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Gestalt and Concept (Excerpts)

C,ARL EINSTEIN

Tianslated and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen

This text is a fragment of a larger manuscript that was never published andprobably never finished. The ideas expressed in it are close enough to those in CarlEinstein's Georges Braque (1934) to suggest that it dates from around the same time.In several unpublished letters dating from 1930-31 to Ewald Wasmuth, Einsteinwrote of his plan to publish his "aesthetics," which he described as a collection ofessays; it seems probable that "Gestalt and Concept" was part of this unfinishedproject.l Even as a fragment, it remains one of Einstein's most important-andbrilliant-theoretical texts.

The German word "Gestalt" has been left in the original because no commonEnglish translation of it seemed entirely satisfactory given its somewhat idiosyn-cratic meaning for Einstein. It is not synonymous with "form," "structure," or"figure"; as Einstein writes in a passage of the essay not excerpted here, form, incontrast to the amorphous, dynamic richness of gestalt, "means delimitation,impoverishment, exclusion of the Real." Gestalt denotes the opposite of theseattributes; it signifies the raw, unmediated subjective experience of inner and outerphenomena prior to any articulation in form or concept; it signifies process as

opposed to fixity, thinking as opposed to knowing. And here art is identified notwith form but with gestalt, with the concrete, the visionary; it is opposed to conceptu-alization and cognition. It strives "to contest deadly generalizations and therationalisitic impoverishment of the world, to sever the chains of causality, tounravel the web of significations." And it achieves this through the "proliferation ofgestalt, such that the deadly, ever more pervasive order is combated and destroyedby an intensified disorder, i.e., by a continually renewed gestalt formation."

l The German text is printed under the title "Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns" in Carl Einstein,Werke Band 4: Aus d,ern Nachlar|.I, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei &Walz, 1992), pp. 194-221. It is not clear why the editors do not use the title "Gestalt und Begriff,"which can be found on a separate page included with the manuscript preserved in the Carl-Einstein-Archiv of the Akademie der Ktinste Berlin.

OCTOBER 107, Winw 2004, pp. 169-76. @ 2004 Octobn Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Tbchnolng."C,estalt and C,oncept" @ 2004 Fannei {l WalzVerlag, Berlin.

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Even as Einstein affirmed the "quintessentially utopian" nature of art, hisfaith seems to have been wavering. writing to wasmuth in 1931, he confided:"The art book that I still have to do fC,eorges Braquel will be my last. I have hadenough of it, it makes me puke. Enough of theories, too. We have been pastedover with this wallpaper long enough. Either something completely different willcome my way or Herr Einstein isn't writing any more." Einstein ceased publishingon art after the appearance of his Braque book. Yet he did write again. He under-took an unsparing critique of the avant-garde-and of his own former attitudesand cherished beliefs-in his last major finished manuscript, rhe 480-page "TheFabrication of Fictions," which remained unpublished at his death. In its openingpages he offered his verdict on modernism: "Artists will never make major history,"he wrote. "In former times art served modestly to solidify conventions and todefend important shared values and human standards. Today's modernism willfade away, because it lacks norms and social commitment. This art will perish inautistic over-sophistication and playful isolation."2

These aestheticians induce us to consider the problem of the oppositionbetween concept and gestalt, between the rationalization of the world and itsdefamiliarization.

Man defends himself against overwhelming impressions and experiences,against surging forces, by rationalizing and conceptualizing them. That is to say,he effects a diminishing reduction of the Real in its complexity. He fears thetremendous power of experiences that force him into the zone of passivity; he isespecially fearful of hallucinatory processes that condemn him to a role of sufferingendurance. And so he proceeds to diminish the impact of the coercive forces ofthe world, namely of the Real, through conceptual impoverishment. Every act ofconceptualization is designed to assimilate and master concrete experience. Thusconceptualization involves a principle that depletes gestalt. This is how oneattempts to create an economy of forces; one erects barriers against the stream ofconcrete events; the dynamism of the whole becomes segmented. This is the crucialpoint: the world of concrete events unfolds beyond the limits of cognition, whichis at bottom a movement that seeks distance from what is immediately concrete.one overestimates this small rational segment of reality, the reasonable, for thesake of self-preservation, all the more because man is threatened by anotherannihilation from within: self-destruction through identification with the concretegestalt event, through metamorphotic dissolution.

Conceptualization means to fend off what is deadly and vital, the immensecoercive power of the world. Cognition is an attempt to abandon the self-identical

2. Carf Einstein, Die Fahrikati.on der Fiktionm, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,1973), p. 14.

C,estalt and Concept

center of the world in order to assume a safe peripheral position by splitting upthe coercive forces of the world into a subjective and an objective realm. Oneachieves such a position by denying the interwoven character of the workings ofthe world; instead one strives for discrete spheres and segments. The distinctionbetween an inner and an outer world is only a matter of perspective, an issue ofpower, as is the belief in a discrete, self-contained human form and in staticobjects. We can also see this method of repression at work in the construction ofcausal sequences; one rationalizes out of fear, i.e., one diminishes. Now conscious

man lives on the edge of the world, while around him lurk powers, hostile orindifferent, which he seeks to entangle ever more deeply into his web of concepts.To combat these active masses, he carves out q?ologies, he strives at arry price tominimize and weaken his complex connections to the world. He wishes to controlthe overpowering mass of events that are alien to him. To identify with themwould mean his certain destruction. We regard cognition primarily as a negativetendency, as a struggle against the concrete world and the increase in gestalt. Oneneutralizes the forces of individual gestalts, those embodied demonic animisms,by generalizing them. Spirits, gods, and cosmic powers degenerate into mereideas or elements, mythic processes dim into rational metaphysical operations.Here we perceive a negative phase of resistance against the world'

Through concepts man deadens powers that were once dominant or at least

equal to him. He splits apart the complex Real into an inner and an outer reality,

into subjective and objective spheres. (To be sure, ideas or concepts inherit thetremendous powers of the gods, for humankind always overestimates the results ofits latest effort; instinctively it attempts to secure its most recent, yet feeble acquisi-

tion, e.g., the conscious ego, by overvaluing concepts.) In this way, the power of thefunctional is carved up and the falsification that underlies all philosophy is accom-

plished. The concrete gestalt is degraded and devalued to the status of a subservientmaterial, while functional values are displaced into the point that is called "subject."

Thus the Real is diminished even as the protective operations of logic are

overvalued. For this reason, we view logic as a means of destroying reality, and themathematical calculability of a process entails its drastic diminution and thenegation of its function. By reducing phenomena to types based on laws onedomesticates them. Thus impoverished, deprived of all possibility of chance ordisorder, they are disarmed. And yet as such they are especially valued fssausg-what comfortl-they permit apparent repetitions. (A complete contrast to this isthe process of metamorphotic identification, i.e., here the concrete experience

lErlebnisl is preserved and the subject dissolves into a dlnamic, complex fusion.Generalization, on the other hand, serves the defense of the conscious ego.)

In the isolation of the subject, of the conscious and rational ego as opposedto the complex animist person, we grasp a biologically important event: the birthof the anthropocentric attitude.

Every experience should be considered a shock-a shock that is arrested byconverting it into a concept or by diverting and displacing it metaphorically. One

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could speak here of an uncanny process of shadow formation. Compared to theReal, the world now fades into mere appearance; the concrete, the gestalt, decaysin the concept to become a form of deception, and the concrete, hallucinatoryperson, measured against the rational ego, becomes contorted into a liar andproducer of all that is arbitrary. Now one shrinks the crucial zone of visionaryexperience and decreases the metamorphotic danger by explaining away what isconcrete and functional in experience. One attempts to displace the entire massof activity into the conscious ego.

Up to now these conceptual fixities have been considered a vitally positiveforce, whereas we regard them absolutely as a sign of death and a reduction of thefunctional. We consider these concepts, which weaken all that is concrete anddynamic, to be of inferior biological value.

Noq with the overemphasis on the conscious ego and on concepts destructiveof gestalt, a static image of the world emerges. Events are paralyzed by reason anddeadly systems are constructed. Now it is ideas that are feared, yet in these ideasthe concrete experience grows old and atrophies.. ..

Once the cement binding human beings to their environment-namely,God-had crumbled, the chasm between psychological processes and their causalexplanation deepened and became the fundamental problem. God had functioned.as a mean, reconciling paradoxes and antinomies. Absorbed and neutralized inC'od, they were thus removed from the immediate world. In earlier times, cognition,logic, and dialectics were subject to the irrational dominant that was God. Theincongruous and the miraculous were considered to be the origin and the groundof being; the hallucinatory, mythic origin of cognition was clearly apparent andretained its power. In this regard, medieval thought was far more complex thanmodern thought, since it encompassed logic's irrational opposite. Hence, thanks toits elementary antagonisms, the cognitive process was dialectically more complex,especially since it incorporated the alogical within itself. Today, howeveq we areruled by a prejudicial belief in continuity and in the qualitative unity andunambiguousness of knowledge. We forgot that both continuity and causality repre-sent only a reaction through which we acquire a comfortable selection of repeatablefacts. In our view, laws are the narrowest segments and the most monstrousexceptions, for cognition is an escape from the concrete, an elimination of gestaltevents, which are supplanted by logical operations. With every act of cognition or ofjudgment one distances oneself from the concrete event. The very predicate of ajudgment introduces a word that actually belongs to other groups of events andhence functions as a transition to them. Accordingly, every act ofjudgment meansan alteration of its object and a depletion of gestalt. Generalizations and syllogismswill always neutralize or structurally change the objects of experience. Every sy'logismentails a homogenization of different conditions by virtue of eliminating undesirableproperties, and here we can see that the act of knowing represents an attempt tofalsifr dynamic fragments by deconcretizing them into wholes, so rhat the condi-tional nature of cognition is concealed. One covers over the origin, the provisionally

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dlmamic, to mitigate the plunge toward death. And yet it is thanks to this depletionof gestalt that one gains an ostensible continuity; it is this effort that is expressed inthe sign for infinity, which is a desperate attempt at ultimate mastery of thi world.

We point out the gestalt-depleting deadliness of knowledge, and the murd.er-ousness of philosophical categories, which culminate either in the Absolute or inthe void of the mystic. Philosophy can be defined essentially as a technique forconjuring away the Real, as the reduction to nil of what is functionally conciete, inwhich subject and object, virtually stripped of qualities, wither away. The manifoldapplicability of concepts is founded precisely on their gestalt-less empriness. . . .

This tendency toward conceptual standardization demonstrates the funda-mental opposition between cognition and gestalt. Every instance of meaning carrieswith it a fundamental limitation of process and a coercive reduction of the psycho-logical. It is here that we perceive the negative effect of any act of cognition, and wesee that the cognitively constructed reality contains but a minimum of the Real.This reveals the negative emphasis of cognition's biological value; it is based on theprinciple of gestalt destruction.

Continuity means standardization of all processes, which is achieved byeliminating the conflicting, irrational, irritating-i.e., irreconcilable-laye.r urrjtendencies. In this way, one suppresses the genetics of the ostensibly static configura-tion as well as the intuitive processes that, at any given point, can break throughor tear apart any rational system, since they cannot be incorporated within it. Toconceptualize means to standardize at the cost of the immediate and concrete; inthe act of knowing we perceive a hostile manifestation of the weak and threatenedhuman being.

The chance for freedom is not to be found in cognition; rather it lies preciselyin freeing ourselves from unequivocal causality and from the narrow constraintsof continuity, which spontaneous hallucination disrupts.

Every continuum, including that of causality, represents a simplification andreduction of process, which by its nature is immensely paradoxical and pluralistic.

All vitality originates from the chaotic tension of concrete shocks. From thisstandpoint we regard causality as something provisional, as a diminution of life; itis at once an aspect and a process ofdeath.

This is a fundamental fact: cognition is directed against thinking, and is itsdeadly final phase.Just like the fixed subject and object, cognition is the terminalstage of function. Perhaps we can view this ossification as a sign of a dying planet,as one element of a more general process of dying. In that light, knowledge, likeeverything fixed, including images, would be a symptom of the final sLge ofplanetary death, such that the vital forces ofthe earth are gradually overgrown byits propensity to death.

It is not events that unfold causally; rather, it is only our belated acquisitionsof knowledge and its fragments that seem to us to be causally structured. In theact of knowing, one resists metamorphotic identification with the gestalt, oneflees the vortex of process to assume a tangential position in which the most

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recurrent shocks provide accents. Thus fear of concepts may present itself as

fear of the most frequent shocks; but then the veneration and overestimation ofconcepts may stem from a secret fear, since the concept destroys the concreteperson and diminishes and deconcretizes the spectrum of his experiences. Inthe concept, the human subject dies, just as by means of the concept he destroyshis reality.

All causally based knowledge has validity only within the limits of thehypothesis on which it is based. That dispenses with the idea of universally validlaws. Perhaps one overestimates causality because of its origin in magic and aboveall because it represents a projection of human desires. But that cannot possiblyserve as an argument for its epistemological value.

The causal chain of events belongs to the category of merely illusorydynamisms, for in the causal chain, cause and effect are simultaneously imagined,and the effect is less a consequence than a correlate ofthe cause.. ..

In order simply to live and not succumb wholly to the negative and impover-ishing processes of logic, man must hurl himself again and again into logicallysenseless and irrational processes, so that all meaningful unity is unceasinglydestroyed. An opposing current is thus formed against the tendency to experiencethe world as a continuum, for one is driven to singularize, dissolve, and estrangethe world into abrupt discontinuities. This occurs through the constant scatteringof not yet logically determined visions into a well-adjusted and rationalized world.And in this way the reasonable world, from which elementary psychologicalprocesses are excluded, is annihilated; its continuity and its unity are ended.

Again and again dialectical chaos flows anew when, periodically, the floodsof irrationality break through the dams of logic. For this reason art now assumes a

decidedly greater importance, for what matters now is concrete experience, bywhich one repels deadly fixities and generalities. Reality draws from visionaryexperience, i.e., out of nothing, the mythic increase in gestalt, without which itwould die. Now one disrupts the mechanical continuity of causality and an eventunfolds that the religious would call a miracle. Yet even without this step the futilityof logic becomes apparent, since the struggle of different solutions reveals logic'sutter meaninglessness. The very existence of dialectics demonstrates that there is

nothing definitive or binding about logic, especially since an excess of constrict-ing meanings was and is unbearable to us.

Thus a power would have to be ascribed to art that, to be sure, moves it outsideof the schematic classical aesthetics of order. By means of art, one attempts tocontest deadly generalizations and the rationalistic impoverishment of the world,to sever the chains of causality, to unravel the web of significations. This occursthrough the proliferation of gestalt, such that the deadly, ever-more pervasiveorder is combated and destroyed by an intensified disorder, i.e., by a continuallyrenewed gestalt formation.

We will now briefly attempt to determine how the achievements of art differfrom those of cognition.

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In the late antique aesthetic of Plato and Plotinus, works of art, which theyheld in contempt, had validity only insofar as they partook of the Idea. This meansthat the gestalt possessed no value in itself; rather, its criterion lay outside of it andworks of art were considered diminutions of the Idea. Aristotle in turn made artcompletely dependent on the rationally real. The art work is an imitation, orperhaps just the imitation of an imitation; therefore everything spontaneous ormythic is excluded. For the imitation of a myth would be extremely unmythic andthoroughly rational. In every case congruence is being sought, whether it is withthe Idea or with the Real. This belief in a complete identity of the human beingwith the rationalized Real dominates the aesthetics of the Renaissance and ofclassicism; in this way one hoped to prove the legitimacy of a single bindingdoctrine of art and of the unity of its tradition. This position in turn led to theconservative attitude that reason, law, and order offered the only chance of humanfreedom. Consequently, the classical aesthetic excluded the spontaneous andconcrete layers of experience, and invention declined to the status of an arrange-ment or a defect.

But what if man was not congment with the rationally Real? And what if thisalogical incongruence regained its primary power and the gestalt became anexpression of the difference between human beings and their rationalizedenvironment, just as in former times such incongruence had found form in myth?The art work, in other words, is no longer an attempt at adaptation, but growsfrom a counterimpulse, a refusal to accept the world as given.

And in this way art is directed against the identification with given objectsand conventional experiences. Now it is no longer governed by tradition but bymetamorphotic revolt.

Every object represents merely a comforting normalization of experiences,an accord, a parti pris.What is needed now is not repetition of tired tiutologies,but the extension of the repertory of concrete gestalts to form new visionaryobjects. Yet, with that, artistic activity is rescued from passivity and its optimistically servile attitude is shattered to pieces. Art becomes a human means forshaping and altering reality, i.e., it is now guided by active factors. with this wemark an important moral change of position.

Now the meaning of art no longer rests on its partaking of the idea ofcontinuity, of the Logos, and even less in the imitative Aristotelian tautology;rather the meaning of artistic creation now lies in the possibility of its shatteri*ngthe suggestion of the given and the causal standardization of the world. AnJherein lies the slight chance for our freedom. Now the coercive power of inher-ited or given experience is offset and dissolved by visions of what is to come. \Arhatis factual and concrete in reality is no longer overestimated and not only externalfacts are valued. Vision and image now count as valid concrete realities and artthereby regains its former power of hallucinatory clairvoyance or magic. . . .

We remarked that the viability and effect of the individual gestalt in the arrwork are grounded in hypnotic fixation, in trauma. The art *oik g.o*, from a

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hallucinatory compulsion, and consequently something fatally real is created thatopposes rationalized being, which is characterized by mediated reactions that as

such permit choice. At first one will reject this out of fear of regression, of losingthe rationality of choice. By contrast the rational worldview offers, despite its lim-its, an apparent possibility of choice; thus cognition would be an enfeeblingprocess of differentiation of the psychological functions, from which the idealisticarbitrariness of interpretation then grows. Such a worldview corresponds fully toliberal individualism and its construction of personal facades. The rational oper-ates precisely on the periphery of the primary psychological layers, while thecompulsiveness of visions belongs to an archaic layer, which in opposition to allrationalization breaks through repeatedly. We described this process as the peri-odicity of regressions. (This periodicity is unquestionably demonstrable, forexample in art: the archaic regression in the Greek art of the eighth and seventhcenturies B.c.E., the regression in Saitic and later in Coptic art, the Byzantineregression, the regression in French art; see Nicolas Poussin and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, for example.)

Here we glimpse in the gestalt a means of resistance against standardization;by means of images, rational unities are shattered. In opposition to the need forunity we can discern a compensatory drive for changes of gestalt, a need for discon-tinuities. If one no longer believes in a rational psychology of abstractions thatworks with forces devoid of abstraction, then one gains the functional gestalt as theprimary psychological sign. The Freudian complexes, then, represent only heuristictypologies and crude generalizations, in which one stabilizes the experience of theindividual gestalt and thereby interpolates again more or less abstract pseudo-functions, through which the psychological is excessively stabilized. The complexesare already psychological conventions that one varies within an experience; they aretherefore absolutely not primarily spontaneous domains of experience.

The repetition of form or the fixation of the experience of a gestalt into astylistic group is often shaped by extra-artistic factors, namely through magical ritesand beliefs, to the extent that art is not merely a playing field for apes who exercisewith stolen muscles; in which case art now degenerates into idiotic reproduction.One succumbs to the biological spell of repetition.

But if art should succeed in effecting a proliferation of gestalt, then it mustspring from the hallucinatory, the alogical, or the void of the rationalist; art istherefore quintessentially utopian, as soon as its task becomes the transformationof the Real.

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