Those who lament the demise of criticism are fools. For its time has long sincepast....“Sovereignty”and the“autonomousgaze”...have become a lie.
Literary criticism has finally bid “A Farewell to Interpretation.”2 For some critics, the dismissal of hermeneutics has been long overdue. Susan Sontag spoke out “Against Interpretation” already in the sixties, arguing that “[i]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (“Against Interpretation” 104). Although today her visions might appear somewhat tainted by the overall spirit at the time, Sontag rightly anticipated the demise of hermeneutic methods of reading at the end of the twentieth century. In the wake of French poststructuralism and the waning hope to “learn from history” by thinking and representing it “as a narrative” (In 1926 xi), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht recently recognized the rise of a “nonhermeneutics” that dispenses with the confining paradigm of traditional interpretation. The latter is charged with an inherently idealist agenda unable—or unwilling—to pay attention to the “materialities of communication” that actually sustain the signifying process. In his foreword to Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme, David Wellbery similarly argues “that a literary criticism informed by post-structuralism is, in fact, a post-hermeneutic criticism,” which, “to put the matter briefly, stops making sense” (“Foreword” ix). Of course one is tempted to ask what exactly that is supposed to mean were it not for the obvious fact that this very question itself is precisely what is being questioned and put on trial in Wellbery’s statement, namely the hermeneutic effort to give meaning to that which resists it, be it a simple text or the world in which we live (call it Being, life, the real).
To concede this much and to allow for the posthermeneutic questioning of meaning is not, I hasten to add, to embrace irrationalism and the end of communication, as some critics have argued. Sure, Wellbery’s statement engages in a performative self-contradiction since his exhortation to stop making sense cannot but make sense nonetheless, and it thus implicitly relies on the same mechanism of interpretative understanding it calls into question. While such scholastic reasoning may be logically valid, it completely misses the powerful rhetorical dimension of this posthermeneutic stance, which is, after all, of crucial interest to literary critics. Wellbery’s efforts are still directed toward the analysis of literary texts, yet he approaches the question of meaning from its opposite end, so to speak. His criticism focuses on those instances or elements generally overlooked as mere nonsense or, quite simply, “noise.” Not only does noise pervade all systems of signification, Wellbery contends, but its existence must continuously be suppressed by means of an interpretative method whose only goal remains over and over again to “make sense.” Both of these factors—the irreducible existence of nonsense and its continuous suppression—are, in Wellbery’s view, constitutive for the production of (textual) meaning and the survival of hermeneutics. Since traditional forms of interpretation cannot but presuppose the very sense or meaning they purportedly find represented in language, hermeneutics describes a tautological practice at best, a narcissistic projection of its own methods and prejudices upon textual matters whose sole purpose becomes to valorize the applied method as such.
Kittler’s work, for example his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Goldne Topf,” tries to unveil this self-reflective mechanism at work within Romantic literary texts in which truth is said to reside in the interiority of the author as subject, while its revelation, in turn, depends upon the ingenious “divination” of the reader-subject to “understand” what the text really means to say.3 Literature thus functions as a kind of mirror reflecting back to the interpreter his or her own self-ideal as a coherent, autonomous subject forever relishing the uncontestable truth of its own being. The hermeneutic method sanctions this specular relationship between mankind and language. It calls upon readers to become authors to become readers again and again until, finally, the spiraling effects of this universalizing process leave no space unaffected by the endless proliferation of meaning. Posthermeneutics, by contrast, seeks to expose the sociohistorical roots of this seemingly “natural” ideal of (self-)understanding: the dissemination of knowledge in the form of books and other learning material, the institutionalized methods of “correct” reading and writing, the instrumentalization of the mother’s voice as the disembodied origin of pure meaning, etc. As soon as the reader recognizes and critically investigates the contingent effects of these various “apparati” instead of relying on their efficiency to “make sense,” a whole array of interrelated metaphysical notions both derived from and constitutive of the hermeneutic enterprise—for example, “understanding,” “subjectivity,” “interpretation,” etc.—are thrown into relief, breaking apart the apparently boundless universe of linguistic meaning.
According to Kittler, this is precisely what happened in the “discourse network” of 1900. Literary modernism at the turn of the century discovers the materiality of signification and thus leaves the hermeneutic universe and its emphasis on sense-production behind. Instead of focusing on the meaning potential of language, modernism zooms in on the obscurity of the signifier and the breakdown of communication. Aestheticist authors, in other words, literally write down and inscribe the death of Romanticism into their texts. Although I generally agree with this line of criticism, it is too unbalanced and generalized to be convincing overall. Posthermeneutics provides a trenchant critique of the history of modern signification, yet it fails to elucidate the provenance of the material letter on which it is based. Instead, it tends to promote a technological determinism that presupposes the givenness of media (print, analog, digital), much like earlier hermeneutics presupposed the existence of meaning. In other words, posthermeneutics differs from its predecessor in that the latter focused predominantly on the spiritual quality of language, whereas the former focuses predominantly on its material basis. From the perspective of literary criticism, posthermeneutics seems least interesting where it succumbs to the simplicity of this reversal and most productive where it resists it. In order to develop this argument and to understand what precisely is at stake in the recent shift of emphasis from sense to nonsense, from hermeneutic interpretation to the analysis of “meaning-production,” I want to examine in greater detail both the theoretical and methodological implications of this shift.
Since posthermeneutics evolved out of French poststructuralism, a good place to start is the Derrida-Gadamer debate of the early eighties in which the philosophical similarities and differences between German hermeneutics and French deconstruction were already discussed at length. The most interesting question about this debate is to determine whether it has actually taken place at all. The Derrida-Gadamer encounter, as it was evasively phrased, certainly did not qualify as a dialogue as that term was understood by Gadamer, who expressed his disappointment and even some irritation with regard to the brief and, in his eyes, misguided questions posed to him by Derrida.4 In light of this nondebate, some critics have charged Derrida with willfully sabotaging Gadamer’s “goodwill” toward mutual understanding, while others have denounced Gadamer’s condescending, even patriarchical, attitude and blamed his “closet essentialism” for the failure of communication.5
In more general terms, Manfred Frank has repeatedly lamented the lack of a “meaningful” exchange between the two schools. Contending that deconstruction is a mere variant of the hermeneutic enterprise that originated with Schleiermacher’s philosophy, Frank relates both paradigms back to the Romantic tradition of interpreting the interplay between an abstract linguistic system and its subjective appropriation in individual speech acts. Language thus emerges as “Das Individuelle Allgemeine,”6 a reservoir of potential meaning (das Allgemeine) whose instantiation into actual speech or text (das Individuelle) is tantamount to altering and affecting the very source from which it emanates. According to Frank’s understanding of traditional hermeneutics, it never presupposed the idealist notion of pure, self-identical sense, because every form of linguistic utterance invariably expresses a sense that previously remained—quite literally—unspeakable. Every text, Frank argues, represents an innovative and individual performance in the form of a linguistic event that remains irreducible to the abstract system underlying it. Hermeneutics simply names the process by which the nascent meaning of a text is being understood as that which literally “makes a difference.” Frank thus recognizes Derrida’s insistence on “différance” as already “prefigured” in Schleiermacher’s Dialectics and even regards some of Lacan’s writings as paradigmatic examples for the hermeneutic interpretation of texts.7
Gadamer’s and Frank’s dogged efforts to elicit further negotiations regarding the similarities and differences between hermeneutics and deconstruction have remained unanswered or been dismissed by the other side as mere “attempts at ameliorative appropriation” (Wellbery, “Foreword” ix). Yet this refusal to enter into a hermeneutically charged dialogue is significant in and of itself. First, it bespeaks a certain weariness on the part of literary critics to have to continuously discuss the theoretical foundations of their work rather than being able to engage in reading literary texts. More important, however, this reluctance is also symptomatic of the intellectual distance or safety zone that posthermeneutics needs to establish between itself and its adversary for fear of contamination, since to engage hermeneutic theory on its own ground (i.e., by means of a close reading of some of its major proponents) would require a project similar to Frank’s that might lead straight back to the interpretative paradigm posthermeneutics strictly opposes. It is, therefore, hardly accidental that in those rare cases where posthermeneutic scholars provide more precise references to what exactly hermeneutics “means,” they either situate it in highly abstract terms within the larger context of the modern era since the Renaissance—the need for modern man to “interpret the world”—or they refer specifically to the works of Wilhelm Dilthey.8
Dilthey, however, represents an obvious and all too easy target: his ceaseless efforts to increase the scientific rigor of the humanities in general, his emphasis of the methodological rules and regulations that structure the process of interpretation along with the significance granted to the artistic genius (the subject par excellence) as the original source of meaningful interpretation, and, finally, his famous exhortation that the “last goal of the hermeneutic method is to understand the author better than he understood himself”9—all of this evokes idealist notions of subjectivity and indeed “presupposes that ‘meanings’ are always given—in the interiority of the subject’s psyche,” as Gumbrecht concludes (“Farewell to Interpretation” 396). Gumbrecht’s criticism strikes to the core of Dilthey’s idealization of artistic genius, which cannot be defended against the further objection, advanced by Wellbery, that the notion of genius “merely reproduces, tautologically, the discourse it seeks to interpret” (Specular Moment 121–22). The “genius” is indeed an ideal construction of poetic texts and not an anthropological fact existing in the real world—whoever claims the latter must come to terms with the transcendental problem of a self-originating subjectivity the genius is said to represent. In other words, if the hermeneutic method indeed rests on the original creativity of the ingenious reader, as Dilthey argues, then it cannot avoid being entangled in the self-reflective snares of idealist philosophy (i.e., Fichte’s notion of a self-positing ego) that contemporary theory has successfully called into question. Dilthey’s version of hermeneutics thus falls prey to the postmodern critique of metaphysics with which all hermeneutics is said to coincide. Precisely this latter assumption, however, is repeatedly challenged by Frank and Gadamer. They claim that deconstruction’s critique of subjectivity slays a dead horse since hermeneutics, too, is built upon the “subject in crisis” and relies on a notion of “individuality” radically different from that of an idealist “subjectivity” ascribed to it by advocates of poststructuralism.10
My point here is not to come to some final judgment in the philosophical debate on subjectivity and meaning. Far from it, I want to argue that aside from its specifics, one can read the peculiar deadlock of the entire discussion itself as symptomatic not of the mere improbability of an encounter between hermeneutics and deconstruction, but of its structural impossibility. Any encounter requires a common ground upon which it can take place, and as long as deconstruction remains unable or unwilling to advance toward a new model of interpretation that accounts differently (meaningfully?—but how?) for the nonsense or blind spots it recognizes in literary texts, it cannot but avoid a hermeneutic dialogue in which the opponent enjoys a crucial “home advantage” to begin with. Let me briefly discuss the works of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man as the two major paradigms that have emerged as a possible response to this dialogical impossibility.
De Man’s own reading of literary texts often begins and ends with the startling confession that reading is, indeed, impossible, and this “impossibility of reading,” de Man emphasizes, “should not be taken too lightly” (Allegories of Reading 245). This provocative statement does not declare the whole process of reading superfluous, but aims to reject its traditional concept, which holds the critic’s genius to be responsible for giving meaning to a text. De Man reads texts to find an “essential disarticulation that was already there” to begin with (Resistance to Theory 84) and that reflects a linguistic necessity: any rhetorical figure posits its own deconstruction with it. It is not a subject that deconstructs the text, but “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” (RT 118) since “the cognitive function [of literary language] resides in the language and not in the subject” (“Rhetoric of Blindness” 137).11 Consequently, de Man denounces the critic’s greatest insights regarding the meaning of texts as the unwittingly produced side effects of their greatest blindness. In other words, “the paradigm for all texts consists of a figure ... and its deconstruction”—a process that governs both the written text and its interpretation (AR 205). Hence, the important question for a reader is not to ask whether the author remained obtuse about what he meant to say, but “whether his language is blind or not to its own statement” (“RB” 137). The crucial insight for de Man is precisely that the terrain for the interpretation of literary texts never changes: everything takes place in language. This process, for de Man, remains independent of human agency and is controlled by the linguistic field and its chaotic openness: “[T]he inhuman is: linguistic structures, the play of linguistic tensions, linguistic events that occur, possibilities that are inherent in language—independently of any intent or drive or any wish or any desire we might have” (RT 96).
It remains questionable whether de Man’s understanding of language does not grant linguistic structures the same kind of self-reflexive subjectivity he explicitly denied the human individual—“the return of the repressed,” as Frank insists (Was ist Neostrukturalismus? 128). Be that as it may, what remains crucial in our context is the fact that de Man’s theory of reading by no means transcends the hermeneutic model of interpretation. This need not diminish de Man’s formidable exercises in reading literary texts, but it does problematize the sentiment that deconstruction has actually moved beyond hermeneutics. De Man himself was rather unconcerned about the popular charge that he practiced nothing but a particular form of “New Criticism,”12 while Wellbery and others explicitly reject de Man’s readings as “a negative theology of the literary work” (“Foreword” viii) unable to found a viable alternative to the traditional search for meaning in texts.13
Derrida, by contrast, has promised not only “the end of the book,” but also “the beginning of a grammatology.” His Of Grammatology from 1967 invoked a new practice of writing that follows the trace of “différance” as the constituent process that creates linguistic meaning. And yet, he also admits that any attempt to break out of the metaphysics of presence “is trapped in a kind of circle” which “describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. ... We can pronounce not a single destructive proposition that has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (Derrida, “Structure” 280–81). The circle Derrida evokes with regard to the impossibility of stepping outside of metaphysics is reminiscent of the “hermeneutic circle” that Heidegger embraced in Being and Time. If Derrida’s grammatology thus signifies its own impossibility and remains an unkept promise, as some critics argue, then his own methods of reading are being reabsorbed into the same playful process of absence and presence, meaning and nonmeaning that sustains interpretation proper.14 Hence, not only Frank and Gadamer consider Derrida “a hermeneutic thinker.” The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, for example, also regards Derrida’s work as “a deconstructionist version of hermeneutics” that aims to suspend its traditional ideal of ultimate cogency “within a multiplicity of perspectives that render them possible (and also shows them to be merely possible)” (Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation 91–92, 100). It follows that deconstructive meditation “increasingly resembles a performance” (Vattimo, Beyond 101), providing Derrida’s text with an Aestheticist appeal that, in Vattimo’s eyes, takes precedence over its argumentative strand.
Made (in)famous by Habermas’s (non)reading of Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, this reproach of blurring the generic difference between literature and philosophy is, of course, well known among advocates and adversaries of deconstruction alike. At first glance, it betrays a mere gesture of indignation that hardly advances any substantial criticism of the issues at hand other than a certain “provincialism” of those who feel the integrity of academic disciplines violated. But there is more at stake, for the literary tendency of deconstruction once again bespeaks the lack of a viable alternative to the hermeneutic principle it attacks yet continues to perpetuate nonetheless. If deconstruction cannot provide a theoretical alternative to the hermeneutic paradigm of reading and turns toward a peculiar kind of Aestheticism instead, does it not run the risk of succumbing to the “pleasure of the text” that founds the aesthetic enjoyment of the (hermeneutic) subject par excellence—the reader? Does the deconstructive message in the form of literature not implicitly rely upon and even call for the very methods of interpretation it seeks to replace? From this perspective, the literary “turn” of deconstruction involves a potentially self-destructive turning toward the very “origin” of meaning, which, and from which, it sought to split. Deconstruction prompts the question whether there really remains no-thing outside the “Fort-Da” game of language and the hermeneutic universe it constitutes.
It is precisely at this point that posthermeneutics takes its leave from the deconstructive mode of reading by returning to Derrida’s unkept promise of grammatology. “Writing” appears as the keyword in posthermeneutic criticism, not only in the Derridian sense of “différance,” but particularly in its physical properties as the material basis for modern communication. By focusing on the “exteriority of writing” (Wellbery), critics try to break the spell of universal meaning. Their goal is to move beyond the confinement of literary interpretation forever caught in the endless circle of presence and absence, signifier and signified, and meaning and nonmeaning that sustains both deconstruction and traditional hermeneutics. Breaking free—but where to?—to the letter proper, that black mark on a white surface traditionally charged with obscuring the self-identical presence of the truth it signifies. The letter emerges as the privileged site of reading since it makes a difference simply by being there. Posthermeneutics encourages the reader’s gaze to seize upon the letter not as a transparent sign, but as a material object in its own right, with its own history and its own properties. Under the auspices of this gaze, a different universe unfolds, one in which hermeneutics is exposed as a historical construct based upon particular institutional and social apparati, one in which the production of sense is recognized as an anonymous and contingent process rather than the controlled result of individual action, and one in which the (technological) media literally inscribe their message onto the human body, which is subject to, rather than the subject of, the letter. As it focuses on this universe, posthermeneutics literally begins to speak a different language. It operates from the outside rather than the inside of signification and hence is able to recognize the nonbenevolent power of signs: “The object of study is not what is said or written but the fact—the brute and often brutal fact—that it is said, that this and not rather something else is inscribed” (Wellbery, “Foreword” xii).
Meaning, in the posthermeneutic sense, is the coerced effect of a violent contortion of a (linguistic) universe bent out of shape so as to appear forever meaningful by itself, ready to validate and tend to all subjects able to read and write. Nonhermeneutic readers, like Kittler, who attempt to leave this universe behind and look beyond, must, in Wellbery’s words, “suffer through the difference that post-structuralism makes” (“Foreword” viii). Given the posthermeneutic emphasis on the letter, I am inclined to read this statement literally: the suffering, it seems, bespeaks the level of difficulty and the pain endured by any form of reading—and writing—that seeks to wrest itself from the hermeneutic grip of circulatory meaning. Such pain distorts the physical body of those bearing it as well as the textual body of those recording it. Kittler’s own readings indeed exhibit the particular marks of this suffering, evident, for example, in his unorthodox style of writing or the deliberate lack of a proper introduction or overall thesis statement.15 Claiming that reading and writing around 1900 became a physiological study of autonomous codes guided by the laws of psychophysics, yet severed from the subject’s own (un)conscious, Kittler implicitly validates his argument by performing it: his analysis cuts into pieces the structural coherence of the literary examples to which he refers. Quoting unsystematically from various texts at a time, he often reads passages with reference to the various technological and scientific inventions that allegedly shaped them, and not with regard to their interior meaning—for his own thesis, of course, forbids that they should have one to begin with. Rather than trying to understand them, Kittler’s readings “spell out for the first time” the texts he engages (Discourse Networks 317). Kittler’s method perfectly “makes sense,” for if writing around 1900 indeed mirrored the fragmentation of the senses and the mechanical mode of operation of human consciousness, it literally makes no sense—now as well as then—to try to analyze these texts according to the hermeneutic principle they deliberately undermine.
As I argued in the first chapter, I believe Kittler’s readings are partly based upon the same exaggerated notion of a profound “language-crisis” around 1900 that also informs more traditional scholarship. Although arguing from a decidedly hermeneutic perspective, Gotthard Wunberg, for example, similarly regards the “incomprehensibility” of literary modernism as its most characteristic trait, which he defines as the “impossibility to paraphrase the text” such that it “leads to a meaningful, consistent result” (“Unverständlichkeit” 313f.). For Wunberg, as for Kittler, the increasing autonomy and isolation of single aesthetic particles in literary modernism represents the logical conclusion of sociohistorical developments. More precisely, it reflects the triumphal success of scientific positivism and the concomitant rise of the visual media: “Ever since there is film, it has become possible for literature to delegate its traditional task. Now it can explore its own modernity, that is, the aesthetic autonomy of its signifiers” (“Unverständlichkeit” 350). Wunberg thus rephrases Kittler’s basic argument, yet their joined efforts also give rise to some fundamental problems in literary criticism. Under the auspices of this theoretically sanctioned thesis of overall incomprehensibility, the often difficult and challenging poetic language around 1900 can legitimately be relegated to the side as little more than “pure metaphors,” or “absolute ciphers,” or a musical “Gebilde” that defies coherent meaning—especially since authors like George and Hofmannsthal explicitly endorsed this perspective as their own.16
The mere fact that hermeneutic and posthermeneutic criticism peacefully shake hands over the lack of sense allegedly encountered in literary modernism should suffice to make any reader suspicious. Both sides operate within a somewhat static framework of binary oppositions that juxtaposes “sense” and “nonsense” without examining in detail the ways in which the interdependency of both actually shapes individual texts. Thus, the alleged incomprehensibility of the discourse network around 1900 can be said to reintroduce, on a metatheoretical level, the hermeneutic mirror theory of literature it allegedly overcame. Instead of allowing the poetic subject to recognize its idealized self-image in the text it reads or writes, modern texts, according to Kittler, reveal the emptiness of the entire concept of bourgeois interiority and thus, once again, adequately reflect the (this time nonsensical) nature of the human self. Both times, the signifier has no story to tell of its own. Literature simply functions as the indispensable mirror in order to validate whatever notion of (hyper)reality and (non)subjectivity seems culturally en vogue at the time: once, around 1800, literature operated from inside the hermeneutic universe, while around 1900 it is used to observe and record the demise of this mechanism from the outside.
To be sure, there is little doubt that Kittler’s work and posthermeneutic studies in general rank among the most productive and innovative in recent literary scholarship. Less obvious, however, is the methodological price to pay for opening one’s eyes to the materiality of the letter. What epistemological terrain remains once the critic has abandoned the language game and come to see the sociocultural mechanisms responsible for the fabrication of meaning? What guarantees or enables (in the double sense of “begründen” as both to explain and to ground) the various “presuppositions” (exteriority, mediality, corporeality) Wellbery emphasizes in his discussion of Kittler’s work? What is the significance of the posthermeneutic emphasis on external observation that replaces the imaginary inside of linguistic meaning? And who—or what—is responsible for the pain posthermeneutic texts both record and are made to bear?
These questions do not simply lead back into the twisted universe of traditional hermeneutics. Rather, they seek to locate both the posthermeneutic position and those who claim to inhabit it within the realm of exterior materiality thus disclosed. If the media are said to shape the production of meaning and give rise to those cultural phenomena known as literature, cinema, or cyberspace, one might ask who or what shaped them in the first place. Obviously film, for example, was not simply “born” that day in December 1895 during the Lumière showing at the Grand Café in Paris. Media do not suddenly emerge out of the blue, as Kittler’s own work has convincingly demonstrated, nor can a mere descriptive account of their internal history—the various technological “inventions” succeeding and reinforcing each other—suffice theoretically to provide an answer to the question of origin. On the contrary, the history of cinema points toward a dialectical process of “overdetermined” sociopolitical changes caused, among others, by modern industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century. This process involves an interconnected array of macro- and microcosmic developments taking place within “the complex structured whole” of society, as the French Marxist Louis Althusser described it.17
Kittler’s notion of “Aufschreibesysteme” seems to imply a similar structure at work on behalf of the letter, yet his own analysis remains ambiguously suspended between a broad Marxist critique of social materiality in general and the materiality of modern media in particular. Since Kittler emphasizes the latter over the former, the scope of his analysis remains too limited to support his major claim according to which “media determine our situation” and define the reality in which we live. What then is reality, one might ask, and how exactly does it take shape? Are media really the primary or even the only force at work here? Since Kittler does not explicitly engage these questions, Wellbery addresses them for him. According to him, posthermeneutics rejects the common notion of “Ideologiekritik” since Marx’s own definition of ideology as “false consciousness” presupposes its opposite in the form of a “right” consciousness buried underneath and waiting to be revealed. In a phenomenological gesture, posthermeneutics abandons this notion of hidden truths and embraces the “surface materiality of the texts themselves,” which “is the site of their historical efficacy” (Wellbery, “Foreword” xvii).
Let me note in passing that Wellbery’s critique of “Ideologiekritik” stands as a red herring in the context of Marxist criticism, particularly in light of Althusser’s radical redefinition of ideology as a necessary and irreducible precondition for the sustenance of any human society, even a communist one.18 Strongly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on linguistic structures, Althusser, contrary to Marx, abandoned the hope of ever completely stepping outside of ideology. This concession brings structuralist Marxism in much closer alliance with the posthermeneutic enterprise than Wellbery seems ready to admit. Generally speaking, though, Marxism remains far too concerned with objective reasoning and the determination of historical truths (i.e., Marx’s “historical materialism” or Althusser’s continued emphasis, inherited from Engels and Lenin, on the “last instance” analysis) to be of any assistance to a literary critique that set out to question the validity of precisely these concepts. Although posthermeneutics seeks to fold the hermeneutic universe of signification back upon the material basis that constitutes it, it nonetheless refuses to identify with a traditional Marxist perspective, for the latter does not allow for historical contingency or for giving methodological preference to surface appearances in the form of literary texts and the materiality of writing. Marxism is an obvious, yet dangerous, ally for posthermeneutics and ultimately needs to be avoided, and this accounts for the tension between traditional leftist academic circles and Kittler’s media studies in Germany during the last decade.19
This posthermeneutic effort to sever the materialities of communication from their broader materialist framework remains problematic because it avoids coming to terms with the question of origin or grounding both of the letter and the entire mediated reality it evokes. Having forsaken both the (hermeneutic and deconstructive) language game of (non)meaning as well as the basic principles of Marxist dialectics, posthermeneutics needs to rely on a genealogical account of history exemplified in the works of Michel Foucault and New Historicism on the one hand and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory on the other.20 Yet in doing so, it inherits their theoretical and methodological baggage as well. Gumbrecht himself acknowledges a precarious tendency in New Historicism to supplant the traditional paradigm of “learning from history” with that of discursively “making history” as text, in which case the notion of autopoietic subjectivity threatens to be reintroduced under the guise of New Historicist authors expressing themselves in and through the stories they write.21 Similarly, Foucault’s genealogical approach posits a contingent and discontinuous series of historical events and epistemic changes that can be studied merely by means of the complex network of interrelating discourses. He does not, however, determine the epistemological position of the “archaeologist of knowledge” who surveys this historical field. Althusser, who faced the same problem of accounting for the validity of his own insights into the all-comprehensive mechanism of ideological interpellation, tried to address and solve the dilemma as a true Marxist: he simply claimed to inhabit a space outside of the ideology he scrutinized—a hardly convincing argument.22 Explicitly rejecting the scientific objectivity allegedly commanded by Marxism as yet another discursive effect, Foucault’s texts ultimately remain obscure with regard to their own location within the discursive history they describe, as Frank argues.23 One wonders where Foucault’s archaeologist comes from and how he knows what he knows. If it is neither the human subject nor language itself that produces knowledge, who or what does?
Precisely this question is at the very basis of Luhmann’s cybernetic model of systems theory. It operates under the paradoxical premise that the observation of the contingent effects that govern modern society as a whole requires systems theory to posit itself as necessary and thus to occupy the very privileged position Luhmann himself declares impossible.24 Modernity, for Luhmann, is but the name for an amorphous locus or structure inhabited by a variety of what he calls “autopoietic” subsystems, that is, self-reflective systems able to reproduce themselves independently from their environment. Since the task of modern society as a whole is to enable pluralism and the peaceful resolution of social conflict, it follows that the law of contingency that enables this process to unfold must itself be posited as necessary. Any efforts to break out of this paradox, Luhmann argues, are either doomed to fail, that is, to lead to new and different dichotomies that merely extend rather than overcome modernity, or, if they truly were successful, would obliterate modernity as such without any possible clue to imagine what follows it since we cannot think that which exceeds the operational mode of thought itself, namely difference. Hence, the paradox of necessary contingency—the fact that one must start somewhere by means of an arbitrary distinction that “cut[s] into the unmarked state of the world” (Art 42)—is constitutive of our thought. This, in turn, liberates the critic from having to account for the paradoxical position he occupies as long as his “analysis reclaims for itself the characteristics of its object of study: modernity” (Beobachtungen der Moderne 12). In other words, since nobody can observe himself observing things, it makes little sense to fret about an epistemological dilemma that cannot be avoided: “The unobservability of paradox,” Luhmann concludes, “legitimates the arbitrariness of beginning” (Art 42).
While Luhmann’s cybernetic model of modern society sounds theoretically convincing by virtue of acknowledging its fundamental paradox, it provides little insight with regard to the realm of aesthetics other than a generalized, if intriguing, description of the social subsystem called “art.” In Art as a Social System, Luhmann spends over 400 pages discussing “art” without specific reference to—let alone an in-depth analysis of—an individual work of art. Instead, he argues that art cannot possibly “make a difference” in modern society since this would contradict his basic contention regarding the closed and self-referential nature of all systems. According to Luhmann, nobody is able to observe the totality of the world, not even by means of the work of art: “Focusing one’s observation on the means of observation—on artistic means (such as twelve-tone technique)—excludes a total view of the world. No further reflection can get around that. . . . Transparency is paid for with opacity...”(Art 61). Although Luhmann acknowledges that the goal of art is to provide viable alternatives to the “way things are” and thus to “expose reality” in some way, he also insists that the means and inspiration for these aesthetic counter-paradigms are created within the system itself rather than provided by the real environment surrounding it. Like any autopoietic subsystem, art cannot, by definition, provide an adequate space for the intersection of conflicting perspectives on modern society at large since it remains obtuse to what exactly these perspectives are. Art can certainly imagine how other systems understand themselves, yet there is no hope whatsoever that such an aesthetic interpretation will ever fully coincide with the actual self-understanding of those systems to whom it refers. All works of art necessarily envision the other in ways prescribed by their own identity as art. Even if it claims to speak for and with the other, art only refers to itself, and aesthetic difference is just more of the same.
According to Luhmann, the unfolding of this paradox is what distinguishes art from other “things” in the world. Luhmann himself, however, is not interested in following the particular “ins” and “outs” of this process with reference to individual works of art. Rather, he provides an outside perspective of this operation as such, which is precisely what art itself cannot afford to do: “Whatever can be observed in art is thus the unfolding of a paradox that, for its part, escapes observation. ... The only option is to observe forms instead of the unobservable, while knowing that this happens by unfolding a paradox” (Art 42). It follows that Luhmann is “not offering a helpful theory of art,” as he himself concedes, but instead presents “a theoretical endeavor intended to clarify the context and contingency of art from a sociotheoretical perspective” (Art 3). No doubt, Luhmann is as clearsighted about his own perspective as he can possibly be. He has managed to discuss art from the outside without being seduced by its charm, its beauty, or its paradoxical nature. Luhmann has nothing specific to say about any work in particular because, in his eyes, they are all more or less alike.
My point is that one need not disagree with Luhmann’s overall theory regarding modern society to express some dissatisfaction and even disappointment about the insights it yields into the world of art. His comments are meant to elucidate the overarching idea of his systems theory rather than individual artworks. Although his critique of the institution of art is very informed, it remains too generic overall and hence ultimately serves to silence rather than enliven aesthetic objects. In order to resist this tendency, this study will give more credence to the Aestheticist perspective, according to which art is more than merely one system among many. Ideally speaking, one might say that the survival of art paradoxically hinges on its complete self-annihilation. There literally is no art except as other, for art is the other. The goal of art is to create an epistemological rupture that enables difference as such to emerge. Art is believed to be able to reflect and transform society at large precisely because it only exists in the form of its own negation. It cannot but keep alive the dream of a world “in which things would be different,” as Adorno claimed, that is, a world in which things would be as they truly are by being different from what they have been made to be.
One may certainly disqualify this vision of art as an illusory construct contrived by artists and intellectuals who try to ensure the survival of their own subsystem, as Luhmann’s theory implies. Yet the paradoxical “double character of art as both fait social and autonomous” (Adorno), that is, its ability to provide a space in which social contingency and difference are revealed as such, oddly mirrors that of system theory itself—which is to say that by disqualifying the self-understanding of autonomous art, Luhmann simultaneously jeopardizes the self-understanding of his own system theory since both are seen (or see themselves) as second-order observers, surveying the sociohistorical mechanisms that regulate modern society. Luhmann, of course, cannot admit this similarity and therefore charges the ideal of aesthetic autonomy pronounced by the l’art pour l’art movement with a fundamental misunderstanding of autopoiesis, a reproach worth quoting at length: “‘L’art pour l’art’ wants to thematize the essence of the system within the system itself and hence misses the crucial fact that autonomy does not abort the connections to the outside, but indeed presupposes them. It would lead to the end of aesthetic autopoiesis if dependency would be understood as the negation of dependency. Luckily, this program fails—for obvious reasons” (“Kunstwerk” 626; my translation).
Although he sounds as if he wanted to reprimand art for challenging the founding principles of his theory, Luhmann nonetheless formulates a crucial insight regarding the primary goal of art around 1900, which many of its critics have failed to notice. For the aesthetic autonomy of art was indeed supposed to end the autopoiesis of art by consciously subscribing to it. Aestheticism regards the autonomy of art as the paradoxical prerequisite for its transcendence into life and not, as is generally claimed, as an end in and for itself. However, instead of discrediting this vision, as Luhmann aims to do, his expressed relief about the historical failure of Aestheticism testifies to the very possibility of its success. In fact, I want to argue that art and aesthetic self-reflexivity can reasonably lay claim to the same epistemological clarity as does systems theory itself.
What does all of this mean for the discussion of posthermeneutic literary criticism? The previous analysis was intended to show: first, that the scholarly emphasis on the materiality of the letter opens up new dimensions for the reading of literary texts, while at the same time remaining trapped in the epistemological aporias of the poststructuralist perspective from which it emerged; and second, that Luhmann’s recognition of contingency as a constitutive force of modern society does not categorically disqualify the revolutionary potential of art to thematize and disrupt the necessity of contingency. Quite the contrary, art might be understood as that paradoxical element of necessity that enables contingency to actually take place and become recognizable. Art is different and figures as the irreducible “supplement” within the postmodern thinking of difference itself. It literally embodies the difference it signifies. Wellbery himself acknowledges this ideal of self-cancellation at work in modern art: “Art is the subdomain of semiosis in which the random element intrinsic to all signification is elevated to a constitutive principle. . . . In art, I want to say, semiosis exposes itself to randomness, at once gives itself and withdraws itself within the singularity of its occurrence” (“Exteriority of Writing” 22). One can easily agree with Wellbery’s statement without, however, subscribing to the entire agenda of posthermeneutics. Rather, Wellbery’s own formulations bring to mind the hermeneutic wanderings of the later Heidegger and his notion of aletheia. Wellbery’s comments are thus primarily directed against the Romantic ideal of the hermeneutic project and not against its twentieth-century variation. It cannot be otherwise, for if posthermeneutics were truly to abandon the language game that sustains hermeneutics and deconstruction alike, there literally would be no space left for an analysis of the signifying process, and posthermeneutics would be forced to advocate and reinscribe the reign of absolute “nonsense” instead of analyzing the means of meaning-production.
Literary criticism ends in a cul-de-sac if it aligns itself too closely with media studies. The latter celebrate the arrival of the technological media as the irrevocable death sentence of art in general, and often “hail the conquering engineer”25 as the replacement of the traditional artist. These days, Kittler himself is interested primarily in the social effects of digitalization and computer software and not in art—a distinction he, of course, would reject as immaterial and ideological, but one that I believe to be crucial. It follows that the methodological problems I have tried to point out are somewhat peripheral to his work, yet they are relevant for art and poetry around 1900. While that need not bother him or media studies in general, it should bother literary critics and those still interested in some kind of interpretative reading. By the same token, Foucault, New Historicism, and Luhmann can only offer limited insights into the single work of art because they do not share its basic premise of aesthetic autonomy. This indifference toward aesthetic difference also explains why Kittler readily adopts the overall incomprehensibility theory with regard to high literary modernism. If the work of art does not call forth a world of its own, but merely reflects the operative mechanism of media technology, it loses its privileged status and ultimately falls silent since it has nothing left to say.
I realize that posthermeneutic critics welcome this silence as a longoverdue repose from the idle chatter of hermeneutic sense-production, and although I value much of their basic critique, I fail to see how posthermeneutics can possibly lead literary analysis back toward the materiality of the letter as if that were the absolute and incontestable ground upon which its own analysis could positively take place. I want to argue the exact opposite, namely that posthermeneutic criticism, paradoxically, “misunderstands” both its history and its own trajectory by failing to distinguish between the various models of hermeneutic reading available today. To the degree that posthermeneutics in fact does examine the contingent effects of the primordial encounter between meaning and its other within the text—an encounter that constitutes and takes place within language—these readings remain, I argue, indebted to hermeneutics, albeit not in a Romantic, but in a Heideggerian sense. If the material ground for literary analysis cannot be identified or presupposed as something given without foreclosing the fundamental questions it seeks to answer, the appropriate critical practice is one that reflects its own unfoundedness. Wellbery himself concludes as follows: “The methodological consequence of my claim, then, would seem to be that the science of art, if you will, would develop its discourse as a reading of the unreadable, a reading that adheres to the moment of accidentality and non-sense that marks the work in its singularity and in the singularity of its history. But it is unclear whether such a reading could codify itself as a method, as a protocol, without obliterating the very thing it seeks to account for” (“Exteriority” 23).
“A reading of the unreadable”—is this not exactly what (a deconstructive, non- or post-) hermeneutics is all about, a nonmethodical method aimed at honoring aesthetic difference by means of a Heideggerian “Andenken” that tries to remember the different as different? Does, therefore, this literary practice not lead back to a particular tradition of hermeneutic reading exemplified in the later Heidegger’s reflections on language and the work of art? I mean this not in the sense of rediscovering a primordial origin or presenting the common ground from which emerged both Gadamer’s dialectodialogical method and Derrida’s sense of “écriture,” but in the sense of going back to a corpus of texts that problematize this notion of grounding itself. The task would be to try to unveil the difference within the identificatory power of language and the poetic notion of truth it enables.
Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein and its relationship to Being can also be helpful with regard to the methodological concerns raised by posthermeneutic criticism. According to Heidegger, Dasein must not be understood in the enlightened sense as an independent subject facing a world of objects, but needs to be determined in relation to Being as such, of which Dasein partakes. Dasein is turned toward Being and corresponds to it: “Man actually is the relation of this equivalence, and he is only that” (Der Mensch ist eigentlich dieser Bezug der Entsprechung, und er ist nur dies) (Identität und Differenz 22). The circulatory reasoning involved in the discernment of both Being and Dasein is deliberate: Dasein is its relationship to Being, a relationship that nonetheless already presupposes Dasein as one of its constitutive poles.26 Dasein can only be itself by entering into a fundamental relationship with Being as the unconcealment of every-thing in the world: “The open harbors as its proper self the essential space of man, while he, and only he, is the form of being to whom Being reveals itself” (Das Offene birgt als es selbst die Wesensstätte des Menschen, wenn anders der Mensch, und nur er, dasjenige Seiende ist, dem das Sein sich lichtet) (Gesamtausgabe 54: 224). This logical circle involves a temporal paradox as well since Dasein alone may recognize Being as such and create the opening within which it will enable Dasein to become itself. Dasein thus emerges both as the cause and the effect of the primordial event of Being. It is called upon to properly open up the world into which it finds itself always already thrown.
Let me emphasize that one need not endorse Heidegger’s entire philosophical project to appreciate its methodological insights for the study of literary texts. If one replaces “Dasein” with “the critic” and “Being” with “the text” in the quotes above, one can read Heidegger’s comments as the outlines of an approach toward literary texts based upon the insight that text and critic are turned to and influence each other. In this sense, the scholar is not radically severed from his object of study, as Althusser and modern science contend, nor does he emerge as a mere effect of discursive epistemes (Foucault) or media systems (Kittler). Rather, the critic’s gaze is retrospectively enabled by the world he engenders in his own critique. This is not a matter of simple dialectics between a subject and its own personal version of history, as criticized in Gumbrecht’s reassessment of New Historicism. Instead, it demands a recognition of our passive inheritance of a history that nonetheless requires its active reconstruction in order to become realized: “[H]ermeneutics,” Vattimo recently argued, “is legitimated as a narrative of modernity, that is, of its own provenance,” and “it argues for its own validity by proposing a reconstruction of the destiny-tradition from which it arises” (Beyond Interpretation 12, 108). That reconstruction, or what Vattimo elsewhere calls the “hermeneutical return in infinitum,”27 is absolutely necessary and cannot be circumvented. Yet it should not be mythologized either, as Heidegger often does. Rather, it must be performed self-critically and in full awareness of its inevitability.
In order to justify one’s own reading of a text, one must provide an interpretation that accounts not only for its latent meaning, but also for the active reshaping of a hermeneutic world that enables both text and critic to relate to each other in the first place. This world need not be Heidegger’s mythical reconstruction of ancient Greece—it might as well be Kittler’s discursive network around 1900. In any case, however, one’s analysis cannot simply be based upon some positive ground, such as the materiality of a letter whose provenance remains obscurely relegated to the domain of the governing media, presupposed as simply being there. Otherwise, the one “sense” that remains in posthermeneutics—the sense of getting it right by observing the mechanisms of meaning-production from the outside—must get it wrong if it refuses to account theoretically for the very “outside” it claims to inhabit. This, it seems, posthermeneutics cannot do since it would lead straight back to the very inside from which it allegedly took leave. I wonder if this tendency of language to give and lose itself in the web of its own being is not the actual cause for the physical pain posthermeneutics both suffers and records? Indeed, this pain has no proper place since it does not emanate from a self-identical origin that could be named without further proliferating and prolonging the agony it hopes to end. Posthermeneutics, too, must “suffer through” the difference language makes because its gesture of revealing the hidden grounds of writing and sense-production still remains caught therein. The materialistic critique of language is being reappropriated by the very mechanism it criticizes because the signifier cannot be set free to tell its story without being lost in the story it tells. Not only is this aporia always at stake during the process of reading and writing, but it also leads right to the core of the Aestheticist paradigm.
Modernist poetry around 1900 remains highly conscious of this predicament. In response, it tries to operate simultaneously from inside and outside the hermeneutic universe. Aestheticism linguistically deconstructs its own epistemological base, that is, the Romantic paradigm from which it emerges and upon which it depends for its own survival. This ambivalence gives rise to a high level of complexity in modernist poetry, which recognizes that there is no outside of language that has not always already been infiltrated by its mechanism of internal differentiation. In terms of contemporary media or systems theory, one might say that Aestheticism recognizes the ubiquity of the linguistic code that permeates and sustains society at large, at which point it sees the entire metaphysical history of binary oppositions breaking down. There remains no difference between art and life because the linguistic code constitutes both, and concepts such as identity and difference, inside and outside, subject and object, are nothing but the self-expression of the code underlying them.
The various chapters in this book try to remain mindful of this constitutive ambivalence of modernist poetry. If poetry around 1900 seeks to voice the ineffable and professes the death of the author, that demise should give rise, in the words of Roland Barthes, to “the birth of the reader” (“Death”; Image, Music, Text 148). Therefore, this study repeats the constitutive movement of the texts themselves in the process of reading them, which is why I operate from the inside out rather than, in a posthermeneutic manner, situating myself firmly outside of and in opposition to the text from the very beginning. Nor, however, do I presume to find an authorial and prior meaning in the text waiting to be restored, for either practice cannot but miss the intriguing self-performativity of language that is characteristic of Aestheticist poetry. What remains is for readers to follow the letter of the text, simultaneously looking forward toward the hermeneutic horizon and backward upon the trail of signification left behind. Unlike the gory locomotive at the Gare Montparnasse, readers cannot simply break through the interior realm of aesthetics onto the other side lest they are ready to accept the same disastrous consequences that distinguished the accident in Paris. Indeed, the surface of the literary text can be likened to the window at the train station: it allows us a glimpse of the other world that surrounds and sustains the inside. As the borderline that connects and separates two heterogeneous realms, the window of the text must be approached with caution rather than at high velocity. Even the posthermeneutic reference to the brutality of fact and the material aspects of communication does not liberate the critic from the grips of hermeneutics, but merely recognizes the constraints under which it—and all of us—are forced to operate. Otherwise, literary criticism is forced to destroy what it seeks to elucidate, namely the intricate play of materiality and meaning, sound and sense at work in literary texts. The ensuing ambivalence of a critique suspended between the material plane of isolated signifiers and the transcendental vision of their signified meaning not only is inevitable, but constitutes the very essence of literary criticism: “Like all authentic quests, the quest of criticism consists not in discovering its object but in assuring the conditions of its inaccessibility” (Stanzas xvi), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben contends. Every reader must endure the impossibility of reading.
My readings of works by Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and George presented in the second part of this study draw not only from Heidegger’s philosophy, but also from another major reader of high literary modernism, Theodor W. Adorno. My choice of these two thinkers is determined by various factors, the most obvious being their shared emphasis and incisive commentaries on both phenomenology and life philosophy on the one hand and the three poets on the other. Their particular modes of reading, however, differ distinctly. Adorno shuns close readings and comments on fragmented passages exclusively, whereas Heidegger spends dozens of pages translating a single poem into his own idiosyncratic language, often losing sight of the original text. The two approaches are symptomatic of the larger philosophical framework within which they operate. For Adorno, the aesthetic fragment functions as a crucial reminder of the catastrophic impact of Western capitalism in modern culture. The process of commodification and mindless homogenization is best resisted in the nonsystematic form of the essay, whereas any effort to restore the imaginary wholeness of either poetic or critical texts silences the only remaining voice of criticism still alive in art today: the determinate negation of the untrue. For Heidegger, by contrast, poetry carries a more positive, yet far less specific, message regarding the primordial intertwinement of Being and truth. In order to understand what language means to say, the critic needs to circle the text and revisit every word over and over again until finally the presencing of truth (aletheia) is recognized in and through the work of art. “On the path towards language,” however, Heidegger never experiences the Benjaminian “shock” of sudden awareness or the “flash of lightning” caused by the aesthetic “constellation” of highly charged particles left over and spurned by capitalist society. Rather, a critic inspired by Heidegger engages in a slow and tedious process of literally reinventing the originary moments of truth he claims to perceive in the text.
This leads to a second reason for consulting Adorno in the context of this study. Seeking to protect the “particular” or “nonidentical” from its appropriation into the capitalist mode of exchange, Adorno’s sociopolitical mode of reading emerges as the necessary corrective to the mythological idealization of language recognizable in both Aestheticism and the later Heidegger “after the turn.”28 Adorno, whose own deconstructive “force” has repeatedly been acknowledged by critics,29 still insists on the “social nature of poetry” that allows the philosopher to think the possibility of “a world where things would be different” (“Rede” 52). History sediments into language, he claims, meaning that Heidegger’s search for the original meaning of single words is as misguided as his entire effort to name the essence of Being. Heidegger implicitly counters Adorno’s dialectical investigation of language with an oracle-like affirmation of its obscure essence: “Saying and Being, word and thing belong together in a concealed, rarely contemplated, and unthinkable way” (Sage und Sein, Wort und Ding gehören in einer verhüllten, kaum bedachten und unausdenkbaren Weise zueinander) (Heidegger, “Das Wort”; UzS 237). His reflections on language literally silence any sociopolitical critique, a silence Adorno reads as the confession of its own complicity with the authoritarian violence governing the outside.30 One of the most fundamental differences between Heidegger and Adorno thus lies in the latter’s emphasis of negativity, his unwillingness to ever identify aesthetic truth with the primordial power of “worlding” recognized by Heidegger, who takes comfort in the idea that “truth is at work within art.” This self-sufficiency of art as well as its (imaginary) rootedness in the lost origin of Greek philosophy stands in stark contrast to Adorno’s emphasis on the fate of modern art as a fait social determined by capitalism. One might conceptualize this difference as that between history and historicity, between a dialectical effort of recuperating that which, for Adorno, has been irrevocably lost in the course of history (namely freedom from domination) and Heidegger’s nondialectical effort to “unconceal” the presencing of an ahistorical truth at workinart.
In spite of these differences, however, the two thinkers also share some characteristic traits. Both insist on philosophical thought moving in and through language and thus endorse what Heidegger calls the “neighborly relations” between “Dichten und Denken,” that is, the interdependency of art and philosophy. If Heidegger deliberately moves in circles, Adorno’s thought moves in a dialectical spiral that seeks to reintegrate that which it was forced to exclude without ever coming to a final conclusion. And yet, Adorno pursuing a “negative dialectics” is not fundamentally at odds with Heidegger’s effort to account for the “Gleichursprünglichkeit” of life and Dasein, of Being and language. Although their methods differ, the ultimate goal remains similar, namely to salvage, via art, a utopian moment in the history of modernity that cannot be assimilated into the prevalent mode of instrumental rationality. Of course, the complexity of the engagement between these two thinkers far exceeds the scope of this study. But I still want to suggest that Adorno’s often problematic (mis)readings of Heidegger’s “Jargon of Authenticity,” his polemics against the “tautological” and “antidialectical” nature of Heidegger’s philosophy, and his charge that ontology fortifies, instead of dismantles, modern myths and thus succumbs to a totalitarian form of pure “irrationalism”—all these attacks might indeed be read as therapeutic mechanisms of purification meant to exorcise what appeared “uncanny” in Heidegger, namely the sometimes striking similarities with regard to the meaning and essence of art in modern society, which Adorno desperately seeks to disavow yet implicitly acknowledges by means of the disavowal itself.31
This brings up the last reason for juxtaposing Heidegger and Adorno, which concerns the political implications of their work. Heidegger’s enthusiastic cooperation during the early years of National Socialist power in Germany defines one possible response to the challenge of modernity. Adorno’s critical theory inherited from Marx and Freud designates the other. I am aware that my attempt to draw from both thinkers may strike some readers as problematic in light of the ethical implications of their work. While I do not want to minimize the personal and theoretical differences between the two philosophers—differences that shall become more apparent in the subsequent chapters of this book—I similarly resist the tendency to disavow the complexity of their engagement by creating the juxtaposition of a “good” and a “bad” object of reference meant to serve as searchlights guiding the uncharted course of academic criticism. If Heidegger’s poetics at times surfaces as the “return of the repressed” in Adorno’s own Aesthetic Theory, it seems not only legitimate, but crucial, to read them in the context of each other in order to understand the ethicopolitical dimension of art and philosophy around the turn of the twentieth century.
Thus, a three-part structure emerges as the guiding theoretical framework for this entire study. While Kittler tries to situate himself completely outside the imaginary performance of the letter, whose historical modes of (ab)use he records, and Heidegger’s metaphysical readings of modern poetry aim at precisely the opposite by literally following the path of language from inside the text, occasionally getting lost therein, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory might be said to occupy the middle ground between the two poles. He explicitly rejects the radical Marxist position exemplified in the works of the later Lukács, who more or less identifies all art and thought at the beginning of the twentieth century as a particular form of irrationalism leading straight to fascism.32 On the other hand, however, Adorno similarly refuses to follow the hermeneutic paradigm of immanent reading, situating his critique in the force field between autonomous and socially determined art instead. What remains is a vast corpus of difficult readings that are often as idiosyncratic as they are insightful, for example when Adorno condemns jazz as the epitome of the capitalist culture industry, or unambiguously pits “Schönberg and progression” against “Strawinsky and reactionism” in his Philosophy of New Music, or denounces Rilke’s “words of consolation” (Trostsprüche) as well as Hofmannsthal’s “theater for children” (Kindertheater) as paling variants of high literary modernism in comparison to the lyrical works of Eichendorff and Mörike.
I emphasize what I consider to be some of the problematic aspects of Adorno’s work from the very beginning, not only because this study tries to resist being appropriated by either one of the three theoretical sources informing it. More important, Adorno’s critical comments about Aestheticism are symptomatic of a particular bias that pervades his readings, namely his adherence to some notion of a self-determining, nonalienated subject as the only basis for an active resistance against the totalitarian politics of capitalism. Adorno’s critique consistently favors Romanticism (as well as modernist texts by Kafka, Proust, and Beckett) over Aestheticism because the former anticipated or mourned the loss of subjectivity, whereas the latter deliberately dissolved the human subject within the presymbolic realm opened up by the look of things, and indeed celebrated this dissolution as the regained freedom of mankind.
As recent critics have noted, Adorno thus develops an ambiguous, if not self-contradictory, notion of modern subjectivity: On the one hand, he regards the unified subject as the coerced effect of the pervasive social constraints inherent in capitalism and thus as a sign of domination. On the other hand, however, he equally rejects the dissolution of subjectivity and instead holds fast to the notion of a “liberated” or “free” subject able to preserve the integrity of its own “inner nature.”33 The latter, it seems, only serves as the necessary specter for his critique of the former, particularly in light of Adorno’s refusal to flesh out the details of this utopian promesse de bonheur that characterized, for example, much of Herbert Marcuse’s philosophy. Indeed, Adorno’s harsh critique of Benjamin’s arcades project and his (somewhat more nuanced) discussion of surrealism, as a kind of object fetishism that abandons theoretical mediation and thus fortifies the already existing reification of the real, stem precisely from Adorno’s reluctance to allow for the kind of messianic redemption to which Benjamin aspired.34 “Were one to speak forcefully, one might say that the work [Benjamin’s arcades project] is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched. Only theory is able to break the spell” (Wollte man drastisch reden, so könnte man sagen, die Arbeit [Benjamins Passagenwerk] sei am Kreuzweg von Magie und Positivismus angesiedelt. Diese Stelle ist verhext. Nur die Theorie vermöchte den Bann zu brechen) (Benjamin, Schriften I/3: 1096).
Adorno’s critique of modernist poetry repeats this charge regarding the mystification of the commodity form over and over again: “The modernist poet is vanquished by the power of things like the outsider is subdued by force of the cartel” (Der Dichter der Moderne läßt von der Macht der Dinge sich überwältigen wie der Outsider vom Kartel) (“George und Hofmannsthal” 235). In other words, Adorno strongly resists what he elsewhere calls the “dissolution of all self-posited human existence” (“Charakteristik Walter Benjamins”; GS 10/1: 246). However, Adorno’s apodictic rhetoric as well as his strong critique of Benjamin’s project forestalls the question it implicitly poses, namely whether a radical Aestheticism is inherently uncritical, repressive, or even totalitarian by default. If “theory is able to break the spell,” as Adorno put it in his letter to Benjamin, I do not see any aesthetic ground or reason to impose such a strict hierarchy between Romanticism and Aestheticism as long as one does not uncritically hypostatize either one. For Aestheticism’s attempt to redeem subject and object alike in the form of poetic language pays the price of a potentially reified aesthetics, much like Romanticism often fell prey to a purely speculative or idealist notion of freedom devoid of material substance. The space between these two visions can only be bridged during the process of critical reading as discussed in my previous comments. Hence, the following chapter outlines what I consider the major differences between the “discourse networks” of 1800 and 1900.