Elena Vogman

Dance of Values
Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project

DIAPHANES
THINK ART Series of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith)—
Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and
Cultural Theory (ZKK)—University of Zurich.

With the generous support of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith) and
the DFG project “Rhythm and Projection. Thinking Possibility in the
Soviet Avant-garde,” Freie Universität Berlin.

First edition
ISBN 978-3-0358-0108-8

© DIAPHANES, Zurich 2019

All rights reserved

Cover Image: “Living legs made to do Charleston jumps as a storefront ad for a

stocking business.” Sergei Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-
1107, pp. 28–29. (Plate 32)

Layout: 2edit, Zurich, and Uliana Bychenkova

Printed in Germany

www.diaphanes.com
 Table of Contents

9 Preface

The Value of Crisis

13 Exhibition Value
21 “Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves
of Capital
34 “Novelist approach to film script”
41 The Glass House

Capital ’s Stream of Consciousness

81 Cassini’s Ovals and Hypnosis
87 Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”
96 Faits divers, Words Dispersed
100 One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup
to the British vessels”
116 The Color of Gorky’s Eyes

The Value of Lenin

143 Melting Symbols, or How to Eat the Image of the Leader
147 Decomposing Symbols or Elements of Cine-Cubism
155 Gods and Reflexes
167 The True Lenin
173 Expressive Economies

Metamorphosis of Values
199 Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille
212 Urformen of Advertisement
218 Marx’s Scene of Metamorphosis
225 Goethe’s Gift to Hegel
235 “Values resemble a dance, not a statue”
243 Cinema “Beyond the Stars”
271 List of Illustrations
275 Bibliography
285 Acknowledgments
“The language of communism is always at the same time tacit
and violent, political and scientific, direct, indirect, total and
fragmentary, lengthy, and almost instantaneous. Marx doesn’t
live comfortably with this plurality of languages, which always
clash and come apart in him. Even if these languages seem to
converge toward the same end, they could not be translated
into one another. It is their heterogeneity, the gap or the dis-
tance that throws them off center, that make them noncontem-
porary and that, producing an effect of irreducible distortion,
oblige those who must embark on a reading (a practice) to sub-
mit themselves to an endless reworking.”
Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Marx”
Preface

This book deals with Eisenstein’s yet unpublished diaries pro-

duced between 1927 and 1928, the year in which the Soviet film
director intensively elaborated a film on Karl Marx’s Capital.
Three notebooks, each containing around one hundred and
fifty pages, accompanied by a large number of press clippings,
drawings and diagrams, are today preserved in the Russian
State Archive for Literature and Art in Moscow. Rather than
offering an exhaustive reconstruction of Eisenstein’s project,
this study undertakes a close reading of a number of selected
documents from this archival body. It focuses specifically on
their material construction—their montage—and follows their
conceptual and visual figurations. The abundant presence of
images—mostly marginal or poor images, which Eisenstein
collects from the press and advertisements—acquire the high-
est use value within the conceptual framework of his project
and therefore are the central issue of my book. Through a series
of material, visual and linguistic operations, which have been
overlooked or neglected by researchers in the past decades,
Eisenstein develops a distinct stance towards his contemporary
political situation. In these aesthetic choices several of Marx’s
concepts—such as “value form,” “metamorphosis of commod-
ities,” “social metabolism” or “hieroglyphic”—are invoked,
restaged, reanimated, brought to dance.
Traversing various fields and several disciplines, these con-
ceptual and visual figurations show, as in a close up, capital-
ism’s inscriptions within the geopolitical processes of longue
durée as well as within the most intimate and remote spheres of
everyday life. In this perspective, Eisenstein’s persistent empha-
sis on the manifold interrelations between artistic practice and
economic as well as ideological manifestations becomes, on the
pages of these diaries, an attempt at a radical reconsideration
of cinema; that is, an attempted intervention into the very mode

9
Preface

of its production. The series of cinematographic concepts he

invents, such as “intellectual attractions,” “deanecdotization”
of the plot, “cine-essais,” or “cine-cubism,” can be understood
as part of this strategy.
The notebooks for Capital lead Eisenstein from a film idea
to a book project, transforming the planned circular struc-
ture of cine-essais into a vision of a spherical book, a book on
“method.” Metod [Method] is the title of Eisenstein’s vast theory
project, conceived and developed after Capital, between 1932
and 1948, the last sixteen years of his life. My previous book,
published in German under the title Sinnliches Denken. Eisen-
steins exzentrische Methode [Sensuous Thinking. Eisenstein’s
Eccentric Method] focuses on the genesis of Metod, in particu-
lar on how it systematically blurs the margins between draft
and accomplished work, art theory and theoretical experiment.
Eisenstein conceptualized this technique as “sensuous think-
ing,” a notion which traverses Metod in various constellations.
It came to name the entanglement of aesthetic and epistemic
processes in art, and, more generally, the necessary coexistence
of both poles, their unsettling ambivalence and paradoxical
temporality. In Metod Eisenstein elaborates a specific writing
technique: he writes on loose sheets of paper, which he collects
in thematic folders, allowing him to perpetually reorganize
and remontage his texts. Ultimately, the forty folders of Metod
contained, without any hierarchy or definite order, an unman-
ageable amount of fragmentary notes on themes ranging from
aesthetic theory to comments on advertisement, an abundant
number of quotations from different sources, drawings, expres-
sion diagrams and so forth. From this work in progress emerge
almost the entirety of Eisenstein’s late theory projects, all of
which remained fragments—from Montage to Nonindifferent
Nature and Disney. This is how the micro- and macrostructural
implications of Eisenstein’s archive became intimately linked
with the question of method, that is, the materiality of how
Eisenstein constructs the gaze and the methodology related to

10
Preface

its potential reading. Working through Eisenstein’s archive of

Metod refined my perception for such linkages, guiding atten-
tion to the intersection of formal elements and conceptual for-
mations in their irreducible coevolution.
This work on Metod provided a “laboratory” for my read-
ing of Capital, and it is why the material basis—the archive
of Capital—so strongly orients my reading. The plates, which
accompany each chapter of this book, serve not as mere illus-
trations but as constitutive arguments in their own right. To a
certain extent, they can be regarded as protagonists or agents:
concrete sources of complex theoretical statements. Such was,
at least, the reason for displaying them on various pages of this
book, accompanied by translations and diagrams: to attempt
to make them act, to follow their entanglements, their sensu-
ous and epistemic effects. What these diaries negotiate—like
the impossible spherical book, which, despite everything and
against its time, was written and exists—is the possibility of
a film on Capital. This film exists as Capital’s stream of con-
sciousness, traversing five hundred diary pages, their visual and
linguistic figurations.

11
The Value of Crisis

Exhibition Value

“The crisis of democracies should be understood as a crisis of

the conditions of exposition of the political man.”1 This is how
Walter Benjamin, in 1935, describes the decisive political con-
sequences of the new media regime in the “age of technological
reproducibility.” Henceforth the political question of represen-
tation would be determined by aesthetic conditions of presen-
tation.2 In other words, what is at stake is the visibility of the
political man, insofar as Benjamin argues that “radio and film
are changing not only the function of the professional actor but,
equally, the function of those who, like the politician, present
themselves before these media.”3 Benjamin’s text evokes a dis-
torting mirror in which political man appears all the smaller,
the larger his image is projected. As a result, the contemporary
capitalist conditions of reproduction bring forth “a new form
of selection”—an apparatus before which “the champion, the
star, and the dictator emerge as victors.”4

1 The original version contains the following sentence: “Die Krise der Demo-
kratien lässt sich als eine Krise der Ausstellungsbedingungen des politischen
Menschen verstehen.” Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Erste Fassung),” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 1.2 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 454. The English translation renders this as follows: “The
crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions govern-
ing the public presentation of politicians.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 49. The translation loses
some of the nuance and reach of “politischen Menschen,” a phrase that approxi-
mately corresponds to “political human” and seems to suggest more expansive
effects than the official translation’s “politician.”
2 Benjamin, The Work of Art, p. 50.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.

13
The Value of Crisis

The same condition of technological reproduction that

enables artistic and cultural transmission is inseparably tied
to the conditions of capitalist production on the one hand
and the rise of fascist regimes on the other. Benjamin was
not the first to draw an impetus for critical analysis from this
relationship; seven years prior to the “Work of Art” essay, Ser-
gei Eisenstein assembled a composition in his notebook, ele-
ments of which surprisingly echo in Benjamin’s thesis. Using
montage as a morphological tool, Eisenstein constructs his
argument out of three visual components: on the right we see
“Das Sportgesicht,” the masked face of an American baseball
player, Miss Catcher. On the left, an anti-capitalist poster of the
Russian International Red Aid (Mezhdunarodnaia Organizatsia
Pomoshchi Bortsam Revolutsii, MOPR) appears (plate 1). Above
them Eisenstein places a cutout from the journal Soviet Art that
addresses the interrelation of artistic techniques from different
historical periods with their respective ideologies. This frag-
ment calls forth the relation between the two heterogeneous
images: “Not by chance did the artists of industrial capitalism
work so passionately on landscape, then on still life, on the
object, creating the style of the epoch and transforming com-
modity into fetish. One cannot separate ‘formal innovation,’
the formal ways of producing a new style, from the subject and
the ideological content of art.”5 The mask over the sportswom-
an’s face corresponds to the swastika, forming a prison. “Help
the prisoners of capital!” the poster implores. By showing, in
all its screaming ambivalence, the same over-exposition of the
athlete that Benjamin describes, Eisenstein’s argument func-
tions not as an eloquent explanation but as a concrete material
construction: a selection of fragments brought into a constel-

5 Sergei Eisenstein, diary from February 23, 1928, in the Russian State
Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), collection 1923, inventory 2, folder 1105,
p. 91 (hereinafter, locator information is abbreviated as follows: 1923-2-1105).
All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

14
Exhibition Value

lation. Portrayed with the intensity of a close-up, the baseball

player appears simultaneously as star and prisoner, a concrete
consequence of mass mediatization and a singular agent of the
mute and oppressed political man. The Hungarian art historian
and political activist János Mácza, whose article from Soviet
Art Eisenstein quotes here (plate 1), emphasizes the historical
continuum in which such bodily representations are inscribed:
“Not by chance did the artists of the renaissance ‘experiment’
with the human body, with materials closely related to this
body. Their historical aim was to counter the schematism of
the Middle Ages with the formal perfection, the vital apotheosis
of the human-individual.”6 The exhibition of formal perfection
within this continuum highlights the relationship between the
experimental achievements of the new arts and their technical
conditions as dialectical: the technical conditions facilitate the
growth of capital while the dynamic reinforces the fetishism of
the commodity by way of the expanding exhibition value.
Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay focuses on a problem of
fundamental importance in Eisenstein’s working diaries from
the late 1920s: the problem of exhibiting the political. Before
Hitler emerged as a radiophonic, theatrical, and cinemato-
graphic phenomenon on German newsreels, tipazh—a certain
class of non-professional actors7—had already played their own
role on Soviet cinema screens.8 These occurrences, although

6 Ibid.
7 “Tipazh,” the Russian word for “type,” is a concept for “typical appear-
ance,” representative of a social class. Eisenstein and other pioneers of Soviet
cinema used this term to refer to non-professional actors, as opposed to pro-
fessionals. The later model presupposed a psychologically laden dramaturgy.
The political formula of tipazh quoted by Eisenstein, was a “social-biological
hieroglyph.” Its effect consisted in an immediate visual presence that displaced
the norm and moved towards a singularity of expression.
8 The crisis of political visibility in Germany in all its dramatic consequences
after 1933 is analyzed and literally re-staged in the visual montages of Bertolt
Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal, which he kept between 1938 and 1955. See Bertolt
Brecht, Arbeitsjournal 1938–1955, ed. Werner Hecht, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1973). Brecht’s work, later included in his Kriegsfibel is excellently

15
The Value of Crisis

­ iametrically opposed, nevertheless responded to a common cri-

d
sis. This crisis of the conditions of exposition called for an active
invention of alternative conditions, for a new politics “of exhibi-
tion of the political man.” Eisenstein’s treatment of the portrait
of the “First National Star,” Yola D’Avril, pasted on one of the pre-
vious pages of his notebook, shows such an attempt (plate 2). Yola
emerged as a national star in the United States in 1928. That same
year Eisenstein shot The General Line—a film whose intention
was, precisely, to operate “beyond the stars.” Next to the image,
he writes “This is what Marfa Lapkina will look like,” referring
to The General Line’s protagonist. Indeed, Yola d’Avril’s acces-
sories return in the helmet and glasses that Marfa wears in the
final scene of Eisenstein’s film (fig. 1–4). Whereas Yola, the star,
appears as a decorative object, Marfa, the non-professional actor,
the peasant, acts as an emancipatory force on both a political and
a sexual plane. In this way, Eisenstein re-appropriates the means
of capitalist representation for a gesture of empowerment. Exhi-
bition value appears as an immanent political relation under the
new conditions of technological reproducibility: between visibil-
ity and invisibility, transparency and opacity. In this way, exhibi-
tion value transforms the work of art into a “construct with quite
new functions [Gebilde mit ganz neuen Funktionen].”9 According
to Benjamin, these functions consist of revealing not only the
religious parameters of political representation but also the mag-
ical parameters of the artistic image.
The visual mediation of the political lies at the core of the fol-
lowing arrangement in Eisenstein’s working diary: on an image
cut out from the Rabochaia Gazeta [Workers’ N ­ ewspaper], dated
March 5, 1928, a series of portraits is displayed in the form of an
arc (plate 3). “Moscow’s ironworkers who have won the bonds

interpreted in terms of a “politics of imagination” by Georges Didi-Huberman,

Quand les images prennent position: L’oeil de l’histoire I (Paris: Minuit, 2009),
pp. 228–238.
9 Benjamin, The Work of Art, p. 25.

16
Exhibition Value

Fig. 1– 4: Marfa Lapkina in Eisenstein’s The General Line, 1928.

of the Rabochaia Gazeta” states the caption. The names of the

workers are followed by the names of the factories they work
in. “Such a pity not to have the Revue program ready to hand,
where ‘the stars’ are displayed on a fan. I would paste them as
pendant to this wheel—commenting on the bourgeoisie would
be unnecessary.”10 Building on the analogy of the two forms of
display, the Soviet and the Western, Eisenstein’s remark turns
the exhibition value into an instrument of immanent critique,
a method which operates on the level of its objects. Whatever
modes of mediation prevail, they condition the political rela-
tions between the visible and the invisible. Eisenstein’s pro-
cessual understanding of the exhibition value derives from his
immanent method, which reveals new interrelations between
different fields: politics and spectacle, aesthetics and econ-
omy, art and labor, the crisis of visibility and the potential of its
critical knowledge. This allows Eisenstein to refrain from any

10 Eisenstein, diary from March 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 112–114.

17
The Value of Crisis

comment: not because the words would not be necessary, but

because the images themselves are given a voice to speak in face
of the facts. This gesture implies an act of showing that spares
explanation by intervening in the process and simultaneously
transforming its conditions of production.
Thus the operations on the pages of Eisenstein’s notebooks
embody what Benjamin would later demand of the author as
producer: not an authorial production of a unique work of art
but the transformation of the very conditions under which it
is produced, an anti-information par excellence. It is precisely
because “the description of the author as producer must extend
as far as the press,”11 that Benjamin devotes so much attention
to journalistic production:

For in Western Europe the newspaper does not constitute a service-

able instrument of production in the hands of the writer. It still
belongs to capital. Since, on the one hand, the newspaper, technically
speaking, represents the most important literary position, but, on the
other, this position is controlled by the opposition, it is no wonder that
the writer’s understanding of his dependent social position, his tech-
nical possibilities, and his political task has to grapple with the most
enormous difficulties.12

In other words, the challenge of the author as producer

consists in transforming the very conditions of a certain form
of authorship. Neither the consoling speech of propaganda nor
the concealing style of grand auteur. This perspective contex-
tualizes another 1928 press clip in Eisenstein’s notebook. This
time it is not a star emerging in the spotlight of big screens or
an imprisoned baseball player, but a seemingly marginal report

11 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Selected Writings 1931–

1934, ed. Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans.
Rodney Livingstone, vol. 2.2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1999), p. 772.
12 Ibid.

18
Exhibition Value

entitled “Characteristic Trifles. From the Materials of the Revo-

lution Museum.” Its first passage informs the reader that, of all
the “remarkable exhibits” preserved at the Moscow Museum
of the 1917 Revolution, the text pays attention only to those
“which could not yet enter the vitrines.”13 It focuses less on doc-
uments that bore witness to the glorious and heroic events of
the revolution than on those ominous or suspicious artefacts,
those traces and remainders, that could not be simply sublated
by the irreversible course of the historical moment.

The museum preserves a number of badges with crossed weapons,

skulls, and highly patriotic inscriptions. There are even “poems”
inscribed on them, such as the following:
We will awake the sleepers from their sleep
And we will lead the legion to the fight…14

These insidious remnants of the old regime—forms of

speech and emblems of monarchy—persist in a form of spec-
tral existence, revealing not only the inconsistency of the new
symbolic order but also the impossibility of any definitive tran-
sition to a new political present (plate 4). Eisenstein highlights
the following paragraph of the article with a frame: “In the days
of February, everyone turned into a revolutionary. Even … the
district center ispravniks.15 One of them addressed a telegram
to the president of the parliament: ‘Being a secret revolutionary
for 23 years, I am honored to salute your Excellency.’”16 Beyond
their potential interest in the context of Eisenstein’s contem-
porary film October, which commemorates the tenth anniver-
sary of the revolution, what is the value of these “characteristic
trifles?” What do these objects evidence, as objects that are not

13 Eisenstein, diary from February 25, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 109.

14 Ibid.
15 In the Russian Empire this title referred to a clerk or a boyar in charge of law
enforcement in a certain county or district.
16 Ibid.

19
The Value of Crisis

only worth knowing but also worth seeing? Appearing in close

proximity to such iconic pieces of evidence as the faces of celeb-
rities that speak the language of the new ideology (plates 1 & 2),
these curiosities might seem worthless—amusing at best. Yet
Eisenstein reads these “documents of the epoch” not only as
“monuments of post-February vulgarity,”17 (plate 4) but also as
specific witnesses of “the position on the classlessness of the
February event.”18 In fact, these documents embody more than
a failure of a historical event—the February Revolution—they
stand, symptomatically, for all kinds of contradictions. Hidden
in a place devoted to visibility and knowledge, they hide a com-
plex, an unredeemed latency. It is the curiosity of witnessing
the past in an unfulfilled revolutionary present.
In a later entry referring to October, Eisenstein emphasizes
a “necessary class character [klassovost’] of the objects,” which
is why, he argues, one cannot simply “put crosses on the Kom-
somol’s books,” just as little as one can “turn their folders into
breviers.”19 The conversion of the symbolic order effected by
ideologies has to be dialecticized; it has to be seen as a process
of immanent contradiction, of resistances and latencies. In this
sense, the series of disparate trifles resists a linear reading of
history; rather, they reveal the presence of anachronisms. Turn-
ing attention to these marginal phenomena—giving them a vis-
ibility and voice—Eisenstein introduces them as eminent actors
of history. In doing so he transforms the “technical” level of
historiography, taking up a concern that was also Benjamin’s:20
here history no longer appears as a visible occurring of time, but

17 Ibid., p. 98.
18 Ibid., p. 100.
19 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI 1923-2-1107, p. 129.
20 This aspect of historiographic technique was crucial to several of Benjamin’s
texts. His essay “The Author as Producer” focuses mainly on literary and photo-
graphic “techniques,” opposing them to the “spiritual” contents of the fascist
mediation: “It is not spiritual renewal, as fascists proclaim, that is desirable: tech-
nical innovations are suggested.” Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” p. 774.

20
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

as a complex reoccurring, a revolution in the very understanding

of a punctual and irreversible historical event.

“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

What can be gained from Eisenstein’s morphological juxtapo-

sitions? The interrelation between capital’s continuous expan-
sion and exhibition value as mediated through technology con-
stitutes the central theme of Eisenstein’s unfulfilled Capital
project. The director planned to use the Marxian magnum opus
as a “script” while employing techniques inspired by James
Joyce’s Ulysses. The idea for the film resulted directly from the
process of editing October. Nearly blind, overworked, and liv-
ing on stimulants in order to finish the film on time to com-
memorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution, Eisenstein
made the following note in his diary (plate 5):

October 12, 1927

It’s settled: we’re going to film “Capital,” on Marx’s script—
the only logical solution.
NB. Stickers … those are notes pasted to the montage wall.21

In fact Eisenstein successively transformed his working

diaries—not without irony numbered by “volumes”—into an
editing surface where graphic elements, quotations, images
from various sources, and text captions entered into manifold
interrelations. He conceived the future film as a loose structure
of “nonfigurative chapters” or “miniatures.” As a result, extant
archival materials provide neither a narrative structure nor
a classical film script but a series of conflicting and heteroge-
neous elements: a polyphonic debate, unfolding precisely at the

21 Eisenstein, diary from October 2, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 2.

21
The Value of Crisis

i­ ntersection of the material and conceptual layers—where liter-

ary, private, political, historical, and economic issues intertwine.
The planned film adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital stands
as one of the most enigmatic projects in the history of cinema.
“It is known that Eisenstein wanted to make a film of Capital,”
claimed an article in the journal of the Situationists in 1969,
probably written by Guy Debord himself, which he would also
use as an epigraph to one of his programmatic texts on cinema:

Considering his formal conceptions and political submissiveness,

it can be doubted if his film would have been faithful to Marx’s text.
But for our part, we are confident that we can do better. For example,
as soon as it becomes possible Guy Debord himself will make a cin-
ematic adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle that will certainly not
fall short of his book.22

By pure historical contingency, Debord’s first feature-length

film after his book La societé du spectacle appeared in 1973, the
same year as the first publication of excerpts from Eisenstein’s
Capital notebooks. The latter—a ten-page fragment prepared
and commented by Naum Kleiman and Leonid Kozlov in the
Soviet journal Iskusstvo kino [Cinema Art]—reveals the aston-
ishing scope of Eisenstein’s project.23 This short text selection
from Eisenstein’s notebooks was soon translated into several
languages: the Italian version was published even the same
year in the journal Cinema Nuovo; two years later, in 1975, the
German translation was included in Eisenstein’s Schriften

22 Situationist International, “Cinema and Revolution,” in Situationist Inter-

national Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public
Secrets, 2006), p. 378. / “Le cinéma et la révolution,” Internationale Situation-
niste 12 (1969), pp. 104–105. This passage is then quoted by Debord as the
epigraph to his “À propos du film,” in  Œuvres, ed. Jean-Louis Rançon (Paris:
­Gallimard, 2006), p. 1271.
23 Naum Kleiman and Leonid Kozlov, “S.M. Eizenstein: Iz neosushchest­
vlennykh zamyslov [Kapital]” [S.M. Eisenstein: From the unrealized projects
(­Capital)], in Iskusstvo kino, no. 1 (1973), pp. 56–67.

22
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

[­ Writings]; the English translation was published in 1976 in the

journal October, and the French one became part of Barthélémy
Amengual’s 1980 monograph ¡ Que Viva Eisenstein  ! Widely
received as an ultimate outline revealing the “secret” of how
Eisenstein “would have filmed Capital,”24 the text fragment has
continued to stoke excitement in artistic and academic circles,
most recently with Alexander Kluge’s eight-hour film News
from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital.25 
However pioneering, this first and to this day only edition
is marked by what remained absent: Eisenstein’s intense work
with images displayed on the pages of his notebooks. Instead,
not only the Russian version but also the subsequent transla-
tions used frame enlargements from Eisenstein’s films Strike
and October, along with biographical photographs to illus-
trate the text. In turn, Eisenstein’s direct references to the use
value of images seem to have been successfully overlooked,
despite the director’s insistence on their importance as argu-
ments in their own right, an aspect that is further underlined
through his extensive image collection and library, his inventive
drawing and drafting practice. In this way, for example, the Eng-
lish translation of the “Notes for the film of Capital” opens with
the following lines: “[…] NB. Additions . . . those are clips pasted
to the wall of montage.”26 The translation inverts the words in
Eisenstein’s original nota bene note, which reads: “NB. Stick-
ers . . . those are notes pasted to the montage wall.” Without
any consideration of the Russian word nakleiki, stickers—cut
and pasted elements which crucially denote the materiality and
disparity of montaged links in Eisenstein’s text—the editors
Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson speculate

24 Barthélémy Amengual, “Comment Eisenstein pensait filmer Le Capital,”

Cinéma 195 (1975), p. 34.
25 Two other film projects dedicated to Eisenstein’s Capital are Mark Lewis’s
Two Impossible Films from 1999 and Michael Blum’s Wandering Marx-
wards from the same year.
26 Eisenstein, diary from October 2, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 2.

23
The Value of Crisis

almost arbitrarily on a possible meaning of this term, trans-

lated as “additions.” The editor’s footnote comments this sen-
tence as follows: “The image is that of the news bulletin affixed
to walls of factories and other public places.”27
A look into Eisenstein’s Moscow archive and the more than
five hundred diary pages he dedicated to the Capital project from
October 1927 to November 1928 reveals an entirely different
perspective. Not only “the image” mentioned in singular in the
English translation but images in plural are missing in this edi-
tion, images that traverse the pages of Eisenstein’s notebooks.
The fundamental role of these visual elements put forth as argu-
ments equal to conceptual formations is one of the central issues
of the present book. Furthermore, these images are an element
of the complex structure of the working diaries: Eisenstein nearly
always dates his entries, which turns their continuous flow into
a reflected and significant element of the “composition.” Form-
ing long sequences, they are marked by repetitions, fractures,
returns, ironic self-reflections, deviations, and digressions of
various kinds. The selection made by Kleiman and Kozlov, and
equally applied to the translations, takes little account of this
logic of a continuum. Editorial choices from the vast archival
body are not identified as such; omissions are invisible to the
reader. Of course, such interferences transform the potential
significance of the source; they strongly orient the reading in
a particular sense. In some cases these invisible sections seri-
ously reduce the source’s complexity, ­obliterating its dialectical
and playful character. For instance, one of E ­ isenstein’s ­pivotal

27 Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson translated these

notes from Eisenstein’s “Working Diaries 1927–1928” for October magazine,
albeit without referring to the first Russian publication. This obscured not
only Kleiman’s pioneering work but also the character of the materials, which
were henceforth considered to be the sole remains of Eisenstein’s Capital proj-
ect. Sergei Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital,’” trans. Maciej Sliwowski,
Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson, October, no. 2 (1976), p. 3. See also Elena
­Vogman, “Dance of Values: Reading Eisenstein’s Capital,” Grey Room, no. 72
(September 2018), pp. 94–124.

24
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

entries, often quoted as an outline for the “aim” of Capital,28

reads in the English translation as follows:

In those “great days” I noted on a scrap of paper that in the new cin-
ema, the established place of eternal themes (academic themes of
Love and Duty, Fathers and Sons, Triumph of Virtues, etc.) will be
taken by a series of pictures on the subjects of “basic methods.” The
content of Capital (its aim) is now formulated: to teach the worker to
think dialectically.
To show the method of dialectics.29

Eisenstein’s actual manuscript, however, reveals an unex-

pected digression in the middle of this passage. It transforms
the programmatic tone of the statement into a more ambiva-
lent and multilayered expression:

In those “great days” on a shard [oskolok] of paper …

NB. In “Sokol’niki,” in the course of the conversation nice poems were
written:

I fucked
Broke the dick
Come, dear, and look
How I will, with the shard.

… I noted that in the new cinema, the established place of “eternal

themes” (academic themes of “Love and Duty,” “Fathers and Sons,”
“Triumph of Virtues,” etc.) will be taken by a series of pictures on the
subjects of “basic methods.” The content of Capital (its aim) is now
formulated: to teach the worker to think dialectically.
To show the method of dialectics.30

28 Kleiman and Kozlov, “S.M. Eizenstein,” p. 56.

29 Eisenstein, “Notes for a film of ‘Capital,’” p. 10.
30 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 67.

25
The Value of Crisis

The relevance of this small poem, tacitly removed by the edi-

tors, becomes even more obvious as one learns that it was writ-
ten in “Sokol’niki,” that is, in the Moscow district where Eisen-
stein underwent psychoanalytic treatment. With this phrasing,
Eisenstein indicates that this text was written under the imme-
diate impact of psychoanalysis. Indeed, during the entire period
of Eisenstein’s work on Capital, he was undergoing psychoanal-
ysis, an experience which catalyzed ideas and visions for the
project, resulting in the shattering dynamic of the notebooks.
In other words, the same “shard of paper”—a fragment empha-
sized in its materiality by the unusual combination—serves
both for a frivolous poem and for the ideological orientation of
the new visual language. Both coexist within Eisenstein’s work-
ing diaries. In this way the shard, which appears as a motif in
the poem, comes to embody the “method,” a wedge against the
totality of “eternal themes.” These interrelations between the
heterogeneous elements involved in Eisenstein’s Capital pro­
ject play a crucial role. Such fragments are consciously involved
in its vertiginous montage chains. Their “heretic”31 and het-
erodox character not only stands against the linear reading
of contemporary historical materialism, but aims at opening
fundamentally new horizons for Eisenstein’s political cinema.
The diaries for the Capital project appear so interesting pre-
cisely because they do not describe or explain the future film
but instead offer an operative and dynamic structure, an experi-
mental field of force “for the invention of formal elements for
Capital […] learning to think and to invent on a new level.”32
The main sources for a reconstruction of Eisenstein’s work
on Capital are three unpublished convolutes from the Rus-
sian State Archive for Literature and Art.33 Eisenstein’s three

31 Eisenstein, diary from April 1, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 41.

32 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 113.
33 I thank RGALI, especially its director, Tatiana Goryaeva, for generously
making these materials available for the present publication.

26
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

­ otebooks, spanning the period from 1927 to 1928, provide

n
the first and most considerable source. The second consists
of ­Grigori Aleksandrov’s forty-page notebook from October
1927, entitled “Capital,” which contains quotations and press
excerpts related to politics, faits divers, and reflections on
advertisement (plate 6). Aleksandrov, Eisenstein’s assistant,
collected these materials under the director’s close supervision;
they often reappear in his own notebooks. The third source is
a letter by the Marxist historian and later professor of Ameri-
can studies Aleksei Efimov, entitled “Primitive Accumulation.”
In this letter, addressed to the Soviet Directorat for C ­ inema
(Sovkino) on March 23, 1928, Efimov proposes a “scientific
film” based “mainly on Marx’s Capital,” written and conceived
together with Eisenstein.34 While the notebooks form a patch-
work of concrete and highly fragmentary elements, the letter
provides a coherent summary of the planned film. Efimov sug-
gests three parts, each corresponding to a different historical
epoch: the period of colonial politics and serfdom, the debut of
industrial capitalism, and the confrontation between Fordism
and “socialist accumulation.”35 The only allusion to the film’s
visuals appears in the second part, and involves an abstract
remark on “a large range of everyday life material from Russian
history.”36 While there is no evidence that Sovkino ever answered
this letter, the collaboration with Efimov proves Eisenstein’s

34 Aleksei Efimov to Sovkino, March 23, 1928, in RGALI, 1923-1-293, pp. 1–2.

35 The first part was to include themes such as “the initial deprivation of peas-
ants,” “the colonial politics of capitalism,” “forms of colonial exploitation,” “the
role of slavery and serfdom in the primitive accumulation,” and so on. The sec-
ond part would address primitive industrial capitalist accumulation, pointing
to “the struggle of trading with the industrial capital in the sphere of produc-
tion.” The third and last part would be based on the opposition between “social-
ist accumulation” and “accumulation at the edge of monopolist capitalism and
Fordism,” highlighting the more recent “methods of the Czech entrepreneur
Tomáš Bata” and contemporary “colonial exploitation that is dependent on
mandatory countries.” Efimov to Sovkino, pp. 1–2.
36 Ibid., p. 1.

27
The Value of Crisis

engagement with Capital’s historical dimensions.37 It reveals a

further layer of complexity in Eisenstein’s preliminary research,
one that goes beyond an illustration of Marx’s ideas in the con-
temporary context.
In their introduction to the Russian publication of Eisen-
stein’s notes, Kleiman and Kozlov describe Eisenstein’s inter-
est as demonstrating concrete relationships between society,
the individual, ideology, and everyday life. Eisenstein’s goal
of teaching the worker dialectical thinking was to be achieved
through a “visual expression of dialectical interrelations.”38
Eisenstein planned to develop a radically new type of cinema­
tographic narration, one in which “elementary connections
were dissociated and—through rigorously selected successive
chains—incorporated into the system of social and historical
relations.”39
Why did the filming of Capital, this “Magnitogorsk of cin-
ematography,” fail?40 An apocryphal source refers to Eisen-
stein’s personal talk with Josef Stalin in 1929 and the latter’s
single-sentence comment, “Eisenstein, are you insane?”41 Even
prior to the great waves of terror and the ban on “formalism,”

37 In the 1930s Efimov was a pioneer in Soviet research into American history.
In his critical bestseller SShA. Puti razvitia kapitalizma [USA: Ways of Develop-
ment of Capitalism] he analyzes the Marxist concept of “primitive accumulation,”
beginning with the seventeenth century, as a main “historical process of separa-
tion of the producer from the means of production.” Aleksei Efimov, “Ocherki
istorii SShA ot otkrytiia Ameriki do okonchaniia Grazhdanskoi voiny” [An outline
of the history of the USA from the discovery of America to the end of the Civil War],
in SShA. Puti razvitia kapitalizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), pp. 35–36.
38 Kleiman and Kozlov, introduction to “S.M. Eizenstein,” p. 56.
39 Ibid.
40 This is how Eisenstein referred to his Capital project in a 1932 question-
naire on the topic, “What did V. I. Lenin give me?” See Naum Kleiman, “Neo-
sushchestvlennye zamysly” [Uncompleted Works], Iskusstvo kino no. 6 (1992),
p. 58. Magnitogorsk is an industrial city—partly constructed, partly left as uto-
pian plan—that the Soviet Union massively expanded as part of a five-year plan.
41 According to screenwriter Michail Bleiman, Eisenstein told him of his
meeting with Stalin in 1929. See Kleiman, “Neosushchestvlennye zamysly,”
p. 56.

28
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

this response effected an irrevocable judgment on the Capital

project. It widens the gap, as it were, between the Soviet Union’s
totalitarian course and Eisenstein’s dialectical vision of a politi-
cal cinema. At the same time, Stalin’s judgment symptomati-
cally points to the parallel between Benjamin’s diagnosis of the
“crisis of the conditions of exposition” and Stalin’s consolidat-
ing dictatorship, which paradigmatically condensed in a ban
on political criticism through aesthetic means. Through Capi-
tal, Eisenstein was already theorizing the vehemently political
meaning of the aesthetic condition that Benjamin, under the
shadow of National Socialism, would later conceptualize as
“exhibition value.”
Eisenstein’s notebooks, in turn, bear traces of his attempts
to communicate his project to the party functionaries in order
to make its realization possible. His note from April 22, 1928
documents such a failed attempt:

Yesterday I went to speak to [Nikolai] Podvoisky—Kreml-Maschine

hin und Kreml-Maschine zurück [Kremlin-Machine back and Kremlin-
Machine forth]. He is also against Capital, although he personally very
much appreciates “philosophical” things. He says we should make
“miniatures of each event.” “Coal Mining,” “Sochi,” “State Granaries.”
Stay all the time on the level of the burning question. Very well but …
that means to cook jam in retorts!42

The revolutionary and director of the Red Sport Interna-

tional (Sportintern), Nikolai Podvoisky, was the person who
commissioned October and even played his own role in the
film, which referred back to the events of 1917. Despite the
“philosophical” interests, his account of the agenda of the new
cinema resembles more an agitprop of the local development
of the socialist state, obviously conflicting with Eisenstein’s
experimental goals. The director identifies his own task in the

42 Eisenstein, diary from April 22, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 66.

29
The Value of Crisis

“developing and forwarding of cine-cultural problems,” seen in

opposition to “actualités” [newsreels].43 The interest in filming
Capital is precisely that of leaving local propaganda behind; it
involves a reflection on the post-revolutionary period, expand-
ing the view onto global political events such as colonialism,
nationalism, and large scale capitalism.
In another passage, Eisenstein describes this as follows:

The most difficult thing now is to relate dialectically to one’s own

time, to the experienced dégrignolade [collapsing]. LEF is purely inde-
pendent dégringole de par devant à toutes les quatre pates [frontal col-
lapse on all four paws]—as it should be for those in the front. The
Futurists—these are inevitably the first “pessimists.” This is not at all
what we need. Le socialisme sera [the socialism will be].
My book can already be formulated, but—feeling of nausea.44

Neither the perception of obsolescence nor a mere misun-

derstanding of his time mark the atmosphere of Eisenstein’s
notes. Rather, he perceives an impossible actuality of his vision
of Capital, of his idea of a coming socialism. In employing
the French phrasing, “Le socialisme sera” he might be think-
ing of one of the episodes of the Paris Commune (an event he
absorbed through various literary and iconographic sources
during his childhood) or of Jean Jaurès’s vision of socialism
as “religious awakening.” More importantly, Eisenstein’s film
project gradually passes into a book project, a desire for theo-
retical groundwork that will frequently reappear on the pages
of his Capital notebooks. Before Eisenstein will develop these
theoretical issues into a proper method in the eponymous book
project—Metod [Method]—it seems remarkable how the Capi-
tal project provokes and dynamizes these questions without
ever leaving the medium of the notebook.

43 Ibid.
44 Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 43.

30
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

The approach undertaken in this book does not aim at a recon-

struction of Eisenstein’s unrealized film; rather it dives into
Capital’s vast archival body to explore its contingencies and
immanent logic, its precise linguistic operations and excess
of associations. Thus the drifting lines of Eisenstein’s pro­
ject themselves instruct the analysis: only a close reading of
a series of operational chains of heterogeneous elements
given in their formal concreteness—“lambeaux for complex
combinations”45—produce an adequate understanding of Cap-
ital’s process of thought. In this way, archival materials for the
project can shed light on Eisenstein’s working method, resist-
ing direct comparisons with his “canonic” montage theory
and its transformations over the course of his œuvre. Yet even
such comparisons would require a microanalysis of the archi-
val sources, with particular attention on the avoidance of sep-
arating the theory from its formal genesis (montage, graphic
insertions, lacunae, and shifts).46 To understand the dynamic
relation between sources and their transformations, between
concrete aesthetic choices and their theoretical and political
dimensions in Capital, this book is broken into four chapters.

45 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 120.

46 See Elena Vogman, Sinnliches Denken: Eisensteins exzentrische Methode [Sen-
suous Thinking: Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method] (Zurich: diaphanes, 2018), which
analyzes Eisenstein’s Method (1932–1948). The various implications of “sensuous
thinking” are discussed first and foremost within the evolution of Eisenstein’s
theoretical writings: their material and rhythmic compositions unfold dynami-
cally from the early notebooks and working diaries in the 1920s through an
intense practice of excerpts in the Mexican diaries (1931–1932), which try to estab-
lish the “connection of everything with everything,” to the more systematic theory
of montage in the later works. At the same time, the early Capital project’s associa-
tive and rhizomatic character continues through his entire late work, from 1932 to
1948, the year of his death. Among these complex theoretical projects, published
by Kleiman in Russian within the joint series of the Muzei Kino and Ėizenshtein
Centr, the following merit special mention: Montazh [Montage] (2000), Metod
[Method] 1 and 2 (2002), and Neravnodushnaia priroda [The Non-indifferent
Nature] 1 and 2 (2004). Kleiman’s most recent publication is Eisenstein on Paper:
Graphic Works by the ­Master of Film (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017).

31
The Value of Crisis

The first chapter attempts to map the “loose leaves” of Cap-

ital while simultaneously elucidating the complexity of Eisen-
stein’s archive. His associative method of “thoughts sticking as
a bristle in all directions,” which will be closely analyzed in the
second chapter, appears here as an answer to a fundamental
crisis of representation: a crisis which equally affects cinema,
advertisement and political mediation. Eisenstein’s continuous
montage and re-montage of concrete materials stand in direct
relation to his “novelist approach to film script,” which argues
for the necessity of “short cine-essais” instead of “whole works.”
The coevolution of the Capital project and The Glass House—an
unrealized film envisioned in a transparent skyscraper—accen-
tuate the crisis of the visibility of the political under capitalist
conditions. In dialogue with Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay,
this chapter analyzes the crucial intersection between politi-
cal and aesthetic issues in Eisenstein’s work, crystallized in the
concept of “exhibition value.”
The second chapter concentrates on the surprising asso-
ciation of two main “sources” for the Capital project: Marx’s
­Critique of Political Economy and Joyce’s Ulysses. This encoun-
ter seems almost as enigmatic as the fact that Eisenstein never
quotes directly from either of these texts. In turn, the notebooks
for Capital clearly articulate the question of how to translate the
history of capitalist exploitation by means of concrete forms,
that is, by means of aesthetic experience, necessarily errant and
incomplete. What does it mean to reimagine Marx’s Capital
after the literary model of Joyce’s Ulysses? This cinema would
interweave the political-historical thrust of the former with the
latter’s intimate, unconscious inner monologue. Eisenstein’s
experience of psychoanalytic treatment, his elaboration of the
“intellectual attraction,” grounded in the theory of the non-pro-
fessional actor, of tipazh, and the invention of an associative
method, enter into a constellation. The chapter then explores
how Eisenstein’s project entailed a radical revaluation of cin-
ematic representation, which occurred against the backdrop of

32
“Primitive Accumulation” and Other Loose Leaves of Capital

the film-image’s transition toward sound film and toward the

concomitant ascension of the “great speaker” and the political
system most commensurate to this figure: fascism.
The third chapter analyzes Eisenstein’s critique of symbolic
values and the power relations they embody and perpetuate.
Returning at different junctures to his film October, he articu-
lates the framework for the Capital project with references to
these conceptions. Eisenstein transposes the concept of value,
which is at the core of Marx’s Capital, into a field of image cir-
culation: images that function as actors, symbols, and medias
of the capitalist system. Reconstructing the fierce debates with
Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Esfir’ Shub about the
symbolic values and representation of history in October,
the chapter focuses on the visual answers Eisenstein gives in
­Capital—in the form of precisely constructed collages. Refer-
ring to the sequence of the gods in October, these concrete
elements dismantle the complex logic of cult images, especially
the image of the leader, which had found new forms in capital-
ist as well as socialist systems.
Addressing Eisenstein’s encounter with Georges Bataille
in Paris in 1930, Benjamin’s concept of “thread of expression,”
Grandville’s social botany of fetishes and, ultimately, the danc-
ing values on the pages of Eisenstein’s notebooks, the fourth
chapter reads Eisenstein’s “dialectic through forms.” What will
come to light as the common link between these elements is
a morphological approach latent in Marx’s Critique of Political
Economy, precisely embodied in the concept of “metamorpho-
sis.” Goethe’s Metamorphosis of the Plants helps to understand
not only the relational and protean dynamic within the trans-
formation of values, developed later by Marx, but also Hegel’s
fascination with the notion of the Urphänomen. Understanding
the transformation of forms as the process of metamorphosis
implies a new understanding of the dialectic, which Eisen-
stein reads as a movement of singularization. Exhibiting such
metamorphosis in images of commodities and commodified

33
The Value of Crisis

bodies, Eisenstein paradigmatically explores this value of sin-

gularity in the age of technological reproducibility. His mon-
tages take up this semiotic excess, which stirs the various found
materials and represented bodies into a dance analogous to
Marx’s “dance” of “petrified conditions.” Mirroring techniques
of reproduction and fragmentation in the press clippings he
included in his working diaries, Eisenstein, as an act of criti-
cism, exceeds the capitalist logic of fetish production. This
movement also characterizes the Joycean technique of stream
of consciousness—the “physiology of the detail” and concrete-
ness of the close up—imagined as the Capital project’s inner
voice. Employing a decidedly morphological approach, Eisen-
stein’s montage sequences produce a kind of surplus value, a
value all their own.

“Novelist approach to film script”

After the drama, poem, ballad in film, October presents a new form
of cinema: a collection of essays on a series of themes which constitute
October. Assuming that in any film work, certain salient phrases are
given importance, the form of a discursive film provides, apart from
its unique renewal of strategies, their rationalization, which takes
these strategies into account. Here’s a point of contact already with
completely new film perspectives and with the glimmers of possibili-
ties to be realized in Capital, a new work on a libretto by Karl Marx. A
film treatise.47

An incessant reflection on the form of the Capital project

­traverses Eisenstein’s notebooks from the very beginning, the
fall of 1927: from the “montage wall” to “film treatise,” from “col-
lection of essays” to “intellectual attractions,” from “libretto” to
“discursive film,” and so forth. In fact this repeated variation of

47 Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital,’” p. 4.

34
“Novelist approach to film script”

different forms and genres, which appear as cinematographic

models for the future film, is characteristic insofar as it does
not orient itself toward any goal. The object of this research is a
form in motion, an experimental morphological opening of rigid
categories and genres—“an immediate spatial articulation of
the slogan,” as Eisenstein states in these months in the article
“I.A. 28” [Intellectual Attraction 1928].48 At the same time these
notes are closely related to the situation of crisis; they are an
attempted intervention into the very conditions of production:
an invention of a new cinematographic language. Only from
this perspective can one understand Eisenstein’s almost obses-
sive engagement with aesthetic theory and its political, literary,
factual (documentary), and journalistic stakes. The form of the
film script seems crucial in this regard, not only because on the
same pages of his notebooks Eisenstein reflects on the scripts
of October and The General Line, which he planned on
publishing post factum. “The novelist approach to film script”
is also decisive because it is the driving force as well as the
medium, the means by which the same notebook is gradually
transformed into a script for Capital. Not by chance do these
pages contain several plans for articles, only some of which
were written. These plans bear witness to an intense engage-
ment with the contemporary theoretical and aesthetic debate.
In a note from February 4, 1928, one finds the following exten-
sive plan with a series of promising titles:

Following articles need to be made:

1) “S.O.S.”—for Kul’tura i revolutsiia [Culture and Revolution]—
“For a Capital Letter” from workers’ everyday life—and more
­precisely on the problems of labor

48 The full version of the article is still unpublished; the typescript of the text
“I.A. 28” is preserved at Gosfilmofond Archive, V/4-11-1, p. 20. Sergei Ėjzenštejn,
“I.A. 28,” Kinovedcheskie Zapiski 36/37 (1998), pp. 39–48.

35
The Value of Crisis

2) “Beyond the Played and the Non-Played” on October for Kino-

Gazeta [Cinema Newspaper] and the publication of the film
script.
3) On Piscator—the Berliner and the “Philosophy” of Marx for Sovre-
mennyi teatr [Contemporary Theater]
4) “John and Schopenhauer” for an edition of the script of The
­General Line—on basic permanent attractions.
5) How to write a script—here as well [viz. in the same article]—on
the novelist approach to film script, using attractions from the
article “On duty.”
6) “The Red Hoffmann”—on Dovzhenko as they said but maybe
from the point of view of the newspaper and how to understand
it countering the narrowness of LEF. In this sense also on the
­project by Burov.
7) To finish an article on the “Soviet Cinema Culture” for Freeman—
to complete a “chapter” on the third monopoly—the ideological
one—in the sphere of technology and form (America)
8) To rewrite “two skulls of Alexander of Macedon” for the German
journal. (There is some pressure on the proposition of the jour-
nal. Urgent!)

And then to bring both publications in a form. Write enough introduc-

tions p[ar]. ex[emple].
And then for “October”49 in the chapter on “Lose Blätter” [Loose Leaves]

1) On the unrealized (“flow,” “dogs” etc.)

“How to Film Lenin, Or: On the Rotten Eggs of Vladimir Mayakovsky.”

NB. To ask Il’ia to search for iconography of Lenin (in the Institute?)

49 Here Eisenstein is probably referring to the publication of the script for his
film October, which is structured by chapters. Alternatively, he may be refer-
ring to the “October Group,” which was founded by a collective of constructivist
artists in October 1928 in Moscow; besides Eisenstein, the group consisted of
Esfir’ Shub, El Lissitskii, Aleksei Gan, Gustav Klutsis, and Aleksandr R
­ odchenko,
among others.

36
“Novelist approach to film script”

Lenin with the sense, Chinese lubok, and in general, exotic distortions
of Lenin for illustrating the positions of the article. NB. To prevent the
question of “nationalization” of the figure of Lenin—of making him
nationally accessible. This objection is to be considered, for example,
in relation to the presentation of the bible, accompanied by images of
the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Land lords etc. To give a vignette
from Dürer.50

What does Eisenstein’s idea for a “novelist approach to film

script,” embedded in a constellation of sharply critical issues
that all refer to a series of interrelated problems, mean? This
approach appears crucial in the context of Eisenstein’s work on
Capital, primarily as an attempt at articulating a literary and a
theoretical stance towards the present. The unsystematic and
fragmentary character of these projects seems to respond to this
demand, as does their intensely critical tone. These qualities do
not weaken their force. On the contrary, they echo an essential
need to not reduce the complexity of relations involved in politi-
cal crisis, in the force of cinematic representation and its ten-
dency towards totalitarian ostentation—but rather to present
them in all their contradictoriness. “Reflections— in the form
of a brush,”51 as Eisenstein figuratively describes his mode of
writing, do not maintain any coherent argument, but reveal
and exhibit the incoherence covered behind each dogmatic
totality. This concerns primarily the complexity of the ideologi-
cal regimes, socialist no less than capitalist, insofar as in 1928
both are already affected by a crisis of the very conditions of the
exhibition of the political. Not by chance does the emergency
state of culture and its mediation, the “S.O.S.,” occupy a posi-
tion close to the capitalist “monopoly in the sphere of technol-
ogy” in Eisenstein’s list. A critique of the dogmatic position of
the Soviet Left Front of the Arts (LEF) is announced right next to

50 Eisenstein, diary from February 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 67–69.

51 Eisenstein, “I.A. 28,” p. 39.

37
The Value of Crisis

the imminent danger of the “nationalization” of the figure of

Lenin.52
Such drafts—concrete intentions related to the future
film—thus appear as rhythmic elements in tension with the
present, forms and forces in conflict with this emergency state
of culture. Glosses on the “novelist approach to film script”
can in fact be found in Eisenstein’s article “On Duty,”53 which
he references in the list. In this article Eisenstein attempts to
clarify the relation between literature, cinema, and film script.
“Comrade writers! Don’t write film scripts!” is his directive. “Let
the production companies buy your product as novels. Sell the
rights for the novel. And the film directors have to find the cin-
ematic equivalents to these literary works.”54 Having introduced
these economic notions for the understanding of artistic work,
Eisenstein goes on to emphasize the enormous value of litera-
ture, giving the examples of Emile Zola and James Joyce in whose
work he recognizes concrete “methods” for the future cinema.
He highlights two rather heterogeneous or even opposed quali-
ties of literature. On the one hand, cinema has to learn from the
“physiological quality of the detail” in Joyce, from his process
of “de-anecdotization” of a particular case, the intensity of his
“close-ups,” and “the expression of the theme through a strong
impact of the material.” On the other hand, literature—includ-
ing Zola and Joyce—constitutes “a kind of statistics,” a “gigan-
tic archive of ‘clips’ from the everyday and social events.” By
realizing this tension between the formal poetic construction
and documentary traces, and w ­ ithout ­abandoning the conflict,

52 This interrelation, especially in Eisenstein’s sharp critique of Novyi LEF’s

positions towards his film October, is closely analyzed in the third chapter of this
book.
53 This article consists of Eisenstein’s answers to a questionnaire, published
in a newspaper and reprinted later under the title “Literatura i kino” [Literature
and Cinema], in Izbrannye proizvedenia, vol. 5, 6 vols. (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1968),
pp. 525–529.
54 Ibid., p. 528.

38
“Novelist approach to film script”

Eisenstein enhances the value of “newspaper” and “specific

research” for the articulation of the cinematographic lan-
guage.55 In an article written in 1929, “The Form of the Script,”
he sees the “the script” as “a stage in the condition of the mate-
rial”; it is “a shorthand record of an emotional outburst striving
for realization in an accumulation of visual images.”56 Although
the script “is not a drama,” it requires an emotional condensa-
tion, a “cipher communicated by one temperament to another,”
an “imprint of rhythm.”57
How should we understand this double claim, this double
imperative—of the “novelist approach to film script” on the
one hand and the uncompromising ban of the script in favor
of the most experimental literature, as well as facts and statisti-
cal data on the other? The notion of a “cinematic equivalent”
appears decisive in this regard, since it maps a zone of imma-
nence in which different forms of expression—literature, film,
newspaper and everyday life—coincide. Far from falling prey to
a naïve belief in a mimetic relation between political or social
events and their cinematic representation, cinema bears an
equivalent: an equal mode of intervention into the very condi-
tions of these events, a mode for their transformation. “Novelist
approach to film script” thus has to be understood as a literary
force operative in cinema. It no longer requires a storyboard, a
“schedule of shots,” or “an anecdotal chain of the events in the
script.”58
Such an understanding of literary works—and of poetic,
visual, or bodily expression in general—reveals a fundamen-
tal vector in Eisenstein’s Capital project: its ustanovka. This

55 Ibid., pp. 527–528.
56 The article was first published in 1929 in Literaturnaia Gazeta [Literature
Newspaper], no. 24, Moscow. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Form of The Script,” in
Selected Works. Writings 1922–34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor, vol. 1 (London:
British Film Institute; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 134.
57 Ibid. Translation slightly modified.
58 Ibid.

39
The Value of Crisis

­ ussian word, which can be translated as “setup,” “tune-up,”

R
and “orientation,” as well as “position” or “attitude,” is also
a highly important concept for constructivists and authors of
LEF; in these contexts it describes a psychophysiological mon-
tage of body and technology, an entanglement of intentionality
and socio-cultural formation.59 Eisenstein repeatedly mentions
that “Capital’s ustanovka” is to be developed as “visual instruc-
tion in the dialectical method.”60 This vector orients itself pri-
marily towards those means which are not given or inherent,
but have yet to be invented. In the macro- and micro-structural
dimensions of Ulysses, Zola’s meticulous observation of dif-
ferent milieus,61 as well as in other literary, historical, and sci-
entific sources, Eisenstein found that heightened intensity of
the fact that he called “beyond the played [vneigrovaia].”62 This
experimental change of the means of production and the use of
theoretical categories—palpable even in Eisenstein’s perpetual
invention of concepts and in his use of neologisms—carries
deep significance for Capital’s confrontation with the regime
of exhibition value. Facing the distribution of mass medi-
ated images, Eisenstein’s “visual instruction in the dialectical
method” can be understood as a radical revaluation of a par-
ticular case: an eminently political “de-anecdotization” trans-
forms these images into an active and critical value, a reoccur-
ring singularity.

59 Especially in Soviet ergonomics and biomechanics, the term ustanovka

underwent a significant discursive, theoretical, and experimental development,
mainly under the influence of Aleksei Gastev, Nikolai Bernstein, and Vsevolod
Meyerhold. See Maria Gough, “Switched On: Notes on Radio, Automata, and the
Bright Red Star,” in Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design, ed. Leah Dick-
erman (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 39–55; and Ana Ole-
nina, “Engineering Performance: Lev Kuleshov, Soviet Reflexology, and Labor
Efficiency Studies,” Discourse 35, no. 3 (2013), pp. 297–336.
60 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 124.
61 See Emile Zola, Carnets d’Enquets: Une éthnologie inédite de la France, ed.
Henri Mitterand (Paris: Plon, 1987).
62 Sergei Eisenstein, “Our ‘October.’ Beyond the Played and the Non-Played,”
in Selected Works. Writings 1922–34, pp. 101–106.

40
The Glass House

The Glass House

The process of revaluation through montage affected Eisen-

stein’s work from early 1927 to 1930 and beyond. He understood
montage not only as relocation of an isolated fragment within
a new structural relation but also—and more primarily—as a
potential mode of shifting the perspective, of producing a new
visibility. A shift occurs in Eisenstein’s research during these
years. In endeavors such as his project on “intellectual attrac-
tions,” the unlimited potentials of the “Dynamic Square,”63
the dialectical relation between “form” and “content,”64 the
“Fourth Dimension in Cinema,”65 the cinematic effects “Beyond
the Shot,” and the tectonics of transparency developed for his
film project The Glass House, one can discern an opening of the
operational field of the cinema. These reflections, in turn, con-
tribute to his contemporaneous elaboration of Capital. Thus,
the political function of the image was construed as a process
of radical metamorphosis, a drive for an alteration of forms, the
potential of the visible itself (rather than the subject) to “change
the point of view.”66
Eisenstein conceived this dynamic fraction of vision in
his film project The Glass House, a satire on bourgeois society
whose action was to take place in a skyscraper made entirely out

63 Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dynamic Square,” in Selected Works. Writings

1922–34, pp. 206–219.
64 Sergei Eisenstein, “Perspectives,” in Selected Works. Writings 1922–34, p. 152.
65 Sergei Eisenstein, “Fourth Dimension in Cinema,” in Selected Works.
­Writings 1922–34, pp. 181–195.
66 This formula—written in English—traverses Eisenstein’s notebooks on
Glass House and Capital. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Glashaus, Notizen,” in Eisen-
stein und Deutschland: Texte, Dokumente, Briefe, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin:
Henschel, 1998), pp. 18, 28, 30. Sergei Eisenstein, diary from February 9, 1928,
RGALI 1923-2-1105, p. 72. The most complete edition of these materials has
recently been published in France: Sergei Eisenstein, Glass House – Du projet de
film au film comme projet S. M. Eisenstein, ed. Alexandre Laumonier and François
Albera, trans. Valérie Posener, Michail Maiatsky, and François Albera (Paris: Les
presses du réel, 2009).

41
The Value of Crisis

of glass. A “nightmare” and a “symphony” of glass.67 The ideo-

logical tension between transparency and opacity is translated
in the most vertiginous formal experiment with the material
of glass: the inclusion within the frame of several actions and
perspectives, their multiplication and dissection, and finally
the realization of montage within these qualities of the mate-
rial. The idea for the film occurred to Eisenstein while he was
visiting Berlin in April 1926 for the premiere of Potemkin. The
first note appeared only on January 13, 1927, the day after he
received an invitation from Douglas Fairbanks Corporation:
“Glass House […] a skyscraper out of glass. Through its walls
a vision of America. Ironically, like in [Anatole] France. The
theme needs to be treated as a parody—a parody of Hollywood
clichés = the real America. The reality as parodic element of the
quasi real Hollywood cliché.”68 Oksana Bulgakowa rightly finds
in The Glass House a parody of the ideological camps (capital-
ism versus socialism) and suggests that the project can there-
fore be read as a polemic answer to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,
whose production Eisenstein had visited in Berlin. She argues
that it can also, and even more so, be read as a cinematic
answer to architectural utopias of transparency, as exemplified
by the projects of Bruno Taut, Frank Lloyd Wright, Konstantin
­Melnikov, and El Lissitskii.69
Eisenstein’s fascination with glass architectures and their
dialectical and narrative potential—expressed through cinematic
means—increased the complexity of The Glass House project,
bringing it closer to such city poems as Moholy-Nagy’s Dynamik
der Großstadt, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin – Die S ­ infonie der
Grossstadt or Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino-apparatom.
By modulating the qualities of glass, the film aimed to unfold

67 Eisenstein, “Glashaus, Notizen,” p. 21.

68 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
69 Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergej Eisenstein – drei Utopien: Architekturentwürfe zur
Filmtheorie (Berlin: PotemkinPress, 1996), pp. 112–115.

42
The Glass House

the variety of modes and regimes of the gaze in contemporary

society—from opacity and social indifference to overall surveil-
lance and control. Aesthetically close to Vertov and Moholy-Nagy,
this transformation of formal, political, and social elements
expanded the possibilities of cinema, turning it into an actor
of acceleration, sensuous experience, and the social dynamiza-
tion of the metropolis. Thus Eisenstein’s theoretical and politi-
cal understanding of montage seriously engages the question of
exhibition value, an issue that brings his “visual instruction in
the dialectical method” in close proximity to the works of John
Heartfield and Bertolt Brecht. A parodic remontage and a criti-
cal reappropriation of capitalist environments, performing and
exceeding their dream of transparency, constituted the project’s
“social mission.”
Reading The Glass House against the backdrop of his con-
temporary theoretical reflections, Antonio Somaini empha-
sizes Eisenstein’s attempt “to rethink the way of representing
space”70 by means of its cinematographic “transformation.”71
What is striking about this shift is its crucial “absence of the
frame, of margins” which would define or limit the image
from all sides.72 Somaini follows the articulation of this labile
image—an image able to reflect or to absorb exteriority—to
Eisenstein’s dynamic understanding of the cinematographic
screen, presented for the first time in his 1930 lecture in Holly-
wood. The screen becomes a protean surface, “the one and only
form that is equally fit, by alternatively suppressing right and
left or up and down, to embrace all the multitude of e­ xpressive
rectangles in the world. […] The ‘dynamic’ square screen, that

70 Antonio Somaini, “Utopies et dystopies de la transparence. Eisenstein,

Glass House, et le cinématisme de l’architecture de verre,” in Appareil, no. 7
(2011), pp. 1–33, p. 3. See also François Albera, “Formzerstörung und Trans­
parenz – Glass House, vom Filmprojekt zum Film als Projekt,” in Eisenstein und
Deutschland, ed. Bulgakowa, pp. 123–143.
71 Somaini, “Utopies et dystopies de la transparence,” pp. 1–5.
72 Ibid., p. 3.

43
The Value of Crisis

is to say one providing in its dimensions the opportunity of

impressing, in projection, with absolute grandeur every geo-
metrically conceivable form of the picture limit.”73 Eisenstein’s
all-embracing interest in the metamorphic power of montage—
which he methodically analyzed “beyond the shot” and later as
a rhythmic quality far beyond the cinema74—was neither a mere
theoretical obsession nor a naïve belief in the universal prin-
ciples of the image. His notes and drafts for The Glass House,
which often overlap with the notes for Capital, show the close
epistemic and aesthetic interrelations between the two proj-
ects: they intersect in Eisenstein’s engagement with the stakes
of political transparency and opacity under the new conditions
of visual mediation (plates 7 & 8).

For Capital the problem of the frame will be of utmost importance.

The ideology of the unequivocal frame must be thoroughly reconsid-
ered. How, I can’t yet tell. Experimental work is needed. For that, it’s
madly necessary first to make The Glass House in which the (usual)
idea of the frame is turned upside down while the other conditions
remain “orthodox.” What happens there to the frame is what happens
to the structure of things in the fragments of October and to the
entire structure of Capital.75

In which way should The Glass House be understood as

an experimental training for Capital? And why is it of utmost
importance to transform the univocity of the frame, to multiply
its modes of use and to enlarge its effects, such that it is finally

73 Eisenstein, “The Dynamic Square,” p. 209.

74 In the chapter “The Rhythmic Drum” of his major theoretical study Method,
Eisenstein constructs his morphological argument on cinematic rhythm, refer-
ring to Goethe’s Urphänomen [originary phenomenon]. In this way, the “organic
quality” of montage references Goethe’s morphology as an important model for
cinema. Sergei Eisenstein, Metod [Method], ed. Oksana Bulgakowa, vol. 1, 4 vols.
(Berlin; San Francisco: PotemkinPress, 2008), p. 241.
75 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 148. Eisen-
stein, “Notes for a film of ‘Capital,’” p. 24. Translation slightly modified.

44
The Glass House

associated with the relational quality of the objects, the struc-

ture of their linkage in the experimental scenes of October? To
understand the necessity of realizing The Glass House in order to
conceive Capital, certain passages from Eisenstein’s notes are
helpful, as they often not only directly link both projects but also
articulate the same conceptual and aesthetic questions.
The evolution of the material glass from the concrete archi-
tectural basis to a protean agent—one that is able to reveal and
reflect the power relations that are inherent in the capitalist
regime—establishes the link between both projects: unfold-
ing the whole action, the whole drama and comedy of The Glass
House out of the varying qualities of the glass. In this link Eisen-
stein sees both, the sphere of formal experimentation and the
possibility of Marxist critique, which turns The Glass House
finally into a “model” for Capital.76 “All experiments need to be
intensified by new angles of view. Concerning both, the view
and the interpretation. Défilé of American Stars as a cliché,
make the people who act [in the film] appear pale beside the
down-home people, the real men.”77 The variation of different
states of the glass merges with the perception of shifting per-
spectives—the perception of space, the appearance of its inhab-
itants—and the ideological significance of the action. Eisen-
stein aimed at carefully planned modulations of the perceptual
apparatus, subjecting it to sudden shocks and aberrations, as
evidenced in the following passage amidst his notes for Capital:

“The Glass House” […]

6) As a principle: In the beginning the glass is perceived as a motiva-
tion for spectacular angles of view. Then to “adapt” to this spectacle.
To psychologize it. To enlarge the psychological expressivity. Accord-
ing to the analogy—the hammer = an “extended” fist; the room = an
“enlarged” jacket etc. For example, a humiliated bow in front of a half-

76 Eisenstein, “Glas Haus, Notizen,” p. 29.

77 Ibid., p. 20.

45
The Value of Crisis

circle of superiors is sinking deeper through the glass floor—one floor

below (see the drawings on the previous page).
Later, when “the motive of the glass” is totally forgotten—to confront
violently with this motive: for example a sudden driving a nail into a
glass wall etc.
The effect of a man (in this case the spectator) who is driving against
the mirror taking it for the extension of the corridor.78

Subjecting the spectator to a series of sensorial shocks—

shocks deriving from the violence of metamorphosis—is in fact
intended as a gradual revelation of the opaque ground of social
and economic relations on which capitalism has built its world
of availability and transparency. The gap between the concrete
material—its actual and its virtual quality—and its perception
becomes the threshold on which the world of glass receives its
political significance.

For The Glass House a series of Marxist principles needs to be formu-

lated, like a montage of formulas. They will have an eccentric effect
on the concrete material. One principle and different solutions. Not
the material is decisive, but its expression. The materialization of an
abstract idea.79

The intense elaboration of the Capital project within

The Glass House and vice versa becomes even more palpable
when the above-mentioned consideration of the “comedy of
principles”80 ends in an ironic remark about the real state of
censorship: “For the State Committee of Censorship I have to
present only the ideological conception of The Glass House—
without the plot. For the West only a cliché book without any
allusion to the ideological conception. The film will satisfy only

78 Sergei Eisenstein, diary from January 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-1105, pp. 41–42.

79 Eisenstein, “Glas Haus, Notizen,” p. 27.
80 Ibid., p. 28.

46
The Glass House

the Committee of Censorship.”81 However pessimistic or reso-

lute this comment might sound in February 1928, it shows that
both projects address an ideological blind spot of both political
orders, a fact that underscores the urgency of Eisenstein’s pro­
jects even further.
Indeed, the materialization of an “abstract idea” proved
difficult. Several attempts to approach glass from a material-
ist perspective evince this challenge. For example, Eisenstein’s
draft for a “prologue” ends in a self-referential parody: “The
history of glass from the antique and stupid use (jewelry, glass
pearls, glass luster, monocle) to glass design—spaces of comp-
toir (Ford), glass cars, glass coffins, glass death carriages, glass
furniture, glass wall, glass … glass … glass … Glass House.”82
The materialist outline which appears in the beginning turns
quickly into an excessive rhythmic chain of “frames” that tau-
tologically reflect each other. The rhythmic repetition within a
variation, the automation of even the act of exhibiting itself pro-
vided not only a crucial motive for The Glass House and Capital,
it traversed both projects as a medium in which the question
of exhibition value received its most concrete articulation. The
figuration of this motive—the figure in which the mechanical
reproduction and the gesture of exhibition meet each other—
can be found in a series of cabaret scenes with “girls” (plates
9, 10 & 11). In one of his early notes on The Glass House project
Eisenstein places a rather grotesque “varieté theater” on the top
floor of the house. “In this theater there is a pool with sea lions
(like in ‘Scala’83 with the girls), the pool explodes. Many sea lions
and water, they are slipping downstairs.”84 In a further note the
“girls” appear again in a constellation with the cabaret and the
sea lions. This time, Eisenstein gives a source: “this happened

81 Ibid., p. 29.
82 Ibid., pp. 31–32.
83 The “Scala” Theater in Berlin was built by Walter Würzbach, the architect
of the group “Die gläserne Kette” [Glass Chain] founded by Bruno Taut.
84 Eisenstein, “Glas Haus, Notizen,” p. 18.

47
The Value of Crisis

in Berlin to a troop of girls and See Löwen [sea lions], I’ve read
about it in BZ am Mittag85 during my visit in 1926.”86 This vision
is followed by a rather “tragic” and disturbing scene in which
a drowning man is presented to the audience through the all-
round glass walls. The spectators of the scene do not dare to
open the door. They are afraid of the water streaming into their
rooms. Like glass, the water changes its function from luxury
and entertainment to opacity and danger. Someone hangs him-
self. After the suicide the café with the pool is ironically called
“À la corde du Pendu” [The Hanged Man’s Noose]. “In the café
on the rooftop people are required to be naked, rather than
wearing tailcoat and evening dress.”87 The margins between
exterior and interior spaces, public and private, voyeurism and
control are gradually abolished.
The collaged example of the “Girls pour le numéro de ‘­ Pierrot’”
is of particular interest (plates 10 & 11). Eisenstein turns the wom-
en’s bodies into an exhibition machine, and places the voyeur,
Pierrot—or more precisely his multiplied and grotesque reflec-
tions—at the center of his potential voyeuristic gaze, that is on
the bodies of the “girls,” the object of his desire. The whole con-
struction turns out to be even more ambitious when one reads
Eisenstein’s instruction on the “Technik des silbernen Vorhangs”
[technique of the silver curtain], written in German.88 Eisen-
stein’s drawing precisely explains the mechanism by means of
which the “curtain,” made of two pieces of fabric fixed on the
girl’s arms, opens when the girl opens her arms (plate 11). It
reveals two figures of “Pierrot,” each of which is placed on one
of her breasts. The shot is framed by Eisenstein’s detail of the
identical bodies of two girls, each holding two ­Pierrots to their
breasts. Following such a detailed shot, the instruction states

85 A Berlin newspaper.
86 Eisenstein, “Glas Haus, Notizen,” p. 24.
87 Ibid., p. 29.
88 Ibid., p. 30.

48
The Glass House

that “the whole number as such” should be given. It is accompa-

nied by the French folk song “Au clair de la lune” [By the Light of
the Moon]. Although Eisenstein quotes only the first four lines
of the song on the right side of the collaged page (plate 10), the
following four seem to be of interest too:

By the light of the moon,

My friend Pierrot,
Lend me your quill
To write a word.
My candle is dead,
I have no light left.
Open your door for me
For the love of God.

In the weak moonlight, additionally emphasized in Eisen-

stein’s drawing, the scene is suddenly illuminated by the auto-
mated opening of the curtain. The exhibited Pierrot puppets
face the viewer, uncannily anticipating, embodying his gaze.
This unsettling effect is reinforced by another of the director’s
remarks: the “technique of the silver curtain” is to be contrasted
with scenes of “feeding mothers,” “durcheinander geschnitten,”
cut disorderedly. The simultaneity of all perspectives as the
key formal element of The Glass House is thus turned into an
all-encompassing spectacle in which the eroticized body, the
seduced spectator, and even the potential psychoanalytic read-
ing of the scene, are presented simultaneously, revealed in one
and the same action.
The episode with the “girls” not only emerges as the figura-
tion of the new medial regime that fragments, reproduces, and
projects the commodified body but also shows the turning point
between the exhibited commodity and the exhibition as a total-
ized value of its own. At the same time the scene increases the
contradiction between the total exhibition and the i­nvisibility
of the political actor behind it. The experimental technique of

49
The Value of Crisis

The Glass House consists in the sensuous staging of this total-

ized vision and its simultaneously parodic exaggeration. The
vertigo of changing “points of view,” the varying effects of the
glass, and their extension into the dynamic qualities of the
frame result in the experience necessary for the conception of
Capital, as both projects share the same critical intent.
The importance of the cabaret and the girls, placed on top
of the exhibition palace and involved in several parodic-erotic
scenes, cannot be overestimated. They relate to what Siegfried
Kracauer in 1927, the same year in which Eisenstein conceived
Capital, described as the political figure of the “mass orna-
ment.” The tension between the ornamental shape formed by
the multitude of bodies and the extinction of each individual
shape within this ornament—which Kracauer analyzes in the
spectacle of the Tiller Girls, “products of American distrac-
tion factories”89—appears in Eisenstein’s automated cabaret
scenes. For Kracauer this conflict manifests itself in a “pattern”
that organizes the spectacle of the masses while concealing
the mechanism of its production from them. This automated
“monstrous figure” conditions the exhibition and visibility to
the degree that it functions in accordance with the principles of
the exploitation of labor. Both obey the same rhythm.

It is conceived according to rational principles which the Taylor sys-

tem merely pushes to their ultimate conclusion. The hands in the fac-
tory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls. Going beyond manual
capacities, psychotechnical aptitude tests attempt to calculate dispo-
sitions of the soul as well. The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex
of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires.90

89 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, ed. and trans.
Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 75.
90 Ibid., pp. 78–79.

50
The Glass House

For Kracauer, the geometry of human limbs, especially in

terms of graphic and abstract expression of their movements—
the motif to which Eisenstein devotes his greatest attention in
the notebooks for Capital91—becomes an ambivalent figura-
tion of the political, a “mise-en-scene of disenchantment.”92 By
framing identical elements of the shot, Eisenstein mediates the
spectacle, evoking the mass ornamental image. Thus the con-
flicting montage of the “feeding mothers” interrupts the orna-
ment; it breaks the continuum of the shot, as do Eisenstein’s
montages for Capital, in which the images—gathered from
magazines and newspapers—enter into new relations with one
another and thereby express the political. They introduce a
relational matrix in which the new form of collectivity finds an
image commensurate with it.
In this sense the notebooks for Capital function as an auto-
mated theatre en miniature: a montage of scenes, presented
without comment, that effects a critical demontage of mass-
mediated ideological scenarios. Framing the automated spec-
tacle in a single image, and subsequently showing the cabaret
dancers in a series, Eisenstein draws a parallel between the
cinematographic technique and the operation of the spectacle.
At the same time the critical potential of montage is actualized
in its potential of interruption: in breaking the perspective, in
changing the viewpoint. The resultant breach annuls the total-
ity. It not only interrupts the exhibition mechanism, disman-
tling its structure, but also exhibits the fragment—an actor in
the chain—empowering it to alternative action. The mass orna-
ment, which for Kracauer reflects the “entire contemporary
situation,” giving an image of the “capitalist production pro-
cess,” reduces the individual to its “task on the conveyor belt,”

91 For Eisenstein’s experimental work with the graphic notation of bodily

movement, see the fourth chapter of this book.
92 Thomas Y. Levin, Introduction to The Mass Ornament, p. 19.

51
The Value of Crisis

its “partial function without grasping the totality.”93 In doing

so it abstracts the bodies from the action, the ornament from
its bearers.94 The framing process that occurs in a sequence of
The Glass House—the fragmenting gesture of its montage—
involves an abstraction of a different kind. It is not the reign
of the ornamental totality, but a sensuous shock induced by a
detail of the action. An excess of detail. Eisenstein experiments
with such excessive and grotesque manipulation of detail in
one of the sketches for The Glass House (plate 13). A figure of
a voyeur multiplies across this page, assuming different posi-
tions and viewing angles. The figure’s breasts are armed with
spectacles, taking on the role of its eyes. This eroticized object
of vision is the vision apparatus itself, reduced ad absurdum in
different miniatures. Such comic variation of the detail, iso-
lated as a motive from the chain of automated cabaret figures,
exceeds any compositional totality by reflecting its mechanism
within the same movement. In this uncanny theatre, the breasts
oscillate between their nourishing function and that of a vision
machine, subjecting the figure to a perpetual metamorphosis:
an infantile voyeur and its own object of desire in one body.
Taking this self-reflecting and self-transforming mecha-
nism as a model for both The Glass House and Capital provides
an insight into their logic. The performative dimension of the
images consists not only in showing, but also, more radically, in
destabilizing the gaze through sudden metamorphosis. In The
Glass House the simultaneous vision of all perspectives func-
tions to reverse power relations by engaging the visible in a dis-
comforting sensuous shock. In this labile process images take
a position—not stable or determinable, but rather dynamic,
resulting from Eisenstein’s perpetual theatre of relocation and
remontage. In this sense the process of metamorphosis is an
eminently political one: in The Glass House and Capital meta-

93 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 78.

94 Ibid., p. 77.

52
The Glass House

morphosis describes the very topology of exhibiting the politi-

cal; it locates the exhibition value in an act of its perpetual relo-
cation, in “changing the point of view.”

53
February 23, 1928

Not by chance did the artists of the capitalism work so passionately

Soviet Art no 7
February 1928
J[ános] Mácza
renaissance “experiment” with the on landscape, then on still life, on
human body, with materials closely the object, creating the style of the 
related to this body. Their historical epoch and transforming commod-
aim was to counter the schematism ity into fetish. One cannot separate
of the Middle Ages with the formal “formal innovation,” the formal
perfection, the vital apotheosis ways of producing a new style, from
of the human-individual. Not by the subject and the ideological con-
chance did the artists of industrial tent of art.

Good:
(also to reproduce)

MOPR

ALL

HELP
THE PRISONERS

OF CAPITAL!

From the graphic works by the

students of the Moscow Art School,
commemorating 1905.
Woman’s sports face:
Miss Catcher, captain of a well known
baseball team in Pennsylvania, wearing her
protective mask.
Plate 1: Eisenstein, diary from February 23, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 91.
 1928 January 11, 1928

Today, Kaufman
leaves for Berlin
at 8 o’clock in the
evening, and is
fully confident
that the shooting
of The General
Line will be fin-
ished in Berlin.
Received the
attached portrait
from “br[others]
Vasil’ev” (politi-
cal editing at
Sovkino).
Yola d’Avril, a first National Star

This is what Marfa Lapkina will look

like after the shooting of The General Line

On the day of January 2, Coolidge’s right arm hung on a bandage.

Result of 3’330 handshakes on this day
         (Vecherniaia Moskva January 10, 1928)
Plate 2: Eisenstein, diary from January 11, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 47–48.
The stage direction is colloquial, although performed—half and
half—with and without the accent. Mendel and Benya Len are
­terrible. Mendel is either a gray-haired Gambetta or Anathema
with an overgrown beard sprawling out from under the make-up.
Their performance is even grimmer. I want to telegraph Babel for
his marvelous play [Sunset]

March 5, 1928 RABOCHAIA GAZETA, SUNDAY, MARCH 4, NR. 55 (1799)

Moscow’s ironworkers who have won the Rabochaia

Gazeta bonds. From left to right: 1) ARMAKOV—Gomza
factory; 2) IVANOV—Gomza factory; 3) IVANOV—Ham-
mer and Sickle factory; 4) SEDOV—Mastiazhart factory; 5)
SEREBRIAKOV—Mastiazhart factory.

Such a pity not to have the revue program ready to hand, where
“the stars” are displayed on a fan. I would paste them as pendant to
this wheel—commenting on the bourgeoisie would be unnecessary.
Plate 3: Eisenstein, diary, from March 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 112–114.
March 24, 1928 Monument of Post-February vulgarity

With deepest joy I inform relatives and acquaintances that,

following drawn-out and grave illness, on February 27, 1917
the autocratic and despotic regime passed away.

A Citizen of Free Russia…………………………………..................

In one of the first versions of October this “document of

the epoch” was to characterize the narration of the idea of
the revolution in the post-February period, the “Rodzianko
time” of the first days /To reproduce in the book/

Ochotnoriadec had to sign a card.

Plate 4: Eisenstein, diary from March 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 98–99.
 October 12, 1928

It’s settled:
we’re going to film Capital,
on Marx’s script—
the only logical solution.

NB. Stickers … those are notes pasted to

the montage wall.
Plate 5: Eisenstein, diary from October 12, 1927, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 1–2.
CAPITAL–

Moscow October 25, 1927

No. 272
Plate 6: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 1.
Plate 7: Eisenstein, diary from January 2, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 40.
1. “The Glass House” At night, from January 2 to 3, 1928

1) The “hungry” room and the “food lift”

(from the basement kitchen to the rooftop restaurant):

a) Diagonally in all directions; b) passage with an elevator

through all floors

(with the dishes
in the foreground)

2) A machine-gun salvo on the glass,

leaving a pattern of holes.

[A salvo] on the water cube—room and

a drawing emerges, fountains from the holes.

3) In place of a glass floor, a surface of water (the furniture

hangs, level with the water). Maybe as the beginning of the
performance with the sea lions. Comically. First misleading
and then revealing that it is a varieté show.

4) A spangled curtain

5) Metronome tone
Plate 8: Eisenstein, diary from January 2 to 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 41.
It is realized “purely literally.” sings
“Turn around,” against the backdrop of reflectors
(From the Swedish Ballet Picabia NB. Check in Querschnitt)
with eight partners in white wigs and black velvet crinolines.
Ladies sternly do not turn. And only finally do a pirouette
and leave open … just pearls.

“DREH’ DICH UM!”—DRAWN FROM MEMORY

Analogous to Auf Java sind die Mädchen braun [On Java the
Girls are Brown] (describe), fortune-telling with cards and
pantomime (get a cut from the old Berliner Illustrierte) and
finally Für Dich [For You] vocal routine of gift transfer—
human-sized display of powder compacts, vials, powder
puffs, etc. etc
Plate 9: Eisenstein, diary from January 16, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 56.
§ 62. GLASS HOUSE
“By the light
June
23, of the moon,
1928
my friend
Pierrot,

Lend me
your quill,

To write
a word.”

The girls’ (The “nose”

costume —titon!
for the natural)
“Pierrots”
number

NB. The first picture

detail and the number, as such.
Plate 10: Eisenstein, “Girls pour le numéro de ‘Pierrot’,” draft for The Glass House,
diary from June 23, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1109, pp. 77–78.
§ 61. Variants to the above:

1. After the “Pierrot”-revue—a “negro”—

revue of negress-tits

2.

silver

The technique of the silver curtain. silver

3.
Image detail variant
of the single-tit
costume.

Drunkenness
(cut disorderedly with

the mother scenes. Feeding mothers!)

4. The “single-tit”
variant—necessarily
more erotically
effective! silver
Plate 11: Eisenstein, “Girls pour le numéro de ‘Pierrot’,” draft for The Glass House,
diary from June 23, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1109, p. 79.
For the Glass House-Revue

Twins The twin

brothers

April 22, (Who sneeze

1928 milk!)

Electric
limelight

The souffleur’s
brothers
Plate 12: Eisenstein, drawing for The Glass House, RGALI, 1923-2-162,
p. 42ob.
Plate 13: Eisenstein, drawing for The Glass House, RGALI, 1923-2-162, p. 36.
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

Cassini’s Ovals and Hypnosis

“In the frame of this notebook the entire ideology of the new
cinematography is to be solved.” This sentence opens the sec-
ond of Eisenstein’s Capital notebooks. Filled only over twelve
days, between March 31 and April 11, 1928, it comprehensively
addresses this problematic over the course of more than one
hundred fifty pages.

All the supposed concepts and their missing conclusions on O

­ ctober
fall into nothing but semblance. Strong winds blow through this new,
endless desert. Frightening. There is no hold. The gods and the steps
of October. The dematerialization of the frame. Fragments about
speech, about words, about the image [obraz]. Analysis. Analysis.
Analysis. Algebra and the system of Descartes. Historical path. Tipazh.
The statue. The thing [vezh]. The fact. The slogan. The principle of the
reversed unfolding. Theoretical fragments applied to an unknown
field …1

Eisenstein did not accomplish all three notebooks used

in researching and drafting the Capital project in the same
tempo and with the same intensity; the others took him more
than five months each: the first dates between October 12, 1927
and March 31, 1928, the third between April 12 and September
21, 1928. Eisenstein was very much aware of this temporal and
formal character, the “frame” imposed by the notebooks, as
his—certainly ironic—comments on their “genesis” show. For
instance, the third notebook related to the Capital project (plate
14) begins with the following self-deprecating remark. Beneath

1 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 1.

81
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

a group portrait of twelve old men dressed in “­ apostle’s cloth-

ing,” Eisenstein writes: “Entering ‘volume’ five of my ‘diary’ I feel
old, old like all the above-mentioned old men taken together.”2
The second notebook, which begins with the formal and ideolog-
ical issues of the new cinema, ends with two equally ironic visual
elements. The first is the pasted image of a frog, a caricature of
the Assoziatsia Khudozhnikov Revoliutsionnoi Rossii (Association
of Artists of the Revolution; AKhRR) which Eisenstein comments
with “dead frog throwing the stimulus’s [razdrazhitel’] paw from
the belly.”3 The second is Eisenstein’s own signature, revealing
the theatricality of his theoretical reflections, following a note:
“This notebook is finished on April 11, 1928. At noon. Though
the ‘challenge’ formulated on its first page can be regarded as
fully mastered. For this, 12 days is quite intense a time.”4
These self-reflexive remarks do not reveal the introspective
mood of a conventional diary; neither do they bear the continu-
ous trace of an écriture de soi nor the conceptual astringency of
a theoretical work. Taking into account the experimental and
extremely heterogeneous character of these notes—their epis-
temically efficacious and at the same time immediately expres-
sive character—reveals their proximity to a practice that Michel
Foucault referred to as hupomnēmata. In this way Eisenstein’s
labile constellations can be understood as aides-mémoires, that
is, as “memory aides” in the broadest sense of the term. “The
writing of hypomnemata,” according to Foucault, is “a regu-
lated and deliberate practice of the disparate. It is a selecting of
heterogeneous elements.”5

2 Eisenstein, diary from April 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 1.

3 Eisenstein, diary from April 11, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 180.
4 Ibid., p. 180.
5 In Greek antiquity, this term designated a structured collection of notes,
citations, and excerpts that served at once as a memory bank for its author
and as an inventory of material for producing future texts. Michel Foucault,
“Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow and James D
­Faubion, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1 (New York:
New Press, 1997), p. 212.

82
Cassini’s Ovals and Hypnosis

Eisenstein announces the decision to use the notebooks

as such a memory aid—their experimental and performative
necessity as a repository for heterogeneous elements—in the
second notebook’s early pages. Here we read an important
detail that relates this practice to an epistemic interest in psy-
choanalysis on the one hand and to intense research on the for-
mal and theoretical implications of the new cinematographic
language on the other. The director points out that the ideas
exposed on the following pages emerged directly from his psy-
choanalytic treatment, which included methods of hypnosis.6
In contrast to the characteristic introspective mode, though,
this “half-dream” state, “or even a dream,” catalyzed an intense
theoretical engagement: the invention of a mathematical
model for cinematographic expression, or, more precisely, “a
parallel between the mathematical and the cinematographic
mechanisms,” which he went on to investigate later in the same
notebook (plate 15).7
Emerging at the intersection of Joyce’s literary technique
and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, the Capital project
becomes palpable in its source: the notebooks themselves reveal
their model, a deliberately practiced “stream of conscious-
ness,” an experimental setting involving unconscious and ran-
dom fragments of thought. This writing arose from Eisenstein’s
insight into the intimate relation between the political and aes-
thetic issues of the new cinema and the process of thought, the
latter itself affected and shaped by social and political relations.
Moreover, Eisenstein’s experiments, lying at the core of his con-
ception of “intellectual attraction,” introduced a materialist
perspective into the very notion of ­subjectivity and thought: the
conscious and unconscious dimensions of the Joycean model.8

6 Eisenstein mentions his treatment by the psychoanalyst Dr. Konovalov, in

Moscow’s Sokol’niki district.
7 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 4.
8 In this regard Eisenstein’s research was close to the theoretical focus
of his colleagues and friends, especially the adherents of cultural-historical

83
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

In the new cinematography the slogan [lozung] needs to find an ex­­

pression as a spatial phenomenon—a cine-treatise, as an abstract
algebraic formula within a physically perceptible s­ patial geometrical
construction in Descartes’s or polar coordinates: “Beauti­fully” issue a
chapter on this, giving it the title:

and ending it “spatially”:

This is an equation of Cassini curves (ovals) and their spatial (planar)

expression (see Borisov Foundations of Analytic Geometry p. 95).9

This mathematical equation and its geometrical expres-

sion—known collectively as Cassini’s Ovals—appear in both
Eisenstein’s notebooks (plate 15) and in one of his most semi-
nal texts, written in the very same month: “I.A. 28.” This article
on “intellectual attractions” brings the problem of the new cin-
ema, the complexity of its theoretical articulation, and Cassini’s
geometrical figure into a single constellation. Eisenstein begins
it with a sketch: “This is not an essay. And, good lord, not a trea-
tise. First of all, it is a batch of reflections. Reflections—in the

­ sychology—later associated with the names Luria, Leontiev, and Vygotsky.

p
The same group, particularly including the psychologists Aleksandr Luria and
Lev Vygotsky, contributed to a strong reception of psychoanalysis in the Soviet
Union. Their translation of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
which appeared with their editor’s introduction in 1925, stimulated the for-
mation of the Soviet Psychoanalytic Circle. Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria,
“Predislovie,” in Po Tu Storonu Principa Udovol’stvia (Moscow: Sovremennye
problemy, 1925), pp. 3–16.
9 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 1.

84
Cassini’s Ovals and Hypnosis

form of a brush. Sticking in all directions.”10 Cassini’s figure is

analogous to this announced spectrum of different thoughts,
since it encapsulates “the countless multiplicity of points,”
showing a possible relation within an ostensible disparity of
positions. “Cassini’s Ovals” refer to a class of shapes in which
the distances from any point on the curve(s) to two fixed points
within—referred to as ‘foci’—always multiply to the same prod-
uct. In more mathematical terms, which Eisenstein draws on
in his texts, if P is any point on the curve(s) and F1 and F2 are
the foci, the distance from P to F1 times the distance from P to
F2 always equals a third, constant number.11 Nearly mirroring
the argument contained in his notebook, Eisenstein goes on to
unfold the analogy between the geometrical expression of the
mathematical formula and the cinematic or visual expression of
an abstract “slogan”:

By means of an analysis of the specific conditions of the location of

these points, and using the coordinate system, one draws a conclusion
on these points, unifying them into an abstractly formulated solution
that concerns them all and holds true for each of them in particular.12

What fascinates Eisenstein so much about an abstract for-

mula that is equally valid for a curve connecting several points
and for each single one of these points? He argues that it is the
translation of an abstract relation into “the sensuously percep-
tible conditions” of a spatial expression or shape that gives “the
possibility of a concrete perception of this formula.”13 It is, he
argues, the topological manifestation of an ideal or abstract
relation, which makes it at once “comprehensive” and “viscer-
ally perceptible.”14

10 Eisenstein, “I.A. 28,” p. 39.

11 Ibid. Also Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 4.
12 Eisenstein, “I.A. 28,” p. 39.
13 Ibid., p. 40.
14 Ibid.

85
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

While Eisenstein’s notebook and his article on “I.A. 28”

diverge from this point onwards, their latent interrelation,
explored in the following, demands consideration: “I.A. 28”
draws a parallel between the geometrical expression of the
­Cassini figure and the “social analysis” undertaken by Marx
in his ­Critique of Political Economy.15 Marx discovers a “whole
bunch of facts conditioned by the same socio-economical
premises” and, like Cassini, develops a “tactical solution in
relation to a given system of facts,” a solution that is equally
“valid with regard to each particular fact.”16 Having discovered
this unlikely parallel, Eisenstein brings them together in an
approach that dismantles capitalism’s totalizing tendencies by
way of a meticulous engagement with the most mundane and
disparate phenomena.
Again, the emphasis on the equal validity of the solution—
for each particular case, each singular fact, and the entire ensem-
ble—stands out. In analogy to Cassini’s equation, in which the
concrete ensemble of points as well as each particular point find
their articulation in one mathematical formula, Marx’s analysis
of social facts finds its expression in a tactical approach, in a
political statement. To show this interrelation, Eisenstein posits
a speculative etymology of the Russian word for slogan, “lozung”
from the German “Lösung,” English “solution” or “resolution,”
which he, for the sake of his argument, considers as a French
synonym of “statement,” Russian “rezoliutsia.”17 “Resolution
[rezoliutsia]—means ‘solution’ in French. The solution which
remains a statement [suzhdenie] in relation to the facts, long
passed, that actually comes to be a directive under the current
conditions.”18

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.

86
Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”

The reference to Marx’s Capital in the context of the mani-

festo on “intellectual attractions” goes far beyond the merely
formal linking of historical materialism with an aesthetic
agenda, as was common in contemporary agitprop. Rather,
one must understand this reference precisely in its relation
to Eisenstein’s work on the Capital project: the all-embracing
research on the visual expression of the “dialectical method,”
which equally concerns the ensemble of social relations and
each individual. Eisenstein’s article goes on to interrogate this
threshold between art and its potential for action, between
abstract knowledge and its aesthetic and sensuous expression.
“The materialization of the slogan” can no longer be incorpo-
rated in an image of a hero or a mere fictional character, such
as Poor Liza or the Good Soldier Švejk.19 “We are mature enough
for Cassini’s Ovals. Analytical geometry is closer to us” than the
ancient heroes, Eisenstein claims.20 He calls for—and this is
the context in which Cassini’s enigmatic figures appear—an
“immediate spatial expression of the essence of the slogan.”21

Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”

Returning to the atmosphere evoked on the very first pages of

the notebook—the perception of an “endless desert” of “theo-
retical fragments applied to an unknown field”—raises the
question of which aesthetic perspective, precisely, Cassini’s
formula envisions. What is the call for an immediate expres-
sion of the ideological content, if not a desperate flight into

19 Poor Liza is a famous Russian novel and outstanding example of sentimental

literature, written by Nikolai Karamzin and published in 1794. The Good S ­ oldier
Švejk is the abbreviated title of an unfinished satirical black comedy by the Czech
author Jaroslav Hasek, initially planned as a series of six volumes, the first of
which appeared in 1921. Ibid., p. 41.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.

87
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

rationalism, or, even worse, to a platonic revelation of an idea

behind the image? On the following pages of the notebook and
in his article “I.A. 28,” however, Eisenstein develops a different
position. He articulates this claim by replacing the traditional
concept of the “actor” with a new understanding, that of tipazh,
which functions precisely as a concrete “materialization of the
slogan.” In this regard the link to the “formal side” of the Capi-
tal project, announced as a “dedication” to Joyce’s Ulysses,22
reveals a crucial perspective in the guise of this intricate liter-
ary reference. The use of the expressive presence of the non-
professional actor, the tipazh, and the “physiology of the detail”
in Joyce’s literary technique—the stream of consciousness—
both acquire, in their interrelation, the greatest epistemic rel-
evance in the manifold voices of Capital. Eisenstein formulates
the definition of tipazh in opposition to the traditional under-
standing of the actor—with reference to the physiognomic dis-
course of the nineteenth century—as a “claim” for an immedi-
ate and “sensuous transmission of characterology.”23 An actor’s
role consists in traversing a series of situations. In this way,
Eisenstein argues, the director “raises a particular type,” like
Molière’s Misanthrope or Harpagon; the “method consists of
raising the characters through a series of acts.”24 Comparing this
to the process of raising chickens, Eisenstein mockingly asks:
“Who needs this incubation—this raising [vyvedenie], when the
conclusion [vyvod] is needed?”25 However, far from presenting
the tipazh as a ready-made conclusion of any type, Eisenstein
introduces it as constituting a new and effective relation to the
spectator on the one hand, and as a trace of the social reality
on the other. “What is a real tipazh?” he asks. “It is the most
ostensible drawing of a human shape (including all motoric

22 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 143.

23 Eisenstein, “I.A. 28,” p. 42.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.

88
Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”

manifestations), of all his social and individual behavior.”26

In this immediate phenomenality, however, the tipazh never
receives the status of a fixed type; he is never identified with
any pre-determined role. His potential for action escapes any
of Bertillonage’s fantasies of control and classification. “Tipazh
is a social-biological hieroglyph, yet in a way that in relation to
him everyone is a Champollion of his own.”27 The tipazh is not
an actor; he acts. As a consequence, this action affects the real
“viscerally,” insofar as his gestures and his facial expressions
relate directly to the “social” milieu. Yet these gestures remain
“hieroglyphs,” as their interpretation is not fixed by any identity
or physiognomic classification. In this way, the “tipazh is dia-
metrically opposed to the actor.” The latter appears as “ideally
neutral” and is to be “folded through a series of actions into a
knot of a character.”28 A particular tipazh, on the other hand,
reveals action, since its immediate appearance “unfolds into a
series of conditions which constitute him.”29
By bringing them onto the same level, this active definition
of the new cinema directly relates “tipazh,” “image,” and “sign”
to one another.30 It thus introduces a second premise, which
states that one ought not to separate action from thought, a
chain of “motoric manifestations” from “a chain of associa-
tions.” Relying on this model, Eisenstein formulates a concept
of “behavioral associations” [behavior’nye assoziazii]; this term,
itself a montage, alludes to the psychological movement of
“behaviorism” and the flow of associations in Joyce’s Ulysses.31

26 Ibid.
27 Eisenstein is referencing the French philologist and orientalist Jean-Fran-
çois Champollion (1790–1832), known as the decipherer of Egyptian hiero-
glyphs and pioneer in the field of Egyptology. Ibid., p. 43.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p. 45.
31 Ibid.

89
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

The deliberately open and fragmentary form envisioned for

Capital differs from Eisenstein’s previous films precisely in its
“intellectual” focus: a visual “treatise” that would directly affect
thought without any conceptual mediation, generalization, or
Begriff. This is how Eisenstein describes the new cinema in
“I.A. 28.” At the same time, this emphasis on intellectual attrac-
tion features many continuities with the early aesthetic prin-
ciples of his “Montage of Attractions” published in the journal
LEF in 1923.32 These include the dialectic of physiological shock
and intellectual impact, the overall structure (“montage”), and
the autonomy of each singular element (“attraction”) within
the chain. Eisenstein’s “intellectual” revaluation of the isomor-
phic affinity between a sequence of images in a montage and
the associative chain of thought is especially important in this
context. “The intellectual attraction is an attraction which acti-
vates not an immediate emotional reaction, but an associative
process.”33 Just as the sequence of biomechanical movements
serves as the “constructive principle” for the “organics of the
motoric principle” in “Montage of Attractions,” the intellectual
attraction here serves as a model for the “organics of the mecha-
nism of the intellectual process.”34 Thus the theory of intellec-
tual attractions offered a model for a closer and more complex
relation between physiological expression and thought, affect,
and associative process, and the conscious and the unconscious
inscriptions of “ideology.” These qualities allow Eisenstein to

32 Sergei Eisenstein, “Montazh attrakcionov” [The Montage of Attractions],

Levyi Front Iskusstv [Left Front of the Arts] 3 (1923), pp. 70–75.
33 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 154.
34 Ibid. From the early 1920s onwards, Eisenstein’s theory of “expressive
movement” is informed by an intense research in reflexology, German science
of expression, and biomechanics, expanding later into the fields of Gestalt psy-
chology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics. See chapter three of this book (espe-
cially the section on “Gods and Reflexes”) as well as the chapter on “Geste, Aus-
druck, Synästhesie” [Gesture, Expression, Synesthesia] in Vogman, Sinnliches
Denken, pp. 187–297.

90
Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”

state that “the process of I.A. 28 is a process of an immediate

exposure of ideology.”35
In this regard it is significant that the theory of intellectual
attractions emerges from Eisenstein’s own experiments in asso-
ciative writing and thought, practiced during the period he was
undergoing hypnosis. He names this associative principle—in
opposition to a “deduced basis or logical assumption”—the
principle of “stringing thoughts [together].” It relies on the doc-
umentation of a series of disparate reflections out of which “the
notion of I.A. 28 dialectically [emerged], which unified them
all.”36 In fact this method initiates a process that allows for the
inclusion of both a heterogeneity of different points of view as
well as their potential unity or interrelation, a process for which
Cassini’s figure provides a mathematical and geometrical solu-
tion. Eisenstein insists on the topological necessity of this
principle, that is, on the sensuous perception of the “sphere”
in which heterogeneous thoughts circulate. The “dialectics”
of this method can be understood as a tension, an incessant
contradiction that immanently allows for a “possible inver-
sion of the process” of thought. This sphere constitutes a zone
of immanence in which heterogeneous elements, exhibited or
chained, receive a voice and become witnesses and actors of the
future film. “For the inventiveness [izobretatel’stvo] this is a cru-
cial technique. The perception of the sphere, which determines
the character of the idea, must be given at all times.”37 From
the perception of the elements, their possible associations and
interrelations, a chart emerges. “Analyzing the chart—the draw-
ing of the chart, one finds its equation.”38 Eisenstein sees a rela-
tion between Cassini’s chart, the intellectual attractions, and
the concrete elements of the Capital project: the production of

35 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 151.

36 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 110.
37 Ibid., p. 111.
38 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 5.

91
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

a concrete associative field through montage. “All writing now

is a draft for the invention of formal elements for Capital […]
learning to think and to invent on a new level.”39 This passage
makes evident, like nowhere else, the epistemic interrelation—
residing in the procedure itself—between the geometrical lan-
guage of Cassini, the Capital project’s theoretical groundwork,
and the genesis of the notebooks.
Thus the sphere is not only a medium of inventions but also
one of inversions of all kinds. It is in this way that Joyce’s lit-
erary method appears in Eisenstein’s notes as the theoretical
and poetic structure of the future film in genesis. Eisenstein’s
notebooks operate within different spheres where his meta­
reflection on the heterogeneous elements undergoes a series
of transformations, without losing reference to both the whole
and each particular element. “Literality” often provides a start-
ing point for inversions in which the formal, phonetic, etymo-
logical, metaphoric, and symbolic qualities of a word or an
image come into play. A literal understanding of an idiomatic
term, an expression, an image, or a genre serves Eisenstein as a
productive technique involving a process of different readings
and inversions.

The dynamic understanding of a “noun” […] is a bridge to the dynamic

decryption of the thing which is a trace of the process of becoming.
The tipazh as the production of a particular behavior.
Relating to the interrupted thought on page 6,40 the transition to the
presentation of the “triad”: the fact of the geometrical place of the
point, the deduction of the equation, and the construction of the geo-
metrical image of it.

39 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 113.

40 Eisenstein’s own pagination in his working diaries plays an important role.
In the process of the archival classification, these numbers have been replaced
by archival pagination (Russian State Archive for Literature and Art), which is
used in my text.

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Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”

This should be developed […] in LEF. Not an article, but une sorte
d’hérisson [a kind of hedgehog] thoughts sticking as a bristle in all
directions. (Yet). Hérisson transmits this sense quite well. Our “hedge-
hog” [ezh] is far from giving this sense, although ezh comes from the
Indo-European edy for ‘stinging’ (maybe also sticking) (page 213 from
the Etymological Dictionary of Preobrazhenskii, 1910)
Maybe the formulation “an article in form of a brush” fits better, it is
closer to hérisson—hedgehoging [ershit’sia].41

The operation of inversion provides the word with a sensu-

ous and rhythmic quality (“sticking,” “stinging,” etc.) that estab-
lishes a new chain of associations. Eisenstein calls this pro-
cess “literalization”; the Russian term bukvalizatsyia contains
bukva [letter], thus alluding to the perception of the composi-
tional units of a word, their possible montage and demontage
in the process of “literalization.” Eisenstein seeks to establish
this method for both the linguistic and the visual realms by
sketching a physiological basis for aesthetics, with reference
to Emmanuil Enchmen’s reflexological psychology, Ludwig
Klages’s science of expression, as well as Sigmund Freud’s psy-
choanalysis.42 “There is a whole bunch of words (images) that
have lost their reflexological potential [reflektornost’], that is
the sensuously motoric reaction, and which operate through
an isolated automatism, that is, without setting the respective
chains in motion.”43
This immediate sensuous effect on the perceptual appara-
tus recalls Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie, the famous
technique of defamiliarization, which gives sensuous percep-
tion back to a form through an effect of “enstrangement” (from

41 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 12–13.

42 Eisenstein brings these authors into conversation as he tries to formulate a
perceptional model for “intellectual attractions.” Eisenstein, diary from March
31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 10. The third chapter of this book further dis-
cusses the reflexological references in Eisenstein’s Capital project.
43 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 153.

93
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

the word “strange,” stranno).44 However, Eisenstein’s insis-

tence on literality refers more closely to a cinematic and visual
logic. It emphasizes its ideological implications. Employing
his method of literality, Eisenstein derives the definition of the
image, obraz, from obrez, “cut,” thus linking it to the essential
technique of montage. “Image [obraz] = cut [obrez], disclosure
[obnaruzhenie]. On the dynamic reading of the static word.
The content has to be understood not as container but as an
act of containing. In contemporary parlance it is a ‘principle of
organization.’”45 One year later Eisenstein further develops this
active interrelation into a more programmatic definition of the
image, again basing it on montage:

How much inky blood has been spilled because of the persistent desire
to understand form only as deriving from the Greek phormos or wicker
basket—with all the “organizational conclusions” that flow from that!
A wicker basket where those same unhappy “contents” bob about on
the inky floods of the polemic.
Whereas you have only to look in a dictionary, not a Greek one but a
Russian dictionary of “foreign words,” and you will see that form in
Russian is obraz or “image.” ‘Image’ [obraz] is itself a cross between
the concepts of “cut” [obrez] and “disclosure” [obnaruzhenie]. These
two terms brilliantly characterize form from both its aspects: from the
individually static (an und für sich) standpoint as “cut” [obrez], the iso-
lation of a particular phenomenon from its surroundings (e.g. a non-

44 Shklovsky omits the first T in the Russian word “otstranenie.” Spelled as

such, the neologism captures the “strangeness” of ostranenie through an ortho-
graphical “mistake.” See Alexandra Berlina, “Introduction,” in Viktor Shklovsky.
A Reader, ed. and trans. Alexandra Berlina (New York; London: Bloomsbury Aca-
demic, 2017), p. 56.
45 One finds here Eisenstein’s draft for his article on “Perspectives” (1929),
where this reflection is developed further. In his Capital notebook he continues
as follows: “There is a double reading—a cut on to the form in relation to one-
self, so to speak on the individual plane a ‘disclosure’ regarding the relation to
the milieu, and through its Sanskrit meaning—a ‘connecting link’ of elements
exposing this principle or idea.” Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI,
1923-2-1107, pp. 11–12.

94
Tipazh, “a social-biological hieroglyph”

Marxist definition of form, such as Leonid Andreyev’s, which confines

itself strictly to this definition).
“Disclosure” [obnaruzhenie] characterises image from a different,
socially active standpoint: it “discloses,” i.e. establishes the social link
between a particular phenomenon and its surroundings.
Put more colloquially, “content” [soderzhanie]—the act of containing
[sderzhivanie] is an organizational principle.
The principle of the organization of thinking is in actual fact the “con-
tent” of a work.46

This definition of the image is dialectical in that it simul-

taneously operates on two poles: obraz is obrez because it cuts
and connects, lays bare and relates, isolates a phenomenon
from its surroundings and exposes it in the same movement.
The early principle of a montage of attractions can be seen in
this dialectic: one particular attraction transmitted in a chain
of connected elements.
In this way, for Eisenstein, the literal concreteness of form
extends to a crucial characteristic of tipazh, which he opposes
to the notion of photogénie formulated by the French film-
maker and theorist Louis Delluc. “The absurdity in the under-
standing of photo-génie as a direct derivation, as translation
into ‘photogenic’ (a link to genetics)—a ‘photogenius’ instead
of literality.”47 Here Eisenstein’s critique of subjectivity, as it
relates to the romantic concept of génie within the term photogé-
nie, becomes significant. He understands each tipazh, in his or
her literal power, as a value, radically refusing any determined
character, fixed meaning, or sense. Hence tipazh is an “attrac-
tion”: its “hieroglyphic” quality leads to a process of dispersion,
a deciphering which does not end but rather multiplies in end-
less chains of interpretation. Thus the cinematic significance
of tipazh derives not solely from its formal quality, but further

46 Eisenstein, “Perspectives,” p. 154.

47 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 10.

95
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

unfolds as a particular relation to the social and political condi-

tions. Showing tipazh is an eminently political gesture of “dis-
closure,” a making visible of a social type, thereby endowing it
with the capacity for speech and action.

Faits divers, Words Dispersed

Such a definition of the image as a “cut” returns some days later

in Eisenstein’s notebook, now described in terms of a Marxist
method:

My linguistic “drift” strongly involves all parallel “readings” and all

parallel significations. I think that this is correct in a Marxist way. It
is inconvenient to refer to a unique reading—isolated from the entire
chain. A comparative interrelating use of meanings from one root in
the whole chain gives very much. In this way for example image [obraz],
cut [obrez], disclosure [obnaruzhenie]. Educated [obrazovannyi].48

The insight attained through such supposed etymologies,

their material components, and their transformations, reveal,
for Eisenstein, a materialist method guided by a proper intel-
ligence of words. As he writes in the 1929 essay “Perspectives”:
“When we come upon the definition of a concept we ignore, at
our peril, the method of a purely linguistic analysis of the actual
designation. The words we use are sometimes significantly
‘cleverer’ than we are.”49 Such inventive etymological research
allows for a demontage of even a single word, a single notion. It
reveals hidden and unexpected relations with other meanings,
elective affinities with other words by way of their homonymous
or consonant structures.

48 Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 44.

49 Eisenstein, “Perspectives,” p. 152.

96
Faits divers, Words Dispersed

Gathering such affinities and conflicting elements on the

formal and theoretical issues of Capital, “lambeaux for complex
combinations,”50 Eisenstein simultaneously discovers in this
disparate order a major structure, a genuine method for his future
film. With an increasing complexity of his field of reference and
the rising disparity of the elements in play, he introduces a par-
ticular notational system. The fragments are henceforth num-
bered and accompanied by paragraph signs, starting with zero:
Ҥ 0 From this passage on there is a paragraphization for mak-
ing more easily Sprünge ins Vor- und Rückwärts [jumps into the
forward and backward].”51 This minimal structure allows for a
continuous association from various orders on the same plane:
theoretical and aesthetic reflections, quotations from different
sources, press cuts, images, drawings, and so forth. These ele-
ments enter a field of resonance; they constitute mobile constel-
lations for the Capital project, which continuously allow for new
and sudden inversions, affinities, and conflicts.
Far from being a mere play of contingent elements, the emi-
nently political character of these constellations is brought to
the fore by another literary source that Eisenstein references as
a formal model for his Capital project: in 1928, under the title
Faits divers, the French socialist writer Henri Barbusse pub-
lished a series of short stories, presented as a collection of dis-
parate facts, “notes fished by hazard,” which, in their apparently
contingent choice, witness the twentieth century as an “age of
blood.”52 “The book is impressive. I am ready to take back all
the evil things I said about Barbusse. I’ve read it at night three
hours nonstop for Capital,” Eisenstein writes in his notebook
on March 31, 1928.53 He received a copy of the book signed by

50 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 120.

51 Ibid., p. 122.
52 Henri Barbusse, “Dédicace,” in Faits divers (Paris: Flammarion, 1928),
pp. VII–VIII.
53 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 7.

97
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

the author, “À Eisenstein, Yours brotherly, Henri Barbusse.”54

Barbusse’s collection of “disparate facts”—a title which Eisen-
stein couldn’t but read literally—aimed at “exposing the infor-
mation roughly,” and voicing the most radical critique of impe-
rialist wars.55 Each of three parts—titled “The War,” “The White
Terror,” “And the Rest”—includes a series of five- to ten-page
stories that reveal personal, political, or civil vignettes: sce­narios
related to the recent history of the world war. In their laconic
and violent expression, these seemingly contingent, yet actu-
ally carefully selected and constructed facts offered Eisenstein
an operative structure for Capital: “The form of Faits Divers or
a collection of short cine-essais is perfectly suited for replacing
the ‘whole’ works [vezh].”56 History, as univocal story, is thus
replaced by an assemblage of micro-narratives with different
perspectives: diverse histories or “historiette.”57 What Eisen-
stein here calls “essais” demonstrates an increased attention
to a particular case or cases; henceforth, in their associations,
these cases crystallize macrostructural relations. The French
word “essaie,” which is here used for the first time in relation
to cinema, and which will later acquire the significance of a cin-
ematographic genre,58 denotes a threshold between two mean-
ings. Between the active form of “experimenting” or “trying out”
[expérimenté] and the passive form of “undergoing” or “experi-
encing” [éprouvé] there is a process of an irreducible experience
in play that involves particular material conditions. The value of
the case in its unique concreteness is marked by what Eisenstein
calls “de-anecdotization”: “This is a piece from ‘tomorrow,’ […]

54 Eisenstein quotes Barbusse’s note in his diary. Eisenstein, diary from

March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 9.
55 Barbusse, “Dédicace,” p. VII.
56 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 7.
57 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 125.
58 See the chapter “Deviation as Norm—Notes on the Essay Film” in Volker
Pantenburg, Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, trans. Michael Turnbull (Amster-
dam University Press, 2015,) pp. 135–152.

98
Faits divers, Words Dispersed

the condition for what follows in Capital, namely the principle

of a logical bringing ad limitum of one principle particularity.”59
According to this assumption, Eisenstein conceived Capi-
tal as a loose structure of “nonfigurative chapters” or “minia-
tures.” Extending the structure, different genres—parts of the
“played” and the “non-played”—were to be interlaced in the
same way as fragments of different narrations were assembled
in an associative chain. Reacting to criticisms of October,
which reproached the film for its “confusion of styles,” Eisen-
stein envisions answering with Ulysses, “to void [this reproach]
using Ulysses, to void academism in general!”60 Accordingly, the
extant archival materials do not provide a clear narrative but
reveal a process of becoming that unfolds precisely at the inter-
section of the different material layers—where literary, private,
political, historical, and economic issues intertwine. As such,
“showing the method of the dialectic” means concretely exhib-
iting the maximum disparity of the material, which is not orga-
nized sequentially but durcheinander [in disarrangement].61
Eisenstein did not shy away from using the German durchein-
ander in connection with the “continuity of the series,” as he
meant an “associative unfolding” of heterogeneous elements
that, in this way, would produce new interrelations.62 In Ulysses
Joyce uses the German words nacheinander [one after the other]
and nebeneinander [side by side] to allude to a possible distinc-
tion between the spatial and temporal dimensions of sensorial
experience.63 Eisenstein’s reference to durcheinander in ­Capital

59 Eisenstein, diary from November 23, 1927, RGALI, 1105, p. 17.

60 Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 9.
61 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 67–68; and
Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 145.
62 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 145.
63 With these terms Joyce quotes Lessing’s Laocoön in order to question the
differentiation between the different media Lessing had elaborated by oppos-
ing sculpture to literature in the same way as the ordering of “side by side” is the
opposite of “succession” and alteration. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon. An
Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. With Remarks Illustrative of Various

99
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

can be understood in proximity to the Joycean procedure of

stream of consciousness: a zone of immanence of theoreti-
cal and poetic expression, of formless, diffuse fragments and
rhythmic alteration, of affect and thought.

One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup

to the British vessels”

“On Saturday I got Ulysses. The Bible of the new cinematog­

raphy,”64 Eisenstein notes on February 20, 1928. He had already
heard about Joyce’s novel in 1927, at the very moment he began
his work on Capital and conceived the theory of “intellectual
attraction.” He read the only copy of the novel then available in
Moscow, and later acquired his own through the English wife
of his friend Maxim Litvinov. One year later, in November 1929,
Eisenstein met Joyce in Paris. The nearly blind writer played a
record of his voice reading from the work-in-progress Finnegans
Wake (1939), and confessed to Eisenstein that he saw in him a
potential cinematographic adapter of Ulysses.65
On March 8, 1928, a further reference to Ulysses appears in
Eisenstein’s notebook, this time in the context of a longer and
more significant passage:

Yesterday thought a lot about Capital. About the structure of the work
which will derive from the methodology of film-word, film-image,
film-phrase, as now discovered (after the sequence of “the gods”).
The working draft.

Points in the History of Ancient Art, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Roberts
Brothers, 1887), p. 8.
64 Eisenstein, diary from February 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 75.
65 Eisenstein describes his encounter with Joyce in a chapter of his unfin-
ished theory project Metod, ed. Bulgakowa, vol. 2, “Inner Monologue and Idée
Fixe,” pp. 381–411. See also Jacques Aumont, “Ulysses,” in Reading with Eisen-
stein, ed. Ada Ackerman and Luka Arsenjuk (Montreal: Caboose, forthcoming).

100
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

Take a trivial progressive chain of development of some action. …

For instance: one day in a man’s life. Minutieusement set forth as an
outline which makes us aware of departure from it. For that purpose,
only. Only as the critique of the development of associative order of
social conventions, generalizations and theses of Capital.
Generalizations, from given cases to ideas (this will be completely
primitive, especially if we move in a line from bread shortages to the
grain shortage [and] the mechanics of speculation. And here, from a
button to the theme of overproduction, but more clearly and neatly.)
In Joyce’s Ulysses there is a remarkable chapter of this kind, written
in the manner of a scholastic catechism. Questions are asked and
answers given. The subject of the questions is how to light a Bunsen
burner. The answers, however, are metaphysical. (Read this chap-
ter. It might be methodologically useful.) Thanks to Ivy Valterovna
­Litvinova.66

In Capital, the most precise—even “trivial”—concreteness

of a certain case can serve as point of departure for a philosoph-
ical critique. Joyce’s Ulysses provides an illuminating model of
how Eisenstein conceived of a concrete case: on the one hand,
its omnipresent recurrence—one day in Bloom’s life, for exam-
ple—and on the other hand, the “meticulous” attention of a
close-up, where phenomenological details serve as departure
for transgressive chains of thought. In this way Eisenstein envi-
sioned the intimate proximity between the unique, individual
perception and the political, economic event.
Only a month later, in two entries from April 6 and 7, Eisen-
stein develops this idea more precisely, focusing on the dialecti-
cal relation between the concrete case and its derivative chain
of associations, between the singularity of form and the move-
ment of thought:

66 Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital,’” p. 7.

101
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

The first, preliminary structural draft for Capital would consist of tak-
ing a banal development of a perfectly unrelated event. Say, “A day in a
man’s life,” or something perhaps even more banal. And the elements
of this chain serve as points of departure for the formation of asso-
ciations through which alone the play of concepts becomes possible.
The idea of this banal intrigue was arrived at in a truly constructive
manner.
Association presupposes a stimulus. Give a series of these, without
which there is “nothing” to associate. The maximum abstractness of
an expanding idea appears particularly bold when presented as an off-
shoot from extreme concreteness—the banality of life. Something sug-
gested in Ulysses provides additional support for the same formulation:

Nicht genug! Ein

anderes Kapitel ist im Stil der Bücher
für junge Mädchen geschrieben, ein
anderes besteht, nach dem Vorbild des
scholastischen Traktate, nur aus Frage
und Antwort: die Fragen beziehen
sich auf die Art, wie man einen Tee-
Kessel zum Kochen bringt, und die
Antworten schweifen ins große Kos-
mische und Philosophische ab …
Iwan Qoll, “Literarische Welt” Berlin
(taken from a prospectus on Ulysses by Rhein-Verlag)67
Joyce may be helpful for my purpose: from a bowl of soup to the British
vessels countersunk by England.68

67 “[…] And there’s more! Another chapter is written in the style of books for
young girls, another in the form of scholarly tracts, composed only of questions
and answers; the questions concern how to bring a teakettle to boiling point,
and the answers digress into the great cosmic and philosophical […]” Eisen-
stein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 122–124; “Notes for a Film
of ‘Capital,’” p. 15.
68 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 122–124.

102
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

In this way, the “confusion of styles” that October’s crit-

ics identified as a deficiency, returns—again in the form of a
quote—as one of Ulysses’s major virtues. This multiplicity of
styles reveals another crucial element which cannot be regarded
as an aesthetic value alone: the heterogeneity of voices involved
in Capital’s becoming derives directly from the real heterogene-
ity within its associative chains. What kind of path leads from
the “bowl of soup to the British vessels”? For Capital, Eisenstein
gives an answer by constructing another vertiginous chain,
starting again with a “perfectly unrelated event”:

Throughout the entire picture the wife cooks soup for her returning
husband. NB. Could be two themes intercut for association: the soup-
cooking wife and the home-returning husband. Completely idiotic (all
right in the first stages of a working hypothesis): in the third part (for
instance), the association moves from the pepper with which she sea-
sons food. Pepper. Cayenne. Devil’s Island. Dreyfus. French chauvin-
ism. Le Figaro in Krupp’s hands. War. Vessels sunk in the port. (Obvi-
ously, not in such quantity!!) NB. Good in its non-banal transition:
pepper-Dreyfus-Figaro. It would be good to cover the sunken English
vessels (according to Kushner, 103 Days Abroad) with the lid of a sauce-
pan. It could even be not pepper, but kerosene for a stove and transi-
tion into oil.69

The “absolute particularity” being brought to its utter

limit is not the scene in the kitchen, even though the parallel
to Joyce’s “day in a man’s life” is striking. It is rather the chain
of heterogeneous elements—“pepper-Dreyfus-Figaro”—which
reveals the particularity of this sequence. The relation between
these elements is not given but produced via association. This
turns the disparate and indifferent elements into constella-
tions relating to the global course of history. In their interre-
lations these fragments do not reveal a totality, but rather an

69 Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, pp. 129–130.

103
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

assemblage of distances that makes each of them a particular: a

singularity that challenges, suspends, and shatters any possible
totality of history.
In his notes Eisenstein focuses on the question of how to
make these associations effective and how the different ele-
ments—in their formal concreteness—connect to one another.
The model for these interconnections is provided by Ulysses: “It
is remarkable in James Joyce—das Auspinnen der Assoziation
und manchmal ganz zu selbstständigen Themata [the spinning-
out of an association and sometimes to an entirely independent
theme].”70 These associations do not merely reveal preexisting
ideas. On the contrary, they unfold into autonomous themes;
they involve images that act on their own. The concept of “de-
anecdotization,” which Eisenstein derives from Joyce’s liter-
ary method reappears here, “probablement le plus moderne de
ce qu’il y a [probably the most modern thing there is]”.71 He
quotes several long passages from Joyce’s first novel, The Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, six years
prior to Ulysses. In these quotes Eisenstein accentuates a pro-
cedure that Joyce fully develops only in Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake, namely “a physiological materiality,” which intensi-
fies the perception and opens onto concrete interrelations of
all kinds. In this technique Eisenstein recognizes two fruitful
principles for cinema: the “close-up” and the movement of
interrelation between these intensified fragments—montage.72
“Der Sinn or der Eindruck kommt durch Zusammenstellen [the
sense or the impression derives from putting together].” This
is how Eisenstein describes, in German, this mode of percep-
tive construction before quoting a passage from Joyce in which
the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, tries to avoid spiritual exal-
tation and successively brings each of his senses “under a

70 Eisenstein, diary from December 25, 1927, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 29–30.

71 Ibid., p. 24.
72 Ibid.

104
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

rigorous discipline.”73 In doing so, each sensuous capacity,

isolated and hence heightened, becomes even more intense.
Eisenstein emphasizes this physiological intensity in Joyce’s
“incessant definition of odors and odors of decomposition par
excellence”:74

To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no

instinctive repugnance to bad odors whether they were the odors of
the outdoor world, such as those of dung or tar, or the odors of his own
person among which he had made many curious comparisons and
experiments. He found in the end that the only odor against which his
sense of smell revolted was a certain stale fishy stink like that of long-
standing urine; and whenever it was possible he subjected himself to
this unpleasant odor.75

This passage is followed by various other quotes from

Joyce’s Portrait76 in which Eisenstein identifies elements of
composition and decomposition, associations, close-ups, and
sensuous montage. These excerpts exemplify how the narrator’s
voice integrates the different senses and qualities of intensified
objects that slowly acquire autonomy and potential of speech of
their own. In his study Joyce’s Voices Hugh Kenner deconstructs
the concept of “stream of consciousness” as applied to Joyce’s
texts, and shows what stands behind the seemingly homoge-
neous “stream,” namely a complex composition, a patchwork
or montage of different “voices” camouflaged as a narrator’s
speech. Kenner calls Joyce’s “method” in reference to The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the “Uncle Charles prin-
ciple.” With this term he describes how “the normally n ­ eutral

73 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (B. W. Huebsch: New
York, 1916), p. 174.
74 Eisenstein, diary from December 25, 1927, RGALI, 1123-2-1105, p. 24.
75 Passage from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 174, quoted
by Eisenstein, diary from December 25, 1927, RGALI, 1123-2-1105, p. 25.
76 Eisenstein, diary from December 25, 1927, RGALI, 1123-2-1105, pp. 25–27, 30.

105
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

­ arrative vocabulary [is] pervaded by a little cloud of idioms

n
which a character might use if he were managing the narra-
tive.” Thus he concludes that “in Joyce’s various extensions of
this device we have one clue to the manifold styles of Ulysses.”77
Although Eisenstein never quotes directly from Ulysses in his
Capital, Joyce’s principle lends itself as a model for its associa-
tive chains.
In fact, in dedicating the “formal side” of Capital to Ulysses
Eisenstein aimed at a specific economy of means: the quality
of including heterogeneous styles within one stream, the possi-
bility of giving voices to different phenomena within one move-
ment of thought. This economy gave rise to a reconsideration of
the montage principle, which figures in the following example,
where Eisenstein evokes some elements for a possible associa-
tive chain:

China, pyramids, New York, all that frightened Grisha, are not really
themes, but montage fragments for forming thoughts. They corre-
spond to close-ups and medium shots of a single event.
NB. Abgesehen [apart] from rules of “spelling,” that is of the montage
ABC: a single fragment of meaning = minimum of two in montage. One
fragment is not, after all, visible in cinema; the first is used for sur-
prise, the second for perception.
We say, one shot, “China,” corresponds to the “central” shot of the
horse on the bridge. Naturally, this will be five shots (or more). But
one must remember that these are (taken) not to explain China but to
explain one’s main idea, Egypt, by use of this one shot in conjunction
with the others, like those of New York: Egypt.78

These fragments of montage stand in analogy to Joyce’s

voices in Ulysses. Referring to “montage ABC” in its elementary

77 Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 17.
78 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 79; “Notes for
a film of ‘Capital,’” pp. 12–13.

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One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

relational logic, Eisenstein aspires to bring it to a new level.

“China, pyramids, New York”: dissociating the space-time-con-
tinuum between these heterogeneous and distant elements,
the chain associates them for the sake of relations on a different
level, that is, the perspective of Capital. This moving structure,
inspired by Joyce’s literary technique, was meant to achieve
this dialectical simultaneity of association and dissociation, of
a sensuous interrelation on the concrete level of form and an
intellectual effect on the abstract level of thought.
From this perspective it is worth looking more closely at
the associative chain, quoted above, that Eisenstein puts forth
as an example for Capital: “The association moves from the
pepper with which she seasons food. Pepper. Cayenne. Devil’s
Island. Dreyfus. French chauvinism. Figaro in Krupp’s hands.
War. Vessels sunk in the port.”79 The first association moves
from pepper to Cayenne, thereby highlighting one of the pro­
ject’s recurring themes: the link between colonial violence and
capitalism. The word derives from the Old Tupi term quiínia
and names a particular type of chili pepper produced in French
Guiana. The following association moves geographically from
the colony’s capital, Cayenne (named after the pepper) to the
nearby “Devil’s Island”—the French penal colony of Cayenne,
commonly known as “Île du Diable.” Over its hundred-year
existence, from 1852 to 1953, this site played a particular role
within the successive French judicial systems: serving as a des-
tination for political prisoners, its harsh treatment of detain-
ees earned it a notorious reputation. The next element names
one of its prisoners, Alfred Dreyfus, who spent four years on
Devil’s Island from 1895 to 1899. The turn of the century Drey-
fus affair revealed a deep political crisis of antisemitism and
miscarriage of justice in France. In Eisenstein’s chain it traces
the relation between the following elements: “French chauvin-
ism. Figaro in Krupp’s hands. War.” Thus the entanglement

79 Eisenstein, diary from April, 7, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, p. 130.

107
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

between ­monarchic, imperial, colonial, military, anti-Semitic,

and ­capitalist ­interests becomes a major issue in Eisenstein’s
speculative assemblage.
Another page of the notebook bears traces of intense
research on the etymology of the French word chauvinisme:

I’m happy like a baby. In UHU there is a question “from which word
derives chauvinism.” The answer is: from “Chauvin”; in the beginning
of the 19th century in France it was a word naming recruits. (Sublime!)
I’ve looked immediately into my three dictionaries of argot (my pride!)
to clarify the meaning of “Chauvin.” I’ve found only praise “au chau-
vinisme—notre dernière vertue” [on chauvinism—our last virtue] (!!!)
by Larchey.80 There is a reference to 1825, the year of Charlet’s creation
of that type of caricature—“le conscrit Chauvin” [selectee Chauvin].
Under the influence of “liberal” thought “ces éloges donnés aux
Français par les Français” [those eulogies given by the French to the
French] become ridiculous. In other [dictionaries] there is nothing.
My explanation. Probably from chauve—hairless = shaven. /?/
Where to find out something more substantially? To ask in Paris about
the argot dictionaries. Should I write “à mon ami Barbusse,” [to my
friend Barbusse]?
In any case the “military” origin of the word—chauvinism—shines
with French elegance.81

What is at stake here, first of all, is a micro-history that seeks

to derive a set of relations from the non-written and popular
dimension of language, rather than from official or general his-
toriography. Secondly, Eisenstein gives importance to the visual
dimension of this history, which he finds in the etymology of
“chauvinism” by way of a reference to Charlet’s caricature. In
the same notebook Eisenstein alludes to another caricature “in

80 Lorédan Larchey, Dictionnaire historique d’argot: des excentricités du

­langage (Paris: E. Dentu, 1881).
81 Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, pp. 26–27.

108
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

line with Dreyfus.”82 Here he aims to introduce a shift towards

a progressive chain of events, towards a procedure that would
reveal what he calls “debris d’action” [remnants of action]. The
visual reference which accompanies Dreyfus is Daumier’s Le
ventre legislatif (fig. 5). This lithograph, published in 1834 in
L’association mensuelle, shows a fictitious reunion of thirty-
five deputies, whose individual portraits Daumier has already
drawn before. Eisenstein calls this image a “judicial tipazh of all
deadly sins, or better, one increased tenfold, an all-embracing
tipazh.”83 Taken as a whole, the shape of the reunion, defined
by the semicircular “minister’s bench,” echoes the shape of the
belly of each minister seated upon it. In Eisenstein’s interpreta-
tion, Daumier’s satirical image of politics, literally embodied in
the belly, becomes a potential image of the law facing Dreyfus.
It is another story that derives visually and etymologically from
the shine of “French elegance.” The expressive force of these
images, which follow an associative and eminently visual prin-
ciple, evinces their tendency to develop into an autonomous
theme without interrupting the continuity of relation to the
chain’s preceding and subsequent elements.
The next link of the chain suggests a relation between the
French newspaper Figaro and the monopolist of the German
steel and armament industry, the Krupp family. “Figaro in
Krupp’s hands” provides a rather speculative association, pos-
sibly originating in Eisenstein’s gloomy vision of global capital-
ism consolidating into a form of omnipresent authoritarian-
ism. Eisenstein mentions this idea previously in the context of
Capital’s “patriotic theme” and the idea of Krupp’s “revenge” as
the sponsoring of the journal Le Figaro.84
Another speculation on Le Figaro, given as a press clip
from the Vecherniaia gazeta [Evening Newspaper], appears in

82 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, p. 145.

83 Ibid., pp. 145–146.
84 Eisenstein, diary from January 1, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1105, p. 39.

109
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

Fig. 5: Honoré Daumier, Le Ventre législatif. Aspects des bancs ministériels de la

chambre improstituée, 1834. Archive of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

­Aleksandrov’s Capital notebook. Under the title “Coty ‘Fright-

ens,’” the article claims that “the owner of Figaro, the infa-
mous perfumer and black-hundredist85 François Coty, started
a campaign to publish a cheap boulevard gazette, the price of
which would be 10 centimes, while the normal price of a French
newspaper is 23 to 30 centimes.” The following stunning detail
relates immediately to Eisenstein’s Capital project: “‘The pro-
gram’ of the gazette is: ‘research on communism.’ The gazette
shall be named after a prominent newspaper of the French Rev-
olution: ‘The Friend of the People.’”86 This last remark reveals
what appears crucial for Eisenstein’s associative chain. Like

85 The black-hundredists (chernosotentsy) were an ultra-nationalist and mon-

archist movement in early twentieth-century Russia; they held various xenopho-
bic beliefs, such as Ukrainophobia and anti-Semitism, and advocated pogroms.
86 Grigorii Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 37.

110
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

a restless ghost, the ideological content oscillates, inhabiting

polar positions, following the shifting interests of capitalism,
communism, or imperialism, incessantly changing politi-
cal camps, traditions, and forms. The example of Le Figaro is
particularly striking in this regard. At the outset of the Dreyfus
affair Le Figaro was among the first to side with the convict, pub-
lishing a travel report that revealed the miserable conditions of
Dreyfus’s detention and clearly aimed at the reader’s compas-
sion. However, over the course of the affair, the journal quickly
shifted to the opposite side, when readers from the national-
ist, anti-Dreyfus camp declared a boycott and canceled their
subscriptions. The article on François Coty furthermore shows
a similar incident, which goes even further in laying bare the
unscrupulous venality of the press. In 1927 the French indus-
trialist already owned two thirds of Le Figaro’s stocks, mak-
ing the newspaper, against the resistance of its editors, into
the primary mouthpiece for his nationalistic and anti-Semitic
vision. Ruthlessly appropriating two radical political camps in
this way—the historical anti-monarchist and patriotic position
of the French press and the growing contemporary interest in
communist politics—Coty aimed to manipulate the masses in
favor of his reactionary and populist stance. The cynicism of
this gesture appears even more blatant in light of the gazette’s
extremely low price: easily affordable, the journal targeted
potential communists in an effort to insidiously recruit them
for the opposing side, the reactionary alliance of ultra-conser-
vatism and high capitalism.
Although figures such as Dreyfus, Krupp, or Coty reappear
on the pages of Eisenstein’s notebooks, they are not in the
foreground, neither as leading actors in history nor in the pro­
ject itself. They figure instead as ciphers or symptoms. In this
way Eisenstein’s emphasis on the autonomy of associations is
manifestly anti-essentialist: it is not directed towards historical
subjects or events, but towards their potential of becoming—
the possible interrelations, meanings, and forms they might

111
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

­ roduce. For this reason his attention focuses on the move-

p
ment of polarization itself, the relational dynamic which turns
the same medium or form into an ideological instrument, into
a war machine.
The last two elements in Eisenstein’s associative chain
provide a paradigmatic example of such a movement of polar-
ization. “War. Vessels sunk in the port.”87 These two elements
seem to allegorize the ideological revaluation of values, which
morph from weapons and other means of destruction into pro-
ductive elements. The story behind this scene comes from an
article entitled “Denikin’s Tractors,” published in the Vechernii
Ekspress Moskva [Moscow Evening Express] on January 2, 1928.
Cut out and pasted in Aleksandrov’s notebook (plate 17), the
article tells an astonishing story about twenty-two artillery trac-
tors given to the White army by the allied England. “But, thanks
to his hurried escape from the Red Army, Denikin failed to take
advantage of these tractors. However, unwilling to leave them
to the Reds, the tractors were sunk.”88 The first half of the story
thus reveals how the value of the same objects changes into the
opposite. Depending on the geo-strategic position of the respec-
tive forces, the tractors oscillate, for each side, between active
instruments of power and destruction and a possible threat.
Intended as a support from the British monarchy, they suddenly
become a liability, a danger in urgent need of elimination. In
the second half of the article the story takes an unexpected turn,
as it describes how the same tractors were lifted from the sea by
“workers of a special-purpose underwater expedition.” Some of
the vessels, “which were not particularly damaged by their time
in the sea,” are comprehensively refurbished for use “as motors
in agriculture and small industrial enterprises.”89

87 Eisenstein, diary from April, 7, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, p. 130.

88 Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 7.
89 Ibid.

112
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

For the first time the chain includes the use of imperial
and capitalist values by the Soviets themselves, as they obey the
imperatives of a war economy. This highly ambivalent process
of ideological revaluation ultimately reveals the socialist system
as a part of this chain. It might be for this reason that Eisenstein
adds “[i]t would be good to cover the sunken English vessels […]
with the lid of a saucepan,” thus alluding to the necessity of self-
censorship, which would have been dictated by the fact that the
story would appear rather problematic in the eyes of the reign-
ing Soviet ideology. Aleksandrov’s comment on the right side
of the page emphasizes the relevance of such shifts for Capital:
the devaluation, destruction, and transformation of values.
“The War.” A list of actions follows this title, actions which
are diametrically opposed to the logic of an accumulation of
value and much rather exemplify the logic of war (plate 17).
“Retreat—destruction of things. Burning of Ford’s automo-
biles. Burning of bread stocks. Destruction of vessels. Sinking
of submarine boats and battleships. (Civil War on the Black
Sea).”90 These cases—quoted by Aleksandrov and taken up in
Eisenstein’s associative chain—may offer some examples of the
screaming ambivalence of values: their capacity of changing
their meaning and function according to the reigning ideology,
constantly outliving their previous raison d’être. These transfor-
mations, however, only seemingly contradict the logic of capital-
ism. For, as Eisenstein’s chain makes apparent, the destruction
caused by the war manifests a higher stage of capital’s becom-
ing; the ostensibly irrational mechanisms within the chain of
apparently unrelated events reveal this higher principle and
its power for inversions. Not the inertia of common perception
and the opacity of the capitalist market provide the conditions
of possibility for such counter-logical operations, but rather the
potential of phenomena themselves to change their meanings,
to shift their positions, to function differently. Presenting these

90 Ibid., p. 6.

113
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

sensuous and formal qualities in their dialectical movement—

a movement on which both capitalism and its (visual) critique
have to rely—is a key element in Eisenstein’s Capital. “Every
appearance lets itself be grasped dialectically: not how it is, but
how it becomes,” Eisenstein claimed in an interview on his proj-
ect. “In natural science they admit it, in psychology they do as
well; only in social science do they deny it.”91
In this way the series of polarizations and inversions pre-
sented in his chain shows a double movement: on the one
hand it mobilizes concrete cases on the level of their manifes-
tation—given in the press, voiced in language, or shown in an
image (plates 18 & 19). On the other hand this phenomeno-
logical concreteness of juxtaposed cases makes more abstract
relations visible: geopolitical and historical movements on the
global scale. Eisenstein, however, never reversed this principle,
zooming in from the general to the particular, from the global
to the local context. This has significant repercussions for his
reading of Marx: “Now the script should be written like a page
from Karl Marx. An equivalent put in words—a position pre-
sented through a cinematographic image.”92 This is how the
cases should be understood: not as mere examples of general-
ized relations behind them, but as unique elements within con-
crete constellations “through which alone the play of concepts
becomes possible.”93
This “Marxist understanding of history” cannot be sepa-
rated from history’s concrete manifestation, the perception of
its most marginal phenomena. And it bears noting that Eisen-
stein shares this vision of history with the author of The Arcades
Project. For it was Walter Benjamin who asked, in response to
what he perceived as a widespread lack in contemporary Marx-

91 Bruno Frei, “Gespräch mit Eisenstein” [Conversation with Eisenstein],

Die Weltbühne 24, no. 32 (August 7, 1928), pp.205–207.
92 Eisenstein, diary from March 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p.123.
93 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 122.

114
One Day in a Man’s Life, or “From a bowl of soup to the British vessels”

ist theory: “Must the Marxist understanding of history neces-

sarily be acquired at the expense of history’s perceptibility?
Or: in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened vivid-
ness [erhöhte Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of the Marxist
method?”94 Very much in the sense of such a “heightened vivid-
ness,” even the most random phenomena, the oddest and most
marginal descriptions enter Eisenstein’s collection of events
for Capital. This is particularly evident in the following passage,
which quotes several lines from George Grosz’s autobiographi-
cal essay “Moia zhizn” [My Life] that are directly related to the
omnipresent theme of war:

… an astonishing time, when everything was permeated by the sym-

bols of war, when every pack of artificial man was decorated by a cross
of the second order, when on the back of each letter an inscription was
pasted “Lord! Punish England!” … When the old leather suitcases were
recycled into soldier boots … and the famous war mousse was so acrid
that it etched holes in the tablecloth. Only the human stomach could
bear all this …!95

The logic of war not only affects the press and the global
course of history; it also infects and inverts the smallest signs
and details of everyday life. These are the elements on which
Eisenstein focuses in his history, a story “like a page from Karl
Marx.” He transforms these speaking phenomena directly into
a scene for Capital: “Good to give the boys leaking ‘mousse’
and drops of it corroding the tablecloth.” Further developing
this scene, Eisenstein associates another micro-inscription of

94 Walter Benjamin,  The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press, 2002), p. 461. Translation slightly modified.
95 George Grosz, “Moia zhizn” [My Life], in Prozhektor [Projector], 14 (1928),
p. 132. Quoted by Sergei Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-
1107, p. 142. George Grosz’s essay was first published in the Soviet journal
­Prozhektor before it appeared in German.

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Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

global war with it, this time taken from a memory of Fridrikh
Ermler’s, who quoted Grosz’s image of Christ wearing a gas
mask96 in his film Fragment of an Empire (1929). “In the
same context (after the stories of Ermler about Berlin)—coast-
ers under the beer cups—with inscriptions: ‘Germany can’t live
without colonies. Rice, pepper, etc.—all is given by colonies.
England has deprived us of colonies.’”97
Here again, rather than offering a grand narrative, Eisen-
stein’s Capital assembles a series of disparate phenomena with
symptomatic significance that not only dismantle the cruel
machinery of war but also show its sheer and vulgar banality.
Signs of destruction—like the soldiers’ drink, which corrodes
fabric but not the stomach, or suitcases that are transformed
into boots—do more than bear witness to a state of emergency
brought about by the war. They also, even more significantly,
reveal an extreme lability inherent in things, their potential for
revaluation and radical metamorphosis. This dynamic of unset-
tling things, symbols, and commodities will reappear in Eisen-
stein’s interpretation of one of Marx’s most crucial concepts,
that of the value form.98

The Color of Gorky’s Eyes

On February 15, 1928, for instance, Eisenstein includes a short

article with the title “How Many Months Do You Wear a Pair of
Shoes?” The subtitle explains that “the minimal durability for
shoes is set,” inferred from the fact that “the user often returns
to the shop with broken shoes one month after the purchase.”
Given the impossibility of any compensation or refund from

96 George Grosz, Maul halten und weiter dienen [Shut Up and Do Your Duty],
rotogravure on laid paper, 1927.
97 Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 143.
98 See in particular chapter four of this book.

116
The Color of Gorky’s Eyes

the shop, the article advocates the introduction of a “minimal

term of use” for “each particular type of shoes,” depending
on their respective quality.99 In the right-hand margin of the
article, Eisenstein comments: “Commercial enterprise, pre-
cisely a mercantile one, can’t be a cultural institution. In this
case commerce and culture go hand in hand. If the culture of
commerce reigns supreme, ideology [imposes] a cultural con-
straint on Sovkino [Sovetskoe kino].”100 The theme of the use
value of shoes appears here again as a symptom of something
else, something that is difficult to grasp on its own. In contrast
to the soldiers’ boots example, however, which quoted Grosz’s
experience of war, this marginal case provides a sharp critique
of the ideological orientation of the Soviet Union’s cultural
politics. The Soviet cinema organization, Sovkino, was initially
founded in 1924 as a stock company, and developed quickly
into a major import, production, and distribution company for
films throughout the entire Soviet Union; among these tasks, its
authority included the preliminary censorship of film scripts.101
The parallel between shoe sale and film distribution provides
Eisenstein with a paradigmatic example of use value merging
into commercial value. Since what might appear, in the case of
the shoes, as the user’s security becomes, for the cultural value
of films, a commercial verdict. The transition between these
two disparate phenomena, both of which echo the effects of the
first five-year plan, reveals a transformation which Eisenstein

99 Eisenstein, diary from February 15, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 74. Eisen-
stein does not provide a precise source for the pasted article.
100 Ibid., p. 73. Goskino (1924–1925), Sovkino  (1925–1930) and Soiuzkino
succeeded each other as the central cinema organizations of the Soviet Union.
Sovkino’s productions included Eisenstein’s October and The General Line.
The institution was liquidated in 1930.
101 On the historical development between the cinema institutions Proletkino,
Goskino, and Sovkino, see: Natalie Ryabchikova, “‘Proletkino’: ot ‘Goskino’ do
‘Sovkino,’” [‘Proletkino’: from ‘Goskino’ to ‘Sovkino’], Kinovedcheskie Zapiski,
94/95 (2010), p. 91.

117
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

might call an effect of “intellectual attraction”: a movement of

thought stimulated by a montage of heterogeneous elements.
On the same pages of his notebook, other disparate news
appears, random curiosities without any further reference or
evident relation. One of the many examples of this absolute ran-
domness is an article with the title “What Is the Color of Gorky’s
Eyes?” The text assembles some rather contradictory observa-
tions from different sources: “A. V. Lunacharsky noticed a
tear in Aleksei Maksimovich’s blue eyes (Krasnaia panorama
[Red Panorama] n. 12); Fedor Gladkov remarked that Gorky’s
eyes are ‘strangely tired and colorless’ (Prozhektor, n. 13). […]
‘Gorky’s blue eyes were looking firmly and slightly ironically at
Aseev.’ […] And yet, what is the color of Gorky’s eyes—colorless,
light grey, or blue?”102
On the heels of this puzzling curiosity follows another spec-
ulation, this time taken from the German journal Scherl’s Maga-
zin: “Warum fällt die Katze stets auf die Füße?” [Why does the
cat always fall on its feet?]103 Eisenstein highlights the theory
that explains this phenomenon with the cat’s particular phys-
iology, that is, from its “neck-righting reflex.”104 One can only
speculate that the relation between the cat’s sense of orienta-
tion and its reflexes might be of interest in the context of Eisen-
stein’s physiology of intellectual attractions. Another page
shows a short press clip from the Film-Kurier (plate 21). It tells
of a balancing act of a rather different kind: according to medi-
eval folklore, the article claims, the mandrake plant (German:
Alraunen) grows from the semen of the hanged, symbolizing a
transition between life and death.105
This heterogeneity of the material seems to exceed Eisen-
stein’s own associative capacity, the possibility of generating

102 Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 139.

103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Eisenstein, diary from March 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 115–116.

118
The Color of Gorky’s Eyes

new interrelations within Cassini’s hypothetical sphere, the geo-

metrical image of his Capital project. On February 20, 1928, he
writes: “Again a horrible depression. Can’t write. Can’t work.”
Some lines further down he recalls his friend’s advice: “Shk-
lovsky says that I shouldn’t write articles but publish materials
for articles. In either case they won’t understand it.”106 The per-
ceived profusion of material produces constant doubts, a state
that oscillates between the opening of new interrelations, their
excess, and their sudden and subsequent breakdown. The asso-
ciative chain which leads from “a bowl of soup to the British ves-
sels sunk by England,” also ends with a critical remark: “Every-
thing written under the §§§ 5 and 6 is under monstrous doubt. It
is still very reactionary!”107 The dialectical limbo of these reflec-
tions appears astonishing, since under § 6 Eisenstein offers a
solution he evidently feels bound to question right away:

Problem of volume of material which can fit in. To be solved by an

incredible succinctness and by treating each part entirely in its own
way. Perhaps one part even “acted” with two characters—ganz fein.
Another one, entirely from newsreels. Etc. The character of the mate-
rial presented calls for economy. The “ancient” cinema was shooting
one event from many points of view. The new one assembles one point
of view from many events.108

The “economy” mentioned here is crucial. Transposing

Marx’s Capital on the level of the presented materials—the con-
stellation of disparate “events”—this visual economy involves
a dialectics of conflict. This dialectics invites association and
excess to join. Eisenstein explains on a previous page: “Sty-
listically, this closed plot line, whose every moment serves as

106 Eisenstein, diary from February 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 77–78.
107 Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 133.
108 Ibid., p. 132; “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital’,” p. 18. The relation between the
“ancient” and the “new” cinema is analyzed in detail in the next chapter.

119
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

a point of departure towards materials that are both ideologi-

cally defined and physically dissociated, provides maximum
contrast as well.”109 This precisely constructed and contrasted
play of conflicts, however, implies a risk: a loss of relation, a dis-
order of thought. Eisenstein invents a splendid name for these
conflicts when he calls them “mechanical springboards for
samples of dialectical attitudes towards events.”110
Such a dialectic of conflict pervades Eisenstein’s writing of
Capital. It can be found and interpreted within the disparate
elements of his pasted and written montages. The process of
association, which operates via manifold “mechanical spring-
boards,” is as much structured and composed here as it is bro-
ken and dissociated. Maybe for this reason the “final chapter”
envisioned for the film is missing from the notebooks. Yet it
certainly is also because Eisenstein expected something impos-
sible from this end, namely to “produce a dialectical decoding
of the very same story irrespective of the real theme,” which
he could not fail to name, following his dialectical principle,
“grösste Spreizung” [the coarsest spread].111
However, for Eisenstein, the project’s revolutionary thrust
lay in its experimentation with a new cinematographic lan-
guage, one that aimed to create the closest possible relation
between thought and perception, the conscious and the uncon-
scious, the social and the formal dimensions of the image.
This is how the perfectly marginal element from previous
press clips—the image of a shoe—returns on one of the most
precisely constructed collages, alluding to this new cinemato-
graphic language (plate 22). The page is structured by four red
lines and fragments of notes pasted between them. The struc-
ture forms a square in which a men’s patent-leather shoe is
vertically placed. Two crosses can be seen on the page. One of

109 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 124.

110 Ibid., p. 125.
111 Ibid.

120
The Color of Gorky’s Eyes

them is placed horizontally on the shoe, while the other inter-

rupts—literally crosses out—a German inscription: “The end of
tempered notation”—“blessedly deceased.”112
Here, the “inner speech” of the new cinema is associated
with the end of the composed music of the silent-film era. The
dates at the bottom of the page (from September 6 to Septem-
ber 13, 1928) correspond perfectly with Eisenstein’s intense
research on overtone montage, a concept inspired by Kabuki
theater. According to Eisenstein, the classical model of musical
composition is rendered obsolete when it is dialectically related
to the expressive elements of cinematographic image super-
position. This does not imply an arbitrary or purely dissonant
understanding of sound, as a first glance at the fragmented
dynamic of the collage might suggest; on the contrary, the con-
struction of cinematic expression as intended by Eisenstein
should incorporate even higher levels of complexity in compo-
sition through the inclusion of a subtler counterpoint or con-
flict. In his September 1928 notes, Eisenstein invents a nota-
tion method of expressive movements that he calls a “spherical
coordinate system,” based on the deformation and polyphony
of heterogeneous elements in time. Overtone montage was thus
a concept for a continuous choreography of conflicting ele-
ments; it also evidences the impact of Joyce’s poetic method, a
form in which fragments of speech interact in the dynamic flow
of an articulation process.113
One year later, on August 17, 1929—after Stalin ordered
The General Line renamed Old and New—Eisenstein draws
an outline for its sound score, which echoes the polyphonic
structure of his notebooks on Capital as well as his overtone-
based montage conception:

112 Eisenstein, diary from September 13, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, pp. 194–202.

113 Eisenstein, diary from September 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-972, p. 88. For
further analysis on the spherical system, see the fourth chapter of this book.

121
Capital’s Stream of Consciousness

1. music
2. natural surroundings and what we might now term concrete sound
3. “mickey-mousing,” as developed in the animation film.

Other degrees and categories include:

1. variations in speed
2. acoustic distortions
3. variations in volume (counter to image)
4. leitmotifs and distortions thereof
5. conflicting resolutions
6. categories of opposition to frame and intertitle
7. multiple exposures (conceivably superimpositions) of sound
8. transitionless increases in volume
9. distortions of sound analogous to those optical distortions by use
of 28'' lens
10. contrasts of musical style and genre […]114

One can read such a polyphonic assemblage that goes

beyond classical music composition elements to embrace “con-
crete sound” in analogy to Joyce’s principle: a decomposition
of a classical narrative structure through a demontage into its
smallest sensuous elements. In a text written the same year,
Eisenstein uses a political metaphor to describe this technique:
“The General Line was edited in a different way from orthodox
montage by individual dominants. The ‘aristocracy’ of unam-
biguous dominants was replaced by the method of ‘democratic’

114 Eisenstein’s notes, dated August 17, 1929, for a sound score for Old and
New, to be composed by E. Meisel, are reprinted in Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow,
Eisenstein at Work (New York. NY: Pantheon Books; The Museum of Modern Art,
1982), pp. 38–40. For an interpretation of these notes, see Annette Michelson,
“Reading Eisenstein Reading Ulysses: Montage and the Claims of Subjectivity,”
Art & Text 34 (1989), pp. 66–68.

122
The Color of Gorky’s Eyes

equal rights for all stimulants, viewed together as a complex.”115

Looking back at Capital’s use of fragmentation and digression,
this political vision of the score emerges as continuous with
this logic. The polyphonic structure which Eisenstein will later
develop into a notion of all-embracing “vertical montage,” can
be understood as a crucial attempt at establishing an alternative
aesthetic to that of a dominance of one element. This polyva-
lence of all heterogeneous elements in their possible interrela-
tions opens a way of voicing and sensing the most random and
contingent qualities. These material “voices,” first perceived in
Joyce’s method, traverse not only Eisenstein’s notes for Capital,
but also his subsequent theory and film projects.

115 Sergei Eisenstein, “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema,” in Selected Works.

Writings 1922–34, p. 182.

123
§ 1. Entering “volume” five of my “diary” I feel old, old,
like all the above-mentioned old men taken together.

One must rest. To become young again, so as not to

spoil the serious pages of my records with digressions
of a lyrical character.

Theoretical problems included in this volume—

of paramount importance!
Right: Easter gift of the city of Munich.
Twelve old men are presented with the
apostle’s clothing.
Plate 14: Eisenstein, diary from April 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, pp. 1–3.
phenomenon—a cine-treatise, as an abstract alge-
braic formula within this, physically perceptible
spatial geometrical construction in Cartesian or
polar coordinates:

“Beautifully” issue a chapter on this,

giving it the title:

and ending it “spatially”:

This is an equation of Cassini curves (ovals) and

their spatial (planar) expression. (see Borisov
Foundations of Analytic Geometry p. 95)
Plate 15: Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 2–3.
It is already April 3, 2h 35 m. Now the overseas
“fate” of October has been decided ...

9. (Chauvinism) At the beginning of the 19th

century, Chauvin was the popular name for
French recruits.

Off the cuff comedy—in German Commedia dell’arte

(see e.g. E.T.A. Hoffmann Signor Formica)

4. (Off the cuff) Off the cuff means “stirrups;”

the saying means originally: do something
quickly, without first getting off the horse [out
of the saddle]

For the article for LEF about the “slogan”

In the United States, a book cover does not in-

dicate the literary content of the volume but
reports

that it takes three and a quarter hours to read it.

and especially:

“I know a very nice guy,” said Emil Berr, “but he see p. 63

has a terrible habit. Every time you ask him, ‘How April 2, 1928
are you?’ He begins to tell you how he is doing.
One cannot get along with him anymore!”

There are concepts that are only physiologically transferable:

Plate 16: Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, pp. 28–29.
DENIKIN’S TRACTORS
— War.
As is known, all the White Guard
armies received military equip-
ment from the allies. Denikin’s
army was no exception, having Retreat—destruction
received 22 artillery tractors from
the British, which were brought on
of things.
the “Urpike” steamer. But, thanks
to his hurried escape from the Burning of Ford
Red Army, Denikin failed to take
advantage of these tractors. How-
automobiles.
ever, unwilling to leave them to the
Reds, the tractors were sunk. Burning of
bread stocks.

Destruction of vessels

Sinking of submarine
boats and battleships

(Civil War on
the Black Sea)

Recently, along with various v­ essels January 2,

sunk in the Civil War, these trac-
tors were raised by the forces of 1928
EPRON (workers of a special-purpose
underwater expedition). Some of
these, which were not particularly
damaged by their time in the sea,
are undergoing comprehensive re-
furbishing and will henceforth be
used as motors in agriculture and
small industry.

Vecherniaia Moskva
January 2, 1928
Plate 17: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, pp. 6–7.
 On the construction of the L.Z. 127

About 85 meters of the 226-meter-long new Zeppelin airship L.Z. 127 are
currently completed. Our picture shows the attachment of an engine na-
celle to the ship’s framework; five engines of 500 HP output each are in-
tended. The airship is expected to make its first trips in the summer of
1928. Its capacity amounts to 105,000 cubic meters, while the Z.R. III. com-
prised only 68,000 cubic meters.
Plate 18: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 19.
 AM
Izvestia Z.I.V.

ERI
Winter January 14,

ANC
1928

M ICR
OSCig. Bor.
F
OP Efimo
E. va.

—THE QUESTION OF “ETERNAL PEACE” CANNOT

BE CONSIDERED BY AN UNARMED EYE!
Plate 19: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, pp. 24–25.
The General Line

One must primarily work not

on the speeds (as in October)
but on the absence of such

March 18, 1928

e
ral ow
Lin
h
Ge to s
in T essar OL
he y—
ne
Ne NSOM
KO
c

OVER 500 MILLION EGGS

kept fresh annually by “Garantol.” Ensure that
you too, have good and cheap winter eggs by
preserving them now at low prices—but only in
the time-tested “Garantol,” which, according
to legal certifications, is the best egg preserva-
tive. Smallest pack for 120 eggs 40 ct. Available
in drugstores, pharmacies, and grocery stores.
13 / XXIV
Plate 20: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, pp. 24–25.
Very interesting: March 6, 1928.
Mandrake—since ancient times, the mandrake root, or A lamp swings
witchweed, has been shrouded in common superstition. before me. There
The berries of the herb with human-like shape served in stands a “Narzan”
antiquity for love and sleeping potions.
In the Middle Ages, however, the legend went: “On the glass. The lamp
border between life and death, the hanged man's last life swings in a circle—
force fertilized the Allmother Earth. Thus criminals on the a shadow runs
gallows sired the mandrakes, those roots with human-like
features. At full moon, people went out to seek mandrake around the glass.
roots, as it was said that they would bring fortune into the
home; yet that they would also bring grief, that they forgot!
—Settled.
Film-Kurier “Mandrake” This will go into
The General Line.
In the scene in which Evdokia, after the death of the bull,
falls in her yard.

Objects cast
small shadows,
which slowly
begin to
grow further,
extending
themselves
ever further.
Coming over Evdokia, covering her …………

NB. One could have the shadows “intersect!”

|entirely contrary to logic|One could have them later revolve
on their axes. But all this would fit better in some other scene.
Plate 21: Eisenstein, diary from March 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 115–116.
 THE END
OF TEMPERED
STRUCTURE!

TEMP - ERED
NOTA TION.
1928
September 6—September 13
BLESSEDLY
DECEASED!
Plate 22: Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 194–202.
The Value of Lenin

Melting Symbols, or How to Eat the Image of the Leader

Eisenstein’s decision to construct the future film using Marx’s

Capital as its script and Joyce’s Ulysses as its literary method
ensured that a conflict would develop at the intersection of
the political and historical with the intimate and unconscious.
Eisenstein described this intersection as “a vital power of sym-
bolization,” an intersection where meaning and act, affect and
sign merge together in a coevolution, which he also under-
stood as an anthropological basis of emotional economy.1 As
he said in an interview on the project in 1928: “From the fact
that every human symbolizes unnoticeably, the film must
draw consequences.”2 Demonstrating once again a heightened
attention to the psychoanalytic reading of social phenomena,
he states:

Not the having-become but the becoming symbol interests me. For
instance, I want to express the Marxian dialectic entirely visually.
Every appearance lets itself be grasped dialectically: not how it is, but
how it becomes. In natural science they admit it, in psychology they do
as well; only in social science do they deny it.3

A visual element from his Capital notebook corresponds

exactly to this statement: an image, apparently cut out from the
German newspaper Die Woche, shows a group of men loading
several large things onto a truck, things of approximately human

1 “Die Kraft zu Symbolisieren ist eine immer lebendige Kraft […].” Bruno
Frei, “Gespräch mit Eisenstein” [Conversation with Eisenstein], pp. 205–207.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.

143
The Value of Lenin

size and covered with white fabric (plate 23). “Wie zerronnen, so
gewonnen,” the caption comments, in a phrase that can be idi-
omatically translated as “easy come, easy go.” The paper further
identifies these veiled shapes as “wax figures ‘wounded’ in a fire
in a London wax museum.”4 After having been restored, the fig-
ures of different “famous people” arrive at their “new home.”5
Next to the excerpt Eisenstein ironically comments: “brilliant
film material (especially vom symbolischen Standpunkt aus
[from the symbolic standpoint]).”6 In this way the melting of the
celebrity icons strikingly concretizes the deconstruction of the
symbolic power embodied in personality cults. The melting of
these iconic figures—symbols intimately involved in perpetuat-
ing personality cults—is no accident, though. However, noth-
ing points directly to the contemporary question of symbolic
power; Eisenstein’s appreciation of this news as “brilliant film
material” needs to be contextualized in his polemic against the
rising propaganda of the leader, paradigmatically embodied
in the figure of Lenin. The distant and objectified character of
this material, its nature as fait divers, reinforces the ambiguity.
Thinking of October, especially the sequence of the gods, ana-
lyzed in detail in the following, Eisenstein invests the “symbolic
standpoint” with a political and anthropological significance.
The image’s shrouded figures evoke both Christian and pagan
rituals while also interlacing with cult and exhibition value in an
exemplary way. Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s ris-
ing personality cults and monumentalization of political lead-
ers, the question of (re)presenting the political—that is, its con-
crete and dynamic figuration—traverses Eisenstein’s C ­ apital

4 The original German idiom “Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen” (literally “melted

as soon as gained”) is inverted in the caption, becoming “Wie zerronnen so gewon-
nen” (“gained as melted”). Zerronnen also describes the state of being melted.
Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 162–163.
5 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 162
6 Ibid., p. 161.

144
Melting Symbols, or How to Eat the Image of the Leader

project as a leitmotif. It reveals a critical position, one able to

deconstruct—or melt—a fixed symbol and hence its cult-value.
How did Eisenstein imagine expressing the dialectics of
value visually? And what does it mean, concretely, to revalue
and invert the logic of representation and to show—simulta-
neously—the “method” of Marx’s Capital? This simultaneous
deconstruction of symbolic values and construction of a critical
stance, a dissolution of fixed meanings and a sensuous excess
of signification, is at work everywhere in Eisenstein’s use of
visual materials. Images of various kinds—verbal and visual,
metaphoric and plastic, of stone and of sugar—appear and dis-
solve in ludic chains of association in his visions for Capital. In
a note from March 1, 1928, for instance, Eisenstein mentions
his trip to Archangelsk, a port city in the north of Russia, where
he saw a “portrait of Clara Zetkin,” a German Marxist theorist
and advocate of women’s rights, “made out of birch bark and
sweets.” Eisenstein comments this phenomenon as follows:
“Good material for an episode about how the kids have eaten
half of the leader made by an amateur artist out of candies—
confectionery and caramel.”7 This childish gesture of destroy-
ing and dissolving symbolic images yields a Dionysian form of
pleasure. Exceeding any ultimate constitution of meaning or
sense, it proves to be only one in a series of manifold possible
modes of decomposition and dissolution of power relations
executed on the pages of Eisenstein’s notebooks. Power, as it
presents itself and implodes here, is embodied in cult images
of various kinds, even including the figure of Lenin. These ges-
tures refer back to Eisenstein’s aesthetic choices in October
and his engagement with a chorus of critical voices that reacted
to the revolutionary epic. They also refer back to Eisenstein’s
analysis of the historical and aesthetic value of the revolution,
its possible significations, and, ultimately, the construction

7 Eisenstein, diary from March 1, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 110.

145
The Value of Lenin

of a language for the future cinema, an expressive language of

images capable of setting static concepts in motion.
Ultimately, these gestures seek to introduce a new economy
of the very means of cinema: “The character of the material pre-
sented calls for economy. The ‘ancient’ cinema was shooting
one event from many points of view. The new one assembles
one point of view from many events.”8 Some pages on, Eisen-
stein mockingly analyzes the etymology of the Russian word
antichnaia:

Ancient [antichnaia]—a term fitting perfectly to describe the old cin-

ematography:
O. Petruchenko, Latin–Russian Dictionary, p. 44
Antiquus: … II) what happened before, old.
previous … past … b) old-fashioned, forthright, simple, honest… ha-
ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha! Honest!
As everyone knows since the dawn of time: honest means right, tra-
ditional, licentious. It turns out, the tradition comes from the Latin
ha-ha-ha!9

Although he introduces such a derisive and slightly tenden-

tious etymology, Eisenstein is not interested in a teleological
ban on his preceding cinematographic experiments. On the
contrary, he made use of the visual economy of “shooting one
event from many points of view” in October. The pages of his
notebook on Capital open a reflexive sphere for a reconsidera-
tion of this principle.

8 Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 132; “Notes for
a Film of ‘Capital’,” p. 18.
9 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 88.

146
Decomposing Symbols or Elements of Cine-Cubism

Decomposing Symbols or Elements of Cine-Cubism

October begins with a famous scene in which a statue of Alex-

ander III is dismantled (fig. 6–17). The vertigo of this opening
sequence derives not so much from the process of its dismount-
ing, however, as it does from an accelerating montage of differ-
ent perspectives, which offers disjointed images of the muti-
lated parts of the statue. The frenetic succession of montaged
images translates the revolutionary disempowerment of the
monarchy.
On December 9, 1927, an intriguing notion appears on the
pages of Eisenstein’s notebook. He plans to write a book on
“cine-cubism,” defined as a “period in which phenomena and
action were decomposed into countless perspectives.”10 Eisen-
stein considers this aesthetic principle as an important experi-
ence of the past, a “research into the unit and the theory of the
new cinematographic imagery.”11 And, according to an inverse
logic, he associates these same experiences with the first com-
positional attempts of montage which produced a “whole fig-
ure from different pieces shown subsequently.”12
Ideas on cine-cubism become of crucial importance, tracing
a demarcation line between the old and the new aesthetics; they
return in Eisenstein’s Capital project in a series of excerpts from
different art-historical sources on cubism. Among others, Eisen-
stein quotes Daniel Henry Kahnweiler’s Der Weg zum Kubismus
[The Rise of Cubism], Rudolf Blümner’s Der Geist des Kubismus
und die Künste [The Spirit of Cubism and the Arts], and Albert
Gleizes’s Vom Kubismus. Die Mittel zu seinem ­Verständnis [On
Cubism. The Means to its Understanding]. Eisenstein directs
his attention towards the origin of the movement’s name, which
derives, as Blümner asserts, from a m ­ isunderstanding: “that

10 Eisenstein, diary from December 9, 1927, 1923-2-1105, p. 32.

11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.

147
The Value of Lenin

Fig. 6–17: Dismantling of the statue of Alexander III in October, 1928.

the word ‘cubism’ doesn’t say anything—or only falsehoods—

as to its meaning.”13 According to Kahnweiler, the misappre-
hension of the name dates back to the 1908 Salon d’Automne
in Paris. Matisse, who in that year sat on the jury, described a
series of paintings sent by Braque for the exhibition as land-
scapes “avec des petits cubes” [with small cubes]. The art critic
Louis Vauxcelles derived the notion “­cubism” from this com-

13 “[…] daß das Wort ‘Kubismus’ über seine Bedeutung nichts oder Falsches
aussagt.” Rudolf Blümner, Der Geist des Kubismus und die Künste (Berlin: Verlag
der Sturm, 1921), p. 10, quoted in Eisenstein, diary from April 20, 1928, RGALI,
1923-2-1108, p. 20.

148
Decomposing Symbols or Elements of Cine-Cubism

ment while Braque’s series, entitled Maisons à l’Estaque, was

rejected by the jury of the Salon d’Automne.14 In this way, the
“derogatory term applied by its enemies” came to name a new
contemporary art movement.15 After citing different statements
about the mediation of dimensions in cubism—on whether the
artist should depict the three dimensions of “reality” or rather
stay in the two-dimensional space of the painting—Eisenstein
sharply criticizes the self-referential limits of the debate on
cubism. “With a composition of quotes one could write a whole
treatise. The ugliness appears from the moment at which the
load of the quote reaches its minimum: that is the length of the
quote. That is the personal and non-ambiguous thought of the
quote.”16 This argument leads Eisenstein to strictly distinguish
the cinematic unit, an image or frame, from the univocal for-
malism that he reads in the discourse on cubism. “One must
prove,” he concludes sardonically, “that the cine-unit and the
brick are fundamentally different things.”17
The opposition between the ancient and the new cinema
reveals itself as a confrontation between a certain univocal use
of the frame, associated with the cubist approach, and a poly-
phonic assemblage of events that constructs a single “point of
view” from their ambiguity. Here, Eisenstein once again evokes
Joyce’s dialogue intérieur— and goes back to Kahnweiler’s defi-
nition of the cubist movement as “lyricism of forms”: “The
period following Impressionism must be described as lyric,
not lyric in the literary sense of mood [literarischen Stimmungs­
lyrismus], but lyric in the painterly sense of form.”18 Given the

14 More precisely, the jury rejected two paintings from the series. In response,
Braque withdrew the entire series.
15 Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (New York: Wittenborn,
Schultz, 1949), p. 5, quoted in Eisenstein, diary from April 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-
2-1108, pp. 19–20.
16 Eisenstein, diary from April 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 21.
17 Ibid., p. 22.
18 Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism, p. 1, quoted in Eisenstein, diary from April
20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 23.

149
The Value of Lenin

stakes of the Capital project, such a definition could hardly sat-

isfy Eisenstein. He is not interested in “the sentimental lyrics of
a contemplation of forms,” which drives “the scholars of cub-
ism.” “After the drama, the epic, [comes] a new understanding
of an ideological lyricism—this is the direction.”19
Yet instead of theoretically defining any ideological stand-
point, Eisenstein insists on the relational and dynamic ambigu-
ity of montage, in which “sense derives from the correlation, not
from the absolute [meaning] of the pieces.” He plans to illus-
trate his thoughts with some photomontage examples from the
Bauhaus books, or with a remontage of a photographic image,
previously cut into pieces. “In contrast to the significance of the
symbols, their initial position in each part, clearly new expres-
sive positions [will emerge]. [This is] conditioned only through
the respective dispositions of the parts.”20 Such a dynamic mon-
tage practice is not only suggested or theorized but concretely
executed, performed, and varied on several pages of Eisenstein’s
notebooks. Symbols, political actors, and advertisements are
cut into pieces and rearranged. These montaged images hint at
motifs for Capital.
Eisenstein opposes this relational dynamic of montage to
the aesthetics of the “non-played” [neigrovaia], articulated in a
long dialogue with Esfir’ Shub, his friend, collaborator, and one
of October’s severest critics. Eisenstein’s answers to Shub’s
criticism traverse several pages of his notebooks, and effec-
tively reconfigure the contemporary discursive field of the new
cinema. Crucially, this issue goes far beyond a mere opposition
between played and non-played, between the aesthetic of the
newsreels and the dramatization through stage play. It relates
to Eisenstein’s reflection on the contemporary value of so-called
“facts” and their “fetishization” through a ban on any possible
ambiguity. Rather than taking them at face value, Eisenstein

19 Eisenstein, diary from April 20, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 23.

20 Eisenstein, diary from November 24, 1927, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 19.

150
Decomposing Symbols or Elements of Cine-Cubism

highlights their constructed and staged nature by activating

the entire semantic field of the notion of “play.” The parallel
between the use value of material in chronicles and the cub-
ist “contemplative” attitude to form emerges as crucial, espe-
cially in regard to Eisenstein’s critical engagement with these
two different poles. In his article on “Beyond the Played and the
Non-Played,” published in 1928, he polemically addresses this
problematic:

When there are two contestants it is usually the third who is right.
In the ring now: played and non-played.
That means that justice lies with the third.
With the beyond-played.
With cinema that places itself beyond the played and the non-played.
With cinema that stands on its own two feet with its own, admittedly
as yet undesignated, terminology.
[…]
A theoretical novelty—the “non-played” film—has in due course
replaced
plot by fact.
Illusion by raw material.
Aesthetic fetishization was replaced by a fetish for raw material.
But a fetish for material is not quite materialism.
In the first instance it is still after all fetishism.
When the question of the hegemony of “raw material” merged into
general usage, a hysterical scream, the “cult” of raw material, it meant
the end of raw material.21

Here again, materialist terminology nourishes Eisenstein’s

critical tone against the aesthetic agenda of the left. How does
Eisenstein locate the issues of his Capital project beyond the
played and the non-played? And why did the mere opposition

21 Eisenstein, “Beyond the Played and the Non-Played,” p. 103.

151
The Value of Lenin

between these poles not even touch the problems which Capital
is intended to address?
Eisenstein, for his part, articulates these questions as fol-
lows: How to give an image of “the tactics of Bolshevism?” How
to show the method of “empirical criticism?” he asks. Ulti-
mately, how to visualize the “theory of surplus value” and the
“method of dialectical materialism”?22 He alludes to a possible
solution, referring to a scene from October that shows the con-
struction of a gun. Instead of including documentary material
from the period of the Civil War, the use of the gun by the Red
army is given in a laconic gesture: static views showing succes-
sive steps in a montage of a gun: “Proletarian, learn to use your
rifle!” reads the banner in the preceding shot (fig. 18–29). An
instruction for action—performing and transmitting a particu-
lar know-how—the scene escapes the representational logic
of played and non-played. This didactic character consists not
only in showing an action but also in making the scene act and
redeem “the tactics of Bolshevism.”
At the same time Eisenstein reads this scene against an
ideological instruction for the armament of the people. What
is at stake for him is “the question of the class nature of art,”
as he puts it. How to make images that not only show class
consciousness but act in accordance with it, that is to say, act
beyond the demarcation line of “content” and “form”?23 Refer-
ring to the gun scene, Eisenstein answers: “Ideology is here a
constructive element of the thing […] it is not separable from
the thing”; it is “a formal carcass and not a conformational coat
or a leather jacket.” Instead of identifying the scene’s content
with a military claim, Eisenstein affirms its ideological poten-
tial for action: “A gun can be white, it can be red: but the idea of
overall disarmament can be only red!”24 In this sense the scene

22 Eisenstein, diary from March 8, 1928, RGALI 1923-2-1107, p. 159.

23 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 51–52.
24 Ibid., p. 52.

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Decomposing Symbols or Elements of Cine-Cubism

Fig. 18–29: “Proletarian, learn to use your rifle!” in October, 1928.

has to be understood dialectically: on the one side as a carefully

constructed, concrete claim for action, and on the other as a
simultaneous deconstruction of a military position from within
the visual sphere.
To understand this visual logic it is helpful to consider
the formal elements of the scene. Static close ups of the con-
struction of the rifle are part of a longer montage sequence
that shows a process of reconciliation: the Bolsheviks bring
the Caucasian Native Cavalry Division (named “Savage Divi-
sion”), formerly commanded by the Imperial Russian Army
and then called to protect the Provisional Government, to their
side. The new communist alliance is given in a sequence that

153
The Value of Lenin

Fig. 30–41: “Savage Division” in October, 1928.

first shows the Ukranian folk dance trepak and then the Cau-
casian traditional lezginka (fig. 30–41). The rhythmic accelera-
tion goes along with a successive morcellation of the moving
bodies through montage: close-ups of moving faces, arms,
and feet; bodies performing acrobatic movements. The scene
is framed by swords, traditionally worn as an element of the
lezginka, returned to their scabbards: a sign of reconciliation.
In his Capital notebooks Eisenstein comments this contrasting
danse macabre in the sense of intellectual attractions, putting it
forward as “a counterpart to the non-played”—yet as an insuf-
ficient one, as he states:

154
Gods and Reflexes

Now the script should be written like a page from Karl Marx. An equiv-
alent put in words—a position presented through a cinematographic
image. […] It is remarkable that lezginka, in its combinational scheme,
is in fact an element of such a construction of meaning. But an insuffi-
ciently worked out one. Lezginka and trepak—are not everyday life but
an idea. A Bolshevist tactic, going through the commanding heads, a
tradition traversing the entire Civil War.25

Oscillating between the dynamic dance of reconciliation

and the static armament instructions, the montage transmits
a vital rhythm of the historical event, the “temperament of the
twist,” rather than its documentary evidence.26 Eisenstein’s
decision to bring a vertiginous Dionysian dance together with
dry proto-educational instructions is undoubtedly a dialecti-
cal one. The action, based on affective attraction stimulating
thought, echoes his claim for “literality”—a literal understand-
ing of images and words for dismantling ideological contents.
Eisenstein juxtaposes such a potential, which he sees given in
images and signs, with symbolic values, an opposition that can
be grasped in one of the most celebrated examples of intellec-
tual attractions: October’s sequence of the gods.

Gods and Reflexes

The critical dismantling of static and petrified symbols is a proj-

ect of intellectual attraction, which is able to set conceptual for-
mations in motion. Eisenstein refers to the “sequence of the
gods” in October as the “most sophisticated,” “academically
brilliant, sensuously attractive montage.” He characterizes
the experiential impact of such an operation as “non-fictional

25 Eisenstein, diary from March 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p.123.

26 Ibid.

155
The Value of Lenin

[…] not educational but absorbing and propagandistic.”27 The

sequence parodies General Kornilov’s attempted coup against
the transitional government and the Bolsheviks. According to
Eisenstein, the sequence of the gods introduced a model for
intellectual attraction (fig. 42–53). More importantly for the
present context, in such image-immanent thinking he saw a
model par excellence for his Capital project. In the essay “The
Dramaturgy of Film Form,” from 1929, he emphasizes the
sequence’s epistemic power:

Kornilov’s march on Petrograd took place under the slogan “In the
Name of God and the Fatherland.” Here we have an attempt to use rep-
resentation for anti-religious ends. A number of images of the divine
were shown in succession.
From a pompous Baroque Christ to an Eskimo idol.
Here a conflict arises between the concept of “god” and its symboliza-
tion. Whereas idea and image are completely synonymous in the first
Baroque image, they grow further apart with each subsequent image.
We retain the description “god” and show idols that in no way corre-
spond with our own image of this concept. From this we are to draw
anti-religious conclusions as to what the divine as such really is.
Similarly, there is here an attempt to draw a purely intellectual conclu-
sion as a resultant of the conflict between a preconception and its grad-
ual tendentious discrediting by degrees through pure ­illustration.28

In his journal entry for March 14, 1928, Eisenstein states

that the rhythmic sequence of heterogeneous gods and idols
devalues the symbol of a unique god (that is, the crucifix), as
well as its concept [Begriff]. This happens in a juxtaposition
of incommensurable images of divinities—incommensurable

27 Eisenstein, “Notes for a film of ‘Capital,’” p. 14.

28 Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form [The Dialectical Approach to
Film Form],” in Selected Works. Writings, 1922–34, vol. 1 (London: British Film
Institute; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 179–180, transla-
tion slightly modified.

156
Gods and Reflexes

Fig. 42–53: Sequence of the gods in October, 1928.

idols placed into a successive temporality through montage.

“‘God,’ ‘god,’ ‘god,’” read the notes to Capital, “and a seman-
tic diminuendo in the material. Rows of meanings.”29 Here
the musical term for a reduction in the volume applies to the
gradual shutting-down of the traditional semantic field. This
occurs through the excess of a visual crescendo, as Eisenstein
confronts the “concept of ‘god’” with a series of unique coun-
ter-images. The “pompous Baroque Christ”—the symbol of
the monotheistic “god”—is followed by a dynamic montage of
­incommensurable idols. The excessive multiplication of one god

29 Eisenstein, diary from March 14, 1928, in RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 130.

157
The Value of Lenin

disassembles the claim of the single and absolute truth through

the material incarnations of so many deities (fig. 42–53). This
complex visual argument calls the monopolistic position of
a Christian symbolization into doubt on an anthropological
plane. In his materialist critique of religion, Eisenstein exhibits
the idols both in their respective cultural settings—in their iri-
descent particularities—as well as in their ubiquity. In this way
he makes a third point that dismantles the generally accepted
term of “preconception” as a linguistic fetish: in this case the
paradigmatic idol of rational thought itself, the concept. The
montage pieces are correlated on a downward curve; they lead
the idea of god down to the wooden idol.30
This is how Eisenstein imagined “a purely intellectual
film”31 oriented towards grammatical structure or linguis-
tic units rather than towards “theatrical play.”32 But far from
imposing a structuralist matrix on images, the “intellectual
attractions” aimed rather at directly affecting thought “without
any transitions or paraphrases.”33 On April 18, 1928, the day he
reflects on cine-cubism and makes excerpts from Kahnweiler,
Eisenstein also comments on the emotional value of intellec-
tual attractions:

I think that the intellectual attraction does not at all exclude “Emo-
tionality,” [sic] because the reflexive activity is perceived as the pres-
ence of an affect. The question concerns the ways of affecting and
the perspectives des zur Offenbarung Möglichen [of what is capable
of revelation]—possibilities in the sphere of expression by means of
these specific new ways. The maintenance of the emotional effect is
an imperative.34

30 Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form,” p. 180.

31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., p. 178.
33 Ibid., p. 180.
34 Eisenstein, diary from April 18, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 28.

158
Gods and Reflexes

Eisenstein never fully developed a theoretical model for

such a direct affective stimulation of thought, but he indicated
a number of references, including the vitalist graphologist and
philosopher of expression Ludwig Klages, Freud’s psychoanaly-
sis, and the “theory of new biology” developed by the Soviet
behaviorist Emmanuil S. Enchmen. Doubtless, this constella-
tion appears heretical by the standards of the contemporary
doxa of historical materialism, notwithstanding the fact that
behaviorist psychology and reflexology had already entered
the canon of official ideology. Nikolai Bukharin, the leading
ideologist of the Communist Party and director of the Com-
munist International, for instance, characterized the theory
of conditional reflexes as a “weapon from an iron arsenal of
materialism.”35 Just as historical materialism saw the develop-
ment of cultural processes as reflecting economic processes, so
the leading scientists of the two opposing schools of reflexol-
ogy, Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov, analyzed conscious-
ness itself as a reflection of underlying physiological process-
es.36 However, in the early Soviet Union reflexology represented
not only one discipline among others but also a programmatic
surface of social and political speculations, “a tangible instru-
ment for reshaping human nature.”37
In this atmosphere of an experimental construction of
an eminently political society based on reflexes, a republic of
reflexes, Eisenstein began his career as a theater director at

35 Cit. in Irina Sirotkina, “The Ubiquitous Reflex and Its Critics in Post-Revolu-
tionary Russia,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32, no. 1 (March 2009), p. 71.
36 For inspiring thoughts on reflexology in the framework of artistic experi-
mentation in the early Soviet Union I would like to thank Matthew Vollgraff. I am
indebted here to his conference paper “Behaviorism on the Stage: Biomechan-
ics and Reflexology in the Early Soviet Union,” Society for Literature, Science and
the Arts Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA., 2016. 
37 Irina Sirotkina, “The Ubiquitous Reflex and its Critics in Post-Revolution-
ary Russia,” p. 71 See also Ana Olenina, “Psychomotor Aesthetics: Conceptions
of Gesture and Affect in Russian and American Modernity, 1910s–1920s” (PhD.
diss., Harvard University, 2012).

159
The Value of Lenin

Proletcult. Theater stage and cinema served as “laboratories”

of gesture: as a palpable mise-en-scène of conditioned reflexes
on the one hand, and as a didactic transmission and condition-
ing of new movements on the other.38 Eisenstein’s teacher, the
theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, summoned by Anatoli
Lunacharskii in 1919 to lead the theatrical section of the Soviet
Ministry of Education (Narkompros), countered the academic
and bourgeois theater of the past with a Taylorist model, ori-
ented toward calculation and efficiency: an actor as “a machin-
ist operating a machine.” In his text on “The Actor of the Future
and Biomechanics,” Meyerhold stated: “Only after mastering
the role technically, mathematically, can we allow ourselves
the ecstasy of inspiration. […] We don’t need ecstasy, we need
arousal [vozbuzhdenie], based on a firm physical foundation.”39
In 1921, having resigned from his post at Narkompros, Meyer-
hold developed this “physical foundation” of acting into a set
of stage movement exercises, named “biomechanics.” Eisen-
stein joined Meyerhold’s theater of biomechanics during the
period in which the latter replaced traditional forms of act-
ing with a training of the actor’s “reflex sensitivity” [reflektor­
naia vozbudimost’].40 Among the pedagogical materials from
­Meyerhold’s workshop in 1922, a “Program of Biomechanics”
suggests new materialist and scientific foundations for the
theater that can shed further light on Eisenstein’s reflexologi-
cal focus in Capital. The key element of the new stage play was

38 When Meyerhold called his stage a “laboratory,” it was far from being a
metaphor. See Vogman, Sinnliches Denken, pp. 257-272.
39 Vsevolod Meyerhold, “The Actor of the Future and Biomechanics”, in Mey­
erhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia, by
Alma H. Law and Mel Gordon (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1996), p. 143.
40 In 1922, Meyerhold claimed that “the indispensable qualification of the
actor is a capacity for sensitivity of the reflexes […] The coordinated communi-
cation of reflex sensitivity constitutes the art of acting.” Vsevolod Meyerhold,
Valery Mikhailovich Bebutov, and Ivan Aleksandrovich Aksënov, Amplua Aktera
(Moscow: Izd. gos. vysshikh rezhisserskikh masterskikh, 1922), cit. in M ­ arjorie
L. Hoover, Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater (Amherst: University of
­Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 297.

160
Gods and Reflexes

no longer to locate the “nature of expressive movements and

actions” in the alleged virtuosity of the actor, but rather in “the
biological construction of the organism.” Bringing together
vitalist and mechanist elements, Meyerhold’s theater of biome-
chanics emphasized the following themes:

a. The human organism as an auto motor.

b. Repeated automatic actions.
c. Mimeticism and its biological significance (Bekhterev).
f. Receptors, conductors, effectors.
g. A study of the reactive mechanism of the nervous system.
h. Psychic reactions as an objective of natural science.
i. Psychic phenomena— simple physical and mimetic reactions in the
form of: tropisms, taxis, or purely physiological reflexes.
j. Instinctive reflex.
k. Reflexes, their connections, linking, interdependence.
l. Mechanization (unconscious habitual acts).
m. Physical and reflexive normalization.41

The materialist interest of Meyerhold’s and later Eisen-

stein’s aesthetic program consisted primarily in breaking with
the concept of interiority, understood as a monadic subjective
psyche. The notion of the “reflex” provided a new epistemic
ground for understanding the relation between physical and
psychic processes. One of the most speculative and far-reach-
ing reflex theories was developed by Vladimir Bekhterev, whose
name figures prominently in Meyerhold’s program. In his 1921
study Kollektivnaia Refleksologia [Collective Reflexology], this
former student of Jean-Martin Charcot aimed at unfolding
an objective mass psychology based on the universal laws of
energy. Artistic expression was not excluded from Bekhterev’s

41 Law and Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics, p. 126. Matthew

Vollgraff, “The Science of Expression: Ausdruckskunde and Bodily Knowledge in
German Modernist Culture” (PhD. diss., Princeton University, 2019), pp. 257–266.

161
The Value of Lenin

scientific interests but considered as a sphere of “collective

reflexes of a higher order.”42 According to Bekhterev, reflex man-
ifestations were operators of a specific law of economy derived
from the phenomenon of the conservation of nervous energy.
Consequently, physiology and art met at that point where the
artwork’s use value was seen as an instrument to organize the
spectator’s responses.
“One should find a better notion for ‘stimulus,’” Eisenstein
states in his notebook for Capital, “one that could replace ‘attrac-
tion.’ For now, neither ‘irritator,’ nor ‘excitator’ nor ‘provocator’
is useful.”43 In early texts such as “The Montage of Attractions”
or “The Montage of Film Attractions” the meaning of “attrac-
tion”—an effect that corresponds to a series of reflexes in the
perception of the spectator—is so close to the notion of “stim-
ulus” that they almost seem like synonyms. Consequently, a
visual montage of attractions had as its equivalent a montage of
reflexes in the body of the spectator. This correspondence was,
for Eisenstein, anything but a mere isomorphic coincidence. In
a short newspaper article from 1925, entitled “The Method of
Making a Worker’s Film,” he suggests a relation between the
aesthetic and the political dimensions of acting and links them
through the notion of “reflex”: “The maximum tension of the
aggressive reflexes of social protest in Strike is an accumula-
tion of reflexes that make no allowance for relaxation (satisfac-
tion), that is, a concentration of the reflexes of struggle (a raising
of the potential class tone).”44 From this perspective the use of
non-professional actors, of types, tipazh, reveals a reflexological
understanding of the body as a medium not only of aesthetic

42 Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, General Principles of Human Reflexology:

An Introduction to the Objective Study of Personality, trans. Emma Murphy and
William Murphy (New York: International Publishers, 1932), p. 433.
43 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 67.
44 Sergei Eisenstein, “Metod postanovki rabochei fil’my,” Kino 11 (August 11,
1925); “The Method of Making a Workers’ Film,” in Selected Works. Writings,
1922–34, vol. 1, p. 65.

162
Gods and Reflexes

Fig. 54–65: Performing biomechanical exercises in Strike, 1924.

but also of political energy: a medium that transcends the gate

between the played and the non-played, between the laboratory
of gestures and political action. In Strike the workers’ uprising
is, therefore, shown through a significant change of function:
a conversion of the working tools into weapons of the strike
(fig. 54–65). These weapons subsequently serve as concrete
constructions for a series of acrobatic and biomechanical exer-
cises, enacted on the factory floor.45

45 See Elena Vogman, “Striking Factory and Strike of Consciousness in the

Work of S. M. Eisenstein,” Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej, no. 6
(November 1, 2014).

163
The Value of Lenin

The recourse to materialist psychology and reflexology in

the arts prepared another crucial encounter: that of art and
ergonomics. Referring to the Central Institute of Labor (CIT),
founded in 1921 by the revolutionary poet Aleksei Gastev, Sergei
Tret’iakov stated that biomechanics “provides for expressive
movement the same scientific foundation that the Scientific
Organization of Labor and scientifically based sport brought to
the labor movement.”46 Written together with Sergei Tret’iakov
in 1922, Eisenstein’s first article, “Expressive Movement,” dis-
cusses a wide spectrum of theories of expression, ranging from
disciplines such as evolutionary biology, physiology, and psy-
chology to the arts. The “expressive movement” is conceived as
a conflict that results from a confrontation between the “reflex
impulse” and its “retention” through the will:

[S]uch is the snarl (expression of fury)—by retention of the general

motor impulse the jaws keep moving forward; by surprise or fear gog-
gled eyes, following that reflex impulse, which aims at giving man the
possibility to look closer at the object, to orient oneself in a particular
atmosphere […].47

In such situations of conflict, the body becomes a medium

of expression: expressive movement traverses it as a move-
ment of deformation, a “snarl,” for example. “These are reflex
waves arriving at the waterfront of the body,” Eisenstein states,
“spreading on its extremities and allowing for a participation of

46 Sergei Tret’iakov, “The Theater of Attractions,” October, no. 118 (Fall 2006),
p. 21.
47 The article was commissioned by Meyerhold for a theater encyclope-
dia, but only posthumously published. Sergei Tret’iakov, Sergei Eisenstein,
“Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie” [Expressive Movement], in Mnemosina: Dokumenty I
faktz iy istorii russkogo teatra v XX veke, vol. 2 (Moscow: URSS, 2006), pp. 280–
305, here p. 301. See Oksana Bulgakowa, “Sergej Eisenstein und die deutschen
Psychologen: Sergej Eisenstein und sein ‘psychologisches’ Berlin – zwischen
Psychoanalyse und Gestaltpsychologie,” in Herausforderung Eisenstein, ed.
Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin: Akademie der Künste der DDR, 1989), pp. 80–91.

164
Gods and Reflexes

the entire body in this movement.”48 This understanding of the

body as a medium of expressive impulses exteriorizes the con-
cept of the psyche, transforming it into a matter of calculation
and construction. It also involves the notion of the work of art—
and in particular that of the cinematographic image—as a pro-
jection and transmission surface for such expressive impulses.
Here the conception dovetails with Walter Benjamin’s under-
standing of the relation between technology and human per-
ception, which accorded an empowering potential to cinema
through “innervation:”

Film serves to train human beings in those new apperceptions and

reactions demanded by interaction with an apparatus whose role in
their lives is expanding almost daily. To make the enormous techno-
logical apparatus of our time an object of human innervation—that is
the historical task in whose service film finds its true meaning.49

Without abolishing any of his early positions, Eisenstein’s

1928 claim for intellectual attractions in Capital—for stimuli
putting thought in motion—needs to be understood à la lettre.
In that very literal sense Eisenstein tries to derive the Russian
word “thought” [myslia] from “muscle” [myshtsa].

Take from the “Theory of New Biology” that astonishing face which
emphasizes that it is a physiological principle at work in thinking just
as in physical activity. [To do this] through pointing at the same root

48 Eisenstein, “Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie,” p. 303.

49 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility [First Version],” trans. Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room, no. 39 (April 1,
2010), p. 19. Benjamin is serious about the political dimension of such innerva-
tions, stating that “revolutions are innervations of the collective—or, more pre-
cisely, efforts at innervation on the part of the new, historically unique collective
which has its organs in the new technology.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed.
Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 45.

165
The Value of Lenin

in thought [myslia] and muscle [myshtsa], and both equal to the root
of the word mouse [mysh], being a tempo indicator of the quickness in
the activity of nerve tissue […].50

Eisenstein’s reference to Enchmen’s behaviorist theory

is insightful, as it emphasizes a hitherto neglected parallel
between physical and psychological as well as material and
conscious experiences without presupposing a stable subject.
In his Eighteen Theses of the “Theory of New Biology” Enchmen
expands the notion of the reflex, stating that “creative thinking,
the speech of an orator, the play of a musician, the movement of
a single-cell organism toward the source of light—all are sum-
mations or chains of reflexes.”51
Without further significant discussion of Enchmen’s theory,
which was a taboo after having been condemned by Bukharin
in 1923 for solipsism and anti-Marxist tendencies, Eisenstein’s
notes for Capital are traversed by reflexological vocabulary.
“Concerning Capital I should open a section ‘On stimuli,’ that is
on suggestive materials.” In response to this self-ascribed task,
Eisenstein then places—cuts and pastes—a series of reviews of
his film October from different newspapers. “For example,” he
continues, “this press clip gives some suggestive elements for
the ‘pathos’ in Capital (for its, let’s say, last ‘chapter’—the dia-
lectical method of the class struggle).”52 In lieu of a dialectical
instruction for the class struggle, one finds a Socratic dialogue
in the form of material fragments, intertwined with Eisenstein’s
polemic comments. This dialogue is presented as a “critique

50 Eisenstein, diary from April 1, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 14.

51 Emmanuil S. Enchmen, Vosemnadtsat’ tezisov o teorii novoi biologii [Eigh-
teen theses of the “theory of new biology”] (Piatigorsk: Tipografia Sovnarkoza,
1920) p. 20, cited in George Windholz, “Emmanuil S. Enchmen – A Soviet Behav-
iorist and the Commonality of Zeitgeist,” The Psychological Record 45, no. 4
(1995), pp. 517-533; pp. 522–523.
52 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 63.

166
The True Lenin

after the critique of October.”53 The voices critical of October

are thus perceived as “stimuli” for creative reactions: concrete
conceptual and material inventions for the film of Capital.

The True Lenin

In this way, Eisenstein’s notebook for Capital opens a kind of

biomechanical stage play where articles on October and the
director’s responses to them constitute a series of exercises, a
dialectic of thought in action. An envelope pasted on one of its
pages (plate 24) contains another arrangement: Esfir’ Shub’s
scathing review of October is placed in a constellation with the
advertisement of “the first press clipping service in the USSR,” a
precursor to large-scale media monitoring services.54 These two
elements are made to form, not without a grain of irony, a cross.
Another article, that of Prim’s, entitled “October,” is put into
the same envelope, which bears Eisenstein’s label “‘Wails’ of E.
Shub and ‘Hypocrisy’ of Prim.” While the title of Shub’s article
“This picture is crying …” resonates with Eisenstein’s inscrip-
tion, it contrasts with another element of this assembled com-
edy on paper: the second title Eisenstein gave to the envelope,
“documented data.”55 Documentary material is, in turn, what
Shub claims to be missing from Eisenstein’s October. The term
constitutes a decisive break between their aesthetic programs.

Did Eisenstein and Aleksandrov fulfill with the film October the anni-
versary task given by CIK [Central Executive Committee], the most
responsible social order from all given to masters of ­cinematography?
Did they show “Ten Days that Shook the World?” Did they let “people

53 Ibid.
54 On the history and use values of the press clip, see: Anke te Heesen, Der
Zeitungsausschnitt. Ein Papierobjekt der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
2006).
55 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 57.

167
The Value of Lenin

and things return ten years back” and convince us that the FACT OF
WORLD SIGNIFICANCE occurred precisely like that […]? No, – Octo-
ber has not fulfilled this task.56

With this severe judgment, Esfir’ Shub pronounces an

argument that will resonate in manifold variations, voiced by
authors of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), in particular Vladimir
Mayakovsky and Ossip Brik. “One cannot stage historical fact,
because staging distorts the fact.” The failure of Eisenstein’s
representation of history, Shub argues, lies not in some random
mistakes, but rather in his “method,” that is, in October’s
“position” [ustanovka] towards history. This has direct political
implications, in so far as Shub asserts that, “one cannot allow
that millions of peasants and workers who did not take part in
the struggles, as well as the next generation [smena, literally
“our shift”]—Komsomol and pioneers—believe that the events
of that great day happened exactly according to Eisenstein and
Aleksandrov’s October.”57 That is why Shub concludes her arti-
cle with an appeal: “This work is crying,” she states, “film more,
film in a better organized fashion, film chronicles, events, facts,
people acting in their lives and not people play-acting lives,
because only cine-chronicles will preserve our great epoch for
the coming generations.”58
For this reason the question of historical truth suddenly
appeared fundamental, even decisive. This is why it was consid-
ered to affect the entire framework of the Capital project. What
was at stake was the issue of aesthetic mediation, that is, of its
construction. Contemporary exchanges show that Eisenstein’s
colleagues did not share his understanding of intellectual mon-
tage as a new means of constructing history. Formalists as well

56 Esfir’ Shub, “This picture is screaming,” in Eisenstein, diary from April 4,

1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 59.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.

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The True Lenin

as authors from LEF accused Eisenstein of producing a histori-

cal lie and of committing high treason against documentary
principles. The most prominent example concerned the repre-
sentation of Vladimir Lenin. Eisenstein had used an amateur
actor, Vasily Nikandrov, to play the role of Lenin, and in a well-
known sequence of October this “false” Lenin is seen on a
tribune in the wind (fig. 66–67). This sequence provoked harsh
reactions. “One cannot replace Vladimir Ilich by an actor’s
play and by a face aping Vladimir Ilich’s,” claimed Shub in her
article.59 Mayakovsky, for his part, even menaced screenings of
October for including this short sequence. “No matter when,
even in the most solemn moment,” he wrote in 1927, “I will
throw rotten eggs at the head of this fake Lenin.”60 For Maya-
kovsky, an actor playing a role voids the sense of the historical
figure. He complained that “Eisenstein is not able to create a
symbol out of authentic material,” alluding to documentary
footage of Lenin.61 Similarly, Ossip Brik argued that Eisenstein
“is cheating on the real facts; in his formal experiments he pro-
duces schemas.”62
In his notebooks on Capital, Eisenstein counters these
critical voices with sharp polemical responses. For example,
he plans on writing an article titled “How to Film Lenin, or On
the Rotten Eggs of Vladimir Mayakovsky.” Here, as elsewhere,
he counters a static and petrified symbol with a dynamic and
vital sign, a stance that acquires a particular political urgency
at a time when documentary images of Lenin were increasingly
employed in a growing personality cult that effectively reintro-

59 Ibid.
60 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Ob Oktiabre” [On the Film October, public talk on
15 October 1927], in S.M. Ejzenštejn: Pro et contra, antologija (Saint Petersburg:
RChGA, 2015), p. 196. Originally published in Novoe o Maiakovskom [New on
Mayakovsky] (USSR, 1958), p. 77.
61 Mayakovsky, “Ob Oktiabre,” p. 77.
62 Ossip Brik, “Ring Lefa,” Novyj Lef, no. 4 (1928), cited in S.M. Ejzenštejn: Pro
et contra, p. 212.

169
The Value of Lenin

Fig. 66–67: Vasily Nikandrov playing the role of Lenin in October, 1928.

duced plainly authoritarian forms of symbolic power. Prohib-

iting the representation of Lenin means, for Eisenstein, the
petrification of his image, a process he identifies as the “nation-
alization of the Lenin figure.” He considers illustrating the arti-
cle with an unseen iconology of Lenin: “unknown and exotic
images of Lenin” that would exceed or outpace the rising cult.63
“S.M. Eisenstein has found himself in a most difficult and
stupid situation,” Brik wrote in the April 1928 issue of Novyi
LEF. “He was suddenly proclaimed as a world-level director, as
a genius […]. To [him] it seemed narrow-minded to undertake
minor experiments […] he had to solve the world’s problems […]
and nothing less than filming Marx’s Capital.”64 In addition to
this charge of megalomania, Eisenstein was also accused of fail-
ing to use the ideologically legitimate form, since from the per-
spective of the LEF authors, just as for Shub, the task of Octo-
ber could have been solved entirely through the “montage of
documentary footage.”65 Instead, Eisenstein chose the path of
“clumsy effects,” which—due to their deficient documentary
authenticity—cheated the principles of the left’s chronicles.66
The heaviest accusation from the LEF circle was, therefore, that

63 Eisenstein, diary from February 4, 1928, in RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 68–69.

64 Brik, “Ring Lefa,” cited in S.M. Ejzenštejn: Pro et contra, p. 211.
65 Ibid., p. 212.
66 Ibid., p. 213.

170
The True Lenin

Fig. 68–69: Ladies killing of a Bolshevik with their umbrellas in October, 1928.

of the “historical lie.” Rather than executing a “symbolic eleva-

tion” of the material, Eisenstein dealt in scenes of shock value,
as with the cruel-burlesque killing of a young Bolshevik with
bourgeois ladies’ umbrellas.67 “The umbrellas did not appear as
a symbol, but rather as a worn-out prop,” Brik complained. The
scene of destruction in the Winter Palace was neither a “sym-
bol” nor a “poster” but a stark “lie.”68
Eisenstein comments on these accusations on various
pages of his 1928 notebooks, transforming them into the Capi­
tal project’s theoretical groundwork. “There are discussions
about the qualities of the ‘beyond played,’” Eisenstein states,
returning once again to this crucial notion. “There is an attempt
to present the concept of ‘beyond played,’ as a chess move for
‘hiding’ my transition from the fiction-played to the merely
… non-played. Shub even wants to write an article on this topic.
She could name it ‘Move With a Knight.’”69 Eisenstein makes an
allusion to the October scene with a horse—an allusion that
derives from the Russian word for knight, kon, horse—which
falls into the Neva river from the opening bridge. This reference
bears another ironic layer, as the scene obviously has recourse

67 Ibid., p. 215.
68 Ibid.
69 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 168.

171
The Value of Lenin

to Eisenstein’s arsenal of the “beyond played.” Shub is “of

course wrong,” he argues.

Because the concept of the “non-played” does not include everything

but the played! Its label is pasted on a way more modest “documen-
tary” sphere. On the chart of the growth of cinematography the fact
is to be located on the same fundamental scission as the tipazh, the
statue, the “play of things” (and not “with the things” NB—on this
difference of the play a detailed article must be made!). A fact is the
same sign which demands an unfolding. A piece of an old Budyonny
chronicles—is in the same way a conditional attraction as are num-
bers 1, 9, 1, 7—for the one who is uninitiated into, or unaffected by, the
revolutionary pathos—this is an empty sound. […] Sweetwater mon-
tage is though even more reactionary: Lenin, Vladimir, Ilya, “a kitten”
mawkish like Mary Pickford.70

This short passage is crucial for Eisenstein’s dialectical

understanding of the historical fact, a dialectics expressed
here not in synthetic terms, but as a “fundamental scission,” a
state of tension without any predefined resolution. Like tipazh,
previously described as a “hieroglyph” (also a crucial notion in
Marx’s Capital, a parallel that will be discussed further on), the
fact is a “sign,” which demands interpretation and construc-
tion, an “unfolding” in the constellation of the “play.”
Eisenstein formulated this radically anti-essentialist vision
of things and facts as early as 1926 in a draft titled “The Play
of Objects.” Cubism already appears here as an instrument of
vision, able not only to dismantle the totality of objects, but also
to shift their functions and qualities. In this play, which pres-
ents “a purely cinematic device,” “the actor is completely freed
from the role,” making it possible for the objects to enter the
scene:

70 Ibid., pp. 158–159.

172
Expressive Economies

This occurs through a transference of this function [of acting] to spe-

cially selected inanimate objects, phenomena or people construed as
some kind of nature morte [still life] (understood here not as a com-
plete “picture,” but as a fragment of a cubistically decomposed form,
then a fragment of photo-montage, which, subsequently, attains its
temporal equivalent in the film-montage established by us). […] The
affective expressivity of an object results from the ability of our appa-
ratus of perception, under the influence of the corresponding state, to
attune to responding only to a certain series of stimulants—rhythm,
color, texture, etc. These stimulants contribute or correspond to the
affective charge.71

What Benjamin will later call the “innervation” of the per-

ceptual apparatus is exactly what Eisenstein evokes here as a
premise for a potential dissociation of time and space, of object
and its habitual function.

Expressive Economies

The cinema’s capacity to destabilize the traditional concep-

tions of cause and effect in order to produce a new mediated
space—a milieu in which things acquire new functions—has
been described by the screenwriter Michail Bleiman in an
article on October, which Eisenstein prominently pastes and
comments in his Capital notebook.
“These clips from Bleiman […] are so good that it’s not a
waste to devote a ‘feuilleton’ of the page to them,” Eisenstein
states, pasting three fragments of Bleiman’s article on the same
page. In fact these clippings appear as the best possible answer

71 Eisenstein, “The Play of Objects,” RGALI, 1923-2-763, pp. 37–38. I thank

Irina Schulzki and Tatiana Astafeva for their translation of the text in the context
of the workshop “Eisenstein and the Play of Objects,” held on November 22–24,
2018 in Potsdam.

173
The Value of Lenin

to Shub’s and Mayakovsky’s criticisms, challenging as they do

any form of proto-determinist position.

The most immutable thing in the cinema seemed to be the place of

action. The frame was perceived as an action located at some particu-
lar place. The frame in October is a semantic sign. That’s why it loses
its place. This is remarkable. This allows a tank in the field to destroy a
clay Napoleon, standing on a table. The linguistic structure of the film
becomes absolutely clear. What is destroyed is the reality of the space
which has always been bothering cinema.72

Bleiman argues from the perspective of a sharp under-

standing of the cinematic language, expanding the potential
effects of the film form. Yet instead of collapsing a documen-
tary principle into a seemingly unbound linguistic structural-
ism, he accentuates the poetic power of the cinematographic
logic: rhythmic associations and dissociations as well as repeti-
tions and reversions of the action break, thereby exceeding the
continuum of space and time.

At the same time the temporal reality is destroyed. The statue of Alex-
ander III jumps up—three, four times. The Congress elections are
shown in groups—a simultaneous process is dissected without losing
its simultaneity. All this is subjected to the demand of the elevation of
the film’s emotional tone. The repetitions are first perceived as mon-
tage negligence (forgot to cut out what was too much), however they
reveal themselves as a method.73

The production of these unforeseen space-times—based on

the particular cinematographic logic—was ultimately not fixed
by any semantic or linguistic model. It was not aiming to repre-

72 Michail Bleiman, article on Eisenstein’s October, in Eisenstein, diary

from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 65.
73 Ibid.

174
Expressive Economies

sent any historical truth, but to demount its totality in order to

reveal history’s movement of becoming. This is why October
was more specifically committed to an expressive structure, to a
demountable and variable sign, which incorporates image and
word on the level of stimulation:

All the auxiliary demagogy of the terms of cinema production: speech,

word etc. can go to hell. We have our own linguistic instrumentary!
[…] The cinematic image is of quicker value than the linguistic one.
[…] The cinematic entity is in essence integrally physiological (“the
frame”) and apparently has a direct move into the idea. P[ar] ex[emple]
proved by the gods.74

This physiological understanding of the cinema as montage

of expressive signs led Eisenstein “beyond the played and the
non-played.” The methods described by Bleiman, especially the
sequence of the gods, paradigmatically show the insufficiency
of these established concepts for grasping the visual language
of October.
Eisenstein’s stance towards history reveals precisely the
mise-en-scène of historical events not as a representational logic,
but as their actual mode of occurrence: the theater of the press,
of ideologies and advertisement, restaged on the pages of the
Capital notebooks. Such a mise-en-scène of political events—in
the form of fragments taken from newspapers and journals—
resonates with Eisenstein’s reflections on October and “intel-
lectual attractions”: “Can one find a better farce tipazh and
costume than of katholische hohe Würdenträger [high Catholic
dignitaries]?” An impressive portrait of such honorable men,
taken from the Kölnische Illustrierte Zeitung, appears on the
following page of Eisenstein’s notebook (plate 25). A group
of Catholic clergymen, whose robes cover their bodies almost
entirely, resemble a puppet show. “The first Japanese Catholic

74 Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 47.

175
The Value of Lenin

bishop, Januarius Hanasaka, visiting New York in the circle of

high American clergy,” tells the caption. Eisenstein points to a
formal analogy in their appearance: “Look: Note round glasses
and lace skirts.”75 The highly coded and symbolically charged
elements of their appearance—attributes of religion and of
power at once—are immediately profaned in Eisenstein’s com-
ment, placed below the image in French: “The little mamzelles’
pussies are also made of lace!”76
The dialectical restaging of historical events appears as
a movement that wreaks havoc on symbolic power; here this
takes the form of profaning religious meanings, a dismantling
Eisenstein had already initiated in October. As Giorgio Agam-
ben remarks, the passage from the sacred to the profane can be
brought about “by an entirely inappropriate use (or reuse) of the
sacred: namely, play.”77 It is in this sense that one can under-
stand how Eisenstein brings the objects into play: October
performs the theatricality of historical events in transforming
Kornilov, Napoleon, Christ, or Eskimo idols into images and
actors of history, dialectically dismantling their symbolic val-
ues. Exploring this method further, the Capital notebooks con-
tinue to dissociate temporal and spatial frames of the historical
mediation, thus opening a dynamic stage of critical revaluation.
In this way Eisenstein brings certain economic implica-
tions of different symbolic orders into play, which the formal-
ists and ­critics of October seem to have overlooked completely.
In an equal parts scathing and ironic—if unsent—reply, Eisen-
stein engages with Ossip Brik’s critique about an insufficiently
advanced understanding of Marx’s account of the historical
development of political economy. Drawing on the theoretical
content of Marx’s Capital, Eisenstein moves into the conceptual

75 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 148.

76 Ibid.
77 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books,
2007), p. 75. I thank Malte Fabian Rauch for making me aware of this passage.

176
Expressive Economies

territory of his film project. “That symbolism cannot be a charac-

teristic of the working class was something that I already wrote
as I sought to prove that the term of a proletarian art is unlim-
ited (‘The idolatrous thoughts’).”78 Although Eisenstein’s con-
cept of symbol resists precise definition, his use of it refers to a
more static, unaffected, holistic entity. “Symbol” [simvol] implies
a total that cannot be fragmented or separated. In contrast, the
“sign” [znak] denotes a mobile constructive element of mon-
tage, oscillating and demountable. While the meaning of a sym-
bol appears determined, that of a sign is relational, expressive,
and context-dependent. In this way Eisenstein’s unsent reply
sketches a theory of symbolic value that builds on Marx’s devel-
opment of the money form as the general form of value. “Never-
theless, Brik’s bad luck exists in the fact that October does not
produce any symbolism or symbolic language. This is because
[October] pays a 1,500 ruble check rather than a herd of cows.
And it is quite naive to consider a three-ruble bill as being a ‘sym-
bol’ for three rubles!”79
This critical answer to Brik’s objection establishes the new
film project’s first priorities. Eisenstein develops his argument
on a level immanent to his object—that is, Capital. Because
Brik thinks in terms of “a herd of cows,” he does not grasp
the contemporary extent of abstraction (evoked through the

78 Eisenstein could be referring here to his text from 1925 on the “Problem
of the Materialist Approach to Form,” where he states that “the revolutionary
novelty of Strike by no means derives from the fact that its content—the revo-
lutionary movement—was, historically, a mass rather an individual phenom-
enon (hence the absence of plot and hero, etc., that characterize Strike as the
‘first proletarian film’), but rather from the fact that it has promoted a properly
devised formal method of approaching the exposure of the abundance of histor-
ical-revolutionary material in general.” The characteristic “movements” of the
latter, Eisenstein underlines, “were investigated from the point of view of its
‘manufacturing’ essence” and not from the symbolic standpoint, as representa-
tive images of these historical events. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Problem of the
Materialist Approach to Form,” in Selected Works. Writings, 1922–34, pp. 59–64.
Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 160–161.
79 Ibid., p. 160.

177
The Value of Lenin

form of the check), and therefore the dynamic nature of value

itself. Instead, Eisenstein searches for an exchange currency
that resides not on the symbol’s static plane but rather on its
dynamic plane: that of the “becoming symbol.” In doing so,
he makes the “sign” the central element of a visual economy:
“Between symbol and sign there is a difference!” he states,
“And the sign is not the dead ‘Small Grand Hotel,’ but a motor
stimulant. A stimulus in a chain etc. […] Let Brik pay in aurochs’
horns and rant about October. He is progressive. Progressive.
Progressive, like … a progressive paralysis.”80
Eisenstein’s discovery consists in an analogy between
“Marx’s method” and the principle of montage. Marx traces the
“exchange value” back to the existence of a common element “of
identical magnitude in two different things”: “Both are there-
fore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor
the other.”81 Montage, in turn, is a tool that produces a relation
capable of showing a third property that two elements taken on
their own cannot. In this regard, as a producer of equivalences,
Eisenstein grasps the sign as a dynamic process of permanent
revaluation.82 The opposition between “sign” and “symbol” is
not only demonstrated via the paradigm of money, since both
a “three-ruble” bill and a “crucifix” can also appear as symbols.
The question is rather the efficacy by which the first may appear
as “living” and the second as “dead.”83 Eisenstein follows this
analogy on both a semiotic and an economic register. What
dynamizes the banknote is not the fluctuation of the stock mar-
ket or its exchange value but “the change of value in regard to
the relations—the total extent of the cash at the disposal of the
bearer.” And he concludes by translating this interrelation back
into three rubles: “With [a total of] 250 rubles, three are a trifle;

80 Ibid., p. 169.
81 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1
(New York: Penguin Books; London: New Left Review, 1976), p. 127.
82 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, in RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 77.
83 Ibid.

178
Expressive Economies

with 2.50, an unattainable amount. The reciprocal relation of

nominal value and exchange value make it [the bill] dynamic,
not stone-like like a crucifix.”84
Eisenstein articulates the questions of Capital again and
again at the intersection of affect and economic values, of aes-
thetic and symbolic currencies. In this way the issue of “three
rubles” appears on the same page as the image of melted
wax figures of a London museum (plate 23). Melting symbols
become a “brilliant film material,” thus transforming once
again a random historical fact into a valuable currency for Capi­
tal: a revaluation machine, which reveals these economic rela-
tions in the core of cultural and social life.
In a similar gesture Eisenstein discovers a close proxim-
ity between the questions of value, fetish, and cult.85 His notes
contain plans for a sequence devoted to the sale of cult objects
(plate 26). He comments: “From all of this one could make a
film entitled Tod dem Osterhasen [Death to the Easter Bunny].”
It is not by accident that the image of the gigantic bunny on the
left (plate 27) comes from the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, the
journal in which John Heartfield also published his photomon-
tages. The caption of the image reads: “Easter bunnies, Easter
eggs, big business around Easter.” Their commercial activity
with Christian values associates the four Catholic clergymen
to the Easter bunnies. “This is how they look, the preachers of
Christian ‘charity’,” reads the inscription that Eisenstein pasted
below. “One only has to look at the four frock-weares shown
here to understand that this preacher folk, these heralds of

84 Eisenstein, diary, undated, 1928, in RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 77.

85 Not unlike Eisenstein, Benjamin pushes the parallel between cult values
and capitalism to the limit: “In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic reli-
gion, perhaps the most extremely cultic that ever existed. Within it, nothing has
meaning that is not immediately related to the cult; it has no specific dogma
or theology.” Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings,
1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Liv-
ingstone, vol. 1 (London; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1996), p. 288.

179
The Value of Lenin

‘Easter good tidings,’ are inclined towards anything and every-

thing other than the renunciation and human kindness called
for by Christ.”86
This industrial reproduction and circulation of values through
images reveals a crucial dialectic in these images, simultaneously
showing an anthropological continuum at work in Christian cul-
ture and a transformation within new forms of industrial capital-
ism. Fetish and cult appear precisely within the historical com-
plexity of their perpetuation and metamorphosis. Another press
clipping is located above and to the right: an image of “Bondu
devils from Sierra Leone”—which not by chance strongly resem-
ble the gods from the October sequence (plate 27). “Every vil-
lage there has these devils,” tells the caption vertically pasted to
the right of the devil figures. “They are dressed in strange robes
of woven bast. The natives worship and fear them and attribute
unlimited power to them.”87 The formal analogy between the
Easter bunnies and Bondu devils is suggested through montage,
which introduces a comparison that transfers the qualities of the
devils to the bunnies. The latter, previously dismantled as instru-
ments “of profit of religious illusions,” become the omnipotent
operators of capitalism’s commodity fetish.
Almost half a year later, Eisenstein analyzes the phallic ori-
gin of the divinity images (plate 28). He pastes a negative from
October’s sequence of the gods into his notebook, address-
ing it to Bleiman: “To Bleiman,” he writes, “a portrait of the
head of the penis, from which splashed the seed of the new
cinematography!”88 In its sensuous and epistemic explicitness,
this note reveals not the logos but the eidos spermaticos—a met-
aphor for desire, rather than reason, being the procreative and
prolific image of what Eisenstein at the time called an intellec-
tual attraction. This excessive process of simultaneous construc-

86 Eisenstein, diary from April 28, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 52.

87 Ibid., pp. 44–54.
88 Eisenstein, diary from September 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 175.

180
Expressive Economies

tion and deconstruction of symbols occurs through Eisenstein’s

use of montage. In this way it mobilizes a dialectic without a syn-
thesis—not as a form of sublation via determinate negation, but
as a conflict-laden polarity: an eccentric instrument for continu-
ous revaluation.
On another page of his notebook, this theatricality of social
and historical events is shown in an even closer interrelation with
the real theatre. The economic and aesthetic elements of value
production are presented in striking proximity. Eisenstein deals
with these questions again through montage by associating three
elements on a single page of his notebook (plate 29). The press
excerpts at the lower center show the safes of the York Safe and
Lock Company, which theaters once used to store their cash. An
article on the arrest of “Tsarevich Aleksei” constitutes the second
element: “A rumor began to spread among the peasants of the
Mar oblast; allegedly the son of Nicholas II, ‘Tsarevich Aleksei,’
was alive and hiding in the city Kosmodemyansk.”89 According to
the article, this man, eventually revealed to be the twenty-three-
year-old Aleksander Savin, had made a fortune in the monaster-
ies of Russia by pretending to be the young Tsar Aleksei.

It turned out that “Tsarevich Aleksei” sometimes appeared in the clothes

of a nun; other times he was dressed in a fine men’s suit. “Tsarevich
Aleksei” was often visited by priests, who brought him money. The other
day, “Tsarevich Aleksei” was arrested. He turned out to be a 23-year-old
Aleksandr Savin. He called himself Tsarevich Aleksei in order to collect
money from the clueless part of the population in this way.90

Having ostensibly survived the revolution, “Aleksei” rep-

resented a kind of false money or stock of a bankrupt monar-
chy. The third element in Eisenstein’s montage is an adver-
tisement in which the contemporary actress Josephine Baker

89 Eisenstein, diary from January 11, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 50.

90 Ibid.

181
The Value of Lenin

invites the viewer to Paris to dance the tango, the Charleston,

and “to jazz” (plate 29). The detention of the false tsar usurp-
ing his identity and the stocking of values earned on a dance of
false appearances provoke a critical play of different notions of
value: exchange and monetary values as well as symbolic and
“exhibition value,” later to be a crucial concept for Benjamin.
Fragments of these visual elements begin to interact with one
another, producing continuously new meanings; for instance,
Baker’s head appears “arrested” in the Lock Company’s safe.
Symmetrically, the false Tsarevich reveals himself to be of an
actor’s quality rather than of a hustler’s.

182
[…]
Considering a paper “treshka” as a “symbol” of three rubles is naïve!

§ 49.

Brilliant
film material.
(especially
from a symbolic
standpoint).—

As melted, so gained. Wax figures “wounded” in a fire in

a London wax museum that contained stuffed replicas of
many famous people are brought to their new "home” on
stretchers following repair. Phot. Wide World

§ 50.
The Week
no 13, March 31,
Especially
1928
comfortable,
Right: The iron
as the cell is cage in which the
on wheels. Sultan Mulay Hafid
let his his adversary
Bu Hamara lan-
guish before throw-
ing him to the lions.
Plate 23: Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 161–163.
In this way we converge in the assessment of
Potemkin, boy Prim. The form of Potemkin is a
bourgeois-democratic stage in the history of the
development of public cinematographic forms.

Documentary data:

“Wails” of E. SHUB
and
“Hypocrisy” of PRIM
Plate 24: Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 57, 62.
Look: Note round glasses and lace skirts.

Wide World
The first Japanese Catholic bishop,
Januarius Hanasaka, visiting New York in the circle of high American clergy

The little mamzelles’ pussies are also made of lace!

Plate 25: Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 148–150.
This is also in The General Line—to edit
into the bell ringing to the procession
that “forty thousand churches all over
great Russia will ring in this way”…!

§ 25. To the clippings from A.I.Z. [The Workers’

Pictorial Newspaper] on the next page.
Splendid theme: selling of cult objects— 
or, even better, forms of its degeneration
like Easter Bunny, eggs, etc.
From all of this one could make a film
entitled “Death to the Easter Bunny.”
For example: traditional story in the
toy factory—rabbits, or in the
setting of “Weavers”—a village
that crafts toys. Anyway,
a “rabbit” film. Maybe in part it will be
possible to touch on in Capital, as
it is very eccentric material to
the “idea at hand”!
Plate 26: Eisenstein, diary from April 28, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 43.
 To § 25 page 24

Berlin, April 15, 1928

They are dressed in strange robes of woven bast. The natives wor-
Bondu devils of Sierra Leone. Every village there has these devils.

Volume VII no 15
ship and fear them and attribute unlimited power to them.
Easter Bunnies,
Easter eggs—
big business
around
Easter

But what was still faith, fanaticism

A.I.Z.
or zeal and devotion to a very specific
ethos many centuries ago, is today
merely and exclusively politics in the
interest of the ruling class: the
bourgeoisie. And then, apart from
politics, it is a business. Over time,
entire industries that seek to profit
from religious illusions—and indeed
do so—with Easter Bunnies, Easter
eggs, and other nice things

have developed around this Easter.

One only has to look at the four frock-wearers
shown here to understand that the preacher folk,
these heralds of “Easter good tidings,” are inclined
This is how they look—the
towards anything and everything other than the re-
preachers of Christian “charity” nunciation and human kindness called for by Christ. EASTER
Plate 27: Eisenstein, diary from April 28, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, pp. 44–54.
Today I send a photo to Bleiman
With an inscription:
“To Bleiman a portrait of the head
of the penis, from which splashed
the seed of the new cinematography!”
(and maybe myself—then it would be—“the head and the
head from which it splashes etc.”)

(NB. The head of this god (from October)—obviously

of phallic origin. Note the retracted, folded skin.)

“… forehead colliding entities …” A. France.

Today I bought, next to the Chinese city wall: Sharngorst
Spherical Trigonometry Applied to Astronomy 1889
and Vogel Ibid, and Latanus’s Tutorial on Cutting Men’s
Clothing. The combination is strictly logical.
As cutting a jacket is a problem of spherical trigonometry.
Plate 28: Eisenstein, diary from September 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 175–176.
“TSAREVICH ALEKSEI” ARRESTED
A rumor began to spread he was dressed in a fine men’s

JOSEPHINE BAKER

The most visited Cabaret, the most glamorous

and fancy society—tango, foxtrot, Charleston,
among the peasants of the suit. “Tsarevich Aleksei” was

40, rue Fontaine—PARIS—Trudaine 07–11

Mar oblast; allegedly the son often visited by priests, who
of Nicholas II, “Tsarevich brought him money.
Aleksei,” was alive and hiding The other day, “Tsarevich

Midnight Meeting
Of elegant people
If you visit PARIS,
in the city Kozmodemyansk. Aleksei” was arrested. He
“Tsarevich Aleksei” lived in turned out to be a 23-year-old

Black-Bottom, Jacob’s Jazz

the city Kozmodemyansk Aleksandr Savin. He called
at the Abbess of Savvateeva himself Tsarevich Aleksei in

go to
monastery. Soon the relevant order to collect money from
authorities took an interest the clueless part of the popu-
in the “Tsarevich Aleksei.” lation in this way.
He was monitored. It turned
out that “Tsarevich Aleksei” (Rabochaia Gazeta
sometimes appeared in the from January 2, 1928)
clothes of a nun; other times The Russian Domela!

One of the thousands

of great York vaults
that safeguard money
and valuables. This
picture shows the
entrance of the vault
of the First National
Bank, Jersey City, N.J.

Below: The York Bur-

glary Chest used by
hundreds of theatres
to protect their cash.

York Safe and Lock Company

Factory and Principal Office: YORK, PA.
Plate 29: Eisenstein, diary from January 11, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 49–52.
Metamorphosis of Values

Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

In the extensive convolute for Eisenstein’s Capital project one

cannot find even a single quote from Marx’s own text. This fact
appears striking, not only because the book was supposed to
serve as the “script” of the film but also in light of its ideologi-
cal overdetermination in the Soviet Union. Indeed, one could
even raise the question of whether Eisenstein read Marx at all.
In Moscow’s Eisenstein museum, where the remaining part of
his library is preserved,1 Marx’s Capital is conspicuous in its
absence. As was the case with Joyce’s Ulysses, however, the copy
of the book could have been removed from his library or offered
to someone by Eisenstein’s widow, Pera Atasheva, after Eisen-
stein’s death.
Despite this, Capital’s archival body bears a whole multi-
tude of references—concepts and images—to themes of Marx’s
political economy. And beyond these implicit and explicit
quotes, Eisenstein announces that Capital’s “theme” is noth-
ing less than “Marx’s method.”2 How is one to understand this
self-ascribed task? On the one hand it relates to Eisenstein’s
attempt to elevate cinema’s capacity of thought: to enable
images to think conceptually, to unleash their “intellectual”
potential, something that Eisenstein saw as exemplified so far
only in October’s sequence of the gods. On the other hand the
dedication of Capital’s form to Ulysses, as well as Eisenstein’s
emphasis on “literality,” show the project’s particular affinity to

1 The Eisenstein Scientific-Memorial Cabinet, a branch of the Museum of

Cinema, which was directed for a long time by Naum Kleiman, is closed today
and will move to a new location.
2 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 146.

199
Metamorphosis of Values

questions pertaining to the structures of thought and language.

He speaks in favor of these cinematographic qualities in a let-
ter, to his friend the French writer Léon Moussinac, which pres-
ents October as an attempt “to overturn” his “entire system,”
especially the method of his previous film, Potemkin:

Thematically as well as formally. I think that we shall find our cinema-

tography “on the other side” of the acted film—that is, in the film as
newsreel, as well as in the film as itself. And most amusing of all, this
cinematography will be genetically ideological, for its substance will
be the screening of … Here’s kind of coup de théâtre: the one essential
word in all this hodgepodge doesn’t come to mind, my explanation
becomes a charade. And no dictionary at hand. Okay, take the German
word Begriff (concept, idea). But there is no absolute Begriff. They are
always “classical.” (From the word “class” and not “classicism.”)3

It is not difficult to recognize Capital’s conceptual outline

behind this program. What is much more difficult is to iden-
tify historical materialism in its official form as the generic
method of this new cinema. On the contrary, what lies behind
Eisenstein’s claim for its ideological orientation, its “class”
allegiance, is explicitly stated on the pages of the Capital note-
books. And once again the explicit character of an “idea” derives
from the literal meaning of a word:

Just how much the method of linguistic analysis teaches us to think

more easily: ἰδέα has a literal meaning, among other explications,
a splendid one: the way of speaking (also species). The “proletarian
ideology” is then a theory about the proletarian way of speaking, i.e.
about the proletarian interpretation of the phenomena. There is a
large number of words (images) which have lost their reflex-ability
[reflektornost’]—sensuous motor reaction and which function already

3 Léon Moussinac, Sergei Eisenstein. An Investigation into his Film and Phi-
losophy, trans. Sandy Petrey (New York: Crown Publishers, 1970), pp. 28–29.

200
Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

through an isolated automatism, that is, not by bringing the corre-

sponding goals/chains in motion. […] One should de-stamp a series of
concepts. De-automatize a series of perceptions.4

Eisenstein reverses here the Platonic separation between

ideas and concrete phenomena by emphasizing the process of
their becoming, or more crucially: their mode of expression.
Concreteness of sense and affection of the senses go hand in
hand. In this simultaneity Eisenstein locates the motivation for
art’s ideological impact. Similarly to Shklovsky—who associ-
ated art’s “device” with the effect of “enstrangement,” the way
of making objects unfamiliar and forms difficult5—Eisenstein
seeks to break the habitual and petrified modes of perception
by chaining together new sensuous experiences. For this rea-
son the deliberate heightening of the sensuous impact of forms
appears as art’s ideological aim par excellence.
Keeping this constellation in view, it comes as no surprise
that Eisenstein would later develop his vast theory project
Metod around the notion of “sensuous thinking.” The physi-
ological concreteness of the intellectual process, so often
emphasized in his notes for Capital, will later be conceptual-
ized as a ­morphology of senses, a method that led him to a com-
pletely new reading of cultural and artistic phenomena. Given
these parallels between the late work and the notes for Capi-
tal, it appears imperative to trace the genealogy of “sensuous

4 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 153–154.

5 “The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recog-
nizing, things; the device of art is the ostranenie [enstrangement] of things and
the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of
perception, as the process of perception is its own end in art and must be pro-
longed.” Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky. A Reader, ed. and
trans. Alexandra Berlina (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 80. See also:
Vogman, Sinnliches Denken, pp. 204–257; Elena Vogman, “Gesture—‘a flash in
slow motion through the centuries of evolution’—Sergei Eisenstein’s Method,”
in: Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present c. 1930, ed. Tom Holert and Anselm
Franke (Berlin; Zurich: diaphanes, 2018), pp. 192–205.

201
Metamorphosis of Values

Fig. 70–71: Frame enlargements from Eisenstein’s The General Line, in

Documents 4 (1930).

t­hinking” f­urther back. Understood as a dialectical concept,

which names a quality of form to affect thought, it is evident
that the germ of the idea of “sensuous thinking” is to be found
in the theory of “intellectual attraction,” which in turn was cru-
cial to Eisenstein’s vision of Marx’s “method.”

202
Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

In 1929 the French surrealist journal Documents announced

a series of Eisenstein’s lectures at the Sorbonne with the title
“Méthodes d’expression cinématographiques comparées aux
méthodes d’expression des autres arts.”6 Instead of six ­lectures,
Eisenstein gave only one; the premiere of his new film The

6 Georges Henri Rivière, “Six conferences d’Eisenstein,” in Documents 1, no. 7

(1929), p. 384.

203
Metamorphosis of Values

­General Line was canceled and the copy of the film confis-
cated by the French police. In 1930 the fourth issue of Docu-
ments published an article by Robert Desnos entitled “La Ligne
génerale,”7 accompanied by a double spread with frame enlarge-
ments, chosen and arranged by Eisenstein himself (fig. 70–71).
Desnos highlights the “concreteness” of his cinematographic
method, a quality which provides, for him, the link between two
projects, The General Line and Capital.

This is a film with a single goal. Concreteness. Concreteness of what? Of

the notion that in union lies the strength of the individual, that the past
does not determine the present, a present responsible only to the future
[…] In any case, a film of this sort, transcending the mating of horned
cattle and the thickening of cream in the mechanical separator, gives us
an approach to a domain in which questions of a practical, philosophi-
cal, and social order are in play. Eisenstein is already in the process of
realizing the project presented in his Sorbonne lecture: to render con-
crete, tangible, and clear as daylight theories of the most abstract sort,
the very conclusions of reason and of inference that are least accessible
to the uninstructed. […] The photogeny of ideas remains to be studied.
It was therefore confidently, if not without some surprise, that an audi-
ence of 800 listened to his intention of filming Marx’s Capital.8

Desnos’s brilliant intuition resides in linking the ideologi-

cal, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of Eisenstein’s cinema
by its mode of operation. This is even further underlined by what
remains unsaid in Desnos’s text: the immediate concreteness of
thirty frame enlargements facing the reader. Eisenstein’s choice
for Documents materializes—by means of the visual arrange-
ment—some of the crucial ideas developed in his article on

7 Robert Desnos, “La Ligne génerale,” in Documents 2, no. 4 (1930), pp. 217–223.

8 Ibid., pp. 220–221. Translation from Annette Michelson, “Eisenstein at
100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions,” in October, no. 88 (Spring,
1999), p. 79.

204
Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

“intellectual attraction” (“I.A. 28”): the significance of tipazh,

emphasized in this text in materialist terms as a “social-bio-
logical hieroglyph,” is shown here as an expressive variation of
types. The types which appear to the viewer are named as “peas-
ants,” “the kulak” and his “wife,” “the pig,” “the bull Fomka,”
three “peasants” again, the “spring,” the “Komsomol,” and so
on. These faces pray, doubt, laugh, hope, and listen. At the same
time, the “typical expression” of these non-professional actors—
peasants—is brought to an excess through the alteration of par-
ticulars. Each type receives a unique expression in a rhythmic
variation of polarities. Their traits become “viscerally-percepti-
ble,” just as Eisenstein had earlier conceptualized the intellec-
tual effect of such “ostensible” manifestations.9 And Desnos is
right to recognize in the “concreteness” of such expressive forms
and their “metamorphoses”10 an announcement of Eisenstein’s
next film project: the Critique of Political Economy.
Eisenstein’s method figures even more prominently in
Georges Bataille’s text on “The Deviations of Nature,” which
had appeared in the previous issue of Documents. Reading
Eisenstein’s aesthetics in a dialectical perspective, Bataille
expects from Capital the “value of a revelation.” He writes:

The expression of the philosophical dialectic through forms, such as

the author of Battleship Potemkin, S. M. Eisenstein, intends to carry
out in his next film […] may take on the value of a revelation, and deter-
mine the most elementary, and thus consequential, human reactions.
[…] one can affirm that the determination of a dialectical development
of facts as concrete as visible forms would be literally overwhelming.11

9 Sergei Eisenstein, “I.A. 28,” p. 42.

10 Robert Desnos, “La Ligne génerale,” p. 220.
11 Georges Bataille, “Les écarts de la nature,” Documents 2, no. 2 (1930),
pp. 79–84; “The Deviations of Nature,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M.
Leslie Jr., Theory and History of Literature, no. 14. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 56. Translation slightly modified.

205
Metamorphosis of Values

Bataille goes even further as he recognizes that Capital’s

critical import lies in the very concrete and palpable “expres-
sion” of an abstract concept. Why is this concreteness critical?
After this impressive interpretation of Eisenstein’s dialectic of
“visible forms,” Bataille adds a quote from Pierre Boaistuau’s
1561 Histoires prodigieuses, a sentence that traverses his entire
text like a refrain.

[…] nothing is seen that arouses the human spirit more, that ravishes
the sense more, that horrifies more, that provokes more terror or
admiration to a greater extent among creatures than the monsters,
prodigies, and abominations through which we see the works of
nature inverted, mutilated, truncated.12

In this anthropological and heterodox reading of dialectic,

which operates not through abstract ideas but in the medium of
“visible forms,” Georges Didi-Huberman lucidly recognizes the
affinity between Bataille and Eisenstein.13 The complex montage
of images from different domains in Documents allows, accord-
ing to Didi-Huberman, for a demontage of an anthropomor-
phic “figure of man” (figure humaine). Eisenstein and Bataille,
although in different ways, were both experimenting with mat-
ter’s immanent potential for alteration. Such metamorphoses
allowed both authors to dispel the well-formed human fig-
ure—synonymous with a perfectly abstract Platonic idea or the
Enlightenment belief in man—from the center of knowledge.
In its place they both posited a dynamic and eccentric center,
a monstrous and heretical figure—“one of materialism’s most
virulent manifestations,” in Bataille’s words, “a donkey-headed
god.”14 This decentered and dismembered image of an abased

12 Ibid.
13 See Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir
visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995).
14 Georges Bataille, “Le bas matérialisme et la gnose,” Documents 1, no. 1 (1930),
pp. 1–8; translation: “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in Visions of Excess, p. 46.

206
Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

figure without a face accompanies Bataille’s text on “Base Mate-

rialism and Gnosticism” in Documents.15 One can easily draw a
parallel between Eisenstein’s sequence of the gods in October
and Bataille’s images of the archontes. Hence it is no accident
that Bataille’s cruel caricature of metaphysics—this “shame-
less revolt against idealism in power,” this authentic image of
materialism—served as the subject of exchange between both
authors. In fact they met in Paris on January 4, 1930, at the Cabi-
net des Médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale, where Bataille
worked.16 The figure of the donkey-headed god reappears,
among other drawings, in Eisenstein’s diary, on the page where
he reports of his encounter with Bataille. Their exchange of such
eccentric values was guided by an anthropological economy,
which Bataille also addresses in his study on “base materialism”:

Yesterday I was at the Bibliothèque Nationale visiting Georges Bataille

(the author of Histoire de l’oeil). He is a curator at the [Cabinet des]
Médailles. An embêtant [boring] business, but I saw:
Greek coins from the 1st century of this form: [drawing]
a mechanical transfer onto money of traditions of the exchangeable
leg of mutton.
Carved stones of the gnostic sects (the very first centuries of Christian-
ity. They survived for a long time—they were the opponents during the
Albigensian Crusade and were destroyed by the thousands).
Their deities have heads of roosters, donkeys, and lions.
Sometimes 2 heads. | The dualism of the separate existence of good
and evil as a self-standing category.

15 Ibid.
16 Twenty years after the publication of Didi-Huberman’s book, his intuition
about the affinity between Bataille and Eisenstein is confirmed through recently
discovered evidence of this encounter. See Marie Rebecchi, Elena Vogman, in
collaboration with Till Gathmann, Sergei Eisenstein and the Anthropology of
Rhythm (Rome: Nero, 2017), pp. 12–13. The documents were shown at the exhi-
bition with the same title in fall 2017 at Nomas Foundation, Rome.

207
Metamorphosis of Values

The donkey plays a big role in their cult. The identification of Christ
with the donkey (Bataille). I remembered the first caricature of C[hrist]
C[rucified]
—a crucified donkey.
The donkey is seen as a symbol of the virilité [virility] (Bataille). That
must be the reason. They were against procreation. Castration?—I
don’t know but they discharged semen not into a woman but onto the
… Eucharist. They consumed semen | the masturbated one | with St.-
Sacrement [Holy Communion]. If a woman got pregnant they would
perform the abortion and would partake of the fetus.
| All this is to my question about cannibalism. Here there is a tangible
link between semen—fetus—child, etc.
With one’s own child | Saturn | , etc.
We talked about the double-faced Janus. There is also a three-faced
kind:
[drawing of a Janus face with four eyes] and later [drawing of a Janus
face with two eyes]

Again, an astrological sign of Saturn!17

These documents, which Bataille put before Eisenstein’s

eyes, must have been a striking confirmation of Eisenstein’s
own visual method, a revelation in the very sense of Bataille’s
heterodox notion of materialism. Eisenstein could not resist
drawing in his diary, in detail and form, what Bataille in his
research on Gnosticism called the “most impure fermentation”
(fig. 72). For Bataille these concrete forms and traces, which
Gnosticism and the new Christian religion introduced into the
Greco-Roman, possessed a capacity to decompose the “estab-
lished intellectual order” through foreign elements, intrusions
“from Egyptian tradition, from Persian dualism, from Eastern

17 Eisenstein, diary from January 4, 1930, RGALI, 1923-2-1116, pp. 2–3. Trans-

lated by Natalie Ryabchikova in Marie Rebecchi and Elena Vogman, Sergei Eisen-
stein and the Anthropology of Rhythm, pp. 12–13.

208
Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

Fig. 72: Eisenstein, diary from January 4, 1930, RGALI, 1923-2-1116, p. 2.

Jewish heterodoxy” and so on.18 These “impure fermentations”

resonate with Eisenstein’s interest in decomposition of the
unique notion of god through a montage of its manifold heretic
manifestations.

18 Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” p. 46.

209
Metamorphosis of Values

Fig. 73–74: “Archontes with duck heads” and “God with the legs of a man, the
body of a serpent, and the head of a cock (Cabinet des Médailles)” in Georges
Bataille, “Le bas materialisme et la gnose,” Documents, no. 1 (1930)

In light of this interrelation, the emphasis on a “dialectic

through forms” in Bataille’s “Deviations of Nature,” published
shortly after his encounter with Eisenstein, appears even more
challenging. What did Bataille expect from a “dialectic through
forms?” And how would Eisenstein’s visual interpretation of
Capital take on the “value of a revelation,” and consequently be
“literally overwhelming?” The loose set of “concrete and imme-
diately perceptible”19 phenomena that Bataille shared with the
Soviet director offers more than a mere historical enigma or an
object from a cabinet of curiosities. For Bataille these images
engraved on coins and stones confront “the worst difficulties of
interpretation,”20 due to the syncretism of their religious mean-
ing and the impossibility of their precise historical determina-
tion. In their enigmatic yet concrete phenomenality these docu-
ments express “an intransigent materialism,” which, through
its “incongruity” and “overwhelming lack of respect, permits
the intellect to escape the constraints of idealism.”21 Like a
secret link, Bataille’s vision of these expressive artefacts from a

19 Ibid., p. 52.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 51.

210
Dialectic Through Forms: Eisenstein Encounters Bataille

remote, almost inaccessible past, lends urgency to Eisenstein’s

project of “showing the method of the dialectic” in Capital, that
is, of applying Marx’s theory of value on the visual level of con-
crete forms. For what Bataille conceived as the debasement of
idealism is exactly what returns in Eisenstein’s Capital as the
devaluation of symbolic authority.
Similarly, Capital’s “dialectic” of concrete forms needs to be
understood as their revaluation. This is how, moving into Marx’s
theoretical framework, Eisenstein remotivates value theory at
the level of visual signs by juxtaposing the static model of repre-
sentation with an active and dynamic one: montage. Adapting
Marx’s method— going beyond simple quoting his Capital—
engaged the process of montage as an experimental structure in
motion, a field of force in which Capital’s concepts would con-
cretely acquire new meanings. The old Platonic ἰδέα is brought
back to its “literal meaning” by means of montage, a “way of
speaking,” that interlinks new reflexes in order to “de-autom-
atize” habitual schemas.22 In Metod, Eisenstein has recourse to
the concept of “concrete thinking,” which he derives from Leo
Tolstoy’s novels and Goethe’s morphology, in order to describe
this structure in motion as a mode of “sensuous thinking,” an
intellectual attraction capable of revitalizing static symbols by
dismantling them and placing them into new sensuous interre-
lations.23 Involving consistently new concrete ­elements—docu-
ments of the present, taken from various sources and relocated
within Capital’s mobile structure—allows for a revaluation
process, which reintroduces Marx’s theory of value on the level
of “facts as concrete as visible forms.” Revaluation makes such

22 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 153–154.

23 In his speech at the All-Union Conference on Soviet Cinema in January 1935,
Eisenstein insists on the continuum between the concepts of “intellectual film”
(his theory of intellectual attraction), the cinematographic use of “inner mono-
logue,” referring to Joyce, and “sensuous thinking,” which he will develop fur-
ther in Metod. Moreover, he includes the typescript of his speech as a chapter in
Metod. Eisenstein, “Elements of Form 2,” in Metod, ed. Bulgakowa, pp. 355–381.

211
Metamorphosis of Values

forms circulate, decompose, and dismantle the stable catego-

ries and symbols of contemporary capitalist, as well as socialist,
dogmatic ideologies.

Urformen of Advertisement

In Capital’s kaleidoscopic variation of heterogeneous elements,

concrete and disparate phenomena become a matter of history.
The theoretical value of these dynamic forms can be read in the
very sense of Benjamin’s concept of the historian as chiffonier.
“To create history with the very detritus of history,”24 tells the
epigraph which prepends a chapter on painting and novelty in
The Arcades Project. Speaking as a historian, Benjamin names
the kaleidoscopic affinities within his text a “method” of “liter-
ary montage”: “I needn’t say anything. Merely show,” goes his
well-known statement. “I shall purloin no valuables, appropri-
ate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these
I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come
into their own: by making use of them.”25 This is how the phe-
nomena collected by the chiffonier become, not only a matter of
history, but also a matter of intensity, laying bare, beyond “the
causal connection between economy and culture,” to use Ben-
jamin’s vocabulary once again, the “thread of expression” in
which they can be perceived as concrete singularities. Despite
their different contexts, one cannot, for Eisenstein as for Benja-
min, underestimate the theoretical importance of the concept of
“expression.” Returning to it at decisive junctures, both authors,
in parallel if different ways, developed a method of “materialist
physiognomics,”26 or more precisely, a ­materialist morphology in

24 Benjamin quotes Rémy de Gourmont’s Le IIme Livre des masques. Benja-

min, The Arcades Project, p. 543.
25 Ibid., p. 460.
26 Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill. Approaches to the Passagen-
Werk” in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 940.

212
Urformen of Advertisement

order to analyze capitalism’s “expressive character.”27 It is no sur-

prise, then, that Benjamin addresses his study explicitly to Marx-
ist readers in an extraordinary passage of his Arcades Project:

This research—which deals fundamentally with the expressive char-

acter of the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial archi-
tecture, the earliest machines, but also the earliest department stores,
advertisements, and so on—thus becomes important for Marxism in
two ways. First, it will demonstrate how the milieu in which Marx’s
doctrine arose affected that doctrine through its expressive character
(which is to say, not only through causal connections); but, second,
it will also show in what respects Marxism, too, shares the expressive
character of the material products contemporary with it.28

Benjamin thus formulates a double hypothesis guiding The

Arcades Project, a work he begins in 1927, precisely at the same
time Eisenstein draws the first lines of his Capital project. On the
one hand Benjamin recognizes in Marx’s Capital a signature of
the capitalist society of the 19th century, whose “expressive char-
acter” affected Marx concretely, beyond conceptual mediation.29
Like Eisenstein in this regard, Benjamin’s heterodox reading of
Marx avoids abstract determinism in the understanding of his-
tory. On the other hand, Benjamin claims for the Marxist analysis
the same sensibility to the material givenness of things, objects
of use, and means of production that emerge in their “height-
ened vividness” through the literary montage of his own text.

27 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 460.

28 Ibid.
29 Emphasizing Marx’s engagement with the concrete manifestations of
social conditions, Benjamin does not, however, oppose conceptual expression
and phenomena. How to use concepts was of central importance for his under-
standing of dialectics: “What matters for the dialectician is to have the wind
of world history in his sails. Thinking means for him: setting the sails. What is
important is how they are set. Words are his sails. The way they are set makes
them into concepts.” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 473. I would like to thank
Malte Fabian Rauch for reminding me of this beautiful passage.

213
Metamorphosis of Values

Without any causal mediation, but precisely in the logic of

the montage principle, on the same page of the Arcades Ben-
jamin introduces a crucial aesthetic concept that points to the
morphological procedure of his analysis: the Urphänomen. This
“perceptible Ur-phenomenon” is called on to reveal the expres-
sion of economic forces at the core of contemporary culture.
It is able to conjoin two different poles: on the one hand “the
heightened vividness [erhöhte Anschaulichkeit]” of history, and
on the other “the realization of Marxist method.”

For us, what matters is the thread of expression [Ausdruckszusammen-

hang]. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented,
but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other
words, is the attempt to grasp the economic process as perceptible Ur-
phenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life.30

This focus on the morphological necessity of the analysis is

conditioned by the irreducible entanglement of cultural and eco-
nomic processes, by their interdependence. Hence such mate-
rialist readings need to be intimately related to the aesthetic
manifestations of the products of culture. Benjamin shares this
morphological conception of economic relations, exemplified
through the notion of a “thread of expression,” with Eisenstein.
Crucially, both authors turned their attention to advertisement,
a domain where aesthetic and economic issues intersect in a
paradigmatic fashion. Likewise, both shared a tremendous
admiration for Grandville, whose ­Metamorphoses du jour Eisen-
stein carefully analyzed as a precursor of Disney in Metod.31
“Grandville’s works are the sibylline books of publicité,” Benja-
min notes. “Everything that, with him, has its preliminary form
as joke, or satire, attains its true unfolding as advertisement.”32

30 Ibid., p. 460. Translation slightly modified.

31 Eisenstein, Metod, ed. Bulgakowa, pp. 755, 822, pp. 851–852.
32 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 853.

214
Urformen of Advertisement

Grandville’s animation of the objects of bourgeoise society

simultaneously revitalized the natural forms of the commod-
ity fetish: “If the commodity was a fetish, then Grandville was
the tribal sorcerer.”33 In Arcades Benjamin observes Grandville’s
graphic metamorphoses not without a particular focus on dif-
ferent morphological states, especially that of vegetal life. It was
precisely the principle of metamorphosis that interested both
Benjamin and Eisenstein in Grandville’s eccentric transitions
between natural forms and the fetishism of the commodity.
One of Grandville’s morphological sorceries from the series
Un après-midi au jardin des plantes shows a sparse landscape
filled with an array of exotic plants (fig. 75). On closer examina-
tion we recognize not the Plantes marines, evoked in the first
part of the picture’s title, but “laces, brushes, pompons, quiffs”
and other attributes of the toilette of the Parisian bourgeoise,
named in its second part.34 Grandville’s exotic garden, seem-
ingly flourishing by itself, or by a miracle of some foreign and
distant nature, reveals, however—and not without some dis-
concerting effect—the social botany of French middle-class
fetishes. One can understand why Benjamin saw “Fashion’s
Revenge on the Flowers”35 in these rising Urformen in Grand-
ville’s work. Guided by an intuition of this morphological
imprint on Marx’s own analysis in Capital, Benjamin can state:
“The subtleties of Grandville aptly express what Marx calls the
‘theological ­niceties’ of the commodity.”36 Consequently, Ben-
jamin planned to compare Grandville’s metamorphoses with
“Hegel’s ­Phänomenologie” in order to derive them “in terms

33 Ibid., p. 186.
34 Grandville, Plantes marines, une reproduction exacte des dentelles, brosses,
pompons, toupets et gazons, 1844. Engraving from the series Un après-midi au
jardin des plantes. See also the analysis of this image by Grandville in Georges
Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images
(Paris: Minuit, 2000), pp. 139–142.
35 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 852.
36 Benjamin, p. 182.

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Metamorphosis of Values

Fig. 75: Grandville, Plantes marines, une reproduction exacte des dentelles,
brosses, pompons, toupets et gazons, 1844. Engraving from the series
Un après-midi au jardin des plantes.

of the philosophy of history.”37 By means of decomposition

and exaggeration, means that fascinated Eisenstein in Metod,
Grandville transforms the whole of nature into “specialties,”
as Benjamin notes. “He presents them in the same spirit in
which the advertisement (the term réclame also originates at
this point) begins to present its articles. He ends in madness.”38

37 Ibid., p. 583.
38 Ibid., p. 7.

216
Urformen of Advertisement

The same philosophical perspective on advertisement, the

same morphological focus on economy, presents, though dif-
ferently, a visual arrangement from Eisenstein’s Capital. Eisen-
stein analyzes an advertisement from the journal UHU that
presents a beauty product for women, the powder Khasana-
Compact (plate 30). “What is a compact?” asks the title of the
advertisement which Eisenstein places, like a close-up, on the
right side of his diary page. “You know this joke, madam?”
comments another fragment from the same dissected adver-
tisement. “You also know the clenching motion of the hands
of those to whom it is addressed? It works again and again and
always looks almost the same.”39 The disposition of the clips
extracted from the advertisement is here marked by a cesura. In
the space between the clippings, Eisenstein writes: “Up to here
it is ‘philosophy,’ but after, advertising.”40 Perfectly correspond-
ing to Benjamin’s characterization of réclame as production
of “specialties,” the advertisement then shifts the focus on its
specialité, an aspect that is further underlined through Eisen-
stein’s montage: “But there is another compact. Also clenched
and firm, but tiny and fine—Khasana-Compact.” Resonating
with Grandville’s garden, the advertisement breathes life into
its object in the very act of its creation:

Pressed into a solid tablet, lying in delicate jars, Khasana-Compact is

the most suitable powder for use outside the home. No spilling, no
dusting of clothes, inconspicuous application! Khasana-Compact
powder should not be missing from any purse!41

The object Khasana-Compact, which appears as a delicate

image (plate 30), placed right after the description, comes to life
in a plastic act of metamorphosis: fitting in every woman’s purse,

39 Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 36–37.

40 Ibid., p. 35.
41 Ibid., p. 38.

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Metamorphosis of Values

“suitable” for use, “compact.” Unnoticeably the powder adjusts

to the shape of its user, becomes as close and indispensable as
a body part. Eisenstein’s sensitivity to capitalism’s permeating
quality, the ability of its commodities to shift boundaries and cre-
ate ubiquity is evinced by the attempt to focus precisely on its lan-
guage: details of the advertisements, their subtle yet vivid trans-
formations. Tracing in their concrete montages the “adventures
of the strolling commodity,”42 both Eisenstein and Benjamin
expand the scope of Marx’s analysis to the domain of culture.
Following capitalism’s concrete manifestations in the cultural
realm, they employ a method that merits closer examination.

Marx’s Scene of Metamorphosis

These morphological processes of transformation have a con-

ceptual inscription in German thought, precisely incorpo-
rated in the notion of metamorphosis (die Metamorphose). The
dynamics of value, as Marx develops them in all their complex-
ity in Capital, must be understood as a relation rather than as a
stable form. Marx formulates the concept of “value form” [Wert-
form] as a part of the theoretical framework of Capital, while
dealing with commodity and value. He begins with an organicist
metaphor. “For bourgeois society,” he states, “the commodity
form of the product of labor, or the value form of the commod-
ity, is the economic cell form.”43 Marx points to the difficulty in
analyzing this economic germ cell in comparison with the entire
organism. Later, he picks up the thread with perfectly morpho-
logical notions: “we perceive straight away the insufficiency of
the simple form of value: it is an embryonic form which must
undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the

42 This is how Benjamin describes Grandville’s drawings in a parallel with the

movements of the flâneur on the market. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 367.
43 Marx, Capital, p. 90.

218
Marx’s Scene of Metamorphosis

price form.”44 Marx’s language should be heard in all its preci-

sion: the process he refers to here is neither a development nor
even a dialectic of the value form but, crucially, a metamorpho-
sis—one from which abstract price form is not excluded, but
with which it constitutes a kind of protean element.

I do not proceed from “concepts,” hence neither from the “concept of

value”; what I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the
labor product presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the
commodity. This I analyze, initially in the form in which it appears.45

In the ambivalence of this concreteness Marx does not point

to an abstract quantity, but to a quality of value. What does this
mean? Value, in fact, is a mediated social relation that needs to
be located and analyzed not only in its condition as a quantity
but in its phenomenological potentiality, as a form and its mul-
tiple transformations.
In his “Notes on Adolph Wagner’s ‘Lehrbuch der politi­
schen Ökonomie’,” from 1881, Marx formulates a harsh cri-
tique of an understanding of value in which “the ‘value’ of
goods” implicitly introduces a “measurement of this value.”
Here, value derives from “goods,” which in turn derive from a
certain “hierarchy of his [man’s] needs.”46 Marx considers such
a superficial ­interrelation—in which the value of goods results
from a certain order of needs, witnessing “the economic nature

44 Marx, Capital, p. 154. Marx’s German vocabulary expresses the analogy to

morphological processes particularly well: “Der erste Blick zeigt das Unzulän-
gliche der einfachen Wertform, dieser Keimform, die erst durch eine Reihe von
Metamorphosen zur Preisform heranreift” [The first glance shows the insuffi-
ciency of the simple form of value, this seed form, which only ripens into the
price form through a series of metamorphoses]. Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik
der politischen Ökonomie, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1991), p. 62; my translation.
45 Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s ‘Lehrbuch Der Politischen
Ökonomie’ (Second Edition), Volume 1, 1879,” in Collected Works. Marx and
Engels: 1874–83, ed. Valentina Smirnova, trans. Barrie Selman, vol. 24 (New
York: International Publishers, 1989), pp. 531–59, here p. 544.
46 Ibid., pp. 542–543.

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Metamorphosis of Values

of man”—as “tautological confusion,” a “hairsplitting and

underhand maneuvering” analysis that ultimately engenders
an obfuscated concept of value.47
However, turning his attention to the word’s history, Marx
sees a symptomatic misunderstanding in this obscuring deriva-
tion of the concept of value: a pattern implicit even in Wagner’s
hint to the Latin etymology of the word. In his critical notes Marx
rehearses this etymology, making an extensive linguistic digres-
sion that is surprisingly analogous to Eisenstein’s etymological
preoccupations in the Capital notebooks. Marx is interested in
the continuum between the Latin “dignitas = dignity, merit,”
which also means “value,” and the Latin “dico, to point out or
show.” According to Marx, this relation to a distinctive quality
also exists in other languages, such as the Greek (δεικ-νυμι, δακ-
τυλο, for “finger”), Gothic (ga-tecta, “dico”), German (zeigen,
“to show”) … “and we could arrive at a lot more ‘derivations’,”
he derisively concludes.48 Derivations that point to value’s out-
standing nature do not clarify but repress the historical genesis
of the phenomenon, crucially conditioned by social relations.
This obscuring of the social and economic processes of value
formation, which Marx analyzes extensively in Capital, is symp-
tomatic and goes hand in hand with an obscuring of the fact
“that labor depends on nature” [Naturbedingtheit der Arbeit]:

The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernat-
ural creative power to labor, since precisely from the fact that labor
depends on nature, it follows that the man who possesses no other
property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and
culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves owners
of the material conditions of labor.49

47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Basic Writings On Politics
and Philosophy, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (New York:
Anchor Books Doubleday & Company, 1959), pp. 112–113.

220
Marx’s Scene of Metamorphosis

Quoting this “extremely important” passage in his Arcades

Project, Benjamin emphasizes its critical import in relation to
the concept of the “creative.”50 Keeping this in view, one can
understand why Marx’s political economy tirelessly addresses
the “never asked” question, namely “why labor is expressed
in value, and why the measurement of labor by its duration is
expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product.”51 Capi-
tal in its entirety could be read as a perpetual dismantling of
the alleged authenticity of this interrelation, simultaneously
dismantling in the same movement the bourgeois standpoint,
which presents labor as “a self-evident and nature-imposed
necessity” or as “productive labor itself.”52
This is why Marx counters the etymological link between
value and worth, suggested by Wagner, with the same dialectical
mistrust, clarifying the factual relation behind his mis­reading:

The only thing which clearly lies at the bottom of the German stu-
pidity is the fact that linguistically the words value [Wert] or worth
[Würde] were first applied to the useful things themselves, which
existed for a long time, even as “products of labor,” before becom-
ing commodities. But this has as little to do with the scientific determi-
nation of the “value” of the commodity as the fact that the word salt was
first used by the ancients for cooking salt, and consequently sugar, etc.
also figure as varieties of salt from Pliny onwards (indeed, all colorless
solids soluble in water and with a peculiar taste), and therefore the
chemical category “salt” includes sugar, etc.53

In Capital Marx replaces this simultaneously idealist and

delusive understanding of value, based on a naturalization of
economic processes, with one that starts with the p
­ henomena

50 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 658.

51 Marx, Capital, pp. 173–174.
52 Ibid., p. 175.
53 Marx, “Notes on Adolph Wagner,” p. 548.

221
Metamorphosis of Values

themselves—specifically “the simplest concrete element of

economics,” the commodity. For this reason Marx insists on
the point that for him the primary status of value is not so much
that of a concept (Begriff), but more fundamentally that of a
characteristic form.54 Emphasizing this shift in understanding
value, he distinguishes commodities from simple use values.
“In order to produce commodities, he [man] must not only pro-
duce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values.”55
Consequently, the notion of use value, as the use value of a com-
modity, bears a specific historical and social inscription. That
which defines commodity as such is a complex social and eco-
nomic relation: its dual quality of use value and exchange value.
It is all the more remarkable that in Capital it is not an eco-
nomic but a biological term that comes to describe this circu-
lation process: “We therefore have to consider the whole pro-
cess in its formal aspect, that is to say, the change in form or
the metamorphosis of commodities through which the social
metabolism is mediated.”56 The social circulation of matter or
“metabolism” [sozialer Stoffwechsel] constitutes a core part of
Capital’s chapter on the “Metamorphosis of Commodities,” in
which “metamorphosis” comes to name the dynamic transi-
tion between different value forms within the social tissue of
capitalist society.
Why does Marx refer to the concept of “metamorphosis”
in order to describe the reality of capitalist commodity circu-
lation? Keeping in mind his critique of the naturalization of
social and historical realities, what could be his interest in
transposing this concept from the biological context to that of
political economy? Coming from the Greek meta-, which means
“changed,” “altered,” “higher,” or “beyond,” and morphe—
“form,” “shape”—the word dates back at least to the mythical

54 Marx, Capital, p. 455; Marx, “Notes on Adolph Wagner,” p. 545.

55 Marx, Capital, p. 131; Marx, “Notes on Adolph Wagner,” p. 545.
56 Marx, Capital, pp. 198–199.

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Marx’s Scene of Metamorphosis

transformations described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It names

a transition from one state to another, an ultimate change in
form, nature, or structure, fulfilled in such a way that renders its
object unrecognizable. Thus a metamorphosis implies a radi-
cal—that is, irreversible—transformation, an alteration of form
that necessarily renounces all (re)cognition. Yet such transfor-
mations are fundamentally products of culture, all the more
since Marx ascribes to them a status of signs bearing a “secret”:
concrete but illegible. In the chapter on “The Fetishism of the
Commodity and Its Secret,” Marx writes:

Value […] transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic.

Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret
of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of util-
ity have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their
­language.57

And it seems as though in response to this suggestion—

prominently quoted by Benjamin in his Arcades Project—that
Eisenstein, almost contemporaneously, conceptualizes his use
of the non-professional actors in Marx’s terms: “Tipazh is a
social-biological hieroglyph, yet in a way that in relation to him
everyone is a Champollion of his own.”58 Just as for Marx value
is not a fixed content or quantity of a thing but an expressive
quality, a dynamic expression of social relations, for Eisenstein
tipazh is not an executor of a prescribed role but a complex
expression of history, able to enact or transform it in turn.
For exemplifying the metamorphosis of commodities, their
dynamic entanglement with social relations, Marx uses exam-
ples whose status is neither that of empirical facts nor that of
economic numbers or mathematical abstractions. Rather, in
order to address transactions on the market, he introduces

57 Marx, Capital, p. 167.

58 Eisenstein, “I.A. 28,” p. 43.

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Metamorphosis of Values

characters such as “our old friend the weaver of linen,” who at

this point has already appeared in Capital’s previous “scenes”:

Let us now accompany the owner of some commodity—say, our old

friend the weaver of linen—to the scene of action, the market. His 20
yards of linen has a definite price, £2. He exchanges it for the £2, and
then, like a man of the good old stamp that he is, he parts with the £2
for a family Bible of the same price. The linen, which in his eyes is a
mere commodity, a depository of value, he alienates in exchange for
gold, which is the linen’s value form, and this form he again parts with
for another commodity, the Bible, which is destined to enter his house
as an object of utility and of edification to its inmates. The exchange
becomes an accomplished fact by two metamorphoses of opposite
yet supplementary character—the conversion of the commodity into
money, and the re-conversion of the money into a commodity.59

Beyond empirical reality or mathematical abstraction, the

linen and the Bible not only enter into the example’s “scene of
action, the market” but also Marx’s own scenes in Capital. They
appear as concrete characters, “personnages d’une scène,” as
Jacques Rancière named Marx’s examples in his recent book
Les bords de la fiction.60 These objects enter the scene to perform
a metamorphosis—an irreducible transition of a commodity
into different value forms structured and conditioned by the
social tissue. In other words, the social metabolism offers value
the possibility to valorize, the condition for its own metamor-
phosis: “For the valorization of value to take place, value must
change form,” writes Étienne Balibar. “It must even, as Marx
also says, permanently shift from one ‘scene’ onto another,
from the scene of monetary exchanges onto the scene of pro-

59 Marx, Capital, pp. 199–200.

60 Jacques Rancière, Les bords de la fiction [The Edges of Fiction] (Paris: Seuil,
2017), p. 67.

224
Goethe’s Gift to Hegel

ductive consumption.”61 These “scenes” expose and accentu-

ate the metamorphosis; they allow us to grasp the crucial and
irreversible change of forms in all their sudden manifestations.
There is a decisive parallel between Marx’s arrangement of
“scenes” and Eisenstein’s montaged pages—as, for example,
on those that deal with the transformation of values in the con-
text of the “Arrest of Tsarevich Aleksei.” In this assemblage of
Eisenstein’s, the detention of the false tsar and the stocking of
values produced through a dance of false appearances provokes
a critical tension between different forms of value: exchange
and monetary value, symbolic and “exhibition value.” In both
cases, the values are made to dance: Marx’s use of characters
as well as Eisenstein’s montage of images open up a series of
concrete and palpable scenes of metamorphosis. These scenes
serve as a fundamental dispositive that sheds light on the invis-
ible economic relations directing both the circulation of com-
modities and their protean transformations.

Goethe’s Gift to Hegel

When Marx wrote Capital, the concept of metamorphosis had

already been the subject of a heterodox re-reading, undertaken
by the German author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Having
entered the vocabulary of biology in the 1660s, in Goethe’s
times the term was used to describe the transformation of
caterpillars into butterflies and tadpoles into frogs, processes
which the poet and researcher had carefully studied. By shifting
the notion from the zoological to the botanical sphere, that is,
to the “metamorphosis of plants,” Goethe sought to discover a

61 Étienne Balibar, “Towards a New Critique of Political Economy: from

generalized surplus value to total subsumption,” in Capitalism: Concept, Idea,
Image. Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today, eds. Peter Osborne, Éric Alliez, Eric-John
Russell (London: CRMEP Books, 2019), p. 44.

225
Metamorphosis of Values

particular law-like process, a formula at work in manifold ways

throughout the realms of nature.62
In his article “Zu Marx’ Aufhebung der Metamorphosen-
lehre Goethes” [On Marx’s sublation of Goethe’s Theory of
Metamorphosis], Elmar Treptow recognizes Marx’s Capital as
a theory of metamorphosis. He states that “Marx preserves and
develops further Goethe’s fundamental ideas on the metamor-
phosis in nature, by transposing them into the understanding
of society and its formations.”63 Despite Treptow’s ­illuminating
intuition, this hypothesis seems to be only partly valid. In
expanding the concept’s scope to the sphere of political econ-
omy and society, Marx in fact transposes Goethe’s formula of
polarity and, moreover, his method of “tender empiricism.”64
However, he never conceives a metamorphosis of a totality; that
is, he never applies the concept to social phenomena in gen-
eral. Crucially, Marx’s morphological gaze in Capital concerns
a fragment of the total, a particular case, the commodity as a
phenomenon. For this reason Marx rather directs his attention
to the most “concrete” or “simplest social forms,” which he
identifies in the commodities.
But Treptow goes wrong when he attributes to Marx an ide-
alist theory of human nature that supposedly underwrites his
theory of metamorphosis. For Marx, he asserts, metamorpho-
sis consists in “critically presenting the socially false, alienated
metamorphosis, i.e. a change of form which is not a gradual
renewal, not a skinning or rejuvenation, but an increasing
ossification, petrification or overgrowth.”65 But in fact Marx’s

62 See Gordon L. Miller, “Introduction” in The Metamorphosis of Plants, by

­Jo­­hann Wolfgang von Goethe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), p. xix
63 Elmar Treptow, “Zu Marx’ Aufhebung der Metamorphosenlehre Goethes,”
[On Marx’s Sublation of Goethe’s Theory of Metamorphosis] Zeitschrift für phi-
losophische Forschung 34, no. 2 (April–June, 1980), p. 179.
64 On Goethe’s concept of “tender empiricism” see Amanda Jo Goldstein,
Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago; Lon-
don: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
65 Treptow, “Zu Marx’ Aufhebung der Metamorphosenlehre Goethes,” p. 179.

226
Goethe’s Gift to Hegel

­ orphological gaze in Capital goes far beyond such essentially

m
moralistic judgementalism. The notion of metamorphosis does
not name a stasis or petrification, but a decisive dynamic in the
socio-economic tissue, a dynamic which conditions its “metab-
olism.” Precisely as in Goethe’s morphology, the commodity as
the “simplest social form” implies polarities and “extremes”;
it operates latencies and “transmutations” in the process of its
multiple metamorphosis. The dynamic understanding of this
concept is foundational to Marx’s critique of the capitalist sys-
tem as a whole.
In his approach in The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe
shows how an authentic shape (Gestalt) can be conceived only
by apprehending its simplest, most irreducible principle,
which he named the Urphänomen, the originary phenomenon.
He gained an insight central to his concept of metamorphosis
while walking in the Sicilian gardens during his Italian journey
(1786–1788). In this seminal experience, acuminated in the for-
mula “Alles ist Blatt” [All is leaf], Goethe draws a picture of the
plant as transformation of the leaf:

It came to me in a flash that in the organ of the plant which we are

accustomed to call the leaf lies the true Proteus who can hide or reveal
himself in all vegetal forms. From first to last, the plant is nothing but
leaf, which is so inseparable from the future germ that one cannot
think of one without the other.66

66 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Herder, Naples, 17 May 1787, in Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 11, 14
vols. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), p. 375. English transla-
tion: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786–1788, trans. Wystan
Hugh Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London; New York: Penguin Books, 1962),
p. 366. On Goethe’s use of the notion “organ” see Leif Weatherby, Transplanting
the Metaphysical Organ. German Romanticism between Leibnitz and Marx, Forms
of Living (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

227
Metamorphosis of Values

Goethe understood the process through which this dynamic

“leaf” progressively assumes the form of different parts of the
plant (cotyledons, stem leaves, sepals, petals, pistils, stamens,
and so on), as “the metamorphosis of plants.” In this way meta-
morphosis describes nature’s leaping from one state to another,
the unfolding of “one part through another,” and ultimately the
process of “creating a great variety of forms through the modi-
fication of a single organ.”67 Such transformations, conceptual-
ized by Goethe in the course of precise observations, were not
only of progressive or teleological character. Beside the “regu-
lar” or “progressive metamorphosis,” which named the step-by-
step formation of the plant from seed to fruiting, he ­developed
two other notions: that of “irregular,” or “retrogressive,” and
“accidental” metamorphosis. While he does not further explore
the latter—a “monstrous” mode, “caused accidentally and from
without”68 (such as for example by the intervention of insects)—
he accords a great attention to “retrogressive metamorphosis,”
wherein nature seems to invert its course, taking “one or more
steps backward.”69
Although “metamorphosis” described a palpable and sud-
den transition from one state to another, it was not only a concept
for immediacy; as the “science of transformation,” morphol-
ogy also offered a method to think in non-linear and complex
temporalities. In this way Goethe could expand the focus from
botanical research to other domains, such as anatomy, meteo-
rology, osteology, or geology. In one of his fragments on com-
parative anatomy, entitled “Morphology,” Goethe describes the
potential in a radical affirmation of phenomenal appearance:

67 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, ed. Gordon L.

Miller, trans. Douglas Miller (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), pp. 5–6.
68 Ibid., p. 10.
69 Ibid., p. 6.

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Goethe’s Gift to Hegel

Morphology rests on the conviction that everything that is must also

manifest and show itself. […] The inorganic, the vegetable, the animal,
the human, all manifests itself, appears as what it is, to our outer and
inner sense. Form is something mobile, that comes into being and
passes away. The science of form is the science of transformation. The
theory of metamorphosis is the key to all of Nature’s signs.70

To describe this hidden signature of concrete phenomena

in all their epistemic efficacy, Goethe ceaselessly invented new
concepts, time and again following concrete cases. This scien-
tific and poetic method on the margins of different disciplines
provoked interest in the circles of Goethe’s contemporaries.
In 1822 the German psychiatrist Johann Heinroth published
his Lehrbuch der Anthropologie [Textbook on Anthropology],
in which he describes Goethe’s thinking as “concrete” [gegen-
ständlich] because of its specific quality not to proceed “in a
common, philosophical, abstract” way but rather to follow the
thread of phenomena:

Hereby I want to say that his thinking is not separated from the
concrete objects, that the elements of these objects, the intuitions
[Anschauungen] traverse his thought in a most intimate way, so that
his vision is itself thinking, and his thinking an act of vision.71

Inspired by Heiroth’s assessment, Goethe answers vividly in

a short article, published under the title “Bedeutende Fördernis
durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort” [Considerable effect from
one single mot d’esprit]. Therein Goethe emphasizes the prolific
impact of the concept of gegenständlich, as that “one single word”

70 Translation from Helmut Hühn, “Comparative Morphology and Symbolic

Mediation,” in Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Roman-
tic-Period Aesthetics, ed. Helmut Hühn and James Vigus, trans. Kathrin Grüneputt
(London; New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 93.
71 Johann C. A. Heinroth, Lehrbuch der Anthropologie [Textbook on Anthro-
pology] (Leipzig: Friedrich Christ. Wilhelm Vogel, 1822), p. 387.

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Metamorphosis of Values

which provided the inspiration for his title. Moreover, the very
concreteness of this “word” drives Goethe to reconsider the link
between his morphological and poetic approaches. Discovered
by Eisenstein in the course of his research in Metod, Goethe’s
article itself appears as a concrete phenomenon in his text: the
director cuts it out from Goethe’s Morphologische Schriften and
files it into his manuscript. In this way the clipping becomes a
seminal part of Metod’s chapter on “Concrete Thinking,” which
Eisenstein structures on the basis of annotations on Goethe’s
text.72
In his answer to Heinroth, Goethe discovers the guiding
method of his natural science, morphology, operative in his
poetic method; he names this “concrete poetry” [gegenstän-
dliche Dichtung]. In both spheres he finds the same paradoxi-
cal logic at work, a non-linear temporality stimulated by the
phenomenon. Immediate vision and latency of thought, active
perception and passive memory operate simultaneously. “Each
new object [Gegenstand], closely observed, opens a new organ
within us.” Goethe connects sensuous perception and intellec-
tual reflection through one particular moment which he calls
the “incisive point”: “I do not rest until I find an incisive point
[prägnanter Punkt] from which many things can be derived, or
rather which on its own accord produces much out of itself and
brings it forth towards me.”73 For Goethe’s morphology this phe-
nomenological omen marks a concrete as well as a structural
moment of perception, affecting the view and revealing knowl-

72 Goethe’s text was included in the 5th volume of Goethe’s Schriften, pub-
lished in 1840. Goethes sämtliche Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 5 (Paris, 1840),
p. 336–337. Reproduction of Eisenstein’s manuscript (preserved at RGALI 1923-
2-238, pp. 6–7) in Vogman, Sinnliches Denken, pp. 122–124.
73 “[…] ich raste nicht, bis ich einen prägnanten Punkt finde, von dem sich
vieles ableiten lässt, oder vielmehr der vieles freiwillig aus sich hervorbringt und
mir entgegenträgt.” Goethes sämtliche Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 5 (Paris, 1840),
p. 336–337.

230
Goethe’s Gift to Hegel

edge in the same movement.74 Interestingly enough, for Goethe

this immediacy of the phenomenon reveals an almost archaeo-
logical and latent layer of thought which crystalizes at the very
moment of the encounter of the “incisive point.” In this sense
Goethe’s uncompromising validation of the p ­henomenon
reveals itself as an epistemic position. Beyond the opposition
between the general and the particular, it focuses on the rela-
tional dynamic of metamorphosis within the series of appear-
ances which never exist in isolation, as Ding an sich.
Without any direct reference to morphology in Capital,
Marx’s use of the concept of “metamorphosis” resonates with
Goethe’s especially in its phenomenological and temporal
complexity. Remarkably, in the first volume of Marx’s ­Capital
the term Metamorphose, which Goethe also named a “true
Proteus,”75 appears nearly sixty times, including three mentions
in the table of contents. Likewise, he uses a synonym for meta-
morphosis, the German word Verwandlung, which appears even
more frequently. However, in the literature on Marx this strong
morphological imprint on Marx’s writings seems to have gone
largely unrecognized.76 While the most relevant readings, such
as Hans-Georg Backhaus’s monograph Dialektik der Wertform,
agree on the insufficiency of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s
teleological and abstract model of the dialectic in understanding

74 Without any direct reference to Goethe, this morphological paradigm can

be found in Roland Barthes’s concept of “punctum,” or more recently in Giorgio
Agamben’s theory of “signatures,”—of which the latter encompasses a hidden
concrete sign within a phenomenon.
75 Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 366.
76 There is no mention of a possible source for Marx’s notion of “metamor-
phosis” in recent studies, such as Tino Heim, Metamorphosen des Kapitals.
Kapitalistische Vergesellschaftung und Perspektiven einer kritischen Sozialwis-
senschaft nach Marx, Foucault und Bordieu, Sozialtheorie (Bielefeld: transcript
Verlag, 2013), or Kōhei Saitō, Natur gegen Kapital. Marx’ Ökologie in seiner unvol-
lendeten Kritik des Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016). Research
has been done on the inspiration Marx drew from Goethe’s Faust, focusing pri-
marily on intertextual links.

231
Metamorphosis of Values

the concrete procedures of Marx’s critique of capitalism, no clear

consensus exists on an alternative to this persistent ­reference.77
Another discrete link can shed light on the morphological
trace in Marx’s Capital: Hegel’s own fascination with Goethe’s
concept of the Urphänomen. Hegel describes Goethe’s Meta-
morphosis of Plants in detail and underlines, in relation to his
theory of colors, the importance of the Urphänomen in his Ency-
clopedia of Philosophical Sciences, which in all likelihood Marx
read.78 More interestingly, even prior to the publication of the
Encyclopedia, the exchange between Goethe and Hegel can be
traced through their correspondence, which lasted more than a
decade. On February 24, 1821, Hegel wrote to Goethe, describing
the Urphänomen as a key element in Goethe’s epistemic method:

What is simple and abstract, what you strikingly call the Urphänomen,
you place at the very beginning. You then show how the intervention of
further spheres of influence and circumstances generates the concrete
phenomena, and you regulate the whole progression so that the suc-
cession proceeds from simple conditions to the more composite, and
so that the complex now appears in full clarity through this decompo-
sition. To ferret out the Urphänomen, to free it from those further envi-
rons which are accidental to it, to apprehend as we say abstractly—this
I take to be a matter of spiritual intelligence for nature, just as I take
that course generally to be the truly scientific knowledge in this field.79

77 Beside Elmar Treptow, the most pertinent work on this subject can be
found in a recent essay by Andy Blunden, philosopher and cofounder of the
Marxist Internet Archive Collection. In the essay, he discusses the adoption
of the Goethean Urphänomen through Hegel and its migration to Marx. Andy
Blunden, “Goethe, Hegel and Marx,” Science and Society 82, no. 1 (January 2018),
pp. 11–37. I would like to thank Thomas Kuczynski for the insightful guidance
on Marx’s concept of “metamorphosis.”
78 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissen-
schaften im Grundrisse 1830. Zweiter Teil. Die Naturphilosophie. Mit mündlichen
Zusätzen, vol. 9, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 380–393;
pp. 255–268.
79 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Chris-
tiane Seiler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 698.

232
Goethe’s Gift to Hegel

As Hegel goes on to speak of his philosophical appropria-

tion of the Urphänomen, he refers metaphorically as well as con-
cretely to its qualities:

But may I now still speak to you of the special interest that an Urphä-
nomen, thus cast in relief, has for us philosophers, namely that we can
put such a preparation—with Your Excellency’s permission—directly
to philosophical use. But if we have at last worked our initially oyster-
like Absolute—whether it be grey or entirely black, suit yourself—
through towards air and light to the point that the Absolute has itself
come to desire this air and light, we now need window placements so
as to lead the Absolute fully out into the light of day.80

Initiated by the Urphänomen, the “light of day,” according

to Hegel, could produce an encounter between the “abstruse
world” of the philosopher and “the world of phenomenal
being.”81 Goethe replies to Hegel’s account of the Urphänomen
with a splendid wit, recalling the romantic Witz, which achieves
its epistemic effect through a shift of registers. Not by chance
does Goethe’s answer stick to the level of the phenomenon.
Instead of philosophically questioning the premises of Hegel’s
insistence on the Absolute, Goethe holds on to the “Gegen-
stand” and gifts Hegel two such objects: an optical prism and an
opaque stained wine glass (fig. 76), which he referred to in the
Theory of Colors. These concrete phenomena are accompanied
by a short note:

Seeing that you conduct yourself so amicably with the Urphänomen,

and that you even recognize in me an affiliation with these demonic
essences, I first take the liberty of depositing a pair of such p
­ henomena

80 Ibid., p. 699. See the analysis of the exchange between Goethe and Hegel by
Andy Blunden, “Goethe, Hegel and Marx,” pp. 2–3.
81 Ibid.

233
Metamorphosis of Values

Fig. 76: “The Urphänomen,” Goethe’s gift to Hegel on

April 13, 1821.

before the philosopher’s door, persuaded that he will treat them as

well as he has treated their brothers.82

And Goethe dedicates the wine glass in the best fashion:

“The Urphänomen very humbly begs the Absolute to give it a
cordial welcome.”83 This gesture, preceding his text on “con-
crete thinking” by precisely one year, seems to fulfill Goethe’s
famous dictum that there is nothing to search for beyond the
phenomena; “they themselves are the theory.”
Goethe thus locates knowledge within the Urphänomen.
“Even though it never crosses into the generality of a hypothesis
or law, the Urphänomen is nevertheless knowable,” Agamben
states with reference to Goethe’s morphological method; “it is
indeed in the single phenomenon the last knowable element,
its capacity to constitute itself as a paradigm.”84 And one could
add that it is precisely the phenomenon’s capacity to undergo
a metamorphosis which constitutes its crucial epistemic force.

82 Ibid., p. 693.
83 Ibid.
84 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca
D’Isanto with Kewin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), p. 30.

234
“Values resemble a dance, not a statue”

“Values resemble a dance, not a statue”85

Eisenstein’s work on Capital undertakes precisely such a pro­

ject, displaying concrete phenomena—images of the capitalist
society—on the pages of his notebooks. In these visual articula-
tions, often without precise explanation or comment, he devel-
ops a morphological undercurrent within Marx into a model of
dialectics as metamorphosis. Marx shows the dynamic quali-
ties of value metamorphosing into different value forms that
engage social, anthropological, and aesthetic orders. Eisen-
stein reveals this labile and complex economy within the sen-
suous logic of the images in order to present their active and
critical potential in a movement of singularization. Following
this morphological principle through isolating images as par-
ticular cases, Eisenstein exhibits them in their singularity and,
at the same time, makes them intelligible as a new ensemble.
In this dialectical movement, the images—revealed as actors in
the capitalist value production—perform a crucial movement
of revaluation, producing a critical surplus value.
This is how Eisenstein’s morphological explorations of
linguistic formations can be understood: random words, quo-
tations from advertisements, or elements of argot become
concrete phenomena which enter complex interrelations with
other elements, like images or historical events. For example,
the word chauvinisme, displayed in a series of press clippings

85 “La valeur ressemble à une danse, et non à une statue.” Raymond Ruyer, Phi-
losophie de la valeur (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1952). In his essay on “Virtual
Ecology and the Question of Value” Brian Massumi refers to Ruyer. Following
Nietzsche, Raymond Ruyer, Alfred North Whitehead, and Félix Guattari, Massumi
analyzes the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of value as potentiality.
Massumi’s reading of value as “quality” was a significant inspiration for my read-
ing of Eisenstein’s visual interpretation of Marx. Brian Massumi, “Virtual Ecology
and the Question of Value,” in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed.
Erich Hörl and James Burton (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017),
pp. 345–373 and Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value. A Postcapi-
talist Manifesto (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

235
Metamorphosis of Values

(plate 16), forms an associative chain with the events related to

French colonial politics and the rising antisemitism. Another
example locates different quotes from the journal UHU as con-
crete objects, undertaking a “philosophical” reading of adver-
tising (plate 30). These perfectly marginal phenomena appear
important in a refined assemblage, where linguistic economy
and the circulation of commodities reveal each other dialecti-
cally in showing capitalism’s omnipresent nature. Eisenstein’s
research serves as a reconstruction of a sensuous remainder
even in abstract terms—similarly to his interest in the history
of argot, which could offer another glimpse into the use value
of words in all their concreteness. Such “survivals” allow for an
opening of the political and social relations of the present. In
the spirit of the overdetermination that accrues from an excess
of signs, Eisenstein allows the different meanings in his con-
tinuous montage and deconstruction to vary and transform.
In this way, on the same page of the Capital notebook, right
after the advertisement for Khasana-Compact, another fact
appears, seemingly disconnected and without any mediation:
“Somewhere in the West. A factory, where it is possible to pinch
metal parts and tools. Workers are not searched. But—exit con-
trol gate—magnetic. No comment necessary.”86 The striking
ability of the capitalist system to permeate the body, a quality
given as a delicate allusion in the previous element (the “most
suitable powder”), reoccurs here in a different extreme. It no
longer represents the body’s discreet companion but an invis-
ible dispositive of its control. The proximity of these elements
allows Eisenstein, once again, to forego comment, explanation,
or even generalization. These concrete and disparate phenom-
ena attain the value of paradigmatic singularities in the very
moment they show, in a unique way, the most sophisticated
exploitation, the capitalist infiltration into the most intimate
spheres of individual life.

86 Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 35.

236
“Values resemble a dance, not a statue”

What kind of values emerge from this dismantling of capi-

talist economies in processes of revaluation? Visually unfolded
on Eisenstein’s diary pages, these processes—which will be
analyzed in the following—produce excessive values, a surplus
that must be understood as a force rather than as a norm. Eisen-
stein’s montages modify the use values of images; they alter the
meanings of words. The sensuous perceptibility of value that he
ascribed to the irritant potential of the sign in its role as an ele-
ment of montage rests on an expressive model: from this per-
spective, “the word is not sign of the act, but act” itself.87
These acts affect both the repetition and the transfor-
mation of motifs on the pages of Capital. Thus the cage that
imprisons the pasted face of the American baseball player
(plate 1), resonating with the “prisoners of capital” alongside,
returns thematically: “The Iron cage, in which the Sultan Mulay
Hafid let his adversary Bu Hamara languish before throw-
ing him to the lions”88 (plate 23). Eisenstein’s laconic, sharp-­
witted comment—“especially comfortable, since the cage is on
wheels”89—produces a sudden connection to the next page of
his notebook, which shows an excerpt from the same German
newspaper, Die Woche, featuring an architectonic cage of work-
ers’ exploitation (plate 31). The wheeled cage here appears as
the metaphoric imprisonment of two thousand “willing work-
ers,” which an American transport company keeps in reserve in
case of a strike.90 The contextual and figurative disparity of such
scattered visual elements functions to increase the contrast to
the utmost: to realize, at once, association and dissociation in
the sense of what Eisenstein refers to as the “gröbsten ­Spreizung”
[coarsest spread].91

87 Eisenstein, diary from September 24, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 78.

88 Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 161, 163.
89 Ibid.
90 Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 165.
91 Eisenstein, diary from April 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 124.

237
Metamorphosis of Values

Commodity and advertisement weave perhaps the longest

thread through Eisenstein’s Capital, creating morphological
affinities and conflicts with themes of war and capitalist exploi-
tation. One of his notebook pages presents a curiosum of “living
legs made to do Charleston jumps as a storefront ad for a stock-
ing business”92 (plate 32). The image thus captioned shows a
woman’s legs in a vitrine performing a typical Charleston step,
twisting the feet. The upper body of the woman remains hidden
by a curtain. Eisenstein’s comment to the left of the image men-
tions a “similar” phenomenon having occurred in the Soviet
Union. This case must have impressed him not only in the con-
text of his Glass House project with elements of revue and cab-
aret. He even claims to have documented the “living legs” for
inclusion in The General Line: “to be shown in parallel to the
death scene of the bull in the village. Night scenes.”93 Among
various other episodes, this scene must have been censored in
the last version of The General Line, renamed by Stalin per-
sonally as Old and New.94
On another page of Eisenstein’s notebook, one reads a kind
of “director’s note”:

Woman’s stocking full of holes and a silk one in a newspaper adver-

tisement. It starts with a jerky movement, to multiply into 50 pairs of
legs-Revue. Silk. Art. The fight for the centimeter of silk stocking. The
aesthetes are for it. The Bishops and morality are against. Mais ces pan-
tins dance on strings pulled by the silk manufacturers and the garment
peddlers who fight each other. Art. Holy art. Morality. Holy morality.95

92 Eisenstein, diary from November 25, 1927, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 28–29.

93 Ibid.
94 On the censorship of The General Line, see Annette Michelson, “Reading
Eisenstein Reading Ulysses. Montage and the Claims of Subjectivity,” pp. 64–78.
95 Eisenstein, diary from April 7, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 26, 27; “Notes
for a Film of ‘Capital’,” p. 17.

238
“Values resemble a dance, not a statue”

The sequence, which echoes Marx’s examples from the

“scene” of the market, was intended to introduce a “comic”
and “farcical” contrast to the previous part, the sequence on
Le Figaro and the war. Some days later Eisenstein reinforces
the repetition, resuming the scene in a more drastic rhythmic
structure. The final element of the chain on “a pair of silk stock-
ings” suddenly introduces a critical cesura:

In this sense one could solve A pair of silk stockings—A. p. s. S.—the
moral.  A. p. s. S.—the sale and the competition. A. p. s. S.—Indian
women are forced to carry silk cocoons in their armpits.96

Frenetic dance and rhythmic repetition traverse the revues,

the fetish of commodities, and the acceleration of indus-
trial production. Eisenstein turns them into a kind of critical
method: a morphology in the age of technical reproducibility.
“A series,” Eisenstein writes, “gives us a dialectical possibility
to produce, again and again, a comparison.”97
As such, the repetitions place the disparate elements into
a rhythm, thereby producing a structure—a critical structure
that raises conflicts and breaks through to the level of thought.
In this way the series produces critical difference within rep-
etition. The Capital project’s morphological chains create an
excess value, an intensity in the sense of a singular experience:
a metamorphosis. The montage, as an operator of these asso-
ciative arrangements, shakes things up and makes them dance.
This is the cut that takes the elements out of their context, that
is, their usual conditions.
Repetition and animation, repetition and reproduction,
repetition and suggestion, repetition and reflection: all are
filmic elements of a process of association. What is under con-
sideration here is not a film but a “dancing” variation on its

96 Eisenstein, diary from April 11, 1928, RGALI 1923-2-1107, pp. 177–178.

97 Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, in RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 177.

239
Metamorphosis of Values

themes. In Eisenstein’s montage, sequences of elements—of

capitalism’s industry and the commodity’s fetish—are sub-
jected to a movement of revaluation. In this process Marx’s
theory of value returns as a movement of perpetual singulariza-
tion. For Marx, too, the intensification of conditions constitutes
an excess of thought. He conceives of this critical impulse in
the categories of dance to show intensity as a critical principle
of estrangement. In his Introduction to A Contribution to the
­Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he states:

The actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it con-

sciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by
publicizing it. Every sphere of German society must be shown as the
partie honteuse of German society: these petrified relations must be
forced to dance by singing their own tune to them!98

Following the principle of this rhythmic intensification,

Eisenstein takes up Marx’s critical project by concretizing the
idea of the animation of political consciousness through the
dance of “petrified relations” in the Capital project. In this
way Eisenstein also realizes a dance of values in the sense in
which Marx’s contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, formulates
it in terms of a new theory of cognition. In Thus Spake Zara-
thustra and The Gay Science Nietzsche describes dance as an
act of expenditure, a notion crucially discussed in Bataille’s
­anthropological economy. This act lays claim to all affects in
order to create new values: the gods of fertility. Nietzsche’s
dance is Dionysian; it demands a stepping outside of oneself—
ecstasy.

98 Karl Marx, “Introduction. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philos-

ophy of Law”, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works 1843–44, by Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart; New York: International
Publishers; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 178.

240
“Values resemble a dance, not a statue”

Fig. 77: Eisenstein, draft for a book cover, from the series Ex-stasis, Mexico,
March 10, 1932, RGALI, 1923-2-1304.

The dancing constellations cross Eisenstein’s Capital notes

in manifold ways. Some appear without commentary, purely as
visual traces. In this way the motifs of reproduction, exhibition,
and commodity fetishism return in a press excerpt from Janu-
ary 31, 1928, in which one sees “Goliath ears. A worktable with

241
Metamorphosis of Values

artificial ears for demonstration purposes in universities.”99 The

series of exposed giant ears (plate 35) communicates with Eisen-
stein’s ironic statement, which references the final sequence of
October, in which monarchy objects are destroyed in the occu-
pied Winter Palace: “Nobody thought to define my ‘manner’ of
directing—as a wholesale director. For all the wholesale I have
a ‘grandiose’ craving. Orders. Eggs. Dishes of the Winter Palace.
Browning Colts.”100
One month later Eisenstein assembled a collage that shows
Vera Reynolds’s ear in close-up (plate 36), adorned with an “ear
clasp of pliable platinum set with diamonds.”101 On this page
the capitalist world of reproduction and duplication returns in
the fragmentation of particulars, transformed once again into
concrete singularities. As in the case of the “living legs” in the
display window, body parts play the main role. Now Eisenstein
foregrounds Reynolds’s ear with red ink.
It is no secret that advertising in journals, one of contem-
porary capitalism’s core technologies, similarly worked with
close-ups and the fetishization of details. Keeping this ­parallel
in mind, one can see that Eisenstein’s montages effect an imma-
nent subversion of these techniques: they appeal to objects’
inner qualities in order to bring them to oscillation and in this
way ruin their accustomed similarities. Through such an alien-
ation and de-automatization of objects, this form of montage
can subject things to a fundamental revaluation.

99 Eisenstein, diary from January 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 64–65.

100 Ibid.
101 Eisenstein, diary from February 24, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 100.

242
Cinema “Beyond the Stars”

Cinema “Beyond the Stars”

In Joyce’s Ulysses there is a remarkable chapter of this kind, written

in the manner of a scholastic catechism. Questions are asked and
answers given. The subject of the questions is how to light a Bunsen
burner. The answers, however, are meta­physical.102

The immanent connection of theoretical approaches with

aesthetic and sensuous as well as formal elements, all of which
undergo a continuous process of transformation within the
Capital project, suggests a circular structure. Yet Eisenstein did
not interconnect these heterogeneous elements—pieces of a
fragmented and destabilized world—in order to construct any
“unitary thing,” but rather to present them as the visual unfold-
ing of “nonfigurative chapters” or “miniatures.” The cycle,
within which the model of the sphere announces itself, would
aspire to a dynamic plane beyond hierarchy:

The miniature as such is surely the form with which we ally ourselves.
In the place of a unitary object—a fan of cyclical miniatures. Capital in
its six (five) parts is, strictly speaking, conceived in 5–6 discrete pieces
that are cyclically encompassed by one theme and one artificial frame
and brought into a ring-shaped construction. A sort of Boccaccio! Or
Ulysses, from Joyce!103

In Eisenstein’s Capital, the cycle would correspond to both

a temporal category as well as to a form of narration—a spatial
visualization, a “ring-shaped construction.” Although Capital
was never filmed, this model lived on in a new medium. Starting
in 1928, Eisenstein began to imagine a nonlinear theoretical
work: a spherical book without beginning or end. This vision-
ary project may announce itself here, in the construction of a

102 Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of ‘Capital’,” p. 7.

103 Eisenstein, diary from April 22, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, pp. 66–67.

243
Metamorphosis of Values

discursive milieu that challenges not only the borders between

disciplines but the borders between elements that share terri-
tory. This idea resonates with Eisenstein’s unfinished theory
project, Metod, which he worked on from 1932 until his death
in 1948. Originating in Capital, one can understand why Metod
was dedicated to “sensuous” perception in art—opening an
anthropological horizon beyond names or stylistic tendencies
and traversing history from cave painting to cinema. This corre-
spondence appears in 1928 precisely as the question of the cycle
shifts from Capital to a book project: “to construct the book
(the volumes) analogically to the formulation of Capital.”104 The
way from sensuous perception, “statistics,” and associations to
philosophical conclusions implies a heuristic that becomes
possible within a cycle in which neither beginning nor end, nei-
ther static hierarchies nor standstill exist.
In this context the Capital project reveals a further charac-
teristic of the dynamic sphere. Eisenstein’s “spherical coordi-
nate system,” described in September 1928, originated from
“the necessity of recording something so difficult” as expres-
sive bodily motion.105 He therefore developed it into a notation
system for physical expression.106 How the cyclical structure, as
presented in the projects for both Capital and Metod, relates
to Eisenstein’s ideas about the recording of bodily movements
remains an open question. One of the pages from Capital, titled
“System of recording of gestural and mimic pairs (1928),” shows
a complex chart and a drawing of a human figure, whose move-
ments (“legs,” “head,” “torso”) Eisenstein tries to correlate on
different charts (plate 37). These attempts are meant to “indi-
cate the ‘relation’ of mise-en-scène and gesture,” in a way that
the “mise-en-scène” appears as a “gesture splashed on the sur-
face,” while the “gesture” becomes visible as a “spatial graphic,

104 Eisenstein, diary from September 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 142.

105 Ibid.
106 Sergei Eisenstein, diary, undated, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-229, p. 4.

244
Cinema “Beyond the Stars”

laced along the body.”107 The sphere—also recognized within

the rotation of limbs—suddenly gave Eisenstein the vision of a
spherical book: “make it into a book, as a logical discovery!”108
For Eisenstein, this theoretical coincidence is the “ecstasy of
Zarathustra.” As he writes further on, “Zarathustra dances, now
I can dance.”109
For Eisenstein, bodily movement and critical thought were
never opposed. He conceives a graphic line as “a trace” left after
a movement that affects thought. The thought, in turn, imprints
itself onto forms, images, and words. Eisenstein’s first “sceno-
metrical” experiments date back to 1923, when he worked as
a theater director at Vsevolod Meyerhold’s studio for biome-
chanics. Here he developed a notation system that allowed for
recording actors’ bodily movements in space and time. Later,
from June to October 1928, having discovered Rudolf von
Laban’s dance-movement notations in Choreographie (fig. 78),
he made a series of notations for tracing cinematographic
movements entitled “Principles of Dance Notation and Move-
ment Expression.”110
In an entry in his Capital notebook made the same day as
the comment on Laban’s book, he quotes Victor Shklovsky’s
remark calling Eisenstein a “producer of time and author of
coordinates.”111 Eisenstein interpreted this as a “prophecy”
regarding his graphic inventions, especially the one he titled
“Graphic Recording System of Each Spatial and Mimic Move-
ment in Time According to the Cartesian Rectangular Coordi-
nate System and Eisenstein’s Spherical Coordinates,” a series

107 Eisenstein, diary from September 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 95.

108 Ibid. I want to thank Patrick Riechert for his help in translating this page
and his inspiring ideas concerning Eisenstein’s “spherical book.”
109 Eisenstein associates writing itself with “Zarathustra’s Ecstasy.” Eisen-
stein, diary from September 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 141.
110 The diary entry with the comment on Rudolf von Laban’s Choreographie
(1926) dates to September 5, 1928. Eisenstein, Drafts on “Principles of Dance
Notation and Movement Expression,” RGALI, 1923-2-972, pp. 1–53.
111 Eisenstein, diary from September 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 92.

245
Metamorphosis of Values

Fig. 78: Icosahedron. Geometric

Representation of Three-ring-
situations Scheme, in Rudolf von
Laban, Choreographie (1926).

of notes dating from the same year.112 The sphere appears now
as a potential space for bodily movement, a space that orients
it from within, in accordance with the coordinates’ axes. Com-
menting on the drafts for the notation of the “vertical” and
“horizontal” locomotion within the sphere, Eisenstein sud-
denly discovered that its “roots” rely on the “rotation axis” and
enable the movement of the limbs.113 The sphere as an epis-
temic model and a root of bodily movement provided Eisen-
stein with an image of movement, one capable of localization
and metamorphosis, rotation and vertiginous displacement of
any linear perspective.

112 Sergei Eisenstein, “K teorii virazitel’nosti” (On theory of expression),

undated, 1928, RGALI 1923-2-229, p. 1.
113 Eisenstein, diary from September 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 93.

246
Cinema “Beyond the Stars”

A new circle appears in the Capital journal’s last pages.

This one is part of a series, elements of which consist of a star-
watching scene taken from the journal UHU (plate 38), followed
by an “archaic astrological-astronomical map” from the year
1609 (plate 39).114 A photograph of a bull breaks the spheri-
cal star chart’s bestiary. This rough incision references Eisen-
stein’s film The General Line, which he had already com-
mented on in the preceding pages. The collage breaks through
both the cosmic order of astral constellations and the register
of its possible meanings. The sensuous fragment set into the
image deforms the scale of the map of the sky and challenges
its legibility: “the entire sky rotates! Comets!!!”115 Eisenstein
adds, “The stars arrange themselves into the image of the bull
and walk as a bull across the rotating celestial sphere!” One can
read here an echo of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s anthropological “law
of participation.”116 Eisenstein analyzed this law in Metod as a
theoretical framework that describes a form-immanent process
which inverts causal relationships through a potency both con-
crete and mystical that he attributes to the mode of “sensuous
thinking.”
However, this montage also refers to a poetic and politi-
cal position; it effects a return of myth in the “age of techno-
logical reproducibility” in order to subject things to a dynamic
revaluation. The fragmentation of montage, which Eisenstein
also understood as the “Osiris-Method” of an archaic division

114 Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 191–
193. Eisenstein’s comment on the contemplative couple in the picture refers to
The General Line’s heroine, Marfa Lapkina (“Marthe”): “Notre boeuf passera
through the firmament chercher s’il n’y a pas entre les âstres un ‘boeuf’. Alors le
faira voler envers Marthe! Toute le système céleste tourne! Comètes!!!” [“Our
bull will pass through the firmament. Searching for a ‘bull’ among the stars. So
let him fly to Marthe! The entire Celestial System turns! Comets!!!”]
115 Ibid., p. 189.
116 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive (Paris: Flammarion, 2010),
p. 119–120.

247
Metamorphosis of Values

and animation, produces new values from that conflict.117 The

photograph of the bull comes from a dream sequence in The
General Line; the dream shows the farmer Marfa Lapkina liv-
ing a new life on a Kolkhoz. A montage of heterogeneous times:
the bull of the old star chart meets that of the new Soviet com-
mand economy. The dialectical images are like the “constel-
lation” Benjamin describes as the medium of awakening, as
the “breach” that, in Eisenstein’s montage, literally emerges
from the material breach in the celestial sphere. However, the
images also suggest Aby Warburg’s “constellations,” in which
the polarities between astronomy and astrology, between magic
and logic, embody themselves in a “method” of the legibility
[Lesbarkeit] of the world.118
Eisenstein’s short text “Beyond the Stars,” which ascribes
its own meaning to this montage, stands in direct relation to
these currents.119 This ironically promotional text recommends
releasing Battleship Potemkin in America, describing it as a
“film without stars.” “The absence of ‘stars’ was a reason why
attention within this work turned to countless cinematographic
problems that ordinarily, under the conditions of the protago-
nists’ ‘starlight’ in other productions, invariably remain in the
shadows.”120 That these “cinematographic problems” need to
be considered in terms of their political consequences—as
problems of aesthetic figuration of political subjects—was
something Sergei Tret’iakov not only made the theme of his
texts on The General Line and Soviet montage technique,
but incorporated into the praxis of a factography, which, in pre-

117 See Elena Vogman, “Die Osiris-Methode.  Dialektik der Formen im Werk
Sergej Eisensteins” in Erscheinen – Zur Praxis des Präsentativen, ed. Mira
­Fliescher, Fabian Goppelsröder, and Dieter Mersch, Sichtbarkeiten 1 (Zurich:
diaphanes, 2013), pp. 39–67.
118 Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Gertrud Bing (Leipzig: T
­ eub­­-
ner Verlag, 1932), p. 506.
119 Eisenstein, Metod, ed. Kleiman, vol. 1, p. 33.
120 Ibid.

248
Cinema “Beyond the Stars”

senting facts, takes a stance towards reality.121 Subsequent to

the Capital project, Eisenstein’s Metod made this relationship
between fact and its presentability into the Grund­problem, the
fundamental problem of an anthropology of the political that
steps beyond the ideology of the center in favor of an aesthetic
of singularities, an eccentric “aesthetic beyond the beautiful.”122

121 Sergei Tret’iakov, Kinematografičeskoe nasledie: Stat’i, očerki, steno-

grammy, vystuplenija, doklady, scenarii [Cinematographic inheritance: Essays,
drafts, shorthand notes, reports, lectures, scripts] (Saint Petersburg: Nestor
Istoria, 2010).
122 Eisenstein, Metod, ed. Kleiman, vol. 1, p. 6.

249
 You know this joke, madam? You also know |Back cover|
the clenching motion of the hands of those
WHAT IS to whom it is addressed? It works again and
again and always looks almost the same.
“COMPACT”?
Up to here it is “philosophy”
but after, advertising
From where it is taken:
But there is another compact. Also clenched
All clips on page and firm, but tiny and fine—Khasana-Compact
24 and 25 are taken from Pressed into a solid tablet, lying in delicate jars,
Khasana-Compact is the most suitable powder
for use outside the home. No spilling, no dusting
UHU of clothes, inconspicuous application! Khasana-
Issue 7. Compact powder should not be missing
April from any purse!

1928

Somewhere in the West. A factory where

it is possible to pinch metal parts and tools.
Workers are not searched.
But—exit control gate—magnetic.
No comment necessary

Max read somewhere.

will include in Capital

“… as the following indicators of the culture

of the Voronezh province is, for example
Plate 30: Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 35–39.
 How American transit companies protect themselves
against the risk of strike. Mass quarters for two thou-
The Week sand persons willing to work, who are to maintain the no 13, March 31, 1928
most necessary traffic in the case of an impending
strike of the New York subway companies.

§ 57.
Plate 31: Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 164–167.
A. Piotrovsky in Life of the Arts no 47 November 22, 1927

About the cinematification of the theater, and the influence of

my associative technique of construction on Meyerhold (Revizor).
This method is older than my work in cinema.

November 25, 1927

Something similar
was arranged on
our end at Stolesh-
nikov [Lane].
However only for
a couple of days.

It was banned
by the unions.

But quite long enough to get into The Gen- Living legs made to do
eral Line in the scene “Men in the City,” Charleston jumps as a store-
edited to be shown in parallel to the death front ad for a stocking busi-
ness.
scene of the bull in the village. Night scenes.

Remarkable in James Joyce—the spinning out of association

almost and sometimes completely
Plate 32: Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, pp. 28–29.
[...] resolutions, as well as for Harry Peel, the man and
the restaurant (if not more!—I told the head of the
Film Department of Rabochaia Gazeta—Blumkin)

Great
idea for
the cover
of a purely
theoretical
work.
For example
on montage.

(From trash
brought 1926
from a trip
to Berlin)
Plate 33: Eisenstein, diary from February 22, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 88–89.
 Biography

I have no past.
About the future, I cannot say much.

1. Languages
2. Abroad
3. Sciences
4. In 5 years, 1 film

and s.o. January 1, 1928

A horse was brought on an

airplane from Paris to London
Plate 34: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 13.
 Yesterday.
Nobody thought
to define my
“manner”
of directing—
as a wholesale
director. For all
the wholesale
I have a
“grandiose”
craving.

Orders. Eggs.
Crowd scenes.
Dishes of the
Winter Palace.

Goliath ears. A worktable with artificial ears for Browning Colts.

demonstration purposes in universities.
etc. etc. etc

February 2, 1928. “Engraved glasses fell from the table” ...

Today’s “Lil’ bricks.” Four to five calls at Music Hall. Write in the
article about “humps.” Where, you know! All the more, as also dishes.

February 3, 1928. In Piscator’s article. On the isolation of Potemkin

from the era of the year 1905—to indicate that Dieu soit loué
[God be praised] P. begins to read Berdnikov and already expresses
Plate 35: Eisenstein, diary from January 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 64–65.
It was supposed to be a pendant to a private bailiff,
who expressed congratulations to Rodzianko.
Connected to this is the episode with the countess,
playing billiards with the sailor guard. To illustrate
the non-class situation of the February event.

Krishinsky called
On Sunday or Tuesday
a long article by Vera Reynolds wears
something brand new, an
Shvedchikov appears ear clasp of pliable platinum
set with diamonds.

BRATIANU WAS BROUGHT WAY BY OX

in Pravda.
To hold on
to—for the
answer.
“Instruction of the
C[entral] C[ommittee]” on this
occasion—to cover. To cover with
In Romania, where after King Ferdinand obscenities—of course in literary form.
there remained the figurehead queen
Maria and the child king Michael, the The idea of a particular department
prime minister wields unrestricted finds a positive response there.
power …
On November 24, 1927, the de facto ruler
of the country died in Romania—Prime
Minister Bratianu and his cousin Vintla
Bratianu were appointed in his place.
Bratianu is dead—long live Bratianu!
In the pictures: the funeral of Bratianu,
whose coffin, according to the old
Romanian custom, is drawn by oxen.
Plate 36: Eisenstein, diary from February 24, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 100–103.
(The vertical) (The horizontal)

here it is not important to System of the recording of gestural

depict it (it is included in and mimic pairs (1928)
special material)

It’s brilliant in the system

torso

See Lautrec, Miss Cissy Loftus

of graphs that they

ad
he
graphically indicate the
“relation” of mise-en-
scène
and gesture.
axis
Mise-en-scène is a gesture
splashed on the surface. legs
And vice versa: the gesture
is a spatial graphic, laced
along the body. I. torso and head up to 45°
The task

II. head in place, torso up to 90°

And here the layout plane III. head comes to 60°, torso in place
0000 becomes the vertical
axis of rotation 00: and the head path (1–2)—A1–A2
parallels of the time ladder torso path (1–3)—B1–B2
“that follow it” go into
the system of concentric
circles (make it into a
book,
a logical discovery!)
Plate 37: Eisenstein, diary from September 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 95.
 through the firmament. Searching for a “bull” among the stars. So let him fly to Marthe!
Searching for a boot for the drawing (t.o.p.)—found this in UHU. Our bull will pass
THERE is THE bull!
(The stars arrange
themselves into the
image of the bull and walk
AS A BULL ACROSS

The entire Celestial System turns! Comets!!!

THE ROTATING
CELESTIAL
SPHERE!

… this big star that you see there is sixty-six trillion kilometers away …

UHU: January 1928, no 4. “Race between Homer and Lexicon,”

O. Henry. Z. O. Linnekogel.
Plate 38: Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 189–190.
 ANCIENT ASTROLOGICAL-A stronomical map
of the sky.
reproduced from the manuscript Catalogus veteres affixarum longitudines Conferens
from 1609.

From the books:

N. Morozov
Revelation in
Thunderstorm
and Tempest.

History of the
Apocalypses
Origin.
Moscow 1907.
Ed. Sabin.

NB. bought
yesterday!
LOOK
!!
É RI!
CH We will give
TAURUS
the chance
concentrically,
rushing over
the firmament
and afterwards
decending
from the sky
in spirals.

Northern Hemisphere

The figures are here in reverse from the contemporary

celestial sphere and tried to look at …
Plate 39: Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 191–193.
List of Illustrations

Sources directly related to Eisenstein’s Capital project are preserved in the

Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI, Moscow). The mate-
rials used for the present publication are indexed under the following
archive numbers:

Sergei Eisenstein, diary from October 12, 1927 to March 31, 1928. RGALI,
1923-2-1105
Sergei Eisenstein, diary from March 31 to April 11, 1928. RGALI, 1923-2-
1107
Sergei Eisenstein, diary from April 12 to September 21, 1928. RGALI, 1923-
2-1108
Grigorii Aleksandrov, Notes on Capital. RGALI, 1923-2-1116
Sergei Eisenstein, diary, undated. RGALI, 1923-2-229.

Figures

Fig. 1–4: Marfa Lapkina in Eisenstein’s The General Line, 1928.

Fig. 5: Honoré Daumier, Le Ventre législatif. Aspects des bancs ministériels
de la chambre improstituée, 1834. Archive of the Bibliothèque natio-
nale de France.
Fig. 6–17: Dismantling of the statue of Alexander III in October, 1928.
Fig. 18–29: “Proletarian, learn to use your rifle!” in October, 1928.
Fig. 30–41: “Savage Division” in October, 1928.
Fig. 42–53: Sequence of the gods in October, 1928.
Fig. 54–65: Biomechanical exercises in Strike, 1924.
Fig. 66–67: Vasily Nikandrov playing the role of Lenin in October, 1928.
Fig. 68–69: Ladies killing of a Bolshevik with their umbrellas in O
­ ctober,
1928.
Fig. 70–71: Frame enlargements from Eisenstein’s The General Line, in
Documents 4 (1930).
Fig. 72: Eisenstein, diary from January 4, 1930, RGALI, 1923-2-1116, p. 2.

271
List of Illustrations

Fig. 73–74: “Archontes with duck heads” and “God with the legs of a man,
the body of a serpent, and the head of a cock (Cabinet des Médailles)”
in Georges Bataille, “Le bas materialisme et la gnose,” Documents 2
(1930).
Fig. 75: Grandville, Plantes marines, une reproduction exacte des dentelles,
brosses, pompons, toupets et gazons, 1844. Engraving from the series
Un après-midi au jardin des plantes.
Fig. 76: “The Urphänomen,” opaque stained wine glass in F. von Lommel,
“Eine optische Reliquie von Goethe,” Deutsche Revue 2 (1895) p. 48.
Fig. 77: Eisenstein, draft for a book cover, from the series Ex-stasis, March
10, 1932, crayon and ink on paper, RGALI, 1923-2-1304.
Fig. 78: Icosahedron. Geometric Representation of Three-ring-situations
Scheme, in Rudolf von Laban, Choreographie (1926).

Plates

Plate 1: Eisenstein, diary from February 23, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 91.
Plate 2: Eisenstein, diary from January 11, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 47–48.
Plate 3: Eisenstein, diary, from March 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 112–
114.
Plate 4:Eisenstein, diary from March 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 98–99.
Plate 5: Eisenstein, diary from October 12, 1927, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, pp. 1–2.
Plate 6: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 1.
Plate 7: Eisenstein, diary from January 2, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 40.
Plate 8: Eisenstein, diary from January 2 to 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
p. 41.
Plate 9: Eisenstein, diary from January 16, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105, p. 56.
Plate 10: Eisenstein, “Girls pour le numéro de ‘Pierrot’,” draft for The Glass
House, diary from June 23, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1109, pp. 77–78.
Plate 11: Eisenstein, “Girls pour le numéro de ‘Pierrot’,” draft for The Glass
House, diary from June 23, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1109, p. 79.
Plate 12: Eisenstein, drawing for The Glass House, RGALI, 1923-2-162, p. 36.

272
List of Illustrations

Plate 13: Eisenstein, drawing for The Glass House, RGALI, 1923-2-162,
p. 42ob.
Plate 14: Eisenstein, diary from April 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, pp. 1–3.
Plate 15: Eisenstein, diary from March 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107,
pp. 2–3.
Plate 16: Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, p. 28-29.
Plate 17: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, pp. 6–7.
Plate 18: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 19.
Plate 19: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, pp. 24–25.
Plate 20: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, pp. 24–25.
Plate 21:
Eisenstein, diary from March 6, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
p. 115–116.
Plate 22: Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 194–202.
Plate 23:
Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107,
pp. 162–163.
Plate 24: Eisenstein, diary from April 4, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 57, 62.
Plate 25: Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 148–
150.
Plate 26: Eisenstein, diary from April 28, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108, p. 43.
Plate 27: Eisenstein, diary from April 28, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 44–54.
Plate 28: Eisenstein, diary from September 12, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 175–176.
Plate 29: Eisenstein, diary from January 11, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 49–52.
Plate 30: Eisenstein, diary from April 3, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 35–39.
Plate 31:
Eisenstein, diary from April 8, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107,
pp. 164–167.
Plate 32: Eisenstein, diary from April 2, 1928, RGALI, 1123-2-1107, pp. 28–29.
Plate 33: Eisenstein, diary from February 22, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 88–89.
Plate 34: Aleksandrov, notebook on Capital, RGALI, 1923-2-1916, p. 13.
Plate 35: Eisenstein, diary from January 31, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 64–65.

273
List of Illustrations

Plate 36: Eisenstein, diary from February 24, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1105,
pp. 100–103.
Plate 37: Eisenstein, diary from September 5, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
p. 95.
Plate 38: Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 189–190.
Plate 39: Eisenstein, diary from September 13, 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1108,
pp. 191–193.

274
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Acknowledgments

The idea for this book emerged in 2015, in Moscow, while I

was finalizing my doctoral research on Eisenstein’s theory
project Method, which was supported by the Cluster of Excel-
lence “Languages of Emotion” at the Free University of Berlin.
Between 2016 and 2019, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the DFG
project “Rhythm and Projection. Thinking Possibility in the
Soviet Avant-garde” at the Free University, which offered a pro-
lific context for conceptualizing and writing my book, enabling
further archival research in Moscow, and providing material
assistance for the transcription and translation of the sources.
My deepest gratitude goes to the director of the DFG project,
Professor Georg Witte, who granted my work the highest atten-
tion and trust. I also want to thank the Russian State Archive for
Literature and Art for allowing me to use high resolution cop-
ies of Eisenstein’s diaries. Furthermore, extensive support for
this publication was provided by the Centre for Arts and Cul-
tural Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts and especially
by Professor Dieter Mersch, who co-supervised my dissertation,
published by diaphanes in 2018 within the same series, “Think
Art.” In winter 2018, following Ada Ackerman’s invitation, I
was a guest professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris,
where I had the opportunity of presenting my work in progress,
and benefiting from my audience’s stimulating comments and
suggestions.
This study would not have been possible without the immea-
surable help of Malte Fabian Rauch and Patrick Urs Riechert,
which ranged from discussing the chapters’ thematic and
conceptual frameworks to advising on stylistic and linguistic
details and proofreading. My thanks also go to the book artist
and designer Uliana Bychenkova, who developed the layout for
the plates that display selected pages from Eisenstein’s diaries,
as well as to Maria Mushtrieva, Julia Portnowa and Patrick Urs

285
Acknowledgments

Riechert, who assisted me with their transcription and transla-

tion.
Furthermore, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to
the colleagues and friends who provided various contexts—from
conferences and workshops to exhibitions and anthologies—
in which I could present parts of this book. In particular I would
like to thank Joseph Albernaz, Aleksei Artamonov, Michael
Bies and Elisabetta Mengaldo, Mireille Brangé and Jean-Louis
Jeanelle, Georges Didi-Huberman, Soso Dumbadze, Patrick
Eiden-Offe, Noam Elcott and Byron Hamann, Till Gathmann,
Vanessa Oliveira, Benedikt Reichenbach, Marie Rebecchi,
Romana Schmalisch, Robert Schlicht, and ­Antonio Somaini. I
would also like to thank Maximilian Gilleßen, ­Ekaterina Tewes,
and Mathias Schönher for their critical reading and important
advice at different stages of this project.

286