1. What happened so far Flashcards
After the Linguistic Turn – Literary Theory in the 20th Century
Part I: Logistics and overview
Reading:
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto; Grundrisse; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Capital Vol. 1, Letter to Joseph Bloch (NATC 759-788).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense; The Birth of Tragedy (NATC 870-895)
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; The ‘Uncanny’; Fetishism (NATC 913-956)
Part II: What is Literary Theory?
- Before the turn of the century, literary studies were mostly limited to philology.
- Philology analyzed literary historical influences, the etymology of words, and the development of genres.
- Around the turn of the century, the wish to make the study of literature more „scientific“ emerged.
Part III: What Happened So Far
- In order to understand the impact of Saussure’s work and that of his successors, it is essential to understand that the so-called ”linguistic turn” was one of four developments in theory and philosophy that had a decisive impact on the Enlightenment and its belief in the power of reason (and man’s power as the embodiment and epitome of this reason).
- While literary and aesthetic romanticism formed a first line of attack and opposition against the predominance of the rationalist agenda of the Enlightenment, three thinkers dealt a severe blow to this belief in reason:
1. Marx, 1818-1883
2. Nietzsche, 1844-1900
3. Freud, 1856-1939
[*] In order to understand the impact that Marx, Nietzsche and Freud had on the enlightenment, it is essential to have a look on one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment: Immanuel Kant.
The Categorical Imperative
and the Second Maxim
Kant
[*] Besides his three Critiques – The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment, which basically constitute a rational analysis of the true, the good and the beautiful – Kant is best known for his Categorical Imperative and his Second Maxim – both of which testify to the importance of reason in his philosophy, and are laid out in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).
[The Categorical Imperative says:
- “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”*
The Second Maxim says:
”Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”
Man and Reason - Kant
[*] Reason, according to Kant, is ”not in time” – nor, for that matter, in space. It is valid independently of time and space, it is the same anywhere and any time, and thus ”universal.”
[*] If I thus act in way that my act could become a universal law, I have acted in a rational, and thus morally right manner, as morality is based on reason, and not on any other considerations such as pity, empathy, or fairness.
[*] Man thus should not treat any other man as a means, because man, as a rational being, is always an end (of reason, as its embodiment), and never only a means to achieve something else (as could be done with an object).
The Critique of Judgment - Kant
[*] While, for Kant, the truth and the morally good can be proven – or, in the case of the Moral Law (Categorical Imperative), be proven as ”necessary” – what counts as beautiful cannot be verified objectively, but intersubjectively.
[*] Similar to Schiller, Kant claims that beauty is created through a harmonious interaction between the faculties of the imagination and of reason (the exception being the sublime where, due to imagination’s incapability to capture infinity or the power of an overwhelming nature, reason has to ”save” imagination).
[*] The contemplation of beauty is possible because art is purposeless, i.e., it does not serve any other purpose than its enjoyment.
The role of literature - Kant
[*] The sublime plays a large role, since the Moral Law cannot be directly represented or perceived. As imagination cannot represent it to itself, reason jumps in to ensure it. This causes a kind of mixed feeling of defeat (of imagination) and victory (reason takes over).
[*] Kant abhors sentimental art, and his view has influenced a modern view on literature until now:
“We have both spirited and tender emotions. The latter, if they rise to [strong] affections, are worthless; the propensity to them is called sentimentality. A sympathetic grief that will not admit to consolation, or one referring to imaginary evils to which we deliberately surrender ourselves – being deceived by fancy – as if they were actual, indicates and produces a tender, though weak soul – which shows a beautiful side and which can be called fanciful, though not enthusiastic. Romances, lacrymose plays, shallow moral precepts, which toy with (falsely) so-called moral dispositions, but in fact make the heart languid, insensible to the severe precept of duty, and incapable of all respect for the worth of humanity in our own person, and for the rights of men (a very different thing from their happiness), and in general incapable of all steady principle; even a religious discourse, which recommends a cringing, abject seeking of favour and ingratiation of ourselves, which proposes the abandonment of all confidence in our own faculties in opposition to the evil within us, instead of a sturdy disposition to endeavour to overcome our inclinations by means of those powers which with all our frailty yet remain to us; that false humility which sets the only way of pleasing the Supreme Being in self-depreciation, in whining hypocritical repentance and in a mere passive state of mind – these are not compatible with any frame of mind that can be counted beautiful, still less with one which is to be counted sublime” (CJ 141/2).
The Enlightenment begins to falter
[*] The works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud deal severe blows to Enlightenment’s belief in the perfectionability of man as the epitome of reason.
[*] Marx throws into doubt the role of human consciousness as the driving force of history (which Hegel assumes) – and of history to be, according to Hegel, the process of the ”world spirit coming into itself.” According to Marx, being determines consciousness (and not the other way around), and man has only limited control over history.
[*] Freud’s psychoanalytic studies seem to prove that (wo)man is not even master in his/her own house, torn, as (s)he is, between the unconscious, the subconscious and the conscious layers of the mind; or, as he later puts it, between the pleasure principle of the id and the demands of the moral superego. The ego more or less successfully has to mediate between the two.
[*] Nietzsche, finally, puts into question the concept of truth itself, as he considers human existence driven by blind will and desire, the results of which are only rationalized a posteriori (after the event). Truth, according to Nietzsche, is but a…
”mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration and which, after they have been used for a long time, strike people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensual vigor, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in
a Non-Moral Sense (1873)
The role of art: Karl Marx
[*] Since for Marx and Engels the base (the means of production and their distribution) ”ultimately” – as Engels specifies in the letter to Ernst Bloch – determines the superstructure (to which literature belongs), literature can only play a secondary role for both.
[\*] The purpose that literature can serve – in strong contradistinction to Kant’s ”disinterestedness” – is to mercilessly uncover reality as class struggle, and to help overcome the false consciousness that ideology constitutes. [\*] For both Marx and Engels, however, individuals do not constitute agents (they hardly can, as history unfolds with the force of law), but matter as embodiments of ideas and components of systems; a fault brilliantly exposed and corrected by novelists which exposed the dynamics of capitalist society, as, e.g., Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac.
[*] One of the paradoxes inherent in Marx’ and Engels’ work is its own status within their theory – and that of the intellectual him/herself. Is their work also part of the superstructure; if so, can it change anything? Does the fact that they conceive of themselves neither as philosophers nor as intellectuals, but as scientists analyzing this base alleviate this problem? The role of the intellectual or a Marxist elite will pose a perpetual problem, which will be addressed by Lenin and Antonio Gramsci.
[*] The demystifying work of the bourgeoisie (”all that is solid melts into air”) – which results in what Walter Benjamin will later call the ”loss of aura” of the work of art – also points toward the call for a new realism in literature, that Georg Lukacs works puts at the center.
The new cosmopolitanism
of the Bourgeoisie
[*] In what is almost a prophetic passage of today’s globalized market in times of the world wide web, Marx writes:
”The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country…. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations…. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature…
… it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
Marx/Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
The role of art: Friedrich Nietzsche
[*] In contradistinction to Marx, Nietzsche accords a major role to art and literature. For him, the scientific claims of Marx put the latter into the Apollonian faction that, with the help of concepts, tries to control reality.
[*] Against the rationalistic agenda of Marx, Nietzsche favors the irrational, Dionysian world view that he sees mostly embodied in art.
[*] While science claims to represent a truth that cannot be approached by words – and in this, Nietzsche foreshadows Saussure and his epigones -, but has only an ”army of metaphors” at its disposal, art joyfully sheds the illusion and pretense of truth, and liberates the Dionysian energies. (In fact, his dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian echoes strongly in Freud’s distinction between the unconscious drives and the pleasure principle on the one hand, and the super-ego on the other, with man – the ego – the ”tragic” instance trying to negotiate the two).
[*] Indeed, he goes as far as to say that ”only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified.”
[*] Individuation – which is the penultimate goal of the Apollonian drive for control – cuts man off from the experience of the social and the universal, which only the Dionysian aspects of art can reconnect him with.
Nietzsche on Language
[*] ”… what is the status of those conventions in language? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Is there a perfect match between things and their designations? Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?
…
If truth alone had been decisive in the genesis of language, if the viewpoint of certainty had been decisive in creating designations, how could we possibly permitted to say ’The stone is hard’, as if ’hard’ were something known to us in some other way, and not merely as an entirely subjective stimulus? … How arbitrarily these borders are drawn…. The ’thing-in-itself’ (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible for even the creator of language to grasp…. He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in order to express them, he avails himself of the boldest metaphors.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense (1873)
Nietzsche, Dreams,
Myth, and Freud
[*] ”… a Dionysiac phenomenon, one which reveals to us the playful construction and demolition (or: ”De-construction”, T.C.) of the world of individuality as an outpouring of primal pleasure and delight, a process quite similar to Heraclitus the Obscure’s comparison of the force that shapes the world of the playing child who sets down stones here, there, and the next place, and who builds up piles of sand only to knock them down again.”
[*] This is strikingly close both to the as-yet unhindered drives of the child that hasn’t yet reached the state of individuation that follows the ”mirror stage” (Lacan) and the ”weg-da” game.
The role of art: Sigmund Freud
[*] Literature as such often serves to illustrate Freud’s theories, as is the case in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or E.T.A. Hoffman’s ”The Sandman.”
[*] Dreams indeed follow a poetic logic of displacement (metaphor), condensation (metonymy), and overdetermination (symbolism as such).
[*] Dreams are able to surmount syllogism, and thus fly in the face of reason (”The alternative ’either – or’ cannot be expressed in dreams in any way whatever”).
[*] The psychoanalyst has to decipher them accordingly. The ”interpretative process” of psychoanalysis is thus similar to the interpretive work of the reader.
[*] Literature offers the possibility to unveil things that have been repressed either within the single author (”For it can of course only be the poet’s mind which confronts us in Hamlet”), or, as in the case of the uncanny, by society and history.
[*] Literature’s fictive character – it’s being able to bypass and put into brackets the reality principle – allows these depths to be gauged.
Dichotomies
[*] Although neither Marx, Nietzsche or Freud intensely perceived each other’s work, what all three seem to point at are deep dichotomies immanent in human life and experience, which undermine the assumed unity (or universality) and predominance of reason and man as its epitome.
[*] What Marx calls estrangement and the forceful suppression of the worker’s needs within the class struggle finds an analogy in Freud’s concept of the sublimation of the drives when confronted by the super-ego, and the dialectics of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in Nietzsche.
[*] All three work with the assumption of a decisive split between what is real (economic history in Marx, the reality principle or super-ego in Freud, and the Apollonian drive to explain and control the world), and what escapes the real (ideology as false consciousness in Marx, the drives or the pleasure principle in Freud, the Dionysian dissolution of the self in Nietzsche.)
