Husserl and the Cubists on a Thing in Space

References

• Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures 1907. trans. by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997. From now on referred to as T+S in the text.
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• Jean-Luc Petit, “Constitution by Movement“, in: Jean Petitot & others, eds. Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) p.226.
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• Quoted in Edwin Mullins, Braque (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968) pp.15–16.
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• Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art. Rev. edn. (New York: Abrams, 1976) p.14.
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• The opening-out of “a new space” in the contemporary novel has been addressed in several recent studies; see for example, Joseph Franks, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in his The Widening Gyre (Indiana University Press, 1968); Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (NY: New York University Press, 1971); and Darren Tofts, “Joyce, Duchamp and the Fourth Dimension”, in his Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology (Sydney: G & B Press, 2000).
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• Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, p. 43; on the modernist novel, see also Christopher Butler, “Language and Innovation”, in Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
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• For more on space, time and object in Pirandello and Gide's works, see esp. Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Life (NY: Random House, 1960) pp.289–311.
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• For the last three quotations: Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) pp.50–51; see also Christopher Butler, “Schoenberg and Atonality”, in Early Modernism.
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• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) p.25; on the contemporary political situation, see David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
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• Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p.301.
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• H. Minkowski, “Space and Time“, in H. A. Lorentz & others, The Principle of Relativity. Trans. by W. Perret & G. B. Jeffrey (London: Methuen, 1923) p.75.
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• It is standard in English translations of Husserl's work to distinguish the actual Object (German Objekt) from the intentional ‘object’ (German Gegenstand).
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• Samuel Todes speaks of the perceptual world as a field of fields-within-fields, Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 2001) pp.114–17.
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• See also Elizabeth Ströker, Investigations in the Philosophy of Space, trans. by Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp.29–30, 75–82; Ströker's groundbreaking work (far too little valued in current research) was completed in 1964, almost ten years before the first publication of the German text of Husserl's lectures in 1973. The inner-spatial sense of nearness and remoteness also underlies Husserl's generative investigations of home-world and alien-world as Steinbock has persuasively argued, Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
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• For Husserl's later view (1912–25) on the theme of the lived body, see Edmund Husserl, Ideas Second Book, trans. by Richard Rojcewicz & André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp.60–64, 154–60.
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• For detailed analysis of these pairs’ operations, see Ströker, Investigations, pp. 62–71; on space and time as the correlates of the active subject's body, see Todes Body and World pp.48–52.
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• There are now several good summaries of these central texts; see, for example, Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern & Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserl's Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp.130–40; Kevin Mulligan in Barry Smith & D. W. Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.198–206; Jean-Luc Petit, “Constitution by Movement”, pp.220–30; and Bernard Pachoud, “The Teleological Dimension of Perceptual and Motor Intentionality”, in: Petitot et al, op. cit., pp.196–219.
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• Jean Petitot, “Morphological Eidetics“ in: Petitot, Naturalizing Phenomenology, pp.358, 361.
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• T+S pp.149–70, 173–88, 192–8; in summary see Bernet, Kern & Marbach, An Introduction, pp.135–38; Drummond, “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space”, pp.23–32; Petitot offers formalised statements of these principles, “Morphological Eidetics”, pp.353–63.
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• Husserl argued that the geometrical space of these movements is Reimannian topological space, T+S pp.270–5, 339–41; on this theme see also Ströker Investigations, pp.285–95. For the Cubists’ space in relation to non-Euclidean geometry see esp. L. D. Henderson, “A New Facet of Cubism: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry” in Art Quarterly 34 (1971), pp.410–33; Drummond thinks that Husserl's resort to non-Euclidean space is a mediated thesis; “such mathematical ascriptions in the philosophy and psychology of the immediate and ordinary experiences of space easily raise false issues”, John Drummond, “Objects’ Optimal Appearances and the Immediate Awareness of Space in Vision”, in Man and World 16 (1983), p.204, note 13; see also his earlier paper, “On Seeing a Material Thing in Space”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 40 (1979), pp.19–32.
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• Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century. Art, p.47; see also p.136.
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• John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 3rd Ed, (London: Faber & Faber, 1988) p.84.
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• Jean Petitot, op. cit., p.349.
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• Petitot, op. cit., p.353.
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• On the Cubists’ influence on architecture see esp. the essays by Eve Blau, Nancy Troy, and David Cottington in Eve Blau & Nancy Troy, eds. Architecture and Cubism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); on its impact on the theatre see J. Garrett Glover, The Cubist Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1983); in relation to the cinema, see Standish Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (NY: New York University Press, 1975); and in relation to fashion see Richard Martin, Cubism and Fashion (NY: Harry Abrams, 1998).
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• Golding, Cubism: A History, p.17.
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• Douglas Cooper prefers to include Fernand Leger in this elite group, see: The Esssential Cubism 1907–1920 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1983).
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• Golding, Cubism: A History, pp.73–80.
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• On this painting's significance, see Golding, Cubism: A History pp.47–62; Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century. Art, pp.15–30; John Richardson, A Life of Picasso Volume II: 1907–17. (NY: Random House, 1996), pp.11–27; and Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. by Olivia Emmet (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), pp.65–78.
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• Golding, Cubism: A History, pp.57–8; see Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century. Art, p.25.
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• Rosenblum, op. cit. p.15.
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• Golding, op. cit. p.62.
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• Daix, op. cit. p.102.
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• Golding, op. cit. p.70.
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• Quoted in ibid p.64.
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• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind“, in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
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• Quoted in Golding, op. cit. p.33.
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• ibid pp.101–2.
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• Apollinaire, of course, did not have access to the phenomenological notions of intention, constitution, horizon, and so forth. In fact, he rewrote this paragraph three times. It is curious to note the subtle but telling shift in emphasis between the first and the second version: “By representing reality as it is conceived, the artist can produce a three-dimensional effect…foreshortening or perspective…would distort the quality of the form as it is conceived.” In contrast the later version says: “by representing conceived reality, the artist can in fact produce the illusion of three-dimensional…. foreshortening or perspective…would distort the quality of the form conceived.” Guillaume Apollinaire, Essays and Reviews 1902–1918. Ed.by L. C. Breunig, Trans. by Susan Suleiman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), pp.256, 261. The distinction between the object as it is intended and the object intended is important to Husserl's analysis of the constitution of objective meaning.
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• Apollinaire, op. cit., pp.256, 260–1, 268–9.
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• See Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, p.79.
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• Quoted in Golding, Cubism A History, p.112
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• ibid, p. 115; see Rosenblum op. cit. pp.71–2.
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• Quoted in Golding, Cubism: A History, p.110.
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• Jean-Luc Petit, “Constitution by Movement“, p.227.
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• Rosenblum op. cit. pp.13–14.
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• Ibid., p.14.
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• Quoted in Mullins, Braque, p.21.
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• Rosenblum, op. cit., p.13.
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• For both quotations see: Mullins, Braque, pp.15–16.
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• Jean Petitot “Morphological Eidetics”, pp.358, 361, already cited above.
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