Rock Paper Scissors*

Home , Joachim Neugroschel, Made of Stars

LAURIE MONAHAN

I feel sorry for those who have not, at least once in their lives, dreamt of turning into one or other of the nondescript objects that surround them: a table, a chair, an animal, a tree trunk, a sheet of paper. They have no desire to get out of their skins. . . . To remain at ease with oneself, like wine in a wineskin, is an attitude contrary to all passion, and consequently to everything that is really worthwhile. —Michel Leiris1

Rock

It begins with rocks: rocks that petrify, rocks that form ruins, rocks that “betray a despair that paralyzes like a cramp.” Thus art historian and critic Carl Einstein describes the seventeenth-century landscape engravings of Dutch artist Hercules Seghers in the September 1929 issue Documents, the avant-garde journal he coedited with Georges Bataille. According to the critic, Seghers’s images are “a narrow, isolated revolt against everything that can be called Dutch.”2 To effect this revolt, the artist produces scenes that are like sheets of stone, whether these be jagged cliff faces or crumbling stone structures. Ostensibly revealing broad vistas, Seghers’s landscapes instead form a stony wall of impenetrable material, confounding view with picture plane. The viewer is not meant to enter these spaces. Instead, one observes an immutable landscape of rock, such that, Einstein tells us, “the organic continuity of

* With thanks to Mick Taussig, who ﬁrst suggested to me the magical properties of stone. I am especially indebted to Sally Stein and Todd Porterﬁeld for their invaluable suggestions in the preparation of this essay. . 1. “Dictionnaire critique: Metamorphosis,” Documents 6 (November 1929), p. 333, translated in Encyclopaedia Acephaelica, Atlas Arkhive 3, ed. Alistair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 60. 2. Carl Einstein, “Gravures d’Hercules Seghers,” Documents 4 (September 1929), pp. 202, 204; English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, “Etchings of Hercules of Hercules Seghers,” this issue, pp. 154–57. All references given hereafter refer to this translation.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228704322790917 by guest on 26 September 2021 Top: Hercules Seghers. Ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg. Reproduced in Documents 4 (September 1929). Right: Seghers. Mountain Gorge Bordered by a Road. Reproduced in Documents 4.

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Dutch art congeals into a kind of oppressive, petrified horror; or else it dissipates into a flight of planes that lacerate an eye wearied by flaccid, aimless parallels . . . the eye collides with densely crowded rocks, with piles of prisons.”3 These rock formations, representing the physical features of a landscape but also the surface of the composition itself, are the means by which Seghers depicts his own state of immobility: unable to transcend the world in which he lived, the world in which he felt trapped. For Einstein, these are not ordinary landscapes but images of “troubled paths leading the eye into the interior, from which it is quickly expelled.”4 In the artist’s hands rock is made to break apart structures: the abbey in ruins, the fragments of rubble scattered throughout the landscapes, the piles of rocks at the foot of impervious cliffs. Seghers’s images work against serene views of the country- side, replete with details that delight the eye. His detailed, broken surfaces offer no picturesque escapes, only fragmented scenes. These represent what Einstein identifies as the artist’s experience of Dutch culture, a culture “that affirmed all objects with perfect contentment and mastered the observation of the external world with extraordinary virtuosity.”5 Unable to endure Dutch society, Seghers makes it over into stone, using the material to stand in for both the cause of his symptoms and their effects. Seghers deploys rock, in this account, like a magical talisman for the psyche, warding off the perils of the social, providing a protective barrier between the internal and the external, the invisible and visible. It is not a strategy designed to beat the system, but simply to survive it: When he represents the dead matter of the rocks, he seeks to dupe death by preempting it—a classical motif, if we recall the anticipation of death in tragedy, in the initiation of adolescents, in the hysterical catalepsies; and if we recall insects simulating death in order to escape peril.6 Seghers’s rock, Einstein contends, resolutely resists the affirmation and celebration of the artist’s material world. This artist does not eschew the meticulous detail of Dutch imagery but uses the close scrutiny characteristic of northern painting against itself, employing details to decompose the totality of the whole. In these landscapes of a shredded baroque, planes have been ground up into tiny pieces. . . . This technique is a “zero-technique”; a dialectic of forms under the sign of death, a reciprocal destruction of parts. In this instance totality results not from one element augmenting the other, but from their mutual extirpation.7 Each material element is meticulously articulated only to form a dense and confusing surface within the composition. Massive stone cliffs are broken up by lighter areas

3. Ibid., p. 154. 4. Ibid., p. 155. 5. Ibid., p. 156. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 155.

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meant to indicate trails or roads through the scene. Yet the means of traversing the landscape or escaping through it are occluded, the pathways appearing as solid rock formations rising out of the landscape. Einstein likens them to lava: what had once been a molten flow is now encrusting an already barren landscape of stone. From tiny church steeples to the lone figure in the foreground of the abbey of Rijnsburg, any signs of life in the landscape are only nominal markers. All these are entombed by the carefully articulated fragments that form the ruins of the abbey. Seghers’s detailed observations serve as obstacles that obscure rather than reveal. They speak to an inability to master nature rather than the plea- sure of possessing it. What remains is only “the process of decomposition in the tiniest elements . . . it is within this order of the miniscule that he ranks the human being. His figures seem to be the product of geological chance. Man is an inferior thing.”8 For Einstein, Seghers’s landscapes invoke an earlier time, when man was incidental to nature. These compositions represent a reversion and transformation. Seghers subordinates man to nature, just as he seeks refuge in rock. Einstein’s approach to Seghers’s work means to document an experience rather than establish facts, and the distinction is crucial not only to Einstein’s account, but to Documents’ aim of turning the “art journal” on its head. Like most of the essays appearing in Documents, Einstein’s idiosyncratic reading of Seghers’s work avoids art historical exegesis. There is no formal analysis, no artistic techniques, no

8. Ibid., p. 157.

Seghers. River Valley with Waterfall. Reproduced in Documents 4 (September 1929).

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precedents and subsequent innovation. Art historical training notwithstanding, the critic has no interest in recounting the site locations or the artistic inﬂuences on the motifs.9 Rather, Einstein uses Seghers and his work to suggest relationships between object and image, individual and society, viewer and view. The essay is as much about alienation as it is seventeenth-century Dutch pictorial practice. These connections are suggested but never explicated. In this regard Einstein’s practice could be likened to that of the chronicler, as described by Walter Benjamin a few years later in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller”: It will take no effort to gauge the difference between one who writes history (the historian) and one who narrates it (the chronicler). The historian’s task is to explain in one way or another the happenings with which he deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with simply displaying them as models of the course of the world. But this is precisely what the chronicler does . . . [he has] lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from [his] own shoulders. Its place is taken by interpretation, which is concerned not with an accurate concatenation of deﬁnite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.10 For Benjamin, a surfeit of information has supplanted the experience of storytelling because the historian has displaced the chronicler. Both Einstein and Documents exemplify the impulse of Benjamin’s storyteller. The journal’s title speaks not to a pretense of objective reportage, but rather an attempt to present material in order to evoke connections and associations in the reader.11 With Seghers’s example, Einstein takes the artist’s personal state of alienation as wellspring of both his story and the artist’s imagery, stating outright that the

9. Very little had been written on Seghers prior to Einstein’s piece, and he relied heavily on Wilhelm Fraenger’s short monograph, Die Radierunden des Hercules Seghers (Erlenbach-Zeurich: E. Rentsch, 1922). Almost all the subsequent literature on the artist seems to compulsively catalogue these features. References to the artist’s lack of success or to his “imaginary” landscapes are made only in passing and without commentary. See for example Willem van Leusden, The Etchings of Hercules Seghers and the Problem of His Graphic Technique (Utrecht: A. W. Bruna and Zoon, 1961); E. Haverkamp Begemann, Hercules Seghers (Amsterdam: J. M. Meulenhoff, 1968) and Hercules Seghers: The Complete Etchings (Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema, 1973); and John Rowlands, Hercules Segers [sic] (New York: Georges Braziller, 1979). 10. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3 (1935–38), ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 152–53. There is no documentary evidence that Einstein and Benjamin were in contact, although both were Jewish, German expatriates living in Paris, and seemed to have had mutual acquaintances (e.g., Georges Bataille). They undoubtedly knew of each other as early as 1912, when their names appeared together on a ﬂyer for a poetry reading in Berlin sponsored by the journal Die Aktion (my thanks to Sebastian Zeidler for this information). It is hard to imagine that they would not have known each other’s work. For details on Einstein’s life, see Liliane Meffre, Carl Einstein: Itinéraires d’une pensée moderne (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), passim. 11. Their project shares clear afﬁnities with what Benjamin describes as the tradition of storytelling: “the most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connections among the events are not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.” Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, pp. 147–48.

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artist’s revolt ultimately led to his death.12 The potential drama of this claim is undercut by the rote manner in which the critic recounts and dispenses with the anecdotal details of the artist’s life in a summary paragraph preceding his essay: Seghers could not sell his work, or even his copper plates for scrap; he married an older woman and then got a younger one pregnant, which produced legal problems; he died drunk, falling down some cellar stairs. Einstein’s perfunctory style of reporting these events reinforces his disdain for what he elsewhere identifies as the discipline’s “anecdotal psychology that transforms the history of art into a novel.”13 By contrast, Einstein’s “art history” is meant to articulate an experience distilled through images and the world they purport to make resonant. Seghers’s dilemma is ultimately Einstein’s cautionary tale: the artist’s vexed relationship to the object and the image kills him. Identifying with both, Seghers experiences a psychological split that was impossible to sustain. He is imprisoned twice over. At once a victim of the society that compels him to flee, he is at the same time unable to construct a stable world outside the system that holds him hostage. Imagining rock as a means to escape the reified relations of his culture, Seghers’s mimetic circuit ultimately fails. Too closely identifying with the materials he depicts, he is imprisoned by the stony substance meant to protect him: The rock is the sign of death, of complete impotence, the sign of psychic immobility, of total anesthesia, of a terrible silence. Rocks are oppressive weights, like a millstone grinding nightmares. The rubble suggests the threat of being crushed. One could speak of an ecstasy of impotence, of an impoverishment of life.14 Rock and self become one, but this mimetic transformation cannot be prised from the social elements that determine it. Seghers’s work might be likened to sympathetic magic, a phenomenon where “like produces like; contact results in contagion; the image produces the object itself; a part is seen to be the same as the whole.”15 Einstein’s own work on African sculpture and his interest in ethnography—shared by those collaborating

12. “To begin, we should note the unusual character of Seghers’s work, which presents an exclusively negative view of the world. It is a narrow, isolated revolt against everything that calls itself Dutch. For this attitude Seghers paid with his life.” Einstein, “Hercules Seghers,” p. 154. 13. Einstein, “Notes sur le cubisme,” Documents 3 (June 1929), p. 146. English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, “Notes on Cubism,” this issue, pp. 158–68. All references given hereafter refer to this translation. 14. Einstein, “Hercules Seghers,” p. 155. 15. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 11. Originally published in his Sociologie et Anthropologie (1950). Mauss is paraphrasing E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), and he goes on to discuss J. G. Frazer’s use of the term in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1911). Mauss is critiquing the term “sympathetic magic” as an all- inclusive term for practices of magic, although he is not disputing the concept itself. Interested in African art and ethnography, Einstein would certainly be familiar with these discussions; Mauss’s lectures were attended by many of those involved in Documents, and Mauss himself contributed an essay to the journal.

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in Documents—suggest that the connection is more than coincidental. Imbuing the object with a particular power capable of freeing the participants from a problem or situation, sympathetic magic poses a potential solution through the process of mimesis. Einstein noted this as early as 1915 in his Negerplastik: A human being always changes slightly, but he still tries to maintain a certain continuity, an identity. It is particularly the European who has shaped this feeling into an almost hypertrophic cult. The African, however, is less burdened by a subjective selfhood and he honors objective forces: in order to prevail against them he must become those forces, especially when he celebrates them most intensely. With his transformation he establishes the balance with an annihilating adoration; he prays to the god, he dances ecstatically for the tribe, and, by donning the mask, he personally transforms himself into the tribe and the god. This transformation gives him the most powerful understanding of objectivity; he incarnates it in himself and is himself this objectiveness, in which all individuality is destroyed. Hence, the mask has meaning only when it is nonhuman, nonpersonal—that is, constructive, free of individual experience.16 Einstein’s account points to the difficulty for the European Seghers: the artist has no genuine collective community with which to identify, a price exacted by the triumph of individual subjectivity. There is no possibility of reverting to a state in which “all individuality is destroyed,” as Seghers’s example amply demonstrates. In this cultural context, the results of the artist’s mimetic efforts prove catastrophic. There is no release through identification since it only reproduces symptoms rather than effect- ing a cure. In an effort to preserve the self, Seghers’s recourse to rock is doomed. A potentially healing displacement is riddled with the contradictions he projects into the substance he summons. The artist finds himself stonewalled without and within. Sympathetic magic fails Seghers. The individual must be subordinate to a collective in order to be delivered by its power. It is in fact the collective belief and identification in magical power that sustains culture as a whole. The solitary individual cannot produce this alone.17 Seghers’s desire for self-preservation inhibits magical transformation because the individual is antithetical to, or at least insuffi- cient for, the process itself. The struggle to preserve the self renders impossible the sacrifice of self implied by any mimetic transformation. This is the paradox posed by the development of subjectivity, a point Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer make in their Dialectic of Enlightenment:

16. Einstein, Negerplastik [African Sculpture] (1915), trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Jack Flam with Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 90. English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, “Negro Sculpture,” this issue, pp. 122–38. 17. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, pp. 18–19, 40.

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If belief in sacrificial representation implies recollection of something that was not a primal component of the individual but originated instead in the history of domination, it also becomes untruth in regard to the individual as he has developed. The individual—the self—is man no longer credited with the magical power of representation. The establishment of the self cuts through that fluctuating relation with nature that the sacrifice of the self claims to establish.18 The community united by its fear of the unknown forces of nature must necessarily be subservient to those forces that are imbued with the power of gods. It is only such community that makes possible the permeability between nature and the social, allowing the magic of mimesis to serve as protection for all against the unknown. The development of the individual makes this fluid interaction impossible because the self becomes the central focus for preservation at the expense of the well-being of the collective. The relationship between nature and the social is transformed when collective fear of the unknown is banished. Knowledge and reason establishes the sovereignty of man over the elements that formerly terrified him. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that this reverses the terms of domination between nature and the social while exacting a price: Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown. That determines the course of demythologization, of Enlightenment, which compounds the animate with the inanimate just as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate. Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is no more than a so to speak universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outside- ness is the very source of fear.19 When knowledge assumes the power of the absolute, sympathetic magic loses its potency. Disallowed by a system that purports to know all, those who deem it legiti- mate are dismissed as irrational or insane. Once knowledge enjoys the potential of omnipotence, the unknown is doomed. As Adorno and Horkheimer elaborate, that death warrant has profound implications for all participants in the Enlightenment:

18. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1969), p. 29. Originally published as Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944). Their focus on myth and epic narrative as a metaphor for the evolution and victory of Enlightenment thought seems to be the outgrowth of an analysis developed by intellectuals on the left in the 1920s and ’30s, and can certainly be seen in arguments made in and through Documents more than a decade before their text was published. The political and aesthetic signiﬁcance of myth and sacriﬁce for both the left and the right during this period is a history that remains to be written. 19. Ibid., p. 16.

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The ratio [calculation] which supplants mimesis is not simply its counterpart. It is itself mimesis: mimesis unto death. The subjective spirit which cancels the animation of nature can master a despiritualized nature only by imitating its rigidity and despiritualizing itself in turn.20 Seghers instantiates this diagnosis with a vengeance. He makes nature over into image but, Einstein cautions, this image is inseparable from the “despiritualized nature” of the culture his subjective spirit longs to escape. Through rock, Seghers renounces his selfhood in an effort to preserve it, but in the end, he “gives away more of his life than is given back to him.”21 Paradoxically, his alienation from society seems to make him its most successful citizen under the terms in which individuality is exacted in bourgeois society.22 But his mimetic play is reversed. Lacking sufficient distance from the descriptive language he uses to reproduce nature, Seghers conflates image with object. Unable to master the world he describes, he reproduces his own subjective despiritualization. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Seghers is unable to build a structure that can psychologically deliver him from the fragmented subjectivity he experiences in the world. The debris he perceives in culture—that same culture “which affirmed all objects with a perfect contentment”—yields in his work only more of the same, inanimate and lifeless: where there are buildings, there are ruins; where there are cliffs, there is rubble. Escape is doomed because it is premised on a past that is incompatible with the present. In this way Seghers’s landscapes record a longing for what Nicolas Leskov, Benjamin’s storyteller, calls that old time when the stones in the womb of the earth and the planets at celestial heights were still concerned with the fate of men— unlike today, when both in the heavens and beneath the earth everything has grown indifferent to the fates of the sons of men. . . . None of the undiscovered planets play any part in horoscopes any more, and there are a lot of new stones, all measured and weighed and examined for their specific weight and density, but they no longer proclaim anything to us, nor do they bring us any benefit. Their time for speaking with men is past.23

20. Ibid., p. 57. 21. Einstein, “Hercules Seghers,” p. 154. 22. As Adorno and Horkheimer note: “Renunciation, the principle of bourgeois disillusionment, the outward schema for the intensiﬁcation of sacriﬁce, is already present in nuce in that estimation of the ratio of forces which anticipates survival as so to speak dependent on the concession of one’s own defeat, and—virtually—on death. The nimble-witted survives only at the price of his own dream, which he wins only by demystifying himself as well as the powers without. He can never have everything; he has always to wait, to be patient, to do without . . . the title of the hero is gained at the price of the abasement and mortification of the instinct for complete, universal, and undivided happiness.” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Englightenment, p. 57. 23. Benjamin, quoting Nicolas Leskov’s “The Alexandrite,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, p. 153.

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Paper

Rock no longer speaks. Men speak for rock. Paper becomes the modern medium par excellence. Words fill the world like the ubiquitous stuffing that filled the domestic furniture in the bourgeois home of the late nineteenth century.24 Likewise paper and the printed discourse it supports serve as insulation for the modern mind, demonstrating the way the regime of rationality could turn the lightest of substances into a suffocating mass. For Einstein, the quality of words is altogether different from the solidity of stone: the materiality of rock is eclipsed by words that claim to represent the essence of the thing described, while cutting loose all reference to its actuality. Explanation and definition mask the actual experience of the material object, making these complexities over into abstractions. The dynamism of man’s relationship to the world is displaced by words, hardened into fixed meanings and factual description. Rock is replaced by calcified thought: What we denote with the help of words is less an object than a vague opinion; one uses words as though they were ornaments of one’s own person. Words are usually petrifications that trigger mechanical reactions in us. They are instruments of power suggested by people who are either crafty or drunk.25 Idea and the object are divided, with words acting as the agent solidifying their separation. In place of experience and all that this entails in relation to a material world, Einstein argues that we are given words that set like stone, producing auto- matic responses rather than active engagement. Writers by and large do nothing to contest these conditions, Einstein argues, and their poetics only make the problem worse. Each facile poem or novel convinces the naive writer that the human spirit has been articulated anew. A clever turn of phrase describing the human soul only masks the spiritual vacuousness of the rationalized world. Paper proliferates in their hands, serving to cover over the substance of things: . . . the paper-scratchers, with supreme confidence, have floundered in the swamps of syntax: they found tremendous daring in mutations of nuances and imagined they could transform things by poeticizing the commonplace. Perhaps a few not yet sanctioned subjects were treated with an elegant academic syntax. Yet strictly speaking they went no further than changing the adjectives. Who among them thought of

24. See Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), pp. 154–55. Originally published as Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1955). I am grateful to Sally Stein for bringing this reference to my attention. 25. Carl Einstein, “Dictionnaire critique: Rossignol,” Documents 2 (May 1929), p. 117. English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, “Nightingale,” this issue, pp. 152–54. All references given hereafter refer to this translation.

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questioning the hierarchy of values or even logic itself? These writers are prisoners of words.26 The real danger lies in the conviction that something new can be produced using materials already emptied of life. Poetic innovation cannot produce substantive meaning if it only renews exhausted forms. To ignore this fact is to miss the tragedy and the lesson produced by Seghers’s struggle. Heady with their own rhetoric, these “errand boys of poetry” produce only the echo of spiritual longings while convincing themselves that they have given real voice to innovation.27 In order to “take risks,” Einstein argues, one must suspend belief in words. Trusting words locks down the unknown. Words are imagined as desire fulfilled: they convince the believer that possessing an illusion is more fulfilling than dwelling on the wishful- ness that produced it. These are conditions that Einstein resolutely rejects. His critique of literary poetics was central to the project of Documents, particularly in the “Critical Dictionary,” a regular feature in the magazine.28 Conceived and produced as a means of deliberately undercutting conventional definitions, the “Critical Dictionary” aimed, as Yve-Alain Bois succinctly described it, “not to give the meaning but the jobs of words.”29 It often featured words associated with aesthetic categories—e.g., “angel,” “aesthete,” “eye,” “architecture”—using a wholly unexpected set of terms to confound traditional meanings. The contributors subverted the “mechanical” or reflexive expectations elicited by such words, offering in place of definitions an array of associations intended to create subversive dissonance in lieu of reassuring facts. Einstein includes the term “nightingale” in the “Critical Dictionary” as a means of suggesting the worst offense committed by writers: the production of allegory. The nightingale convention demonstrates the ways in which words serve to obfuscate the complex experience of the world: Except for unusual cases, we are not talking about a bird. The nightingale is almost always a cliché, a narcotic, a form of laziness and ignorance . . . [it] is an allegory, a game of hide-and-seek. The nightingale must be classed among those ideals that have been emptied of meaning; it is regarded as a means of disguise; a moral phenomenon. It is utopia on the cheap, covering over misery.30 The bird is appropriated by words meant to elicit prepackaged emotion, to call up the sensation of flight from the conditions that both create the impulse to escape

26. Einstein, “André Masson, Étude ethnologique,” Documents 2 (May 1929), p. 93. I thank Charles W. Haxthausen for sharing with me his unpublished translation of this essay. 27. Einstein uses this term to speak of “failed poets”; see “Notes on Cubism,” p. 161. 28. The “Critical Dictionary” ﬁrst appeared in the second issue and was a consistent feature in all subsequent numbers of Documents. 29. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless,’” in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 18. 30. Einstein, “Nightingale,” p. 153.

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and render that escape futile. The nightingale, bourgeois trope for sentimentality and romance, is the false double for the bird Benjamin describes in “The Storyteller”: Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—the activities that are intimately connected with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this, the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to.31 The active relation necessary to keep words alive in Benjamin’s account is made over by allegory into clichés of emotion and sentiment. The nightingale drives away the dream bird, and in its wake, boredom’s discontent must be satisfied with a distracting game of hide-and-seek, the fruitless search for substance among shadows. Substituting “cheap utopia” for human experience, allegory creates a parallel universe, one that precludes the examination of the actual substance of conditions on earth. Allegory’s abstractions produce a fictional spiritual dimension for a barren, rationalized world that takes knowledge as its means of mastery. “What we call the soul,” Einstein declares, “is for the most part a museum of signs stripped of meaning. These signs are hidden behind the facade of contemporary life.”32 Allegory is the most dangerous of substitutions because it feigns magic. It counters the potential of mimesis, and, while interposing itself between man and the world at large, it claims to heal this breach.33 It conceals the “threatening and hallucinatory processes against which we defend ourselves with a superstructure of knowledge”—processes necessarily attached to the forces of the unknown.34 As a practice inevitably engaged in the production of images, visual art has within it the potential of being the ultimate allegory. Its institutions and objects are imbued with the hyperbole of spiritual significance: art is the pinnacle of creativity, the expression of spirit—one could produce an endless run of clichés that form textbook examples. Nowhere is “culture” more prominent than in the realm of art, and nowhere is nature more distanced in relation to the activity of

31. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, p. 149. 32. Einstein, “Nightingale,” p. 153. 33. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s analysis of the Apollonian aspects of Greek tragedy, governed by logic and beauty: “When after a forceful attempt to gaze on the sun we turn away blinded, we see dark-colored spots before out eyes, as a cure, as it were. Conversely, the bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero—in short, the Apollonian aspect of the mask—are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night. Only in this sense may we believe that we properly comprehend the serious and important concept of ‘Greek cheerfulness.’ The misunderstanding of this concept as cheerfulness in a state of unendan- gered comfort is, of course, encountered everywhere here today.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage), p. 67 (section 9). 34. Einstein, “Nightingale,” p. 152.

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man. Einstein was well aware of the implications of his own art-historical practice, and thus it is certainly no accident that he invokes the museum as the structure housing the vast array of meaningless signs standing in for the soul.35 The resonances of his critique of allegory are present as he describes artistic representations of the dead: “a naturalistic representation that should be understood as expressing not a celebration of life—as is almost always the case—but a fear of death.”36 The valorization of art renders utterly tautological the promise of reassurance held out by images, supplying visual affirmation of man’s mastery of things themselves: “The world of pictorial doubles fulfilled a longing for eternity. Weakened aesthetically in order to reinforce the stability of reality, images proved more secure and durable than human beings.”37 The naturalism developed in Renaissance art transforms the window on the soul into a window on the world, refracted through the individual whose point of view is likened to God. These rationalized forms set the standard by which all other art is measured and, in the process, convince man that the universe is his. In this sense, the illusion they afford is better than life itself. The empiricism inspiring it suggests a perfect correspondence between man and nature so that spirit has never appeared more grounded in worldly forms. The cold, clear eye of reason motivates this hybrid illusion and insists that something eternal has been captured through it. Einstein contends that art based on Renaissance systems produces an imagined equivalence between man and nature while suppressing the distance between them. Through its putative objectivity, this art becomes allegory. The vital relationship between nature and man is overcome by systems and precise details. What had in earlier times produced gods, magic, and ritual in order to survive the encounter with the unknown in nature is now transformed: The concept of nature has become an aggregate of such specialized constructions that it has virtually ceased to have any human significance. It is so impregnated with calculations and constructions as to be no more than an intellectual hallucination, no longer comprising an immediate reality: it is a world of more or less arbitrary rational signs.38 Endlessly varied, the objects and details represented through such systems are nevertheless completely interchangeable. What is privileged is the virtuosity demonstrated through the use of the system and its innovative applications. A necessarily corollary to this scientific system is that any and all specific objects risk becoming incidental. Precision in the image produces the abstraction of genius.

35. See especially his discussion on art historical methods in “Notes on Cubism,” p. 160. 36. Einstein, “Aphorismes Méthodiques,” Documents 1 (April 1929), p. 32. English translation by Charles W. Haxthausen, “Methodological Aphorisms,” this issue, pp. 146–50. All references given hereafter refer to this translation. 37. Einstein, “Notes on Cubism,” pp. 161–62. 38. Einstein, “Methodological Aphorisms,” p. 146.

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To render the world as a system of rules is the sign of reason’s victory over nature, but the price exacted for this triumph is a reality made over as convention. It is, like the writer’s paper-thin platitudes, emptied of specific significance. There is violence in the jump from object to image that paper and words conceal. The truth they purport to represent, and the ease with which this is accepted, confers on them the power of the absolute, another term Einstein singled out for interrogation in the “Critical Dictionary.”39 Like the nightingale, the absolute lacks a meaningful relationship to an object. In distinctly modern terms Einstein makes emphatic that evacuation of substance: Like money, the neutral absolute is a means of power: each may be changed into anything whatever, since they do not possess precise qualities. The absolute belongs to leaders, priests, madmen, to animals and to plants. On the one hand to the mighty and to kings, on the other to those without any power, entirely separate from objects and by that very fact from their poverty.40 Money unites image, paper, and text as absolute equivalents. Completely abstracted from material reality, its power seems irrefutable. It owes its substance to an abstraction, which gives the impression of eternity because it is always and forever replaceable, never verifiable. There is in Einstein’s reference to money a certain wistfulness for an object- based theory of value. Indeed, Einstein’s account of the “absolute” implies that man, by means of his domination of nature, has produced a different kind of tyranny to which he must defer: The absolute has been man’s greatest exploit: it is thanks to that exploit that he has outgrown the mythological state. But it was at the same time his greatest defeat, because he invented something greater than himself. Man has created his own servitude. That absolute is identical with the void and with that which has no object. It is thus that man dies by the absolute which is at the same time his means of freedom. Man dies, killed by his fetishes, whose existence is more or less situated in the absolute.41

39. Einstein writes, “The absolute is the sum of the compensations for human wretchedness. To create so perfect a notion, man has been obliged to renounce his peculiarity and miserable content. The absolute is powerful because perfectly empty: it is thanks to this characteristic that it represents the perfection of truth.” See “Dictionnaire critique: Absolut,” Documents 3 (June 1929), pp. 169–70; and “Absolute,” translated in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 31. All references given hereafter refer to this translation. 40. Einstein, “Absolute,” p. 32. Einstein’s claim ﬁnds its resonances in the notion of equivalence as Adorno and Horkheimer describe it: “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature.” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 7. 41. Einstein, “Absolute,” p. 31.

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The absolute produces a phantom spirit, a reified soul in place of the living. The result is an impoverished life where alienation passes for living. And yet in spite of his damning assessment of current conditions, Einstein recognizes that a return to the state of “prehistory” is impossible. Seghers’s example is the antidote to any such regressive nostalgia. Eschewing the possibility of returning to the past, Einstein focuses on the transformation of the fetish, exemplified through the example of the nightingale. The psychological death incurred at the hands of this creature, located in the absolute, is ostensibly painless. Lost in the seductive song of poetry’s pet, man is able to avoid reflection and mental problems. It is a means of diversion, an ornamental motif. One attributes to animals, to plants, etc., a moral perfection with which one embellishes oneself. The allegory, the surrogate, must conceal human frailty and ugliness: hence the human soul is made of stars, of roses, of twilight, etc., in other words, we impose schemata on a defense- less world and project an idealized self into a lap dog. One weeps with the nightingale in the hope of winning big in the stock market.42 Stressing the absurdity of allegory, where exaggerated happiness is confused and conflated with the accumulation of capital, Einstein invokes the small and annoying dog. Here he scratches at the paper separating abstract idea from material object, for nothing could be more irritating than the miniature canine, Chihuahua or Shih Tzu, yapping over the dulcet tones of the bird of phantom dreams.

Scissors

Cut to experience, generated as tension between object and subject, thing and image, nature and man. One must tear through the spurious unity of the world, the seamless appearances produced by allegory and the absolute. For Einstein this assault begins with the dream, the spaces of hallucination that escape the rational order imposed on things: What is important is this: to disturb so-called reality by means of untamed hallucinations, so as to change the value hierarchies of the real. Hallucinatory energies open a breach in the order of mechanical processes; they introduce blocs of “a-causality” into this reality which, absurdly, is believed to be the sole possible one. The smooth tissue of this reality is lacerated, and one lives in the tension of dualisms.43 These hallucinatory energies are distinguished from the poetic ﬂights of fancy produced by the writers Einstein so deeply scorns. Their revolutionary potential 42. Einstein, “Nightingale,” p. 153. 43. Einstein, “André Masson,” p. 95.

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lies in the fact that they cannot be understood through the syntax and systems determining reality. They cannot be “known” because they refuse to follow a rational order or causal relationships. As such, they cannot be schematized or integrated into the “values of the real.” And yet they are not to be confused with the unknown that inspired primitive man and his religious practices, for that too was a totalizing power in which the imagination ruled over everything like an autonomous power. . . . If in the past hallucinatory forces were an expression of a collectivity and its dogmatism, today they exert their influence only in the subjective realm, by breaking with conventions. Formerly imaginative elements belonged to the same realm as the absolute, and determined knowledge and consciousness. An alogical affirmation prevailed and was never questioned in the conflict between antinomies.44 Seeking a highly subjective force to counter such systems, Einstein does not valorize individual, irrational expression per se. Rather, what matters for him is the creative dissonance they produce. Only a “dissociation of the conscious” might unravel the fabric of poetic platitudes. The stakes are high: “It is in this very discordance between the hallucinatory and the structure of objects that our minute chance for freedom lies: a possibility of changing the order of things.”45 The crux of this possibility is located not in “new images” replacing old, but rather in an engaged struggle that fundamentally questions our existing conflation of consciousness and knowledge. Rejecting representation that confuses consciousness with knowledge or essence, Einstein advocates a dynamic force capable of activating a subject habituated to “mechanical” responses. Cognitive force—not as reason or irrationality—is the agent meant to bring alive tensions between image and object: It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.46 Following this Hegelian model, Einstein stresses an activity of the mind that not only identifies appearance as a kind of illusory truth of the world, but also character- izes this activity as the “truth” of self-consciousness. This is not a post-modernism avant la lettre, calling for the revelation of constructions of the self, but rather a recognition that “the small chance for freedom” can be found only by beginning to think about the activity of desiring, acting and transforming as a distinct kind of knowledge in and of itself.

44. Ibid., pp. 95–96. 45. Ibid., p. 99. 46. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 103 (Part III, ¶165).

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If art following the Renaissance produced an appearance of unity between image and object, Einstein looks to Cubism—particularly Analytical Cubism—to present a promising possibility to cut through the tyranny of the “real.”47 While its geometric forms are not generally associated with the “hallucinatory,” Cubism nevertheless presents for Einstein a “completely invented structure” that forces the viewer to take an active role in the production of the image. This is not to be confused with the now-standard cliché of multiple perspectives embodied in a single image, a fixed motif articulated through a succession of singular and fixed perspectives as one moves around it. What interests Einstein is the way in which the Cubist work elicits the viewer’s sustained engagement. The activity is what is privileged. It does not terminate by identifying the objects depicted, or the ways in which image is constructed, but rather motivates and perpetuates these impulses: “The motif is no longer an objective thing separate from the spectator; rather, the thing seen partici- pates in his activity as he configures it according to the sequence of his subjective optical perceptions.”48 Eliminating the motif itself as a known element, the viewer is forced to make sense of the image. This cognitive process is based not on prior knowledge of things, but rather the viewer’s subjective reactions; “it is the observer who is in charge, not the motif.”49 Thus delivered from the conventional responses associated with known reality, the viewer must focus on the tension produced by the split between the rendered object and its dissociation from the known world. This separation between material and man is fundamentally different from that effected by the representational “naturalism” initiated by Renaissance art. The latter’s perfect illusions of the world signified the absolute and eternal quality of nature by purging the image of its material relations to it, severing object from image while producing a semblance of perfect harmony between them. By contrast, Cubism marks “the end of that optimistic unity of reality and image. The image was no longer an allegory, no longer a fiction of another reality.”50 The split it effects through this break with reality cannot render the sensations of a table itself but only our own sensations of it. Following this assertion, Einstein proceeds to his corollary argument: A table represented in a picture makes sense only if the sum of a complex of tangled sensations that one calls table is subordinated to the technical demands of the picture. The mnemonic legacy of objects had to be destroyed, forgotten; thus the image became not the fiction of another reality but a reality with its own conditions.51

47. Einstein does not name any artists in his “Notes on Cubism,” although the accompanying images are exclusively Picasso’s. When referring to the paintings, his language veers toward a kind of objective anonymity: “Here we reproduce some examples of the ﬁrst period of Cubism” (p. 163). It is as if simply naming Picasso will invoke a cascade of associations (“genius,” “masterpiece”) of the absolute Einstein obviously wants to avoid. 48. Einstein, “Notes on Cubism,” p. 165. 49. Ibid., p. 166. 50. Ibid., p. 162. 51. Ibid., p. 165.

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It is thus not a question of “deforming” the object or describing it differently (this would only be “changing the adjectives,” after all). Einstein calls for an “autonomous vision” produced through the viewer’s own active interaction with the world rather than the talents (or genius) of the artist. This presumes an altogether different reality because the world would be manifest through the dynamic of conceptual activity itself, distinct from “knowing” or “believing.” Forcing the viewer to step outside of what is verifiable and known, the representation is fundamentally linked to subjective experience rather than “mechanical reactions” affirming the world as known and eternal. One might argue that Einstein is setting up another kind of “absolute,” inevitably born from the even greater separation between nature and man. But the dynamic engagement between these terms is what for Einstein differentiates them from the fixed image. Such constant and grounding interaction prevents both images and viewers from spiraling into the heavens and aspiring to a fixed place among the stars of the soul. What is proposed is not a reproduction of the world, but the activity that engenders and perpetuates transformation. In this regard, Einstein detects affinities between the contemporary developments of Cubism and earlier art forms: [It is] in mythic periods that we almost always find a tectonic art, and the tectonic has never been a means of mimetic representation. It would be more accurate to say that since 1908 the figure has become functional and has been humanized. We observe a sort of animism of form, except that now the vitalizing forces no longer come from spirits but from human beings themselves. Artists no longer work from an image of the gods but from their own conceptions. Consequently we regard tectonic forms, precisely because they are not measurable, to be the most human, for they are the distinguishing sign of the visually active human being, constructing his own universe and refusing to be the slave of given forms.52 In formal animism Einstein posits a kind of sympathetic magic with the subjective hallucinatory forces within. The productive dissonance with reason and matter produced through the hallucination is the point of contact, pointing the way to something else: a different reality.

Rock Paper Scissors

It is generally considered a child’s game, one designed to make a decision or settle a dispute. The play is simple. Each player shakes a ﬁst in preparation for the transformation of the hand into rock, paper, or scissors. The organic is connected

52. Ibid., p. 166.

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to the inorganic, chance with the premeditated, matter to idea. The rules are based on the elemental physics of disparate forces: rock beats scissors because a rock dulls scissors; scissors beat paper because scissors cut paper; and, in an elemental twist where surface area triumphs over sheer weight, paper beats rock because it covers it. At the designated moment—usually on the count of three—each player chooses to mime one of these objects: the hand is drawn into a fist; the hand is made into a single flat plane; two fingers are separated from all other digits to form a cutting blade. Usually there is a silence as the organic connects to the inorganic, chance with the premeditated, and matter to idea. Sounds return as players take stock of their relative positions and submit to the hierarchical reckoning. When players choose the same material, the match is a tie and must be played again, forcing each participant to reconsider earlier choices. Of course a rematch only adds ludic energy to this sort of adjudication, reminding all players of protean possibili- ties for mimesis and repositioning. Certainly the game could be played by simply calling out the names of those three things. But without the miming, there would be no visceral resolution of conflict and competition, a release produced by submission to the governing force of those three things, in and of themselves and in relation to each other. Enacting

“Stone picked up off the beach, collection Carl Einstein.” Anonymous photo reproduced in Documents 7 (December 1929).

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a dialectical process of reckoning, each player’s position hinges on a chance conver- gence of internal and external choices for specific substitutions. Words are not adequate here. Names of things must submit to physical alterations, inert elements must be transformed by dynamic experience. Adults, by contrast, find what they take to be more sophisticated methods of determining the order of things: rational arguments, facts, proofs, and cases made on the basis of considerable thought, reflection, conventions, and ideas. We leave behind the crude materials that children imbue with magical powers, powers based on inorganic properties and the body’s mimetic relationship to them. It is just a kid’s game, after all. Einstein’s critical practice was deeply committed to the kind of creative dialectical play found in a game of Rock Paper Scissors. Like Documents, whose very name ironically evoked those adult methods of science and evidence, Einstein took as primary the task of activating a relationship between human beings and all other matter, cutting through the empty void separating objects and subjects. It is therefore not surprising that Einstein’s singular visual contribution to Documents would be a rock become human. This remarkable transformation is prosaically identified with the caption “Stone picked up off the beach, collection Carl Einstein.”53 The descriptive information reveals nothing, save to suggest the casual, random selection of the found object situated among pages devoted to “modern sculpture.” Its scale and mineralogy are impossible to discern, but its form suggests a human head in profile. Asleep, possibly dreaming, but far from inert. No allegory or explanation here: only the stone’s sympathetic magic—or is it ours?—recasting inert matter into human form and back again.

53. See Documents 7 (December 1929), p. 392.

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