Totality

Abstract

OCTOBER 107, Winter 2004, pp. 115–121. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Totality” © 2004 Fannei & Walz Verlag, Berlin. Published in three installments in Die Aktion, a freewheeling left-wing journal 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 crit ique 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 that is grounded in spatio-temporal categories—whether those are considered 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