Contents:
His central claim is directed first of all to literary scholars when he asserts early on that "[a]estheticism must not simply be equated with early German Romanticism or German Idealism" According to Strathausen and in contradistinction to dominant literary historical categories, text and image were not engaged in a battle for exclusivity but rather negotiating a more profound and precise communication based on an ambivalent interdependence.
Key to understanding this problematic in the poets Strathausen presents is the reciprocal gaze. His readings expose the reader to contemporary theories of spectatorship and their intellectual history in 20th century German philosophy.
giuliettasprint.konfer.eu: The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around (University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures): Carsten. Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around , Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer .
Strathausen understands the conundrum of "seeing" in German philosophy and literature as a key conundrum in spectatorship itself: to see is to be seen. He prepares his reader in the first section of the book for a particularly evocative reading of Rilke on this point. The first two chapters survey philosophical investigations of visuality with specific attention to Bergson and Husserl. Contributions by Heidegger, Kittler, and Adorno are woven throughout these first chapters and Strathausen's use of the material is confident and provocative. Readers of Kittler in particular-as the title of the book suggests-will find him one of the most significant interlocutors for Strathausen.
He announces the imperative of close readings to his method early on and delivers chapters devoted to readings of Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and George in the second section of the book. But let us not carry too far this comparison. It gives us but a feeble and even deceptive image of reality. Let us think rather of an action like that of raising the arm; then let us suppose that the arm, left to itself, falls back, and yet that there subsists in it, striving to raise it up again, something of the will that animates it.
In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already a more exact representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself. CE f. Presence slips into the past as soon as it is realized, and it is gone the very moment it becomes present. For the Whole is its own virtuality that can only become actual by losing itself.
It consists in exposing the Whole allegedly revealed by metaphysical intuition as precisely that which Bergson denounced the most: a convenient linguistic symbol devoid of any substance whatsoever, an empty word that lacks the very life it claims to present. But through the words, lines and verses runs the simple inspiration which is the whole poem.
This belief was radicalized in German Aestheticist poetry, in which poetic language appears not only to provide a direct access to life, but to sustain life itself. Trying to bridge the objective and subjective perspective on reality, it simultaneously draws from both the metaphysical and the positivist legacy of the nineteenth century and thus represents a kind of fusion of phenomenological and lifephilosophical impulses at the turn of the century. It not only advocates the being of language as meaningful in itself, but also insists on the redemptive power inherent in poetry.
And yet, this potentiality cannot be redeemed without forfeiting its inherent power.
This leads to a reverse formulation: successful poetry is impossible, a contradiction in terms. Successful poetry is doomed to fail, yet it succeeds by means of its necessary failure. This can only make sense if we recognize a dual function at work in poetry: language i.
After this originary moment of poetic self-expression has passed, both words and things alike are doomed to linger in a state of alienation devoid of the mythical realm they once shared. On the basis of this primordial interdependency of things and words, Hofmannsthal both demands and rejects the fundamental distinction between art and life. He argues that both realms are inextricably intertwined, but need to be separated from each other precisely in order to be once again perceived as one.
Meaning would already be inherent or inscribed within the things as such. Being would be its own meaning, and that meaning would be the simple fact that things are the way they are. Poetry is life since words enable all things to come forward and present themselves in the purity of their proper name.
He resembles the seismograph whose vibrations register every tremor even if thousands of miles away. Even his darker hours, his depression, his confusion and unpersonal states resemble the twitches of the seismograph, and a profound gaze could discover in them more secrets than in his poems.
But his metaphor nonetheless remains indebted to the very process of translation it seeks to overcome. The real has no language, no voice, no meaning because it is strictly opposed to the symbolic. But it shelters it as well since only in and through language can the body be said to speak at all. All of them seek to reveal a primordial truth that cannot be revealed without getting lost in the process.
Whereas Bergson turns away from language toward intuition, the young Hofmannsthal turns from intuition toward language and hence embraces the paradox of merging meaning and materiality, art and life. As I argued in this chapter, the chiastic relationship between vision and language around literally seeks to uproot this triangular scheme in an attempt to break through to the immediacy of life. All eyes at the time were focused on the things themselves, and all theories were built upon the explicit rejection of theory altogether.
If nineteenth-century empiricism and psychophysics had still assumed a fundamental parallelism between the world of the mind and that of reality, the constitutive paradox of the speaking gaze around consisted in presupposing an utter lack of presuppositions.
Rather, it sought to create a new world in and as poetry whose purpose for being is to prove nothing beyond the possibility of its own existence. Solely based on the premise of its autopoietic originality, the speaking gaze of Aestheticism is born of the poetic ideal of poverty rather than the positivist objective of plenitude. What remains is the primal Nietzschean insight that recognizes no transcending qualities of : pa rt i life other than life itself.
For the entire world is present at each and every moment in all of its parts, and to write a poem about this insight is to materialize all of its secrets at once. Modernist poetry thus replaces the representational model of truth i. What, then, is the role of the reader during this process, and how are these poems to be read? And yet, all art implies and addresses an audience since its whole purpose consists in conveying an original message that must arrive somewhere for somebody lest it be irretrievably lost.
Both on the level of production and on the level of reception, Aestheticist poetry is built upon this paradox of a contingent autonomy that simultaneously recognizes and disavows its dependency upon individual poets and readers alike. Rather, I want to situate my own readings within an important debate that seems particularly pertinent with regard to Aestheticist poetry. More precisely, I contrast the recent rise of a posthermeneutic criticism with traditional methods of hermeneutic interpretation. Whereas the latter focused i n t u i t i o n a n d l a n g uag e : mostly on text-immanent readings of individual texts, the former examines modernism mainly with regard to the institutional and sociohistorical processes said to control the production of meaning around This reversal of the Romantic paradigm requires the reader of Aestheticist texts to draw simultaneously from the hermeneutic and posthermeneutic approach toward literature since both perspectives are already operative within the poems themselves.
The poem, in other words, opens up a material world of its own, and the reader, much like the modern poet, scientist, or philosopher, is charged with developing a kind of cross-eyed view of language as both matter and meaning. For its time has long since past.
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. 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.
The hermeneutic method sanctions this specular relationship between mankind and language. 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. 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. 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.
The most interesting question about this debate is to determine whether it has actu- : e xc u r s u s ally 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. 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. 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 m e t h o d s o f r e a d i n g : 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.
Precisely this latter assumption, however, is repeatedly challenged by Frank and Gadamer. The crucial insight for de Man is precisely that the terrain for the m e t h o d s o f r e a d i n g : interpretation of literary texts never changes: everything takes place in language. 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.
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? Breaking free— but where to?
Such pain distorts the physical body of those bearing it as well as the textual body of those recording it. For Wunberg, as for Kittler, the increasing autonomy and isolation of single aesthetic particles in literary modernism represents the logical conclusion of sociohistorical developments. Thus, the alleged incomprehensibility of the discourse network around can be said to reintroduce, on a metatheoretical level, the hermeneutic mirror theory of literature it allegedly overcame. 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 , literature operated from inside the hermeneutic universe, while around it is used to observe and record the demise of this mechanism from the outside.
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?
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. What then is reality, one might ask, and how exactly does it take shape?
Still, though the ideal objective viewer has no predilection for beauty but responds genuinely, we in fact do find toads "and the like" disconcerting, or if we do not, we know we are unusual in this. The sea? Moore employs this turnabout technique frequently. How then to explain that even when Kinsella returns, as of the publication of Blood and Family, to a more formal poetic line, he continues to refuse closure, thus condemning each vision, and possibly his poetry, to oblivion? Chambers Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms ed.
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. This concession brings structuralist Marxism in much closer alliance with the posthermeneutic enter- m e t h o d s o f r e a d i n g : prise than Wellbery seems ready to admit. Generally speaking, though, Marxism remains far too concerned with objective reasoning and the determination of historical truths i.