7
POESY AND THE
ARBITRARINESS OF THE
SIGN
Notes for a critique of Jena romanticism
J. M. Bernstein
words without spirit, method without inner illumination, figures of speech without feeling.
(Moses Mendelssohn)
Almost from the moment that modern aesthetics took on a distinctive shape in the middle of the eighteenth century, there arose claims that sought to make aesthetic reason or experience privileged. Aesthetic reason could come to have this privileged position because it could be seen as responding to a profound crisis of reason brought on by the disenchantment and dematerialization of circumambient nature that was the consequence of the mechanization and mathematization of nature by the new science, on the one hand, and the deworlding (and dematerialization or disembodiment) of freedom and subjectivity that arose as the necessary saving response to the loss of nature as habitat, on the other. The desubstantializing of the self into an empty form was but the flip-side of the emptying of the natural world of meaning.1 Nature dematerialized and human subjectivity deprived of worldly substantiality in their interaction and re-enforcement of one another form the two struts supporting the various rationality crises of modernity to which art works and the reason they exemplify might somehow be a response. The privileging of aesthetic reason arose from the insight that unavoidably and uniquely art works bridge the abyss separating the new, transcendental separation of sensible nature from intelligible freedom and subjectivity — or so the conception of the aesthetic that arose from Kant's Critique of Judgement contended.2
The bald argument for this privileging runs like this: If art works are going to be a response to the crisis, to project or insinuate or promise or exemplify a resolution, then they must suspend the dematerialization of nature and the delegitimation of its voice, and, simultaneously, reveal the possibility of human meaningfulness becoming incarnated, materially saturated and embodied. Hence the core of art's rationality potentiality relates to the role and status of artistic mediums. By mediums I mean, minimally, the material conditions of a practice as they appear to an artistic community of producers at a given time; so, the medium of an artistic practice is the disposition of the material conditions of that practice at a given time, thus materials as conditions of possibility for making works. The medium(s) of sculpture at a given time would include not just the raw materials thought acceptable for sculpting (wood, marble, etc.), but what kinds of things are required to make stuff like that into works, what things minimally can or must be done to that stuff in order to transform it into a work, hence what potential for making works is perceived as lying in those materials, as projected on to those materials through the practices that might shape them. Working in a medium is working with a material that is conceived of as a potential for sense-making in a manner that is material-specific. Hence in art the medium is not a neutral vehicle for the expression of an otherwise immaterial meaning, but rather the very condition for sense-making. The specificity of (modern) art-meanings is that their mediums are not regarded as contingent with respect to the meanings communicated;3 if that were so, if the medium were there simply as an instrument, a means, for conveying a meaning (the end) indifferent to it, then the work of art would disappear once the meaning it conveyed was grasped. But this is precisely what we think is not the case with the kind of sense-making that occurs in works of art. Art meanings, the kind of meanings art works have, are non-detachable from the medium through which they are embodied and communicated.
Artistic sense-making, then, is making sense in a medium. So mediums are the potential for sense-making. But since mediums are at least certain types of materials (as conditions of possibility for sense-making), then mediums are those materials, hence matter conceived of as a potential for sense-making. Since art is that kind of sense-making that is medium-dependent, and mediums are aspects of nature conceived of as potentials for sense-making, then art, its reason, is minimally the reason of nature as a potential for sense-making at a certain time. If art works make a claim at a particular time, then at that time nature is experienced as possessing a material-specific potentiality for sense-making. Hence, the experience of a work as making a claim at a time is to experience the dematerialization and delegitimation of nature as suspended. Or rather, that is how we come to understand and experience uniquely modern, autonomous works of art, and, in time, it is the claim that self-consciously modernist works make for themselves. The idea of an artistic medium is perhaps the last idea of material nature as possessing potentialities for meaning.
Working from the other side: in modern works of art freedom, the human capacity for autonomous sense-making, appears, that is, art works are unique objects that as unique sources of normatively compelling claims are experienced as products of freedom, as creations; their uniqueness and irreducibility are understood, experienced, as the material mark of an autonomous subjectivity. In autonomous works of art human autonomy appears; the autonomy of the former hence figures the autonomy of the latter. Beauty, Schiller tells us, is freedom in appearance. But the material bearer of appearing freedom cannot be neutral or indifferent, a mere occasion through which a meaning indifferent to its material substratum is transmitted. If meaning is indifferent to its material bearer, then freedom is not so much appearing as merely being transmitted. For freedom to appear, it must be embodied; but if truly embodied, then there must be an exchange between matter and meaning, a way in which that matter enables that meaning to be the meaning it is. Matter becomes a medium through artistic forming, but once formed it, retroactively, becomes matter-possessing-meaning-potential. So for freedom to appear nature must be truly amenable to human sense-making, implying, again, the idea of a medium as revealing nature as a potential for sense-making.
In modern, autonomous works of art nature in the form of an artistic medium appears as meaningful (e.g. the compellingness of modernist paintings derives solely from paint-on-canvas and not from conventional codes or representational illusions or culinary delight), and human sense-making is absorptively present in what is nonetheless simply a useless (purposive but without a purpose) material object. Artworks contest the duality of freedom and nature, and thereby suspend, displace, sublate, side-step, ignore, contest scientific and (immaterial) moral rationality. Aesthetic reason is the rationality revealed in the production and comprehension of autonomous works of art in which there occurs an authentic binding of meaning and matter. For the purposes of this chapter, this thesis is going to be assumed rather than defended.4
Because scientific and moral rationality really are constitutive of our empirical rationality, then what contests them is nothing empirical. So what makes art works only appearances, semblances, is that they abrogate the conditions that make empirical experience, cognitive and moral, possible. What makes such appearances substantive in their own right is that they reveal, however we construe the status of this revelation, through the compellingness or demand-ingness of the works, a rationality potentiality excised from the (normative and/ or transcendental) repertoire of modern self-consciousness.
The cuckoo in the nest of aesthetic reason so understood is Jena romanticism, above all that of Friedrich Schlegel. What happened, in brief, is this: Beginning with Lessing, the argument arose that among the arts poetry should be accorded a privileged position because its medium, the arbitrary linguistic sign, enabled rather than constrained the freedom of the imagination.5 This elective affinity between the arbitrariness of the sign and the freedom of the imagination provides poetry with a universality that the other arts, because they are bound by the materiality of their medium, cannot match. But the freedom of the imagination is equally not just any power of the subject: with Kant and Fichte, it became tempting to conceive of the freedom of the imagination as the essence of modern subjectivity. Hence poetry becomes the unique vehicle for expressing the essence of subjectivity. But once poetry is conceived of as having this task, then the constraints of material mediums become otiose, and this new, romantic privileging of aesthetic reason dissolves the specificity of the aesthetic, the linking of nature and medium, which had been the source of its original privileging.6
My explicit argument here will be that what is meant by romantic poetry as “progressive, universal poetry” (AF 116),7 which is the idea of poetic works becoming explicitly and self-consciously the bearers of the idea of art as the fullest embodiment of human freedom, is very approximate to, because originally derived from, Lessing's understanding of poetry minus Lessing's qualification that what, in fact, makes poetry poetry, poetry art (and not the prose of the world) is the requirement that in it linguistic presentation be maximally sensuous or sensate, sinnlich. In order for a linguistic presentation to be sensate, Lessing argues, it must be, in essence, painterly:
A poetic picture is not necessarily one that can be transformed into a material painting; but every feature, and every combination of features by means of which the poet makes his object so sensate that we are more clearly conscious of this object than of his words, is called painterly [mahlerisch], is called a painting [ein Gemählde], because it brings us closer to that degree of illusion of which the material painting is specially capable and which can most readily and most easily be conceptualized in terms of a material painting.8
In Lessing, the idea of painting as a constitutive constraint on poetic language is the final moment of resistance to the emptying of the natural world of any authority, since what it means for Lessing to make poetic language painterly is to make linguistic meaning appear as if natural. The claim for the universality of poesy, as premised on the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, necessarily dissolves even this constraint. With it gone, the duality between deworlded subjectivity and disenchanted nature necessarily returns. Hence, the romantic defense of aesthetic reason terminates, despite itself and perhaps all unawares, in a radical anti-aesthetic that represses both the crisis of rationality and the uniqueness of the aesthetic that, arguably, was the magnificent achievement of idealist thought.
In Jena romanticism, a version of the idea that art must become self-conscious about itself, must become the philosophy of itself, is acknowledged and embodied in a practice that veers from the philosophical to the artistic, but artistic in a manner that is all the more theoretical and philosophical. Each of the characteristic gestures of Jena romanticism — its conception of irony, the fragment, incomprehension, genre indifference, and works as critically self-conscious — involves a further relinquishing of the idea of an artistic medium, and hence a further colluding with the forms of rationality that art was meant to be resisting.
Probably as a consequence of Schelling's Letters on Dogmatism and Skepticism, along with the continuing influence of Spinozist pantheism as a counter to the dominance of the methodology and metaphysics of Cartesian subjectivity, the intense experience of nature as disenchanted that, for example, so stamps Schiller's and Hölderlin's thought (call it their orthodox Kantianism) simply does not appear in the writings of Novalis and Schlegel. On the contrary, in their writings there occurs a repeated taken-for-granted proposing of nature as itself forming the paradigm of poetic action which is participated in and imitated by human poetic activity. At the very beginning of the “Dialogue on Poesy” (1799) we find:
And what are these [poems] compared to the formless and unconscious poesy that stirs in a plant, shines in light, that smiles in a child, shimmers in the bloom of youth, glows in the loving breast of women? But this is the first, originary poesy without which there would surely be no poesy of words… We are capable of hearing the music of infinite chimes, capable of understanding the beauty of a poem, because a part of the poet, a spark of his creative spirit, lives in us as well and never ceases to glow with a mysterious force deep beneath the ashes of self-made unreason.9
Nearly from the outset, romanticism transformed the critical awareness of the disenchantment of nature and the requirement that the idea of nature as a source of meaning be kept alive artistically, which is to say, the critical awareness of the necessity and impossibility of thinking of nature as a source of meaning which Schiller salvages from the Critique of Judgment, into the philosophical/poetical presumption of nature as an originary source of meaning, as an everlasting poem. Any depth experience of disillusionment is no part of the romantic outlook; hence, one will not find in their writings the kind of tragic self-consciousness of loss that scores Hölderlin's early writings, for example. The absence of this tone and outlook derives from the absence of the disenchantment of nature from their thought.
Against the background of its enchanted conception of the natural world, how is it, then, that romantic poetics has been appropriated as a distinctly and radically modern philosophical poetics? If the romantics take for granted nature's enchantment, then the question to which their philosophical poetics is the answer must be systematically different from the question underlying Lessing and addressed by Kant and Schiller. Till this juncture I have written as if, since the two sides of the crisis of modernity — the dematerialization of nature and the de-substantialization of the self — re-enforce and complement one another, then to the degree to which works of art are conceived as responses to the dilemma, what counts as a response to the one side will a fortiori count as a response to the other. To what extent distinctly modern works of art must or even can be conceived as resolving the simultaneous equation requiring the re-enchanting of nature (via the medium) and the objectification of freedom (the material binding of the arbitrary social sign) is perhaps the most difficult and significant question in the interpretation of modern art.10 That there exists at least the possibility of divergence derives from each side of the dilemma possessing a metaphysical specificity that is not shared by the other. Metaphysically, nature as a potential for significance conflicts with nature as a closed causal order fully explainable through mathematical laws. Metaphysically, whilst the insubstantiality of subjectivity can be conceived of as an inwardizing of the subject demanded by the loss of nature as human habitat, one can also conceive of freedom (autonomy) as the power of transcending any given state of the self, and hence as what is intrinsically incommensurable with a fully material objectivity. Any material determination of freedom in an object would be, by that very fact, not free. Freedom cannot materially appear and still be freedom. Consider this the sublimity of modern freedom. Yet, still, one would suppose that for us works of art are paradigmatic products of free action. So somewhere close to the center of the concerns of the Jena romantics is the question: How is it possible to have a non-self-defeating, non-skeptical aesthetics that is premised upon sublime human freedom? This question spreads out to become all but all-encompassing once, following Fichte, freedom is identified as the essence of human subjectivity. What Friedrich Schlegel offers, and it is with his thought I will be concerned for the remainder of this chapter, is an aesthetics of production; poesy, the romantics' metaphysical conception of the linguistic arts, is a way of thinking subjectivity-as-freedom. This aesthetics of production can be shown to be an elaboration of Lessing's notion of poetry minus Lessing's concession to the idea of painting.
In pressing this negative thesis, I do not mean to deny that Schlegel's romantic poetics contains more explicitly modernist ideas about the work of art than any of his idealist predecessors. In scanning Schlegel's theory those modernist notions will be highlighted since they belong to his achievement and the seduction his theory poses: they form the compelling bridge to the collapse that occurs in its denouement. Indeed, it is because his modernist moments are so utterly lucid and prescient that the eventual collapse is so dispiriting. Nor is the collapse arbitrary: it represents the exemplary aesthetic denial of the aesthetic, the way art in seeking to be all, an apotheosis of modern reason, becomes a philosophical critique of art. What is worse, it is just the moment in which aesthetic reason undermines the aesthetic, in which there occurs what I shall frame as the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, that Schlegel's supporters celebrate and make their own. All this, I am contending, is what is hibernating in Lessing's notion of pure poetry, poetry stripped of the idea of painting, poetry as the repudiation of the notion of art as medium-bound.
The seeds of Schlegel's conception of poesy are planted in On the Study of Greek Poetry (1795),11 an essay in which the characteristic Schlegelian comprehension of the relation between ancient and modern literature is first laid down. Equally here, Schlegel develops a conception of poetry in relation to the other arts that explicitly borrows from and elaborates Lessing's. For Schlegel the singular experience of modernity is the collapse of traditional authority, the loss of the self-evidence of the classical, the sense that even in our appreciation of the authority of Greek art we stand outside it. Hence, the study of Greek literature faces the problem of explicating how it is possible for us to represent the kind of authority and perfection it exemplifies whilst acknowledging its inaccessibility to us; we cannot create works nor perfect ourselves on the model of the Greeks, yet they remain somehow a model and a paradigm. Although no fully compelling solution emerges, Schlegel's thought is to configure the relation of ancient to modern poetry as natural to artificial Bildung. Bildung is the bridge between ancient and modern; in this context it possesses the full range and imbrication of its various senses: culture, formation, development, education, maturation. To consider the progress of Greek literature a Bildung is thereby to relate it explicitly to history and implicitly to human freedom. The conceptual energy of the essay requires us to hear natürliche Bildung as nearly oxymoronic, to hear the ambiguity and tension in the thought of culture unfolding, developing in accordance with nature. Taking the paradox out of the expression is the essay's achievement. To think the development of Greek literature as a natural Bildung is to consider that development as owing nothing to subjectivity or individual self-consciousness, an artist's awareness of himself as separate (as a source of meaningful claims) from the community of which he is a part. Without a sense of subjectivity, apartness from the community, the subjective/objective distinction becomes idle; hence, the progress of culture occurs under the presumption of fidelity to “nature,” where nature, what is “natural,” rather than being posed against culture, figures the experience of normative ideals as always socially actual; that is, a world in which there occurs natürliche Bildung is one without a systematic separation of ideal from actual — as does occur, for instance, in social worlds in which there are competing ideals. But without a separation of ideal and actual, there is equally no requirement for self-consciousness, a sentimental awareness of the self's relation to its ideals, on the one hand, and actuality on the other from which the self remains separate, which have to be put into relation by the self. Greek unity of ideal and actual explains the cohesion of Greek culture. So the development of Greek literary culture is one that emerges from the requirement of fidelity to nature in this expanded sense.
with greater intellectual development [Bildung], the goal of modern poetry naturally becomes individuality that is original and interesting. The simple imitation of the particular is, however, a mere skill of the copyist, not a free art. Only by means of an arrangement that is ideal does the characteristic of an individual become a philosophical work of art.12
Individuality, what will become the ideals of autonomy and authenticity, emerges when self-realization can no longer occur through identification with established social roles. Individuality is expressed through originality and the interesting; they are what make an individual individual, this unique one distinct from all others. The interesting for Schlegel is a provisional aesthetic totalization manifesting as such the disappearance of taken-for-granted universality. Sophocles wrote objective tragedies, Shakespeare interesting ones; Sophocles summoned the fate of a culture as a whole, Shakespeare narrated the experience of individuals who are etched by the absence of a governing culture. Modern works stand in relation to an ideal that remains separate from the work; the gap between the ideal and the actual, the infinite and the finite, is what makes the modern an ever open and incomplete striving. The modern age is an artificial formation (künstliche Bildung) because objectivity is at best an achievement, something striven for, but striven for without fully determinate ends or criteria. This is why our perfectibility and corruptibility go together, why our world lacks cultural cohesion. Schlegel labels the modern work of literature “philosophical” because its arrangement occurs by means of a concept whose ideality, again, both informs and stands apart from the work. So modern works of art are riven with a reflective, critical self-consciousness of themselves as works of art in relation to (postulated, posited, proposed, invented) indeterminate ideals from which they remain forever separate. However crudely, most of the fundamentals of Schlegel's Athenaeum conception of literature are already on display in On the Study of Greek Poetry.
It is in this context that Schlegel's direct borrowings from Lessing occur. His first borrowing occurs in the context of a discussion of the universality of the arts. It may be the case, Schlegel concedes, that not all circumstances, cultural and/or geographical, are propitious for the production of the plastic arts; but this cannot be so with respect to poetry. It is a “universal art” because “its organ, fantasy, is already incomparably more closely related to freedom, and more independent from external influence. Poetry and poetic taste is thus far more corruptible than plastic taste, but also infinitely more perfectible.”13 Poetry's reliance on only the imagination, fantasy, makes it proximate to pure freedom and hence independent from the constraints of external circumstance. This independence is the ground of both poetry's anthropological universality, in comparison to the other arts, and its infinite perfectibility. When Schlegel picks up this problem again somewhat later poetry's relative universality has become absolute; poetry is the “single actual pure art without borrowed vitality and external assistance.”14 The other arts, Schlegel now contends, are “hybrids that fall between pure nature and pure art”;15 the vitality and particularity that are the advantages of the plastic arts and music are not intrinsic to those arts as arts, but are rather borrowed from nature. The appeal to the senses, the kind of sensuous particularity that might be thought, was thought by Lessing, to distinguish art-meanings from non-art-meanings, here become the remnant of nature intruding upon art, making any art so dependent on nature a hybrid thing, human and inhuman at once. Hence, nature, even as a principle of sensible vitality, is conceived of as essentially extrinsic to pure art; only poetry, “whose tool, an arbitrary sign-language, is the work of man, and is endlessly perfectible and corruptible.”16 So an argument that begins by asserting, in typical Lessing fashion, that it is only poetry's “unrestricted compass” that gives it an advantage over the other arts, concludes by making the other arts hybrids between nature and art, and poetry alone pure art. Pure art, the meaning of art, is thus to be aligned directly with imaginative freedom and universality, which are our capacity for infinite perfectibility, in opposition to the limiting character of what belongs to intuition and sensibility which now are regarded as falling squarely within inhuman nature.
The Lessing origin of this defense of poetry as the only pure art is underlined in the next paragraph in which Schlegel compares the kinds of unity achievable by the different arts. Because an action can only be completed in time, then sculpture cannot truly represent an action.17 Equally, the most fully determined sculptural character must presuppose a world in which it belongs, a world that sculpture itself can never provide. Hence, “the most perfect statue is still only a sundered, incomplete fragment, not a whole perfect unto itself. The most that images can attain is an analogon of unity.”18 The second great advantage of poetry is that it can offer the perfection of artistic integration since it alone can present a complete action, which, Schlegel contends, “is the sole unconditioned whole in the realm of appearance.”19 This sounds unconvincing, since, first, it is not evident that empirical actions are ever fully complete, so unconditioned; and, second, it appears to make the perfected integration of artistic works parasitic on the unity or integration of the object represented. In fact, Schlegel compellingly argues the thesis from an opposed direction: “An entirely accomplished act, a completely realized objective yields the fullest satisfaction. A completed poetic action is a whole unto itself, a technical world.” So it is the integration of the work as poetic action that enables the poetic work to be an actual unity, and it is the model of the poetic action itself, the model of the work as act, that offers the notion of completion and fulfillment to action. Works as actions, or actions realized as works, yield a “technical” world, that is, a whole that is unconditioned, wanting nothing from without. Or: spatial unity, no matter how complex, must finally correspond to a natural unity, the unity of a material object or a geometric unity. Only essentially temporal items, in being essentially non-spatial and therefore non-material (the material being what fills space), can have a human unity. The primary meaningful unity of a temporal duration is the unity of an action; indeed, only through conceiving of temporal moments as bound together through an action can there be non-natural unity: no meaningful unity without unification.20 Since unifying itself takes time, then, again, only the purely temporal can be humanly unified. In narrative works of art, the unity of the work is the unity of its forming action; so the form of a narrative, its narration, what makes it a technical world, is the unity of the action forming it. Feelings of satisfaction in response to narrative works is feeling the satisfaction of an action (improbably but necessarily) completed; the satisfaction in the representation is in reality a satisfaction in the achieved representing.
So again the thought is that the unity of a work of plastic art is either borrowed from nature, the material unity of the representing medium, or, since bound to an atemporal medium, then, at the level of representation, a fragment of a whole it presupposes but cannot provide. Only escaping the constraints of materiality, the constraint of a resistant medium, allows the unity of action to appear — the infinite perfectibility which “arbitrary sign-language” provides to poetry derives from its indefinite plasticity. So the linguistic medium is ideally not a specifically artistic medium at all; that is its strength. The arbitrariness of the sign-language, there being no causal or material reasons for relating this sign to that object or meaning, is the profound source of its universal power.
The argumentation of On the Study of Greek Poetry is unsteady at best: Schlegel appears to be still thinking about Greek tragedy in his defense of the unity of the work as act,21 and once he emphasizes the unity of the poetic act over the act represented, then he has no grounds for discriminating between poetry, widely understood, and the other temporal arts. Nonetheless, what is evident is that there is a more than elective affinity between modern, artificial Bildung and the Lessing-inspired notion of poetry, and that it is this constellation which is deepened by the characteristic gestures of Athenaeum philosophical poetics.
Athenaeum fragment 216 sets the terms in which modernity and romanticism are to be aligned: “The French revolution, Fichte's philosophy, Goethe's Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age.” The mutual references of these three items forms the constellation composing Jena romanticism.22 They share: the experience of the collapse and overturning of traditional authority; the premising of all forms — social, political, theoretical, literary — on freedom and autonomy; the necessity for including within forming action a reflective account of it (“the new version of the theory of knowledge is simultaneously philosophy and the philosophy of philosophy” (AF 281); so revolution must include, implicitly, beyond political events, an account, a philosophy of revolu- tion — which is in part what Schlegel thinks Fichte's philosophy and Goethe's Meister provide: they are the self-consciousness of the Revolution); the removal of hierarchy (so the leveling out and mixing of classes and genders in society, and genres in literature); the affirmation of becoming and history (hence the infinite perfectibility of literature as paradigmatic for the infinite perfectibility of the self); and the accounting for that history through a process of self-creation (self-positing), self-destruction (positing of the other as not self), and self-restriction (LF 37).23
What is meant primarily by the idea of romantic poesy is the novel (Roman), beginning with Shakespeare's tragedies and Don Quixote, and becoming self-conscious in the paradigm Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre. Even at the representational level Wilhelm Meister, for Novalis “the Absolute Novel,” embraces not just “spectacle, drama, representation, art, and poetry” (GM 274),24 but equally “the art of all arts, the art of living… The intention is not to educate this or that human being, but to represent Nature, Education itself in all the variety of these examples and concentrated into single principles” (GM 283–4; note the elision whereby nature is identified with Bildung; culture is our nature). If Meister represents the art of all arts, the art of living, the art of living becomes visible through the art of the novel; which is to say that the phrase “the art of all arts” is not metaphorical: life is the formation and cultivation of the self on the model of the progressive formation of a work. The notion of an autonomous subject, whose emblem is the (romantic) artist, and the notion of the romantic work of art, the novel, translate one another: “Then what philosophy is left for the poet? The creative philosophy that originates in freedom and belief in freedom, and shows how the human spirit impresses its law on all things and how the world is its work of art” (AF 168).
In “On Goethe's Meister” (1798), Schlegel's exegesis of the third element of his constellation, he argues that
this book is absolutely new and unique. We can learn to understand it only on its own terms. To judge it according to an idea of genre drawn from custom and belief… is as if a child tried to clutch the stars and the moon in his hand and pack them in his satchel.
(GM 275)
For the novel to be “new and unique” is constitutive of what it is to be a novel; it must exceed genre requirements — as emblems of traditional authority — as a condition for it to be a work of art. To fail in this regard would be for a work to be a mere imitation, a copy; the idea of being a mere imitation or copy can now be understood as itself a consequence of the emergent requirement for uniqueness and newness (the new as the guarantor of the unique). The absence of pre-established norms and standards entails that the very idea of what it is for something to be a novel, and by inference to be a work of art überhaupt, can only be given through the work itself. Hence the work must inscribe and project its own account of what it is to be work. To judge such a work on the basis of genre considerations, say the ideals of the classical, would be to miss it entirely. It requires that it be understood in its own terms. Minimally, this is to say that a romantic work is one that “spares the critic his labor” since “it carries its own judgement within itself…not only does it judge itself, it also describes itself” (GM 275). A romantic work must be both itself and the idea of itself.
To claim that modern, romantic works implicitly, allegorically in the case of Wilhelm Meister, include an idea of themselves is equally to say that
the novel is as much an historical philosophy of art as a true work of art, and that everything which the poet so lovingly presents as his true aim and end [the work itself] is ultimately only means [for the revelation of the philosophical idea of the work].
(GM 274)25
If a work of art is to be new and unique, it must implicitly propose a new idea of what it is to be a work; to propose a new idea of a work of art is a philosophical task. Hence, a romantic work must be both a work and, however implicitly, a philosophy of itself. It is an historical philosophy of itself because the idea being proposed is to be historically novel, a progress beyond where literature (poesy, art) has been. Because the idea being proposed is the self-consciousness of its object, a laying down of the necessary conditions of possibility for the work, then the historical philosophy of the novel is a form of transcendental reflection. Because each romantic work inscribes its own conditions of possibility, then works are also “critiques” of art in the transcendental sense, and every work of literary criticism simultaneously an effort of philosophical criticism. Thus, the romantic work of art is both a work of art and the philosophical reflection of the conditions of possibility of the work. In joining art and transcendental reflection the concepts of literary criticism and poetic self-reflection necessarily and imperceptibly modulate into “critique” in the austere Kantian sense. The capsule demand for this entanglement and modulation is succinctly expressed in Athenaeum fragment 238.
But just as we wouldn't think much of an uncritical transcendental philosophy that doesn't represent the producer along with the product and contain at the same time within the system of its transcendental thoughts a description of transcendental thinking, so too this sort of poetry should unite the transcendental raw materials and preliminaries of a theory of poetic activity — often met with in modern poets — with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring that is present in Pindar … and, among the moderns, in Goethe. In all its descriptions, this poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry.
“On Goethe's Meister” offers a prescient account of artistic modernism; not needing to wait upon Flaubert, James, Proust, Joyce or Mann, it unnervingly anticipates some of the burdens the novel would find itself required to undertake. But it also overburdens the novel, pressuring it in a direction in which it would cease being a work of art, in which the “beautiful self-mirroring” of Pindar or the lyric fragments of the Greeks would be eclipsed by the demands of transcendental reflection — just the eclipse of the idea of painting. If Schlegel goes awry in making these demands, he does so with reason; his error subtle, not crude. The precise conceptual difficulty Schlegel is attempting to solve, what he thinks a truly modern philosophy of art must explicate, is how it is possible to have a conception of works of art that shows how they can be normatively compelling without following any antecedent norms. This correctly poses the issue of the meaning of freedom in a post-Kantian frame in which three distinct items need to be triangulated: freedom, normativity without a priori backing, and phenomenal appearing, a work realizing the interlocking of freedom and normativity. Schlegel is clear that the notion of poetry is normative; a definition of poetry is not the establishment of a natural kind, but of an ideal to be realized (AF 114). But, with the end of classicism, the ideal cannot be time-lessly stated. The rightly famous closing sentences of Athenaeum fragment 116 assert just this thought.
The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.
How treacherous these sentences can become, we shall come to. For the moment, let us assume that they simply state the requirement that romantic works realize an ideality for which there is no antecedent. How is this possible? Kant attempted to answer this dilemma by demonstrating how judgements of taste, that is judgements that do not rely upon a given conceptuality, are possible: actual judgements of taste reveal that the subjective conditions of judgement in general involve a non-demonstrable fitness between our powers of judgement and nature as a whole. Judgements of taste reveal a transcendentally inexplicable but necessary harmony between human powers for knowing and acting, and their natural surrounding. Schiller, more modestly but equally with an eye toward an expansion of the analysis that will make it fully appropriate to works of art, attempts to show generally how judgements of beauty consistently track a harmony between freedom and material instantiation: beauty is always a nonconceptual material appearance of meaningfulness (freedom) without gravity or mechanism. Since the puzzle of nature and freedom has already been pantheistically solved for Schlegel, these systematic solutions must be left behind.26
If there can be no general account of how judgements of taste or works of art are possible, no systematic account of the intelligibility of art and taste, then there can be no separate philosophy of art, no determination of the meaning of art apart from works themselves. Only works can reveal how works are normatively possible. From this it follows that authentic works of art satisfy what might be called a “transcendental function,” that is, each authentic work of art, necessarily and minimally, exemplifies what it is for something to be a work of art. In this respect, there is indeed something “philosophical” about modern, autonomous works of art. But it is just here that Schlegel's first slippage occurs: while philosophy cannot legislate the conditions of possibility of art, and thus in order for a work to claim aesthetic approval (as beautiful or interesting or sublime) it must simultaneously offer that claiming as what art now demands, it does not follow that works can or need to directly or overtly provide an account of their own philosophical conditions of possibility. Schlegel, perhaps over-impressed by the self-consciousness and reflexivity of Goethe's Meister, conflates the legitimate insight that, with the coming-to-be of art as a fully autonomous domain, philosophy can no longer legislate for art, and hence that authentic art works themselves satisfy a transcendental function, with the untoward claim that what satisfies a transcendental function must be conceived as reflectively offering a transcendental account of its object, or at least the “the transcendental raw materials and preliminaries of a theory of poetic activity.” Hence, Schlegel shifts from the at least plausible thought that works satisfy a transcendental function, each authentic work exemplifying the meaning of art in general, to the implausible claim that authentic works are both works and the philosophical accounting of themselves. Or, more directly, Schlegel moves from the legitimate thought that authentic modern works must be conceived as lodging a claim about what it is for an item to be a work, to the exorbitant thought that authentic modern works must explicitly provide a discursive account of their own conditions of possibility.27
Once philosophy can no longer extrinsically legislate, and the requirement for transcendental accounting (the representation of the producer along with product) accepted, then philosophy becomes poetry (freedom must freely configure, be a free self-representation of, itself and the revealing of itself), and all poetry must be a transcendental philosophy, a poetry of poetry. For Schlegel the demand that poetry absorb philosophy, that there be an utter unification of philosophy and poetry, emerges as a direct requirement of the project of triangulating freedom, normativity, and their reciprocal determination of one another in a work.28 Because Schlegel is untouched by the disillusionment which, in Schiller, say, makes the duality of freedom and nature, form-drive and sense-drive, philosophy and art the aporetic condition permanently disrupting and fragmenting subjectivity, ruining it, he presumes there must be, at least formally, an unconditional formulation of what would satisfy the triangulation requirement. Jena romanticism is modernism without disillusionment; this is both the source of its continuing appeal and of its theoretical exorbitance. The mark of that exorbitance is, again, the requirement that the romantic work be fully both work and the philosophical, transcendental accounting of itself as the actualization of freedom. Bearing up under the burden of the second limb of the requirement comprehensibly comes to squeeze out and finally disqualify the first limb. So what can appear as the utterly marginal shift involved in requiring that the implicit transcendental function of modern works become explicit, tenden-tially engenders the philosophical disenfranchisement of art. This is what poetry without the idea of painting comes to.29
I interpret Schlegel's little essay “On Incomprehensibility” (1800),30 in reality a commentary on Athenaeum fragment 216 linking the French Revolution, Fichte's philosophy, and Goethe's Meister, as a radicalization of that shift, as, that is, the fullest articulation of the disenfranchising tendency. This essay was the final item in the final issue of the Athenaeum; the essay is thus the journal's summation, apologia, and farewell; the farewell, on my reading, is of a different order than Schlegel conceives it. In the essay the Athenaeum generally, and the Fragments from 1798 in particular, come to displace Goethe's Meister as the exemplary romantic work, or, one might say, fragment and irony come to displace work and reflection; I interpret this shift as the hermeneutic key for comprehending the underlying intention of the idea of romantic poesy. Schlegel's growing doubts about Goethe's novel could be understood as a consequence of coming to see it as more representative of Weimar classicism than Jena romanticism, and hence of simply coming to doubt that it could bear the weight of significance being attributed to it. While not wrong, the real doubt about Wilhelm Meister, I think, is simply that it is a work.
The closing sentences of Athenaeum fragment 116 could be interpreted as stipulating that with romanticism the meaning of art is given through works and cannot be a priori legislated. But that would radically underdetermine the effort of transcendental reflection Schlegel thinks an authentic work must accomplish. Jena romanticism contends that each authentic work reflectively articulates itself as a further determination of the idea of art, where the idea of art is nothing less than the full exposition of the idea and actuality of the meaning of human freedom. If the heart of romanticism is taken as the philosophical thought that the idea of art is given through each work, then no fully self-sufficient work, no matter how self-conscious, can be adequate to the idea. Any determinate work would be insufficient with respect to the idea that romantic poetry “should be forever becoming.” Hence, even exemplary works could be taken as falsifying the Zarathustrian thesis that “the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.” So the slippage from implicit to explicit came to be understood as disqualifying autonomous works as satisfying the romantic idea of art. Schlegel thus insists that the core impulse of fragment 216 is not given through the constellation formed by the troika of the French Revolution, Fichte and Goethe, but
lies in the word tendencies … And so I now let irony go to the winds and declare point blank that in the dialectic of the Fragments the word means that everything now is only a tendency, that the age is the Age of Tendencies.
(OI 301)
The palpable collapse that occurs in the claim that since the romantic idea of art is necessarily indeterminate, then a determinate work is incompatible with it must be taken to be a consequence of the earlier conflation of works being required to satisfy a transcendental function with the requirement that they provide a transcendental accounting of themselves. Without the pressure from the requirement that works discursively account for their own conditions of possibility, fully uniting art and philosophy thereby, it is not obvious why determinate works must be insufficient to romanticism. Once, however, only works can be the reflective bearers of the idea of romanticism, with the idea declaring that romanticism is forever becoming, then a self-sufficient work would transparently belie the idea. For a work to fully exemplify and reflectively articulate the idea of poetry as infinite becoming it would have to cancel itself as work, bracket itself as work for the sake of the indeterminate idea, unwork its being as work, forfeit its status as material presence in favor of art's “not yet,” be itself and always beyond itself. It would need to be a fragment without being a part of a whole, and rehearse an ironic displacement of whatever immanent claim it would make. So the romantic concepts of fragment and irony emerge as the form of work and reflection required by a transcendental poetry which will sustain the idea of art as forever becoming, where the forever becoming thesis encapsulates freedom's sublimity: its power to legislate, give the law to itself, and always be beyond whatever law it legislates.31 As the dissolution of the autonomous work, fragment and irony are nothing but the systematic undoing of the claim of the idea of painting. The idea of painting is what romanticism emphatically disqualifies. In the midst of its presumptive pantheism, Jena romanticism cancels any synthesis, harmonization, riveting together of materiality and the social sign. On the contrary, and doubtless despite itself, romanticism becomes the thought of their incommensurability, an incommensurability that for it emerges from the demand for configuring the power of legislation, configuring sublime autonomy.
As in the defense of artistic modernism in “On Goethe's Meister,” Schlegel's best thoughts and his worst ones seem to be the same notions seen from different angles. The high moment of “On Incomprehensibility,” providing the metaphysical basis on which fragment and irony as forms rely, is his defense of the necessity for opacity and darkness, for the incomprehensible.
Yes, even man's most precious possession, his own inner happiness, depends in the last analysis, as anybody can easily verify, on some such point of strength that must be left in the dark, but that nonetheless shores up and supports the whole burden and would crumble the moment one subjected it to rational analysis. Verily, it would fare badly with you if, as you demand, the whole world were to ever become wholly comprehensible in earnest. And isn't this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility and chaos?
(OI 305)
“Über die Unverständlichkeit,” say, “On the Impossibility of Understanding,” is in its own way a critique of pure reason; its defense of the incomprehensible just the contention that the limits of the understanding are equally its conditions of possibility. However, and pace Kant, it is not the case that we can a priori determine the limits of the understanding: our desire for understanding is boundless, and our power for rendering transparent knows no limit — since our unending, that is, transparent world is constructed from chaos (anticipating Nietzsche), then we can always render the world transparent, leaving the chaos behind — it is this leaving behind that requires correction. One cannot know the limits of reason, turning Hegel inside out, since to know the limit would be indeed to step beyond the limit. Hence, the limit of reason cannot be known, it can only, but equally must, be accepted, acknowledged, experienced. And because at one level the understanding is without limit (in its hubris, its metaphysical desire, its relentless power for making transparent), then the attempt to provide a limit, to inscribe it, by producing writing whose ironic or fragmentary nature blocks full understanding, will naturally be resisted. Some of the outrage with which the Athenaeum was met stemmed from its routine frustration of that desire and power. Hence, Schlegel is detecting beneath the acceptance of the finitude of reason, the requirement that reason be self-limiting, that might have been thought to be the most routine accompaniment of idealism, a resistance in practice. When actually faced with forms of writing that demand an acknowledgment of limits, when our actual attempts at comprehension are blocked and frustrated, we balk, angrily.
A true transcendental idealism must be aesthetic, poesy, because only aesthetic forms can appropriately exhibit the self-limitation of reason; only in them are comprehension and the incomprehensible entwined — “It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will have to decide to combine the two” (AF 53). Hence, in reality, it is only the Athenaeum itself that could, and did, provide a critique of pure reason. It is no accident that Schlegel breaks off his defense and concludes the essay with a poem — the discursive claim for incomprehensibility displaced and affirmed by its poetic exhibition. At this level of generality, Schlegel's argument is delicate and compelling. But are fragment and irony as forms adequate to the task Schlegel assigns them? I have been arguing that Schlegel's attempt to absorb philosophy into poesy, to create a transcendental poesy as the appropriate form of transcendental idealism, necessarily reverses into the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, precisely the opposite effect to what might have been anticipated. Standardly, as with Lessing and Schiller, the aesthetic is to taken to exceed the understanding in virtue of the predominance of sense over concept, hence, precisely because works are medium-bound; with the disenchantment of nature, whatever is medium-bound, occurs as semblance. Hence the notion of the aesthetic becomes an intertwining of sense and semblance. Now while Schlegel's various comments on fragment and irony do not all match up, it is at least noteworthy that the two most forceful defenses of Jena romanticism, Paul de Man's “The Concept of Irony” and Maurice Blanchot's “The Athenaeum,” both read these notions in emphatically anti-aesthetic terms.32 I will use de Man's essay to help think romantic irony, and Blanchot's as a guide in the delineation of the romantic fragment. That de Man and Blanchot identify their own thinking with what is accomplished in these concepts gives their accounts a particular urgency.
De Man's analysis can be parsed into two steps.33 In Lyceum fragment 42 Schlegel argues that Socratic philosophy is the true home of irony because in it irony occurs everywhere. At this level of analysis, irony is being compared to an open-ended, non-systematic dialectic with its recurring patterns of assertion and negation, (self-)creation and (self-)destruction (dialectic and romantic irony always have, at least, a Fichtean tinge in Schlegel). Poetry can rise to the level of philosophy because it allows irony to be everywhere and not only in restricted passages; in the poems (novels) in which this occurs
there lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.
The buffo in commedia dell'arte is the aside to the audience that disrupts the narrative illusion of the play. In rhetorical theory the technical term for the interruption of a discourse by a shift in rhetorical register is parabasis. But, de Man contends,
parabasis is not enough … Irony is not just interruption; it is (and this is the definition which he [Schlegel] gave of irony), he says, the “permanent parabasis,” parabasis not just at one point but at all points, which is how he defines poetry: irony is everywhere, at all points the narrative can be interrupted.34
In those poems in which there lives a real transcendental buffoonery there is irony everywhere; in order for there to be irony everywhere, a permanent parabasis, there must be at each moment the illusion and the disruption of the illusion.
In order to begin thinking how it is conceivable that there be disruption everywhere — surely, the critic would object, disruption presupposes some homogeneity that gets disrupted, and so cannot be everywhere — de Man points us toward the little chapter of Lucinde, “A reflection,” which on a first pass sounds like a bit of Fichtean philosophy, but which, scandalously, also can be read as, simultaneously, a reflection on some of the physical aspects of sexual intercourse. High philosophical conceptuality and base physical sexuality occupy the same linguistic space even if they are opposed semantically. Everywhere the base sexual interrupts the abstractly philosophical which would think itself forever independent from and beyond the crudely sexual. But this, however charming, is less than an illustration of permanent parabasis; it is, at least without some Freudian heavy lifting, just a metaphor for permanent disruption. Nonetheless, it is the right sort of metaphor since what it projects as disruption is a system of complete reciprocity between the ideality of meaning (philosophy) and the brute materiality of mechanism (sex), or so de Man urges. What Schlegel needs then is some account of language, of linguistic activity that would enable him to reveal, let's say, a stratum of nonsense (incomprehension/ non-system) beneath each moment of sense (comprehension/system). And this points to the second part of de Man's analysis.
With our large Lessing ears, we might have anticipated this moment. From the outset, the universality of poesy relative to the plastic arts has turned on the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, on language not being a (productively) resistant medium. The systematic downgrading of the plastic arts demanded by modern reflexivity, no poetry without a poetry of poetry, and the requirement that reflexivity be fully discursive, the becoming philosophy of art, are inconceivable without aesthetics generally, the philosophy of art as the philosophy of freedom, taking a linguistic turn. Equally, the possibility of aligning freedom and normativity, each poet and each human a lawgiver, has depended upon language possessing a moment of radical indeterminacy, of non-meaning,35 which would thus make possible meaning-giving, the bestowal or creation of meaning. So the taking of a linguistic turn is necessary for the possibility of the transformation of philosophy into poesy; and within that linguistic turn it is necessary for there to be a metaphysically charged arbitrariness of the sign if poesy is to be the bearer of the appearing of human freedom in a manner compatible with poesy being universal (capable of addressing everything). While things do not turn out quite this neatly (the romantic ideology of poesy as imaging perfectionism, an infinite self-making, does not survive the steps taken to defend it), nonetheless whilst de Man and Blanchot run this moment somewhat differently, for both it is some version of the arbitrariness of the sign, its excess beyond rational control, that is the pivotal moment.
De Man opts for a passage from the “Speech on Mythology.”36 In it Schlegel is comparing mythology as “the artwork of nature” with the wit of romantic poesy, as in Shakespeare and Cervantes, which, like irony, is not limited to particular passages, but is to be found everywhere. Wit in this passage stands for what joins the unlike; so it is “this charming symmetry of contradictions, this wondrous, eternal exchange of enthusiasm and irony” — all this the analogon to traditional mythology. Let us call what mythology and romantic wit share here a holistic structure of aesthetic illusion, a joining of the different without system — or, what is the same, a system of tropes. Schlegel now claims that mythology and romantic wit so understood share a massive presupposition.
Neither this wit nor a mythology can exist with something primal and inimitable [that seems to be the authentic language], which is absolutely indissoluble, which after all transformations still allows the original nature and the original force to shine through, where naive profundity allows the glimmer of the absurd and the crazy, or of the simpleminded and the stupid, to shine through. For this is the beginning of all poesy: the sublation of the course and the laws of reasonably thinking reason and our transportation again into the beautiful confusion of fantasy, the original chaos of human nature for which I have yet to know a more beautiful symbol than the colorful swarm of ancient gods.37
The meaning of this passage is far from unambiguous. From the fact that Schlegel immediately goes on to discuss Spinoza and ancient, non-Western mythologies, we might suspect that what is being thought in this “original chaos of human nature” is some sort of Dionysian pantheism. De Man suppresses this possibility. He wants the authentic language to be the one of “error, madness, and stupidity.” This is authentic language, reelle Sprache, de Man asserts, because it “is a mere semiotic entity, open to the radical arbitrariness of any sign system and as such capable of circulation, but which as such is profoundly unreliable.”38
In “On Incomprehensibility” Schlegel quotes Goethe's thesis “that words often understand themselves better than do those who use them” (OI 298). De Man thinks that words slipping by our control, their having meanings in themselves beyond and prior to whatever meanings we might assign to them, is the arbitrariness of the sign being gestured toward by Schlegel. But he infers from this something more radical: what slips past control must a fortiori be controlled from elsewhere. Call that elsewhere mechanism.
There is a machine there, a text machine, an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness, unbedingter Willkür, he says [Lyceum fragment 42], which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and the dialectical model, both of which are, as you know, the basis of any narration. There is no narration without reflection, no narrative without dialectic, and what irony disrupts (according to Friedrich Schlegel) is precisely that dialectic and that reflexivity, the tropes.39
Responding to this requires delicacy, since what is being addressed is not the nature of language in general (that the determinacy of any linguistic meaning is a determination of an indeterminate base is not in question), nor that particular works might inscribe the appearance of meaning as possessed by its radical, material absence. What is at issue, rather, is the meaning of romantic works as bearers of the philosophical idea of art, hence the claim of such works. For de Man the ultimate referent for romantic irony as a permanent parabasis is that feature of language which is like a machine in that meanings come from it independently of our willing. This is a curious claim to make, since one would have thought that the idea of a “text machine” with “an implacable determination” would be the exact opposite of “total arbitrariness” — the rule of meaning is not the rule of what is intended nor one binding word to object, but the rule of mechanical law, say, which is hardly “arbitrary”: it appears arbitrary from the perspective of intention, but if mechanically determined, then fully determinate, albeit determined elsewhere than from the will. Nor is it at all clear how this theory of irony would be compatible with any form of writing; on the contrary, by making the romantic notion of irony devolve into, rather than merely being related to, the authentic language of error, madness, and stupidity, de Man seems to make impossible a practice of ironic discourse — which would, of course, be an intentional/intended practice. Or, better, he makes ironic discourse, even if there could be some, unnecessary by making the two levels of meaning production, intentional and mechanical, coincide everywhere. But by coinciding everywhere the specificity of romantic works as works of art disappears. Only the philosophical thought of meaning and its absence remains.
Nonetheless, it is possible to see why de Man thought this satisfactory: if we allow that at the level of production, so to speak, that irony as text machine refers to a blind, quasi-causal mechanism, then at least the thought of non-meaning, the causal or quasi-causal mechanism, beneath (intentional) meaning emerges. And at least in that respect irony means “disruption, disillusion.”40 If disruption were related to another irruption of meaning, then the case for romanticism would have been at least possible. But for de Man the disruption runs in the opposite direction; not freedom but eternal mechanism is the result. But does not that result turn semblance into mere semblance, illusion pure and simple? One can see what de Man is after, namely, the revelation that beneath the illusion of emphatic meaning which the work of art provides there lies an unavoidable absence of meaning; by acknowledging this absence of meaning, romantic irony achieves an authentic, heroic and stoical, affirmation of the empty ground of each human construction of meaning. But to say that meaning is without ground or foundation is emphatically different from saying that beneath each appearing of meaning lies a system of mechanism as fierce as the laws determining atoms in a Newtonian universe.
In being more explicit about language's excessive semiotic potential, the potential for meaning beyond or outside intentional or representational meaning, the passage Blanchot lights upon from Novalis's Monolog, monologue or soliloquy, a text, Blanchot says, of “angelic penetration,”41 fits the demands of the theory in a less reductive manner than does de Man's account.
Speaking and writing is a crazy state of affairs really; true conversation is just a game with words. It is amazing, the absurd error people make imagining they are speaking for the sake of things; no one knows the essential thing about language, that it is concerned only with itself. That is why it is such a marvelous and fertile mystery — for if someone merely speaks for the sake of speaking, he utters the most splendid truths. But if he wants to talk about something definite, the whims of language make him say the most ridiculous stuff… If it were only possible to make people understand that it is the same with language as it with mathematical formulae — they constitute a world in itself — their play is self-sufficient, they express nothing but their own marvelous nature, and that is the very reason why they are so expressive. … And though I believe that with these words I have delineated the nature and office of poetry … I know … what I have said is quite foolish because I wanted to say it, and that is no way for poetry to come about.42
Again, hardly an unambiguous passage. One way through it would make poetry that form of writing that, in letting words themselves speak, in permitting intransitive sense to emerge, construes language as itself a resistant medium.43 That would push the passage toward modernism. However, that hypothesis needs instant revising if I now complete the sentence stating that words are so expressive because they express nothing but their own marvelous nature, because in being self-sufficient, Novalis continues,
they are the mirror to the strange play of relationships among things. Only their freedom makes them members of nature, only in their free movements does the world-soul express itself and make of them a delicate measure and a ground-plan of things.
This would make pantheism, some enchanted conception of nature with man as a part, a condition of possibility for language having meaning before and in excess of its intentional/representational meaning; in letting language speak, poetry lets nature come to self-consciousness. Again, it is at least not obvious that these thoughts are not consistent with the “Speech on Mythology,” and for all of which the title “magical idealism” is not a bad one. All this, romanticism's wholly un-disillusioned side, appears as almost the opposite of language as mechanism.
But there is a third interpretive possibility, the one required to make the romantic understanding of language fit with its notions of fragment and irony. Blanchot wants the excised version of this text, say only that portion of it that I originally quoted, to provide the key to romantic philosophy generally (rather than just Novalis). Without the background pantheist naturalism, the passage possesses an almost Saussaurean ambition; and this ambition, for Blanchot, expresses the “non-romantic essence of romanticism,”44 acknowledging thereby romanticism's internal ambiguity and ambivalence, its hovering between optimistic utopian idealism and radical disillusionment. What these two moments share, what makes them both sides of romanticism, is that they both can be seen as having poesy express the finitude of human thought, its forever becoming, hence a poetic perfectionism. And for both formulations of romanticism there must be an aspect of language passed over by representational discourse. For Blanchot what this other side of language points to:
that to write is to make (of) speech (a) work, but that this work is an unworking; that to speak poetically is to make possible a non-transitive speech whose task is not to say things (not to disappear into what it signifies), but to say (itself) in letting (itself) say, yet without taking itself as the new object of this language without object.45
Earlier we noted the puzzle of the incommensurability between the work as determinate object with poesy as project. Blanchot is wanting to hear in the thought of the poet as heeding language, and thus retreating from the ambition to represent the world, the coming-to-be of meaning, where this event or coming-to-be can only be revealed by dissolving the work as (representational) meaning. For Blanchot it would appear to be the case that adequate theoretical self-consciousness, that is adequate acknowledgement of the excess of the possibility of meaning over its actuality, requires the suppression of self-consciousness since the moment of self-consciousness would be a second-level determinacy, the determinate comprehension of the indeterminacy of meaning exemplified by the event of meaning. The fragment thus becomes, ideally, the indeterminate presentation of the indeterminacy of meaning, the coming-to-be of meaning without any attendant meaning.
With that thought in mind, Blanchot can now knit two claims: (i) It is no accident that romanticism is almost without works, that it ended so quickly and badly with suicide, loss, forgetting:
this is because it is the work of the absence of (the) work; a poetry affirmed in the purity of the poetic act, an affirmation without duration, a freedom without realization, a force that exalts in disappearing and that is in no way discredited if it leaves no trace, for this was its goal.46
(ii) The fragment is the ironizing of representational discourse, its unworking, not for the sake of suspending it, merely disrupting it (as de Man would have it), but for the sake of making the momentary, the becoming, absolute:
the work's power to be and no longer to represent; to be everything, but without content or with a content that is almost indifferent, and thus at the same time affirming the absolute and the fragmentary; affirming totality, but in a form that, being all forms — that is, at the limit, being none at all — does not realize the whole, but signifies it by suspending it, even breaking it.47
We now have, in effect, four versions of romanticism: (a) romantic poesy as the expression proper to the poesy nature itself is — romantic pantheism; (b) romantic poesy as the only non-self-defeating expression of human freedom — transcendental poesy as the truth of transcendental idealism; (c) romantic irony as the permanent disruption of the illusions of philosophy and art; (d) the romantic fragment as the revelation of the finitude of meaning, the event of meaning prior to any stable, representational meanings.48 The first, pantheistic reading, whilst almost certainly the most hermeneutically accurate, is equally the least philosophically interesting. I have argued that the second, and most acute version emerges not just by-the-way but essentially out of a radicalization of Lessing's privileging of poetry over the plastic arts, a privileging that Schlegel rightly hears as converging with the universality and productivity of human freedom: poesy as the only pure, which is to say, purely human art. But this is the version of Lessing's conception of poetry that dispenses with the idea of painting, the idea which, finally, is necessary in order for poems to be works of art. Without the ballast of the idea of painting, romantic poesy is literally unstable, tending toward, well, toward the very disappearance of the work that de Man and Blanchot, however differently, hear in romanticism — in the claims of irony and fragment — as its non-romantic essence.
In the context of Lessing's emergent modernism and Schiller's underwriting of that modernism, de Man's and Blanchot's excision of the idea of painting, their anti-aesthetic, looks terribly like a pure anti-aesthetic ideology. For Schiller the finitude of the work of art, its mortal being, depends on its being mere semblance, its posing of the materiality of meaning, of nature as meaningful and freedom as materially realized, as both necessary and impossible. Nothing supports the possibility in general of the materiality of meaning other than aesthetic meaning, the compellingness of works themselves. The finitude of meaning in its aesthetic appearing is its being bound to works that are necessarily and forever subject to denial, collapse, loss. Authentic finitude of meaning requires the possibility of the death of meaning; but there can be no death without works, items that can in their significance pass away; significant stone cracks, crumbles, becomes chips then dust; or, even more commonly, the claim of the work fades as semblance dissolves, the construction of meaning disrupting the meaning constructed. Hence, the distinctive character of Schiller's modernism was its lodging of human meaningfulness in the ether of aesthetic appearance.
De Man and Blanchot track romanticism's philosophical disenfranchisement of art by seeking a meaning, which for both is simultaneously the absence of meaning, beyond semblance. In the case of de Man this absence of meaning is bizarre; in elaborating Kant's conception of the sublime, in his most bracing formulation of his materialism, of the non-phenomenalizable conditions of the possibility of meaning, de Man states: “this vision is purely material, devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics.”49 Why did we need to go through the tortures of idealist aesthetics, through the infinitely demanding and complex reflections of The Critique of Judgment, Hegel's Aesthetics, or the Athenaeum at all if, at the end of the day, we are to end up with the dematerialized materiality of nature that was the very problem which made the turn toward aesthetics tempting in the first place? Did we need that detour to tell us that beneath meaning there lies the mechanism of nature? Why would one turn to philosophical aesthetics to uncover the mechanism behind meaning since it is everywhere before aesthetics ever raises a finger? This again is not to deny that modernist art has been centrally concerned, in Lucinde-like works, with the occurrence of an uprising of meaning out of material non-meaning (think: Pollock). In modernism, however, the insistence upon material non-meaning has been the means through which meaning and materiality might be soldered together: significant stone reveals mere stone as silent stone. Since significant stone is semblance, then only semblance holds in place the difference between silent and mere stone, enchanted and disenchanted nature.
Blanchot is more anxious and nuanced, wanting fiercely, in his own name and for romanticism, to avoid the philosophical reflexivity and surety which his writing nonetheless conveys: “for if poetry is simply a speech that claims to express the essence of speech and of poetry, one will, and scarcely more subtly, return to the use of transitive language.”50 The difficulty, of course, is that the aim of romantic discourse, as exemplified in the romantic fragment, is emphatically to express the essence of language, indeed the essence of human freedom, as the essence of poetry. Hence, even in the unworking of the romantic fragment, precisely in its not being a work, there emerges a reflexivity and essentialism that cannot be anything else but knowledge — without that emergence there is nothing to experience in the fragment. Eschewing aesthetic semblance, the romantic fragment becomes philosophical idea. Both de Man and Blanchot, in wanting to get to the non-meaning that is the condition of meaning, call it text machine, call it event, must displace, forever, the fragile aesthetic object and replace it with, however mediated and detoured, philosophical knowing, the knowing of non-knowledge. But this is metaphysics in the bad old sense, since it is a pure knowledge of the absence of meaning, dependent on no particular objects for its presence or absence. This is why it is an ideology of finitude: it is the knowledge of the finitude of meaning without finite beings, the unworking of works but without there being any works, no significant stone that might reveal silent stone. There is in all this something too knowing and comforting, as if the loss of meaning would be tolerable after all if we could so possess it, have it, so surely, authentically, stoically, and beautifully. A beautiful death after all.
1 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, Albany NY, SUNY Press, 1988, pp. 30–1, get right the crisis of the subject, its loss of substance, but conspicuously fail to mention the crisis of nature.
2 For an elaboration of this thought see Robert Pippin, “Avoiding German Idealism: Kant, Hegel, the Reflective Judgment Problem,” in his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; and my The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994.
3 I am aware that it is just this comprehension of modernism that Duchamp meant to contest. On my reading, Duchamp conflated the reasonable thought that the claim of the medium was bound to the tradition of painting (which is finite, and hence mortal), with the general claim for art being medium-bound in my restrictive sense; alas, Duchamp's conflation was affirmed by the defenders of painterly modernism (above all, Greenberg), and the artists who wanted to contest modernism. It is the wider thesis that I do not think has yet had a general hearing. So, for example, on my reading, works normally viewed as postmodern, or, at least, anti-modernist, like those of Joseph Cornell and Louise Bourgeois, not to speak of much of minimalist art or the sculptures of Richard Serra, can be interpreted as unproblematically modernist. For this see my “Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.: Nominalism and the Paradox of Modernism” and “Freedom From Nature? Reflections on the End(s) of Art,” both forthcoming in my Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno's Late Modernism and the Idea of Painting, Stanford, Stanford University Press, and, from a wildly different angle, Rosalind E. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, Winter 1999, pp. 289–305. In this setting, I am taking the material binding of meaning through medium-specificity to form a taken-for-granted hypothesis. The excesses of Jena romanticism hence form a test of the thesis.
4 Against the background of the eighteenth-century crisis of reason, and in the tradition of “The Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism” wherein “truth and goodness are brothers only in beauty,” I would hope the claim that aesthetic reason is distinguished from formal reason in making ideas sensible, hence in binding meaning and matter (medium), can be regarded as an uncontentious thesis about the meaning of aesthetic reason at this historical juncture. My interest here is not in the thesis itself, but in its dissolution at the hands of (a certain) romanticism; there are, to be sure, other romanticisms. As will become apparent, there is reason to think that this romantic dissolution of aesthetic reason amounts to a general repudiation of the aesthetic, and hence to an anti-aesthetic; if that is true, then it should serve as, at least, indirect support for my taken-for-granted hypothesis.
5 5 Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. A. W. Steele, chs 16–24 in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
6 Needless to say, I regard the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign as mistaken; I track its current critical espousal in my “Freedom From Nature? Reflections on the End(s) of Art.” Here I am interested in the genealogy of that espousal that runs from Lessing through Schlegel's romanticism.
7 References to the Athenaeum Fragments (AF), Lyceum Fragments (LF), and Ideas (I) are to the fragment number in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Firchow entitles the Lyceum Fragments “Critical Fragments.”
8 Lessing, Laocoön, ch. xiv, p. 79.
9 In Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Haynes Horne, Andreas Michel, Elizabeth Mittman, Assenka Oksiloff, Lisa C. Roetzel and Mary R. Strand (eds and trans) Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 180. Further references to this volume will be abbreviated: TP. While I do not know the origin of the romantic version of the idea of artistic creation imitating divine creation, Schlegel and Novalis would have had at least the version of it from Moritz's “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful” (1788), a partial translation of which appears in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, pp. 131–44.
10 See T. J. Clark, Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1999, who makes the soldering together of the sociality of the sign and re-enchantment of nature the question of modernist painting.
11 Translated by Stuart Barnett, Albany NY, SUNY Press, 2001. Although written wholly independently, this essay contains a conception of the relation of ancient to modern that is quite similar to that found in Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, published just months before Schlegel's essay, forcing him to write a preface taking into account Schiller's work. On the Study of Greek Poetry thus can be regarded as triangulating romanticism with Schiller's modernism and Lessing's defense of poetry.
12 On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 32.
13 Ibid., p. 42.
14 Ibid., p. 59, italics mine.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. In making a severe distinction between pure and hybrid art, Schlegel is not making an obvious intellectual error. On the contrary, if nature, especially as it functions as a medium of art, is dead nature, then how can it be a source of vitality? From the perspective of scientific rationality, would not the ascription of vitality to dead nature be a form of animism? And hence is not Schlegel's consignment of the non-poetic arts to the domain of the hybrid just the acknowledgment of the authority of the self-determining subject? Would not the presumption of a source of meaning outside subjectivity be tantamount to conflating, through the efficacy of projection, self and world? The problem of art in modernity is indissoluble from the problem of animism; which is why that problem forms the inaugural gesture of Hegel's account of the death of art: only mind can be a source of intelligible vitality.
17 Famously, in chapter xvi of Laocoön, Lessing argues that the plastic arts depend upon natural signs (figures and colors) spatially coordinated with one another, whilst the linguistic arts depend upon articulated sounds in time. Hence objects, and objects alone, become the proper object of the plastic arts, while actions are the true subjects of poetry. Sound, in its original appearance here, is regarded as immaterial, or, at any rate, as not material in the way in which extended stuff is material.
18 On the Study of Greek Poetry, p. 60.
19 Ibid.
20 This, of course, is the premise of Kant's transcendental deduction.
21 I may be underestimating Schlegel. His argument could be taken to have the form: what was in the closed world of the Greeks the idea of a unitary action, a praxis, an action complete in itself and not done for some end beyond it, is only possible under conditions of modernity in the production of artistic works. (It is sometimes claimed that even Aristotle thought that the representation of praxis, hence the means through which any praxis might be perceived, was dependent upon poetic action.) Only art works can be for us self-sufficient actions hence only art works are a praxis in modernity. While an argument to this effect is kicking around in this period, and certainly possesses a surface attractiveness, it is highly contentious if for no other reason than it presumes a one-to-one correspondence between Aristotle's ethical conception of praxis and the “one action” requirement of his Poetics.
22 As will become evident, my attempt here is to unpack the whole of Jena romanticism from the lead given by fragment 216.
23 De Man, “The Concept of Irony,” pp. 170–3, convincingly relates the dialectic of self-creation, self-destruction and self-limitation to the three moments in the transcendental constitution of actuality in Fichte's Wissenschaftsslehre.
24 Passages marked GM refer to “On Goethe's Meister” in the version that appears in my Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, pp. 269–87.
25 This is the development of the idea that the significant unity of a work of art lies not in what is represented but in the representing. Now that representing, the novel's “I think,” its specific synthetic unity of apperception, is its idea of itself. But if its idea of itself is indeed its unique “I think,” then in truth the novel must be for the sake of the revelation of it and not what is represented. Without further ado, the work is vanquished, so to speak, by the philosophical idea of itself.
26 Since I have already suggested that his conception of freedom presupposes the disenchantment of nature, whilst this run of thought presupposes the exact opposite, then I am ascribing to Schlegel a systematic ambivalence about the standing of nature — a thought that is anyway required for the comprehension of his shifting alliance with and departures from Novalis. As much as I dislike ascribing contradictory beliefs to a serious thinker, interpretive necessity demands it here.
27 Which is not to deny that, to the degree to which they must take up the burden of legislating for themselves what it is for a work to be a work, and thus art to be art, modern works possess an implicit self-consciousness of themselves. But this self-consciousness is purely formal, representing only the implied awareness of the predicament of art which is given by the sheer fact of a work's being a new and original work under modern conditions.
28 All this simply assumes that there cannot be a (transcendental) law of freedom; a law of freedom would make the law, so reason, higher than freedom itself. But this is not to support the opposite: freedom as arbitrariness or sheer spontaneity. The self-showing of freedom as freedom must be normatively authoritative. Hence the self-figuring of freedom as freedom here anticipates, fully and self-consciously, Nietzsche's critique of the categorical imperative.
29 Again, and problematically, in indifference toward the pantheism which remains a constant presence. One could say that pantheistic ideas run deep in Novalis, but are only casually embraced by Friedrich Schlegel, so casually that they offer no resistance to the idea of poesy that emerges between 1797 and 1800. Or perhaps, the right way to express the thought is to say that it is the pantheism that supports the lack of disillusionment which in its turn provides the condition for the exorbitant theoretical quest.
30 All references, designated OI, are to the translation of “On Incomprehensibility” that appears in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, pp. 297–307.
31 This Nietzschean-sounding principle is here, of course, a direct consequence of the embrace of Fichte's conception of freedom.
32 In addressing de Man and Blanchot I do not mean to imply that their account of Schlegel is somehow more obviously accurate than competing interpretations. Rather, their argumentation fulfills and focuses on what is obviously one line through Schlegel: romantic anti-aesthetics. The best competing analysis, which does pick up a discernible line of thought which connects Novalis and Schlegel, holding together romantic irony with the notion of “hovering,” and so getting right the Fichtean moment in romanticism, is to be found in Peter Szondi, “Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony, with Some Remarks on Tieck's Comedies,” in his On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Although sympathetic, Szondi's reading would fall foul of the Hegelian critique of romantic irony. It is, I think, the exposure of the idealist reading of irony to Hegelian critique that silently lies behind de Man's and Blanchot's efforts.
33 I am ignoring the opening argument relating the structure of romantic thought to Fichte's system mentioned in note 22 above. Roughly, de Man there construes the first moment of Fichtean self-positing as equivalent to, for Schlegel, an arbitrary act of naming, a performative exceeding cognitive control, which is equally the basis of the cognitions that follow.
34 “The Concept of Irony,” pp. 178–9. The thesis that “Die Ironie ist eine permanente Parekbase” occurs in “Zur Philosophie” (1797), fragment 668. In fact, de Man is wanting this thesis to operate as a deconstruction of Fichte and thus of idealism in general, which is how he is construing Schlegel's philosophy. So in his own technical terms his thesis is that “irony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” (ibid., p. 179). This is less obscure than it sounds. De Man interprets the primitive acts of likening things to one another and distinguishing them from one another by means of which the simplest judgements are formed as having the structure of metaphor, the structure of tropes (p. 174). So, more broadly now, since Fichte aligns his dialectic of positing to the minimum conditions for judgement, then the structure of the whole Fichtean system is “tropological” (p. 176). The system of tropes, it is argued, covers over, via the narration the system performs (which is what the system of tropes is, a narrative), the original self-positing or performative. Rhetorically: the original catachresis (the universality of language to name anything as emerging from its power to misname any item) moves the system but exceeds it as performance exceeds cognition. What is novel with de Man is that presumptive rational transparency or system here comes not from reason, but from the system of tropes, precisely what we normally think of as disrupting the transparency of reason. Hence for de Man the literary as tropes and the transparency of reason are the same illusion; the illusion of philosophical system is an aesthetic illusion. What disrupts this illusion, aesthetic semblance, the ideology of the aesthetic, and the transparency of reason, is irony as permanent parabasis. So to say that irony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes translates into irony being the permanent disruption of philosophy and aesthetics.
35 This is an illegitimate inference since indeterminacy of meaning is not equivalent to non-meaning. The Wittgentsteinian critique of the identification of a meaning with a rule, for example, turns on the demonstration that no rule can saturate a usage (because future usage could reveal a potential for meaning in a present usage indecipherable from the present), without that thought entailing skeptical collapse into non-meaning. How thoroughly the illegitimate inference governs de Man's account is worth registering and interrogating. Certainly, de Man nowhere entertains the thought that linguistic indeterminacy is just the form of potentiality for meaning that is compatible with context coming to play a determining role, without that determination again entailing unconditional determinacy. This suggests that de Manian disillusionment turns heavily on the presumption of full determinacy; dogmatism and skepticism again perform their familiar dance in his thought.
36 TP, pp. 186–7.
37 The bracketed phrase is from a later version of the passage used by de Man.
38 “The Concept of Irony,” p. 181.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 182.
41 “The Athenaeum,” in his The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 356.
42 “Monologue,” in J. M. Bernstein (ed.) Classic and Romantic German Aesthetic. See also TP, pp. 145–6.
43 Think of this as the recovery of the semiotic dimension of meaning — sound, rhythm, association, desire — within the discursive/symbolic/semantic construction of meaning. I take the semiotic/symbolic doublet from the writings of Julia Kristeva, say her Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.
44 “The Athenaeum,” p. 357.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., p. 353.
47 Ibid. It is worth noting that the thesis about the other side of language does not in fact entail the notion of fragmentary emptiness or that of the event of meaning beyond meaning proposed in (i) and (ii). Not every bracketing of representational meaning will yield the specific almost contentless event of meaning Blanchot is wanting here. Still, it is a marvelously illuminating false inference. The limpidity and brilliance of Blanchot's essay has not gone unnoticed; it has begotten, quite directly and immediately, two of the finest readings of Jena romanticism: Philippe Lacoue-Larbarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, op. cit.; Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, London, Routledge, 1997, lecture 2, (a)-(c).
48 I construe Szondi's interpretation in “Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony,” op. cit., as one expression of the second version, while the marvelously patient account of Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, would like some version of romanticism as anticipating literary postmodernism to be correct.
49 “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, op. cit., p. 83. This same materiality is, finally, for de Man, “the prosaic materiality of the letter” (ibid., p. 90), which I take to be synonymous with the text machine of the Schlegel essay.
50 “The Athenaeum,” p. 357.