"The Heap" examines this classical problem in the quintessentially modern setting of a laboratory in the improbable year 3456. The Philosopher-in-Chief is asked unexpectedly whether the "Truly Liberated Society" of 3456 has solved the unsolved problems of the ancients, and, caught off guard, affirms they have been answered fully. He subsequently commissions an underling named Janno with producing one of the purported solutions, namely, that for the sorites. The following narrative takes the form of a brief, escalating series of conflicts in Janno's lab. One day, Janno's colleague Jirro comes to visit the lab where Janno is taking snapshots of screws he is dropping one by one into a basin in hopes of catching the precise moment when their number becomes a heap. The preposterously literal experiment ignites a conflict between the obsessed Janno and his tactically-minded colleague Jirro. When a siren summons the institute members to the parade grounds for a routine inspection, the two colleagues' methodological conflict promptly escalates into a social conflict: the terms, to speak with the philosophy of science, switch from Karl Popper's doctrine of methodological individualism to Thomas Kuhn's model of social constructivism. 55 Bound by his vision of a principled solution to the sorites, Janno refuses to conform to ritual procedure, much to the horror of his expedient colleague who has reconciled himself to the reigning paradigm. Eventually, scientific and police authorities converge simultaneously on Janno's lab, where the two colleagues remain struggling over quantity and quality, principle and expediency. The ensuing confusion, anticlimactically, supplies no clear resolution to the sorites. On the contrary, confusion, complexity and cross-purposes are the dubious conditions under which quantity alchemizes into quality. The resolution comes in spite of itself: the contending parties at the institute are heaped together in Janno's messy lab by circumstances beyond their control.
If this confusion is a disappointing answer to the sorites, a closer look at Fühmann's story brings more satisfaction than one might expect from such murky proceedings. "The Heap" translates Klaus' cybernetic paradoxes from logic into literature, a cognate medium for Fühmann, for, as he remarks in his diaries, "the world can be expressed in poetry, because it can be mathematized." 56 Thus, the "hypertrophy of feeling" in his science fiction is, as his preface has it, "the emotional counterpart to thinking a thing logically through to its end, except that thinking has a different stringency and objectivity than fearing, dreading, anticipating or repressing. 'Fearing to the end' aims at catastrophe; 'anticipating to the end' banishes alternatives; 'repressing to the end' means destruction; 'dreading to the end' not only conjures ghosts, but makes them omnipotent, omnipresent, and absolute." 57 The ghosts haunting Fühmann's scientists, I hope to show, arise from the equally dreaded and anticipated possibility of another system, uncannily familiar in its modernity, but visible only as a specter in the sudden rupture of the current system's pragmatic, adaptive, maximizing functions. Like all such incommensurabilities, this qualitative interruption escapes both ethical and material calculi; its ambiguous value is to be sought only in its openness and potential. Let us see how Fühmann's scientists develop the implications of a qualitative turning point in quantitative continuity.
Seeing the absurd experiment Janno is conducting, his colleague Jirro asks him who has paid for the film and screws. Janno, aware that his superiors would hardly be so financially forthcoming, has paid out of pocket. But Janno's one-time expense, as Jirro realizes, threatens to become a precedent if word gets out. "If the administration, as is only to be expected, generalizes from your bad example and makes every Ph.D. pay research costs out of pocket, we'd have only Janno to thank" ("TH," 36). Intuitively grasping how the particular transmutes into the general under the watchful eyes of power, Jirro sets himself against Janno's idealistic attempt to isolate the sorites in his basin of screws, determined instead upon two more materialist goals: preventing Janno's sacrifice from setting an institutional precedent, and getting a hold of 10 of his screws while the getting is still good. 58 Both objectives necessitate escaping detection. Janno, meanwhile, remains obsessed with capturing on film the moment a quantity of screws becomes a quality. Detection—systemic observation—it seems is the precise spot where the qualitative transformation matrix comes into play. Jirro, however, is canny enough to realize that what Janno is seeking, the pure qualia, is an illusion—Jirro is a materialist, not a phenomenologist, and "the thing in itself" holds no attraction for him. 59 He steers Janno back to quantity by asking him crassly "what the solution is worth to him." A price? Janno stammers. Unperturbed, Jirro names it himself: "twenty pounds" ("TH," 38).
Although he coughs up the sum to his friend, Janno's mind is elsewhere. Not prices, but qualia alone will deliver him from the infinite plasticity of the social system: a self-subsistent quality, a kingdom for a quality, and he will burst asunder the relentless constructivism of numbers, prices, salaries, authorities, and social systems. So as Jirro, in exchange for his fee, tiresomely reiterates his constructivist belief that for their purposes only the "Kameraden Klassiker" (of Marxism-Leninism) can reliably determine a quality, Janno becomes aware of the wan light filtering through his dirty office window. After enduring Jirro's vain dialectics a while longer, he has had enough, "no, . . . we can no longer understand each other, Jirro. It's as though I've just now made a leap into another existence: that one suddenly doesn't want to go on as one did in the past, regardless what happens . . . the problem, Jirro, the pure problem beyond any purpose, in pure freedom" ("TH," 46). The siren wails, Janno refuses to answer the hailing system, Jirro panics over losing his money and cut of the screws, and, without warning, Janno smashes the dirty window, blood pours from the backs of his hands, the pure blue of sky streams in, as do two columns of control troops, the Control Commander and the Philosopher-in-Chief.
As story and experiment draw to a catastrophic end, Fühmann seems to side with Jirro that the sorites has no ideal, only a constructed solution, with quality asserting itself in precisely the manner Jirro feared, as state sovereignty and panoptic violence. It is simply a pre-modern relic, the dark underbelly of threatened rationality. Quality—which humanists might have been predisposed to embrace as their essence—turns out to be a reactionary value, sheer unlegitimatible power. 60 When the Commander and the Philosopher-in-Chief see a political scandal in the wreckage of Janno's lab—an uncooperative philosopher, perhaps one of many, and an "unbelievable waste of productive capacity"—they quickly hit upon an inverse function that can serve as a mutually satisfactory bureaucratic resolution to the problem: "as great as is the harm caused by this heap of inner enemies, so infinitesimally small is its actual number" ("TH," 54). It is an official formulation that Jirro easily carries over to Janno's private experiment: "a heap—or more exactly, the quantity of its quality—is always exactly what it has to be in order to count as the appropriate quantity of a heap in the interests of the Truly Liberated Society" ("TH," 55). Overwhelmed, but determined to the last to capture on camera a qualia, even such an unpleasant one, Janno has Jirro snap a picture of the Commander, his control troops, the Philosopher-in-Chief, and his wayward underlings in this jolly moment of reconciliation in the classless society. But Janno notices that the heap is incomplete, the Commander—naked police force—has somehow eluded the photo-image, and in his naiveté, Janno reaches out to pull him back into the circle. The troops panic, pistols are drawn all around. Jirro, meanwhile, sees his chance to sneak past the metal detector with his cut of ten screws—for who would notice that little heap in the midst of such great events?—and he bolts.
This is the moment of revelation, and it appears to vindicate the machinations of individualists and pragmatists such as Jirro. Yet Jirro falls on the inert side of the dialectic of necessity and free will that Georg Klaus claimed cybernetics could resolve. "In the case of natural laws a person is more or less irrelevant," ("EDHS," 170) Klaus comments, and the same holds true for Jirro's conformism to social law. Janno, by contrast, rejects interpellation. By literally refusing to respond to the siren, the "Institutsappell" ("TH," 48), he sets a limit to social constructivism. In a single moment, he causes a qualitative transformation of his environment: poetry emerges from the blood, the shards of glass, the crystalline revelation of a sudden interruption of mechanical routine. Fühmann, in a 1971 letter to his editor, points out the importance to him of the word "sudden." "It is in fact the basic experience of my time on earth." 61 After describing the abrupt interruptions that have characterized his life—from Bohemian Catholic school boy, to Nazi SA member, soldier, prisoner of war, Communist—he reflects: "Now, one could say with horror: what a spongy world, in which ruptures are ceaselessly occurring! I could answer: what a robust world that it can stand it! But I believe it is true about the ruptures. It is a world of being handed over and exposed, a world of being objectified. I could say: it's to escape it, or to first become aware of it, that I write." 62
While it would seem that "The Heap" only confirms the danger of qualitative reason and substantive ontology, there is another side of the story represented by Janno's stubborn refusal to be constructed by systemic imperatives. In a flash of broken glass, "the human" briefly exceeds the system's measure, an incommensurate quality that shatters its machinery of optimization. The flash, however, illuminates ambiguously. The quality escapes functionalization in the continuous metrics of one system, but lasts no longer than the light of intuition. Here we are reminded of Kuhn's retort to Popper that he never meant the flash of intuition that leads one to transfer allegiance from one paradigm to another to be understood as an ontological revelation. That quality seems to transcend one system does not imply that it is an ontological absolute for all possible systems. Janno's irreducible qualitativeness exposes his system's optimum as relative merely to it, not an optimum optimorum, grounded once in for all in value beyond measure. Yet it likewise supplies no basis for a final measure or first substance. In the ruins of Janno's lab, the only certainty is that no quality exists outside each heap and as the criterion for them all. Far from despairing that no system subsumes all alternatives, Fühmann's modernity, his experimental and gradualist sensibility, draws him to the sharp point where measure reveals itself as a construction and the opportunity for recalibration emerges. At that point, and it is a risky one, quantity tilts past a system's limits, either as violence or as hope, always as radical discontinuity: "the turning point can only be grasped as 'sudden,'" Fühmann writes his editor. "That can also be demonstrated mathematically. There are curves, hyperbola (of the type: y=1/x 2 ), for example, where with the least change in the curve, the addition or subtraction of the smallest imaginable unit, the differential quotient explodes from positive to negative infinity." 63 The question, then, posed by the qualitative, is whether the breach in the commensurable shall be filled with what Hegel called "the wrong or negative infinity" or with a positive one that yields to qualitative transformation. 64 And the answer to that question Fühmann, and the history of alternatives to liberal capitalist modernity, has left to us.
They have heart who know fear, but compel it, who see the abyss, but with pride.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra 65
Fühmann puts his readers before a stark choice: an infinite destructive regression or an infinite asymptotic convergence. In a sense, however, the two options are not options at all, but the conditions of systematicity. A dynamic system, as Klaus made clear, can always be disrupted or protected, correcting itself to converge on a finite stability or exploding into chaos. Fühmann, in the battle of sensibilities between Janno and Jirro, asks whether stability, equilibrium, order and mediation are the optimum goal ["Sollwert"], or whether crisis is a worthwhile risk for finding an optimum outside of the target states of the given system. Thus, Klaus writes in his 1960 Neues Deutschland article that "man is not content just to maintain the conditions of his environment, he wants rather constantly to improve them, and not only that, he also strives to ensure the security and stability of human relationships against chances of every sort." 66 Precisely this question, whether the goal of science and thus of humanity is stability or risk, is addressed by Nietzsche in "On Science," where his antagonists argue whether they seek Zarathustra to find more security or insecurity. Zarathustra himself believes that science is not a refinement of fear in search of security, but a refinement of courage in search of risk and change. 67 Fühmann's two scientists play out this dialectic, where Janno's destructive courage finally seems a risk worth taking. The crisis he induces exposes the sovereignty of his system as a formal constraint on all its possible states. In the sudden light of crisis, sovereignty is hypostatized for Janno as a form of control rather than a medium of self-realization. It is the positive historical form (and hence practical negation) of any ideal universality.
Another way to see the force of Fühmann's story—and socialist culture's intensive exploration of alternate forms for a positive sovereignty that is nonetheless disposed to a universal modernity—is to examine the fortunes of sovereignty in several key debates after the fall of historical socialism. Since the end of the Cold War a series of transatlantic discussions have shaped the way we talk about sovereignty and the prospects of universal, boundless systematicity. The first set of debates, conducted against the background of the 1990-91 Gulf War and European-American engagements in the former Yugoslavia, turned around a comparison of national with international institutions for securing global order. The outcome was an emphasis on the importance of international institutions. Multilateralists argued that the traditional mechanisms of state sovereignty—economic autarky, the military, the friend/foe distinction, ethnic identification, and religious homogeneity—were becoming outmoded in an increasingly globalized world in which order could be more effectively maintained through a common legal framework. Unlike state sovereignty, international law appealed to reason, debate, and limited corrective force, rather than to power, religion, ethnic loyalty, or national interest. Even Marxist thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri, apparently so far outside of any popular consensus, argued that the era of sovereignty and spatio-temporal borders of power had ended with the end of the socialist second world, gradually being replaced by unlimited capital mobility and "a single logic of rule." 68
After September 11th, however, the tenor of the times switched, sovereignty becoming the preferred rubric under which policy and opinion makers conceive the strategic world order. 69 It is argued that a strong state, with a credible military force, is necessary to guarantee not only the security of its citizens, but also the order of relationships between states and populations in the world. 70 Although the tenor of the two debates is different, as are the specific challenges of the world events to which they refer, the two consensus positions are not as divergent as they might at first seem. In the former debate, as idealistically as thinkers from John Rawls in the U.S. to Jürgen Habermas in Germany argued for the primacy of reason and its institutionalization in international law, the clear understanding was that jurisdiction in the world would center on the U.S., as both the most powerful state and the most influential model for legality, primus inter pares. Similarly, in the latter debate, today's return to "the state" does not mean a return to many states, each par inter pares in a multi-polar world of alliances and spheres of influence, but a return to a forthright projection of U.S. might. There are advantages and disadvantages to the emphases of each consensus. If the first consensus indeed held up the laudable idea of universal justice as a system for resolving disagreements between states, it had the drawback of obscuring the factual concentration of legislative, judicial and police powers in a few states that had by no means repudiated the sovereign use of force. If the second consensus seems more cynical in its appeal to a narrow idea of national interest and in the eclipse of humanitarian ideals in favor of strategic calculations, it has the merit of removing the ideological camouflage from international actions that are credibly explicable in categories of national self-interest.
Although the assertion, in the second consensus, of the rights of aroused power over those of just procedure is harsher than that which followed the Gulf War, its way of validating itself shares essential features with the earlier consensus, especially its articulation in terms of the humane values that all such strategic thinking is intended to serve and protect. Whether good laws or smart missiles secure their viability, the humane values themselves—openness, pluralism, gradualism and consumerism; or Max Weber, John Dewey, and Karl Popper—remain without credible challengers in the transatlantic public, defining a good life to which strategists must appeal to win their positions. Contemporary elites, lofted on a platform of global markets, democracy, and technology, have learned to do business without fundamental truth claims and to accommodate a diversity of ideas and practices. Intellectuals as disparate as Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Walzer, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukayama, Louis Menand, Nussbaum and Sen, attest to the ascendancy of reason over identification, pluralism over totality, skepticism over certainty, reform over rupture. 71 In German public letters, Die Zeit editor Josef Joffe fits into this mainstream as surely as does Berlin Academy of Arts President György Konrád, and as do Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Henryk Broder, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger; the quarrelling camps of Habermas and his late rival Niklas Luhmann are also reconciled here. 72
These familiar ideas constitute in fact the core of what is generally regarded as the modern worldview. In his famous 1918 talk "Science as a Vocation" Weber, as we have seen, gave modernity an influential formulation as a worldly disenchantment and secular responsibility that forgo secular salvation. 73 After the subsequent century's violent eruptions of nostalgia for (or messianic anticipation of) the fundamental, the pure, and the total, Weber's disciplined forfeiture of transcendental satisfactions has been all-but-decisively vindicated against persistent romantic claims for fundamental ontologies, against Herder's "Volksgemeinschaften," Fichte's "geschlossener Handelsstaat" or any number of "Schicksalsgemeinschaften" ["communities of fate"] of both left and right provenance. 74 Thus, for Habermas, the imposition of a liberal state form on half of the defeated Third Reich was not an ontological imposition—a controlling order in the contingent form of American-style constitutional sovereignty—but truly an emancipation of Germany from its pre-modern particularity. 75 Historically saddled with ponderous appeals to "special German paths"—and special Teutonic qualities—Germany was thenceforth liberated into a cosmopolitan modernity that is rightly not special at all, except in the degree to which it is advanced along the path of universal development. 76
I want to return to the debates between Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn to propose looking at the bifurcation of our times differently than one between an open, universal, and globalizing modernity, on the one side, and a conventional, qualitative and closed pre-modernity, on the other. Popper, as we have seen, based his cold war animus on the belief that Western industrial democracies founded on a modern experimental ethos were open societies, whereas Marxist states, guided by an unfalsifiable ideology rather than scientific reason, were terminally closed. This postulate expresses a faith in rational communication and the possibility of reasonable adjudication of competing views. "Thus in science, as distinct from theology, a critical comparison of the competing theories, of the competing frameworks, is always possible. . . . In science (and only in science) can we say that we have made genuine progress: that we know more than we did before." 77 As much as Popper based his position on transcendent rationalism while social theorists like Habermas and Rawls base theirs in an immanent sociology of undistorted consensus, they all have an optimistic belief in the ability of rational discussion, rooted in individual development free from coercion by irrational power, to overcome, through the gradual give and take of positions, the sharp qualitative differences that distinguish between categories and systems.
Kuhn likewise believed that scientific communities were good models for rational modernity, but he also held that their defining characteristic was not their openness. They are enclosed by their own paradigms and beyond these frameworks their conclusions cannot be rationally adjudicated. Thus, John Watkins characterizes Kuhn's view as maintaining that "the scientific community [is] an essentially closed society, intermittently shaken by collective nervous breakdowns followed by restored mental unison." 78 With this view of Kuhn's position in mind, we can see how the socialist east might indeed have been a relatively closed ideological system that precisely for that reason resembled a modern scientific community. In Closed Worlds: Computers and Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Paul N. Edwards uses the phrase 'closed-world discourse' "to describe the language, technologies, and practices that together supported the visions of centrally controlled, automated global power at the heart of American Cold War politics." 79
Now, one should emphasize that what is at stake in the discussion
of socialism is not a distinction between two views of the world, but
between two ontological totalities, each systematically organizing their
worlds. In this sense, the view that Klaus and Fühmann afford us from
within socialism shows that power, however constructed, internalized, and
decentralized is always necessarily articulated at its borders as a form
of hypostatized sovereignty. Such sovereignty, however, no more implies an
external imposition than the skin of a body implies a constraint upon its
extension. I do not mean to naturalize sovereignty; indeed, the validity
of power and force is continually reassessed in terms of legitimacy,
efficiency, happiness, or any other powerful guiding value—and the
essence of the political is to contend power's validity. But between
systems, the rational terms of contention necessarily confront the
forceful perimeters of sovereignty. Systematicity, as Luhmann has
commented, is unable to see its own exterior and thus the conditions
of its sovereignty. "Observation is any kind of operation that makes a
distinction so as to designate one (but not the other) side. . . . Every
description of society must take place within that society."
80
Ultimately, both systematicity and sovereignty are contingent, and
contingent precisely upon each other as their own preconditions and
limits. What Fühmann's story indicates is that the suddenness and
illumination of crisis is a moment, not necessarily of apocalypse, but of
risk. This choice between systems can only be rationally reconstructed
in retrospect on a quasi-juridical model in which specific, given
facts and postulates are assessed. It cannot be made prospectively on
apodictic grounds. Prospectively, the best one can do is be attentive
to the ontological construction of quality, or, what amounts to the same
thing, circumspectly commitment oneself at one moment or another, one
place or another, to a specific difference. To exhibit this prospective
openness, this reception to the temporality of suddenness, rupture and
change, is not nihilistically to repudiate the retrospective attitude
of judgment. Nor is it to devote oneself to a messianic, and pre-modern,
redemption. For as firm as open-ended commitment must be for qualitative
difference to matter, it still must accept that quality and measure are
always immanent to a provisional and closed system of coordination.
Benjamin Robinson is assistant professor of German at Northern Illinois University. He is finishing a manuscript,Other Systems, examining problems of science and economics in Christa Wolf and Franz Fühmann's imagination of socialism. His current projects focus on law, morphine and phenomenology in the transitions between twentieth-century German states.
1. "Es gibt kein kybernetisches System, das so beschaffen ist, daß es in seiner Gesamtheit den Sozialismus und den Kapitalismus darstellen könnte." Georg Klaus, "Kybernetik und ideologischer Klassenkampf, Einheit 25. 9 , 1181. Henceforth abbreviated as "KUIK."
2. On the history of the East German microelectronics industry see Dolores L. Augustine, "Frustrated Technocrats: Engineers in the Ulbricht Era" and Gary L. Geipel, "Politics and Computers in the Honecker Era," in Science under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Perspective, ed. Kristie Macraks and Dieter Hoffmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 183-98; 230-46.
3. Jérôme Segal, "Die Einführung der Kybernetik in der DDR: Begegnung mit der marxistischen Ideologie." http://jerome-segal.de/Publis/Kyb-DDR.htm. Accessed 2 Feb. 02.
4. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, introduction to their edited volume The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4.
5. This idea of the GDR's failure should be understood as a paradox that the following article explores. As Imre Lakatos, otherwise very close to Karl Popper, has pointed out, Popper is inconsistent precisely with respect to the question of the failure or refutation of Marxism, which leads Popper to make "such confusing formulations as 'Marxism is irrefutable' and, at the same time, 'Marxism has been refuted.'" Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes," in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91-196, n119. The point might be made more clearly outside of the Popperian program of falsifiability. In the same volume, Thomas Kuhn ("Logic of Discovery of Psychology of Research?" 1-23) argues that rival models of knowledge (paradigms)—and, more fundamentally, the communities that support their respective frameworks—are mutually incomprehensible to each other. They cannot be tested, and thus cannot fail, in each others' terms (13, and for Lakatos' characterization, 179). The failure, then, of the GDR, must be seen, as I suggest below, as a failure of historical state socialism to establish persuasive criteria for its own effective and legitimate self-description.
6. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, transl. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-56. The classic statement of Popper's position, centrally engaged with cold war ideological struggle, is The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
7. Martha Nussbaum distinguishes four distinct constituent claims in Plato's ethical science of measurement (metretike techne). Metricity implies that in a situation of choice there is a common value, varying only in quantity, to each choice. Singleness implies there is one metric for all situations of choice. Consequentialism implies that these comparable values reside in the outcome of the choice. Maximalization implies that there is a value that (either in each case, or—for example happiness or pleasure—in all cases) can and should be maximized. Martha Nussbaum, "The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality," Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56. The distinction, or, more precisely, the ambiguity that I am emphasizing is between criteria as universal standards "outside" of the situation being decided, and criteria that themselves are effective causes of a situation of choice in the first place and thus cannot be adduced as independent (third party) standards.
8. Loren R. Graham makes a similar point about the study of Soviet science. He points out that precisely because Soviet society was "based on principles—economic, social, philosophical—strikingly different from those of other industrial nations," those aspects of it that were similar to Western nations, in particular its science, reveal a lot about the way science and society relate. He concludes his overview of the Soviet experience that "we can understand how much our science and our culture are conditioned by our society only if we have another society and another culture with which we can appropriately draw comparisons. The Soviet Union may well have been one of the last modern alternatives to dominant Western patterns with which such comparisons of science can be made. In that sense, the study of Soviet science is also a study of our science." What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 135.
9. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 69-82. In the metaphysical tradition, this fundamental language that subsumes all differences in a single all-inclusive framework is referred to as either the "philosopher's language" or God's language.
10. Nussbaum also discusses akrasia in "Plato on Commensurability and Desire," Love's Knowledge, 106-24.
11. This well-ordering is a key idea also in John Rawls' theory of international justice, elaborated in the The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). He argues that only those states based on a reasonably well-ordered deliberative framework can be admitted to self-jurisdiction in a system of international law. Non-well-ordered (rogue) states are subject to military enforcement.
12. The debate over the incommensurability of "paradigms" in Kuhn's work is a more recent, but now classic, locus for the discussion of incommensurability. "The point-by-point comparison of two successive theories demands a language into which at least the empirical consequences of both can be translated without loss or change . . . no such vocabulary is available. . . . Successive theories are thus, we say, incommensurable." Thomas Kuhn, "Reflections on My Critics," Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Lakatos and Musgrave, 266-7.
13. The most famous statements of qualitative incommensurability to appear since the end of the cold war are Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) and Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995).
14. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 104ff.
15. Edmund Husserl, §6, The Crisis of the European Sciences: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, transl. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 15-6. Henceforth abbreviated as CES.
16. Hubert Laitko, "The Reform Package of the 1960s: The Policy Finale of the Ulbricht Era," Science under Socialism, eds. Macraks and Hoffmann, 47. Raymond G. Stokes, Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany 1945-1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), esp., "The Controlled Experiment in Technological Development: Technology in the New Economic System," 131-52.
17.  Walter Ulbricht, VII. Parteitag, cited in Günter Mittag, "Sozialistische Ökonomie und wissenschaftlich-technische Revolution meistern," Einheit 22.8 , 972.
18. "Auf dem VII. Parteitag hat Genosse Walter Ulbricht die grundsätzliche Bedeutung der Kybernetik für das entwickelte gesellschaftliche System des Sozialismus hervorgehoben." See Mittag, "Sozialistische Ökonomie," 978.
19. Steve Heims describes the crucial role of the 1946-53 Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation Conferences in New York for consolidating a new cybernetic social science based on Wiener and von Neumann's war-time research. Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991).
20. The words "in principle" are key here. I am not claiming that the party ever came close to relinquishing tight ideological control over the various social subsystems. Most revealing here would be the 11th Party Plenum of 1965, in which the cultural liberalization promised with the Wall suffered a heavy blow (the nickname for the Plenum was "Kahlschlag") at the same time as the NÖS program struggled to keep itself in place.
21. These words are all entries in Klaus' Wörterbuch der Kybernetik, ed. Georg Klaus (Berlin: Dietz, 1969). Henceforth abbreviated as WDK. See "Selbstorganisation," 556-7, "Selbstreproduktion," 559-60, "selbsttätige Regelung," 560, "selbsttätige Steuerung," 560, and "Zielstrebigkeit," 727-9.
22.  Klaus, WDK, "Zielstrebigkeit," 729.
23. See William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann's Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 36, for a discussion of the significance of this idea for contemporary systems theory.
24.  Klaus, WDK, "Trial and error," 661.
25. The Dictionary describes the difference between "internal" and "external" contradiction in the entry for "Wechselwirkung," Klaus, WDK, 713-5.
 Klaus, WDK, "Dialektischer Widerspruch," 143.
26.  Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR (Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), esp. 221-41, here 231.
"Fähigkeit eines kybernetischen Systems, seine Struktur zu verbessern, um größere Stabilität zu erreichen bzw. sein inneres Milieu besser und zweckmäßiger gegen Störungen aus der Umwelt bzw. gegen Abnützungserscheinungen im Inneren zu verteidigen." Klaus, WDK, "Selbstorganisation," 556-7.
27. Georg Klaus, "Regelkreise und Organismen," Neues Deutschland (15 Oct. 1960), 15. Henceforth abbreviated as "RUO."
28. "Für die Kybernetik ist auch charakteristisch, daß sie viele Prozesse einer quantitativen Betrachtung unterwirft, von denen oft angenommen wird, daß sie nur qualitativ erfaßbar seien." Klaus, "RUO," 15.
29. "Roboter können nicht dialektisch denken," Klaus, "RUO," 15.
30. "Determinate Being is Being with a character or mode—which simply is; and such unmediated character is Quality." G. W. F. Hegel, "First Subdivision of Logic. A. Quality," §90, Hegel's Logic, transl. William Wallace, forward J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 134. Henceforth abbreviated as HL.
31. §104, HL, 153.
32. §107, Zusatz, HL, 157.
33. "Es muß sich . . . ein neuer Denkstil durchsetzen. . . [Philosophie] muß der Zeit und den konkreten Erfördernissen der planmäßigen Anwendung moderner Wissenschaften, inbesondere der Mathematik, entsprechen," Georg Klaus, "Die Entwicklung des sozialistischen Denkens und Handelns in philosophischer Sicht," Einheit 22.2 , 168. Henceforth abbreviated as "EDHS."
34.  Klaus, "EDHS," 168.
35. Husserl, "§9. Galileo's mathematization of nature," CES, 33.
36. "Die Beziehung von Quantität und Qualität wird exakt durch Logik und Mathematik beschrieben." Klaus, WDK, "Qualität," 504.
37. "Die Ausnutzung der ökonomischen Gesetze kann stets nur im Rahmen der Gesamtgesetze der Entwicklung des Sozialismus erfolgen.  Klaus, "EDHS," 170.
38. " . . . das Wesen der gesellschaftlichen Gesetze des Sozialismus . . . " Klaus, "EDHS," 170.
39. For one formulation of this paradox, see Husserl, "§53. The paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world," CES, 178.
40. This succession of paradoxes applies to Hegel's Logic as well. Thus, the introduction of "Quantity" in §99 is followed by the distinction between "Continuous" and "Discrete" in §100. HL, 145, 148.
41.  Klaus, WDK, "Qualität," 504.
42. Klaus Dieter Wüstneck, "Die Bedeutung der Kybernetik für die Führungstätigkeit der Partei," Einheit 22.8 , 992.
43. "Umschlag von quantitativen Veränderungen in qualitative." Klaus, WDK, "Qualität," 504.
44. Karl Popper, "Normal Science and its Dangers," in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 57. Similarly, Lakatos in ""Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes," criticizes Kuhn's model of paradigm shifts by calling it "a mystical conversion which is not and cannot be governed by rules of reason" .
45.  Klaus, "KUIK," 1181.
46. "Kapitalismus zum Beispiel bildet ein gesellschaftliches Gesamtsystem mit einem entsprechenden Klassenhinhalt, einer Klassenideologie usw. Seine Teilsysteme wirken keineswegs so, daß sich eine Optimierung des Gesamtsystems herausbildet. Im gesellschaftlichen System des Sozialismus dagegen steht der Mensch im Mittelpunkt und erfolgt die Entwicklung eines Teilsystems immer im Hinblick auf das Gesamtsystem." Klaus, "KUIK," 1181.
47. Plato, "Theatatus," 160d, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 866.
48. "So erweist sich auch die Kybernetik as eine Waffe in den Händen der siegreichen revolutianären Arbeiterklasse und ihrer Verbündeten, als ein Mittel der Entfaltung ihrer Offensive im Kampf gegen den Imperialismus." Klaus, "KUIK," 1180.
49. Kuhn, "Reflections on My Critics," 261.
50. Plato, , ed. Hervert Schwamborn (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1965). "rhetoric is a creator of persuasion," 453a. Socrates goes on in his argument with Gorgias to characterize rhetoric as "a creator of a conviction that is persuasive but not instructive," 455a. See also Plato, "Gorgias," The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns.
51. Plato, "Georgias," 474d.
52. "Ich häufe ungeheure Zahlen,/ Gebirge Millionen auf,/ Ich setze Zeit auf Zeit/ Und Welt auf Welt zu Hauf,/ Und wenn ich von der grausen Höh'/ Mit Schwindel wieder nach Dir seh:/ Ist alle Macht der Zahl,/ Vermehrt zu Tausendmal,/ Noch nicht ein Theil von Dir." Cited by Hegel, §104 Zusatz, HL, 154.
53. Franz Fühmann, "Der Haufen [The Heap]," Saiäns-Fiktschen: Erzählungen (Rostock: Hinstorff, 1981). Henceforth abbreviated as "TH."
54. Galen, On Medical Experience 16.1-17.3, in Vagueness: A Reader, ed. Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 58.
55. For a discussion of methodological individualism, associated with the critique of Marxism in the work of F. A. Hayek and Karl Popper, see Richard W. Miller, "Fact and Method in the Social Sciences," The Philosophy of Science, Ed. Richard Boyd, Philip Gasper, and J. D. Trout (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 743-62. Kuhn, in contrast to Popper's a priori rationalism, believes that any explanation of scientific progress must "be a description of a value system, an ideology, together with an analysis of the institutions through which that system is transmitted and enforced." Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery," 21.
56. "Die Welt ist durch Poesie ausdrückbar, weil sie mathematisierbar ist." Franz Fühmann, 22 Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens (Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 127.
57. Fühmann, Saiäns-Fiktschen, 6-7.
58. For a discussion of the distinction in Aristotelian rhetoric between an attested fact, subject to syllogistic reason, but not to generalization, and a paradigm for guiding future action generally, see Carlo Ginsberg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999).
59. Edmund Husserl's famous phenomenological slogan was: "Den Sachen selbst!"
60. Here, we can also see how a satire of cybernetic reasoning such as Christa Wolf's 1970 story "Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers" ["The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat"] played a reactionary role against the NÖS. Bitterly repressed at the 11th Party Plenum ("Kahlschlag Plenum"), humanists like Wolf did not recognize that their enemies were not directly the technocrats then in favor with the Ulbricht regime. They equated the state with technocratic reasoning, which presumably spurned humanist values such as quality, and thus when the state struck back with the qualitative force of Party sovereignty, they had lost their chance for an alliance with quantity. Fühmann's story, in contrast to Wolf's, sees the merits of quantity and the dangers of quality. Christa Wolf, "Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers," Gesammelte Erzählungen (Frankfurt / Main: Luchterhand, 1981), 97-123.
61. "Eigentlich wollte ich's in diesem Brief . . . nur einen Beitrag aus dem Empirischen liefern, und zwar zu meinem Leitwort 'plötzlich, jählings'. Es ist dies in der Tat wohl das Grunderlebnis meines Erdenwandelns." Franz Fühmann, Fühmann to Kurt Batt, 22 August 1971, Briefe 1950-1984. Eine Auswahl, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (Rostock: Hinstorff, 1994), 102.
62. "Nun könnte man entsetzt sagen: was für eine morsche Welt, in die unablässig Einbrüche erfolgen!  Aber ich glaube, das mit den Einbrüchen stimmt. Es ist eine Welt des Ausgeliefertseins, eine Welt des Objektseins. Ich könnte sagen: ihr zu entrinnen, oder ihrer als Vorstufe dazu bewußt zu werden, schreibe ich." Fühmann, to Batt, Briefe, 104.
63. "Der Umschlagspunkt ist nicht anders als mit 'plötzlich' zu fassen. Das ist auch mathematisch nachweisbar.  Fühmann to Batt, 9 Sept. 1971, Briefe, 105.
64. §94: "This infinity [of endless negation] is the wrong or negative infinity: it is only a negative of a finite: but the finite rises again the same as ever, and is never got rid of or absorbed." In the Zusatz to §94 Hegel elaborates the good infinity by contrast. "Such a progression to infinity is not the real infinite. That consists in being at home with itself in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself in its other." Hegel, HL, 137.
65. "Herz hat, wer Furcht kennt, aber Furcht zwingt; wer den Abgrund sieht, aber mit Stolz." Friedrich Nietzsche, "Vom höheren Menschen," Also sprach Zarathustra (München: Goldmann, 1999), 234.
66.  Klaus, "RUO," 15.
67. Nietzsche, "Von der Wissenschaft," Also Sprach Zarathustra, 244-7.
68. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii.
69. Alexander Stille, "What Is America's Place in the World Now?" New York Times (Sat. 12 January 2002), A17. Benjamin Barber, "Beyond Jihad v. McWorld," The Nation (21 January 2001), 11-8.
70. See, for example Harvard Professor Steven Walt, cited in "What is America's Place," "One of the principle lessons of Sept. 11 is that failed states are not just a humanitarian problem, they are a national security problem."
71. Michael Walzer, "Terror," Dissent: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/archive/fa01/terror.shtml. Accessed 18 Jan. 2002.  Accessed 18 Jan. 2002. See also the German press reaction to Martha Nussbaum's optimistic call for a global ethics in her Berlin lecture, "For a social democratic Aristotelianism": Jürgen Kaube, "Recycling für die SPD: Martha Nussbaum, Aristoteles und die Sozialdemokratie," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 29 (4 Feb. 2002), 41.
72. For summaries of the positions of leading German public intellectuals see the following two articles. Jan Ross, "Arbeit am neuen Weltbild,"Die Zeit Dossier 45 , http://www.zeit.de/2001/45/Politik/. Accessed 31 Oct. 2001. Sven Wieboldt, "Pro und Contra: Der Streit nach dem 11. September," Fluter (the youth magazine of Die Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) http:www.fluter.de/look/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2002. Henryk M. Broder, "Kampf der Kulturen: Nur nicht provozieren!" Der Spiegel 38 (16 Sept. 2001), http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel//0,1518,157553,00.html. Accessed 18 Jan. 2002; György Konrád, "György Konrád über die Epoche des latenten Terrors," Spiegel Online 21.25 (7 Oct. 2001), http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,161200,00.html Accessed on 18 Jan. 2002.
73. Weber, "Science as Vocation," 129-56.
74. For a discussion of Herder and Fichte and their ideas of a national community, see Bernd Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1995).
75. "I have always regarded the intellectual openings to Western traditions after 1945 as liberating. . . . This orientation toward the West did not involve a distortion of the German soul, but it did involve our getting used to an upright posture." Habermas, A Berlin Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 101, 102. "If . . . one conceives 'socialism' as the set of necessary conditions for emancipated forms of life about which the participants themselves must first reach an understanding, then one will recognize that the democratic self-organization of a legal community constitutes the normative core of this project as well." Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996) xli.
76. In contrast to Habermas, many Germans still object that the American constitutional system is precisely such an imposed, hypostatized form of control. Thus Bernd Fischer observes, "da der republikanische Nationsbegriff Deutschland 1949 (bzw. 1990) von außen aufoktroyiert wurde, scheint er den Deutschen nicht nur bis heute teilweise unverstanden und fremd, sondern wird häuals zu armselig und 'seelenlos' angesehen, um das zu beschreiben, was man unter Deutschen verstehen will." Das Eigene und das Eigentliche, 15.
77. Popper, "Normal Science and its Dangers," 57.
78. John Watkins, "Against 'Normal Science,'" in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 26.
79. Paul N. Edwards, Closed Worlds: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 7.
80. Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47, 78.
Near the beginning of the essay "Pictures" (one of the six lectures that make up her American speaking tour of 1934-5), Gertrude Stein describes the formative experience—at age eight—when she first sees a large painting of the battle of Waterloo:
It was an oil painting a continuous oil painting, one was surrounded by an oil painting and I who lived continuously out of doors and felt air and sunshine and things to see felt that this was all different and very exciting. There it all was the things to see but there was no air it just was an oil painting. I remember standing on the little platform in the center and almost consciously knowing that there was no air. There was no air, there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own. . . . 1
Dwarfed by this room-sized panorama, Stein compares her feelings inside the gallery to her other childhood experiences, "continuously out of doors." She loves fresh air, but the painting thrills her in a different way—as an art object with "a life of its own." The stimulating part of this experience, as she explains it, is not exactly the objects represented ("the things to see")—she already knew all about Napoleon—what excites her is the representation itself: "the thing that was exciting me was the oil painting" ("P," 226).
One way to read her interest in the painting, rather than the things painted, is as an example of what is usually thought of as the modernist critique of referentiality. According to this view, modern works of art and literature attempt to displace the nineteenth-century naturalistic emphasis on external reality by problematizing the relation between a representation and the thing represented. But Stein's focus on air—its absence in the painting versus its presence outdoors—suggests that her actual point is slightly different. It is not that she is concerned to characterize the relationship between the painting and the thing painted as non-referential; what she says instead is that "the relation between the oil painting and the thing painted was really nobody's business" ("P," 237). Thus she compares the panorama to her experience of an actual battlefield in Gettysburg not to assess its verisimilitude or lack thereof but to insist that the "oil painting" is "an entirely different thing." The point of insisting that there is no air in the oil painting will be to shift her focus from the relation between an object and its representation to the relation between an art object (a representation) and its beholder.
We can see that her primary interest is not referentiality from her characterization of paintings as individual faces. Becoming familiar with oil paintings, she writes, is like the process of becoming "more and more familiar with faces" ("P," 236). To understand an oil painting fully is to become intimate with a new person's face: "Faces gradually tell you something . . . as you grow more and more familiar with any and all faces and so it is with oil paintings. The result was that in a way I slowly knew what an oil painting is. . . . " ("P," 236). Whatever else you might feel about a new face—and Stein acknowledges that you may feel surprised or "even shocked" by a new face—you cannot dismiss a new face as a copy of another face you already know: "You cannot refuse a new face.  And so with an oil painting" ("P," 237). The point here is that Stein is not interested in discovering resemblances between a painted portrait and an actual person (a representation and its referent), but in confronting and accepting a painting as a new person, entirely separate from the beholder. She comes to know "what an oil painting is," in other words, when she understands it as the face of an autonomous person with a "life in and for itself of an oil painting" ("P," 237). A painting for Stein is not simply another functional object in the gallery (like the platform), but a self-reliant subject with a place all its own.
Or consider the unusual, childhood perceptual games she devises in Italian museums, when she begins—literally—"to sleep and dream in front of oil paintings": "There were very few people in the galleries in Italy in the summers in those days and there were long benches and they were red and they were comfortable at least they were to me and the guardians were indifferent or amiable and I could really lie down and sleep in front of the pictures" ("P," 231). The activity Stein describes is when, upon waking, she can momentarily (albeit sleepily) identify with the paintings as faces "sleeping" in front of her. She perceives the paintings as "sleeping" because they are perpetually unaware of her. 2 The painting is never able to see the viewer, that is, to see Stein sleeping—and waking—on a red bench in an Italian museum. But the importance of this activity is that her sleep dramatizes the fictive irrelevance of the beholder to the work of art. By imagining paintings as faces—and, by extension, as persons with conscious states like her own (sometimes sleeping, sometimes waking)—Stein is also imagining paintings that are utterly independent of her own consciousness. In other words, her deep reverie is so complete that she can imagine a painting as another conscious person, even when she herself is sleeping and not consciously beholding the painting.
Clarifying her point, Stein explains that this is not merely about playing an optical trick on yourself ('convincing' yourself you are in a pastoral landscape upon awaking): on the contrary, if the painting's status as representation is effaced the game will fail. Thus, unlike a Tintoretto or Giotto, a naturalistic Botticelli is a poor painting to sleep in front of because the illusion (the "thing painted") overpowers the representation (the "painting"): "I used to walk in the country and then I concluded that the Botticellis being really so like the flowers in the country they were not the pictures before which one could sleep, they were to my feeling, being that they looked so like the flowers in the country, they were artificial" ("P," 231). Stein is not interested in sleeping in front of a simulacrum of the flowers—this is the substance of her complaint about the "artificial" Botticelli flowers. Instead, she must sleep in front of a representation that has "a life of its own"—the Tintoretto flowers. Each experience underscores her understanding of painting as representation: "As I say in sleeping and waking in front of all these pictures I really began to realize that an oil painting is an oil painting. I was beginning after that to be able to look with pleasure at any oil painting" ("P," 232).
We can begin to see why sleeping in front of an oil painting is such a crucial model for Stein, and why I am arguing that Stein's interest is not in the work of art in relation to its referent, but in the work of art in relation to the beholder. When Stein realizes, in the midst of the panorama, that "there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own," she is claiming that the work of art inhabits a space that is different not only from the space inhabited by the things the painting represents, but is also different from the space inhabited by its beholder. Stein captures this idea by claiming that in the painting, there is no air. Her interest in the difference between the space of the painting and the space of the beholder explains what is otherwise very hard to explain; namely, her dramatization of the beholder in front of the painting as an insistence that the beholder is asleep. In other words, Stein illustrates a distinction between two spaces—the space of the painting versus the space of the beholder—as a distinction between two individuated consciousnesses: the awake person and the sleeping person.
As idiosyncratic as her preoccupation with air in paintings may seem, Stein is not the only major modernist to reflect upon the possibility or impossibility of breathing in painting. In The Childermass , Wyndham Lewis imagines an art full of air by depicting a painting his protagonists can walk into. Resembling a chattier and busier version of a Samuel Beckett play, the novel portrays Pullman and his bumbling companion Satters as they wander around an otherworldly, yet vaguely familiar, landscape. In this modernized version of Dante's Divine Comedy, they are stuck "Outside Heaven" in a purgatory resembling England between the wars.
As these two ghosts study their new environment, they eventually notice a strange landscape where "nothing seems to be moving on its surface" and everything "is a little faded": 3
"What the devil's this?" Pullman's voice is as sober as before it was all on fire. Satters does not like to say what he sees . . .There is a wide view stretching as far as the eye can reach across flattish country. It is bounded by rain-clouds, they block the horizon. Thenthere is snow.
"It's like a picture," Satters suggests, haltingly, afraid the word may not be right.
"Exactly!" (TC, 104)
Pullman and Satters have inadvertently stumbled into a huge, nearly completed, landscape-painting that appears as "flattish country". In fact, Pullman identifies this painting as the same type that delights Stein at age eight: "Why we're in a panorama!" (TC, 123). Barely distinguishable from the broader environment, the painting is so large that Pullman advises Satters that they had better "go through it" because walking around it "would take hours" (TC, 106). While in it, they notice that the leaves on the bushes become progressively smaller, suggesting that they are walking "into" the illusion of depth: "Look at that hedge. Do you see its perspective? It's built in a diminishing perspective! I believe the whole place is meant to be looked at from behind there, where we have just come from" (TC, 123). This painting's canvas and frame are entirely invisible to them—it is only the paint and the painting that they perceive. Thus, Pullman can only surmise the appropriate spectator position ("from behind there, where we have just come from") after he has entered the painting, traversed its imperceptible frame, and examined the shrinking hedges.
Nonetheless, there are some palpable differences between their world and the painting's world. Consider, for example, the initial moment when they walk "into the picture": "After taking a few steps forward [Satters] encounters what by contrast is an icy surface of air. He stops, catches his breath. For a moment the hot wind beats behind him, then he steps into the temperature of the 'picture' or the 'hallucination.' It is moist and chilly but windless" (TC, 106). The air in this picture is startling: Satters "catches his breath," shocked by the difference in temperature between painting-air and purgatory-air. But despite being colder, thinner, and windless, the crucial issue here is that the painting-air is still encountered as air. Painting-air might be slightly different from purgatory-air, but the air is essentially the same type: breathable. Satters and Pullman can disregard the invisible frame of this painting, treating it as a window frame to step through (although not without some shock), placing them physically in the scene of representation. Lewis effectively equates the experience of walking into a place (through a window frame) with the experience of being absorbed in a representation (through a picture frame).
At this point, the contrast to Stein could not be more striking. Where Stein, in front of the painting of Waterloo, imagines that "there was no air, there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own . . .  Whereas Stein divides the place of a painting and the place of the beholder, Lewis combines these two spaces into one. Instead of a painting separated from the spectator's physical world by its airlessness, the panorama Pullman and Satters encounter is their world, albeit a slightly different part of their world, where the air "has a rarity of its own—it's really as though we were on the Matterhorn" (TC, 122). Most crucially, Stein invokes the example of painting to illustrate her commitment to the irrelevance of the spectator experience to the meaning of the art object. Lewis, in contrast, emphasizes that these purgatory-paintings need active spectators—the physical and mental involvement of Pullman and Satters is required for the painting to be complete.
It is not, however, as if Lewis creates this entire episode of Pullman and Satters strolling into a painting in order to advocate air-filled painting as a theory of art. In fact, it is exactly the reverse. He is satirizing those artists and critics who, if they did not exactly believe that art was full of air, did believe that art was something to be stepped into and completed by its beholders. 4 In Lewis's opinion, this belief was an integral part of a broader cultural trend (which he termed "time-philosophy") that had become all too common in modern, post-Impressionist art and literature. When Satters mumbles that their new landscape is not exactly a picture but "like a picture"—and Pullman immediately agrees ("Exactly!")—Lewis is taking aim at the vision of the work of art here embodied (TC, 104). In other words, this panorama resembles a painting without actually being one. Lewis satirizes art that needs its spectators' experience to be whole, because such art fails to differentiate between a painting of a panorama and one's experience of a view at the top of the Matterhorn.
What I am arguing here, that in Stein the phenomenological space of the beholder is different from the space of the art object, is completely contraindicated in the critical consensus on Stein (a consensus that begins with Lewis himself). Instead of producing an art that merges content and context—that is, a painting and its beholder's place, a poem and its reader's point of view—Stein wants to make everything about the beholder or reader irrelevant to her art. In the next section, I show how Stein accomplishes this aim with Tender Buttons , her exceptional book of avant-garde poems, by removing punctuation. Although in discussing Lewis's dramatization of Pullman and Satters intruding into the painting I am describing exactly the opposite of Stein's theory of art, and although Lewis himself saw his position as completely opposed to Stein, Lewis was, in fact, also advocating an art that imagined the beholder as irrelevant. In the third section, I show how The Childermass is an articulate dramatization of time-philosophy in painting, and thus an excellent example of Lewis's aesthetic theory put into novelistic practice. 5
Stein is primarily interesting to us as a writer, and only secondarily as an art theorist. What does her position on the ontology of art objects ("an oil painting is an oil painting") have to do with Stein as a writer? In part, Stein allies herself with painters throughout her career as a form of strategic self-advertisement: the popular success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (excerpted in the Atlantic Monthly in 1933) was fueled by Stein's unabashed affiliation with this Parisian avant-garde of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. 6 But her motives are also strategic in a different sense. Stein aligns her poetry with Picasso's painting to increase the value of her seemingly inaccessible writing as an art with meaning. Thus she explains that she "was expressing the same thing in literature" as Picasso was in painting. 7
Most often, literary critics have interpreted this claim as Stein's support for "literary cubism"—a jumble of words juxtaposed for their overall sound or appearance instead of their meaning. Thus Michael Hoffman interprets Stein's Tender Buttons as "verbal collage," and Marjorie Perloff reads Susie Asado as matching, "the instability, indeterminacy, and acoherence of Cubism." 8 But I am arguing that Stein does not share Hoffman's and Perloff's view of Picasso's Cubist painting—and more pertinently—that her work is not "literary cubist" in their sense of an art of indeterminacy. For one thing, her 1912 portrait of Picasso—written in the middle of his Synthetic Cubist (i.e., collage) stage—focuses repeatedly on his ability to produce a definite art object with a precise meaning. Picasso creates "a heavy thing, a solid thing and a complete thing" which has "a solid meaning, a struggling meaning, a clear meaning" ("PI," 282). Furthermore, he entrances a coterie of beholders ("they were always following him," ["PI," 284]) with his complete meanings. Stein champions Picasso's Cubism because, like herself, he asserts the completeness of the work of art; that is, when the art object "is completely contained within itself . . . this gives it at once its complete solidity, its complete imagination, its complete existence." 9 She aims to produce a similarly complete, entrancing object—albeit a poetic object—one which could produce that feeling of "no air" at the Waterloo panorama, and that sensation of waking up in a gallery and realizing "that an oil painting is an oil painting" ("P," 232). She wants her poem to be so completely absorbing and meaningful that where the reader is does not matter: "On one level, she might simply mean that her writing is absorbing for the reader: It is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do, you completely do. I always do." 10
If losing yourself in books sounds a lot like straying into a painting, Stein's interest in the reader's engrossment is nonetheless undercut by the logic of her main aesthetic point. It is not the process of completely losing yourself in books that she is focusing on, but rather the irrelevance of the response of the reader to the meaning of the text. In other words, she is describing something much closer to the fiction of the reader'snonexistence. A poem succeeds as "a complete thing" by ignoring the reader: "An Audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business." 11 To clarify, this is not merely an avant-garde indifference to success, although at times Stein does indeed display such an indifference. 12 Instead, Stein is committed to distinguishing the writer's "business" from the reader's (whose presence is merely "pleasant" and "flattering"). What the reader does is something she is indifferent to, or more properly, what the reader does is something that has no relevance to the meaning of the text. At best, you as a writer can hope that your "force" is felt, that somebody "will have to realise that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean." 13 The author's intention to mean must be assumed as an act of faith on the part of the reader, but whether or not the reader offers such good-faith, Stein knows what she means when she writes. 14
Recall once again her response to the panorama: "there was no feeling of air, it just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own." The Waterloo painting disregards the viewer's "feeling of air"—that is, it eliminates the relevance of the world outside the painting, the world of the European museum which the painting is literally part of. Stein attempts to produce poetry and prose with a similarly "complete existence" by eliminating punctuation, above all commas. The problem with commas is that they let "you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath." 15 Just as the air you inhale while looking at a painting has nothing to do with the picture on the wall (because the painting has "a life of its own" and "no feeling of air"), the air you inhale while reading has nothing to do with Stein's written texts: "Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath ("A," 793). She sees punctuation as an effort to dictate the literal experience of reading; to focus on the reader would be to sacrifice the autonomy of the text. In fact, Stein writes that "the longer, the more complicated the sentence . . . the more I felt the passionate need of [the words] taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them" by adding punctuation ("PAG," 321). Stein extends this point beyond commas, claiming that all diacritical marks (question marks, exclamation marks, apostrophes, quotation marks, etc.) should be eliminated in order to confirm the irrelevance of the reader ("PAG," 316-21). 16 The only mark of punctuation she will finally accept is the period, and not because the period is of any use to the reader, but because it is inevitable that a writer sometimes needs to take a break: "physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop some time then periods had to exist" ("PAG," 318). The crucial point here is that Stein's use of periods is not a contradiction of her larger critique of diacritical marks, but rather an example ofher thorough commitment to the writer's engrossment in her own writing and of the irrelevance of the reader's body to the meaning of the text. If periods are a necessary condition for the poet to write—and thus must be used—commas and other punctuation unnecessarily intrude upon the reader's own "business" and should be avoided.
Starting with "Objects," the first section of Tender Buttons, Stein intends some of her words to signify as if they were detached from the sentence by quotation marks—yet she leaves out the quotation marks that would help the reader understand her meaning. "A box" begins, "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle" ("TB," 314). Such an apparently random list of words does not make sense until we recognize that Stein is abstracting the definition of "boxiness." A box is a container for particular objects: "boxiness," Stein suggests, embodies the relationship between a set and its examples. Thus to define "a box" she writes a sentence containing variations on the formulaic phrase, "out of set-x comes y-example." Blushing ("redness") might indicate that a compliment has been paid (a "kindness"), hounding someone with a repetitive "same question" is an example of "rudeness," while "research" is anything produced by looking around (with "an eye"). In each case, Stein's words are potentially replaceable, marked by implied—but not printed—quotation marks. Each word is a possible defined value for either x or y. Set-x equals "kindness," "rudeness" or "an eye," while example-y equals "redness," "rapid same question" or "research". To understand her intended meaning, you must not only know what the words mean; you must also recognize the entire sentence's repetitive formula. You must understand, moreover, that implied quotation marks signal a word as one example of a set, even though these quotation marks are not literally present. 17
Such grammar games continue throughout Tender Buttons, becoming more and more complicated by "Rooms." 18 But regardless of the complexity of her sentences, she always intends to mean with her texts, even when the words she chooses, "were not the words that had in them any quality of description." 19 A reader might make mistakes when attempting to punctuate, and understand, one of these sentences for himself. But that, as Stein would say, is the reader's "business," not hers. Her aim is to choose words so carefully, and to construct sentences so scrupulously, that punctuation marks are not required: the words and syntax are doing the work the punctuation marks used to do. Her meaning is there to be found, even if such sentences initially appear nonsensical. "I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense," Stein wrote, "and found it impossible." 20
From a purely literary historical standpoint, one purpose of my description is to rectify the mistaken lineage often provided for Stein by contemporary literary critics, where she most typically emerges as a poststructuralist poet avant la lettre. In Perloff's words, Stein intends to dramatize "the arbitrariness of discourse, the impossibility of arriving at 'the meaning' even as countless possible meanings present themselves to our attention" (POI, 76). In fact, as I have been stressing, Stein is completely indifferent to the reader's particular perspective. But for Perloff, because Stein's meaning "all depends on our angle of vision," Stein's writing parallels "the instability, indeterminacy, and acoherence of Cubism" (POI, 76-7). According to these views, Stein intends transgressive indeterminacy, and her most fascinating characteristic, according to Charles Altieri, is her "freedom of linguistic play." 21 For critics such as Perloff, Altieri, and Jayne Walker, Tender Buttons is valued for the dramatic effects of its grammar games, syntax disruption, and language obfuscation; it is "a text to play with." 22 But just as Stein does not care where or when the reader breathes, she also does not care how much fun the reader is having. She creates texts that mean what they mean regardless of her reader's desires to play with them.
Closely related to these poststructuralist interpretations are depictions of Stein as the harbinger of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such as Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe. These poets readily adopt Stein as the poetic matriarch of their "radical modernism"—a kind of incipient postmodernism suggested by the "nonuse value of language in Stein." 23 Accordingly, the December 1978 issue of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E contains a special feature of seven poets interpreting Tender Buttons. But in contrast to my reading of Stein (namely, that for her the reader's experience is irrelevant to the meaning of the poem), these poets value Tender Buttons for precisely the opposite reason. Michael Davidson and Bruce Andrews believe the poem incorporates each reader's experience into the meaning of the text so that Tender Buttons increases the "possibilities for meaning" as it is read by more and more people, because "readers do the rewriting." 24 Extending this logic, Bernstein understands poetry's value as the "sum of all the specific conditions of the experience (place, time, order, light, mood, position, to infinity) made available by reading." 25 If Stein's point is that the Waterloo painting eliminates the relevance of the world outside the painting (the world of air, light and time), Bernstein's point—in contrast—is to underscore the total significance of "the specific conditions of the experience" that make up the reader's world. Not only do the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets value Stein for exactly the wrong reasons, these poets also contribute to the inaccurate—but canonical—view of Stein as the first modernist poet of indeterminacy and reader-derived meaning.
In addition to these literary historical aims, my point in discussing Stein's notion of painting and writing is to show that Stein understood the irrelevance of the beholder (of a painting) as related to the irrelevance of the reader. In both painting and writing the audience's "job" is distinct from the artist's. One might imagine that I am aiming to replace the contemporary description of Stein (as a proto-poststructuralist or an ancestral L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet), with another, unlikely label: Stein as an expatriate New Critic in avant-garde clothing, promoting the autonomous poetic object. New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, for example, argue that one's affective responses to a poem do not lead to satisfying critical inquiries: readers must avoid the "Affective Fallacy," that situation where the "poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear" in the surge of the reader's emotional response. 26 It might appear, therefore, that Stein's theory of poetic meaning resembles the New Critical poetic "objects" and their relation to the reader—Stein, Wimsatt, and Beardsley all want more emphasis on the poem as object, and less on the reader's emotional response to the poem.
But there are crucial differences between Stein's account of the irrelevance of the reader and the New Critics' privileging of the poetic object over the reader's response. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the danger of the Affective Fallacy is that a poem's meaning could—and does—"disappear" in the presence of readerly emotion. In response, Wimsatt and Beardsley aim to protect the poem (like museum guards around a Monet) from the audience members whose enthusiasm might besmirch the work. But for Stein, there is no need to protect the poem from the reader because this particular hazard does not exist. Or, to put it more precisely, this particular hazard cannot exist. A poem's meaning is never in danger of being effaced by the reader—however radical the reader's interpretation—because the reader's response, by definition, cannot alter the poem's meaning in any way. The meaning of a poem is entirely indifferent to the reader's emotion, or, for that matter, indifferent to any type of judgment the reader could deliver. Thus, unlike Wimsatt and Beardsley, Stein is not prioritizing objective over subjective responses: each is just as inevitable—and irrelevant—to the meaning of the text.
Stein's decision to remove all forms of diacritical, readerly assistance (commas, quotation marks, etc.) is the logical extension of her theory of textual meaning.  Not only does Stein present a challenge to poststructuralist and postmodern theory—and particularly to those poststructuralist accounts of her own poetry, where meaning "all depends on our angle of vision" (POI, 76)—she also presents a challenge to the New Critical account of poetry as a cultural artifact endangered by the reader's misinterpretation. My literary historical argument about Stein, therefore, is also her theoretical argument about literary meaning.
Considering Lewis's and Stein's shared commitment to avant-garde art and literature, and more relevantly, their common interest in the relation of art to the beholder, one might have suspected some mutual understanding between them. Stein was largely supportive of and amused by Lewis; Lewis, on the other hand, despised Stein and her work. In some respects, his repugnance is a predictable version of the received account of Lewis as a hostile, misogynous, anti-Semite. Most often, his antipathy appears as hysterical aversion: Stein is a phony member of the avant-garde—"a faux-naif" and "a sham"—because she produced fake art. 27 Lewis also implies that she attempts to emasculate young (white) male writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, by overpowering them with her monstrous, female (Jewish) persona. 28 But these deliberately offensive accusations are a type of rhetorical camouflage, masking a far greater anxiety. Stein threatened Lewis's description of himself as "The Enemy"—that is, the outspoken artiste in the liminal world of avant-garde modernism. "I defend my choice of her as an enemy at all times and in all places," he writes in "The Diabolical Principle and the Dithryambic Spectator," an essay first published in one of Lewis's critical organs, a periodical he in fact named The Enemy. 29 Even this indictment suggests a problem: if Stein is "The Enemy's" enemy in The Enemy, Lewis's singularity and novelty are precarious.
Although Lewis despises what he believes is Stein's "bad philosophy," that philosophy was far closer to Lewis's than he was in a position to admit. Like Stein, Lewis is repeatedly focusing not on the relation between a representation and the object represented, but on the relation between the space of the painting and the space of the beholder. Consider, once again, the scene of Pullman and Satters encountering the painting in The Childermass. "Milky" wall surfaces dissolve instantaneously, and the dusky shafts of sunlight are more dense than they appear:
These solid luminous slices have the consistence of smoked glass: apparitions gradually take shape in their substance, hesitate or arrive with fixity, become delicately plastic, increase their size, burst out of the wall like an inky exploding crysalid. . . . Satters surreptitiously reaches out his hand to the cutting edge of the light. It is hard, it's more like marble. It is not sunlight or it is frozen beams. He hastilywithdraws his hand, looking to see if Pullman has noticed. (TC, 40)
Lewis, a professional painter as well as a novelist, depicts light filtering through air as a thick, viscous substance, perhaps the consistency of oil paint as it is applied to a canvas (initially gooey and finally solidifying). The image of enlarging apparitions which "burst out of the wall like an inky exploding crysalid" also suggests a painting in the process of its creation. But Pullman and Satters are able to see the paint and the painting—and nothing else: not the canvas, not the paintbrush, not anything surrounding the painting. The artist, who sometimes paints slowly and hesitantly, and sometimes creates forms boldly and quickly, is also invisible: "apparitions gradually take shape in their substance, hesitate or arrive with fixity." In other words, Satters and Pullman experience this painting-apparition not as a representation, but as part of the physical world in which they themselves exist, a world in which Satters can touch the solid sunlight.
By the final scene inside the purgatory-painting, it is clear that this painting—indistinguishable from the physical world—does not fulfill Lewis's notion of a representation. The incident begins when Satters becomes distraught by the hostile reception he receives from an eighteenth-century "ploughman" in the painting: "His face terrified me! I didn't tell you at the time—I felt he knew quite well you were looking at him! . . . I feel we ought not to be here. . . . I feel an intruder. . . . I feel I'm trespassing" (TC, 112-3). Satters senses that his gaze is acknowledged by the res represented, leading him to experience anxiety and dislocation. In a sense, it is as if the painting—through the ral representations in it—wants to exclude him from the representation but cannot ("I feel we ought not to be here. . . . I feel an intruder"). In other words, the invisible frame they have stepped through has failed as a barrier to halt them in front of the painting.  With this act of disration, Satters and Pullman are violently expelled from the painting: "the light is extinguished in a black flash and they are flung upon their faces" (TC, 130). Not only are they expunged from the painting, but the panorama itself disappears. By interacting with painted representations, Satters brings about the destruction of the painting.
Thus halfway through the novel, Lewis reveals the true function of this painting: to provide a satire of the contemporary understanding of painting as a space the beholder can enter. The disappearance of the painting is the key to this long scene, for Satters and Pullman are the satiric "puppets" who (unwittingly) bring about the result Lewis felt was inevitable: art that a person can enter into will lead to the destruction of art. The Childermass is, in fact, one of the sharpest examples of Lewis's satire—a genre so significant to him that he considered it the modern art par excellence, encompassing both his fiction and his painting strategies. 30 He does not simply present us with a modern version of purgatory as situational comedy (although the novel often does that too). Instead, Lewis imagines a visual illustration of "time-philosophy," the modern preoccupation with temporal experience that he spends 500 pages disparaging and discrediting in Time and Western Man , the aethestic-poltical-philosophical treatise he published one year beforeThe Childermass. Pullman—Lewis's surrogate—is unperturbed to enter a panorama that is "like a picture," because this panorama fails as a representation: "This is nothing. . . . It's hollow! It's only Time!" (TWM, 105-6). Pullman need not treat it like a painting (that is, by standing in front of it and looking at it), but can walk into it, as an atmospheric disturbance: "It's a time-hallucination—we don't get them often but I've seen several" (TWM, 105). It might be disruptive, but it is not art: the experience of air in time is only as interesting or uninteresting as the weather.
For Lewis, the crucial characteristic of art—such as his own abstract, Vorticist painting—is that it is a different order of experience from reality, or "life," chiefly because it is a form of life that does not rely upon time. 31 Thus he writes in Blast I , his early Vorticist polemic, that art is "in no way directly dependent on 'Life.' It is no EQUIVALENT for Life, but ANOTHER life [what Stein calls "a life of its own"], as NECESSARY to existence as the former." 32 In contrast, the "time-hallucination" Pullman and Satters have walked into relies upon the viewer's experience in life to produce its meaning. Tarr (another Lewis surrogate) argues a similar point against time-painting: "Life is anything that could live and die. Art is peculiar; it is anything that lives and yet you cannot imagine as dying." 33 When Anastaysa, Tarr's intellectual partner, counters with a familiar rebuttal, "Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead man," Tarr remains adamant: "No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say, of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue." 34 The reason the work of art cannot die is because to die is to stop breathing, and the work of art cannot stop breathing because the work of art never was breathing. In other words, Lewis argues, art is a form of life, but with crucial differences: it is a life without air, without the particularities of a certain place at a specific time, and without the possibility of death. For Lewis, all these characteristics of art can be redescribed as life without the experience of time. In contrast, the panorama Pullman and Satters encounter is only a time-experience: they could go around it, but even "that would take hours"; instead they choose to go through it, which also necessarily takes time, albeit "a few minutes" (TC, 106).
In Blast I, Caliph's Design and Time and Western Man, Lewis presents most of the major modern art movements (including Impressionism, Futurism and Surrealism), as manifestations of "the prevalent time-doctrine" (TWM, 451). 35 He argues that the Impressionist commitment to quick, en plein air painting is, in fact, a commitment to temporality. Just as Marcel Proust "embalms" his past in A la recherche du temps perdu, so does Claude Monet embalm his experience of a moment of morning light (and, in other paintings, afternoon light, noon light, and dusky light) on the Rouen Cathedral. Futurism fares little better (dismissed as Impressionism with cars, or "automobilism"), while Surrealism aims to make art "super-real" by mummifying reality. 36
Oswald Spengler's theory of art, according to Lewis, is one of the clearest articulations of time-philosophy's aesthetic philosophy: because Spengler conceives of art as a "full, coloured, breathing materiality . . . it not only dies for ever, but everything about it dies for ever. There is nothing 'universal' left in it" (TWM, 267). When Spengler conceives of art as alive in time—with a "breathing materiality"—he describes an art with air. Such art is flooded by experiences of time, by the particularities and contingencies of its temporal existence. Lewis presses his point further. The contemporary audience of time-philosophy art is not satisfied with "a picture, a representation." Instead, "we exact real blood and tears. We want, in short, reality" (TWM, 271). By opposing reality ("realblood and tears") to a representation ("a picture"), Lewis underscores the opposition between time-art and a representation. By breaking down the distinction between art and life, a time-philosophy object—whether it is a painting by Salvador Dalí or the painting Pullman and Satters walk through—is a social phenomenon as opposed to an aesthetic one. 37 As Lewis puts it, time-art "no longer stands for itself" (TWM, 274).
Lewis, who is rarely credited with a coherent theory of representation, is actually consistently—satirically—expressing one. Most importantly, what initially appears to be the characteristic of his divergence from Stein—the air in the painting—turns out to be an endorsement of her theory (although Lewis would never imagine himself aligned with Stein). Just as Stein removes commas from her poetry to exclude the audience's breath from the meaning of her text, Lewis scorns time-art for its "breathing materiality" (TWM, 267). In fact, Lewis's condemnation of The Childermass painting as a "time-hallucination" takes Stein's theory and expands on it. By rejecting time from art, Lewis is not just ignoring the physical existence of the audience via his or her breath. He is attempting to withhold from art that which any living creature needs to sustain itself: regular, repeated intakes of air, over a sustained period of time. His repudiation of time-philosophy is, in essence, a sweeping rejection of the experience of the viewer or reader to the meaning of the work of art. However fleeting a human experience might be, it must have duration.
I am suggesting that Lewis and Stein—one hostile to the other and neither of them aligned by critics—actually hold a similar theory of the art object, and from their understanding of the relation between painting and the beholder we can deduce a whole set of other issues. Consider, first of all, the literary historical claims: my reading goes against the accepted view of both Stein and Lewis. In section two, I argued that Stein is not trying to produce indeterminate meaning, and thus she cannot be satisfactorily categorized as a poststructuralist or a postmodernist (as is often attempted). While the critical consensus on Lewis is less unified (in part because many studies of his work do not tackle his complicated aesthetic theory), the style of his satirical writing has led critics to interpret it as incipiently postmodern. 38 David Peters Corbett, for example, interprets Lewis's work as, " . . . radically ambiguous—at once essential to all human experience and claustrophobically private." 39 Jessica Burstein provides a provocative account of Lewis's "cold modernism" (characterized by prosthetic devices and beetle shells), also taking its implicit cue from postmodernism. 40 Fredric Jameson most explicitly claims Lewis's modernism as postmodernism by noting, "the striking similarities between Lewis' undertaking and the contemporary poststructuralist aesthetic, which signals the dissolution of the modernist paradigm . . . and foretells the emergence of some new, properly postmodernist or schizophrenic conception of the cultural artifact. . . . " 41 Jameson characterizes Lewis's narrative as an unconscious, postmodern critique of political ideology; a Lewis novel "frees its ideological content to demonstrate its own contradictions" (FOA, 22-3). According to Jameson, Lewis's "protofascism" is, in fact, a sophisticated, life-long opposition to traditional Marxism, and thus such "protofascism," has more in common with Althusserian theory than with Hitler's policies. But my point here is that Lewis is not producing a postmodern "cultural artifact," and thus his "protofascism" cannot be rationalized as a postmodern ideological critique. 42 Instead, Lewis aims—quite explicitly—to produce a satire of the most egregious cultural phenomenon (in his view)—the "Time Cult." The other effects generated (i.e., narrative discontinuity and prosthetic persons) are not indications of his postmodernism, but side-effects of his comprehensive satirical goal. Moreover, by rejecting the idea that the spectator's experience is part of the meaning of the work, Lewis is also rejecting any theory—poststructuralist, postmodernist, reader-response or some other variation—that values the spectator's contribution to the work of art.
In other words, Lewis is producing not the first example of postmodernism, but the first critique of it. The "time-hallucination" painting inThe Childermass (which has been wholly neglected by critics), does not raise issues in the realist tradition, such as how a painting depicting real life relates to the subject matter it represents. Instead, time-painting foregrounds the issue of whether an art work even has an impenetrable frame that stops you, physically, at the surface of the painting. Lewis is, in fact, anticipating a version of Michael Fried's central theory of twentieth-century modern painting, articulated decades later in "Art and Objecthood" . As in Stein's essays and Lewis's novel, in Fried's essay the focus is on the relationship between the art object and its beholder. Noting the escalating dominance of the physical object to one's experience of art, Fried argues that the central struggle in modernist painting is to "undo or neutralize objecthood in one way or another," by opposing all manner of literality (AAO, 41). In contrast, the Minimalist art of the 1960s, represented by Tony Smith, Robert Morris and Donald Judd (among others), "offered their audience a kind of heightened perceptual experience" of the object in its installation space (AAO, 40). Instead of defeating objecthood, Minimalist art relished in objecthood by establishing the spectator's experience as an essential part of a work's meaning.
Temporality, as Fried notes, is crucially connected to the notion of objecthood. Unlike the modern painting and sculpture of Frank Stella and Anthony Caro, Minimalist art "was preoccupied with experiences that persist in time; the 'presentment' of duration, of 'time itself as though it were some sort of literalist object (AAO, 44).'" 43 Fried and Lewis both believe that temporality is part of the destruction of art; for Fried, temporality is another version of objecthood, while for Lewis, temporality is the crucial aspect of experience and thus the chief threat to art. Moreover, one crucial aspect of Fried's theory is that art cannot simply disregard literality (or temporality); it must defeat the theatrical presence of the literal object. When Pullmann and Satters are unable to perceive the physical conditions of painting as distinct from representation—that is, they cannot see the canvas but can perceive the oil painting emerging as "an inky exploding crysalid" (TC, 40)—the novel is depicting time-painting simply ignoring its physical conditions, instead of acknowledging and overcoming those physical conditions. In a sense, Lewis is ridiculing time-painting's status as only an object in the world, and thus an experience of time. But the essential point here—that the experience of temporality in art is anathema to art—is identical in both Fried and Lewis. 44 The writers and artists Lewis denounces venerate time as a literal object (in his view) instead of aiming to defeat objecthood.
The time-art Lewis warns against persists in other postmodern movements, such as Conceptual, Earthworks, Happenings, and Performance art. Earthworks artist Dennis Oppenheim notes that, "sculptors have never been as dynamically involved in time as they are now." 45 The decision by these artists to make art in and of the landscape foregrounds the spectator's involvement in durational art. 46 Most recently, the summer 2002 "Tempo" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (in Queens), "focuses on distinct perceptions of time—phenomenological, empirical, political, and fictional," by including works which require the spectator's physical involvement. Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculpture is a performance series that instructs each museum-goer to complete a 60-second action ("Hold your breath and think of Spinoza"). 47 Such a work illustrates Lewis's point: time-art involves "the merging of art in life" in order to produce a social experience in life—"not an aesthetic phenomenon" (DPDS, 68-9).
But besides these literary historical and art historical arguments (that
it does not work to see either Stein, or Lewis, as postmodern), Stein's
and Lewis's view that everything outside the "frame" of their work is
irrelevant to meaning is one version of a major, twentieth-century
theoretical debate. By focusing on the ontology of the art object,
Stein and Lewis are in fact calling attention to a more general set of
beliefs concerning the relation between a thing and its place. Their
view is that an object and its place are entirely separate conceptions,
and that the artist should aim to maintain that separation. Thus a poem
is distinct from its reception in the world, a painting is distinct from
its frame. In the subsequent chapters of the dissertation, I show how
this notion of an object's connection to place has reemerged in recent
literary theory in the guise of a radically different topic: diaspora. But
if the problem of the diasporic differs from Stein and Lewis's interests
in the ontology of the work of art, the basic structure of the debate
is the same. Specifically, recent theories of diaspora replace the thing
with a person, and the place with a nation. Instead of the question, How
does an object relate to where it is in the world, the question is now,
In what sense is a people related to the place they are from?
Lisa Siraganian is the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Humanities Fellow in English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. This essay derives from her recently completed dissertation, Breathing Freely: The Object of Art and the Subject of Politics in American Modernism (Johns Hopkins University, 2003).
1. Gertrude Stein, "Pictures," in Writings, 1932-1946, vol. 2 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 226-7. "Pictures" will henceforth be abbreviated as "P," Stein's Writings, 1932-1946, vol. 2 will henceforth be abbreviated as V2. See also Volume One of Stein's Writings, 1903-1932, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1998), henceforth abbreviated as V1.
2. Stein is introducing a sophisticated rendering of her relationship to painting here, one which is remarkably akin to Michael Fried's revolutionary claims decades later. In a series of essays and books, Fried argues, "that for Diderot and the French anti-theatrical tradition generally, the painter's task was crucially to negate or neutralize what I have called the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld. This was to be done, in the first place, by depicting res so engrossed or . . . absorbed in what they were doing, thinking, and feeling that they appeared oblivious of everything else, including, crucially, the beholder standing before the painting;" Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 47-8, henceforth abbreviated as AAO. A successful rendering of absorption could lead to a painter's "ultimate purpose—bringing actual viewers to halt in front of the painting and holding them there in a virtual trance of imaginative involvement;" AAO, 48. It is precisely this "virtual trance" that Stein describes repeatedly in her essays, stemming from painting's ability to "give me pleasure and hold my attention" (Stein, "P", 225).
3. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London: Methuen, 1956). Henceforth abbreviated as TC.
4. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that Satters and Pullman are already dead, and their experience in the afterlife is as close to life as they can get. But instead of problematizing my argument, this point is in fact a support of it. Lewis is suggesting that air-filled painting is nearly indistinguishable—not just from real-life—but from an attenuated after-life in purgatory.
5. My larger project concerns the ontology of the work of art, not only in Stein and Lewis, but also in William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Marcel Duchamp, and more contemporary writers and artists including Amiri Baraka, Robert Smithson and Leslie Marmon Silko. Each is interested in the nature of the object and hence the position of the subject (both reader and writer) in relation to the object. In taking up an aesthetic problem at the heart of modernism—and postmodernism—I also explore related political projects. In fact, I argue that writers with political positions as different as Stein's suffragism, Lewis's anti-Communist comopolitanism (and, as I suggest in subsequent chapters, Williams's diasporic nativism, Olson's New Deal liberalism and Baraka's Black Nationalism) are all committed to deriving their politics from their vision of the work of art, a vision articulated by each in terms of air.
6. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933). Other members of this avant-garde group included Juan Gris and Francis Picabia, both of whom Stein befriended and promoted.
7. Gertrude Stein, "Picasso," in V2, 508; henceforth abbreviated as "PI."
8. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons in V1, 313-55, henceforth abbreviated as "TB"; and "Susie Asado," V1, 362. Michael Hoffman, Development of Abstractionism in the Writings of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1965), 162; Marjorie Perloff, Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 76-7, henceforth abbreviated as POI.
9. Gertrude Stein, "What is English Literature," In V2, 198. Henceforth abbreviated as "WIEL."
10. Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein: A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 113.
11. From Gertrude Stein, How Writing is Written: Volume Two of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), quoted in Bruce Keller (ed.), A Gertrude Stein Companion: content with the example (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 305.
12. Stein's relationship to success was complicated. On the one hand, she reported being hurt by people's failure to understand her meaning. She compares the public rejection of her poetry to the initial rejection of Matisse's painting: "she could not understand why it infuriated everybody . . . it bothered her and angered her . . . just as later she did not understand why since the writing was all so clear and natural they mocked at and were enraged by her work" (Stein, "Autobiography", V1, 693, henceforth abbreviated as "A"). But on the other hand, she takes this initial confusion and rejection to be a validation of her poetic genius and her poetry's semi-conscious staying power: "They always say . . . that my writing is appalling but they always quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly. . . . My sentences do get under their skin, only they do not know that they do" ("A," 730).
13. Gertrude Stein, "Henry James," (1932-33), in V2, 158.
14. At first glance, it might seem easier to justify the reader's "business" of absorption than the writer's absorption in her own words. Stein, while interested in both, is aesthetically committed to the writer's to a greater extent. In her essay, "What is English Literature", she characterizes this pleasure of concentration with the text not in terms of the reader's engrossment, but the writer's "choice between serving god and mammon . . . [which] has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to with success. It has to do with completion" ("WIEL," 202). The reference here is to the New Testament ("No one can serve two masters. . . . You cannot serve God and wealth", Matt 6:24—"mammon" is Greek for "wealth"). If a writer uses words "indirectly" then he or she is serving mammon, and by extension, the reader. Thus in choosing to write to a particular audience, the writer is choosing particularity and materialism (hence "mammon") over God, and losing her "direct" relationship to words.
15. Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," in V2, 230-1, henceforth abbreviated as "PAG."
16. Stein considers and rejects various forms of punctuation for several pages. Questions and exclamations are implied in a sentence's form, "and so why add to it the question mark . . . exclamation marks have the same difficulty" ("PAG," 317). Other marks are rejected because they resemble commas: colons and semi-colons "are definitely more commas than period . . . they really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature" ("PAG," 319).
17. One of the most suggestive and illuminating readings of "A BOX" is William Gass's, "Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence," in The World within the Word (New York: Knopf, 1978), 63-123. He suggests that Stein's "manifest text" is actually a "coded commentary on the covert texts" (The World within the Word, 92). Gass, however, does not consider how Stein's removal of punctuation marks alters the typical interpretation of these poems, nor does he consider Stein's reasons for their removal as part of her larger aesthetic.
18. Consider the following example in which Stein presents a series of noun modifiers which are sorted out as the sentence continues: "Blind and weak and organised and worried and betrothed and resumed and never startled and not at all bloated, this which is no rarer than frequently is not so astonishing when hair brushing is added," ("TB," 347). As with "A BOX," this sentence is baffling until one recognizes the categorization of words by part of speech. "Blind," "weak," "organized," "worried" and so on are examples of adjectives, while "startled" is "never" in this set because it is a verb ("startling" is the correct adjective). "Not at all bloated" might appear problematic—"bloated" is an adjective—until we realize that the entire phrase, "not at all bloated" is an adjectival phrase (as in, "the not at all bloated sponge"). Thus Stein includes "not at all bloated" because it suggests the difficulty of categorization when certain words have several possible syntactical functions. "This," for example, can be either a pronoun or a demonstrative adjective: hence the "astonishing" situation of "this" functioning as both a pronoun (as in the phrase, "this which is no rarer than . . . ") and as a demonstrative adjective (as in the second "this" of "This is this dress, aider," V1 , 326). The sentence concludes with an adverb ("frequently") and verb participle ("hair brushing") because both have syntactically dual roles.
19. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetitions," in V2, 303.
20. Haas (ed.), Gertrude Stein: A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 18.
21. Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 248.
22. Jayne L. Walker, The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 148.
23. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
24. Michael Davidson, "On Reading Stein," 197; Bruce Andrews, "Text and Context," 37, reprinted in Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (eds.), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). For another account of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets' interpretation of Stein, see George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989): 4-7.
25. Charles Bernstein, "The Dollar Value of Poetry," 139, reprinted in Andrews and Bernstein (eds.), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.
26. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), 21.
27. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 26. Henceforth abbreviated as TWM.
28. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art, ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 26. Henceforth abbreviated as MWA.
29. Wyndham Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), vi. Henceforth abbreviated as DPDS.
30. Satire for Lewis "is nothing else but the truth", but "it is the 'truth' of the intellect" instead of the "'truth' of the average romantic sensualism'" (Lewis, MWA, 99-100). Lewis emphasizes the intellect in contrast to "romantic sensualism" in order to distinguish his work from escapist fiction, which denies the reality of the modern world. While the "plain-reader" might suppose that "the author . . . is mainly occupied with the problem of taking us out of ourselves . . . making us live for a few hours a more exciting life than our own" (MWA, 11), the satirist aims for a permanent art that is altogether different and more substantial because it requires "the entire human capacity—for sensation, reflection, imagination, and will" (MWA, 12). Satire is also like Lewis's Vorticist painting because both aim to criticize modern culture, without merely attempting to escape from it: "Vorticism accepted the machine-world: that is the point to stress. . . . This, of course, serves to define Vorticism as the opposite of an 'escapist' doctrine." From Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913-1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), 340.
31. Vorticism essentially emerged from Lewis's Vorticist "Manifesto" in Blast 1, the magazine he edited in 1914. The various artists and writers associated with the magazine included Ezra Pound, Rebecca West, Ford Maddox Ford, Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsworth, and Jacob Epstein (among others). In Charles Harrison's words, Vorticism was "determinedly anti-Victorian and anti-picturesque"; "The mechanical and the geometric were upheld against the organic and the naturalistic, energy against sensibility, will against morality." Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism: 1900-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 111. Vorticism has been compared to (and is at least related to), Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism.
32. Wyndham Lewis (ed.), Blast 1 (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1992), 130.
33. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: the 1918 Version, ed. Paul O'Keeffe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), 298.
34. Lewis, Tarr, 298-9.
35. The one major art movement Lewis is ambivalent towards is Cubism. Although he sometimes dismissed Cubist still-life paintings with the punning label, "Nature Mortism", he was also admittedly indebted to the Cubism he sometimes "blasted." His training at the Slade might have left him fairly hostile to new, continental European art movements, but by 1911 his painting showed the influence of Picasso's and Braque's developing Analytical Cubist style. See "Chapter 4: Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism," in Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 75-113; and "Chapter 3: Matter and Creation: Painting, 1911-1912," in Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 53-94.
36. Lewis's term "Automobilism" comes from Blast: "Futurism, as preached by Marinetti, is largely Impressionism up=to=date. To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt," (Lewis, Blast I, 143). Lewis complains that the Futurists' relationship to machinery is more like worship. They are too emotional and not thoughtful enough: "not a deliberate and reasoned enthusiasm for the possibilities that lie in this new spectacle of machinery; of the use it can be put to in art." Wyndham Lewis, Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex? , ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1986), 57. But the larger complaint against Futurism was that it stemmed from Impressionism, without advancing on what the Impressionists attempted: "The Futurists, and their French followers, have as the basis of their aesthetic the Impressionists generally. They are simply a rather abstruse and complex form of the 1880 French Impressionists" (Caliph's Design, 104).
37. His specific argument against Surrealism works as follows: The surrealists "pass over into the living material of all art, its ground and what it contemplates, and . . . tamper directly with the cezannesque apples, for instance, before the painter has started his picture" (DPDS, 67). In other words, when the surrealists transform an apple before painting it, they effectively aim to alter life, instead of art. Since Surrealism is "the merging of art in life" (DPDS, 69), it is therefore, "not an aesthetic phenomenon" at all, but a social phenomenon (DPDS, 68). As Lewis describes in a later essay, the spectator of art should "not be required to participate in any way in the real", for art is "something outside 'the real'—outside the temporal order—altogether" (Lewis, "Super-Nature versus Super-Real," in Wyndham Lewis on Art, 331-2). Lewis is fundamentally opposed to art which requires the spectator to experience reality as presence; that is, an art which insists upon the spectator's experience of the object in real-time.
38. Other critics who propose significant, theoretical interconnections between Lewis's art and writing—as do Paul Peppis, Tom Normand, and Reed Way Dasenbrock—tend to focus on the early Vorticist manifestos in relation to Lewis's politics, philosophy and painting, instead of The Childermass. See Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror up to Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). More generally, literary critics have neglected The Childermass in favor of Tarr, The Revenge for Love and other Lewis works, which also means that critics have ignored the extent to which this lengthy scene of Pullman and Satters walking into a painting is a powerful narrative example for many of Lewis's aesthetic and philosophical writings. Exceptions include Hugh Kenner, Peter Caracciolo and Daniel Schenker, who provide valuable insights into the novel, but nonetheless neglect the scene of the painting: Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1954); Peter L. Caracciolo, "'Carnivals of Mass-Murder': The Frazerian Origins of Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass," in Robert Fraser (ed.), Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1990), 207-31; Daniel Schenker, Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
39. David Peters Corbett, "History, Art and Theory in Time and Western Man," in Paul Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis's Painting & Writing (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996), 120.
40. Jessica Burstein, "Waspish Segments: Lewis, Prosthesis, Fascism," 4.2 , 139-64.
41. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 19-20, henceforth abbreviated as FOA. Jameson, of course, was also trying to argue that despite Lewis's poststructuralist maneuvers ("stressing discontinuity, allegory, the mechanical, the gap between signifier and signified, the lapse in meaning," FOA, 20), Lewis "cannot be fully assimilated to the contemporary textual aesthetic without anachronism: we will indeed want to insist on the ways in which these tendencies are over and over again strategically recontained in his work" (FOA, 20).
42. In the dissertation, I consider this issue of Lewis's "protofascism" at more length. Lewis's disturbing flirtation with fascism is undeniably problematic, but Jameson's account of Lewis's "protofascism" as a form of postmodern ideological critique does not solve the problem. In fact, in The Childermass, the re Pullman and Satters nearly kill is none other than Thomas Paine himself, the father of modern representational democracy. Thus Lewis is suggesting that stepping inside a painting full of air—an instantiation of time-philosophy—threatens the very possibility of representation. His point is that the frameless art of time-philosophy not only corrupts representation in art; time-philosophy also undermines political representation by creating a world in which persons and representations appear to be equal. The "loutish" Satters destroys the re of Paine because he feels that this re is a threat to himself. It is time-philosophy's corruption of representation—both aesthetic and political—that Lewis is focusing on here: aesthetic because Paine is a ral representation in the painting, and political because Paine is a historical symbol of political representation. Therefore, Lewis is not theoretically opposed to a liberal politics, nor is he postmodern: instead, he contemplates the ultimate fate of the modern democratic state when the very notion of representation is under enormous strain by people as thoughtless as Satters. In an effort to avoid the destruction of representation, Lewis produces his own version of an art without time: intricate, semi-abstract self-portraits of himself as a beetle on covers of his magazine, The Enemy (1926-27).
43. In Minimalism, literality manifests itself as framelessness, instantiated for Fried in Tony Smith's sublime car trip on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Smith describes the moment at which painting ends, when he realizes that his experience of this ride cannot be represented pictorially: "there is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it" (quoted in AAO, 158). In other words, Tony Smith, according to Fried, eliminates the frame of a painting by first reconceptualizing it as a frame of window that can be physically traversed in time—precisely like Pullman and Satters' journey into the panorama in The Childermass. These are both versions of the ruptured frame between art and life. By turning the picture frame into a window frame, both Smith and the time-philosophers negate the frame and thus espouse literality.
44. Part of the confusion here is that Lewis's term of attack—"Modernist"—is the same term Fried uses to defend art. Of course, Lewis could not have known the Minimalist art of the 1960s that Fried was responding to, nor did Lewis ever formulate his theory in Fried's condensed terms. Moreover, the Minimalist "new esthetic" Fried discredits was, for Lewis, already rearing its head in early twentieth-century modernism, while the particular objects of Lewis's polemic do not concern Fried.
45. Patricia Novell, interview with Dennis Oppenheim, 29 March 1969 in her Recording Conceptual Art, Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Weiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 29.
46. Robert Smithson, another major artist of the period, writes that, "art not only communicates through space, but also through time." Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 342. His glue-pours (vats of bright orange glue poured down a slope) and mirror displacements (mirrors cantilevered in the dirt), focus precisely on the issue of art's duration.
47. Roxana Marcoci, Tempo Brochure (29 June-9 September 2002, MOMA/QNS). Available as a pdf file on the web at www.moma.org/exhibitions/2002/tempo/flash_content/Tempo.pdf. According to Marcoci, "Each of [Wurm's] time-based sculptures consists of an instruction that can take the form of a drawing - often with a list of the items involved, or with a written proposition, such as 'Hold your breath and think of Spinoza' . . . the artist creates experimental situations in which unorthodox action and the structure of time form the work" (Marcoci, Tempo, 7). See also Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculptures, 1988-1998: Index of Works (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 1999), 139.
"In view of the phenomena to be dealt with, and also because of the now evident tendencies to think in terms of 'type,' it is possible that the conception of type, types of man, physical and psychological types of men, will, among thoughtful people, largely supplant the now prevalent notion of races. However this may be, suffice it here to repeat that race is a confused and uncertain subject."
Jean Toomer, "Race Problems and Modern Society" 1
When Toomer wrote these words in 1929, six years had passed since his immersion in African American rural culture and the publication of Cane, the book that would eventually secure him a place in the American canon. 2 In the following year, 1930, Toomer would deny James Weldon Johnson permission to include poems from Cane in the revised version of the Anthology of Negro Poetry, as he was reluctant to be associated with "all things which emphasize or tend to over-emphasize racial or cultural divisions." 3 After being hailed as one of the instigators and stellar prospects of the Negro Renaissance—he was lauded as the "the very first artist of the race. . . . a bright morning star of the race in literature" by the influential critic William Stanley Braithwaite—Toomer's disdain for racial essentialism, which characterized most of his career, hardened into a principle of not being identified publicly as African American by 1924. 4 This decision was also influenced by his contact with the Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff, a relationship which led to what many have seen as Toomer's idealistic and millennial predictions about the end of racial categorization in the western world—a type of hazy thinking and bland transcendence of social actuality and social organization which has incurred much criticism. Indeed, critics have often made a link between a downward trajectory in his career and his refusal to accept an African American identity; Robert Brinkmeyer Jr. is merely more outspoken than most in remarking that "without the touch of the black soul, Jean Toomer was not an artist but a scribbler." 5 Yet this dismissal of his later thinking can obscure its continuities with the Cane period, and particularly the subtlety of some of the ways in which Toomer engaged with mass cultural discourses as a way of disturbing normative practices of racialization. As the quotation at the start of this essay implies, Toomer was not so much interested in eliminating all social categorizations and distinctions, as in reconring them in accordance with new ideas about what constituted "identity." "Types," whether considered physiologically or psychologically, might come to replace "races," or so he hoped; and in doing so the rigidly deterministic attitude towards race in the America of the 1920s might become avoidable, or even irrelevant. It is Toomer's engagement with the discourse of physical culture, its implications for racial politics in the 1920s, and how this is explored in Cane that I shall examine—and how seeing bodies as "types" might begin to disrupt or dislodge racial encodings of the body.
In his late 1920s autobiography "Earth Being," Toomer attested that "I would far rather form a man than form a book." 6 For much of his life Toomer, who classified his heredity as containing "Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish [strains], with some dark blood," was interested in the possibilities of developing his sense of self, something that almost all biographical portraits of him have noted (WAS, 92). 7 This took various forms, and was usually under the aegis of a particular philosophical, technical or spiritual system; it applied to his intense involvement with the regimen of physical culture exercises which he undertook in the early 1910s, his ambition to be first a musician and then a writer during the early 1920s, his involvement with Gurdjieffian philosophy from 1924 onwards, his social experiment in communal living at Portage in 1931, and his interest in the Alexander technique in the 1940s. Each of these was initially characterized by Toomer's extreme enthusiasm and remarkably energetic application, an enthusiasm akin to what he jokingly later referred to as a "neophyte on the threshold of a new world." 8 These "neophytisms" represented a belief in a capacity to reshape and reform his subjectivity, a view which takes subjectivity as a version of aesthetic formalism, something to be shaped and revised in relation to an ideal; as he said, "my whole being is devoted to making my small area of existence a work of art" (WAS, 19). Such statements attest to the strength of Toomer's belief that a process of continual self-creation, which he termed "individualization," was the most significant personal, social or political concept imaginable. What they also suggest, however, is that new discourses of physiology were emerging (and specifically for the purposes of this essay, the discourse of physical culture) which had a significant role in the gender formations of modernity, and that such discourses often offered their consumers a particular agency over the constitution of their identity. Put in simpler terms, physical culture promised its customers that building the body built the man. Yet evading biological determinism in this way by taking oneself "in hand," as Toomer remarked on beginning his physical culture regime, becomes much more subversive when the built body troubles the biological determinations which were believed to be specifically racial. It is this which the essay proposes to investigate, through looking at Toomer's involvement with the physical culture phenomenon, the bodybuilding "craze" which America underwent in the early twentieth century.
As the historian Harold B. Sergel has commented, the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century were characterized by the beginning of the "extraordinary modernist preoccupation with physicality." 9 The physical culture movement that swept across Europe and America in the latter years of the nineteenth century, making millionaires and celebrities of res like Bernarr Macfadden and Eugene Sandow, was just part of the "sports craze" which saw unprecedented levels of participation and organization in a variety of sports across the U.S. 10 The precursor to modern body-building, the physical culture movement made millions of dollars by publishing techniques for developing muscular physiques in magazines such as Macfadden's Physical Culture, which he began publishing in 1899. This was a magazine that prescribed health in terms of a disciplined attitude to diet, exercise, sex, work and leisure, and enjoyed a circulation of 550,000 just over a year after it was first published. 11
Macfadden himself was a self-made success in the Horatio Alger mould. Born in Missouri in 1868, he had an upbringing beset with family instability, poverty and illness, which he counteracted through obsessive attention to his health, fitness, diet, and the development of a complete system of complementary medicine and exercise. In 1893 he attended the World's Fair in Chicago, and marveled at the classical sculptures, which he described as "perfect specimens of human life carried out in stone" (WIAC, 17). While at the fair, he met Florenz Ziegfeld, who was there promoting Eugene Sandow. As Robert Ernst discusses, "Ziegfeld's lighting effects, which accentuated the German strongman's muscles in the contrast of highlights and black shadows, fascinated young McFadden, who donned tights and began imitating Sandow's poses as Hercules, Atlas, Ajax, and Samson" (WIAC, 17). After a while Macfadden moved to New York, re-named himself Bernarr as a more masculine moniker than his original name of Bernard, and opened a physical culture studio. He founded his publishing company in 1898, which was the beginning of his phenomenal success, and would produce many titles over the course of his career; these included Making Old Bodies Young: 38 Lessons in Building Vitality ; Marriage a Lifelong Honeymoon ; The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood ; The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood ; Physical Culture for Baby ; How to Gain Weight ; How to Lose Weight ; and Exercise and Like it . 12 The success of these books, Physical Culture magazine, and especially his confessional magazine True Story, resulted in his fortune totaling $30 million by 1931. Macfadden's career was marked by incredible entrepreneurial energy, total belief in his own carefully developed systems of holistic health, and a humorless inflexibility which led him to extreme views on certain social and political matters. All of these factors bear striking resemblance to the career of Toomer.