Statue of a Chowke Chief from Angola. State Tretyakov Galleries, Moscow

Statue of a Chowke chief from Angola. State Tretyakov Galleries, Moscow.

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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.

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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 everyday 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 psychological principle: a rigorous symmetry that lends the figure an intensity not based on the vibrancy of an inner life, which the reader could recover 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 contemporary 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;

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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 significance 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 introduction 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. 114–75; 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. 37–93; David Pan, Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 121–35; Rhys W. Williams, “Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik and the Aesthetics of Expressionism,” in Expressionism in Focus, ed. Richard Sheppard (New Alyth, Blairgowrie, Scotland: Lochee Publications, 1987), pp. 73–93; “Positivism in the Works of Carl Einstein, Carl Sternheim and Gottfried Benn,” Journal of European Studies 13 (December 1983), pp. 247–67. Rather than quarreling with the literature at every turn, I have instead chosen to present my own point of view. 5. For a different perspective on the Hildebrand/Rodin divide see now the stimulating essay by David Getsy that reached me only after the completion of my own study: “Encountering the Male Nude at the Origins of Modern Sculpture: Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand, and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality,” in The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, ed. Antoinette Roesler- Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2003), pp. 297–313. 6. On Einstein’s studies at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (1904–06 and 1908), see Sibylle Penkert, Carl Einstein: Beiträge zu einer Monographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Rupprecht, 1969), pp. 44–46.

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for him and through his own constitutive agency, into a totality known variously as the “unity of the manifold” or the modern “world picture.”7

Causal Knowledge: Hildebrand’s Wittelsbacher Fountain

What might a sculpture look like that would fit this description? My two illus- trations represent a conceivably overdetermined example: the Wittelsbacher Fountain in Munich, completed in 1895 by the neoclassicist sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand. Overdetermined, because the historical web of connections is suit- ably thick: Hildebrand was an acquaintance of Hermann von Helmholtz (he modeled his bust and designed his family’s tomb), whose physiological optics would become an unnamed but major target throughout Einstein’s critical work. Hildebrand was a close friend of Wölfflin, who advised him on the actual design of the fountain and celebrated his achievement in several laudatory essays, one of which included the frontally taken photograph shown here.8 And, of course, he was the author of the most influential prewar treatise on sculptural theory, The Problem of Form (1903), a book that was indebted to Helmholtz’s physiological optics and was explicitly cited by Einstein as a target in Negerplastik.9 The Wittelsbacher Fountain was the solution to The Problem of Form. What was this problem? It was, precisely, to produce sculpture as epistemological model: to offer the modern subject the experience of a formal configuration purged of the mess of everyday sensory contingency, dispersed memory, disjunctive spaces, and temporal attenuation—a configuration that would excite (but never trouble) the subject to process it as visual knowledge. The problem of form was, in Hildebrand’s words, to find a way of relieving the modern subject of the “anxiety of the cubic,”10 or

7. As the young Einstein put it in a short, fragmentary manuscript that is one of his earliest statements on visual art, “Critique of Judgment, or Epistemological Faculty and Art. The forms of vision were interpreted [in the age of Kant] as forms of the epistemological subject; vision was indebted to epistemology, precisely, for form.” Carl Einstein, “Die Bildung kunstgeschichtliche[r] Gesetze” (ca. 1906), in Werke, vol. 4, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992), pp. 267–68. 8. On the commission of the Wittelsbacher Fountain (1890–95), see Sigrid Esche-Braunfels, Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921) (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1993), pp. 210–26; Jürgen Wittstock, “Adolf Hildebrands Hauptwerk: Der Wittelsbacher Brunnen in München,” in Oberbayerisches Archiv 101 (1976), pp. 7–67. For the Helmholtz tomb see Esche-Braunfels, Adolf von Hildebrand, pp. 387–89. In April 1892, while the design process for the fountain was under way, Helmholtz visited Hildebrand in Florence for a “spirited exchange” of ideas (Tamara Felicitas Hufschmidt, Adolf von Hildebrand: Architektur und Plastik seiner Brunnen [Munich: UNI, 1995], p. 24). The fountain photograph is taken from Heinrich Wölfﬂin, “Adolf von Hildebrand zu seinem siebenzigsten Geburtstag am 6. Oktober” (1918), in Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), p. 91. 9. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form (1903), in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, ed. Henning Bock (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969), pp. 199–265; English edition, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), pp. 227–79. 10. “dem Kubischen das Quälende zu nehmen.” Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form, p. 242; The Problem of Form, p. 258.

Adolf von Hildebrand. Wittelsbacher Fountain, Munich. 1890–95.

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in Wölfﬂin’s words, to “organize and soothe perception,” and both agreed that sculptural relief was the paradigmatic medium to achieve that task.11 The “anxiety” in question arose from the threat of epistemological fragmentation, when a subject tries and fails to totalize its three-dimensional environment as a ﬁeld of vision. It arose when the spatio-temporal experience of what Hildebrand obsoletely calls “nature” (when he really means the metropolis ca. 1900) would not resolve itself into a stable constellation where objects are accessible as visual wholeness, observable from a distance. And in order to think how that wholeness might be achieved sculpturally, Hildebrand turned to Helmholtz’s seminal theory of unconscious inference.12

11. “die Wahrnehmung ordnen und beruhigen.” Wölfflin, “Adolf von Hildebrand zu seinem siebenzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 99. 12. The significance of Helmholtz for Hildeband’s sculptural theory, possibly eclipsing Konrad Fiedler’s, was first pointed out by Wölfflin and has meanwhile been stressed by several other scholars. See Wölfflin’s “Adolf Hildebrand’s Problem der Form” (1931), in Kleine Schriften, pp. 104–06; Elisabeth Decker, Zur künstlerischen Beziehung zwischen Hans von Marées, Konrad Fiedler und Adolf Hildebrand (Dudweiler: Klein, 1967), p. 112; Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 84; and Timothy Lenoir, “The Politics of Vision: Optics, Painting, and Ideology in Germany, 1845-95,” in Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 131–78. Fiedler, too, was aware of it: in a letter dated August 6, 1892, he cautioned Hildebrand that future readers of the The Problem of Form, available to him in manuscript, might find that “individual points” of the argument had already been made by Helmholtz. See Adolf von

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Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Jonathan Crary, Gary Hatfield, Timothy Lenoir, and others, we have a clear picture today of what this theory was all about: a rethinking of Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, laid out in The Critique of Pure Reason, in terms of a psycho-physiological optics of embodied vision.13 Helmholtz, that is to say, sought to describe how a subject organized the formless array of stimuli initially given to perception into the fabled “unity of the manifold.” Specifically, he sought to answer a question that had played no role in Kant’s purely philosophical account. Considering that psychophysiological research had shown that the subject’s initial knowledge of the outside world comes in the form of stimuli imprinted on the retina as two-dimensional “local signs”; considering that, moreover, human vision is binocular so that two disparate sets of stimuli will be received; considering, finally, that (in Helmholtz’s famous antinativist turn) an innate sense of spatiality must be rejected: how does the subject cohere—or how can it be prompted to cohere—these stimuli into a three-dimensional unity?14 The solution was a theory of vision as unconscious inference, and its uncanny beauty was the way in which it accounted for what would seem to be the troublingly contingent fact of embodied vision as its very enabling condition. Helmholtz argued that, while Kant’s epistemology was an intellectual abstraction, it was nonetheless not invalidated but rather newly corroborated by his own research, for his model of embodied vision involved a ceaseless activity of synthesis that hinged on a rigorous logic of causality derived from Kant’s first Critique.15 Vision in Helmholtz is a process during which new stimuli are constantly compared to old ones stored in memory, such that their location and extension in space will be identified through an act of syllogistic generalization based on past experiences.16 This is a model of vision that assumes that a subject’s experience of

Hildebrand und seine Welt: Briefe und Erinnerungen, ed. Bernhard Sattler (Munich: Callwey, 1962), p. 385. 13. Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); Lenoir, “The Politics of Vision”; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 319–23. 14. On the complex history of the problem of depth perception from the late eighteenth century up until Helmholtz, see Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative, pp. 167–84, and R. Steven Turner, “Consensus and Controversy: Helmholtz on the Visual Perception of Space,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 155–204. 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), pp. 218–33. 16. “If I know that a particular way of seeing, for which I have learned how to employ exactly the right kind of innervation, is necessary in order to bring into direct vision a point two feet away and so many feet to the right, this also is a universal proposition, which applies to every case in which I have fixed a given point at that distance before or may do so hereafter. It is a piece of knowledge which cannot be expressed in words but which sums up my previous successful experience. It may at any moment become the major premise of an inference—whenever, in fact, I fix on a point in this position and feel that I am doing so by looking as that major premise states. This perception of my fixation is then my minor premise, and the conclusion is that the object I am looking at is to be found at the location in question.” Hermann von Helmholtz, “Recent Progress in the Theory of Vision” (1868), in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Russell Kahl (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 145–222. Helmholtz points out in his Treatise on Physiological Optics that this model of syllogistic vision was in fact inspired by John Stuart Mill’s Logic.

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an object is temporally linear, epistemologically cumulative, and deeply backward- oriented, for the subject will always seek to interpret the new as but a variation of the old: as effect of a prior cause, the identification of which will be, precisely, the purpose of unconscious inference. The consequence of this model for sculptural experience, all too familiar from a plethora of twentieth-century treatises on that issue, become obvious when Helmholtz defines the visual experience of an object as the gradual “fusion” of its “multiple perspectival aspects into the concept of its three-dimensional form.”17 Every encounter with an object, that is to say, involves subsuming the phenomenal singularity of its aspects under a general intellectual concept that the subject brings to the encounter ready-made—“human figure,” say. And the subject will acquire visual knowledge about this object as a three- dimensional totality precisely to the extent that in the act of perception the object gradually disappears into a mere mental image of itself—precisely to the extent that its aspects are treated as so many “realizations of the possible,” instantiations of a generality which is, however, nowhere to be seen.18 It is saying something about the urgency of the threat of contingent experience in modernity that even this model was no longer enough, in 1903, to alleviate Hildebrand’s “anxiety of the cubic.” He was too troubled by the spatio-temporal dila- tion that accompanies the experience of any freestanding sculpture, and which implies that it will not be fully present to a mobile viewer at any one moment.19 Hildebrand wanted knowledge to be fully present to vision, and so he turned to Helmholtz’s model of relief as default modality of distant vision.20 The relief as Fernbild that is Hildebrand’s sculptural paradigm in The Problem of Form is located at that point where the kinesthetic activity of bifocal vision, which at close range will constantly strain to compound disparate surface data into an optical whole, has been arrested into a soothing stasis. For when the material object retreats into the distance, dispari- ty is evened out as the eyes’ lines of sight become near-parallel, just divergent enough for the subject still to have inferential work to do, no longer disparate enough for it to feel incapable of that totalization. Because, again, that is what unconscious inference crucially depends on: a perceptible difference that it will be the task of the subject to synthesize away. That, after all, is the reason why Helmholtz considered a relief capable of producing a much more compelling illusion than most paintings, because, unlike brushstrokes on a flat surface, it generates inferrable disparities, and because, like human distant vision, relief compresses the spatial distances between objects located far away from the viewer.21

17. Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1896). This passage, from the second German edition of the Handbuch, which was revised by Helmholtz himself, does not occur in the English version, which is based on the posthumously revised third edition. 18. For the ideology of a model of experience as “realization of the possible,” see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968), trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 211–12. I will address this issue in more detail below. 19. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, p. 230. 20. On distant vision as “normal” modality of perception, see Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P. C. Southall (New York: Dover, 1962), pp. 14–15. 21. “That is why, perceived from the correct position, a relief is a much more perfect kind of imitation,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790881 by guest on 26 September 2021 Hence the Wittelsbacher Fountain. And hence the precise staging of its experience in the photograph taken from Wölfﬂin’s essay, which through its proscription of viewing angle and distance strives so hard to block out both the expansive three-dimensionality of the fountain’s burgeoning forms and its highly contrived insertion within the urban site. For, as we learn only from the comparison with a different image, the fountain is situated at a point where a public square, the Lenbachplatz, terminates in a steep drop toward the adjacent park, the Maximiliansanlagen, and that it is semicircular in plan, with the central section bulging out toward the square while its back drops off vertically toward the park, where a second basin is located on a lower level. None of this is apparent in the photograph, for here the viewer has been assigned a place from which the work’s actual material dimensions and the spatial relations among its elements seem as unclear as possible, which is to say where these relations have been “resolved” into the visual totality of a relief. Witness how the rim of the basin curves just enough at the edges to make it seem to oscillate between ﬂatness and plasticity; how the rim thereby (in virtue of its three-dimensionality) leads the eye back toward the flanking figures on their recessed

at least as far as the object’s form is concerned, than the most accomplished ﬂat painting could ever be.” Helmholtz, Handbuch, p. 807.

von Hildebrand. Wittelsbacher Fountain, Munich. 1890–95.

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pedestals even as it also (in virtue of its two-dimensionality) pulls them forward by appearing to merge with the straight upper edge of the pedestals into a single fronto-parallel line. How, likewise, we seem to be looking at a single row of over- flows, where the two outer ones are in fact recessed back. How the figures’ postures are organized as strong contrasts of frontal and profile aspects, thus yielding maximum visual information about their three-dimensional bodies within a shallow relief space. How the figures seem to draw the expansive protu- sion of the central, circular fountain toward which they converge back into that shallow slice of space which they themselves inhabit, thus joining with it to form the silhouette of a virtual two-dimensional triangle. And how, finally, the absence of any discernible ground between the fountain and the trees in the distance renders the spatial interval between them unmeasurable, and so works to pictori- alize even the ambient space of the fountain by turning it into the intangible background plane of its relief composition. It should have become clear from my description that the “solution” to the “problem of form”—of visualizing three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional relief—is not so much the actual as the illusionistic and illusory achievement of that impossible task. Just as the celebrated clarity of the Wittelsbacher fountain is based on an obfuscation of the material objecthood of its elements, so the compelling sense of their plasticity—the sense that one doesn’t feel a need to move around the fountain to gather further visual data—is based on the visual compression of their actual interrelation in space. In Hildebrand’s terminology, Daseinsform—“existential form,” that is, material objecthood—has been reconfig- ured as Wirkungsform, “effective form.”22 Referring as it does to the Helmholtzian visuality of causal inference, “effective form” clarifies for us that even as it insists on being beheld as a relief, from a fixed point of view at a distance, the Fountain does not thereby substitute the process of successive inferential data gathering with something radically different. Punctuality in Hildebrand is not the moment when a temporally attenuated quantitative experience—the accumulation, comparing, and generalizing of sensory data as syllogistic knowledge over time— flips over into its absolute, qualitative Other, the incommensurable parousie of the aesthetic. The punctual experience of Hildebrandian relief should rather be defined as modernization masquerading as modernism: unconscious inference rooted to the spot, so that it may revel in its own epistemological loop.23

22. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, p. 233, where Daseinsform is translated as “inherent form.” 23. In her discussion of François Rude’s Marseillaise, Rosalind Krauss has described how causality had been the underlying narrative structure of early-nineteenth-century, neoclassicist historical relief. The Wittelsbacher Fountain, whose narrative content is purely nominal (Hildebrand used to joke with Fiedler about the exact meaning, if any, of its marine iconography), dates from a time where causality has been displaced from subject matter and introjected into the body as its very structure of vision—a movement that points, once again, to the retrograde nature of later, modernist-type theories of relief. See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 11–13.

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Becoming as Totalization: Simmel’s Rodin

To address the second sculptural paradigm rejected in Negerplastik is to be confronted with a paradox. Because for us today it seems entirely unclear how the work of Auguste Rodin could be criticized, and apparently for much the same reason, as Hildebrand’s. At stake here is not just the evident superiority but also the radically different issues relevant to the Rodin we have come to know through the critical revisions of the past several decades.24 Issues, moreover, that Hildebrand, for example, was well aware of: Rodin’s Victor Hugo and almost all of his sculptural groups “fall apart,” he declared; “one can’t find an aspect from which they could be grasped as a unified image [Einheitsbild].”25 Quite so. Thanks to their phenomenological materialism—the disjunctness of their aspects, the palpability of the stuff of which they are made—many of Rodin’s sculptures resist being “grasped,” where “to grasp” is “to comprehend,” and moreover to comprehend as image. And as such, they would also seem inherently resistant to being perceived as aesthetic models of any kind of subject formation that hinges on a sense of that subject’s self-identity. And yet that is precisely what they came to stand for in the writings of Einstein’s teacher Georg Simmel. Because for Simmel, the work of Rodin promised nothing less than a utopian resolution of the “tragedy of culture” through an aesthetics of becoming as temporalized process of identity formation. What is the tragedy of culture? It is the tragedy of an insidious, specifically modern process of the self-alienation of the subject precisely in what used to be the very modality of its self-realization: the production of objects. In his sociology, that is to say, Simmel outlined a broadly Marxian (but ultimately Romantic) account of identity formation according to which a subject becomes subject principally through its self-externalization into a material by working that material—by turning nature into objects, matter into form.26 And he went on to describe how this model of sub- jectivity then came under threat in modernity when the division of labor shattered self-externalization into meaningless fragments and artisanal object production was displaced by collective, automated processes. Unlike the Marxists, however, Simmel

24. See Leo Steinberg, “Rodin” (1963), in his Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 322–403; Krauss, Passages, pp. 20–31, and her “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” (1981), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 151–57; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture” (1980), in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 1–39. 25. Adolf von Hildebrand, “Auguste Rodin” (1918), in Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 425–30; for an abridged English translation, see Rodin in Perspective, ed. Ruth Butler (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 139–43. 26. Georg Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” in Philosophische Kultur: Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne (3/1923; Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1998), pp. 195–219; “On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” in The Conﬂict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), pp. 27–46. On the intellectual tradition of Simmel’s “expressivist Bildungsideal,” see Jürgen Habermas, “Simmel als Zeitdiagnostiker,” in Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, pp. 7–17.

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believed that this rupture was a quasi-ontological condition that extended not just to the new object paradigm of the commodity27 but to all “objectivations” of contemporary “culture,” whether social norms, the institutions of the modern nation-state, or interpersonal relations: “The subjective life which we feel in its continuous stream . . . can aspire to cultural perfection only through forms which have become completely alien and crystallized into self-sufficient independence.”28 The “subjective life in its continuous stream”: this passage alerts us to the way in which Simmel gave Romantic self-externalization a Bergsonian slant. Simmel was among the earliest serious readers of Bergson in Germany, and he was instrumental in popularizing his work among a younger generation.29 What he found in Bergson was a model of subject formation as fundamentally interior, always already layered, and continuously multiple. This was an interiority which to describe in terms of a syllogistic, cumulative knowledge, organized by a self-identical agency, would be an ex-post-rationalization: an externalization. For Simmel as for Bergson, that is to say, modern “culture” was neo-Kantian by default, and its epistemology was a pragmatic territorialization of this vital interiority, a transformation of “life” into “nonlife” through its systematic objectivation as static, detemporalized form.30 There was, however, for Simmel one sphere of production that escaped this vicious circle: the sphere of art, and more specifically the sculpture of Rodin.31 In a crucial passage on Rodin in his deeply sentimental book on Rembrandt, Simmel called the sculptor the paradigmatic artist of a “modern Heraclitism,” a world-picture [Weltbild], in which all substantiality and stability of empirical experience has been substituted by movements. A fixed quantum of energy permeates the material world, or rather: is this world; no formal construct is granted even the briefest duration, and the ostensible unity of its contour is but vibration

27. “The ‘fetishism’ that Marx assigned to economic objects in the era of commodity production represents only a special case of this general fate of the contents of our culture.” Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” p. 213; “On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” p. 43 (translation modiﬁed). 28. Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” p. 198; “On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” p. 30 (translation modiﬁed). 29. For Simmel’s Bergsonism, see Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 2/1922), especially pp. 62–72; Rudolf W. Meyer, “Bergson in Deutschland: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Zeitauffassung,” in Studien zum Zeitproblem in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1982), pp. 10–64; Felicitas Dörr, Die Kunst als Gegenstand der Kulturanalyse im Werk Georg Simmels (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), pp. 43–49. 30. Simmel’s fullest statement on Bergson is his “Henri Bergson” (1914), in Zur Philosophie der Kunst: Philosophische und kunstphilosophische Aufsätze (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1922), pp. 127–45. 31. For a detailed discussion of the documentary evidence for Simmel’s fascination with Rodin, starting as early as 1900, see J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, “Simmel und Rodin” (1976), in Rodin-Studien: Persönlichkeit. Werke. Wirkung. Bibliographie (Munich: Prestel, 1983), pp. 317–28. For another reading of Simmel on Rodin, see the excellent study by Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 72–75. See also David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 62–64.

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and the undulation of energy exchange. Rodin’s figures are elements of a world perceived in this way.32 The sculptures of Simmel’s Rodin did not just represent this modern world- picture of flux that was falsely domesticated by neo-Kantian epistemology; they also produced a Heraclitean subject in and as the act of sculptural experience. For in Rodin’s work, Simmel believed, becoming was not just illustrated by a sculpture: the sculpture rather incorporated becoming as its form and its very modality of experience. This is a modality that might be called a totalization as infinite post- ponement, and for Simmel it was emblematized by nothing so much as those Rodin sculptures in which a figure was so intimately fused with the very matter it was made of—the marble block—that it could seem as though it represented subject formation as open-ended temporal process that never reached completion.33 Precisely because it will never resolve itself into a single comprehensive aspect; precisely because its crouched, circular posture at once represents its own becoming and demands of the viewer to reenact it as he ambulates around the block; precisely because of this double incompletion of its form, a sculpture like Rodin’s Danaid emblematized for Simmel at once a successful self-externalization that had not been reified into a rigid form, and a sculptural experience that shared in that success by mimicking it.

32. Georg Simmel, Rembrandt: Ein kulturphilosophischer Versuch (1916; Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1919), p. 134. For the hopeless idealism of the Rembrandt book, see Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 153, n. 53. 33. The “emergence of the ﬁgure from the stone” is an “unmediated making-sensible [Versinnlichung] of the becoming which is now the very signiﬁcance of its representation.” Georg Simmel, “Rodin” (1911),

Auguste Rodin. Danaid. 1885. Kunstmuseum Athenaeum, Helsinki.

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But just how “incomplete” was the subject of sculptural experience of this Heraclitean “world-picture”? To be sure, Heraclitus’s dictum, that one never steps into the same river twice, was one of Bergson’s favorite examples for a model of becoming as the temporal unfolding of difference within repetition. Hence, insofar as it was Bergsonian, the Simmelian subject would seem to be the polar opposite of the Helmholtzian subject, founded as the latter is on a model of identification, bent on nothing so much as assimilating difference to the generality of the already known. And indeed, Simmel explicitly rejected a causal model of subjective experience for precisely this reason.34 But then one should be alert to the fact that Helmholtz had been on Simmel’s first dissertation committee, and to the exact phrasing of the quote above: “a fixed quantum of energy.” Unlike the river of Bergson’s Heraclitus, Simmel’s flux resembles a pool in which change is finite and repetitive. And so, it is tempting to think that Simmel was here in fact trying to dovetail vitalism with a rather different model: the paradigm of a causal world-picture that the young Helmholtz had described, decades earlier, in his extremely influential essay on the conservation of force.35 Part of the enormous significance of his argument had been that even as he dynamized classical mechanics by postulating the continuous agency throughout nature of an all-pervading Kraft, or energy, he simultaneously sought to contain that dynamization within the framework of a law that guaranteed the finitude, predictability, and self-identity of those aggregate energetic states that now replaced the classical object. That containment was achieved by claiming that it was precisely the discovery of energy—and the discovery of its conservation—that proved the validity of one particular aspect of the law of causality: that cause equals effect. Even as the material world was liqufied, that is, this liquefaction was in turn neutralized by the constancy of a law that supposedly governed it. Identity was dispersed into ceaseless change, but the (perfectly self-identical) law of causality ensured that change could be thought as but a repetition of different versions of the same.36

in Philosophische Kultur, pp. 151–65. Translations from this essay are mine; a truncated English version was published as “Rodin’s Work as an Expression of the Modern Spirit,” in Rodin in Perspective, pp. 127–30. 34. “Life is a ceaseless, ﬂowing creation of novelty . . . it does not exhaust itself in the form of cause and effect, which, after all, only ever derives sameness from sameness; it is rather an entirely originary creative movement, which cannot be calculated like a mechanism but which can only be experienced [erlebt].” Simmel, “Henri Bergson,” p. 132. 35. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Conservation of Force: A Physical Memoir” (1847), in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, pp. 3–55. On the tremendous importance of this essay for a rethinking of labor power in modernity, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 52–63. 36. In the lucid summary of Milic Capek: “What we call ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ is in the language of classical physics nothing but two successive forms of the constant quantity of energy. No cause can be without its effect because no particular quantity of energy can disappear without being transformed into its equivalent; and no effect can be without its cause because no quantity of energy in the world can arise out of nothing, but only from the transformation of a previous energetic equivalent. Thus the basic identity and quantitative constancy of the unitary physical stuff underlies the successive causal series in nature.” Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science VII (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), pp. 12–13.

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This antihistorical impulse of Helmholtz’s model of causality would go a long way to explain Simmel’s claim that “the state of absolute animation into which the souls and Rodin’s vibrating, convulsive bodies are forced negates time. . . . Absolute becoming is just as unhistorical as absolute non-becoming.”37 The visual spectacle of Rodin’s modélé, that is to say, for Simmel represents the externalization of an effect taken to such an extreme that the temporality of ﬂux becomes indistinguishable from stasis. No one saw this more clearly than a certain Leon Trotsky, who had heard Simmel lecture on Rodin in his Vienna exile, and who in 1911 recorded his verdict in a Pravda essay: The “new soul” is animated through and through, and that animation lacks any central impulse or dogma. It is not just different from one moment to the next; it is not identical with itself even in a single moment. It is always different. . . . It absorbs everything and dissolves it within itself. Each of its states is but a stop along the way from the unknown into the unknown.38 One may disagree with Trotsky’s call for a “central dogma”—for the restoration of a primal cause—and still admire the acuity with which he unmasked the “Heraclitism” of Simmel’s Rodin for what it was: the reconﬁguration of the identity principle as the eternal recurrence of a change in which an empty repetition is matched by what another author has called the empty difference of the “beautiful soul.”39 And so, it is on two issues that Simmel and Hildebrand converge: the diagnosis of subjective experience in modernity, and, given that diagnosis, sculpture’s function in modernity. Hildebrand had opposed the totality of relief to the fragmentation of perception in everyday life: a totality that was an illusion produced within the viewer as a calculated effect of embodied vision. In the face of contingency, Simmel’s Rodin produces no such totalities. But he does activate the viewer with a similar end in mind. The work of Simmel’s Rodin is about a process of totalization, such that the contemplation of the fragmentariness of modern experience is turned into an aesthetic of becoming. The philosopher of money was more realistic than Hildebrand; for Simmel, totality in modernity was no longer available in the experience of any one thing. And so he processual- ized it. Yet in doing so, his model of the aesthetic subject—a subject who derived

37. Simmel, Rembrandt, p. 134. 38. Leon Trotsky, “Zwei Wiener Ausstellungen im Jahre 1911” (1911), in Literatur und Revolution, trans. Eugen Schaefer and Hans von Riesen (Munich: dtv, 1972), pp. 412–27. I was alerted to Trotsky’s text, which was not included in the English edition I consulted (Literature and Revolution [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966]), by Schmoll, “Simmel and Rodin,” pp. 327–28. 39. “There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed. . . .” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. XX.

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his sense of identity from a ceaseless excitation kept alive by inﬁnite postpone- ment—came to resemble the very subject of commodity consumption that Simmel himself had examined, melancholically, in such detail in his sociological work.

Negerplastik: Against Optical Naturalism

And that was, precisely, the argument of Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik: that irrespec- tive of their vastly different arguments, the paradigms of Hildebrand’s relief and the freestanding sculpture of Simmel’s Rodin, a neo-Kantian visual epistemology and a “softcore” Bergsonism of false becoming, were essentially alike. Einstein’s term for both is “pictorial sculpture” (malerische Plastik), and his term for their ideology is “optical naturalism”: The optical naturalism of Western art is not the imitation of external nature; rather, the nature that is passively imitated here is merely the vantage point of the viewer. Whence the geneticism, the excessive rel- ativism that characterizes most of our art. This art adapted itself to the beholder (frontality, distant image), and increasingly the production of the final optical form was entrusted to an actively participating beholder. (NP, p. 256; NS, p. 133) The “optical naturalism” of sculpture, that is to say, is no longer a mimetic naturalism, for it fully reckons with the “eclipse of the referent” brought about by neo-Kantian–type models of embodied vision, with the Copernican turn from a “copy-type” model of the phenomenal world as unproblematically accessible to a subject, to the belief that this world will be configured, by the subject, in the act of perception. What is being “naturalized” in optical naturalism, therefore, is rather the subject’s position within and toward this world: the simultaneous constitution, in the act of sculptural experience, of the subject as subject, and of the world as picture—for that subject.40 Hence optical naturalism’s formal means can be equally “frontality, multiple viewpoints, transitional modélé, and sculptural silhouette” (NP, p. 255; NS, p. 132): a cumulative processing of aspects (as in Helmholtz on freestanding sculpture), an interminable totalization (the Danaid of Simmel’s Rodin), or the pregnant gestalt of a relief’s overall contour (the Wittelsbacher Fountain). And it is in order to get at the root of this becoming-image of the phenomenal world for a centered subject that Einstein crucially modifies a term from Wölfflin to dismiss the work of both Hildebrand and Rodin as “pictorial sculpture.” Because pictorial sculpture, as Einstein encountered it in either The Principles of Art History or in Wölfflin’s lectures at Berlin University, was part of “the most decisive revolution which art history knows,” the transformation of a Renaissance

40. On this double constitution of the subject within the world, and the world as picture for that subject, see Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 115–54.

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“tactile image” [Tastbild] into the “visual image” [Sehbild] of the Baroque, and hence the origin of a modern art of “visibility,” of a reconfiguration of the world into a “world seen.”41 For Wölfflin, that is, the “classical” art of the Renaissance had been tactile in the sense that the precise linearity of a painting by Bronzino or Hans Holbein had recorded the most insignificant detail with a near-hallucinatory clarity that gave the viewer little work to do; their palpable severity of line rendered the phenomenal world as though it existed in the image independently of the subject who beheld it.42 The “world seen,” in contrast, was a world made over into a set of stimuli to be synthesized by a subject’s vision: a world in which appearance takes precedence over object and where pictorial means no longer served to clarify the objective form of things—as when in a Dutch land- scape the winding parallel lines of a country road are partly submerged in the shadow cast by the allover chiaroscuro of a cloudy sky above, a road that does not exist except insofar as it is seen, at a specific moment, under specific lighting conditions, by a subject. For Wölfflin, this subjectivism of the world seen lasted into his own present. He associated it with Impressionism—which for him meant not just the painting of Claude Monet (his example in the Principles for a contemporary art of the Sehbild), but also the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. “Composition and silhouette simply don’t exist for him,” an awed Wölfflin told his students in a lecture on nineteenth-century art, making his point with a slide of the Citizens of Calais.43 Wölfflin’s conviction that the experience of sculpture is above all optical— whether as tactile image or as visual image—led him to treating a Rodin like a Medardo Rosso: given that sculpture must be an image, “Impressionist sculpture” went too far, for the chiaroscuro flicker that animated its surfaces threatened to dissolve what ought to be a formal gestalt into a formless chaos that gave the viewer-subject altogether too much work to do. What was required was rather a sculptural paradigm that for Wölfflin seemed like the very antithesis of Rodin: the relief of his friend Hildebrand. But this was not really an antithesis, for nowhere does Wölfflin argue that Hildebrand’s work is a return to the tactile image of the Renaissance. Wölfflin’s implicit claim was rather that all modern sculptors were concerned with setting up the pure visibility of a world seen, by a subject—only that some did so more successfully than others. Recognizing this, Einstein did not make the mistake of many Wölfflin translators who would render malerisch as “painterly” rather than “pictorial,” for at stake in the turn to the “world seen” is not a specific stylistic morphology but a centering of the subject.

41. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art , trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), pp. 21–22. 42. Ultimately, Wölfflin’s Tastbild is of course an oxymoron, since tactility-as-image, being a representation, is not tactile but, precisely, optical. See Yve-Alain Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless,’” in Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 13–40. 43. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Akademische Vorlesung, ed. Norbert Schmitz (Alfter, Germany: VDG, 1993), p. 115.

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What then was Einstein’s critique of Hildebrand and Rodin, specifically? I begin with the latter, for it is more complicated: first, because in Einstein’s critique the Simmelian Rodin is blended with a peculiarly German reading of Rodin as “Impressionist” sculptor, a reading on which Wölfflin and a younger generation of critics could readily agree; and second, because this critique seems to be delivered, ultimately, from a Hildebrandian point of view.44 Let us return to the Danaid: how can it be called Impressionist? By abstracting from the way in which materiality and form here fuse into an inseparable whole, and instead treating it as though it were a three-dimensional Sehbild, a solid mass covered with a surface texture available to vision only. In this perspective, the fine grain of the marble would act as a layer of flickering chiaroscuro that worked to subjectivize—optically naturalize— the sculpture. To the extent that it loses its material independence as object; to the extent that its form becomes a function of the constant inflection by lighting ceaselessly playing over and reconfiguring its surface from one moment to the next; to the extent that it thereby becomes a perpetually changing thing seen by a constant subject: to this extent the sculpture will appear to be fully constituted only by that subject’s interpretive activity. “The spectator was woven into the sculpture; he became an inseparable functional component of it. . . . [The sculptor] shifted the emphasis to the visual activity of the viewer and modeled with touches, so that the construction of the actual form would be left to the viewer” (NP, p. 250; NS, p. 128). First criterion of optical naturalism as criticized by Einstein: a dematerializa- tion of form that is involved when the viewer is presented with an object that seems to depend on him in order to become picture. Second criterion: a false temporalization of sculptural experience, one that works doubly to anthropomorphize the object even as it further dematerializes it. First, by introjecting into the sculpture the retrograde temporality of what we might call a “bad indexicality”; second, by having the sculpture conform to the basic existential condition of the subject: namely, to exist in time, and to experience over time. For Einstein, both aspects are at stake in a Simmelian Impressionist misreading of the “temporal function” of Rodin’s fabled modélé (NP, p. 253; NS, p. 131). I am calling the first aspect a bad indexicality in order to get at the causal structure that in Einstein’s view underlies the reading of that modélé both as Sehbild and as testimony of a subject’s self-externalization. In terms of the Impressionist Sehbild, modélé is causal since its apparent formal incompleteness invites a subject to infer its total optical form from the synthetic combination of visible and invisible parts—from the highlights on the ridges and the shadows in the valleys that together create modélé’s chiaroscuro.45 In terms of Simmelian self-externalization,

44. For an account of Rodin as paradigmatic sculptor of “Impressionism,” see Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst (Cologne: M. Dumont-Schauberg, 1907), pp. 44–50. It should be noted that Hamann is unique in that, in a brief aside, he calls Hildebrand’s Problem of Form a symptom rather than a critique of “Impressionist sculpture,” because it valorizes distant-view relief, the most optical of sculptural media (p. 44). 45. I am much less sure than most Germanists that Einstein ever read, or cared for, the work of Aloïs Riegl, certainly not the Riegl as distorted by Wilhelm Worringer. But, as I will show elsewhere in an essay

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modélé is causal since it turns the sculpture into “the subject of a conversation between two persons,” into the interface of two unalienated self-externalizations (NP, p. 250; NS, p. 128). In a famous passage of one of his Rodin essays, Simmel had called him the paradigmatic sculptor of modernity, “for the very essence of modernity is psychologism: the experience [Erleben] and interpretation of the world according to the responses of our inner self.”46 And he had claimed that this psychologistic retrieval hinged on the optical vibration that animates the surface of a Rodin and which, for him, purposely fragmented the work so that the viewer might make it whole.47 To treat a sculpture as conversation piece, that is to say, is to interpret modélé as “personal handwriting,” as imprinted with the traces of a creative individual’s self- externalization (NP, p. 249; NS, p. 127). What is at stake here for Einstein is not just the critique of a vulgar genius aesthetic; for him, that went almost without saying. At stake is more fundamentally the way in which a backward-oriented causal hermeneu- tics profoundly derealizes the sculptural object. For by treating it as visible effect of an invisible prior cause, the retrieval of which would constitute the experience of the sculpture, the decisive moments of this experience were displaced into “preludes and postludes,” a self-externalization in the past and its inferential recuperation in the present, leaving the object itself, precisely, nowhere: “increasingly the work dissolved into a conduit for psychological excitation, the individual flow, the causative agent and his effects, were fixated” (NP, p. 249; NS, p. 127). The presence of Bergson in Simmel notwithstanding, Einstein understood that it was overshadowed by a thought that turned the sculpture of Rodin into but a manifestation of an absent cause, and its experience in the present into but a doubling of a past event. Secondly, the modélé of the Simmelian Rodin comes under attack in Negerplastik for setting up what we already know as the model of a temporalized experience of sculpture as infinite totalization. When Einstein rejects modélé for being “transitional,” what he has in mind is the way in which the play of light and shadow will potentially be dislodged from its local, descriptive function to extend across—and thereby devalue—the silhouette established by any one of a figure’s aspects, thus asking the viewer to walk around it in search for a complete form that will, however, purposely elude him. For us today, decades after the advent, and more recently the downfall, of Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology, this rejection of the temporal processuality of sculptural experience seems intuitively wrong. And it brings up the troubling question, which we must now address

entitled “Riegl’s World-Picture,” in Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl explored the causality of chiaroscuro in sculptural relief in an account that merged Helmholtz’s psychophysiology of inferential vision with his causal physics of the “Conservation of Energy” essay, and he went on to map that account onto Impressionist painting. 46. Simmel, “Rodin” (1911), p. 164. 47. “A maximum of ‘excitation’ is provided because the withholding of the complete form strongly demands a maximum of activity by the viewer himself. If there is a grain of truth in that adage of art theory—that the subject repeats the creative process within himself as he appreciates the work—then it could not have been realized more forcefully than by having the imagination itself complete the incomplete, and by inserting its productive animation between the work and its ﬁnal effect within us.” Ibid., p. 157.

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before returning to the Simmelian Rodin: Is Carl Einstein’s critique not, ultimately, a Hildebrandian argument? Is it not the case that Negerplastik is full of snippets from The Problem of Form? Would not Hildebrand have endorsed Einstein’s program- matic claim that sculpture, rather than imitating a human body by modeling the surface of a solid mass until it resembles a ﬁgure (but only in a, literally, superﬁ- cial way), ought to represent instead the “cubic perception of space”? That its task, therefore, is to construct, for a viewer, the three-dimensionality of volume, such that the third dimension is perceived as the optical “totality” of “a single integra- tion” (NP, p. 255; NS, p. 132)? Are we therefore not dealing with a theory that, for all its pretensions to the contrary, is but an updated version of a neo-Kantian paradigm of sculpture as visual epistemology? No. Not only is Hildebrand nowhere endorsed in Negerplastik; rather, like Rodin’s, his work is in fact explicitly rejected, as pictorial sculpture, and for exactly the reasons which we examined in our discussion of the Wittelsbacher Fountain. The beauty of that rejection, delivered as a critique of the frontality of Hildebrandian relief, is the way in which Einstein dovetails a politics of vision with a formalist argument: Frontality concentrates all power into a single aspect and essentially cheats the viewer out of the experience of the cubic. It arranges the foremost parts according to a single viewpoint and endows them with a degree of plasticity. The simplest naturalistic aspect is chosen, the side closest to the beholder, the one that habitually orients him psychologi- cally and representationally. Through a pattern of rhythmic interrup- tions, the other, subordinate aspects suggest a sensation that corre- sponds to an idea of three-dimensionality based on our ideas of movement. The mental synthesis of abrupt movements—movements that are motivated above all by the motif—generates the idea of a spatial unity that has no formal legitimacy. (NP, p. 255; NS, p. 132) Translation: Hildebrand’s Wittelsbacher Fountain fails as art precisely to the extent that it promotes an optical naturalism whereby it is left to the subject mentally to complete the visual experience of a formal construct that has, in fact, been purposely designed as a fragment in order to enable that completion. To promote relief as sculptural paradigm is to organize the phenomenal world for a subject: it is ideologically to naturalize it by remaking it as image, consumable from a point of view, and so installing the subject as observer of the world—even as that world, in order to become so observable, is dematerialized into a mere picture, seen from a distance. To promote relief as sculptural paradigm is to pander to a “habituated” subject, a subject, that is, who has learned, through ceaseless repetition, to consider the modality of distant-vision relief as “normal view.” It is to pander to the expectations of a subject nurtured on a Helmholtzian “psychology” of unconscious inference.48

48. Helmholtz is never once mentioned in Negerplastik. But, while I disagree with his conclusions, I entirely agree with Klaus Kiefer (Diskurswandel, pp. 121–25) that he is an invisible presence in Einstein’s

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And in the process it is to produce an object that must necessarily be fragmentary to the extent that it is an object for that subject’s vision, to the extent that it is frontal. The three-dimensionality of the Wittelsbacher Fountain is not its objective material property but rather a supplement inferentially added by the viewer. “Abrupt movements” is Einstein’s term for this strategy, which he likely encountered in Wölfflin’s lectures and writings on “classical art.” He is referring to the way in which a figure’s posture is contorted into a combination of frontal and profile aspects so that a maximum of visual information about its body is crammed into a single (frontal) view—the Sistine Adam and the allegorical representations of Day and Night in the Medici Chapel are Wölfflin’s examples.49 And he is referring to the way in which, in a work like the Wittelsbacher Fountain, two figures between themselves generate the virtual image of a “combined” body: the male rider is shown with frontal torso but legs and head in profile, with the female adding a three- quarter view of legs and face (all of which is superficially motivated by narrative residues that further dissolve the fountain as form insofar as they turn it into an iconographic riddle). In each case, the body thus created exists nowhere except as an illusion of knowledge in the viewer’s constantly inferring mind. And it is in turn for its surreptitious epistemology that Einstein attacks Simmelian-type, temporalized sculptural experience. This is clear from the peculiar- sounding term he uses to dismiss it: sculpture that demands of the viewer to ambulate around it, he claims, is inherently “genetic” (NP, p. 256; NS, p. 132). That term refers to the attempt, in the years immediately predating Negerplastik, by the Marburg School of philosophy to rebuild neo-Kantian epistemology from the ground up.50 Thinkers like Moritz Schlick and Paul Natorp—whose name crops up on a reading list composed by the young Einstein51—tried to overcome the first Critique’s dualism between pure thought on one hand and a manifold of sensation waiting to be synthesized on the other, by a “genetic” theory of knowledge according to which “the processual nature of cognition” would turn out to be “the true meaning of the synthetic a priori.”52 As a scientific methodology, this was the origin of that familiar concept of scientific progress as a gradual yet infi- nitely postponed approach to absolute knowledge.53 And in terms of temporalized experience as knowledge-like, it enabled a rapprochement between two seemingly

early work, and I am able to cite a piece of (admittedly ambiguous) circumstantial evidence in support: Einstein jotted down the title of Helmholtz’s “Facts in Perception” on a piece of scrap paper that, to judge from the handwriting, would seem to date from before the war (Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl- Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 322, no. 29). 49. Heinrich Wölfﬂin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (1899), trans. Linda and Peter Murray (London: Phaidon, 1952), pp. 183–92, 257. 50. For the following I am indebted to the brilliant study by Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), pp. 31–33. 51. Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Carl-Einstein-Archiv, Sig. 322, unnumbered loose sheet. 52. Paul Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910), p. 14, n. 1. 53. “The object of knowledge itself, as the ‘reality’ standing over and against pure thought, is simply the ideal limit point—the never completed ‘X’—towards which the methodological progress of science is converging.” Friedman, Parting of the Ways, p. 31.

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irreconcilable philosophies: Bergsonian vitalism and neo-Kantianism. For, if Kantian knowledge was found to be fundamentally temporal—if the static factum could be thought as processual fieri without thereby becoming nonepistemologi- cal—then temporality was not the Other of knowledge; it was rather its very enabling condition.54 And so, Einstein felt that a temporalized sculptural experience was not an option for an alternative model of subject formation, for its “genetics” of becoming would define the subject in such a way that its incompleteness of form would generate the sense of an open-endedness that was ultimately scientific. Hence, Carl Einstein asks us to entertain a very difficult thought: What would a sculpture look like whose formal structure is nontemporally given to vision and which is yet not epistemological? What would a sculpture look like that would thereby refuse to offer an experience as tautological repetition of a prior identity? A sculpture that, unlike Simmel’s Rodin, would not be about the identification “of beholder and maker” (NP, p. 250; NP, p. 128) as retrieval of a prior subject-cause?55 A sculpture that, unlike Hildebrand’s relief, would not have been produced by an artist who “would always maintain the distance of the future viewer” and who would merely “model the effect” (NP, p. 250; NP, p. 128) of a prior knowledge-cause?

Tot ality as Actualization

It is time to examine the object I have introduced at the beginning of this essay more closely—even if to do so is to go against the grain of practically the entire Einstein literature, which has taken its cue too readily from Einstein himself and has internalized as its own methodology the absence of any discussion, in Negerplastik’s text of a speciﬁc object from its plate section.56 Yet it is quite clear that Einstein has the Chokwe ﬁgure and half a dozen similar objects from the book in mind when he declares that “it is the task of sculpture to form an equation in

54. “The scientific ‘factum’ ought simply be understood as a ‘fieri.’ . . . Indeed, it is only the fieri that is the factum: all being that science seeks to ‘arrest’ must necessarily dissolve again in the stream of becoming. And in the end it is only this becoming of which it can rightly be said: it is.” Natorp, Die logischen Grundlagen, p. 14. 55. The anti-tautological thrust of this statement was directly inspired by Nietzsche; compare The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 429 (#811). If I mention Nietzsche here only in passing, it is because he does not have a strong presence in Negerplastik; however, the importance of Nietzsche’s critique of causal epistemology for the later Einstein cannot be overestimated. For a discussion of the young Einstein’s relation to Nietzsche, see Rüdiger Riechert, Carl Einstein: Kunst zwischen Schöpfung und Vernichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 21–38. 56. I have respect for the attention recent Germanist studies have paid to Einstein’s awareness of the derealizing figurality of language, even and especially the language of art criticism. But as an art historian I find I have to test his writing against the evidence of its objects. To consider Einstein’s art criticism as a purely infratextual event runs the risk of treating Negerplastik as though it had been published without its plate section. Ultimately, what seems to be required is to think the interval between text and plates. (See Erich Kleinschmidt, “Das Rauschen der Begriffe: Produktive Beschreibungsproblematik in Carl Einsteins Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Weimarer Beiträge 47 [2001], pp. 507–24; German Neundorfer, “Ekphrasis in Carl Einsteins Negerplastik,” in Carl-Einstein-Kolloquium 1998, ed. Roland Baumann and Hubert Roland [Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001], pp. 49–64.)

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which naturalistic sensations of movement . . . are completely absorbed and in which their successive differentiation is converted into a formal order” (NP, p. 257; NS, p. 133), that a sculptural counterparadigm to Hildebrand and Simmel’s Rodin must repel any “temporal interpretation based on ideas of movement” (NP, p. 254; NS, p. 313) and instead gather those parts “which are not simultaneously visible” together “with the visible parts into a total form” (NP, p. 256; NS, p. 133). Does this sound like bad Cubist art criticism glossing Hildebrand? Let’s unpack these statements while looking at the Chokwe figure. What is optically naturalist about movement, and how does the figure “absorb” rather than represent it, or demand of the viewing subject to reenact it? Movement, it will be clear by now, introduces temporality into a subject’s perception of a sculpture, which for Einstein means that at any one moment the sculpture is never complete (this is the medium-specific part of his argument). And by introducing temporality, movement also introduces “continuity” into that perception: it makes the experience of the sculpture an enterprise of cumulative data gathering and processing, and in doing so, it makes the subject productive—precisely to the extent that the sculpture itself becomes illusionistic (this is the perceptual politics part of the argument). The Chokwe figure in contrast expunges movement just as it reduces the perceptual temporality to a single punctual moment. It achieves this by turning three-dimensionality—or as Einstein calls it with Hildebrand, “cubic space”—into form (NP, p. 250; NS, p. 128). That is to say, rather than treating (as Rodin does) the sculpture as a solid mass displacing space through movement, the Chokwe artist represented what we could call the movability of the figure as such. This he did by accepting the vertical condition of every human body as the generating structure for the figure’s posture. Neck, torso, and limbs then become local modulations along an axis whose endpoints are the headgear and the pedestal, respectively. And these modulations are organized in such a way that the capacity of the body for movement becomes visible as exhaustively as possible from a single, frontal viewpoint even as the figure also remains perfectly immobile. This is achieved by a cunning trick that we might call “aspect reversal.” The figure’s arms and legs are bent, indicating its capacity for displacing space by movement, both backward (in the case of the arms) and forward (the legs). But not only that: the arms and legs are bent at almost the same angle, and they are of nearly identical length; arms and legs become echoes of one another, and in such a way that for a frontal view the legs are mirror images of what the arms look like from the back, and vice versa—just as the strangely protuding lower torso echoes the spine of the figure, and just as the sphere-shaped part of the headgear echoes the bulging skull. As a result, a maximum of visual information about the body has been assembled into a single, frontal aspect even as its ability to move has been systematically explored: “The twofold movement into depth, forward and backward, has been bound into a single cubic expression” (NP, p. 260; NS, p. 134). Yet at the same time, one cannot really call this “moving,” for both the rigorous vertical symmetry of the overall posture and the “aspect reversal” symmetry of

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the limbs neutralize any sense of directed movement because they neutralize each other’s thrust. And for the same reason, one cannot say that this figure possesses the integrity of a body conceived as either a continuous, organic whole or as a solid material mass. For the body’s own “continuity” is here broken up and reorganized according to a syntax of movability, or, as Einstein calls it, borrowing a term from mathematical vector analysis, as a series of “directional resultant[s] of spatial contrasts” (NP, p. 259; NS, p. 135): a syntax whose elements must be discontinuous from one another in order to be perceptible as the opposing vectors (backward/forward) that they are. And indeed the sense of discontinuity could hardly be emphasized more strongly than by the way in which the sculptor has, literally, hinged the body’s posture on those anatomic joints that are the neuralgic areas of every figurative sculpture: the elbow tips and the kneecaps. Filed to razor-sharp points that now thrust forward, now back, they are the generative points—the “functional centers” or “points centrales” (NP, p. 258; NS, p. 134)—of a differential system of postures that at once dovetails and mutually opposes concavity and convex- ity, openness and closedness, front view and back view, without ever trying to blend them into one another.57 And so, the Chokwe figure eschews the strategies that both the Simmelian Rodin and Hildebrand had used in order to produce within the viewer-subject the sense of a spatio-temporal continuity that he supposedly shares with the object of his experience. It eschews the continuity of a “transitional modélé” that gently and interminably guides the viewer around a freestanding sculpture. And it also eschews the causal continuity that is generated within the viewer as he is prompted inferentially to synthesize, over time, the “pregnant” front and profile views of a figure into a conceptual whole that only ever exists in his mind. But even so: Einstein’s eloquent critique of the Hildebrandian paradigm notwithstanding, from which perspective is he delivering it? Are we not dealing here, ultimately, with an exacerbation of that paradigm, one that not so much departs

57. Yes: this is one of the moments in Negerplastik where its argument potentially opens onto a semio- logical reading of the Cubist object. If Picasso’s Steel Guitar learned from the Grebo mask to conceive of space as a nonmimetic relational system of solids and voids, then it might well be argued that what I am calling a syntax of movability as relational system of “posture contrasts” does for ﬁgurative sculpture what the protuding eye socket does for the face of the mask and what the cylinder and/as sound hole do for the musical instrument. (For which, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson” [1988], in Painting as Model [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993], pp. 65–97, especially pp. 79–94.) Yet, as I will show elsewhere, Einstein’s actual writings on Cubism date from a period when he is no longer deeply interested in sculpture or its lessons for painting; they are at their best when dealing with (presemiological) Analytic rather than Synthetic Cubism, and this is because they draw on an intellectual arsenal (Mach and Nietzsche, among others) that does not mesh well with a structural-linguistic type of semiology but rather, if anything, with what a famous Nietzsche reader would call a “semiotic of impulses” (Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle [1969], trans. Daniel W. Smith [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], pp. 15–54). Ultimately, that is to say, we are dealing here with two ways of decentering the self-identical subject: one which confronts it with the reality of a system that generates those utterances which that subject would like to think are its own. And another that seeks to erode even this impersonal system, because, in its will to codiﬁcation, its apriorism, in its very systematicity, it still smacks too much of knowledge, and hence of subjecthood reinstated on the level of structure.

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from as it radicalizes Hildebrand in its improbable-sounding demand for an exclu- sively visual, utterly nontemporal experience of the full spatial reality of the sculptural object from a single vantage point? (“Three-dimensionally situated as they may be, all parts of the composition must nonetheless be represented simultaneously, i.e., the dispersed space must be integrated into a single field of vision” [NP, p. 255; NS, p. 132]). A radicalization whose novelty would simply consist in the fact that its author is prepared, as Hildebrand ultimately was not, to jettison mimetic naturalism in favor of what, nonetheless, surreptitiously amounts to an optical naturalism? Is there a difference between what Einstein calls the formal “totality” (NP, p. 258; NS, p. 134) of the Chokwe figure and the epiphanic totalities familiar from postwar modernist art criticism? In order to answer that question we must turn to another text by Einstein, reprinted in translation in this volume, and entitled, precisely, “Totality.”58 Published in five parts in Aktion magazine in the year before Negerplastik’s first edition, the “Totality” essay is its epistemological—or rather, anti-epistemological—complement. Over a few densely written pages Einstein here tries to think just how their very formal and experiential structure—their totality—enables objects like the Chokwe figure to rupture the visual economy of the Western subject. We ought not be troubled by the fact that Einstein occasionally calls totality “transcen- dent,” and its experience an act of “cognition” (T, p. 226, 227; T2, p. 118). Because what is being “cognized” here is, precisely, that disruptive power: totality is “tran- scendent” insofar as its concreteness resists a subject’s attempt to generalize it as knowledge. “Transcendence” in the “Totality” essay is not a realm of pure ideas or forms that hover above the empirical world as its purified summa; transcendence is rather the immanence that knowledge must produce as outside in order to stabi- lize itself. So far from rehashing a neo-Kantian aesthetic, Einstein’s “Totality” essay rallies the work of a sworn enemy of neo-Kantian thought for its cause, a cause insufficiently explained by the umbrella term “primitivism,” and which I want to explore here as a primitivization: the rupture, in the act of aesthetic experience, of a modern subject model based on vision as knowledge by the encounter with an object that stages form as an actualization of the virtual. It has long been recognized, if not sufficiently explored, that Henri Bergson— specifically, the Bergson of Time and Free Will—is a major presence in the “Totality” essay.59 But Einstein’s reading of Bergson is highly selective (and, needless to say,

58. Carl Einstein, “Totalität” (1914), in Werke, vol. 1, pp. 223–29 (hereafter cited as T); English version, “Totality,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, this issue, pp. 115–21 (hereafter cited as T2). 59. Matias Martínez-Seekamp, “Ferien von der Kausalität?: Zum Gegensatz von ‘Kausalität’ und ‘Form’ bei Carl Einstein,” Text + Kritik 95 ( July 1987), pp. 13–22. On Bergson’s presence in Einstein’s Bebuquin, see the brief but valuable remarks in Oehm, Kunsttheorie, pp. 86–88. I am not persuaded by Dirk de Pol’s sug- gestion that the “Totality” essay should be understood as a straightforward critique of Kant’s epistemology. It is that, of course, but the target is not so much Kant himself but rather those Helmholtzian, neo- Kantianist models of the subject that in the late nineteenth century sought to “incorporate” his epistemology as visual knowledge of the body. Not to realize this is to lose sight of the historical speciﬁcity of

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deeply un-Simmelian); hence for a proper understanding of Negerplastik it is crucial to determine just what Einstein found useful in this writer for his own project, what he chose to disregard, or even, in effect, turn on its head. The first part of that inquiry is identified easily enough. It is a well-known fact that Bergson’s project of rethinking an unalienated model of subjecthood in modernity included a critique of Helmholtzian-type, associationist models of unconscious inference, and in his reading of Time and Free Will, Einstein appropriated that critique for his own purposes: for an attack on those paradigms of sculptural experience as visual knowledge that Negerplastik was designed to obliterate.60 The critique of causality as dissolution of concrete experience into the generality of a concept; the critique of a spatialized temporality as dissolution of qualitative punctual experience into an empty repetition of uniformly quantified moments; the subsumption, on the most fundamental level, of the singular under the “metaphor” or “allegory”61 of an identity principle that has been extrapolated from a mere moment of self-certainty to serve as rigid and predictable structure of the past and the future of subjective experience:62 all of these Bergsonian arguments are present, if in highly condensed form, in the “Totality” essay. Consider the following passage: Causal analysis is purely retrospective and always exceeds the concrete object; causes are substituted, but not the totality. The causes of the object always lie in another, posthumous plane than the object itself. Causal thinking dissolves into an unarticulated multiplicity and dispos- es of its object as an allegory of a nonsensible process that lies outside of the object. For that reason it says nothing about form or its quality. (T, p. 228; T2, p. 120)

Einstein’s Kant—and ultimately, of Einstein’s own project. See Dirk de Pol, “‘Totalität’: Die Kant-Rezeption in der Ästhetik des frühen Carl Einstein,” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 104 (1997), pp. 117–40. 60. On Helmholtz as unnamed adversary in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, pp. 319–22. 61. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1919; anastatic reprint, Kila: MT, s.d.). Bergson uses the term “metaphor” to describe the derealization that is involved when the qualitative difference of the sensation of individual shades of color is expressed by a system of magnitude that aligns those sensations as equidistant increments on a scale (p. 58). “Allegory” is Einstein’s term in “Totality” for the way in which causal epistemology in turn derealizes a concrete event as mere instantiation of a prior cause. “Allegory” and “metaphor” are used interchangeably by Einstein throughout his career, and it is quite possible that his suspicion of language was instigated by Bergson, among other sources. 62. For Bergson’s argument that causality is nothing other than a punctual self-identity that has been ideologically temporalized into a structure of repetition (like causes, like effects), see Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 207: “The principle of identity is the absolute law of our consciousness: it asserts that what is thought is thought at the moment when we think it, and what gives this principle its absolute necessity is that it does not bind the future to the present but only the present to the present. . . . But the principle of causality, insofar as it is supposed to bind the future to the present, could never take the form of a necessary principle; for the successive moments of real time are not bound up with one another, and no effort of logic will succeed in proving that what has been will be or will continue to be, that the same antecedents will always give rise to identical consequents.”

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Causal thinking destroys a sculpture as totality. Mentally to synthesize the relief of a sculptural object like the Wittelsbacher Fountain through unconscious inference is to venture beyond that object in a twofold way: it is to venture beyond it as formal construct, and it is to venture beyond it as formal construct given to experience now, in the present. For to treat the incomplete visual information about its three-dimensional appearance as so many effects of an absent cause is to activate, by recourse to a repertory of memory images, a concept of three-dimensionality of which the object is now considered a mere fragmentary instantiation. It is this reliance on a model of memory as resource of causal generalization that makes sculptural experience as unconscious inference—and the objects designed to encourage it—at one and the same time abstractly conceptual and deeply antiquarian. Further, what Bergson calls, now “intellectual thought,” now, expressly, “discur- sive reason,”63 is what Einstein calls “quantitative thinking”: a form of knowledge that works to quantify what is originally qualitative in experience; to homogenize the heterogeneous; and to spatialize the originally nonspatial temporality of subjective experience. Einstein uses Bergson’s example of a model of time as numerical sequence to make a point that is familiar from the Bergson literature: “Scientifically we measure time indirectly, with the help of magnitude, and transform it into a simultaneously spatial factor” (T, p. 228; T2, p. 120). To space out punctual sensations as increments on a scale (1, 2, 3 . . . ), that is to say, is to derealize temporal experience several times over. It is to insinuate that this experience is uniform at every instance; that this uniformity is in turn subject to uniform repetition which, qua repetition, adds nothing to the experience since it is conceived as the very structure, rather than as itself a kind of experience; and that what used to be its intensity—a fluctuation that belongs to this particular experience and is incommensurable to others—now becomes a measurable extensity, demarcated spatially by that interval that denotes the magnitude that separates it from the others. We have encountered this empty interval before. For as Bergson makes clear, it is an interval that opens up—and is immediately filled—as soon as visual perception is conceived as inferentially binocular: “The more you insist on the difference between the impressions made on the retina by two points on a homogeneous surface, the more do you thereby make room for the activity of the mind, which perceives under the form of extensive homogeneity what is given it as qualitative heterogeneity.”64 Even before the Helmholtzian subject performs its synthesis of sensory impressions, that is, it will already have interpreted them as spatialized: 1, 2. . . . It will then go on to fill the empty quantitative difference of the interval that it has carved out between them with its very own epistemological activity, as it sublates the impressions on either side of it into a synthetic syllogism. And the subject will perform this synthesis over the course of a time that, once again, is of that subject’s own making. For while the two sets of sensory data had hit the two retinas simultaneously, this simultaneity,

63. Ibid., p. 229. 64. Ibid., p. 79.

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too, is now spatialized into a sequence, and necessarily so, for synthetic judgments need time in order to deploy their synthesis. We now understand why time—as spatialized time—is the enemy in Carl Einstein’s model of sculptural experience. And we have reason to think that the temporal simultaneity that he insists is its modality is not that of two moments sep- arated by the tiniest spatio-temporal difference; it is rather that very difference between those two moments. Einstein is very clear on this: “considered allegori- cally, on the basis of geometrical ideas,” time becomes a “spatial sequence”; whereas true time, time “imagined purely, must mean a qualitative difference of experiences” (T, p. 227; T2, p. 120 [my emphasis]). Hence, the temporality of Einstein’s model of experience in the “Totality” essay sounds very close to Bergson’s famous definition of duration as “a succession of qualitative changes,” a “pure heterogeneity.”65 And that is indeed the case, provided it is understood that Einstein departs from Bergson in significant ways. Martin Jay has pointed out that, for all his insis- tence on this heterogeneity of duration, Bergson tended to consolidate its flow, and so blunt the critical edge of his own concept, by likening it to the experience of a melody, “which intertwines past, present, and future in a meaningful whole.”66 Einstein, in contrast, is not interested in thinking the temporal undulation of a melody, the composite totality that emerges from the present sensation and past rec- ollection of the “notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another”; he is interested in thinking the experience of a sculptural totality as qualitatively punctual. And he is not interested in thinking “succession without distinction”67 but rather in the distinction that arrests succession as the “qualitative difference of experiences.” And so, I suggest that in order to understand Einstein’s Bergsonism, we must think it together with another: a Bergsonism which, too, endorses Bergson’s all-important distinction between an epistemology of gradual, “numerical multiplicity” and a non- epistemological experience of a qualitative, “continuous multiplicity,” but a Bergsonism that is much more interested in the multiple than in the continuous.68 Take another look at the Chokwe figure, at the way in which it deploys its syntax of limbs to create an absolute, unmediated contrast between forward and backward: not a difference of degree, a difference in kind; for it is “the contrast, i.e., the unconditional unity of opposites,” that “constitutes totality” (T, p. 227; T2, p. 119 [my emphasis]). And, having introduced a potentially troubling term, he quali- fies his statement two sentences later: “Totality is not unity; for unity always implies repetition” (T, p. 227; T2, p. 119). Unity, that is to say, is but a synonym for identity, and identity necessarily opens onto an empty repetition: 1, 1, 1. . . . A totality conceived as self-identical would in fact lose its status as singularity, for it would no longer be one of a kind. Nor is totality founded on a judgment of exclusion:

65. Ibid., p. 104. 66. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 197. 67. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 110–11. 68. On numerical versus continuous multiplicity in Bergson, see the lucid summary in Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 4/1997), pp. 38–39.

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“Totality never excludes anything, i.e., it is not preceded by either a positivity nor a negativity” (T, p. 227; T2, p. 119). A totality according to Einstein’s Bergsonism is not based on a negation, for that would imply that totality is preceded by a full- fledged conceptual system that would be entrusted with defining that totality, from some vantage point outside of (most likely above) it, in contradistinction to what it is not.69 Nor is it based on a prior “positivity,” which is to say a prior, more comprehensive identity—such as the mental “image” of a complete human figure—for that in turn would reduce a totality to a mere instantiation of a concept, a mere realization of the possible.70 Einstein’s totality rather exists, neither as unity, nor as derivate of a self-identical a priori. It exists only as difference: it is a totality only insofar as and only at the very moment when it constitutes itself as con- trastive within the immanence of its hermetic form. It is then as an actualization of the virtual, in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, that the totality of Einstein’s Chokwe figure confronts the Western viewer in 1915 as a formal construct that generates qualitative difference entirely within and as itself: “The actualization of the virtual . . . always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation. Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle.”71 A totality as actualization, in other words, is two things simultaneously. First, it is originally multiple: it is only insofar as it is qualitatively differential, and insofar as this internal differentiation refutes any sense of its self-identity. This totality does not resemble itself. Second, a totality is only as “concrete totality,” as a “pregnant qualitative configuration” (T, p. 227; T2, p. 120); only insofar as its formal structure is so fully deployed as to make clear that “it can neither be derived from parts nor be traced back to a higher unity,” that it does not resemble another identity outside of it, either.72 And therein lies, precisely, the radical potential of art as totality for Carl Einstein, its “formal realism” (NP, p. 253; NS, p. 123): in the fact that, if existence is fundamentally structured by the differential quality of form, then visual art, as formal totality, is able to actualize that differential quality most fully, without lapsing, as systematic philosophies and their “optically naturalist” derivates in art are prone to do, into the dichotomy of the real and the possible, the absent concept and its formal instantiation, identity and its shadow:

69. For Deleuze, “the heart of Bergson’s project is to think differences in kind independently of all forms of negation.” Because “instead of starting out from a difference in kind between two orders, from a difference in kind between two beings, a general idea of order or being is created, which can no longer be thought except in oppostion to nonbeing in general.” Deleuze, Bergsonism, pp. 39–40. 70. On Deleuze’s critique, inspired by Bergson, of a notion of the possible as merely “a mode of antici- patory resemblance of the real,” which, shackled as it is to the identity principle, cannot conceive of the New, see the brilliant essay by Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 15–28. 71. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 212. 72. “The possible and the virtual are . . . distinguished by the fact that one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition.” Ibid., pp. 211–12.

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Form is that perfect identity of vision and individual realization, which are structurally isomorphic and hence do not relate to each other as concept and individual case. Vision may encompass several possible cases of realization, but has no higher qualitative reality than they do. It follows that art represents a special case of unconditional intensity, and that quality must be generated undiminshed within it. (NP, p. 256; NS, p. 133) Visual art as form, in other words, is wholly empirical (it is right there, and nowhere else), and, being nontemporal, it is lucidly distinct (it is not falsely becoming in Simmel’s sense). It is at once the postulate and the application of the idea of qualitative difference: this is the concreteness of its “formal realism.” Helmholtzian subjects and Simmelian Rodinistes like to think that sculptural experience is modeled on a numerical multiplicity: “Movement is usually conceived as a continuum that delimits space by strolling through it” (NP, p. 257; NS, p. 133). Hence, the danger that qualitative difference is diluted into either a false unity of gradual quantitative difference or into the forever evolving difference of the “beautiful soul.”73 But art as true totality, as form, actualizes quality nontemporally and fully empirically, and so ruptures that continuum. As Einstein puts it (and he clearly has the Chokwe figure’s differential configuration of forward and backward thrust in mind): “Because art by definition fixates its object, this unity [of the spatial continuum] is split into two opposite directions and so articulates two completely divergent tendencies that elsewhere, e.g., in the infinite space of the mathemati- cian, have no significance” (NP, p. 257; NS, p. 133). Art as totality is an arrestment of Bergson’s continuous multiplicity into the starkness of form. As such, it charges modern homogeneous space—the secret substrate of modern, spatialized time— qualitatively, by marking, as the Chokwe figure does, spatial directions as radically distinct from one another. The result is a sculptural paradigm that is not concerned with the fabled synthesis of aspects condensed into a single, unified view. To the contrary, it is the very ideology of generalization—of reconstructing an absent identity from its parts—which subtends that synthesis model that is being attacked here. The result is rather the rupture that occurs when a subject spatial- izes two sensations in order synthetically to bridge the interval between them, only to find it occupied, instead, by the nonsynthesizable, and to realize that this interval is not an empty “passing,” but a “difference.”74 And this opening of difference within the sculptural experience of an alien object extends, finally, to become an outward resistance to phenomenological contextualization. A work like the Chokwe sculpture, that is, performs a critique of a psychophysiological situational aesthetics of sculpture. I have in mind a short snippet

73. Ibid., p. xx. 74. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 66. Totality against the spatialization of time: it is only for reasons of space that I have to pass over here what I think would be an extremely meaningful comparison between Einstein’s Bergsonism and that of Georg Lukács (the Lukács of the Theory of the Novel and of History and Class Consciousness, respectively).

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in Negerplastik that Einstein apparently lifted almost unchanged from Hildebrand’s Problem of Form: “Form is an equation” (NP, p. 257; NS, p. 133).75 “Apparently,” for in truth the meaning of that enigmatic phrase to these two writers could not be more different. The context in Hildebrand is a discussion of the ways in which a sculpture can most effectively produce a sense of the unity of the manifold within the viewer, and the answer, familiar enough from our analysis of the Wittelsbacher Fountain, is: not through mimetic naturalism but through a reconfiguration of nature into aesthetic form—through an internal commensuration of parts such that all actual spatial relations are translated into “relative values that are valid only for the eye.” And Hildebrand goes on to compare this new, internal relation to the way in which mathematics “abstracts from numbers and expresses values only as the possible relationships between a and b.”76 That statement in turn was very likely inspired, if not by the work of Gustav Fechner, then by Helmholtz’s application of the Weber-Fechner Law to the analysis of different light intensities in painting.77 It was inspired, that is to say, by an “obliteration of the qualitative in sensation through its arithmetical homogenization,” whereby perception was no longer inextricably linked with a referent but was rather conceived as a product of the functional relations of stimuli, a relation that could be expressed mathemati- cally.78 Hildebrand called his Wittelsbacher Fountain a “totality,”79 but this is a totality that’s founded on a quantitative equation, one that builds on techniques developed for the modernization of vision in order to produce the illusion of a unity of the manifold within the viewer. And that quantitative equation was in turn the root principle of a sculptural thought that sought to extend that unity to a relational aesthetics of the urban situation. In 1915, in an essay charting Hildebrand’s unbroken fame in Germany, the critic Walter Riezler praised “the self-evidentness with which the Wittelsbacher Fountain arises from its situation,” and in his survey of contemporary art Wilhelm 75. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, p. 233; compare Problem der Form, p. 213 (“Gleichung der Form”). 76. Hildebrand, The Problem of Form, p. 234. 77. Helmholtz had argued that pictorial lighting will seem convincing to embodied vision if the artist takes into account that, rather than trying to depict an illusion of absolute, “objective” lighting “as it really is,” he needs to represent lighting relations, and he cited a version of Fechner’s Law in support: “Within very wide limits of brightness, differences in the strength of light are equally distinct or appear equal in sensation, if they form an equal fraction of the total quantity of light compared.” The artist, in other words, needs to understand that his work will be exhibited in a gallery space where light intensity will be confined to a much narrower section of the spectrum than in the real world, and, likewise, that the subject’s vision will be comparatively less strained than under normal conditions. Hence, it would be naive for a painter simply to copy the luminosity of fleshtone “as it really is” into his work; his job is not imitation but rather the “translation” of a luminosity “ratio”: he needs to factor the relation between the brightness of fleshtone over against, say, the brightness of a costume color as seen under normal lighting conditions into his painting in such a way that this relation will be preserved even as the absolute brightness will necessarily be different in the gallery space. See Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Relation of Optics to Painting” (1871), in Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 279–308. 78. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 147 for the quote; pp. 141–49 for the momentous importance of the Weber-Fechner Law for the nineteenth-century modernization of vision. 79. Adolf von Hildebrand, “Zum Fall Hildebrand” (1907), in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, pp. 483–87.

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Hausenstein declared, with customary hyperbole, that “there simply cannot be anything more perfect in the field of site-specific sculpture [Situationsplastik].”80 In fact, Riezler and Hausenstein were only echoing claims made by Hildebrand himself in a number of essays devoted to the issue of sculpture within the architectural context of the city. Hildebrand was deeply troubled by the way in which the reor- ganization of city centers increasingly turned the urban environment into a jumble of historical and modern structures and spatial configurations. The public square looked to him like an incoherent assembly of buildings and monuments as disjunct solitaires, their interrelation plotted by nothing so much as a sheer “game of chance.”81 The failure of epistemological totalization that Hildebrand sensed, at the level of the individual object, as the “anxiety of the cubic,” was matched, at the level of the urban spatial environment as site of that object, by a version of the agoraphobia [Platzangst] famously theorized by Camillo Sitte.82 Whether in his critique of Rodin’s Citizens of Calais, his praise for the Piazza della Signoria in Florence as harmonic ensemble of medieval architecture and Renaissance sculpture, or his description of his own public projects, for Hildebrand it was always a question of designing a sculpture in such a way that it established both an internal and an external quantitative commensurability of form.83 Internally, by organizing the composition as inferential relief; externally, by inserting the monument into the preexisting urban situation in such a way that both were joined to form a new optical meta-gestalt—as when Hildebrand praised the way in which radically different sediments of history were sublated into a totality by putting Michelangelo’s David next to the Palazzo Vecchio, or when the Wittelsbacher Fountain fuses with its topographical environment into a single image. The ambiguous control game at stake here becomes starkly clear when Wölfflin calls the fountain a monument “so powerful that it will immediately ‘assign the viewer his place [seinen Platz anweist].’”84 Platzanweisung as antidote to Platzangst, a fitting metaphor to describe a strategy that seeks to reorganize public space by setting up a theater-like relief screen on a square for a public ushered to assemble as audience in front of it. For

80. Walter Riezler, “Adolf von Hildebrand und die Schätzung seiner Zeit,” in Die Kunst XVI, 1 (1915), pp. 41–54. Wilhelm Hausenstein, Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1914/1920), p. 252. 81. Adolf von Hildebrand, “Beitrag zum Verständnis des künstlerischen Zusammenhangs architektonischer Situationen” (1908), in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, pp. 380–91. 82. Hildebrand does not use the term Platzscheu; he’s not troubled by empty so much as randomly configured spaces, and his argument isn’t psychopathological so much as optico-physiological. Nonetheless, what he shares with Sitte is the identical anxiety in face of the disruption of a supposedly organic urban fabric by the specter of modern contingency. Compare Camillo Sitte, Der Städte-Bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1889). For Sitte on agoraphobia see Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 25–49. 83. For Hildebrand’s discussion of the Piazza della Signoria and other Renaissance urban ensembles, see his “Beitrag zum Verständnis des künstlerischen Zusammenhangs architektonischer Situationen,” pp. 382–84. 84. Wölfﬂin, “Adolf von Hildebrand zu seinem siebenzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 91.

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all the derivative neoclassicism evident in the details of its formal language, the Wittelsbacher Fountain as totality was part of a modern optical regime whose effect was ultimately precisely calculable. Carl Einstein’s sculptural totality, on the other hand, is a differential equation, which internally, in virtue of its qualitative multiplicity, defies quantification, and which externally, in virtue of its hermeticism, remains incommensurable with its environment. Consider, again, the Chokwe sculpture, specifically the relation between figure and base. Einstein claims that it is a hallmark of most African sculptures that unlike their European counterparts, they do not need a base and that, if they do have one, it “will be accentuated sculpturally” (NP, p. 259; NS, p. 135). What he means by this is that a work like the Chokwe object disrupts the pedestal/figure logic of the Western monument by integrating the base into the sculpture. For the design of the base is clearly a function of what I have called the qualitative syntax of movability that structures the figure above it. The base extends just far enough for the limbs to deploy themselves along the vertical axis, which is to say that it both defines and contains the space that the figure displaces. As such the base is entirely an element of the interior organization of the work and does not mediate at all between this interior organization and an external environment. Wherever the object will happen to be placed, therefore, it will seem out of place, because the customary connection-yet-separation between aesthetic sphere and everyday space set up by a pedestal will have been severed.85 Such is the hermeticism of Carl Einstein’s sculptural totality: the object internalizes the uprootedness inflicted upon it by its abduction from its original context and turns it against the viewer who so abducted it in order to enlarge his knowledge yet who finds it unassimilable. Dysfunctional as ritual object in its new Western context, Einstein’s African sculpture simultaneously becomes anticontextual as an aesthetic object in the Western sense. It doesn’t belong either in the museum of fine arts or the museum of natural history. Because it doesn’t belong.

85. It is extremely regrettable that Einstein never wrote at any length about the work of Constantin Brancusi. For what Rosalind Krauss has called the sitelessness or “aterritoriality of the sculptural object” that is generated when a work becomes all base might have been complemented by an account of an anti- contextualism that likewise refuses to mediate between object and site. On the ﬁgure/pedestal logic of the monument, see Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 276–91; on Brancusi, see her “Echelle/monumentalité, modernism/postmodernisme: La ruse de Brancusi,” in Qu’est-ce que la Sculpture moderne? (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), pp. 246–60. Margit Rowell has in fact associated Negerplastik and Brancusi, but in terms of a shared project of formal autonomy—a prob- lematic term, for aterritoriality, at least in Einstein’s case, includes a refusal to being territorialized: in terms of a Western autonomy aesthetic, for example. Rowell,“Brancusi: Timelessness in a Modern Mode,” in Friedrich Teja Bach et al., Constantin Brancusi 1876–1957 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), p. 46.

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