Our Broad Present: Our Broad Present

V. STEADY ADMIRATION IN AN EXPANDING PRESENT

While our relationship with classics has so far neither become a typical subject for exam questions nor appealed to literary supplements, many observations, some seemingly trivial, suggest that this relationship has altered—altered as it is experienced by educated readers, not as it is reflected in institutions, which are slower to respond to change. As yet we have no vocabulary to describe the shift; it has no name, no agenda—but it is certainly not restricted to the culture of any one particular nation. It is, indeed, the very diffuseness of this new relationship with classics that both reveals and obscures this novel dynamic.

Wherever developments of this nature have been perceived in the last three hundred years, two contrasting reactions have ensued with reflexive predictability. There have always been voices that celebrated a “return to the classics” as the inevitable triumph of absolute quality in a literal sense; something to be welcomed, as if the present were correcting itself, albeit too late. Yet others, with a slight sense of insecurity, have asked if retreat to classics is a symptom of the diminished vitality, even decadence, of the age.

We professional students of literature and the arts should have relegated such trite responses to the arena of dinner party repartee long ago, since they are no more than arbitrary postures, adopted uncritically. Indeed, we have an obligation to do so to those who finance us. The point is not to celebrate the latest development regarding the classics or to react with a frown. My alternative, in many respects more challenging, is to argue first and foremost that our new relationship with classics, still operating diffusely, has grown out of a change in our construction of time (I shall employ the word chronotope as a synonym here, though I am well aware that this usage does not convey all the nuances that students of Mikhail Bakhtin, the originator of this term, would insist upon). Time-forms, as we know from Edmund Husserl, shape the stage upon which we enact experience; including the context in which we read texts we have inherited on the pretext of their inherent merit.

My thesis only demands support because the transformation of our chronotope—which explains why our altered relationship with classics is so all-pervasive—has escaped the notice of the humanities. Those admirably complex terms historical time and history still—as, most prominently, Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck have shown from such various points of departure—carry a range of reference that crystallized in the early nineteenth century. I argue that this range of reference no longer accurately characterizes the manner in which our experience is shaped in the present day. The transformation has caught us unawares; caught, indeed, everyone in the humanities unawares. So our new relationship with classics is in fact an important symptom of this new chronotope. Indeed, it is becoming clear that our relationship with authority, and not solely cultural authority, has undergone a transformation in tandem with our prevailing construction of time. For our new relationship with classics seems more irenic than it was in the era of historicism.

I will lay out my argument in five stages. First, I shall give some, as already stated, diffuse examples that tell of a new relationship with classics in our present. A brief reflection on the reform of the terms classic and canon between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will follow. This leads on to the third part of my argument, in which I compare the emergence of historicism after 1800 (and its implications for the terms classic and canon) with some of the reasons for its obsolescence in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Against this background it is possible to illuminate a new relationship with classics, not just—as I am arguing—in diffuse instances, but, first and foremost, in a new way of reading. Perhaps surprisingly, in the fifth part of my argument I look at how the situation differs from country to country. Lastly, I inquire whether, while our relationship with words such as classic and canon have changed through history, differences might not also have developed within nations.

It is often remarked that no brilliant thinkers have emerged among the intellectuals of recent decades. This is more obvious in Paris than anywhere else. Less than three decades ago, an educated person who visited the city might have hoped to meet some of his contemporary intellectual heroes at a seminar or in a café (though the latter aspiration always accompanied a fairly predictable, romanticized notion of Paris). For at that time truly world-famous thinkers lived, taught, and wrote in Paris: the philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard; the historians François Furet, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Le Goff; the semiotician who became a literary figurehead for a new movement, Roland Barthes; and Claude Lévi-Strauss—even then a kind of father figure—who was to outlive most of the others. There is certainly no lack of highly competent and productive humanities scholars in Paris today, but there are only a few figures that remain from that great period who give off any kind of aura—Michel Serres is one of them. This is surely symptomatic of our changed relationship with intellectual authority.

Simultaneously, we are more enthusiastic than every before about new (or recently augmented) editions of classic texts with extensive commentaries. The letters of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which do not come close to matching the power of his literary prose, were a sensation in the French book market at the beginning of 2010. In Germany, above all, the apparently endless flood of anniversary celebrations has attained prodigious proportions, blazoning Johann-Peter Hebel’s verse and blank face upon the pages of literary supplements and on the shelves of surviving bookshops. Whenever institutions offering funding dare to refuse applications for new editions of classics, they find themselves exposed to a storm of national indignation. Greater and lesser classics have appeared, not only as carefully edited texts but recently via widely researched and well-written biographies, too, which is all the more remarkable since, until recently, academics anathematized this genre. It may have been Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, as bold as it is lucidly speculative, that—after initial resistance—achieved an international breakthrough. Since then, certainly, no one in Germany has been surprised by a series of weighty accounts of Stephan George, followed by a history of reception that augments the biographical coverage; no one has been surprised by abundant accounts of Schiller’s life, celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth; indeed, people are not even surprised by a study of the life of the social historian Werner Conze, a scholar who was as unoriginal as he was opportunistic in his relationship to the Nazi rulers.

And all these books are read, discussed, and esteemed by a generation of amicable “young” scholars between the ages of twenty-five and fifty who are profoundly competent in narrow fields and thus avoid the oedipal conflicts that ensue from advancing provocative theses. What can the eminent exrevolutionaries of my generation do but renounce both the well-maintained practice of “critical revision” and the ambitions of arcane seminars (e.g., “Cultural Difference in Alaska and the Problem of Frozen Traces”) that we may pay homage to classics, saving as much face as possible? Instead of being stubborn, and finding myself ignored, I have acquired the habit of advertising one of my four lectures to college students and PhD students—in an economical program—under the bare names of classic Western writers: Jean Racine, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Gustave Flaubert; Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Musil, and Gottfried Benn; Lope de Vega, Calderón, García Lorca, and Luis Martín Santos. Success in teaching Kleist to undergraduates convinced me that this alteration to the degree course was more meritorious than one that conformed to academic convention. The listeners in Stanford enjoyed what they called “Kleist’s linguistic mannerism”: for instance, his description of the protracted cry of a robber who jumped into a stagecoach and was hit by the coachman’s whip, which lets us interpret Kleist’s lapidary conclusion to a letter of March 1792: “We happened upon this charming concert in Eisenach at 12 o’clock at night.” The students also returned again and again to the mismatched footprints left behind by the village judge Adam’s apprehensive trudging through the snow. Positively surprised by their fascination, when a little-known university in central Brazil invited me to give three lectures on Kleist I could not resist the temptation. More young people attended these lectures than any I had hitherto delivered, and they came to hear both the German original and an improvised Portuguese translation of Kleist quotes with which they were familiar. The suicide of Kleist and his lover Henrietta Vogel by the Wannsee, and his final letters written there, surprisingly (to me at least) became a favourite subject of theirs; in particular, the passage where Kleist likens the ascent of his and Henrietta’s souls to that of two serene airships. There, in Vitoria da Conquista, a middle-sized town in the Brazilian state Bahia, if not before, it became clear to me that something fundamental had happened to our present’s relationship with literary classics. At the time, though, this was not a change I could explain.

What exactly was and is the background against which we can we identify and describe a change in our relationship to the classics? In Germany no definition of the classic is more popular than Hans-Georg Gadamer’s. By this definition, the “eminence” of these exceptional texts is founded on their enduring “immediate power to speak to us.” Implicitly, then, classic texts strike us as possessing a paradoxical character, for Gadamer’s historicist assumption is that as texts grow older their accessibility diminishes. Three issues become clear here: First, the term classic, used commonly until today, is a paradox. Second, its paradoxical form derives from the historicist assumption that the meaning of a text is dependent on its specific historical context. Third, this term classic flourishes, above all, in Germany, despite the relative unpopularity of the notion of a canon. For a canon is supposed to be timeless, and is therefore difficult to reconcile with a corpus of classics that are paradoxical anomalies.

If the relationship with classic texts (embodied in Gadamer’s definition) was a cultural signature of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, its contradistinction to another definition of classic, popular until the eighteenth century, should be obvious. The article “Classique” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, elaborated from the middle of the century of Enlightenment, lists a canon of texts from Greek and more especially Latin antiquities that—for no specified reason—are considered paradigmatic by virtue of their form and manifest wisdom. I shall not merely reiterate that the notion of a canon is necessarily weakened by the recognition that phenomena are susceptible to change over time and, consequently, to the progressive erosion of their claims to admiration. For the contrast between Gadamer’s nineteenth-century definition and that of the Encyclopédie also reveals that circa 1800 a change must have taken place, which in two respects rendered the traditional synchronic definition of “classic” null and void. Since Reinhart Koselleck, as I have mentioned before, scholars in Germany have tended to associate important changes in the decades before and after 1800 with the metaphor of the “saddle period.” For Koselleck himself, in the emergence of historicism we see something like the apparatus of thought of the saddle period—a period when many phenomena of change that he observed accumulated and converged.

Since I have argued that the institutionally dominant relationship with classics that predominated until recently was an outcome of historicism, I will briefly examine the latter’s emergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century that we may establish whether the historicist chronotope entered a state of crisis in the twentieth century, and thus precipitated a change in our relationship with classics, and, if it did, why. The very emergence of a historically specific chronotope, which was to become so compelling and undisputed that for more than a century it was taken for “time” and “history” itself, can itself be seen as contingent upon the emergence of a historically specific mental attitude: second-order observation. By “second-order observer,” I am referring to Niklas Luhmann’s observer—an observer who in the act of observing, observes himself. Since human consciousness is always capable of second-order observation, which we would call self-reflection, we must specify that circa 1800 second-order observation had become prevalent in a particular social group. This is to say, from that date intellectuals (they were more frequently known by the French term philosophe) could not avoid observing themselves while observing the world. The perspectivist mode of delineating our experience was one direct consequence of this innovation. For a second-order observer discovers that the perspective of observation determines each of his experiences; and since he recognizes the infinity of possible perspectives, the second-order observer soon apprehends that for every object of experience there is a potential infinity of conceivable forms. A dizzying epistemological horror vacui ensues—abundantly apparent, for example, in Friedrich Schlegel’s Air of Reflection. In the face of potentially infinite forms of experience and representation for every object of observation, how can one believe in the existence of an ultimate object of experience, identical with itself?

This problem would find a solution early in the nineteenth century that became the basis for the emergence of historicism. The solution was found in substituting a narrative manner of representing the world and ordering our experience for the mirrorlike structure. From the early nineteenth century, if you ask someone what Switzerland is, he will relate the history of Switzerland; those who seek to understand natural phenomena are urged to study evolutionary history. And when the young Hegel came to describe the nature of the spirit, he conceived his “phenomenology of the spirit” as a history. How could adopting a narrative mode for ordering our experience and representing the world fill the epistemological horror vacui unleashed by perspectivism? Precisely because narratives can absorb a plurality of representations of experience and link them to each other.

The historicist chronotope, wherein no phenomenon was immune to temporal change, soon unfolded on this foundation and made the permanent value of the classics, hitherto casually asserted, seem a paradox. One of the central endeavors of Reinhart Koselleck’s work was to describe and historicize this chronotope, within which the past seems to be left behind by the passage of historical time, shedding its ability to give us our bearings. In historicist time the future appears as an open horizon of available possibilities. Between the past—which faded away forever behind its successor, the present—and the future, whose threshold lay before the next step, the present narrows to an “imperceptibly brief moment of transition” (as Charles Baudelaire put it in his Le Peintre de la vie moderne in 1857). The present as a mere moment of transition—as the place where the subject choses from the possibilities of the future based on past experience, adapted to the present—became an assumption for the Cartesian subject. This act of choosing is the central component of action. The particular nature of the present in the historicist chronotope therefore became a foundation and precondition of action.

In my experience the single most controversial element in my thinking (though it seldom provokes any real controversy) is my claim that the historicist chronotope no longer constitutes the matrix of assumptions that shape how we experience reality, though its discourse persists unaltered, even unto the present day. There is reason to regard the invective exchanged by intellectuals in the late seventies and early eighties who suddenly sought to be “postmodern,” and their opponents who determined to persevere with the modernist project, as symptomatic of the rapidly shifting chronotope. This is not to say that the new chronotope should be named a postmodern one or that the postmodern faction should claim a victory. What is significant, rather, is that in the course of this debate—which seems to us, in retrospect, excessively acrimonious—and, more precisely, in Jean-François Lyotard’s pamphlet La condition postmoderne, a central premise of the historicist mentality was rendered problematic with lasting consequences. Above all, Lyotard sought to criticize the claims of “great” totalizing historical metanarratives to represent absolute truth. Might not, Lyotard asks, a potentially infinite number of competing historical narratives supersede dominant institutionalized narratives? Thus the narrative mode of representation was challenged as a solution to the problem of perspectivism and the basis of the historicist mentality and was soon abandoned. In the decades leading up to our present, a new—still nameless—chronotope was established as a premise for our experience of reality in the place of the historicist mentality. Instead of constantly leaving our pasts behind us, in the new chronotope we are inundated by memories and objects from the past. Time no longer erodes the “direct power to speak to us” of classics. Instead of transporting us onto a wide horizon of possibilities, today the future appears intimidating in many respects. And so, between the threatening future and the past in which we are immersed, an ever expanding present has become of that “imperceptibly brief moment of transition.” It is at least possible that recourse to the notion of a canon might easily reintegrate the classics as a component within this pluralistic sphere of simultaneity. If it is indeed true that the Cartesian subject was situated epistemologically within the narrow present of the historicist mentality, then it is unsurprising, in this new ever expanding present, when we search for more nuanced alternatives of human self-reference to the Cartesian “subject.”