Totality Author(s): Carl Einstein and Charles W. Haxthausen Source: October, Vol.

107, Carl Einstein (Winter, 2004), pp. 115-121 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397595 Accessed: 24/11/2010 08:18
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Totality*

CARL EINSTEIN Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen Introduced by Sebastian Zeidler

Published in three installments in Die Aktion,a freewheeling left-wingjournal edited by his brother-in-law Franz Pfemfert, Carl Einstein's "Totality"essay is one of the most hermetic texts from a century that had no shortage of them. Part of its hermeticism is owed to the fact that it is at once fiercely nondiscursive and intensely referential. The essay's argument is apodictic; it does not name names, and yet it is deeply engaged in contemporary philosophical debates in order to make its case, a case for visual art as a totality that would work to disrupt models of subjectivity, which hinge on a subject's experience of art as visual knowledge. To make matters more complicated, "Totality"is animated by a deep tension that is ultimately not resolved but rather internalizes the very qualitative difference which, according to the text, is the enabling condition of any totality-including "Totality"itself. This tension is generated by a clash between two heterogeneous intellectual resources: a number of aggressively transcendental neo-Kantian philosophemes 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, tries to merge a radicalized Fiedlerian autonomy aesthetic with a critique of the Marburg School's (neo-Kantian) "transcendental logic" even as it endorses that school's 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 knowledge those are considered that is grounded in spatio-temporal categories-whether intellectual a prioris, as Immanuel Kant had claimed, or are thought to be incorporated in the subject as the very structure of embodied perception, as Hermann von Helmholtz had argued. If art is a totality, this totality is not the unity of the spatio-temporal manifold. But Einstein goes on to reject the claims of Marburg
* "Totalitat,"translation from the revised version published in Carl Einstein, Anmerkungen (Berlin: Verlag der Wochenschrift "Die Aktion," 1916), pp. 32-40; first published in Die Aktion 4 (1914), cols. 277-79 (I, II), 345-47 (III, IV), 476-78 (V). OCTOBER Instituteof Technology. 2004, pp. 115-121. ? 2004 October 107, Winter Magazine,Ltd. and Massachusetts ? Berlin. "Totality" 2004 Fannei & WalzVerlag,

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School thinkers such as Paul Natorp, who (somewhat like Edmund Husserl before them) in the second decade of the twentieth century tried to retranscendentalize Kantian epistemology by arguing that it was grounded in the realm of the disembodied, 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 some "Totality"passages sound as though they were written by Konrad Fiedler. Yet while Fiedler had disputed that art was a subdivisionof scientific knowledge, he did claim that it was likescientific knowledge-that the purpose of art as "pure visibility"was a process of Aneignung, an appropriation that would totalize the world's originary inchoateness into an image for a subject, as that subject's "visual property," or Sichtbarkeitsbesitz. it is on this issue that Einstein parts ways with Fiedler and all And other neo-Kantians, and instead tries to think the experience of art as totality in terms of a selective reading of Henri Bergson's Timeand FreeWill (sections IV and V). In that book, Bergson had famously rethought subjective experience via a model of time as duration, as a heterogeneous multiplicity that could not be grasped by neo-Kantian concepts of time as a causal succession of empty, identical moments. But if the qualitative difference of a Bergsonian totality emerged gradually within duration-like a melody differentiating itself over time, and thus more akin to music-then Einstein's totality was more germane to visual art's allat-onceness, for he thinks it as the punctual eruption of a formal construct as static qualitative difference into the empty intervals of quantified time. As such, Einstein's totality posited a model for art that was radically incommensurable with the expectations of a subject who would appropriate it, neo-Kantian-style, as visual knowledge-whether conceptually, through unconscious inference, or nonconceptually, as pure visibility. Rather, in a perverse radicalization of formalism, Einstein's totalities were the more formally accomplished the less they accommodated the viewer's desire to make them his aesthetic property. For a totality exists only insofar as it is "concrete"-insofar as it resists being subsumed under a concept-and only insofar as it is differential-insofar as it resists being conceived as an identity in the subject's own image. Negerplastik(1915) would supply muchneeded examples to test this wild idea.

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

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necessitates laws of vision by which the data of physiological vision are appraised and thereby endowed with human significance. Our notions of space assume importance since through art we have the capacity to shape and to alter them. Art becomes an effective force insofar as it is capable of ordering our visual perception according to laws. Too often, by naively confusing the beholder with the work of 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 aesthetic judgments; rather, such laws are founded on the elementary forms that are the basis for a potential work of art. Under the influence of philosophy the overrated doctrine of aesthetic judgment was erected as the foundation of aesthetics; on this basis, one believed, one could establish that which was specific to art. Such was the consequence of a teaching that defines philosophy as the scientific doctrine of concepts that underlies cognition, from which one deduced that aesthetics was the doctrine of the concepts that underlie judgments about art. Here we see clearly the consequences of an indirect method, namely, not that the given facts are established as premises, but as a surrogate psychological process or an intellectual content, whose function is, as it were, underpinned with metaphysical substrata. Yet a judgment on a work of art is not such a fact, since the process of artistic creation has a claim to being at least equally important. More to the point is the simple fact that we have at hand a series of achievements that constitute art. Certainly one could reasonably assume that through judgments grounded in knowledge of art one might determine what art actually is, where it begins, and where it ends; especially since there is an oppressive glut of so-called art that is described as bad, vulgar, or inartistic. Here the concept of qualitative judgment comes into play, which, to be sure, does not aid us in constructing an object from what is given, yet neither does it limit itself to the given substance of art. Especially since the beholder, through his judgment, transforms and fixes the facts for himself. These contradictions are conditioned by the nature of aesthetic judgment itself, since this is not an intellectual matter but proceeds from the elements of form. Perhaps, in the interest of greater clarity,we may no longer regard aesthetics as that methodological domain of philosophy that examines the method for attaining knowledge 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 act of creation itself, in the sense that the individual work of art itself constitutes an act of knowing and ofjudgment. The subject matter of art is not objects, but configured vision. What counts is the imperative of seeing, not the objects that happen to be seen. In this way one penetrates to the objective elements of an a priori knowledge of art 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 the creation 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 other than the creation of content that is based on laws, i.e., that is transcendent.

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The laws that govern logic are not universal; rather logic is a particular science like physics or any other, one that has its proper objects, yet it may not venture to falsify 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 logic's incapacity to grasp or fathom the entire spiritual dimension of existence. Just as Scholasticism believed that being was produced by means of judgment, so one now succumbed to the no-less-dangerous error that the legitimacy of spiritual and intellectual systems must be grounded in logic. Logic is nothing other then the doctrine of those concepts that are peculiar to logic itself and which cannot be used to control or justify the larger intellectual and spiritual world, being linked to it only insofar as they also represent a particular part of this domain and for that reason have a few characteristics in common. From this mistaken, overly universalized application of logic there emerged in every specialized domain the so-called antinomies of reason, which disappear when one tests each area as to its especially objective, properly cognitive substance. Logic as a universal science is a comparative technique, from which the dialectical character of logical practice developed directly, and this undermines any possibility of establishing laws that are based on it. II Psychology is nothing but a reaction against logic. One hoped that by positing individual 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 constituting components of our being, can never explain what is distinctly constitutive of total realms generated by laws; for psychology may address the preconditions of such phenomena, but not their immediate content. (One should add that psychology frequently operates with hybrid concepts.) Psychology isjust as prone as logic to the erroneous assumption that a science is capable of propositions about something other than itself. This error springs from the absence of a universal metaphysics, which, although no more capable than any other science of consolidating rules for specialized 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 from one 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 to become reality. For every realization, every manifestation of consciousness means

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nothing other than delimitation; totality is nothing other than a self-contained system of specific qualities, and this is total if the totality is accompanied by sufficient intensity. Totality means that the goal of all knowledge and endeavor no longer 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 qualitative laws, to the extent that now the individual system's conformity to law rests not on the varied repetition and the return of the same, but on the character of specific, elementary constructs. By this means one succeeds in setting up qualitative laws, laws that always yield a unified system and do not vary quantitatively, but intensively, which do not recur endlessly, but detach themselves qualitatively, so that 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 cognition is not a critical operation, but the creation of ordered contents, i.e., of total systems. What we understand by system is not the integration of a manifold displaying certain one-sided characteristics, nor do we mean a somehow quantitatively determined order, i.e., one that encompasses a certain number of objects. By system we mean rather every concrete totality that cannot experience an ordering or articulation by means of some external instrument, but which is organized within and for itself. By defining cognition as the creation of concrete organisms, we separate it from the doctrine of a universality characterized by duplication or repetition. In this way cognition is wrenched from its theoretical isolation and insignificance, cognition becomes equated with creation, and something of immediacy is created that was, to be sure, latently present but which had as yet not achieved representation. IV Totality is a concept that cannot be extrapolated; it can neither be derived from parts nor be traced back to a higher unity (as such it legitimizes every living being). Totality excludes nothing, i.e., it is preceded neither by a positivity nor a negativity, for the contrast, i.e., the unconditional unity of opposites, constitutes totality. Totality is never determined quantitatively in any way and can always appear according to purely qualitative presuppositions. Every individual organism must be total. Totality is not unity; for unity always implies repetition, indeed, repetition into quantitative infinity; whereas totality as a finite system exists only when all the discrete and varied parts within the system come into play. Accordingly, anything that tends to lie beyond the limits of thought is eliminated within the operative law. Totality makes possible concrete apprehension and by means of it every

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concrete object becomes transcendent. As intensity, totality has nothing to do with the extensive magnitude of the spatially infinite, from which physicists derive their 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 selfcontained qualities, because it is precisely totality that constitutes their significance, to the degree that they derive their qualitative specificity from that totality. We would never be able to define and imagine anything specific if our memory did not represent the unification of pregnant qualitative configurations, without which-totality being a function and as such one that can and must experience a temporal determination-time could never be differentiated for us. Time, imagined purely, must mean a qualitative difference of experiences, which considered allegorically on the basis of geometrical ideas, means spatial sequence, while time is only a difference of quality. Because we define cognition as the creation of concrete objects, principles are conceivable only on the basis of their being, on the basis of this mode of cognition. The a priori basis of the principle is the quality or totality. All qualitative principles are a posteriori paraphrases of totality. Art considered as cognition does not yield concepts but the concrete elements of representation. The total object absorbs every psychological process that is purposely directed toward it as it also absorbs every form of causality. 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 disposes of its object as an allegory of an insensible process that lies outside of the object. For that reason it says nothing about form or its quality. Memory is the pure function of qualitatively different experiences that become subsumed within their quality and are simultaneously latent, in order to act within a qualitative experience that takes in something suitable or antagonistic. In the concrete experience we possess time directly, conscious of its relation to the qualitative. Scientifically we measure time indirectly with the help of magnitude and transform it into a simultaneously spatial factor, while it is directly a difference of quality. We grasp time directly, immediately in the relationship of the concrete experience 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 themselves represent multifaceted elements. This way of thinking applies above all to the creation of objects and is most

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closely linked to the immediate life process, which, like memory, is defined purely qualitatively; for number is the medium of retrospective thinking, it represents experiences simultaneously and causes us to deceive ourselves into thinking a continuity is possible only through the nonqualitative and is guaranteed only by means of number; totality on the other hand demonstrates a minutely articulated temporal sequence, one that at any given point may be interpreted, temporally, i.e., as qualitatively immediate, a temporal sequence whose intensity now increases, now decreases, depending on the kind and intensity of the experience and, which in fact can begin at any moment. Totality enables us to see any given part of our experiences as a whole. Observing quantitatively, by contrast, would forbid us to remain at a given point, because its continuity may never be qualitatively defined, so that delimitation becomes impossible. The qualitative [sic] observation of experiences does not permit us to determine even the smallest unit, i.e., our experiences would fully dissolve into chaos and we would lose any way to reinterpret our experiences as particular latent functions, that, defined qualitatively,can emerge at any given point. Since the quantitative cannot generate anything new but represents only the repetition 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 retroactively repeats a process. Such an act appears impossible to us in the immediacy of life, since apprehension in time alwaysrepresents a new constellation. This continuous qualitative differentiation notwithstanding, our being does not shatter into fragments, since by its very qualitative dimension it represents one of the various totalities.