth; then, it tries to ameliorate it, and so to liken the pauper to what he is not: the rich man. But “that implies shifting the pauper from his position, considering him an object of sublation, a transitory state, and precisely not as the pauper.” Whereas the pauper himself insists on being just that: “For once” he wants to be seen “without comparison, for once without the shame of the rich, for once without the objects he does not possess. Let him not be given a name that is improper to him.”81 And so, Einstein has his work cut out for him: he must find the proper words for the pauper’s incomparability, must inquire into the meaning of his essence. If that could be pulled off, antisymbolist poverty and antisymbolist literature would fuse into a single project of revolt in the pages of Die Aktion. But it never happens, for the essay keeps embroiling itself in the symbolism it claims to fight. It makes sense too, given the text’s stated brief: the social democrats want the pauper to become like the rich man; Einstein wants him to remain unlike

50

Form as Revolt

him. But then, likeness and unlikeness are just two different forms of comparison; they relate as negative and positive simile. As a result, all the text ever manages to do is gesture toward the pauper’s identity through a kind of improper name-calling that defines him as a living privative of the rich man. That is true for some of the quotes I just provided, replete as they are with strictly negative qualifiers; and it is spectacularly true for the following sentence: “Poor is not a negation of rich, is nothing superfluous, is no affliction and no illness.”82 The performative contradiction here is easy enough to spot. “Poor is not a negation” is a negation; and it is followed by a string of others that determine poverty with increasing precision but constantly diminishing ontological substance. The most impressive fireworks in the text are deployed around its efforts to determine the pauper’s “position,” as Einstein called it above; he also referred to it as the “zero point of indifference.”83 What is the point of indifference? It is a technical term from the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, Romantic philosopher and friend of Novalis.84 Like Novalis, Schelling was a thinker of being; like Novalis, he believed that being was a relation, not a substance; and, like Novalis’s notion of essence, Schelling’s notion of the point of indifference could be understood, by interested parties, as proving that that relation was fundamentally groundless. Succinctly put, in Schelling the point of indifference is the exact midpoint in between two determinations: the point at which their opposition is neutralized as their individual powers cancel each other out. Schelling’s favorite example for it was a magnetized iron rod. At the center of that rod, the forces that descend toward it from the positive and negative magnetic poles reach an equilibrium: their difference, their mutual negativity, is fully preserved even as it is suspended at a point of indifference. Moreover, since every segment that’s extracted from the rod, however small, will itself become a miniature rod, complete with its own positive and negative poles and point of indifference, the magnet served Schelling as an illustration for the infinite groundlessness of being. For what goes for the rod also goes for being in general: no matter how deep you dig in order to find a point of origin that’s single, substantive, and positive, you will only ever come upon a point that’s double, relational, and negative; a point that, like Novalis’s essence, is an empty interval in between two opposed determinations. And that is where the pauper finds himself lodged throughout Einstein’s essay: at a point of indifference, an “equilibrium [Gleichgewicht] between nothing and nought,” around which so many opposed determinations of his identity keep swirling. To demonstrate how, I will again discuss just one bravura passage. To prevent readers from getting distracted by the semantics, I will point out that Einstein lifted several of its glittering nouns from Ludwig Rubiner’s declamatory manifesto for a lumpenprole bohemia, published in Die Aktion the previous year.85 As with the “Political Notes,” so with “The Pauper,” therefore: we’re dealing with a rhetorical thesaurus whose lexis is second-hand at least in part; and in which what actually matters is what the syntax does with it, or rather to it.

The Lost Wanderer

51

He sees sunshine and rain, bread and education, as moments that will protect him from the great fate [Geschick] only insofar as it might thereby permeate him in a more gradual, perhaps more darkly shaded fashion. He is subordinate to fate [Schicksal], unclothed, without roof and without obscuring knowledge, unmediated. He perceives his skin and his soul precisely, for his sole inner nourishment consists of experiences, though not the typical experiences of acquiring wealth and of knowledge. Two things exist for him, the fairy tale and an attitude that doesn’t mind snuffing it; and above all the miracle, the instant, and eternity. Not this metaphysically defined eternity, but rather a selfsame being.86

Note the way in which the writing relates the pauper to the glittering nouns it keeps bringing in: they are things that he sees as, perceives as, or that exist for him in such and such a way. And the way in which they so exist for him—the way in which they mean for him—is as “two things”: as pairs of opposed comparanda that descend from a single term that is either radically devalued semantically or absent from the page altogether. The term is devalued, first, by being synonymized, as when “fate” is first called Geschick, then Schicksal—two words that in German mean the same murky thing. It is devalued, second, by being merely invoked and then elaborated in terms of what it is not: as when the pauper’s sole nourishment (singular) is said to consist in experiences (plural) about which we learn nothing beyond the fact that they are opposed to the pair of wealth and knowledge. Most frequently, though, the single thing is implied periphrastically, as a zero point on the page to either side of which two opposites are spawned. There is, for example, Nature, which divides into sunshine and its opposite, rain. There is Life, which divides into the prosaic gathering of one’s daily bread and the lofty pursuit of education (Bildung). There are two different attitudes toward Reality: a sentimental one, which treats it as a fairy tale, and a tough-minded pragmatism “that doesn’t mind snuffing it.” There is Subjectivity, split up into the pauper’s corporeal skin and his intangible soul. And there is Time, split up into eternity, which lasts forever, and the instant, which doesn’t last at all. Observe how the algebra is structuring the prose throughout. The pauper doesn’t possess either wealth or knowledge, but he does endorse both sunshine and rain. The presence of bread and education will protect him from fate; the absence of shelter and knowledge will expose him to it. And then there is the finale: “Not this metaphysically defined eternity, but rather a selfsame [gleiche] being.” The negation of a glittering noun is paired up, negatively, with a tautology: compared to itself, the pauper’s being is itself. Quite so, but what is his being? Einstein cannot tell us, and even telling us as much will only make matters worse. For to call the pauper “the intangible one” is merely to enact the quandary one more time.87 Compared to everyone else, the pauper is incomparable; unlike them, he cannot be grasped: we are always returned to square one, always referred on to some phrase

52

Form as Revolt

or word that divides itself against itself, as the pauper’s essence keeps retreating further the more the writing is claiming to probe it.

Fanatic Humorism In short, by 1913 we have hit rock bottom. To his credit, Einstein had been aware of it for a while already. In an unpublished prose piece from around 1911 the narrator describes two acquaintances: a student who kept “hounding his soul from one strange form into another, until it hid from him and he was thrown into confusion”; and a mathematician who “was struggling hard with theorems and algebraic signs till blood was drawn.” Both of them have a knack for words, says the narrator, but they are also “poor and unhappy people”: “There is probably no greater affliction than being good at nothing.”88 Being good at nothing: being a virtuoso nihilist writer. At the outset of this chapter I suggested that, inspired by Novalis, Einstein’s ambition for that writing had been to merge fantasy and logic into a “fantastic.” The merger never happened, and the student and the mathematician can stand for the two disconnected halves of that project: autobiography on one hand, a system of language on the other. That disconnection was given form throughout the prose as the disjunction between lexis and syntax, between the powerful immediacy of the subject matter and its clinical dissection by the grammar. The enigma that remains to be addressed is the gratingly humoristic tone that’s produced by the disjunction. Not only are philosophical convictions, dramatic political events, and real, actual poverty de-essentialized: they are de-essentialized in a manner that can be positively jokey. That the joke is on the author’s personas, and so ultimately on him—on the student’s “soul”—doesn’t quite redeem the gratingness. Was Einstein not just a nihilist but a cheerful one to boot? The question has been implicitly answered in the affirmative by those scholars who have called his early writing Dandyist, where that term is meant to describe an author’s detachment from a world that he seems to be grinding through the mill of his writing in a perfectly dispassionate manner.89 But is that assessment really accurate? Stereotypes like “aestheticism” or “l’art pour l’art” that are routinely invoked in support of it fall flat as soon as one tries to apply them to Einstein’s prose in a manner that goes beyond vague gestures in the general direction of Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter. And for all the homages Einstein dutifully paid to Poe and Beckford, the Spleen de Paris and the Divagations, another of his heroes was Miguel de Cervantes: not exactly a Dandyist, but a humorist and the creator of a world, a world explored by two wanderers in search of a meaning whose ambiguity they do not resolve but produce. In 1923, Einstein used a paired opposition to praise Cervantes: he compared the “passionate coldness” of Don Quixote to his autobiographical project, BEB II.90 Ten

The Lost Wanderer

53

years earlier, in an important letter to his wife, he had used a similar dyad to describe his own work of the prewar period. It suggests a more complex and specific authorial stance than the Dandyist one, as well as Einstein’s awareness, and it is not a dispassionate awareness, that it might be fundamentally misguided. Au fond, one ought consider me a fanatic humorist. They are people who can’t deal with favorable conditions, who hope for nothing, and who work through a couple of ideas in a frenetic and cold manner. But one oughtn’t take these people for posers or something.—Still, we must write books—revolutionize people, have bad luck, and feel like nothing every instant.91

“Poser” is a harsh word. Sibylle Penkert, Einstein’s first biographer, who published the letter, believed she had caught him in a rare moment of letting his hair down; and on one hand this is true. On the other hand, close reading reveals that what looks like a transparent confession of doubt and an effort at braving it is once again an exercise in the style of nonessence. We must write books—revolutionize people (plus), have bad luck (minus), feel like nothing (minus) every instant (plus). Even so, this time around the equation that’s being set up amounts to more than just an aporetic tautology. The phrase au fond—“basically,” “essentially,” “at ground level”—is the giveaway here. Einstein is explaining the essential meaning of his writerly project to his wife; and, as always, essence splits up as soon as its meaning is probed. It happens in a familiar manner: a sentence that defines the project negatively, using a paired opposition, is preceded by one that defines it positively, using another paired opposition. One oughtn’t take Einstein for “a poser or something”: that is one pair. Meanwhile, au fond, one ought consider him a “fanatic humorist”: that is the other pair. “Fanatic humorist,” therefore, is not a casual oxymoron but a precisely divided couple of terms, and that makes it an accurate self-description.92 Fanatic humorism describes the ambiguous authorial stance of the lost wanderer, a stance at once engaged and disengaged, frenetic and cold. Einstein also referred to it as equanimity (Gleichmut), a state of mind in which different passions aren’t absent or balanced in any simple sense but are juxtaposed, violently, on either side of a psychological equation.93 The fanatic humorist is located at a point of indifference; a point where plus and minus, hope and nothing, collide; where passions neutralize each other as the ground gives way onto some abyss that no single word can seal over without breaking up into comparanda right away. Internalizing that break as the tone of the writing, it was fanatic humorism that produced the disjunction in Einstein’s prose: into the coldness of the syntax and the frenzy of the nouns, into nihilist relativism and political topicality. The lost wanderer had to find a way out of this trap. In his political writing, he never quite did. Even at moments of greatest historical urgency, the style of

54

Form as Revolt

nonessence would either undermine on the page the politics for which Einstein was fighting in the trenches or the street, or it would be absent altogether. That is why this book is passing over Berlin Dada and the Spanish Civil War: because, while Einstein’s exploits during these moments are important for a history of leftwing militancy and have been well documented as such, they are redundant for an account of Einstein as a writer or art critic. His Civil War texts, inverviews, and speeches are straight-up anarcho-syndicalism, except for some serious hedging on the syndicalist part. His Dada texts either follow that pattern; or they are political denunciations any card-carrying Dadaist could have churned out, give or take a few privatives; or else they rehearse Einstein’s Aktion style of 1912/13, only less impressively so. To make that point, I will again limit myself to just one example: Einstein’s manifesto “To the Intellectuals!” (“An die Geistigen!”), which appeared in March 1919 in Die Pleite, a Berlin journal run by himself, George Grosz, and the Herzfelde brothers.94 As with the “Political Notes” of 1912, the manifesto’s timing couldn’t have been more dramatic or its political context more clear-cut. Liebknecht and Luxemburg had been killed in January during the Spartacus Revolt; Einstein, his wife, and the Pfemferts had been arrested the same day; in June he would be one of the speakers at Luxemburg’s belated official funeral.95 The Pleite issue in which Einstein’s manifesto appeared contained a call for the assembly of the new Communist International; another for the collaboration between German and Russian artists issued by order of Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Enlightenment; and a list of recommended readings, among them the Communist Manifesto, Lenin, Trotsky, Kropotkin, and Landauer. In short, the Pleite line of politics was communism plus x, with the x writ rather small. As for the manifesto’s addressees, these were not intellectuals in the abstract but a specific group of people, and Einstein’s attack on them was timely. They were the Geistige movement, founded by Kurt Hiller, a mercurial public intellectual whom Einstein had known since his Neopathetisches Cabaret days, and whose idea of political “activism” had been to try and erect an elite logocracy, organized into Councils of Intellectual Workers (Rat geistiger Arbeiter), which Hiller had founded during the November Revolution a few months earlier. There was no love lost between Hiller and the Dadas in general or Einstein in particular, who at the time was engaged in some actual, radically democratic councils.96 Given all this, the manifesto’s point would seem to be simple enough: to call the logocratic bourgeois to order with a plea for a militant communism. Moreover, the political constellation repeats but also escalates the moment of the 1912 Reichstag crisis. In early 1919 Einstein is no longer a bystander but fully involved in the political struggle, risking his own life in fact. So, has his writing become militant as well? I quote from the manifesto’s opening section.

The Lost Wanderer

55

One thing matters: to realize the communist community. One goal, too essential to permit intellectuals to split it up dialectically. . . . We walk among the masses, we are marching with the simple ones, the unconditioned ones, towards a near, necessary cause. We renounce allegory and legerdemain metaphor. We have no need for originality.97

The Goal (Das Ziel) was the title of Hiller’s journal. Hence the claim of the second sentence, familiar from Einstein’s 1912 attack on the parliamentarians: the bourgeois intellectuals are de-essentializing the revolution. They must be taken in hand by the communist militants, for the latter are devoted to the right kind of goal: the essential goal, the One Goal, the Goal of One. Starting with the very first word, that oneness is a recurring presence in the manifesto, which capitalizes on the meaning of the German word ein as both indefinite article (“a”) and numeral (“one”); notably when it refers to its ostensible heroes as die Einfachen: the simple ones, or, to be exact, the unicitous ones.98 That said, it is odd to find that oneness repeatedly encroached upon or diluted by a number of paired nouns, adjectives, and clauses; as when the simple ones, who are apparently not all that simple, get to be called the unconditioned ones as well, in an apposition that effectively splits up the former in two and makes them condition the latter. And then there is the rejection of originality. In times like these, Einstein insists, simplicity must be the watchword for politics and literature both. Down with the literati’s bogus originality, their merely dialectical symbolism; all hail true originality, the indivisible essence of communism. That is a noble cause, but it is deserted by its author, performatively and by now predictably, when a few lines down he ridicules the Geistigen as so many “pharmacists of mystic redemption pills,” and calls their assemblies a “tin can of spiritual conventicles.”99 Pharmacists? Tin can? Metaphors don’t get more bogus original than that; and the alliteration Einstein produces between two of them—Konservenbüchse (tin can) and Konventikel—is offensively fatuous. And what are the simple ones to make of a comrade who denounces metaphor by means of a metaphor, and one as recherché as “legerdemain”? As I said: less impressive than 1912. But the general point remains. As in 1912, so in 1919, a deliberately botched effort at writerly originality compromises an emphatic manifesto of political originality. That is why according to the manifesto “we” are said merely to walk among the masses and with the simple ones: because “we” aren’t actually identical with them; not on the page. That fusion will happen only during those moments when “we” drop the pen and physically join them in the street: moments when “we” cease to be writers for a time. Either a groundless writing or a grounding militancy: as far as politics was concerned, the fanatic humorist’s quandary always remained the same. An intriguing statement by Einstein on political power suggests why this should have been so. The statement is made in a letter of 1916 to Franz Blei, his

56

Form as Revolt

first mentor. Einstein, then a soldier, was stationed in German-occupied Brussels, where he was working at the Belgian Colonial Office. He starts out the letter reporting to Blei on his Brussels adventures, which included a dinner with government officials. But then Einstein gets distracted, or so he says at the end, by an idea for a literary treatment: a comedy about a writer who first engages in politics and then is estranged from it. What complicates matters, as readers will by now readily notice, is that in spite of its apparent anecdotal vividness the letter is carefully composed in the style of nonessence. After all, the addressee was a stalwart Mallarméan. The algebra starts with “me” (minus) and “the excellencies” (plus). If only you had seen me among the excellencies—in a stained shirt, unshaved, seat of the pants dangerously threadbare. And now I’m sitting at the desk of the blessed Belgian Secretary of Colonies. Put a poor devil like that in charge of government, and what you have is not a bad comedy. . . . Its title: Power. . . . Psychologically, his stance should be a perplexed neutrality; not at all interested, not even in himself, impersonel. A chance occasion, to which he playfully rises, sweeps him to the top; a stupid caper, undertaken wholly out of deliberate caprice, gets him kicked out. He exits the scene with a grin on his face. I believe this could be turned into a comedy; it occurred to me while writing.100

The last sentence is both misleading and accurate. The letter itself is the comedy it also announces; and it is its style that estranges the writer, cutting him away from political power. As Einstein sits down behind the Secretary’s desk, he comes up with a new autobiographical persona. This is the engaged intellectual, who is described by a string of Mallarméisms (chance, play, caprice, impersonality), the most interesting of which is an oppositive dyad: perplexed neutrality, the state to which the fanatic humorist finds himself reduced after his dabbling in politics has ended in disaster. What is intriguing is that the disaster is the outcome of a kind of algebraic narrative that has been generated as the writing revolves around the zero of power. First the intellectual seizes power, but he does so by chance (plus, minus). Then he forfeits it again, but he does so on purpose (minus, plus). What we have here may be more than an empty numbers game; namely, a piece of predictive autobiography that would become reality after the war. In 1919, perhaps around the time of the Pleite moment, Einstein joined the Communist Party, only to leave it, or be forced to leave it, for reasons that included a violation of cadre discipline in matters of cultural doctrine. In other words, he told the ideologues off, as was his wont.101 Did the style of nonessence make him do it? While we may find the usual modernist life-imitates-literature explanations excessively metaphysical, we should allow for the possiblity that to a writer as hardcore as Einstein the style of nonessence was not just a way of organizing words on the page but of organizing his conduct in the world of real political events.

The Lost Wanderer

57

After the war, once he became politically engaged, the style, translated into life, may have become an ethics for him. On one hand, it enabled Einstein not to be afraid of trying to seize power in a chaotic and dangerous situation, as during the Spartacus Revolt. On the other hand, it may have prompted him to get himself disempowered whenever he saw politics headed toward some oneness he could not tolerate, as when the KPD turned into the monstrosity it may always have been. That would explain the pattern of Einstein’s abrupt engagement and disengagement from politics, and also its aggregate result. Not a bad comedy, as he put it to Blei: minus, minus, zero. It would also explain why he was never able to forge a durable alliance between style and politics in his writing. With art, it was a different matter.

Toward Finiteness It is not difficult to see why Einstein should have felt compelled to turn from literature to art criticism. If the former uses words to create infinite poetic worlds, then the latter uses them to respond to a finite thing in the real world: a work of visual art. Hence, at least in principle, the turn to criticism promised a way out of the labyrinth of symbolist solipsism. Instead of confronting a white page that might be covered with an endless relationality of fly spots, all of them signifying different versions of yourself, you are now faced with a concrete material object, made by somebody else, that comes with its own formal structure to which your writing must plausibly connect. Nor did the turn to criticism demand inventing a new kind of writing from whole cloth. On the contrary, as soon as it was pointed at something beyond itself, the style of nonessence could become a major art-critical tool. Once glittering nouns were switched out for visual facts, the Wortfolge, thriving as it did on joining up disparate phenomena into tight chains of comparison and contrast, was apt to produce powerful descriptions, precise, dissonant, and unified. There is historical precedent here. As Michael Baxandall has shown, the humanists of the Italian Renaissance, they too, came to the encounter with contemporary art steeped in a rigorously structured style. What the Wortfolge was for Einstein, the Ciceronian period was for them. Derived from Cicero’s Latin, the period is an intricate, often paragraph-length sentence comprised of interlocking clauses that, tightly linked by conjunctions and connectives, generate strings of oppositions and comparisons: “if A, then B; though A, yet B; as A, so too B.”102 The pitfall was that the writing tended to remain concerned with itself even when it was addressing something beyond itself. Leonardo Bruni’s remarks on the analogy between translation and painting emerged as if automatically from his syntax and figurality, making his thoughts on art “a product of the periodic sentence, not of his experience of painters.” But then, besides the Brunis there was also a Leonbattista

58

Form as Revolt

Alberti. In De Pictura, instead of absorbing art into rhetoric as just another lexical resource, Alberti, looking closely at the work of Andrea Mantegna, tracked the composition of the Renaissance image as though it were a visual period.103 In his turn from prose to criticism, Einstein did nothing essentially different. Converting himself from a Bruni into an Alberti, he went on to adapt the style of nonessence for the exploration of the world of modern art.104 Still, this new world was explored by the old wanderer. As will become evident in the following chapters, the style helped Einstein preselect the range of artworks he was going to look at, made him pick out certain details rather than others, and find them related in this way rather than that. Einstein’s transition from prose to criticism was not an absolute break with his past, and his basic predicament would stay with him to the end. Abandoned as the grammatical structure of prose, groundlessness would be reencountered as the visual structure of an artwork. Depending on the object and the artist, that might be either good news or bad. The promise of Novalis remained alive, and so did the shadow of Hegel.

2

Sculpture Ungrounded

Grounding Classicism The transition from prose to art criticism was not an easy one for Einstein. It was a gradual process that came with its share of false shortcuts and dead ends. For a while, between 1910 and 1914, it seemed as though visual art might become one of two things for him: either another colony for the style of nonessence, or else a safe haven from it. In his texts of the first type, art didn’t survive contact with the writing, which crunched it in just the manner we saw it crunch politics and sociology in chapter 1.1 The texts of the second type, which did take artworks seriously as visual artifacts, are of limited interest for a different reason. They are evidence that, so long as he continued to be a prosaist above all, Einstein was tempted to embrace art as a compensation for the threat he kept confronting in literature: the threat of groundless infinity. That is why he turned to practices of contemporary art that came with one or another kind of rigidly finite visuality built into them. There was no shortage of these in late Imperial Germany. Around 1910, Ferdinand Hodler, Hans von Marées, and Ferdinand Waldschmidt could all qualify as purveyors of paintings that did a job similar to the one later performed by French rappel à l’ordre art: the job of stabilizing a field of vision that had been scattered by impressionism; the job, in short, of deinfinitizing experience. That is how Einstein embraced them, and it is what makes some of his earliest art writing equally desperate and dusty.2

60

Form as Revolt

Figure 2.1. Aristide Maillol, La Méditerranée, 1902–1905 (original design), circa 1925 (marble version). Marble, 110.5 cm high. Reproduced from Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (1931).

Still, there is a text from this moment that is of more than antiquarian interest. It can serve as an important control case for the one major piece of criticism Einstein did produce before the war. That control case is his essay of 1913 on the sculptures of Aristide Maillol. It belongs to a brief episode in the history of modern sculpture, when figures like Maillol, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, and Emile-Antoine Bourdelle appeared to be doing roughly the same thing in sculpture that Hodler et al. were doing in painting: they seemed to be eclipsing the “impressionist” sculpture of Rodin with a new simplicity of form and severity of pose that were derived from the art of ancient Greece and Egypt. The idea here was to achieve a strong if insipid formal coherence, typically by way of recursive symmetries in two and three dimensions between static posture, geometric silhouettes, and the angular alignment of limbs.3 Einstein’s Maillol essay was doubly symptomatic of that moment. Not only did he celebrate the sculptor’s work for these qualities; he also adapted the argument of Maurice Denis, who had made a case for Maillol as a “classical primitivist.”4 That the case was artistically without merit and culturepolitically dubious only makes the question more pressing: why did Einstein fall for Denis and Maillol to begin with? Because Denis seemed to be suggesting that Maillol’s classical primitivism offered a twin respite from literature’s threat of infinity. Formally, it curbed the

Sculpture Ungrounded

61

boundlessness of meaning; historically, it regrounded the receding origin. For one thing, Denis had argued that a Maillol sculpture resolved “the infinitely varied relations we perceive in nature into a small number of clear and concise forms.” For another, he had suggested that, so far from delivering a pastiche of ancient Greek sculpture, Maillol had invented it all over again. That was what to Denis’s mind made him a bona fide primitive rather than a historicist: that Maillol was being Phidias by instinct, not by design.5 Given the bleakness of 1913, the year of “The Pauper,” Einstein chose to endorse Denis’s threadbare claims. He argued that the composition of a Maillol sculpture, say La Méditerranée, whose plaster version was illustrated in his essay, is everywhere closed in on itself even as it continuously offers new aspects of itself to the viewer who is ambulating around it (fig. 2.1). Each of these aspects, Einstein wanted to believe, presents itself as a salient hierarchy of forms that’s organized around a single plastic fulcrum to which all other details are subordinated—and so is the viewer. As a result, “the gaze never roams about arbitrarily or without guidance but instead submits itself to a pregiven order.”6 Put another way, as he was looking at the Méditerranée, the lost wanderer was trying to persuade himself that he had reached the end of his perilous journey at last. Textual errancy is left behind for visual submission, willful arbitrariness for imposed necessity, the doubleness of the word for the singleness of the plastic fulcrum. What is more, in Maillol the infinity of meaning seemed to have been fully preserved even as its ontological threat was blunted. For, unlike Einstein’s own writerly infinity, Maillol’s sculptural infinity unfolded from within a finite structure that both produced and controlled it. The Méditerranée, Einstein argued, looks different and new from every angle, yet it is self-identical at every point, so that its overall formal integrity never threatens to dissipate.7 Or so goes the claim. It bears stating that it is only superficially in touch with the visual structure of the object, which is not a finite infinity but a repetitive tautology. Three of the figure’s four limbs are bent at the same angle, forcing the body into a rigid posture that, further echoed by the inclination of the head and the alignment of hands, fingers, and feet, resembles the x, y, and z axes of a graph. Einstein’s Denisian defense of Maillol’s originality is even less plausible: “Because he possesses the same ground-mindedness [gründliche Gesinnung]” as the sixth-century Greeks, “Maillol has been accused of being a classicist, which accusation ignores the fact that art, since it is not arbitrary, must constantly return to its elementary conditions.”8 So far from arbitrarily retrieving a historical style, Maillol was tapping into the same mysterious elementary conditions as the Greeks, and thereby reinvented sixth-century sculpture from first principles, and with it a new ground for modern art. In short, as of 1913 there was still a great deal of work to do. “The Pauper” and the Maillol essay were the two halves of a totality that didn’t add up: the nightmare of the writer’s groundlessness, the false paradise of his regrounding as the viewer

62

Form as Revolt

of an artwork. In order for the halves to connect, and for the style of nonessence to become proper criticism, groundlessness had to be accepted as an artwork’s fundamental condition. And in 1915, it was.

Groundless Fetishism The year 1915 saw the publication of Negro Sculpture (Negerplastik), Einstein’s extraordinary book on African art.9 Its sudden appearance remains a surprise. Before 1913 there is no indication for his interest in the topic at all, and yet the argument of the book is clearly the result of sustained and deeply searching thought. Thanks to the research of Ezio Bassani, Jean-Louis Paudrat, and others, we do know about the circumstances that enabled its gestation.10 During his visits to Paris, Einstein frequented the circle of the Dômiers, a group of artists and intellectuals led by the Matisse student Hans Purrmann who met at the Café de Dôme. There, Einstein got to know Joseph Brummer, a Hungarian sculptor and lately a dealer in African art on the boulevard Raspail. It may have been Brummer, who after the war would become a wealthy and powerful dealer in African and modern art, who introduced Einstein to his topic; he certainly provided him with the lion share of Negro Sculpture’s illustrations. Given these facts, its title, and its subject matter, is Negro Sculpture an extension of the Maillol essay into non-Western art? Is it a celebration of primitive art, only with the classicalness filed off? Not quite. It is not just the topic that changed from essay to book. Einstein’s argument too underwent a phase shift together with it, one that ungrounded the wanderer instead of regrounding him on a new territory.11 In Negro Sculpture, African art worked like a third term for Einstein, in between the threatening infinity of his prose on one hand and Maillol’s falsely consoling finiteness on the other. Like a Maillol, the African objects too were sculptures, and hence finite; but unlike a Maillol, they weren’t classical, and hence not grounded in Western art history. Their origin was irretrievable, or so Einstein was resolved to believe. Consider the following statement on the African artist from the book’s first section, entitled “Notes on Method.” It returns us to the full range of problems in Einstein’s prose that the Maillol essay had either bypassed or claimed to have solved: the problem of the receding origin, and with it, of causality; the problem of meaning, and with it, the point of indifference: the problem, in short, of nonessence. Carelessly, [the African] is made to fit rather vague hypotheses of evolution; he had to serve some people for a misguided notion of primitivity, others in turn abused their hapless victim in order to polish up such convincingly wrong phrases as “people of eternal prehistory” [Urzeit], and so on. The hope here was to seize something like a beginning in the negro, a condition that never makes it beyond the start.12

Sculpture Ungrounded

63

Note the synonymizing of the origin as beginning and start, which is familiar from Einstein’s essay on the snob, discussed in chapter 1. It gives us a vital clue about what is actually going on in the passage, and by extension in Negro Sculpture as a whole. What we have here is a transformation of autobiography into arthistorical method, of groundlessness as writerly experience into groundlessness as art-historical fact. The ontological position formerly held by Einstein’s authorial personas is shifted to the African artist. In Europe in 1915, Einstein is saying, African art is a nonessence, located at a point of indifference between two mutually opposed Western meanings. These meanings are two versions of one primitivism, two notions of originality that relate as hostile twins, since they are both built on the same model of history as an unrolling causal chain. On one hand, there is a derogatory primitivism, which, blending ethnography with evolutionism, considers African art the crude, early stage of a developed Western culture.13 On the other hand, there is a well-meaning, Gauguinesque primitivism, which considers it the relic of a paradise that was lost with the onset of a decadent Western civilization. The first primitivism dismisses the art, the second embraces it. Both think they know exactly what it is; both believe in its originality, its firstness in a causal chain of evolution that begins in Africa and ends in Europe.14 Einstein did not. In Negro Sculpture, he programmatically embraced neither of the two primitivisms but rather the nonessential condition of African sculpture that’s produced by their mutual cancellation. That is why he declared himself agnostic about its cultural context and stylistic history. Witness the cascade of Mallarméan negations and privatives, familiar from “The Pauper,” into which the “Notes on Method” devolve as they claim to attempt to get the identity of the artists into view: “De facto, our non-appreciation of the negro merely corresponds to a non-knowledge of him that only weighs him down unjustifiedly.” Witness how the objects themselves receive the same treatment: “Our knowledge of African art is on the whole scant and indeterminate; nothing can be dated except for some works from Benin; various types of artworks are determined according to their site, yet I believe I ought not profit from this” (NP 235; NS 125).15 Finally, consider the way in which the Wortfolge of a single breathless sentence invokes, zugleich, three different models of scholarly method—evolutionism, pluralism, and diffusionism—only in order to have their competing claims neutralize each other. Frequently, wholly different styles originate from a single region; several explanations for this phenomenon may be put forward here even as we have no right to decide which is the legitimate one; it might be suggested that we are dealing with an earlier and a later stage of art, or that two styles co-existed at the same time, or else that one of them was imported. (NP 235–36; NS 125)16

Why this deliberate obfuscation of chronology?17 Why decline to profit from the historical insights of the emerging disciplines of African ethnography and art

64

Form as Revolt

history? Because historical models are causal, and causality defines the object of historical inquiry as a point of origin for the historian, who, by the simple but fundamental act of dating that object, distances it temporally, pushing it away from himself down the causal chain toward point A. The countermeasure here, goes Einstein’s implicit argument, cannot be a merely scholarly skepticism, which suspends judgment about historical causality until further research has yielded more accurate information. Rather, the countermeasure must be a fundamental skepticism that refuses to decide among competing scholarly arguments on principle and forever.18 The result would be a historically specific ahistoricism, which, by ungrounding African art as origin, will also unground the European historian. That, in any case, was the idea. Today, its limits are evident enough; one might as well be up-front about that. Most postwar Africanists have been unimpressed by Negro Sculpture, and with good reason. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Einstein did steer clear of two false notions of primitivism, but that did not save him from succumbing to a third version. More familiar from the work of his future associates at Documents magazine, this was a primitivism to which, as Hal Foster has put it, non-Western art “appeared less as a solution to Western aesthetic problems than as a disruption of Western solutions”; but it was a primitivism nonetheless.19 Which means that the merit of Einstein’s argument was also its flaw. Skepticism can easily collapse into plain ignorance: nine of Negro Sculpture’s objects aren’t from Africa but from Oceania. As for the work I am about to discuss, an object made by the Chokwe people from present-day Angola (fig. 2.2), it is a nkishi shi, a sculpture that is used in a healing ritual. The ritual involves dressing the figure and adding “power medicine” to capture the spirit of the sick person’s deceased relative. Hence, as photographed in Negro Sculpture, the work is actually incomplete. It lacks both clothes and medicine, which were probably not removed on route to Europe but were never added in the first place.20 It is its unfinishedness as African ritual object that makes it look finished as a sculpture in the Winckelmannian sense. We would not know any of this from reading Negro Sculpture, which famously provided no captions or provenance information for its images. Einstein’s reasoning behind that omission is obvious enough: such information would have fed into a causal model of art history. But that is another way of saying that he neglected to address the conditions of his book’s own possibility; that together with two bogus causalities Einstein also threw out the quite real causality of colonial abduction that had brought the objects to Europe and made their images land on his desk in the first place. It is sometimes argued that after the war, starting with African Sculpture (Afrikanische Plastik, 1921), his follow-up to Negro Sculpure, Einstein became more ethnographically respectable. But, as Zoë Strother has pointed out, this is imprecise: at core, he always remained uninterested in African sculptures as ritual objects in a social context.21 It is true that unlike its predecessor, African Sculpture came with

Sculpture Ungrounded

65

informative captions and a scholarly bibliography. But the fact remains that Negro Sculpture’s ontological skepticism is present in African Sculpture as well; only it now stands in an unresolved tension with some of the culture-historical facts it also marshals.22 For when Einstein endorsed Frobenius’s argument, that European colonialism had destroyed an ancient high culture, he was not just deploring that culture’s irretrievability but was also embracing it: because it prevented the art from serving European primitivists as exhibit A in a causal origin story. That is why Einstein was only too ready to accept that contemporary tales and legends about African history were spurious: a “bottomless narrative” (bodenlose Erzählung) that cannot—and must not—serve to ground the art historically. And it is why he de-essentialized the meaning of a well-known primitivist chestnut without trying to figure out what the objects it designated actually meant: “African statues are often referred to as fetishes, and everyone uses that word; but it explains nothing, means all manner of things, and occludes the significance of these sculptures and above all our own ignorance.”23 What sounds like a programmatically discursive statement is an exercise in the style of nonessence. Note the redundancy of terms like reference, meaning, and significance: so far from being about the meaning of the fetish, the sentence is about the meaning of meaning. Embedded within a familiar semantic algebra (“nothing,” “all manner”), the word “fetish” works just like “essence” in Einstein’s early prose: it occupies the indifference point of meaning, lodged as it is between plus and minus, “significance” and “ignorance.” It’s not just that we don’t know what “fetish” means, Einstein is saying: we don’t even know that we don’t know what it means. Nor can we possibly find out by writing about it, for the last thing words will do is enable us to produce epistemological statements that relate to anything beyond the page. Least of all God—which brings us to the subject of Einstein on African religion. Strother has argued that, in contrast to his apparent dismissal of the term in African Sculpture, Einstein’s definition of a religious object in Negro Sculpture sounds like the de Brossesean fetish in all but name. And indeed, when we read Einstein’s claim about African sculpture, that “it means nothing, it does not symbolize; it is the god” (NP 242; NS 130),24 then we seem to be looking at a straightforward postulate of the perfect fusion of signifier and signified, sculpture and god. But again there is a major complication here. It is not the case that in Negro Sculpture Einstein was still being anachronistically religious, and in African Sculpture became respectably ethnographic. It is rather the case that in both books he was being neither, since in both cases he was being too much of a writer. To put the matter epigrammatically by mangling the most famous lines by Einstein’s favorite French poet: in Negro Sculpture, God is the absent flower in all primitivist bouquets, since the fetish is being written by Mallarmé. For to say about a sculpture that “it means nothing, it does not symbolize; it is the god” is to take us right

Figure 2.2. Chokwe (Angola), ritual sculpture, early twentieth century. Wood, 39 cm high. State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Reproduced from Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (1915).

Sculpture Ungrounded

67

back to the writerly symbolism of Einstein’s prose. The sculpture means nothing: it means the word “nothing.” It does not symbolize (“es symbolisiert nicht”): it symbolizes the word “not.” And it is the god, because it “is” that word. There is no fusion of signifier and signified here, for, as the lost wanderer knew all too well, the moment you invoke God on the page is the moment you will expel him from it. Put another way, whether his topic was politics, cubism, surrealism, or African art, Einstein was always a wanderer in search of the ambiguity of contemporary meaning, not a believer in search of God or a scholar in search of historical accuracy. He liked his African art ungrounded, as opposed to rehistoricized: that is the mattering difference between Einstein and all Africanists from Frobenius and Ankermann onward. And while it also distinguishes him from the Herbert Spencers and Emil Noldes, it prevents his work from serving as an early benchmark for an academic discipline. That said, there is a crucial difference between African Sculpture and Negro Sculpture: where the former is a compromised hybrid of amateur ethnography and de-essentializing prose, there the latter, when it gets round to actually describing its objects, turns into powerful art criticism. Like African Sculpture, Negro Sculpture cannot stand as an accurate historical account of African art. But, thanks to its art-critical share, it can stand as something like the obverse: as a book that, by taking the art deeply seriously as visual fact rather than distancing it as historical or ethnographic document, allowed it a powerful comeback against contemporary models of Western sculpture.25 Within this more limited purview, the book’s flaw can flip over into a merit. The captionlessness of Einstein’s images, part and parcel of his historical skepticism, obscured their colonialist provenance, but it also maximized their visual impact on the page; a page where words began to connect to the concrete form of an object.

Causal Knowledge: Hildebrand’s Wittelsbacher Fountain In 1915, reading Negro Sculpture must have been a disorienting experience, particularly if one casually opened the book on a random page and was confronted with the image illustrated here (fig. 2.2). The image shows a sculpture, but it is not accompanied by a caption that would identify its cultural or phenomenological context. For the average reader, it is impossible to know with any certainty where the object is from, when it was made, by whom, for what purpose, whom (if anyone) it represents, or under what circumstances it became available to a Western photographer. Nor is it possible to determine, from the scarce visual evidence the image provides, the size of the sculpture or even just its spatial situatedness. The photograph miniaturizes the object, but it is not clear at which scale; for the absence of a ruler or indeed any other object prohibits an inference based on a comparison either with a measuring standard or with some item intuitively familiar to the reader

68

Form as Revolt

from his own everyday environment. And its placement on a piece of cloth that folds up behind it to become a grey, grainy background indistinguishable from the photographic paper but for the faintest trace of a cast shadow makes the figure appear as if it were afloat in a nonspace; one in which the laws of gravity are suspended, and which seems purposely designed to resist all attempts at imagining the object’s groundedness in any imaginable lifeworld. The figure’s demeanor, finally, is not helpful either: expecting a sculpture of the human body to generate meaning through its facial expression and posture, the reader is instead confronted with a body in which both are articulated in terms of a formal rather than a psychological principle: a rigorous symmetry that lends the figure an intensity not based on the vibrancy of an inner life, which the reader could recover empathically. If comparison helps produce knowledge about an object by assimilating it to another and so subsuming it under a general category of which both are particular cases, then the object in the image is incomparable. If imagining the object as emerging from a lifeworld helps create a sense of hermeneutic fusion as the reader finds both it and himself joined by a shared vital bond, then the object in the image is deeply unhermeneutic. If the purpose of figurative sculpture is to carve out a sphere of authenticity in modernity and establish a psychological communion between two subjects, then the object in the image is deeply antipsychologistic. It is all the more enticing, even unsettling, for these very reasons. And so, the reader turns to the introductory text for guidance, only to be repelled yet again. For not only does that text come entirely without footnotes and bibliography; it never explicitly refers to a single example from that selection of objects that it, after all, is supposed to introduce. When it discusses its subject, what it has in mind, apparently, is African sculpture “in general”; and what it has to say about it is phrased in a singularly abstract theoretical idiom. If the contemporary reviewers of Einstein’s Negro Sculpture, from Ernst Bloch through Wilhelm Hausenstein to Hans Tietze, had anything in common, it was their bafflement in face of the nondiscursive;26 and this bafflement can still be felt in the sizable scholarly literature, which, while it has produced valuable insights and discoveries, has tended to cast its nets very wide in its efforts to allay the book’s violent hermeticism by restoring it to its proper context. And I will attempt nothing dissimilar here—except that my perspective and emphasis will be different. I am interested in Negro Sculpture not just as a theoretical text, but as a theoretical text about sculpture; and one that engages not just other texts about sculpture, but actual objects. That is why the rest of this chapter will be an attempt to make sense of it in Negro Sculpture’s terms; where sense means an adequate explanation of the disorientation it generated, a disorientation that I think we can feel even today. My focus on just this one object is deliberate, for to understand Negro Sculpture properly is to reenact the hallucinatory obsession of its author with the experience of specific works of art.27 But to work toward that explanation in turn requires first an extensive look at certain other objects—objects that are nowhere mentioned in Einstein’s text,

Sculpture Ungrounded

69

yet which his argument is everywhere designed to invalidate. For the historical significance of Negro Sculpture was to set up a countermodel to two paradigms that dominated sculptural discourse in prewar Germany; two paradigms that from our vantage point in the present could not seem more different: the work of Adolf von Hildebrand on one hand, and the sculpture of Auguste Rodin on the other.28 What could these two practices possibly have in common? In order to solve this riddle, it is necessary to invoke two other names: those of two of Einstein’s teachers at Berlin University, Heinrich Wölfflin and Georg Simmel.29 It was Wölfflin who provided Einstein with certain critical terms; only that Einstein turned them on their head. And it was Simmel, among other critics, who was instrumental in shaping a peculiar image of Rodin in Germany before 1914, one on which Hildebrand and Wölfflin could in fact agree even as they believed that Hildebrand was its polar opposite. I will look at these tangled issues in turn; and I want to begin by pointing to an assumption that was shared by all of Negro Sculpture’s targets. This was the assumption that, over and above their mimetic function, works of art are epistemological models: objects whose purpose is to induce the viewing subject to believe that the phenomenal world will cohere, for him and through his own constitutive agency, into a totality known variously as the “unity of the manifold” or the modern “world picture.”30 What might a sculpture look like that would fit this description? I am choosing a conceivably overdetermined example: the Wittelsbacher Fountain in Munich, completed in 1895 by the neoclassicist sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand. Overdetermined, because the historical web of connections is suitably thick: Hildebrand was an acquaintance of Hermann von Helmholtz (he modeled his bust and designed his family’s tomb), whose physiological optics would become an unnamed but major target throughout Einstein’s critical work. Hildebrand was also a close friend of Wölfflin, who advised him on the actual design of the Fountain and celebrated his achievement in several laudatory essays, one of which included the frontally taken photograph shown here (fig. 2.3).31 And, of course, he was the author of the most influential prewar treatise on sculptural theory: The Problem of Form (1903),32 a book that was indebted to Helmholtz’s physiological optics and was explicitly cited by Einstein as a target in Negro Sculpture. The Wittelsbacher Fountain was the solution to the “problem of form.” What was this problem? It was, precisely, to produce sculpture as epistemological model: to offer the modern subject the experience of a formal configuration purged of the mess of everyday sensory contingency, dispersed memory, disjunctive spaces, and temporal attenuation; a configuration that would excite (but never trouble) the subject to process it as visual knowledge. The problem of form was, in Hildebrand’s words, to find a way of relieving the modern subject of the “anxiety of the cubic,”33 or in Wölfflin’s words, to “organize and quiet perception,”34 and both agreed that sculptural relief was the paradigmatic medium to achieve that task. The “anxiety” in question arose from the threat of epistemological fragmentation, when a subject

70

Form as Revolt

Figure 2.3. Adolf von Hildebrand, Wittelsbacher Fountain, 1890–1895. Maximum width 26.84 m. Lenbachplatz, Munich. Reproduced from Heinrich Wölfflin, “Adolf von Hildebrand zu seinem 70. Geburtstag am 6. Oktober” (1918).

tries and fails to totalize its three-dimensional environment as a field of vision. It arose when the spatiotemporal experience of what Hildebrand obsoletely called “nature” (he really meant the metropolis circa 1900) would not resolve itself into a stable constellation where objects are accessible as visual wholeness, observable from a distance. And in order to think how that wholeness might be achieved sculpturally, Hildebrand turned to Helmholtz’s seminal theory of unconscious inference.35 Thanks to the work of Jonathan Crary, Gary Hatfield, Timothy Lenoir, and others, we have a clear picture today of what this theory was all about: a rethinking of Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason, in terms of a psychophysiological optics of embodied vision.36 Helmholtz sought to describe how a subject organized the formless array of stimuli initially given to perception into the fabled “unity of the manifold.” Specifically, he sought to answer a question that had played no role in Kant’s purely philosophical account: Considering that psychophysiological research had shown that the subject’s initial knowledge of the outside world comes in the form of stimuli imprinted on the retina as two-dimensional “local signs”; considering that, moreover, human vision is binocular so that two disparate sets of stimuli will be received; considering, finally, that (in Helmholtz’s famous antinativist turn) an innate sense of spatiality must be rejected: how

Sculpture Ungrounded

71

does the subject cohere—or how can it be prompted to cohere—these stimuli into a three-dimensional unity?37 The solution was a theory of vision as unconscious inference. Its uncanny beauty was the way in which it accounted for what would seem to be the troublingly contingent fact of embodied vision as its very enabling condition. Helmholtz argued that while Kant’s epistemology was an intellectual abstraction, it was nonetheless not invalidated but rather newly corroborated by his own research: for his model of embodied vision involved a ceaseless activity of synthesis that hinged on a rigorous logic of causality derived from Kant’s first Critique.38 Vision in Helmholtz is a process during which new stimuli are constantly compared to old ones stored in memory, so that their location and extension in space will be identified through an act of syllogistic generalization based on past experiences.39 This is a model of vision that assumes that a subject’s experience of an object is temporally linear, epistemologically cumulative, and deeply backward-oriented, for the subject will always seek to interpret the new as but a variation of the old: as effect of a prior cause, the identification of which will be, precisely, the purpose of unconscious inference. The consequence of this model for sculptural experience becomes obvious when Helmholtz defines the visual experience of an object as the gradual “fusion” of its “multiple perspectival aspects into the concept of its three-dimensional form.”40 Every encounter with an object involves subsuming the phenomenal singularity of its aspects under a general concept that the viewer brings to the encounter ready-made—“human figure,” say. The viewer will acquire visual knowledge about the object as a three-dimensional totality precisely to the extent that in the act of perception it gradually disappears into a mere mental image of itself—precisely to the extent that its aspects are treated as so many “realizations of the possible,” instantiations of a generality that is, however, nowhere to be seen.41 It is saying something about the urgency of the threat of contingent experience in modernity that even this model was no longer enough, in 1903, to alleviate Hildebrand’s “anxiety of the cubic.” He was too troubled by the spatiotemporal dilation that accompanies the experience of any freestanding sculpture, which implies that it will not be fully present to a mobile viewer at any one moment.42 But Hildebrand wanted knowledge to be fully present to the viewer; and so he turned to Helmholtz’s model of relief as the default modality of distant vision.43 The relief as Fernbild that is Hildebrand’s sculptural paradigm in The Problem of Form is located at that point where the kinesthetic activity of binocular vision, which at close range will constantly strain to compound disparate surface data into an optical whole, has been arrested into a soothing stasis. For when the material object retreats into the distance, disparity is evened out as the eyes’ lines of sight become near-parallel: just divergent enough for the subject still to have inferential work to do, no longer disparate enough for it to feel incapable of it. Because, again, that is what unconscious inference crucially depends on: a perceptible difference that it is the task of the viewer to synthesize away. That, after all, is the reason Helmholtz

72

Form as Revolt

Figure 2.4. Adolf von Hildebrand, Wittelsbacher Fountain, bird’s-eye view.

considered a relief capable of producing a much more compelling illusion than most paintings: because, unlike brushstrokes on a flat surface, it generates inferable disparities, and because, like human distant vision, relief compresses the spatial distances between objects located far away from the viewer.44 Hence the Wittelsbacher Fountain. And hence the precise staging of its experience in the photograph taken from Wölfflin’s essay (fig. 2.3), which strives so hard to block out the expansive three-dimensionality of the Fountain’s burgeoning forms and its highly contrived insertion within the urban site. For, as we learn only from comparison with a different image (fig. 2.4), the Fountain is situated at a point where a public square, the Lenbachplatz, terminates in a steep drop toward the adjacent park, the Maximiliansanlagen; and it is semicircular in plan, with the central section bulging out toward the square while its back drops off vertically toward the park, where a second basin is located on a lower level. None of this is apparent in the photograph, for here the viewer has been assigned a place from which the work’s actual material dimensions and the spatial relations among its elements seem as unclear as possible, which is to say where these relations have been “resolved” into the visual totality of a relief. Witness how the rim of the basin curves just enough at the edges to make it seem to oscillate between flatness and plasticity; how the rim thereby (in virtue of

Sculpture Ungrounded

73

its three-dimensionality) leads the eye back toward the flanking figures on their recessed pedestals even as it also (in virtue of its two-dimensionality) pulls them forward by appearing to merge with the straight upper edge of the pedestals into a single fronto-parallel line. How we seem to be looking at a single row of overflows where the two outer ones are in fact recessed back. How the figures’ postures are organized as strong contrasts of frontal and profile aspects, thus yielding maximum visual information about their three-dimensional bodies within a shallow relief space. How the figures seem to draw the expansive protrusion of the central, circular fountain toward which they converge back into that shallow slice of space that they themselves inhabit, thus joining with it to form the silhouette of a virtual two-dimensional triangle. And how, finally, the absence of any discernible ground between the fountain and the trees in the distance renders the interval between them unmeasurable, and so works to pictorialize even the ambient space of the fountain by turning it into the intangible background plane of its relief composition. It should have become clear from my description that the “solution” to the “problem of form”—of visualizing three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional relief—is not so much the actual as the illusory achievement of that impossible task. Just as the celebrated clarity of the Wittelsbacher Fountain is based on an obfuscation of the material objecthood of its elements, so the compelling sense of their plasticity is based on the visual compression of their physical relation in space. In Hildebrand’s terminology, Daseinsform—“existential form,” that is, material objecthood—has been reconfigured as Wirkungsform, or “effective form.”45 Referring as it does to the Helmholtzian visuality of causal inference, “effective form” clarifies for us that even as it insists on being beheld as a relief, the Fountain does not thereby replace the process of successive inferential data gathering with something radically different. Punctuality in Hildebrand is not the moment when a temporally attenuated quantitative experience—the accumulation, comparing, and generalizing of sensory data as syllogistic knowledge over time—flips over into its absolute, qualitative other, the incommensurable epiphany of the aesthetic. The punctual experience of Hildebrandian relief should rather be defined as modernization masquerading as modernism: unconscious inference rooted to the spot, so that it may revel in its own epistemological loop.46

Becoming as Totalization: Simmel’s Rodin To address the second sculptural paradigm rejected in Negro Sculpture is to be confronted with a paradox. Because for us today it seems entirely unclear how the work of Auguste Rodin could be criticized, and apparently for much the same reasons as Hildebrand’s. At stake here is not just the evident superiority of Rodin’s work but also the radically different issues that matter for the Rodin we have come

74

Form as Revolt

to know through the critical revisions of the past several decades.47 Issues, moreover, that Hildebrand, for example, was well aware of: Rodin’s Victor Hugo and his sculptural groups “fall apart,” he declared; “one can’t find an aspect from which they could be grasped as a unified image [Einheitsbild].”48 Quite so. Thanks to their phenomenological materialism—the disjunctness of their aspects, the palpability of the stuff they are made of—many of Rodin’s sculptures resist being “grasped”: where “to grasp” is “to comprehend” as image. As such, they would also seem inherently resistant to being perceived as aesthetic models of any kind of subject formation that hinges on a sense of that subject’s self-identity. And yet that is precisely what they came to stand for in the writings of Einstein’s teacher Georg Simmel. Because for Simmel, the work of Rodin promised nothing less than an utopian resolution of the “tragedy of culture” through an aesthetics of becoming as temporalized process of identity formation. What is the tragedy of culture? It is the tragedy of an insidious, specifically modern self-alienation of the subject in what used to be the modality of its selfrealization: the production of objects. In his sociology, Simmel described that alienation in the terms of a broadly Marxian but ultimately Romantic account of identity formation. A subject becomes a subject through a process of selfexternalization that requires work on a material: work that turns raw nature into shaped objects, matter into form.49 Simmel argued that this model came under threat when the modern division of labor shattered self-externalization into meaningless fragments, and artisanal object production was displaced by collective, automated processes. Unlike the Marxists Simmel believed this rupture was a quasi-ontological condition that extended not just to the new object paradigm of the commodity,50 but to all “objectivations” of contemporary “culture,” whether social norms, the institutions of the nation-state, or interpersonal relations: “The subjective life which we feel in its continuous stream . . . can aspire to cultural perfection only through forms which have become completely alien and crystallized into self-sufficient independence.”51 The “subjective life . . . in its continuous stream”: this passage alerts us to the way in which Simmel gave Romantic self-externalization a Bergsonian slant. Simmel was among the earliest serious readers of Bergson in Germany, and he was instrumental in popularizing his work among a younger generation. What he found in Bergson was a model of subject formation as a fundamentally interior process, richly layered and continuously multiple. This was an interiority that, if it were described in terms of a syllogistic, cumulative knowledge, would be submitted to a degrading rationalization: to an externalization. For Simmel as for Bergson, modern “culture” was neo-Kantian by default; and its epistemology was a tragic depletion of the subject’s vital interiority: a transformation of “life” into “nonlife” through its objectivation as a static, detemporalized form.52 There was, however, one sphere of production for Simmel that escaped this vicious circle: the sphere of art, and specifically the sculpture of Auguste Rodin.53 In a crucial passage on Rodin

Sculpture Ungrounded

75

in his sentimental book on Rembrandt, Simmel called the sculptor the paradigmatic artist of a “modern Heraclitism,” a world picture (Weltbild) in which all substantiality and stability of empirical experience has been replaced by movement. A fixed quantum of energy permeates the material world, or rather is this world; no formal construct is granted even the briefest duration, and the ostensible unity of its contour is but vibration and the undulation of energy exchange. Rodin’s figures are elements of a world perceived in this way.54

The sculptures of Simmel’s Rodin did not just represent this modern world picture: they also produced a Heraclitean subject in and as the act of sculptural experience. For in Rodin’s work, Simmel believed, becoming was not just illustrated by a sculpture: the sculpture rather incorporated becoming as its form and modality of experience. This is a modality that might be called a totalization as infinite postponement, and for Simmel it was emblematized by those Rodin sculptures in which a figure was so intimately fused with the matter it was made of—the marble block—that it could seem as though it represented subject formation as an open-ended temporal process that never reached completion.55 Precisely because it will never resolve itself into a single comprehensive aspect; precisely because its crouched, circular posture at once represents its own becoming and demands of the viewer that he reenact it as he ambulates around the block: precisely because of this double incompletion of its form, a sculpture like Rodin’s Danaid (fig. 2.5) emblematized for Simmel a successful self-externalization that had not been reified into a rigid form, and a sculptural experience that shared in that success by mimicking it. But just how “incomplete” was the subject of sculptural experience of this Heraclitean world picture? To be sure, Heraclitus’s dictum, that one never steps into the same river twice, was one of Bergson’s favorite examples for a model of becoming as the temporal unfolding of difference within repetition. Hence, insofar as it was Bergsonian, the Simmelian subject would seem to be the polar opposite of the Helmholtzian one, founded as the latter is on a model of identification, bent on nothing so much as assimilating difference to the generality of the already known. And indeed, Simmel explicitly rejected a causal model of subjective experience for precisely this reason.56 But then, one should be alert to the fact that Helmholtz had been on Simmel’s first dissertation committee, and to the exact phrasing of the quote above: “a fixed quantum of energy.” Unlike the river of Bergson’s Heraclitus, Simmel’s flux resembles a pool in which change is finite and repetitive. And so, it is tempting to think that Simmel was actually trying to dovetail vitalism with a rather different model: the paradigm of a causal world-picture that the young Helmholtz had described, decades earlier, in his influential essay on the conservation of force.57 Part of the significance of his argument had been that even as he dynamized classical mechanics by postulating the continuous agency throughout nature of an all-pervading Kraft, or energy, he simultaneously sought

76

Form as Revolt

Figure 2.5. Auguste Rodin, Danaid, 1885. Marble, 39 cm high. Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki.

to contain that dynamization within the framework of a law that guaranteed the finitude, predictability, and self-identity of those aggregate energetic states that now replaced the classical object. That containment was achieved by claiming that it was precisely the discovery of energy—and the discovery of its conservation— that proved the validity of one particular aspect of the law of causality: that cause equals effect. Even as the material world was liquefied, this liquefaction was in turn neutralized by the constancy of a law that supposedly governed it. Identity was dispersed into ceaseless change: but the (perfectly self-identical) law of causality ensured that change could be defined as just a repetition of different versions of the same.58 This antihistorical impulse of Helmholtz’s model of causality would go a long way to explain Simmel’s claim that “the state of absolute animation into which the souls and Rodin’s vibrating, convulsive bodies are forced negates time. . . . Absolute becoming is just as unhistorical as absolute non-becoming.”59 Put another way, for Simmel, the visual spectacle of Rodin’s modelé amounts to an externalization of the self’s vitality taken to such an extreme that flux becomes indistinguishable from stasis. No one saw this more clearly than a certain Leon Trotsky, who had heard Simmel lecture on Rodin in his Vienna exile, and who in 1911 recorded his verdict in a Pravda essay.

Sculpture Ungrounded

77

The “new soul” is animated through and through, and that animation lacks any central impulse or dogma. It is not just different from one moment to the next; it is not identical with itself even in a single moment. It is always different. . . . It absorbs everything and dissolves it within itself. Each of its states is but a stop along the way from the unknown into the unknown.60

One may disagree with Trotsky’s call for a “central dogma”—for the restoration of a primal cause—and still admire the acuity with which he unmasked the Heraclitism of Simmel’s Rodin for what it was: the reconfiguration of the identity principle as the eternal recurrence of a change in which an empty repetition is matched by what another author has called the empty difference of the “beautiful soul.”61 And so, it is on two issues that Simmel and Hildebrand converge: a diagnosis of modern subjective experience, and, given that diagnosis, sculpture’s function in modernity. Hildebrand had opposed the totality of relief to the fragmentation of perception in everyday life: a totality that was an illusion produced in the viewer as a calculated effect of embodied vision. Simmel’s Rodin produced no such totalities, but he did activate the viewer with a similar end in mind. The work of Simmel’s Rodin is about a process of totalization that turns the fragmentariness of modern experience into an aesthetic of becoming. The philosopher of money was more realistic than Hildebrand: for Simmel, totality in modernity was no longer available in the experience of any one thing. And so he processualized it. But that is why his model of the viewer—a viewer who derives his or her sense of identity from a ceaseless excitation kept alive by infinite postponement—came to resemble the subject of commodity consumption that Simmel himself had described, melancholically, in such detail in his sociology.

Against Optical Naturalism And that was the argument of Einstein’s Negro Sculpture: that irrespective of their vastly different arguments, the paradigms of Hildebrand’s relief and the freestanding sculpture of Simmel’s Rodin, a neo-Kantian visual epistemology and a “soft-core” Bergsonism of false becoming, were essentially alike. Einstein’s term for both is “pictorial sculpture” (malerische Plastik); and his term for their ideology is “optical naturalism.” The optical naturalism of Western art is not the imitation of external nature; rather, the nature that is passively imitated here is merely the vantage point of the viewer. Whence the geneticism, the tremendous relativism that characterizes most of our art. This art adapted itself to the beholder (frontality, distant image); and the production of the final optical form was increasingly entrusted to an actively participating beholder. (NP 245; NS 133)62

78

Form as Revolt

The “optical naturalism” of sculpture is no longer a mimetic naturalism, for it fully reckons with the “eclipse of the referent” brought about by neo-Kantian-type models of embodied vision: with the Copernican turn from a “copy-type” model of the phenomenal world as unproblematically accessible to the viewer, to the belief that this world will be configured by the viewer himself in the act of perception. What is being “naturalized” in optical naturalism, therefore, is rather the subject’s position within and toward this world: the simultaneous constitution, in the act of sculptural experience, of the subject as subject, and of the world as picture—for that subject.63 Hence optical naturalism’s formal means can be equally “frontality, multiple viewpoints, transitional modelé, and sculptural silhouette” (NP 244; NS 132):64 a cumulative processing of aspects (as in Helmholtz on freestanding sculpture), an interminable totalization (the Danaid of Simmel’s Rodin), or the pregnant gestalt of a relief’s overall contour (the Wittelsbacher Fountain). It is in order to get at the root of this becoming-image of the phenomenal world for a centered subject that Einstein modified a term from Wölfflin, and dismissed the work of both Hildebrand and Rodin as so much “pictorial sculpture.” Pictorial sculpture, as Einstein encountered it either in the Principles of Art History or in Wölfflin’s lectures, was part of “the most decisive revolution which art history knows”: the transformation of a Renaissance “tactile image” (Tastbild) into the “visual image” (Sehbild) of the Baroque. That transformation in turn was the origin of a modern art of “visibility,” of a reconfiguration of the phenomenal world into a “world seen.”65 For Wölfflin, the “classical” art of the Renaissance had been tactile in the sense that the precise linearity of a painting by Bronzino or Holbein had recorded the most insignificant detail with hallucinatory clarity that gave the viewer too little work to do: their palpable severity of line rendered the phenomenal world as though it existed in the image independently of the subject who beheld it. The “world seen” of Baroque art, by contrast, was a world made over into a set of stimuli that still awaited synthesis by a viewer in the act of perceiving the painting. For this was a world in which appearance took precedence over being, so that pictorial means no longer clarified the objective form of things; as when in a Dutch landscape the winding parallel lines of a country road are partly submerged in the shadow cast by the allover chiaroscuro of a cloudy sky above—a road that does not exist except insofar as it is seen, at a specific moment, under specific lighting conditions, by a viewer. For Wölfflin, the Baroque subjectivism of the “world seen” continued into his own present, where it had devolved into intolerable extremes. Wölfflin associated it with impressionism, which to his mind included not just the paintings of Monet, but also the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. “Composition and silhouette simply don’t exist for him,” a bewildered Wölfflin told his students in a lecture on nineteenthcentury art, making his point with a slide of the Citizens of Calais.66 Wölfflin’s conviction that the experience of sculpture was above all optical led him to treating a Rodin like a Medardo Rosso: given that sculpture must be an image, “impressionist

Sculpture Ungrounded

79

sculpture” had gone too far, for the chiaroscuro flicker that animated its surfaces threatened to dissolve what ought to be a formal gestalt into a formless chaos that gave the viewe altogether too much work to do. What was required was rather a sculptural paradigm that to Wölfflin seemed like the antithesis of Rodin: the relief of his friend Hildebrand. But that antithesis was only an apparent one; for nowhere did Wölfflin argue that Hildebrand’s work was a return to the tactile image of the Renaissance. His implicit claim was rather that all modern sculptors were concerned with setting up the pure visibility of a world seen, by a subject: only that some did so more successfully than others. Recognizing this, Einstein did not make the mistake of the many Wölfflin translators who have rendered malerisch as “painterly” rather than “pictorial”: for at stake in the turn to the “world seen” is not a specific stylistic morphology but the optical centering of the viewer. What then was Einstein’s critique of Hildebrand and Rodin, specifically? I begin with the latter, for it is the more complicated case: first, because in Einstein’s critique the Simmelian Rodin is blended with a peculiarly German reading of Rodin as “impressionist” sculptor, a reading on which Wölfflin and a younger generation of critics could readily agree;67 and second, because his critique seems to be delivered from a Hildebrandian point of view. Let us return to the Danaid: how can it be called impressionist? By abstracting from the way in which materiality and form here fuse into an inseparable whole, and instead treating it as though it were a three-dimensional Sehbild: a solid mass covered with a surface texture available to vision only. In this perspective, the fine grain of the marble would act as a layer of flickering chiaroscuro that works to subjectivize—optically naturalize—the sculpture. To the extent that it loses its material independence as object; to the extent that its form becomes a function of the constant inflection by lighting ceaselessly playing over and reconfiguring its surface from one moment to the next; to the extent that it thereby becomes a perpetually changing thing seen by a “constant” subject: to this extent the sculpture will appear to be fully constituted only by that subject’s interpretive activity: “The spectator was woven into the sculpture; he became an inseparable functional component of it. . . . [The sculptor] shifted the emphasis to the visual activity of the viewer and modelled with touches, so that the construction of the actual form would be left to the viewer” (NP 239; NS 128).68 First criterion of optical naturalism as criticized by Einstein: a dematerialization of form that is involved when the viewer is presented with an object that seems to depend on him in order to become picture. Second criterion: a false temporalization of sculptural experience; one that works doubly to anthropomorphize the object even as it further dematerializes it. First, by introjecting into the sculpture the retrograde temporality of what we might call a “bad indexicality”; second, by having the sculpture conform to the basic existential condition of the subject: namely, to exist in time, and to experience over time. For Einstein, both aspects are at stake in a Simmelian impressionist misreading of the “temporal function” (NP 253; NS 131) of Rodin’s fabled modelé.

80

Form as Revolt

I am calling the first aspect a bad indexicality in order to get at the causal structure that in Einstein’s view underlies the reading of that modelé both as Sehbild and as testimony of a subject’s self-externalization. First, in terms of the impressionist Sehbild, modelé is causal, since its apparent formal incompleteness invites the viewer to infer its total optical form from the combination of its visible and invisible parts—from the highlights on the ridges and the shadows in the valleys that together create modelé’s chiaroscuro in Rodin. Second, in terms of Simmelian self-externalization, modelé is causal, since it turns the sculpture into “the subject of a conversation between two people” (NP 239; NS 128): into the interface of two unalienated self-externalizations.69 Einstein’s allusion to Simmel is clear enough. In one of his Rodin essays, Simmel had called the artist the paradigmatic sculptor of modernity, “for the very essence of modernity is psychologism: the experience and interpretation of the world according to the responses of our inner self.”70 And he had claimed that this psychologistic response depended on the optical vibration that animates the surface of a Rodin, which is purposely fragmented so that the viewer might make it whole.71 Put another way, to treat a sculpture as a conversation piece is to interpret its modelé as so much “personal handwriting” (NP 238; NS 127), as an imprint of the traces of a creative individual’s self-externalization. The problem here is not just the vulgar genius aesthetic that Simmel’s essay underwrites. The problem is more fundamentally the way in which a backward-oriented causal hermeneutics profoundly derealizes the sculptural object. For by treating a sculpture as the visible effect of an invisible prior cause, the retrieval of which is supposed to constitute the experience of the sculpture, the decisive moments of that experience are displaced into “preludes and postludes,” as Einstein put it (ibid.): into a self-externalization in the past and its inferential recuperation by the viewer in the present, which leaves the sculpture itself nowhere: “Increasingly the work dissolved into a conduit for psychological excitation; it was the individual flow, the causative agent and his effects, that were being fixated” (ibid.).72 Secondly, the modelé of Simmel’s Rodin comes under attack in Negro Sculpture for setting up what we already know as the model of a temporalized experience of sculpture as infinite totalization. When Einstein rejects modelé for being “transitional,” what he has in mind is the way in which the play of light and shadow will potentially be dislodged from its local, descriptive function to extend across—and thereby devalue—the silhouette established by any one of a figure’s aspects, thus asking the viewer to walk around it in search of a complete form that will purposely elude him. For us today, decades after the advent of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Einstein’s rejection of the processuality of sculptural experience seems intuitively wrong. Isn’t Einstein’s critique of Simmel ultimately a Hildebrandian argument? Wouldn’t Hildebrand have endorsed Einstein’s claim that sculpture, rather than imitating a human body by modeling the surface of a mass, ought to represent instead the “cubic perception of space”? That the sculptor’s task is to

Sculpture Ungrounded

81

construct the three-dimensionality of volume as such, so that the third dimension is perceived as the optical “totality” of “a single integration” (NP 255; NS 132)? Are we not dealing with a theory that, for all its pretensions to the contrary, is but an updated version of a neo-Kantian paradigm of sculpture as visual epistemology? No. Not only is Hildebrand nowhere endorsed in Negro Sculpture; rather, like Rodin’s, his work is explicitly rejected, as pictorial sculpture, and for exactly the reasons that we examined in our discussion of the Wittelsbacher Fountain. The beauty of that rejection, delivered as a critique of the frontality of Hildebrandian relief, is the way in which Einstein dovetails a politics of vision with a formalist argument. Frontality virtually cheats the viewer out of the experience of the cubic and concentrates all power into a single aspect. It arranges the foremost parts according to a single viewpoint and endows them with a degree of plasticity. The simplest naturalistic aspect is chosen, the side closest to the beholder, the one that habitually orients him psychologically and representationally. Through a pattern of rhythmic interruptions, the other, subordinate aspects suggest a sensation that corresponds to an idea of three-dimensionality based on our ideas of movement. The mental synthesis of abrupt movements—movements that are motivated above all by the motif— generates the idea of a spatial unity that has no formal legitimacy. (NP 244; NS 132)73

Translation: Hildebrand’s Wittelsbacher Fountain fails as art to the extent that it promotes an optical naturalism that leaves it to the viewer to complete the visual experience of a sculpture that has been designed as a fragment for just that purpose. To promote relief as sculptural paradigm is to organize the phenomenal world for a subject: it is to remake the world as an image, consumable from a point of view, and so to install the subject as its observer. It is to pander to a viewer who has learned to accept distant-vision relief as “normal view”: to pander to the expectations of a subject nurtured on a Helmholtzian psychology of unconscious inference.74 In the process, it is to produce an object that must necessarily be incomplete to the extent that it is an object for that subject’s vision: to the extent that it is frontal. The three-dimensionality of the Wittelsbacher Fountain is not its objective material property but rather a supplement inferentially added by the viewer. “Abrupt movements” is Einstein’s term for this strategy, which he likely encountered in Wölfflin’s lectures and writings on Renaissance art. He is referring to the way in which a figure’s posture is contorted into a combination of frontal and profile aspects so that a maximum of visual information about its body is crammed into a single (frontal) view. Wölfflin’s examples are Michelangelo’s Sistine Adam and his allegorical representations of Day and Night in the Medici Chapel.75 In a similar fashion, between themselves the two human figures of the Wittelsbacher Fountain generate the virtual image of a “combined” body. The male rider is shown with frontal torso but with legs and head in profile, to which the female is adding

82

Form as Revolt

a three-quarter view of legs and face, all of which are superficially motivated by narrative residues that further dissolve the Fountain as form insofar as they turn it into an iconographic riddle. In turn, it is for its surreptitious epistemology that Simmelian-type, temporalized sculptural experience comes under attack by Einstein. This is clear from the peculiar-sounding term he uses to dismiss it. A sculpture that demands that the viewer ambulate around it, Einstein claims, is inherently “genetic” (NP 244; NS 132). That term refers to the attempt, in the years immediately predating Negro Sculpture, by the Marburg School of philosophy to rebuild neo-Kantian epistemology from the ground up.76 Thinkers like Moritz Schlick and Paul Natorp—whose name crops up on a reading list composed by the young Einstein77—tried to overcome the first Critique’s dualism between pure thought on one hand and a manifold of sensation waiting to be synthesized on the other with a “genetic” theory of knowledge according to which “the processual nature of cognition” would turn out to be “the true meaning of the synthetic a priori.”78 As a scientific methodology, this was the origin of the familiar concept of scientific progress as a gradual if asymptotic approach to absolute knowledge.79 And in terms of temporalized experience as knowledge-like, it enabled a rapprochement between two seemingly irreconcilable philosophies: Bergsonian vitalism and neo-Kantianism. For if Kantian knowledge was found to be fundamentally temporal—if the static factum could be thought as processual fieri without thereby vanishing as epistemological object—then temporality was not the other of knowledge but its enabling condition.80 And so, Einstein felt that a temporalized sculptural experience was not an option for an alternative model of subject formation; for its “genetics” of becoming would produce a sense of open-endedness that was nonetheless rigidly scientific. Hence, Einstein asks us to entertain a difficult thought: What would a sculpture look like whose formal structure is nontemporally given to vision and which is yet not epistemological? What would a sculpture look like that would thereby refuse to offer an experience as tautological repetition of a prior identity? A sculpture that, unlike the work of Simmel’s Rodin, would not be about the identification “of beholder and maker” (NP 239; NS 128) as retrieval of a prior subject-cause? A sculpture that, unlike Hildebrand’s relief, would not be the work of an artist who “would always maintain the distance of the future viewer” and who would merely “model the effect” (ibid.) of a prior knowledge-cause?

Totality It is time to examine more closely the object I introduced earlier on. For it is quite clear that Einstein has the Chokwe figure and half a dozen similar objects from the book in mind when he declares that “it is the task of sculpture to form an equation in which naturalistic sensations of movement . . . are completely absorbed and in

Sculpture Ungrounded

83

which their successive differentiation is converted into a formal order” (NP 245– 46; NS 133): that a sculptural counterparadigm to Hildebrand and Simmel’s Rodin must repel any “temporal interpretation based on ideas of movement” (NP 243; NS 131), and instead gather those parts “which are not simultaneously visible” together “with the visible parts into a total form” (NP 245; NS 133).81 Let us unpack these statements while looking at the Chokwe figure. What is optically naturalist about movement, and how does the figure “absorb” rather than represent it, or demand of the viewer to reenact it? The representation of movement, it will be clear by now, processualizes the temporality of sculptural experience, so that at any one moment the sculpture is perceptually incomplete (this is the medium-specific part of Einstein’s argument). By the same token, the representation of movement also introduces “continuity” into that perception: it makes experience a matter of cumulative data processing, so that the viewer becomes productive to the extent the sculpture becomes illusionistic (this is the perceptual politics part of the argument). The Chokwe figure, by contrast, expunges movement just as it reduces temporal process to a single punctual moment. It achieves this by turning three-dimensionality—“cubic space”—into form (NP 239; NS 128). Rather than treating the sculpture as a mass that displaces space through movement, the African artist represented what might be called the movability of the figure as such. This he did by accepting the vertical condition of every human body as the generative structure for the figure’s pose. Neck, torso, and limbs then become local modulations down along an axis whose endpoints are the headgear and the pedestal. And these modulations are organized in such a way that the capacity of the body for movement becomes visible as exhaustively as possible from a single, frontal viewpoint even as the figure itself remains perfectly immobile. The artist achieved this by a cunning formal trick that might be called “aspect reversal.” The figure’s arms and legs are bent, indicating its capacity for displacing space by movement, both backward (in the case of the arms) and forward (the legs). Moreover, the arms and legs are bent at almost the same angle, and they are of nearly identical length. As a result, all limbs become versions of one another. To a frontal view the legs are mirror images of what the arms look like from the back, and vice versa, just as the protruding lower torso echoes the spine of the figure, and just as the sphere-shaped part of the headgear echoes the bulging skull. As a result, a maximum of visual information about the body has been assembled into a single, frontal aspect even as its ability to move has been systematically explored: “The twofold orientation in depth, the movement forward and backward, has been bound into a single cubic expression” (NP 249; NS 134).82 Still, we cannot really call this “movement,” for the rigorous vertical symmetry of the posture and the aspect-reversal symmetry of the limbs suspend any sense of directed movement by neutralizing each other’s thrust. Nor does the figure possess the integrity of a body conceived as a continuous organic whole. Instead, that continuity is broken up and reorganized according to a syntax of mobility, or, as

84

Form as Revolt

Einstein calls it, borrowing a term from mathematical vector analysis, as a series of “directional resultants of spatial contrasts” (NP 248; NS 135): a syntax whose elements must be discontinuous with one another in order to be perceptible as the opposing vectors (backward/forward) that they are. This sense of discontinuity is strongly emphasized by the way in which the sculptor has quite literally hinged the body’s posture on its anatomic joints. In ordinary figurative sculpture the elbow tips and the kneecaps are means of spatial transition. The opposite is true for the Chokwe sculpture. Filed to razor-sharp points that now thrust forward, now back, the elbow tips and kneecaps are the generative points—the “points centrals” (NP 247; NS 134)—of a differential system that at once dovetails and juxtaposes concavity and convexity, openness and closedness, front view and back view, instead of blending them into one another.83 The result, to introduce a loaded term that will be explored below, is a sculpture as totality; where totality is defined as “contrast, i.e., the unconditional unity of opposites.”84 So it is that the Chokwe figure rejects the strategies that both Simmel’s Rodin and Hildebrand had used in order to produce a sense of spatiotemporal continuity in the viewer that he supposedly shares with the object of his experience. It rejects the continuity of a “transitional modelé” that gently and interminably guides the viewer around a freestanding sculpture. And it rejects the causal continuity that prompts him inferentially to synthesize the front and profile views of a figure into a conceptual whole. This reading of African sculpture is an impressive critique of the Hildebrandian paradigm, but one wonders from which perspective Einstein is delivering it. “The three-dimensionally situated parts must be represented simultaneously, that is, the dispersed space must be integrated into a single field of vision” (NP 244; NS 132).85 Given their insistence on the instantaneity of sculptural experience, statements like these seem to suggest that Einstein’s point was merely to radicalize Hildebrand rather than to dismiss him altogether. Was the difference between them simply that Einstein was prepared to get rid of mimetic naturalism in favor of his own version of optical naturalism? Is there a common ground between the formal totality of an African object (NP 247; NS 134) and the epiphanic totalities of postwar high modernist sculpture? In order to answer that question we should turn to another text by Einstein, one that is entitled, precisely, “Totality.” Published in Aktion magazine in the year before Negro Sculpture’s first edition, the “Totality” essay is its philosophical complement. Over a few densely written pages Einstein tried to think how their formal and experiential structure—their totality—enables objects like the Chokwe figure to rupture the visual epistemology of the Western subject. It has long been recognized that Henri Bergson was a major theoretical resource for the young Einstein, and his presence makes itself felt in “Totality” as well.86 But it is equally clear that Einstein’s reading of Bergson was highly selective. For a proper understanding of Negro Sculpture we need to determine what he

Sculpture Ungrounded

85

found useful in this writer, and what he chose to disregard. The first question is answered easily enough. It is a well-known fact that Bergson’s project of retrieving an unalienated model of modern experience included a critique of Helmholtziantype, associationist models of unconscious inference.87 In his reading of Bergson’s Time and Free Will Einstein appropriated that critique for his own purposes. The critique of causality as dissolution of concrete experience into general concept; the critique of a spatialized temporality as dissolution of qualitative punctual experience into an empty repetition of uniform moments: both these Bergsonian arguments are present, in highly condensed form, in the “Totality” essay. Consider the following passage. Causal analysis is purely retrospective and always exceeds the concrete object; it is the causes that are being constructed here, but not the totality. The causes of an object are always located on a level different from that of the object itself. Causal thinking dissolves into an unarticulated multiplicity and externalizes its object into the allegory of a nonsensuous process that is extrinsic to that object. For that reason it can say nothing about its form, its quality. (T 220; T2 120)88

Causal thinking destroys sculpture as totality. Mentally to synthesize a sculptural object like the Wittelsbacher Fountain through unconscious inference is to venture beyond that object as a formal construct that’s given to experience now. For to treat the incomplete visual information about its three-dimensional appearance as so many effects of an absent cause is to activate, by recourse to a repertory of memory images, a concept of three-dimensionality of which the object itself is considered a mere fragmentary instantiation. It is this reliance on memory as resource of causal generalization that makes the inferential model of sculptural experience at once abstract and antiquarian. Further, what Bergson calls now “intellectual thought,” now “discursive reason,”89 is what Einstein called “quantitative thinking”: a form of knowledge that quantifies what is originally qualitative in experience, and that spatializes what is originally a nonspatial temporality. To make the point, Einstein used Bergson’s well-known attack on the model of quantitative time as numerical sequence: “Science measures time indirectly, by recourse to magnitude, and thereby transforms it into a simultaneous spatial entity” (T 220; T2 120).90 But to space out punctual sensations as so many increments on a scale (1, 2, 3 . . .) is to derealize temporal experience several times over. It is to suggest that this experience is uniform at every instance; that the uniformity is itself subject to a uniform repetition; and that what used to be its intensity—a fluctuation that belongs to this particular experience and is incommensurable to all others—now becomes a measurable extensity, one that’s separated from all other experiences by an empty interval. We have encountered this empty interval before. For, as Bergson makes clear, it is an interval that opens up—and is immediately filled—as soon as visual

86

Form as Revolt

perception is defined as inferentially binocular: “The more you insist on the difference between the impressions made on the retina by two points on a homogeneous surface, the more do you thereby make room for the activity of the mind, which perceives under the form of extensive homogeneity what is given it as qualitative heterogeneity.”91 Even before the Helmholtzian viewer performs a synthesis of sensory impressions, he has already interpreted them as spatialized: 1, 2. He will then go on to fill the empty quantitative difference of the interval he has carved out between them with his own epistemological activity, which consists in sublating two contradictory impressions into a single synthetic syllogism. We now understand why time, as spatialized time, is foreign to Einstein’s model of sculptural experience. The simultaneity that he insists is its modality is not a synthesis of two disparate moments of perception; it is rather the very difference between them: “Time, imagined purely, must mean the qualitative difference of experiences” (T 219; T2 120).92 The “Totality” essay’s model of time sounds very close to Bergson’s definition of duration as “a succession of qualitative changes.”93 But Einstein also departs from Bergson in significant ways. Martin Jay has pointed out that, for all his insistence on the heterogeneity of duration, Bergson tended to consolidate its flow, and so blunt the edge of his own concept, by comparing it to the experience of a melody, “which intertwines past, present and future in a meaningful whole.”94 Unlike Bergson, or Bergson fans like Simmel, Einstein was not interested in thinking the temporal experience of a sculptural totality as an unbroken undulation, a “succession without distinction.”95 He was rather interested in thinking it as punctual and differential. Hence, I suggest that in order to understand Einstein’s Bergsonism properly, we should consider it together with another: the Bergsonism of Gilles Deleuze. After all, Deleuze, too, endorsed Bergson’s distinction between an epistemology of gradual, “numerical multiplicity” and a nonepistemological experience of a qualitative, “continuous multiplicity”; but he was much more interested in the multiple than in the continuous.96 Moreover, both Einstein and Deleuze were interested in imagining a formal structure, whether an artwork or a system of philosophy, that is a self-supporting entity not grounded in an a priori. “Totality never excludes anything, i.e., it is not preceded by either a positivity or a negativity” (T 218; T2 119).97 A totality is not based on a negation, for that would imply it is ontologically insufficient, that it emerges into being in distinction from something else that it is not.98 Nor is a totality based on a prior “positivity,” in the manner a naturalistic sculpture is based on a live model; for that, in Deleuze’s terms, would reduce it to a mere realization of the possible.99 Einstein’s totality rather exists only insofar as it constitutes itself within the immanence of its own form. It is then as an actualization of the virtual, in Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, that the totality of Einstein’s Chokwe figure confronted the Western viewer in 1915: as a formal construct that generates qualitative difference entirely within itself:

Sculpture Ungrounded

87

“The actualization of the virtual . . . always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation. Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle.”100 A totality is originally multiple: it is only insofar as it is always already differential. Moreover, a totality is always a “concrete totality,” a “pregnant qualitative configuration” (T 218, 219; T2 120): its formal structure is so fully deployed that “it can neither be derived from parts nor traced back to a higher unity” (T 218; T2 119).101 A totality is not an organic relation of parts to whole any more than an incomplete copy of a more perfect version of itself. And therein lies the radical potential of art as totality for Einstein, its “formal realism” (NP 242; NS 130): in the fact that since being is fundamentally structured by the differential quality of form, visual art, as formal totality, is able to actualize it most fully, without lapsing into the dualism of the real and the possible, of general concept and particular case, of nature and artwork. Form is the name of that perfect identity of vision and individual realization which are structurally isomorphic and which do not relate as concept and individual case. Vision does indeed encompass several possible cases of realization, but it possesses no higher qualitative reality than they. It follows that art represents a special case of unconditioned intensity, and that quality must be generated undiminished within it. (NP 245; NS 133)102

Visual art as form is at once the postulate and the application of qualitative difference: this is the concreteness of its formal realism. As Einstein put it in Negro Sculpture, clearly with the Chokwe figure’s differential configuration of forward and backward thrust in mind, “Because art by definition fixates its object, this oneness [of cubic space] is split up into two opposite directions and so articulates two wholly divergent tendencies that elsewhere, e.g. in the infinite space of the mathematician, are quite unimportant” (NP 246; NS 133).103 Dismissing quantitative for qualitative space, duration for simultaneity, and identity for opposition, art as totality is an arrestment of Bergson’s continuous multiplicity into the starkness of sculptural form. There is a final twist, which returns us to the issue with which this chapter began: the relation between sculpture and ground, or, more specifically, sculpture and context. In 1915, the critic Walter Riezler praised “the self-evidentness with which the Wittelsbacher Fountain arises from its situation”; and in his survey of contemporary art Wilhelm Hausenstein declared, with customary hyperbole, that “there cannot be anything more perfect in the field of site-specific sculpture [Situationsplastik].”104 Riezler and Hausenstein were echoing claims made by Hildebrand himself on the issue of sculpture in its architectural context. Hildebrand was deeply troubled by the way in which the reorganization of modern city centers around 1900 increasingly turned them into jumbles of historical and contemporary structures. The

88

Form as Revolt

public square looked like an incoherent palimpsest to him, an assembly of buildings and monuments as disjunctive solitaires, their relations plotted by nothing but chance.105 The failure of epistemological totalization that Hildebrand sensed, at the level of the individual sculpture, as the “anxiety of the cubic,” was matched, at the level of its architectural environment, by a version of the agoraphobia (Platzscheu) that the urbanist Camillo Sitte had diagnosed as a phenomenological disease of the modern city.106 Like Sitte, Hildebrand felt compelled to provide a cure. Whether in his critique of Rodin’s Citizens of Calais; in his praise for the Piazza della Signoria in Florence as a harmonic ensemble of medieval architecture and Renaissance sculpture; or in his descriptions of his own public projects: for Hildebrand, it was always a question of designing a public sculpture in such a way that it established both an internal and an external commensurability of form.107 Internal, by organizing a monument as optical relief; external, by inserting it into the urban situation so seamlessly that the monument and its context jointly formed a new, optical metatotality.108 The ambiguous control game at stake here becomes starkly clear when we find Wölfflin call the Wittelsbacher Fountain a monument “so powerful, it will immediately ‘assign the viewer his place’ [seinen Platz anweist].”109 Platzanweisung as antidote to Platzscheu: that is a fitting metaphor for the effort to redeem the vertiginous experience of the modern city by organizing public space as spectacle—by setting up a screen-like relief for people who are ushered in front of it to assemble there as its passive audience. If Hildebrand’s goal was a seamless merger of monument and context, Einstein’s was just the reverse. To understand his argument, we need to remind ourselves that what frontality is for relief, a pedestal or base is for freestanding sculpture: a device that shapes, or fails to shape, the relation between object and site. On that note, consider the Chokwe object again, specifically the relation between figure and base. Einstein claimed that it is a defining trait of most African sculptures that unlike their European counterparts they don’t need a base, and that if they do have one, “it will be accentuated sculpturally” (NP 248; NS 136).110 Einstein’s point was that the Chokwe object collapses the figure/pedestal logic of European freestanding sculpture.111 A pedestal’s job is to mediate between aesthetic sphere and public space: between the figure on top of it and the context around it. But, as Einstein correctly observed, the Chokwe object disrupts that mediation by integrating the base into the sculpture itself. For the design of the base is a function of what I have called the qualitative syntax of movability that structures the figure above it. The base extends just far enough for the limbs to deploy themselves along the vertical axis, which is to say that it both defines and contains the space that the figure displaces. That makes the base an element of the totality of the work, which unlike Hildebrand’s resists integration into a metatotality. Wherever the object will happen to be placed, it will seem out of place.

Sculpture Ungrounded

89

And that is the groundlessness of African sculpture: that the object internalizes its uprootedness from its origin as its form, and then radiates it back out as its phenomenological resistance to its new context. Deprived of its ritual function, it refuses to serve an aesthetic function. It doesn’t belong in either the museum of ethnography or the museum of fine arts. Because it doesn’t belong.

Toward the Real At the outset of this chapter I argued that Negro Sculpture’s “Notes on Method” bear the traces of Einstein’s style of nonessence. The same is true, it may have emerged, for the core argument of the entire book. Negro Sculpture is a manifesto of African art, but it is also a lost wanderer’s phenomenology of space. It is not difficult to see that Einstein’s hostility to inferential vision or genius aesthetics is motivated by his general aversion to prime causes or absolute origins, whether to Rodin as the cause of his sculptures’ modelé or to God as the origin of Creation. For Einstein to deplore the “geneticism” of an artwork, to insist that it shouldn’t be considered the present effect of a past cause, was to demand that it be as groundlessly autogenetic as his own prose. Whether “totality,” his name for such artworks, is a discursive or a writerly term is a question that his texts will never quite settle. For to state that “totality is a concept that cannot be deduced in any way, and which can neither be derived from parts nor traced back to a higher unity,” is to produce a cascade of sheerly negative traits. As such, that definition is no different from Einstein’s definition of the meaning of the fetish or of the being of the pauper (see chapter 1) Moreover, to argue that in African sculpture “the oneness” of the spatial continuum “is split up into two opposite directions, which extend out from points centrals,” is to say that the Chokwe sculpture’s kneecaps and elbows are its phenomenological indifference points. The sculpture is cleft in two, “simultaneously” (gleichzeitig), down along the zero of its vertical axis; rather like the protagonist of “The Pauper” or the history-maker of the “Political Notes” are split up across the Wortfolge of a sentence. So, is the plate section of Negro Sculpture a gallery of Einstein personas? Personas that inhabit the nonspace of the photographic image the way Einstein’s protagonists inhabit the nonspace of his prose? It is tempting to think so. When Einstein declared himself unsure whether certain African masks in his plates represented either a frightened face or a frightening one; and when he called this the “ambiguous equivalidity” (zweideutige Gleichgültigkeit) of their psychology—then clearly what he saw in these masks was the portrait of a wanderer: a faciality of indifference, two opposed emotions extending across the blank slate of personhood.112 The product of the unique encounter between a lost wanderer and a set of uprooted objects, Negro Sculpture treads a fine line between a manifesto of visual art and

90

Form as Revolt

an extension of a solipsistic literary project. That makes it a hinge work between Einstein’s prewar prose and his postwar art criticism. “It is thanks to totality that the goal of all cognition and all efforts is no longer located in infinity, as an undefinable purpose, but is instead contained within the singular” (T 217; T2 119).113 A manifestation of doubleness within oneness, a “unity of opposites,” African sculpture kept the threat of infinity at bay, closing in on itself all while preserving the ambiguity that Maillol’s work had shunned. But what if that unity of opposites were extended out from the artwork, and became a relation between it and the viewer? Then, rather than being opposed absolutely, viewer and work would be interacting on a common ground. And what if the viewer were defined as the artist: as the maker of a work he keeps looking at while he keeps making it? Then, rather than with a scenario of passive beholding that may only end in either perfect fusion or catastrophic rupture, we would be dealing with a transitive exchange between two equals. The unity of opposites would now become the goal that the artist would keep pursuing as, for example, he paints a picture, and then another, and then still another. Admittedly, to the degree that it would be regrounded in the groundlessness of creative invention, the unity of opposites would have to become infinite again: uncertain, open-ended, as likely to fail as to succeed. But then, that is true for relations in the real world more generally, whether these are visual, political, or personal.

3

Cubism’s Passion

Cubism’s Originality This chapter has a double focus. It is devoted to Einstein’s writings on cubism as well as to the cubism he was writing on. The term meant something quite specific to him, for his interests were highly selective. For one thing, Einstein had no patience for the Salon cubists, and while he respected the work of Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, his essays on them are short and lesser texts. For another, Einstein had no compelling things to say on the Demoiselles d’Avignon or cubism at Cadaqués, and nothing much on collage and the papiers collés that he hadn’t stated on painting already. As for cubism in 1914, it remained as opaque to him as to everyone else. That leaves us with the core account: Einstein on the art of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1911 and 1912. After some brief and hesitant efforts before World War I, he developed that account in The Art of the 20th Century, above all in the first and third editions (1926, 1931), and again in the monograph he wrote on Braque (1934).1 I will explore that account in some depth, by outlining Einstein’s art-theoretical thoughts and then delivering an analysis of the art in their light. But first, a summary of the story so far will be useful. We have identified the problematic that had sent Einstein on a wanderer’s quest. Whether it was socialist politics, the being of the pauper, or the visuality of an African sculpture: each time we found Einstein probing an origin, essence, or ground that was not one but two, not a substance but a relation. And each time that relation turned out to be ambivalent at best, nihilist at worst. For each time Einstein was describing, and

92

Form as Revolt

enacting in his writing, a formal constellation in which two units were facing each other as antagonists across a void: two factions in the Reichstag, two existential moods, two aspects of a sculpture, two nouns in a clause. Einstein had tried to write an origin for modern politics and subjectivity, for sculptural experience and for experimental prose; but as that origin withdrew from him, no creation had been built on the abyss of its recession. What had emerged instead was the opposition that the recession had spawned in its wake: an opposition between divided terms around a point of indifference. The style of nonessence had written it many times across the page. Matters changed dramatically when Einstein was finally able to write extensively on cubism from the mid-1920s on. The shift from literature to art criticism was at the same time a shift from a nihilist ontology to a hopeful one. Braque and Picasso seemed to have completed the wanderer’s quest, for they had come up with “an image type that’s characteristic of the beginning twentieth century” (K3 117).2 As I suggested in my introduction, there is a double entendre here: the beginning century was the century of beginnings. It was the great era of modernity’s efforts at creating an origin for itself, an origin for new relations between people and people, people and world; relations that could be viable even though they were brutally uprooted from all extant traditions of customs, politics, religion, or art. Where the wanderer’s prose had failed to give these relations form, there Braque and Picasso had succeeded at it in their art: that was the hope. To account for the success in medium-specific terms, Einstein modified his terminology. Infinity and essence faded from his writing, but the notion of the ground became more central than before. Witness his announcement to his friend Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler that The Art of the 20th Century was going to be a gründlich study.3 Gründlich, or “thorough,” is derived from Grund, or “ground.” A gründlich book is a thorough book, but it is that because it explores the ground on which modern painting begins.4 Was that ground the surface of the canvas? Not exactly. In Einstein, a surface is one thing, but a ground is two. What went for the origin of African sculpture or the essence of socialist politics also went for the ground of a cubist painting: it was not a substance but a relation, not a unicity but a doubleness. Like all beginnings in the century, cubism’s beginning too was split. A painting begins the moment marks are made on a surface. But the moment they are so made is the moment they start engaging in a relation with it. In Braque and Picasso, that relation was between surface and space: between a blank canvas and a set of marks that try to carve some pocket of pictorial space into it. “Space and surface” are cubism’s “foundational conditions” (K3 82),5 and in Einstein’s writing they are as inextricable as an adjective and the noun that it modifies. Gründliches Raumerlebnis, gründliche Durchformung des Bildraums (K3 122, 43): phrases like these defy easy translation, but they accurately describe a visuality that’s both spatial and grounded in a surface.

Cubism’s Passion

93

Inextricable the relation may be, but it is far from harmonious. Between them, space and surface produced a tension in cubism around 1911/12 that Einstein called a “foundational contrast” (Grundkontrast; K3 125).6 To some degree, that contrast is always at work in a painting. But for Einstein, Braque and Picasso’s originality lay in the fact that they foregrounded the foundational contrast as visibly as never before; that they raised the question of just what kind of relation a contrast actually is, and what it might become. A great deal was riding on the answer to these questions. I stated just now that Einstein believed cubism was an unqualified success. That is indeed what he wanted to believe, but it is clear he had many moments of doubt. On one hand, he was observing a gründliche Umbildung in the art: a ground transformation that joined surface and space into a new kind of intimacy. But he also noticed a gründliche Spannung at work: a ground tension that juxtaposed the two as hostile adversaries (K3 66, 48).7 So, are we still on the Hegel territory we explored in chapter 1? In the new image type, did a negativity of groundlessness spawn an art of negative relations? Or did Braque and Picasso seize groundlessness as an opportunity for redefining relation in a positive way? In the first case, cubism would have continued the wanderer’s dark errancy in another medium. In the second, it would have been an original event in the strong sense of the term: a visual revolution to match the political revolutions in Luxemburg and Gramsci. This chapter examines whether it was that and on what grounds. Much of its analytical framework is Einstein’s, but most of the visual analyses are my own. The Einstein scholar Charles Haxthausen has demanded that we finally do what readers of Walter Benjamin have been doing for decades: that, instead of just rehearsing our hero’s ideas, we make them productive for our own art-historical work.8 The descriptions I will deliver below are my response to that injunction.

An Ethics of Function Epistemology is . . . the attempt to evacuate the center of the world for a safe tangential position, to produce a division . . . into a domain of subjects and a domain of objects. This tangential position is gained by renouncing the nature of the world as a fabric of effects; instead, one aims at conceiving it in terms of spherical limits and cross sections. But positing an inner and an outer world is merely a matter of perspective, a question of power, and so is the postulate of a self-enclosed human figure on one hand, inert objects on the other. The same method of suppression is at work in the postulate of causal sequences.9 It transpired that the object is a nexus of functions; that it is the result, as well, of the action of a subject; that its apparent stasis is above all a matter of linguistic habituation and of the desire to enable convenient—that is, conformist—actions; the object, in short, is a matter of biological memory. (K1 58)10

94

Form as Revolt The trafficking in substances had everywhere gone bust. The venerable idea of the soul, solid and immobile like a sideboard, had been dispersed functionally; the stable I was revealed as a mere facade, a prejudice; matter was dissipated into discontinuous force fields, and philosophical concepts were recognized for what they were: signs of psychological fatigue, mere negative states.11 It’s nonsense to assume a fixed psychological identity. The I is a function that increases and decreases in intensity.12 In experience, subject and object signify limit states, extremes of action; in thought, they signify limit terms and resistances. What must be restored is the subject-object process in its full complexity and lability. That is, any process is possible at all only through the intimate binding of both forces. (B 293)13 We are no longer positioned across from a motif as observers, with the neat distinction between inner and outer world firmly in place; rather, things are now a function of man just as man is a function of the world. (B 339)14

These passages from the survey’s cubism chapter, the Braque monograph, and several related texts show how Einstein was enlisting various theoretical resources for his art-critical task. What he called a world of “force fields” or a “fabric of effects” is better known through cognates from the work of a number of modern thinkers. To mention only the two who were most relevant to him: Friedrich Nietzsche called it a “world of relationships” or of “complexes of events”;15 and Ernst Mach, a world of “element complexes.”16 At stake in these technical terms was the early twentieth century’s singular contribution to the history of ontology: a revision, from the ground up, of the fabric of the modern world and of people’s place in it. One major consequence of the revision was succinctly expressed by Mach’s famous dictum that das Ich ist unrettbar:17 that the notion of a punctual, substantive subject located in a world inhabited by equally punctual objects was no longer tenable. “An isolated ego exists no more than an isolated object,” Mach insisted; “both are provisional fictions of the same kind.”18 That is a conceivably radical move. Up until Mach, Nietzsche, William James, Bergson, and Whitehead, thinkers in the tradition of Bewußtseinsphilosophie from Descartes through Hegel and Freud, had agreed on a basic assumption about what it means for anything to be in the world. This assumption was that in a relation between two or more elements—subject and object, master and slave, self and other—it is the elements that precede the relation rather than the other way around. Subjects variously observe, know, negate, desire, miss, or otherwise interact with objects that they confront on the other side of some primordial division. Subjects and objects are primary and divided; relation is secondary; and relation’s job consists in negotiating the division: defying it, asserting it, bridging it over.

Cubism’s Passion

95

It is this order of things that was shattered by Mach, when in his ontology the primordial division came down as he inverted the primacy of the elements over their relation. To explain that inversion, Mach used a term from mathematics that recurs many times in Einstein as well: the term “function,” as in the expression “x is a function of y”: x = f(y). As Mach put it with typical concision, “Where two or more immediately dependent elements are connected by a single equation, each is a function of the others.”19 Hence in a function it is the relation itself that is prior to the elements it relates, for the latter do not meaningfully exist before it, outside it, or independently of it. Or to put this in the terms in which it mattered to Einstein: we are always already related to other people and the nonhuman world before we ever turn into subjects over against the objects of “our” experience. Relation is primary, subject- and objecthood are secondary. In fact, subject- and objecthood are deficient modes of relation, mere “limit states” or “resistances,” as Einstein called them. So far, so Machian. But as my opening quotes demonstrate, Einstein drifted his ontology into another territory, and so turned it into a proper ethics rather than just a physics: the territory of Nietzsche’s Will to Power. For Einstein as for Nietzsche, as decades later for Michel Foucault, what is at stake in all functional relations is power; where power is defined as a medium, not as a substance.20 Power is not a prize over whose possession the parties in a relation will fight it out; rather, power is the very material of their relation. In Einstein, a functional relation is a kind of zero-sum game in which a finite amount of power circulates as if on a sliding scale back and forth between x and y, subject and object, so that each of them constantly “increases and decreases in intensity.” In an important letter to his friend Ewald Wasmuth from 1923, Einstein described this back-and-forth as a “struggle within the subobjective function between subjectivation and objectivation.”21 “Subobjective function” is a neologism with which he tried to express the intimacy of a relation that knows no division among its elements. “Subjectivation” and “objectivation” in turn are meant to describe the conflicting wills to power that animate it. Where objectivation wins out, power has shifted all the way to the object pole; as when a person momentarily loses his or her sense of self-identity, enthralled by a searing vista, an irresistible obsession, the pull of a mass demonstration toward the Reichstag or the onslaught of violence that seeks to repel it. Objectivation is our yielding to other people or the nonhuman world that renders us powerless. Subjectivation is just the opposite; it is our own self-assertion within a relation. It can be a narrow escape from grievous harm, the mapping of meaning onto a landscape in a poem composed on the spot, the ecstatic consummation of desire, or the exhilaration of crushing the political enemy in the street. In Einstein’s ethics, subjectivation and objectivation are the poles between which our existence fluctuates. Whether at a political meeting or in an intimate relationship, whether in the street or in the studio: that life is desirable that, rather than resisting

96

Form as Revolt

this fluctuation, embraces it—embraces the fact that “things are a function of man just as man is a function of the world.”

The Image-Object The question arose whether objects ought to be reproduced or a free image-object ought to be invented. (K1 56)22 The artist keeps entirely to the formal conditions of the picture surface; the individual object is sacrificed to the image-body; but the annihilation of the object, the flight from the mnemotechnics of civilization or from practical necessity is not all; rather, viewing, which is so often saddled with mystifications, is finally laid bare for what it is. (K1 59)23 One day people had to stumble upon the fact that space doesn’t signify a fixed condition but rather a process, a suffering and a doing, that space is merely a convenient abbreviation and schematization of what in truth is a manifold experience. . . . But once the inferior schema of passive observing, which accepts reality as an immutable given, was disrupted, the real itself became a problem and a task. (B 321)24 Now things could no longer be represented but had to be created. This attitude is thoroughly atheist, for the shape of the world is no longer considered a divine and ultimate solution; rather, man is assigned the task of inventing man and world—those defective provisoria—ever anew again. (B 313)25

How, according to Einstein, does this ethics get deployed in art, and specifically in painting? By the way in which a painter gives form to visual experience. Looking around yourself, organizing your field of vision, is one way in which you relate to the world: the way of a viewer. The moment a painter steps up to the easel is the moment he or she starts defining what it means to be such a viewer, using the specific means at his or her disposal: brush and pigment, color and line. In Einstein’s terms, this is the moment when painter and canvas join up into a functional relation: the moment when a power exchange of visibility unfolds between them. Because in Einstein, painter and canvas start out at ontological cross-purposes. The canvas is a flat, two-dimensional surface, which the painter will try to nullify by recording the three-dimensional volumes of bodies and things on it. With a nod to Richard Wollheim, I will call this effort the painter’s volume-seeing.26 In Einstein, the surface is a stand-in for objectivation: a stand-in for other people and the nonhuman world. As such, the surface is the painter’s opposite, that share of the world that resists all efforts at mapping his or her meanings onto it. Volume-seeing in turn is the painter’s impulse to do precisely that. It is a will to carve familiar or desirable shapes into the surface, to project three-dimensional replicas of bodies and things into a space not actually there.

Cubism’s Passion

97

Volume-seeing is the will to subjectivation, and the surface is its objective counterpart. As I suggested above, the opposition between them is what Einstein called the foundational contrast (Grundkontrast). The way in which a painting formalizes that contrast determines its ethical value. For example, the painting may resolve it into the complete victory of volume-seeing over surface, and so effectively deny the contrast even exists. That is what Einstein believed Renaissance art had done, by which he meant Italian High Renaissance painting as described in Wölfflin’s Classic Art.27 And it is why Einstein despised it so much: because of what he felt was its deeply unethical anthropocentrism. By rendering the surface invisible under three-dimensional bodies in motion on a receding ground plane, Renaissance painting had given free rein to volume-seeing, and so staged a functional relation in which power had been shifted all the way to the pole of subjectivation.28 It is also why, conversely, Einstein admired cubism so much. For by acknowledging “the surface as arch-phenomenon” (K1 64),29 cubism unfolded the foundational contrast between volume-seeing and surface that the Renaissance had rendered invisible. The result was the “piercing of the closed form,” as Kahnweiler famously put it: the fracturing of illusionistic volumes of people and things all across the canvas.30 Unlike his friend, Einstein keenly felt the negativity at work in that fracturing; but still he insisted that “the annihilation of the object” was “not all.” Getting rid of a fiction enables you to act, and cubism’s act was one of liberation: the liberation of the artist from his fictive mastery over the world to his acceptance of his actual precariousness within it—and to an invention that was enabled by that acceptance. The illusionistic object of Renaissance painting was lost forever, but another object was gained in its wake: the “image-object” (Bildgegenstand). What is an image-object?31 An image-object is a novelty with a double origin. It is not a represented figure or thing but an invented one whose exact shape isn’t seen before the moment brush is put to canvas. For an image-object is as much of the surface (Bild) as it is of volume-seeing (Gegenstand), and hence is a phenomenon that ontologically exists on canvas only. That is the image-object’s autonomy, its Selbständigkeit: that it can stand on its own two feet precisely because it has a foot each in both— volume-seeing and surface, painter and world.32 An image-object does not belong to either of the parties in a subobjective function but is rather a visual statement of their relation. It strikes a precarious formal balance between subjectivation and objectivation, a balance that will vary from painting to painting or even from detail to detail. For the cubist space in which the image-object exists is radically instable; it is Alberti’s space seen through the Will to Power. Space is not “a fixed condition” but “a process, a suffering and a doing”: an image-object’s volume, or lack of it, is the product of an open-ended power negotiation. The artist’s “doing” consists in seeing volume into the surface, his “suffering” in allowing the surface a comeback to his effort. Any image-object is the form of this back-and-forth. It renders salient how our viewing in the fabric of effects is at once fragile and inventive; how “man is assigned the task of inventing man and world—those defective provisoria—ever anew again.”33

98

Form as Revolt

A final point before we look at some examples. Certain image-objects clearly held a special significance for Einstein. After all, what does it mean to say that in cubism “every complex painting will contain a number of psychological and biological contrasts in face of which all talk of merely formal oppositions will fall away as so much superficial blather”? Or that mandolin and guitar “seem equivalent to the human figure” and “might make us think of a bisexual motif ” (B 344, 362)?34 It would appear Einstein noticed something peculiar in cubism. He never described what he saw in detail, and as will become clear he couldn’t have, not in an official artist monograph or in a Propyläen survey of contemporary art. But he did give a name to it. He called it an image-body (Bildkörper; K1 59). What then is an image-body? An image-body is a particular kind of image-object. It emerges from a foundational contrast that is specifically erotic. An image-body formalizes a relation between man and woman in which the full range of amorous passion, from tenderness through delirium to shamelessness, is released onto canvas. If all goes well, an image-body will give form to an eroticism in which both partners are granted full visual equality. And that is the image-body’s ethics: that here man becomes a function of woman just as woman becomes a function of man. The image-body’s presence in cubism makes it part of a well-known tradition of French painting that at once summoned the female figure onto the canvas and problematized our access to it: by putting the artist-as-male and the artist-as-artist at cross-purposes with one another.35 Einstein can help us understand how cubism took that project, the project of Manet and Degas, into the early twentieth century. In the functional space of Braque and Picasso, the body became more delirious and more elusive than it had ever been. The result was what Einstein called cubism’s visuell geistige Leidenschaft, its “visually intellectual passion” (K1 72). That is a vintage wanderer’s phrase: the adverb both modifies and opposes the adjective; together they form a pair of terms across from a blank. A number of major cubist paintings were such blanks. They were indifference points between the visual and the intellectual, and so gave birth to a uniquely double passion. Cubism was both systemic and quaint, a new visual ontology and an outmoded studio art, a general treatise on modern experience and a shamelessly intimate fantasy. In exploring its passion in the pages to follow, I will try to keep these dissonant registers in view. Space was volume, but volume was body: this chapter started out with Mach, but it will end with Beautiful Eva.

Braque: The Open Cylinder In 1908, Braque told Gelett Burgess: “I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness . . . I haven’t the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression.”36

Cubism’s Passion

99

Typically for Braque, a complex definition of artistic eroticism is built into a few terse sentences. First, making a virtue out of necessity (“I haven’t the skill”), Braque describes a shift in his practice from an illusionistic, Renaissance-type eroticism to a formalist one. Rather than in the representation of a lovely body, this eroticism resides in the means of representing it: volume, line, and so on. Second, this eroticism is not a given but a task: it is not a matter of copying a motif but of being compelled to create a “beauty” that will—or will not—“appear.” Third, that appearance is subobjective: beauty, eroticism, will emerge only where paint and surface agree to cohere productively with the artist’s volume-seeing, his “subjective impression.” And finally, beauty may appear in genres besides the female nude, or so is the implication. After all, at the time he was talking to Burgess, Braque had stopped painting female figures and, with the exception of a single bust-length portrait, would not attempt representing them again until 1910. Instead, he was painting pictures like the Fruit Dish, now at Stockholm (fig. 3.1). At first blush, the work looks like standard cubist fare circa 1908: a midsize still life with a roughly textured earthen color range in which groups of eroticized pears cluster around a bowl overflowing with swelling fruit. A typical example of Braque trying his hand at Picasso’s Cézannism and, as usual, coming up a bit short? Not quite. If we ask what is specifically Braquean about the work, we will notice the presence of two formal constellations that cannot be found either in Cézanne or in Picasso at this time.37 They would prove significant indeed in the coming years. The first constellation recurs several times in the shape of the fruit bowl; it may well have prompted Braque to choose this particular vessel in the first place. I mean the bowl’s distinctly separate lobes (fig. 3.1a), each of which is typically composed of four formal units: a curved line, sometimes painted white, which serves as the lobe’s upper rim; another line that extends down the lobe’s side, distinguishing it from its neighbors; the outward bulge of the lobe’s “body,” whose contour these two lines define; and an expanse of paint just above the rim. Rim and paint expanse partake in a surface/volume tension that in various ways animates the still life throughout: a tension between concavity and convexity, hollow space and solid. Are we looking at the empty interior of the bowl or at the bulging shape of a palpable fruit? Taken up by the pile of fruit in the bowl, the theme is diffusely erotic, if in an admittedly not very compelling way. The second constellation is even less noticeable. It comes in two main parts: the low “platform”—a plate warmer wrapped in a napkin?—on which the fruit bowl is resting; and one of the longest bananas in the history of still life, which is looping around platform and bowl from our left. I will share a few brief observations about them, which for now will seem forced but in a few pages will become salient. Try to extract platform and banana from their naturalistic context, and consider them strictly in terms of their relation as shapes. With a bit of effort it will become apparent that they jointly formalize a basic way of carving out a volume from a surface: by establishing the in-frontness and in-backness of what would otherwise be just a flat silhouette. The platform (and part of the bowl) is that silhouette, and the

100

Form as Revolt

Figure 3.1. Georges Braque, Fruit Dish, 1908/9. Oil on canvas, 53 × 64 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

banana helps it acquire plasticity. By emerging from behind the bowl, circling down and around the platform, and then terminating in front of it, the banana declares that the platform inhabits a slice of space in between the two slices through which the banana itself is curving. Volume is created as one form embraces another: that, over and above its phallic shape, was the reason Braque chose the banana, a highly unusual still life object in any century, which he needed for its length and flexibility.38 What is most important about this painting, though, is that, strictly speaking, the two constellations I have described are in fact just one. At least potentially, fruit bowl lobe and banana/platform are versions of one another, for each is produced by the interaction between a curved shape and a straight shape: between lobe rim and side edge on one hand, banana and platform contour on the other. A certain abstract systematicity makes itself felt in a work that’s seemingly devoted to a phenomenology of still-life particulars; it is caused by the presence of a device that has not been fully activated yet. A year later that would change. In Braque’s Castle at La Roche-Guyon, painted in the summer of 1909 (fig. 3.2), a crucial detail is hiding in plain sight; a detail that would prove far more momentous

Cubism’s Passion

101

Figure 3.1a. The fruit bowl lobe in figure 3.1.

for the cubism of 1911/12 than the Cézannist faceted blocks swirling all around it. I mean a constellation of forms right at the center, halfway up between chateau and hilltop donjon (fig. 3.2a). It looks as if it might be either part of the chateau’s crenellated back wall, or else a narrow path winding its way around the cliff face on route to the donjon. But photographs of La Roche-Guyon past and present record no exact equivalent in the topography.39 Nor could they, for the constellation is not natural but formal; it is a descendant of the Stockholm fruit-bowl lobe. At La Roche-Guyon it comes in four parts: a curved white line; a straight white line that descends downward from the curve’s right end; the ochre-brown cliff section that these two lines enclose; and the swath of greenish shrubbery just above the curve. The difference from Stockholm is that the device has been visibly activated as what I call an open cylinder. The curve is the cylinder’s rim; the straight line is one of its edges; the cliff outcropping, carefully modeled in the round, is its outer wall; and the shrubbery is tricky. Consider the dominant direction of the brushstrokes of which the shrubbery is composed: they extend at a steep angle from lower left to upper right that is the

Figure 3.2. Georges Braque, Castle at La Roche-Guyon, 1909. Oil on canvas, 92.5 × 72.5 cm. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Figure 3.2a. The open cylinder in figure 3.2.

104

Form as Revolt

same as the angle of the cylinder’s inclination. The visual effect here is double. On one hand, the shrubbery is not so much sitting pat above the cylinder as it seems to be bursting forth from it. On the other hand, the more one is aware of this—the more closely one scrutinizes the brushwork qua brushwork—the more shrubbery and cylinder will reveal themselves for what they materially are: paint on canvas. What we have here is an image-object in which the opposites of volume-seeing and surface are intimately joined by way of a continuous exchange between outside and inside. To the extent the cylinder’s exterior visually maintains itself as cliff outcropping, it insists on being a rounded volume rather than just surface matter. But then, to the extent it insists on being a volume, it also suggests that, like all volumes, it has an interior. Which means that, to the extent it then goes on to spew forth paint from that interior, the cylinder agrees that, after all, surface matter is the stuff of which it itself, and indeed everything else around it, is made. “Farewell to landscape, to the given world,” Einstein wrote about Braque and Picasso’s landscapes (K1 71).40 Farewell indeed: as painting begins anew, volumeseeing and surface join into a single loop of autogenetic formalization. Together they blaze a trail into a field of vision that continuously erupts itself into itself, the product and the producer of a double origin. Given the shape and inclination of La Roche-Guyon’s open cylinder, the erotic nature of the eruption is obvious enough—too obvious, in fact. It would be explored further in the years to come, when Braque abandoned the cosmogonic fanfare of landscape for the intimate subtleties of passionate portraiture.

Braque: The Image-Body Let me leap right into the thick of things: 1911, the year in which Braque upgraded the open cylinder from local incident to basic unit of formalization. The marvelously evanescent painting at Düsseldorf is a good place to start examining its stakes (fig. 3.3). On this canvas, volume-seeing is no longer a given but a task. A volume will emerge, to varying degree or not at all, from the interaction between the brush guided by the eye and some local section of the surface. Each interaction produces an image-object that is both generalizable and singular. It is generalizable in the sense that each time it is an open cylinder; it is singular in the sense that each open cylinder is a unique negotiation of the foundational contrast. What makes it unique is the degree of visual consistency the cylinder manages to acquire: the degree to which volume-seeing is able, or unable, to activate the surface and jointly produce with it an image-object. At one extreme, an open cylinder will turn into a fully individuated thing with firm contours, internal shading, cast shadows, proper foreshortening, and rotational slant into depth. Examples include the scroll ornament on the armchair rest in the

Cubism’s Passion

105

lower left corner; the wineglass (or gas jet?) a few inches up and to the right; the violin scroll; and the violin neck, whose bottom part is composed of a double-rimmed open cylinder receding obliquely back into space. But an open cylinder can also be just an empty wireframe of black contours hovering about, the rim and side edge of a volume that never coalesces because the surface refuses to let them transform it into a bulge. It is then, but only then, that the open cylinder deserves the name that Yve-Alain Bois, taking his cue from Kazimir Malevich, has given it: the “sickle.”41 For Bois’s observation is valuable, but it tells only half the story. The sickle is not the formal device of Braque’s cubism; it is rather just one instantiation of that device, which is the open cylinder. It is through its inflations and deflations that the open cylinder diagrams the shifting of visual power back and forth on the sliding scale of function. And in Braque’s ethics, the sickle—the open cylinder maximally deflated—stands for the defeat of volume-seeing by surface, for the artist’s voluntary relinquishment of visual power to the world. Braque himself described his painterly project in just this way. He is not on record as a philosophical mind, but his remarks on what he called “the exigencies of painting” condense into a few sentences the ethics of volume-seeing that Einstein extracted from Mach and Nietzsche: “The object cannot appear except to the extent painting allows it to appear.” “It’s not a matter of starting out from the object but of heading towards it.” “I was unable to introduce the object until after I had created the space.”42 “Objects don’t exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them and myself.”43 Sometimes, painting will prevent the artist from seeing volume into its surface, the object will fail to appear, and no rapport will be established. At Düsseldorf, that failure has a special poignancy. For there are not just image-objects here; there is also the presence, still tentative, of a metaphorical image-body. In order to get it properly into focus we need to understand which genre we are even looking at. I have deliberately avoided referring to the work by its customary title, Still Life with Harp and Violin, for that is a misnomer. The painting is actually a Man with a Violin: a three-quarter-length frontal portrait, one of many in Braque and Picasso’s cubism, of a seated male figure in an armchair with a musical instrument resting in his lap. First, note the chair’s armrest scroll at lower left (fig. 3.3). It recurs in Braque’s Emigrant, his Woman Reading, and the MoMA Man with a Guitar and provides a clue about scale and aspect (fig. 3.5; R 99, R 92). Second, relate the scroll and the armchair it implies to the size and location of the violin and try to imagine the large and admittedly schematic black circle segments near top center as the man’s face and neck. Above all, third, note the contoured hand that is holding an angular plectrum to the violin’s body a few inches to the right of the f-hole (fig. 3.3a). This is one ingenious image-hand, its fingers and plectrum all generated by a sequence of nested open-cylinder elements that ascend from the violin’s tailpiece. Not only does the hand prove the musician’s presence in the painting; it also introduces an erotic dimension into its functional power exchange of visibility. The exchange is between two parties: the musician’s hand and plectrum on one hand, the

Figure 3.3. Georges Braque, Still Life with Harp and Violin (so-called), 1911. Oil on canvas, 116 × 81 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Figure 3.3a. The hand and plectrum in figure 3.3.

108

Form as Revolt

violin on the other. The violin’s body seems to be evaporating into the brownish haze of the painting’s ambience to the degree that the hand manifests in front of it in order to pluck it. This is the first example, as yet imperfect, of a zero-sum game of erotic power in Braque’s cubism: as volume-seeing produces a male presence in the canvas, a metaphorical female body—for that, as I shall argue in a moment, is what the violin is—withdraws into the surface. Objectivation countermands subjectivation. It is true that the trade-off is still rendered a bit awkwardly. For one thing, there is an unwelcome narrative dimension here—the illusion, almost futurist, of an explosion of violin into ambience. For another, the trade-off is not really a trade-off, because. strictly speaking. an evaporation is not a formalization: it is a withdrawal from form, as opposed to the form of a withdrawal. A different solution had to be found, one that would join musician and instrument into a proper unity of opposites instead of making the one vanish as the other emerged. And it was found. Braque’s Man with a Violin at Zurich (fig. 3.4) is a darkly luminous oval, blindingly bright around its two foci, basked in darkness almost everywhere else. It too is a three-quarter-length portrait. The musician is likely sitting in a chair, and the violin is resting horizontally either in his lap or on the surface of a table that has been pulled right up in front of him. To be sure, all other details in the painting are radically in doubt. The physiognomy of the man’s face is all but washed out by a flash of Turner-grade luminosity. A lone sickle underneath it tries and fails to register as his neck; and its many companions to either side of the ethereal torso do not fare much better. It all looks like an easy victory of surface over volume-seeing, more than halfway on route to Mondrian. But a careful look at the painting’s lower half will complicate matters dramatically. Something is not quite right with the violin (plate I). Its strings extend from the tailpiece and fine tuners at left and after a brief hiatus pass between the two f-holes toward the right. That f-hole area contains a detail that musicologically speaking shouldn’t be there: a circle segment that, partly overlapped by the strings, is located on axis with the f-holes, and hence like them must be resting on the obliquely uprighted surface of the instrument. A sound-hole, in other words. But what is a sound-hole doing on a violin, as opposed to a guitar? Artistic license? No doubt, but what is the point? The answer is lurking a few inches further down: right underneath the lower f-hole, where two parallel black lines rise up toward the sound-hole from an area occupied by two further circle segments, these segments adjacent to one another. But this language of geometry is putting the matter too abstractly; after all, this is the area of the musician’s crotch. Let me spell it out, then: the two circle segments at bottom are his testicles, and the parallel lines form the shaft of an open cylinder that ascends diagonally upward and terminates at the sound-hole, which doubles as the cylinder’s rim. The reason the violin has a sound-hole is that its body is being penetrated through its full height by an erection from below.

Figure 3.4. Georges Braque, Man with a Violin, 1912. Oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm. Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich.

110

Form as Revolt

Einstein was right, then, and so were the art historians who suspected as much later on: in a number of cubist paintings, the musical instrument is a metaphorical female body.44 But it is that in the starkest way imaginable. We are looking at an unexpected instantiation of the open cylinder indeed: an image-body, jointly composed of erection and musical instrument, which casts a new light on the origin and meaning of a familiar cubist phenomenon—the so-called sound-hole cylinder. The sound-hole cylinder is supposed to have emerged only in late 1912, in Picasso’s famous paperboard Guitar, and then for formal reasons that are narrowly epistemological, to do with the conversion of space into semiology, of protrusion and recession into a quasi-linguistic structure. The reality is different. The soundhole cylinder originated in painting in 1911; its formalism was explicitly erotic; and neither its emergence just beyond the threshold of vision nor its fluctuating expansions and contractions on the canvas can be adequately tracked by a rigidly diacritical system of oppositions.45 Nor is the Zurich Man with a Violin the only example. To varying degree of visibility, metaphorical image-bodies fused with sound-hole cylinders recur in a number of major cubist paintings from 1911 and 1912. The list includes Picasso’s Mandolin Player (1911), which may have been the first to have introduced it;46 Braque’s MoMA Man with a Guitar (1911/12; R 99); his Emigrant (1911/12); and another Man with a Violin (1911), this one at the Pompidou and, like the work at Düsseldorf, usually misidentified as a still life (figs. 3.5, 3.7, 3.16; plates I and II). Whether violin, mandolin, or guitar: each time we are looking at an open-cylindrical erection that attempts to penetrate it. And each time the erection belongs to a three-quarter-length musician, a highly unusual genre in any period, but one chosen by Braque and Picasso for a specific purpose. Half-length musicians, a common format in Terbrugghen or Caravaggio, would have been unsuitable, since a crotch-level zone was needed where instrument and arousal could merge. Let me attempt to make sense of this discovery. What we have here, formalized as a mix of shocking vulgarity and seductive subtlety, is the foundational contrast eroticized. The surface is the world; the artist who faces it is the volume-seer; the musician is the artist’s proxy and other in the painting; and the instrument is the point of contention between them. This tension, between the artist-as-artist in front of the canvas, and the artist-as-male within it, is what generates the cubist musical instrument as image-instrument: as a metaphorical body suspended between surface and volume. In an intimate relation between male and female, what is the distribution of power; and what are the terms, and the tone, of the subobjective function? What is the proximity, and what is the difference, between ecstatic fusion and brutal violation? Will a gentleness that exposes the latter as bizarre and ridiculous produce a unity of opposites instead? Braque’s paintings address these ethical questions by converting them into pictorial ones: How much visual autonomy—how much Selbständigkeit—will be ceded to the musical instrument? Does it maintain

Cubism’s Passion

111

its embeddedness in the surface, and so its freedom in the world? Or is it extracted from the surface as a volume, and so is penetrated by the musician? Is the soundhole cylinder inflated, lifting the instrument obliquely forward and out? Or is the cylinder being deflated, so that the surface folds the instrument back into itself, flattening the erection in the process? In his paintings from 1911/12, Braque spent infinite care on leaving these questions open. As he was negotiating the foundational contrast in the process of painting, Braque split himself up into two, into volume agent and surface agent, his brush by turns strengthening and weakening each party’s claim to visibility. Let me describe that split by focusing on the detail of the sound-hole cylinder in its two most complex instantiations: in the Zurich Man with a Violin and the Emigrant (figs. 3.4, 3.5; plates I and II). In both cases, the crucial area is the cylinder rim. Is the rim a volume-agent, or is it surface matter? Is it an ellipse, and hence a foreshortened circle that would fit what in that case would be a fully rounded volume underneath it like a lid fits a jar? Or is the rim a perfect circle, and hence a flat surface fact that would nullify the cylinder’s claim to three-dimensionality? Each time, Braque’s answer is an infinitely subtle yes. At Zurich, the sound-hole rim is missing an entire circle quadrant, so that the cylinder opens onto the surface, sinking back into it at the point of its own maximum elevation. Further, the topmost violin string doubles as a horizontal tangent to the rim, joining with it into a sickle whose claim to frontality is at variance with the shaft’s claim to obliquity. The f-holes only amplify the confusion. On one hand, their location one above the other visually folds the violin into the vertical, and so makes it immune to backward penetration and outward extraction. On the other hand, the upper f-hole is partly hidden from view and just a bit smaller than its partner; as if the soundboard were mildly foreshortened and hence, like the f-holes, obliquely positioned after all. Zurich is an extreme painting in every way. Braque exploited the formal properties of the oval in order to record an improbably concentrated and fleeting moment of delirious fusion.47 The oval’s double focus produces both a contrast and a rhyme between the musician’s washed-out face, which is located at one focus, and the penetrated image-body in his lap, which is located at the other. The oval’s format, which according to Picasso can signify “a circular plane seen in perspective,”48 binds them together even more intimately. Picasso’s remark may be taken to mean that, qua canvas, a cubist oval painting is a surface fact even as, qua silhouette, it is a receding volume. The Zurich oval would then be like the rim—somehow at once foreshortened and flattened—of an open cylinder, and so would internalize as its format the erotic unity of opposites stated by its composition. In the Emigrant, Braque tried a different tack. The most obvious difference from Zurich is that the instrument is hardly even there; no credible soundboard contours or neck are in evidence. Even so, Braque stated twice that the figure is a “guitarist”; and indeed we can see the strings and the sound-hole, not to mention the prominent

Figure 3.5. Georges Braque, The Emigrant (The Portuguese), 1911/12. Oil on canvas, 116.7 × 81.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel. Gift of Raoul La Roche, 1952.

Cubism’s Passion

113

cylinder and the testicle at its root.49 And the precedent of the Düsseldorf violin (fig. 3.3) clarifies the spectral nature of the instrument: again we are dealing with a zero-sum game of visibility. The guitar’s volume dissipates into the surface the moment the cylinder manifests at its center in order to penetrate it. The result is an erotic Cheshire guitar, an image-body composed of sexual arousal and its frustration. Still, volume-seeing tries to work with what it has got. It tries, for example, to declare the cylinder’s roundedness by establishing a uniform transition from highlighted to shaded areas down along its length. But the facture militates against the chiaroscuro effect it is supposed to generate. No brushstrokes in the Emigrant sit as smoothly and flat on the surface as those that went into painting the cylinder’s curvature. Moreover, the cylinder is only half as wide as the rim above it: Braque stopped painting it at that point where the flat band of paint would have turned into an unambiguous erection in the round. Three other details further amplify this ambiguity. First, there are the guitar strings. Most of them do not fully pass across the sound-hole rim but dissipate within it. The reason is simple: parallel lines are surface facts, hence their complete passage across the rim would have resolved the foundational contrast rather than stating it. Second, there are the intervals between the strings. The rim’s black contour partly disappears underneath them. As a result, the question of the rim’s exact shape—ellipse or circle?—is forever kept open, and with it the question of erotic satisfaction. Finally, there are the parallel lines that extend beyond the sound-hole toward the upper right. They are a deliberate pentimento. At one point the emigrant was meant to be holding an accordion. Its outline is still visible. It was sitting obliquely in his lap, extending from the left back toward the right. The black parallels are the upper contours of the accordion’s bellows. The bellows try to pull the guitar strings back into the space into which they claim to be receding. So, are the guitar strings surface agents or volume agents? If the strings were receding together with the bellows, there would be an accordion, and hence no guitar to penetrate for the cylinder. If the strings were to remain parallel, there would be a guitar but no recession, and hence no penetration. This then is Braque’s vocabulary for eroticizing the foundational contrast: elliptic circles, guitarless sound-holes, receding parallels. Each time an image-body is the site of an opposed fusion between surface and volume-seeing. Yet each time that fusion is stated as a suspension, layering, or dissipation: not as an irreconcilable conflict, but not as an easy merger, either. It is one elusive kind of passion; many Picasso fans, desensitized by the master’s rapports de grand écart, have mistaken it for hesitancy. What shall we call it? Einstein once called it Braque’s feine Gewalt (K1 76). The obvious English translation, “subtle violence,” is dissatisfying, since it suppresses the rich etymology of the German term fein. A postmedieval equivalent not just for the Latin subtilis but also for delicatus and tenuis, fein can mean “gentle,” “delicate,” “stretched out,” or “threadbare”—like a tenuous argument, but also like a finely spun web.50 Braque’s violence, Einstein was saying, not only imposes itself in a gentle fashion. It

114

Form as Revolt

Figure 3.6. Braque in his studio at 5, impasse de Guelma, Paris, 1911 or 1912 (detail). Laurens Archive, Paris.

also exposes its own delicacy as it does, its willingness to attenuate rather than force a visual claim, and be it at the risk of seeming to have failed to make it altogether. A mesmerizing photograph shows how the feine Gewalt extended to the artist himself. Taken in either 1911 or 1912, it shows Braque in his studio at the impasse de Guelma together with the Emigrant (fig. 3.6). Like so many photographs of Braque and Picasso from the 1910s, it is clearly staged. Why prop up the painting on the easel this low; why squat next to it in such a way that our view of the figure is partly obscured by its maker? In order to establish a tenuous equivalence between the two. Not only is Braque’s body exactly level with the emigrant’s; his posture, including the relation between profile head and frontal torso, is the same

Cubism’s Passion

115

as well, only rotated sixty degrees or so. Turn it sixty degrees back, and you are looking at Braque in the place and pose of the emigrant. Except that Braque is not holding a guitar but a palette and a bunch of brushes. In the photograph they project into the painting at the same angle at which the sound-hole cylinder projects forward and out toward them. The visual argument made by this formal rhyme is one we will see Picasso make as well (figs. 3.10, 3.11): a crotch-level open cylinder is not just like an erection but also like a brush. But by splitting the device in two, the photograph insists that in Braque erection and brush are not as one. The same tool that has painted in the cylinder has also painted out the guitar. Musician and artist relate as two opposites joined into the unity of a double self-portrait: a male who imagines seizing a body, and an artist who, by painting his picture, will give him a hard time of it.

Braque: Simultaneity While it is a startling discovery, the sound-hole cylinder image-body, to coin an ugly phrase, should not be considered the secret of Braque’s cubism finally exposed. Braque’s paintings aren’t accessible to a surface/depth hermeneutics; nothing is actually hidden in them. Instead, Braque explored what it means for a phenomenon to accede to visibility, to cross a threshold beyond which a peripheral blur in our field of vision will suddenly acquire the distinctness of a hallucination. I have made that case for certain details in Braque; it is time to step back and take in a painting as a whole. Above I called the Pompidou Braque a Man with a Violin rather than a still life, but that is a claim that still needs arguing (fig. 3.7). The following description is meant to back it up, but it is also intended to push the descriptive language into a territory of ambivalence that calls for a new Einsteinian term to resolve it. A man is seated in an armchair behind a small table on which a violin is lying horizontally; note the strings, the f-holes, and the neck and scroll at right. Note, furthermore, the chair’s armrest scroll at the left; the handless forearm raised at forty-five degrees next to it; the triangular “head area” at top right; the receding tabletop with its strongly accentuated horizontal front edge; and, in the bottom right quadrant, the two vertical strips underneath the table: they are the front side and one oblique side (folded forward) of a single table leg. The “head area” needs commentary to become visible at all. Two precedents should help. First, there is Braque’s own bust-length Girl with a Cross (1911; fig. 3.8), an unsuccessful work that is nonetheless instructive in one respect: as at the Pompidou, one of the several possible shapes of the face is an inverted triangle slightly inclined to our right. Second, there is Picasso’s Cadaqués Guitarist (1910; fig. 3.9), a three-quarter-length male musician who is seated in a chair, one forearm resting on a table that extends into the painting from our right. Observe how

Plate I. The image-body (details of figs. 3.4, 3.5, 3.7, 3.16).

Plate II. The image-body (schema).

Figure 3.7. Georges Braque, Still Life with a Violin, 1911. Oil on canvas, 130 × 89 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Cubism’s Passion

119

Figure 3.8. Georges Braque, Girl with a Cross, 1911. Oil on canvas, 55 × 43 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Braque copied the double-strip table leg right into his Pompidou painting; then note the Guitarist’s “head area.” By means of a juxtaposition of differently angled lines (some rectilinear, others diagonal) and differently colored planes (some dark ochre, others dark gray), Picasso is prompting us to imagine the guitarist in two alternative postures: either sitting straight up, with the head facing us frontally; or with the head inclined to our right—its shape an inverted triangle, among other options—and the shoulder slumped down toward the table. In the Pompidou painting’s “head area,” Braque was trying his hand at Picasso’s frontality/inclination formula, only with mixed results. Finally, note the image-body (fig. 3.7; plates I and II). We are looking down upon the violin on the tabletop, from which an open cylinder is obliquely rising forward and up right through it. The cylinder terminates in a circle-segment rim, which, as at Zurich (fig. 3.4), doubles as the violin’s sound-hole. It is unclear what the cylinder is supposed to be. One would be grateful if it were just a candlestick,

120

Form as Revolt

Figure 3.9. Pablo Picasso, Guitarist, 1910. Oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. André Lefèvre, 1952.

which it may well be, given the presence of a circular base (a dish?) on the table from which it seems to be projecting. But we cannot rule out that we are being asked to imagine an erection piercing both the tabletop and the violin from below. Either way, whether literal or metaphorical, this is a lurid fantasy, though one whose visual consummation is suspended in a familiar manner. The impressionist stipples of gray and ochre that gently issue from the cylinder’s rim, La RocheGuyon-style (fig. 3.2a), prevent it from hardening into a shaft; more such stipples gather round its base, and so suspend its penetration of the tabletop. That said, what are we to make of the painting’s genesis? In a letter to Picasso from November 1911, Braque reported he was working on it. He called it a still life: “There’s an entire fireplace in it, with wood inside.”51 And indeed, given this piece of information, the armrest scroll at left looks large and solid enough to pass for almost a marble mantelpiece ornament.52 In turn, once that is accepted, the table surface becomes imaginable, barely, as the ground plane of a fireplace

Cubism’s Passion

121

receding back into a wall toward the chimney. Then again, a violin just isn’t firewood. Meanwhile, in light of Braque’s letter, is the forearm really a forearm? We seem to have entered a major interpretive quagmire. Accordion-guitars, armrest-mantelpiece scrolls, candlestick-erections, still life-violinists: how, other than by hyphenation, can we make sense of various visual phenomena in Braque’s cubism that seem to be several things at once? To speak of “palimpsests” or “afterimages” would be to invoke an unwelcome sense of causal linearity: a sense of earlier marks left to stand as pentimenti among more recent layers, of the individual stages of a process to be retrieved by the viewer. I say unwelcome, because successiveness—a definition of visual experience over time as a sequence of events unrolling one after the other—is precisely what is not evident in Braque’s paintings. On the contrary, a model of time as succession is what they are programmatically displacing. It may have been procedurally the case, but it simply isn’t visually the case, that the Emigrant’s instrument “started out” as an accordion and “subsequently” became a guitar, or that the Düsseldorf and Pompidou paintings were “changed” from still lifes into portraits by “adding” a hand or a forearm. In our actual experience, each instrument is simultaneously two, just as each still life is simultaneously a musician, and each instrument a body. Which returns us to Einstein: the last and arguably the best art critic of the early twentieth century to make a serious effort at thinking cubism as an art of simultaneity.53 A brief general note on the topic is in order, for once upon a time simultaneity was many things to many people. By 1926, when Einstein first started using the notion systematically, it had already been outmoded in art world circles for a decade or so; but in the period just before World War I simultaneity had been a polysemic buzzword that had stirred the imagination of an entire generation. At its most specific, it had been at issue in the fiercely technical debates among physicists about the nature of time in the wake of the theory of relativity; Albert Einstein (no relation), Mach, Whitehead, Bergson, and Poincaré all pronounced on it.54 Meanwhile, at its most general, simultaneity had been used to invoke the sensory overload of the modern urban environment that generated an experience of time at once fractured and layered, and as such had been lavished onto all sorts of prewar cultural artifacts: the paintings of Robert Delaunay as well as of assorted Salon cubists, the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, the multimedia efforts of the Italian futurists.55 How does Einstein fit into this scheme of things? The physicists’ debates clearly went over his head; his writings contain only the briefest nods in the general direction of Relativity. But simultaneity in Delaunay and futurism (he always lumped the two together) was a different matter. Einstein pronounced on it in detail and long before he appropriated the notion for cubism, if always in strongly negative terms.56 Einstein was unfair to futurist thought and merciless to the art; but some of his verdicts rose above the level of polemics. For one thing, he deplored the

122

Form as Revolt

way in which in futurist painting the “impressionist instant was expanded by way of memory into a dynamic simultaneity of the imagination, but the formal countervalue remained undiscovered” (K1 93).57 For another, using the futurists’ own Bergsonism as a club against their art, he attacked their “cinematographic technique” (K1 67): the fact that in futurist painting figures and objects are as if arranged “on a psychological screen, a filmic surface.”58 The deeper flaw for Einstein here was the notion of time with which the futurists seemed to be operating, and the way in which it was formalized in their work. Einstein felt that, at the end of the day, in futurist painting time was defined merely as the succession, however “durational,” of several moments of visual experience. A futurist painting was the compromised simultaneity of these moments. It either merged them together, blurring the contours of objects in order to extend “the impressionist instant” of perception backward and forward in time; as when a swaying Eiffel Tower is circled by swishy aeroplanes. Or else it unrolled these instants one after the other, filmstrip-style: as so many girls on balcony, so many dogs on a leash. And it did so merge or unroll them on a surface that it treated as the docile ground of that unrolling rather than as its “formal countervalue.” Put another way, it was their flawed notion of time as succession that made the futurists fudge the foundational contrast. For Einstein, that was the crucial difference from Braque and Picasso. To his mind, it was by foregrounding the foundational contrast that they recorded a temporalized experience on canvas whose simultaneity was neither cumulative nor successive but what I call diagrammatic. A cubist painting was a diagram of possible experiences, a visual simultaneity of different kinds of relation in the fabric of effects. As Einstein put it in The Art of the 20th Century, “In simultané, form is seized as the unity of temporally differentiated action” (K1 68).59 He tried unpacking this dense statement many times, most clearly so in the colloquial language of the draft he composed for a letter to Kahnweiler in 1923. Let’s say you experience something; fine. You go on to express it, but precisely in so doing you suppress what makes the thing a sensible experience at all: the complicated complexity, the intrinsic functional contrast of the sensation, the process that unrolls simultaneously according to different kinds of “logic.” If that weren’t the case, our psychic life either a) would have no mobility at all, or b) would rush forth unrestrained like a cataract, exceeding any conceivable speed of the phusis.60

Translation: in the Will to Power, Nietzsche got it right.61 Selfhood is functional; it is multiple and riven, not singular and unitary. At any one moment of anyone’s psychic life, various mutually opposed impulses are entwined (com-plicated) with one another in so many power relations. As a result of this ongoing struggle, Einstein wrote, “a person” constantly “increases and decreases in terms of volume, of self-sensation and

Cubism’s Passion

123

object-sensation.”62 This waxing and waning of the self over time is unavoidable, for the simultaneous oppositions among the impulses are irreconcilable and open-ended. This is a good thing, Einstein was telling Kahnweiler. If it weren’t so, we would all be either Parmenideans from hell or Heracliteans from hell. Either time would not exist and we would only ever have one experience (a); or time would “rush forth like a cataract” and we would have every conceivable experience all at once (b). But such fictions, Einstein was arguing, should be left to the metaphysicians who enjoy making them up. In reality, psychic life is neither inert nor cataractic but mobile. By opposing one another functionally, psychic impulses are egging one another on and slowing one another down. This is how they become “sensible,” how they acquire form as a specific experience or image at all. That said, as the experience or image does acquire form, the conflict that produced it is typically suppressed in favor of the victor. Because in thinking about themselves, people tend to resolve the simultaneity of their different psychic investments into a linear chain of consecutive states of mind. We’d like to think we are now aesthetically sensitive, now aroused, now rational. First we appreciate the finer points of an artwork, then we have sex, and then we do our taxes. And of course that is what we do. The question is, Just what is this “we”? Is it one, or is it many? The conviction that it is one is as attractive as it is because it allows us to think of ourselves as a unity in temporal diversity: as a single cohesive self that’s passing through sundry states of mind one after the other. But then, Einstein was asking Kahnweiler, where are all these different states coming from? How is it that arousal emerges at all and displaces aestheticism, and is then displaced by instrumental reason in turn? Why do we ever change? The answer Nietzsche had given in the Will to Power was that all these different affects, and countless others besides, do not come from nothing but are always copresent in the psyche. A self is not a chain of states of mind that keeps unrolling but a fabric of effects that keeps reconfiguring itself. Aestheticism, arousal, and so on are constantly active impulses, opposed in simultaneity; it’s just that at various moments one of them will provisionally vanquish the others. Einstein’s point was that Braque was painting the struggle that comes before, and after, these transitory victories. The result was an art that, so far from being otherworldly, shows what it’s like for a person to exist in time. Braque’s cubism exploded the fictive linearity of experience into an unpredictable openness, and it dissolved the stable meaning of our field of vision into the uncontrollable manifold it actually is.63 With his trademark laconicism, Braque himself said as much: “It’s all the same to me whether a form represents a different thing to different people or many things at the same time.”64 What Braque was getting at is what we might call a simultaneity of on-the-vergeness. He had in mind a kind of painting in which a functional contrast is only ever about to be resolved in favor of one of the impulses

124

Form as Revolt

that comprise it. A painting will be the diagram of that contrast, not its resolution. The work at the Pompidou, which, like the others I have discussed, is best left untitled, is such a diagram. It produces a psychic contrast both at the level of various details and at the level of its genre as a whole: as the oscillation between armchair and mantelpiece, erection and candlestick, portrait and still life—between a male’s succumbing to a delirious fantasy and an artist’s commitment to genre convention.

Picasso: Freedom and Constraint Like Braque and Einstein, Picasso had a visual ethics. He never cared to elaborate it discursively in the manner a critic or philosopher would, but still it can be teased out of the statements he made about his work. Then, it will transpire that Picasso came up with his own terminology in order to address the question that also moved Braque and Einstein: the question of the foundational contrast. In Picasso’s ethics, the question hinged—quite literally, as we shall see—on the issue of freedom. Despite its existential importance for the artist, that issue has never been adequately addressed by the literature. It is worth looking into in some detail. Just what is freedom, Picasso asked himself many times in his misleadingly apodictic way; and just how should it be given form in art? At first blush, the answers he gave over the years seem wildly contradictory, but on close inspection they will actually add up. Let us consider two pieces of evidence. First, there is a statement from 1944. Recorded by Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s partner and interlocutor of several years, it is one of the most important remarks he ever made about his working method: “Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of constraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”65 Constraint liberates invention: according to Picasso, freedom would seem to be a desirable thing. But then there is another statement, again to Gilot, which was prompted in 1948 by a well-known incident. Picasso received a cable from New York with an urgent plea. The curator James Johnson Sweeney reported on recent attacks on modern art by conservative US politicians.66 Sweeney warned of a “wave of animosity towards free expression” in the United States, and he implored Picasso to lend his public support to the cause of the embattled American artists. That seems a reasonable request, yet Picasso categorically refused to consider it and threw the cable in the trash. He flew into a rage and denounced all clamor for the freedom of art. The point is, art is something subversive. It’s something that should not be free. . . . There has to be a rule even if it’s a bad one because the evidence of art’s power

Cubism’s Passion

125

is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with obstacles—that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shapeless, meaningless—zero.67

The apparent contradiction between these two statements will disappear once we realize Picasso is not talking about one but two notions of freedom: a good notion, which he endorses in the first statement, and a bad notion, which he rejects in the second one. The two notions are distinguished by the role each of them assigns to a human impulse to expression in the achievement of that freedom. According to the bad notion, promoted by Sweeney, freedom is simply unbridled expression. Picasso considers it bad because he believes the result won’t actually be liberatory but catastrophic. Remove the bridles from expression, and it will dissipate: it will become “shapeless, meaningless—zero.” Free speech, Picasso is saying, is the formlessness of meaning. His point should not be confused with an aristocratic denunciation of liberal relativism. Picasso is not arguing that if everything may be said, then nothing that can be said is of value. Rather, he is arguing that if everything may be said, then nothing actually can be said. The moment you are in a position to say anything whatever is the moment you are no longer able to say anything in particular, for it is the moment you have deprived yourself of the means of saying anything at all—the means of formalization. That point is elaborated in Picasso’s first statement, which insists that freedom, as defined by the good notion, is not intrinsic to expression. Rather, freedom emerges from the interaction between that expression and a constraint that limits it, and that, in limiting it, enables it to acquire form.68 Form is expression freed from the threat of meaninglessness by its submission to constraint: that is the linchpin of Picasso’s ethics. Hence his hostile response to the cable from America. Sweeney was arguing that freedom and constraint are at odds; Picasso insisted they go together. An “obstacle” or “barrier” against which an expression runs up, a constraint nonetheless “liberates invention.” It forces you to convert the world’s resistance to your effort at mapping your meanings onto it into the form of a new kind of meaning that emerges from the friction between the effort and the resistance. What we have here is the outline of an ethics of the medium with some real heft to it. But there is also a sinister dimension. It is signaled by the presence of the word “subversive” in the second passage I cited. It is surprising to find it used by Picasso, an artist who is still routinely dismissed, or else celebrated, for having been infatuated with a model of art making as “bourgeois creativity” and with the Sweeneytype freedom that is said to go with it. As we just saw, this alleged infatuation is actually a myth. But that only throws the real problem of Picasso’s ethics into full relief: the problem of negativity. Consider another moment from the conversation

126

Form as Revolt

about Sweeney’s cable. The subject has drifted to art and politics in general, and Picasso is bringing in a new example: the Soviet Union. Only the Russians are naive enough to think that an artist can fit into society. That’s because they don’t know what an artist is. What can the state do with the real artists, the seers? Rimbaud in Russia is unthinkable. . . . There wouldn’t be such a thing as a seer if there weren’t a state trying to suppress him. It’s only at that moment, under that pressure, that he becomes one.69

The socialist realist ethics of the Russians is the obverse of the abstract expressionist ethics of the Sweeneys. The Sweeneys think an artist must protect his freedom from the state; the Russians believe he should submit his freedom to it. Neither of them understands that the art of the seer, which liberates invention, is subversive by default. Contrary to the Sweeneys, art always needs the constraint of a state; contrary to the Russians, it needs it only in order to fight it. That thought is as curious as its consequences are bleak: to liberate yourself, you must first be imprisoned, but in prison is also where you will stay. For the condition of freedom cannot actually be attained; all that can ever be done is to engage in the struggle for liberation. Art making, formalization, is that struggle in perpetuity. Picasso’s ethics may have originated in his allegiance to anarchism during his Barcelona years in the early 1900s, when antistate manifestos were regularly published in Arte Joven, a journal for which he had worked as coeditor.70 If so, then over the following decades, as his political ties faded away, a momentous decoupling took place in Picasso’s thought. What may have begun as an antistate politics turned into an anti-anything ethics, in which “the state” came to serve as an abstract placeholder for something unnameable, malevolent, and ubiquitous. To be sure, it may have been that at Barcelona already, in which case anarchism simply helped give a name to an elusive target. Either way, all political formations Picasso ever brought up in his later years became, to his mind, so many “states”: not just Stalin’s Russia or McCarthy’s America, but also the Middle Ages, for example. Take the report of an American journalist who had visited Picasso in Paris in 1944: “‘A more disciplined art, less unconstrained freedom, in a time like this is the artist’s defense and guard,’ Picasso said. ‘Very likely for the poet it is a time to write sonnets. Most certainly it is not a time for the creative man to fail, to shrink, to stop working. Think of the great painters and poets of the Middle Ages’.”71 So, an artist’s resistance to fascist occupation consists in internalizing the political constraints upon his life as the formal constraints upon his work. Fair enough, but how do we get from German-occupied Paris to the medieval manuscript workshops? By assuming the medieval illuminators were so many Picassos; that, whatever its historical context, art is always “working against.” That phrase comes up in a very important statement Picasso made to Hélène Parmelin, and it is implied in another recorded by Gilot. In both cases, constraint is stripped of all

Cubism’s Passion

127

political connotations and instead is defined as an adversary in a raw ontological antagonism. Picasso says that when you work you must be “against.” You must do everything against. And never for. “From the moment you begin to work for, you’ve had it,” he says.72 Anything of great value—a creation, a new idea—carries its shadow zone with it. You have to accept it that way. Otherwise there is only the stagnation of inaction. But every action has an implicit share of negativity. There is no escaping it. Every positive value has its price in negative terms, and you never see anything very great which is not, at the same time, horrible in some respect.73

In the paintings of Pablo Picasso, what was the negativity that was accompanying the action? What was it he was working against? And how does his ethics line up with Braque and Einstein’s? To answer these questions, let us consider two further remarks. The first one was reported by Alexander Liberman after a visit to the artist’s studio; the second is Picasso’s notorious put-down of the art of Pierre Bonnard. He looked around him [in the studio] and said: “All of this is my struggle against the two-dimensional aspect.”74 [Bonnard] fills up the whole picture surface, to form a continuous field, with a kind of imperceptible quivering, touch by touch, centimeter by centimeter, but with a total absence of contrast. There’s never a juxtaposition of black and white, of square and circle, sharp point and curve. It’s an extremely orchestrated surface developed like an organic whole, but you never once get the big clash of the cymbals which that kind of strong contrast provides.75

It is likely that, if asked to define the difference between Braque’s cubism in 1911/12 and his own, Picasso would have come up with a milder but essentially similar description. Strong juxtapositions can be found in Braque; but, as we saw, his ethics led him to suspend their clash. That Picasso for his part insisted on a contrast, “tension,” or “opposition” in his own work76—a contrast among the individual forms in a painting as well as between these forms and the surface—invites a translation of his visual ethics into Einsteinian terms. The same is true for the “struggle against the two-dimensional aspect” he mentioned to Liberman. The surface is the constraint, and volume-seeing is the artist’s impulse to expression. Just as in Braque, a foundational contrast emerges when the two meet on canvas. But unlike in Braque, the contrast will be violent, for the constraint of the surface is at once embraced and resented by Picasso. The resentment in question is

128

Form as Revolt

a resentment of aspectivity: of the fact, which is hardwired into easel painting as a medium, that to paint a volume under one aspect onto a surface is simultaneously to lose all other possible aspects from view. To paint a head in three-quarter view turned toward the left, for example, is to be compelled not to paint it in lost profile or from the back. Moreover, even to paint that single aspect of a three-dimensional figure is to be constrained to painting it in two dimensions: it is at once to indulge in volume-seeing and to relinquish its object to the surface. Obviously enough, any representational painting addresses this doubleness, but Picasso made it the very ground of his art: by confronting “the state” every time he started to paint. Every “action”—every movement of the brush—was accompanied by an “implicit share of negativity”: even as an “aspect” was being recorded on canvas, its two-dimensionality was being foregrounded as well. Nor could it be otherwise. Subversion cannot exist without some “state” to subvert; to paint a volume, you need a surface that will deny you your wish. The result was not an art of freedom but, second best, an art of liberation. The origin of painting was ever split for Picasso, yet for him that split became a bottomless wellspring of form.

Picasso: The Hinge In 1921, Braque’s Emigrant (fig. 3.5) was acquired by the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche for his distinguished collection of modern art, assembled on the advice of Amédée Ozenfant, then still an Einstein associate. Four years later, the Emigrant received company when La Roche moved the collection to a new abode in Paris. Designed by Le Corbusier, the Villa La Roche was completed in 1925 and instantly became a pilgrimage site for the European avant-garde. Proudly on display in it was a recent major acquisition: Picasso’s Aficionado, painted in the year Braque completed the Emigrant (fig. 3.10).77 Since Einstein’s fascination with both paintings is well documented, it is tempting to imagine him visiting the Villa repeatedly, wandering from the Emigrant to the Aficionado and back, musing about the different passions on display.78 An aficionado is a fan of the bullfight, a sport in which sharp metal plunges into volume, cutting the surface of skin in two. Picasso’s figure is holding one of the weapons employed for that purpose: a banderilla, a straight, rounded stick that ends in the semicircular curve of a barbed blade (fig. 3.10a). Yet another instantiation of the cubist open cylinder—a sickle literalized—the banderilla in Picasso’s portrait doubles as brush and, given its location, as erection.79 This overdetermination makes the banderilla the Aficionado’s equivalent of the Emigrant’s sound-hole cylinder: a detail that programmatically states a visual ethics of form that prevails across the canvas at large. But Picasso’s banderilla is deeply foreign to Braque’s ethics of suspension. Equating brush with blade, mark-making with slicing, gestation with division, the banderilla suggests a relation between freedom and constraint, volume-seeing and surface, in which violence and form are as one.

Cubism’s Passion

129

Nor is the banderilla the only example. Consider Picasso’s Poet (fig. 3.11), it too an Einstein favorite, painted in 1911 at Céret while Braque was working there on the Emigrant. The Poet is another case—and there are still more—of a three-quarterlength cubist male with crotch-level issues.80 Thomas Crow has pointed out that the figure’s pipe, held in the lap, is spewing forth smoke in an unmistakably phallic way (fig. 3.11a).81 Once again, the conceit is straight out of Braque; once again, it is tellingly transformed in the borrowing. Unlike cliff and shrubbery at La Roche-Guyon (figs. 3.2, 3.2a), no autogenetic loop unites pipe and smoke in the Poet, which insists instead on their unsuspended opposition: the opposition between volume-seeing and surface. One of the most distinctly rounded shapes in the painting, the pipe is yet spewing forth sheer pigment, the bane of all roundedness. The paint’s materiality does not blend into the pictorial world into which it emerges, much less does it claim to create it; it rather smears across it as far as it can reach, obliterating the poet’s abdomen in the process. In the Poet as in the Aficionado, creation is bound up with eroticism but also with negation, the paint serving as medium, ejaculate, and blotting ink. Where the pipe blots out, the banderilla slices. On one level, the slice is metaphorical: it negates, as it does not in Braque, the artist-viewer’s temporal coherence from one visual act to another. All across the canvas of the Aficionado the psychological rope is cut up into a simultaneity of strands whose “different kinds of ‘logic’” are incommensurable with one another. Each detail comes with its own handling, lighting, degree of finish, built-in aspect, and viewing distance—even with its own implicit miniature world, which it unfolds locally in the painting, asserting it against the others. Take the upright guitar at left, the bottle at lower right, and the banderilla itself. The guitar headstock is an oneiric vision, a looming ziggurat glimpsed from below in a moonlight haze as if from hundreds of yards away. The bottle is a Kantian visual category right out of Kahnweiler, an engineer’s diagram that pares the vessel down to circumference, elevation, and plan. The banderilla for its part is the most naturalistic detail in the painting, the reflection on its blade caused by a glaring spotlight that, like the headstock-ziggurat’s moon, shines for it alone. Hallucination, Pure Reason, eroticism: we are looking at a phenomenon known as Picasso’s “stylistic multiplicity”; a multiplicity that he is supposed to have discarded after the Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) in favor of the search for a “unitary system of notation.”82 But the Aficionado proves that stylistic multiplicity—a clumsier, Einsteinian term would be “subobjective simultaneity”—extended right into Picasso’s cubism. And despite its presence, and just like the Demoiselles, the Aficionado does not fall apart, for the dissonance of its psychic impulses is embedded in a coherent substrate of form. This is where the second kind of slicing comes in. To get it into proper focus, and understand its difference from Braque’s approach, it will be useful to compare the faces of the Emigrant and Aficionado from close-up (plate III). Both formalize the foundational contrast in similar terms: the Emigrant’s face, as a contrast between three-quarter view and full profile; the Aficionado’s as one between three-quarter view and frontality.

Figure 3.10. Pablo Picasso, The Aficionado, 1912. Oil on canvas, 134.8 × 81.5 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel. Gift of Raoul La Roche, 1952.

Figure 3.10a. The banderilla in figure 3.10.

Figure 3.11. Pablo Picasso, The Poet, 1911. Oil on canvas, 131.2 × 89.5 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York).

Figure 3.11a. The pipe and smoke in figure 3.11.

Plate III. Picasso and Braque: The hinge and the open cylinder (details of figs. 3.10 and 3.5).

Cubism’s Passion

135

The emigrant’s face is turned toward our left; but just how much it is turned—at which angle exactly—is a question that, as always, Braque declines to answer. Note that the main features are generated by open cylinders: bulbous nose, grinning mouth with bared teeth, the lower contour of an earlobe, an eyelid. All of them emerge from so many local interactions between surface and volume-seeing; all are designed to suspend their opposition. Does the mouth belong to a full profile, which is a surface fact, or to a three-quarter profile, which implies the volume of a head rotated in space? Is the rhyme between the lips and the lower contours of nose and earlobe enough to flatten the mouth, and so to make it assist them in declaring the face a silhouette? Or does the mouth manage to loop around the face in the manner in which a cord loops around a curtain fold? Hovering between the competing claims, the mouth gently suspends them both. The Aficionado’s face couldn’t be more different. It is true that Picasso referred to it as “a nice ole Southerner’s mug.”83 But that remark should not deceive us into thinking we are looking at a caricature; not if that term is meant to suggest a tone of thigh-slapping jollity. Nor should we call the formal elements of which the face is composed, notably the mustache, “emblematic signs” or “hieroglyphs”; not if those terms are meant to describe flat silhouettes sitting pat on the surface. The mustache looks funky, but the funkiness is straddling an abyss. And the mustache looks flat, but the flatness is quivering with an unsuspended tension. The mustache is peculiar in two ways. It is tilted out of the horizontal, and its left half is several millimeters shorter than the right half. Between them, tilt and asymmetry mount a visual argument for the mustache as a volume in space. The argument is that it is ever so slightly foreshortened and turned away from us to our left; and that, by extension, the entire head too is rotated to our left and back as well as being inclined to our right. But then, other formal properties of the mustache militate against this suggestion. For one thing, its right half, whose frontality is perfectly undistorted, refuses to foreshorten in sync with the left one. For another, both halves are striated with the same pattern of parallel waves, probably generated by a house painter’s comb; waves whose undulation recurs in the mustache’s contour. And contour, parallel lines, and striation are all surface facts. Thus foreshortening stands against frontality, rotation against parallelism. Now consider the abyss whose brink the mustache is straddling. I mean the line that extends down the center axis of the face, splitting it in two. To the left of the line is a vertical strip painted the white and rosy colors of the cheek. A merger of pigment and makeup, the strip is all surface, paint flush with the canvas. The area to the right of the slice is just the opposite. Down along its entire length Picasso converted black paint into that most intangible of volumes: a shadow that claims to be plunging “down onto” a second strip, which it thereby declares to be located in the “depth” behind it.

136

Form as Revolt

Finally, think mustache, strip, and shadow zone together. A visual chiasmus unfolds across the slice, the first of several we will encounter in Picasso’s work. Foreshortening (the left mustache half ) and depth (the shadow recess on the right) join forces against flatness (the left strip) and frontality (the right mustache half ). A face has emerged as if by the slice of a banderilla blade—an image-face, at once created and split by a foundational contrast that rallies the basic registers of imagemaking in order to divide them against each other. To call the vertical line of the Aficionado’s face a slice amounts to more than just using a metaphor. For, strictly speaking, the line is not a line, since it is not a mark at all. It just looks like one. A mark is a positive notation, but this line is a negative division. Picasso painted the vertical strip and the shadow zone that abuts it, and the line emerged visually as that abutment. That makes it an example, one of many in Picasso’s cubism circa 1911/12,84 of what I call a hinge: a form that generates image-objects as a unity of opposites—surface and volume-seeing—even as the form itself, in its sheer negativity, declares their antagonism.85 Picasso’s hinge is the device of his passion, which at bottom is deeply foreign to Braque’s.86 It is a passion that insists that freedom and constraint are cooriginary, that “when you work you must be ‘against’”: that to paint a picture is to want to see a volume into a surface and at the same time to suffer the surface to break it up. The “invention” of “new forms” will consist in dramatizing that break in ever new ways, generating ever new image-objects, half seized from the canvas, half lost to it. Or to put this in Einstein’s terms, we are looking at a passion that splits up the subobjective function’s sliding scale into a balance with two pans and the image-object as the pointer: as the point of indifference between subjectivation and objectivation rather than as the form of their merger. Hence Picasso’s hinge is both the cousin and the other of Braque’s open cylinder. Where the open cylinder loops, transitions, and suspends, there the hinge interrupts, opposes, and defines. The difference emerges all the more clearly in those instances where one of the artists looked sideways and mapped his own ethics onto the other’s device. Take the vertical axis of the Emigrant’s face (plate III): bringing an open-cylinder approach to the hinge, Braque made the shadow zone dissipate gently on the surface like a wave on a beach. Conversely, when Picasso picked up Braque’s open cylinder, he reconceived it as a hinge. Let us see how.

Picasso: The Mandolin Player Sometime in 1911 Picasso carefully staged a still life in his Paris studio on the boulevard de Clichy and took a photograph of it (fig. 3.12). Among the objects on view is a mandolin lying on a pedestal table next to a bottle of champagne, and a

Figure 3.12. Pablo Picasso, Still Life on a Pedestal Table, 1911. Modern gelatin silver print from original negative no.1014. Musée Picasso, Paris.

138

Form as Revolt

Figure 3.13. Pablo Picasso, Self-Portrait, 1910. Gelatin silver print, 14.7 × 11.6 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

zither that has been propped up against the wall right behind it. The photograph is strangely compelling. The props are mundane, yet their arrangement has charged them with an intensity whose nature one cannot quite pin down. The plot thickens once one realizes the image belongs to a photographic series that began in late 1910, extended through the spring of 1911, and recommenced in the fall after a summer hiatus at Céret (figs. 3.13–3.15).87 In four of these photographs, men and women—Braque, Picasso (his picture taken by Braque), and the painter Marie Laurencin—were individually posed beside the table. With one exception, a mandolin was present too, either resting on the table or held by Laurencin. Four other photographs lack the table but include a mandolin, either placed on a couch next to the sitter or hanging on a wall. Here all sitters are male; they include Picasso himself, two of his closest friends, and one acquaintance: Max Jacob, Ramon Pichot, and Frank Haviland. Picasso took these photographs in order to explore a phenomenology of the studio. “The studio is where the world, as it gets into painting, is experienced,” as Svetlana Alpers put it succinctly in her book on the studio tradition from Vermeer

Cubism’s Passion

139

Figure 3.14. Georges Braque, Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1911. Modern gelatin silver print from original negative. Private collection.

to Picasso.88 By extension, the studio photograph, which makes experience durable by recording it, served Picasso as a filter between painting and world. Photography arrested his casual looking about the studio into a series of images that could be scrutinized methodically. It allowed him to manipulate the inventory and visitors of his work space, to arrange them in a manner germane to his visual ethics. By a mixture of chance and design, relations might emerge in a photograph among the various volumes and surfaces on which Picasso was training his lens. The camera might reveal how these objects could be turned into image-objects. The camera gave visual weight to certain details, among them the tablecloth’s braided border and tassels and, in the photos that Braque and Picasso took of each other (figs. 3.14, 3.15), a number of canvas stretchers with wedges fitted into their corners. Above all, the camera picked out the difference between male body and mandolin (figs. 3.13, 3.15). That difference is between two kinds of corporeality, two ways in which a three-dimensional object in space appears to the viewer or lens: as the flexible oneness of the body, as the unbending doubleness of the instrument. The photos stress the body’s continuity as an unbroken volume from the

140

Form as Revolt

Figure 3.15. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Georges Braque, 1911. Modern gelatin silver print from original negative no. 40. Musée Picasso, Paris.

erect torso down to the thighs, its physicality powerfully modeled by the heavy fabric of a dress or uniform. At the same time, the photos stress the mandolin’s discontinuity: the fact it comes with a foundational contrast built right into it. A swelling shape abruptly sheared off by a flat soundboard, a mandolin can be all volume, all surface, or their transitionless opposition, depending on placement and camera angle. Thus photography had extracted a visual antagonism from studio phenomenology, raising the question of how it might be stated in art. How could body and mandolin be joined into a painting? The still-life photo answered the question with the invention of a form (fig. 3.12). The clue here is the placement of the mandolin. Picasso wedged its neck between bottle and zither in such a way that, with its soundboard obliquely turned toward us, the reclining instrument is lifted halfway off the table and is held suspended in that position. Why did Picasso do this? Because he noticed the rhyme that emerged from the juxtaposition of the two sound-holes once raising the mandolin had made them adjacent. This was a rhyme that resonated deeply with the artist’s passion: a rhyme between two circles that are identical in terms of their

Cubism’s Passion

141

shape but different in terms of their inclination in space. Manipulating his studio props back and forth on the table, Picasso had chanced upon a hinge. For what we have here is the foundational contrast staged as a still life. The sound-holes touch but cannot merge, because they and the instruments to which they belong inhabit two realms of being that in Picasso’s art are radically incommensurable unless an effort is made to formalize their unity: the realms, respectively, of volume-seeing and surface, expression and constraint. Mandolin stands against zither as ellipse stands against circle, obliquity against frontality, foreshortening against uprightness, recession against surface—female against male. For does the bottle not look like a forearm complete with wrist and hand? Holding as it does the mandolin in place by touching the fingerboard with its neck, it certainly works like one. That seems to have been what Picasso himself was thinking when he painted his most impressive contribution to the cubist genre of the three-quarter-length musician: the Mandolin Player (fig. 3.16). Besides Braque’s Emigrant and MoMA Man with a Guitar (fig. 3.5; R 99), the painting is in close communication with at least two members of the photographic campaign: the still life and the portrait of Braque (figs. 3.12, 3.15). In the Mandolin Player, Picasso thought them together. He mapped still life onto portrait, painting onto photo, answer onto question. Imagine Braque in the photo holding the mandolin in his lap, one leg slung over the other; then imagine body and instrument joined by the still life’s double-sound-hole hinge: there is the Mandolin Player. Compare the player’s crotch-level area to the still life (fig. 3.12; plates I and II). The painted mandolin’s angle of inclination is almost the same, and its sound-hole rim too is juxtaposed with a second rim. The difference is that instead of the zither we now have the male player, whose hand replaces the bottle’s neck, and that the rims are assigned to different owners. The lower rim, an ellipse, now belongs to the player’s cylindrical erection. The top rim, a perfect circle, now belongs to the mandolin. But what goes for mandolin and zither in the photograph also goes for erection and mandolin in the painting: a hinge unites them into the form of their opposition. As erection becomes volume, inflating itself obliquely upward, the instrument frontalizes its soundboard, withdrawing back into the surface. Desire, to put it in Picasso’s terms, seeks to express itself unbridled, only to hit the constraint any medium will impose on expression. And painting’s constraint is the foundational contrast. Routed through studio photography, this then was Picasso’s version of Braque’s open cylinder: two rims that are circle and ellipse instead of one rim that might be both or either. That difference can stand more generally for the difference between the two artists’ visual erotics: the difference between an image-body as the statement of a suspended fusion, and an image-body as the statement of an open antagonism. In Braque, two parties merge, their unity founded on their partial self-relinquishment. In Picasso, each party denies the other, their unity founded on a mutual denial in which each is the constraint to the other’s freedom. To modulate the theme further—to diagram, in Einstein’s terms, “the process that unrolls simultaneously according to different kinds of ‘logic’”—Picasso

Figure 3.16. Pablo Picasso, The Mandolin Player, 1911. Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 69.5 cm. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection.

Cubism’s Passion

Figure 3.16a. Detail of figure 3.16, top right (stretcher and wedge above braided frame ornament).

Figure 3.16b. Detail of figure 3.16, lower right (stretcher and wedges).

143

Figure 3.16c. Detail of figure 3.16 (mandolin headstock).

brought in a number of other studio details that photography had recorded. The mandolin player’s slung thighs, for example, are trying to consume autoerotically the union of volumes denied by the hinge. But the tablecloth border deflates that ambition: by converting the sling-around of the thighs into a repeat ornament on the surface. Meanwhile, in the top right corner, an oversize wedge either succeeds or fails at penetrating the interior of a stretcher frame from bottom right (fig. 3.16a). It depends on how one reads the three black verticals: are they the contours, respectively, of the left stretcher bar’s flat front and its obliquely receding interior side, or of two adjoining flat strips? A different version of the question is raised at bottom right by the angular squiggle of black lines (fig. 3.16b). That squiggle is actually the combined silhouette of a wedge and the inside of a stretcher frame’s top left corner. In this case, wedge and stretcher have indeed fused, but fused into a surface contour only. And then there are the pegs on the mandolin’s headstock (fig. 3.16c). It is as if they are trying to regularize the mad vacillation of the total field by extracting and then repeating its logic at the bedrock level of mark-making. Each peg has been rigidly painted as a single brushstroke; each stroke is casting another stroke as its shadow onto the headstock. The result is a mix of the bizarre and the systemic, of hazy dream vision and coarse materiality. On one hand, the pegs look like a colonnade of idols on a forgotten desert plateau. On the other, each peg-and-shadow pair repeats a version of the contrast that animates the painting throughout: between uprightness and recession, verticality and obliquity, light and shadow. In the simultaneity of Picasso’s eroticism, hallucination, pornography, and a pedantic rage for order go together.

144

Form as Revolt

Picasso: The Guitar’s Two Bodies During the summer at Sorgues in 1912, cubism’s passion reached a high point. The bare chronological facts are known well enough.89 In May 1912, accompanied by his new girlfriend, Eva Gouel, Picasso left Paris for Céret, where he intended to work as he had the year before. When he learned that Fernande Olivier, his previous girlfriend, might be visiting, Picasso and Gouel departed. In late June, they ended up at Sorgues, a small town to the north of Avignon. From there Picasso wrote to Kahnweiler, imploring him to tell no one of his whereabouts—no one except for Braque, who joined him with his own girlfriend at Sorgues in July. In late September, Picasso and Gouel returned to Paris. Until then, hidden away in the seclusion of the Villa des Clochettes, Picasso got some stunning work done. The work was a series of Guitars (figs. 3.17, 3.19–21).90 The specificity of the genre bears stressing: they are neither Guitar Players nor Still-Lives with Guitars. Even when the instrument is accompanied by other props, it is always the central focus, displacing everything else to the periphery. I suggest we make sense of the series by recalling Einstein on cubism: “Every complex painting will contain a number of psychological and biological contrasts in face of which all talk of merely formal oppositions will fall away as so much superficial blather” (B 344). Note the exact distinction Einstein is drawing here: between a formalism that has no room for psychology and one that does. And the latter is what we need. In the summer of Sorgues, Braque’s presence stood for the form of cubism’s passion, Gouel’s for its psychology, and Picasso’s Guitars for the convergence of the two. To add some specificity to this claim, I will read three of Picasso’s own statements together. The first two he scribbled into a sketchbook he compiled at Sorgues, which makes them precious documents in spite of their brevity: arttheoretical dicta by the artist, pronounced while cubism was actually under way. The third statement was made much later to Christian Zervos, but it is nonetheless instructive for the issue in hand. In painting, an idea won’t be pure if it can be expressed in a language other than painting’s own. To find the equilibrium between nature and our imagination.91 Do you think it concerns me that a particular picture of mine represents two people? Though these two people once existed for me, they exist no longer. The “vision” of them gave me a preliminary emotion; then little by little their actual presences became blurred; they developed into a fiction and then disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems. They are no longer two people, you see, but forms and colors: forms and colors that have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibration of their life.92

Cubism’s Passion

145

The first sketchbook note is a declaration of medium-specificity: if you are going to express your “idea” in painting, do it with the medium’s own unsubstitutable means. The statement to Zervos elaborates on how these means get deployed: during the process of painting, the intimacy that binds two people together will be transformed into problems of form and color, all while preserving their “vibration.” The vibration in turn will be preserved so long as the second sketchbook maxim is heeded: “To find the equilibrium between nature and our imagination.” That sounds like an empty art-theoretical topos, but the evidence of the sketchbook and the paintings reveals it as a specific ethical self-injunction: the injunction to formalize a unity of opposites between the world (“nature”) and the meanings an artist maps onto it (“imagination”): between objectivation and subjectivation, constraint and expression, female body and male desire. In the Sorgues Guitars, Picasso explored the visual language of that equilibrium. He embarked on a serial experiment in subobjective function, in the invention of new relations of form to match a new relation in life. The experiment’s focus was the guitar. That it was once again both an instrument and a metaphorical female should not be in doubt, since that equivalence was stated repeatedly in the sketchbook. Picasso often drew on its verso pages only, leaving many of the rectos blank. Several times, by way of a process of metamorphotic tracing, he used a finished verso drawing as the basis for a new one, which he would begin on the next verso that sat on top of it. In this fashion, right after he had jotted down his second maxim, Picasso converted a Violin into a Woman with a Guitar, a Guitar into a Seated Woman, and a Woman with a Violin into a Guitar; making it abundantly clear that image-instruments and image-bodies were as one.93 Except that they were not one but two. The formal baseline of the Sorgues series was what I call the simultaneity of the guitar’s two bodies. One body belonged to the surface, the other to volume-seeing; both were unified in opposition by a hinge. The vibration generated by that opposition migrated across various media, including drawing, oil, and charcoal; and it raised “all kinds of problems” to do with the basic means of image-making: frontality and obliquity, silhouette and foreshortening, color and texture. But always the basic questions were the same: how much autonomy to grant to the body, how much of the body to claim for the artist, how to give form to their relation, and how to define that relation’s tone. An extraordinary drawing that’s part of the series lays out the formal parameters in all their dazzling rigor (fig. 3.17). The key to understanding it is the intersection of three lines—a vertical, a horizontal, and a diagonal—a few inches below the sound-hole. The horizontal and the diagonal are two guitar bridges; the vertical is the hinge between them. The diagonal bridge stakes a claim for the oblique location of the guitar: a claim for the artist-viewer’s will to see the instrument as a volume whose left half is emerging from the surface into his own space even as its right half is sinking back into the space of the sheet. The horizontal bridge disputes that claim; it insists on the guitar’s frontality, its flushness with the surface. In turn, bisecting

Figure 3.17. Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912. Pen and ink over traces of graphite, 34.3 × 22.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

Cubism’s Passion

147

the entire guitar as well as the bridges, the vertical works as a pivot between them: between frontality and obliquity, surface and volume-seeing, which it unites in opposition, splitting the instrument up in the process. That split is stripped down to the basics by the two pairs of three bridge pins to either side of the hinge. They stand divided as the two fundamental kinds of mark-making that are available to line drawing: silhouette and solidity, contoured white circle and black dot. We will meet that division again in chapter 4. The turmoil on the rest of the sheet is the fallout of this nuclear conflict. There is, for one thing, the wild cascade of circle segments at the left. Drawn as if with a compass, the segments try to impose on the guitar the same rotating motion— the motion of a volume in space—that Picasso’s hand had enacted when he was producing them: but producing them as marks on a surface. For another, there is the double guitar neck. Like the double bridge, it is divided against itself, though now as frontality against profile, and as forward against backward foreshortening. On one hand, the neck is seen in frontal recession, in the manner of Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ. Diminishing in length and intervals toward the top, its frets ascend the fingerboard like the rungs of Figure 3.18. Pablo Picasso, a ladder reclining back into space. On the other Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 (detail). Oil on canvas, hand, the zigzag line that plunges down the frontal 243.9 × 233.7 cm. The Museum neck’s right side is that same neck seen in profile. of Modern Art, New York. But here the frets are increasing in size toward the Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. top and hence are suggesting the neck is actually looming forward; which is exactly what it will do a few months later in Picasso’s paperboard Guitar from the fall of 1912. At the same time, this radical spatial instability also points back to an earlier moment in Picasso’s oeuvre. It makes the drawing’s image-guitar a descendant of what Leo Steinberg called the “rampant gisante”: that nude figure in the Demoiselles d’Avignon, which, it too, had been riven by the competing demands of backward pull and uprightness (fig. 3.18).94 Whether in 1907 or 1912, whether the image-body was actual or metaphorical: for Picasso, the terms of freedom and constraint were always the same. A marvelous oval extends the contrast to painting and charcoal (fig. 3.19). In this work, the hinge coincides with the left vertical edge of a painted faux bois section

Figure 3.19. Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 64.5 × 50 cm. Private collection.

Cubism’s Passion

149

at top right. As in the drawing, the hinge would bisect the guitar’s body were it to continue downward. As in the drawing, the ascending ladder at center top and the zigzag frets to its right make competing claims for the fingerboard’s frontality and profile. But the most significant contrast unfolds between the charcoal and the colored areas. What we have here is the psychological dimension of a well-known formalist issue: the so-called cubist dissociation of line and color. That dissociation is not the result of a rationalistic laboratory analysis but of an ethical decision: the decision to strike a vibratory “equilibrium between nature and imagination.” Its point is to separate the guitar’s two bodies, one claimed by the artist-viewer, the other ceded to the surface. Let us get the first body into view by focusing on just the charcoal. Consider the open trapezoid wireframe that’s formed by (a) the right contour of the fingerboard ladder; (b) a second line at lower right that extends through that contour at a right angle toward the left; (c) a third line that extends up from this second one, again at a right angle; and (d) a short fourth line that extends from the third one near the top. Now consider the guitar strings: they ascend straight up from the bridge across the sound-hole until they reach a horizontal plateau, then continue straight up from there. Finally, think wireframe and strings together. The plateau defines the depth of the guitar’s inclination, the wireframe its angle. The sense here is of the guitar’s top half reclining backward and to the left, and of its bottom half protruding forward and to the right, out toward the artist-viewer. But this charcoal volume is an intangible, all hollow transparency and no substance. The painted parts, by contrast, yield color and texture in abundance, the pink and turquoise combining a pastel-like lyricism with a tinge of the shrill. Yet this seductive richness is programmatically confined to flat strips. The brown faux bois ought to cover the soundboard, adding facture to the contoured void. Instead, it withdraws to the periphery, and so defines the soundboard negatively. One body’s volume is a cutout from the other’s surface. Picasso’s faux bois is too often considered just a means of ironizing illusionism or avant-garde deskilling, of substituting a hand-painted wood-grain pattern with a prefab or trompe l’oeil version of it. But in Picasso’s cubism, including all collages and papiers collés, the faux bois is actually always painted, and painted moreover in a powerfully sensuous way.95 Faux bois, therefore, is not a substitute for painting but rather a constraint upon it; and I submit its sensuousness is metaphorically erotic. A typical Sorgues faux bois section is a pattern of marks whose handling ranges from dirty wash-like stains to piled-on smudges incised with the palette knife. Even and particularly at its most trompe l’œil, the pattern can look positively hypnotic, what with the pulsating grain and the knots staring right out at the viewer (figs. 3.19, 3.20). Svetlana Alpers once drew a distinction between

Figure 3.20. Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912/13. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 72.5 × 60 cm. Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Oslo.

Cubism’s Passion

151

two basic ways of painting a nude’s external appearance: either as smooth twodimensional skin, as in Titian, or as three-dimensional flesh, as in Rubens.96 By extension, faux bois at Sorgues should be considered metaphorical image-flesh: Rubensian flesh processed through the foundational contrast. The wood-grain pattern both invokes the palpable voluptuousness of flesh in relief and flattens it out into two dimensions, the painter’s mark fusing with the volume it consents not to model in the round. In the second oval of the series, now at Oslo, the pattern becomes familiar (fig. 3.20). Fragments of a trapezoid wireframe, weak but recurring, are inclined at the same angle as in the first oval. The drawing’s divided bridges are present, and so are the fingerboards. The right one is a recessional ladder, precision geometry ascending frontally and back; the left one is a sequence of irregularly curved hatching marks that declare an oblique view of sagging flesh in the round. What is different at Oslo is the programmatic use of blurring and erasures all across the canvas. I will mention just a few instances. The fingerboard ladder’s right contour suddenly becomes spectral toward the top, its claim to recession fading together with its visibility. The black pins of the right bridge are vigorously drawn, yet they are stranded on a weakly contoured ochre ground that bleeds into the faux bois around it and so prevents the bridge from lifting off from it obliquely forward. Finally, the upper portion of the leftmost guitar string evaporates in a grayish haze as if blotted out. The idea here—and its execution is purposely aborted halfway—is to force the strings out of their surface parallelism and submit them to a foreshortened recession back toward our left. (For the same idea fully realized, see the top ends of the guitar strings in fig. 3.21.) Or to put all this another way, at Oslo the relation among the guitar’s two bodies becomes a matter of process, of the artist-viewer adjusting the balance of visual power, and be it in his disfavor, over the course of completing the work, and be it by painting out what he had previously painted in. A final example: the powerful little painting known as Guitar “J’aime Eva” (fig. 3.21 ). Its title is derived from the words that were once inscribed in the bottom area, which now looks like a blank cartellino . A personal gift from the artist to Gouel, it is the only Picasso known to have been owned by her.97 That promises to make the work special even by Sorgues standards; and it is. Let us quickly note the familiar series traits. There is the hinge between frontality and obliquity, which here is located in a vertical that extends through the guitar neck’s right edge down below the bridge. And there are the strings, which clarify the point of the Oslo erasure. Their bottom ends terminate at the horizontal line of the bridge, which asserts their frontality; but their top ends descend in a staggered progression, which asserts their foreshortening

Figure 3.21. Pablo Picasso, Guitar “J’aime Eva,” 1912. Oil on canvas, 35 × 27 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

Cubism’s Passion

153

Figure 3.21a. Detail of figure 3.21.

toward our right, as if the guitar were rotated around the hinge back into space. Internally riven by the foundational contrast, these strings are imagestrings, relatives of the Aficionado’s image-mustache, it too painted at Sorgues (fig. 3.10). The relation between the two paintings goes deeper than that. The Aficionado is metaphorically present in Guitar “J’aime Eva”: as one party in a subobjective power exchange that cleaves the image-body in two. The opposite party (“the state”) is represented by the sound-hole. Its flat frontality and facture, the latter worked up to the density of unsmoothed concrete, deny the idea of a cavity behind it. But there is also a comeback: the rounded volume that’s swelling in the guitar’s lower left section (fig. 3.21a). Picasso carefully shaded the bottom edge to model its curvature; he also painted a blob right into its center. Between them, swell and blob summon the shape of an almost-breast onto the canvas. It is caressed by a strand of almost-hair that runs down the guitar’s left contour. Subjectivation inflates one part of an image-body even as objectivation withdraws another to the surface: that is a very Braquean way of formalizing

154

Form as Revolt

a visual power exchange. But in Guitar “J’aime Eva” Picasso’s emphasis is on Gewalt rather than Feinheit, on the difference between the materiality of paint and the illusion of swelling flesh. Moreover, the swell is being violated. Halfway down, the strand of almost-hair abruptly veers inward and cuts into the almost-breast. The brownish-red brushstrokes undergo a similar transformation. Their house-painter comb pattern fades toward the bottom, and with it all constraints to expression, as the brushstrokes turn into stains of almostblood. One of them is even dripping down onto the table with the Kahnweilerian wineglass. As if the almost-breast had been swished, ever so gently, by a banderilla.

Braque and Picasso: The Opposite of Unity At one point in The Art of the 20th Century , Einstein described the relation between Braque and Picasso as follows: “Taking sides is nonsensical; both men are indissolubly linked to the creation of cubism, and the biased indulge in the struggle over priority” (K1 74).98 What sounds like a straightforward appeal to art-critical fairness takes us back to the problematic of Einstein’s prewar writing. For what we have here is a wanderer’s ontology in a nutshell. As we know, creation and priority—origin and firstness—are loaded terms in Einstein’s book. His point is that the origin of cubism wasn’t single but double; that as Braque and Picasso formed up into a pair of comparanda, cubism was born at the point of their indifference. That is another way of saying the two were complementary and equal, that Braque and Picasso related as plus and minus to the zero of modern art. That has in effect been the argument of this chapter, and I close it by pointing to the existential weight it had for Einstein. Readers may have noticed the term “simultaneity” has a familiar ring beyond Einstein’s polemic against futurism: we came across many synonyms for it in chapter 1. There, we had seen Einstein struggling with the way in which different kinds of subjectivity were appearing “at once” or “at the same time” (zugleich, gleichzeitig) in a single text: different authorial personas in “The Decorator,” different political agents in the Aktion “Political Notes,” different existential moods in “The Pauper.” When Einstein was looking at cubism, he mapped that writerly problematic onto visual art. And here, seeing double, the wanderer found simultaneity realized in two ways. Braque had achieved on canvas what Einstein himself hadn’t achieved on the page. The problem of form was the problem of time; the problem of time was the problem of a beginning; and that the beginning was split was no longer a problem. For in Braque’s cubism the beginning had become a moment of

Cubism’s Passion

155

productive bifurcation: a moment when temporal flow, instead of either unrolling as a causal chain or disintegrating into negativity, was compressed into an at-onceness of sheer potentiality. Just which outcome one extracts from the Pompidou painting (fig. 3.9)—is it a musician, or is it a still life?—is a question its simultaneity doesn’t answer but broach. In Braque, that question was a conceivably intimate one, but to Einstein it had much wider ramifications. To define a field of vision as only ever on the verge of coalescing was more broadly to define any moment of any kind of experience—pictorial, amorous, political— as open, conflicted, and producible rather than as closed, predetermined, and merely executable. Braque’s spontaneous realism seemed to have given form in the studio to a beginning to which Rosa Luxemburg had given form in the street. The same could not be said of Pablo Picasso, a subversive artist who always needed the prison walls of “the state” to bang his brush against. But just where does one draw the line between working under constraint and nihilism? “You must do everything against. And never for. From the moment you begin to work for, you’ve had it”: Picasso was the Georges Sorel to Braque’s Luxemburg. Like Sorel, Picasso had a taste for violence for its own sake, for liberation not as means but as end. That fact did not escape the author of the Aktion “Political Notes,” and the words he found for describing it were again familiar ones. “By unity we understand the compression of dialectical opposites and variations; for it is only in the preservation of the animating conflict that forms will stay active. The idea is to preserve the tension of the forms and the danger of their destruction” (K3 121).99 Statements like these will gain no purchase on the Emigrant, but they get at the simultaneity of the Aficionado well enough (fig. 3.10). In Picasso as in Braque the ground of painting was split, but in Picasso that split didn’t open onto a beginning. Instead, the oppositions it generated looked as dialectical to Einstein as their equivalents had in his own writing. The banderilla left traces on the canvas as sharp as those the pen left on the page: an imageface cut up into two, a word divided as prefix against noun. The Aficionado is a humorist self-portrait every bit as fanatic as “The Pauper.” Which means that Kahnweiler was right after all: in the 1910s Einstein had indeed been a cubist poet of sorts.100 A final note. The presence of the dialectic in the passage I just cited is symptomatic of Einstein’s renewed obsession with Hegel around 1930. That obsession, and his related obsession with Picasso, will be one focus of the next chapter. We are headed into dark territory, and that cannot be helped. The problem was that by 1930 one member of the cubist dyad had faded away, and with him the promise his art had been carrying. To be sure, it was in the early 1930s that Einstein would write his monograph on Braque.

156

Form as Revolt

But the brevity and hyperbole of its postcubism sections reveal that book as a largely commemorative exercise. In his heart of hearts, Einstein was well aware Braque was no longer producing significant new work. Picasso, on the other hand, had lately been going strong again. Only one painter was now available for the wanderer’s double vision, and he looked at his art with twice the intensity.

4

The Double Style

There is a reason why Einstein never became a Weimar Culture household name. The Twenties didn’t roar for him; except for The Art of the 20th Century, they were the decade of his flattest writing. But after his move to Paris, the dry spell suddenly ended. The years between 1929 and 1934 saw a tremendous increase in the quality, quantity, and variety of his work. The single most important factor in bringing it about was Documents (1929/30), the Wildenstein-financed journal for which Einstein served as a founding editor and which he ran together with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris.1 Einstein published dozens of short texts in Documents and other venues, among them Die Weltkunst, a mainstream art magazine that provided a source of income; exhibition catalogues, as for André Malraux’s Galerie de la NRF; and the third edition of his survey (1931), for which he delivered complete rewrites of the chapters on Picasso and Klee. All of these texts demonstrate how, in line with tastes at Documents, Einstein’s broad interests broadened still further. He was now writing about topics as varied as central Asian nomad art, seventeenth-century Dutch landscape etchings, and the latest Picassos at Rosenberg’s; and his thinking was refreshed by new theoretical resources, notably psychoanalysis and ethnography. At the same time, however, Einstein’s mind was darkening as it became haunted by old obsessions again. Buried for over a decade if never quite laid to rest, the specter of the Berlin prose was looming anew. The result was some of the most powerful art writing of the early twentieth century; powerful for constantly surfing the edge between brilliance and dysfunctionality. In Einstein at Documents, the one could not be had without the other.

158

Form as Revolt

In the following two chapters I will attempt to blaze a trail through this rich territory of thought.2 To stay the course, my account will be guided by three assumptions. The first concerns the larger context of the Paris art world. It is that Einstein’s participation in the usual avant-garde warfare is anecdotally entertaining but critically negligible. Like Bataille and Leiris, he traded barbs with André Breton’s faction of surrealism. But ultimately, Einstein’s position was more akin to his friend Kahnweiler’s; his hostility was that of a prewar formalist partisan of cubism. One gets the sense that the Bretonian surrealists looked like latter-day futurists to him: literati upstarts who were strong on manifestos but weak on giving them form in visual art. Hence Einstein’s dismissal of Salvador Dalí’s psychoanalytic naturalism; hence his insistence on the superiority of cubist collage over the surrealist efforts in the medium; hence his endorsement, disappointingly brief, of those surrealists who seemed to be working in the cubist tradition: André Masson and Joan Miró. That Einstein’s perspective on Bretonian surrealism was untenably narrow needs no belaboring. It is also why it will not receive extensive treatment here.3 The second assumption is to do with the art of Pablo Picasso in the later 1920s, which will receive that treatment, for it was very much on Einstein’s mind. If we count in his survey’s Picasso section as well as collective exhibition reviews and translations, he published no less than seven texts on the artist between 1928 and 1932. My thesis is that Picasso mattered to Einstein because of a deep division that seemed to be running through his oeuvre. Einstein’s Picasso was double, he was not one but two, and that was what made his work so compelling: compelling because congenial. In his writing on the artist, Einstein managed to convert that doubleness into a simultaneity that I have found impossible to imitate analytically; instead, I have resolved it into a consecutive narrative. I will first present the Picasso whom Einstein wanted to see, and then the Picasso he couldn’t help seeing at the same time. Still, Picasso’s art is only half the story. This chapter will consider a number of other practices in light of the theoretical resources Einstein brought to bear on them in various texts from the early 1930s, among them the “monograph” on Georges Braque (1934), the odd catalogue preface and Weltkunst piece, and the extensive notes on art history from the Paris period (1928–40) that are preserved in Einstein’s estate. The topics I touch on extend from Mesopotamian art to the prints of Hercules Segers, from Hegel’s Science of Logic to Mauss’s General Theory of Magic. I will range this widely precisely for sake of clarity. One reason for the continued bafflement at Einstein’s presence at Documents is that the three main strands of his thought—philosophy, art history, and art criticism—were so inextricable they were constantly encroaching upon each other. The challenge is to tell them apart and then think them together again. That does mean starting out from the abstract before getting round to the concrete. But the boon is that once the project is clear and the terminology in place, some very detailed observations

The Double Style

159

can be made about works of visual art. That said, I will allow my account of Einstein as a thinker and viewer to be complicated by another of Einstein as a writer. The meaning of the art he was looking at always resided in the words he was finding for it. At Documents, these words were dividing again, and the same is true for this chapter on them. My third and final assumption is that, unlike Georges Bataille’s, Einstein’s project still needs clarification, hence the spotlight will be firmly on him. Nonetheless, implicit parallels are going to emerge. Bataille and Einstein were two ships in the night, but at Documents they were sailing under the same flag. Hence some familiar topics will be gone over again, but in the process questions will be raised whose answers have been taken for granted for too long. At the end of the day, just what was the ethical and political value of the dialectic in Hegel or the death drive in Freud? This chapter will follow Einstein grappling with these notions, and it will end on a deeply skeptical note.4

The Tectonic Einstein’s art history and criticism of the 1930s were powered by a more fundamental theoretical project. This was his philosophy of being, or, as he called it, the real. A fuller treatment of it will be given in the next chapter, but a précis of the pages to follow will be helpful at this point. Let me use a heuristic fiction, and suggest that in Einstein the real consists of two closely related levels. At the first and “lower” level, the real is all chaos, contingency, and flux: untamed nature, chance events, pure psychic flow. At the second level “above” the real, people have emerged from the chaos and try to keep it at bay by giving it a form in space and time: by wrestling down the elements, controlling the course of history, composing an artwork, or writing a philosophy book. The salient question for Einstein was whether the presence of the real “below” is acknowledged or denied by the forms of culture “on top.” Whether in art, philosophy, or personal biography: is form used as a means of denying the real even exists? Or is it used as a means of acknowledging the fragility of human life; a fragility that’s caused by its ongoing exposure to the real? In the first instance, a culture will pretend to be grounded in itself; in the second, it will admit to the threat of its own groundlessness. To Einstein writing in exile in the 1930s, the forms of denial outweighed the forms of acknowledgment by a wide margin. He saw it his job as an art historian and critic to point to examples of both. The ideal was to chance upon a kind of art that neither yielded to the threat of the real nor denied that it exists, but which instead gave form to a way of living with it. That ideal proved hard to find. So much for the précis. Let’s look at Einstein’s actual argument more closely by considering some of the means of denying the real that he read back into the

160

Form as Revolt

history of art and thought. In an undated note he came up with a concise list of them. The petrification of the world and of being is one of our primary tendencies; that is, the struggle against death, against a massive movement that signifies life yet whose energy surpasses our own. Against this tremendous, vital movement of the world we oppose the repetition of our actions, of ritual, memory, abstraction, style: an arrestment (a barrier) by means of which we seek to inhibit and slow down this movement of the world; a means . . . by which we compose and impose structures.5

What we have here is a kind of dark Bergsonism: a philosophy of the real that gives the same weight to becoming and perishing. To say the phenomenal world is “a massive movement that signifies life,” but to add in the same breath that it poses a deadly threat, is to insist, against all naïve vitalisms, on what Einstein elsewhere called Weltzwang, the “equally deadly and vital compulsion of the world.”6 The vital and deadly power of the real is such that the movement of its becoming will first cause life to emerge within itself, and then go on to overwhelm it with the onslaught of its formless sensory richness, and eventually kill it. The real is threatening us with its chaos and contingency, and the question is how we are going to respond to that threat. Will we yield to a becoming that brings death to the life it spawns, and be absorbed by its flux? Will we seek to escape from its immanence into an airless transcendental sphere of our own invention and embrace there a being without life? Or will we accept our own becoming toward death within the real, take up the challenge, and actively embrace our transformation by it? These are the three existential options in face of Weltzwang that Einstein mapped out in his ontological ethics and in the theory of art he based on it. I will examine them in order, by beginning with two false choices and ending up with the right one. To return to our quotation: repetition, arrestment, barriers, petrification, not to mention Weltzwang itself, a term that rhymes with Schicksalszwang or Wiederholungszwang—if Einstein’s terms sound vaguely familiar, that is because the first ontological stance he has in mind is related to the behavior of a certain protoplasmic vesicle in Sigmund Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920).7 In Freud’s account, that behavior stands for a more general stance toward the real that’s shared by all organisms, humans included: a stance that seeks to erect a stimuli shield against it in order to produce a barrier of complexity reduction against the onrush of a hostile environment. The problem with that stance, Einstein learned from Freud, is that this effort at self-protection is actually self-defeating. It is precisely by trying to impose a measure of stability onto their environment that both the vesicle and the Freudian trauma patient are yielding to the wish not to protect a vibrant life against the deadly adversity of the real, but to protect their desire to die peacefully, “after their own fashion”: the wish to install, already in life, a static

The Double Style

161

equilibrium that would be fully consummated at its end. “The aim of all life is death,” as Freud notoriously declared.8 On a bad day, of which there were many in the 1930s, Einstein was inclined to agree with him. As he explained to Michel Leiris, he believed that ontological choice number 1 had been a tempting option throughout all historical periods and cultural practices, from ancient religion to nineteenth-century philosophical idealism and contemporary poetry.9 A textbook example from the history of art will help make his argument more concrete. In a number of texts from his Paris period, Einstein located ontological choice number 1 as far back as the origin of sedentary civilization. To his mind, the art and architecture of the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia stood for the questionable victory of a postnomadic humanity over the threatening fluidity of the real. A will to permanence had become the origin of human civilization, grounding it in repetition. Civilization had invented the city (Stadt) as a Stete, or steady terrain, and the home as a Bleibe, or an abode that will remain (bleiben) the same and in the same place over time; and it had populated this new territory with an architecture whose language of “repetitive formal elements” further reinforced the structure of lives now organized according to a cyclical rhythm of work, ritual, and recurring seasonal change.10 Einstein called this stance a “settler conservatism”: a domestication of the real by means of an elementary architectonic language, which, in virtue of its simplicity, regularity, and durability amounted to a “form shield” against the onslaught of the real’s unpredictable flux.11 Given the rhyme between “form shield” (Formschutz) and Freud’s “stimuli shield” (Reizschutz), the underlying point here is clear enough: according to Einstein, the true founder of Sumer and Babylon was the death drive.12 Moreover, the term “conservatism,” which in Freud is neutrally descriptive, in Einstein acquires an ethical, even a political dimension. By seeking to preserve their lives the wrong way and so to elude the compulsion of the world, the Mesopotamian settlers were conservatives for being thanatophiliacs: the death drive was right-wing. What went for architecture also went for visual art. In 1929, the orientalist Georges Contenau had published a brief survey essay on Sumerian sculptures in Documents, and these left a strong impression on Einstein. He became fascinated by the numerous portrait statues that Gudea, ruler of the city-state of Lagash (ca. 2150–2125 B.C.), had commissioned during his reign, so that his life and achievements might be commemorated millennia after his death (fig. 4.1).13 Observing that many of Gudea’s statues bear the inscription “May his life be long,” Einstein decided that their production was actually motivated by a paralyzing fear of perishing, which ensured they achieved the opposite of their stated purpose. “Terrified by death, men try to conserve life in the image, and the settler, afraid of chaos, uses tectonic forms to this end. The enduring existence of the deceased depends on the durability of the forms of the body; whence the popularity of solid stone.”14 By

162

Form as Revolt

Figure 4.1. Seated statue of Gudea, 2150–2100 BC. Diorite, 44 cm high. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1959.

having his immobile likeness carved in the indestructible hardness of diorite, Einstein was saying, Gudea had achieved permanently what Freud’s trauma patients were achieving only intermittently: a “defense against death through the anticipation of death.”15 In Gudea’s case, the deadly constancy of the sitter had been underscored by the immutability of the sculptural material; but to Einstein’s mind the thanatophilia of the tectonic had much wider applications: not just as a work of art’s physical property but also as its formal structure. Consider his notes on prehistoric art, written up around or after the moment of Documents. Here Einstein set up an opposition between the vividly detailed cave art of the Paleolithic period and the abstract, repetitive ornament of the Neolithic that succeeded it. Tectonic—the limitation of expression—a small number of options—protection from losing oneself in the detail—the building as center—the image as building

The Double Style

163

member and hence as secondary element—(Paleolithic painting freer—Neolithic art bound to architectural form) the defense against experience, censorship, selection.16

Translation: Paleolithic art had been groundless twice over. It had been the work of itinerant nomads not rooted permanently in a Bleibe; and it had consisted of paintings on cave walls whose formal structure had not been derived from the shape of its support. Neolithic art, by contrast, was the work of people now grounded in settlements, their lives centered around a Bau; and the formal structure of their art was extrapolated from the architecture it was merely decorating. The tectonic ornament of the Neolithic formalized as image what Mesopotamian diorite formalized as material and architecture as topography: a conservative selfprotectionism, a defense against the real. But all this was ancient history. The work of his former teacher at Berlin, Heinrich Wölfflin, helped Einstein think about the relation between the tectonic and more recent art.17 In the Basic Principles of Art History (1915), Wölfflin had defined the tectonic as a reciprocal relation between the filling and the frame of a painting; a reciprocity that he believed had been perfected in the Renaissance. It is clear from Wölfflin’s language that for him, as for Einstein, this formal solution was also an ethical one; but there the similarity ends, for Wölfflin was a conservative in the Einsteinian sense of the term. As early as his Prolegomena (1886), Wölfflin had considered architecture the paradigm of all organized form, including the form of subjecthood. “What holds us upright and prevents a formless collapse?” he had asked. “It is the opposing force that we may call will, life, or whatever. I call it force of form. . . . We assume that in everything there is a will that struggles to become form and has to overcome the resistance of formless matter.”18 In the Basic Principles Wölfflin went on to shift the argument over into visual art. In the tectonic style, the filling visibly relates to the given space. . . . Whether the field is rectangular or round, we find the classic era following the principle of having the given conditions become the rule of one’s own will, that is, the whole is made to look as if this filling were just made for that frame, and vice versa.19

Wölfflin’s description of Brescianino’s Venus (fig. 4.2) is a case in point. The figure has been comprehended into a schema so that . . . the formal elements interact with each other in elementary contrasts, and the totality of the image is governed throughout by tectonic forces. Picture axis and figure axis mutually reinforce one another.20

In Wölfflin, for visual art to become tectonic, for the body to be configured sub specie architecturae (his phrase), was for life to win the battle against death. But another way of putting this would be to say that Wölfflin’s notion of the tectonic

164

Form as Revolt

internalized the death drive’s impulse toward stasis as the formal reciprocity of filling and frame; so that a human subject here voluntarily submits to the rigid limits of an a priori order of his own making. That at least was Einstein’s take on the matter. In the hands of most people the tectonic will petrify into a hopelessly repeated schema; understandably so, given it is a sign of fear and of the desire for permanence. Originally a means of power wielded against nature, the tectonic will in due course turn against man himself, who, once the protective magic formula has been successfully applied, will go on to repeat it slavishly, and turn it into the fetish of his formal rites. (K3 123)21

Einstein was not referring to Mesopotamia or the Renaissance here but to the art of his own present. The quote is from the third Figure 4.2. Andrea del Brescianino, Venus and Two edition of The Art of the 20th CenPutti, circa 1525. Oil on panel, 150 × 66 cm. Galleria tury and its context is a passage in Borghese, Rome. which the stalwart of cubism was indulging, one more time, in his contempt for modern abstraction. Einstein dismissed the most diverse practices, from Mondrian through Malevich and Tatlin, as so much “rationalism kitsch,” “Platonism of formal purity,” “fetishism of the absolute,” and, not least, “ersatz architecture” (K3 239). We are not required to buy into his polemic, but still we may note that Einstein’s phrase does fit an image like Josef Albers’s Tectonic Group [sic] (fig. 4.3), similar works by whom were included in a Zurich Kunsthaus survey of abstract art, which Einstein dismissed in the following terms: “It’s an old story: generalization as a tool of power. The tensed and virtually indecomposable paintings of one’s predecessors are reduced to purified formulas, which is to say they are being emptied.”22 Put another way, what made modern abstraction loathsome to Einstein was that its tectonic compositions seemed to have pared down the paintings of Braque

The Double Style

165

Figure 4.3. Josef Albers, Tectonic Group, 1925. Sandblasted glass, 29 × 45 cm. Private collection, Switzerland.

and Picasso to the naked armature of the cubist grid, and thereby fatally impoverished their achievement. The hallucinatory fluidity of cubism’s image-objects that we examined at length in the previous chapter had been purged from the canvas in favor of a reciprocity of repetitive forms. Abstract art had extracted the tectonic from cubism and put it in service of the death drive; and, as we shall find Einstein arguing below, it would fall to an erstwhile cubist to reclaim it for the real.

The Psychogram A transvaluation had already begun with Nietzsche, who had insisted on the primary influence of the drives, compared to which the role of reason was that of a lifeinhibiting force. That transvaluation in turn was powerfully promoted by Freud, who rediscovered in the dream and the unconscious the life of the drives, the forces that oppose the rational. (K3 158)23

Form against formlessness; stasis against movement; frame against filling; death against life; reason against the drives: given this string of dual terms, and his apparent rejection, in each case, of the first of each pair, we might expect that Einstein would have unconditionally embraced the second one. We might expect that at the moment of Documents, Einstein, who had been familiar with Freud’s psychoanalysis and the art of the French surrealists since at least 1926, would have joined in their exploration of that most antitectonic of territories: the Freudian unconscious. And it is true that, given his disdain for the ascetic compositions of the tectonic, Einstein reserved special praise for the surrealist practice that seemed to release a wildly Dionysian psychic intensity without any inhibition onto the surface of the

166

Form as Revolt

Figure 4.4. André Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 × 20.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously.

artwork, a filling not constrained by any frame. Again and again in his texts from 1928 on Einstein endorsed surrealism’s automatic drawing, or, as he preferred to call it, the “psychogram” (K3 111; fig. 4.4). But the tone of his endorsements was a weary one. “By and large, the art which I’m going to show you,” he told his audience at a talk in Berlin, to which he had brought slides of works by André Masson, “is being created and determined by a passive type, a suffering subject.”24 In The Art of the 20th Century he elaborated on that thought by comparing the psychogram with the tectonic. The two, it turned out, had more in common than one might think. They did not relate as two incommensurable antagonists, as life and death, psychic liberation and rigid constraint; but rather as two different kinds of ontological dysfunctionality, as false freedom and false submission. Stasis had been a product of the fear of death, of the effort to arrest the continuous process toward death; it had been the life belt of the fearful. . . . Today, yielding once more to process . . . one paints out of cruelty against oneself, and such images are stages on route to death, symptoms of self-annihilation. (K3 165)25

The Double Style

167

If the immobilized forms of the tectonic had amounted to a death-like defense against the real, then the breathless movement of intensity recorded by the psychogram, seemingly its opposite, was in fact, given its ontological stance, its twin. How this could be so was explained by Friedrich Nietzsche in the Will to Power. There, the two stances toward the real that Einstein saw manifested in the tectonic and the psychogram were described not as opposites but as versions of one another: as two kinds of reactivity that are distinct from a single kind of activity; two kinds that, as Gilles Deleuze has shown, are only gradually, not categorically different from one another. According to Nietzsche, Deleuze has argued, “passive” is simply “reaction insofar as it is not acted. The term ‘passive’ stands for the triumph of reaction, the moment when, ceasing to be acted, it becomes a ressentiment.”26 If the rigid formal order of the tectonic is a resentful reaction against the chaotic onrush of the real by a human subject seeking to preserve his integrity, then the psychogram stands for the moment in which that subject, instead of switching stances from reaction to action, retreats from reaction into passivity, and, overpowered by the flow of intensity, dissolves within it: into the formless tangle of the psychographic record. So it is that both the tectonic and the psychogram must end in death—the death of the real in one case, its burial under repetition; the death of the subject in the other, the dissolution of its ability to formalize. That is why Einstein, who called the tectonic “sadistic,”27 was troubled in turn by what he called “the downright masochistic attitude” (K3 165) he saw at work in the psychogram. He was troubled by the way in which, in the shift from one stance to the other, the arrow of ontological violence was not broken but merely reversed.

Picasso I: Tectonic Hallucination “Nietzsche had strictly separated Dionysian ecstasy from the Apollonian state of meditative purification, whereas the two in fact complement one another”: thus Einstein’s claim in the Picasso section of The Art of the 20th Century’s cubism chapter (K3 117).28 Picasso, Einstein is arguing, achieved what abstraction and automatic drawing did not. He combined the two complements that in Albers and Masson had been separated out: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the tectonic and the psychogram. There are two “decisive psychological poles between which Picasso’s images are oscillating,” Einstein argued: “the pole of unconscious vision and the pole of conscious construction”; “subjective hallucination” and “collective tectonic forms”; a “zone of suffering” and one of “active, willed construction” (K3 111, 116).29 In certain works from the later 1920s, Picasso merged the two zones into what Einstein called a “tectonic hallucination”: a formal imbrication of the stances of reaction and passivity within a single work of art—a work that itself was active.30 In which artworks did Picasso manage to achieve this merger? Einstein’s stab at an answer presents us with a difficulty, because it is not satisfying. In a

168

Form as Revolt

Documents essay from 1929 he gestured toward recent paintings like The Studio and The Painter and His Model, now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Studio at the Venice Guggenheim (Z VII 142, 143, 136). But, as Einstein himself acknowledged, his claims didn’t gain enough purchase on them: “In these paintings, construction is founded on tectonic hallucination: but only the static accents have been retained, those elements which are capable of opposing the flight of visions. What we observe here is a disciplining of hallucination: the flood of psychological processes is as it were repelled by the dam of static form.”31 Einstein was right. It is true that the MoMA Studio contains massive traces of overpainting and vigorous incisions with the palette knife. They suggest that for Picasso tectonic discipline was a violent act of erasure rather than the effortless accomplishment it is in Wölfflin’s Brescianino. Nonetheless, in the MoMA Studio the battle against the psychogram has been won. Still, there are more adequate examples of tectonic hallucination available in Picasso. They include a second Painter and His Model, this one at the Musée Picasso, and The Milliner’s Workshop at the Pompidou (figs. 4.5, 4.6). Both were painted at a slightly earlier moment than Einstein’s examples—1926 rather than 1927/28—but they do share a number of traits with them. There is the panoramic horizontal format, the monumental size that parades them as major statements, and there are the personnel and the setting. Both paintings stage an encounter between a male and a female in an interior that is, respectively, a studio and a workshop: a paradigmatic space for the erotically invested production of form. The Painter and His Model and the Milliner’s Workshop are often considered symptomatic of a moment during which Picasso, out at sea after his abortive flirtation with neoclassicist painting in the early 1920s, was looking closely at surrealism for a creative shot in the arm.32 But for all the obvious debt to Masson and Miró, his paintings amount to more than an eclectic mapping of automatic drawing onto the genre of the artist’s studio. Rather, Picasso, as Einstein will help us see, was prompted by the surrealists to revisit his own cubist achievements, and rethink them in a way the younger artists were never quite able to do. I will begin testing this hypothesis by describing the Painter and His Model, which I consider the logical rather than chronological first of the two (fig. 4.5). We are looking at a crammed interior space that’s filled almost to capacity with the expansive bodies of two monumental figures. The artist is sitting in an armchair on the right, hunched over a palette that he clutches with his left hand, and from which he is picking up pigment with the brush in his right. The artist’s head is framed by a canvas tacked to a stretcher on which he has recorded a rough sketch of the model in front of him; on the wall to the right, a black-and-white painting displays one of Picasso’s trademark double heads. At the extreme right, a strip of primed canvas with underdrawing has been left exposed. On the left, the female model’s pin-size head is propped up by her arms close to the edge of the composition. Her giant left foot juts forward into its center, and we are asked to

The Double Style

169

Figure 4.5. Pablo Picasso, The Painter and His Model, 1926. Oil on canvas, 172 × 256 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

imagine her torso reclining somewhere in between, on an upended bed or couch that’s propped up by a row of floorboards. Needless to say, this brief description of the image is inadequate for being too itemizing. The real subject of the painting is not an encounter between artist and model in an interior but the dissolution of their distinct identities and the space they inhabit within a single continuous web of pulsating black lines or bands. This in spite of the fact that the web seems to have originated in one of the figures, as a gigantic doodle that’s spreading out from the intersection of the painter’s brush, palette, and crotch. But that suggestion is countermanded by the final result: the alloverness of the web, whose uncenteredness, directionlessness, and visual parataxis work against the notion of punctual origin or chronological unfolding. Instead, the impression is of a simultaneous looping back and forth between left and right, up and down, of the pulsating bands, whose interaction has produced every element in the image, including the figure of their creator. The painter in his studio is not defined as the author of a desiring fantasy or its representation, but as one more local event within a network of unbound energy from which any and all such fantasies and representations emerge in the first place. The point is underscored, somewhat too didactically, by the contrast between network and underdrawing. At the extreme right, the armrest of the artist’s chair is first shown foreshortened and shaded

170

Form as Revolt

in charcoal-like paint, and then again as a flat black spiral, making it clear that in this painting one order of visibility programmatically displaces another: that network supersedes naturalism, the pulse of the field the discreteness of things. The fact that the network should hold together at all bears stressing. Somehow it is able to spin forth a whole spectrum of figurations, from the nearly abstract undulations in the center to details like the palette, all while sustaining its own continuity: the continuity of an ambience or milieu that weaves depth, shallowness, and vastly different scalar relations into a single fabric. I say fabric rather than space, because space in this image is not an empty a priori medium that would subsequently be filled with bodies and objects; nor is it absent altogether. Rather, space comes into being locally and together with the figures, which it does not admit into itself so much as it adheres to them. Container and contained are coeval. That is why disjunctions of proportion and location can exist side by side, among them the contrast between the model’s diagonally foreshortened foot and the artist’s profile leg; and another between, on one hand, the bed that has been wrenched up from the ground plane by floorboards that refuse to recede as orthogonals, and, on the other, the painter’s foot that’s firmly resting on that plane. All this is possible because, absorbing and surpassing the lesson of Masson’s automatic drawings, Picasso extended the purview of line in such a way that it could now serve as foreshortened contour, now as surface ornament, now as the transition in between. Still, the painting’s seamless continuity is in tension with the upright polygonal fields whose grayish, ochre, and bright white shapes are out of sync with the black web. To make a provisional distinction I will reconsider later on, where the web is all line without field, the fields are all light without line. The very fact of that opposition, between light and line, provides a hint that in Picasso’s work web and polygons had once belonged together, and that it was only by 1926 that they had become the two halves of a totality to which they no longer added up: because they had meanwhile been joined into a new one. This earlier totality had been that single unbroken visual plenum that is the three-dimensional figure or object as it is conjured up on the canvas by means of contour on one hand, and chiaroscuro modeling on the other. That pair of formal devices—line as contour and chiaroscuro as illumination—threatened to come apart at the moment of analytic cubism. Contour was on the verge of becoming grid, a configuration of lines that no longer traced the outline of an imagined object but echoed instead the shape of the canvas. Chiaroscuro for its part was suspended in the grid’s meshes as so much homeless shading. From Einstein’s point of view, that move came with a danger. As he had put it in Negro Sculpture, in a brief aside on the task of the “artist of today,” by whom he meant Picasso, “An all too reactive strain is woven into his efforts; his critique, necessary as it is, reinforces the analytic side” of his project.33 In 1915, cubism seemed in danger of having been merely critical: merely devoted to reactively destroying an old order of representation instead of actively constructing a new one. In turn,

The Double Style

171

the fact that by 1929 abstractionists like Albers seemed to claim that by hypostatizing the grid they had taken cubism to its own logical conclusion proved to Einstein that the laying bare of that device—the tectonic—was an ambivalent achievement. As Einstein insisted it in his “Notes on Cubism,” the tectonic was in need of an activation that was productive first, negatory second: “We consider tectonic forms . . . the most human of all, for they are the signs of a visually active subject who creates his own universe and who refuses to be the slave of given form.”34 And that is what Picasso in the Painter and His Model set out to do. The work preserves cubism’s division of light and line but transforms the terms of their interaction. The web is a descendant of the grid, but a grid now activated as a generator of psychic events. The polygons are monumental versions of cubism’s chiaroscuro facets, with the flicker of shading now separated out into transitionless degrees of luminosity: white, yellow, dark gray. They cast some sections of the web into semidarkness even as they single out others with the precision and randomness of beaming searchlights. Precision, as when the minuscule face and the hands of the woman are caught in the glare at the far left edge; randomness, as when the center panel illuminates the vacillating semantic emptiness at the heart of the image; and a mix between the two, as when the light above the painter’s head slices into the apparition of a face with empty eye sockets and caricature grin. Put differently, in the Painter and His Model we are looking at a fusion of tectonic and psychogram in such a way that the devices that cubism had analyzed out are rearticulated onto one another in order to arrive at a new kind of visibility: a visibility of the unconscious as an active, productive force. Call it a dream-work space: the incessant flow of the raw, unbound energy of the primary process as it moves, by way of condensation and displacement, from one cathexis to another, as when a black line blossoms into the bizarre cartoon profile of a bird, or when a white light slices a painter’s face in half down along the nose, only to reveal two further halves: one profile on top of another, both revolving around a single vaginal eye.35 The result is a tectonic hallucination that avoids both the reactive immobility of the tectonic and the inchoate discharge of the psychogram. Instead, by dovetailing the former with the latter, it turns the entire composition into a volatile milieu of energy flows that join up into always new and instable configurations.

Picasso I: Formal Animism Abstract as it sounds, to put the matter this way is to approach another kind of specificity. For it is on this general level—the level of the emergence of formal events within a world—that certain curious statements by Einstein on Picasso will begin to resonate intimately with the artist’s work. They alert us to the presence of another body of thought in his writing besides psychoanalysis. That discourse

172

Form as Revolt

comes into view in an important distinction Einstein drew, in his Documents essay from 1929, between Picasso’s cubism and his most recent work. Previously, transparent planes had cut into each other and had thereby created discontinuous forms; whereas these days one creates a certain continuity of analogical forms. . . . The figures that are inscribed into the surface are full-blown inventions that emerge from a beyond of form. All their parts are rendered as analogies of the totality of the composition; their values are derived from the telepathy of imagined analogical forms and from the variations of these forms.36

Telepathy and analogy are technical terms that belong with a third one that subsumes them both, it too well known to Einstein. That term is animism. It takes us into a territory first explored by Christopher Green: the relevance of ethnographic theories of magic for the work of Picasso around the time of Documents.37 Early twentieth-century ethnography had theorized animism as an ontology that a reader of Nietzsche, Mach, or William James could readily recognize as a philosophy of the world as will to power or as a pluralistic or functional universe. After all, ethnographers with whose work Einstein was familiar, notably Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on “prelogical thought” and Hubert and Mauss on magic, had described the animist world as a single, nonhierarchized continuum of inanimate and animate forces.38 Lévy-Bruhl had argued that the “natural environment of a certain group, tribes or family of tribes . . . appears in their collective representations, not as an object or a system of objects and phenomena governed by fixed laws, according to the laws of rational thought—but as an unstable ensemble of mystic actions and reactions, of which persons, things, phenomena, are but the vehicles and manifestations.”39 These actions and reactions were governed instead by what Lévy-Bruhl famously called the participation of all phenomena in one another by way of modalities like sympathy, telekinesis, “transference, contact, projection, contamination, defilement, possession.”40 As in the world as will to power or in the pluralistic universe, so in LévyBruhl’s prelogical thought: we are dealing with a power network that knows no finite, static identities of people or things nor any discontinuities between them, but which incessantly transforms all of its elements, turning them into each other’s property or effect. Nowhere more so than in the case of that curious mainstay of Melanesian animism that Hubert and Mauss had brilliantly described in their General Theory of Magic (1902/3), and which crops up again and again in Einstein’s writings of the 1930s: mana.41 What is mana? Mana is first of all an action of a certain kind, that is, a spiritual action that works at a distance and between sympathetic beings. It is also a kind of ether, imponderable, communicable, which spreads of its own accord. Mana is also a milieu, or more exactly functions as a milieu, which in itself is mana. . . . It is the mana of the magician

The Double Style

173

which works through the mana of the rite on the mana of the tindalo, and which sets other manas in motion and so forth and so on. In its actions and reactions there are no other forces involved apart from mana. It is produced in a closed circuit, in which everything is mana and which is itself mana, if we may so express it.42

So that is what mana is: everything. It is simultaneously a quality, a substance, a medium, and an agency; a “power-milieu” as Mauss called it: at once a static ambience and a mobile force that everywhere traverses and stirs it, enabling and provoking the emergence of events within. The mana of Melanesian animism is “the active, distinct and immanent principle of the whole universe”43—in short, the immanent rather than metaphysical cause of a nontranscendental pantheism.44 What Mauss’s animism shared with Nietzsche’s and James’s ontologies, Einstein realized, was that both were accounts of a world in which form and flux, people and environment, are intimately joined, and in which there were no safe havens of constancy for reactive-minded subjects to retreat into. Moreover, Einstein understood that the animist universe is not for that reason all formless wobble and contingency. It is a closed circuit that defines the interaction of its elements by a number of precise rules: the rules of sympathy according to Mauss, the law of participation according to Lévy-Bruhl. As Einstein was reading up on ethnography while looking at Picasso, it dawned on him that in the former he had come upon a description of the interaction and emergence of forms within a bounded field that was transferable to the latter. Hence his assertion in the Documents essay on cubism: “We are dealing here with a formal animism, except that the vivifying force no longer originates in the spirits but in man himself.”45 Hence his elaboration in The Art of the 20th Century, where he called Picasso’s Studio the product of a “formal mythology,” a set of configurations that, “so far from being illustrations, emerge from formal immanence itself ” (K3 134).46 These remarks clarify that while Einstein’s animism is indeed a primitivism, it is one with a twist. For Picasso to practice a formal animism is not to yield, reactively, to the superior power of a premodern spirit world; it is actively to seize that power from it. For Einstein, Picasso’s art stood for a very modern kind of animism, and it did so to the extent that, rather than representing it, his compositions internalized it as their generative principle: the principle of analogy. In Einstein’s book, to create an analogical composition is to do two things at once. It is to accept that “the primary condition is the surface”—that it is the canvas with its distinct physical properties, and not some model in nature, that must serve as the origin of a world. And it is to go on to populate that surface with a pattern of individual “form fields.”47 These form fields must be anchored within the overall similitude of the total field of the canvas, and so participate in both it and one another across a tightly organized surface like so many phenomena gliding through the smooth space of an animist universe. But the form fields must also propagate themselves as ever so slightly different inflections of the totality, as inclinations rather than instantiations of it. Then, difference will emerge within sameness, or,

174

Form as Revolt

Figure 4.6. Pablo Picasso, The Milliner’s Workshop, 1926. Oil on canvas, 172 × 265 cm. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

to recall Einstein on Mesopotamia, the unstet will emerge within the stet: the wildness of the psychogram will emerge within the regularity of the tectonic. Instead of the one trumping the other, as it had in Gudea and Brescianino, both will serve the joint origin of the work of art. It is because that origin is split in two that it becomes the source for a production of form worth the name: a production that admits chaos into order, and so gives form to an acknowledgment of the real. This is what happens in the Milliner’s Workshop (figs. 4.6, 4.6a). What makes it a more austere but also a more fully realized work than the Painter and His Model is the way in which chiaroscuro and line have been more fully integrated. There is no division here into panels of luminosity on one hand, a linear network on the other. Instead, both are merged into a single, cohesive mosaic of form fields that’s able to produce a whole range of different formal events, from depth to flatness, illumination to darkness, geometric rigor to libidinal flow. Uniformly painted in black, white, gray, and the palest shade of yellow, the fields are joined into an overall pattern that, since it is nowhere particularized by local color or traces of modeling, marks them as so many relatives of the flat, rectangular canvas, so many analogues of the tectonic. Still, the fields are everywhere on the cusp of forming up into nontectonic figurations, three-dimensional pockets of bodies-in-space that emerge

The Double Style

175

Figure 4.6a. Detail of figure 4.6.

within the overall rhythm of undulating form and light, as with the squat figure of a sewing girl who is attentively bent over her needlework behind a table at left. Ultimately, though, the image is about formalizing the coming into being, through a process of decentering and recentering, of recognizable configurations, and then about their unraveling again, as the analogical elements that compose them are pulled elsewhere and join into new associations with their neighbors. I will point to just a few examples here, in ascending order of psychic investment. There are, most obviously, the double heads that split up the faces of all three females in the workshop into confronted profiles joined into a kiss, which together with the convulsed volumes of their bodies suggest that more than just needlework is being performed here. Then there are the three curved shapes that align into a swelling blossom at dead center. The blossom’s abstract fleshiness makes it something like the painting’s master form, an emergence stopped just short of concretizing. As importantly, there is the push and pull, ambivalently libidinal and violent, at the far right. Here, the form fields have joined up into the figure of a double-faced male who is about to enter the women’s space through a paneled door. Caught in a yellow glare, the male extends a phallic pseudopod through the door’s lower panel. In response, a prehensile C-scroll emerges from within the workshop and

176

Form as Revolt

locks around the pseudopod like a vise. At once tender and castrative, that jigsaw embrace is a deep presence within the universe of Picasso’s formal mythology, a double form that throughout his career would resurface in ever new contexts.48 It is crucial that the door in the Milliner’s Workshop should be both ajar and not, that its lower edge is horizontal and flush with the painting’s own while its top edge is diagonally foreshortened back into space. In this, the door is not behaving any differently from its most significant predecessor, the French window door in the Three Dancers, painted in the previous year (Z V 426). But in the Milliner’s Workshop the stakes of the incongruity are raised. The four fingertips of the male’s hand are trying to push the door open from behind. Were they to succeed, the workshop space would at once be established visually and penetrated physically; but the door itself would be tectonicized. That makes the door a hinge not just between inside and outside, male and female, but more broadly between volume and surface: between burgeoning erotic analogies and the field from which they are trying to emerge. So it was that an older, cubist obsession got translated into Picasso’s formal animism of 1926.

The Return of the Wanderer So much for the exuberant part. Regrettably, it is only half the story, and the strenuous half at that. At the outset of this chapter I suggested that Documents saw the return of old ghosts, and I want to begin confronting them head-on. The story so far has been best-case Picasso described by best-case Einstein; it has been devoted to that part of Picasso’s work that Einstein wanted to be the whole. But the critic and his artist were complex people. Prewar Berlin was casting a shadow on postwar Paris that was falling on Picasso’s most recent paintings, many of them illustrated in Documents. They fit that shadow alarmingly well, and Einstein’s writing registered it. So far, I have been treating that writing as transparently discursive, but that approach too will have to change. When the lost wanderer walked into Documents, he was bringing the style of nonessence along. He found ample use for it. Documents offered lots of new wine for the old wineskin, new lexis for the old syntax. It is disconcerting to realize just how many of the dozens of short texts Einstein published in the early 1930s are variations on his fanatic humorism of the 1910s. The entry on the “Nightingale” for the Critical Dictionary, for example, is one of his best-known pieces for the journal, but its fame is quite undeserved. Supposedly a timely contribution to Documents’ general project of antimetaphoricity, “Nightingale” is anything but that; nor is its argument new. “Nightingale” is a rehearsal of the performative contradictions of the “Paraphrase” prose piece from 1911 that I discussed in chapter 1: a denunciation of the comparative symbolism of language that programmatically defeats itself by indulging in an orgy of symbolic comparisons.49

The Double Style

177

Another well-known essay, this one on the Documents benefactor Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, revisited the genre of collection writing that Einstein had first explored in 1913. The results were just as tortuous and unsurprising. The Reber essay is called “Portrait of a Collector.” The title seems to signal a kinship with certain texts by Walter Benjamin, but that is an illusion: Eduard Fuchs matters; Reber doesn’t. For it is Einstein himself who’s the collector here and his own text that’s the collection: a collection not of objects but of the words that fail to reach them. Over and over again, Einstein claims he wants to get at the incomparably unified coherence of Reber’s collection, at its essence or unicity. Yet, over and over again, he makes sure his effort falters. “This is not a collection of literary paraphrases,” the fanatic humorist declares, and then he goes on to produce a text that is precisely that: he keeps paraphrasing Reber’s art by wrapping it in chains of pathetically cheesy similes and metaphors. “These artworks stand before us like blood brothers.” “So often we can no longer see the artworks; they have been submerged and suffocated in the mud of paraphrases. What elementary powers of resistance must a Cézanne like the ‘Boy in a Red Vest’ contain for it to be able to breathe as vividly as on the first day.”50 Note how Einstein capitalizes on an editorial convention here: the title of the Cézanne isn’t italicized but put in quotation marks, just as “essence” had been in the early prose. Always the point, which again mightily impressed Leiris, was the same: antimetaphoricity, noncomparativeness, is a pious wish. Literature can only ever write around art (essence, the origin, the ground), and never about it.51 There are many other equally splenetic texts, but there also are some significant exceptions. As we saw, what was actually new at Documents for Einstein was that the history of art was now opening up for him, that the critic found himself turning into a scholar of sorts. But for Einstein that scholarship, such as it was, was a means to an end: the end of extending the wanderer’s project into art history. As he was pursuing his studies of the outlandish and the marginalized, he came across a number of prospective personas, and the fascination they exerted on him pulled him away from the old literary quagmire and on toward new experiments in art writing. That pull saved Einstein from a relapse into solipsism but not necessarily from the threat of nihilism. It was one fine line to tread. Were the artists to whom he felt drawn actively building a world, or were they reactively annihilating one? Given the precedent of the Berlin prose, we should not expect a clear-cut answer to that question. At Documents, the history of art became the groundless ground for a roaming subjectivity, for a multiplicity of different ontological stances that Einstein kept diagramming in sudden bursts of short, incisive essays. To give us a sense of the range, I will consider the two strongest examples here, one of them a bit too predictably brilliant, the other marvelously improbable. Then, I will return to the wanderer’s most important persona in contemporary art.

178

Form as Revolt

The Zero of Landscape In falling you are suspended Entangled In the contradiction Between image and ground. ......................... You won’t be carried along by the boastful images That sail across the bottomlessness.52

These lines are taken from a poem called Design for a Landscape. Einstein published it in 1930, a year after he had devoted a memorable Documents essay to the seventeenth-century Dutch etcher Hercules Segers. The poem and the essay should be considered together. For while Design for Landscape never mentions Segers, its topic and phrasing suggest that it is he whom Einstein has in mind at this point in the poem. In addressing the artist with the voice of apostrophe, its lines summon Segers into his own prints as an interlocutor for Einstein. The poem thereby achieves lyrically what the essay achieves with prose: an intimate unity between writer and artist, stranded together in a jointly made world, but a world ravaged by a shared predicament. The essay states that predicament in powerful ways. Einstein had been alerted to Segers’s stunning landscapes (figs. 4.7, 4.8) by Wilhelm Fraenger’s brief but important monograph on the artist.53 The book was a double revelation. It put Segers on the art-historical map as a major figure by any standard, a singularity in his own time that to the present day has resisted adequate contextualization.54 Moreover, many passages in Fraenger seemed to suggest, verbatim, that the singularity was the basis of a kinship; that Segers too had been a wanderer, an artist who had perfected a style of nonessence in visual terms.55 In a text on Segers, therefore, the form of the writing and the form of the art promised to fit hand in glove. One wanderer would be entering the landscapes of another, retracing on the page an antediluvian topography of ontological drift. The result was “The Etchings of Hercules Seghers,” a text every bit as stylized and dense as “The Pauper” from 1913, its closest predecessor in tone. That is why it would be a mistake to trust one’s first impressions, and consider it a surrealist period piece. As at Die Aktion, so at Documents: in Einstein’s texts the turmoil is just lexical; the syntax is as clinical as can be. Syntax and lexis relate as tectonic and psychogram, and that relation needs to be recognized to get the nihilism right. Witness the sheer systematicity of the essay, the thoroughness with which Einstein picked out one by one the several parameters of Segers’s dazzling prints and managed to rally them all as examples for a single argument: that the technique of the artist, and not only his, is “a zero technique, a dialectic of forms under the sign of death, a mutual extermination of parts.”56 That zero technique, a paired opposition of plus and minus, Einstein found at work in Segers’s subject matter, his manner of execution, the design of his compositions, and in their psychophenomenology of viewing.

The Double Style

179

Figure 4.7. Hercules Segers, Mountain Gorge by a Road. Version I. Blue ink on paper prepared with pink body color, 16.7 × 15.3 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam.

To begin with subject matter: “What we have here is a suicide via a detour through an alien motif. He takes his revenge by smashing his own fixed ideas, which he is giving form as shattered landscapes” (G 208).57 So, in Segers’s etchings sadism and masochism are equally present, at once, and they are canceling each other out. First, he sadistically violates the sixteenth-century Flemish world landscape by draining nature of its salvific meaning and instead mapping his private fantasies all over it.58 He turns cartwheel tracks into pulsating veins, and rocks into phalluses (fig. 4.7, top right; fig. 4.8, center right). Then, or rather simultaneously, Segers goes on masochistically to violate his own fantasies in turn. He castrates his phallus-rock with a cloud as if with a knife. He traps a sailor in the rigging of a ship that the sailor has climbed in order to escape from the moonscape below: that, in

180

Form as Revolt

Figure 4.8. Hercules Segers, River Valley with a Waterfall. Version II. Green ink on paper prepared with pink body color, 15 × 19 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam.

any case, is Einstein’s reading of the tangled blob on a plate into which Segers had initially etched the contours of a massive sailing ship, and which he later reworked into a landscape (fig. 4.7, center top). Then there is the register of technique, which sets up an opposition between the bold swiftness of Segers’s generalizing marks and the painstaking labor of detail fetishism: “These landscapes have been drawn with rapid contours yet at the same time have been decomposed in a manner both fearful and pedantic” (G 205).59 The simultaneity returns, in a different key, in the design of the overall composition. “The Baroque has expanded so much, it leads the eye astray in a narrow labyrinth” (G 204).60 Segers’s vistas, Einstein is saying, are as sweeping as the world landscapes of his teacher Coninxloo. But in Segers the relation between part and whole, individual pebble and total environment, is not stated as a continuum but as a rigid contrast. There are no scalar transitions, no repoussoir figures, no middle-ground props that would mediate between the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. What midsize landmarks exist do not help organize the topography but are swallowed up by it. Just compare the majestic windmills of Segers’s contemporaries, Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, with the diminutive specimen at lower left in figure 4.7.

The Double Style

181

So it is that the viewer is given a choice between getting trapped by the one and getting lost in the other: the spiky texture of foreground rocks, the optical flicker of the distant view. The result is a visuality of vertigo, a back-and-forth of the gaze between close-up smudges and mountain peaks looming on the far horizon. “Vertigo signifies the fatality of the fall and at the same time the fact of being rooted to the spot, that is, a cramp in-between two contrasts and a psychic annulment” (G 205).61 Note the presence of the verb “signifies,” and recall our discussion, in chapter 1, of the way in which things mean to the personas of the Berlin prose. In the Segers essay, which is not prose but criticism, the vertigo is both the artist’s and the writer’s, a visual and textual oscillation of divided terms around zero, of paralysis and free fall, stasis and abandon. The apostrophe I quoted from Design for a Landscape is making the same point. It addresses Segers as the sailor-blob: entangled, suspended in falling, not carried along by the images that are sailing across his plate. As the artist is summoned into his own work, visual meaning divides for him the way textual meaning divides for Einstein: he is caught between ship and landscape, ocean and mountains, two topographies juxtaposed across a bottomlessness not itself seen. At several points in the essay, writing and image converge still more intimately. “Segers repeats the peaks, the leaves, the rocks, which is to say that due to a fear of death he wants to arrive at a certain constancy, and to seize duration by means of that constancy” (G 205, 208).62 The death-drive argument is familiar enough from Einstein on Mesopotamian art, but in the present sentence it is not just discursive but self-enacting. Visuality gets ported over into prose by the act of description. As Einstein repeats Segers’s repetitive marks in the form of an itemizing list (peaks, leaves, rocks), he is writing the constancy—the word itself is repeated—that he is observing in the prints. Moreover, when he sprinkles his essay with phrases like nous constatons and je constate, which he does five times on just four pages, he is going for the same effect. Translating them as “we observe” or “I will note here” is technically correct but nonetheless inaccurate. The phrases, whose present tense matters, indicate an ongoing activity by means of which the criticism does something to the psychographic share of the art that extends beyond a mere registration of visual facts. Nous constatons un atavisme de l’imagination, une véritable obsession (G 208): we are rendering constant the wildly fluctuating fantasies we are writing about; by writing about them. By appositing, synonymizing, and thereby regularizing “atavism” and “obsession,” we are dovetailing tectonic and psychogram, syntax and lexis, as plus and minus. Hence it would be imprecise to assume that their “dialectic of forms under the sign of death” makes Segers’s images so many landscapes beyond the pleasure principle. From a wanderer’s perspective, signification is never single but always double. Its nihilism even splits up death: into textual repetition and psychic volatility, reaction and passivity. Zero trumps the death drive, which is not the essence of Segers’s etchings but one of two terms that dance around their groundlessness.

182

Form as Revolt

Desert Nomadism Was there a way of writing about the history of art that amounted to more than just an elaborate mimesis of ontological self-disembowelment? Perhaps. Einstein’s most interesting alternative to the Segers essay was “The Art of the Nomads of Central Asia,” a short text that was published simultaneously in German and French in 1931: as the catalogue essay for a small exhibition organized by André Malraux at the Galerie de la NRF, and as a “review” of that show in Die Weltkunst.63 In the German version, the essay’s programmatic theme is obvious at a glance. The words Wanderer, Wandern, and Wanderung occur nine times on just two and a half pages. It starts with the first sentence, which announces both the topic and the author’s performative relation to it: “Nomad art: a style experienced by wandering” (ZN 191).64 We are dealing with another convergence of art and writing, therefore, with a text set adrift in response to a wanderer’s art. Still, its tone and result differ significantly from the Segers essay, and this in spite of the look of the objects in the show. Take the frontispiece illustration for Einstein’s catalogue essay: a decorated head, possibly photographed by Germaine Krull (fig. 4.9). The starkness of the work seems to make it a textbook Documents choice; the reader expects a fiery treatise on the bassesse of nomad art. But what matters to Einstein is not the head’s bizarre physiognomy but the peculiar dualism it sets up between surface and decoration, between the plain stereometry of the dark, wooden cylinder and the dense web of intricate copper ornaments that cover its surface. That is what the writing seizes on: the proliferation of formal relations across a smooth, featureless ground. Einstein describes the object in the following terms: the skullcap on top is, “perhaps,” a Sassanian helmet. Underneath it, “a wreath of almost Scythian or Tibetan masks is fenced around the head in order to ward off the evil spirits.” He goes on to speculate about its ritual function in nomad society: “If the chief is cured, or if he dies, the head will be burned. Perhaps its medicine has passed over into the cured person, or else the magic head proved impotent, or perhaps the demon of illness took flight into it” (ZN 191, 192).65 Even these brief quotations reveal a pattern in the writing: nothing is certain. The whole text is a bravura piece of eloquent tentativeness, replete with words and phrases that express doubt about the validity of their own claims. Witness the many instances of the conditional tense, the “or” conjunction, and the abundance of adverbs of uncertain probability, incomplete degree, hesitant manner, and unreliable frequency: “perhaps,” “almost,” “slowly,” “oftentimes.” All of them are given the same skepticist work to do, and the motivation for it is familiar enough from chapter 2. As with the Chokwe figure in 1915, so with the nomad head in 1931: the point is not a scrupulous weighing of the scanty evidence in order to contextualize an object more firmly in a period style or a social practice. For the point is not that the writing ground the object at all; it is rather that the object unground the writing.

The Double Style

183

Figure 4.9. Ritual head, central Asia. Copper and wood, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Reproduced from Art des nomades de l’Asie centrale (1931).

Hence Einstein’s description of the head: its stylistic origin is diluted, its ritual function contradictory, its magical causality invertible. The decoration is either Sassanian, Scythian, or Tibetan; almost. The head is used at the moment of either healing or death. And its efficacy is either outward, inward, or nil—either it is an active source of medicine, a passive receptacle for a demon, or else it is inert altogether. Plus, minus, zero: we know the routine. Like the front and back aspects of the Chokwe figure or the psychophenomenology of a Segers print, the nomad head’s style, function, and causality revolve around a point of indifference. But what makes the essay compelling is that its nihilism is deployed as a means to an end. The style of nonessence uproots the meaning of the object in order to clear the ground for a powerfully fragile exercise in textual world building. Consider the following passage. These heads are covered all over with configurations that signify endless wanderings. The blackened cheeks are as if traversed by trails. . . . These heads are blossoming like

184

Form as Revolt

microcosms. Demons, flowers, and animals sprout forth from them, they rest in the meander stream that’s being wandered endlessly by the caravans. As the years keep turning, so do they, from Leh through Lhasa and Kashgar, centipede-like back and forth. The wanderers cycle through buying and selling and exchange merchandise and forms. They offer turquoise, buy wool, and borrow motifs that seem magical to them, and hammer them into the blackened cylindrical skull. . . . So, in artistic terms we would seem to be dealing with a wanderer eclecticism. An animal style, since one is living with animals. Ornaments, since one keeps marching down the trails in neverending caravans. The trails are winding like animals. The wind creates animal clouds in the sky, and spirit-like ornaments are threatening from the desert. (ZN 192–93)66

A wanderer eclecticism: a Silk Road lyricism. Paratactic word lists interlock with chains of short, tight clauses that are crammed with similes and metaphors; together they weave a fine mesh of circular relations between geology, style, weather, seasons, and magic. The result is a coproduction of the real, a smooth nomadic space that absorbs the object, its makers, their lifeworld, and Einstein’s writing about them. For the nomads, trading on the move is a zero-sum game that keeps filling their world with ever more phenomena that are set in circulation within it: pack animals, exotic destinations, precious materials. The ritual head is the ontological pivot around which this expansive world is revolving. In an ornamental migration that’s equally art-historical, geographical, and textual, the head is both the map and another feature in the territory, a mobile token that keeps accreting forms as its owners keep moving through the desert. The head is embedded in the meander of the trails on which the nomads are passing through the Hellenizing cultures from whom they have appropriated the meander ornament in the first place.67 At the same time, the wrinkles on its cheeks are themselves these trails; the trails are the animals that are trotting down along them; and the animals are the clouds that are forming up above them. So it is that “the men of the desert seek to populate the emptiness that causes them anguish—the horror of the vast, empty expanse that surrounds them compels them to cover heads and beasts with loquacious signs— one kills the desert.”68 This sentence, which occurs only in the French version of Einstein’s text, uses the word vide twice. The men of the desert are Mallarméans, then, and they are not the only ones. What the desert is to the nomads, the empty page is to the lost wanderer at his desk. As that page gets populated with words upon words, a world unfolds across its ground as if across the surface of a head-shaped desert. “These objects are strewn with signs. One might almost speak of a symbolic tattoo.”69 Note the conditional tense and the adverb of degree. Then recall the terminology of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, and observe that the phrase “symbolic tattoo,” since it is a metaphor, is itself a symbol. An intricate tattoo of symbols is imprinted on the page the way copper ornaments are hammered onto a cylinder, gradually

The Double Style

185

displacing an infinite emptiness with an infinity of formal relations. At the Galerie de la NRF, the unlikeliest of objects revealed itself as a wanderer’s portrait, one that both summoned and banished the old specter of Novalis. Perhaps.

Picasso II: The Double Style Now we are aware of the resurgence of the style of nonessence in the pages of Documents, it is time to turn from Einstein’s art-historical personas back to their successor in contemporary art. I will begin reassessing Einstein on Picasso by considering a few passages from the chapter on the artist in The Art of the 20th Century. It is precisely because they are tokens of their author’s deep identification with his hero that these passages are and are not what they seem. At stake in them is a question that was raised by the trajectory of Picasso’s work after cubism and that will be explored throughout the rest of this chapter: what does it mean for a self to exist over time and to make art in the process? Einstein had been reading up on recent answers to it in a journal that Documents loved to hate. His argument shows he had learned something from them, even though his tone leaves no doubt that he had found them misguided at core. Let’s not ignore the fact that idiotic adulation will turn art into a veritable inhibition, into the very means of reaction. These things [sc., Picasso’s paintings] need to be considered as part of the movement of the whole. Images aren’t bibelots but psychic tools, and a considerable share of the meaning of Picasso’s work consists precisely in his unfixity, his mutability. (K3 110)70 We experience our world picture pluralistically, namely by means of signs of ever changing dream- and form-types; we emphasize the manifold sedimentation and the change in a person rather than the unity. That justifies the legitimacy of a protean type. (K3 112)71 One enjoys opposing to those capable of transformation the cowardly bourgeois idea of a persistent, self-enclosed I, when it is precisely the permanent defeat and annihilation of the unitary person that enable the manifold of visions. It is through the superstitious belief in an enduring I that we try to hide those frequent defeats and ravagings. Yet that I is merely a rescue after the fact; for the psyche exists in a dialectical struggle, in the tension of antagonisms and in a permanent self-suspension. (K3 111)72

“A protean type”: the art-historical context of these remarks is obvious enough. Einstein was hijacking a well-known Picasso ideology from the late 1920s for his own purposes. Invented by critics like André Level and Christian Zervos, propagated in the pages of Cahiers d’Art, and massively popular ever after, this was the ideology of Picasso as Proteus.73 According to it, Picasso was the supreme

186

Form as Revolt

shape-shifter, the effortless master of styles, from cubism to neoclassicism and, lately, surrealism. For Zervos, this bewildering diversity, so far from putting the unity of Picasso’s subjectivity into doubt, only worked to strengthen it further. In order to make the case, Zervos used a metaphysical sleight of hand: a surface/depth hermeneutic that Nietzsche once denounced as the separation of a deed from its doer, “of the event from someone who produces events.”74 By claiming it was the artist’s “inner life which gives his work unity despite the extreme diversity of its appearance,” Zervos displaced the site of Picasso’s unity from the visible to the invisible, from the paintings to the person.75 That enabled him to argue that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: that the transformations in Picasso’s work were proof positive of the artist’s selfsameness, for the integrity of the doer in spite of the disparity of his deeds. In Einstein’s hands, Zervos’s ideology turned into something very different. For proteanism, read style of nonessence. Picasso’s mutability made him the ideal persona, a fellow wanderer adrift on the groundlessness of psychic pluralism. Nor was that pluralism divided up into doer and deed; in Einstein, there is no Picasso behind the paintings any more than in his own prose there had been a writer behind the writing. Both weren’t multiple expressions of a unitary I; they were rather the multiplicity itself.76 Einstein believed this pluralism was responsible for Picasso’s switch of styles over the past several decades as well as for the mutations of paintings produced over a much shorter period of time. The name he gave to this phenomenon has a familiar ring. Einstein called it a double style, and he defined it as follows. In any given image, specific psychological tendencies will be consummated, but at that point those sediments which weren’t realized will equally [gleichermaßen] demand their own realization. Hence, in order to realize one’s personality, which is more complex than the experience of a single image, one will react against the previous solution with another that is its downright opposite.77

What Einstein was seizing on here was a dimension of Picasso’s oeuvre that is neglected by those admirers of the artist who fall for the bibelot, the individual masterpiece. That dimension is Picasso’s seriality, the fact that a significant share of his work unfolds as so many variations on a finite number of formal problems. Within any given series, even the masterpiece is just one “psychic tool” among others. It is part of “the movement of the whole,” an event whose point may consist in quieting other, (still) more disturbing events. This approach sounds quite promising, and the antibourgeois barbs that Einstein was firing in the general direction of Zervos are a nice bonus. But we mustn’t let the rhetoric drown out the alarm bells that will go off on a careful reading. Let us parse Einstein’s remarks more closely. The double style describes a series that’s deployed in such a way that one psychic event—one painting—will summon another into being that is its opposite:

The Double Style

187

just as, say, in the Segers essay the artist’s sadism had summoned his masochism onto the plate, and vice versa; or as, in the “Political Notes” of 1912, the Reichstag parliamentarian had summoned the Sorelian onto the page, and vice versa. Hence, whether it is Segers’s psychic stances, Einstein’s prose personas, or the paintings in a Picasso series: they relate. They relate as so many hostile comparanda that equally (gleichermaßen) demand realization; so many dialectical twins that are spawning as pluses and minuses around a zero point that is their vanishing origin, their infinitely receding ground. It is this creative destruction that defines the doubleness of Picasso’s style, and Einstein registered it at various levels of his writing: across several essays, within an individual paragraph, and even as a single sentence. Take Einstein’s claim that “the meaning of Picasso’s work consists precisely in his unfixity, his mutability.” What reads like a straightforward description of proteanism is actually its de-essentialization. For what went for the pauper’s subjectivity in 1913 now goes for Picasso’s in 1931: to try and pinpoint its meaning is to see it split up into a paired apposition. One of the pair’s terms is positive. Mutability has got -ability in it; it is the capacity for creative production. But the other term is negative twice over. Unfixity is a reactive negation of fixity (permanency, enduringness), which, as we know from Einstein on Mesopotamian art, is itself reactivity incarnate. So, was serial Picasso Gudea as Proteus? Was his proteanism creative or destructive? Was it a production of the real worth the name, or just an endless proliferation of ressentiment? In his darker moments it seemed to Einstein that it was both and neither. The double style was the or itself, the conjunction of alternating stances over time, one painting after another. What made Picasso’s double style hang together, for all its marvelous variety and shrill inventiveness, was the constancy that all those years ago had made the style of “The Snob” hang together: the constancy of the sine curve.

Picasso II: The Double Page That constancy played itself out in abundance across the pages of Documents. One would not guess this from the literature on the informe, but, as far as the journal’s editors were concerned, in terms of the sheer quantity of illustrations, contemporary art was Pablo Picasso plus x. There is strong circumstantial evidence that it was Einstein who was sending that message, that he served as the resident Picasso image editor. After all, while Bataille and Leiris each wrote just one piece of criticism on the artist, Einstein published seven Picasso texts in just four years.78 And then there are his contacts in the Paris art world. Einstein’s ties to Picasso’s dealers and his friendship with the artist’s most important collector of the 1920s, Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, must have given him privileged access to photographs.79 The plate section of The Art of the 20th Century’s third edition suggests as much. It

188

Form as Revolt

Figure 4.10. Double page from Documents 2 (1930): 152–53, with an untitled Picasso painting (1929, left) and Woman with a Red Hat (1921, right).

contains as many as forty-eight Picassos. Fourteen of them date from between 1928 and 1930; twenty-four had previously appeared in Documents. This focus and that overlap make it likely that it was Einstein who had selected many of them for the journal in the first place. Moreover, whether in Documents or in the survey, close scrutiny of the illustrations reveals an Einsteinian pattern in their arrangement; notably in the special Picasso issue of 1930. Works by Picasso are repeatedly juxtaposed as pairs that are facing one another on opposite pages.80 That is no coincidence. The lost wanderer, seeing double, was trying his hand at being a layout designer, turning the artist into his persona in the process. Take the double page that immediately precedes Einstein’s own contribution to the Picasso issue; Brigitte Léal has rightly argued it must have been he who put it there (fig. 4.10).81 We are looking at the juxtaposition of a surrealist painting of 1929 with a neoclassicist pastel of 1921. They seem incommensurable on every level, whether medium, style, or mood; and yet Einstein is claiming otherwise. Following Zervos’s recent practice at Cahiers d’Art, his captions record not just the author and dates but also the dimensions of the works.82 And those dimensions turn out to be virtually identical—64 x 47 cm versus 64 x 49 cm—which for Einstein was another way of arguing that the same amount of psychic energy had gone into the formalization of each.83 If this was the common ground of painting and pastel, what was the point of their juxtaposition? It was to exploit the medium of the art magazine in order to

The Double Style

189

compress double style into double page: to convert the oeuvre’s temporal consecutiveness into a “dialectical simultaneity of solution and counter-solution” (K3 118).84 Once again, there is precedent for that move. The relation between the two Documents illustrations is the same as the relation between the two paragraphs in the Aktion “Political Notes” that we examined in chapter 1. The fold between the pages operates like the paragraph break in that text. It serves as a point of indifference, as the groundless ground for an antagonism between two terms—two political positions, two artistic styles, two psychic events—that on close inspection turn out to be each other’s comparanda. The Documents comparison, needless to say, is between tectonic and psychogram. On the left page, a double head confronts two profiles in a viciously instable agony that they try and fail to resolve into a unified frontal view. The profile of the woman on the right is tranquillity itself; her immobile features have been rendered with the crispness of statuary. But what’s at stake in the juxtaposition is not just the double style’s sheer variety but, more specifically, its temporality. By presenting the later work “first,” and having the earlier one look “back” toward it, Einstein made normal reading direction (left to right) contradict oeuvre chronology (right to left). Two arrows of time neutralize each other by crossing each other. As the reader keeps scrutinizing the double page, tectonic and psychogram, neoclassicism and surrealism, A and A′, keep alternating back and forth across the fold. As in Einstein, so in Picasso: a dialectical simultaneity of psychic events trumps the linear causality of personal biography and stylistic evolution. Moreover, by choosing the illustrations he chose, the image editor was arguing that, as in Einstein, so in Picasso, there was constancy within the alternation. His case is made by the pastel. To dismiss it as a sugary rappel à l’ordre fad is not to be visually curious enough: it is to ignore the powerful dissonance it sets up between the woman’s porcelain face and the oversize fleshy ribbon loops on her hat. In a formal contrast that recurs many times in Picasso’s oeuvre, her profile is one and calm, but the loops are two and embroiled. Einstein capitalized on that difference, as well as on the rhyme between the ribbon and the double head across the fold. The suggestion here is that painting and pastel relate as nightmare and the threat of it. The turmoil that’s acted out on the left is weighing down on the woman as well, defining her self-composure as an effort maintained under duress, as unicity paired up with doubleness.85 And again the argument, about the nature of subjectivity, is folded into a larger one about the nature of Picasso’s oeuvre. It is that an antagonistic doubleness is that oeuvre’s constancy, a deep structure that’s both powering and migrating through the proteanism in all its dazzling guises. Doubleness motivates the switch between styles, as the syntax to their lexis. And it also recurs within each style: as confronted profiles, knotted ribbon loops, and many other things besides. Things that include not just pictorial motifs, but the basic forms from which any and all motifs are composed in the first place: light and shadow, for example, or one kind of line and another kind of line.

190

Form as Revolt

Picasso II: Picasso’s Grundoperation But we are getting ahead of ourselves. It is time for a theoretical interlude that finally addresses the elephant in the room: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Readers will have noticed the ubiquity of the term “dialectic” in Einstein’s writing at the moment of Documents. “The psyche exists in a dialectical struggle, in the tension of antagonisms and in a permanent self-suspension”: this is The Art of the 20th Century on Picasso, but it might as well be the Aktion essay on the pauper. As he was trying to make sense of the darker share of the artist’s surrealism, Einstein dug out the Science of Logic once more. Raising the question, What brought on this relapse? Just why and how did Hegel matter for Einstein looking at Picasso in the late 1920s?86 Let me put the issue in general philosophical terms before I get art-historical again. What Einstein saw at work in Picasso’s double style was a tug-of-war that, in his veering between animism and the dialectic, he himself enacted as the doubleness of his own art criticism. The tug was between two different ontologies, two different ways of thinking the relation between humans and their world, and two different ways of giving form to these relations. The first ontology we have reviewed already. It was thoroughly modern, the unique contribution of the early twentieth century to the history of thought. Nietzsche articulated its most forceful version, and we have seen it variously recur in Mauss, Mach, James, and Bergson. According to it, the world was will to power and nothing besides: a kaleidoscope, network, or force field that defines the relation between humans and world as primordially interwoven, dangerously volatile, yet potentially coproductive. The second ontology wasn’t Nietzschean but Hegelian. It was a holdover from the nineteenth century that remained tenaciously alive well into the next, where it proved adaptable to the needs of the most diverse parties. Psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, structural linguistics, and deconstruction all drew on it; only Deleuze and, for the most part, Foucault were immune. Hegelian ontologies define the relation between humans and their world in just the opposite way from the Nietzschean ones. Différance, dialectic, diacriticality: these are the terms that describe the way in which a primordial disjunction precedes all relationality, a primordial antagonism precedes all sociability, and a primordial negation precedes any creative production that might occur (but how?).87 All this can be threaded back to Hegel himself; for, contrary to much of his postwar reception, he was an ontologist first, and a thinker of subjectivity, history, art, or law second.88 Hegel delivered the most concise account of his ontology in the Science of Logic, the subtitle of whose first volume is, after all, The Doctrine of Being. Bits and pieces of its terminology were spooking through Einstein’s writing as early as the 1910s. In that book, Hegel unfolded what Dieter Henrich has called his foundational operation (Grundoperation) of “autonomous” or “double negation.”89 It is double negation that makes Hegel’s dialectic one of the blackest theories of everything modernity has ever come up with.

The Double Style

191

For the Science of Logic is Hegel’s Book of Genesis from hell: in the beginning there was a double no. That is, in the beginning there was negation, and nothing but negation. Accordingly, since there was nothing for negation to relate to but it itself, negation folded back on itself, as a negation of the negation, and so divided itself into two, and then into four, and then into many. Henrich refers to this primordial folding back as negation’s self-relation (Selbstbeziehung). The term alerts us to the furtive anthropocentrism at the core of Hegel’s ontology, so foreign to Nietzsche’s or Mauss’s. What’s lurking at that core is not quite a self, but rather the very structure of a self ’s resentment of the world. Here, since there isn’t yet a world around that could be negated, primordial resentment turns against itself, and thereby becomes aware of itself. So it was that Hegel turned self-reflexivity, self-hatred actually, into the Big Bang, the generative structure of the universe. The origin of the world is a double negative that spans a groundless void. It is also the origin of all relationality, whether physical or social, for Hegel’s ontology is of course far from solipsistic. Its nihilism is eminently sociable; you always need at least two terms (things, people) for it to work properly. Witness one of the basic tenets of the Science of Logic, that “determinateness is negation posited as affirmative.”90 For us to affirm ourselves in a world with other people is for us to define ourselves over against them, and vice versa. Our individuality, our determinateness, is not primordially an affirmation of our own positivity; it is rather the result of our negation of the positivity of others, and of their negation of ours in turn. Two selves emerge from a double no that’s pronounced at once. Hence the weight Hegel put on the notion of the limit (Grenze), on the distinction between one thing and another thing, one person and another person. The limit “is the middle between the two of them in which they cease. They owe their determinate being beyond each other to their limit; the limit as the non-being of each is the other of both.”91 The limit between self and other, the line where both of them meet as each of them ends, is the axis of symmetry in Hegel’s ontology of ressentiment. A dialectical opposition between plus and minus extends back and forth across it: a dyad of interpersonal violence, deployed on a groundless ground. At their mutual limit, the self, negating the other, acquires form as the not-other; and the other, negating the self, acquires form as the not-self. I become fully myself only the moment I meet you, for as we touch you negate me by stamping out my form and so give me a proper taste of my future death: welcome to the Hegelverse. And welcome back to Picasso’s double style, diagrammed on the double page in Documents. The example I will consider now mattered deeply to Einstein, for it is the only double page that he restaged in The Art of the 20th Century without any modification (fig. 4.11). It confronts two paintings of 1927, one of them a major statement: the Painter and His Model, now at Tehran; and a Woman in an Armchair, now at Minneapolis (figs. 4.12, 4.15).92 For clarity’s sake, I will postpone discussing Minneapolis, and first explore the relation between Tehran and the Painter and His Model at the Musée Picasso from the previous year (fig. 4.5). Tehran can serve as

192

Form as Revolt

Figure 4.11. Double page from Documents 2 (1930): 148–49, with figure 4.12 (left) and figure 4.15 (right).

the dark pole of Picasso’s double style, of which the Musée Picasso painting will turn out to have been the bright one. That the Tehran and Musée Picasso works are serially related events is obvious at a glance. Both are monumental statements in the same genre that oppose artist and model in an interior on upended floorboards. Both share the same laboratory focus on line and light, contour and chiaroscuro, at the expense of color; for at Tehran, too, color is present only as light: as yellow. That common ground makes the differences all the more striking and programmatic. In Einsteinian terms, Tehran is the dialectic to the Musée Picasso’s animism, the Science of Logic to its General Theory of Magic. A wild, open-ended delirium has been displaced by the diagram of a terminal confrontation. Hence the transformations of line and light from 1926 to 1927. At Tehran, rather than with aleatory strips of light and shade, we are dealing with two distinctly shaped spotlights, one each for painter and model, which puncture a shadow foil painted an even gray that overlays the field. The mere evenness of random luminosity has given way to precisely calibrated figure/ground oppositions. Similarly with line. At Tehran, figuration is not an instable possibility but an accomplished fact: the Musée Picasso’s interlace has been disrupted and individuated out into two starkly different entities. This is as it should be. Since individuation must be preceded by a primordial disjunction, it cannot emerge from within a network but only in the aftermath of the network’s severance. It is only then relations may be established, but these will all be dialectical. What are their terms?

Figure 4.12. Pablo Picasso, The Painter and His Model, 1927. Oil on canvas, 214 × 200 cm. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

194

Form as Revolt

To begin on a phenomenological note, the painter is an angular stick figure who seems as if welded to his chair in an agony the more intense for being rooted to the spot. One arm prolongs his jaw toward the edge of an empty canvas where it terminates in a brush. The second arm rises up from the chair in a single zigzag line; it holds a rectangular palette that is punctured by a black thumbhole. The model across from the painter is its opposite, a sinuously swelling volume at once bizarre and sensuous. But the distinction between the painter and model’s linearity extends much deeper than morphology. Tehran is the pictorial origin of a formal bifurcation within a future sculptural project: Picasso’s designs for his abortive monument to Guillaume Apollinaire. The figure of the model is related to a series of drawings from the summer and fall of 1927 that would lead to the sculptures known as Metamorphosis I and Metamorphosis II (fig. 4.13). The painter in turn is related to another series that culminated in a number of celebrated wire sculptures (fig. 4.14).93 Put differently, what Picasso did in 1927 was stage an opposition, in a single painting, between what in 1928 he would spin out separately as two irreconcilable sculptural paradigms: sculpture as an interior space enclosed by a surface on one hand; sculpture as an open structure that displaces space on the other.94 The Tehran painting translates this irreconcilability from three dimensions into two. It formalizes a dialectical opposition between two kinds of line: between line as contour of a solid (the model) and line as itself a solid (the painter); between line as the boundary of a body and line as itself a kind of body. That opposition has been set up with paradigmatic clarity at the center of the painting, where breast confronts palette. Like its stick-figure owner, the palette is not an object bounded by a line but rather is all line; to make the point, Picasso has purposely left out one of its edges so as to avoid generating a closed interior. By contrast, like the model herself, her breast is such a closed interior, defined by line as contour. The opposition is stripped down to the formal bedrock in the confrontation of nipple and thumbhole, which relate as circle and dot, plus and minus: as a black contour that encloses a white space, and a black solid that displaces one. At the mutual limit of painter and model, two kinds of line form up, at once, into two kinds of identity, each by negating the other. Line is contour because it is not-solid; line is solid because it is not-contour. The shift in format and composition—from oblong to square, tripartite to double—works to focus the opposition still further. At the Musée Picasso, painter and model had been located at the peripheries of a center that they were ceding to an ongoing process of wayward formalization. The center of Tehran is empty, a dead ground to either side of which the affirmation of a self is built on the negation by an other across from it. The linear antagonism recurs in the register of chiaroscuro, which both amplifies and complicates it. As I suggested, light and dark relate as figure and ground; which is another way of saying that at Tehran the contour of illumination—the line of light—begins to matter. And it matters doubly, in a manner that in spite of its formal clarity pushes visual description to the edge of the sayable.

Figure 4.13. Pablo Picasso, Metamorphosis I, 1928. Bronze, 22.8 cm high. Musée Picasso, Paris.

Figure 4.14. Pablo Picasso, Figure, 1928. Iron wire and sheet metal, 50.5 cm high. Musée Picasso, Paris.

196

Form as Revolt

As light acquires shape and hence a contour, line is divided against itself a second time. It splits into what I call line-as-mark on one hand, line-as-division on the other. Line-as-mark is the black strokes on canvas that produced the figures of painter and model in the ways we have examined. In turn, line-as-division is the mutual limit, the sheer adjacency, of spotlight and shadow. Line-as-mark is a positivity, a limit that divides a surface into two. Line-as-division is a negativity, a limit where two surfaces touch. The Tehran painting stages an antagonism both within each of these two linear systems and between them. Call the left spotlight a crescent, the right one a kidney. In what looks like a tedious morphological essentialism, the crescent seems to accommodate the erect protrusion which the kidney is extending toward it. But matters are more complicated. For one thing, the “male” kidney is a rounded (“feminine”) biomorphic shape while the edges of the “female” crescent are sharply angular where it confronts the intruder. For another, once we consider not just the light but also what it illuminates, this second opposition, too—between “male” yet “vulnerable” kidney and “female” yet “castrative” crescent—turns out to be too pat. The hard-edged crescent illuminates the sinuous volume of the model; the soft kidney illuminates the jagged stick figure of the painter. Finally, the advance of kidney toward crescent from right to left is inverted in miniature by the advance of the woman’s hand toward the painter’s retreating arm. Roundedness and angularity, thrust and counterthrust, aggression and seduction, male and female, are so many markers of uncertain semantic meaning that traverse the registers of line and light to combine into ever new pairs of dialectical negation. This chiasmic structure culminates where the two systems of line are made to intersect literally; an intersection that Picasso purposely and repeatedly staged as a violent cut. As many as four times, line-as-division neatly slices a bodily detail in half that has been created by line-as-mark: the woman’s navel, her vagina, the painter’s topmost eye, and a second vagina-like slit—anatomically redundant but formally crucial—at the center of the painting. This last intersection is the point of a double confrontation: between light and dark, and between line-as-mark and line-as-division. It is the device laid bare of the Tehran painting, the systematic origin of its negations and the geometric pivot around which they are deployed.

Picasso II: Acrobats in the Studio Like the Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Tehran Painter and His Model presents itself as a terminal statement, pared down, finely tuned, the confrontation to end all confrontations. But then, what about the day after? As Einstein well understood, in Picasso, oeuvre trumps masterpiece, the movement of the whole the parts of which it is comprised. The dialectic goes ever on, and Einstein found words for the way in which it does.

The Double Style

197

Figure 4.15. Pablo Picasso, Woman in an Armchair, 1927. Oil on canvas, 71.8 × 59.1 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Cowles.

“Every form is equivalent to distinction, separation, restless negation.”95 This sentence from the Documents essay Picasso is self-performing in a familiar way. To call one thing equivalent—gleichwertig in German—to a list of three other things is formally to split up the definition that one is trying to pin down. Moreover, it is to cram the movement of the whole into a single sentence. For it is to argue that Picasso’s psychic polyphony of the later 1920s is the pictorial equivalent of a list of apposited synonyms: a massive parade of paintings that are by turns about distinction, separation, restless negation—paintings that, while all being different from one another, are really all the same for that very reason, since each of them will internalize the preceding negativity that had impelled it into being in the first place. Which brings us to the Woman in an Armchair, Tehran’s companion on Einstein’s double page (figs. 4.11, 4.15). The comparison is meant to open bibelot onto

198

Form as Revolt

polyphony, and in the process to suggest how the latter is able to preserve its constancy throughout all formal innovations and changes of genre: from studios to nudes to single figures and back again. In the remainder of this chapter, I will track the score of just one of that polyphony’s many melodies. It should be admitted that Einstein was loading the dice to make his comparison work. The Woman in an Armchair is a lesser work, one-third the size of Tehran, and it belongs to a different genre. Nonetheless, the paintings do share traits that lift them out of their respective series: the color scheme of white, gray, and yellow; the morphological resemblance between the nudes (head, navel, sagging breast, thin forearm extended to our right); and, most importantly, the activation of line and light as formal means, which serves as the comparison’s tertium. For the argument of the double page is that Tehran and Minneapolis, solution and countersolution, are tokens in a zero-sum game of visibility, a game in which double negations keep migrating across the registers of art making. As at Tehran, these negations are gendered. In the switch from one painting to the other, a male presence disappears from the register of line only to reappear in the register of light: at Minneapolis, a lone contoured nude is flanked by two male profiles that are carved into light and shadow. Except that matters are more intricate. We are not dealing with a simple opposition of linear female and chiaroscuro male. Rather, as at Tehran, chiaroscuro is divided against itself: but divided into male profile and female profile. Each male summons forth a female pendant down along its contour, a negative of itself with which it is locked into a kiss: the male “shadow profile” at left is kissing a female “light profile”; the male “light profile” at right, a female “shadow profile.” As at Tehran, so at Minneapolis: self and other stand opposed within the register of line-as-division, across a limit where they stamp each other out as light and shadow. To put it this baldly is not to claim the female profiles at Minneapolis are nearly as distinct as the males. They are hard to get into focus, and then only as caricatures that don’t amount to visual facts on par with their pendants. That lopsidedness is part of the point. Starting in the mid-1920s, faces in Picasso get systematically split up into confronted profiles that are engaged in a power struggle for visibility.96 The Milliner’s Workshop can serve as a helpful example here, since it displays the full spectrum of that struggle (fig. 4.6). As in the Woman in an Armchair, the face of the top-right intruder is a male profile that confronts a nigh-formless presence across from its contour (fig. 4.6a). The face of the leftmost seamstress, on the other hand, is dominantly frontal and female; and the faces of her two colleagues in between are split into confronted profiles that are breaking even in terms of both gender and visibility. This matter clarified, we can start considering Picasso’s series of Acrobats from 1930. Accompanied by Leiris’s essay, they were published in Documents fresh off the easel; they culminated in a work that Einstein in turn reproduced in his survey (figs. 4.16–18).97 It is the movement from Tehran and Minneapolis toward this

Figure 4.16. Pablo Picasso, Female Acrobat, 1930. Oil on canvas, 64.2 × 49 cm. Private collection.

Figure 4.17. Pablo Picasso, Acrobat, 1930. Oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

The Double Style

201

Figure 4.18. Pablo Picasso, The Painter (here called The Studio), 1930. Oil on canvas, 50 × 65 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Gift of Gerard Bonnier.

latter painting, as well as the constancy within the movement itself, that the present analysis is tracking. The Acrobats are a crucial intermediate step here, but they are also powerful achievements in their own right. They look simple enough, but looks can be deceiving. What’s at stake in them is an ontological transformation of the normal figure-ground relation in visual art: a transformation from consecutiveness into simultaneity. In the Acrobats, the ground of a painting is not defined as a ready-made world, say a landscape or an interior, that would subsequently admit a figure. Rather, figure and ground, humans and world, emerge into being together: each coalesces around the other, at once. For, considered on its own terms, the ground in the Acrobats is radically featureless, a flat, evenly painted field. It is only the figures’ attitudes toward it that specify it as what it is. Take the two examples illustrated here. The female’s sagging buttocks and flaying limbs suggest the impact of gravity on her body, and so define the ground around her as midair: as an infinite expanse open in all directions beyond the frame (fig. 4.16). The posture of the male, by contrast, treats the frame as a physical

202

Form as Revolt

presence and impediment (fig. 4.17). His foot is standing on it, his hand is resting on it, his limbs are bending as the elbow and the knee are bumping into it. For the female, the ground is a world through which her body is falling; for the male, it is a world in which his body is imprisoned. These are two diametrically opposed phenomenological experiences, but the form of their emergence is the same. In the Acrobats, air and tumbler, cell and prisoner, are coeval. In negating one another, they determine one another. Nowhere more so than at the limit of line-as-division, where figure is kissing ground. Right across from the face of each acrobat, another face, this one upside down, is manifesting around the lips, ever so faintly but ever so insistently. That presence reveals the Acrobats as relatives of Minneapolis and the Milliner’s Workshop, full-figure extrusions of Picasso’s confronted profiles of the later 1920s. Except that now we are dealing with paintings in which a self, instead of negating an other in the world, negates him or her as the world. Male negates female, determining her as his prison even as she determines him as her prisoner. Female negates male, determining him as her abyss even as he determines her as a tumbler through it. And that is Picasso’s Grundoperation: that he has defined the real ground of the Acrobats not as single but as double, not as a field but as a relation— as the relation between figure and ground, the double negation that makes both of them come into being. No figure without ground, no ground without figure. No male without female, no female without male. No humans without world, no world without humans: no nothing at all without something to embrace and terrify it. With this we have reached the culmination of the series, a small but powerful work now at Stockholm (fig. 4.18). Its customary title, The Painter, is based on the incorrect assumption that the figure on the left is the artist.98 Einstein’s name for it, Before the Easel, is more accurate for being more vague. For the painting, whose overall composition recalls the early stages of the seminal Blue Period work known as La Vie (1903), is actually a Studio. Painter at right and model at left are flanking a large canvas that depicts two acrobats who are their representations. That setup makes Stockholm an intriguing serial nexus of the late 1920s: a nexus between the Painters and Models on one hand, the Acrobats on the other. Painter and model are descendants of Tehran (fig. 4.12). The stick figure’s body, chair, and easel have been welded together into a headless scaffold, composed of line-as-solid. The model has disintegrated into an inchoate assemblage of volumes, each of which is bounded by line-as-contour. To be sure, her appearance has changed significantly. But the long strands of black hair identify her as a woman who has turned her head away from us toward the canvas, and her posture echoes the model’s in the earlier painting. At bottom center, a hand extends out from the left toward the painter; at top left, an upper arm and forearm rise from the torso to touch the head.

The Double Style

203

The real difference between Tehran and Stockholm is that Picasso has opened the purview of double negation from bedrock formalism to projective inhabitation.99 He has extended a diagrammatic opposition between two kinds of line to a phenomenological opposition between two kinds of inhabitable bodies, one brittle but unitary, the other swelling but inchoate. Put more simply, painter and model feel like real people, and that is why they too cannot connect. Their difference is made salient by the different relations between the model’s hand and the painter’s knee with the internal canvas. Her hand and wrist obscure its lower edge, but his knee leaves its right edge visible: where a bounded volume will override linearity, there a volume-less bound will overlap it. The distinction is more than just formalist; it is vested with actual emotion. The model’s hand is one of the most moving hands in the oeuvre of an artist who specialized in them, on par with the hands in certain studies for Guernica. But it is precisely because the hand is the beautifully limp and tender volume it is that its effort at making physical contact with the painter’s scaffold stilt must expire halfway on route. Like the Tehran nipple and thumbhole, the Stockholm index finger and stilt belong to two different orders of form and hence of being. The same cannot be said for the figures in the internal canvas, which combines two members of the Acrobats series into one image. Each acrobat faces its counterpart in the studio space, but unlike their beholders both are painted the same way and share a single ground as their world. But that is another way of saying that the acrobats are alone together, inverted mirror images that are turning their backs to one another as each figure is trying to split up the ground into the matchingly gendered ambience for its own private antagonism. This leaves us with accounting for the relation between the two couples, the figures within the canvas and their beholders without. Picasso has masterfully deployed his stylistic multiplicity to suggest they are a perfect match for being a pair of negative comparanda: that the acrobats’ alikeness leads to intimate agony just as the painter and model’s individuality leads to resigned disconnect. The Stockholm Studio is then a diagram of two kinds of failed relation. One relation fails because people are too different, the other because people are too similar. But both fail for the same familiar reason: because both define relationality as a double negation, as plus against minus across from zero.

Beyond Olga and Pablo “Picasso is the signal for all that which our time possesses of freedom.” “Picasso is a signal for what freedom our time might possess” (K3 134). “Picasso fully justifies the maxim according to which man and universe are created by man every day.”100 These statements aren’t hyperbolic and wavering but precise and

204

Form as Revolt

dissonant. Each time, “Picasso” is not a person but a name, a word on the page like “essence,” “origin,” or “ground,” and the sentences are trying to figure out what it “signals,” that is, what it means. But the meaning of the name is divided, and so is the meaning of the project for which the art of its bearer is a signal or whose maxim it justifies. Nor is the style of nonessence used gratuitously here. The lost wanderer was finding words for the most fundamental ambiguity of his persona’s double style. Picasso’s tremendous formal imagination held out the promise of groundlessness as a ground of freedom. The freedom Einstein had in mind exceeded the resolution of Olga and Pablo’s marriage crisis, and he was right to assume that it did. The studios that the paintings showed and in which they were made were not a monadic space. For the studio, to recall Svetlana Alpers’s argument, is “an experimental instrument for attending to the world”; and the issue at stake in it “is not a personal matter. It has to do with how every individual establishes a relationship with the world”—with how man and universe are created every day, as Einstein put it.101 Taking its cue from Cahiers d’Art, Documents was publicizing the fact that by 1928 Picasso had started recording that creation meticulously; the captions for the Acrobats and the Stockholm Studio are dated to the day.102 In doing so, the journal presented Picasso’s oeuvre as an art of everyday living, as a model for the quotidian invention of new relations among people, for a world building broadly conceived. But it also rendered visible the inherent danger of that project, which the lost wanderer knew all too well. The danger was that, as in Einstein’s Berlin-period prose, the art’s founding gesture will seep into its form, that a fierce opposition to the extant world will define all relations in the new one as oppositional too. Such relations won’t be signals of freedom seized but of freedom missed. Day in, day out, the creation of the new will be the resentment of the old in another guise. Groundlessness will not be bridged over but infinitely restated. Alpers might be read as saying that it is a hallmark of the studio setup that individuality precedes relatedness. In that case, the danger in Einstein and Picasso might vanish once the privacy of the artist’s quarters is left behind for more collective projects. But the danger is not restricted to the spaces and moods of bourgeois autonomy. It is not a matter of political organization but of ontological stance. Consider how, looking back on the titanic struggles of the early twentieth century, Alain Badiou, a neo-Leninist and self-declared active nihilist, has described the issue of relationality on the collective scale. He has called his account a “theory of the Two,” “an anti-dialectical Two, devoid of synthesis.” In every demonstration of fraternity there is an essential Two: that of the “we” and of the “not-we.” The century stages the clash between two manners of conceiving

The Double Style

205

the “not-we.” Either one sees it as a polymorphous formlessness—an unorganized reality—or else one sees it as another “we,” an external and hence antagonistic subject. The conflict between these two conceptions is fundamental, and sets out the dialectics of the anti-dialectical. If, in effect, the “we” relates externally to the formless, its task is that of formalizing it. Every fraternity then becomes the subjective moment of an “information” of its formless exterior. In this case, one will declare things like: the apathetic must be rallied to the Party; the left must unite with the center to isolate the right. . . . If, on the contrary, the “not-we” is unavoidably always already formalized as antagonistic subjectivity, the first task of any fraternity is combat, where what is at stake is the destruction of the other. One will then announce that whoever is not with the Party is against it, that the left must terrorize the center to defeat the right. . . . At the heart of the century, for reasons pertaining to the anti-dialectics of any primordial duality, the properly dialectical contradiction between formalization and destruction plays itself out.103

The “anti-dialectical dialectics” bit is a postwar Hegelian’s generic gesture of out-Hegeling Hegel, or, which is the same thing, of out-negating negativity. Like Badiou, the Bataille literature and the Frankfurt School have rehearsed it many times.104 What matters to us here is the specific part. Badiou is describing the relation between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the non-Party Left. His formal scenario is straight out of the Science of Logic: omnis determinatio est negatio. Either the Party annihilates the non-Party Left by assimilating it: by determining it as a ground to match its own figure. Or the Party annihilates the non-Party Left by expelling it: by determining it as a figure that’s different from itself. Contrary to Badiou’s claim, the difference here is not between formalization and destruction but between two kinds of destructive formalization. Assimilation on one hand, expulsion on the other: there are, apparently, no other relational options in this demonstration of “fraternity.” Switch out painter and model for Badiou’s “we” and “not-we,” delete the empathy felt by the model’s hand, and the Stockholm Studio is the fraternity’s diagram: a Two devoid of synthesis, two aggressors confronting those whom they have determined as their others. That said, the neo-Leninist is right on one count: his formal constellation recurs far too many times in the early twentieth century. The danger in Einstein and Picasso is present in any endeavor, whether individual or collective, that embraces a Hegelian-type ontology or finds itself reduced to embracing one: reduced to having the terror before the groundlessness of the modern world flip over into a terrorist way of regrounding it anew. Did Einstein succumb to that danger? As we know, he came to Documents as a veteran of the Spartacus Revolt and later joined the Durruti Column. The distinction between individual and collective

206

Form as Revolt

freedom was fluid for him, and he pledged his life to attaining them both. But the streets of Berlin and the Aragon Front had this in common with a Picasso Studio, that they were battlegrounds for lethal antagonisms rather than blank slates for experimental world-building. To say that Einstein on the dialectic is better than Einstein on animism, or that Tehran is a better painting than the Musée Picasso’s, is merely to say that, on average, the lost wanderer and his double were better at fighting a world than at designing one. In that sense, they did belong at Documents.

5

Private Mythologies

In the later 1920s there was only one contemporary artist besides Picasso whose work prompted Einstein to write a significant amount of art criticism about it, and which was powerful enough to support his argument. That artist was not Georges Braque, whose work of that moment Einstein’s monograph failed to redeem in spite of its length. Nor was it André Masson or Joan Miró, about whom, contrary to his declared sympathies, Einstein actually wrote very little.1 It was rather Paul Klee, an artist whose work he had been following for a long time.2 Exactly when their paths first crossed is unclear. They may have met before the war in the Blauer Reiter circle, but if so, the meeting didn’t generate any writing on Einstein’s part. By 1922, however, he was considering publishing a book on Klee’s drawings, and two years later he was discussing it with the artist in earnest. As so often with Einstein’s projects, the book never got written; still, he remained in touch with Klee and kept thinking about his work. The result were the Klee chapters in the three editions of The Art of the 20th Century (1926, 1928, 1931). The timing was no coincidence: Einstein’s interest in Klee increased with his interest in surrealism and with the surrealists’ interest in the artist. In 1924 Klee had been endorsed in Breton’s first Manifesto, and since 1925 his work had been regularly exhibited in Paris galleries and illustrated in magazines from Cahiers d’Art to Documents. Everyone was praising him: Aragon, Crevel, Limbour, Tzara, Vitrac.3 But these were literati homages, not art criticism. Einstein’s rigorous argument could have filled a need here, but few Germans cared for surrealism, and fewer surrealists read German at the Einstein level of difficulty. Einstein intended to remedy the

208

Form as Revolt

situation by publishing a “huge” Klee essay in Documents, but, typically, he failed to produce it.4 As a result, to the present day his survey chapters on the artist have remained unknown except to specialists. That is a pity, for what they lack in quantity these chapters, especially the first and the third versions, make up in quality. Between them, and precisely because they do not quite add up, they amount to the best criticism Klee’s work received in his lifetime; where “best” means attentive to the specifics of the art, free of stereotypes, adequately complex, and, the same point stated differently, properly vacillating about their subject.5 There was a reason for the vacillation. Klee’s art stood for Einstein’s highest hopes and deepest fears as otherwise only Picasso’s did. Around 1930, Picasso had ended up formalizing one way of relating to the world, Klee another. The urgent question was whether these were distinct projects or versions of the same, different merely in subject matter and tone. One outcome of cubism was mired in a proteanism at once inventive and nihilist; what about the other one? To explore the question Einstein brought a complex terminology to bear on Klee’s art. Developed fully around 1930, it was the best-case version of the lost wanderer’s philosophical project, which is partly familiar to us from chapter 4. Einstein called it a theory of “the real”; I will refer to it as his ontology of form. According to that theory, to recall, visual art is one of many territories in which we formalize our attitudes—what I call our ontological stances—toward one another and the world at large. Which elements of the world people have at various points in history allowed to acquire visibility; how within that visibility these elements are translated into form and are related one to the other and to the viewer—how works of art produce definitions of individuality, of collectivity, and of the nonhuman world within which humans define their own identity: these are the questions Einstein asked himself, and they are questions that implicitly inform, and perhaps always precede, the more straightforwardly political positions we hold. It was Klee’s art that raised them most urgently for him. That is why the Klee version of Einstein’s argument is replete with a number of new terms, among them metamorphosis, myth, revolt, and realism. By the early 1930s all of these were hypersaturated with meaning, some of it deeply questionable, depending on whom you asked or read. To get at their specific significance in Einstein, let me first try to disentangle them in his mind, and then consider their applicability, or not, to the art of Paul Klee.

The Real As we know, Einstein in his texts too often tried to say everything at once. But on occasion he managed to organize his ideas into an almost linear train of thought. Suddenly, a nutshell account of his project will appear in a single paragraph

Private Mythologies

209

that’s buried in The Art of the 20th Century. One such passage occurs in the Klee chapter of its third edition. A dense and evocative argument opens that chapter onto territories that seem to reach far beyond its ostensible subject or, for that matter, visual art as a whole. I will quote the passage in full and then unpack its meaning. What remains characteristic about recent art is that it has turned against rationalism. . . . It might almost be argued that reason is a means of reacting against those psychic strata which have not yet been assimilated, and so to inhibit their action. A rationalist interpretation of the extant world implies an unequivocal and verifiable description of that world. Reason commits us to those experiences and forms which we can prove visually, e.g., by comparing a still life painting with the actual fruit and vessels; so it is that reason hems in creativity. And yet we constantly experience elementary and unverifiable processes such as the dream and the miracle, where the psyche apparently acts oblivious to the correctness of physics or of a superficially formal correctness. Reason imposes on man an idiotic monotony of existence and of the gestalts, of which he will at best produce variations or rearrangements; this is a fatal limitation. In earlier times, myths had served as a means of defense against such gestalt monotony; gestalt formation was not a matter of aesthetics but of religion. A social symptom of this desire to transform the type would be primitive exogamy, which in the final analysis is rooted in a desire to transform a constant type. The aim is to release oneself from the prison of planned standards, to acquire unknown or novel bodily or psychic powers. The transformation into animals, plants, rivers, etc. was another means to that end. This same impulse is at work today in the experiments with new gestalt relations; the fundamental drama of metamorphosis, of gestalt transformation, is being played out anew. That’s easily possible in an image, for every form can signify a tremendous number of things. (K3 263–64)6

The dream and the miracle on one hand, non-Western animism, ancient myth, and modern “gestalt experiments” on the other; all of them joined through a mysterious principle of “metamorphosis”: the subject of this passage appears to be a wide-ranging but ultimately familiar notion of surrealist primitivism, of the kind one would expect to emerge from Documents. But something rather more unusual is going on here. Let us first determine what metamorphosis is not: what it is up against. Metamorphosis is the sworn enemy of what Einstein calls “reason,” a comprehensive will to the submission of particularity under sameness which in modernity has permeated philosophy, science, culture, art, and the myriad routines of our everyday experience. In his theoretical work, Einstein examined the many forms of that submission one by one. In the present passage, he is concerned with the form of “verification,” the process by which the truth, and hence the specific being, of something—anything—is ascertained. To verify a phenomenon by comparing it

210

Form as Revolt

to a previously established standard of truth, Einstein argued, is to hollow out its specificity by defining it in terms of some general a priori. Whether that a priori is the established body of facts of scientific positivism, the Concept or Idea of metaphysics, or a doctrine of artistic naturalism that declares a still-life painting the copy of “the actual fruit and vessels”: the basic structure of verification remains the same. In each case, the novelty of newly emergent objects, experiences, and practices is blunted by treating them as mere repetitions, reflections, or aberrations of some already known fact. Given our familiarity with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this sweeping diagnosis of modernity sounds at once accurate, gloomy, and, by now, disconcertingly intuitive. But despite his many moments of despair Einstein tried not to be a permanent tenant at the Grand Hotel Abyss. In his better moods, he was being a Nietzschean in the sense in which Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault would become Nietzscheans decades later. Part of what that means in our present context is that Einstein insisted that the many kinds of standardization that “reason” and its cognates have been mapping onto the modern world are mere fictions—that the world is in truth fundamentally un-“reasonable,” and that that is what throughout history has made these mappings perennially vulnerable, and continues to do so. Because the mapping of fictions is work: it is an exertion of power that takes an effort, and this effort can be undone by a countereffort; in fact, “reason’s” very exertion of it acknowledges the latter’s existence as a force that has to be reckoned with. To argue that case, Einstein used certain technical terms from Nietzsche, and called “reason” a mere reaction, an “inhibition,” or “countermeasure”: in order to make the point that “reason” is pushing hard against an action that stands up to it. What are these terms about? Let me answer the question by juxtaposing two statements: first, the locus classicus from which they are derived, a well-known section from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; and second, a passage from an Einstein text known as “Gestalt and Concept,” which is essentially a paraphrase of that section. The slave revolt in morals begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and ordains values: the ressentiment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who find compensation in an imaginary revenge. While all noble morality grows from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says no to an “outside,” to an “other,” to a “non-self ”: and this no is its creative act. . . . In order to exist at all, slave morality from the outset always needs an opposing, outer world; in physiological terms, it needs external stimuli in order to act—its action is fundamentally reaction.7 Artistic practice is torn out of the zone of passivity, and its optimistically servile attitude is demolished. Art becomes a human means of producing and changing reality, i.e., it is now defined by an emphasis on activity. With this, we are sketching out the crucial change of the moral position that’s at stake here.8

Private Mythologies

211

To be sure, at face value Nietzsche’s statement seems quite sinister. But I join Gilles Deleuze in thinking that his actual argument amounts to virtually the opposite of what many of his right-wing fans in the twentieth century have taken it to be saying; and I submit that Einstein too intuited as much.9 Einstein, we will recall, was an active participant in the Spartacus Revolt; he also went on record as a scathing critic of various conservative Nietzscheanisms that were rampant in the Weimar Republic. He ridiculed “the Prussian lieutenant as Overman,” and he lambasted the will to power as “the philosophical foundation of modern Imperialism.”10 And yet, that didn’t keep Einstein from realizing that Nietzsche’s philosophy of action and reaction, laid out above all in the Genealogy and in the Will to Power, contained the germ of a left-wing ontological politics; nor was he exactly the only one in early twentieth-century Germany to find it there.11 What is this politics about? Nietzsche, or at least Einstein’s Nietzsche, isn’t making a case, not in any straightforward sense, for a noble aristocracy over against a mediocre democracy, for the exceptional individual over against the herd, and so on. Rather, he is concerned with defining two competing ontological stances, two fundamentally different attitudes that humans strike up toward the world and toward other people: a “slavish,” or reactive stance, and a “noble,” “masterly,” or active stance; and these cut across familiar political distinctions in unfamiliar ways. The crucial point here is that slavehood and mastery aren’t defined in terms of the amount of power they are exerting within the world but rather in terms of the specific ways in which they are relating to it. In Einstein’s Nietzsche, how one exerts power is ultimately far more important than how much of it one exerts. It is possible to dominate the world and other people with impunity, yet to do so based on a slavish stance: slavish, because it defines the world as a hostile given that exists separately from itself to which it will then resentfully react. Conversely, it is possible to be dominated by others yet still to strike a masterly stance: masterly, because it understands itself as part of the world: because it actively opens itself to it even if that implies the risk of its own destruction. What Einstein calls “reason” is a slavish stance in this unfamiliar sense. “Reason” considers the world a chaotic array of contingent facts, a hostile “other” over against which it defines itself as an unchanging sameness. By contrast, the masterly stance is called that because it seeks to master not the world, but rather its own fear in face of a world of which, it understands, it is an integral part. The fundamental difference between the two is then this: The slavish stance reactively says no to the world and its own immersion in it even as it seeks to master it. The masterly stance actively says yes to the world and its own immersion in it even as it embraces the world as unmasterable. That is why, on one hand, like Nietzsche, Einstein frequently calls the reactive stance “slavish” or “servile”; and why, on the other hand, and unlike Nietzsche, he never calls the active stance masterly or noble. Because in Einstein, the active stance is liberatory but not triumphant. What makes his Nietzscheanism left-wing, and what at the same time has made it illegible to both

212

Form as Revolt

Frankfurt School and poststructuralist thought, is that he inverts our familiar political notions of affirmation and negation, of saying yes and saying no to the world. In Einstein, negation is not a gesture of resistance but the expression of a will to domination that’s fueled by ressentiment. In turn, affirmation is not the cynical endorsement of some status quo, but at once an acknowledgment of the limits of our power over others and the world at large and an incitement to revolt. “Reason” says no; revolt says yes: there’s an unfamiliar politics. More on it in a moment. First, a word on agency. To say we must embrace the world as unmasterable is not to suggest we must become passive witnesses to its aimless transformations throughout history. The active stance is called active for a reason. It is rather to suggest that human agency in history has been possible all along and remains so now. It is to argue that while history has seen comprehensive attempts to master the world, these attempts have never been ultimately victorious, and never will be. Because there has always been, and there always will be, an active pushback. The crucial point here is that in Einstein such “activism” is not conceived voluntaristically; that what distinguishes him from the Marxist tradition is not some greater degree of “optimism” (read: naïveté). Rather, what distinguishes him is a radically different political ontology, according to which an active revolt against “reason,” just like “reason” itself, is built into the very structure of the real. This is an ontology that’s familiar to us from another intellectual tradition. It is familiar, once again, from Nietzsche, who in the Will to Power had argued that “the world” is “only a word” for the interminable struggle of “actions and reactions” that renders any one moment in history—including recent history—multiple, antagonistic, and open.12 And it is familiar from Nietzscheans like Foucault and Deleuze, who argued, respectively, that power and resistance are co-originary, that all efforts at “reterritorialization” will at the same time produce “lines of flight.”13 In art history it is familiar from a Foucauldian like Jonathan Crary, who has suggested, in Suspensions of Perception, that it was precisely the late nineteenth century’s efforts at standardizing human attention that simultaneously produced a vast field of aberrant experiences.14 Decades before these thinkers, Einstein had said nothing essentially different. Consider the following remarks from his monograph on Georges Braque, and from related notes from the 1930s. Every reality is merely a section that is continually replaced and displaced. Hence there is a constant and simultaneous production of counter-realities, so that the real needs to be understood as a pluralistic complex.15 In actual fact, beyond a reality that has been fixated there subsists a sphere of permanent creation and metamorphosis, that is, of the enduring revolt against the imposed world picture; for everything mythic signifies the difference between man and given being. (B 399)16

Private Mythologies

213

The non-concordance of man with the world as it is perceived by him is the basic fact [Grundfakt] of existence, and so is metamorphosis—i.e., the changing of the given situation—as prototype of human action.17

These statements argue that any episteme—any “fixated reality” or “world picture”—will spring into being simultaneously with its outside: that a historically specific knowledge or visibility, precisely to the extent it is imposed on the world, will generate a zone of darkness around itself into which the human imagination will project itself in order to think the world differently. That is the meaning of metamorphosis: that “reason” will flip over into a revolt against itself; that a “fixated” reality will give rise to a “counter-reality” that unfixes it. In Einstein, “reason” is always embattled because the real is always in revolt, which is to say in metamorphosis. But what exactly is the real? Einstein came up with a clear definition of it in a letter of 1923 to his friend Ewald Wasmuth. In that letter he reported on his investigation of “the psychic,” of the process of inner life, the ceaseless succession and multilayered simultaneity of thoughts and affects whose linguistic expression had frustrated him in the early 1920s. And then he went on to describe the root cause of that frustration: “Like all other functional and real phenomena, [the psychic] seems to me to transgress every apprehension [Fassung], and this at the very moment of being apprehended. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an action at all, wouldn’t be reality at all, whose characteristic seems to me to consist in the fact that it will always transgress apprehensibility [Faßbarkeit].”18 The German term Fassung is usefully polymorphous. It refers to a framing or arrestment in the broadest sense. It can mean the preliminary or definitive version of a text, a piece of music, or a work of visual art that had previously been in flux; the maintenance of one’s composure under duress; or, as here, the intellectual grasping of an intractable psychic mobility. Fassung is then formalization broadly conceived: the mapping of some formal order or structure, some reality, onto some part of the world. And once again Einstein’s argument is that it is precisely a will to Fassung itself that will summon its own “transgression” into being, that the positing of any one reality will summon forth the revolt of a counter-reality. I will note in passing that Einstein’s use of the term “transgression” as early as 1923 shows that any resemblance to Georges Bataille’s more famous notion of the same name is both interesting and coincidental. But what’s really important about this quote is that it gives us a working definition of the real. It clarifies that the real in Einstein must not be confused with reality as we normally understand that term. The real isn’t any one particular reality; it is neither the reality that is imposed on the world by “reason” nor a counter-reality that transgresses it. After all, as we saw, the real produces both: both “reason” and the revolts against it. Rather, whenever Einstein uses the term Wirklichkeit (reality) rigorously, and especially when he refers to das Wirkliche (the real), he means it literally. The real is something that realizes, actualizes, or effects: das Wirkliche is

214

Form as Revolt

something that wirkt. It is not a substance but a production, not a condition but a generative structure. Its mode of being is performative. Not so unlike pathos in Nietzsche, the real in Einstein is the very alternation between realities and counter-realities itself.19 It is the arrestment of flux into Fassung, and then the transgression of Fassung in turn. The real is metamorphosis: it is the process of revolt. Hence the great chance the real offers to us and the horrifying threat it poses to us. On one hand, the real is liberatory. It ensures that something like history is possible at all. It enables us to transgress the given and produce new realities, to formalize them as Fassung. On the other hand, and by the same token, the real enables the transgression of our realities by others in turn. Our freedom and our mortality, the very possibility of new worlds as well as their radical impermanence, go together. Which stance we strike up toward the world will depend on whether or not we can tolerate this basic ontological fact. “Reason” cannot tolerate it. What motivates its ressentiment, its no to the real, is its fear of death. That is why, Einstein argued, “reason” cherishes “history as a constant and painstaking repetition” (K3 92), for repetition is always a “means of defense against death” (K3 93).20 By contrast, the active stance says yes to the real as production, and in doing so it itself becomes productive—and precarious. For us to instigate metamorphotic revolts, “to produce and change reality,” is to accept that we ourselves will be changed in turn. Thus the real in Einstein, who knew Bergson’s work intimately, is nonetheless a far cry from the philosopher’s comfortingly vitalist notion of “life.” Einstein explicitly insisted that “l’évolution créatrice is constantly accompanied and constrained by a force mortelle.”21 Because to say yes to the real is to say yes to our own mortality. It is to find the courage to invent new realities in full knowledge that the effort might fail, that it might end in madness or despair, and that even if successful the result won’t last forever. It is to understand that the real ensures that realities cannot be repeated but must always be made. Must be made, nota bene; for, again, the real in Einstein is not some inexorable logic of history to which we would unwittingly submit. “History without catastrophe and novelty, without the latter’s horror and bliss, would merely be repetition. . . . In that case, tradition [Überlieferung] would indeed mean copy, and would be kept alive by some metaphysical substance beyond the concrete and beyond individualized life” (K3 67).22 To examine the concreteness of history manifested in “individualized life” is to understand how the real has unfolded as actual people actually made their history, and how, therefore, they may go on making it. That conviction made Einstein a kind of humanist, not so unlike the humanist Foucault would become later on. Both thinkers turned to Nietzsche in order to disabuse us of our fictions: not in order to celebrate the “death of man” but in order to enable us to see clearly, once “man” and metaphysics are finally out of the way, what we can actually do in the world, and what dangers we are actually facing.23 Hence Einstein’s notion of the real. The real is the nonhuman structure of human interactions with one another and with their world in history. As such the

Private Mythologies

215

real is different from humans, but it doesn’t exist before, beyond, or above them; it doesn’t determine their actions. Rather, at any one moment in history the real’s very existence, the unfolding or the arrestment of its production, its future horror or its future bliss, depend on what people choose to do or not to do. History is being made in the present, without any metaphysical training wheels. It was this mix of radical contemporaneity and radical uncertainty that lent Einstein’s political ontology both its “activist” dimension and its desperate urgency. “What if the real were a simultaneously growing and dying organism, i.e., what if reality weren’t just something given but rather an effort, a task?” (B 323).24 This is not a rhetorical question but a political and ethical injunction: Let us actively work to keep the real “alive,” for it is always in danger of “dying.” Because “reason” and its many cognates in modernity constantly seek to impose their reality, their Fassung, onto the world once and for all. Afraid of the real as a task, as an ongoing production of realities that must be made, they try to arrest it in favor of a single reality that they set up as an ultimate given that must merely be contemplated, enacted, or repeated: the truth of an Idea or Spirit, the telos of a future communist society, naturalism’s nature, Cartesian space, “cinematographic” time, among many others. Each moment in history when such a Fassung is successfully imposed is a moment the real “dies.” It is a moment when, as the Genealogy put it, no becomes a “creative act”: the moment when a Fassung—however resplendent, revolutionary, or sage it may seem—is founded on the reactive negation of the real. Whereas the real will “grow” only if we switch stances: from reaction to action, from repetition to performativity, from contemplating a given reality to producing a new one. We need to transgress “reason’s” Fassungen: by inventing some Fassung ourselves, but one that implies or generates its own transgression, and so accounts both for our ability to invent and for the limits of our power over others and the world at large. For there is nothing wrong with Fassung per se. Fassung is formalization, and to Einstein’s mind humans are formalizing animals: “Realities are always structured realities, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to act and set purposes for ourselves within them, or even to apprehend [fassen] them at all.”25 We cannot help but map our formalizations onto the world, whether in art, science, inner life, everyday experience, or politics in the ordinary sense. Nor is this a problem, for it is through formalization that an active stance inventively revolts against a given situation it finds itself in. What is wrong is the hypostatization of any one Fassung as the permanent one. It is at this point that political activism in the Einsteinian sense intervenes.

Metamorphotic Revolt For revolt won’t happen automatically. There is work to do, for philosophers, for political activists, for art critics and historians. They must retrieve instances of revolt from historical oblivion and contemporary marginalization, instances where

216

Form as Revolt

active forces are on the rise and a transgression is about to happen. Einstein took that task seriously. He felt the need to discover examples of revolt in as many disparate territories as possible, so as to drive home the point that at any given historical moment the battle of realities has raged on many fronts, across many practices and forms of experience, that history was much less unitary than it looked, and that unexpected alliances might become thinkable in the present. For Einstein it was this conviction, and not some proto-interdisciplinarity, wayward exoticism, or taste for bassesse, that was the point of the expansion of research into “ideas, archaeology, fine arts, ethnography” that was announced on its masthead. From the late 1920s on, under the impact of the intellectual culture of surrealism in general and Documents in particular, Einstein gathered examples of revolt from the depths of art history and from contemporary art, from psychology, ethnography, and the natural sciences. Given more time, discipline, unlimited funds, or tenure at a university, he might eventually have assembled this material into a full-blown catalogue of metamorphotic revolts, a kind of Thousand Plateaus for the 1930s. While fragments of such an endeavor exist, it didn’t come to pass, but even so the range of Einstein’s examples is impressive enough. My inaugural quote from the survey’s Klee chapter lists some of them. Drawing on examples from Negro Sculpture, Einstein’s “monograph” on Braque, and “Gestalt and Concept,” among other texts, a more complete list would look something like this. As exogamy, metamorphosis is a revolt, on the territory of the social, against the endogamous self-reproduction of a society.26 As erotic “perversion,” metamorphosis is a revolt, on the territory of sexuality, against the heterosexual selfreproduction of a species.27 As tattoo, metamorphosis is a revolt, on the territory of the body, against the biologically given shape of the human.28 As hermaphroditism and bisexuality, metamorphosis is a revolt against that body’s biologically given gender (B 399–400).29 As scientific hypothesis (an issue given currency in the early twentieth century by Henri Poincaré’s influential book on that subject), metamorphosis is a revolt, on the territory of scientific method, against the dictate of verifiability—against the demand that a new idea, while new, must yet also conform to already established ones.30 As the dissipation of the animist subject into the animals, plants, and minerals of its environment, metamorphosis is a revolt, on the territory of natural philosophy, against the model of the perennially unchanging self and the stable objects of its epistemology.31 And as the experience of the miraculous, metamorphosis is a revolt, on the territory of temporal experience, against the rote linearity of time. Let me briefly discuss this last example as pars pro toto. In 1923, in his important draft of a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Einstein mentioned his interest in premodern miracles. He clarified his motives straightaway: “I’m not at all drawn to mysticism or some kind of religious thing; I just think we need to see whether we’re actually analyzing inner processes correctly.” He explained: “Take the miracle: two moments in time that our current sensibility is unable to align

Private Mythologies

217

into congruence. Which simply means that people once had the courage to come up with observations that transgress the psychological method that’s habitual nowadays. Nobody can deny these people actually did experience miracles. But that means that these forces must have been displaced somewhere.”32 Again, this statement is from a draft letter, and a rambling one at that; but those fluent in Einsteinian will be able to unpack it. The history of miracles, Einstein is telling Kahnweiler, is not the history of the victory of Enlightenment knowledge over superstitious ignorance, as “reason” would claim. It is rather the history of the victory of one human Fassung of temporality over another. In the Middle Ages a miracle was the simultaneous experience of two different moments in time: a moment, say, in the lifetime of a saint, and a moment in the lifetime of the person having the vision. These two moments were forced into the simultaneity of a single moment by the effort of the visionary. A miracle, therefore, was not an experience one passively endured, the hapless victim of a superstition of which “reason” has thankfully cured us by now. It was rather the active transgression of a given Fassung: the arrestment, disassembly, and then reassembly of the human experience of irreversible time. By the early twentieth century, this latter Fassung had become the norm, so much so that we ourselves continue to find it nearly impossible to formalize it otherwise in our imagination. And yet, as the history of miracles proved to Einstein, it was just that: a norm. To uncover the vanquished Fassung of miraculous experience underneath the misleading label “mysticism,” therefore, was to restore to the past the dignity of its singularity and to pry the present moment wide open. It was to insist that modern irreversible time was as much a formalization, and hence as transgressible, as medieval miraculous time. It was to understand that earlier realities had never been superseded by anything but merely “had been displaced somewhere”; rather like throughout human history “madness” has by turns been rendered glaringly visible and shunted off into the shadows. Such realities, Einstein suggested, might be retrieved from the shadows, updated, and activated against the dominant one. The simultaneity of analytic cubist painting, to finish his thought, might be such an update of the miracle: not because Braque and Picasso had religious visions, but because their work formalized a transgression of modern “cinematographic time,” which split up the layered flow of experience into a rigid sequence of isolated, freeze-frame moments (see chapter 3). Einstein never used the term in this sense, but it is evident that the historical share of his writing was committed to exploring, however sketchily, what Nietzsche called the genealogy of history. And as myth, finally, metamorphosis is—a special case. The term has come up in my quotes more than once already, and it was indeed crucial to Einstein’s thought around 1930. It deserves some attention because it is prone to generating confusion. The most important thing to understand about the notion of myth in Einstein is that in his lexicon it is used in two senses, one narrow, one general. Myth in the narrow sense is what we usually mean by that term. It is the actual

218

Form as Revolt

literature from Hesiod through Ovid; it is Greek tragedy according to Nietzsche; it is the social bonds that coalesce around the totem in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life.33 As such, myth in the narrow sense is one more item on the list of revolts recited above: a subset of metamorphosis. Which means that myth in the narrow sense is a revolt that happened in the past. It was a revolt, on the territory of collective belief systems, against “the idiotic monotony of existence,” against a lifeworld that ancient and non-Western cultures experienced as a deadly and indifferent given, and that they proceeded to animate with the fickle gods and spirits of their imagination. But myth in the narrow sense is only a special case of myth in the general sense, the definition of which is this: “Myth is the expression of man’s difference from reality” (GB 211).34 Hence myth in the general sense is a synonym for, not a subset of, metamorphotic revolt. It is the generic name for the various practices in which humans engage in order to perform the production of the real. Tattoo, scientific hypothesis, sexual deviancy, totemist rituals, and Greek cosmogonies are all mythic practices insofar as they are all revolts against the given. It follows that myth in the general sense is neither a pantheon of gods nor a catalogue of iconographic motifs. For myth in the general sense isn’t a belief, knowledge, or representation but is rather a pragmatics: it is the active transgression of a given situation through the production or performance of something new.35 It follows, in turn, that myth in Einstein is not a rallying cry, either, for the restoration of some lost religion, culture, or community that it would soon become in the 1930s, not least among mainstream surrealists and his erstwhile colleagues at Documents; let alone for the racist myth of blood and soil that was proclaimed, shortly before the publication of the third edition of Einstein’s survey, by Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930).36 The difference between this latter mythology and Einstein’s own was intuited by the Marxist art historian Konrad Farner. In 1936 Farner delivered a wide-ranging lecture on Paul Klee in Lucerne that was partly inspired, as Otto Karl Werckmeister has shown, by a sympathetic reading of the Klee chapter of Einstein’s survey. Farner distinguished between those contemporaries who “concretized” or “realized” (verwirklichen) myth, and those who, like Rosenberg, were seeking to create “new ‘old myths’.”37 Farner’s curious temporal oxymoron precisely describes what recent research into fascism has called a “palingenetic” or “rejuvenating” model of myth; that is, the fascist and national socialist efforts selectively to revive symbols, rituals, artistic morphologies and iconographies from the past in order to achieve a renewal of the modern present rather than a wholesale regression of modernity back into antiquity.38 Put in Einsteinian terms, the palingenetic model seeks to erect a hybrid “new ‘old’” world by resurrecting a past myth in the narrow sense and fusing it with “reason’s” modernization of the present. Albert Speer’s architecture, among a vast number of other examples, can stand for this marriage of “reason” and myth,

Private Mythologies

219

of new and old, decking out as it did the obscenely functionalist seriality of the architecture of the camps with the veneer of the classical order. But at stake in its inhumanity is not just the temporal oxymoron that’s built into the very word “re-newal” but also an ontological one. The difference between Einstein and the palingenetic model is the difference between myth as practice and myth as the object of a practice, namely, of a practice of imitation rather than of production. It is on this deeper level, the level of stances toward the world, that “reason” fuses with fascism itself. As Einstein put it, “The imitation of a myth would be profoundly unmythic and thoroughly rational” (GB 213; GC 175).39 So, to want to resurrect myth in the narrow sense is to betray myth in the general sense. For such a restorative imitation would amount to treating myth, not as a revolt against the given but as itself a given: as a repertory of visual symbols, social customs, or racial bonds that can retrieved from the depths of history ready-made. This effort is structurally the same as wanting to imitate nature in a work of art, treating the empirical world as the reflection of an Idea or history as the evolution of Spirit: it is to submit the culture and politics of the present to some a priori that the present would go on merely to enact or repeat. “Reason” and its apparent opposite, the irrational embrace of myth, are then two different versions of the same reactive stance. In Einstein, both fail to meet the challenge that’s built into the structure of the real: the challenge actively to exist in the present. And it is only myth in Einstein’s general sense that meets it. How so? All mythic practices in Einstein have this in common, that they happen in the now. This is due to their specific ontological modality. Again, myth is a pragmatics, not an iconography or an epistemology. Its performativity is due to the fundamental being of the real, which is radically instable: the real is a production, not a substance that might be re-produced. As we saw above, the real is insofar, and only insofar, as it is being realized: das Wirkliche is insofar as it is being verwirklicht. And this realization is not autogenetic but needs to be produced in order to keep going: in the present, through praxis, by people. Einstein explained the stakes of that engagement in a moving passage in his “monograph” on Georges Braque. What courage it takes constantly to annihilate the conventionally given real, and so to compel oneself, adrift on a narrow plank, ceaselessly to create a new reality. I.e., one accelerates the death and birth of the real, and, driven by a constant inquietude, keeps destroying one’s own selfhood. So that here death becomes the conjurer of the new and the creator of myth. (B 406)40

Death becomes the creator of myth: however close it may sound, for its apparent celebration of violence and negativity, to the thought of Georges Bataille, that phrase means something very different in Einstein. Since the two thinkers are often treated as versions of one another, it is worth spending a moment to point out how their ontological politics were literally worlds apart. To be sure, there are

220

Form as Revolt

many similarities between them. To name just some of these, in his theoretical work Bataille was famously, endlessly obsessed with the destruction of selfhood to which Einstein himself was no stranger; what Bataille called “homogeneity” or “rationalism” is identical to what Einstein called “reason”; and both myth and metamorphosis were designated weapons in Bataille’s arsenal as well. In “Wild Animals,” for example, his contribution to the well-known entry on “Metamorphosis” for Documents magazine’s Critical Dictionary, metamorphosis is defined as the release of savage animality from within the prison of the self. In turn, in “The Pineal Eye,” a text written around 1930, myth is declared a “delirium” that will violently rise up against scientific rationalism, and this precisely because of rationalism’s exclusion of myth from its purview.41 As in Einstein, then, myth and metamorphosis in Bataille are enemies of selfhood and “reason”; but unlike in Einstein that is indeed all they are: negations of the given. For there is no equivalent for Einstein’s counter-realities in Bataille; all there is is the violation of “reason’s” reality from within. And that is the allimportant difference here. In Bataille, transgression isn’t defined as the displacement of one reality by another but as the cataclysmic implosion of a single reality, the only one that is ever on view. We are never told what happens once the cataclysm is over; instead, both the regime of “reason” and its transgression are conceived as interminable. This is so because Bataille’s politics is fatally enmeshed in what it seeks to overcome. Its response to “reason” is a mimesis of “reason’s” ontological stance. It says no to “reason’s” no to the world; it fights ressentiment with ressentiment. The target changes, but the stance remains the same. Hence the interminability of the project: you will never manage to get rid of what you keep repeating in reverse. What we have here, in the difference between Einstein and Bataille on myth and metamorphosis, is a watershed between two ontological politics of art in modernity: a politics of displacement, which shoves one reality out of the way by producing a counter-reality; and a politics of resistance, which inhabits a given reality in order to destabilize it from within. The first was a politics of novelty and experiment; the second, a politics of negation. The first was prevalent in the early twentieth century; the second became dominant toward its end. Accordingly, it is often assumed nowadays that the first kind of politics was just a version of the second, its “utopian” mood, for example. But in fact the two were distinct. Neither was a version of the other, each had its own merits, and each had its own deficient mode. Hence Einstein’s point about “death” as origin of myth: a point made in order to steer clear of the deficient mode of his kind of politics. The pursuit of myth, the production of counter-realities, he is arguing, is at once vital and dangerous; it comes with a price, which an active stance must have the courage to pay. We must let go of our reactive embrace of identity—whether of past mythologies, present routines of modernization, or of our deeply ingrained need for our own stable selfhood—and instead actively engage in such mythic practices as tattoo,

Private Mythologies

221

“perversion,” hypothesis, hallucination, world building, and art: in bodily, intellectual, psychological, political, and visual experiment. But we must also face the fact that the “death” of the self that such experiment entails can be excruciating, so much so that it can put the entire project into question. As I suggested in chapters 1 and 4, Einstein took the full measure of it. Moreover, many sections of BEB II, his catastrophically fragmented autobiography, are just as tortured as Bataille’s Inner Experience. And in his last book-length text, The Fabrication of Fictions, a maniacally spiteful indictment of the intellectual avant-garde that reads like a Proletkult version of Julien Benda’s Trahison des clercs—not a happy tome, in other words— he renounced every single conviction he had ever held.42 Einstein was honest to himself to the point of despair. He shared the early twentieth-century’s urge, even its rage, to make the world new. But he also recorded the terror that attended that urge, and the wretchedness of a novelty that’s merely the figment of a private imagination—recorded them so faithfully that he allowed them to prevent him from giving a Fassung to nothing less than the account of his own life. This is not to say that therefore Einstein was like Bataille after all. It’s rather to say that in his pursuit of novelty he was more responsible than the Italian futurists, of whose promising beginnings and ultimate fate he was well aware.43 Unlike Bataille, Einstein was convinced the modern world could indeed be made new. Unlike the futurists, he realized not only that reactive versions of novelty were beckoning everywhere, but also that, far worse, even the bliss of the genuine article came with a horror all its own. Our transgression of a given world may cast us adrift without ever letting us reach the shore of a new one, for the destructive force at work in every transgression may overpower our very ability to formalize. We may get sucked into the maelstrom of the ever-accelerating “death and birth of the real.” This was the mortal danger at the heart of modern novelty: the loss of Fassung altogether or the aimless spinning forth of one Fassung after another, all equally vapid, or so it can seem. It was the danger of reaction lurking within action, the misunderstanding of metamorphosis as end rather than as means, as negation rather than as production. It was a danger that had to be neither indulged in nor ignored but confronted head-on.

Realism And that, to move toward the subject at last, is why Einstein wrote about the art of Paul Klee. What made this artist so fascinating to him was that he too seemed to have confronted a danger of whose menace the lost wanderer himself was only too aware. On a good day, Klee’s art seemed to be an art of the real: a realism in Einstein’s unique definition of that term. On a bad day, it seemed to be a fiction

222

Form as Revolt

that merely looked like one. To explain that matter, let me clarify some art-critical terms. First, a word on the notion of poetry (Dichtung) in Einstein. Like his notion of myth, it is easily misunderstood. The fact that in the early 1930s he would refer to visual art as poetry can make it seem as though he was engaged in a revival of the old ut pictura poesis debate. He was not. Poetry and visual art were indeed homologous to his mind, but not as sister arts within a general theory of the aesthetic, but rather as two practices, among others, within a general ontology of creative production. Two Einstein statements will help shed light on that crucial point. The first one alludes to Poincaré’s book on Science and Hypothesis; the second one was repeated like a mantra throughout Einstein’s texts of the early 1930s: “In hypothesis, a conventional real is bracketed out, and a created fact displaces the given, thus as it were enabling an unfettered knowing. Like the poem, knowing now serves the construction of a new reality or of counter-realities” (GB 208). “Myth is an element of the real, and poetry becomes the origin of the real.”44 These passages aren’t calls for scientists to turn into lyrical selves; nor is Einstein suggesting, with Lautréamont or Paul Eluard, that “poetry must be made by all”—not if that means that verse making must become a collective endeavor of reenchanting the world with the power of an imagination that the world supposedly lacks if left to its own devices.45 It is not the case that an empty life should finally heed the revelations of poets. It is rather the case that life, being poetic to begin with, should be lived accordingly at last. What does this mean? It means that in Einstein poetry, like myth, comes with a narrow and a general sense, and it is the latter not the former that he has in mind here—not poetry as revelation or re-enchantment but poetry as poiesis, or general creative production. It is in order to ensure the real continues to exist that life should be lived poetically in this general sense; where to live poetically means to produce counter-realities that displace the given. To demand that poetry become the origin of the real is to insist that we keep actively performing the real—in our scientific imagination, our body politics, our social rituals, and, not least but not first either, in our poetry narrowly conceived. And that, finally, goes for visual art as well. In the aesthetics of late antiquity, in Plato or Plotinus, works of art were despised and were granted value only to the extent they participated in the Idea. . . . Aristotle in turn submitted art to a state of utter dependency on a rationally conceived reality. The artwork is an imitation, or even the imitation of an imitation; hence, everything spontaneous or mythic is excluded. . . . In both cases, an effort is made to posit a congruence: whether between the artwork and the Idea or between the artwork and reality. (GB 213; GC 175)46

Like all revolts, art too has its own particular version of “reason” to contend with. Where scientific positivism demands of a hypothesis that it accommodate

Private Mythologies

223

the known facts—that its novelty be just a version of the old—there countless aesthetic theories have demanded of art that it represent some a priori, that its novelty be just a clone of something that precedes it, whether Plato’s Idea or Aristotle’s phusis. Einstein’s attack on Greek philosophy is succinct if not entirely fair. But he had in mind all approaches to art, past and present, that want it to be a mere reflection, emanation, or mimesis, and so try to domesticate what joins art to the real: its form. Hence the peculiar definition Einstein came up with in the Klee chapter of his survey, which added a new subheading to one of the longest entries in the art-historical lexicon: “Realism now acquires a deeper meaning, namely no longer that of an imitation or representation but of the new creation of something that’s concretely real [Wirkliches]” (K3 262).47 In a turnabout of dictionary wisdom, realism in the Einsteinian sense doesn’t reproduce some extant reality; it rather produces the real: by formalizing it on canvas. How so? Let us return to a passage from our inaugural quote, and complement it with two other remarks. It is thanks to the very nature of form that gestalts are assimilated and related to other, more distant configurations. (K3 264) Forms enable tremendous approximations and transformations of one gestalt into another that is seemingly alien to its essence . . . Now the significance of form amounts to more than aesthetic excitation: it signifies the power of selftransformation and the unity of the metamorphotic process. (K3 265) The fundamental drama of metamorphosis, of gestalt transformation, is being played out anew. That’s easily possible in an image, for every form can signify a tremendous number of things. (K3 263–64)48

Visual art is one more territory of metamorphotic revolt. It may seem as though it is privileged above all other revolts because it operates on the ontological bedrock level: the level of form. It is on this level that art explores the full range of form’s dizzying semantic vacillations, as we shall examine in a moment. But for now we should clear up a final confusion right away. Einstein’s realism is a formalism. But just as the former is miles away from familiar period realisms, the latter is equidistant from familiar period modernisms. Einstein wasn’t Georg Lukács, and he wasn’t Roger Fry either. Art is political through and through, which is why it doesn’t reflect the class struggle; and art is all about form, which is why it has no autonomy. Not in the ordinary sense of that word. In Einstein, it is precisely its form that joins art to all other revolts—to the “unity of the metamorphotic process”—rather than separating it from them. That is what makes his ontology an ontology at all instead of a

224

Form as Revolt

theory of “the aesthetic,” where that term means a special precinct of formal experiment that’s radically separate from the rest of the world. In Einstein, art formalizes ontological stances toward the world from within it: just like all other human practices. And it does so autonomously: just like all other human practices. Autonomy is Selbstgemäßheit, the uniquely proper selfconsistency of any such practice.49 It is a set of rules, techniques, procedures, and materials that together add up to a specific formalization that’s unsubstitutable by any other. Thus a poem is autonomous, and so is a medieval miracle, and so again is a Riemann manifold.50 The world of human practices is the sum total of these formalizations. They are all autonomous from one another, which is to saythey are all intimately related, since they are all autonomous in the same way. For, the real being what it is, all formalizations have this in common, that they are inherently transgressive. And it is the exploration of their autonomy—of a Fassung’s Fassung-ness, to coin an ugly phrase—that will discover this common ground. Take again Einstein’s example of the miracle. The visionary rejects linear time and instead treats time as a formalizable material. The result, the experience of miraculous time, is autonomous: it is a uniquely specific counter-reality that stands opposed to that reality of time that “reason” claims is not a Fassung at all but an unassailable fact. The moment the visionary discovers time as Fassung is the moment he or she realizes, or ought to realize, that many other such Fassungen exist as well: Fassungen of space, objecthood, language, and so forth. To discover the autonomy of form is to discover the homology of form: it is to discover that the real is producible across the board. Because all metamorphotic revolts are at root formal transformations. Tattoo is a metamorphosis of the form of the human body. Sexual “perversion” is a metamorphosis of its biological reproduction apparatus. Exogamy is a metamorphosis of a society’s kinship structure. Hypothesis is a metamorphosis of the schemas of positivist thought. Animism is a metamorphosis of the model of punctual selfhood. A Riemann manifold is a metamorphosis of the structure of Cartesian space. And so on. What modern art—a “formal mythology,” as Einstein called it in The Art of the 20th Century— does is to render evident with particular saliency the structural unity of these various practices: the “fundamental drama of metamorphosis” that unfolds in them all. Realism’s medium-specific stake in an ontological politics is that it produces new visibilities of form as revolt. For Einstein, the art of Paul Klee was an especially complex example for both the potential and the limits of that project.

Elemental Cosmology [Then] we encounter enigmatic gestalts that drift through a pale, lightless desert, or others whose facets gleam in sun-like fashion; i.e., entire constellations have been

Private Mythologies

225

imprisoned in these gestalts, astral ancestors perhaps, who incarnate themselves in them. Humans may drift as plants, rest as minerals, glow as stars, or fade as moons. Man, that is to say, is the juggler of the aggregate states of the world that radiate out from him. Thus his fate is to submit himself to every state and every transition; man is the dreamt play of incessant metamorphosis. (K3 268)51 Animate forms seem to originate in air, water, or fire, and hence, surprisingly, a bond is established between the signs of psychic excitation and the ancient system of the elements. We seem to be dealing with the downright return of the ancient doctrine of the elements from which man and all gestalts are descended. In that case, the gestalt would now be merely a synthesis of different cosmic forces, the tension and difference between which would generate the soul and the person. (K3 265)52 Passive recording is an expression of the capacity for suffering, of the power to become a medium; hence it will generate vegetal, acquiescent forms [fig. 5.1]. With the tectonic, by contrast, we try to defend ourselves against the vacillating dream, and violently to impose limits and edges onto it [fig. 5.2]. . . . The vegetal spheres of the calligram show humans as growths, adrift in the wind or frazzled by tactile sensations, thoroughly exposed to the elements. Seemingly geometricized gestalts are meant to represent more resistant, more conscious figures, crystal beings as it were, into which minerals and stasis have been projected. . . . The vegetal man would then perhaps be the unconscious dreamer, while the tectonic figures are products of the will and of the defense against the dream. (K3 264)53 Where plant, mineral, astral constellation, and man are almost completely equalized, a humanized plant may replace man as agent, or else an emotion may transfer itself into the structure of a mineral. (K3 265)54 Conversely, plants and minerals too now acquire metamorphotic power; i.e., they transform themselves and affect other and indeed new beings, and so acquire a power equal in vitality to man. The positivist hierarchy that is founded on consciousness is being thoroughly shaken. (K3 265)55

I have let Einstein speak for himself at some length in order to demonstrate the range and quality of his thoughts on Klee, which at the time of this writing are still not available in English. What we have here is a complex but lucid theoretical edifice. In the Klee chapter of The Art of the 20th Century Einstein adapted the Nietzschean formalism he had most thoroughly developed in his work on Picasso’s surrealism; he merged it with a new philosophical theme specific to Klee—cosmology—and he integrated the two under the rubric of metamorphotic revolt. Put another way, matters are slightly complicated. I will disentangle them by proceeding in two steps. First, I will identify the intellectual framework of Einstein’s argument, and as I do I will assume that Klee’s art is a straightforward

226

Form as Revolt

Figure 5.1. Paul Klee, Before the Snow, 1929. Watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard, 33.5 × 39 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Private loan.

illustration of it. But further down I will complicate that assumption when I attend to the visual structure of actual works by the artist. To begin with the most unfamiliar issue, the passages I have cited are replete with references to the ancient cosmology of the four elements, the three kingdoms (animal, vegetal, mineral), and the astral bodies. Why the presence of this material in a chapter on Paul Klee and in other texts from the period as well? Why did Einstein mention Paracelsus in an essay of 1928 on Giorgio de Chirico; why did he refer, however briefly and cavalierly, to the Renaissance philosophy of microcosm and macrocosm in his “Methodological Aphorisms” a year later?56 Because of a felicitous coincidence between Einstein’s philosophical project and a major theme in Klee criticism, and an interest in cosmology on the part of Einstein’s closest intellectual ally at Documents.

Figure 5.2. Paul Klee, Monument in Fertile Country, 1929. Watercolor and pencil on paper on cardboard, 45.7 × 30.8 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

228

Form as Revolt

For one thing, a decade after its canonization by the art critic Leopold Zahn in a flimsy but influential pamphlet, elemental cosmology had become a recognizable trope in the Klee literature, and as such was both familiar to its readers and ready for a radical redescription.57 For another, cosmology had more recently become a subject of interest to Michel Leiris, Einstein’s collaborator at Documents, who wrote a review of Fritz Saxl’s catalogue of astrological manuscripts in the Vienna National Library.58 As Einstein was prompted to investigate the matter, either by reading Zahn or by discussions with Leiris or both, he discovered that cosmology was profoundly germane to his own philosophy of the real. He realized that it was one more territory of metamorphotic revolt. To be sure, the above passages suggest that Einstein wasn’t deeply read in either the original literature from antiquity or in the Renaissance hermetic tradition; his statements are simply too brief and generic to be traced back to a specific source, for example. Even so, if asked to give an account—and a partisan evaluation—of the history of cosmological thought and its fate in modernity, Einstein would likely have been able to come up with something like the following. The cosmology of elements originated with Empedocles, was given supreme poetic form by Ovid, was revived in the Renaissance by Paracelsus among others, and was then gradually displaced by Newton’s physics, Lavoisier’s chemistry, and Descartes’s philosophy. Introducing the notion of a homogeneous, inert, empty space to go with a mechanical physics, Newton discredited the assumption that the four elements each had their own specific location and motility, and that the world was therefore composed of inherently dynamic phenomena that exert their power on one another. In turn, insisting that chemical processes hinge on the separation and recombination of substances, Lavoisier discredited the assumption that elemental transformation is a matter of converting substances into one another, and so annihilating their individual identity in the process. Finally, declaring the Ego cogito the criterion of vital being, Descartes discredited the assumption, still held by Paracelsus, that animate beings are distinguished from one another by degree rather than by kind, and that therefore human subjects weren’t passive observers of the world from without but were fully enmeshed in its equally vital and deadly dynamic network.59 Given this prehistory, for Einstein to retrieve cosmology from oblivion amounted to more than putting a new spin on a familiar topos in the Klee literature. It amounted to rethinking cosmology, and by extension Klee’s art, as metamorphotic revolt: a revolt against a world picture, imposed on the real by “reason,” whose notion of space is that of Newtonian physics, whose notion of a phenomenon is that of Lavoisier’s substances, and whose notion of subjecthood is that of the Cartesian self. How so, precisely? Let us explore the argument in the passages I have cited, in greater detail. Where plant, mineral, astral constellation, and man are almost completely equalized [gleichgeordnet], a humanized plant may replace man as agent, or else an emotion may transfer itself into the structure of a mineral. (K3 265)

Private Mythologies

229

Conversely, plants and minerals too now acquire metamorphotic power; i.e., they transform themselves and affect other and indeed new beings, and so acquire a power equal in vitality to man. The positivist hierarchy that is founded on consciousness is being thoroughly shaken. (K3 265)

What shakes up the “positivist hierarchy” is cosmology’s erosion of the distinction between an autonomous human subject on one hand, the surrounding environment of phenomena on the other. This hierarchy is collapsed by what Einstein calls—using a term that also occurs in Leiris’s Saxl review—an “equalization of phenomena” (Gleichsetzung der Erscheinungen; K3 265), which puts humans and world on a radically equal footing. It is equalizing, first, because here the two are different from one another no longer in kind, as life against death, but only by degree: the degree to which at any given moment they tap into a single source of energy that circulates among human and nonhuman, conscious and nonconscious alike. It is equalizing, second, because this energy is finite and circulates within a closed system, so that to the extent that humans grant animation to the world they simultaneously deanimate themselves. And it is equalizing, third, because the identity of people and the things in the world is not conceived as permanent or self-contained but as provisional and interactive, so that the kingdoms and the elements will be constantly humanized even as humans are constantly elementarized. Humans may drift as plants, rest as minerals, glow as stars, or fade as moons. Man, that is to say, is the juggler of the aggregate states of the world that radiate out from him. Thus his fate is to submit himself to every state and every transition; man is the dreamt play of incessant metamorphosis. (K3 268)

Drifting versus rest, radiation versus fading, man as “juggler” versus man as “play”: turning as they do on a relation of power exchange in which humans play the role now of active agents, now of passive objects, these oppositional pairs will sound familiar from what we have learned about Einstein’s work on Picasso’s surrealism. The common ground between the cosmology he developed in the Klee chapter and the psychic economy he described in his Picasso texts is the same Nietzschean ontology of action and reaction. In chapter 4, I suggested how that ontology works, but a brief recapitulation will be helpful. Einstein founded it on a basic assumption that is commonsensical enough: The world includes human beings but is itself nonhuman. We are part of a world that is not made for us, that continuously threatens our existence by chance events beyond our control, and that will inevitably terminate that existence in death. In Einstein, there are two possible human responses—two possible ontological stances—to this condition: an active stance and a reactive one. A reactive stance will treat the real as an enemy, and either seek to dominate it or else capitulate before what it perceives as the real’s unassailable domination. As we saw

230

Form as Revolt

earlier on, Einstein considered naturalism in art—a passive, “slavish” doubling of the world—to be one such reactive stance. But there are other, nonnaturalistic ones. As we know, Einstein identified two artistic devices with the two modes of reactivity, domination and capitulation: the tectonic, a term he lifted from Heinrich Wölfflin’s Basic Principles of Art History (1915); and the psychogram, Einstein’s name for surrealist automatic drawing. A tectonic artwork is one whose composition is derived, entirely or to a large extent, from the shape of its frame, which generates formal echoes throughout the image (figs. 4.2, 4.3). A tectonic composition, therefore, is defined by the submission of form to repetition and regularity; and as such it stands for an aggressive mapping of human order onto the unpredictability of the real. In turn, the psychogram, that chaotic, unmediated record of unconscious psychic energy invented by the French surrealists, stands for a submission of form to the real: for a defeatist assimilation to what is wrongly taken to be the overwhelming force of the real’s sheer contingency (fig. 4.4). In other words, in visual art a reactive stance will be recognized by a nonproductive use of form. In the tectonic, form is arrested into tautology; in the psychogram, it dissolves into shapeless scribbles. An active stance, by contrast, uses form productively. It forms the real and permits itself to be formed by it in turn. It activates form as metamorphosis, and in so doing joins the real as production rather than either negating it or submitting itself to it. To Einstein’s mind, Picasso achieved this feat by surrealizing his own cubism: by dovetailing the tectonic composition of analytic cubism with the surrealist psychogram. As a result, in Picasso’s paintings of the later 1920s a formalism of the unconscious was generated out of the framework of the tectonic, as figures and objects emerged from a network of lines in the manner in which in Freud’s psychoanalysis cathected objects arise from the unbound energy of the primary process. The polarity of control and uncontrol, activity and passivity, was combined into a single generative structure (figs. 4.5, 4.6). In turn, in Einstein’s cosmological account of Klee this polarity is expanded from microcosm to macrocosm, from the interaction of forces within the psyche to the interaction between humans and the world at large; an interaction that in Klee’s art unfolds as a series of kinetic, thermal, and material transformations among earthly elements and celestial bodies, vegetal flow and mineral stasis, stellar radiance and lunar receptivity. But despite this change of ontological scale, human existence is conceived in the same fashion: as “a synthesis of different cosmic forces, the tension and difference between which would generate the soul and the person” (K3 265). As in Picasso, so in Klee: human subjectivity is this difference, this enactment of the real’s metamorphosis as a drift between stances, whether these are psychic or elemental. Einstein stressed this parallelism between microcosm and macrocosm in several key passages of his Klee chapter, pulling together the language of psychoanalysis,

Private Mythologies

231

the formalism of the tectonic and the psychogram, and the cosmology of the kingdoms and elements. Through mediumistic writing one dreams oneself back into the world of palpating plants; or else by way of the tectonic one reaches the sphere of slowly moving minerals, in which configurations erect themselves with wilful angularity. (K3 265)60 Passive recording is an expression of the capacity for suffering [Leidensfähigkeit], of the power to become a medium [mediale Kraft]; hence it will generate vegetal, acquiescent forms. With the tectonic, by contrast, we try to defend ourselves against the vacillating dream, and violently to impose limits and edges onto it. . . . The vegetal spheres of the calligram show humans as growths, adrift in the wind or frazzled by tactile sensations, thoroughly exposed to the elements. Seemingly geometricized gestalts are meant to represent more resistant, more conscious figures, crystal beings as it were, into which minerals and stasis have been projected. . . . The vegetal man would then perhaps be the unconscious dreamer, while the tectonic figures are products of the will and of the defense against the dream [Traumabwehr]. (K3 264)

By the “calligram” Einstein means the whimsical linear flourish of Klee’s most draftsmanly works, which endeared the artist to the surrealists for their apparent kinship with automatic drawing (fig. 5.1). The calligram diagrams that moment of subjectivity in which man has struck up a will-less, passive yet mobile “vegetal” stance toward the world that Einstein thinks in analogy to the oneiric drift of the dreamer. In turn, the tectonic—that share of Klee’s art that most obviously grew out of cubism’s grid—diagrams the waking self ’s reactive response, which by embracing the regular order of the mineral assimilates its ideal of consciousness-incontrol to a death-like crystalline stasis (fig. 5.2). In Einstein’s view, no single one of these stances is permanent or preferable to the other. On the contrary, as soon as one of them is absolutized, it becomes reactive. Passive drift leads to the dissolution of the self in the world; aggressive order leads to the violation of the world by the self. Both are two ways of saying no to the world, one hopelessly masochist, the other sadistic. What counts is rather a third stance that consists in an oscillation between the two that redefines their economy of power, converting the no into a yes. It was in order to think this oscillation that Einstein once again took his cue from Nietzsche. Trying to pin down how “hallucination” and “the tectonic,” uncontrol and control, might go together, he borrowed two key terms from the Birth of Tragedy: “One doesn’t stay within the domain of wayward Dionysianism but hones it to Apollonian precision” (K3 117).61 This statement curtly paraphrases the Birth of Tragedy’s central argument, which is that the Greek drama is “the Apollonian rendering sensible of Dionysian insights and effects.”62 By this Nietzsche doesn’t mean that the Dionysian is an immaterial idea that the Apollonian would

232

Form as Revolt

materialize. Rather, the Dionysian is a material but shapeless horror that the Apollonian formalizes, “hones to precision.” Nietzsche describes this as a process of metamorphosis (Verwandlung) in two steps: “The Dionysian enthusiast sees himself as satyr, and as satyr he in turn beholds the god, that is, transformed in this way he sees a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian completion of his state. With this vision, the drama is complete.”63 Let me unpack this statement. First, the members of the dithyrambic chorus transform themselves into satyrs, and that transformation then enables them to have a vision of the satyr god Dionysus. This seems to leave no room for the Apollonian, but it is there. The initial transformation is indeed Dionysian: the chorist abandons his or her human selfhood for a mimetic fusion with the monster. But the subsequent vision is Apollonian: the monster beholds something that is separate from itself. Here, the distance between self and other that had collapsed a moment ago returns in a new guise. The satyrs are having a vision of their god: they don’t fuse with him as the humans had fused with them just now; rather, they behold him from a distance, as a human would a work of art. Both the subject and the object of the vision are Dionysian, therefore, but the structure of the vision itself is Apollonian. Art, the Apollonian, is neither ravaged by the Dionysian nor does it claim to be a substitute for it. It is rather the mode of its visibility. “One moves beyond the zone of suffering towards active, willed Gestaltung, and so it is that these works contain the play of the mutually opposed basic psychic forces” (K3 116).64 Whether in Nietzsche on Greek tragedy or in Einstein on modern art: an active embrace of a passive self-abandonment is the origin, in turn, of an active formalization. That Gestaltung is truly active which neither submits to the Dionysian drift of the oneiric altogether nor suppresses it with a falsely redemptive Apollonian order but which instead says yes to both: Fassung and transgression, humanity and the threat of the nonhuman world. And that is the third stance. Again taking a leaf from Nietzsche, Einstein called it Leidensfähigkeit or mediale Kraft: a capacity for suffering, the power of being a medium.65 In the Birth of Tragedy, Leidensfähigkeit defines not the capitulation of the Greeks before the Dionysian, but rather their courage to let it appear at the very heart of their culture, and their ability to give it form in spite of their fear. Leidensfähigkeit is a synonym for what in the Will to Power Nietzsche called pathos, a term that Deleuze helpfully glossed as “affectivity,” “the capacity for being affected.”66 In Einstein, affectivity or Leidensfähigkeit is the stance that will not settle for any one particular state, whether the vegetal or the mineral, the lunar or the solar, the calligram or the tectonic. Rather, affectivity is the capacity to be affected by all of these states in turn. On one hand, manifested in the crystallizations of the tectonic, there is the power to affect, to graft organized form onto an inchoate environment ever in flux. On the other hand, manifested in the wayward meandering of the calligram, there is the power to be affected, to yield to the world’s impact

Private Mythologies

233

on us, to serve as a medium through which its vectors will pass. Affectivity is the power to dare to be now the juggler, now the play; it is the existential enactment of the metamorphosis of the real.

Affectivity Formalized Einstein’s name for the form of affectivity in Klee’s art is “gestalt.” The term has cropped up several times in the passages I have cited, and it deserves clarification. Gestalt in Einstein is only superficially related to the Bauhaus notion of Gestaltung and the gestalt theory of Ehrenfels and Köhler. Instead, he likely derived it from the late nineteenth-century art theorist Konrad Fiedler. According to Kahnweiler, Einstein was an admirer of Fiedler, and he did indeed derive a number of important ideas from him.67 Like Einstein, Fiedler had distinguished the visual gestalts of art from the abstract concepts of science; like Einstein, he had defined realism not as the imitation of reality but as the production of it. But that is where the similarity ends. The fundamental difference is that, unlike Einstein’s, Fiedler’s gestalt is firmly on the side of “reason.” It is often argued that Fiedler’s distinction between art and science was a hierarchy with art on top; that he was a thinker in the Schillerian tradition who wanted to set apart a sphere of vital aesthetic experience from the deadening routines of scientific thought. But that argument gets it only half-right. According to Fiedler, a conservative neo-Kantian and a friend of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, art and science weren’t enemies but twins separated at birth. Both offered different solutions to what Fiedler felt was the same gut-wrenching problem: the problem of contingency, of the “confusion, indeterminacy, fleetingness” of everyday experience and empirical “nature” (recte modernity). For Fiedler, “nature” and the everyday were manifolds in need of a unity, a raw, formless chaos that had to be regularized. Science regularized it by imposing nonsensuous concepts on it; art regularized it by imposing visual gestalts on it. That imposition was what made art—good art—a proper realism; where realism was the transformation of an atomized field of vision into the “clear, determinate, and enduring reality” of art. That is why Fiedler drew a line between his notion of realism and the nineteenthcentury literature of “naturalism,” and why impressionist painting was an unnamed but recognizable target in his texts: because, instead of bestowing a proper form upon modern experience, naturalism and impressionism were merely registering its dispersal. Zola and Monet were positivists who were just recording what they saw; but Hans von Marées and Adolf von Hildebrand, Fiedler’s favorite artists, were proper neo-Kantians: they were “producing reality” by burying sensory contingency under the gestalts of neoclassicist pastiche.68 Hence Einstein’s selective reading of Fiedler. What he found attractive in his work was a definition of realism as poiesis, but he had no interest in the way in

234

Form as Revolt

which it was harnessed to a conservative politics of visual stability; on the contrary, he would have dismissed that version of realism as so much unreal Platonism. Accordingly, Einstein’s notion of gestalt, too, must be distinguished from the sense Fiedler had given the term. In Einstein, a gestalt is a hallucinatory entity that transgresses the given visibility of the world. It is neither an imitation nor a sublimation of an extant reality; it is rather a new reality that exists on canvas only. That last point is true for Fiedler’s gestalt as well; but in Einstein, so far from stabilizing a field of vision, a gestalt renders it profoundly volatile. For a gestalt is a coproduction between viewer and world, artist and medium, and in Klee’s art that makes it an entity both fragile and precious. It is precious, because, rather than just imitating the world, it gives us something new to see. And it is fragile, because this novelty is founded on the unpredictability of the power exchange that has produced it. Let us examine that fragility more closely. So far, I have tacitly assumed that form in Einstein’s Klee produces gestalts on a semantic level, as so many metamorphoses of the representation of human figures, for example. But this is imprecise. At root, form in Einstein is nonhuman and as such is nonrepresentational. Just as the real enables human ontological stances but is itself not reducible to them, so form in art enables representations of human beings but is itself not reducible to them. To Einstein’s mind, the art of Klee was one territory on which this irreducibility was made explicit. Here, the representation of human metamorphosis flips over into the metamorphosis of human representation; and this flipping over is metamorphosis in its purest state. By rendering it visible Klee formalized affectivity visually. That is how he met the challenge of realism that Einstein posed to art: “The demand on artmaking [Bilden] and images [Bilder] to acquire the power to produce the real can be phrased thus: images ought not to represent but to be” (B 322).69 What goes for myth in the general sense also goes for the “formal mythology” of visual art. Art is not a representation of metamorphosis but its practice, not its reactive copy but its active performance. Let me explain this matter by examining three aspects of metamorphosis in Klee. They are, first, the metamorphosis of visual experience (of the viewing of form); second, the metamorphosis of form itself (of its articulation in the work of art); and third, the metamorphosis of signification (of the way in which this articulation gives rise to human representations). In Ardent Flowering (Heiss Blühendes, 1927; fig. 5.3), a work whose title announces a mixture of elements and kingdoms and hence a cosmological metamorphosis as its subject matter, the quivering calligraphy of Klee’s pen has generated a group of unusually animate floral creatures. Hovering just above a ground line as if they are airborne seeds and hence creatures of both soil and air, their shapes yet radiate with the heat of a fire that expands like an aura of red and gold all around them into a dark space that is tentatively explored by their feelers. Air, fire, and earth, vegetal nonsentience and animal self-awareness, jointly produce a group of

Private Mythologies

235

composite beings that seem tender and hesitant on one hand yet possessed of a radiant energy on the other. But metamorphosis in Ardent Flowering cuts far deeper than the iconographic level. A surrealist fellow-traveler like Einstein would have considered these creatures the protagonists of a dream image. But this would be a very specific dream image, one that diagrams a fundamental trait of Einsteinian metamorphosis: its performative contemporaneity. Because the dream in Ardent Flowering unfolds in the now: in the present moment of our viewing of the image. I’d like to call this dream experience a triple suspension, for it involves the unhinging of a classificatory judgment, a sense of floating that emerges in its absence, and a visual arrestment that arises in its stead. The little creatures are suspended in the first sense in virtue of their elemental hybridity. They are suspended in the second sense in virtue of their weightless drift. But they are also suspended in the third sense: in virtue of the way in which they are lined up in a row, frontally and side by side, their calligraphy condensing at various points into eyelike concentric circles, each one carefully accentuated in red, which collectively confront the viewer with an arresting gaze. The first suspension, breaking down the order of elements and kingdoms and the distinction between life and nonlife, clears the ground for a metamorphotic recombination of ontological traits. The second suspension suggests the fragility of a newborn vision that arises from that tabula rasa into the night of a dehierarchized world. But the third suspension, setting in motion another kind of metamorphosis, suggests this new vision’s compelling power over the subject who is giving rise to that vision—the dreamer. Which is to say the viewer: because this is a vision whose protagonists are facing us directly, like the Dutch group portrait or Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, and which therefore address us in the second person rather than in the third. The point is graphically made, in more than one sense, by one of Klee’s signature devices: a tiny arrow that insistently directs us to the blossom-eye located just to the right of the center axis (fig. 5.3a). Since the arrow is not a part of the dream vision itself but rather a formal means of steering its reception it collapses the distinction between inside and outside, past and present: between the world of the viewer and the world of the image. By issuing a “viewing order” to us—right now, in the present of our looking at the work—the arrow pierces the picture plane both temporally and spatially.70 Ardent Flowering then sets itself up as an image that comes into being at the very moment, and because of the very fact, that we are looking at it. It posits the viewer not as the belated witness to a previously completed representation, but as a participant in an ongoing exchange that expands out through the picture plane. The work defines this exchange as an exchange of power, and it defines the continuum of vision and viewer as the closed system of an oneiric economy. Within this system, some participants gain power to the exact measure that other participants lose it. To the degree that the viewer-dreamer is reduced to a state of will-less passivity,

236

Form as Revolt

Figure 5.3. Paul Klee, Ardent Flowering, 1927. Pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 34 × 46 cm. Private collection, Germany.

a menagerie of active, animate gestalts springs into existence. The fragility of these gestalts indicates the passive side of the dreamer’s affectivity, the depletion of his power that enabled their coming into being, even as their own hypnotic compellingness indicates the power they have acquired over their own origin. Plants are humanized even as the viewer is “vegetalized,” to use Einstein’s terms. So it is that, besides the level of subject matter, metamorphosis in Ardent Flowering also operates at the level of reception. It is here that the work declares the dream one of the territories of metamorphosis: a territory on which the viewer is defined as at once the creator, the conduit, and the victim of a world inhabited by fluctuant identities. I now want to examine the second aspect of metamorphosis in Einstein’s Klee: the metamorphosis of form itself. I have chosen Forest Architecture (Wald Architektur, 1925; fig. 5.4) to discuss the matter because it is so instructively different from Ardent Flowering. Where the latter work produces the metamorphosis of calligraphic frailty into hallucinatory power, there Forest Architecture’s title seems to signal the reverse: an effort at Traumabwehr, at warding off passive, “vegetal” drift by arresting it into tectonic regularity. This defensive impulse is responsible for the leveling of empirical particulars by repetition and uniformity all across the work’s

Private Mythologies

237

Figure 5.3a. The blossom-eye in figure 5.3.

visual field, a leveling implemented by line and color alike. Line attempts to even out such irregular details as tree crowns, trunks, and (at top right) mountaintops by submerging them in a pattern of rectangular strokes of equal thickness. And color replaces a myriad local shades with a single wash of pale turquoise, and so attempts to reduce the verdant greens and browns of empirical nature into the uniform icy blue of crystal. But this is not to say that such Traumabwehr is ultimately successful. The absence of a hyphen in the painting’s German title is surely programmatic; it avoids reducing one noun to a mere inflection of the other, and instead states the ontological equality of nature and culture. Forest Architecture, which might as well be called Architecture Forest, generates chaos out of its very efforts at regularity: by the formal metamorphosis of the work’s basic units of tectonic order. There are essentially two of these. On one hand, there is a post-and-lintel configuration whose staggered repetition into depth generates receding hallways complete with ceiling beams and staircases. On the other hand, there is a lozenge-like crystalline shape, mostly composed of vertical facets, which, increasing in height toward the center, push its shape forward optically. But that is another way of saying that

238

Form as Revolt

Forest Architecture’s tectonic units are deployed at cross-purposes. The hallways are trying to establish recession; the crystals seek to impose protrusion; accordingly, confusion reigns where the two intersect or are adjacent to one another. At lower right, in a constellation repeated several times elsewhere, a lozenge might be either a crystal jutting forward against the foil of a flat pattern of horizontal stripes; or else it might be two walls receding backward along two staircases on either side. In turn, in the top right quadrant, another lozenge is bisected horizontally, its upper half a mountain peak arising frontally, the lower half a row of hallway ceiling beams vanishing into depth. The result is that the tectonic, successfully imposed upon the vegetal at the local scale, devolves into a jungle on the global scale. No one strong crystal-figure arises to displace the rest of the field as its ground; no one hallway recedes insistently enough to provide a master vanishing point that would situate us toward a horizon line. Klee summons two major strategies of mapping order onto our field of vision—figure/ground opposition and one-point perspective—only to have them cancel each other out. As a result, the viewing experience of the work becomes exactly the kind of passive, aimless drift in defense against which the composition had marshaled the tectonic in the first place. Even as the vegetal sphere is arrested into a mineral world, a dazzled vision is set loose to wander across that world from detail to detail. As tectonic form gives rise to calligrammatic reception, a metamorphosis of ontological stances is enacted within the very act of viewing. That said, it bears stressing that what’s at stake in Klee for Einstein is not the triumph of the brave vegetal over its mineral oppressor, of drift over stasis, of the Dionysian over the Apollonian. Metamorphotic revolts don’t happen in the name of any one particular stance but rather in the name of their oscillation: in the name, precisely, of metamorphosis itself. The top left quadrant of Forest Architecture, where a massive tree abuts a nave-like hallway, can serve to illustrate this distinction. Here, a repetition of lines—diagonal at the top, vertical further down—has established a zone of transition that can be seen as unfolding both from right to left and from left to right: from tree crown and trunk to vault and fluted columns, and vice versa. Is a cathedral turning into a tree, or is a tree turning into a cathedral, as in the old adage of a cathedral as a forest of pillars? Is nature being tectonicized or architecture naturalized? The undecidability of the question is crucial.71 In Einstein’s Klee, form isn’t defined as grounded either in nature or in architecture, the calligram or the tectonic, the vegetal or the mineral. Rather, all of these are defined as grounded in form. To repeat: “Forms enable tremendous approximations and transformations of one gestalt into another one that is seemingly alien to its essence” (K3 265). Form individuates the gestalts of a new kind of world, a world whose members are at once distinguished and united in radical equality. Architecture is architecture insofar as it isn’t nature; but architecture is also like nature insofar as both emerge from form.

Figure 5.4. Paul Klee, Forest Architecture, 1925. Pen and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 31 × 21 cm. Private collection, France.

240

Form as Revolt

This brings me to Klee’s relation to cubism.72 The cubist grid, including the well-known confusion of convexity versus concavity that it so often generates, is a prominent presence in Forest Architecture. But, as everywhere in Klee and in the surrealism of Masson, Miró, and of Picasso himself, its function has been reversed.73 The grid has been converted from a reactive device into an active one, from a means of atomizing naturalistic figures into a structure that generates gestalts, whether the gestalts of the unconscious or the gestalts of a cosmos. No doubt, they resemble again the people and things in the world that cubism had purged from view. But resemblance now arises as a secondary effect: the effect of a formal reciprocity among the elements of a new world on canvas, a world for which even in Klee’s most informal canvases the grid serves as something like an invisible tabular order. That tabularity ensures that formal correspondences override hierarchies of distinctions based on scale and spatial location; and this is complemented by Klee’s incorporation of cubism’s other achievements: the uncoupling of color from local shade and natural referent, and of pictorial light from a unified light source. In Ardent Flowering, a “fiery” color scheme is improbably matched up with vegetation; in Forest Architecture, the turquoise shade confuses rather than distinguishes mineral and vegetal. Whether space, line, light, or color: the pictorial elements of the given world that cubism had spliced apart are recombined as the building blocks of a new one. There is a limit to such recombinations, however; a limit best examined by way of an answer to the question, Given that in Einstein form is the great leveler of semantic hierarchies, a generator rather than a copy of resemblance, might his notion of form be a version of what is known as the diacritical nature of the sign? Are we dealing with a semiotic analysis of Klee that is essentially Saussurean, along the lines of what has been suggested for Picasso’s cubism? Not quite. Einstein did bring something like a theory of signs to bear on Klee’s work, but that theory is embedded in his ontology of the real. The difference will become clear from an expansion of a statement I cited above: “The fundamental drama of metamorphosis . . . is being played out anew. That’s easily possible in an image, for every form can signify a tremendous number of things. Therefore, some objective interpretation [gegenständliche Ausdeutungen] needs to be embedded within each form; i.e., in order to make forms unambiguous, they need to be specified out into a determinate representational context” (K3 263–64; my emphasis).74 Forms need to be “specified”: despite its somewhat wooden terminology, this passage clarifies that Einstein both subscribed to a broadly semiotic definition of form and put a different spin on it. What he did, in effect, was process semiology, the formation of a human Fassung out of nonhuman form, through the Birth of Tragedy. In Einstein, form is an initially unmarked unit that will generate meaning relationally rather than referentially, by way of interaction with other units within the composition of a particular painting (a “determinate representational context”): as

Private Mythologies

241

when parallel lines are “specified out” into posts and lintels in Forest Architecture. Semiologists call this unmarked being of form its arbitrariness and focus on the play of signifiers it enables. In Einstein, by contrast, the arbitrariness of form—its nonhumanity—is not a neutral condition of signification but an ethical injunction to it. The real compels us to a decision; a decision, in this case, about the stance a human subject should strike up toward the unmarked being of form. The nature of that decision can be phrased as a question: Given that form is like a langue, will we rise to the occasion, and in our art register the relation between langue and parole, between the nonhuman structure of form and its human “specifications”? And, in so doing, will we recognize signification for what it is: not a game of meaning but a power exchange between the Dionysian world of form and our Apollonian efforts to shape it into representation? A truly metamorphotic art will address this exchange. It will register how form passes from nonhuman arbitrariness into human representation and back again. In this way it renders visible, on the territory of visual art, the perennial passage between active intervention and passive endurance that takes place on the territory of human existence in general. Diagramming the metamorphosis of form on canvas, an affectable (leidensfähig) artist enacts the metamorphosis of human subjectivity within the real. Flower Eater (Blumenfresser, 1927; fig. 5.5), which Einstein reproduced in The Art of the 20th Century, dramatizes this metamorphosis in a fashion both amusing and gently disturbing. Its title announces, once again, a cosmological metamorphosis as its subject matter—here, the power exchange between the animal and vegetal kingdoms, one feeding on the other. But besides the animal and the vegetal there is also the mineral. Klee has used white angular lines of identical width to draw the scrubs in the lower foreground, the flower eater at right, and the flowers at left; flowers whose blossoms and branches are clearly assimilated to the structure of a crystal. Whether that crystal is ice, and therefore water, and whether the somewhat indistinct circular web in the top right quadrant is a sun, and therefore fire—but a crystalline fire at that—is open to a speculation Klee clearly encourages us to engage in. And we are just as free to imagine the loose, locally clustered distribution of all these gestalts across the dark ground as a process similar to hoarfrost gradually emerging on a windowpane: as the early stage of a crystallization that will be complete once the entire surface is covered with a uniform linear network. At this later point, the gestalts that were specified out from the network earlier on—namely, right now, at the moment of our beholding of the image—will be absorbed, illegibly, into an allover crystalline indistinction. This is not to say that the crystal is ultimately the master term that regulates the individuation of form in the image. Close inspection especially of the flowers at left reveals that their leaves and blossoms have been generated by the staggered repetition of identical V-shaped brush marks. The real engine of metamorphosis in the

242

Form as Revolt

Figure 5.5. Paul Klee, Flower Eater, 1927. Oil on cardboard, 25 × 41 cm. Lost; formerly Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

work is a configuration of purely formal units that neither resemble nor belong to any of the elements into which they are “specified out.” The upshot of these observations is that Flower Eater offers a specific definition of the metamorphosis of form and of the role of human representation within it. It defines metamorphosis as an individuation of gestalts unfolding over time, and it defines visual art as the snapshot of one moment within that process. That moment is none other than the moment of formal specification itself, which occurs in the interval between the absence of form from the ground on one hand, and its entropic ubiquity on the other. This moment marks the active intervention of a human subject into what would otherwise be form’s anonymous, automatic self-reproduction. By means of this active intervention the subject—the artist—has produced a world of new gestalts, but a world whose origin is visibly nonsubjective at root. The very material of which its gestalts are made and which ensures their cohesion and enables their interaction is yet grounded in none of them and will ultimately eclipse them all. In the fundamental drama of metamorphosis, human-made worlds will appear on stage only to exit in due course. To put it this way is to realize that on occasion, whenever he managed to shed his Goethean harmonism, Klee’s own ontology did intersect more than superficially with Einstein’s. A famous statement by the artist, so important to him that between 1916 and 1920 he labored over several different versions of it, stakes out that common ground, or rather that common groundlessness. In that statement, Klee defined his “own position” over against that of Franz Marc, who had recently

Private Mythologies

243

died in the war and whose work and ideas had had a powerful impact on Klee since his involvement with the Blauer Reiter.75 My work lacks a passionate kind of humanity. I have no deep, earthly love for animals or any other beings. I neither lower myself down to them nor do I raise them up to myself. Instead, I tend initially to dissolve in the totality and then establish a brotherly relation to all earthly proximity. I take up the position of a remote, archecreational point, where I imagine the presence of formulas for man, animal, plant, mineral, and the elements, for all the powers of circulation at once. The notion of earth recedes before the notion of world.76

In this extraordinary passage Klee is rejecting, in the name of a cosmology of “world,” Marc’s rather more comforting and limited cosmology of “earth,” which is to say of nature. For, according to Klee, Marc’s is a cosmology that, by seeking either to ground man in his true animality or else to raise up the animal to its true humanity, will only perpetuate the hierarchy of the real with other means: by either inverting or broadening its apex. By contrast, the nonhierarchical, nonhuman, yet for that very reason truly “brotherly” relation between the phenomena of the world that Klee is trying to establish will be found only by way of a prior ungrounding of them all. Such is the anarchism of arché-creation. Klee’s anarchism is the quest for a formal principle that is able to generate the kinship between man and animal, and between them and the elements in turn. This is a principle that will produce beings at once radically different and radically equalized, beings whose true proximity will be revealed to the degree they are all “specified out” from a formal unit that is not extrapolated from any single one of them. It is by rejecting the notion of earth for that of world, by abandoning the idea of an essential humanism, an essential animality, an essential elementarism, that a new sense of the world will emerge: the sense that it is radically producible, that the relations among people and things are deeply intimate yet not preordained. For these relations are grounded, not in a resemblance among identities that have been fixed once and for all, but in the “powers of circulation” of the forms that enable any such resemblances to emerge in the first place. Ardent Flowering demonstrates this by equalizing the dreaming self and the creatures of its dream; Forest Architecture, by equalizing nature and civilization, tectonic form and calligraphic vision; and Flower Eater, by equalizing the subjects and their environment.

Negation and Gemütlichkeit At face value, this is a conceivably powerful project. The affectivity that’s diagrammed in the art of Einstein’s Klee pivots on a human acceptance of, rather than an aggression against, the threat of the world’s nonhuman contingency. Affectivity

244

Form as Revolt

is a stance of openness to the world, and as such is a first step toward an active, productive intervention into it, an intervention that includes reimagining the relations among humans within it from the ground up. Affectivity starts out as a personal ethical stance. But it might expand into a full-blown politics, a formalization of collectivity as metamorphotic—at least in theory. The practice, needless to say, was rather more complicated. The art of Paul Klee was one slender column to support the project of a collective revolt. Can a new, truly mythic world ever be founded on an individual basis? Won’t something go fatally awry when it is? To Einstein’s mind, Klee’s work wasn’t the answer to that question; it was rather the question itself. Einstein tried to come up with the answer himself, but instead of one he ended up with two, just as he had in Picasso’s case (chapter 4). We have reviewed the first one above: the optimistic answer he gave in the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century. But five years earlier, in the first edition, and in a few skeptical passages hidden away in the third, he gave quite another. To explain Einstein’s second answer, it will be instructive to contrast it with another opinion on Klee that sounds deceptively similar to it. Like Einstein, Clement Greenberg was always of two minds about Klee. He admired one side of him deeply and despised the other. The two sides, as he saw them, were negation and Gemütlichkeit. Klee’s art contained too little of the former and too much of the latter. And throughout the 1940s Greenberg kept worrying about that. It seemed to him as though the American artists’ infatuation with the wrong side of Klee might turn somebody like Mark Tobey, rather than Jackson Pollock, into the paradigmatic abstract expressionist. But abstract expressionism was supposed to be American, monumental, and ample, and not European, small, and fussy. And so, in 1950, Greenberg endeavored to set the record straight. Klee is not subversive. He is well content to live in a society and culture that he has robbed of all earnestness; in fact, he likes them all the better for that. They become safer, more gemütlich. Far from being a protest against the world as it is, his art is an attempt to make himself more comfortable in it; first he rejects it, then, when it has been rendered harmless by negation, he takes it fondly back. For notice that Klee’s irony is never bitter.77

For Greenberg, still the Eliotic Trotskyist in 1950, modern art begins with a gesture of implacable negation of the given world.78 And he thinks that Klee’s art begins with it, too—only that in his case, in a second step, this negativity turns out merely to be paving the way for an endorsement of the given world after all: as a more harmless version of it. Klee starts with a negation of the given world but ends with its affirmation. What enables the transition between these two stances is a compromised kind of irony, an irony that Greenberg says is “total, but not nihilistic”: it is quaintly gemütlich when really it should be grandly annihilating.

Private Mythologies

245

Who would disagree? Einstein would. To understand why, let us look at two passages, one from the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century, the other from the third, which elaborates on it. Klee scrutinizes his own vision with subtle humor. He not only distantiates himself from the given; rather, this distantiation also teaches him to look at his own visions with mocking humor. This is how he defends himself against visionary ecstasy: not so much by means of generalizations as with a humor that designates even the world of his own invention as a merely provisional one. (K1 141)79 Perhaps humor indicates loneliness, a distance of the human. The relations to given existence are shaken. This distantiation may be motivated by a sense of fear and oppression; it is certainly motivated by a desire for defense. (K3 266)80

“Visionary ecstasy” does not refer to a religious experience but is a technical term from non-Freudian psychology. Einstein, who was well read in the literature on hypnotism and somnambulism, either lifted it straight from the source— James Cowles Prichard’s Treatise on Insanity (1835)—from a later handbook, or from discussions with his surrealist friends.81 Prichard had called “ecstatic visions” those states of reverie in which the distinction between daydream and everyday life is collapsed. Here, the former is briefly imposed on the latter, blocking it out or reshaping it; and even after the patient awakens, a vivid memory of the event is retained. To Einstein’s mind, such states of reverie amount to more than just curable symptoms of a personal pathology: they are structurally homologous with the origin of any serious project of revolt. Whether in art, poetry, or politics proper, it always takes an “ecstatic” state—a momentary suspension of selfhood and its certainties about the given world and its own place in it—in order to imagine a new counterworld that might displace it. Klee’s “ecstatic vision” is such an act of imagination, Einstein says . . . except that his counterworld is never actually recorded on canvas in its raw state. That is Einstein’s beef with Klee, and it is significantly different from Greenberg’s. Where Greenberg believes Klee offers us a diluted version of the given world, Einstein believes he offers us a diluted version of the counterworld. That is not a minor issue. What is true for the relation between Einstein and Bataille is also true for the relation between Einstein and Greenberg. The two stand opposed as representatives of two eras of modern art and criticism: a prewar era, in which the politicalness of art consisted in the production of new worlds; and a postwar era, in which that politicalness was reduced to the negation of a given world that was, and is, routinely assumed to be fundamentally unassailable. Let us look at Einstein’s argument more closely. In his account, too, there are two steps: first, as in Greenberg, there is Klee’s negation of the given, his “distantiation” from it; but then, in a mirror reversal of the first step, there is Klee’s

246

Form as Revolt

distantiation from his own creation in turn. And the role of irony, or humor, is different, too. In Einstein it is present in both steps, and it functions not as the opposite of negation but as negation in disguise. Klee begins with a negation of the given world and ends with a negation of his own counterworld. What has changed between the two steps is not the ontological stance but rather its target. Let me translate Einstein’s elliptical argument into a by-now familiar terminology. To distantiate oneself from the given world is to conceive of oneself as a lone, individual self that exists over against it. It is to strike up what we saw Nietzsche in the Genealogy call the “slavish” stance of defense toward it. It is “from the outset” to say “no to an ‘outside’, to an ‘other’, to a ‘non-self ’,” and to have this no be one’s “creative act.” It is to try to produce a world by negating a world. And that is where everything goes wrong. Because this founding stance of negation will then infect one’s stance toward what was supposed to be the alternative: the new world that’s erected over against the given one. Negation is carried over into affirmation, selfhood into “visionary ecstasy,” reaction into action. And Klee’s preferred means of reaction is irony. That is why, just as for Greenberg, for Einstein, too, irony was exactly the problem; but for the opposite reason. To Einstein’s mind, it’s not that Klee’s art didn’t have enough irony: it had far too much of it. It’s not that Klee wasn’t negationist enough: he was that far too much. It’s not the case that Gemütlichkeit is the opposite of negation: it’s rather the case that Gemütlichkeit is negation. Gemütlichkeit is the mask that hides a ressentiment against the world—any world. How does Klee distantiate himself from the very worlds he so impressively conjures up in his art? By means of a whole arsenal of what might be called ontological bracketing devices: devices that ironically soften a work’s claim to a credible version of a new world by foregrounding its merely fictional nature after all. These devices include, at the level of subject matter, the setting of his works, which couch the novelty of their postcubist composition within the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century fairy tale. They include, at the level of technique, the parodistic simulations of auratic age-value that Charles Haxthausen has explored in a fundamental essay on the artist.82 And they include, at the level of scale, the paradox of what Einstein called “visionary miniatures” (K1 143), that massive disparity between monumental theme and diminutive execution that is the hallmark of so many Klees: pocket-sized cosmogonies where one would expect the Big Canvas. This in turn leads to an ironization of reception. In Klee, to behold the order of a vast new world is to withdraw into a private moment of close, intimate scrutiny. And then there is the large number of more literal brackets. I mean the elaborate peripheral architecture of bands and strips, cardboard mounts, ledger lines, and handwritten annotations that surrounds countless works by the artist (figs. 5.1– 5.3, 5.5). A suspiciously obvious textbook example of parergonality, this apparatus of titles, dates, and catalogue raisonné numbers draws attention to a work’s status, not as a model for a possible world beyond the given world, but as a mere fiction

Private Mythologies

247

within it; a fiction that locates itself squarely within that most confining of given worlds: the modern art world.83 At most what these works achieve is the production of that peculiar territory which Klee himself famously called an in-between world (Zwischenwelt). According to Klee, the in-between world, which “exists between the worlds our senses perceive,” is inhabited by the classic triad of modernist primitives: the mentally ill, the primitive, and the child. It is, he claimed, a world of subjectivities who, unlike the modern self, still possess “the power to see”; and Klee’s aim was for his art to access that visibility: “the realm of what can be, might be, but need not necessarily be.”84 Einstein was familiar with the term, and he had his suspicions about it. “Klee creates a tiny in-between world, which, to be sure, is not intended to become an academic exemplar, but whose scurrilous piety ought not to be denied either” (K1 142).85 What was scurrilous about the in-between world, or so it seemed to Einstein in his darker moods, was that it was the product of an oxymoronic “private mythology” (K1 142); that the only resident of the in-between world was in fact the artist himself. Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor (Bauchredner und Rufer im Moor, fig. 5.6), a major work that Einstein reproduced in his survey, charts that paradoxical locale in a characteristically bittersweet way. The first thing one notices about this image is that it has toned down the postcubism tabular order in favor of a more conventional figure/ground composition. Here, a menagerie of birds, rabbits, and fishes doesn’t extend all across the visual field as so many gestalts individuated out of a grid. To be sure, the grid is present in the image, but as an antagonist of figuration, not as a generator of gestalts. The creatures are enclosed within a centralized human figure whose organic contour is contrasted with the rectangular pattern of a dark, gridded ground. Changing only in brightness but not in structure, that ground extends into the figure itself, where it contrasts with the contours of the creatures inside. In Klee’s typical Russian-doll manner, a double antagonism of outside and inside, grid and figuration, is thus proclaimed. First, the deadening regularity of the outside world, represented by the nongenerative grid, stands opposed to the vital, sinuous contour of the figure of a self. This antagonism then returns in reverse within the self, whose own gridded interior stands opposed to the teeming life of the animals, which are clearly meant to be that self ’s “vision,” his private mythology. The message of this reversal is clear enough. On one hand, the lone, vital self considers himself too different from what he takes to be “reason’s” standardized world to be reconciled with it. On the other hand, and by the same token, he is yet also too similar to “reason” to be reconciled with the world of his own inner vision. The reactive assertion of the self over against the given world is repeated in reverse as the alienation of the self from the new counterworld of his own imagination. And this ontological split between inside and outside, microcosm and macrocosm, is not just represented but also enacted by the structure of the composition. As the self retreats from the world the generative order of grid and gestalts is spliced apart

Figure 5.6. Paul Klee, Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor, 1923. Watercolor and transferred printing ink on paper, bordered with ink, mounted on cardboard, 38.7 × 27.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984.

Private Mythologies

249

into figure and ground, and the metamorphosis of form is undone, leaving two irreconcilable halves in its wake: “Today, myth and world will rarely agree to join up; instead, locked in a battle of irony, they mock each other, for we are not yet able to discover their unity” (K1 143).86 Ultimately, of course, this was not just about Klee personally. Klee was rather a paradigmatic example for a quandary in which, Einstein believed, all mythic efforts increasingly found themselves caught in the later 1920s. They included his own efforts as an art critic. Throughout the previous pages, attentive readers may have recalled my remarks on Einstein’s prewar prose in chapter 1. Rightly so, for some of his most impressive lines on Klee are generated by the style of nonessence. In a familiar way, adjectives, nouns, and verbs cancel each other out as the markers of a textual game whose currency is semantic value. Just take the long passage I quoted at the outset of the section on elemental cosmology above: we might as well be reading the prose piece on the pauper. In Klee’s art, the desert is pale and lightless (minus) even as the facets of gestalts are gleaming in sun-like fashion (plus). A constellation is imprisoned in a gestalt (minus) unless an astral being incarnates itself in it (plus). Some gestalts are glowing (plus), others are fading (minus). And man is called their juggler, or Akrobat, which makes him a relative of the jongleur who had been one of Einstein’s personas in the 1910s.87 Back then, the jongleur, a juggler of textual meaning, had been too close to the artiste for comfort. It might be argued, optimistically, that by 1931 that had changed—that now that Einstein had converted himself from writer into critic, the juggler had become the player and the play of a world that extends beyond the world of fly spots on the page. In that case, Einstein’s algebra would be a means rather than an end, a writerly equivalent for the visual democracy of power that Klee would be diagramming on canvas. The style of nonessence wouldn’t be resignedly nihilist but courageously affective. Metamorphosis, mythic production, would be about something other than itself. It would be a joint production of the real, by the painter at his easel and the critic at his desk. But Einstein’s texts on Klee are so finely balanced between discourse and writing that we can never quite tell which of the two they are; and the point seems to be that we aren’t meant to. Paleness, lightlessness, and gleaming facets, for example, work as straightforwardly descriptive terms, but they are also so many Mallarméisms. The same is true for memorable phrases like “visionary miniatures,” “private mythology,” and “scurrilous piety.” Considered as art criticism, they are precise characterizations of the ambivalent traits of Klee’s art. Considered as writing, they are neatly oppositive pairs, products of a stance of indifference that in 1913, the year of “The Pauper,” Einstein had called his fanatic humorism. That in 1931 he should call Klee a humorist, too, is cause for alarm. And then there is the notion of myth. In the first half of this chapter we saw just how much theoretical mileage Einstein got out of the term. But even myth is

250

Form as Revolt

occasionally in danger of being undermined: in danger of devolving into a glittering noun that is slotted into the syntactical armature that structured Einstein’s Berlin-period prose. For example, to write that “everything mythic signifies the difference between man and the given being” (B 399) is to insert myth into a statement about the nature of signification that is familiar to us from chapter 1. It is to state that an inquiry into the meaning of any one thing—here, myth—will end up generating a pair of oppositive terms—here, man and given being—between which that one thing will then serve as a division. Hence, to say that myth is the difference between man and given being seems to amount to saying that since it is indeed nothing but that difference, myth has this in common with a paragraph break in an Aktion text, the fold of a Documents double page, or the negative line in Picasso’s Aficionado: that it itself is nothing at all. Put another way, whenever he was looking at Klee’s Ventriloquist, Einstein, recognizing the self-portrait of a persona, was on the verge of devolving into the lost wanderer again: into a solipsist whose writerly universe was as eloquently ungrounded as the art of his subject. In stating as much, I don’t mean to take Einstein to task for it. By the time of his writing, solipsism was no longer an aesthete’s posture but a historical predicament. Consider the following, clearly autobiographical passage from Georges Braque together with one of the wearier sections of the 1931 Klee chapter. The private type is massively under threat, for the collective material forces of state and economy are trying to expropriate the resisting individual psychically. Now the individual will flee into territories [Bezirke] that are hard to control or even to grasp by the community, namely into the secret recesses of the unconscious. For the time being, we will see efforts to repel the pressure of standardization and to defend these force fields passionately against encroachments by the collective, in order to lock oneself up within one’s own microcosm. (B 279)88 Yet such creation is thoroughly opposed to the legends of old. It gestates in isolation, and it grows in separation from the milieu, whereas in earlier times myth had been an expression of collectivity. Hence the new myth must be considered a revolt, while earlier on it had preserved the experience and heritage of the common. (K3 259–60)89

It is its privateness that makes Klee’s art symptomatic, not of an abstract existential condition, but of a specific historical situation: the ever-increasing disjunction of collectivity and myth under capitalism and a Stalinized Soviet Union over the course of the 1920s. Mythic practices have always been intrinsically collective, Einstein says; they are the means by which people together overcome their fear of the real, and produce and sustain a new world for themselves. But after the failed revolutions in western Europe in the wake of World War I it was the standardizing power of capitalism that came to hold a monopoly on collectivity. And capitalism invented a perverse version of collectivity as standardization: of people

Private Mythologies

251

as so many producers and consumers of objects. In turn, after the epochal moment of mythic revolt that was the October Revolution, an oppressive state economism came to hold the monopoly on collectivity in the Soviet Union. It too generated a perverse version of collectivity as standardization, by press-ganging the proletarian workforce into fulfilling the Five-Year Plans. In the process, the integrity of the original impulse of collective mythic revolt circa 1917 was torn in two. Whether in western Europe or in Russia: the practice of myth, by rights the very medium of collectivity, now devolved into the means of an individual retreat from it. Klee himself knew as much, of course; witness his famous lament, a year after the Ventriloquist was completed, that “we are not supported by a people” (Uns trägt kein Volk).90 The awareness of his own political ungroundedness makes Klee’s Ventriloquist as much a solipsistic self-portrait as a diagram of the catastrophic rift that opened in the epoch’s political ontology. The unraveling of the tabular order of gestalts into the Ventriloquist’s figure and ground formalized the European-wide disjunction of myth and world, individual and collective, in the later 1920s. When Einstein’s Klee criticism devolved into prose, it was registering that division in its own way. Soon enough myth and world would be spliced together again, but now in the name of a reactive collectivism that would hound Klee into exile and Einstein into the Spanish Civil War and then to his death. The aftermath of that catastrophe would see the return, with a vengeance, of Gemütlichkeit and negation in postwar art and criticism. So much so that today the collective mythic impulse of which these two are just deficient modes, the quest for a political art as the active production of new worlds, has become virtually unthinkable other than as the subject of irony.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Benjamin Buchloh for his support of a dissertation that, in the event, did not become this book but rather led up to it. Over the course of writing it, I received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would like to thank both institutions and the individuals who awarded them to me: Thomas Crow and T. J. Clark. I am also grateful to Clark for the unique opportunity to teach a Picasso seminar at Berkeley with him. Whitney Davis and Keith Moxey gave me my first jobs, and so enabled me to get the project under way. For debate and encouragement I am indebted to the Einstein scholars Uwe Fleckner, Rainer Rumold, and Maria Stavrinaki. The generous advice of other colleagues is acknowledged individually in the notes. Dawn Ades, T. J. Clark, Harry Cooper, Peter Fenves, Isabelle Kalinowski, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Julian Myers, Regine Prange, and Maria Stavrinaki invited me to present my work at such diverse public venues as the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; the University of California, Berkeley; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington; Northwestern University, Evanston; the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris; the School of Visual Arts, New York; the California College of the Arts, San Francisco; and the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Early versions of sections of chapters 2, 4, and 5 originally appeared in October, Papers of Surrealism, Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, and RES. My thanks to these journals for the permission to republish, and to the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, for allowing me to cite material from the Carl-Einstein-Archiv.

254

Acknowledgments

The copyright fees and some of the production costs have been covered by the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. I am also grateful to Yale for a sabbatical and a Griswold Fund traveling grant. During the final stages of this project I have been greatly helped by the collegiality and kindness of three department chairs: Edward Cooke, David Joselit, and Alexander Nemerov. The book would not have made it across the finish line without Peter Uwe Hohendahl, the Signale board, Peter Potter, Kizer Walker, and two anonymous readers, who helped me place the right kind of manuscript with the right kind of publisher. My research assistant, Sam Sackeroff, gathered the illustrations with astonishing resourcefulness. The text was meticulously edited by Marian Rogers. I am very grateful to David Joselit and Christopher Wood for thoughtful conversations and unflagging support. Finally, for help and inspiration at various points in various ways, a special note of thanks is due to Diana Bush, J. D. Connor, Nina Dubin, Uwe Fleckner, Milette Gaifman, Christopher Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, John MacKay, C. F. B. (Charlie) Miller, and Mimi Yiengpruksawan.

Notes

Carl Einstein: A Life 1. Except for a few details, this biographical sketch relies on the hard work of a number of Einstein biographers: Sibylle Penkert, Carl Einstein: Beiträge zu einer Monographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969); Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994); Liliane Meffre, Carl Einstein, 1885–1940: Itinéraires d’une pensée moderne (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002); Uwe Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert: Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie, 2006); and Marianne Kröger, “Das Individuum als Fossil”: Carl Einsteins Romanfragment “BEB II” (Remscheid: Gardez!, 2007). 2. See Heike M. Neumeister, “Masks and Shadow Souls: Carl Einstein’s Collaboration with Thomas A. Joyce, the British Museum, and Documents,” in Carl Einstein und die europäische Avantgarde, ed. Nicola Creighton and Andreas Kramer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 135–69. 3. For Einstein at Brussels, see Klaus H. Kiefer, “Carl Einstein and the Revolutionary Soldiers’ Councils in Brussels,” in The Ideological Crisis of German Expressionism: The Literary and Artistic German War Colony in Belgium, 1914–1918 (Columbia: Camden House, 1990), 97–112. 4. The most substantial account of this moment in Einstein’s life is by Dirk Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung: Materialien zum Scheitern eines revolutionären Programms in Berlin und Bayern 1919,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Widerstandes und der Arbeit 12 (1992): 41–92. 5. On Einstein and Berlin Dada, see Charles W. Haxthausen, “Bloody Serious: Two Texts by Carl Einstein,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 105–18; and Uwe Fleckner, “The Real Demolished by Trenchant Objectivity: Carl Einstein and the Critical World View of Dada and ‘Verism’,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington, DC: CASVA, 2005), 57–81. 6. On Einstein and Russian constructivism, see German Neundorfer, “Kritik an Anschauung”: Bildbeschreibung im kunstkritischen Werk Carl Einsteins (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 196–225. 7. It is likely that Einstein was kept abreast of developments in the Soviet Union by his friend the Dutch syndicalist Nico Rost. Rost shared Einstein’s misgivings about the NEP, and in 1924 he voiced them in an extraordinarily perspicacious account of his recent visit to the country, where he had met scores of key figures in art and politics. Unknown except to a few specialists, Rost’s book deserves the attention of all students of the Russian avant-garde. See Nico Rost, Kunst en Cultuur in Sowjetrusland (Amsterdam: Querido, 1924). 8. For the editorial history of the survey, see Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, “‘Schauend ändert man Mensch und Welt’: Carl Einstein und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in K3 7–32.

256

Notes to Pages 5–13

9. On the circumstances of the foundation of Documents, see the important essay by Klaus H. Kiefer, “Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses: Carl Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents,” in Elan vital oder Das Auge des Eros (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1994), 90–103. 10. For a discussion of the massive editorial problems surrounding BEB II, see German Neundorfer, “Edition und Interpretation: BEB II,” in Carl Einstein im Exil: Kunst und Politik in den 1930er Jahren, ed. Marianne Kröger and Hubert Roland (Munich: Fink, 2007), 265–80. Kröger, “Das Individuum als Fossil,” makes a valuable effort to survey the material. Carl Einstein: An Introduction 1. In a letter to Rudolf Michaelis, Rüdiger complained about Einstein’s “deficient understanding of the CNT and of anarchism in general”: “He knows little about the issues of the workers’ movement, and doesn’t know about or understand the movement’s unionist efforts at all.” The letter is quoted in Dirk Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung: Materialien zum Scheitern eines revolutionären Programms in Berlin und Bayern 1919,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Widerstandes und der Arbeit 12 (1992): 41–92; 42. 2. “Keiner weiss seine kind[heit]; somit entbehren wir der elemente unseres lebens, das uns somit ganz unbekannt bleibt; darum als ersatz die anfangsmythologie von urgrund etc., kosmogonien etc.” (Carl Einstein, BEB II notes, quoted after Ines Franke-Gremmelspacher, “Notwendigkeit der Kunst”? Zu den späten Schriften Carl Einsteins [Stuttgart: Heinz, 1989], 165). The term Urgrund is from Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift; see chapter 1, in which I also explain Einstein’s curious penchant for the “etc.” (note 74). 3. In his discussion of the issue of the ground in Walter Benjamin, Rainer Nägele has pointed to a crucial distinction between Urgrund and Ursprung in Benjamin’s poetology: between the solid but inaccessible archground of divine creation and the abyssal origin of human poetry. “Only an Urgrund could be a ground in the rigorous sense; origin [Ursprung] is the name for the absence of ground.” My suggestion will be that, in a related way, the discursive share of Einstein’s texts kept postulating a ground that their writerly share kept bottoming out. See Rainer Nägele, “Benjamin’s Ground,” in Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 19–37; 34. 4. For the diagram, see the book jacket of Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936). 5. “Stellt Geschichte, als Kontinuum von Wiederholung gefaßt, nicht die Schöpfung in Frage—ist Kostbarkeit der Tradition nicht gerade Rettungsgürtel der Unschöpferischen? Wiederholung oder Erfindung—man wollte sich entscheiden” (K1 56). 6. I am quoting from Sanford Kwinter’s unsurpassed description of the Città Nuova: “In this mise-en-abyme system, where every element seems in part only fortuitously there, in part already there, relaying forces received from other similar elements, the earth as first principle or ground seems no longer to exist at all; rather there is a homeostatic system of circulating currents, which, thanks to the visionary use of reinforced concrete, seems virtually untouched by gravity or any other absolute (grounded or original) cause.” See Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 78–80. 7. Jeffrey Kipnis, A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture, ed. Alexander Maymind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 159. 8. Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (1929), in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), 123–75; Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (1935/36), in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), 1–74. See chapter 3, note 4, for more on Einstein and Heidegger. 9. See Ralph Ubl, Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the Wars, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39. 10. This historical vignette is indebted to the monumental survey by Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age, trans. R. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), and to the concise analysis by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001). 11. On Engels as admirer of Darwin, see Dieter Groh, “Marx, Engels und Darwin: Naturgesetzliche Entwicklung oder Revolution?,” in Der Darwinismus: Die Geschichte einer Theorie, ed. Günter Altner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 217–41. On the merger of Marxism and Darwinism in Second-International political theory, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 19–36. A typical specimen of this literature is Enrico Ferri, Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx), trans. Robert Rives La Monte, 3rd ed. (New York: Kerr, 1917). 12. For a typical Aktion polemic against the theoretical and practical problems that were plaguing revisionism (endorsement of pauperization: Capital must be allowed to achieve maximum accumulation so that it may then go on to undo itself; timid reform projects that still didn’t stand a chance in parliament), see the anonymous attack on “the socialisticizing bourgeois”: “Die sozialistelnden Bürger,” Die Aktion 2:38 (September 18, 1912): cols. 1191–93.

Notes to Pages 13–14

257

13. See Rosa Luxemburg, Sozialreform oder Revolution? (1899); translated as “Social Reform or Revolution,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), 128–67; and Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (1899); translated by Edith C. Harvey as Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York: Huebsch, 1911). Contrary to the English title of his book, Bernstein’s revisionism was not Darwinian, and Luxemburg didn’t claim it was. Unlike her, neither Landauer nor Einstein, who may also have had Kautsky in mind, was in the mood for making such subtle distinctions. 14. Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus (1911; Berlin: Oppo, 1998), 107. 15. Ibid., 106. 16. “Der Darwinismus ist eine durchaus parlamentarische Wissenschaftstheorie.” “Der Sozialismus schwächte [seine Idee] indem er parlamentarisch . . . die Revolte zur Evolution verschleimte” (Carl Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” Die Aktion 2:39 [1912]: cols. 1223–25; W1:143–46; 143, 145). 17. “Die Menschen wurden von der Idee des ‘Ausreifens’ und der Entwicklung überrumpelt. Sie haben sich auf den mechanischen Fluß der Wirtschaft verlassen, um auf leichten Rädern ins sozialistische Paradies zu rollen” (Carl Einstein, “Der Verfall der Ideen in Deutschland,” in W2:533–49; 537). “Selbst die ‘Revolutionären’ Marxisten setzen eine fixierte Utopie, die ‘Ziel’ der geschichtlichen Entwicklung sei” (undated notes, Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 258, fol. 7). 18. “Revolution durchbricht Geschichte und Überlieferung” is the title and first sentence of a text that Einstein probably intended to submit to Veshch’ magazine, and in which he tried to think the political and artistic revolutions in Russia together. I am not making much of this embrace of nonobjective art, since it turned out to be very brief, and since, more importantly, I am not sure whether this text should count as discourse or as writing. See Carl Einstein, “Revolution durchbricht Geschichte und Überlieferung . . . ,” in W4:146–52. 19. “Die Sozialdemokratie erklärte sich zu einer konservativen Partei von Beginn an, da sie sich als Klassenpartei aufstellte” (Carl Einstein, “Die Sozialdemokratie,” Die Aktion 4:12 [1914]: col. 246; W1:213). 20. “Each particular era produces the total historical process that is proper to it. That is a consideration we are permitted to entertain since the discoveries of Kant, and which thoroughly opposes Hegel’s claim that history is the sum of Spirit; for no era is capable of making use of the sum of all possible historical interpretations. . . . Every event that adds itself to our consciousness, whether it is retrospective or an intimation of the future, influences and changes our view of the historical process. It is not the case that a history congealed into ideology dominates our present; rather, the present itself produces and shapes our view of the historical.” While Einstein invokes Kant as witness for these anti-Hegelian claims, they may strike us as closer to Nietzsche and even Foucault (see chapter 5). “Jede eigentümliche Zeit erzeugt den ihr gemäßen historischen Gesamtablauf. Ein Moment, das, seit den Entdeckungen Kants, zu ersinnen uns erlaubt ist und eindringlich der Behauptung Hegels, Geschichte sei die Summe des Geistigen, zuwiderläuft; denn keine Zeit vermag die Summe aller historischen Deutung zu nutzen. . . . Jedes Ereignis, das unserem Bewußtsein hinzuwächst, sei es ein rückwärtiges oder ein Vermuten des Zukünftigen, beeinflusst und verändert unsere Ansicht des geschichtlichen Verlaufs. Nicht eine zur Ideologie erstarrte Geschichte beherrscht unsere Gegenwart, sondern diese selbst bildet und formt die Anschauung des Historischen” (Carl Einstein, “Antike und Moderne,” in W4:140–45; 140–41). For Einstein on Hegel and history, see also chapter 1, note 31. 21. Einstein’s critique of the Bildungsroman as a novel of (auto-)biographical development, hence of linear causality, can be stitched together from a number of elliptical remarks he made about Goethe over the years. For example: “Goethe is a monstrous biographer who loves himself above all else and who keeps developing himself with every book he writes.” “He childishly believes in a unified and continuous causality, without understanding that these—just as with all laws [sic]—are only comfortable, narrow excerpts, and that every continuity is woven out of a fear of death.” See chapter 4 for an explanation of the meaning of the final clause. Carl Einstein, “Brief über den Roman,” Pan 2:16 (1911/12): 477–82; W1:86–91; 86 (“Goethe ist ein ungeheurer Biograph, der sich über alles liebt und mit jedem Buch entwickelt”); Einstein, “Obituary: 1832–1932,” trans. Eugène Jolas, Transition 21 (March 1932): 207–14; W3:209–17; 215. 22. “Dieser Bildtypus charakterisiert das beginnende zwanzigste Jahrhundert” (K3 117). 23. Notably in quantum mechanics, which was wreaking havoc with the notion of causality inherited from Newtonian physics. The fact that Documents should have published a survey on this particular “Crisis of Causality” by the physicist and philosopher Hans Reichenbach suggests that Einstein may have been interested enough in the topic to commission an essay on it. See Paul Forman, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 1–115; the rejoinder by John Hendry, “Weimar Culture and Quantum Causality,” History of Science 18 (1980): 155–80; and the panoramic sketch by Steven Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). For Einstein and science, see Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 119, 146–49.

258

Notes to Pages 14–16

24. “Die russischen Dichter )( sind unmöglich—da die marxistische Doktrin die fähigkeiten u Kräfte zum Gedicht verhindert u lähmt.” See Carl Einstein, undated notes, Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-EinsteinArchiv, Sig. 240, fol. 34. )( is Einstein’s shorthand for “etc.” See chapter 5 for Einstein on poetry as poiesis. 25. Compare Einstein in his Veshch’ text: “What needs to be written is the history of intervals, in which time is rushing most intensely” (Man müßte die Geschichte der Intervalle schreiben, in denen die Zeit am stärksten jagt; “Revolution durchbricht Geschichte und Überlieferung . . . ,” 148). 26. See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” (1920), trans. Julius Katzer, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 31:17–118. 27. “Neues entsteht nicht in logischer Entwicklung, die eher innerhalb des Gleichartigen sich bewegt, sondern bildet sich in visionärem Intervall, worin zunächst das Dasein desavouiert wird, man arbeitet sprunghaft und alogisch im Widerstreit zum geschichtlichen Erbe. Solcher Konflikt wird von den späteren Betrachtern perspektivisch ausgeglichen, das Unverbundene wird geschichtlichem Vorbestand genähert” (K3 114). “Perspective” is obviously a Nietzschean term. Einstein is saying that Braque and Picasso’s originality was normalized by their emulators’ interpretation of it in just the way the October Revolution’s originality was normalized by the Bolsheviks’ interpretation of it: Salon cubism was the NEP of visual art. 28. Here is the full range of passages from Gramsci’s fantastic essay that matter for our purposes: “[The Bolshevik revolution] is a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It was a critical demonstration of the necessity that events must take a certain course in Russia: a bourgeoisie had to develop, the capitalistic era had to get under way and civilization on the Western model be introduced, before the proletariat could even start thinking about its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution. But events have overtaken ideology. Events have exploded the critical schemas whereby Russian history was meant to develop according to the canons of historical materialism. The Bolsheviks have renounced Karl Marx, and they have shown, with the backing of real actions, actual achievements, that the canons of historical materialism are not as iron-clad as it might be thought, as it has been thought. . . . [The Bolsheviks] are living out Marxist thought—the real, undying Marxist thought, which continues the heritage of German and Italian idealism, but which, in Marx, was contaminated by positivist and naturalist incrustations. And this true Marxist thought has always identified as the most important factor in history, not crude economic facts, but rather men themselves and the societies they create as they learn to live with one another and understand one another; as out of these contacts (civilization) they forge a social, collective will; as they come to understand economic facts, and to assess them, and to control them with their will, until this collective will becomes the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality itself, so that objective reality becomes a living, breathing force, like a current of molten lava, which can be channeled wherever and however the will directs.” See Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution against Capital” (1917), in Pre-Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39–42; 39–40. 29. Gramsci, “Revolution against Capital,” 41, 40. 30. See Gramsci, “Revolution against Capital,” 42, and a number of instances in, for example, Einstein’s survey (K3 47, 117, 180). And compare Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 166–78. 31. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions” (1906), in Hudis and Anderson, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 168–99; 198. The question whether, in spite of statements like these, at the end of the day Luxemburg wasn’t a good party soldier after all has been endlessly debated. I am describing the Luxemburg Einstein and Pfemfert wanted her to have been. 32. Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions,” 198. Since Luxemburg’s argument is just as rich and powerful as Gramsci’s, it will again be useful to offer a longer citation. I italicize the passages of which I just provided a summary. “There was no predetermined plan, no organized action, because the appeals of the parties could scarcely keep pace with the spontaneous risings of the masses; the leaders had scarcely time to formulate the watchwords of the onrushing crowd of the proletariat. Further, the earlier mass and general strikes had originated from individual coalescing wage struggles which, in the general temper of the revolutionary situation and under the influence of the Social Democratic agitation, rapidly became political demonstrations; the economic factor and the scattered condition of trade unionism were the starting point; all-embracing class action and political direction the result. The movement was now reversed. . . . The element of spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence. This does not occur in Russia, however, because Social Democracy is still young or weak, but because in every individual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical problem. The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the Social Democrats at their head, appear in the leading role, is not a manoeuver of the proletariat in the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessant crashing, displacing, and crumbling of the social foundation” (ibid., 180, 198).

Notes to Pages 16–18

259

33. For a brilliant account of May ’68 in Luxemburgian terms, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 75–79 and passim. 34. Carl Einstein, Georges Braque (typescript, early 1930s), reprinted in W3:251–516; 342. 35. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 117. 36. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Concept of the Left,” in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove, 1969), 144–58; 145–46. 37. “Man kennt [die Anarchisten] aus einer überalterten Vulgärliteratur, die allzu oft den Pistolero beschreibt. Kaum einer draußen hat . . . den Anarchosyndikalismus dargestellt, der durchaus konstruktiv ist.” See Carl Einstein, “Die Front von Aragon,” Die soziale Revolution 12 (May 1937): 1–2; W3:525–30; 528. 38. In putting the matter this way, I am disagreeing with the prevailing but anachronistic notion that the main point of laboratory constructivism was the modest, late twentieth-century Marxist goal of a “critique of bourgeois creativity.” In constructivism, that critique was only a by-product of the actual goal: the pursuit of a properly revolutionary creativity, or, in my Einsteinian parlance, a groundless invention. Rodchenko himself repeatedly stated as much. Consider his injunction to the Bolsheviks in the magazine Anarkhiia (!) in 1918: “To you who are in power, to you, the victors, I say: Do not stop on the path of the revolution, move ahead, and if the framework of your parties and treaties hinders you in life creation, destroy them, be creators, don’t be afraid of losing anything, for the destructive spirit is the creative spirit, and your revolutionary procession will give you the power of creative invention.” Or take his notes of 1917, in which Rodchenko distinguishes between “two kinds of inventors: some take a samovar and stick two taps on it, [they] take an airplane [sc., a biplane] and invent the monoplane. But there are others, as well, who don’t take anything and create the airplane, the telegraph, who discover electricity, find radium. . . . There are creator-artists who invent new possibilities.” So, Rodchenko’s two kinds of inventors are anarchic creators ex nihilo on one hand, and gradualist teleologists on the other. The former invent the samovar and the airplane as such; the latter merely improve the former’s inventions through gradual development: the doubletap samovar, the monoplane. The difference between Rodchenko and modernist Second Internationalists like Nikolai Tarabukin (“From the Easel to the Machine”) couldn’t be more stark; and yet his project keeps getting read through Tarabukin’s lens. See Alexander Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and other Writings, ed. Alexander N. Lavrentiev (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 82, 86. For an account of Russian constructivism that puts its creative ambitions at the center of the inquiry, see Verena Krieger, Kunst als Neuschöpfung der Wirklichkeit: Die Anti-Ästhetik der russischen Moderne (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). 39. For the concept of stimulus, which Malevich expressly called “groundless,” see his “God Is Not Cast Down” (1920), in Essays on Art, 1915–1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Andersen, 2nd ed. (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1971), 188–223. The best capsule account of Malevich’s ontology remains the substantial survey essay by Miroslav Lamač and Jiří Padrta, “The Idea of Suprematism,” trans. Hana Demetz, in Kasimir Malewitsch zum 100. Geburtstag (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1978), 134–80. While it obviously contains its share of grandiloquent flakiness, I join Lamač and Padrta in believing Malevich’s ontology amounts to much more than mumbo jumbo. I recommend studying the pre-Socratic philosophers, then returning to his texts. Not because Malevich was reading Anaximander or Anaxagoras, but because he was being them: one of a host of early twentieth-century figures, some of whom are identified in this introduction and in chapter 3, who were rethinking the fabric of modernity from the ground up as radically as before them only the ancients had done. 40. On Malevich’s nihilism, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 264–89. 41. What I am calling writing is roughly equivalent to what Moritz Baßler, in his excellent study of Germanlanguage experimental prose of the 1910s, has called texture: “the linguistic material in its specific interrelation.” While his treatment of Einstein is necessarily brief, Baßler should be required reading for all Einstein scholars. He demonstrates how in the work of more than a dozen writers, including Einstein, Gottfried Benn, and Robert Walser, “texture imposes itself on traditional syntactical structures and is carried along by them. In the process, the semantic share of the structure . . . is largely suspended.” The oscillation between syntax and semantics, form and content, will seriously matter to my own analysis of Einstein’s style. I do have some complaints about Baßler’s method and results. Writing as he was at the zenith of the “no outside of the text” moment, Baßler was largely satisfied with ending up with sheer texture, whereas I am not satisfied with sheer writing. Instead of bracketing out “contents of a political, psychological, historical, or epistemological nature,” I want to examine, here and in chapter 1, what these contents are in Einstein, what the writing is doing to them and why, how it got transformed into art criticism, and why that transformation happened at all. For, as I attempt to show in chapter 2, and by extension in chapters 3 through 5, it will not do to claim, as Baßler does elsewhere, that Einstein’s art criticism is simply an extension of his prose, a prose to which visual art allegedly does not matter except as a means of enhancing its incomprehensibility. See Moritz Baßler, Die Entdeckung der Textur: Unverständlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der emphatischen Moderne, 1910–1916 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 8, 13, 68–69; Baßler, “Das Paradox des Historismus: Zu

260

Notes to Pages 19–28

Carl Einsteins Negerplastik,” in Tradition, ed. Christoph J. Nyíri (Vienna: Verein Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, 1995), 129–49; 145. 42. “Tatsächlich besteht über die bereits fixierte Wirklichkeit hinaus ein Bezirk der permanenten Schöpfung und Metamorphose, also der dauernden Revolte gegen das auferlegte Weltbild; denn alles Mythische bezeichnet die Differenz zwischen dem Menschen und dem gegebenen Sein. All unsere Freiheit ist in diesen metamorphotischen Prozeß eingeschlossen” (Einstein, Georges Braque, 399). 43. “Hinzu kommt der Grundkontrast, nämlich die stärkste Darstellung des Volumens wird in das Paradox der Fläche gefügt” (K3 125). 1. The Lost Wanderer 1. Einstein’s interest in Novalis has long been recognized. But so far, it has been understood inadequately: not in terms of a fundamental condition of groundlessness that structures his writing, but in terms of a thematics of the fairy tale that’s occasionally apparent in his imagery; that is, in terms of his debt to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen for some of the motifs in his novella Bebuquin. See Reto Sorg, Aus den “Gärten der Zeichen”: Zu Carl Einsteins “Bebuquin” (Munich: Fink, 1998), 134–38. The importance of Schelling for Einstein has gone unnoticed altogether. Below, I will give a specific example in my discussion of the “indifference point” in Einstein’s essay on the pauper. 2. I am referring to what Manfred Frank has called a “Denken aus unverfügbarem Grunde”; see his “Philosophische Grundlagen der Frühromantik,” Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik 4 (1994): 37–130; 70. 3. “Aller wircklicher Anfang ist ein 2ter Moment. Alles was da ist, erscheint, ist und erscheint nur unter einer Voraussetzung—Sein individueller Grund, sein absolutes Selbst geht ihm voraus—muß wenigstens vor ihm gedacht warden.” See Novalis, Schriften: Kritische Neuausgabe auf Grund des handschriftlichen Nachlasses, ed. Ernst Heilborn (Berlin: Reimer, 1901), 2.1:90; Novalis, Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), 2:591; Novalis’s emphasis. Samuel’s edition is the scholarly one; Heilborn’s is the one Einstein most likely used. Heilborn had presented the largest selection yet of Novalis’s philosophical fragments, notably those on mathematics, and we will find Einstein taking notes feverishly as he read along. 4. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 68; Schelling’s emphasis. I deviate from Love and Schmidt by translating Wesen as “essence” rather than as “being,” and Urgrund as “arch-ground” rather than as “original ground.” 5. For example, channeling Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, Bebuquin’s titular character scoffs at a monkish figure who tries to persuade him that he is an “arch-ground” (Urgrund). Elsewhere, he complains that “I cannot begin with things, for one thing commits us to all things. It is immersed in the flux, and the infinity of one single point is horrific.” Meanwhile, Bebuquin’s doppleganger, Böhm, opines that Kant “managed to come up with a balance [Gleichgewicht] between subject and object. But one thing, the main thing, he forgot to address: what that epistemological subject is doing that’s rendering object and subject constant like that.” To be sure, these are all snippets. But as Einstein scholars know, snippets in this writer can be philosophical iceberg tips. See Carl Einstein, Bebuquin oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders (1912), in W1:92–130; 121, 93, 99–100 (“Ich kann nicht mit den Dingen etwas anfangen, ein Ding verpflichtet zu allen Dingen. Es steht im Strom, und furchtbar ist die Unendlichkeit eines Punktes.” “Aber eines, die Hauptsache, vergaß er: was wohl das Erkenntnistheorie treibende Subjekt macht, das eben Objekt und Subjekt konstatiert”). 6. Einstein’s attacks on causality in the 1920s and later are known well enough. What is not understood is their pervasiveness already in his prewar work. I will add a few examples here to those I provide in the body of the text; each has a page worth of Novalis or Schelling packed into it. (1) One of the characters in Bebuquin insists: “Don’t forget that the principle of causal thought will actually lead you towards the uncausal.” (2) The narrator of the essay on “The Snob” declares that “extending the law of causal effects beyond ourselves is meaningless.” (3) About a character called the man in revolt Einstein in an Aktion essay states that “he will constantly reject causal groundings.” See Einstein, Bebuquin, 97 (“Denken Sie daran, daß man mit dem Satze vom kausalen Denken eben gerade auf das Unkausale kommt”); Einstein, “Der Snobb,” Hyperion 8 (1909); W1:33–37; 33 (“das Gesetz der ursächlichen Folgen über uns hinauszudehnen, ist sinnlos”); Einstein, “Anmerkungen,” Die Aktion 2:35 (1912): cols. 1093–94; W1:142–43; 143 (“er wird stets kausale Begründungen verwerfen”). For postwar Einstein on causality, see his “Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns . . . ,” in W4:194–221; Heidemarie Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins (Munich: Fink, 1976), 23–25; and Matias Martínez-Seekamp, “Ferien von der Kausalität? Zum Gegensatz von ‘Kausalität’ und ‘Form’ bei Carl Einstein,” Text + Kritik 95 (1987): 13–22. 7. Carl Einstein, “Das Problem des Anfangs,” in W4:121–25; 121 (“Das kausale Denken ruht auf der Vereinzelung im zeitlichen Sinn, welche im Begriff des Anfangs gegeben ist”). 8. “Im kausalen Denken setzt der Mensch seine Endlichkeit als Norm” (Einstein, “Das Problem des Anfangs,” 121).

Notes to Pages 28–30

261

9. “Insofar as someone creates God, he is creative. He produces a Nothing, but a Nothing that for this very reason is both a principle and at the same time [zugleich] a veiled thing, for ‘Nothing’ is always the name of the hidden. . . . He [God] spoke a word. He did not even think the world. That would have just made him impure. . . . God does not know the world, and it knows nothing of him.” Palpable as it is in statements like these, the interest in Meister Eckhart’s apophatic theology is one of those fascinating Einstein topics that cannot be properly explored because the evidence is so scant. Einstein did drop Eckhart’s name several times in his prewar writings; it is tempting to think he served him as model for “the mystic,” one of the autobiographical characters of the prose pieces; and Eckhart’s sermon 32 on spiritual poverty feels germane to the essay on the pauper, discussed below. Nor should any of this be surprising. Einstein’s fascination with Eckhart was part of a larger Eckhart revival in Germany circa 1900. See the contributions in Mystique, mysticisme et modernité en Allemagne autour de 1900, ed. Moritz Baßler and Hildegard Châtellier (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1998); and Uwe Spörl, Gottlose Mystik in der deutschen Literatur um die Jahrhundertwende (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997). “So weit einer Gott hervorbringt, so weit ist er schöpferisch. Er bringt ein Nichts hervor aber darum ein prinzipielles und zugleich durchaus verhülltes, denn ‘Nichts’ heißt immer das Verborgene. . . . Er sprach ein Wort. Er dachte nicht einmal die Welt. Damit wäre er nur unrein. . . . Gott kennt die Welt nicht und diese weiss nichts um ihn” (Carl Einstein, “Der Traktat vom Wort und dem Kreuz,” in W4:136–38; 136). 10. “Als kind erinnere ich mich nicht an gott geglaubt zu haben, oder genauer, dies weiß ich nicht mehr. . . . die wenigen gebete meiner jungen jahre erscheinen mir fast als unumgänglicher sündenfall / weil ich gott in den worten betrachtete / ohne irgend welchen eindruck zu verspüren.” See Carl Einstein, “die hinterlassenen bemerkungen eines mönchs über sich gott und die kirche,” in W4:132–35; 132, 134. Needless to say, the title of the text signals that Einstein and the narrator aren’t as one. Even so, self-descriptions like “fanatic fantasist” (“fanatischer fantast,” 132) suggest they are intimately related. 11. “Aber die Schöpfung war nie.” “Es giebt einen Gott weil wir die Vorstellung eines durchaus und nur Produktiven brauchen.” “Die Schöpfung ist ebensowenig erklärbar, wie jedes Entstehen das mit der rückschauenden Betrachtung zu einigen nicht angeht.” See Einstein, “Der Traktat vom Wort und dem Kreuz,” 136, 137. 12. “Mathematisch in sich geschlossene Fantasie—die dermaßen allgemein und gesetzmäßig fundiert ist— daß sie eine Welt ad infinitum ist—aber kein quantitatives Infinitum nur—sondern eine Welt die sich unendlich verschiedener Intensität und Perspektive (Individuum) darstellt” (Carl Einstein, “Der verlorene Wanderer,” in W4:18–23; 20–21). 13. In “The Lost Wanderer,” Einstein referred to the relation between God and man as an “infinite fraction”: “Gott/Mensch ist der unendliche Bruch,” or else the “irrational[e] Bruch”; he also wondered how that infinity might be conceived by way of a calculus of integration and differentation (“Der verlorene Wanderer,” 20, 22). These are very specific speculative thoughts, and they occur almost verbatim in Novalis, who had suggested that “Gott is now 1.∞, now 1/∞,” and who had discussed differentation and integration as operations of dividing and unifying infinite magnitudes. See Novalis, Schriften, ed. Heilborn, 2.1:178, 226; Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 3:448, 127. 14. How did Einstein come across Novalis’s “Mathematical Fragments” in the first place? There are at least two likely sources. Franz Blei, Einstein’s first mentor, had edited a selection of Novalis’s poems (1898) and published a short book on him (1904). And then there is Erwin Loewenson, cofounder of the Berlin avant-garde associations Neuer Club and Neopathetisches Cabaret, at the latter of which Einstein read from Bebuquin in 1911. Two years earlier, Loewenson had explicitly advocated the “Fragments” in a letter to a friend, extensively quoting some of the very passages I am examining here. See Die Schriften des Neuen Clubs, 1908–1914, vol.1, ed. Richard Sheppard (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980), 36–39. 15. “All philosophizing must end at an absolute ground. If that ground weren’t given, if the term contained an impossibility—then the impulse to philosophizing would be an infinite activity. . . . It is through the voluntary renunciation of the absolute that an infinitely free activity arises in us” (Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 2:269–70). 16. “Abstraction from the absolute ground, and instead legitimation of the actual absolute ground of freedom through the relation (totalization) of the explananda into a whole. The more manifold the elements of this whole are, the more vividly absolute freedom will be experienced—the more related the whole is, the more whole it is, the more effective, intuitive, and explained it is, the more of the absolute ground of all grounding, the more freedom it will contain.” In other words, in the absence of a finite ground of meaning (aka God), the manifold of the world has itself become infinitely significant, infinitely interpretable by human beings. Unlike for Einstein, for Novalis this is not a tragedy but a boon: for this new infinity now becomes the ground for a new human freedom to signify. See Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 2:270. 17. The classic study on this topic is Käte Hamburger, “Novalis und die Mathematik” (1929), in Philosophie der Dichter: Novalis, Schiller, Rilke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 11–82. See also Herbert Uerlings, “Novalis und die Wissenschaften: Forschungsstand und Perspektiven,” in Novalis und die Wissenschaften, ed. Herbert Uerlings (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 1–20.

262

Notes to Pages 30–34

18. “Ist da Fantasie und Wissenschaft nur eine Wortvertauschung? nein—denn die Fantasie muß prägnante sinnliche Gebilde schaffen—aber mathematisch typische” (Einstein, “Der verlorene Wanderer,” 21). 19. Novalis, Schriften, 2.1:187; Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 3:455. 20. “Hierzu Gesetze der Symbolik schaffen. Aber losgelöst vom Religiösen. / nur formal wie die Mathematik. / Mittel. Die Grammatik, Rhythmus, Klang. Kreis der Gleichnisse. Satzvariationen. / Rytmus im weitesten Sinn. Komposition der Teile Abschnitte / Sätze in einem Zusammenhang dem ohne / weiteres entsprechend das Ereignis / Kontrapunktisch / Kontrastierend / bald entsprechend / bald kontrastisch / usw. / diese möglichkeiten sind anzuwenden zwischen allen Elementen” (Einstein, “Der verlorene Wanderer,” 23). 21. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 1:486–546; hereafter cited in the body of the text as VA, followed by volume and page. Translations are mine. 22. “Die Kunst überhaupt [besteht] gerade in der Beziehung, Verwandtschaft und dem konkreten Ineinander von Bedeutung und Gestalt” (VA1 395). 23. A note on terminology is in order. As Heinz Schlaffer put it succinctly a long time ago, “Hegel’s use of the term ‘symbolic’ is roughly equivalent to Goethe’s definition of the ‘allegorical’, while Goethe’s ‘symbol’ is congruent with Hegel’s ‘classical art form’.” So Hegel was neither Goethe, who preferred symbol to allegory, nor Walter Benjamin, who preferred allegory to symbol. For in Hegel the fundamental distinction is not between allegory and symbol at all; it is rather between classical art, which he preferred, and symbolic art, which he didn’t prefer, and which for him included allegory, metaphor, simile, and much else besides. Moreover, in Hegel it is the symbol itself, which, thanks to its comparative structure, performs the kind of nihilist formal mobility—what I call dialectical restlessness—that readers of Benjamin have reserved for allegory, and readers of Derrida for the sign. See Heinz Schlaffer, Faust Zweiter Teil: Die Allegorie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), 197 n. 75. 24. “Trennung von Bedeutung und äußerer Realität” (VA1 488). “Endlich, da nicht von der konkreten Erscheinung angefangen wird, aus der sich eine Allgemeinheit soll abstrahieren lassen, sondern umgekehrt von dieser Allgemeinheit selber, die sich in einem Bilde abspiegeln soll, so gewinnt die Bedeutung die Stellung, nun auch wirklich als der eigentliche Zweck hervorzuscheinen und das Bild als ihr Veranschaulichungsmittel zu beherrschen” (VA1 509). 25. For a recent account of simile in Hegel, see the important study by Patrick Greaney, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Greaney is brief on Hegel and simile (203 n. 29), but he makes it productive for a discussion of poverty in Rilke’s “Book of Poverty and Death” (102–8) that is partly germane to my own treatment of Einstein’s essay on the pauper; the same is true for his remarks on privatives in Mallarmé, referenced below. 26. “Nun ist der menschliche Geist tätig, unruhig, und besonders sind Freude und Schmerz nicht tot und ruhend, sondern rastlos und bewegt” (VA1 529). 27. “Als Sinn und Zweck der metaphorischen Diktion überhaupt ist deshalb, wie wir noch bei der Vergleichung näher werden auszuführen haben, das Bedürfnis und die Macht des Geistes und Gemüts anzusehen, die sich nicht mit dem Einfachen, Gewohnten, Schlichten befriedigen, sondern sich darüberstellen, um zu Anderem fortzugehen, bei Verschiedenem zu verweilen und Zwiefaches in eins zu fügen” (VA1 520–21). 28. In calling Hegel’s philosophy an ontology of negation, I am obviously relying on certain Hegel scholars rather than others even as I do not share their sympathies for this thinker. See Dieter Henrich, “Formen der Negation in Hegels Logik,” in Hegel-Jahrbuch 1974 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1975), 245–56; Henrich, “Hegels Grundoperation: Eine Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Logik,” in Der Idealismus und seine Gegenwart, ed. Ute Guzzoni et al. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976), 208–30; and Henrich, “Absoluter Geist und Logik des Endlichen,” in Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 20 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), 103–18. See also the entries on “Determination and Determinateness,” “Dialectic,” and “Negation and Negativity” in Michael Inwood’s valuable Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 77–79, 81–83, 199–202. 29. More familiar from the Science of Logic, this argument—the ontological core argument of the dialectic— is present in the Lectures on Aesthetics as well. For example, with Homer’s epic in mind, Hegel says that “poetry makes the gods act, i.e., makes them strike up a stance of negation toward some determinate being” (Die Poesie dagegen läßt die Götter handeln, d.h. sich negativ gegen ein Dasein verhalten; VA2 87). 30. Needless to say, with his take on Hegel Einstein had company, although, tellingly, it grew numerous only in the postwar period. Here is one characteristic voice: “This world perceives itself as the gray world of interests, oppositions, particularities, and instrumentalities. It therefore perceives itself as a world of separation and of pain, a world whose history is one atrocity after another, and whose consciousness is the consciousness of a constitutive unhappiness. It is, in every respect, the world of exteriority from which life withdraws, giving way to an endless displacement from one term to the next that can neither be sustained nor gathered into an identity of meaning. . . . This world, the realm of the finite, shelters and reveals in itself the infinite work of negativity,

Notes to Pages 35–38

263

that is, the restlessness of sense.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3, 5. 31. “Die heutige Kunst zieht sich auf die ihr eigentümliche autonome Kraft zurück.” “eine Sprache, die im Dichterischen, dem Gleichnis, verbleibt, eine Dichtung, der kein stoffliches Prinzip, wie Milieu und s.f., unterschoben ist.” “Sie glauben, daß den autonomen Formen des Dichterischen autonome Gebilde entsprechen, die gleichsam von Beginn an spezifisch dichterisch sind.” See Carl Einstein, “Über Paul Claudel,” in Die weißen Blätter 1:3 (1913): 289–97; W1:186–93; 186. 32. Einstein’s early interest in Hegel’s dialectic was first recognized by Christoph Braun. Braun doesn’t recognize the dialectic as a textual structure but as the mainstay of what he thinks was early Einstein’s theory of history. His claims strike me as only half-right. Einstein certainly did think about history as a movement powered by a constant struggle of opposites. But Braun is wrong in assuming that in Einstein such opposites are “sublated” within a model of historical development. In fact, Einstein exactly inverted the movement of Hegel’s dialectic. In Hegel, as the past moves toward the present, two erstwhile opposites resolve into one present synthesis. In Einstein, by contrast, as the present looks back to the past, that past divides up into an oppositive dyad. To give just one example, in his prewar essay on “Antiquity and Modernity” Einstein describes how, as the nineteenth century looks back to ancient philosophy, that philosophy divides up for it: into Lassalle’s Heraclitus on one hand, Nietzsche’s Greeks on the other. See Christoph Braun, Carl Einstein: Zwischen Ästhetik und Anarchismus; Zu Leben und Werk eines expressionistischen Schriftstellers (Munich: Iudicium, 1987), 26–30; and Carl Einstein, “Antike und Moderne,” in W4:140–45; 140, 141. 33. “Ihm war das Gedicht zu einem Mysterium absoluter Sprache geworden, deren Formel der Deutsche Hegel aufgestellt hatte: ‘Ein Dasein, das unmittelbar selbstbewußte Existenz ist’” (Einstein, “Über Paul Claudel,” 187). Compare G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 518. 34. According to Hegel, any “Dasein ist bestimmtes Sein,” where “Bestimmtheit ist die Negation als affirmativ gesetzt.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 121, 115. See also my more extensive remarks on the Science of Logic in chapter 4. 35. “Die Dialektik, der beständige Vergleich der Gegensätze” (Einstein, “Anmerkungen,” 142). 36. “Paraphrase ist eine handfeste Sache zu entphilosophieren und als Vorwand zu einem Einfall zu benutzen.” “alles [wird] nur Gleichnis und das Tertium comparationis ist die Technik des Ineinandermischens.” See Carl Einstein, “Paraphrase,” März 5:4 (1911): 114–15; W1:80–82; 81–82. 37. “Einer sagt, daß die zwielichtige Seele von Fräulein Ludmilla Meiersen wie eine Flagge auf Halbmast in das raschelnde Rostrot des verblutenden Herbstes gesenkt ist, wobei er eine gute oder schlechte Handlung dieser Dame berichten will” (Einstein, “Paraphrase,” 80). 38. Carl Einstein, “Der Tapezier,” März 5:4 (1911): 192–94; W1:83–85; 85 (“die endlos sich ringelnde Bezugnahme”). 39. Eckhard-E. Sohns, Der Leser Carl Einsteins: Zu einer Kritik der Interpretation in den frühen Texten (Frankfurt: Lang, 1992), 184. 40. By calling Einstein’s autobiographical protagonists “personas,” I am borrowing a term from Helmut Lethen’s classic study on the literature of New Objectivity of the 1920s. I don’t mean to suggest that Einstein is a precursor of that literature in any simple sense. Its favorite motifs (war, technology, the metropolis), for example, are absent from Einstein’s early prose, and so are the genres of the novel and the short story. But it is significant that, as we will see, Einstein should have praised the “passionate coldness” of Don Quixote, and defended his own writing as “frenetic and cold.” But note that these are ambiguous terms: coldness is one unit in a dyad that also includes its opposite. More on its significance below. See Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 41. “We are tired of the dialectician, the actor, indeed of the ascetic artiste (that white lamb).” Note this is a list of synonyms: the dialectician, the actor, and the artiste are one and the same, ditto the white lamb, which alludes to Mallarmé and the purity of the white page. See Carl Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” Die Aktion 2:39 (1912): cols. 1223–25; W1:142–46; 144 (“Wir sind des Dialektikers, des Schauspielers, ja des asketischen Artisten [dieses weißen Lamms] überdrüssig”). 42. “Diese Lebensbetrachtung, welche alles aus dem Gegensatz sich entwickeln läßt und in diesen hinein, nimmt den Werten . . . ihren Charakter als Wert, indem zu jedem der Gegenwert geboten wird” (“Der Snobb,” 36). 43. “Sie beziehen.” “Unproduktiv, wie sie sind, erscheint ihnen nichts zu ihrer Person gehörig, da sie keine sind” (“Der Tapezier,” 84). 44. “Der Dekorateur wie der Mystiker sind Paraphraseure, nur nach entgegengesetzten Seiten gerichtet” (“Der Tapezier,” 84). 45. “Menschen, die . . . gewissermaßen mit Abwesenheit dichten, denen das Gleichnis die Sache übertäubte” (“Der Tapezier,” 83). Note how, as so often in Einstein, this sentence is self-performing: it uses a quasi-simile (“as it were”) and a metaphor (“drowned out”) in order to mock-denounce comparison.

264

Notes to Pages 38–43

46. “Der Snobb haßt das Symbol und die Einheitskette, die jenes weitziehend schlingt. Er ist nur Variation und Zuschauer derselben, ihr Stilzusammenhang ist die Angst auf Sich zu geraten, er ist so unsymbolisch, so untreu, wie das blinde Auge eines Spiegels, der wie er nur durch die Güte der Dinge lebt” (“Der Snobb,” 35). 47. “Er haßt den diatonischen Dreiklang, das Entdecken des Ursprungs. Der Beginn muß ihm das am meisten Bezweifelte sein. Der Anfang bedeutet für ihn nicht symbolische Bestimmtheit, sondern tatsächliche Ungewißheit, die eine Brücke zu jedem Bedenken und Zweifel ist: ein Turnseil zur Willkür eines Geschmacks” (“Der Snobb,” 34). 48. Bebuquin, 101. 49. “Sie setzt das ‘Wesen’ flink voraus und meditiert um und über eine Sache. Gleich gilt ihr, ob man das ‘Wesentliche’ glaubt oder für lügnerisch hält” (“Der Tapezier,” 84). 50. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 2:234. 51. The precursorship of Novalis on the family to Saussure on language, and by extension to Derrida on différance, is obvious enough; for commentary, see Franziska Struzek-Krähenbühl, Oszillation und Kristallisation: Theorie der Sprache bei Novalis (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2009), 28–29. 52. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Heilborn, 2.2:599, 600; Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 2:238–39. 53. In explaining Novalis on essence I have tried to profit from Manfred Frank’s penetrating “Philosophische Grundlagen der Frühromantik,” 92–93, 95–97. 54. “Der verl[orene] Wanderer. aus seiner Zweideutigkeit ergibt sich das Unwesen das eine ironisiert das andere . . . das eine widerlegt immer das andere. . . . er tut nichts—eilt zu diesem zu dem, sieht zugleich” (Einstein, “Der verlorene Wanderer,” 19, 20). 55. “Die Wirklichkeit der Dichtung ist die Wortfolge” (draft of a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, April[?] 1923; W4:153–60, 160). 56. “Form ist eine Gleichung . . . dies Einheitliche [wird] geteilt, nämlich nach entgegengesetzten Richtungen aufgefaßt, die in dem unendlichen Raum des Mathematikers z.B. ziemlich belanglos bleiben.” See Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915); W1:234–52; 245, 246. 57. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Heilborn, 2.1:225; Novalis, Schriften, ed. Samuel, 3:126. 58. For an extensive if absurdist discussion of the “zero oscillation” structure I am extracting from Einstein’s prose here, see the book by his friend, the wild thinker Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), Rosa, die schöne Schutzmannsfrau (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1913), 26–42. Einstein and Friedlaender shared many obsessions, including infinity and indifference, on which latter topic Friedlaender would eventually publish an entire book. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The list of writers who in the later 1910s regularly touched on issues like indifference and nonessence includes Max Brod, Kurt Hiller, and Ludwig Rubiner. The Germanists have yet to explore this scene systematically. 59. “Denn für ihn [the man in revolt] ist die Geschichte ganz unwesentlich” (Einstein, “Anmerkungen,” 143). 60. I am referring to what Hugo Friedrich in a classic study has called the “ontological dissonance” that permeates Mallarmé’s work: the fact that his linguistic purity was a “privative” purity, a “purity from,” in which words consume or dismiss the things they are supposed to invoke on the page. Even more than his lyric poetry, it is Mallarmé’s Divagations that were relevant for Einstein here, notably the section on ballet music, whose subject matter he took up in his “Letter to the Dancer Napierkovska” (1911). See Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik: Von der Mitte des neunzehnten bis zur Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1956; Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006), 135–36; Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (1897), trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 121; Carl Einstein, “Brief an die Tänzerin Napierkowska,” Die Gegenwart 40:48 (1911): 809– 10; W1:71–73. For a recent discussion of privatives in Mallarmé, see Greaney, Untimely Beggar, 52–55, 68–69. What Greaney calls the unindividuality of Mallarmé’s ballet dancer rhymes well enough with what I suggest is the nonessence Einstein got out of his work. 61. Einstein would have been familiar with Wertphilosophie from the introductory classes on philosophy he took with Georg Simmel and Alois Riehl at Berlin in 1905/6. Rickert’s name appears on one of Einstein’s prewar reading lists. See Sibylle Penkert, Carl Einstein: Beiträge zu einer Monographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 44–45, 75. For the Nietzsche/Wertphilosophie opposition in German philosophy, see Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 166–68. 62. “Wir haben keine Wahrheit mehr, die alten Notdürfte und Verpflichtungen des Instinkts sind abgeblaßt. Die Wünsche hängen hohl und weitfaltig um gemagerte Dinge. Man lernte die Gebundenheit zugleich als Wille verstehen, und da man alles wollen konnte, verloren wir die Werte” (Einstein, “Der Snobb,” 33). 63. “Der Zauber und Reiz des Stils liegt in seiner Konstanz. Er duldet höchstens eine neue Gruppierung und Beleuchtung, aber grundprinzipiell und innerlich ist er durch den Glauben an die Beständigkeit und das Unveränderliche bestimmt. Ein Glauben, in dem jede Tatsache, das ist kritisches Bewußtsein, aufgezehrt wird” (Einstein, “Der Snobb,” 36).

Notes to Pages 44–48

265

64. Franz Pfemfert, “Note,” Die Aktion 1:1 (1911): col. 24. 65. On Pfemfert and Die Aktion, see, for example, Lisbeth Exner, “Vergessene Mythen: Franz Pfemfert und Die Aktion,” in Pfemfert: Erinnerungen und Abrechnungen, ed. Lisbeth Exner and Herbert Kapfer (Munich: Belleville, 1999), 13–60. On Einstein at Die Aktion, see Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 234–45. 66. On the 1912 elections and their aftermath, see Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1973), 265–89. 67. A detailed study of the Ruhr miners’ strike can be found in Klaus Saul, Staat, Industrie, Arbeiterbewegung im Kaiserreich: Zur Innen- und Außenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Deutschland, 1903–1914 (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, 1974), 269–82; see also Groh, Negative Integration, 306–10. 68. Wilhelm Liebknecht, “Sozialdemokratie und Parlamentarismus,” Die Aktion 2:2 (1912): col. 37. 69. Franz Pfemfert, “Eine halbe Stunde fürs Vaterland,” Die Aktion 2:3 (1912): cols. 65–66. 70. “Parliamentary resolutions are for the most part achievements of resignation—where everyone consoles himself with the fact that everyone’s idea fell short. The typical parliamentarian parties are the moderate ones, ranging from the National Liberals through the [SPD] revisionists, whose meaning consists in compromise, who never did have the courage to accede to the majority, with all the responsibility that comes with that.” The point ostensibly made in the last sentence is that now it has won the Reichstag majority, the SPD ought to go ahead and use it properly: hic Rhodus, hic salta. That injunction is lifted straight from Liebknecht; see his “Sozialdemokratie und Parlamentarismus,” col. 37. “Parlamentsbeschlüsse sind zumeist Leistungen der Resignation—wo jeder sich damit tröstet, daß eines jeden Idee zu kurz kam. Typische parlamentarische Parteien sind die mittleren, von den Nationalliberalen bis zu den Revisionisten, deren Sinn im Kompromiß besteht, die nie den Mut zur Majorität mit ihrer ganzen Verantwortlichkeit haben” (Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” 144). 71. Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (1906; Paris: Pages Libres, 1908). Sorel’s presence in Einstein’s prewar thought was first noticed, in passing, by Braun, Carl Einstein, 163. 72. Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” 144, 145; Einstein, “Der Arme,” Die Aktion 3:17 (1913): cols. 443–46; W1:156–59; 158. 73. Moritz Baßler, Die Entdeckung der Textur: Unverständlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der emphatischen Moderne, 1910–1916 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 136–57. 74. Unaware of the style of nonessence and of Baßler’s study, a number of scholars have mistaken literature for ideology by treating Einstein’s Aktion texts as transparently discursive manifestos. They have failed to understand that a Sorelian figure like the fanatic is merely one of several subject positions, which also include the parliamentarian. And they have wrongly assimilated Einstein’s politics to the more familiar projects of other people. Heidemarie Oehm thought she was dealing with a “historico-theological” model of utopian thought along the lines of Benjamin and Martin Buber; Maria Stavrinaki has associated Einstein with Sorel, T. E. Hulme, and “Jewish messianism.” In reality, there is no theology in the Aktion texts, unless we are willing to call the style of nonessence one. But this would be a negative theology, and one of textuality rather than of political action, with no utopia in sight and no claim made to attain it, whether violently or peacefully. So, when trying to tackle prewar Einstein, historians of ideas need to be prepared to do some serious close reading. Then, they will discover how all manner of Sorelianisms are invoked only to be de-essentialized, algebra-style. They will find the unambiguous one get called “wholly unparliamentarian,” and the man in revolt “wholly incredulous.” They will find that the pauper’s “crime” I just cited turns out to be a list of nouns deprived of meaning (“without inhibition”). They will find Einstein demanding “a human being who possesses at once [zugleich] form and violence,” which does not bode well for either the form or the violence. And they will realize that to say that “ideas that overthrow may also inhibit, etc.” is literally to say nothing at all, and is moreover to make that nothingness trail off into infinity. For that is the point of abbreviations like “etc.,” “u.s.w.,” and “u.s.f.” that so often close off a list of words at the end of a clause or phrase in Einstein’s prewar texts: they are prose equivalents for the infinity sign. See Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins, 62–68; and Maria Stavrinaki, “Apocalypse primitive: Une lecture politique de Negerplastik,” Gradhiva 14 (2011): 57–77. 75. “Geschichtsbildend jedoch ist der Mensch, der mehr gibt als das Equilibre der Antithese, der These und Antithese zugleich verschluckt und über den eigenen Kopf springt. Ich meine nicht den Originellen, diesen langweiligsten Marktschreier, diesen Unreligiösen, der ohne Furcht nicht weiß, daß wir in gottergebenen Grenzen verharren, sondern den Belebenden, dessen Mund sich öffnet wie die zerspaltene Erde; den Revolutionär schlechthin. Hingegen ist es das Geheimnis aller heutigen Kämpfe, daß sie unfehlbar den Vergleich bringen— den demokratischen Kompromiß, wo immer beide Ideen (das Wesentliche) in gemeinsamem Einverständnis schänderisch verletzt werden. Wo das Menschliche und das, was Menschen treibt, verplattet und entstellt wird. Das ist schließlich der Sinn des Parlamentarismus” (Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” 144). 76. This point is worth insisting on since it has eluded even some of the more seasoned Einstein readers: diction is not a means of expression but a formal resource. Whenever Einstein’s metaphors sound ridiculous, they’re

266

Notes to Pages 49–52

actually meant to be that. We are not in the presence of a left-wing O Mensch expressionism à la Ludwig Rubiner, Einstein’s friend, adversary, and part-time ventriloquist. 77. “Denn er vermag alles irgendwie im Parlament seiner Inhalte unterzubringen, zu entwesen und zu vergleichen. . . . Fremd ist ihm die Handlung, denn dazu ist er stofflich zu differenziert und zu abgelenkt” (Einstein, “Politische Anmerkungen,” 146). 78. “Aber keine Politik. die Diskussionen haben die Menschen ins Elend dazu gebracht; das Rechtbehaltenwollen ohne selbst anders zu sein. Die gegenseitige Vergewaltigung gleicher” (letter to Maria Ramm, June 28, 1915, quoted in Penkert, Carl Einstein, 78). 79. For the postcard, see Exner and Kapfer, Pfemfert: Erinnerungen und Abrechnungen, 233. 80. Since poverty became something of an intellectual fad in late Imperial Germany, there is no shortage of potential intertextual references in “The Pauper.” The likeliest candidate is Georg Simmel’s landmark essay of 1908. Simmel had described the poor as a kind of sociological privative: as a limit-class that helps define a society by serving as an outsider to it. He had argued that, unlike poor proletarians, whose poverty is a transient condition, not part of their core social identity, the poor as such lack all “positive qualification”: they are “just poor and nothing but poor.” That negative identity is imposed on them by the apparently positive act of almsgiving. It is only when people start receiving alms on a permanent basis that they become members of the class called the poor; until then, they had merely been momentarily impoverished workers, bankers, or artists. Hence almsgiving is an a/social act: it both interpellates the poor into being and expels them from the society of the almsgivers. That is an impressive argument with interesting political ramifications, and Einstein may well have been aware of it. But there is no reason to believe that in 1913 Simmel on the poor mattered differently to Einstein from the way Sorel and Liebknecht on parliamentarianism had mattered in 1912: as so much fodder for the style of nonessence. See Georg Simmel, “Der Arme,” in Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1908), 454–93; 489–90, 492. On poverty in Rilke and Simmel, see Greaney, Untimely Beggar, 110–12. 81. “Wie ist der Arme nicht reich, wie gelangt der Arme zu Besitz, wie kann der Reiche mit ihm zusammenfühlen. Damit trägt man den Armen aus seiner Lage fort, sieht ihn als ein Aufzuhebendes, Übergehendes, und eben nicht als den Armen.” “Einmal doch ohne Vergleich, einmal doch ohne die Scham des Reichen, einmal doch ohne die Dinge, die er nicht besitzt. Man soll ihn nicht damit benennen, was ihm nicht ziemt” (Einstein, “Der Arme,” 156–57). 82. “Arm ist keine Negation des Reichen, nichts Überflüssiges, kein Unglück und keine Krankheit” (Einstein, “Der Arme,” 156). 83. “Er steht auf dem indifferenten Nullpunkt” (Einstein, “Der Arme,” 157). In “The Lost Wanderer,” Einstein also referred to concepts like being, nothingness, the whole, and infinity as “indifference points”; see Einstein, “Der verlorene Wanderer,” 21 (“Indifferente Punkte”). 84. See, for example, F. W. J. von Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801), in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1859), 1.4:105–201; 138. For Schelling on the indifference point, see Bernhard Rang, Identität und Indifferenz: Eine Untersuchung zu Schellings Identitätsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), 134–50. 85. Rubiner: “Wir glauben an das Wunder . . . daran, dass unsere Körper plötzlich vom feurigen Geist brennend gefressen werden, an eine ewige Sättigung in einem einzigen Moment.” The miracle, eternity, and the instant all recur in my quote from “The Pauper.” See Ludwig Rubiner, “Der Dichter greift in die Politik,” part 1, Die Aktion 2:21 (1912): cols. 645–52; col. 647. Sohns, Der Leser Carl Einsteins, 214 with n. 300, rightly calls Rubiner’s text a banal aestheticization but seems not to have noticed that Einstein went on to pilfer it. 86. “Er sieht Sonnenschein und Regen, Brot und Bildung als Momente, die vor dem großen Geschick nur soweit schützen, als es abgestufter, vielleicht dunkler eindringt. Er untersteht dem Schicksal unbekleidet, ohne Dach und verschleierndes Wissen, unmittelbar. Er sieht seine Haut und seine Seele genau, denn seine einzig innere Nahrung bilden Erlebnisse, jedoch nicht die üblichen des Erwerbens und Wissens. Für ihn gibt es zwei Dinge, das Märchen und das Stehen ins Verrecken; vor allem das Wunder, der Augenblick und die Ewigkeit. Nicht diese metaphysisch gefaßte Ewigkeit, sondern das gleiche Sein” (Einstein, “Der Arme,” 157). 87. “Dieser Nichtfaßliche” (Einstein, “Der Arme,” 158). 88. The student “[hetzte seine seele] von einer merkwürdigen form in eine andere abstruse art . . . bis sie sich vor ihm versteckte und er in verwirrung geriet.” The mathematician “hat übel und bis aufs blut mit mathematischen sätzen und zeichen zu kämpfen.” “beide aber sind wohl arme und unglückliche menschen. und es ist wohl kein größeres elend als nichts können” (Einstein, “die hinterlassenen bemerkungen,” 133). 89. The view of prewar Einstein as a Dandyist has been a commonplace in the literature since Wilfried Ihrig’s Literarische Avantgarde und Dandysmus: Eine Studie zur Prosa von Carl Einstein bis Oswald Wiener (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1988), 35–78. 90. “leidenschaftliche Kälte” (letter to Tony Simon-Wolfskehl, 1923; cited in Klaus Kiefer, “BEB II: Ein Phantombild,” Text + Kritik 95 [1987]: 44–66; 63).

Notes to Pages 53–58

267

91. “Au fond halte man mich für einen fanatischen Humoristen, das sind Menschen, die keine guten Zustände vertragen, nichts erhoffen und paar Ideen frenetisch und kalt absolvieren, man nehme diese Menschen aber nicht für Poseure oder sonst was.—Aber wir müssen Bücher schreiben—Menschen revolutionieren Pech haben und uns wie nichts fühlen in jedem Augenblick” (letter to Maria Ramm, January 17, 1913, cited in Penkert, Carl Einstein, 72–73). 92. Germanists know that to say “humorist” is almost inevitably to invoke the name of yet another major Romanticist: Jean Paul, a writer sanspareil and a thinker who in his own way was on par with Novalis and Hegel. And Jean Paul did indeed matter to Einstein, who once claimed he “had discovered a dialectics of the soul”—in other words, that Jean Paul had defined humorist subjectivity as a paired psychic opposition. Einstein knew his work by 1915, latest; he may have been introduced to it by Friedlaender, who had published a Jean Paul anthology in 1907. Unfortunately, the sentence I just quoted is all we have that sheds light on Einstein’s take on this complex figure. See Carl Einstein, “Obituary: 1832–1932,” Transition 21 (March 1932): 207–14; W3:209–17; 216. 93. “Anschauung eines solchen [sc., a humorist’s] ist Fatalismus, Gleichmut” (unpublished note, cited in Penkert, Carl Einstein, 72). 94. Charles Haxthausen has dated the publication of the first Pleite issue to March 1919; see his “Bloody Serious: Two Texts by Carl Einstein,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 105–18; 107. On Einstein and Berlin Dada, see also Uwe Fleckner, “The Real Demolished by Trenchant Objectivity: Carl Einstein and the Critical World View of Dada and ‘Verism’,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington, DC: CASVA, 2005), 57–81. 95. For the most substantive account of these events, see Dirk Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung: Materialien zum Scheitern eines revolutionären Programms in Berlin und Bayern 1919,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Widerstandes und der Arbeit 12 (1992): 41–92. 96. For Hiller’s politics during the November Revolution, see his “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus,” Das Ziel 3:1 (1919): 195–217; 218–23, for the program of the Rat geistiger Arbeiter. For commentary on Hiller, see, for example, Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910–1920 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990), 60–88. 97. “Eines gilt es: die kommunistische Gemeinschaft zu verwirklichen. Ein Ziel, zu wesentlich, als daß Intellektuelle dialektisch es zerspalten dürften. . . . Wir gehen in der Masse, wir sind auf dem Marsch mit den Einfachen, Unbedingten zu einer nahen, nötigen Sache. Allegorie und eskamotierende Metafer lehnen wir ab. Wir bedürfen nicht des Originellen” (Carl Einstein, “An die Geistigen!,” Die Pleite 1 [January 1919]: 2; W2:18). 98. Unicity is “the fact of being or consisting of one in number or kind; oneness” (OED). 99. “Konservenbüchse geistiger Konventikel,” “Apotheker mystischer Erlösungspillen” (Einstein, “An die Geistigen!,” 18). Once again, to call this sort of thing so much “hard-hitting Dada satire” would be to mishear the tone of the writing. There is a reason the Dadas were so befuddled by Einstein: just as he wasn’t Ludwig Rubiner, so he wasn’t Wieland Herzfelde, either. 100. “Hätten Sie mich unter Excellenzen gesehen—mit einem verfleckten Hemd, unrasiert, einem gefährlich dünnen Hosenboden. Und nun sitze ich am Schreibtisch des seligen belgischen Kolonialministers. Lassen Sie so einen armen Teufel regieren u. Sie haben eine nicht schlechte Komödie. . . . Titel. Die Macht. . . . Menschlich muss er von einer perplexen Neutralität sein; gar nicht interessiert, nicht einmal an sich, impersonel; ein Zufall, dem er spielend gewachsen ist—bringt ihn hoch; ein dummer Streich—der gänzlich aus bewusster Caprice gemacht wird, schmeisst ihn raus. Schmunzelnd verläßt er die Scene. Ich glaube—hieraus wäre eine Komödie zu machen; es fiel mir während des Schreibens ein.” See Carl Einstein, letter to Franz Blei, early 1916; reprinted in Carl Einstein: Materialien, vol.1, Zwischen “Bebuquin” und “Negerplastik,” ed. Rolf-Peter Baacke (Berlin: Silver und Goldstein, 1990), 138–39. I am using the slightly more regularized transcription by Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung,” 44. 101. Einstein by his own account had become a KPD member by June 1919. Exactly when and why he left the Party is unknown; it was probably well before 1925. In a letter to Simon-Wolfskehl from March 1923 he complained bitterly about political censorship in the Soviet Union and implied that he may have been blacklisted for having spoken out against Lunacharsky. See Heißerer, “Einsteins Verhaftung,” 56; Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 263–64. 102. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 20. 103. Ibid., 27 (Bruni), 129–35 (Alberti). 104. The parallels between Einstein and Alberti do not end here. In an essay on “Alberti’s Cast of Mind,” Baxandall observed, uncannily, that the thought of this enigmatic figure “often seems an exasperated attempt to reduce thinking to equations, more algebraic than syllogistic”; and that this, Alberti’s tendency toward “conceptual algebra,” might have been “partly developed in dealing with misery.” See Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 30, 34.

268

Notes to Pages 59–62

2. Sculpture Ungrounded 1. Many examples could be given; one will suffice to make the point. Consider this extract from a short, polemical essay Einstein wrote in 1912 on “the contemporary art world”: “Today people are elevating the artist immeasurably high, only to make him sink him again immeasurably low. This nervous talmudism is considered unprejudicedness, revolution, development, etc., when in fact it merely represents the literary maneuver of hausse and baisse.” (Heute treibt man den Künstler maßlos hoch, um ihn wieder maßlos sinken zu lassen. Diese nervöse Talmudistik bezeichnet man als Vorurteilslosigkeit, Revolution, Entwicklung u.s.f., während sie lediglich das literarische Manöver von Hausse und Baisse darstellt.) See Carl Einstein, “Bemerkungen zum heutigen Kunstbetrieb,” Neue Blätter 1:6 (1912): 46–47; W1:139–41; 140. All the basic moves are familiar from my discussion in chapter 1. Meaning—signification (Bezeichnung), representation (Darstellung)—splits up into synonym chains and paired quantities (high/low, hausse/baisse) that are oscillating around the zero of a ground, the word on which Einstein’s essay ends. Note the “etc.,” and recall my remarks on it in chapter 1, note 74. 2. The fullest account of Einstein’s early art writing is by Uwe Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert: Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), 15–36. For a characteristic example, see Carl Einstein, “Arnold Waldschmidt,” Der Demokrat 2:22 (25 May 1910): 2–3; W1:45–49. Waldschmidt’s bizarre art cannot begin to sustain Einstein’s claims. That said, it isn’t clear how serious these claims actually are. Given its numerous lexical and syntactical oddities, the text may well be a prose piece masquerading as criticism. Even so, while as criticism it is a disaster, as prose it would be merely deliciously perverse. 3. For an exhaustive overview of this episode, see the exhibition catalogue Oublier Rodin? La Sculpture à Paris, 1905–1914 (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2009). 4. Maurice Denis, “Aristide Maillol,” in L’Occident 48 (November 1905): 241–49. Einstein’s debt to Denis was pointed out by Werner Drewes, “Max Raphael und Carl Einstein: Konstellationen des Aufbruchs in die ‘Klassische Moderne’ im Zeichen der Zeit,” Etudes Germaniques (January–March 1998): 123–58; 127. 5. Denis, “Maillol,” 242, 249. 6. “Jede Ansicht besitzt einen plastischen Höhepunkt, dem die anderen Formen untergeordnet sind, so daß der Blick niemals willkürlich oder führerlos umherirrt, vielmehr sich einer gegebnen Ordnung fügt.” See Carl Einstein, “Maillol,” Zeit im Bild 11:37 (10 September 1913): 2489–97; not in Werke; reprinted in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 43 (1999): 41–45; 43. For a comprehensive and more sympathetic review of Einstein’s early texts on sculpture, see Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 37–59. 7. “Jede Wendung [sc., of the viewer around the sculpture] gibt eine geschlossene Form, die jedoch nicht hindert, immer neue Ansichten zu erproben; vielmehr regt sie an . . . immer neue, aber bestimmte Formen abzulesen, die an keiner Stelle durchlöchert sind, da das Ganze aus einer geschlossenen Masse erfunden ist” (Einstein, “Maillol,” 43). 8. “Infolge der gleichen gründlichen Gesinnung schalt man Maillol einen Klassizisten und bedachte nicht, daß Kunst, da sie nicht Willkür ist, stets zu den elementaren Voraussetzungen zurückkehren muß” (Einstein, “Maillol,” 43). 9. The literature on Negro Sculpture is extensive. Below I will address some of the more recent publications individually; the following earlier studies can be consulted with profit: Klaus H. Kiefer, “Carl Einsteins Negerplastik: Kubismus und Kolonialismus-Kritik,” in Literatur und Kolonialismus, vol. 1, Die Verarbeitung der kolonialen Expansion in der europäischen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Bader and János Riesz (Frankfurt: Lang, 1983), 233–49; Kiefer, “Fonctions de l’art africain dans l’oeuvre de Carl Einstein,” in Images de l’africain de l’antiquité au XXe siècle, ed. Daniel Droixhe and Klaus H. Kiefer (Frankfurt: Lang, 1987), 149–76; Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte de europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 114–75; Moritz Baßler, “Das Bild, die Schrift und die Differenz: Zu Carl Einsteins ‘Negerplastik’,” in “Unvollständig, krank und halb?”: Zur Archäologie moderner Identität, ed. Christoph Brecht and Wolfgang Fink (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1996), 137–53; Andreas Michel, “Formalism to Psychoanalysis: On the Politics of Primitivism in Carl Einstein,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 141–61; David Pan, Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 121–35; German Neundorfer, “Ekphrasis in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” in Carl-Einstein-Kolloquium 1998, ed. Roland Baumann and Hubert Roland (Frankfurt: Lang, 2001), 49–64; Neundorfer, “Kritik an Anschauung”: Bildbeschreibung im kunstkritischen Werk Carl Einsteins (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 24–88. 10. Jean-Louis Paudrat, “From Africa,” in “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York, Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society, 1984), 125–75; 143, 151; Ezio Bassani, “Le opere illustrate in Negerplastik,” Critica d’Arte 2:2 (Winter 1985): 33–43; Heike Neumeister, “Notes on the ‘Ethnographic Turn’ of the European Avant-Garde: Reading Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915) and Vladimir Markov’s Inskusstvo Negrov (1919),” Acta Historiae Artium 49 (2008): 172–85.

Notes to Pages 62–64

269

11. German Neundorfer has pointed out the common ground between Negro Sculpture and the Maillol essay (“Kritik an Anschauung,” 56–58). But for Neundorfer that common ground consists in the fact that both texts are ekphrases concerned with their own textuality rather than descriptions concerned with the formal traits of artworks. I disagree. Whether in Einstein’s texts or in literature in general, the salient difference between ekphrasis and descriptive art criticism is that ekphrasis needs no actual object to connect to. But that connection is precisely what these two Einstein texts establish, in which he left the ekphrastic exercises of his earliest texts on art behind. For a helpful guide through the intellectual fog that continues to surround the notion of ekphrasis, see Raphael Rosenberg, “Inwiefern Ekphrasis keine Bildbeschreibung ist: Zur Geschichte eines missbrauchten Begriffes,” in Bildrhetorik, ed. Joachim Knape and Elisabeth Gruner (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 2007), 271–82. 12. “Leichtfertig deutet man recht vage Evolutionshypothesen auf ihn zurecht; er mußte dem einen sich ausliefern, um einen Fehlbegriff von Primitivität abzugeben, andere wiederum putzten an dem hilflosen Objekt so überzeugend falsche Phrasen auf, wie Völker ewiger Urzeit und so fort. Man hoffte im Neger so etwas von Beginn zu fassen, einen Zustand, der nie aus dem Anfangen hinausgelangt.” See Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915); W1:234–52; 234; hereafter cited as NP. For an English translation, see Carl Einstein, “Negro Sculpture,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004): 124–38; 124; hereafter cited as NS. In the following pages I sometimes rely on the October translation; more frequently, I have emended it. 13. Starting in the 1890s, evolutionist models of ethnography were being mapped onto African art by figures like Augustus Pitt Rivers; see Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 48–52. Einstein was familiar with Pitt Rivers’s work by 1921. Closer to home in 1915 would have been Adolf Bastian, polymath and founding director of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (Germany’s Trocadéro), who in his sprawling writings endorsed evolutionism, among many other things. 14. One of Negro Sculpture’s more famous put-downs of mainstream primitivism—its rejection of the assumption “that simplicity and firstness could possibly be identical”—is indebted to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl rather than to Leo Frobenius or Alois Riegl, as is sometimes suggested. In his Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910) Lévy-Bruhl had attacked “ethnographers” like J. G. Frazer for their embrace of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism; as when Frazer had argued, in an essay on burial customs, that “in the evolution of thought, as of matter, the simplest is the earliest.” Lévy-Bruhl for his part insisted on the complexity of early human languages, such as those of the Australian aborigines, which “are far less ‘simple’ than English, though much more ‘primitive’.” So, formal simplicity and historical firstness do not coincide; hence evolutionist primitivism is misguided: Einstein took Lévy-Bruhl’s point and applied it to African art. See NP 236; NS 125 (“Man begebe sich der Einbildung, Einfaches und Erstes seien möglich identisch”); and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910); Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 11. 15. “De facto entspricht unsere Nichtachtung des Negers lediglich einem Nichtwissen über ihn, das ihn nur zu Unrecht belastet.” “Die Kenntnisse afrikanischer Kunst sind im ganzen gering und unbestimmt; außer einigen Beninarbeiten ist nichts datiert; mehrere Typen von Kunstwerken werden nach den Fundorten bestimmt, jedoch glaube ich hieraus keinen Nutzen ziehen zu dürfen” (NP 235; NS 125). 16. “Gänzlich verschiedene Stile rühren oft aus einer Gegend her; mehrere Erklärungsweisen können hier auftreten, ohne daß man entscheiden dürfte, welche berechtigt wäre; man kann in diesem Fall annehmen, es handle sich um frühere und spätere Kunst, oder zwei Stile bestanden gleichzeitig nebeneinander, oder eine Kunstart sei importiert” (NP 235–36; NS 125). 17. Einstein’s pseudoscholarly pretensions are sometimes taken seriously. Moritz Baßler, one of Einstein’s best readers, has recognized them for what they are: a “rhetorical bluff.” See his “Das Paradox des Historismus: Zu Carl Einsteins Negerplastik,” in Tradition, ed. Christoph J. Nyíri (Vienna: Verein Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, 1995), 129–49; p.135. 18. By skepticism I mean the actual Hellenistic school of philosophy whose teachings were codified by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD. Here is Sextus’s definition of the school’s project: “Scepticism is an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment and afterwards to tranquility.” “By ‘equipollence’ we mean equality with regard to being convincing or unconvincing: none of the conflicting accounts takes precedence over any other as being more convincing. Suspension of judgment is a standstill of the intellect, owing to which we neither reject nor posit anything. Tranquility is freedom from disturbance or calmness of the soul.” See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4, 5, 37–38, 44–46 (causality), 46–50 (skeptical phrases). While he would have gotten a chuckle out of the alpha privative of the original Greek noun, Einstein cannot be accused of ever having sought to attain tranquillity (ataraxia; Unbeirrtheit; “unperturbedness”). Even so, “standstill of the

270

Notes to Pages 64–69

intellect” is pretty close to the mark; in “The Snob” Einstein did call his personas so many “skeptics”; he may have learned from the skeptics’ critique of causality, and even adopted some of the so-called skeptical phrases. More specifically, in the passage from “Notes on Method” that I cited above, Einstein does to the scholarly literature on African art what Sextus had done to the dogmatism of other philosophical schools: he neutralized them by playing them out against each other. Given that some experts claim X, others Y, and still others Z, we cannot adjudicate the issue in hand. Instead, we will provisionally suspend judgment, where “provisionally” is a tactical euphemism for “forever.” In other words, Einstein wasn’t Leo Frobenius any more than Sextus was Karl Popper. 19. Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, 3rd ed. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 181–208; 200. 20. I am grateful to Bruno Sotto Mayor and Zoë Strother for explaining the object’s ritual function to me. See also the catalogue entry by Peter Stepan in La invención del siglo XX: Carl Einstein y las vanguardias (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2008/9), 110, no. 32. 21. In an important essay Strother has delivered the most trenchant critique of Negro Sculpture to date. Except for my remarks below on Einstein and religion, I accept all of her points. I also join Strother in disagreeing with Joyce Cheng’s claim that Einstein was interested in the ritual function of the objects. See Z. S. Strother, “A la recherche de l’Afrique dans Negerplastik de Carl Einstein,” Gradhiva 14 (2011): 30–55; Joyce Cheng, “Immanence out of Sight: Formal Rigor and Ritual Function in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (2009): 87–102. 22. Few scholars are aware of African Sculpture’s oscillation between discourse and writing. Wolfgang Struck is one of them; see his Die Eroberung der Phantasie: Kolonialismus, Literatur und Film zwischen deutschem Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010), 280. 23. “Man nennt die afrikanischen Statuen oft Fetische und jeder gebraucht dies Wort; doch erklärt es nichts, bedeutet alles mögliche und verdeckt den Sinn dieser Skulpturen und vor allem unsere Unkenntnis.” See Carl Einstein, Afrikanische Plastik (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1921); W2:61–93; 61, 64. 24. “Es bedeutet nichts, es symbolisiert nicht; es ist der Gott” (NP 242; NS 130). 25. This has effectively been the argument of the Tanzanian-born artist, critic, and former anthropologist Everlyn Nicodemus in her important essay on Negro Sculpture: that by ignoring the then available ethnography and focusing on the formal analysis of the objects only, Einstein for all his limits also avoided the limits of that ethnography, and instead got an unobstructed view of the objects themselves. In so doing, Einstein joined a battle in 1915 that in 1993 Nicodemus argued was still ongoing: a battle “between, on one hand, ethnographers and anthropologists and, on the other, radical artists and critics.” See Everlyn Nicodemus, “Meeting Carl Einstein,” Third Text 23 (Summer 1993): 31–38. 26. The reviews of Negro Sculpture are assembled in Zwischen “Bebuquin” und “Negerplastik,” ed. Rolf-Peter Baacke (Berlin: Silver und Goldstein, 1990). 27. That said, I do think the Chokwe figure is a representative example. I count at least seven other figures (typically standing, but sometimes seated) in Negro Sculpture that are presented in the same way and for the same reason: through multiple photographs taken from different angles that reveal the “aspect reversal” I will describe below. One particularly impressive work is a Fang reliquary figure that Wendy Grossman has singled out for the intense focus on the objects that makes the photography of Negro Sculpture unique among the early books on African art. See Wendy Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens (Washington, DC: Philips Collection, 2009/10), 67. 28. For a different perspective on the Hildebrand/Rodin divide, see David Getsy, “Encountering the Male Nude at the Origins of Modern Sculpture: Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand, and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality,” in The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, ed. Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Mann, 2003), 297–313. 29. On Einstein’s studies at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1904–6 and 1908, see Sibylle Penkert, Carl Einstein: Beiträge zu einer Monographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 44–46. 30. As the young Einstein put it in a short, fragmentary manuscript, “Critique of Judgment, or Epistemological Faculty and Art. The forms of vision were interpreted [in the age of Kant] as forms of the epistemological subject; vision was indebted to epistemology, precisely, for form.” (Kritik der Urteilskraft oder Erkenntnisvermögen und Kunst. Die Formen des Schauens wurden als Formen des Erkennenden interpretiert, das Schauen war der Erkenntnis für eben die Form verpflichtet.) See Carl Einstein, “Die Bildung kunstgeschichtliche[r] Gesetze,” in W4:267–68; 267. 31. On the commission of the Wittelsbacher Fountain (1890–95), see Sigrid Esche-Braunfels, Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921) (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1993), 210–26; and Jürgen Wittstock, “Adolf Hildebrands Hauptwerk: Der Wittelsbacher Brunnen in München,” Oberbayerisches Archiv 101 (1976): 7–67. In April 1892, while the design process for the Fountain was under way, Helmholtz visited Hildebrand in Florence for a “spirited exchange” of ideas; see Tamara Felicitas Hufschmidt, Adolf von Hildebrand: Architektur und Plastik seiner Brunnen (Munich: UNI, 1995), 24.

Notes to Pages 69–74

271

32. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form (1903), in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Henning Bock (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969), 199–265; Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 227–79. 33. “Dem Kubischen das Quälende zu nehmen” (Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form, 242; The Problem of Form, 258). 34. “Die Wahrnehmung ordnen und beruhigen.” See Heinrich Wölfflin, “Adolf von Hildebrand zu seinem siebenzigsten Geburtstag am 6. Oktober” (1918), in Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), 99. 35. The significance of Helmholtz for Hildebrand’s sculptural theory was first pointed out by Wölfflin, “Adolf Hildebrand’s Problem der Form” (1931), in Gantner, Kleine Schriften, 104–6; 106. 36. Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Timothy Lenoir, “The Politics of Vision: Optics, Painting, and Ideology in Germany, 1845–95,” in Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 319–23. 37. On the complex history of the problem of depth perception from the late eighteenth century until Helmholtz, see Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative, 167–84; and R. Steven Turner, “Consensus and Controversy: Helmholtz on the Visual Perception of Space,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of NineteenthCentury Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 155–204. 38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 218–33. 39. “If I know that a particular way of seeing, for which I have learned how to employ exactly the right kind of innervation, is necessary in order to bring into direct vision a point two feet away and so many feet to the right, this also is a universal proposition, which applies to every case in which I have fixed a given point at that distance before or may do so hereafter. It is a piece of knowledge which cannot be expressed in words but which sums up my previous successful experience. It may at any moment become the major premise of an inference—whenever, in fact, I fix on a point in this position and feel that I am doing so by looking as that major premise states. This perception of my fixation is then my minor premise, and the conclusion is that the object I am looking at is to be found at the location in question” (Hermann von Helmholtz, “Recent Progress in the Theory of Vision” [1868], in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Russell Kahl [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971], 145–222; 219). In his Treatise on Physiological Optics Helmholtz states that this model of syllogistic vision was inspired by John Stuart Mill’s Logic. 40. Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Hamburg: Voss, 1896), 601. 41. For the ideology of a model of experience as “realization of the possible,” see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 211–12. I will address this issue in more detail below. 42. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 230. 43. On distant vision as a “normal” modality of perception, see Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P. C. Southall (New York: Dover, 1962), 14–15. 44. “That is why, perceived from the correct position, a relief is a much more perfect kind of imitation, at least as far as the object’s form is concerned, than the most accomplished flat painting could ever be” (Helmholtz, Handbuch, 807). 45. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, 233, where Daseinsform is translated as “inherent form.” 46. In her discussion of François Rude’s Marseillaise Rosalind Krauss has described how causality had been the underlying narrative structure of early nineteenth-century neoclassicist historical relief. The Wittelsbacher Fountain, whose narrative content is purely nominal (Hildebrand used to joke with Fiedler about the exact meaning, if any, of its marine iconography), dates from a moment when causality was displaced from subject matter into the structure of embodied vision. See Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 11–13. 47. See, for example, Leo Steinberg, “Rodin” (1963), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 322–403; and Krauss, Passages, 20–31. 48. Adolf von Hildebrand, “Auguste Rodin” (1918), in Gesammelte Schriften, 425–30; 428; for an abridged English translation, see Rodin in Perspective, ed. Ruth Butler (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 139–43; 141. 49. Georg Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” in Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne, 3rd ed. (1923; Berlin: Wagenbach, 1998), 195–219; Simmel, “On the

272

Notes to Pages 74–79

Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” in The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), 27–46. 50. “The ‘fetishism’ which Marx assigned to economic objects in the era of commodity production represents only a special case of this general fate of the contents of our culture.” See Simmel, “Begriff,” 213; Simmel, “Concept,” 43 (translation modified). 51. Simmel, “Begriff,” 198; Simmel, “Concept,” 30 (translation modified). 52. Simmel’s fullest statement on Bergson is his “Henri Bergson” (1914), in Zur Philosophie der Kunst: Philosophische und kunstphilosophische Aufsätze (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1922), 127–45. 53. For the documentary evidence for Simmel’s fascination with Rodin, see J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, “Simmel und Rodin” (1976), in Rodin-Studien: Persönlichkeit, Werke, Wirkung, Bibliographie (Munich: Prestel, 1983), 317–28. Another reading of Simmel on Rodin is Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 72–75. 54. Georg Simmel, Rembrandt: Ein kulturphilosophischer Versuch (1916; Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1919), 134. 55. The “emergence of the figure from the stone” is an “unmediated making-sensible [Versinnlichung] of the becoming which is now the very meaning of its representation.” See Georg Simmel, “Rodin” (1911), in Philosophische Kultur, 151–65; 157. Translations from this essay are mine; a truncated English version was published as “Rodin’s Work as an Expression of the Modern Spirit,” in Butler, Rodin in Perspective, 127–30. 56. “Life is a ceaseless, flowing creation of novelty . . . it does not exhaust itself in the form of cause and effect, which, after all, only ever derives sameness from sameness; it is rather an entirely originary creative movement, which cannot be calculated like a mechanism but which can only be experienced [erlebt]” (Simmel, “Henri Bergson,” 132). 57. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Conservation of Force: A Physical Memoir” (1847), in Kahl, Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, 3–55. On the importance of this essay for a rethinking of labor power in modernity, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52–63. 58. In the lucid summary of Milič Čapek, “What we call ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ is in the language of classical physics nothing but two successive forms of the constant quantity of energy. No cause can be without its effect because no particular quantity of energy can disappear without being transformed into its equivalent; and no effect can be without its cause because no quantity of energy in the world can arise out of nothing, but only from the transformation of a previous energetic equivalent. Thus the basic identity and quantitative constancy of the unitary physical stuff underlies the successive causal series in nature.” See Milič Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), 12–13. 59. Simmel, Rembrandt, 134. 60. Leon Trotsky, “Zwei Wiener Ausstellungen im Jahre 1911” (1911), in Literatur und Revolution, trans. Eugen Schaefer and Hans von Riesen (Munich: dtv, 1972), 412–27; 418. Trotsky’s text is not included in the English edition I consulted (Literature and Revolution [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966]). 61. “There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xx). 62. “Der optische Naturalismus abendländischer Kunst ist nicht Nachahmen der Außennatur; die Natur, die hier passiv nachgeahmt wird, ist der Standpunkt des Beschauers. So versteht man das Genetische, das ungemein Relative, das unserer meisten Kunst anhaftet. Diese paßt sich dem Beschauer an (Frontalität, Fernbild) und immer mehr wurde das Erzeugen der optischen Endform einem aktiv beteiligten Betrachter anvertraut” (NP 245; NS 133). 63. On this double constitution, of the subject before the world, and the world as picture for that subject, see Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54; 132. 64. “Frontalität, vielfältige Ansicht, übergehendes Modélé und plastische Silhouette heißen vor allem die üblichen Mittel” (NP 244; NS 132). 65. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1915; New York: Dover, 1950), 21, 22. 66. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Akademische Vorlesung, ed. Norbert Schmitz (Alfter: VDG, 1993), 115. 67. For an account of Rodin as paradigmatic sculptor of impressionism, see Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst (Cologne: Dumont-Schauberg, 1907), 44–50.

Notes to Pages 79–84

273

68. “Der Zuschauer wurde in die Plastik verwebt, er wurde ihre nicht mehr trennbare Funktion. . . . [Der Plastiker] verlegte das Schwergewicht in die Sehtätigkeit jenes und modellierte in Touches, damit erst der Beschauer die eigentliche Form bilde” (NP 239; NS 128). 69. “Die Plastik war Konversationsstoff zweier Menschen” (NP 239; NS 128). 70. Simmel, “Rodin,” 164. 71. “A maximum of ‘excitation’ is provided because the withholding of the complete form strongly demands a maximum of activity by the viewer himself. If there is a grain of truth in that old adage of art theory, that the subject repeats the creative process within himself as he appreciates the work, then it could not have been realized more forcefully than by having the imagination itself complete the incomplete, and by inserting its productive animation between the work and its final effect within us” (Simmel, “Rodin,” 157). 72. “Die Entscheidung war in Vor- und Nachspiele gelegt, das Werk zerrann immer mehr zu einem Leiter psychologischer Erregung; das individuell Fließende, Verursacher und Bewirktes wurden fixiert” (NP 238; NS 127). 73. “Die Frontalität betrügt fast den Beschauer um das Kubische und steigert sämtliche Kräfte auf eine Seite. Die gegenständlich vorderen Teile ordnet sie nach einem Blickpunkt und verleiht ihnen eine gewisse Plastizität. Die einfachste naturalistische Ansicht wird ausgewählt, die dem Beschauer zunächst liegende Seite, die ihn gewohnheitsmäßig am ehesten gegenständlich und psychologisch orientiert. Die anderen, untergeordneten Ansichten suggerieren rhythmisch unterbrochen die Empfindung, welche den Bewegungsvorstellungen des Dreidimensionalen entspricht. Aus den abrupten, vor allem durch den Gegenstand verknüpften Bewegungen ergibt sich ein Vorstellen räumlicher Zusammengehörigkeit, das formal nicht gerechtfertigt ist” (NP 244; NS 132). 74. Helmholtz is never once mentioned in Negro Sculpture. But I agree with Klaus Kiefer (Diskurswandel, 121–25) that he is an invisible presence in Einstein’s early work, and I am able to cite a piece of evidence in support: Einstein jotted down the title of Helmholtz’s “Facts in Perception” on a piece of scrap paper that, to judge from the handwriting, seems to date from before the war (Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 322, no. 29). 75. Heinrich Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst: Eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1901), 174, 237. 76. The following remarks are indebted to the brilliant study by Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 31–33. 77. Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 322, unnumbered loose sheet. 78. Paul Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910), 14 n. 1. 79. “The object of knowledge itself, as the ‘reality’ standing over and against pure thought, is simply the ideal limit point—the never completed ‘X’—towards which the methodological progress of science is converging” (Friedman, Parting of the Ways, 31). 80. “The scientific ‘factum’ ought simply be understood as a ‘fieri’. . . . Indeed, it is only the fieri that is the factum: all being that science seeks to ‘arrest’ must necessarily dissolve again in the stream of becoming. And in the end it is only this becoming of which it can rightly be said: it is” (Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen, 14). 81. “Aufgabe der Plastik ist es, eine Gleichung zu bilden, worin die naturalistischen Bewegungsempfindungen . . . gänzlich absorbiert sind, und ihre sukzessive Verschiedenheit in eine Ordnung umgesetzt ist” (NP 245– 46; NS 133); “jede zeitliche Interpretation, die auf Bewegungsvorstellungen beruht” (NP 243; NS 131); “die nicht zugleich sehbaren Teile . . . müssen zusammen mit den sichtbaren in eine totale Form gesammelt werden” (NP 245; NS 133). 82. “Die zweifache Tiefenrichtung, die Bewegung nach vorn und nach hinten, ist in einem kubischen Ausdruck gebunden” (NP 249; NS 134). 83. “Richtungsresultante der Raumkontraste” (NP 248; NS 135). The point central is a Cézannean term that also comes up in Hedwig Fechheimer’s Egyptian Sculpture (1914), where it is quoted from Emile Bernard’s conversations with the artist. Since Egyptian Sculpture is often cited as a major influence on Negro Sculpture, a note on Fechheimer, a now forgotten Egyptologist, is in order here. It is clear enough from her text that Fechheimer and Einstein were intellectually close for a time: there is the formalism, the Cézanne quote, the rejection of evolutionism, and even a Meister Eckhart reference. Still, a world of difference separates the two books. Egyptian Sculpture remains at the level of Einstein’s Maillol essay, which most of Negro Sculpture leaves behind: the level of an ultraconservative primitivism. All the time, Fechheimer’s Egyptians quietly bow to the eternal, serenely embrace death, fuse their mere humanity with a higher order, and produce art that celebrates that attitude: elementary, purified, carved into everlasting stone. Some of this ideology did make it into Negro Sculpture, notably into the disappointing section on African tattoo, what with its celebration of the tattooist’s voluntary relinquishment of his or her individuality (the body) to some abstract generality (the form of the tattoo). What we have here isn’t Einstein as precursor of Marcel Mauss but Einstein as reader of Stefan George. Like Fechheimer, he worshipped at

274

Notes to Pages 84–87

the altar of the Conservative Revolution’s favorite poet; unlike her, he became an apostate even before the war. As its weakest passages indicate, Negro Sculpture marks a transitional moment in that process of estrangement. See Hedwig Fechheimer, Die Plastik der Ägypter (Berlin: Cassirer, 1914). On Fechheimer and Einstein, see Kiefer, Diskurswandel, 167–70; Neundorfer, “Kritik an Anschauung,” 46–48. On Einstein and George, see Thomas Krämer, “Carl Einstein und Stefan George,” in Carl-Einstein-Kolloquium 1994, ed. Klaus Kiefer (Frankfurt: Lang, 1996), 29–40. 84. “Der Kontrast, d.h. die unbedingte Einheit von Gegensätzen macht die Totalität aus.” See Carl Einstein, “Totalität,” in W1:214–21; 218; hereafter cited as T. For an English translation, see Einstein, “Totality,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004): 116–21; 119; hereafter cited as T2, and occasionally modified. “Totalität” was originally published in 1914 as a sequence of three Aktion essays. It was republished as a single text in Carl Einstein, Anmerkungen (Berlin: Die Aktion, 1916). 85. “Die dreidimensional situierten Teile müssen gleichzeitig dargestellt werden, das heißt, der zerstreute Raum muß in ein Blickfeld integriert werden” (NP 244; NS 132). 86. See Matias Martínez-Seekamp, “Ferien von der Kausalität? Zum Gegensatz von ‘Kausalität’ und ‘Form’ bei Carl Einstein,” Text + Kritik 95 (July 1987): 13–22; 14. On Bergson’s presence in Einstein’s Bebuquin, see Heidemarie Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins (Munich: Fink, 1976), 86–88. For a reading of the “Totality” essay as a critique of Kantian epistemology, see Dirk de Pol, “‘Totalität’: Die Kant-Rezeption in der Ästhetik des frühen Carl Einstein,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 104 (1997): 117–40. 87. On Helmholtz as unnamed adversary in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 319–22. 88. “Die kausale Betrachtung ist eine rein rückschauende, welche stets den konkreten Gegenstand überschreitet, die Ursachen sind konstruiert, nicht das Totale. Die Ursachen eines Gegenstandes liegen stets in einer anderen Ebene als der Gegenstand selbst. Kausales Denken löst in eine ungegliederte Vielheit auf und veräußert ihren Gegenstand zur Allegorie eines unsinnlichen Vorgangs, der außerhalb des Gegenstandes liegt. Darum sagt sie nichts über die Form, die Qualität desselben aus” (T 220; T2 120). 89. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 229. 90. “Wir messen die Zeit mittelbar wissenschaftlich mit Hilfe der Größe und verwandeln sie in ein simultan Räumliches” (T 220; T2 120). 91. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 79. 92. “Zeit, rein vorgestellt, muß qualitativer Unterschied der Erlebnisse bedeuten” (T 219; T2 120). 93. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 104. 94. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 197. 95. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 110–11. 96. On numerical versus continuous multiplicity in Bergson, see Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 4th ed. (New York: Zone, 1997), 38–39. 97. “Totalität schließt niemals irgend etwas aus, d.h. vor ihr gibt es weder ein Positives noch ein Negatives, denn der Kontrast, d.h. die unbedingte Einheit von Gegensätzen macht die Totalität aus” (T 218; T2 119). 98. For Deleuze, “the heart of Bergson’s project is to think differences in kind independently of all forms of negation.” Because “instead of starting out from a difference in kind between two orders, from a difference in kind between two beings, a general idea of order or being is created, which can no longer be thought except in opposition to nonbeing in general” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 39–40). 99. On Deleuze’s critique, inspired by Bergson, of a notion of the possible as merely “a mode of anticipatory resemblance of the real,” which, shackled as it is to the identity principle, cannot conceive of the New, see Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures yet Unthought,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 15–28; 27. 100. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 212. 101. “Totalität ist ein in keiner Weise ableitbarer Begriff, der weder aus Teilen gewonnen, noch auf eine höhere Einheit zurückgeführt werden kann” (T 218; T2 119). Compare Deleuze: “The possible and the virtual are . . . distinguished by the fact that one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition” (Difference and Repetition, 211–12). 102. “Denn Form heißt jene vollkommene Identität von Anschauung und einzelner Verwirklichung, die ihrer Struktur nach sich decken und nicht sich verhalten wie Begriff und Einzelfall. Die Anschauung umfaßt wohl mehrere Fälle des Verwirklichens, besitzt jedoch keine höhere Qualitätsrealität als diese. So erhellt sich, daß Kunst einen besonderen Fall bedingungsloser Intensität darstellt und in ihr die Qualität unvermindert erzeugt werden muß” (NP 245; NS 133).

Notes to Pages 87–92

275

103. “Da bildende Kunst fixiert, wird dies Einheitliche geteilt, nämlich nach entgegengesetzten Richtungen aufgefaßt und enthält so zwei gänzlich verschiedene Richtungen, die in dem unendlichen Raum des Mathematikers z.B. ziemlich belanglos bleiben” (NP 246; NS 133). 104. Walter Riezler, “Adolf von Hildebrand und die Schätzung seiner Zeit,” Die Kunst 16:1 (1915): 41–54; 48. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (1914; Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1920), 252. 105. Adolf von Hildebrand, “Beitrag zum Verständnis des künstlerischen Zusammenhangs architektonischer Situationen” (1908), in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, 380–91; 381. 106. Camillo Sitte, Der Städte-Bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien (Vienna: Graeser, 1889). For Sitte on agoraphobia, see Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 25–49. 107. For Hildebrand’s discussion of the Piazza della Signoria and other Renaissance urban ensembles, see his “Beitrag,” 382–84. 108. Hildebrand had actually called his Wittelsbacher Fountain a “totality”; see his “Zum Fall Hildebrand” (1907), in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, 483–87; 483. 109. Wölfflin, “Adolf von Hildebrand zu seinem siebenzigsten Geburtstag,” 91. 110. “Die meisten Negerplastiken [entbehren] des Sockels; ist er einmal vorhanden, wird er plastisch akzentuiert” (NP 248; NS 136). 111. On the figure/pedestal logic, see Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 276–91; 279–80. It is regrettable that in spite of his admiration for the work of Constantin Brancusi, Einstein never wrote about it at any length. He would have had all the theoretical tools at his disposal to address what Krauss has called the sitelessness or “aterritoriality of the sculptural object” that emerges in those Brancusis where a sculpture becomes all base. See Rosalind Krauss, “Echelle/monumentalité, modernisme/postmodernisme: La ruse de Brancusi,” in Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne? (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), 246–60. 112. “Hier halten wir einen schönen Beweis für die zweideutige Gleichgültigkeit des psychologischen Ausdrucks. Schon erfahrungsgemäß decken sich die physiognomischen Ausdrucksweisen entgegengesetzter Empfindungen” (NP 251; NS 138). Einstein’s well-known, if slightly flashy phrase “fixed ecstasy” (ibid.) extends this opposition to one between expression and medium: ecstasy is a state of psychic formlessness to which the mask gives form. 113. “Totalität macht, daß das Ziel jeder Erkenntnis und Bemühung nicht mehr im Unendlichen liege, als undefinierbarer Gesamtzweck, vielmehr im einzelnen beschlossen ist” (T 217; T2 119). 3. Cubism’s Passion 1. A brief note on Einstein and cubism in the 1910s is in order. By late 1913 he had seen Picasso’s work firsthand: probably during his stays in Paris, which became regular around 1912; certainly once he had visited an extraordinary show called Picasso and Negro Sculpture (Picasso und Negerplastiken) that opened in December 1913 at the Neue Galerie in Berlin, the German branch of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery. According to John Richardson, the show included fifty-three Picassos from between 1907 and 1913, among them “Ma Jolie” and the great Head of a Girl. A detailed account of the show, as well as of another right before it, again at the Neue Galerie, has been offered by Heike Neumeister. Neumeister has argued that Einstein organized the first show, for which he also wrote the preface, and that he may have had a hand in Picasso and Negro Sculpture as well. Both shows juxtaposed modern art with non-Western objects, which possibly included the Chokwe sculpture (fig. 2.2). All this would be very interesting, if it weren’t for the fact that, as far as Einstein’s art criticism was concerned, nothing actually came of it. For all his fascination with Picasso and his interest in thinking cubism and African art together, Einstein never delivered a full-blown argument on either topic before the war. And when a decade later he did get round to writing comprehensively on cubism, his argument was no longer tied to African art. See John Richardson with Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2, 1907–1917 (New York: Random House, 1996), 317 with 468 nn. 61 and 62; Richardson, “Picasso und Deutschland vor 1914,” in 20 Jahre Wittrock Kunsthandel (Düsseldorf: Wittrock, n.d. [1995]), 10–31; Heike Neumeister, “Notes on the ‘Ethnographic Turn’ of the European Avant-Garde: Reading Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915) and Vladimir Markov’s Inskusstvo Negrov (1919),” Acta Historiae Artium 49 (2008): 172–85. 2. “Dieser Bildtypus charakterisiert das beginnende zwanzigste Jahrhundert” (K3 117). 3. Carl Einstein, letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1922, in Einstein and Kahnweiler, Correspondance 1921–1939, ed. Liliane Meffre (Marseilles: Dimanche, 1993), 130. Some scholars have discerned a common ground between Einstein and Kahnweiler. In my opinion, his texts on Braque and Picasso are simply worlds apart from The Rise of Cubism’s sterile neo-Kantian model of developmental problem-solving. For a different view, see, for

276

Notes to Pages 92–94

example, Birgit Raphael, “Vergleich zwischen den Kubismustheorien von Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler und Carl Einstein,” Kritische Berichte 13:4 (1985): 31–37. 4. In thinking about the issue of the ground in painting I have learned much from a recent anthology that addresses it with unprecedented complexity: Der Grund: Das Feld des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm and Matteo Buroni (Munich: Fink, 2012). Moreover, Gottfried Boehm, who seems not to be aware of Einstein’s precedent, has been using the notion of Grundkontrast in his version of Bildwissenschaft for a long time now. That that version should be Heideggerian points to an overlap between Boehm and Einstein as well as to some categorical differences. For one thing, to put it graphically, it’s a long way from the blood-drenched streets of Berlin in 1919 to the Black Forest shed. For another, there is the intriguingly absent presence of Heidegger in a letter of 1932 in which Einstein reported to a friend that he had recently read “Vom Wesen des Grundes.” The letter looks straightforward enough, but, like so many others, it is a darkly humorist exercise in the style of nonessence (see chapter 1). Over and over again, Einstein wants to write what Heidegger and Husserl mean to him (“fand ich,” “für mich bedeutet,” “ich habe den Eindruck”). Yet, over and over again, that meaning can be stated only negatively: as when, using a privative, he calls Husserl’s Wesensschau “unoriginal,” or, using a Mallarméan quantitative, he calls “Vom Wesen des Grundes” “empty.” So, in Einstein’s letter “Husserl” and “Heidegger” remain words on a page, the absent flowers in all ontological bouquets: the groundlessness of writing trumps the philosophers’ discourse on the ground. Is that all there is to say about the relation between Einstein and Heidegger, then? That depends on what one thinks the ground in Heidegger actually is. There may be a rapport between Einstein’s “indifference point” and the Riß between Erde and Welt that Heidegger describes in his artwork essay. Both notions owe something to Schelling, and both serve similar purposes: they ground the proliferation of human meanings in a nonhuman abyss. What below I am calling Braque’s open cylinder and Picasso’s hinge would then be pictorial equivalents to the Riß on which Heidegger’s Greek temple is sitting. Einstein’s letter, which is the only occasion on which Heidegger’s (misspelled) name comes up in his work, is quoted in Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 375. 5. “Aus den Grundbedingungen, dem Raum und der Bildfläche, wird eine reicher gestufte Einheit gewonnen” (K3 82). Here and elsewhere, Bildfläche (and Grundfläche) will be translated as “surface.” The term should not be confused with two others that didn’t matter centrally to Einstein: “ground plane” (the receding ground of perspectival space) and “picture plane” (the virtual limit between picture space and actual space). 6. “Hinzu kommt der Grundkontrast, nämlich die stärkste Darstellung des Volumens wird in das Paradox der Fläche gefügt” (K3 125). 7. These two phrases are taken from the survey’s chapters on impressionism and Matisse, but it is clear from context that Einstein was implicitly holding up cubism as paragon to them: to his mind, Matisse’s flat arabesques were lacking cubism’s “gründliche Umbildung,” and impressionism’s stippled surfaces its “gründliche Spannung” (K3 66, 48). 8. Charles W. Haxthausen, “Carl Einstein, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Cubism, and the Visual Brain,” in the online journal nonsite.org 2 (2011). 9. “Erkennen ist der Versuch, die identische Weltmitte zu verlassen, um die ungefaehrliche Tangentenstellung durch Zerreissung . . . in einen subjektiven und objektiven Bezirk zu erreichen. Solche Position wird durch Verzicht auf den verwebten Wirkungscharakter der Welt gewonnen; man erstrebt nun stattdessen sfaerische Abgrenzungen und Schnitte. Die Position von innerer und aeusserer Welt bedeutet nur Perspektive, eine Machtfrage, genau wie die Behauptung der geschlossenen menschlichen Gestalt und der starren Objekte. Wir stellen solche Verdraengungsmethode auch in der Setzung kausaler Folgen fest.” See Carl Einstein, “Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns . . . ,” in W4:194–221; 195. The Einstein literature refers to this untitled text as “Gestalt und Begriff ”; it will hereafter be cited as GB. For an English translation, see Einstein, “Gestalt and Concept” (excerpts), trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 169–76; 170–71 (translation modified); hereafter cited as GC. 10. “Man entdeckt, daß der Gegenstand Knotenstation von Funktionen ist, Ergebnis auch subjektiven Tuns, daß seine Starrheit vor allem von sprachlicher Gewöhnung bewirkt wird und von dem Wunsch, recht leichte— das ist konforme—Handlungen zu ermöglichen; also eine Angelegenheit des biologischen Gedächtnisses” (K1 58). 11. “Die Substanzenwirtschaft hatte allenthalben bankrott gemacht, die alte Seele, kompakt und unbeweglich wie ein Buffet, war funktionell zerfallen; das stabile Ich eine Fassade, ein Vorurteil; die Materie war in diskontinuierliche Kraftfelder zersprengt und die Begriffe waren als seelische Ermüdungserscheinungen, als Negatives erkannt.” See Carl Einstein, Georges Braque (typescript), in W3:251–516; 319; hereafter cited as B. 12. “Es ist ein Unsinn eine fixe seelische Einheit anzunehmen. Ich ist eine an Intensität ab und zunehmende Funktion etc.” Carl Einstein, letter to Ewald Wasmuth, November 16, 1923, reprinted in Klaus H. Kiefer, Avantgarde—Weltkrieg—Exil: Materialien zu Carl Einstein und Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona (Frankfurt: Lang, 1986), 60–61; 61.

Notes to Pages 94–97

277

13. “Subjekt und Objekt bedeuten im Erlebnis Grenzzustände, Aktextreme und im Denken Grenzbegriffe und Widerstände. Tatsächlich muß man den komplexen und labilen Subjekt-Objekt-Prozeß wiederherstellen. D.h. ein Prozeß ist nur möglich durch die intime Bindung beider Kräfte” (B 293). 14. “Man steht nicht mehr einem Motiv beobachtend gegenüber, wobei säuberlich zwischen innerer und äußerer Welt geschieden wird, sondern die Dinge sind Funktion des Menschen, wie dieser Funktion der Welt ist” (B 339). 15. “If we give up the effective subject, we also give up the object upon which effects are produced. Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes. . . . If we give up the concept ‘subject’ and ‘object’, then also the concept ‘substance’.” “[The world] is essentially a world of relationships; under certain conditions it has a differing aspect from every point; its being is essentially different from every point; it presses upon every point, every point resists it.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 306, #568; 298, #551. 16. Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans. C. M. Williams (New York: Dover, 1959), 16. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Ernst Mach, Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry, trans. Thomas J. McCormack and Paul Foulkes, 5th ed. (1926; Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 9. 19. Ibid., 205 (translation slightly modified). 20. As Nietzsche put it, “The measure of power determines what being possesses the other measure of power; in what form, force, constraint it acts or resists” (Will to Power, 306). Compare Foucault: “M.F.: I had to reject a priori theories of the subject in order to analyze the relationships that may exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so on. Q.: That means the subject is not a substance. M.F.: It is not a substance. It is a form, and this form is not primarily or always identical to itself.” “I scarcely use the word power, and if I use it on occasion it is simply as shorthand for the expression I generally use: relations of power. But there are readymade models: when one speaks of power, people immediately think of a political structure, a government, a dominant social class, the master and the slave, and so on. I am not thinking of this at all when I speak of relations of power. I mean that in human relationships, whether they involve verbal communication such as we are engaged in at this moment, or amorous, institutional, or economic relationships, power is always present. I mean a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other. So I am speaking of relations that exist at different levels, in different forms; these power relations are mobile, they can be modified, they are not fixed once and for all.” See Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 281–301; 290, 291–92. 21. “Dann der Kampf in der subobjektiven Funktion—zwischen Sub- und Objektivierung” (Einstein, letter to Wasmuth, 61). 22. “Es erhob sich die Frage, ob Gegenstände abgebildet werden sollen oder ein freier Bildgegenstand zu erfinden sei” (K1 56). 23. “Man bleibt lediglich innerhalb der Formbedingungen der Bildfläche; der individuelle Gegenstand wird dem Bildkörper geopfert; jedoch bleibt es nicht bei einer Gegenstandsvernichtung, der Flucht vor der Mnemotechnik der Zivilisation oder des praktisch Notwendigen, sondern dies so oft vollgeheimniste Sehen wird klargelegt” (K1 59). 24. “Einmal mußte man darauf stoßen, daß der Raum nichts Festes, sondern ein Geschehen, ein Erleiden und ein Tun bedeutet, und lediglich eine bequeme Abkürzung und Schematisierung vielfältigen Erlebens ist. . . . Durchbrach man aber das mindere Schema der passiven Beobachtung, welche die Realität als Gegebenes und Unveränderliches hinnimmt, so war das Wirkliche selber als Problem und Aufgabe gestellt” (B 321). 25. “Nun konnte man die Dinge nicht mehr abbilden, sondern mußte sie erschaffen. Solche Gesinnung ist schlechthin ateistisch, da die Welt nicht mehr als göttliche endgültige Lösung betrachtet wird, sondern dem Menschen die Aufgabe gestellt wird, Mensch und Welt—defekte Provisorien—stets neu zu erfinden” (B 313). 26. Readers of Richard Wollheim might want to think of volume-seeing as a Nietzschean version of “seeing-in.” Compare Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 205–26. 27. Heinrich Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst: Eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance (Munich: Bruckmann, 1898). Wölfflin is expressly named as a target in Georges Braque, where Einstein calls him a “classicist” (B 254), clearly in reference to the title of his book. 28. The following passage, whose tone is sarcastic, should be read with Wölfflin’s description of Raphael’s School of Athens in mind (Die klassische Kunst, 87–91): “With perspectival representation one declares oneself independent from the picture surface; one wants to demonstrate how nature is full of mathematics, and how every point in space is harmoniously embedded in the law. A world everywhere heaving with action is

278

Notes to Pages 97–105

related to a static observer, in front of whom a well-ordered cosmos has been unfolded.” (Mit der perspektivischen Darstellung macht man sich von der Grundfläche unabhängig; man will zeigen, wie Natur voller Mathematik ist und jeder Punkt des Raumes harmonisch im Gesetz steht. Die Welt, die weit ausgeatmet mit Handlung erfüllt ist, wird auf den ruhenden Beobachter bezogen, vor dem ein geordneter Kosmos gebreitet liegt; K1 65.) 29. “Der Kubist geht vom Urphänomen der Fläche aus” (K1 64). 30. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Der Weg zum Kubismus (1920); Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, trans. Henry Aronson (New York: Wittenborn Schulz, 1949), 10. 31. While a theoretical comparison might be rewarding, Einstein’s Bildgegenstand is not indebted to Edmund Husserl’s notion of the Bildobjekt. Husserl explored it in a lecture series in 1904/5 that was published only in the 1980s. See Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Berlin: Springer, 2005), 1–205. 32. “[Es wird] von einem autonomen Flächenbild und dessen selbständiger formaler Ordnung, jedoch nicht von vorherrschendem Motiv ausgegangen” (K1 63). 33. Now I have outlined Einstein’s terminology, I should mention a figure who may have helped him come up with it: the art historian and critic Max Raphael, to whom Einstein had been close in the 1910s. In his From Monet to Picasso (1913) Raphael had invoked Mach in order to argue that in modern experience “object and subject no longer stood over against one another . . . but were considered as one and as immanent with one another”; that in Picasso’s art “space signifies the function of spatialization” (Räumlichwerden); and that the artist considered the surface “the limit of the human faculty of forming” (Gestaltungskraft). So, over a decade before Einstein, Raphael was writing, however briefly, on what I am calling a functional ethics of volume-seeing and on the foundational contrast in Picasso: why then consign him to a footnote? Because the sad truth is that Raphael was a much lesser critic than Einstein. A typical Raphael text is an intellectual glass-bead game: the mechanical application of a philosophical terminology to visual art. Hence, while precedent should be acknowledged, so should the fact that Einstein took ideas that he may originally have hashed out together with Raphael into a direction his friend was unable to go. See Max Raphael, Von Monet zu Picasso: Grundzüge einer Ästhetik und Entwicklung der modernen Malerei (1913; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 92–93, 182–83. For the biographical facts, see Werner Drewes, “Max Raphael und Carl Einstein: Konstellationen des Aufbruchs in die ‘Klassische Moderne’ im Zeichen der Zeit,” Etudes Germaniques (January–March 1998): 123–58. 34. “Jedes komplexere Bild [wird] seelische und biologische Kontraste aufweisen, vor welchen das Gerede von formalen Gegensätzen zu vordergründlichem Geschwätz absinkt” (B 344). “Die beiden Instrumente gelten uns gleich der menschlichen Gestalt. Man könnte vor Mandoline und Gitarre an ein bisexuelles Motiv denken” (B 362). 35. On this tradition, see, for example, Carol Armstrong’s classic essay, “Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 223–42. 36. Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” Architectural Record 27:5 (May 1910): 400–414; 405. 37. Other examples from 1908 of what I am describing here include the tree trunk at the left edge of Braque’s Trees at L’Estaque (R 18) and the relation between mandolin soundboard, neck, and strings in his Musical Instruments (R 7). 38. This is not to say there is no still-life phallicism in Braque. For well and truly phallic shapes (and well and truly feminine pears) in 1908 Cézannean Braque, see the knife handles in Napkin, Knives, and Pears and Plate and Fruit Dish (R 28 and 29). For the continuation of this morphological eroticism in a cubist idiom, see the clarinets with testicular bells in three still lifes of 1910/11 (R 94, 96, 157). 39. Compare the early twentieth-century postcards and the author’s photo in Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 130, figs. 64–66. 40. “In Picassos Hortabildern steht Abschied von der Landschaft, vom Gegebenen” (K1 71). Five lines down the same point is made about Braque. 41. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990), 169–208; 182–85. By arguing the sickle is a mode of the open cylinder rather than the other way around, I am obviously disagreeing with Bois on more than a detail. For Bois, a Kahnweilerian Saussurean, the sickle is proof that cubism was a raisonnable project of semiotic Enlightenment that culminated in the telos of the signifier’s flatness. For me, an Einsteinian Nietzschean, the open cylinder is proof it was an unreasonable project of visual passion that kept oscillating between surface and space. Nor does my insistence on cubism’s nonlinguistic visuality make me an advocate of some “pure opticality.” On the contrary, I am showing how the art of Braque and Picasso was much more impure—much closer to Marcel Duchamp’s cubism—than Kahnweiler and the semiologists have allowed it to be. On a more general note, while the individual observations of the semiologists have often been excellent—without Bois on the sickle, I doubt I would have

Notes to Pages 105–122

279

seen the open cylinder—I agree with the fundamental objections that Richard Wollheim has raised against their method. See Richard Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59:2 (Spring 2001): 127–37. Finally, while I have learned a great deal from T. J. Clark’s rejection of the alleged “narrative continuity” of modernism’s cubism, this chapter as a whole can serve to explain why I do not endorse his alternative account of cubism as counterfeit. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 169–223. 42. “Naturellement l’objet ne peut apparaître que dans la mesure où la peinture le permet. Et elle a ses exigences, la peinture . . . Pas question de partir de l’objet: on va vers l’objet. . . . Je n’ai pu introduire l’objet qu’après avoir créé l’espace” (quoted in Dora Vallier, “Braque, la peinture et nous,” Cahiers d’Art 29:1 [October 1954]: 13–24; 16). 43. John Richardson, Georges Braque (London: Penguin, 1959), 27. 44. See, for example, William Rubin, “Picasso and Braque: An Introduction,” in Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 15–62; 23–24; and Werner Spies, “La guitare anthropomorphe,” in La Revue de l’Art 12 (1971): 89–92. Picasso explicitly confirmed the analogy between guitar and female body à propos of a Guitar collage from 1913 (DR 608); see William Rubin, Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 82. 45. On the sound-hole cylinder in Picasso’s paperboard Guitar, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 65–97. 46. The date of Picasso’s Mandolin Player has been investigated by Pepe Karmel, who has concluded that it was begun in the spring of 1911. Hence the prize for the invention of the sound-hole cylinder—as opposed to the open cylinder of which it is an instantiation—would seem to go to Picasso. See the entry for the Mandolin Player in Karmel’s “Notes on the Dating of Works,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 331; my thanks to him for sharing his reasoning behind that entry with me. 47. For alternative views on the Man with a Violin, see Nicolaj van der Meulen, Transparente Zeit: Zur Temporalität kubistischer Bilder (Munich: Fink, 2002), 118–23; and Harry Cooper, “Braque’s Ovals,” in Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2011/12), 39–59. 48. Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 170. 49. Braque referred to the painting as a “guitarist” in his final letter to Kahnweiler from Céret, written just before he returned to Paris to put the finishing touches on it. He also told John Richardson as much after the war, which I take to mean that those finishing touches didn’t change the work substantially. For the letter, see Judith Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” in Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, 387; for Braque’s conversation with Richardson, see Richardson with McCully, A Life of Picasso, 2:458 n. 22. 50. Compare Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1862), 3: cols. 1452–59. 51. Braque, letter to Picasso, November 1911, quoted by Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 383. 52. Compare the volute that serves as a mantelpiece ornament in the lower right quadrant of Braque’s Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece from the autumn of 1911 (R 96). 53. For a clear if image-free account of Einstein’s theory of simultaneity, see Heidemarie Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins (Munich: Fink, 1976), 76–86. Oehm argued that Einstein was wavering between two definitions of the term: the diagrammatic simultaneity I am exploring here; and another, more conventional one that turns on the cumulative simultaneity of the various aspects of an object on a canvas. In my opinion, this second notion, popular with the Salon cubists, was at most weakly present in Einstein’s thought. 54. For an overview of the simultaneity debates of the physicists, see Max Jammer, Concepts of Simultaneity from Antiquity to Einstein and Beyond (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 95–170. 55. There are now many surveys of this tangled discursive web, starting with Pär Bergman, “Modernolatria” et “Simultaneità”: Recherches sur deux tendances dans l’avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première guerre mondiale (Stockholm: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1962). Van der Meulen, Transparente Zeit, 42–55, is a concise summary of the problems that must arise from any crude equation of simultaneity in art and science. 56. For an important early attack on Delaunay and the futurists, see Carl Einstein, “Ausklänge der Hypermoderne auf dem Pariser Salon der Unabhängigen,” Zeit im Bild 12:13 (1914): 711–13; not in Werke; reprinted in Andreas Kramer, “Zwischen Klassik und Avantgarde: Zwei unbekannte Texte Carl Einsteins aus den Jahren 1913 und 1914,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 43 (1999): 45–48. 57. “Man hat den impressionistischen Moment durch Erinnerung zu dynamischer Gleichzeitigkeit der Vorstellung geweitet, doch der formale Gegenwert war nicht gefunden” (K1 93). 58. “kinematographische Technik” (K1 67); “auf einem seelischen Ecran, einer Filmfläche” (Carl Einstein, draft of a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, April[?] 1923, W4:142). The reference here is to the well-known chapter on the “cinematographical mechanism of thought” in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911), 304–70. Einstein’s point was that for all the talk about durée, futurist painting was actually the epitome of the cinematographical thought that Bergson abhorred.

280

Notes to Pages 122–128

59. “Form wird im ‘Simultané’ als Einheit zeitlich differenzierten Tuns erfaßt” (K1 68). 60. “Sie erleben was; gut. Sie drücken es aus, aber sie unterdrücken gerade das, was die Sache zum empfindbaren Erlebnis macht, die komplizierte Komplexheit, das in sich functional Kontrastierende der Empfindung, das gleichzeitig nach verschiedenen ‘Logiken’ ablaufende. Wenn dies nicht so wäre, hätte ja unser seelisches Leben a keine Bewegung b stürzte wie ein Katarakt haltlos über jedes Tempo der Physis hinaus” (draft of a letter to Kahnweiler, W4:159; Einstein and Kahnweiler, Correspondance, 146). 61. “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of ‘cells’ in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command? My hypothesis: the subject as multiplicity” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 270, #490). 62. “Die Person nimmt an Volumen, an Ichempfindung oder Sachgefühl, Zeiteinspannung usf. zu und ab” (draft of a letter to Kahnweiler, 153). 63. On that note, it seems no coincidence that Marcel Duchamp was an early visitor to Braque’s studio around 1911. His paintings of that moment, Sad Young Man on a Train and The Passage from Virgin to Bride, formalize a temporal simultaneity of body and technology that, for all its obvious differences, may have been prompted by the temporal simultaneity of body and still life he saw in Braque’s Pompidou and Düsseldorf paintings. For Duchamp’s slightly hazy recollection of his visits to Braque’s studio, see Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, 3rd. ed. (New York: Viking, 1976), 25. For the temporality of The Passage from Virgin to Bride, see Jonathan Crary, “Marcel Duchamp’s The Passage from Virgin to Bride,” Arts Magazine 51:5 (1977): 96–99. 64. Quoted in Richardson, Georges Braque, 26. Braque’s statement is part of a long quote that summarizes several conversations he had had with Richardson. The quote is replete with Einsteinisms; the term “metamorphosis,” vital to Einstein’s ontology during his Paris years, when he was personally closest to Braque, occurs twice. For the fullest account of the relation between Einstein and Braque, see Uwe Fleckner, “The Joy of Hallucination: On Carl Einstein and the Art of Georges Braque,” in Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 (St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2013), 52–73. 65. Françoise Gilot with Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 57. I have emended the English edition’s “restraint” to “constraint”; the French version too has contrainte (Vivre avec Picasso [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1965], 47). 66. On the Cold War context of this episode, see Serge Guilbaut, “Picasso—Picassiette: Les tribulations d’un agent double au temps de la guerre froide,” in Picasso: L’objet du mythe, ed. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and Androula Michaël (Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2005), 35–50; 44. 67. Gilot with Lake, Life with Picasso, 197, 198. 68. In thinking about Picasso on constraint I have profited from Svetlana Alpers’s study The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), especially 9–45, where Alpers discusses the constraints (a term she derives from the Renaissance thinker Francis Bacon) that the premodern studio imposed on the art that was made in it. 69. Gilot with Lake, Life with Picasso, 198. 70. On Picasso and anarchism in Barcelona, see Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 13–47; 20–21, for an antistatist manifesto published in Arte Joven in 1901 (“La Vida,” by J. Martínez Ruiz). 71. John Pudney, “Picasso: A Glimpse in the Sunlight,” New Statesman and Nation 28:708 (September 16, 1944): 182–83; quoted after Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. Dore Ashton (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 148. 72. Hélène Parmelin, “The Artist and His Model” and Other Recent Works (New York: Abrams, n.d. [1965]), 47. 73. Gilot with Lake, Life with Picasso, 101. 74. Picasso on Art, 61. 75. Gilot with Lake, Life with Picasso, 272. 76. “What interests me is to set up what you might call the rapports de grand écart—the most unexpected relationship possible between the things I want to speak about, because there is a certain difficulty in establishing relationships in just that way, and in that difficulty there is an interest, and in that interest there’s a certain tension, and for me that tension is a lot more important than the stable equilibrium of harmony, which doesn’t interest me at all. . . . So, my purpose is to set things in movement, to provoke this movement by contradictory tensions, opposing forces, and in that tension or opposition to find the moment which seems most interesting to me” (Gilot with Lake, Life with Picasso, 59, 60). 77. On the Aficionado’s provenance, see Franz Meyer, “Picasso,” in Ein Haus für den Kubismus: Die Sammlung Raoul La Roche, ed. Katharina Schmidt and Hartwig Fischer (Basel: Kunstsammlung Basel, 1998), 41–58;

Notes to Pages 128–139

281

47. On the collection and its openness to visitors, see Katharina Schmidt, “Raoul La Roche,” ibid., 9–23; 17–18. One of the photographs Fred Boisonnas took of the Villa’s interior in 1926 shows the Aficionado on view in the gallery (ibid., 250). 78. The Aficionado is one of a small number of cubist paintings that are mentioned in the body of Einstein’s survey text (K1 72, as The Torero). It received a full-page illustration in his Documents essay on cubism, where it was also correctly captioned; see Einstein, “Notes sur le cubisme,” Documents 3 (1929): 148. For another discussion of Einstein and the Aficionado, see Green, Picasso, 29. 79. Natasha Staller was the first to have suggested the equation of banderilla and erection in the Aficionado; see her A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 222 and 380 n. 34. Staller has also argued, rightly so, that the equation is even more apparent in the preparatory drawings, where the figure is also more obviously clasping the banderilla. 80. Even the most conservative list of cubist Picassos in which more or less open-cylindrical phallic implements are being manipulated in a male figure’s lap must include several drawings from 1911 and 1912: a Man with a Tenora (Z XXVIII 43 and 48) and a Man with a Pipe (Z XXVIII 99); a number of studies related to a portrait of Frank Haviland (Z VI 1161, Z XXVIII 154); and the openly masturbating figures from the 1912 Sorgues sketchbook that Zervos chose to call Harvesters (Z II 775, 776; see now Brigitte Léal, Musée Picasso: Catalogue des dessins; Carnets [Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996], 1:223, cat. 16, fols. 37v and 39v). 81. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 178–80. 82. On stylistic multiplicity in the Demoiselles, see Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (Spring 1988): 7–74; 60–62. On the unitary system of notation, see Bois, “Semiology of Cubism,” 180–85. 83. “Une guele bien du midi,” as Picasso put it in a letter of July 1912 to Braque. The letter is quoted in the original French by Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 424 n. 3; for a partial English translation, see Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 399. 84. To name just a few chestnuts: prefigured in the face of the Girl with a Mandolin (1910; DR 346), the negative line recurs in the Philadelphia Man with a Violin (1912; DR 470) and in Poet (DR 499) and Man with a Guitar (DR 495), both of which, like the Aficionado, were begun at Sorgues in the summer of 1912. A powerful instantiation occurs chronologically in between: in what I take to be the right cheek of the Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”) (1911/12; DR 430). 85. A full account of the history of Picasso’s hinge, in which his cubism is just one episode, would have to address at least three crucial earlier moments: (1) The academic drawings from the 1890s, in which an antique torso or live model interacts with a plinth or block in such a way that the latter formalizes a hinge between light and shadow, frontality and obliquity, of which the former’s musculature is a mere instantiation: contrary to their apparent illusionism, Picasso’s academic bodies were already image-bodies. (2) The reemergence of the plinth/ body combination in a number of paintings of nude figures interacting with cubes from 1906, most importantly the Prague Seated Nude (Z I 373), in which the hinge has crept up from the block into the figure’s face, splitting it in two: the origin of the so-called double head in Picasso’s work is the foundational contrast. (3) The moment of Horta, when Picasso discovered the hinge in landscape; or, more precisely, when the stunning photographs he took of Horta served him as a filter through which he looked both at the actual village and at landscape in Cézanne. Blocking out the convulsive passage in Cézanne’s Mont Ste-Victoires, the harsh precision of black-and-white photography enabled Picasso to see the hinge that separates the front and side facades of certain foreground buildings in Cézanne’s paintings as well as of the houses of Horta itself. That in Picasso’s paintings these houses would sometimes be flesh-colored suggests that while Cézanne’s passage was indeed filtered out, its eroticism wasn’t. For Picasso at Horta, the image-village became almost-an-image-body, but one whose organic continuity was riven by the foundational contrast. 86. It will be obvious that what I call Picasso’s hinge is a descendant of what Leo Steinberg called his “arris.” Steinberg has eloquently described the arris as “the salience that defines the external junction of convergent planes,” or else as “the principle on which embodiment turns.” So why rename things? Because I don’t believe either “arris” or “salience” quite cuts it, so to speak. I want to get at a dimension of Picasso’s art from which Steinberg always shied away: the abiding negativity that resided next door to the magic of invention. Steinberg wrote more insightfully on the magic part than any other art historian. But I think there is a reason he was so brief on Picasso’s cubism in 1911/12, or, for that matter, on his surrealism around 1930. In 1911/12, “the principle on which embodiment turns” became the principle on which it went to ground. As I suggested in the preceding note, it was not the only time it did. See Leo Steinberg, “The Prague Self-Portrait and Picasso’s Intelligence,” in Cubist Picasso (Paris: Musée National Picasso, 2007/8), 103–17; 104, 107. 87. For good reproductions, see Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 85–117 and figs. 105, 109–13, 115, 118. I am following Baldassari’s dating of the photographs. 88. Alpers, Vexations of Art, 1.

282

Notes to Pages 144–158

89. For the sequence of events, see Cousins, “Documentary Chronology,” 390–404; Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmet (New York: Icon, 1993), 115–20; and Richardson with McCully, A Life of Picasso, 2:235–57. 90. Other members of the Guitars series include another painting (DR 490) and a number of drawings (Z XXVIII 193–96, 198–201). All of them contain one or several of the formal units I examine here: pivots, wireframes, double fingerboards, divided bridges, compass ruler segments. 91. “Une idée de peinture ne será pure si on peut la exprimer dans un autre langage que le sien [de] la peinture”; “trouver le equilibre entre la nature et notre imagination.” See Léal, Carnets, vol. 1, cat. 16, fols. 16r and 25r; and Edward F. Fry, “Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity,” Art Journal 47:4 (Winter 1988): 296–310; 309. I am following Fry’s transcription of the first quote, which has langage where Léal has paysage. Either way, the sense is the same, provided one takes paysage to mean “proper territory.” 92. Christian Zervos, “Conversations avec Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art 10:7–10 (1935): 173–78; quoted after the modified translation by Myfanwy Evans in Picasso on Art, 10. 93. See Léal, Carnets, vol. 1, cat. 16, fols. 18v and 19v, 28v and 29v, 34v and 35v, with Léal’s introductory notes, ibid., 16, 218; and Pepe Karmel’s observations in his Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 152. 94. Steinberg, “Philosophical Brothel,” 33. 95. Blair Hartzell alerted me to a single exception: the large faux bois wallpaper strip that was once part of the paperboard Guitar assemblage that Picasso put together in the fall of 1912. 96. Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 129–30. 97. According to Daix and Rosselet (at DR 485), Kahnweiler stated that the words were inscribed on a gingerbread heart that Picasso then pasted onto the painting; they also note that the documentation in the Kahnweiler archive lists Gouel as its owner in 1912. Like Christine Poggi, I fail to see the gingerbread in an early photograph of the painting (Z II 352) that still shows the letters. See Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 261 n. 19). 98. “Es ist unsinnig, Partei zu nehmen; beide Männer sind unlösbar mit der Schöpfung des Kubismus verknüpft, und Kampf um Priorität vergnügt die Unsachlichen” (K1 74). 99. “Wir verstehen unter Einheit die Komprimierung dialektischer Gegensätze und Varianten; denn nur im Erhalten des bewegenden Konflikts bleiben Formen aktiv. Die Spannung der Formen und die Gefahr ihrer Zerstörung soll erhalten bleiben” (K3 121). 100. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, trans. Douglas Cooper, 2nd ed. (1946; New York: Abrams, 1968), 185. 4. The Double Style 1. After World War II, Bataille and Leiris kept marginalizing Einstein’s role at Documents, but Klaus Kiefer has set the record straight. Kiefer’s evidence is a detailed publication plan that in 1928 Einstein sent to his friend Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, the wealthy industrialist, major art collector, and, possibly, cofinancer of the journal. The plan, a list of detailed tables of contents for prospective Documents issues, looks like the product of a collective brainstorming session; it dispels the myth that Einstein was just a figurehead at the journal. Kiefer makes many other salient points, notably that, given his age, publications record, and massive art-world clout, Einstein would have been very much a senior colleague to the gifted young writers he was taking on board. See Klaus H. Kiefer, “Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses: Carl Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents,” in Elan vital oder Das Auge des Eros (Munich: Haus der Kunst1994), 90–103. 2. Much of the literature on Documents belongs to one of two camps: studies that address visual art but sublate Einstein into Bataille; studies that insist on Einstein’s specificity but do not address visual art. This chapter is meant to fill that gap. See, on one hand, Denis Hollier, “The Use Value of the Impossible,” in Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 125–44; Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou, Le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995); Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997); and, on the other, Sabine Ebel, “Engagement und Kritik: Carl Einstein; Ein Vermittler zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich” (PhD diss., Universität Bonn, 1989), 145–77; and Kiefer, “Ethnologisierung.” Some authors do break the mold. Uwe Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert: Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), 331–96, has valuable observations to make, but I believe more can be said. Conor Joyce has speculated that an image war between Bataille and Einstein was raging through the pages of Documents, but I do not think he has proven his thesis. See Conor Joyce, Carl Einstein in “Documents” and His Collaboration with Georges Bataille (s.l.: Xlibris, 2002); and the rightly negative review by C. F. B. Miller, “Rereading Surrealism, Misreading Documents,” Art History 28:5 (November 2005): 806–9.

Notes to Pages 158–163

283

3. On Einstein and Bretonian surrealism, see Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 377–421; Ebel, Engagement und Kritik; and Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 357–90. Marianne Kröger has unearthed a polemic between Einstein and René Crevel; see Kröger, Das “Individuum als Fossil”: Carl Einsteins Romanfragment “BEB II” (Remscheid: Gardez!, 2007), 40–41. 4. In a spirited, as opposed to substantive, attack on some of the arguments presented here, Georges DidiHuberman has called my work the product of a school founded by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Given what I have to say about Bataille in this chapter and the next, or indeed about cubism in chapter 3, if I were a member of that school, I would be one naughty student. To the contrary, from where I am standing, which is a position that takes a dim view of gratuitous celebrations of negativity in art, politics, or philosophy, Bois, Krauss, and DidiHuberman look like versions of one another. See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Le bref été de la dépense: Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille et l’économie-Picasso,” Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 120 (Summer 2012): 13–42. 5. “Die Petrification der Welt u des Daseins ist eine unserer primären Tendenzen, also der Kampf gegen das Sterben, gegen eine Masse von Bewegung, die Leben bedeutet, deren Energie aber die unsere übertrifft. Dieser ungeheuren vitalen Weltbewegung setzen wir in der Wiederholung der Akte, dem Ritual, Gedächtnis, Abstraktion, Stil einen Arret entgegen (eine Barriere); Kraft dem wir die Weltbewegung zu bremsen u zu verlangsamen versuchen. ein Mittel . . . wodurch wir strukturen bilden und aufzwingen.” See Carl Einstein, undated notes on art history, in W4:380. 6. “Verbegrifflichung heisst: Abwehr des Toetlichen und Lebendigen, unuebersehbaren Weltzwangs.” See Carl Einstein, “Gestalt und Begriff,” in W4:194–221; 195 (cited as GB); Einstein, “Gestalt and Concept,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 169–76; 170 (translation modified; cited as GC). 7. The importance of Freud to Einstein’s Documents-period thought is underexplored, and the presence of the death drive has barely been noticed. Andreas Michel is the only author to have at least referenced “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and Totem and Taboo; see, respectively, his “Formalism to Psychoanalysis: On the Politics of Primitivism in Carl Einstein,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 141–61; and “Zur Bedeutung des Tektonischen im Werk Carl Einsteins,” in Die visuelle Wende der Moderne: Carl Einsteins “Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts,” ed. Klaus H. Kiefer (Munich: Fink, 2003), 257–71. 8. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 18:7–71; 38. 9. See the well-known journal entry by Michel Leiris, composed in May 1929 after a meeting with Einstein: “La poésie n’est qu’une longue lutte contre la mort (qu’on tâche de connaître, avec l’idée qu’on acquerra ainsi un moyen de la dominer). . . . On se crée un monde poétique parce que dans ce monde tout paraît intangible et non soumis à la vicissitude des corps. A la base de toute évasion, ce n’est pas un désir de pureté qu’on trouve, mais la peur; et même quand on croit vraiment aimer la pureté, ce n’est pas parce qu’étant intemporelle elle est plus noble, mais seulement ‘intemporelle’ au sens strict du mot, c’est-à-dire non assujettie au temps et à la mort (comme dit Einstein).” See Michel Leiris, Journal 1922–1989, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 164. 10. “Der Siedler fixiert, sein Tun ist auf Dauer gerichtet. Und darum ist er konservativer und vielleicht beschränkter als der Nomade. So betont er die stets wiederkehrenden Elemente und bedient sich der tektonischen Formen . . . Man flüchtet immer wieder in die Bleibe und die Vorstellung der Stete und Wiederholung zurück” (Carl Einstein, Georges Braque [typescript, early 1930s], in W3:251–516; 348, 350). 11. Einstein, Georges Braque, 350. 12. The rhyme between Formschutz and Reizschutz has been noted by Michel, “Zur Bedeutung des Tektonischen,” 269. On the conservative nature of the death drive, see Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 36, 38. 13. Georges Contenau, “L’art sumérien: Les conventions de la statuaire,” Documents 1 (1929): 1–8. 14. Carl Einstein, preface, Exhibition of Bronze Statuettes B.C. (Hittite, Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek) (New York: Stora Art Galleries, s.d. [1933]), 3–14; 7 (translation modified); for the original German, see W3:611–30. 15. “Dauer oder Ewigkeit bedeuten eine Todesabwehr, indem man den Tod in ihnen antizipiert” (Einstein, “Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns . . . ,” 201). 16. “Tekton[ik]—die Grenzsetzung des Ausdrucks—die geringen Möglichkeiten—Schutz vor dem sich verlieren im Detail—der Bau als Mitte—das Bild als Bauteil u sekundäres—(Paläolithikum freiere Malerei—Neolith. an Bauformen gebunden) die Abwehr der Erfahrung, Censur, Auslese” (Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-EinsteinArchiv, Sig. 252, fol. 7v). 17. For other explorations of the tectonic, see Joyce, Carl Einstein in “Documents,” 279–96; and Michel, “Zur Bedeutung des Tektonischen.” 18. Heinrich Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture (1886), in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 150–90; 159.

284

Notes to Pages 163–171

19. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, 17th ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1984), 154; Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 131 (translation modified). 20. Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 164; Principles, 139. The attribution of the painting to Franciabigio, endorsed by Wölfflin, is no longer widely accepted. 21. “Den Meisten erstarrt das Tektonische zu hoffnungslos wiederholtem Schema, begreifbar, da jenes als Zeichen der Angst und des Wunsches nach Dauer erfaßt wird. Das Tektonische, dies Machtmittel gegen die Natur, wendet sich dann gegen den Menschen, der, wenn einmal die schützende Beschwörungsformel Erfolg brachte, sklavisch sie wiederholt und zum Fetisch seiner formalen Riten erhebt” (K3 123). 22. “Tout cela est une vieille histoire: la généralisation prise pour un moyen de puissance. On réduit à des formules expurgées les tableaux tendus et presque indécomposables des davanciers, ce qui veut dire qu’on les vide” (Carl Einstein, “L’exposition de l’art abstrait à Zurich,” Documents 6 [1929]: 342). 23. “Eine Umwertung war bereits mit Nietzsche eingetreten, der den primären Einfluß des Trieblebens gewiesen hatte, mit dem verglichen die Vernunft eher die Rolle einer lebenshemmenden Kraft spielte. Diese Umwertung wurde nun erheblich von Freud verstärkt, der das Triebleben, die Gegenkräfte des Rationalen, im Traum und Unbewußten wiederfand” (K3 158). 24. “Die Kunst, die ich Ihnen zeigen werde, ist im großen und ganzen vom Typus des Passiven, des leidenden Menschen bestimmt und gemacht.” See Carl Einstein, “Probleme heutiger Malerei” (lecture manuscript, ca. 1931); reprinted in Einstein, Werke, vol. 3, ed. Marion Schmid and Liliane Meffre (Vienna and Berlin: Medusa, 1985), 576–82; 578. This text, which is the most important statement by Einstein on surrealist art beyond Picasso and Klee, did not make it into the Fannei & Walz edition of his Werke. 25. “Die Statik war ein Ergebnis der Todesangst, den abrollenden Prozeß in den Tod aufzuhalten, sie war Rettungsgürtel der Geängstigten. . . . Nun gibt man sich von neuem dem verzweifelten Ablauf hin . . . Man malt aus Grausamkeit gegen sich selber, und solche Bilder sind Etappen zum Tode, Merkmale der Selbstvernichtung” (K3 165). 26. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 118. 27. E.g., in Einstein, Georges Braque, 349, 403. 28. “Nietzsche hatte die dionysische Entrücktheit scharf von dem apollinischen, meditativ geklärten Zustand geschieden, wiewohl die beiden einander ergänzen” (K3 117). See chapter 5 for more on Einstein and the Apollonian and the Dionysian. 29. “Die Bilder Picassos stehen zwischen den Polen der unbewußten Vision und der bewußten Gestaltung” (K3 111). “Diese Bilder [schwingen] zwischen den entscheidenden seelischen Polen. Die kollektiven, tektonischen Formen erheben die subjektiven Gesichte zu normativer Geltung und führen über das Stadium unbewußter Besessenheit zur bewußten Formbildung. Aus der Zone des Leidens gelangt man zu aktiver, willensmäßiger Gestaltung, somit enthalten diese Arbeiten das Spiel der entgegengesetzten seelischen Grundkräfte” (K3 116). Einstein’s contribution to the Documents Picasso issue of 1930 rehearsed the same argument in French. See “Picasso,” Documents 3 (1930): 155–57; 157. 30. Carl Einstein, “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928,” Documents 1 (1929): 35–38; 35. 31. “Dans ces tableaux, la construction est fondée sur une hallucination tectonique: mais on a seulement retenu les accents statiques, les élements qui pouvaient s’opposer à la fuite des visions. Nous constatons une discipline de l’hallucination: le flot des processus psychologiques est pour ainsi dire rejeté par la digue statique des formes.” See Einstein, “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928,” 35. The literature has made much of the crescendo of close-up illustrations of the MoMA Painter and His Model that accompany this essay. I consider them a strained effort at lending some visual interest to a histrionically busy painting. 32. For Picasso looking at Masson and Miró in the later 1920s, see Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 108–11; and, for the Milliner’s Workshop, Rosalind Krauss, “Life with Picasso: Sketchbook No. 92, 1926,” in Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, ed. Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher (New York: Pace Gallery, 1986), 113–23. 33. “Der heutige Künstler . . . verwebt seinem Streben das allzu Reaktive; seine nötige Kritik verstärkt das Analytische” (Carl Einstein, Negerplastik [Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915]; W1:234–52; 240). 34. “Il nous semble que les formes tectoniques, n’étant pas mesurables, sont les formes les plus humaines, parce qu’elles sont les signes d’un homme visuellement actif agençant lui-même son univers et refusant d’être l’esclave des formes données” (Carl Einstein, “Notes sur le cubisme,” Documents 3 [1929]: 146–55; 155). The relative fame of this essay, which is due to its title and availability in French, is somewhat undeserved. For Einstein on cubism, the first edition of The Art of the 20th Century and the Braque monograph are far superior texts. 35. On dream-work, condensation, and displacement, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in Standard Edition, 4:276–508.

Notes to Pages 172–177

285

36. “Auparavant, des plans transparents se coupaient en créant des formes discontinues: on crée aujourd’hui une certaine continuité des formes analogues. . . . Les figures inscrites, entièrement inventées, proviennent d’un au-delà formel. Toutes leurs parties sont données comme des analogies de la composition totale, les valeurs procédant de la télépathie des formes imaginaires analogues et des variations de ces formes” (Einstein, “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928,” 38). 37. Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 189– 223. Green associates Lévy-Bruhl on “primitive mentality” and Hubert and Mauss on magic with the art of Picasso in the late 1920s, and he pertinently refers to Einstein’s Documents essays in that context. 38. As we saw in chapter 2, Einstein had already incorporated Lévy-Bruhlian ideas into Negro Sculpture (1915). During his Paris period, Lévy-Bruhl’s name resurfaces on a reading list preserved in his estate (Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 240, fol. 46). That is no coincidence. As Green (Picasso, 200) has pointed out, at the moment of Documents Lévy-Bruhl was avidly studied by Leiris. And as Charlie Miller has shown, by 1929 a middle-brow critic like Adolphe Basler could readily associate Picasso with Lévy-Bruhl (and, in the same breath, with Freud). See C. F. B. Miller, “Interwar Picasso Criticism,” in Picasso Harlequin, ed. YveAlain Bois (Milan: Skira, 2009), 37–45. As for Mauss, a contributor to the Documents special issue on Picasso, Einstein seems to have discovered his work only during the later 1920s; perhaps at the suggestion of Leiris? 39. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910); Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 98–99. 40. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 99. 41. To give just one example, taken from Einstein’s Paris notes on animist art: “In these spiritualist cultures there is no sharp distinction yet between the living being—the occasion of the image—and the image as double; for both are traversed or inhabited by the same mana force. The mana of the dreamer or of the spirit of the dead may pass into the image double, which thanks to the principle of sympathetic magic possesses an energy akin to that of the living being.” (In diesen spiritualistischen kulturen scheidet man noch nicht scharf zwischen dem lebenden wesen, dem bildanlass und dem bildhaften doppelgaenger; denn beide sind von der gleichen manakraft durchstroemt oder bewohnt. Das mana des traeumenden oder des totengeistes kann in den doppelgaenger bild ueberstroemen, das dank der magischen sympathie eine den lebenden wesen verwandte energie besitzt; W4:429.) 42. Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie” (1902/3); Mauss and Hubert, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge, 2001), 134–35. 43. Mauss and Hubert, General Theory of Magic, 138, 144. 44. On the philosophy of immanent cause and its reemergence in modernity, see Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 96, 129 n. 42, and passim. 45. “Nous constatons une sorte d’animisme formel, à cela près que maintenant la force vivifiante ne vient pas des esprits, mais de l’homme même” (Einstein, “Notes sur le cubisme,” 155). To be sure, in this essay, formal animism is described as a hallmark of cubism circa 1911. But Einstein’s “Notes” are just one of many efforts in the surrealist ambience at retroactively surrealizing Picasso’s work of the 1910s. 46. “Picasso schuf damals [sc., around 1928] eine Reihe Figurenbilder, Geschöpfe einer formalen Mythologie, die fern von Kommentaren der formalen Immanenz entspringen” (K3 134). 47. Einstein, “Notes sur le cubisme,” 154 (“La condition première est la surface”), 155 (“champs de formes”). 48. I mean, for example, the white ground that locks around the black terminal of the J on the JOURNAL masthead in the famous Stockholm collage of 1912 (DR 528); and, a quarter-century later, the empty air that locks around the doorknob of a French window in the 1937 Seated Woman in Front of a Mirror at Düsseldorf (Z VIII 340). 49. Since the textual issues are so familiar from chapter 1, two brief examples from the “Nightingale” entry will suffice to make the case. To understand them properly, we should recall that, unlike in Goethe, Benjamin, or de Man, but just like in Hegel, whose name is dropped at one point, in Einstein the notions of symbol, metaphor, and allegory are used interchangeably as so many different techniques of comparative symbolism. Hence, to say that “the nightingale is an allegory, a game of hide-and-seek,” is to use an allegory—which is hiding in plain sight—in order to denounce allegory. And to call George Bernard Shaw “the nightingale of socialism” is to indulge in a comparatist excess as extreme as Calderón’s according to the Lectures on Aesthetics. In short: nothing new. See Carl Einstein, “Rossignol,” Documents 2 (1929): 117–18; 118 (“Le rossignol est une allégorie, un cachecache”; “M. Shaw—le rossignol du socialisme”). 50. “Es ist keine Sammlung litterarischer Umschreibungen. Diese Kunstwerke stehen da wie blutsverwandte Freunde.” “Oft vermag man nicht mehr die Kunstwerke zu sehen; sie sind im Schlamm der Umschreibungen versunken und erstickt. Welche elementare Widerstandsfähigkeit muß ein Cézanne wie der ‘Junge mit der roten Weste’ bergen, um . . . lebendig wie am ersten Tag zu atmen.” See Carl Einstein, “Porträt eines Sammlers” (1930), in W3:584–87; 585. My translations are from the posthumously published German text. “La collection Reber,” a

286

Notes to Pages 177–184

shorter French version, which does not include these passages, was published in L’intransigeant on April 4, 1930. Some of the Reber essay’s textual strategies are derivative of an earlier and superior piece: “Die Sammlung Henri Rouart,” Kunst und Künstler 11:4 (1913): 224–26; W1:149–53. 51. “Knowledge always proceeds by way of comparison, so that all known objects are connected to one another by relations of interdependency. With any two of them, it is impossible to determine which is designated by the name proper to it and is not a metaphor of the other, and vice versa. A man is a moving tree, just as much as a tree is a rooted man. In the same way, the sky is a rarefied earth, the earth a denser sky. And if I see a dog running, it is just as much the run that is dogging.” This is Leiris on metaphor in 1929; it might as well be Einstein on simile in 1911, for which see chapter 1. See Michel Leiris, “Métaphore,” Documents 3 (1929): 170; Leiris, “Metaphor,” in Brisées: Broken Branches, trans. Lydia Davis (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), 18. Leiris’s writerly debt to Einstein has been recognized by Kiefer, “Ethnologisierung.” 52. “Stürzend hängst Du / Verwirrt / Im Widerspruch / Von Bild und Grund. . . . Dich tragen nicht die prahlenden Bilder / Die über Bodenlosem segeln” (Carl Einstein, Entwurf einer Landschaft [Paris: Galerie Simon, 1930]; W3:73–82; 77). 53. Wilhelm Fraenger, Die Radierungen des Hercules Seghers: Ein physiognomischer Versuch, 2nd ed. (1922; Leipzig: Reclam, 1986). Hilmar Frank was the first to have noticed Einstein’s reliance on Fraenger; see his informative afterword: ibid., 96–116; 108. 54. But see now Christopher Heuer, “Entropic Segers,” Art History 35:5 (November 2012): 934–57; and Sebastian Egenhofer, “Grund und Territorium bei Hercules Segers,” in Der Grund: Das Feld des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm and Matteo Buroni (Munich: Fink, 2012), 251–76. In an argument that’s equally Heideggerian and Deleuzean, Egenhofer sees Segers’s landscapes as riven by an opposition between ground and territory: between, if I understand him correctly, nature as natura naturans (aka Erde or the BwO), and nature as domesticated by seventeenth-century Dutch political economy (aka Welt or the BwO striated). While Egenhofer does not discuss Einstein’s essay, his argument is germane to it. 55. “[Seghers] war Despot und Sklave seines Handwerks. So spaltet sich sein sensuelles Sein in die zwei Pole: Grausamkeit und Ohnmacht. Die Mittelzone ist verwöhntes Spiel. . . . Sein Einleben in die Gebirge war mehr ein Einsterben in starren Stein” (Fraenger, Radierungen, 10, 19). Given their semantic algebra, these sentences and many others like them could be straight out of Einstein’s early prose. 56. “Cette technique est la technique du zéro; une dialectique des formes sous le signe de la mort, une extermination réciproque des parties” (Carl Einstein, “Gravures d’Hercules Seghers,” Documents 4 [1929]: 202–8; 204; hereafter cited as G). 57. “Il s’agit d’un suicide par dérivation sur un motif étranger. Il se venge en mettant en miettes ses idées fixes, sous forme de paysages morcelés” (G 208). 58. On the world landscape, a genre to which artists from Patinir to Coninxloo made spectacular contributions, see Walter S. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth”: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 59. “Ces paysages sont dessinés avec des contours rapides et en même temps décomposés d’une manière craintive et pédante” (G 205). 60. “Le baroque en arrive à égarer dans un labyrinthe étroit” (G 204). 61. “Le vertige signifie la fatalité de la chute et en même temps le fait de rester cloué, c’est-à-dire une crampe entre deux contrastes et une annulation psychique” (G 205). 62. “Seghers répète les points, les feuilles, les pierres, c’est-à-dire qu’il veut arriver à une certaine constance par peur de la mort, et obtenir une durée par cette constance” (G 205, 208). 63. Carl Einstein, “Art des nomades de l’Asie centrale,” in Art des nomades de l’Asie centrale (Paris: Galerie de la NRF, 1931), 3–12; Einstein, “Zentralasiatische Nomadenkunst: Zur Ausstellung in der Galerie de la Nouvelle Revue Française,” Die Weltkunst 4:11 (March 15, 1931): 2–3; W3:191–93; hereafter cited as ZN. Since the French version dilutes the prominence of the Wanderschaft motif by a number of synonyms (“errants,” “nomades,” “migration”), I will be translating from the German text—with one exception, noted below. 64. “Nomadenkunst, ein Stil im Wandern erlebt” (ZN 191). 65. “Als Schutz des Kopfes vielleicht ein sassanidischer Menschenhelm . . . Ein Kranz fast skythischer oder thibetanischer Schreckmasken umzäumt den Kopf, die bösen Geister abzuwehren. . . . Wird der Häuptling geheilt oder stirbt er, der Kopf wird verbrannt. Vielleicht ist seine Medizin in den Geheilten übergeströmt oder der zauberische Kopf war kraftlos, oder vielleicht ist der Dämon der Krankheit in ihn entwichen” (ZN 191, 192). 66. “Diese Köpfe sind von Gebilden übersät, die endlose Wanderung anzeigen. Die geschwärzten Wangen sind wie von Wegen durchzogen. . . . Diese Köpfe blühen auf wie Mikrokosmen. Dämonen, Blumen und Tiere wachsen aus ihnen, sie ruhen im Strom der Meander, die endlos die Karawanen wandern. Wie die Jahre drehen, so drehen jene von Leh über Lhassa und Kaschgar, tausendfüßig vor und zurück. Die Wanderer kreisen von Kauf zu Verkauf und tauschen Ware und Formen. Sie bringen Türkise, kaufen Wolle und leihen Motive, die

Notes to Pages 184–187

287

ihnen zauberkräftig erscheinen und hämmern sie dem schwarz gefärbten, zylindrigen Kopf ein. . . . Also in künstlerischer Hinsicht wäre von einem Eklektizismus von Wanderern zu sprechen. Tierstil, da man mit Tieren lebt. Ornamente, da man in nie endendem Zug die Wege beschreitet. Pfade krümmen sich wie Tiere. Der Wind bildet Tierwolken am Himmel und aus der Wüste drohen geisterhaft Ornamente” (ZN 192–93). 67. To be precise, the meander ornament occurs on a second head, not illustrated here, which was published in the Weltkunst essay (ZN 197). 68. “Les hommes du désert veulent peupler le vide angoissant—la terreur de la vaste étendue vide qui les entoure les contraint à recouvrir têtes et bêtes de signes bavards—on tue le désert” (“Art des nomades de l’Asie centrale,” 10). 69. “Ces objets sont parsemés de signes. On pourrait presque parler d’un tatouage symbolique” (“Art des nomades de l’Asie centrale,” 10). 70. “Man verkenne nicht, daß Kunst dank der idiotischen Bewunderung geradezu Hemmung und Mittel zu Reaktion wird. Man muß diese Dinge in der Bewegung des Ganzen sehen. Bilder sind keine Bibelots, sondern geistige Werkzeuge, und ein erheblicher Teil der Bedeutung des Picassoschen Werkes besteht gerade in seiner Unfixiertheit, seiner Wandlungsfähigkeit” (K3 110). 71. “Wir erleben unser Weltbild pluralistisch, nämlich in Zeichen wechselnder Traum- und Formtypen, wir betonen an der Person stärker die vielfältige Schichtung und den Wechsel als ihre Einheit. Damit ist ein protheischer Typ gerechtfertigt” (K3 112). 72. “Man hält dem Wandlungsfähigen gern die bürgerlich feige Vorstellung von einem verharrenden, geschlossenen Ich entgegen, während gerade die dauernde Niederlage und Vernichtung der einheitlichen Person die Mannigfaltigkeit der Gesichte ermöglicht. Durch den Aberglauben an ein beständiges Ich versuchen wir die häufigen Niederlagen und Zersprengungen zu verbergen. Jedoch dieses Ich ist nur Rettung nach dem Fakt; denn die Seele lebt im dialektischen Kampf, in der Spannung der Gegensätze und in dauernder Selbstaufhebung” (K3 111). 73. For Picasso as Proteus, see André Level, Picasso (Paris: Crès, 1928), 49. On Zervosian Picasso criticism, see Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, 3–5. 74. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 336, #631. 75. “C’est cette vie intérieure qui fait l’unité de son œuvre en dépit de l’extrême diversité de son apparence” (Christian Zervos, “Les dernières œuvres de Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art 4:6 [1929]: 233–36; 234). 76. Gabriele Guercio has recently shifted Zervos on Picasso into the territory of Judith Butler’s gender performativity, which in turn is indebted to Nietzsche on doer and deed. As a result, according to Guercio’s Zervos, the catalogue raisonné performs the artist’s biography rather than representing it. That particular Zervos is intriguingly germane to Einstein. See Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence: The Artist’s Monograph and Its Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 264–70. 77. “Man erfüllt in einem Bild bestimmte seelische Tendenzen, jedoch die anderen nicht verwirklichten Schichten beanspruchen nun gleicherweise ihre Realisierung. Also wird man mit einer geradezu entgegengesetzten Lösung auf die vorhergegangene reagieren, um seine Person, die komplexer als das einzelne Bilderlebnis ist, einigermaßen zu verwirklichen” (Einstein, Georges Braque, 302–3). This is indeed a quote from Einstein’s Braque monograph. But as every reader of that book knows, much of it is only loosely related to its ostensible subject. There are plenty of other statements on Picasso’s doubleness; the present passage simply happens to be the most extensive one. Compare K3 131 on Picasso’s Doppelgerichtetheit, as well as Einstein’s brief remarks on his “double style” on a sheet of notes from the 1930s (Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 244; the sheet is variously numbered as fol. 4, 6, 9, and [?]12). 78. See Georges Bataille, “Soleil pourri,” Documents 3 (1930): 173–74; and Michel Leiris, “Toiles récentes de Picasso,” Documents 1 (1930): 57–70. Leiris also published a poem and a short exhibition announcement. For commentary, see C. F. B. Miller, “Bataille with Picasso: Crucifixion (1930) and Apocalypse,” in Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007); Miller, “Rotten Sun,” in Creative Writing and Art History, ed. Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 167–89; and Dawn Ades, “Picasso in Documents,” in Bois, Picasso Harlequin, 59–69. 79. For general observations on Einstein as image editor at Documents, see Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, 331–56; on Reber, see ibid., 308–30. For a history and catalogue of Reber’s stunning collection, see Uwe Fleckner and Peter Kropmanns, “Von kontinentaler Bedeutung: Gottlieb Friedrich Reber und seine Sammlungen,” in Die Moderne und ihre Sammler: Französische Kunst in deutschem Privatbesitz vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Andrea Pophanken and Felix Billeter (Berlin: Akademie, 2001), 347–402. Heike Neumeister has attributed other art-historical image juxtapositions in Documents to Einstein; see her “Von der Negerplastik zur ‘Ethnologie du Blanc’,” in Carl Einstein et Benjamin Fondane: Avant gardes et émigration dans le Paris des années 1920–1930, ed. Liliane Meffre and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer (Brussels: Lang, 2008), 61–83.

288

Notes to Pages 188–191

80. As many as three Documents double-page juxtapositions of paintings by Picasso recur, partly modified, in The Art of the 20th Century. Unlike in the Werke edition, in the 1931 original all pairs appeared on double pages, as they had in Documents. See K3 447–48, 463–64, 469–70; and Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1931), 330–31, 314–15, 336–37. 81. See Documents 3 (1930): 152–53; and Léal’s catalogue entry on the pastel in Collection Art Graphique: La Collection du Centre Pompidou—Musée National d’Art Moderne—Centre de Création Industrielle, ed. Agnès de la Beaumelle et al. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2008), 125. 82. In 1929, Zervos’s Cahiers d’Art Picasso captions got more and more comprehensive. First he gave the exact dates, where known; then he also added the dimensions. See Christian Zervos, “Picasso à Dinard, été 1928,” Cahiers d’Art 4:1 (1929): 5–11; Zervos, “Dernières œuvres,” 233–36. See also Green, Picasso, 3–12; and Green, “Zervos, Picasso and Brassaï, Ethnographers in the Field: A Critical Collaboration,” in Art Criticism since 1900, ed. Malcolm Gee (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 116–39. 83. According to Léal, the dimensions of the pastel, now in the Pompidou, are 64.2 x 50 cm, which is still close enough to the painting’s. Another double page in the Picasso issue, this one stranded in between the contributions by Henri-Charles Puëch and Roger Vitrac, also juxtaposes two paintings with identical dimensions (41 × 33 cm). Both are serially related double heads from 1926. See Documents 3 (1930): 124–25. 84. “[B]ei ihm [Picasso] ist von einem dialektischen Simultané von Lösung und Gegenlösung zu sprechen” (K3 118). 85. The contrast between double turmoil and unicitous self-composure in images of women is deeply embedded in Picasso’s oeuvre. I will mention just (1) the two loaves of bread that are weighing down on the head of a peasant woman in a spectacular painting from Gósol (1906; Z VI 735); (2) the two amorous apples on a dish that’s pressing down on an anthropomorphic jug in a famous still life of 1919 (not in Zervos; MP 64); (3) the autoerotic embrace of the charcoal arms that complicates the quiet intensity of the pastel face in Picasso’s 1921 portrait of Olga (not in Zervos; see Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996], 315). 86. The moment Hegel reappeared in Einstein’s thought was the moment he finally appeared in twentiethcentury French thought. And yet the Paris Hegel conjuncture of the early 1930s left no trace in his work. There is no reason to believe Einstein read Jean Wahl’s book on the Unhappy Consciousness (1929), or that he attended Kojève’s lectures at the Ecole Pratique. That disengagement might be telling. It’s not just that the lost wanderer needed no introduction to Hegel; one suspects he was flummoxed by the zealotry with which the recent converts embraced the nihilism to which he was finding himself reduced again. On Hegel in France, see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, 216–34. 87. “We cannot have the shape concept ‘square’ without other shape concepts, like ‘round’, which can be contrasted with it; we cannot have ‘red’ without ‘yellow’, ‘green’ or ‘blue’ or some such. . . . The red object is also essentially not-blue; it can only be grasped as red if it is grasped as not-blue.” What sounds likes Saussure on language is actually Charles Taylor on Dasein in the Science of Logic. As for poststructuralism, Hegel would have called Derrida’s différance the bad infinity of the labor of the negative; and he would have noted that, unlike in his own work, in Derrida that labor is confined to the restricted economy of language only. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 234; Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251–77. 88. As Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out when he insisted on the centrality of the Science of Logic over all other books; see his Hegels Dialektik: Sechs hermeneutische Studien, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1980), especially 65–85. In calling the Science of Logic an ontology rather than just an account of human thought, I am following Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s “Logic” (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), e.g., 115–17. 89. Dieter Henrich, “Hegels Grundoperation: Eine Einleitung in die Wissenschaft der Logik,” in Der Idealismus und seine Gegenwart, ed. Ute Guzzoni et al. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1976), 208–30; Henrich, “Formen der Negation in Hegels Logik,” in Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels, ed. Rolf Horstmann, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 213–29. 90. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Books, 1999), 113. “Die Bestimmtheit ist die Negation als affirmativ gesetzt” (Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 1.1, Die Lehre vom Sein [1832], ed. Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke [Hamburg: Meiner, 1985], 101). 91. Hegel, Science of Logic, 127. I have slightly rephrased the translation and corrected the second sentence, where Miller erroneously interpolated a second “und.” Here is the German original: “Die Grenze ist die Mitte zwischen beyden, in der sie aufhören. Sie haben das Daseyn jenseits von einander von ihrer Grenze; die Grenze als das Nichtseyn eines jeden ist das Andere von beyden” (Wissenschaft der Logik, 114).

Notes to Pages 191–207

289

92. See Documents 3 (1930): 148–49; K3 463–64; and Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 330–31. I would like to express my thanks to T. J. Clark, who alerted me to the importance of the Tehran Painter and His Model in a Picasso seminar we taught together at Berkeley. Clark has since published his thoughts on the painting in his Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to “Guernica” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). There, Clark has called the Painter and His Model an image of “the world before the mirror stage,” a diagram of “the momentary intensity of the totalizing image, and its ability to bind and focus the ‘total scene’ of desires and terrors” (181). On a fundamental level Clark’s psychoanalytic perspective is compatible with my Hegelian one. But as a fan of Foucault’s preface to the Anti-Oedipus I believe that this is precisely the problem: that like Hegel, Freud was a dialectician. It is saying something, not about the human condition but about much of the twentieth century’s notion of it, that the most influential account of the psyche it came up with should have been the primordially resentful narcissism of psychoanalysis. Hence the century’s infatuation with eros; hence its inability to imagine a modern version of agape, from which the Tehran painting is at the furthest imaginable remove. That is a questionable achievement. 93. See Elizabeth Cowling, “The Painter as Sculptor: Picasso in the Late 1920s,” in Bois, Picasso Harlequin, 71–87; and Peter Read, Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 160–79. 94. Or to use Kahnweiler’s well-known distinction: sculpture as “solid compact” on one hand, “drawing in space” on the other; see his Sculptures de Picasso (Paris: Chêne, 1948), s.p. 95. “Toute forme [est] équivalente à distinction, séparation, négation inquiète” (Einstein, “Picasso,” 156). The next sentence reads: “Par ce moyen, l’artiste arrive, non pas au vide et à la généralité de Hegel, mais à la création de visions concrètes et autonomes.” Note the mutual cancellation, by way of “not” and “but rather,” of emptiness and generality on one hand, concreteness and autonomy on the other. 96. What I call confronted profiles is a variation on Picasso’s double head. A double head consists of a frontal face and a profile; a confronted profile consists of two profiles facing one another. On the former, see Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 194–99. 97. For the series as published, see Documents 1 (1930): 65–69 (Z VII 309, Z VII 318, Z VII 308, Z VII 307, Z VII 310); compare K3 472. 98. John Richardson correctly identified painter and model but not the connection to the Tehran painting. Instead, he suggested, unconvincingly, that the figure of the painter echoes Matisse’s Goldfish and Palette of 1914. See John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 391 and 547 n.18. 99. On projective inhabitation, see Leo Steinberg, “Picasso’s Endgame,” October 74 (Autumn 1995): 105–22. 100. “Picasso est le signal de tout ce que notre temps possède de liberté” (“Picasso,” 155). “Picasso ist ein Signal, was diese Zeit an Freiheit besitzen könnte” (K3 134). “Picasso justifie pleinement cette maxime selon laquelle l’homme et l’univers sont journellement créés par l’homme” (“Picasso,” 157). My emphasis in the translations. 101. Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4, 14. 102. On Picasso’s dating of his works, see Green, Picasso, 4 and 246 n. 9. 103. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 109–10. 104. Adorno, for example, was unhappy with Hegel’s alleged conversion of the negation-of-the-negation into mere positivity. Derrida insisted that Bataille was still more negationist than Hegel; Nick Land, that he was still more negationist than Derrida. I have no horse in this race. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Continuum, 1973), 158–61; Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy”; Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 16–21. 5. Private Mythologies 1. The most comprehensive effort at making Einstein productive for an interpretation of Miró is by Hubertus Gassner, Joan Miró: Der magische Gärtner (Cologne: DuMont, 1994), 272–76. 2. For earlier assessments of Einstein and Klee, see Klaus H. Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 380–84; Charles Werner Haxthausen, “‘Die erheblichste Persönlichkeit unter den deutschen Künstlern’: Einstein über Klee,” in Die visuelle Wende der Moderne: Carl Einsteins “Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts,” ed. Klaus H. Kiefer (Munich: Fink, 2003), 131–46; Christine Hopfengart, Klee: Vom Sonderfall zum Publikumsliebling: Stationen seiner öffentlichen Resonanz in Deutschland 1905–1960 (Mainz: von Zabern, 1989), 64–92; Uwe Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert: Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie, 2006), 385–91; and Andreas Michel, “Sehen als Entdecken: Paul Klee im Werke Einsteins und Heideggers,” in Carl Einstein im Exil: Kunst und Politik in den 1930er Jahren, ed. Marianne Kröger and Hubert Roland (Munich: Fink, 2007), 187–200. 3. A sampling of surrealist texts on Klee was assembled in 1929 by Will Grohmann, who would soon publish his own monograph on the artist, into which he incorporated a watered-down version of Einstein’s argument;

290

Notes to Pages 208–212

see Grohmann, Paul Klee (Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 1929). On Klee and the surrealists, see Hopfengart, Klee, 64–92; Reinhold Hohl, “Paul Klee und der Pariser Surrealismus,” in Neue Sachlichkeit und Surrealismus in der Schweiz, 1915–1940 (Winterthur: Kunstmuseum, 1979), 147–54; and Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Handzeichungen, vol. 2, 1921–1936 (Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1984), 92–95. 4. Einstein announced his plan for the essay in a letter to Klee of February 1930; see Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, ed. Thomas Kain et al. (Jena: Stadtmuseum Göhre, 1999), 274. 5. Klee valued Einstein’s writing highly. He thanked him profusely after he had read an advance version of the 1931 chapter, and his sincerity is evident from similar statements to third parties. See Klee’s draft of a letter to Einstein and his postcard to Lily Klee of February 1932, reprinted in Paul Klee in Jena 1924, 280, 288. 6. “Charakteristisch bleibt für diese neuere Kunst, daß man die Wendung gegen den Rationalismus vollzogen hat. . . . Man könnte fast sagen, die Vernunft ist ein Mittel gegen die seelisch nicht angepaßten Schichten zu reagieren und diese an der Aktion zu verhindern. Vernünftige Auffassung der Existenz heißt eindeutiges und beweisbares Beschreiben dieser. Die Vernunft legt uns auf die Erlebnisse und Formen fest, die wir sichtbar beweisen können, indem wir z.B. ein Stilleben mit den tatsächlichen Früchten und Gefäßen vergleichen; so beschränkt sie das Schöpferische. Jedoch erleben wir dauernd elementare und unbeweisbare Vorgänge wie den Traum und das Wunder, worin die Seele anscheinend unbekümmert um eine physikalische oder äußerlich formhafte Richtigkeit handelt. Die Vernunft auferlegt dem Menschen eine idiotische Monotonie des Daseins und der Gestalten, die er im besten Fall variiert oder umordnet; eine schicksalhafte Begrenzung. Gegen solche Monotonie der Gestalten hatte man früher durch Mythen sich verteidigt, die Gestaltbildung war nicht ästhetisch, sondern religiös bedingt. Als soziales Symptom dieses Wunsches nach Abänderung der Typen stellen wir bei den Primitiven die Exogamie fest, die letzten Endes von einem Bedürfnis nach Abänderung des konstanten Typus bestimmt ist. Man will aus der Gefangenschaft der planmäßigen Standards sich lösen, unbekannte oder neue körperliche und seelische Kräfte hinzuerwerben. Als anderes Mittel hierzu diente die Verwandlung in Tiere, Pflanzen, Ströme usw. Der gleiche Trieb arbeitet, wenn man heute neue Gestaltzusammenhänge versucht; das Grunddrama der Metamorphose, des Gestaltwandels, wird von neuem gespielt. Dieses ist im Bild äußerst leicht möglich, da jede Form ungemein vieles bedeuten kann” (K3 263–64). 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 22. 8. “Damit aber wird die kuenstlerische Taetigkeit der passiven Zone entrissen und ihre optimistisch servile Haltung zertruemmert. Kunst wird zum menschlichen Mittel Realitaet zu bilden und abzuaendern, d.h.: sie ist nun von aktiven Dominanten bestimmt. Damit zeichnen wir den wichtigen moralischen Stellungswechsel an.” See Carl Einstein, “Gestalt und Begriff,” in W4:194–221; 214 (cited as GB); “Gestalt and Concept” (excerpts), trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 169–76; 175 (cited as GC). I have sometimes modified the October translation slightly. 9. See Deleuze’s seminal Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), especially 39–72. 10. See Einstein’s essay on “The Decline of Ideas in Germany,” a panorama of Weimar-period cultural conservatism that was originally published in 1924 in the Soviet journal Rossiya. It was subsequently retranslated into German as “Der Verfall der Ideen in Deutschland,” in W2:533–49. 11. For an important survey of the vast range of left-wing projects that took their cue from Nietzsche in the 1910s, see Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910–1920 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990). 12. “Every center of force adopts a perspective toward the entire remainder, i.e., its own particular valuation, mode of action, mode of resistance. . . . The world is only a word for the totality of these actions. Reality consists precisely in this particular action and reaction of every individual part toward the whole” (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage, 1968], 304, #567). 13. “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power,” Foucault famously argued; “there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case.” “But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.” See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 95, 96. As for Deleuze: “The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization, causing particles to spin off strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 270).

Notes to Pages 212–216

291

14. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 15. “Jede Realität ist lediglich ein Ausschnitt, der dauernd ausgewechselt und verschoben wird. Infolgedessen werden dauernd und gleichzeitig Gegenrealitäten gebildet, sodaß man Wirklichkeit als pluralistischen Komplex auffassen muß” (Carl Einstein, Georges Braque [typescript, early 1930s], in W3:251–516; 322 [hereafter cited as B]). Note how Einstein is trying to think together the Will to Power on perspectivism with William James’s Pluralistic Universe. 16. “Tatsächlich besteht über die bereits fixierte Wirklichkeit hinaus ein Bezirk der permanenten Schöpfung und Metamorphose, also der dauernden Revolte gegen das auferlegte Weltbild; denn alles Mythische bezeichnet die Differenz zwischen dem Menschen und dem gegebenen Sein” (B 399). 17. “Die nicht Konkordanz des Menschen mit der percepierten Welt als Grundfakt u die Metamorphose als Prototyp des menschlichen handelns d h das Abändern der gegebenen Situation” (Carl Einstein, undated notes, W4:425). 18. “Es [das Seelische] scheint mir wie jedes funktionell lebendige und wirkliche jede Fassung zu überschreiten, und zwar im Moment des Gefaßtwerdens. Sonst wäre es ja nicht Akt und Wirklichkeit, deren Signatif mir zu sein scheint, dass sie immer die Fassbarkeit überschreitet.” Carl Einstein, letter to Ewald Wasmuth, November 10, 1923, quoted in Sibylle Penkert, Carl Einstein: Beiträge zu einer Monographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 101–2. The letter is reproduced in full, with minor variations, in Klaus H. Kiefer, Avantgarde— Weltkrieg—Exil: Materialien zu Carl Einstein und Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona (Frankfurt: Lang, 1986), 60–61. 19. “If we eliminate these additions [sc., the concepts of number, thing, subject, etc.], no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their ‘effect’ upon the same. The will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos— the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge” (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 339, #635). 20. “Geschichte als stete[r] und peinliche[r] Wiederholung” (K3 92); “mechanische Wiederholung, die als Verteidigungsmittel gegen den Tod eingesetzt wird” (K3 93). 21. “L’évolution créatrice wird von einer force mortelle beständig begleitet u limitiert” (Carl Einstein, undated notes, Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 253, fol. 7). 22. “Geschichte ohne Katastrophe und Neues, ohne dessen Schreck und Glück wäre nur Wiederholung. . . . Überlieferung heißt dann Kopie und lebte von einer metaphysischen Substanz jenseits des Konkreten und des individualisierten Lebens” (K3 67). 23. “Throughout their history people have never once stopped constructing themselves, that is, continuously displacing their subjectivity, constituting themselves in an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that will never come to an end and which will never put us face to face with something that would be man. . . . That is what I tried to say when [in The Order of Things] I was talking about the death of man in a confused and simplifying fashion” (Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, vol. 4, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald [Paris: Gallimard, 1994], 75). 24. “Wie aber, wenn das Wirkliche ein wachsender und gleichzeitig absterbender Organismus wäre, d.h. Realität nicht nur etwas Gegebenes, sondern eine Anstrengung, eine Aufgabe” (B 323). 25. “Die Realitäten sind immer strukturierte Realitäten, sonst könnten wir innerhalb dieser weder agieren und Zwecke setzen noch sie fassen” (Carl Einstein, undated notes, W4:328–29). 26. Einstein presumably came across the issue of exogamy in the course of his research into totemism. His likeliest sources are J. G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1910); and Bernhard Ankermann, “Verbreitung und Formen des Totemismus in Afrika,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 47 (1915): 114–80. Ankermann, a distinguished Africanist and curator, had become friendly with Einstein in the 1910s. 27. “Just how deeply this need [sc., the need ‘to free ourselves from a bodily standard that has been imposed on us’] is rooted in us is proven by the existence of those impulses which are known as erotic perversions. That is, one is no longer content with the physiologically given reality of the body; in that sense, fantasy would be a sublimated perversion or, more importantly, a psychic reaction against erotic fixation.” (Wie tief dieses Bedürfnis [uns von dem auferlegten Körperstandard zu lösen] in uns verankert ist, beweisen die Triebtendenzen, die man als erotische Perversionen bezeichnet. Das heißt: man begnügt sich nicht mehr mit der physiologisch gegebenen Körperwirklichkeit und Phantasie wäre eine sublimierte Perversion oder, und dies ist wichtiger, eine seelische Reaktion gegen erotische Fixiertheit; K3 262.) 28. “The Negro sacrifices his body and intensifies it; his body is visibly dedicated to the universal, which acquires a palpable form on the body’s surface. . . . What a remarkable sort of consciousness this signifies: to conceive of one’s own body as an unfinished work, and to alter it in an unmediated fashion. Beyond the limits of the naturalistic body the tattooist reinforces the form sketched by nature, and the body drawing attains the peak of achievement when the natural form is negated and an imagined one surpasses it.” (Der Neger opfert seinen

292

Notes to Pages 216–218

Körper und steigert ihn; sein Leib ist dem Allgemeinen sichtbar hingegeben und dies erwirbt an ihm greifbare Form. . . . Welch Bewußtsein heißt es, den eigenen Körper als unvollendetes Werk zu begreifen, den unmittelbar man verändert. Über den naturalistischen Leib hinweg verstärkt der Tätoweur die von der Natur skizzierte Form und die Körperzeichnung erreicht ihre Höhe, wenn die Naturform negiert wird und eine imaginierte sie übertrifft.) See Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915); W1:234–52, 250; Einstein, “Negro Sculpture,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, October 107 (Winter 2004): 124–38; 137 (translation modified). 29. “In sexual life, frequently not all erotic drives are properly abreacted, and the constant body is barely able to satisfy the polymorphous, ever-changing psychic tendencies. With this, sexual constancy is torn apart. . . . So it is one renders oneself independent from the constraints of anatomy, for which a manifold of examples can be found in myth.” (Im Sexuellen werden häufig nicht alle erotischen Triebe abreagiert und der konstante Körper kann die polymorphen, wechselnden seelischen Tendenzen kaum erfüllen. Damit wird die sexuelle Konstanz zerrissen. . . . Man macht sich also von der anatomischen Gebundenheit unabhängig; die Mythen gewähren vielfache Beispiele hierfür; B 399–400.) Einstein goes on to list “bisexuality” and “hermaphroditic gods” among these examples. 30. “Knowledge as description belongs to the naturalistic era of epistemology. Knowledge as creation and transformation, by contrast, insists on hypothesis as the foundation of knowing. Hypothesis creates [dichtet] a fact that is specific to knowledge.” (Erkenntnis als Beschreibung gehoert der naturalistischen Phase des Erkennens an. Erkenntnis als Schoepfung und Umwandlung betont vor allem die Hypothese als Grundlage des Erkennens. Mit der Hypothese dichtet man einen der Erkenntnis eigenen Fakt; GB 207; not in GC.) This argument is a radicalization of the much tamer theory delivered in Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis, which embraces hypothesis as a merely useful tool of generalization beyond established facts. Einstein went on to criticize that tameness (GB 209), though typically without naming names. Compare Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (1902; London: Scott, 1905), 140–59. 31. In animism, “a human being feels a deeper kinship to the animal, the rock, the rivers and trees than to another human being. That is, he is dominated by an impulse to destroy his own personality, and he does not believe in the constancy of his own body. He is not content with a predetermined gestalt but instead seeks an intensification of transformative relations. He does not desire rational continuity but gestalt expansion and metamorphotic identity.” (Dort fühlt sich ein Mensch dem Tier, Felsen, Flüssen oder Bäumen tiefer verwandt als einem anderen Menschen. Also ein Bedürfnis, die eigene Person zu zerstören, beherrscht ihn, und er glaubt nicht der Konstanz seines Körpers. Er begnügt sich nicht mit der fixierten Gestalt, sondern wünscht eine Steigerung wandelhafter Bezüge. Er sucht nicht die rationale Kontinuität, sondern die Gestalterweiterung und metamorphotische Identität; B 406.) 32. “Nehmen wir zum Beispiel das Wunder; also zwei Zeitpunkte, die in unserm heutigen Empfinden nicht in Uebereinstimmung gebracht werden können. Man hatte eben den Mut zu einer Beobachtung, die über die übliche psychologische Methode herausgeht. Kein Mensch wird leugnen, daß diese Leute Wunder erlebt haben. Aber irgendwohin müssen doch solche Kräfte geraten sein. Ich neige nun garnicht zur Mystik oder soner religiösen Kiste; sondern meine, man müsste sehen, ob wir innere Vorgänge richtig analysieren” (Carl Einstein, draft of a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, April[?] 1923, in W4:153–61; 156). 33. Durkheim’s monumental study is a very shadowy presence in Einstein’s writings. But for Einstein to argue that “metamorphosis is the classical drama of totemism” is to echo Durkheim’s definition of certain totem rituals as “dramatic performances that have no purpose other than to make the clan’s mythical past present in people’s minds.” See Carl Einstein, “André Masson, étude ethnologique,” Documents 2 (1929): 93–102 (“la métamorphose est le drame classique du totémisme”); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 379. 34. “Der Mythus ist Ausdruck der Differenz des Menschen mit dem Realen” (GB 211; not in GC). 35. That is what categorically distinguishes Einstein’s notion of myth from earlier models in the ethnographic literature, including those of Edward Tylor and J. G. Frazer, who in one way or another had considered ancient myth a prefiguration of modern “reason.” See Robert A. Segal, Theorizing about Myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 41. 36. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (Munich: Hoheneichen, 1930). 37. Konrad Farner, lecture on Paul Klee, Kunstmuseum Luzern, May 23, 1936; partly reprinted in Paul Klee: In der Maske des Mythos (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1999/2000), 160–61; 160; and Otto Karl Werckmeister, “‘Ob ich je eine Pallas hervorbringe?!’,” ibid., 136–62; 146. 38. On palingenetic myth, see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); and Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Notes to Pages 219–225

293

39. “Die Nachahmung eines Mythus waere hoechst unmythisch und durchaus rational” (GB 213; GC 175). 40. “Welchen Mutes bedarf es, das konventionell Wirkliche dauernd zu vernichten und dadurch sich zu zwingen—auf schmaler Planke treibend—unablässig neue Realität zu erzeugen. D.h., man beschleunigt Tod und Geburt des Wirklichen und vernichtet in beständiger Unruhe die eigene Person. Also hier wird der Tod zum Zauberer des Neuen, und zum Erzeuger des Mythus” (B 406). 41. Georges Bataille, “Animaux sauvages,” Documents 6 (1929): 333–34; and Bataille, “The Pineal Eye,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 79–90. 42. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen: Zur Verteidigung des Realen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973). On BEB II, see now the Einstein chapter in Devin Fore’s Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 187–242. 43. The futurism chapter of Einstein’s survey (K3 170–83), written from the hindsight of 1931, is a very wellinformed capsule account of the movement’s history. Einstein insisted on futurism’s seminal importance but acknowledged that it had since given in to the temptations of fascism, technophilia, and the origin myth of nationalist history. 44. “Mit der Hypothese schaltet man das konventionell Wirkliche aus und setzt an die Stelle des Gegebenen einen gedichteten Fakt, wodurch ein geradezu entfesseltes Erkennen ermoeglicht wird. Dieses dient nun wie das Gedicht dem Aufbau der Zeugung neuer Realitaet oder Gegenwirklichkeiten” (GB 208; not in GC). “Der Mythus ist ein Element des Wirklichen, und die Dichtung wird zum Ursprung des Realen” (“Braque der Dichter,” Cahiers d’Art 1/2 [1933]: 80, 82; W3:246–50; 250). 45. Paul Eluard, “Poetic Evidence,” trans. George Reavey, in Surrealism, ed. Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 171–83. 46. “In der spaetantiken Aesthetik, bei Platon oder Plotin, galten die verachteten Kunstwerke nur insofern, als sie an der Idee teil hatten. . . . Aristoteles brachte die Kunst in voellige Abhaengigkeit vom rational Realen. Das Kunstwerk ist Nachahmung und womoeglich Nachahmung einer Nachahmung; somit ist alles Spontane oder Mythische ausgeschlossen. . . . In jedem Fall wird eine Kongruenz versucht, gleichgueltig ob mit der Idee oder mit dem Wirklichen” (GB 213; GC 175). 47. “Realismus gewinnt hier einen tieferen Sinn, nämlich nicht mehr den des Nach- oder Abbildens, sondern des Neubildens eines konkret Wirklichen” (K3 262). 48. “Gestalten [werden] durch den Formcharakter entfernteren Gebilden angenähert und verbunden” (K3 264). “Formen ermöglichen ungemeine Annäherungen und Verwandlungen der Gestalt in anscheinend Wesensfremdes. . . . Form heißt nun mehr als nur ästhetische Erregung: nämlich Kraft des Sichverwandelns und Einheit des metamorphotischen Prozesses” (K3 265). 49. “Autonom, d.i. selbstgemäß” was the curt definition Einstein came up with as early as 1913. See Carl Einstein, “Über Paul Claudel,” Die weißen Blätter 1:3 (1913): 289–97; W1:186–93; 187. 50. In the draft of his letter to Kahnweiler, Einstein mentioned Riemann in almost but not quite the same breath as cubism. While there is no reason to believe that Einstein grasped the technical aspects of Riemannian geometry at even a beginner level of competence, he seems to have understood its ontological implications well enough. To Einstein, the Riemann manifold and cubist painting were two ways, autonomous and homologous, of formalizing spatial transformations without embedding them in the a priori coordinate space of Descartes and Newton. On Einstein and science, see Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 145–49. 51. “Dann begegnen wir eigentümlichen Gestalten, die in fahler, lichtloser Wüste treiben; oder anderen, deren Facetten sonnenhaft funkeln, d.h. in solche Gestalten sind Gestirne verkerkert, vielleicht ein Sternahn, der sich in ihnen verkörpert. Menschen vermögen als Pflanzen zu treiben oder mineralisch zu ruhen, als Gestirne zu leuchten oder als Monde zu verlöschen. Das heißt: der Mensch ist der Akrobat der welthaften Zustände, die ihm entstrahlen. Darum ist es ihm Geschick, jeglichem Zustand und Durchgang sich zu unterwerfen; der Mensch ist das geträumte Spiel unablässiger Metamorphose” (K3 268). 52. “Bewegte Formen mögen Luft, Feuer oder Wasser entstammen und so werden die Zeichen seelischer Erregungen überraschend den alten Elementen verbunden. Man erfährt geradezu eine Wiederkehr der alten Lehre von den Elementen, denen der Mensch und alle Gestalten entstammen. Die Gestalt wäre nun lediglich eine Synthese verschiedener, kosmischer Kräfte, aus deren Spannung und Verschiedenheit Seele und Person entstehen” (K3 265). 53. “Im passiven Niederschreiben äußert sich die Leidensfähigkeit, die mediale Kraft; also pflanzenhaft willige Formen werden entstehen. Im Tektonischen versuchen wir gegen den schweifenden Traum uns zu verteidigen, ihm gewaltsame Grenzen und Ecken aufzuzwingen. . . . Die pflanzenhaften Bezirke des Kalligramms zeigen Menschen als Gewächse, treibend im Wind oder von tastendem Gefühl zerzaust, durchaus den Elementen preisgegeben. In anscheinend geometrisierenden Gestalten will man widerstehendere bewußtere Figuren hinstellen,

294

Notes to Pages 225–240

gewissermaßen Kristallwesen, worein Gesteine und Verharren projiziert sind. . . . Der Pflanzenmensch wäre vielleicht der unbewußt Träumende, während die tektonischen Figuren Ergebnisse der Traumabwehr und des Willens sind” (K3 264). 54. “Sind Pflanze, Mineral, Gestirn und Mensch einander fast gleichgeordnet, so kann an Stelle eines Menschen eine vermenschlichte Pflanze als Akteur treten oder ein Gefühl überträgt sich in die Struktur eines Minerals” (K3 265). 55. “Andererseits gewinnen nun aber auch Pflanzen und Gesteine eine metamorphotische Gewalt, d.h. sie verwandeln sich und wirken in anderen und neuen Wesen und gewinnen somit eine gleichlebendige Kraft wie der Mensch. Die positivistische Rangordnung vom Bewußtsein aus ist heftig erschüttert” (K3 265). 56. Carl Einstein, “Giorgio de Chirico,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 31:4 (1928): 259–66; W2:511–14; 511; Einstein, “Aphorismes méthodiques,” Documents 1 (1929): 32–34; Einstein, “Methodological Aphorisms,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 107 (Winter 2004): 146–50; 149. 57. Leopold Zahn, Paul Klee: Leben, Werk, Geist (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1920). For a discussion of this book and a survey of contemporary Klee criticism, including the cosmology trope, see Hopfengart, Klee, especially 32–36, 41–42; and Otto Karl Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 232–35. 58. Michel Leiris, “Notes sur deux figures microcosmiques des XIVe et XVe siècles,” Documents 1 (1929): 48–52. On Einstein, Leiris, and Saxl, see Spyros Papapetros, “Between the Academy and the Avant-Garde: Carl Einstein and Fritz Saxl Correspond,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 77–96. 59. This brief historical sketch is indebted to Gernot Böhme and Hartmut Böhme, Feuer, Wasser, Erde, Luft: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elemente, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2004). 60. “Man träumt sich dank des medialen Schreibens in die tastende Pflanzenwelt zurück, oder kraft des Tektonischen erreicht man die langsamen Bezirke des Mineralischen, wo Gebilde eigenwillig kantig sich bauen” (K3 265). 61. “Man verbleibt nicht im schweifenden Dionysischen, sondern entwickelt es zu apollinischer Präzision” (K3 117). 62. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (1886), reprinted in Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972), vol. 3.1:9–156; 58; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 51, where Versinnlichung is translated as “concrete representation.” 63. Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie, 57–58; Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 50. 64. “Aus der Zone des Leidens gelangt man zu aktiver, willensmäßiger Gestaltung, somit enthalten diese Arbeiten das Spiel der entgegengesetzten seelischen Grundkräfte” (K3 116). 65. Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie, 33; Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 29. 66. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 62–63. 67. Kahnweiler pointed this out in a letter to Sibylle Penkert; see Penkert, Carl Einstein, 47. 68. This paragraph summarizes some of the main points of Fiedler’s most important art-theoretical essays; see Konrad Fiedler, “Über die Beurteilung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,” in Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Gottfried Boehm, 2nd ed. (Munich: Fink, 1991), 1:1–48; and Fiedler, “Moderner Naturalismus und künstlerische Wahrheit,” ibid., 81–110. It is because of his notion of realism as poiesis that recent writers sympathetic to Deleuze have intuitively found Fiedler compelling. Effectively, like Einstein before them, they have misread him productively. See Ingeborg M. Rocker, “Fugitive Realities: Konrad Fiedler,” Analecta Husserliana 81 (2003): 155–73. 69. “Fordert man jedoch vom Bilden und den Bildern die Kraft, das Wirkliche zu erzeugen, so kann man dies in den Satz fassen: Bilder sollen nicht darstellen, sondern sein” (B 322). 70. The arrow in Klee is a subject unto itself; see Andeheinz Mößer, “Pfeile bei Klee,” Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch 29 (1977): 225–35. Klee described one of the arrow’s purposes in the sense I mean here, namely, as an instrument in a visual power exchange between active artwork and passive beholder: “I strike with the arrow, the observer is struck. The productive individual strikes with the arrow, the receptive individual is struck by the arrow” (Paul Klee, Notebooks, vol. 1, The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim [London: Lund Humphries, 1961], 412). 71. Discussing Forest Architecture as part of a series of works he calls “parallel figurations,” Christian Geelhaar suggested that the repetition of parallel lines as device originated in The Beetle, a Düreresque nature study of 1925 in which the ribs of a leaf are multiplied as repetitions beyond its contour. I would argue that even if Klee thus derived his device from a natural motif, its referential ties are severed where, as in Forest Architecture, it is dovetailed with the cubist grid. See Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1973), 98–106. 72. The most concise account of Klee’s relation to cubism remains Clement Greenberg’s. Greenberg argued that cubism taught Klee to preserve the “unity of the picture surface, and showed him how this was best done by working with flat or very shallow planes. Had he not had the plastic discipline of cubism at hand, had he had to

Notes to Pages 240–251

295

organize his figurations by situating them in illusionistic depth, he would have produced little more than caricature. At the same time cubism sanctioned the very liberties of his imagination.” Greenberg here zeroes in on the double impact of cubism on Klee that Einstein noticed as well. On one hand, the cubist grid helped Klee tighten up his imagination; on the other, it enabled him to spin forth gestalts out of it. See Clement Greenberg, “An Essay on Paul Klee” (1950), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3–13; 6. See also Regine Prange, “Das utopische Kalligramm: Klees ‘Zeichen’ und der Surrealismus,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Helfenstein (Bern: Stämpfli, 2000), 204–25; 216–21. 73. On the transformation rather than abandonment of cubism in the work of Masson and Miró, see Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 253–71. 74. “Infolgedessen ist in jede Form eine Anzahl gegenständlicher Ausdeutungen zu betten, d.h. um Formen eindeutig zu machen muß man diese zu einem bestimmten, gegenständlichen Zusammenhang vergenauern” (K3 264). 75. On the purpose of this text as a public-self-definition by Klee at a crucial moment of doubt, see Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 76–80; and Christian Geelhaar, “Journal intime oder Autobiographie? Über Paul Klees Tagebücher,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk, ed. Armin Zweite (Munich: Galerie + Edition A, 1979), 246–60; 255–58. 76. Paul Klee, diary entry, in Zweite, Paul Klee, 257. 77. Greenberg, “An Essay on Paul Klee,” 12–13. 78. “Eliotic Trotskyism” is the well-known phrase T. J. Clark has coined to describe Greenberg’s project of a high-cultural aesthetic grounded in a left-wing politics. See his “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9:1 (September 1982): 139–56. 79. “Klee betrachtet mit feinem Humor die eigene Vision, er nimmt nicht nur Abstand vom Gegebenen, sondern dies lehrt ihn auch, eigene Gesichte mit spöttischem Humor anzuschauen. So verteidigt er sich gegen visionäre Ekstase weniger mit Verallgemeinerungen als mit einem Humor, der auch die erfundene Welt als nur vorläufig bezeichnet” (K1 141). 80. “Humor mag ein Alleinsein, eine Ferne des Menschen anzeigen. Die Beziehungen zu gegebener Existenz sind erschüttert, vielleicht aus Angst und Bedrängtheit, in jedem Fall aus einem Motiv der Abwehr nimmt man Distanz” (K3 266). 81. James Cowles Prichard, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1835), 405–67. 82. Charles W. Haxthausen, “Zwischen Darstellung und Parodie: Klees ‘auratische’ Bilder,” in Bätschmann and Helfenstein, Paul Klee, 9–27. 83. Derrida explicitly mentions the painted stretcher nails in a Klee as an example of parergonality; see Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 304. 84. See Lothar Schreyer, Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus (Munich: Langen & Müller, 1956); quoted after Felix Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Braziller, 1962), 183–84. 85. “Klee schafft eine kleine Zwischenwelt, die gewiß nie zum Schulhaften erhoben werden soll, deren skurriles Frommsein jedoch nicht verleugnet werden darf ” (K1 142). 86. “Mythe und Welt mögen sich heute kaum verbinden, sondern in ironischem Kampf spotten sie einander, weil wir noch nicht ihre Einheit zu finden vermögen” (K1 143). 87. Carl Einstein, “Der Tapezier,” März 5:4 (1911): 192–94; W1:83–85; 84. 88. “Der private Typus ist schwer bedroht, da die materiell kollektiven Kräfte von Staat und Wirtschaft den widerstrebenden Einzelnen seelisch zu expropriieren versuchen. Nun wird der Einzelne in Bezirke flüchten, die von der Gemeinschaft schwerlich kontrolliert und erfaßt werden, nämlich in die Höhlen des geheim Unbewußten; diese Kräftefelder wird man zunächst gegen kollektive Eingriffe leidenschaftlich verteidigen und den Druck der Standardisierung abweisen, um in eigenen Mikrokosmus sich zu verschließen” (B 279). 89. “Jedoch ist solche Schöpfung durchaus alter Sage entgegengesetzt. Sie wird in der Isolierung gezeugt und wächst in der Abtrennung vom Milieu, während früher der Mythus Ausdruck des Kollektiven war. Also der neue Mythus ist als Revolte zu werten, während er vordem Erlebnis und Erbschaft der Allgemeinheit bewahrte” (K3 259–60). 90. Paul Klee, lecture at Jena Kunstverein (1924), in Das bildnerische Denken: Schriften zur Form- und Gestaltungslehre, ed. Jürg Spiller (Basel: Schwabe, 1956), 81–95; 95.

Copyright and Photographic Credits

2.1: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy of Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH. 2.2: Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2.4: Photo: Courtesy of Gebr. Mann Verlag / Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft. 2.5: Photo: Hannu Aaltonen / Finnish National Gallery. 3.1, 3.1a: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 3.2, 3.2a: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven. 3.3, 3.3a: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Walter Klein. 3.4, I, II (top left): © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection. 3.5, I, II (top right), III (right): © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler. 3.6: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Snark / Art Resource, NY. 3.7, I, II (lower left): © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Philippe Migeat © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 3.8: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. 3.9: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jean-Claude Planchet © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 3.10, 3.10a, III (left): © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler. 3.11, 3.11a: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York). 3.12: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 3.13: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 3.15: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 3.16, 3.16a, 3.16b, 3.16c, I, II (lower right): © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Cantz Medienmanagement, Ostfildern / Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, Beyeler Collection. 3.17: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: B. Hatala: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 3.18: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 3.19: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo. 3.20: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Anne Hansteen Jarre © Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design / The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. 3.21, 3.21a: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: R.G. Ojeda © RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 4.1: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image

298

Copyright and Photographic Credits

Source: Art Resource, NY. 4.2: Photo: SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 4.3: © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 4.4: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. 4.5: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: J.G. Berizzi © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 4.6, 4.6a: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © CNAC / MNAM / Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 4.7: Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 4.8: Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 4.10: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 4.11: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 4.12: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. 4.13: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Beatrice Hatala © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 4.14: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Beatrice Hatala © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 4.15: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library International. 4.16: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. 4.17: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: R.G. Ojeda © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. 4.18: © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 5.1: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 5.2: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 5.3, 5.3.a: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 5.4: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 5.5: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. 5.6: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image source: Art Resource, NY. The original version of parts of chapter 5 is copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abstraction, abstract art, 4, 5, 164–65, 171 action and reaction, 167, 172, 173, 210–11, 212, 215, 221, 229, 246 Adorno, Theodor W., 210, 289n104 Die Aktion (journal), 2, 12, 44–46, 49–51, 178, 250, 256n12, 265n74 Albers, Josef, 164, 167, 171; Tectonic Group, 165 Alberti, Leon Battista, 58–59, 267n104 allegory, 32, 33, 262n23, 285n49 Alpers, Svetlana, 138–39, 149–51, 204, 280n68 analogy, 172, 173 anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17, 44, 46, 54, 126, 243, 256n1, 259n38, 280n70 animism, 171–76, 190, 192, 206, 216, 224, 285n41, 292n31 Aristotle, 222 Arp, Jean, 5 art criticism, 2–3, 22, 59, 67, 90; Einstein’s transition to, 22, 57–58; and ekphrasis, 22, 269n11; and writing, 18–21, 178–81, 182–85, 249–50, 268n2 art history: African art, 62–64; at Documents, 177; Mesopotamian art, 159–65; nomad art, 182–85; and the real, 215–17; Segers, 178–81

automatic drawing, 166, 167, 170, 230, 231. See also psychogram autonomy, 35, 224 Badiou, Alain, 204–5 Baroque, 78, 180 Barr, Alfred, 10 Bassani, Ezio, 62 Baßler, Moritz, 47, 259n41, 265n74, 269n17 Bastian, Adolf, 269n13 Bataille, Georges, 5, 8, 18, 24, 157, 158, 159, 187, 205, 213, 219–20, 221, 245, 282nn1, 2, 283n4, 289n104 Baxandall, Michael, 57, 267n104 Benjamin, Walter, 45, 177, 256n3, 262n23, 265n74, 285n49 Benn, Gottfried, 3, 47 Bergson, Henri, 74, 75, 84–86, 87, 94, 121, 160, 190, 214, 274nn98, 99, 279n58 Bernstein, Eduard, 13, 45, 49, 257n13 Bildungsroman, 14, 15, 21, 257n21 Blei, Franz, 2, 55–56, 261n14 Bloch, Ernst, 68 Der blutige Ernst (Bloody Serious) (journal), 3 Boehm, Gottfried, 276n4

300

Index

Bois, Yve-Alain, 105, 278–79n41 Bonnard, Pierre, 127 Bourdelle, Emile-Antoine, 60 Brancusi, Constantin, 275n111 Braque, Georges, 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 19, 23, 91–93, 127, 128, 129, 144, 154–56, 258n27, 278nn37, 38; eroticism, 98, 105–15; ground, Grundkontrast (foundational contrast), 91–93, 104, 110–13, 122, 155; image-body, 24, 104–15, 119–21; image-object, 23, 104–5; open cylinder, 23, 98–105, 108, 110, 111, 115, 119–20, 136, 141, 279n46; simultaneity, 115–24; in the studio, 114–15, 114, 140; subobjective function, 99, 110; surface and volume-seeing, 99, 100, 104–13, 122; visual ethics, 105, 110; Castle at La Roche-Guyon, 100–104, 102; The Emigrant (The Portuguese), 110, 111–15, 112, 121, 128, 129–35, 141, 155, 279n49; Fruit Dish, 99–100, 100; Girl with a Cross, 115, 119; Man with a Guitar (New York), 105, 110; Man with a Violin (Zurich), 108–11, 109; Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 139, 139; Still Life with Harp and Violin (so-called), 104–8, 106, 110, 113, 121; Still Life with a Violin (so-called), 110, 115, 118, 119–21, 124; Woman Reading, 105. See also cubism; Picasso Braun, Christoph, 263n32 Brescianino, Andrea del, 163; Venus and Two Putti, 164 Breton, André, 4, 158, 207 Brummer, Joseph, 62 Bruni, Leonardo, 58 Burgess, Gelett, 98 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 33, 36, 285n49 calligram, 231, 232, 238 Čapek, Milič, 272n58 capitalism, 12, 13, 15, 250–51, 256n12 causality: in art history, 63–65; in autobiography and in history, 27–29, 257nn21, 23, 260n6; in Einstein’s Picasso texts, 189; in modernity, 9–10; in politics, 13–15; in sculptural experience, 71–85; in skepticism, 269n18 Cervantes, Miguel de, 52 Cheng, Joyce, 270n21 Chokwe people, 64; ritual sculpture, 64, 66, 67–68, 82–84, 86–87, 88–89, 182, 183, 270nn20, 27, 275n1 Clark, T. J., 279n41, 289n92, 295n78 classicism, 59–61 Claudel, Paul, 35

collectivity, 7, 10, 15–16, 43, 167, 204, 205, 208, 244, 250–51 colonialism, 65 communism, 6, 12, 54, 55 Communist International, 54 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 3, 4, 56, 267n101 Confederación Nacional del TrabajoFederación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI), 7, 9, 256n1 conservatism, 13–14, 161, 163 constructivism, 4, 17–18, 259n38 Contenau, Georges, 161 cosmology, 1, 6, 224–33. See also myth; ontology Crary, Jonathan, 212 creation, creativity, 10, 19–21, 29–31, 187, 203–4, 219, 222, 259n38, 261n9. See also ontology; origin Crow, Thomas, 129 cubism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 16, 67, 91–156, 164–65, 168, 170–71, 173, 176, 208, 217, 230, 231, 240, 275n1, 294–95n72; eroticism, 98, 105–15, 129–43, 144–54; ethics of function, 93–98, 105, 110, 122–23, 136, 145; ground, Grundkontrast (foundational contrast), 23–24, 91–93, 97, 98; image-body, 98; image-object, 96–98; originality, 91–93; salon cubism, 258n72; simultaneity, 115–24; volume-seeing, 96–98. See also Braque; Picasso Dada, 3, 54, 267n99 Daix, Pierre, 282n97 Dandyism, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 12 death: as origin of myth, 219–21; struggle against, 160–65, 165–67, 214 death drive, 159, 161, 164, 165, 181, 283n7 Delaunay, Robert, 121 Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 86, 167, 190, 210, 211, 212, 232, 272n61, 274nn98, 99, 101, 286n54, 290n13, 294n68 Denis, Maurice, 60–61 Derrida, Jacques, 262n23, 264n51, 288n87, 289n104, 295n83 Descartes, René, 228 determination, 30, 35, 40, 50. See also dialectic; Hegel; negation dialectic, 17, 24, 34–35, 37, 42, 55, 155, 181, 187, 189, 190–91, 192–96, 204–6, 262nn23, 29, 263n32, 267n92, 289n92. See also Hegel; negation; ressentiment

Index Documents (journal), 5–6, 24, 64, 157–59, 204–6, 220, 228, 257n23, 282nn1, 2; Einstein as image editor, 187–89, 287n79, 288n80; Einstein’s texts, 176–81; Picasso illustrations, 191–92, 198, 204 doubleness and unicity: in cubism, 92, 97, 98, 128, 147, 154–56; in Documents double pages, 24, 187–89, 191, 250, 288nn80, 83; in Einstein’s texts, 21–22, 39, 55, 177, 181, 250, 267n98, 285n41; in Hegel, 34, 190–91; in Picasso, 158, 176, 186–87, 190, 192–203, 288n85; in Picasso’s double style, 24, 189, 191, 204, 287n77; in Schelling, 50; in sculpture, 61, 90. See also Einstein as writer; simultaneity Duchamp, Marcel, 278n41, 280n63 Durkheim, Emile, 292n33 Durruti, Buenaventura, 7 Eckhart, Meister, 28, 37, 261n9, 273n83 Egenhofer, Sebastian, 286n54 Einstein, Carl, as writer: comparison and simile, 31–36, 38, 39–42, 47, 49–50, 51, 57, 177, 184; diction, 265–66, n76; discourse and writing (lexis and syntax), 11, 18–19, 21, 22, 39, 50, 52, 57–58, 176, 178, 181, 249, 257n18, 257n22; fanatic humorism, 53, 55–56, 176–77, 249; paraphrase, 20–21, 39, 40, 41, 176–77; prewar prose, 18, 21–22, 27–30, 36–44; privatives, 39, 42, 42, 63, 264n60, 276n4; relation to politics, 44–49, 54–57, 265n74; rhetorical thesaurus, 47, 50; style, 39–44; Wortfolge (word sequence), 41–42, 48, 57, 63, 89. See also art criticism; art history; doubleness and unicity; essence; ground; indifference point; infinity; personas; simultaneity; symbolism; zero Einstein, Carl, works by: Afrikanische Plastik (African Sculpture), 64–67, 270n22; “An die Geistigen!” (“To the Intellectuals!”), 54–55; “Antike und Moderne” (“Antiquity and Modernity”), 263n32; “Aphorismes méthodiques” (“Methodological Aphorisms”), 226; “Der Arme” (“The Pauper”), 49–52, 61, 63, 89, 154, 155, 178, 187, 190, 249; “Art des nomades de l’Asie centrale” (“The Art of the Nomads of Central Asia”), 286n63; BEB II, 6, 9, 52, 221, 256n10; “Bemerkungen zum heutigen Kunstbetrieb” (“Notes on the Contemporary Art World”), 268n1; Bebuquin oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders (Bebuquin, or The Dilettantes of the

301

Marvelous) 2, 36, 39, 260nn1, 5, 6, 261n14; “Brief an die Tänzerin Napierkowska” (“Letter to the Dancer Napierkovska”), 264n60; “La collection Reber” (“The Reber Collection”), 286n50; “Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns…” (“These aestheticists prompt us to…”), 210, 216, 276n9; Entwurf einer Landschaft (Design for a Landscape), 178–81; “L’exposition de l’art abstrait à Zurich” (“The Abstract Art Show at Zurich”), 164; Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (The Fabrication of Fictions), 221; Georges Braque, 6, 19, 91, 94, 155–56, 158, 207, 212, 216, 219; “Gestalt und Begriff” (“Gestalt and Concept”), 210, 216, 276n9; “Gravures d’Hercules Seghers” (“The Etchings of Hercules Seghers”), 19, 178–81, 187; Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Art of the 20th Century), 5–6, 10, 15–16, 91, 92, 94, 122, 154, 158, 164, 166, 167, 173, 185, 187–88, 190, 191, 198, 207, 208, 209, 218, 223, 247, 225, 241, 244–45, 255n8, 284n34, 288n80; “Maillol,” 60–62, 269n11, 273n83; Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture), 22–23, 42, 59–90, 170, 216; “Notes sur le cubisme” (“Notes on Cubism”), 171, 281n78, 284n34, 287n77; “Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928” (“Pablo Picasso: Some Paintings from 1928”), 284n31; “Paraphrase,” 36, 38, 176; “Picasso,” 284n29; “Politische Anmerkungen” (“Political Notes”), 47–49, 50, 54, 89, 154, 155, 187, 189; “Porträt eines Sammlers” (“Portrait of a Collector”), 177; “Probleme heutiger Malerei” (“Issues in Contemporary Painting”), 284n24; “Rossignol” (“Nightingale”), 176, 285n49; Die schlimme Botschaft (Bad Tidings), 3; “Der Snobb” (“The Snob”), 38–39, 43–44, 48, 63, 187, 260n6; “Der Tapezier” (“The Decorator”), 37–38, 39–40, 41, 154; “Totalität” (“Totality”), 84–86, 90; “Traktat vom Wort und dem Kreuz” (“Treatise on the Word and the Cross”), 29; “Über Paul Claudel” (“On Paul Claudel”), 34–35; “Der Verfall der Ideen in Deutschland” (“The Decline of Ideas in Germany”), 290n10; “Der verlorene Wanderer” (“The Lost Wanderer”), 29–30, 31, 37, 41, 42, 44, 261n13; “Zentralasiatische Nomadenkunst” (“The Art of the Nomads of Central Asia”), 182–85 Einstein, Daniel, 1 Ernst, Max, 11

302

Index

essence, nonessence (Wesen, Unwesen), 27–28, 39–58; in Einstein’s Aktion texts, 44–54; in Einstein’s Documents texts, 176, 177; in Einstein’s Dada texts, 54–56; in Einstein’s prewar texts, 39–44; in Novalis, 40; in Schelling, 28. See also Einstein as writer; ground; origin evolution, evolutionism, 12–15, 62–63 fantasy (Fantasie), 30, 52 Farner, Konrad, 218 Fechheimer, Hedwig, 273–74n83 fetish, 65, 89 Fiedler, Konrad, 233–34, 294n68 Flechtheim, Alfred, 3 Fleckner, Uwe, 268nn2, 6, 280n64, 282n2 Fore, Devin, 293n43 form: as Fassung, 213–15, 217, 223–24; formal animism, 171–76; form shield, 161; as revolt, 222–24; as tectonic and psychogram, 165–71; in African sculpture, 86–87; in Badiou, 205; in Hildebrand, 69–70, 73; in Klee, 230–32, 233–43; in Wölfflin, 163–64 Foster, Hal, 64 Foucault, Michel, 95, 190, 210, 212, 214, 277n20, 289n82, 290n13 Fraenger, Wilhelm, 178 Frankfurt School, 12, 190, 205, 211–12 Frazer, J. G., 269n14 freedom, 18, 19, 124–28, 136, 141, 147, 203–6, 261n16 Freud, Sigmund, 160–61, 162, 165, 230, 283n7, 284nn23, 35, 289n92 Friedlaender, Salomo, 2, 264n58 Friedrich, Hugo, 264n60 function (Mach), 93–96 futurism, 10, 11, 121–22, 154, 158, 221, 279nn56, 58, 293n43 Geelhaar, Christian, 294n71 Geistige movement, 54, 55 Genesis, Book of, 29, 191 George, Stefan, 273–74n83 gestalt, Gestaltung, 209, 223, 224, 225, 231, 233–43 Gilot, Françoise, 124, 126 God: and apophatic theology, 261n9; inaccessibility of, 28–29; “The Lost Wanderer” on, 261n13; Negro Sculpture on, 65–67. See also origin Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 32, 257n21, 262n23 Gouel, Eva, 144, 151, 282n97

Gramsci, Antonio, 15–16, 17, 93, 258n28 Greaney, Patrick, 262n25, 264n60 Green, Christopher, 172, 285n37 Greenberg, Clement, 244–45, 294–95n72 Gris, Juan, 4, 91 Gropius, Walter, 4 Grossman, Wendy, 270n27 Grosz, George, 3, 54 ground, groundlessness: in African sculpture, 87–89; in contemporary art, 268n1; in cubism, 23–24, 91–93, 97, 98; in Einstein on Klee, 250; in Einstein on Picasso, 186–87, 189, 192, 204; in Einstein’s art history, 63–67, 159, 161, 163, 177, 178–84; in Einstein’s prewar texts, 18–23, 27–30, 31, 36, 38–40, 44, 46–48, 50, 53, 55, 58; in Hegel, 190–96; in Klee, 238, 241–43; in Maillol, 59–61; in modernity, 9–11, 205–6; in Negro Sculpture, 63–67, 89; in Picasso, 201–3. See also Braque; Einstein as writer; essence; infinity; origin; Picasso Gudea, 161–62; seated statue, 162 Guercio, Gabriele, 287n76 Guevrekian, Lyda, 6 Hardt, Michael, 16, 17 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 3, 68, 87 Haxthausen, Charles, 93, 246, 267n94 Heartfield, John, 3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 24, 35, 36, 37, 93, 155, 158, 159, 184, 190–91, 205, 257n20, 262–63nn23, 29, 30, 32, 34, 267n92, 285n49, 288nn86, 87, 88, 289nn92, 104; Lectures on the Aesthetic, 31–34, 184, 285n49; Science of Logic, 24, 190–91, 205, 262n29, 288nn87, 88. See also dialectic; negation Heidegger, Martin, 11, 276n4 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 69, 70–72, 75–76, 233, 270n31, 271n35, 273n74 Henrich, Dieter, 190, 191 Herzfelde, Wieland, 267n99 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 69–84, 87–88, 233; Wittelsbacher Fountain, 69–70, 69, 72–73, 72, 81–82, 87–88 Hiller, Kurt, 54 Historical Materialism (HistoMat), 12, 13, 15, 258n28 history: and causality, 12–16, 28, 63–64; and the real, 212–15; and repetition, 10 Hodler, Ferdinand, 59 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 52 Homer, 32–33, 262n29 Horkheimer, Max, 210

Index humorism, fanatic, 52–56 Husserl, Edmund, 276n4, 278n31 hypothesis, 25, 168, 216, 218, 222–23, 224, 292n30 impressionism, 59, 60, 78–79, 80, 122, 233, 276n7 indifference point: in African sculpture, 89; in cubism, 98, 154; in Documents double page, 189; in Einstein, 22, 24, 50, 53, 62–63, 65, 92, 183, 249, 266n83; in Friedlaender, 264n58; in Heidegger, 276n4; in nomad art, 183; in Picasso, 136; in Schelling, 28, 50; in Segers, 183. See also doubleness; simultaneity infinity: in African sculpture, 87, 90; in Einstein, 27–30, 31, 33, 37–38, 40, 44, 50, 57, 59–61, 62, 87, 90, 92, 185, 260n5, 261n13, 265n74, 266n83, 288n87; in Friedlaender, 264n58; in Maillol, 59–61, 62; in nomad art, 185; in Novalis, 29–30, 261nn15, 16; in Picasso, 187; in Schelling, 50; in Simmel on Rodin, 75–77, 80. See also origin Ioganson, Karl, 17 irony, 11, 41, 149, 244, 246, 249, 251 James, William, 94, 172, 291n15 Jay, Martin, 86 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 2, 7, 9, 92, 97, 122, 216–17, 275n3 Kandinsky, Wassily, 4 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 44, 70–71, 74, 129, 257n20, 260n5, 270n30, 274n86 Kautsky, Karl, 45, 257n13 Kiefer, Klaus, 282n1 Klee, Paul, 4, 6, 25–26, 29, 207–8; affectivity, 232–44; arrow, 235, 294n70; cosmology, 225–33, 247, 250; cubism, 240, 294–95n72; metamorphosis, 225–33, 236–42, 249; myth, 247–51; negation and Gemütlichkeit, 243–51; realism, 221–23; Ardent Flowering, 234–36, 236, 240, 243; Before the Snow, 226; Flower Eater, 241–43, 242; Forest Architecture, 236–41, 239, 243, 294n71; Monument in Fertile Country, 227; Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor, 247, 248, 250, 251 Kolakowski, Leszek, 16–17 Krauss, Rosalind, 271n46, 275n111, 282n2 Kropotkin, Peter, 44 Krull, Germaine, 182 Kwinter, Sanford, 256n6 Landauer, Gustav, 13, 54, 257n13 La Roche, Raoul, 128

303

Laurencin, Marie, 138 Lavoisier, Antoine, 228 Léal, Brigitte, 188 Le Corbusier, 11–12 Léger, Fernand, 91 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 60 Leiris, Michel, 5, 6, 7, 158, 161, 177, 187, 198, 228, 229, 282n1, 283n9, 285n38, 286n51, 287n78, 294n58 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 54, 205 Lethen, Helmut, 263n40 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 172, 173, 269n14, 285n38 Liberman, Alexander, 127 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 2, 3, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 265n70, 266n80 Loewenson, Erwin, 2, 261n14 lost wanderer. See personas Lukács, Georg, 11–12, 223 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 4, 54, 267n101 Luxemburg, Rosa, 3, 7, 13, 14–15, 16, 17, 19, 25, 45, 54, 93, 155, 257n13, 258nn31, 32 Mach, Ernst, 94–95, 98, 105, 121, 172, 190, 278n33 Maillol, Aristide, 60–62, 269n11; La Méditerranée, 60, 61 Malevich, Kazimir, 17–18, 105, 164, 259n39 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2, 22, 28, 35, 38, 42, 56, 63, 65, 184, 249, 263n41, 264n60, 276n4 mana, 172–73, 285n41 Marc, Franz, 242–43 Marées, Hans von, 59, 233 Marx, Karl, 12, 15, 258n28 Marxism, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 46, 49, 74, 212, 259n38 masochism, 5, 167, 179–80, 231. See also ontological stances Masson, André, 158, 166, 167, 168, 170, 207, 240; Automatic Drawing, 166 mathematics, 30, 31, 41–42 Matisse, Henri, 276n7 Mauss, Marcel, 5, 158, 172, 173, 190, 191, 273n83, 285nn37, 38 memory, 71, 85, 93, 160, 245 metamorphosis, 19, 20, 208, 209, 212–13, 214, 216–21, 223–24, 232–38, 241–42. See also Klee; the real metaphor, 32, 33, 55, 262n23, 285n49, 286n51 Michel, Andreas, 283n7 microcosm and macrocosm, 226, 230–31, 247, 250. See also ontology miracles, 209, 216–17, 224 Miró, Joan, 158, 168, 207

304

Index

myth, mythology, 208, 217–21, 233, 249–51; formal, 173, 176, 224, 234; palingenetic, 218; performative, 219; private, 247; and writing, 249–50. See also Klee; metamorphosis; myth; the real Nägele, Rainer, 256n3 Natorp, Paul, 82 naturalism, 77–82, 215, 229–30, 233 negation, negativity: in Einstein, 20–21, 35, 39, 50, 63, 86, 93, 215, 220–21, 245–46, 251; in Greenberg, 244–45; in Hegel, 34, 35, 190–91, 205, 262n28, 289n104; in Novalis, 40; in Picasso, 125–28, 129, 136, 187, 194–203; in politics, 16–17, 220. See also dialectic; Hegel; nihilism; ressentiment neo-Kantianism, 74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 233, 275n3 Neolithic art, 162–63 Neopathetisches Cabaret, 2, 54, 261n14 Neuer Club, 2, 261n14 Neumeister, Heike, 275n1 Neundorfer, German, 269n11 New Economic Policy (NEP), 4, 255n7, 258n27 Newton, Isaac, 228 Nicodemus, Everlyn, 270n25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25, 43, 94–95, 105, 122, 123, 165, 167, 172, 173, 186, 190, 191, 210–12, 214, 217, 218, 229, 231–32, 246, 277nn15, 20, 257n20, 258n27, 263n32, 264n61, 277n20, 277n26, 278n41, 287n76, 290n11; Birth of Tragedy, 231–32, 240; Genealogy of Morals, 210, 211, 215, 246; Will to Power, 95, 97, 122, 123, 167, 211, 212, 232, 281n15 nihilism, 18, 21, 34, 46, 49, 52, 92, 155, 178, 181, 183, 191, 204, 244, 262n23, 288n86. See also dialectic; negation; ressentiment nomad art, 182–85 nonessence. See essence Novalis, 2, 21, 22, 27–30, 32, 35, 38, 40–41, 50, 52, 58, 185, 260n1, 261nn13, 14, 15, 16, 264n51 novelty, 14, 15, 17, 20, 24, 29, 97, 210, 214, 220–21, 223, 234 November Revolution, 54 objectivation, subjectivation, subobjective function, 94–96, 108–11, 129, 136, 145, 153–54 October Revolution, 4, 15, 251 Oehm, Heidemarie, 265n74, 279n53 Olivier, Fernande, 144 ontological stances, 160–61, 167, 204, 208, 211–12, 214, 215, 219, 220, 229–32, 234, 238, 241, 244–46

ontology, world-building: in animism, 172–73; in art, 223–24; in Badiou, 204–5; in Bataille, 219–20; in constructivism, 17; in cubism, 97; in Einstein’s art criticism, 22–23, 57–58; in Einstein’s prewar prose, 21–22, 27–30, 34–37, 46, 52; in Einstein’s writing, 18–21; in Hegel, 33–34, 190–91; in Klee, 229–33, 234–38, 241–43, 244–51; and left-wing politics, 16–17; in Mach, 94–95; in Malevich, 17–18; in Mesopotamia, 161; in modernity, 9–16; in Nietzsche, 94–95, 172, 173, 190, 212, 277n15, 290n12; and nomads, 183–84; in Picasso, 204–6; in Segers, 178; in the studio, 138–39; and Weltzwang, 160. See also the real origin, originality, 9–11, 11–17, 15, 27–30, 31, 35, 36, 38–39, 48, 50, 55, 61, 62–65, 89, 91–93, 97, 128, 154, 161, 173, 174, 183, 187, 191, 204, 220, 222. See also essence; ground Paleolithic art, 162–63 parliamentarianism, 12, 13, 22, 37, 45–49, 185, 256n12, 265n70, 266n80 Parmelin, Hélène, 126 Paudrat, Jean-Louis, 62 Paul, Jean, 267n92 Penkert, Sibylle, 53 personas: African masks as, 89; the artiste, 37, 249, 263n41; Braque as, 154–56; the decorator, 37–38; in Einstein’s texts, 22, 23, 24, 37–39, 46–48, 56, 89, 177; the jongleur, 249; Klee as, 249–51; the lost wanderer, 22, 23, 24, 41, 46, 49, 67, 89, 92, 98, 154, 156, 176, 178, 182–85, 188, 204, 206, 250; the mystic, 37–38; nomad head as, 182–85; Picasso as, 154–56, 186–89, 204; the pauper, 49–52, 187, 190; Reber as, 177; Segers as, 178–81; the snob, 38–39, 43 Pfemfert, Franz, 2, 45, 46, 49 Picasso, Pablo, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24–25, 91–93, 110, 111, 115, 119, 154–56; arris, 281n86; double style, 185–89; eroticism, 129–43, 144–54; faux bois, 147–51; formal animism, 171–76, 190, 192; freedom and constraint, 124–28, 141, 145, 147, 149, 154, 155; ground, Grundkontrast (foundational contrast), Grundoperation, 91–93, 97, 98, 127–28, 155, 186, 190–96, 201–5; hinge, 128–36, 141, 145, 147, 151–53, 176, 276n4, 281nn85, 86; image-body, 24, 110, 141, 145–53, 281n85; image-object, 23, 136, 139; line, 135–36, 147, 170, 171, 191–203; negation, negativity, 125–28, 129, 136, 149, 155, 194–98, 202–4; photography, 138–41, 281n85; proteanism,

Index 185–87; simultaneity, 129, 141, 143, 145, 154–55, 189, 201; at Sorgues, 144–53; in the studio, 127, 136–43, 196–206; stylistic multiplicity, 129; subobjective function, 129, 136, 145, 153; subversion, 124–26, 128, 155; surface and volume-seeing, 127–36, 139–53; tectonic hallucination, 167–71; visual ethics, 124–28, 136, 139, 145. See also Braque; cubism; surrealism Picasso, Pablo, works by: Acrobat, 198–203, 200; The Aficionado, 128–36, 130, 153, 155, 250, 281n78; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 129, 147, 147, 196; Female Acrobat, 198–203, 199; Figure (sculpture), 194, 195; Guitar (Oslo), 151, 150; Guitar (Paris), 145–47, 146; Guitar (private collection), 147–151, 148; Guitarist, 115–19, 120; Guitar “J’aime Eva,” 151–54, 152, 153; Horta landscapes, 281n85; The Mandolin Player, 110, 141–43, 142, 143, 279n46; Metamorphosis I, 194, 195; Metamorphosis II, 194; The Milliner’s Workshop, 168, 174–76, 174, 175, 198; The Painter (The Studio, Stockholm), 201, 202–3, 205; The Painter and His Model (New York), 168; The Painter and His Model (Paris), 168–71, 169; The Painter and His Model (Tehran), 191–98, 192, 193, 289n92; The Poet, 129, 132; Portrait of Georges Braque, 139–40, 140, 141; Seated Nude (Prague), 281n85; Self-Portrait, 138, 138; Still Life on a Pedestal Table, 136–41, 137; The Studio (New York), 168; The Studio (Venice), 168; Woman in an Armchair, 191, 192, 197–98, 197; Woman with a Red Hat, 188–89, 188 Picasso und Negerplastiken (Picasso and Negro Sculpture) (exhibition), 275n1 Pitt Rivers, Augustus, 269n13 Plato, Platonism, 164, 222, 223, 234 Die Pleite (The Flop) (journal), 3, 54–55, 56, 267n94 poetry, poiesis, 14, 222 Poggi, Christine, 282n97 politics, 3–4, 9, 11–16, 204–5, 250–51; and theory of the real, 208, 211–12, 209–20; and writing, 18–21, 44–49, 52–57 positivism, 25, 44, 210, 222–23, 229, 258n28 poverty, 49–50, 261n9, 262n25, 266n80 Prichard, James Cowles, 245 primitivism, 39, 60–61, 62–67, 269n14 prose. See Einstein as writer psychoanalysis, 165, 190, 230 psychogram, 24, 165–67, 171, 174, 178, 181, 189, 230–31. See also tectonic

305

Ramm, Maria, 2, 36 Raphael, 227–28n28 Raphael, Max, 2, 7, 278n33 Rauch, Christian Daniel, 32 real, Einstein’s theory of the, 25, 159–63, 184, 208–15, 222–25, 234, 240–41, 250. See also metamorphosis; ontology realism, 208, 221–24, 233–34 reason, rationalism, 209–20 Reber, Gottlieb Friedrich, 177, 187, 282n1, 287n79 religion, African, 65–67 Renaissance art, 78, 79, 81, 88, 97, 163, 164 repetition, 10–11, 14, 19, 76, 77, 85, 160, 161, 214–15, 236–38 ressentiment, 167, 187, 191, 210, 212, 214, 220, 246. See also negation; nihilism revolt, revolution, 12–16, 19–21, 208, 212–21, 222–25, 228, 238, 244, 250–51 Richardson, John, 289n98 Riemann manifold, 224, 293n50 Riezler, Walter, 87 Rodchenko, Alexander, 17, 18, 259n38 Rodin, Auguste, 69, 73–77, 78–80, 84; Danaid, 75–79, 76 Romanticism, Romantic philosophy, 2, 21, 27, 35 Rosenberg, Alfred, 218 Rosselet, Joan, 282n97 Rost, Nico, 255n7 Rowohlt, Ernst, 3 Rubiner, Ludwig, 2, 50, 264n58, 267n76 Rüdiger, Helmut, 6, 9, 256n1 Russian Revolution, 15, 16 sadism, 5, 179–80, 231. See also ontological stances Sant’Elia, Antonio, 11 Saxl, Fritz, 228 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 22, 27–28, 35, 50, 256n2, 260n1, 5, 6, 276n4 Schlaffer, Heinz, 262n23 Schlick, Moritz, 82 sculpture: frontality in, 81, 83, 88; impressionist, 78–79; pictorial, 77–79; relation to site, 87–88. See also Chokwe; Einstein as writer (Negerplastik); Gudea; Hildebrand; Maillol; Rodin Second International, 12–15 Segers, Hercules, 24, 178–81 semiology, semiotics, 240–41, 278n41 Sextus Empiricus, 269–70n18 simile. See Einstein as writer

306

Index

Simmel, Georg, 1, 22, 69, 73–77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 264n61, 266n80 simultaneity, at-onceness (Gleichzeitigkeit): in Braque, 121–28, 154–55; in Einstein’s prewar texts, 41–42, 43, 47–48, 49, 51, 53, 63, 89, 265n74; in Einstein’s theory of the real, 213, 215, 229; in futurism, 121–22; in Hegel, 191; in miracles, 217; in Picasso, 129, 141–44, 145–54, 154–55, 158, 189, 201; in sculpture, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89; in Segers, 179–80; of different models of primitivism, 63; of masochism and sadism, 179–80, 187 Sitte, Camillo, 88 skepticism, 64, 182, 269–70n18 social democracy, 3, 6, 13, 45–46, 49 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 12, 13, 14, 45–46, 265n70 Song of Songs, 33–34 Sorel, Georges, 2, 46–47, 49, 155, 265n74 Soviet Union, 4, 14, 126, 250–51, 255n7, 267n101 space: and Chokwe sculpture, 83–84, 88–89; in cubism, 92–93, 96–98; in nomad art, 184; in Picasso’s surrealism, 168–76; in Renaissance art, 277–78n28; and Wittelsbacher Fountain, 69–73, 87–88. See also cubism (volume-seeing) Spanish Civil War, 6–7, 54 Spartacus Revolt, 3, 13, 54, 57, 205, 211 Speer, Albert, 218–19 spontaneity, 16, 155, 222, 258n32 Staller, Natasha, 281n79 Stavrinaki, Maria, 265n74 Steinberg, Leo, 147, 281n86 stimulus, 17–18 Strother, Zoë, 64, 65, 270n21 subobjective function. See objectivation Sumerian sculpture, 161–62 surrealism, 5, 6, 158, 165–66, 168, 207, 216, 287n78 Sweeney, James Johnson, 124, 125, 126 symbol, symbolism, 31–36, 38–39, 46, 48, 49, 65–67, 176, 184–85, 262n23, 285n49. See also Einstein as writer syndicalism, 2, 46, 54

Tarabukin, Nikolai, 259n38 tattoo, 184–85, 216, 218, 220 the tectonic, 24, 159–71, 174, 178, 181, 189, 225, 230–31, 232, 236, 237–38. See also psychogram telepathy, 172 Tietze, Hans, 68 time: and causality, 27–29; quantitative and qualitative, 85–86. See also art history; history; simultaneity totality, 77, 82–90 transgression, 213–21 Trotsky, Leon, 54, 76–77 the unconscious, 165, 167, 171, 225, 230–31 unicity. See doubleness Urgrund (arch-ground), 28, 256nn2, 3, 260n5. See also ground Ursprung (origin, arch-crack), 39, 256n3. See also origin Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand (journal), 4 virtual, actualization of the, 86–87 vision: Dionysian-Apollonian, 167, 232; inferential, 70–73; in Klee, 235–36, 245–47; visionary, 15, 224; volume-seeing, 96–98 Waldschmidt, Ferdinand, 59 Walser, Robert, 47 Wasmuth, Ewald, 213 Werckmeister, Otto Karl, 218 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 69, 72, 78–79, 81, 88, 97, 163–64, 277nn27, 28 Wollheim, Richard, 96, 277n26, 279n41 world. See ontology Zahn, Leopold, 228 zero: in cubism, 154; in Einstein’s texts, 21, 41–42, 44, 50, 51, 56–57, 268n1; in Friedlaender, 264n58, in nomad head; 183, in Picasso, 187, 203; in sculpture, 89; in Segers, 178, 181. See also indifference point Zervos, Christian, 144, 185–86, 287n76 Das Ziel (The Goal) (journal), 55