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 in Die Aktion, a freewheeling left-wing journal
edited by his brother-in-law Franz Pfemfert, Carl Einsteins 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 ercely nondiscursive and
intensely referential. The essays 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 subjects 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 totalityincluding
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 Schools (neo-Kantian) transcendental logic even as it endorses that
schools 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
that 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 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
* Totalitt, translation from the revised version published in Carl Einstein, Anmerkungen (Berlin:
Verlag der Wochenschrift Die Aktion, 1916), pp. 3240; rst published in Die Aktion 4 (1914), cols.
27779 (I, II), 34547 (III, IV), 47678 (V).
Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen
Introduced by Sebastian Zeidler
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 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 some
Totality passages sound as though they were written by Konrad Fiedler. Yet while
Fiedler had disputed that art was a subdivision of scientic knowledge, he did claim
that it was like scientic knowledgethat the purpose of art as pure visibility was
a process of Aneignung, an appropriation that would totalize the worlds originary
inchoateness into an image for a subject, as that subjects visual property, or
Sichtbarkeitsbesitz. And it is on this issue that Einstein parts ways with Fiedler and all
other neo-Kantians, and instead tries to think the experience of art as totality in
terms of a selective reading of Henri Bergsons Time and Free Will (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 durationlike a melody differentiating itself over time, and thus
more 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 as
static qualitative difference into the empty intervals of quantied time. As such,
Einsteins 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 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 less they accommo-
dated the viewers desire to make them his aesthetic property. For a totality exists
only insofar as it is concreteinsofar as it resists being subsumed under a
conceptand only insofar as it is differentialinsofar as it resists being conceived
as an identity in the subjects own image. Negerplastik (1915) would supply much-
needed examples to test this wild idea.
*
I
Above and beyond its specically 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
OCTOBER 116
necessitates laws of vision by which the data of physiological vision are appraised
and thereby endowed with human signicance. 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 percep-
tion 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 inuence 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 specic to art. Such was the
consequence of a teaching that denes philosophy as the scientic 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 intellec-
tual 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 xes 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 dened as something that comes after the fact.
One would do better to shift notions concerning knowledge of art to the specic act
of creation itself, in the sense that the individual work of art itself constitutes an act
of knowing and of judgment. The subject matter of art is not objects, but congured
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.
Totality 117
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 logics
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 capacit ies or funct ions more precise result s 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 is just 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
OCTOBER 118
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
sufcient intensity. Totality means that the goal of all knowledge and endeavor no
longer lies in the innite, as an indenable overall purpose, rather it is resolved in
the singular, because totality justies 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 rests
not on the varied repetition and the return of the same, but on the character of
specic, elementary constructs. By this means one succeeds in setting up qualitative
laws, laws that always yield a unied 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 instru-
ment, but which is organized within and for itself. By dening 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 insignicance, cognition becomes equated with cre-
ation, 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 innity; whereas totality as a nite system exists only when all
the 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 the
operative law.
Totality makes possible concrete apprehension and by means of it every
Totality 119
concrete object becomes transcendent. As intensity, totality has nothing to do
with the extensive magnitude of the spatially innite, from which physicists derive
their notions of the temporally innite.
V
Within our mental processes we apprehend total, i.e., self-contained, gurations.
Our memory is constituted out of these gurations; they function as self-
contained qualities, because it is precisely totality that constitutes their signicance,
to the degree that they derive their qualitative specicity from that totality. We
would never be able to dene and imagine anything specic if our memory did
not represent the unification of pregnant qualitative configurations, without
whichtotality being a function and as such one that can and must experience a
temporal determinationtime 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 dene 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 qualita-
tive 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 antagonis-
tic. In the concrete experience we possess time directly, conscious of its relation
to the qualitative. Scientically we measure time indirectly with the help of magni-
tude 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 them-
selves represent multifaceted elements.
This way of thinking applies above all to the creation of objects and is most
OCTOBER 120
closely linked to the immediate life process, which, like memory, is dened 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 qualit at ively immediate, a temporal sequence whose intensit y 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 dened, 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, dened 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 always represents a new constellation. This continuous qualita-
tive differentiation notwithstanding, our being does not shatter into fragments, since
by its very qualitative dimension it represents one of the various totalities.
Totality 121