totality carl einstein

5/20/2018 Totality Carl Einstein

1/7

Totality*

CARL EINSTEIN

OCTOBER 107, Winter 2004, pp. 115121. 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Totality 2004 Fannei & Walz Verlag, Berlin.

Published in three installments inDie Aktion, a freewheeling left-wing journaledited by his brother-in-law Franz Pfemfert, Carl Einsteins Totality essay is oneof the most hermetic texts from a century that had no shortage of them. Part ofits hermeticism is owed to the fact that it is at once fiercely nondiscursive andintensely referential. The essays argument is apodictic; it does not name names,and yet it is deeply engaged in contemporary philosophical debates in order tomake its case, a case for visual art as a totality that would work to disrupt models ofsubjectivity, which hinge on a subjects experience of art as visual knowledge.

To make matters more complicated, Totality is animated by a deep tensionthat is ultimately not resolved but rather internalizes the very qualitative differencewhich, according to the text, is the enabling condition of any totalityincludingTotality itself. This tension is generated by a clash between two heterogeneousintellectual resources: a number of aggressively transcendental neo-Kantianphilosophemes on one hand, a Bergsonian vitalism of immanence on the other.The neo-Kantian part of the argument, most noticeable in sections I and II, triesto merge a radicalized Fiedlerian autonomy aesthetic with a critique of theMarburg Schools (neo-Kantian) transcendental logic even as it endorses thatschools critique of late-nineteenth-century (neo-Kantian) psychologism.Einstein, that is to say, rejects the idea that a work of art is a form of knowledgethat is grounded in spatio-temporal categorieswhether those are considered

intellectual a prioris, as Immanuel Kant had claimed, or are thought to be incorpo-rated in the subject as the very structure of embodied perception, as Hermannvon Helmholtz had argued. If art is a totality, this totality is not the unity of thespatio-temporal manifold. But Einstein goes on to reject the claims of Marburg

* Totalitt, translation from the revised version published in Carl Einstein, Anmerkungen (Berlin:Verlag der Wochenschrift Die Aktion, 1916), pp. 3240; first published in Die Akt ion4 (1914), cols.27779 (I, II), 34547 (III, IV), 47678 (V).

Translated by Charles W. HaxthausenIntroduced by Sebastian Zeidler


2/7

School thinkers such as Paul Natorp, who (somewhat like Edmund Husserl beforethem) in the second decade of the twentieth century tried to retranscendentalizeKantian epistemology by arguing that it was grounded in the realm of the disem-bodied, nontemporal pure thought of logic. If art is a totality, it cannot be a

mere derivate of the laws of a master science that exists somewhere outside of art.This claim, that art must be separated from philosophy, logic, and the

natural sciences as a nonconceptual sphere of cognition sui generis, makes someTotality passages sound as though they were written by Konrad Fiedler. Yet whileFiedler had disputed that art was a subdivisionof scientific knowledge, he did claimthat it was likescientific knowledgethat the purpose of art as pure visibility wasa process of Aneignung, an appropriation that would totalize the worlds originaryinchoateness into an image for a subject, as that subjects visual property, orSichtbarkeitsbesitz. And it is on this issue that Einstein parts ways with Fiedler and allother neo-Kantians, and instead tries to think the experience of art as totality interms of a selective reading of Henri Bergsons Time and Free Will(sections IV andV). In that book, Bergson had famously rethought subject ive experience via amodel of time as duration, as a heterogeneous multiplicity that could not begrasped by neo-Kantian concepts of time as a causal succession of empty, identicalmoments. But if the qualitative difference of a Bergsonian totality emergedgradually withindurationlike a melody differentiating itself over time, and thusmore akin to musicthen Einsteins totality was more germane to visual arts all-at-onceness, for he thinks it as the punctual eruption of a formal construct asstatic qualitative difference into the empty intervals of quantified time. As such,Einsteins totality posited a model for art that was radically incommensurable withthe expectations of a subject who would appropriate it, neo-Kantian-style, as

visual knowledgewhether conceptually, through unconscious inference, or non-conceptually, as pure visibility. Rather, in a perverse radicalization of formalism,Einsteins totalities were the more formally accomplished the lessthey accommo-dated the viewers desire to make them his aesthetic property. For a totality existsonly insofar as it is concreteinsofar as it resists being subsumed under aconceptand only insofar as it is differentialinsofar as it resists being conceivedas an identity in the subjects own image. Negerplastik(1915) would supply much-needed examples to test this wild idea.

*

I

Above and beyond its specifically delimited role, art determines vision ingeneral. When viewing an individual picture or gazing upon nature, the beholderis burdened by the memory of all previously seen art. Art transforms vision as awhole, the art ist determines how we form our general images of the world. Henceit is the task of art to organize those images. The structuring of the collective eye

OCTOBER116


3/7

necessitates laws of vision by which the data of physiological vision are appraisedand thereby endowed with human significance. Our notions of space assumeimportance since through art we have the capacity to shape and to alter them. Artbecomes an effective force insofar as it is capable of ordering our visual percep-

tion according to laws. Too often, by naively confusing the beholder with the workof art, one has mistaken psychological responses to art for its actual laws.

Laws of art cannot be derived from the concepts that are the basis of aestheticjudgments; rather, such laws are founded on the elementary forms that are thebasis for a potential work of art. Under the influence of philosophy the overrateddoctrine of aesthetic judgment was erected as the foundation of aesthetics; on thisbasis, one believed, one could establish that which was specific to art. Such was theconsequence of a teaching that defines philosophy as the scientific doctrine ofconcepts that underlies cognition, from which one deduced that aesthetics wasthe doctrine of the concepts that underlie judgments about art. Here we seeclearly the consequences of an indirect method, namely, not that the given factsare established as premises, but as a surrogate psychological process or an intellec-tual content, whose function is, as it were, underpinned with metaphysicalsubstrata. Yet a judgment on a work of art is not such a fact, since the process ofartistic creation has a claim to being at least equally important. More to the pointis the simple fact that we have at hand a series of achievements that constitute art.Certainly one could reasonably assume that through judgments grounded inknowledge of art one might determine what art actually is, where it begins, andwhere it ends; especially since there is an oppressive glut of so-called art that isdescribed as bad, vulgar, or inartistic. Here the concept of qualitative judgmentcomes into play, which, to be sure, does not aid us in constructing an object from

what is given, yet neither does it limit it self to the given substance of art.Especially since the beholder, through his judgment, transforms and fixes thefacts for himself. These contradictions are conditioned by the nature of aestheticjudgment itself, since this is not an intellectual matter but proceeds from theelements of form.

Perhaps, in the interest of greater clarity, we may no longer regard aesthetics asthat methodological domain of philosophy that examines the method for attainingknowledge of art, knowledge being defined as something that comes after the fact.One would do better to shift notions concerning knowledge of art to the specific actof creation itself, in the sense that the individual work of art itself constitutes an actof knowing and of judgment. The subject matter of art is not objects, but configuredvision. What counts is the imperative of seeing, not the objects that happen to beseen. In this way one penetrates to the objective elements of an a priori knowledge ofart that plays itself out only a posteriori in judgment of the work. The cognitive act,i.e., the reshaping of the image of the world, takes place neither through thecreation of the work nor through the beholder, but through the work of art itself.For cognition, which is more than just a critical mode of behavior, is nothing otherthan the creation of content that is based on laws, i.e., that is transcendent.

Totality 117


4/7

The laws that govern logic are not universal; rather logic is a particular sciencelike physics or any other, one that has its proper objects, yet it may not venture tofalsify those objects by turning them into the content of a general science.

From such presumptions of logic there arose the mistaken notion that logic

could aid in the destruction of religious systems, yet all that was proved was logicsincapacity to grasp or fathom the entire spiritual dimension of existence. Just asScholasticism believed that being was produced by means of judgment, so onenow succumbed to the no-less-dangerous error that the legitimacy of spiritual andintellectual systems must be grounded in logic. Logic is nothing other then thedoctrine of those concepts that are peculiar to logic itself and which cannot beused to control or justify the larger intellectual and spiritual world, being linkedto it only insofar as they also represent a particular part of this domain and forthat reason have a few characteristics in common. From this mistaken, overlyuniversalized application of logic there emerged in every specialized domain theso-called antinomies of reason, which disappear when one tests each area as to itsespecially objective, properly cognitive substance. Logic as a universal science is acomparative technique, from which the dialectical character of logical practicedeveloped directly, and this undermines any possibility of establishing laws thatare based on it.

II

Psychology is nothing but a reaction against logic. One hoped that by positingindividual capacities or functions more precise results might be achieved.Psychology grounded its knowledge for the most part in facts that lie completely

outside the domain of philosophy, facts which, although probably constitutingcomponents of our being, can never explain what is distinctly constitutive of totalrealms generated by laws; for psychology may address the preconditions of suchphenomena, but not their immediate content. (One should add that psychologyfrequently operates with hybrid concepts.) Psychology is just as prone as logic to theerroneous assumption that a science is capable of propositions about somethingother than itself. This error springs from the absence of a universal metaphysics,which, although no more capable than any other science of consolidating rules forspecialized domains, may have validity for us simply as a supreme reality unto itself,as the most intensive power, but not as an extensive universal one.

III

It is totality that separates all of these constructs of the mental world fromone another and thereby enables them to achieve a distinctive form of existence.Constructs may exist only when they are clear, when they attain form; only totality,their self-containment, makes them objects of cognition and enables them tobecome reality. For every realization, every manifestation of consciousness means

OCTOBER118


5/7

nothing other than delimitation; totality is nothing other than a self-containedsystem of specific qualities, and this is total if the totality is accompanied bysufficient intensity. Totality means that the goal of all knowledge and endeavor nolonger lies in the infinite, as an indefinable overall purpose, rather it is resolved in

the singular, because totality justifies the concrete being of individual systems,endowing them with meaning. Totality makes possible the establishment of quali-tative laws, to the extent that now the individual systems conformity to law restsnot on the varied repetition and the return of the same, but on the character ofspecific, elementary constructs. By this means one succeeds in setting up qualitativelaws, laws that always yield a unified system and do not vary quantitatively, butintensively, which do not recur endlessly, but detach themselves qualitatively, sothat it is possible to apply such laws to temporal process, for example, to biology,without the need to destroy what is individual in the facts.

We stress that cognit ion is not a crit ical operation, but the creation ofordered contents, i.e., of total systems. What we understand by system is not theintegration of a manifold displaying certain one-sided characteristics, nor do wemean a somehow quantitatively determined order, i.e., one that encompasses acertain number of objects. By system we mean rather every concrete totality thatcannot experience an ordering or articulation by means of some external instru-ment, but which is organized within and for itself. By defining cognition as thecreation of concrete organisms, we separate it from the doctrine of a universalitycharacterized by duplication or repetition. In this way cognition is wrenched fromits theoretical isolation and insignificance, cognition becomes equated with cre-ation, and something of immediacy is created that was, to be sure, latently presentbut which had as yet not achieved representation.

IV

Totality is a concept that cannot be extrapolated; it can neither be derivedfrom parts nor be traced back to a higher unity (as such it legitimizes every livingbeing).

Totality excludes nothing, i.e., it is preceded neither by a positivity nor anegativity, for the contrast, i.e., the unconditional unity of opposites, constitutestotality.

Totality is never determined quantitatively in any way and can always appearaccording to purely qualitative presuppositions. Every individual organism mustbe total.

Totality is not unity; for unity always implies repetition, indeed, repetitioninto quantitative infinity; whereas totality as a finite system exists only when allthe discrete and varied parts within the system come into play. Accordingly, any-thing that tends to lie beyond the limits of thought is eliminated within theoperative law.

Totality makes possible concrete apprehension and by means of it every

Totality 119


6/7

concrete object becomes transcendent. As intensity, totality has nothing to dowith the extensive magnitude of the spatially infinite, from which physicists derivetheir notions of the temporally infinite.

V

Within our mental processes we apprehend total, i.e., self-contained, figurations.Our memory is constituted out of these figurations; they function as self-

contained qualities, because it is precisely totality that constitutes their significance,to the degree that they derive their qualitative specificity from that totality. Wewould never be able to define and imagine anything specific if our memory didnot represent the unification of pregnant qualitative configurations, withoutwhichtotality being a function and as such one that can and must experience atemporal determinationtime could never be differentiated for us. Time, imaginedpurely, must mean a qualitative difference of experiences, which consideredallegorically on the basis of geometrical ideas, means spatial sequence, while timeis only a difference of quality.

Because we define cognition as the creation of concrete objects, principlesare conceivable only on the basis of their being, on the basis of this mode ofcognition. The a priori basis of the principle is the quality or totality. All qualita-tive principles are a posteriori paraphrases of totality. Art considered as cognitiondoes not yield concepts but the concrete elements of representat ion.

The total object absorbs every psychological process that is purposelydirected toward it as it also absorbs every form of causality. Causal analysis is purelyretrospective and always exceeds the concrete object; causes are substituted, but

not the totality. The causes of the object always lie in another, posthumous planethan the object itself. Causal thinking dissolves into an unarticulated multiplicityand disposes of its object as an allegory of an insensible process that lies outside ofthe object. For that reason it says nothing about form or its quality.

Memory is the pure function of qualitatively different experiences thatbecome subsumed within their quality and are simultaneously latent, in order toact within a qualitative experience that takes in something suitable or antagonis-tic. In the concrete experience we possess time directly, conscious of its relationto the qualitative. Scientifically we measure time indirectly with the help of magni-tude and transform it into a simultaneously spatial factor, while it is directly adifference of quality.

We grasp time directly, immediately in the relationship of the concreteexperience to the qualitative functions of the ideas of memory.

Every object can be total provided there are no simple objects.Totalities differ from one another on the basis of intensity, i.e., the more

complex and powerful are the references of their contents, the more these them-selves represent multifaceted elements.

This way of thinking applies above all to the creation of objects and is most

OCTOBER120


7/7

closely linked to the immediate life process, which, like memory, is defined purelyqualitatively; for number is the medium of retrospective thinking, it representsexperiences simultaneously and causes us to deceive ourselves into thinking acontinuity is possible only through the nonqualitative and is guaranteed only by

means of number; totality on the other hand demonstrates a minutely articulatedtemporal sequence, one that at any given point may be interpreted, temporally,i.e., as qualitatively immediate, a temporal sequence whose intensity nowincreases, now decreases, depending on the kind and intensity of the experienceand, which in fact can begin at anymoment. Totality enables us to see any givenpart of our experiences as a whole.

Observing quantitatively, by contrast, would forbid us to remain at a givenpoint, because its continuity may never be qualitatively defined, so that delimitationbecomes impossible. The qualitative [sic] observation of experiences does not permitus to determine even the smallest unit, i.e., our experiences would fully dissolve intochaos and we would lose any way to reinterpret our experiences as particular latentfunctions, that, defined qualitatively, can emerge at any given point.

Since the quantitative cannot generate anything new but represents only therepetition of a unit, so, too, it can never be used to represent temporal processes,except when these are themselves of a purely quantitative kind, i.e., one retroactivelyrepeats a process. Such an act appears impossible to us in the immediacy of life, sinceapprehension in time always represents a new constellation. This continuous qualita-tive differentiation notwithstanding, our being does not shatter into fragments, sinceby its very qualitative dimension it represents one of the various totalities.

Totality 121

totality carl einstein

Documents