i, I I i I i t t t Gestalt and Concept (Excerpts) C,ARL EINSTEIN Tianslated and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen This text is a fragment of a larger manuscript that was never published and probably never finished. The ideas expressed in it are close enough to those in Carl Einstein's Georges Braque (1934) to suggest that it dates from around the same time. In several unpublished letters dating from 1930-31 to Ewald Wasmuth, Einstein wrote of his plan to publish his "aesthetics," which he described as a collection of essays; it seems probable that "Gestalt and Concept" was part of this unfinished project.l Even as a fragment, it remains one of Einstein's most important-and brilliant-theoretical texts. The German word "Gestalt" has been left in the original because no common English translation of it seemed entirely satisfactory given its somewhat idiosyn- cratic meaning for Einstein. It is not synonymous with "form," "structure," or "figure"; as Einstein writes in a passage of the essay not excerpted here, form, in contrast to the amorphous, dynamic richness of gestalt, "means delimitation, impoverishment, exclusion of the Real." Gestalt denotes the opposite of these attributes; it signifies the raw, unmediated subjective experience of inner and outer phenomena prior to any articulation in form or concept; it signifies process as opposed to fixity, thinking as opposed to knowing. And here art is identified not with form but with gestalt, with the concrete, the visionary; it is opposed to conceptu- alization and cognition. It strives "to contest deadly generalizations and the rationalisitic impoverishment of the world, to sever the chains of causality, to unravel the web of significations." And it achieves this through the "proliferation of gestalt, such that the deadly, ever more pervasive order is combated and destroyed by an intensified disorder, i.e., by a continually renewed gestalt formation." l The German text is printed under the title "Diese Aesthetiker veranlassen uns" in Carl Einstein, Werke Band 4: Aus d,ern Nachlar|.I, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1992), pp. 194-221. It is not clear why the editors do not use the title "Gestalt und Begriff," which can be found on a separate page included with the manuscript preserved in the Carl-Einstein- Archiv of the Akademie der Ktinste Berlin. OCTOBER 107, Winw 2004, pp. 169-76. @ 2004 Octobn Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Tbchnolng. "C,estalt and C,oncept" @ 2004 Fannei {l WalzVerlag, Berlin.