October Introduction Vol Carl Einstein

IntroductionAuthor(s): Sebastian ZeidlerSource: October, Vol. 107, Carl Einstein (Winter, 2004), pp. 3-13Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397590 .

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Introduction

SEBASTIAN ZEIDLER

More than sixty years after his death, the art history and criticism of Carl Einstein (1885-1940) remains unfinished business. This is partly due to practical issues, partly with the vicissitudes of intellectual tradition and academic specializa- tion. Not only does his hermetic prose defy casual analysis and graceful translation, but also many of his most seminal texts, especially those on visual art, were never published during his lifetime, or only in rare journals, and so remained inaccessi- ble until a critical edition finally got under way in the 1980s.1 And when Einstein was rediscovered in his native country, it was above all as a modernist writer and cultural critic. This perspective appeared self-evident, considering that Einstein had initially made his mark with the publication of an epochal novella, Bebuquin (1912), and that one of the first texts to be issued from the archive of his estate, "The Fabrication of Fictions" (ca. 1935-37) seemed to cover terrain broadly recog- nizable from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.2 Hence in the decades after World War II, Einstein's work largely remained the natural property of Germanists rather than art historians.

Yet the lion's share of Einstein's critical work was devoted to the visual arts. In the 1900s he had taken classes with Heinrich Wolfflin at Berlin University, and the impact was so profound that Wolfflin would become a major, if largely anonymous, bete noire in Einstein's writings of the next several decades. In fact, his book Negerplastik (1915)3 was fully as much a sophisticated manifesto of modernist "primitivism" as it was an anti-Hildebrandian, and hence an anti-Wolfflinian

1. Carl Einstein, Werke, vol. 1, 1908-1918, ed. Rolf-Peter Baacke with Jens Kwasny (Berlin: Medusa, 1980); vol. 2, 1919-1928, ed. Marion Schmid with Henriette Beese and Jens Kwasny (Berlin: Medusa, 1981); vol. 3, 1929-1940, ed. Marion Schmid and Liliane Meffre (Berlin: Medusa, 1985); vol. 4, Texte aus dem Nachlaf3 I, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992); vol. 5, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996). 2. Carl Einstein, Bebuquin: oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Die Aktion, 1912); Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973). 3. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der WeiBen Biicher, 1915; Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920); reprinted in Werke, vol. 1, pp. 245-391. English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, this issue, pp. 122-38; see also African Sculpture, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 77-91.

OCTOBER 107, Winter 2004, pp. 3-13. ? 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.



OCTOBER

manifesto of sculptural experience. Einstein's next major publication, The Art of the Twentieth Century (1926), in turn outlined a concise if problematic account of modernist art since Impressionism, culminating in the extraordinary chapter on Cubism, the true centerpiece of the book. Its revised edition (1931) was supple- mented with a new chapter on the "primitivizing" psychographic Surrealism of Andre Masson and Joan Mir6, whose work Einstein had learned to admire when he joined the editorial board of Documents magazine in the year after his emigration to Paris in 1928. His brief tenure at Documents in turn marked a broadening of interests and a revision of earlier ideas. In a series of essays on Pablo Picasso and a monograph on Georges Braque, Einstein tried to rethink Analytic Cubism as a primitivist project within the critical framework of the ethnographic angle of Documents' "base materialism." At the same time, his critical purview now extended to the history of art before, and outside of, modernity. Thanks to the recent publication of notebooks and fragmentary texts composed during his Paris exile, it is now clear that the art historical texts Einstein published in his lifetime are but the tip of an iceberg, or rather the entrance to a ruinous labyrinth of speculative thoughts. And thanks to recent archival research it is also clear that this labyrinth was connected to another: Einstein had been trying to solicit contributions for Documents from Fritz Saxl, then director of the Warburg Institute, and Einstein's late art history does beg to be compared to that of Aby Warburg, most especially the Warburg of the Lecture on Serpent Ritual.4

W6lfflin, Hildebrand, Warburg; primitivism, Analytic Cubism, Bataillean Surrealism: the critical coordinates of Einstein's project are conceivably rich and disparate, and we have not even mentioned his major theoretical resources, which included Henri Bergson, Ernst Mach, and Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically the Nietzsche of The Will to Power. What was the critical impetus that fueled this project? In what follows I want to specify some of its most fundamental theoretical assumptions and outline how Einstein mapped them onto his art historical and art critical work.5

At the most general level, Einstein's project was directed against what he believed-with Nietzsche, Bergson, and others-to be a certain kind of identity politics in modernity: a model of subjecthood that turned on a concept of subjective experience as identification. This was a politics that assumed, first, that a subject was fundamentally an unchanging self-identical kernel to which a set of properties

4. For the Einstein-Saxl correspondence, see Conor Joyce, Carl Einstein in Documents and His Collaboration with Georges Bataille (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2002), pp. 230-38. Parallels between Warburg and Einstein have been suggested by Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le Temps (Paris: Minuit, 2000), p. 191, but this is a rich subject on which much more work remains to be done. 5. I want to single out two studies from the sizable Einstein literature, which like my own stress the anti-epistemological significance of Einstein's work; while my approach is different, I found their contributions very valuable: Heidemarie Oehm, Die Kunsttheorie Carl Einsteins (Munich: Fink, 1976), and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Carl Einstein; or, The Postmodern Transformation of Modernism," in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 36-59.

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Introduction

was attached: properties which would then change over time even as the kernel itself remained unaffected, thus ensuring the seamless temporal continuity of a subjective identity that is here not so much transformed by experiences as it "has" or "makes" them. And it was a politics that assumed, second, and by the same token, that the objects of the phenomenal world were themselves so many identities- with-properties, waiting to be explored by a subject: a subject who, by thus identifying them, would constitute, in one fell swoop and ever anew in every act of experience, the world as world and himself as subject, and who would thereby possess this world as his experiential property, for it would be complete only through the synthesizing power of his mind. Einstein never seriously studied the work of Martin Heidegger, but his project is a response-dramatically different, to be sure-to the same diagnosis of subject formation in modernity: "That the world becomes picture is one and the same event as the event of man's becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is."6

"That the world becomes picture": Einstein's work on the visual arts took this statement literally, and with good reason. For if the German-speaking art historians of the generation of his teacher Wolfflin could agree on anything, it was the conviction that works of art are, first and foremost, epistemological models. The significance of an art object, in this view, no longer hinges on either a normative canon of beauty or a paradigm of mimetic naturalism. Rather, works of art are models for how the phenomenal world can, or should, be perceived: models for how it is constituted as world, for a subject, in the act of perception. As an epistemological model, a work of art is only gradually, not categorically, distinct from an everyday object. It is distinct from it insofar as it is an object that has been expressly produced in order to be perceived, insofar as its formal constellation facilitates its processing as perceptual knowledge by the viewer. In presenting the phenomenal world as identifiable, in defining experience as knowledge, and the subject as a subject of knowledge, a work of art as epistemological model relieves that subject of the anxiety of perceptual contingency in modernity-and all the more persuasively so since the work itself does not seem to exist in a radically autonomous sphere but rather offers but a sublimated version of everyday experience.

If there was a single purpose that animated Einstein's sprawling, manic work, then it was to search high and low for desublimatory countermodels to this insidious ideology of subjective identity maintenance, and at various points in his career he found them in non-Western objects, in contemporary practice, and in deliberately forgotten-because profoundly unassimilable-episodes from the history of Western art itself. In my essay in this issue I argue how Negerplastik was Einstein's first major attempt in that vein. It was an attempt not to reify African sculpture as

6. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 132. For another alignment of Heidegger and Einstein see the brief but excellent discussion in Andreas Michel, "Europe and the Problem of the Other: The Critique of Modernity in the Writings of Carl Einstein and Victor Segalen" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1991), pp. 62-65.

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OCTOBER

a set of new objects that would enrich the modern Western world picture, but rather an attempt to think it capable of shattering that picture, by confronting a subject who expects an experience of sculpture to be a realization of the possible with an object whose formal structure ought instead be described as an actualization of the virtual. Negerplastik and its companion essay "Totality" (1914), that is to say, make a "hardcore" Bergsonist case for a model of art as a qualitatively differential and purely immanent formal structure that will repel all attempts at totalizing it as a self-identical, unified whole, deployed for the benefit of an equally self-identical subject.

This project, not of a "primitivism" but rather of a primitivization of a modern Western model of subjecthood, was soon extended by Einstein to contemporary art criticism. He had occasionally dabbled in that genre before the war, but it is in the 1920s and '30s that he would seriously attempt to outline, and constantly modify, a critical account of what for him would always remain the mainstay of modern art: an account of Cubism, specifically Analytic Cubism, as desublimation of a visual experience conceived as a form of knowledge. Unlike his longtime friend Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Einstein harbored a deep hatred for neo-Kantian explanations of Cubism as, of all things, an epistemological improvement over mimetic naturalism. He rejected efforts to think Cubism in terms of a model of vision as unconscious inference that went back to Adolf von Hildebrand's theory of sculptural relief and ultimately to the physiological optics of Hermann von Helmholtz, just as he also rejected the "softcore" Bergsonism mapped onto the work of Picasso and Braque by the likes of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, and he rejected them for identical reasons. Because whether it is argued that Cubism "deformed" conventional naturalism by purging the picture surface of illusionistic depth, a depth that it is now the viewer-subject's job to supply by mentally "completing" the image through recourse to a store of tactile memory images, or whether it is claimed that the original three-dimensionality of the depicted object has not been lost but has rather been folded into the two-dimensional surface and so is fully given to vision: in both cases the Cubist project will seem to have shed mimetic naturalism, only to promote what already in 1915 Einstein had called optical naturalism-a naturalization of the subject as fully in control of a phenomenal world given to him as visual knowledge either in the image or in his own synthesizing mind.

Analytic Cubism, Einstein agreed, offers "multiple aspects" of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface, but this multiplicity is so deployed as to make the point that it will not ever be made over into a whole.7 First, the temporal simultaneity of aspects works to rupture a model of perception as a cumulative processing of an object's sensory data in neat temporal succession, a model that secretly subtends accounts of Cubist painting as opticalized relief; in Einstein's perspective it is precisely Cubism's all-at-onceness that works against modernism's

7. For the following see Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Propylaen, 1926), pp. 56-68, as well as the revised edition (1931) reprinted as Werke, vol. 5, pp. 91-109.

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Introduction

hidden Hildebrandian paradigm of successiveness. Just as, second, the temporal all-at-onceness also implies an unsynthesizable spatial side-by-sideness, emblematized by the increasing separation of residual pockets of modeling from one another by the pictorial infrastructure of the grid. For Einstein, to say that the grid severs the three-dimensional integrity of the depicted object is not to say that this happens in order that both now join to form a new two-dimensional whole. The grid in Einstein has rather a detotalizing function: it works to generate an "autonomous planar image," where "autonomy" means not autonomy for but autonomy from: autonomy from the Hildebrandian subject's efforts to gather what three-dimensional residues it contained into the illusory totality of an optical relief.8 If the work of the late C6zanne was about unfolding a "rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogeneous and temporally dispersed elements" within a single composition, then the grid in Einstein's Analytic Cubism further radicalized that project: it now irreconcilably separated dispersed, provisional acts of looking, deployed along several axes, performed from different distances, charged with heterogeneous affects.9 It was in this way that Einstein's Analytic Cubism helped break the "vertebrate convention": that well-known immobile erectness of the seeing body, which strives to hide its own embodiedness from itself and to distanciate the inchoate, proximate phenomenal world into a representation of equally immobile things.10 For this was what Einstein called Analytic Cubism's "subjective realism": the subject, raised on the seamless perceptual continuity of an art as visual knowledge, is here confronted with the desublimatory realism of an art conceived instead as a heterogeneous multiplicity, as a constellation of disjunct states of vision not open to synthesis.

And that is why Einstein could think Analytic Cubism as a profoundly anti- mnemonic project. In a cruel deformation of Baudelaire's famous dictum, that "art is a mnemotechny of the beautiful," he called optical naturalism a "mnemotechnics of civilization."ll Writing in the 1920s, Einstein joined a plethora of modernist thinkers-to name but Nietzsche, by whom the statement was likely inspired-who were profoundly skeptical that memory could serve any longer as a critical resource. In the face of numerous efforts to render memory docile-to civilize it-what seemed to be required was the articulation of a countermemory, or perhaps even a model of visual amnesia tout court. Specifically, what was at stake for Einstein was the critique of a visual mnemotechnics that no longer worked on the level of iconography but was instead incorporated into the very structure of embodied experience as a crucial tool for a visuality of identification. In the associationist model of subjecthood familiar to Einstein from Helmholtz's physiological optics, for example,

8. Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 63. 9. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 297. 10. Carl Einstein, "Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928," Documents 1 (1929), pp. 35-38; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 476-77. 11. Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 59.

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OCTOBER

memory had been reduced to a passive storage of past sensations, readily and trans- parently available to a subject who used them to synthesize a mental three-dimensional image as a composite of the two-dimensional impressions on the retina and the tactile cues stored in that mnemonic repertory. The result was a "world as tautology," and a model of subjective experience that fundamentally hinged on repetition, for experience here became an assimilation of the new as a version of the already-known.12 Einstein's Analytic Cubism in contrast was anti- mnemonic to the extent that it purged depth from the surface of its pictures. When two-dimensional line gets severed from its former function as contour to instead irreconcilably separate pockets of chiaroscuro from one another, then its supposed "liberation" from mimesis is better called the liberation of an amnesifying vision. What used to be a "pregnant" silhouette richly suggestive of the hidden aspects of an object that it would be the job of the subject to complete mentally, by recourse to the tactile images remembered from past experiences of similar objects, now becomes a flat hiatus: optical naturalism's mnemonic continuity is split up by a net- work of intervals that no longer mark a "passing" but rather a "difference."13

The political and historical dimensions of this desublimatory thought of the interval-a rupture of the linear, causal temporality of both individual experience and of human history in general-become strikingly clear in a brief, isolated, and amazingly early text, translated in this issue: an essay Einstein wrote in 1921, a year before the great van Diemen exhibition in Berlin, on abstract art in the Soviet Union, and which was probably intended for publication in Vesc, the exile Constructivist magazine run by Ilja Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky in Berlin. No proper names of artists or works are cited in the text, but the art under discussion is almost certainly the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, and possibly the Constructivism of El Lissitzky, texts by whom (including the latter's seminal "A. and Pangeometry") Einstein would later include in his Europa-Almanach anthology.14 Sometimes referred to under the (posthumously given) title "Absolute Art and Absolute Politics," Einstein's essay sought to do nothing less than think a historical interval within which would emerge an antiepistemological "proletarian visuality," according to which to be a true revolutionary would mean not to inherit capitalism's world picture but to shatter it to pieces; not to replace the commodity with a new object paradigm, but to strike at the metaphysics of identification that subtended both.15

12. Carl Einstein, "Notes sur le cubisme," Documents 3 (1929), pp. 146-55; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 485-490; English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, this issue, p. 165. 13. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 68. 14. Europa-Almanach, ed. Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1925). For the Vesc connection see German Neundorfer, "Kritik an Anschauung": Bildbeschreibung im kunstkritischen Werke Carl Einsteins (Wiirzburg: K6nigshausen & Neumann, 2003), pp. 206-11. Neundorfer also suggests that the text may have been originally intended as an essay on the art of Einstein's friend Natan Altman. 15. Carl Einstein, "Revolution durchbricht Geschichte und Uberlieferung . . . ," typescript, 1921; reprinted in Werke, vol. 4, pp. 146-52; English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, this issue, pp. 139-45.

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Introduction

In this reading, that is to say, political emancipation did not turn on a class- based production model but rather on a nonproprietarian relation between subject and phenomenal world. Einstein mapped Mach and Nietzsche (or possibly, Hans Vaihinger's Nietzsche) onto Marx in order to argue that the true revolutionary subject was not the worker but rather the pauper. For instead of working matter into objects and aspiring to become their rightful proprietors, the poor are by definition bereft of objects, and as such are the most adequate candidates for a revolution during which objects would not simply change owners but whose decisive gesture would be the expropriation, once and for all, of the ideology of ownership itself- including that ideology that defines the subject as a core identity plus properties, as owner of his proper traits. Because this kind of "individuality is the sentimental excuse for the tyranny of objects," a tyranny whereby inchoate phenomena are rei- fied as an array of stable identities in the subject's own image, and in turn overwhelm the subject through the power of tautological inertia. A truly expropriationist art would be one that went further than Analytic Cubism: it would be an "abstraction" insofar as it swept the objects from the canvas altogether, and instead turned it into an arena for the performance of a "pure visual function." And this act of deletion would be what would make this art "absolute": not because it would "absolutize" the nonobjective as its new object, and so produce the most metaphysical version yet of optical naturalism, but rather because what is being "absolutized" here is the concreteness of visual experience as an active, processual, open-ended performance that will no longer generalize the image either as mere instantiation of a prior concept or as false actualization of the memory image of some absent, preexisting thing. Malevich's Suprematism in this reading would then be about painting the undula- tion of vision in the making, about constructing objects as a functional interaction of forms and viewing subject, an interaction whose ultimate consummation-as a static composition of definitive objects-would, however, be infinitely postponed.

This brief interval of a liberated subjectivity opened up by the art of the Soviet Revolution was one milestone among others that would prompt Einstein to investi- gate the relationships between art criticism and art history, between contemporary practices and their historical prefigurations. Returning to a Bergsonian idea that had surfaced as early as 1914-15 in the "Totality" essay and in Negerplastik, but now rereading it through Nietzsche's will to power, the Einstein of the late 1920s and '30s tried to think both the individual work of art and the passage of history-including the history of art to which the individual work belongs-as an always-already agonis- tic multiplicity. If history is only insofar as it is a continuous struggle of opposing forces; if the will to power is neither a party in that struggle nor a transcendental principle that governs it from outside, but rather fully immanent to it as the differential, qualitative relation of the quanta of these forces; and if it is this condition that makes the will to power "genealogical," then Einstein's project of his Paris exile was to rewrite art history as genealogy.16 Undertaken by an untenured, destitute

16. Gilles Deleuze, "Active and Reactive," in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 80-106.

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critic, this project was bound to remain fragmentary; it survives in the form of a few brief Documents essays, a "monograph" called Georges Braque (1934), which is only tangentially about Georges Braque, and in dozens of notebooks and hundreds upon hundreds of loose notes preserved in his estate. But its genealogical impetus can nonetheless be reconstructed. It operated on several levels simultaneously. On the level of art history, it was necessary to undo the world picture of a methodology that would organize the history of art as a linear, causal succession of periods governed by a single uniform style, Kunstwollen, or Sehkategorie, and instead identify the histori- cally specific constellations of active and reactive forces at work at any given moment; it was necessary to rethink art history as "a struggle of all optical experiences against one another."17 On the level of contemporaneity, it was necessary to think a way in which such historical constellations of forces might join their present equivalents, so that both would merge in an interval that suspended causal time as it actualized a past "optical revolt" for a present struggle. And on the level of the individual object, it was necessary to examine how practices that had rejected assimilation both by the dominant culture of their own time and then by the reigning models of art history were themselves animated by a qualitative difference that prefigured the formal structure of certain contemporary practices or could seem to deliver an implicit critique of others.

I will single out here but two brief examples of this genealogical project. First, I refer the reader to my introduction in this issue to Einstein's Documents essay on the seventeenth-century painter-etcher Hercules Seghers, in which I suggest that this artist provided Einstein with a counter-paradigm to what his teacher Wolfflin had described as a pervasive Dutch visuality of the Sehbild: a "Baroque" art of landscape in which the world was dematerialized to become a mere picture for the viewer-subject. Einstein's Seghers doubly rematerialized this constellation: on the level of the image's formal structure, he shattered the unified optical totality of Dutch art by a perverse totalization of the detail, emblematized by the fierce individuality of the rock or pebble in his antediluvian mountainscapes and of the brick in his etchings of ruins.18 Even more than the ruin's iconography of decay, it was this formal procedure of singularization that for Einstein constituted the strike "against architecture" delivered by works like the Abbey at Rijnsburg: to have dissolved "the

17. Carl Einstein, "Aphorismes methodiques," Documents 1 (1929), pp. 32-34; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 472-75.; English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, this issue, pp. 146-50. 18. We may never know for sure if Einstein was more than superficially aware of the work of Alois Riegl. But the Seghers essay's twin-pronged rematerialization of landscape and ruin makes it even more an anti-Riegl than an anti-W6lfflin, who never drew that connection between the two. For Riegl the contemporary infatuation with the dematerialized age value of the ruin, on one hand, and with the opticality of Dutch landscape (and Impressionism, which he believed was its avatar), on the other, were symptoms of a specifically modem world picture of causal knowledge, one that he was frequently on the verge of endorsing without ever quite doing so. See his "Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modemen Kunst" (1899), in Gesammelte Aufsdtze, intro. Hans Sedlmayr (Vienna: WUV-Universitatsverlag, 1996), pp. 27-37; "Jacob van Ruysdael" (1902), ibid., pp. 129-38; and "The Modem Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin," trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), pp. 21-51.

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Introduction

common rule according to which a building expresses a totality."19 And if

Seghers's practice as a whole thereby posited a scandalous countermodel to the dominant art of his period, and so was proof for how that period was in fact riven

by a struggle of multiple, opposing forces, then the second rematerialization, on the level of subjecthood, involved showing how such multiplicity was internalized within Seghers's practice itself, as a multiplicity of opposing psychic energies that decentered the artist-subject as creator of a world picture.

These psychic energies should not be called straightforwardly Freudian, because while Einstein had meanwhile read up on psychoanalysis, he did not like how in Freud "the Unconscious was conceived metaphysically, as an enduring substance."20 In Einstein's view, that is, the Freudian Unconscious did not resem- ble enough the Nietzschean multiplicity of forces because it resembled too much what Einstein had denounced, following Bergson's Creative Evolution, as the invisible ecran of "cinematographical thought" that stabilized the modern

subject as a subject of knowledge:21 to him, for all their dramatic differences, both psychoanalysis and "cinematographical thought" seemed to be practices of codification, since both appeared to posit a permanent deep structure of which the conscious self was but an instantiation, yet from which that self would nonetheless derive its sense of temporal continuity.22 Arenas for a battle of affects that spread out from representation into formal structure, the landscapes of Seghers, in contrast, seemed equidistant both from a visuality of knowledge and from any simple iconography of the Unconscious. And as such, to excavate

Seghers from past oblivion also served the contemporary purpose of proposing a countermodel to whatever was straightforwardly iconographic or unproblemat- ically "liberatory" about the psychoanalysis of Bretonian Surrealism, of which Einstein, like Bataille, was not a fan.

Just what other Surrealist practices Einstein pitted against that model will be the subject of other essays in this issue, so I shall be brief here and simply clarify that what is at stake in Einstein's discussion of the work of Masson and Mir6 is, among other issues, a rereading of the post-Cubist return to figuration in terms, once again, of the Nietzschean struggle of affects. If the desublimatory work of Einstein's Analytic Cubism had hinged on the emergence of qualitative difference

19. Carl Einstein, "Gravures d'Hercules Seghers," Documents 3 (1929), pp. 202-08; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 493-96; English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, this issue, pp. 154-57. 20. Einstein, "Pablo Picasso: Quelques tableaux de 1928," Werke, vol. 3, p. 476. 21. For Einstein on Bergson's cinematographical ecran, see the famous "Kahnweiler letter" (ca. 1921), reprinted in Werke, vol. 4, pp. 153-60, where Einstein goes on and tries to one-up Bergson by dismissing even the model of duration as itself "cinematographical" (pp. 155-57). 22. In its Nietzschean rejection of Freud, Einstein's model of subjectivity is a remarkably early item on a long list of like-minded critical projects, among which I want to single out here only Pierre Klossowski's breathtaking Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 15-55. While there is no documented biographical connection between the two, and any direct influence is unlikely, it should be noted that Klossowski had begun writing on Nietzsche as early as the mid-1930s for Acephale.

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within the psychophysiology of embodied vision, then he now tried to think that difference on the level of the "figural sign."23 The sphinxes, chimeras, and centaurs that newly invaded the Surrealist canvas seemed to introject the heterogeneous simultaneity of the man-beast into the human figure, a simultaneity that was not open to a dialectical resolution. Because at stake was not the creation of a new mythology or some simplistic recovery of an earlier, primitive one; nor was the metamorphosis of "totemistic identification" these legendary monsters forced the viewer to reenact of a metaphorical kind: metaphorical slippage was rather what was going to be ruptured by and within an interval opened up by myth.24 If Analytic Cubism's grid had interrupted the passage of modeling that had offered the viewer the illusory transition from the visible aspect of an object to its hidden ones, then the image of the man-beast at once pictured and interrupted the passage of human into beast by representing it not as a continuity but in a state of unresolved arrestment. Rather than a fusion of the human and the animalic, of civilization and nature, the man-beast was the scene of an agon between conflicting psychic forces of which a neo-Kantian mythologist like Carl Jung would not have approved, even though Einstein probably read him; for this was a "becoming-animal" whose mythic power was not intended to stabilize the modern subject by way of identification with a forgotten world picture, but rather to rethink that subject's identity as fundamentally multiple.

Now, "becoming-animal" is of course a buzzword not from Einstein but from a much later and rather more famous project, and yet the connection is not as will- ful as it may seem. For it is A Thousand Plateaus that will come to mind to anyone today reading my final sample from the Einstein labyrinth, a powerful if neglected essay he wrote in 1931 on the art of the nomads of Central Asia.25 Introducing the catalog of an exhibition at the Galerie de la Nrf that was organized by Andre Malraux in 1931, Einstein was fascinated by the composite structure of certain objects that were produced by a tribe's sorcerer as part of a healing ritual. A crude skull is carved from wood; its head is covered with a Sassanian helmet; the figure of a centipede is incised into the cheek; Chinese letters are inscribed on the fore- head; Greek meander ornament adorns the base: "These heads are covered in motifs that testify to endless migrations."

From an aesthetic point of view one might speak of a nomadic eclecti- cism: an animal style, since one is living among animals; ornaments, since one ceaselessly traverses the roads. The roads intersect as do the paths of the animals. The wind forms animals in the sky, and ornaments arise from the desert, phantoms full of menace.26

23. Carl Einstein, Georges Braque, typescript, 1931-32; reprinted in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 181-341, p. 325. 24. Carl Einstein, "Andre Masson, etude ethnologique," Documents 2 (1929), pp. 93-102; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 479-82, pp. 481-82. 25. Carl Einstein, introduction to Art des Nomades de l'Asie centrale (Paris: Galerie de la Nrf, 1931), pp. 3-12; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 557-59. 26. Ibid., p. 559.

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Introduction

The carved skulls of Einstein's nomads, that is to say, contradict what I have called the art and art history of the world picture on every count. Assemblages of bits and pieces picked up from the art of sedentary high cultures during migration, they condense the temporally linear succession of styles into a heterogeneous simultaneity, a jumble of Sehkategorien that moreover is not destined to become a lasting monument to the tribe's accumulated knowledge of its wanderings but which will be "destroyed after use." And incised as they are with the shapes of the environment traversed by their makers-the centipede crawling across a cheek that is "wrinkled as if by paths" running through the desert-the skulls are not so much aesthetic configurations as examples of a "symbolic tattoo." Rather than belonging to a world picture's order of representation, in other words, their semiotic modality is that of the imprint or index.27 The skulls of Einstein's nomads are the products of a subject who, unable or unwilling spatially and aesthetically to distanciate the phenomenal world of his environment into the totality of an image "over there," instead permits those phenomena to converge on him and carve themselves into the surface of his own likeness. Like certain psychotic butterflies that are imprinted with the pattern of their own spatial ambience,28 the skulls are the product of a mimesis that is performed by the space rather than the subject moving through it, for the deeply anti-Kantian phenomenology of Einstein's nomad is such that the creative subject diminishes to the extent that he cannot safely situate either himself or the objects within a space conceived as an empty, homogeneous medium that he may measure, traverse, and represent at his whim.

The relation between subject and world proposed by the skulls of Einstein's nomads is then not organized as the striated space of the world picture but rather as a "smooth," haptic space, which "one is never 'in front of,"' for here there "is no visual model for points of reference" that would unite observations "in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer."29 If the essays and translations collected in this issue help indicate how the transcendental ideology of a model of subjective experience founded on this immobility and that outsideness were the targets of Carl Einstein's critical work for more than two decades, then its purpose will have been more than fulfilled.

27. "To represent means to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm. Whenever this happens, man 'gets into the picture' in precedence over whatever is." Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," p. 131. 28. See Roger Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1984), pp. 17-32. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 493.

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October Introduction Vol Carl Einstein

Documents

gaehtgens berlin

berlin university

jstor archive

jens kwasny berlin

criticism of carl einstein

carl einstein winter

jstor terms

klaus siebenhaar berlin