* I would like to thank Murray Krieger, Brook Thomas and Steven Mailloux for their careful readings of the draft of this essay and for their helpful comments. (back)
1. A note on terminology: In the following argument, the term "reception aesthetics" is used to refer exclusively to a theory of aesthetic experience and does not include theories of the history of reception. A simple solution to the terminological problem would be to use, as is often done, the term "reader response criticism." However, I consider the term unnecessarily reductive and therefore unfortunate, because Iser's theory is, above all, an aesthetic theory. Its goal is to clarify the character of aesthetic experience and not "responses" of the reader. (back)
2. The issue in the following discussion is therefore not that of liberalism and its merits as a political philosophy but the superficiality and inadequacy of the term for characterizing Iser's literary theory. (back)
3. "For although Iser postulates a 'transcendental construct,' in reality his reader approximates the ideal of an educated European. Throughout The Act of Reading we encounter a competent and cultured reader who, contrary to Iser's wishes, is predetermined in both character and historical situation.", Holub, 97. (back)
4. Holub criticizes Iser for foreclosing "an integration of historical information in anything but a superficial fashion," (99) but, ironically enough, this can also be seen as a very accurate characterization of the prevalent form of political criticism of Iser's work. (back)
5. Iser's essay on "Ulysses and the Reader" provides a good example of a definition of reception aesthetics as a project that avoids the pitfalls of "Marxist mirror-reflection theory." Prospecting, 136. (back)
6. Als der Krieg zu Ende ging, war ich 18 Jahre alt und glaubte, durch ein Studium der Literatur jenes Bedürfnis nach Distanz realisieren zu können. Freilich war es nun anders besetzt. Mit vielen meiner Generation teilte ich damals die Überzeugung, durch eine Beschäftigung mit Literatur mir nun endllich die eigenen Lebensorientierungen selbst erschließen zu können." ("Antrittsrede", 27). "Der Arbeitsbereich schien abgesteckt, als ich mich in Heidelberg im Jahre 1957 nach zwei Assistentenjahren mit einer Arbeit über das Phänomen des Ästhetischen im fin de siècle habilitierte. Diese Arbeit entfaltet eine historische und eine systematische Implikation. Ich wollte die geschichtliche Bedingtheit durchschaubar machen, aus welcher der Gedanke von der Kunst als dem letzten Wert des endlichen Daseins erwachsen war, wodurch sich zugleich die Frage nach der Notwendigkeit für eine solche Apotheose der Kunst stellte. Die Arbeit war als Vorklärung für die Kunst der Moderne gedacht, die ich nicht als ein Verfallssymptom einstiger Vollkommenheit begreifen konnte. Deshalb schien es mir geboten, den Gedanken autonomer Kunst in jenem phänomenologische Sinne zu reduzieren, um sie auf ihre Ursprünge zurückzubringen. Der Weg zu einer analytischen Beschäftigung mit der Literatur der Moderne war dadurch vorgezeichnet." ("Antrittsrede," 29)(back)
7. An analysis of this position and its shortcomings can be found in the essay "Changing Functions of Fiction," Prospecting, 200f. (back)
8. Für mich stand fest, daß es fremde Literaturen sein müßten, die ich studieren wollte - nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil die eigene in der Vergangenheit so vieles zu legitimieren hatte."("Antrittsrede," 27) ("For me, it was a foregone conclusion that I wanted to study foreign literatures - because my own had had to legitimate so much in the past.", m.t.) (back)
9. Iser's "Doktorvater" (Ph.D. advisor) in Heidelberg, Martin Flasdieck, was strictly a linguist and did not hide his distaste for the "unscientific" nature of literary studies. (back)
10. Wovon ich in meinem Studium abgesperrt war, erschloß sich mir während meiner Jahre als Lektor in England. Als suchender und tastender Autodidakt befand ich mich plötzlich in der Gegenwart; es folgten lange Jahre eines intensiven Rezipierens, in denen sich meine wissenschaftlichen Interessen abzuklären begannen. Die literarische Moderne faszinierte mich als Reflexionskunst. Sich das zu verdeutlichen, was hier geschehen ist, hieß für mich immer auch, auf die Zugriffe zu reflektieren, durch die man sich die von moderner Kunst eröffnete intellektuelle Perspektivität plausibel machen konnte." (29) (back)
11. See also the characterization of "Plato's unique achievement" (88): "What in Platonic philosophy has always been a strict division between idea and copy is seen by Pater as a blending of the two. The abstract realm of ideas is a 'hollow land,' which needs contact with concrete experience in order to come to life, and it is only when experience and ideas join together that there is Platonism, according to Pater's interpretation of the term. Instead of division there is interprenetration, which becomes tangible through 'imaginative reason' - a faculty that establishes not only the Platonic order of the world, but also the predominantly aesthetic quality of this order." (89) (back)
12. Die Arbeit [the book on Pater] war als Vorklärung für die Kunst der Moderne gedacht, die ich nicht als ein Verfallssymptom einstiger Vollkommenheit begreifen konnte. Deshalb schien es mir geboten, den Gedanken autonomer Kunst in jenem phänomenologischen Sinne zu reduzieren, um sie auf ihre Ursprünge zurückzubringen. Der Weg zu einer analytischen Beschäftigung mit der Literatur der Moderne war dadurch vorgezeichnet." ("Antrittsrede," 29) (back)
13. Die Funktion der Kunst besteht dann im Aufdecken der in dieser Sehkonvention enthaltenen Trugschlüsse; indem das konstruierte Bild eine unerwartete Ansicht vom Gegenstand entdeckt, wird das illusionistische Moment der konventionellen Wahrnehmung sichtbar gemacht. Illusionistisch ist diese insofern, als die sie bestimmende Perspektive vorgibt, den Gegenstand erfaßt zu haben." ("Image und Montage," 367) (back)
14. Die Dichtung soll den Blickzwang des in seinen Gewohnheiten befangenen Menschen entstören, damit die in teleologischer Rücksicht verfertigten Schemata der Wahrnehmung nicht mit der Realität verwechselt werden. In dieser Überlegung verbirgt sich ein wichtiger Impuls der neuen Dichtung: sie ist Möglichkeit zur Freiheit. Damit diese Möglichkeit realisiert werden kann, müssen die von den Gegenständen entworfenen Ansichten ein Moment der Reflexion in sich enthalten, denn die Bilder dieser Dichtung sollten in der Gegenstandswahrnehmung eine Dimension aufblenden, die durch die Gewohnheiten verdeckt wird." ("Image und Montage," 369)(back)
15. Die imagistische Dichtung berührt sich mit dem Verfremdungseffekt nur insoweit, als das image eine Entautomatisierung der geläufigen Wahrnehmung bewirkt; die dadurch intendierte Pluralisierung der Gegenstandserfassung aber läuft der Absicht des von Bloch skizzierten Verfremdungseffektes geradezu entgegen." ("Image und Montage," 375)(back)
16. Um eine solche Vermittlungsleistung zu beschreiben, ist es sinnvoll, der von Sartre entwickelten Unterscheidung von Wahrnehmung und Vorstellung zu folgen. Denn was uns in fiktionalen Texten gegeben ist, besitzt nicht die gleiche 'Gegenstandsqualität' wie jene Objekte, die wir in den Wahrnehmungsakten erfassen. Der Wahrnehmung müssen immer Objekte vorgegeben sein, deren Gegenstandsqualität darin besteht, daß sie auch dann noch vorhanden sind, wenn wir sie nicht wahrnehmen. Wenn daher die russischen Formalisten - auf die sich Wellershoff bezieht - von der Kunst als einem Prozeß der Wahrnehmungserschwerung gesprochen haben, so glaubten sie, daß die Kunst die Objektwahrnehmung kompliziere, woraus zwangsläufig eine längere Beschäftigungsdauer resultiere. (...) Während für die Wahrnehmung immer ein Objekt gegeben sein muß, sind die 'Gegenstände' der Vorstellung dagegen immer ein Nicht-Gegebenes bzw. ein Abwesendes." Iser, "Negativität als tertium quid von Darstellung und Rezeption," 530f. (back)
17. This distinction would become the basis for one of the main objections voiced against Iser's form of reception aesthetics by proponents of the new cultural radicalism that would begin to dominate in American literary criticism from the early 80s on, because, as they point out, any object is inevitably "constituted" by culturally pre-existent perceptual categories as well as prior cultural knowledge and therefore not "pre-given." (See, for example, Freund, 150.) However, this point does not weaken but strengthen Iser's distinction, because, in this way, the object of perception is already "known," while it is not, if we have to construct it anew, because there is no identical referent given for it: "I emphasize the difference between ideation and perception because when one reads a text, there are no given objects to be perceived; instead objects must be built up from the knowledge invoked or the information provided." Prospecting, 52. (back)
18. See also Iser's brief characterization in a later essay of his: "For the Russian formalists, art has to de-automate perception, in order to 'enforce a new vision of things and so correct one's own relation to the world.' [a quote taken from J.Striedter] For this purpose it was necessary for the structures in the literary text to be seen as running contrary to the workings of perception, so that the resultant alienation would draw attention to the automated modes we use in gaining access to the world." Prospecting, 226. (back)
19. Cf. the following characterization of negativity in The Act of Reading: "Negativity, in the true sense of the term, however, cannot be deduced from the given world which it questions, and cannot be conceived as serving a substantialist idea, the coming of which it heralds. As the nonformulation of the not-yet-comprehended, it does no more than mark out a relationship to that which it disputes, and so it provides a basic link between the reader and the text. If the reader is made to formulate the cause underlying the questioning of the world, it implies that he must transcend that world, in order to be able to observe it from outside. And herein lies the true communicatory function of literature. Whatever may be the individual contents which come into the world through a work of art, there will always be something which is never given in the world and which only a work of art provides: it enables us to transcend that which we are otherwise so inextricably entagled in - our own lives in the midst of the real world. Negativity as a basic constituent of communication is therefore an enabling structure." Act of Reading, 229f. (back)
20. There is an influential discussion of Hegel's philosophy of art in the Poetik und Hermeneutik- circle in which Hegel's aesthetics is extended to a philosophy of modern art. See Dieter Henrich's essay "Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart (Überlegungen mit Rücksicht auf Hegel)," reprinted in English translation in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, eds. Richard E.Amacher and Victor Lange, 107-133.(back)
21. "However, as the unfamiliar elements cannot be manifested under the same conditions pertaining to familiar existing conceptions, that which literature brings into the world can only reveal itself as negativity. This comes about in the text through the dislocation of external norms from their real context, and through draining these norms of their reality - as described by Adorno: '...everything that works of art contain, as regards form and materials, spirit and matter, has emigrated from reality into the works, and in them has been deprived of its reality.'" Act of Reading, 229. (back)
22. See also the following statement: "But if literature embodied a counterbalance to existing conditions in order ro repair their deficiencies, it would be nothing more than the extrapolation of a bad reality turned, as it were, upside down." Prospecting, 211. This would, of course, also apply to a theory of literature as utopian anticipation. (back)
23. There is no explicit discussion of the student movement's view of literature in this impressive 570-page volume, but is is obvious throughout the volume that the choice of the topic negativity is the group's way of responding to its challenges and to clarify its own views of the "negating potential," or, to put it more positively, of the function and possible effects of literature. Occasionally, in scattered references, the "absent cause" is acknowledged, as, for example, in Marianne Kesting's comment: "Since 1968 and the emergence of the student movement, the wish has grown again, as Th.W. Adorno has noted critically, to give literature a socially useful role without taking into consideration that literature itself 'negates' such instrumentalization." (Weinrich, 541) The reference to Adorno shrewdly manages to set up a "negativity"-faction against the demands of the student movement which soon began to criticize Adorno and critical theory for not being political enough. (back)
24. There is an influential discussion of Hegel's philosophy of art in the Poetik und Hermeneutik- circle in which Hegel's aesthetics is extended to a philosophy of modern art. See Dieter Henrich's essay "Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart (Überlegungen mit Rücksicht auf Hegel)," reprinted in English translation in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, eds. Richard E.Amacher and Victor Lange, 107-133.(back)
25. The essay forms the basis of Jauss's last major work, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. (back)
26. For a discussion of the various meanings of negativity in Adorno's aesthetic theory (as the anti-ideological negativity of bourgeois art; as the formal negativity of autonomous art; and as the ontological negativity of the work of art in contrast to the factually existent), see Hendrik Birus, "Adorno's 'Negative Aesthetics'?" Cf. also Michael Theunissen, "Negativität bei Adorno." The volume Materialien zur ästhetischen Theorie Th.W.Adornos, eds. Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Lüdke contains a number of helpful discussions of Adorno's aesthetic theory.(back)
27. See, for example, Adorno's observation on the changed nature of the utopian dimension of art: "In Selma Lagerlöf's Marbacka a stuffed bird of paradise causes the paralysed child to recover. The impact of an appearing Utopia of this kind was as fresh as ever. But today this has become impossible; nowadays darkness is the representation of Utopia. Art's Utopia, the counterfactual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes on being a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe, which is world history; it is freedom which did not come to pass under the spell of necessity and which may well not come to pass ever at all. The tension that art maintains in relation to the perpetual catastrophe presupposes negativity, which in turn is the methexis of art in the obscure." Aesthetic Theory, 196.(back)
28. Iser's own (brief) discussion of Adorno's position can be found in "Changing Functions of Literature," 211: "Literature refers to things that are suppressed, unconscious, inconceivable, and perhaps even incommensurable, but this does not mean that a view of the invisible must necessarily be Utopian." See also his comments on Adorno's Beckett-interpretation in Prospecting, 301. (back)
29. There is a tendency, for example in Holub's discussion of this development, to see this transformation of the terms negation and negativity into paradoxically "positive" terms as a kind of sell-out of the idea of negation. But the rejection of a Frankfurt School version of negative aesthetics was also characteristic of the student movement which criticized it for not being able to provide a more positive version of literature's potential and function, although it defined this potential in terms of "real" political relevance. For the student movement, negative aesthetics was not political enough, for the Constance School of Literary Theory negative aesthetics could not provide a sufficient explanation of aesthetic experience. (back)
30. Iser thus assigns blanks and negations - defined as a cancellation or resemanticization of our dominant codes which nevertheless retain a reference to that which they negate - a similarly constitutive function for initiating an activity of text-processing. Consequently, negation, for Iser, never had the heroic connotation of a last form of resistance to reification which it has for Critical Theory. For Iser, negation is part of a sense-making process, a cancellation of a reference that allows us to move on and try out new stances by becoming actively involved in the production of sense. (back)
31. One may, in fact, understand the radical conceptualization of negativity in Adorno's aesthetics as an attempt to escape this aporia. Occasionally, Iser himself unwittingly illustrates this dilemma in his own readings of modernist classics, where the temptation is ever present to locate the negating potential of literature in its superior insight into the human condition. Thus he says about Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury that "the constellation of mental images provoked by the blanks" provides us with "the key to the meaning of the novel," namely, "the senselessness of life." (Act, 220) About Beckett's prose he writes: "Here we have a basic dilemma of life itself: though we are alive, we are constrained to search for the meaning of something we can, in the last analysis, know nothing about." (Prospecting, 145) "And this is precisely the position of Beckett's characters, who have rejected all the alternatives and so leave themselves without alternatives, thus revealing the insurmountable finiteness of man to be an endless or in-finite going-on. (...) What Beckett's rejection of fiction reveals is the nature of man's inescapable limitations; it is an infinite retention of the self within this insurmountable finiteness." (151) (back)
32. Iser's objection against "ideological" readings thus need not enter the level of ideological debate. It is not directed against certain ideologies but against a certain mode of dealing with ideology, namely that of internalization: "The question is therefore to what extent a theory of reading that aims at educating to conformity with the system - however praiseworthy such a conformity may be if it is the correct one - must interfere in such process. ... The producing of a 'socialist' manner of reading demands the internalization of the correct social norms so that the subject can adapt to society." ("Im Lichte der Kritik," 339; the translation is Holub's) (back)
33. See, for example, Jane Tompkins: "But he does not grant the reader autonomy or even a partial independence from textual constraints. The reader's activity is only a fulfillment of what is already implicit in the structure of the work - though exactly how that structure limits his activity is never made clear." (xv) The encounter between reception aesthetics and American reader response criticism was an exercise in futility. American critics never understood Iser's underlying concerns and thus grappled, somewhat helplessly, with the concepts that signalled a new approach, that of the reader and the somewhat elusive concept of the blank. In their attempt to present reception aesthetics as a manageable "approach," they completely ignored the issue of aesthetic experience. (back)
34. Iser has stressed this point again and again, for example in his response to critical questions by Norman Holland and Wayne Booth: "My basic concern, however, is not with meaning-assembly as such but with what I have termed the aesthetic object, which has to be created in the act of reading by following the instructions given in the text. (...) I should certainly not want to identify the aesthetic object solely with meaning; had I wished to do so, I should scarcely have bothered to use two different terms.""Interview," Prospecting, 65, 53. (back)
35. See his own characterization: "If I have given the impression that I seem obsessed by 'seeking a meaning' this is due to the fact that I should like to move the discussion of meaning onto a different plane: not what the meaning is, but how it is produced.", Prospecting, 64f. (back)
36. This is a literal translation of the German word "irrealisiert" in order to avoid the implication of escapism associated with the word "unreal" in English. (back)
37. Because the title of The Implied Reader has become a kind of shorthand for Iser's approach, the two books are often conflated while they are actually very different books. In his "Heidelberger Antrittsrede," Iser characterizes The Implied Reader as Funktionsgeschichte (history of the changing functions of fiction) and The Act of Reading as Wirkungstheorie (reader response theory). (back)
38. The move from reception aesthetics to literary anthropology, programmatically stated in the title of the essay collection Prospecting, is thus not a change of direction but a continuation and concretization of Iser's ongoing project. (back)
39. Cf. Iser's definition: "Fictionality is not to be identified with the literary text, although it is a basic constituent of it. For this reason, I refrain from using the word 'fiction' whenever I can and speak instead of fictionalizing acts. These do not refer to an ontologically given, but to an operation, and therefore cannot be identical to what they produce.", Prospecting, 237. (back)
40. In this sense, it seems fitting to speak of re-presentation (instead of mere presentation), because the renewed (feigned) presentation of an object provides the prerequisite for the establishment of difference. Re-presentation in this sense is repetition with a difference. (back)
41. In this way, the doubling effect becomes the hallmark of literary fictionality: "The fictionalizing acts simultaneously separate and encompass the extratextual fields and their intratextual deformation (selection), the intratextual semantic enclosures and their mutual telescoping (combination), and finally a bracketed world and its suspension of the empirical world." Prospecting, 241. (back)
42. This characterization of the human situation is taken from Helmuth Plessner's essay "Die anthropologische Dimension der Geschichtlichkeit" and forms the center of Iser's literary anthropology. (back)
43. I use the word gradual, because almost all of the aspects discussed in this essay can be found in the various stages of Iser's work, but with a gradually changing emphasis. (back)
44. In his lecture "Von der dementierten zur zerspielten Form des Erzählens," Iser discusses the work of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme as two examples of postmodern writing and describes their work as yet another stage in the radicalization of negation which, in retrospect, makes even experimental modernism look like a deeply humanistic project. The lecture has been published in the "Working Paper" series of the John F.Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. (back)
45. "But literature is not an explanation of origins; it is a staging of the constant deferment of explanation..." Prospecting, 245. (back)
46. Gabriele Schwab, who wrote her dissertation and her Habilitationsschrift (the German qualification for a professorship) under Iser, attempts to address these questions in more detail in her books Subjects Without Selves and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen. Otherness in Literary Language. See also the Constance dissertation of Iser's student Ulla Haselstein, Entziffernde Hermeneutik. Generally speaking, Iser's students have pursued two different lines of work: One, of which Eckhard Lobsien's Theorie literarischer Illusionsbildung is the best known, offers phenomenological descriptions of perceptual and textual schemata in literature and aesthetic reception; the other, exemplified by Schwab and Haselstein, draws on psychoanalytic and psychological models to describe the intermediate realm of fiction not only as a space of transferring but transference. (back)
47. For different attempts to work with the category of the imaginary see Gabriele Schwab's Subjects Without Selves and her essay collection The Mirror and the Killer-Queen, as well as my own study Das kulturelle Imaginäre. Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans, 1790-1900. In each case, Iser's work provides a point of departure.(back)
48. See Iser's characterization of the imaginary in his essay "Key Concepts in Current Literary Theory and the Imaginary": "The imaginary is not semantic, because it is by its very nature diffuse, whereas meaning becomes meaning through its precision. It is the diffuseness of the imaginary that enables it to be transformed into so many different gestalts, and this transformation is necessary whenever this potential is tapped for uitilization. Indeed fiction, in the broadest sense of the term, is the pragmatically conditioned gestalt of the imaginary. (...) Fiction reveals itself as a product of the imaginary insofar as it lays bare its fictionality, and yet it appears to be a halfway house between the imaginary and the real. It shares with the real the determinateness of its form, and with the imaginary its nature of an 'As If.' Thus features of the real and the imaginary become intertwined, and their linkup is such that it both demands and conditions a continuing process of interpretation. For fiction always contains a representation of something, but its very fictionality shows that what is represented is merely an 'image,' is put in parentheses and thus accorded the status of an 'As If.' And this is neither totally real nor totally imaginary; the gestalt is too real to be imaginary, but its substance is too imaginary to be real. Thus fiction can never be identified either with the real or with the imaginary, and if the two are bracketed either with the real or with the imaginary, and if the two are bracketed together through that which fiction represents, this does not mean that what is represented is the object of the representation; the object is the possibility of formulating what is represented in a different way from that given by the linguistic formulation." Prospecting, 232f. (back)
49. An interesting example is given by Adorno's comments on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "The immanence of art works, i.e. their almost a priori distance from empirical being, would be inconceivable were it not for the implicit presupposition of a new social order brought about by self-conscious praxis. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, Shakespeare does not by any means expressly espouse an ideal of love free of familial meddling. And yet the drama is about precisely this: the human longing for a condition where love is lo longer disfigured or prohibited by patriarchal rule, or any rule for that matter. Were it not for this tacit, imageless Utopia it would be difficult to explain the abiding attraction Romeo and Juliet has had for generations of theatre-goers. That it is only a tacit Utopia is no coincidence, for the same taboo that forbids cognition to flesh out Utopias holds for art too. Praxis is not the impact works have; it is the hidden potential for their truth content." Aesthetic Theory, 350. Art is thus "like a plenipotentiary of a type of praxis that is better than the prevailing praxis of society, dominated as it is by brutal self-interest. This is what art criticizes. It gives the lie to the notion that production for production's sake is necessary, by opting for a mode of praxis beyond labour. Art's promesse du bonheur, then, has an even more emphatically critical meaning: it not only expresses the idea that current praxis denies happiness, but also carries the connotation that happiness is something beyong praxis. The chasm between praxis and happiness is surveyed and measured by the power of negativity of the work of art.", 17f. In art works, then, "there is only one way to denote the concrete, namely negatively. The work of art suspends empirical reality and its abstract functional interdependence. It does so not by means of some particular content, but because its existence is sui generis. The utopia anticipated by artistic form is the idea that things at long last ought to come into their own." 195. (back)
50. Adorno reciprocated in kind by calling the political criticism of art by the student movement "totalitarian": "When the political avant-garde disrupts events of the artistic avant-garde, the result is confusion writ large: neither the belief that disruption is revolutionary nor the related belief that revolution is a thing of artistic beauty holds any water. Artlessness is not above art but below it; and commitment is frequently no more than lack of talent or of adaptation, in any event a weakening of subjective strength. Far from being new, the recent disruptions by activists are taken straight from the fascist bag of tricks: ego weakness, the inability to sublimate, is being the line of least resistance The days of art, these people allege, are over, and what is left to do is to actualize the truth content of art (which they rashly equate with social content). This condemnation of art is totalitarian in kind." Aesthetic Theory, 355f. (back)
51. One should add that the use of the terms "affirmative" and "negative" in contemporary "oppositional" criticism presents a significant reduction of Marcuse's argument, because Marcuse uses the concept of "affirmative culture" to characterize the "culture of the bourgeois epoch" in toto, and not just those works which fail to be critical or "oppositional." See his essay "The Affirmative Character of Culture," 95. Marcuse's argument, in turn, can be seen as a reduction of the aesthetic theory of Critical Theory. Thus, Adorno writes: "Justified as Herbert Marcuse's critique of culture and its affirmative character may be, it is incomplete because it does not deal with individual projects of art. As it stands, it verges on the perspective of an imaginary league against culture (Antikulturbund) that is no better than the cultural legacy it criticizes. A rabid critique of culture is not the same as a radical critique. As culture is not completely wrong just because it failed, so affirmation in art is not completely wrong either. Culture keeps barbarism in check; it is the lesser of two evils." Aesthetic Theory, 357. (back)
52. See the excellent analysis of this form of political criticism by Wolfram Schmidgen who points out "that the principle of determination in such a structure is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere because every element is defined by the totality of relations that surround it, and it is nowhere because it is nowhere empirically present, can be nowhere concretized or mapped: the complexity of all the relations precisely exceeds the possibility of such spatialization. This is why Jameson called this type of structure an 'absent cause'. What I want to argue in regard to topics such as race, imperialism, or nationalism, is that one branch of recent criticism - not strictly confined to literary criticism - pushes the case for these topics by constructing them as absent causes. As such, race, imperialism, or nationalism permeate the entire network of social relations and affect all literature, even those canonical texts more conservative critics consider exempt from such 'contamination'." "The Principle of Negative Identity," 391. (back)
53. For an analysis of this new type of "cultural" radicalism (in contrast to older forms of political radicalism), see my essay "Literature, Liberalism, and the Current Cultural Radicalism." (back)
54. The dominant forms of historical criticism cannot explain, for example, the processes of transfer and transference that take place in reading fiction. How is it possible that we can still relate to an 18th-century sentimental heroine? The only - highly problematical - answer provided by historical criticism is that of historical or systemic continuity. (back)
55. One of the reasons for this neglect lies in the rejection of the idea of aesthetic difference, either by political claims for adequate representation or by the radical redefinition of power as an all-embracing systemic effect which also pervades the aesthetic and turns the power of art into the art of power. If one wants to claim that power is everywhere and pervades the very forms by which we make sense of the world, then this claim has to be extended to the aesthetic dimension and, consequently, art can no longer be a source of difference. However, such a view could hardly have taken hold as widely as it has in American literary criticism, were it not not for a far-reaching professionalization of literary criticism which, inevitably, has a tendency to suffocate aesthetic experience. If a critic has read and taught a literary text for the 30th time, there may not be any aesthetic pleasure or experience left. (back)
56. In this sense, a shift of emphasis can be noted in the transition from reception aesthetics to literary anthropology. While the former deals, above all, with the phenomenology of text-processing, the latter focusses on various manifestations of the text's doubling structures and their interaction. Again, however, this "play of the text" - exemplified, for instance, in Iser's book on Sterne's Tristram Shandy - can only lead to a typology of play movements, because any further concretization would undermine the conceptualization of the play of the text as a manifestation of negativity. (back)
57. The last part of The Act of Reading contains a chapter on "Historical Differences in the Structure of Interaction," but, in keeping with my analysis, the chapter remains a description of the changing function (and increasing importance) of the blank as a "negating technique." (211) (back)
58. My own major objection would be that we cannot escape from a "pragmatization" of the de-pragmatized space of fiction, because this is the only way in which real or imagined objects become meaningful to us. Therefore, even a radical theory of negativity can very well be understood as another version of such pragmatization, as I have tried to argue in this essay. However, this does neither invalidate this theory as aesthetic theory, nor its description of literature as an intermediate realm and of aesthetic experience as constituted by an interplay of elements. It merely opens these models up to include other and different uses. (back)