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The Primitivist Critique of Modernity: Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin1

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The Primitivist Critique of Modernity: Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin1 The Primitivist Critique of Modernity: Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin1 David Pan In the “Sirens” episode in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus, relying on nothing more than the wax in his sailors’ ears and the rope binding him to the mast of his ship, was able to hear the sirens’ song without being drawn to his death like all the sailors before him.2 Franz Kafka, finally giving the sirens their due, points out that their song could certainly pierce wax and would lead a man to burst all bonds. Instead of attributing Odysseus’ sur- vival to his cunning use of technical means, which he calls “childish mea- sures,”3 Kafka attributes it to the sirens’ use of an even more horrible weapon than their song: their silence. Believing his trick had worked, Odysseus did not hear their silence, but imagined he heard the sound of their singing, for no one could resist “the feeling of having triumphed over them by one’s own strength, and the consequent exaltation that bears down everything before it.”4 The sirens disappeared from Odysseus’per- ceptions, which were focused entirely on himself. Kafka concludes: “If the sirens had possessed consciousness, they would have been annihilated at that moment. But they remained as they had been; all that had hap- pened was that Odysseus had escaped them.”5 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have argued that this ancient 1. From Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism by David Pan. Copyright 2001 by the University of Nebraska Press. 2. Homer, Odyssey, Book 12, pp.166-200. 3. Franz Kafka, “The Silence of the Sirens,” in The Complete Stories, Nahum N. Glatzer, ed. and tr. by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 430. 4. Ibid., p. 431. 5. Ibid., p. 432. 41 42 DAVID PAN epic demonstrates the inseparability of myth and Enlightenment. Odysseus is the model of an Enlightenment faith in human technology. Through clever technical means he is able to escape the injunctions of a mythic fate. By creating an exception to the mythic law and thereby destroying it, he replaces it with a new law of human technical mastery over nature.6 In Kafka’s account, however, the fascination of the story does not stem from Odysseus’ cunning, but from the naïve optimism that could place so much trust in “his handful of wax and his fathom of chain.”7 This interpretation changes the character of the exception to the rule of fate that the story of the sirens presents. Instead of being the first instance of a new law of human sovereignty over nature, Odysseus’ escape is an exception to the law of mythic fate that only affirms fate’s capricious power to grant sur- vival as well as to ordain death. His actions prove the degree of his self- delusion, and his refusal to recognize the power of the sirens has no effect on these impersonal manifestations of the forces of nature. The punish- ment that they have prepared for him is far worse than the physical death other sailors had found. In contrast to his predecessors, Odysseus, mes- merized by his faith in his own technical powers, has been rendered deaf to the voice of fate and dead to the world of spirit. The song of the sirens becomes an invention of his own mind that, in its inconsequential enter- tainment, diverts him from the silence that surrounds him. His survival in the epic depends on silencing the myth; but the fate that lies behind the myth continues to exist, though he is oblivious to it. In this example, Kafka has taken the epic modernity of Homer’s story and reinterpreted it, revealing once again the primitive mythic power that Horkheimer and Adorno seek to deny. If, in their reading, Homer’s text struggles to overcome a mythic fate, Kafka’s text struggles to revive it. The contrast between the Frankfurt School’s modernist reading and Kafka’s primitivist one does not demonstrate the regressive implications of progress, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue.8 Rather, it reveals an alter- native to the twin notions of progression and of regression in history. The progressivist position is not new. It is simply the latest version of the kind of cultural chauvinism that motivates the episodes of The Odyssey in which Homer describes how Odysseus’ cleverness ultimately overcomes various instances of a backward or barbaric primitivity (e.g., the Lotus 6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 34 and 58-59. 7. Kafka, op. cit., p. 431. 8. Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit., pp. 35-36. THE PRIMITIVIST CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY 43 Eaters or the Cyclops).9 When Kafka reads the opposition between myth and Enlightenment as part of a continuing conflict in human culture between piety and pride, he defends the coherence and relevance of a primitive perspective. In presenting this perspective, Kafka does not close off all possibility of Odysseus succeeding in his struggle against the sirens; he merely redefines the criteria for determining this success. He notes in an addendum to his story that Odysseus’ only hope of outwitting the sirens, “although here the human understanding is beyond its depths,” is by hearing their silence, thereby recognizing their power, and then feigning a feeling of victory.10 This chance to effect a true escape from the sirens’ trap does not lie in Odysseus’ own technical abilities, but rather in his ability to maintain an inner consciousness of their sovereignty. The opposition between a modern belief in human achievement and a primitive reverence for mythic fate provides the two basic perspectives defining the development of German culture in the 20th century. Both coexist, often within a single text, yet this opposition does not mean that expressionism is ambiguous.11 Rather, it should be interpreted as part of the struggle of a primitive perspective12 to assert itself in art and literature 9. Horkheimer and Adorno, ibid., pp. 62-67. 10. Kafka, op. cit., p. 432. 11. See Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper, Expressionismus (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 22, who describe a “‘dialectic’ of subject dissociation and renewal of humanity”; and Thomas Anz, “Gesellschaftliche Modernisierung, literarische Moderne und philoso- phische Postmoderne: Fünf Thesen” in Thomas Anz and Michael Stark eds., Die Modernität des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), pp. 2-3. See also Jill Lloyd, German Expres- sionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. vi-ix. 12. Since the mid-1980s, a growing body of work has investigated the primitivist character of modernism. See Robert Goldwater’s classic study, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York: Random House, 1938; Vintage Books, 1967); the catalog of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York edited by William Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984); and such recent books as Karla Bilang, Bild und Gegenbild: Das Ursprüngliche in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1989); Lloyd, German Expres- sionism, op. cit.; Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hud- son, 1994); and Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist As Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Other recent works include Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr., eds., The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 44 DAVID PAN after a prolonged suppression of primitive forms.13 According to this interpretation, “modernism” is a misnomer for early 20th-century aes- thetic movements. The idea of progress and opposition to the notion of tradition embedded in this word do not describe, but rather contradict the motivating impulses of this “primitivist” movement. The confusion is not simply due to an interpretive fallacy, but to the historical situation of modernization against which the expressionists were revolting. The artists and writers of this period were deeply affected by the rapid pace of industrialization, which had transformed Europe from a traditional agrarian to a modern industrial society.14 Yet, 20th-cen- tury aesthetic movements did not develop as an accompaniment to moder- nity, but as a reaction to and revolt against it. The age of industrialism institutionalized an aesthetics of autonomy in the 19th century and in the 20th century avant-garde attempts to merge art with life sought to over- turn this Enlightenment aesthetics of autonomy and to criticize social modernization.15 This double revolt against modernity leads to the devel- opment of a perspective on culture that does not supplement or accom- pany, but contradicts and replaces a modern perspective. Rather than subsuming 20th-century art within a larger process of modernization, understanding this art as fundamentally primitivist serves to emphasize the polar opposition between the modern and the primitive. The equation of expressionism with primitivism brings with it a rein- terpretation of the former’s historical context. It makes expressionism a result of the imitation of primitive art forms rather than the creation of the radically new, and part of a cyclical rather than evolutionary European 13. See also Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy (New York: Alfred A.
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