The Archaeologies of Modernity: The Avant-Garde Bildung - Softcover

Rumold, Rainer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810131129 ISBN 13: 9780810131125

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Archaeologies of Modernity explores the shift from the powerful tradition of literary forms of Bildung—the education of the individual as the self—to the visual forms of “Bildung” (from Bild) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Interrelated chapters examine the work of Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka or Kurt Schwitters, in the light of the surge of an autoformation (Bildung) of verbal and visual images at the core of expressionist and surrealist aesthetics and the art that followed. In this first scholarly focus on modernist avant-garde Bildung in its entwinement of conceptual modernity with forms of the archaic, Rumold resituates the significance of the poet and art theorist Einstein and his work on the language of primitivism and the visual imagination.

Archaeologies of Modernity is a major reconsideration of the conception of the modernist project and will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines.

About this title

About the Author

Rainer Rumold is Professor Emeritus of German Literature and Critical Thought at Northwestern University, USA. His previous books include Eugene Jolas’s autobiography, Man from Babel (1988), which he edited with Andreas Kramer; The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism toward Postmodernism (Northwestern, 2001); and, coedited with Klaus H. Kiefer, Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924–1951 (Northwestern, 2009).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Archaeologies of Modernity

Avant-Garde Bildung

By Rainer Rumold

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3112-5

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Introduction, 
Part I. Decentered Corporeality: Metropolitan and Regional Image Zones of Play, 
Chapter 1. Archaeologies of Modernity: Toward Bildung without a Self, 
Chapter 2. Corporeal Topographies of the Image Zone: From Oskar Kokoschka's Murder of Metaphor to Georges Bataille's Acéphale, 
Chapter 3. Kafka's Nomad Images: From Multilingual Borderland to Global Experience, 
Chapter 4. Regional Sights and Sounds: Jean/Hans Arp's Alsatian Hobbyhorse Play and Franz Kafka's Whistling Mice, 
Part II. The I-less Eye: Primitivist Archaeologies and Images of Modernity, 
Chapter 5. Archaeologies of Modernity in transition and Documents, Paris 1929-30: Eugene Jolas, Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, 
Chapter 6. Seeing African Sculpture: Carl Einstein's "Ethnologie du Blanc", 
Chapter 7. Painting as a Language. Why Not? Carl Einstein in Documents, 
Part III. Toward the Dissolution of Modernity: The Politics of (Auto-) Formation of the Real, 
Prelude: Forms of the Singular versus Georges Bataille's Informe, 
Chapter 8. Kurt Schwitters's forme indéfinie and Merzbau Arche-texture versus Vertical Architecture, 
Chapter 9. Walter Benjamin: The Intoxicated Physiognomist Writing Denkbilder in the Name of Ariadne, 
Chapter 10. Benjamin's Urban Arche-texture: ThoughtImages toward the Dissolution of the Labyrinth of Phantasmagoria, 
Conclusion: The Politics of (Auto-)Formation of the Real from the Visual Unconscious: Einstein and Benjamin, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Archaeologies of Modernity

Toward Bildung without a Self

Walter Benjamin's and Carl Einstein's essays on surrealism and their surrealist-inspired writings disclose how the German and European avant-garde are entwined in ways that resemble family relations of an unspoken consensus in general, but also sharp disagreement in particulars. Critics like Benjamin and Carl Einstein experienced this tension in their own life and work, as in the aftermath of the First World War they both turned against the chauvinism and militarism of the Italian futurists. But they turned principally against the culture of soulful inwardness, a traditionally German Innerlichkeit (inwardness) that was once again cultivated by mainstream German expressionism during and after the First World War. Mainstream "Oh Mensch" expressionism was targeted for its fluffy idealist, holier-than-thou subjectivity and disembodying metaphors, for its perceived reinforcement of a characteristically German tradition of "Bildung" as intellectual and aesthetic "self-cultivation" in the wake of a continued monumentalizing cult of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In turn, with the mid-1920s they favored French surrealism with which they connected a sweeping shift from idealism, as Benjamin puts it so provocatively in his surrealism essay of 1929, toward an "anthropological materialism" in which "political materialism and physical nature share the inner man." Surrealism is therefore said to expose the image of a new man in terms of the material, physiological, and formal relations of a "hundred percent body- and image-space," meaning a tactile space beyond subjective spectatorship, beyond the distance of concept, symbol, metaphor, and temporality, in short an experiential zone "where nearness looks with its own eyes." It is this kind of an eminently tactile process of visuality emerging as materiality that is characteristic of a certain type of European avant-garde production. They begin with the early visceral expressionist Kokoschka in Vienna and contemporaneous cubist productions in Paris where in the erasure of the modern monocular perspective, thus of three-dimensional space and the appearance of volume, mass, and materiality reveal themselves in heterogeneous formal relations, which I here address as archaeologies of modernity.

In other words, we are dealing with what appear to be spontaneous constructs of "auto-formation" or "auto-generation," an alternative meaning of the German term Bildung as it appears in the subtitle of this study, in erasure of a distance between physis and its image constructed by the perspective of an individual, autonomous spectator. Benjamin's image of the play of human facial expressions (Mienenspiel) that metamorphose "to a man" into the face of an alarm clock ringing "sixty seconds in the minute," in which his 1929 essay on surrealism culminates, thus is to explode and jettison the Cartesian subject's worldview. It is to disclose (quite specifically against the idealist phenomenology of Ludwig Klages, a major influence on literary expressionism, valorizing contemplation of the auratic form of the far and removed) "the world of allround (allseitiger) and integral actualities ... so that no limb remains unrent." Surrealism, here in its rending of the subject ("a bad tooth"), is for Benjamin obviously a subsequent dialectical step beyond the Nietzschean event of the tearing apart of the individual in Dionysian frenzy always already being fused in a formal process with Apollonian appearance. Yet for Nietzsche that event is typically independent from any and all social external conditions (Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music). Surrealism, giving birth to and creating its alternative hallucinatory-constructive image space, the tactile visual experience of the closest, the "actual as the singular," has, one reads in his "Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" from 1929, finally annihilated the "gute Stube" of reified bourgeois inwardness, as in middle-class German households this site was traditionally the quasi-sacred, "best room" reserved mostly for Sunday's occasions. After the revolutionary apocalypse, the variegated universe of urban sign-fields is to have replaced the life-world of the individual and with it the remote, contemplatively harmonizing and isolating private space of the book as the medium in which Bildung is packaged and sold as education. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street: "Script — having found, in the book, a refuge in which it could lead an autonomous existence — is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form" (Benjamin, SW 1: 456). Increasingly sensing such a demise of literary culture, Benjamin would write almost a decade later his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," meant to be his contribution to the expressionism debate in the Moscow exile journal Das Wort (1937–38). In his view the medium of film had been paralleled and prepared in some of its techniques by the avant-garde's visual turn. Both are said to share in tearing apart metaphor and symbol as the devices of the construct of the space for individual contemplation. Indeed, his 1929 essay's culminating image of human facial play morphing quasi-cinematically into the face of an alarm clock is one of posthumanist montage. Where Hegel in his Aesthetics had valorized Greek sculpture's "elimination of the facial play" as contingent subjectivity in favor of the representation of an ideal, universal individuality, Benjamin here points at the image of intersubjecticity in the age of technology. The metamorphic motion and movement implied in the verbal image reminds one of a contemporaneous experimental film like the 1928 Ghosts Before Breakfast by the Dadaist Hans Richter, in which from beginning to end the face of a clock merges in fluid play with the individual face and that of groups (also of their behinds!), with the things of Berlin in play like the things in Benjamin's Paris. Things as well as humans are in rebellion against their enslavement by the bourgeois capitalist subject epitomized by the Haussmannization of the city. Thereby also time as a commodity is liberated into the experience of a practically useless "now time," as much as the infinite sounding of the alarm constitutes a mental projection of a sound without function, a "sound image," impersonal, inhuman. The image is of Benjamin's "new man" in the sense that it is beyond the human being that has been discredited. The metamorphic zone of play of the surrealist image, as metamorphic kinesis experienced also in the space of drugs (Benjamin, GS VI: 560), subverts the aura of the unique human face preserved in the genre of the painted and subsequently for the last time in the early photographic portrait. We experience a Spielraum (room for play) which Benjamin sees also produced by the film camera's penetration and actualization of the "optical unconscious." Suffice it to state here, before a case-tocase close-up, that the complex entwinement of play and the unconscious constitutes the heterogeneous forms of all avant-garde Bildung.

Yet, in spite of or because of these various possible references to cultural contexts, the question remains as to the image's identity (so undetermined that I will have to return to it yet again in the conclusion of this study). Are we here looking at forms of Benjamin's "Unmensch," who "does no longer want anything in common with human beings" (GS II: 357), of the impersonal that is evoked to cause the tabula rasa demise of subjectivity and by extension of literary culture, of belles lettres? This may be apocalypse or revolution, yet only as much as that is possible at all in cultural developments. As we shall see, avant-garde image zones are constituted by formal physiological processes, as in Benjamin's surrealist image, by play in its various aspects of anarchic agon and vertigo but also of intuitive mimesis. In other words, Bild (image), form in its amplitude toward its margins or toward excess as with Georges Bataille's informe, materiality, and play as an impersonal phenomenon constitute a fluid yet formal complex. As my study is devoted to seminal, influential developments of the historical German avant-garde and its major contemporaneous theorists, albeit in a European context, I choose to focus on such image zones as forms of avant-garde Bildung. I do so because of the German writers' and artists' own ubiquitous use of the term's numerous compounds, derivatives, and a heightened awareness of its nuances in their critical statements, and, last but not least, in view of the historical complexity and theoretical reach of the term with its roots in Bild (image).

In one way or another, whether in terms of a direct influence or not, behind the German avant-garde artists', writers', and theorists' employment of a wide and variegated word-field from bilden (to shape or form) to Gebilde (construct, shape, or figure), Bildung as das Bilden (forming or Bildung as "auto-generation") stands primarily a lasting legacy of Nietzsche's artist who transfigures every content into images and forms. An intuitive shaper of the linguistic material, Nietzsche's playful artist, his "super-gay hero" was to prefigure the coming of a new phase of mankind. His production was not for the purpose of "betterment or education [Bildung]" but for the renewed experience of existence in the unadulterated image as the product of Dionysian intoxication and the Apollonian will to form. Moreover, Nietzsche's early writings, whether on music or on language, are part of an evolving "physiology of aesthetics." They are a single endorsement of a transfiguration and redemption through the image as psychophysiological Bilderfunken (spark of images), Lichtbild (illuminated image), the Bilderwelt (world of images) as experienced in intuition and insight as opposed to the Bilderillusionen (illusionary pictures), or Schmeichelbild (ingratiating picture) of the Bildungsmenschen (men of education).

For some thinkers and critics like Einstein and Benjamin, their work to varying degrees is unthinkable without Nietzsche's "physiology of aesthetics," yet they were more specifically interested in mediality, visuality, and historically changing forms and conditions. There was, moreover, Alois Riegl's controversial concept of a Kunstwollen (will to art). For Riegl "artistic volition" expresses the "worldview" of a certain era or a people as a function of the changing status of the senses of touch and vision with a historical tendency toward a primacy of abstraction from the senses in modernity. However, modernist art for contemporary criticism becomes a paradigm for beneficial developments in reverse of abstraction. What Riegl had addressed and valorized in classical art as "plastic vision," the close-range "haptic experience" in modernist art now appears to displace the modern alienated, disembodied, "purely optic distant vision." Riegl, of course, had focused on the bildende Künste, the graphic, visual arts. His concept of a "will to art" had relativized classical art as a historical norm and thus opened up the understanding of marginal or undervalued, misunderstood or not yet understood periods and developments of culture as expressions of a universal bildendes Kunstschaffen (artistic creativity of form and image). He thus quite aggressively had downgraded the significance of representation based on Nachbildung (mimesis) and determined by the Erinnerungsbild (memory picture) as a "foggy metaphysical concept," a bogey. In his turn against "abstract aesthetics" for a closer understanding of the "Bildung of stylistic concepts" as an expression of what is registered by the senses, he employed a host of terms like Ausbildung, Fortbildung, and Durchbildung (all sharing in the sense of "elaboration") which emphasize his view of the primacy of "working and forming through" sense perception in terms of the medium.

Between these lines the term Bildung itself as the acting out of a "will to art" has more and more moved into the direction of spontaneous trans-individual "creation," for example when Riegl talks of the first ornamental art of the ancient Egyptians as pflanzenbildend (giving plants their form). It is his notion of an impersonal creativity replacing a romantic concept of the individual artist as demiurge with the artist as a neutral medium of epochal developments which draws Benjamin and Einstein to Riegl's views as equally applicable to any artistic media, including the medium of literature. In his review "Bücher, die lebendig geblieben sind" ("Books That Remain Vital," 1929) Benjamin went as far as seeing in Riegl's The Late Roman Art Industry (Vienna, 1901) a work of epochal significance that broke with pessimistic theories of times of "decay" and "regression into barbarism." While Benjamin's appreciation of expressionism was notoriously split, he always saw its potential dialectically, here relating Riegl's insights to the best of the movement: he "bore the feeling of style and the insights of Expressionism twenty years later with prophetic certainty against the monuments of the later imperial era" (Benjamin, GS 3: 170).

At any rate, in significantly differing ways, representative artists and writers of the expressionist era were motivated by a will to create for an innovative age images and forms perceived as resistant to dominant ideological discourses, including the discourse of classical German Bildung in its devolution from the ideal of self-cultivation to the canonic requirements of institutional humanist education over time. Thus for Gottfried Benn, in the wake of Nietzsche turning against the Bildungsphilister, creativity culminated in the forming of a transcendant Gebilde (construct or shape) as a response to the "form-demanding force of nothingness." Still in the later essay "Provoziertes Leben" ("Provoked Life"), he is concerned with the crisis of the Western worldview that "began with the construction [Bildung] of the term "reality" [Wirklichkeit]." For him as the self-avowed Kunstträger (art bearer) what is left are endogene Bilder (endogenous images) that call for formal expression. Such images without external cause and restrictions, images sui generis, are the remaining testimonies of primordial experience against historical and literary culture, specifically against the reader of historical novels as the Kulturträger (culture bearer) invested in self-cultivation and the education of others. Rainer Maria Rilke in his Sonette an Orpheus (1922) similarly evokes a Wissen des Bildes (knowing in the image) against worldviews based on conceptual pictures in a time of the Weltbild as Heidegger would sixteen years later address the issue. Of course, such valorization of the Bild can turn too easily into its idolization, where the concomitant result will be a manipulative denigration of written culture. This was, for example, a politicized agenda for Rightist developments from Julius Langbehn and the so-called Rembrandt-Germans to Adolf Hitler. As quoted by Gert Mattenklott in his Bilderdienst: Ästhetische Opposition bei Beardsley und George (1970), Langbehn stated symptomatically in 1890:

Book or image, that is the watchword; there is no third. One would like to say that the decision about this question is already given by the word Bildung by itself. Every proper Bildung is bildend forming creative and thus artistic. Hence one has to gladly welcome the development that our Volk is in the process of turning away from the sciences to art.

Forty-three years later the Hitler Volk had turned away both from the sciences and the arts to "German science" and "German art." For Carl Einstein, surrealist productions then were to be the last stand against both bourgeois culture as well as National Socialist collective barbarism, with its roots in the former. Surrealism was a matter of rendering tangible the experience of "formed vision," producing against the derivative metaphors of subjective control and mass manipulation media for the Gestaltbildung (shaping of a holistic form) of trans-individual experience. His vision, derived from André Masson's, and most significantly, Georges Braque's later surrealist productions, was Wirklichkeitsbildung in the sense of an active transforming and shaping of reality as well as in the sense of the word as the already completed, resulting shape of reality itself. The new reality is to be "immediate," unsymbolizable visuality, a purely heterogeneous image zone, in short Bildtotalität which Benjamin, in his terms cited above, also expects from the productions of the surrealist movement.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810131129
• ISBN 13: 9780810131125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272