Outline 12/25/10

1. Introduction: Reconsidering Léger's machine period:
    * Survival of Cubism / Cubist space after 1919
    * Motif of the machine / topos of the factory
    * Marx and Hegel in the age of automated machines

To what extent, and in what ways, did Léger's Cubism pertain to the machines he claims inspired him? How do we reckon with the conspicuous absence of actual machines and machine parts in the paintings of his so-called "machine period"? What "knowledge of the machine" do his pictures ultimately provide?  To answer these questions will necessitate, as I hope to demonstrate, a revolution in our understanding of machines and paintings.

1. Léger and Cubist space. Transition from Contrastes de formes to post-1918 Cubist paintings. Several claims to make here: 1) Léger was never more Cubist than after WWI--in other words, after the moment of Cubism's apparent death. But his relationship to painting, though authentically Cubist, was diametrically opposed to that of Picasso and Braque; the world of his Cubism could not be further from theirs. 2) More so than any of the other Cubists, Léger begs comparison to traditions of pre-classical depiction, Egyptian art (wall painting/relief carving) in particular. Readings of Schafer and Groenewegen-Frankfort. 2) Importance of circular forms; multiple valences of the circle in Léger's paintings: as design motif, object-part (or part-object), as token of a post-Cubist "planetary" space. These possibilities are held in the balance, so to speak; all are suggested as directions for a post-Cubist spatiality, though it's not until the late 1920s that Léger arrives at a conclusive spatiality--though not necessarily a post-Cubist spatiality--appropriated from Kandinsky and El Lissitzky (to be discussed more fully in Chapter 3). 3) The machine object as a "center of energy" (Einstein), an absolute, an obsession. Though Léger insists on the importance of machines throughout the Cubist years (1918-1924), neither machines nor machine parts are visible in his paintings, not even in the "machine period" of 1918-20. To what, if not the machine--or some machinic imagination of the modern city--can we attribute his turn to Cubism?

2. Leger's "machine period" (1918-20) reconsidered. Argument turns on the unpaintability (resistance to depiction) of modern machinery, and in particular the factory. Machinery: "a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs" (Marx). History of painting of machines from Bonhommé to the 1920s. Chapter to be written in two sections: 1) The topos of the factory. Status of factories in his earliest "machine" paintings. Importance of factories as sites of radical uprisings: the Italian biennio rosso, Russian Revolution, Spartacist revolt. Urban sociology of Paris proletariat in aftermath of First World War. 2) Early theories of automatism; boosterists of automated factories; their critics. Influence of Cendrars, Pound. Machines as "absolute objects." Marx and the penseurs de la technique (Reuleux, Maurer, Lafitte, Mumford, Leroi-Gourhan, Canguilhem, Simondon). Several theoretical claims to pursue here: Hegelian status of the unpaintability of power-driven machines. Leroi-Gourhan's theory of the autonomous genesis of technical objects applied to painting: autonomous genesis of the "painting machine," and its technical inoperability in a world become the milieu of a global autonomous machine. Revision of the Hegelian argument about art and absolutification: does painting have access to a mode adequate to the material absolute? No, but cinema and architecture both do--again, Egyptianism.

3. Einstein's Léger, 1929-30: Equivalence and the apotheosis of objects.

4. Conclusion: Schmitt's machines. The earth, enemy of the proletariat? Machines, metal, etc.