SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

elations of intersection, belonging, coincidence or difference, and hybridization.
Conversely, cinema is a “reader,” an “analyzer” of other artistic and spectacular
forms; it is, in Lev Manovich’s words, “the key cultural form of the twentiethcentury.”
19
Atthispointitisnecessarytoreturntotheadjective“general”whichdescribes
this projected cinema history. It echoes what Michel Foucault said at the beginning
of The Archaeology of Knowledge: a “general history” challenges the assumptions
of a “global history” based on causation, analogy, and consistency, where
all phenomena are drawn around a single center – “a principle, a meaning, a
spirit, a world-view, an overall shape.” On the contrary, a general history “would
deploy the space of adispersion”: neither “a pluralityof histories juxtaposed and
independent of one another” (economy, institutions, sciences, religions, literatures,
etc.), nor coincidences of dates, or analogies of form and meaning betweenthesedifferenthistories.Thetaskofageneralhistoryis
to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between
these different series; what vertical system they are capable of forming; what
interplay of correlation and dominance exists between them; what may be the
effect of shifts, different temporalities, and various rehandlings; in what
distinct totalities certain elements may figure simultaneously. 20
Itisprobablyinthisspacethatthehistorio-graphyofEisensteincanbeimportant
toustoday:thestateofknowledgewithregardtothecinemainthenarrowsense
waswhatitwasin1946-1948(seebelow),butthewayEisensteinapprehendsthis
area and especially the unusual way he divides up chronologies and disciplinary
fields opens an approach that is both more accurate (commitment to technical
processes, “details”) and broader, placing the cinema in ductile mobile epistemes
through which we can relate representational traditions (linear perspective),social
orders(with theirhierarchies),andmethodsof communication(mobile
typeface) without giving these “anachronistic” conceptual connections the
coherence of an explanatory system. In this respect the “new history” and especially
its efforts to connect cinema to a context and a set of cultural, intellectual,
symbolic, and technological factors (a path opened by Crary), 21 is not only in
proximity to Eisenstein’s approach, but can also find in it a far bolder example
ofhowtodrawrelationsbetweenareasthatmapsdrawnbyindividualdisciplines
leaveuncharted.
The“theoreticaldiscourse”elaboratedbyEisenstein(withitsgeneralizingtendency
and, one might say, its “superego” attitude) takes the form of a vectorized
historicspeech(origin,evolution,chronology),buthis“theoreticalpractice,”his
historio-graphy, continues to create new tentative timelines, and links disjointed
moments or phenomena with no obvious relationship between them. Consider
“the heritage we renounce”: eisenstein in historioraphy 271