Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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The history of the twentieth-century avant-garde, from its wildly iconoclastic teens to the fifties and beyond, can well be discussed as a function
of its fascination with the non-Western primitive (prehistoric life worlds,
myths and art). In fact, the avant-gardes historical trajectory enacted
Rimbauds postulate of the absolutely modern as the flip side of the
desire for the absolutely primitive. The primitivist vision provided the
intoxication of forgetting the burden of conceptual, historical and moral
memory, and it freed the intellect for a critique of Western rationalist
subjectivity. Absolutely modern was the vantage point of a radically
aesthetic relation to the world, the aesthetic experience being for Nietzsche
the essential, metaphysical activity of life, for Gottfried Benn the
final metaphysical activity, for Rimbaud, later Dada or in Oswald
Spenglers scheme of decadence, the stage before a debunking of art altogether. Delinked from the rational and moral, the aesthetic intuition rendered a site from which the identity of Western cultural traditions and
institutions appeared to the European avant-garde, Italian Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, as strange and unfamiliar as the sight
of exotic cultures had once appeared to the Western explorer. By the
same token, the insight into primitive cultures was to produce universal
images of kinship, of familiarity. A crucial paradox was that the exclusivity of the aesthetic vantage point was an eminently Western product of a
lengthy evolution and emancipation of art from the communal religious
context to the autonomy of art.
Two of the most important interwar magazines of the avant-garde
published in Paris represent a typological constellation in this cultural
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2000.
Copyright 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
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space of a primitivist vision: transition, offering a pronounced universalist point of view of artistic creativity, and Documents, the agenda of a
total critique of Western ideology, includingat least per programthat
of the aesthetic privilege invoked by the former journal. Documents (1929/
30) was edited by Georges Bataille in co-operation with Michel Leiris
and, what is rarely acknowledged in French and Anglo-American criticism, in its planning and earliest stage1 by the brilliant German poet and
essayist Carl Einstein who still awaits his international recognition. It
remains to be seen how Einstein, a steady contributor to Documents, could
function at the same time as advisory editor and author to Eugene Jolass
transition (19271938).2 My focus on these journals activities at the end
of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, during the Great Depressionyears of economic, political, and intellectual crisiswill
amount to a comparison and contrast of two sides of the avant-garde. As
much as such a first focus on the two journals allows, it is centered on the
avant-gardes relation to logos (the word) as a relatively late, cerebral
expression of man and the primordial image. Jolas, the Man from Babel,
pursued an idealist vision of a multi-lingual, transnational, universalist
poetic language for modernity. Bataille, on the other hand, engaged in
an aggressively anti-humanist, anti-idealist, anti-formalist, in this sense
anti-aesthetic project which valorized the shocking, jarring moment of
the physiological image, including bloody images of prehistorical human
sacrifice, images of body parts and excretory functions. In sum, while
Documents implicitly sought to overturn Western core values by revitalizing the early avant-gardes shock strategies with its goals to make the
familiar strange, transitions mission was to make the strange familiar
to a wider transatlantic audience (especially to the conservative American cultural sphere).
Both journals were manifestations of a relatively late phase of the
avant-garde; their programs, however, were ultimatelyalbeit in greatly
varying degreesless radical than they proposed to be. The early avantgardes events were concretely staged for the sublation of art into life,
thus contesting aesthetic autonomy through performance as praxis. The
later avant-garde was mostly theorizing against the institutions of modernity, thereby nolens volens subject to a return of the repressed scientific
and moral vision. Besides, Jolass journal was rooted in the Western idea
of art as a spiritual, quasi-ethical experience, while Batailles indulged in
an unacknowledged practice of an aesthetics of the ugly, amply illustrated by glossy photos of big toes, spitting mouths, cut-off goats hoofs,
Siamese twins, shrunken heads, etc. In fact, the reader/viewer of his journal encounters a series of thematically related images of physiological
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50
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Leiris the occasion to further test and explore his surrealist, anticolonialist attitudes (in the service of French colonialism), as revealed
in his travelogue LAfrique Fantome (1934).
Archeo-logies of Modernity
In the following, I will contextualize Jolass spiritual vision of the primitive as a universal in reference to five texts, all written during the crisis
years 192933. These texts deal with the image of mankind from an anthropological/ethnological and poetological view. In the center of my
reading will be the tension between logos (the word) as a relatively late,
cerebral expression of man and the primordial image, as thematized by
the avant-garde itself. The texts are testimony to what I here call avantgarde archeo-logies of modernity. They are Gottfried Benn, The Structure of the Personality (Outline of the Geology of the I), translated by
Jolas for transition 21, (March 1932), and Jolass corresponding essay The
Primal Personality (published in transition 22, February 1933, just after
Hitlers coming to power which Benn supported). Thirdly Jolass prose
poem Andr Masson, (transition 15, February 1929), which I will contrast with Carl Einsteins Andr Masson: tude ethnologique, published
in Documents 2, 1929), and finally Georges Batailles provocative Le
Gros Orteil (The Big Toe) published in Documents (6, November 1929).
Gottfried Benns 1930 essay, which bears the subtitle Outline of a
Geology of the I, was a revaluation of the modern cogito ergo sum of
Western man, a rejection of the logocentric experience of the cortex of
the big brain as a late development within human evolution. It valorized the bodily experience, of the glands, nerves and ganglia, with its
imprinted memory of the evolution from animal to man. Hence the question whether there would not come, in a further grand anthropological
mutation, a transition to a time that will once more give voice to the
culturally suppressed archaic brain-kernel, the site of a collective unconscious, which the intellective great brain had overgrown. This was
exactly Jolass question, as his essay The Primal Personality, in opening
transitions section Laboratory of the Mystic Logos, also cited Jung, and
Lvy-Bruhl:
Lucien Lvy-Bruhls monumental La Mentalit Primitive showed
the thinking methods of the primitive to be pre-logical ones. This
fact, he says, explains why in the few still existing tribes of savages
we are face to face with the capacity for mystic participation, a
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capacity which modern man has practically lost. Only the creative mind has here and there retained it.17
In short, Jolas envisions for modern man a renewed participation
mystique with the lost prelogical experience through a Revolution of
the Word, for which idea Jolas frequently invoked the authority of Benn.18
Avant-garde poetry would reunite, in transcendence, the subject with
the object as part of the self (a decidedly Romantic outlook that attached
Jolas to his favorite German poet Novalis for life). By contrast, Benn, by
profession a medical doctor specializing in venereal diseases, fully acknowledges the terrifying role of the body in the human experience:
Far removed from human accessibility and understanding, the Soma . . .
carries the mysteries, age-old, alien, untransparent, wholly turned back
to its origins.19 Due to his religious, Catholic upbringing and Romantic
literary predilection, Jolas was dissatisfied with the irrationalism of the
telluric alone. He finds his transcendental vantage pointwhich he
misses in Surrealism as influenced by Freudtypically in C. G. Jungs
ancient mythological archetypes. Jolas understands the primal image as a sign, and symbol, retrievable to modernist literary representation:
The creation of a new mythological mother-world is possible
through the search for the inner meaning of life, through the search
for the sign, the symbol, the primal image and sound. The search
for God.
It is Jolass starry-eyed idealism and his stalwart belief in the universality
of art that allows him to side with (and significantly misunderstand) Benns
assessment that the new mans chief characteristic will be a violent
revolt against the intellect.20
When the modern subject is no longer understood as master in his
house, the bodily unconscious projects, as in dreams, nightmares, or art
produced in the concrete jungle of the modern technopolis, its alogical
images against the conceptuality of the word. The second issue of Documents (1929) features, besides an essay by Leiris, Carl Einsteins amply
illustrated Andr Masson, tude ethnologique. Einsteins essay, a prime
example of his ethnology of the white man, commences with the provocative assertion, unmatched by any avant-garde critic of the avantgarde in the late twenties, that in this generation the literati are
strenuously limping behind the painters. While the painters dared to
change traditional grammar, the former in the best of cases went as far
ARCHEO-LOGIES OF MODERNITY
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as to change an adjective: But who would put into question the hierarchy of psychological values and logic itself? These writers are prisoners of
words. Einsteins attack on writing as representation constitutes a paradigm shift from Hugo von Hofmannsthals language crisis at the turn-ofthe-century (articulated in the Chandos Letter, 1902): the critic aims
at the radical displacement of the literary word with the visual image. In
view of the fact that transition was publishing the 15th installment of
Joyces Work in Progress, or in view of the literary work being produced
by contemporaneous surrealists, the attack appears to be a polemic which
adds insult to injury. Instead of risking their heads, the writers believed
in language,21 Einstein writesin the past tense. And this assault on
the written word, on literature and literary culture as the prison house
of language, comes from Jolass advisory editor and one of the future
signatories of Poetry is Vertical (transition, 21, March 1932: 148-49).
The statement Poetry is Vertical will expand on the journals fundamental proclamation of the Revolution of the Word (transition 16/17
June 1929), emphasizing the upward mission of poetry toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe.
And what exactly does Einstein mean by the prescription for aesthetic production, that one should risk ones head (meaning to forgo
writing)? To begin with, he perceives the surrealist painter Masson as
creating, or re-creating, from a visual memory that has altogether forgotten consciousness. By contrast, literary surrealism was eminently interested in a synthesis of the conscious with the unconscious, as
documented in automatic writing that is, after all, readable,if in a
jarring way. Hence one would expect that Massons paintings are egocentric,22 or solipsistic, which would be the consequence of the subjects
withdrawal from an outside. On the contrary, it is a matter of a hallucinatory dissolution of the inside/outside dualism, recreating a stage
before the differentiation of a subject from the object (in Freudian terms,
the state of oceanic feeling before the separation of an ego from the
id). According to Einstein, Massons paintings enact a self-sacrifice,
they spontaneouslypreempting conscious mediationproject collective images from the memory of the body (for Benn somatic Urbilder).
The painters self surrenders in the act and action of painting to the experience of ecstacy,23 in the sense of standing outside of the intelligible self. In this eminently psychophysiological site, a zone before the
differentiation of the mental perceptual processes from the bodily, seeing
is an act of the primal imagination of the senses. For Einstein the senses
make sense in terms of human evolution: The primal imagination claims
its site before as well as after the late individuated, distanced subjects
54
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the air like a tree. . . . But whatever the role played in the erection by his
foot, man, who has a light head, in other words a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, sees it as spit, on the pretext that he has this
foot in the mud.39
It is Batailles intention to reverse this vertical valuation (there is a
bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously
seen as an elevation), by risking the head (in Batailles words the light
head, the head raised to the heavens). Batailles point is to debunk
traditional art (academic art) as idealist, sightless (objectless) subjectivity, and to review the abstract elevation of the head from the very base
(base as both basis and the low). Contemporary painting, exemplified by
Picassos work, for Bataille is devolution40the latest reenactment, or metamorphosis, of a series of mutilations of the human body, decapitations,
and sacrifices starting with tribal ritualsdepicted in the caves and labyrinths of prehistoric painters, amply discussed and glossily illustrated in
Documents. Batailles provocative valorization of the lowly (the ugly, the
gory, and the obscene) was a reverse form of idealism, Hegels aesthetics
turned upside down, from the ideal to the material, and, after all, a form
of aesthetics of the ugly.
Eugene Jolass magical language
Eugene Jolas, in his only, and even at that quite surprising, contribution
to Documents (a short homage to Picasso in 1930), will admit that the
geniuss work challenges the critics poor, little words. Contrary to
Einsteins language skepticism, he thus proposes the invention of a new
magical language.41 Among Massons paintings reproduced in Documents
2 (1929although most of them were from the year 1928) are twoLe
Chiffre Cinque, and Le Pige et lOiseauthat Jolas also reprints in
transition 15 (Feb. 1929). Earlier in this issue, Jolas (under his pseudonym Theo Rutra; Theo Rutra = God Root) devotes a prose poem to
Andr Masson, composed in a type of magical language:
The loorabalboli glides through the algroves suddenly turning upon
itself. There is a spiral spatter of silver. A thunderbelt lies in the
white. The rolls drum down the hidden malvines, where the
gullinghales flap finwings casually. The feathers of the salibri glint
in the marlite. Then the loorabalboli sings: O puppets of the eremites, the weedmaids fever love. Send Octobus to shores of clay;
thieve younglings out of sheaves of ice. And troutroots dance.
There is a blish. A wonderlope whirs through the floom.
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structures of the myth of the Labyrinth and Minotaur,54 the very structure of decomposition which Bataille, in Documents and later in Minotaure,
and in his anti-fascist journal Acphale, poses against architecture
(Hollier).55 Jolas must have blinded himself to the emphasis of the groups
Manifesto for a Sacred Sociology on the decomposing function of the
excessive, or the scandal for a ferocious individualism. Jolas must
have been blind, as he had earlier been oblivious to Benns embrace of a
violent revolt against the intellect in the late 1920s, to the argument
that indulges in the violent instants of mans intimate experience for
a transition from the will to knowledge to the will to power.56 The
Collge de Sociologies vision of a subversively heterogeneous will to
power was inspired by a will to knowledge below the structures of idealism. It thus seems to have been a project of defamiliarization with at
least a logical (thus meaning only a logical) chance to disrupt Hitlers
fraudulent romanticism of imperial totalitarianismalbeit, in the realm
of ideas, and in the space of the ideas of minuscule secret groups. The
rebirth of myth in such groups would inspire the primitive communal
drives in society at large. Such was to be the mission of Batailles Acphale,
a risky program,57 to say the least. Its so-called directors of conscience
indulged in visions of originality that would somehow distinguish themselves, as Duthuit writes, from Hitlers dictatorial counterfeit and
parody of communal cults.58
Nevertheless, the illumination and disruption of the rigid architectures of the modern nation-state societies from the point of view of
latent, yet repressed instincts, desires, dreams and collective myths manifested in primitive documentsin spite of the divergent approaches of
idealistic familiarization and, respectively, scandalous defamiliarization
was a goal that Jolass journals shared with Batailles. They mutually engaged in a subversive response to Western scientific/rationalist principles
through statements of a surrealist ethnography and aesthetic expressions of a mythical archeo-logy of modernity for renewed communal
experience, albeit on opposite poles of public relations and trust: Jolas on
a grand geopolitical, transatlantic linguistic scale, Bataille in the niche
of the idiosyncratic secret society. In spite of claims to the opposite,
Batailles circle, after all, did engage the moral issuealbeit, from the
vantage point of a violent turn against the Judeo-Christian culture of the
bad conscience (Nietzsche/Freud). It also engaged the aesthetic, if from
the vantage point of the aestheticized ugly and obscene. Hand in hand
with that vision goes a responsible, or in that sense conservative, concern for the comprehensive expression of life, against the prison house
of logic. Carl Einsteins commentary on Massons images as evidencing
ARCHEO-LOGIES OF MODERNITY
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NOTES
1. See Klaus H. Kiefer, Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen DiskursesCarl
Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents, Elan Vital oder Das Auge des Eros, exhibition catalogue
Haus der Kunst Mnchen, 1994, 90-103. Kiefer goes as far as identifying documents as
eminently Einsteins idea, citing from correspondence, beginning since the middle of
August 1928, in which Einstein outlines the contents of the first ten numbers of meine
Zeitschrift (my journal). Of these, however, only a few titles (mostly those that will
turn out to be his and Batailles) find their way into actual publication. In spite of
Batailles growing preponderance in the development of the journal, Einstein clearly
appears to have been the liaison for the many contributions by German ethnographers.
Some features of the journals critique of ideology, for instance the Dictionnaire column, had obviously been prepared by Einstein elsewhere; a glossary is also a prominent feature of transition. In fact, Documents ethnological turn against the idolization
of aesthetic autonomy is part and parcel of Einsteins longstanding thought. For more
details on the formation of and tensions within Documents, with Einstein relatively
more interested in art criticism than in a shocking critique of ideology, see Klaus H.
Kiefer, Diskurswandel im Werk Carl Einsteins. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der
europischen Avantgarde (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1994) 38597. Dawn Ades, Dada and
Surrealism Reviewed, catalogue: Hayward Gallery, London (January 11 March 27, 1978);
Liliane Meffre, Carl Einstein nella redazione di Documents. Storia dellarte ed
64
etnologia, in Dal museo al terrano. Letnologia francese ed italiana degli anni trenta, ed.
Centro culturale francese (Milano, 1987) 18087.
2. Carl Einsteins contributions to transition are: Bebuquin, translated from the
German by Eugene Jolas, 1617 (June 1929): 298301; Design of a Landscape (For
Erna Reber), translated from the German by Eugene Jolas, 1920 (June 1930): 212
17; Poetry is Vertical, 21 (March 1932): 14849; Obituary: 18321932, translated
by Eugene Jolas, 21 (March 1932): 20714. A valuable tool for identifying contributors
and contributions to transition is transition: an Author Index, ed. by Charles L. P. Silet
(Troy, New York: Whitston Publishing, 1980). For a basic discussion of Einsteins contribution to transition, see Dougald McMillans pioneering study transition: The History
of a Literary Era 19271938 (New York: George Braziller, 1976) 5355; for Jolass own
appreciation of Einstein, see Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer and
Rainer Rumold (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998) 95, 12324, 128, 143, 208, 297, 307.
3. I agree with Denis Hollier,The use value of the impossible, in Bataille: Writing
the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995) when he writes: Bataille
privileges the monstrous because he considers it aesthetically ugly. His definition of
the freakish is no longer statistical, but aesthetic. Hollier even speaks of the aesthetic
ideology of Documents, citing in support Carl Einsteins focus (at the instance of Picasso)
on the gap opened by the aesthetic discourse between the normal and the imaginative experience (145). But Einsteins critical writings are far from instantiating what
he calls the aesthetic of disparity, which is above all an anti-aesthetic of the
untransposable (a resistance to aesthetic reproduction)(146). My discussion of Einsteins
essay on Andr Masson below rather shows that the critic is attempting, on the contrary, to develop not immediacy itself (used on the spot) but an aesthetics of the immediacy of the image as, after all, a sign (as a psychologically direct sign).
4. Rotten Sun, Visions of Excess, ed. with an introduction by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 58. See also Soleil Pourri, Documents, 3 (1930):
174.
5. For a discussion of the place of ethnography in Documents see Denis Hollier, The
use value of the impossible, 13349. James Cliffords term surrealist ethnography, I
agree with Hollier, cannot be applied to Documents as a whole where professional German and French ethnographers pursue the understanding of prehistorical artifacts in
straightforward historical and sociological terms. Contributions like Einsteins essay on
Masson (discussed below) in comparison with his review A propos de lexposition de
la Galerie Pigalle, Documents 2 (1930): 10410, reveal the double strategy involved.
In the latter review Einstein finds an aesthetic explication of African art insufficient,
while deriving from it an understanding of its presentation of magical and collective
signs applicable to the corresponding archaism in modern art. This example reveals
an intersection between a surrealist critique of ideology and scientific ethnography
not only at the point of their common (potentially, but not necessarily anti-aesthetic)
focus on the works use value, prioritized by Hollier. It reveals Einsteins practice of
incorporating ethnographic concepts (e.g. totemism) into what, after all, amounts to
art criticism on Masson that not only, for example, paraphrases Bretons revaluation of
the imagination but also articulates similarly liberating, aesthetic expectations from
the work of Masson. Comparable observations can be made for many essays by Leiris
and Bataille, even though they are more shock-oriented. Hence I cannot agree with
Holliers distinction between the two driving forces behind Documents, the ethnographers and the anti-aesthetes(145). On the subject of primitivism and Documents, see
also Rosalind Krauss, No More Play, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1985) 56f.,6468. On the issue of ethnographic surrealism see also Hal Foster, The Artist as Ethnographer, The Return of the
Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996) 180ff.
ARCHEO-LOGIES OF MODERNITY
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6. From the Heart of the Absolute, translated by Jolas, transition 1617 (June 1929):
27782, and much later, the poem Oraison Funbre dun Chasseur, transition 27 (AprilMay 1938): 36973.
7. William Rubin, Introduction, Primitivism in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1984) 1:11. If the term elective affinity initially may imply a conscious choice, in the
course of the essay that connotation is dropped in favor of a natural affinity (e.g., 73).
8. James Clifford, Histories of the Tribal and the Modern, in The Predicament of
Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1988) argues against Rubins notion of an affinity of the primitive and the modern
creative mind from the point of view of Leiriss assessment of a common differentness
in relation to representational artistic modes that dominated in the West from the
Renaissance to the late nineteenth century(192). Such critical understanding serves
better than the ahistorical, culture-blind employment of a kinship term like affinity.
9. See Kirk Varnedoe, Abstract Expressionism in Primitivism in 20th Century Art:
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2:618. See also John Graham, System and Dialectics
of Art (New York: Delphic Studios, 1937). transition 14 (Fall 1928) reprinted two of
John Grahams works (Painting, opposite 170f.). Robert Carleton Hobbs, Early Abstract Expressionism: A Concern for the Unknown Within, in R. C. Hobbs and Gail
Levin, Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971) is also
helpful.
10. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage Books, 1971) 37984.
11. SeeArt and Aesthetics, Michel Leiris and Jaqueline Delange, African Art, trans.
Michell Ross (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968) 3555.
12. See Denis Hollier, The use value of the impossible, 135. Hollier here, for example, registers the coinciding of Leiriss appreciation of a collection of anthropological photographs with Einsteins point of view taken at an exhibition of African and
Oceanic art: Until now,(Leiris) writes,there was no book which presented the general public with a selection of purely ethnographic documents rather than just a series
of works of art. And Hollier quotes Carl Einstein: this art must be treated historically, and no longer considered just from the point of view of taste or aesthetics.
Hollier here, too, prefers to focus on one dimension of the conflict-ridden journal.
13. See Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold, Introduction to Eugene Jolas, Man
from Babel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) xix xx.
14. See Klaus H. Kiefer, Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses- Carl
Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents, 92.
15. As James Clifford has demonstrated in an important essay on Ethnographic Surrealism, Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 117
151, the still quite unexplored and open relationship between surrealist avant-garde
art and ethnography can best be studied by way of Documents.
16. Liliane Meffre, Einstein (Carl) 18851940, Encyclopaedia universalis (Paris 1989)
42.
17. Jolas,The Primal Personality in transition 22 (February 1933): 81.
18. See Kramer/Rumold, Introduction, Man from Babel, xxvif.
19. Gottfried Benn, The Structure of the Personality (Outline of the Geology of the
I), transition 21 (March 1932): 20304.
20. Jolas,The Primal Personality (80, 82). For a critical account of Jolass relations
to Benn, see Rainer Rumold, Gottfried Benn und der Expressionismus. Provokation des
Lesersabsolute Dichtung (Knigstein, Ts.: Scriptor/Athenaeum, 1982) 16374.
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21. Carl Einstein,Andr Masson: tude ethnologique, Documents 2 (1929): 93. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from the French (and German) in this article
are mine.
22. Documents 2:100.
23. Documents 2:100.
24. Documents 2:102; 2:100. For the German version see Carl Einstein, Werke, ed.
Marion Schmid & Liliane Meffre (Wien/Berlin: Medusa Verlag, 1985) 3:2024.
25. See David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso, 1988) 4474.
26. Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience, in Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams
& Leroy Searle (UP of Florida, 1986) 735.
27. See Rainer Rumold, Gottfried Benn (6276; 13951). Regarding the consequences
of Einsteins language crisis in literary and political terms, see Rumold, Carl Einstein
and Buenavenura Durruti: The Poesy and Grammar of Anarchism in German and International Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War: The Aesthetics of Partisanship, ed. Luis
Costa, et al (Columbia: Camden House, 1992) 6477.
28. Documents 2:100. My emphasis.
29. Dictionnaire critique, ROSSIGNOL, Documents 2 (1929): 11718.
30. Since his Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures (1910), Lvy-Bruhl had
employed the term participation mystique in order to elucidate the primitive minds
capacity to see itself embodied, virtually incorporated in the animate and inanimate
world. The ethnologists work was to influence a whole generation of French and German avant-garde writers; it legitimized, on the level of scientific thought, their interest
in the alternative prelogical experience in images before re-presentation. Au fond, their
writings constituted the highly paradox experiment to escape in language the conceptual and temporal confinement inherent in language.
31. See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (London: Croom Helm, 1986) 20f., 102.
32. Documents, 2:102.
33. Documents, 2:102.
34. Einsteins psychologically direct sign obviously disrupts and subverts the temporality of symbolic language. In other words, Einstein here is struggling with a definition of what, with Kristeva (in the wake of Lacan), will be referred to as the semiotic,
a pre-logical language of the unconscious, from which the discourses of avant-garde
and feminine writing derive their energies subversive of the symbolic order. For basic
reference, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 1988) 16162; 164
66). For a critique of Lacans analysis of elemental corporeal images attaching themselves in hallucinatory representational chainsclearly these are the focus of
Einsteins essayas part of a process that reaches from an unsymbolized Imaginary to
the establishment of the Symbolic order, see Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Counting from
0 to 6: Lacan, Suture, and the Imaginary Order, Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita
Pandit (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1990) 40, 43.
35. Documents 2:100.
36. Prestige dAndr Masson, Minotaure 1213 (May 1939): 13 (with cover painting of the Minotaure by Masson). Andr Breton, The magical eloquence of Andr
Masson(1939) in Breton, Surrealism and Painting trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: McDonald, 1972) 154. See also: L Surralism et la Peinture (Paris: Edition
Gallimard, 1965).
37. Georges Bataille, Andr Masson, Labyrinthe 19 (May, 1941): 8.
38. See Denis Hollier, ed. The College of Sociology (193739) (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 389.
ARCHEO-LOGIES OF MODERNITY
67
39. See The Big Toe, Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927
1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 20.
40. Bataille, Rotten Sun, Visions of Excess 58. and Soleil Pourri, Documents 3:174.
41. Documents 3:175.
42. Jolas, Andr Masson, transition 15:101.
43. Jolass response to Benn, his essay on The Primal Personality concluded in a
postscriptum invoking the ecstatic and hymnic language of gnosis, (transition 22 [February 1933]: 83).
44. Jolas, The Revolution of Language and James Joyce, transition 11 (February 1928):
112.
45. Jolas, Homage to James Joyce, transition 21 (March 1932): 250.
46. Jolas, Joyce and Language, Yale University: The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscripts Library, Gen Mss 108, Box 14/270, 7.
47. Man from Babel, 108.
48. Joyce and Language, 4.
49. For a full discussion of the motif and its significance, see Martin Jay, The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of
Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 21162.
50. Cf., Eugene Jolas, The Third Eye: Ascensions to the Tremendum, transition 26
(1937): 15458 The motif is ubiquitous in Jolass writings since 1927, but contrast it
with Georges Battaille, The Eye Documents 4 (September 1929): 216; and his The
Pineal Eye, written around 1930, published much later in LEphmere 3, 1967. One of
the articles, Seeing and Representation by James Johnson Sweeney (a curator for
MOMA), with whom Einstein was connected through the shared interest in African
art, even argued from the level-headed position closer to Einsteins that seeing, too, is
a semiotic process. James Johnson Sweeney, Seeing and Representation transition 24
(June 1936): 6266.
51. It was a decade later when Maria Jolas would translate Georges Batailles Potlatch: The Economic Role of the Gift for Editiones de Minuit, (Paris: Unesco Translations, 1949) in close contact with the author.
52. Eugene Jolas, ed., Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions (New York:
Gotham Bookmart P, 1941) 13f.
53. Vertical, 98f.
54. Vertical, 100.
55. See Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1989), with chapters on The Hegelian Edifice or The Labyrinth, the Pyramid, and the Labyrinth.
56. Vertical, 114.
57. See, for example, Allan Stoekl, Introduction (xviiif). See also Jrgen Habermas,
Between Eroticism and General Economics: Bataille, in The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1987) 221.
58. See Georges Duthuit, For a Sacred Art, Vertical 15152.
59. Documents 2:98.
60. For the Sacred in Art, 132.