Archaeologies of Modernity: Avant-Garde Bildung by Rainer Rumold (review)

Rainer Rumold's Archaeologies of Modernity: Avant-Garde Bildung explores how the German avant-garde brought about new ways of thinking about the concept of Bildung where the image, unmoored from the literary tradition and metaphorical meaning, dominated. The author discusses the works of Franz Kafka, Oskar Kokoschka, Jean/Hans Arp, Carl Einstein, Kurt Schwitters, and Walter Benjamin, whom he regards as formative agents of this paradigmatic shift. Rumold traces affinities in how these representatives of expressionism, Dadaism, and surrealism generated forms and figures of the visual unconscious in the primitivist search for a space outside of an established symbolic order. The avant-garde's visual turn, Rumold argues, represented an implicit critique of the traditional conception of Bildung as intellectual and aesthetic self-cultivation and education through literary high culture. In its place emerged a new sense of Bildung as a process of forming, shaping, or auto-generating non-representational and non-metaphorical images (be they verbal or visual) that constituted a critique of Western conceptions of the self.

Archaeologies of Modernity begins by outlining the significance of the uniquely German idea of Bildung for the historical avant-garde. In the first four chapters, Rumold focuses on the reaction among some German avant-garde artists and writers against the inwardness of mainstream German expressionism, which was perceived to be a return to a traditional understanding of Bildung as the formation of an autonomous self. These avant-gardists turned to French surrealism in their search for the "body- and image-space" (21), a concept Rumold borrows from Benjamin. Through detailed analyses of works by Kokoschka, Kafka, and Arp, the author examines the heterogeneous artistic strategies used by avant-gardists for a playful, tactile image-based critique of language, in an effort to bring to light the forces of the unconscious that were excluded from a traditional conception of Bildung.

By selecting artists from metropolitan centres, like Vienna (Kokoschka), as well as from more peripheral outposts, like Prague and Strasbourg (Kafka, Arp), Rumold highlights how the latter were able to introduce a new critical and creative energy into the modernist project. As outsiders from multilingual borderlands, Kafka and Arp were acutely sensitive to the tendency of tradition to harden into convention and delighted in drawing attention to the relativity of language and the symbolic order. Kafka's literalized metaphors, for example, have an unsettling power to destabilize what is taken as given in language; Arp, on the other hand, drew on local dialects whose sounds and images, he believed, were more directly expressive of the immediate and unconscious character of quotidian life.

In focusing on these writers as borderland figures, Rumold does not lose sight of their place as avant-garde critics within the tradition of Bildung. To this extent Rumold breaks with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's account of minor literature as a subversion of the dominant language. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari place heavy emphasis on Kafka as instantiating his social context, Rumold shows how Kafka breaks free from this context by creating an unlocalizable, archaic dreamworld that prioritizes the visual character of metaphor, in all its strangeness and immediacy, over the familiar mediated meanings of literary tradition.

The second part of the book centres on Carl Einstein's creative and theoretical writings on the European avant-garde. Rumold regards Einstein as one of the most important theorists of the avant-garde next to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, but remarks that he is only now beginning to be recognized outside of Germany and France. Rumold himself has written a number of articles for an anglophone audience on Einstein's involvement with the French avant-garde, and his monograph, The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism toward Postmodernism (2002), includes a chapter on Einstein's exile from Nazi Germany, his political activism during the Spanish Civil War, and his shifting and conflicted relationship to the avant-garde movements of the 1920s to 1930s. In...