Statue of a Chowke Chief from Angola. State Tretyakov Galleries, Moscow
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Statue of a Chowke chief from Angola. State Tretyakov Galleries, Moscow. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790881 by guest on 26 September 2021 Tot ality Against a Subject: Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik* SEBASTIAN ZEIDLER The great question of the “banalization” of space in modern societies might then be attacked not by unique or auratic objects nor by properly “contextual- ized” or “grounded” ones, but rather through strategies of singularization that would lighten spaces, releasing vital differences in them. —John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections In 1915, reading Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik was a disorienting experience, particularly if one casually opened the book on a random page and was confronted with the image illustrated here.1 The image shows a sculpture, but it is not accom- panied by a caption that would identify its cultural or phenomenological context. It is impossible to know with any certainty where the object came from, when it was made, by whom, for what purpose, whom (if anyone) it represents, or under which circumstances it became available to a Western photographer.2 Nor is it possible to determine, from the scarce visual evidence the image provides, the size * This essay is excerpted from a chapter of my dissertation on Carl Einstein’s theory and history of art. I am deeply grateful to my advisors Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss for their unfailing support—it simply could not have happened without them. Their work, and that of Jonathan Crary, has been a constant inspiration. Zoe Strother has saved me from more than one blunder in the field of African art. I alone am responsible for any that doubtlessly remain. I’d like to thank Thomas Crow and the staff of the Getty Research Institute for their exemplary hospitality, intellectual and otherwise. Christopher Heuer and Matthew Jackson have helped me more than they’re aware of. 1. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher, 1915; Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920); reprinted in Werke, vol. 1, 1908–18, ed. Rolf-Peter Baacke and Jens Kwasny (Berlin: Medusa, 1980), pp. 245–391 (hereafter cited in the text as NP); translated in this issue as Negro Sculpture, trans. Charles W. Haxthausen (hereafter cited as NS), pp. 122–38. For another, unauthorized English version, see 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. 2. The object is the sculpture of a chief of the Chokwe from present-day Angola. Carved from wood, it measures sixteen inches, was formerly part of the Shchukin collection and is now located in the State Tretyakov Galleries, Moscow. (See Marie-Louise Bastin, La Sculpture Tshokwe [Meudon, France: A. et F. Chaffin, 1982], p. 113, no. 54.) These bits of information conjure up a whole network of ritual function, imperialist abduction, and modernist appropriation—but only now: now that decades of knowledge have accumulated around it. OCTOBER 107, Winter 2004, pp. 14–46. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790881 by guest on 26 September 2021 16 OCTOBER of the sculpture or even just its spatial situatedness. The photograph miniaturizes the object, but it is not clear at which scale; the absence of a ruler or indeed any other object prohibits an inference based on a comparison with either a measuring standard or with some item intuitively familiar to the reader from his own every- day environment. And its placement on a piece of cloth that folds up behind it to become a gray, grainy background, indistinguishable from the photographic paper but for the faintest trace of a cast shadow, makes the figure appear as if it were afloat in a nonspace—one in which the laws of gravity are suspended, and which seems purposely designed to resist all attempts at imagining the object’s groundedness in any imaginable life-world. The figure’s demeanor, finally, is not helpful either. Expecting a sculpture of the human body to generate meaning through its facial expression and posture, the reader is instead confronted with a body in which both are articulated in terms of a formal rather than a psychologi- cal principle: a rigorous symmetry that lends the figure an intensity not based on the vibrancy of an inner life, which the reader could recover empathetically. If comparison helps produce knowledge about an object by assimilating it to another and so subsuming it under a general category of which both are particular cases, then the object in the image is incomparable. If imagining the object as emerging from a life-world helps create a sense of hermeneutic fusion as the reader finds both it and himself joined by a shared vital bond, then the object in the image is deeply unhermeneutic. If the purpose of figurative sculpture is to carve out a sphere of authenticity in modernity and establish a psychological communion between two subjects, then the object in the image is deeply antipsychologistic. It is all the more enticing, even unsettling, for these very reasons. And so, the reader turns to the introductory text for guidance, only to be repelled yet again. For not only does that text come entirely without footnotes and bibliography, it never explicitly refers to a single example from that selection of objects which it, after all, is supposed to introduce. When it discusses its subject, what it has in mind, apparently, is African sculpture “in general,” and what it has to say about it is phrased in a singularly abstract theoretical idiom. If the contempo- rary reviewers of Einstein’s Negerplastik, from Ernst Bloch to Wilhelm Hausenstein to Hans Tietze, had anything in common, then it was their bafflement in the face of the nondiscursive,3 and this bafflement can still be felt in the sizable scholarly literature, which, while it has produced valuable insights and discoveries, has tended to cast its nets very wide in its efforts to allay the book’s violent hermeticism by restoring it to its proper context.4 And I will attempt nothing dissimilar—except 3. The reviews of Negerplastik have been assembled in Carl Einstein: Materialien Band I. Zwischen Bebuquin und Negerplastik, ed. Rolf-Peter Baacke and Gerti Fietzek (Berlin: Silver & Goldstein, 1990), pp. 85–133. 4. Among a plethora of texts on Negerplastik I found the following studies most useful, even if my own approach is different from theirs: Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Minuit, 2000), pp. 174–89; Klaus H. Kiefer, “Carl Einsteins Negerplastik: Kubismus und Kolonialismus-Kritik,” in Literatur und Kolonialismus I: Die Verarbeitung der kolonialen Expansion in der europäis- chen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Bader and János Riesz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983), pp. 233–49; Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790881 by guest on 26 September 2021 Totality Against a Subject 17 that my perspective and emphasis will be different. I am interested in Negerplastik not just as a theoretical text, but as a theoretical text about sculpture, and one that engages not just other texts about sculpture, but actual objects. This is why I have begun my essay with the image of an object; and this is why this entire essay will be an attempt to make sense of it in Negerplastik’s terms, where sense means an adequate explanation of the disorientation it generated, a disorientation that I think we can feel even today. My focus on just this one object is deliberate, for to understand Negerplastik properly is to reenact the hallucinatory obsession of its author with the experience of specific works of art. But to work toward that explanation in turn requires first an extensive look at certain other objects—objects that are nowhere mentioned in Einstein’s text, yet which his argument is everywhere designed to invalidate. For the historical signifi- cance of Negerplastik was to set up a countermodel to two paradigms that dominated sculptural discourse in prewar Germany, two paradigms that from our vantage point in the present could not seem more different: the work of Adolf von Hildebrand on one hand, the sculpture of Auguste Rodin on the other.5 What could these two practices possibly have in common? In order to solve this riddle, it is necessary to invoke two other names: those of Einstein’s teachers at Berlin University, Heinrich Wölfflin and Georg Simmel.6 For it was Wölfflin who provided Einstein with certain critical terms, only Einstein turned them on their head; and it was Simmel, among other critics, who was instrumental in shaping a peculiar image of Rodin in Germany before 1914, one on which Hildebrand and Wölfflin could in fact agree even as they believed that Hildebrand was its polar opposite. I will look at these tangled issues in turn, and I want to begin by pointing to an assumption, shared by all of Negerplastik’s targets, that I have already outlined in the introduc- tion to this issue: the assumption that, over and above their mimetic function, works of art are epistemological models, objects whose purpose is nothing so much as to induce the viewing subject to believe that the phenomenal world will cohere, “Fonctions de l’art africain dans l’oeuvre de Carl Einstein,” in Images de l’africain de l’antiquité au XXe siècle, ed. Daniel Droixhe and Klaus H. Kiefer (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 149–76; Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte de europäischen Avantgarde (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), pp.