Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art 9781501702082, 9780801479847, 1501702084, 9781501701900, 1501701908

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CO

DRM as VOLT Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

FORM AS REVOLT Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

Zeidler

he German writer and art critic I Carl Einstein (1885-1940) has long been acknowledged as an important figure in the history of modern art, and yet he is often sidelined as an enigma. In Form os Revolt Sebastian Zeidler recovers Einstein's multifac¬ eted career, offering the first com¬ prehensive intellectual biography of Einstein in English.

Einstein first emerged as a writer of experimental prose through his involvement with the anarchist journal Die Aktion. After a few limited forays into art criticism, he burst onto the art scene in 1915 with his book Negro Sculpture, at once a formalist inter¬ vention into the contemporary theo¬ ry and practice of European sculpture and a manifesto for the sophistica¬ tion of African art. Einstein would go on to publish seminal texts on the cubist paintings of Georges Braque

Form as Revolt

si %nale modern german letters, cultures, and thought Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modem 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 im¬ portant 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. Hides 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. 20th century—History.

2. Art, Modern—

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

10

987654321

Paperback printing

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987654321

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

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from The Arcadia Fund

https://archive.org/details/formasrevoltcarlOOzeid

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: Propylaen, 1926)

K3

Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. jahrhunderts, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Propylaen, 1931), reprinted as Einstein, Wetfe, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 5, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996)

W1

Carl Einstein, Wei\e, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 1,1907-1918, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1994)

W2

Carl Einstein, Wei\e, 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, Wer^e, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 4, Texte aus dem Nachlafi /, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992)

DR

Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907—1916; A Catalogue

Raisonne of the Paintings and Related Worlds (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)

s

'

,

Form as Revolt

Carl Einstein

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 nei¬ ther his life nor his writings are familiar to most English-speaking readers, I will offer a precis 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 Frank¬ furt.1 He received a humanistic education at two gymnasiums, where he was in¬ troduced 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 cul¬ minated 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-Universitat, 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 Wolffiin 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 Wolfflin’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, Ein¬ stein was pursuing a career as a writer. The first version of his novella, Bebuqutn, 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 Mallarme, 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 co¬ founder Erwin Loewenson and the writer Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), Ein¬ stein 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 Andre 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 Aftion magazine. Pfemfert had founded it as “an organ of forth¬ right radicalism” that stood “for the idea of a Great German Left,” and in the years before the war Die Action did become a base for writers and thinkers across the full range of the left-wing spectrum. Peter Kropotkin, Erich Mtihsam, Wil¬ helm Liebknecht, Hugo Ball, and the young Walter Benjamin all published in it. Einstein’s contributions to Die Aftion read like aggressively political texts, docu¬ ments 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 doc¬ umented 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 in¬ terested 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 Wolfflinian, 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 Afri¬ can 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 Ein¬ stein 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 un¬ likely home of a wartime artists’ colony: poets like Gottfried Benn, another close friend, and art world figures like Wilhelm Elausenstein 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 com¬ mand. 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 par¬ ticipated 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 speak¬ ers 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.s 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 photomon¬ tage, 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.

Form as Revolt

4

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 liv¬ ing 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 Andre and Clara Malraux, took cog¬ nizance of Andre Breton’s Litterature, was in touch with Amedee Ozenfant of the Esprit Nouveau, and maintained a regular correspondence with Kahnweiler. He wrote a short book on the painter Moi'se Kisling, another personal friend. Plans for other books, on Georges Braque and Juan Gris, didn’t take off; but Einstein did write on Fernand Leger’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’!' 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 cer¬ tain 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 enthu¬ siastic 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 conser¬ vative 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 vol¬ untarily. 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 Propylaen 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.s 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 substan¬ tially rewritten or newly added to cover the recent most art, including French sur¬ realism 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, Ger¬ man 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).’ 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 Weltfunst, 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 Levy-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 dif¬ ferent 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 douhleness resonated deeply with his own childhood, and be¬ yond 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 Boetie. But after the Nazi seizure of power his German bank accounts were blocked, and his employ¬ ment 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 Ein¬ stein’s Werhe 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 re¬ search. 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 mas¬ sive collection of notes for an autobiography that to the present day have remained unedited.1" Some of these notes can make for an enthralling read, but their edito¬ rial 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 Rudiger, 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 Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo-Federacion Anarquista Iberica (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 fight¬ ing 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 du¬ plicated 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 fune, 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-Betharram. 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 chal¬ lenge. 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. Flow 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 anar¬ chist 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 chrono¬ logical 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 contempo¬ raries. 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 Ratezeitung found a speech by Einstein baffling in spite of its straight¬ forward topic (“The Political Responsibility of the Intellectual'’). And in 1937, the veteran anarcho-syndicalist Helmut Rudiger was dismayed to learn his new com¬ rade 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; oth¬ ers 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 Rudiger’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 argu¬ ment of this book. Like Einstein himself, it will use the notions of ground, origin, and causal¬ ity 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 cosmogo¬ nies, 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 auto¬ biography, 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 ground¬ lessness 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 build¬ ing 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 ex¬ tend 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 proj¬ ect 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 develop¬ mental 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).' Either artists, writers, and political activists choose merely to repeat the past by adding a minor update to an unbroken tradition, whether of modernist paint¬ ing, the nineteenth-century novel, or social-democratic reform. Or they resolve to uproot themselves/row 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 incre¬ mental 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 architec¬ ture, 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 infrastruc¬ tures of Antonio Sant’Elia’s designs for the futurist Citta Nuova swept away the earthbound tectonics of Beaux-Arts architecture, so that “the earth as first princi¬ ple and ground seems no longer to exist at all.”6 Meanwhile, the slenderpilotis 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."' 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 phi¬ losophy 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.” Max Ernst, by contrast, can stand for the ironist faction. In his Dada overpaintings the sedimen¬ tation of geologic strata echoes the pattern of the artwork’s wallpaper support. Here, in a visual double entendre, a retrieval (Wiederholung) of a prehistoric ori¬ gin is thwarted by the origin’s repetition (Wiederholung) by the work’s material ground. 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 baffle¬ ment 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 writ¬ ing. In Einstein, discourse states modern groundlessness in the mood of exhilara¬ tion, 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 re¬ quired. 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 Lukacs’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 Lukacs’s book, in an era when revolu¬ tion, 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 contem¬ poraries was the same thing, the era of a “crisis of socialism.”"1 As I will argue in detail in chapter 1, for Einstein and his associates at Die Action 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 Reichs¬ tag. 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 insti¬ tutional 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 dead¬ lock 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 His¬ torical 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-Duhring (1878), a number of SecondInternational thinkers had attempted to merge the HistoMat with a reductive ver¬ sion of Darwin’s Origin of Species in order to think political teleology together with biological evolution." 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 Aftion 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 de¬ terminist 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

IS

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 im¬ portant 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 a la Hegel, there the revisionists are believers in evo¬ lution a la Darwin. They no longer believe in catastrophe and suddenness. Capi¬ talism, 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.”1^ 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 polemi¬ cal dicta, a 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 evolu¬ tion.”i() There is his rejection of the HistoMat's teleology, whether Bernsteinian or Leninist: “People were overwhelmed by the idea of‘maturation’ and devel¬ opment. 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.”i/ There is Einstein’s claim that, on the contrary, a real revolution will “smash right through history and tradition.”14 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.”1' The last statement wasn’t motivated by a Dandyist’s disdain for ordinary work¬ ers; 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 wording class we are dealing with a rejection of class as such. That rejection in turn is in sync with Einstein’s polemic against evo¬ lutionist and developmental models of socialism. For what is subtending all of Einstein’s political remarks is a full-blown ontol¬ ogy 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 ef¬ fects 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 naive 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 al¬ ways used interchangeably by Einstein: because, ontologically speaking, they were all conservative terms in the literal sense. All of them described the conser¬ vation 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 of¬ fense 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 identi¬ ties 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 arche, without an origin to an¬ chor 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 cen¬ tury of beginnings. Contrary to postwar cliches 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 itar/: the era in which, so far from reaching its ultimate link, the chain of causality was break¬ ing 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 ofpoiesis, or general creative production. 4 Conversely, it explains Einstein’s proxim¬ ity 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 fundamen¬ tally 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, interrupt¬ ing 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.2'1

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 confiict, 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 Pi¬ casso. But switch the focus from Paris to Petersburg, and what you have is the ar¬ gument 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.25 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 nor¬ mal 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.”2 ' 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 7° Spontaneity was Luxem¬ burg’s term for a sudden, unpredicted eruption of political revolt that renders all determinist textbooks invalid. In a remark that would forever scandalize re¬ visionists 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.”'1 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, politi¬ cal 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.”22 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.2- Instead, an interval was open¬ ing 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.22

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.”2^ 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 con¬ ditions.” 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 ne¬ gation 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 exist¬ ing 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 nega¬ tive and not a constructive one.”36 In theory, the politics of affirmative novelty that Hardt and Kolakowski de¬ scribe is a marvelous project. When Einstein insisted that, contrary to the stereo¬ type of the bomb-wielding Ravachol, anarchism was a profoundly “constructive” endeavor, he too was endorsing it.3/ Still, in the early twentieth century the proj¬ ect’s empirical realization proved a tall order. It is not just that Einstein was mak¬ ing 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 extraor¬ dinary 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 Rodchen¬ ko’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.3,3 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 dif¬ ferent 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. Flad 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 enig¬ matic ontology of “stimulus,” of an abstract, “groundless” vibration as the founda¬ tion 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 neg¬ ative, 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 In¬ stead 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 Rous¬ sel’s. In Einstein’s texts from between 1907 and 1914, adverbs and prefixes, con¬ junctions 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 stalk¬ ing their political and philosophical ambitions. The result was a deep textual split. At the level of discourse, groundlessness was the promise of a new begin¬ ning. 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 ap¬ pears 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 instruc¬ tively 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 his¬ tory of religion during his tenure at Documents. I will spend the first half of chap¬ ter 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 opposi¬ tions: 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 pres¬ ence 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 heifien are recurring verbs. Third, the verb “to subsist” signals Einstein’s curious preference for a small family of adjec¬ tives, adverbs, and verbs that indicate duration: “permanent,” “enduring,” “per¬ sistent,” “constant,” “to subsist,” “to last” (permanent, dauernd, bestandig, Constant, 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 heifit 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 cest-a-dire\ in his essay on Hercules Segers, ex¬ amined 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 sec¬ ond 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 perma¬ nent 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 affirma¬ tion 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 Bezii\. A Bezir\ is a territory whose limits have been drawn as if with a ZirJ^el, a compass. The Bezir\ 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 ex¬ ample. I say comforting, because this interpretive approach still assumes the pas¬ sage 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 para¬ doxical, that’s vested with personal conviction; or a sheerly grammatical constel¬ lation that just loofys 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 move¬ ment 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 ter¬ ritory 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 mathemati¬ cal 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 sen¬ tence, 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 au¬ thorial 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 syntac¬ tical 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 Mallarme’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 Ein¬ stein 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 some¬ times 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 lor 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. Ein¬ stein’s description of what I call an African sculpture’s aspect reversal demon¬ strated how these objects resisted causal models of viewing, whether of instant inferential vision or of a process-oriented ambulation. Thwarting contempo¬ rary models of site-specilic sculpture, absorbing its own base into itself, Ein¬ stein’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 ontologi¬ cal 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 vol¬ ume into the paradox of the surface” (K3 125)A 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 (B ildgegensta nd). 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 gen¬ tly 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 hallucina¬ tory 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 broad¬ ened 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 indiffer¬ ence, 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 postcub¬ ist 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 per¬ sonas had in his own prose. That he should have called Picasso’s doubleness “dialectical” will prompt us to consider another deja 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 Mod¬ els 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 th an 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 Thou¬ sand 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 tat¬ too, which revolted against the a priori anatomy of the human body; and a specula¬ tive 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 cosmologi¬ cal imagery Klee seemed to be designing a world that ungrounded anthropocentric world pictures by radically equalizing all its inhabitants. Moreover, the equaliza¬ tion 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 K1 ee put it.

26

Form as Revolt

Einstein was alive to the predicament, of course, which is why I suggest in con¬ clusion 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 Bezir\. 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 com¬ piled 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 es¬ sence. 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 ori¬ gin of anything at all—the origin of a human adult in his or her personal biogra¬ phy, 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 dis¬ appear 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 achieve¬ ments built on a void, grounded in a fundamental groundlessness. Einstein’s conviction did not come out of nowhere. We can discern the dif¬ fuse 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.”5 In turn, in his Freiheitsschrift Schelling had insisted that “there must be an essence before any ground and before all that exists, thus gener¬ ally 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 indiffere?7ce 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 prosed 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/’ “Causal thought,” Einstein argued in a short text on “The Prob¬ lem of the Origin,” “is founded on individuation in the temporal sense, which is posited by the concept of the origin.”' 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, meaning¬ ful 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, replac¬ ing 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.”4 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 an¬ guished. 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 Stephane Mallarme’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 cosmogo¬ nies 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 reflec¬ tion.”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 produc¬ ing 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 re¬ solved 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 struc¬ ture. 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 NovalisT 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 con¬ template them in our philosophy, study them in our science, give form to them in our literature.1'1 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 \at 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 recipro¬ cal determination: 2 is 2 insofar as it is neither 1 nor 3. But while it is a finite sys¬ tem, 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 oo. 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 mod¬ ern 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 con¬ structs—yet constructs that are mathematically typical.”18 “Fantasy” (Fantasie) is another technical term from Novalis, and so is the noun “fantastic” (Fantas¬ tic(), 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.”1'' 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 pur¬ view 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 in¬ distinguishable 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 math¬ ematics. The means: grammar, rhythm, sound. A circle of similes. Sentence varia¬ tions. Rhythm in the broadest sense. Composition of parts, sections, sentences into a coherence that will readily yield events that are contrapuntal, contrastive, now cor¬ responding, now contrastive, etc. These options are to be implemented among all the elements.2"

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 en¬ sure 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, gleichgiiltig, 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 bewufite Symbolily der vergleichenden Kunstform).2' 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 rela¬ tions (Beziehungen), specifically, the relation between a general concept (idea, con¬ tent) and some chunk of concrete reality (VA1 395).” 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; sym¬ bolic 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 con¬ crete, 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 indi¬ viduality 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 in¬ dividuality and the matter of marble whose meaning does not exceed its own man¬ ifestation 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 com¬ parison (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, meta¬ phor, 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 war¬ rior 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 undefi 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

S3

Hegel’s Homer used language against the grain—used it as though it were clas¬ sical when it is actually symbolic. Other authors were not so disciplined. Calderon de la Barca is one of Hegel’s examples for a “consciously symbolic” poet, a poet who will follow language’s in¬ nate pull toward comparison all the way. When Calderon 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 Calderon 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 compari¬ sons; 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 lon¬ ger 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 relatabilityT To Hegel’s mind, that indulgence comes at a heavy ontological price: the sym¬ bolist 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 mod¬ ern 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 symbol¬ ist 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 con¬ scious 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 dissemi¬ nated 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 intol¬ erable 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 rela¬ tions into a single, permanent relation only. That makes rest a threat to the indul¬ gence 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 pros¬ pect 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 symbol¬ ism, 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 differ¬ ent 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 ).2 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 rest¬ lessness of Hegel’s symbolist is the dialectic, the interminable movement of nega¬ tion 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 Mallarme. Their work, we are told, is a sign for how “contemporary art is withdrawing to the autonomous power that is spe¬ cific 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 lan¬ guage 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 sever¬ ance 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 Mallarme, the poem had become a mystery of absolute language whose formula had been defined by the German Hegel: ‘a de¬ terminate being that is immediately self-conscious existence.”" 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.”3" 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 experi¬ ence 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 “ParaPh rase,” the essay claims to lambast those kinds of literature in which words un¬ fold 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 Calderon, 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.”^’ 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 au¬ tumn; by which he intends to report on a good or bad action by this lady.”^ But according to Einstein, the poet’s report resoundingly fails. The woman’s psychol¬ ogy and the natural environment that serves as its setting are buried underneath a cascade of comparisons that keep informing us how things are lil^e 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 ridi¬ cule. 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 add¬ ing 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 typi¬ cally runs over just three/to five pages in the Werhe 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 crav¬ ings and convictions; one scholar has called them bachelor machines.30 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 auto¬ biographical 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.”4" Indeed not. Einstein’s char¬ acters 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 dis¬ qualify 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 opu¬ lence 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 ac¬ tual thing.”4^ 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 cir¬ cles [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 Mallarme—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 ^symbolical, it is tell¬ ing 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 lil{e 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 strug¬ gling 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 primitiv¬ ism 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 equal¬ izations.” For note how the passage is spinning forth three successive nouns that synonymize—and so paraphrase, and so distance—that origin thrice over: “ori¬ gin,” “beginning,” “start.” Ursprung, Beginn, Anfang. C-E-G. What the snob ac¬ tually 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 Bebuquiir. Das Kiinstlerische 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 (“un¬ faithful,” “uncertainty,” “to hate”); a tendency to group nouns into pairs (“reflec¬ tion 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 mo¬ ment, 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 quo¬ tation 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.”4' Essence, then, is what paraphrase—symbolism—cannot properly process, and around which it will un¬ fold 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 nega¬ tions 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 accord¬ ing 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 ex¬ position 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 oi 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.^ First, it is to enter into a relation of opposition (