Aesthetic Theory (DENKT KUNST) [Translation ed.] 3035801460, 9783035801460

Table of contents :
Aesthetic Theory
Introduction
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn
The Theoretical Act
Necroperformance: Theory as Remains
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot
Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt
Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge
Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theōria
Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking
List of illustrations
About the authors

Citation preview

Aesthetic Theory Edited by Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, and Sandro Zanetti

Translated by Brian Alkire

DIAPHANES

THINK ART Series of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith)— Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK)—University of Zurich.

© DIAPHANES, Zurich 2019 All rights reserved ISBN 978-3-0358-0146-0 Cover image: Yuri Albert, I like art very much (2017), artist’s collection, © Yuri Albert Layout: 2edit, Zurich Printed in Germany www.diaphanes.com

Contents

7 Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti Introduction 21

Frauke Berndt Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

37

Boris Previšić Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

53

Elisabeth Bronfen Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

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Sandro Zanetti Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

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Klaus Müller-Wille Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

109 Sylvia Sasse The Theoretical Act 125 Dorota Sajewska Necroperformance: Theory as Remains 143 Fabienne Liptay Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge 163 Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot 177 Barbara Naumann Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

199 Rahel Villinger Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge 219 Dieter Mersch Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theōria 237 Benno Wirz Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought 253 Sandra Frimmel Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

267 List of illustrations 269 About the authors

Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti Introduction Emphasizing art as an instrument of analysis (rather than of expression, statement, etc.). Susan Sontag

There is no theory which is not in some way related to perception—to αἴσθησις (aísthēsis)—and in this sense to the aesthetic, to the sensually perceptible. Conversely, perceptions without theoretical conceptualization, and thus without a relationship to theory—θεωρία (theōria)—dissipate into indeterminacy. Theories are unable to form without perspectives or ideas concerning what they are about (just as sensual perception would remain diffuse without the power of distinction and judgment). They would also—in the way they are formulated as arguments or, more generally, as figurations which make use of texts and discourses—be imperceptible and incommunicable if they did not refer back to perception-oriented media, through which they first become readable and comprehensible. Readability in a double sense—of the senses and of comprehensibility—is coupled to basal structures in the realm of language where the sensual aspect of language becomes just as noticeable as its ability to function conceptually. The merely seen or heard, in contrast, would, without theory, remain blurred or indistinct, consisting solely of scattered stimuli and affections. It was an insight of the Enlightenment, specifically ­Immanuel Kant and his dictum that perception without concepts is blind and thought without perception empty, that both sides are reliant upon each other and belong together.1 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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The Critique of Pure Reason famously begins with a “transcendental aesthetics.” The assumption that theory is originally ­aesthetic, and that the aesthetic is genuinely theoretical—an idea advanced in this book—leads us, however, to further terrain. For the aesthetic character of theory includes more than just the simple fact that readings are always sensually mediated, and the theoretical character of the aesthetic is not exhausted— with a view to Kant—in the “synthesis” of apprehension and apperception or the schematism of the “imagination.” It also includes the form of representation,2 medial and figural framing, the work on language, articulation, and embodiment, the various techniques and modalities of articulation as well as the formation of terms and concepts.3 The theoretical character of the aesthetic can in turn be seen, for example, in the various methods of dream interpretation, its poetics of “condensation” and “displacement,”4 and even more fundamentally in the specific procedures of attention, of sensitivity to detail, to nuance. These forms of attention and relation at times seem similar to In German: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956), p. 97f. 2 The necessary coupling of theoretical outlines to processes of representation (and their underlying economies of affect) makes clear why it is possible to find a theory “attractive.” See Joachim Küpper et al., eds., The Beauty of Theory. Zur Ästhetik und Affektökonomie von Theorien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013). The fact that “theory” could be seen as chic or even as a lifestyle (and even still can) is based on the implicit need for representation of “theory,” i.e. every form of theory. For more on the historical boom of “theory” as an article of faith and lifestyle in France and Germany of the 1960s to 1980s, see Philipp Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie. Geschichte einer Revolte 1960–1990 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015). On the relationship between design and thought see Daniel Hornuff, Denken designen. Zur Inszenierung der Theorie (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014). 3 For more on the creation of terms/concepts, compare Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the “conceptual person” as well as of “percept, affect, and concept” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 4 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (published in German in 1900), trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), pp. 296–299, 322–326.

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Introduction

or even interchangeable with artistic praxis and allow the idea of a “particular nature,” as Alexander Baumgarten called it, of “aesthetic knowledge” to appear plausible.5 A further consideration relates to the question of the “effect” or “efficacy” of theories. For there is, as rhetoric in antiquity was already aware, no text or persuasive speech, and thus no theoretical statement, without its artificial construction, without the voluntary or involuntary use of stylistic means, without a τέχνη (technē) involving and simultaneously undermining the sphere of the senses. This “technique” or “artistry” is not limited, as it is in Plato’s critique of sophistry, to turning the weaker item into a stronger one. Rather, this technique is what engenders the argument in the first place, allowing it to develop its efficacy. At the same time, affectivity, as expressed in processes of perception, contains a specific form of associativity and thought, one which Theodor W. Adorno referred to with the aporetic expression “synthesis without judgment.”6 Moreover, theories, their propositionality,7 and the arrangement or dynamic of their continually enacted arguments largely exist on the foundation of a peculiar topography, which provides motifs and perspectives through which a thing or ­matter

5 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, ed. and trans. ­Dagmar Mirbach, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007), §§ 30, 38; Baumgarten, “Metaphysica,” in Texte zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik, ed. and trans. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), § 511. 6 Theodor W. Adorno, “Erpresste Versöhnung” (1958), in Gesammelte Schriften in 20 Bänden, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 251–280, here p. 270. 7 See in contrast Gottfried Gabriel, “Literarische Form und nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis in der Philosophie,” in Gottfried Gabriel and Christiane Schildknecht, eds., Literarische Formen der Philosophie (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1990), pp. 1–25. On the specific relationship between philosophy and literature, see Christiane Schildknecht and Dieter Teichert, eds., Philosophie in Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp / Insel, 1996); Richard Faber and Barbara Naumann, eds., Literarische Philosophie – philosophische Literatur (Würzburg: Königs­ hausen & Neumann, 1999).

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is observed. We could also speak here of models, always implicit or concealed, which have been discussed under various names throughout the history of philosophy and which stubbornly undermine the naïve illusions of an “analysis” calibrated on the basis of logic or rationality. Walter Benjamin speaks in this sense of “thought-images,” Hans Blumenberg of “absolute metaphors” which can no longer be broken down into more fundamental elements, Martin Heidegger of language as a “showing” (Zeige) containing its own performance. These “models” further thought just as much as they thwart it by questioning the manageability of discursive means and demanding transparency and lucidity in their own rhetorical composition. Due to these limitations, the philosophical formulation of theories has become systematically confused and disoriented while, in the same breath, relentlessly attempting to generate new words, formulations, and genres in order to understand and define what needs to be thought. We could speak in this context of an “endlessly” aesthetic character to the texts which continues to develop while repeatedly producing points of connection, as the situational constellations which end up in the texts are constantly changing. At the same time, we cannot avoid the fact that the aesthetic is an unavoidable feature of everything theoretical. That is also true where theories or their “models” are at their most formal: consider computer programs, always written and thus formulated, and their algorithms which, like mathematics, are genuinely aesthetic in their being designed concisely and simply, or elegantly presented, or based on symmetries and other aesthetic principles. Something similar can be said of perception and in particular of art. We should not forget that aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, was, from the very beginning, ambiguous, positioning itself between a theory of perception in the sense of αἴσθησις (aísthēsis) and a theory of art or the arts. The latter was first and foremost a poetics and later an authorship-based doctrine of creative activity, and even later an institutionalized practice which was largely self-referential in permanently ques-

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Introduction

tioning and expanding upon its own self-concept. The former, in contrast, was never limited to the sphere of art. Philosophical aesthetics took on the task of both theorizing the various positions as well as justifying their theorizability. It was also characterized by a typical “backwardness” or reserve. For the act of theorizing continuously refers back to perceptions and remains oriented towards them, with the perceived and perceivable being respectively confirmed, corrected, or discarded. Even the “exact” sciences are only able to “verify” or “falsify” their data to the extent that a respective individual data point—through whatever technological or medial means—has been made visible or audible. In theories of perception—whether of Aristotle, Baumgarten, Hegel, Husserl, Wittgenstein, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name only a few—a differentiation is repeatedly made between the “that” and the “what” of perception, its object (or alwaysprecarious “content”) and the act of perception itself. It became clear that the latter remains to a certain extent singular (as I cannot perceive the perception of another) and cannot be questioned without falling into a contradiction or instability with respect to our relationship towards the world. This in no way means that theories are sufficiently or exhaustively explained by their relationship to the aesthetic— just as αἴσθησις (aísthēsis) is not exhausted in the forms of synthesis, whether of imaginatio, memoria, or other forms of concentration. The claim is simply that theories cannot dispense with the relationships which condition their aesthetics, and that, specifically, they are defined—in their claims, their justification, and their relevance (if any)—by the way in which they are unable to dispense with these relationships. Conversely, the arts are also much more than simply a praxis of θεωρία (theōria) or, more recently, of “research,” as they maintain their own relationships to knowledge and in doing so always also raise the question of what art is and what characterizes arts as arts. In the case of theories, we need to take into account their indisputable connection not only to rational justifications and

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methods but also to the public institutions which define their exoteric pathos, their emphasis on ceaseless publication and review. With respect to the arts, it is the structures of exhibition and curation, their marketability and economic value, as well as their participatory engagement, which appear important and push artistic practices in the direction of the ethical or social. Nonetheless, one of the major intentions of the following essays is to show that the aesthetic nature of theory and the theoretical nature of aesthetics are in a certain way conditiones sine quibus non in the sphere of philosophical aesthetics just as much as in literary and art criticism. This double meaning, an implicitly chiastic constellation, is already latent in the title: Aesthetic Theory, which was intentionally kept simple and austere in order to leave open various directions of inquiry, the abundance and surplus, so to speak, of perspectives. For if the aesthetic is prima vista merely a thematic object of inquiry in “aesthetic theories”—i.e. aesthetics as a phenomenon and discipline—, then it proves to be critical for our task that its theorization can hardly be brought to light otherwise than through an aesthetically-qualified mode of involvement, work, and recapitulation, as well as the presentation of material and medium, or ways of writing as scene and process. These in turn relate directly to one’s own acts, the grammatological textures of putting something into writing, the means of doing this, its “models” and “figurations”—in order to simultaneously intervene in them. Martin Heidegger spoke in this context of an “outline” (Aufriss, implying a “rift” or “rupture” in German) through which “we try to speak about speech qua speech,”8 where the expression “outline” is itself reminiscent of aesthetic procedures originating in architectural methods of drafting and sketching.

8 Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 112. In German: Martin Heidegger, “Der Weg zur Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975), pp. 239–268, here p. 241f.

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Introduction

And Adorno did not think of the outline of his A ­ esthetic Theory as a simple theory concerned with aesthetic phenomena or art specifically as its subject; rather, he was always acutely aware of the aesthetic implications and relationships at play in his own formulation of a theory which uninterruptedly co-composes, distorts, and warps the work or “takes a turn” at the moment it begins to develop its power of persuasion. In his much-discussed interview in Der Spiegel on May 5, 1969, Adorno confessed: “I am a theoretical person who feels that theoretical thinking is extraordinarily close to its artistic intentions.”9 It thus makes sense that the title of Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which we are freely borrowing less as a citation than as a program, conceives of theory as something aesthetic and theoretical work as an intrinsically aesthetic project—and not as a theory about aesthetics. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory should be considered a thoroughly composed work which at every moment refers to the media and instruments of its own composition and thus remains mindful of what makes it possible in the first place.10 It is the correlate of the subject it concerns: art itself, to the extent that its theory

9 “‘Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm’. Spiegelgespräch mit dem Frankfurter Sozialphilosophen Theodor W. Adorno,” Der Spiegel 19 (1969): pp. 204–209, here p. 204. (Translated by Brian Alkire.) 10 We remain in urgent need of a historical-critical edition of ­Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory—with images of the handwritten manuscript and its corrections: not just the documented “aesthetic” work but what is on the paper itself. See Martin Endres, Claus Zittel and Axel Pichler, “‘Noch offen’. Prolegomena zu einer Textkritischen Edition der Ästhetischen Theorie Adornos,” editio 27 (2013): pp. 173–204. Rüdiger Bubner’s criticism misses the mark here in the idea of a “becoming aesthetic” of theory in Adorno. See Rüdiger Bubner, “Kann Theorie ästhetisch werden? Zum Hauptmotiv der Philosophie Adornos,” in Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Lüdke, eds., Materialien zur ästhetischen ­Theorie Theodor W. Adornos Konstruktion der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 108–137, here p. 133. For the question is not how much a theory performs an “aestheticization” of itself (and for Bubner, “aestheticization” is something purely negative: silence about its own foundations, thetics instead of argument, etc.), but to what extent and how a theory (including Bubner’s) is in a relationship to its own aesthetics.

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and thoughts themselves proceed artistically. For this reason, it does not conceal its origins in that which is its goal. Philosophy not only requires the “friendship” of art, as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling noted:11 it also participates in art, in the aesthetic: it must be composed, i.e. written in an aesthetic way, in order to articulate itself. But this aesthetic qualification of theory is only one dimension of Aesthetic Theory and its immanent chiasm, as something similar is true of theoretically-reflected objects, procedures, or events, which are not only taken up and commented on by theory but are themselves also “theories” in the sense of θεῶμαι (theōmai), of astonishing presentation or appearance, specifically to the extent that art reveals itself as θεωρία (theōria). In this way, in fact, the task and difficulty of “aesthetic theory” doubles. It does more than just theorize something aesthetic while itself implying an aestheticization of theory: the correlates which are its subject, aesthetic phenomena, reveal themselves to be theories, which in turn present themselves in the garb of aesthetic practices, in this way coming before our eyes or ears. Without this kind of genuinely “theoretical” understanding of art, we would not be able to judge the epistemological potential of works like Kasimir Malevič’s Suprematist white or black squares, or Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, or Stéphane Mallarmé’s Coup de dés. These projects called into question not only the understandings of art prevalent at the time of their composition and the connected normative ideas of a corresponding “aesthetics.” They also demonstrate how thinking about art requires an altered mode of perception, or even how art enters into a “discourse” with itself, taking part in the conversation about art. Suprematism, to take up the example of Malevič, was not formulated as a “theory” exterior to the image but was rather

11 See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), pp. 122–131. [In English: The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 96–103.]

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Introduction

evident in the work, e.g. in the Square of 1915, which only later became the emblematic Black Square, developing a nonrepresentational and non-figurative philosophy of the image. With this, Malevič made a contribution not only to art but to aesthetics, as a theory of the iconic which broke with the traditional function and conception of the image as representation, and the traditional gaze as “seeing-as.” Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–1923) not only referred back to a theory of perception; it developed one which involved its observers while simultaneously leading them away from the sphere of the senses to the level of the concept. The “image object” (Husserl) and the image as object, i.e. inside and outside, blend together with the result that we are no longer dealing with a representation but with an installation which generates its own reality. Mallarmé’s Coup de dés likewise referred not merely to a possible theory of reading, starting with the material, sensually-perceptible distribution of words on the double-facing pages of a book, but also to printing design as an integral component of the work of theory, which begins in perception in the act of reading without stopping and remaining there. So from both directions—aesthetic theory as text and discourse on the one hand and aesthetic praxis as θεωρέω (theōreō), as insight or ways of making visible on the other—a connection exists to the original meaning of θεωρία (theōria), which conceives of theory as a form of seeing, as “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung) or simply as perspective or point of view. This also means that theory should itself be defined as a form of praxis: a praxis of theory formation or theorizing. Or as Goethe trenchantly said: “Every act of seeing leads to consideration, consideration to reflection, reflection to combination, and thus it may be said that in every attentive look on nature we already theorize.”12

12 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1970), p. xl.

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Peter Szondi in turn held that theorization of this kind can crystallize into an “immanent theory” in an artistic—literary— work itself: “I do not at all consider the theoretical examination of a concrete literary work inappropriate and I believe in an immanent theory which is always more pointed than the work itself.”13 That an “immanent theory” of this kind was “more pointed” than the “work” for Szondi indicates that he conceived of the theoretical dimension of art, here of literature specifically, as transgressive: it is the thorn which can and even should cause one to begin thinking, and not only within the confines of academic scholarship. Stated another way: for Szondi, the assumed immanence of theory in the work of art proves not to be conclusive or closed but rather something decidedly open to interpretation, something generally dialogical.14 In the 1950s, Mikhail Bakhtin suggested, with a view to his own “aesthetic activity,” that literature is always also the artistic perception or recognition of language. He was referring to a tradition in Russian philosophy and literary theory which saw the literary work not as an object of theory but as theory via aesthetic means. Bakhtin read both Rabelais and Dostoevsky, for example, as authors who not only formulated their philosophy but also represented it. Formalist theorists in turn, some of whom were themselves artistically active (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky), sought in the 1910s both to make form the main criterion of analysis in the arts and to move form as a category to the center of theory. It is no coincidence that the Formalists experimented with various genres and approaches to writing.

13 Peter Szondi, Letter to Karl Kerényi, 7 August 1958, cited in Christoph König and Andreas Isenschmid, Engführungen. Peter Szondi und die Literatur (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2004), p. 48 [translated from German]. 14 On an immanent theory of this kind, see e.g. Luzius Keller, “Litera­ turtheorie und immanente Ästhetik im Werke Marcel Prousts,” in Edgar Mass and Volker Roloff, eds., Marcel Proust. Lesen und Schreiben (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), pp. 153–169.

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Introduction

The French poststructuralists also experimented with forms of theory and theory construction. The Théorie d’ensemble, published in 1968 by the Tel Quel group, formulated “theory” as a program, beginning with the very title. In the foreword to this work, the guiding “junction words” (mots-carrefours) were defined: “Écriture, texte, inconscient, histoire, travail, trace, production, scène.”15 These theoretical outlines gain further development in the textual experiments—inconceivable without Tel Quel—of thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Foucault, e.g. in the latter's “idea reportages” (reportages d'idées). Philipp Felsch also understands “theory” itself as a genre where the point is not to aestheticize theory but to make its own aesthetics visible.16 In all of these experiments and theoretical ventures the question arises how the relationship between theory and praxis, between texts and their subjects, between concepts and their content can be thought and realized in detail. How, and between which participants, does the dialogue, the engagement, the critique take place? Art and literary criticism fundamentally answer these questions in the specific way they approach their subjects, images, texts, documents, or events. Every theory behaves, whether intentionally or not, in a specific—and aesthetically-defined—way towards its subject and in doing so allows some aspect of this subject in itself to appear (and also causes much to disappear).17 Under the paradigm of

15 Tel Quel, Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), p. 9. 16 Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie. On the boom in aesthetic theory, see Anselm Haverkamp, Latenzzeit. Wissen im Nachkrieg ­(Berlin: Kadmos, 2004), p. 85f. 17 The connected issue of the use and point of theory is discussed in Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer, eds., The Point of Theory. Practices of Cultural Analysis (London and New York: Continuum, 1994). The specific situation of literary theory, whose medium of articulation, representation, and argumentation coincides with its subject’s medium, is explored in Boris Previšić, ed., Die Literatur der Literaturtheorie. Sammlung Variations 10 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

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“art as research,”18 advocated for in Zurich starting in the 1950s by Serge Stauffer, later founder of the F+F school for experimental design,19 experiments were undertaken in the field of artistic practice where art was intended to make a contribution to research, and thus to theory. In theory, in turn, there has been a major acceleration in recent decades of research working with the concept of the “theoretical object,” foregrounding and taking seriously the possibility that the “objects” to be investigated—phenomena, events, and processes—are “theoretically loaded.”20 But what does this mean for the praxis of research—and for that of the arts? If we take seriously the philosophical claims of the arts, their genuine praxis of θεωρέω (theōreō), then there is no question of valuing theories performed in a scholarly context higher than other forms of theory construction. This is also true of the claims in the essays collected here. They feature reflections which highlight the aesthetic implications of discourses 18 See Jens Badura et al., eds., Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015); Elke Bippus, ed., Kunst des Forschens. Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens (Zurich: diaphanes, 2009); Corina Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler and Tan Wälchli, eds., Art and Artistic Research / Kunst und Künstlerische Forschung. Zürcher Jahrbuch der Künste 6 (Zurich: Zürcher Hochshule der Künste / Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010); Sibylle Peters, Das Forschen aller. Artistic Research als Wissensproduktion zwischen Kunst, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013). 19 See Serge Stauffer, Kunst als Forschung. Essays, Gespräche, Übersetzungen, Studien (Zurich: Scheidegger & Speiss, 2013), pp. 53–55, and Michael Hiltbrunner, “Fragen, Methoden, Prozesse, Archive, Forschende Kunst bei Serge Stauffer und an der frühen F+F Schule,” in Ute Holfelder et al., eds., Kunst und Ethnografie – zwischen Kooperation und Ko-Produktion? Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung 7 (Zurich: Chronos, 2018), pp. 113–126. 20 See Mieke Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, vol 2 (1999): pp. 103–126; Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (1998): pp. 3–17; Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1995), pp. 22–41; Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation en Quattrocento (1989) (Paris: Éditions de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2006), pp. 21–62.

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Introduction

just as much as the epistemic implications of aesthetic events. The interfolding of theory and aesthetics, however, always evokes a limit or resistance, with the result that every formation of a theory will always remain risky and keep a chronic distance from itself. It is disputable, for example, whether such a project is even possible in the framework of an academic publication with its corresponding format requirements and traditions, or even in the medium of a book or digital text—a fundamentally fruitful skepticism which ensures continued discussion. Each essay collected in this volume has a different answer to the question of how it behaves towards its “aesthetic-theoretical counterpart,” its subject or theme. The contributions emerged over the course of a multiyear cooperation between theorists from various disciplines of the Centre for the Arts and Cultural Theory at the University of Zurich and from the Zurich University of the Arts. In the spirit of its guiding question, the intention of this volume is not to provide conclusive answers but to open up further perspectives.

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Frauke Berndt Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Modern aesthetic theory emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries. It began with the revaluation of the so-called inferior cognitive faculties in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff and culminated in Alexander Baumgarten’s comprehensive epistemology of aesthetics, which he himself referred to as the “metaphysics of beauty,”1 a project planned to cover psychology, semiotics, mediology (rhetoric and poetics), ontology, and ethics.2 In the more than one thousand paragraphs of his Metaphysica (1739) and Aesthetica (1750/58), Baumgarten expands upon this epistemology, distinctive in being developed on the basis of literary examples drawn from poetically dense passages in lyric and epic classics. Operating dialogically, Baumgarten draws connections to both rationalist philosophy and, above all, to ancient mediology. It is precisely these retrospective references to rhetoric and poetics, now generally read as 18th century proto-aesthetic theories, which enable Baumgarten to conceive of a school of aesthetic judgement. For he analyzes not only how aesthetic experience, confronted with the world’s abundance of

1 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Kollegium über die Ästhetik, in Bernhard Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Seine Bedeutung und Stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffischen Philosophie und seine Beziehungen zu Kant. Nebst Veröffentlichung einer bisher unbekannten Handschrift der Ästhetik Baumgartens (Leipzig: R. Noske, 1907), § 1; all English translations from this edition by Anthony Mahler. 2 My remarks follow my engagement with Baumgarten’s aesthetic epistemology, among other topics, in Poema/Gedicht. Die epistemische Konfiguration der Literatur um 1750 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011); “Die Kunst der Analogie. A.G. Baumgartens literarische Epistemologie,” in Andrea Allerkamp and Dagmar Mirbach, eds., Schönes Denken. A. G. Baumgarten im Spannungsfeld zwischen Ästhetik, Logik und Ethik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2016), pp. 183–199; Facing Poetry. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Literary Theory (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter (forthcoming)); esp. ch. 4.2.2, “Formlessness.”

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properties, is structured, but also considers how the subject— how every individual person—can develop their natural talents in such a way that they become able to understand the world well, better, or in the best possible way. For aesthetic experience leads, according to Baumgarten, to a more complex knowledge of the world than logical cognition. The upgrading of the aesthetic experience of art to an epistemologically-relevant subject of philosophy revolutionized epistemology. Suddenly, art opened up an alternative path for human understanding of the world—even, if we take Baumgarten seriously, the ideal path. But how do we travel down this ideal path? Baumgarten initially proceeds discursively (I), before this discursive work falls into crisis (II), with the result that the philosopher places his trust in the persuasive power of images (III). The first aesthetic theory of the modern period becomes the first aesthetic theory precisely through this shift from concept to image.

Concept Aesthetic theory’s sore spot—i.e. the need to prove that aesthetics is a genuinely philosophical subject—is the question concerning the truth of aesthetic judgements. To resolve this problem, Baumgarten relies on the traditional philosophical work of forming and defining concepts and terms. In his system, he distinguishes among a series of truth concepts with various metaphysical premises. In the course of doing so, he invents a new concept adapted to aesthetic experience: that of aesthetico-logical truth (veritas aestheticologica), which he uses to solve the philosophical dilemma of how something which is sensate in and for itself nevertheless turns out to be logical enough to be capable of truth (Fig. 1). The first opposition in this system relates to the distinction between object and subject. Baumgarten places objective metaphysics (metaphysica obiectiva) in opposition to subjective metaphysics (metaphysica subiectiva). With the notion of

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten



Fig. 1: Kollegium über die Ästhetik, § 424

­ bjective truth, he is proceeding on ontological terrain, as it is o based on the principle of the “unity of the manifold.” In the context of a genuinely modern aesthetic theory, this truth seems to be no longer interesting; its “untimely” positioning in the world is of disturbing consequence above all when we measure the dawning modern age against the yardstick of Kantian aesthetics. In Baumgarten’s defense, we must of course remember that even Hegel’s aesthetics fully accounts for the object, thus establishing aesthetic theory (again) in the ambiguity between subject and object—like Baumgarten. Likewise familiar is Baumgarten’s contrasting definition of subjective truth, which he conceives of as logical truth in a broader sense and thus also refers to as intellectual truth (veritas mentalis) or the truth of influence, correspondence, or conformity (veritas afficientiae, correspondentiae et conformitatis). He summarizes this distinction in the Aesthetica in the following way: “Metaphysical truth could be called objective truth; the representation of objectively true things in a given soul, subjective truth.”3 Baumgarten deals with one problem by positioning logical truth (veritas logica) and aesthetic truth (veritas aesthetica) 3 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, ed. and trans. Dagmar Mirbach, Vol. 2 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007), § 424; all English translations from this edition by Maya Maskarinec and Alexandre Roberts. “Posset metaphysica veritas obiectiva, obiective verorum repraesentatio in data anima subiectiva dici veritas.”

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on the side of subjective truth. While logical truth is firmly anchored in rational epistemology, aesthetic truth is something both brand new and philosophically unnerving. Baumgarten refers to it as real or material truth (veritas realis, materialis). One must be conscious here of the fact that these terms are logical contradictions (contradictiones in adiecto), even paradoxes. For how could something be truth which is not ideal but material? “Aesthetico-logical” is thus the neologism, or more precisely the magic word which Baumgarten hopes will save him from paradox. He situates this aesthetico-logical truth on the side of subjective truth, between logical and aesthetic truth, where the composite is assigned the task of reconciling reason and the senses. For aesthetico-logical truth “somehow” has logical elements which may be brought into discursive expression. But it also, moreover, possesses aesthetic, i.e. real or material, elements which are completely non-discursive. Because—arguing semiologically—the sheer materiality of the sign has a substantial effect on its meaning, aesthetic truth is both inferior to logical truth (because it is non-discursive) and superior to it (because more complex). Above all, however, aesthetic truth is emphatically independent, and perhaps even autonomous. With his analysis of aesthetic experience, Baumgarten is steering towards the vanishing point of this kind of aesthetic autonomy in a Kantian sense. This both/and may be easily explained with reference to the plastic arts: the discursive element of, for example, a painting from Vincent van Gogh’s sunflower series, would be the fact that it is a painting of sunflowers whose truth is guaranteed by the botanical term of the common sunflower (helianthus annuus); whereas the non-discursive element would be the reality or materiality of the sunflower painting, e.g. the texture of the canvas, the color formulas, the contours and color choices, the brushstrokes—i.e. the uniqueness of each of the twelve individual sunflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1888. Baumgarten’s reference media are, however, neither paintings nor—as was common at the time—ancient statues, as for

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

example in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s antiquarian writings or in Johann Gottfried Herder’s paradigmatic treatise on the Plastic Arts in 1778. Instead, Baumgarten’s epistemology of the aesthetic is based on literary texts, thus simultaneously inventing modern literary theory. This reference medium is obvious in the sense that logical and aesthetic phenomena can be relatively easily separated from each other in literary texts. While semantics and grammar are responsible for logical truth, all pre-predicative phenomena appearing in the non-discursive passages of literary texts reference aesthetic truth. Phenomena of this kind are the sensual dimension of literary language, especially figures and tropes and their performativity, phonetic and rhythmic elements in particular, as well as the graphics of visual figures (expressiones figurarum; lusus (sic) literarum). With this upgrading of aesthetic truth, which cannot be undone even through the clever hedges of logical truth, a revaluation of the fundamental principles of philosophy is now on the agenda of aesthetic theory. The only concepts accessible to human reason are the universals (universalia) of methodological scientific thought. Baumgarten, however, downgrades these in favor of individuals (individua). The more individual something is, the more complex and thus truer it is also, with the result that as we move from the concept of genus to the concept of species and then to the individual, we also see an increase in individual truth (veritas singularis): generic concepts are true, specific concepts are truer, and individual concepts are truest ( prima veri, secunda verioris, tertia verissimi ). Baumgarten’s critique of aesthetic judgement throws everything overboard which was previously held to be sacred by philosophers, or at least right and proper. Although the universal is abstracted from the individual phenomena, this universal lacks that metaphysical truth which characterizes the particular in its material fullness.4 Seen from this perspective, the philosopher feels compelled to mourn the entire project: 4 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 562.

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For my part, I believe that it is entirely apparent to philosophers that whatever particular formal perfection in thought and logical truth is present can only have been acquired with the loss of much and great material perfection. For what is abstraction if not a loss?5

Counter-concepts Good, we might think, let’s leave it at that then: there is a new truth, an aesthetic truth which is not fully released into the free play of the imagination because, as a component of aestheticological truth, it remains firmly contained within the bounds of philosophy. Baumgarten is, after all, not so modern that he throws all logic overboard with the aesthetic. And so: better safe than sorry, and this premodern philosopher is, of course, no Kant. But why, after completing his traditional work of definition, is Baumgarten not satisfied? It is in fact precisely at this point that he begins to flounder: where he places his aesthetic theory on a truly conceptually-workable foundation, guaranteeing truth to aesthetic experience—a foundation which sustains both the object and the subject of aesthetic experience. In Baumgarten’s philosophical project, it is in the paragraphs on truth, of all places, where the line between meta-language and object-language blurs to the extent that concepts give way to figures: similes, metaphors, metonymies, allegories, and personifications. There, logical argumentation fades in importance behind associative, narrative, and dramatic connections. For with his “Wissenschaft von allem, was sinnlich ist,”6 Baumgarten in fact discovered something so new and unprec5 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 560: “Equidem arbitror philosophis apertissimum esse iam posse, cum iactura multae magnaeque perfectionis in cognitione et veritate logica materialis emendum fuisse, quicquid ipsi perfectionis formalis inest praecipuae. Quid enim est abstractio, si iactura non est?” 6 Baumgarten, Kollegium über die Ästhetik, § 1.

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

edented that he was no longer satisfied with the ideas he could deduce philosophically. Discursive philosophical reasoning seems to be insufficient for treating of something as exciting as an aesthetic truth in all of its dimensions; such concepts are simply not complex, and thus not aesthetic enough, to bear the weight of the epistemology of the aesthetic. To put it another way: aesthetic theory itself demands aesthetic procedures of representation, although the middle period of the Enlightenment, which Baumgarten represents, puts its faith not only in the faculty of reason but also in the power of reason’s concepts, through which the theory makes its claim to philosophical dignity, i.e. in those very notions of truth which constitute the core of the epistemology of aesthetics. If, keeping this background in mind, we take a critical look at the first paragraphs of the Aesthetica, we can see the dilemma which Baumgarten has fallen into with the discursive foundations of modern aesthetics. For the project of an aesthetic theory in the middle of the 18th century is not based on discursive concepts but on an elementary rhetorical and dialectical procedure: aesthetics, Baumgarten explains, is an epistemological art analogous to reason (ars analogi rationis). Precisely the truth-functional composite aesthetico-logical condenses the double analogy of aesthetics and logic into a singular term which is for exactly this reason characterized by a constitutive ambiguity. Because to be honest, how can something be simultaneously logical and aesthetic? This ambiguity compels Baumgarten to illustrate the aesthetic on the basis of the logical. He thus departs from the philosophically virtuous path by using an example. To characterize aesthetic truth, i.e. the aesthetic components of aesthetico-logical truth, he turns to the aesthetic experience which one has in confronting uncut rock. By presenting this example—because the aesthetic dimension of truth cannot be philosophically conveyed in a concept—the philosopher himself becomes a poet. The use of an example disburdens philosophical discourse of abstraction. Providing examples, one could argue, is a ­ ctually

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nothing unusual. Philosophers provide examples which, as a rule, serve to illustrate concepts. Examples are epistemologically relevant and ethically grounded in that moment, of course, where there is nothing which something could be an example of, nothing which subsequently illustrates qua example because it was already a satisfying concept in the first place. “Providing examples” is thus more than simply a means of representation; it is an ethical practice through which the philosopher positions himself against philosophy. Such practices, which demand nothing less than contributing to a “good philosophy,” have an affinity with concepts in philosophical discourse. In the case of Baumgarten, examples pave the way to things which cannot be mastered by language. It is in this sense that Theodore R. Schatzki defines practices as a “temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings.”7 Schatzki dissolves the tension between practice and discourse resulting from this definition by emphasizing on the one hand “the discursive component of social practices”8 while on the other hand maintaining: “In my opinion, the difference between discursive and non-discursive actions is fundamental.”9 These non-discursive actions lead directly to the kinds of rhetorical practices which Michel Foucault examines in Self Writing. There they manifest themselves as “ethopoietic function[s]” of discourse.10

7 Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89. 8 Theodore Schatzki, “Sayings, texts and discursive formations,” in The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners, ed. Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 126–140, here p. 126. 9 Ibid., p. 129. 10 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 207–221, here p. 209.

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

In rhetoric, the figure of the sermocinatio (ethopoiia) counts as one of the figures of thought (figurae sententarium),11 explained most notably by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his treatise on the lives and works of Athenian orators using the speeches of Lysias as an example. As an ethical figure, the ethopoiia has the dual task of increasing the evidence for and credibility of the speech. This ethopoetic function can be isolated in Baumgarten’s truth paragraphs in the rigidity with which Baumgarten revalues the materiality of the sign, which is suddenly part of philosophical discussion along with the notion of aesthetic truth. For never before had such a notion been part of philosophy: an affirmation of “phenomenal individuality,”12 as Martin Seel succinctly puts it, which is the basis of aesthetic experience. More radically formulated, this phenomenal individuality is accompanied by “the affirmation of the ‘that’ (quod) of a settlement (Setzung),” as Dieter Mersch formulates it, i.e. the affirmation of the “moment of ‘ex-sistence.’”13 Because this revaluation is so unprecedented, Baumgarten’s concepts of truth fail to cover precisely this aspect. His semiotic approach, which emphasizes the material excess of the signifier in the aesthetic sign, ensuring that signifier and signified can never be in agreement,14 is apparently lacking that persuasive power which Baumgarten believes the Republic of Letters is owed. It is, however, precisely this excess which simultaneously makes an appearance, an excess which guarantees the perfection (perfectio) of aesthetic judgement, referred to by ­Baumgarten in line with metaphysical tradition as beauty (pulcritudo). To 11 Roland Spalinger reconstructed this figure of thought in “Ethopoeia. Historische und theoretische Analyse einer rhetorischen Figur” (Master’s thesis, University of Zurich, 2018). 12 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 26–29. 13 Dieter Mersch, “Paradoxien der Verkörperung. Zu einer negativen Semiotik des Symbolischen,” in Frauke Berndt and Christoph Brecht, eds., Aktualität des Symbols (Freiburg: Rombach, 2005), pp. 33–52, here p. 35. 14 See Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 561.

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c­ ommunicate this aspect—as yet incommunicable in the context of the 18th century—Baumgarten makes use of an example: that of uncut rock, which he prefers to the geometrical form of the sphere: By similar reasoning, one cannot produce a marble globe out of irregularly shaped marble, at least not without such a loss of material that the price of roundness will be quite high.15 This rock has no form which could be reduced to a geometrical term. It proves, in its fragmentariness, to be more beautiful, and thus more perfect, and thus truer than the sphere. Baumgarten does not want to round off anything about the uncut stone, or bring it into form, even if the sublimity of the phenomenon which emerges exceeds the human power of comprehension. Baumgarten is not the first to go on a philosophical search for aesthetic truth. Already in Leibniz, there is an ontological concept of individuality anchored in metaphysics. In contrast to logical space, reality is characterized by chaos. No one thing resembles another, and each is defined by its overwhelming complexity. In his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1765), written between 1703 and 1705, Leibniz thus chooses figurative comparison with uncut rock16—undoubtedly where Baumgarten takes his comparison from—while making decisive corrections. For Leibniz is concerned with the philosophical problem of so-called innate ideas:

15 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 560: “Pari ratione ex marmore irregularis figurae non efficias globum marmoreum, nisi cum tanto saltim materiae detrimento, quantum postulabit maius rotunditatis pretium.” 16 Johannes Hees analyzed this example in “Denken und Betrachten. Zur Proto-Ästhetik bei Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz und Barthold Hinrich Brockes,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 64/1 (2019), forthcoming.

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogeneous block of marble, or to a blank tablet—what the philosophers call a tabula rasa. For if the soul were like such a blank tablet then truths would be in us as the shape of Hercules is in a piece of marble when the marble is entirely neutral as to whether it assumes this shape or some other. However, if there were veins in the block which marked out the shape of Hercules rather than other shapes, then that block would be more determined to that shape and Hercules would be innate in it, in a way, even though labour would be required to expose the veins and to polish them into clarity, removing everything that prevents their being seen. This is how ideas and truths are innate in us […].17 Baumgarten is interested in the uncut rock not for the problem of the ideas that are innate to the marble block. He is also not interested in the aesthetic relationship between rock and the plastic arts which is suddenly under discussion with Leibniz’s Hercules and which Winckelmann expands upon in his famous text Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom (“Description of the Belvedere Torso in Rome,” 1759). There, the autodiagetic narrative instance—a rhetorical “figure of speech”—struggles against the affirmation of phenomenal individuality, where it brings the rock together with the ideal of the Greek demigod. In an encyclopedic review of art and its history, the entire Hercules archive is mobilized. What interests Baumgarten about the rock is its material as such, or more provocatively expressed: he is interested in the real—the material remains which constitute the real truth.

17 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and trans. Peter Remnant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 52.

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Frauke Berndt

Image To convince us of the compellingness of this new concept, Baumgarten moves from the concept to the image, announcing a shift in the argumentation about aesthetico-logical truth. Wherever the aesthetic judgement of the subject depends on the material surplus of the aesthetic object, a certain uneasiness emerges because the spheres of subject and object can no longer be clearly separated from each other, as would normally be required by philosophy. Baumgarten projects statements about the aesthetic object into the process of aesthetic judgement formation, as I ultimately intend to show. Or stated otherwise: he can make no statements about aesthetic judgement which are not molded by the aesthetic object. Or in yet other words: there is no aesthetic theory without the aesthetic phenomenon (phaenomenon). So far, Baumgarten seems to have coupled aesthetic truth to the aesthetic experience of the subject; now, though, he suddenly starts to speak of the aesthetic object again. From a philosophical perspective, we thus have to accuse him of inconsistent argument—at least in those places where we do not take into consideration that Baumgarten is not operating logically and conceptually but aesthetically and figuratively. This procedure can be described as simple projection: Baumgarten shifts his statements concerning the systematic location of the aesthetic object to the systematic location of the subject of aesthetic experience—this is exactly how we can describe the argumentational logic. A good two hundred years later, Jacques Lacan will undertake a very similar projection of the object onto the subject when defining the real in his epistemology of psychic phenomena. This is the third position in the foundational triad of Lacan’s epistemology, next to the imaginary and the symbolic. Like the other two terms, the real refers to a psychic structure, which, however, does not constitute a mere remainder in relation to the imaginary and the symbolic, even though it is incomprehensible, unthinkable, impossible, and above

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

all ­unspeakable. Instead, Lacan defines the real as that which resists both symbolization and the imagination and, as a resistance to the symbolic, is a cut (coupure) in the symbolic.18 The shift from the object to the subject of aesthetic experience makes sense if we consider that the uncut rock is intended to illustrate the aesthetic share of aesthetico-logical truth (veritas aestheticologica). Baumgarten’s theory thus concerns the incommensurable element of aesthetic experience, portrayed as a confrontation with the real, i.e. affectively overwhelming, although Baumgarten does not deploy the concept of the sublime, as he will several years later when defining aesthetic theory. The overburdening of the subject is one feature. The other is the overburdening of discourse itself, which reveals itself to be genuinely aesthetic to the degree that Baumgarten applies the representational method from which he derives the structure of reality and the laws of aesthetic experience: the figures of detailing—especially descriptio, distributio and enumeratio. For this purpose, he takes up Leibniz’s idea of work on material. With his tool, the sculptor works on the rock. But in contrast to Leibniz, the rock does not reveal a Hercules. Rather, the passage culminates in an apotheosis of formlessness, not form. Neither the statue nor a geometrical form like the sphere are beautiful, but rather the rock itself: […] the aesthetic horizon especially delights, however, in the singular, individual, and most determined things exhibiting the greatest material perfection of aestheticological truth, in its forest, Chaos, and matter, § 129, out of which it sculpts aesthetic truth into a form that is, if not perfect, nevertheless beautiful, §§ 558, 14, such that while it is being worked, as little materially perfected truth as possible may

18 See Frauke Berndt, “Das Reale,” in Frauke Berndt and Eckart ­Goebel, eds., Handbuch Literatur & Psychoanalyse (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), p. 638.

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be lost and, for the sake of elegance, be rubbed away by its own power, § 563.19 Baumgarten treats the phenomena philosophically—phenomena being the singular and most strongly determinate objects (exhibentes singulares et determinatissimi) to which the single terms (individua) correspond. But Baumgarten immediately replaces these terms with a series of metaphors which express the affectively overwhelming element of aesthetic truth: forest, chaos, and material (silva, Chao et materia). With this, he explicitly indicates that the problem of aesthetico-logical truth, or the share of the aesthetic in this truth, can only be expressed aesthetically—in images—because the problem does not itself possess a conceptual form. Ralf Simon thus defines the structural denominator of the image series as “an increase in density […] without form, before form, as matrix of form”:20 Of the general aestheticological truths, the aesthetic ones are those that can—and they are aesthetic only insofar as they can—be represented without losing their beauty by the analogue of reason in a sensate manner, §§ 440, 423, either manifestly and explicitly or cryptically in the omitted assertions of enthymemes or in examples in which, just as in concrete things, these abstract things are detected.21 19 Baumgarten: Ästhetik, § 564: “praesertim autem perfectionem materialem veritatis aestheticologicae maximam exhibentibus singularibus, individuis, et determinatissimis fruitur horizon aestheticus, sua silva, Chao et materia, § 129, ex quibus veritatem aestheticam ad formam, nisi perfectam omnino, pulcram tamen, §§ 558, 14, ita exsculpat, ut inter elaborandum, quam fieri potest minimum veritatis materialiter perfectae pereat et elegantiae causa pollendo deteratur, § 563.” 20 Ralf Simon, Die Idee der Prosa. Zur Ästhetikgeschichte von Baum­ garten bis Hegel mit einem Schwerpunkt bei Jean Paul (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), p. 52. 21 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 443: “Veritatum aestheticologicarum generalium eae tantum aestheticae sunt, quae et quatenus analogo rationis, salva venustate, sensitive repraesentari possunt, §§ 440, 423, vel manifesto, et explicite, vel cryptice in omissis enthymematum

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Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

Thus only the shift from logical and conceptual to aesthetic and figurative language, the shift from philosophy to literature, leads Baumgarten to aesthetic truth. The series of images thus generates a “shift dynamic”: marmor, silva, Chao, materia. A metonymy of this kind, which Wolfram Groddeck refers to as a “border shift trope,”22 glides almost imperceptibly from the old to the new. Its power lies in its ability to convince us of this new thing—and specifically not in a logical but rather an aesthetic way. While concepts in a Cartesian sense are logically self-evident, Baumgarten’s images are aesthetically evident. They are the royal road upon which he makes his approach towards the complex aesthetic truth. Just as with aesthetic truth itself, this conviction also does not provide proof but rather affectively overwhelms. This is why Suada, the Roman goddess of persuasion, is the patron23 of Baumgarten’s invention of aesthetic theory. Despite the substantial effort he put into demonstrating the aesthetic share of aesthetico-logical truth, he ultimately replaces aesthetic truth, boldly, consistently, and above all fully anti-metaphysically: since then, modern aesthetic theory has no longer been concerned with truth but rather simply with probability or verisimilitude (verisimilitudo)—an aesthetic “appearance of truth” in an emphatic sense. Referred to here is the individual truth of the phenomenon, inseparable from the double sense of appearances—both phenomenon and (mere) seeming—and thus from a constitutive ambiguity of truth.

enunciationibus, vel in exemplis, in quibus, tanquam concretis, haec abstracta deprehendantur.” 22 Wolfram Groddeck, Reden über Rhetorik. Zu einer Stilistik des Lesens (revised edition) (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2008), p. 234. 23 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 847.

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Boris Previšiƈ Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot Every historical and discursive contextualization of a theoretical object demands an act of objectification, a bringing together of disparate elements into a comprehensible whole and thus a distancing from the specific dynamics of the object—a demand which holds true as well for Denis Diderot’s dialogue D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de D’Alembert), the subject of this essay. At the same time, it is precisely this contextualization which has the potential to deprive the moment of its actuality. The theoretical object provides us, as Hubert Damisch writes, with a means not just of producing a theory but of reflecting on what theory is and how it functions.1 The seductiveness of theorizing, of seeing thought in its bodily, temporal, and discursive dimensions, makes clear how difficult it is to approach the theoretical object without discursive or narrative distortion, reducing it to a simple object.2 If theory, as “contemplation” or “speculation,” emphasizes a visual method, the aesthetic, as general sensual perception (αἴσθησις), points to the medial ­limitedness of theory.3

1 Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (1998): pp. 3–17, here p. 6. 2 It is in this sense that Mieke Bal criticizes the narrative overdose with which contemporary works of art are often furnished, instead of asking about what “matters.” See Mieke Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, vol 2 (1999): pp. 103–126, here p. 105. She is concerned here not only with meaning but just as much with the non-transformable materiality of the theoretical object itself, a materiality which does not have an arbitrary relationship to its medium. 3 See also Boris Previšić, “Akustische Paradigmen vor der Philologie: Herder,” in Mario Grizelj, Oliver Jahraus and Tanja Prokić, eds., Vor der Theorie. Immersion – Materialität –Intensität (Würzburg: ­Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), pp. 337–350.

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D’Alembert’s Dream, by examining this dilemma of aesthetic theory in countless variations, is a reference text more relevant today than ever. It was written in an epistemological threshold time—similar to the one we find ourselves in today. Diderot stands not in but before the modern epistēmē of temporalization and historicization, an era we have departed without knowing where exactly we find ourselves today.4 Neither “grand narratives” (Lyotard) nor even simply a general scientific attitude based on objectivity and rationality are suitable instruments for the analysis of our “broad present,” unable as they are to escape their limitedness and immanence to the system.5 The aesthetic, in contrast to theory, offers us a dimension which resists objectification, as it concerns the question of the materiality of perception and thought which Denis Diderot poses to himself.6 As an advocate for an empirically-grounded sensualism, he insists on a turning away from an Enlightenment dominated by visual metaphors, favoring an acoustic and musical orientation and ultimately a differentiation of the various senses. In his encyclopedia article on the color organ or “ocular harpsichord,” Diderot pointed to the problem that neither the simultaneous nor the successive relationship between the colors could be grasped.7 The visual thus does not, in this case, offer an equivalent replacement for the acoustic. There is no “aesthetic” per se. An acoustic aísthēsis does initially intensify the paradox of aesthetic theory. At the same time, however, it 4 I am referring here to the shift of the epistēmē between the age of classical representation and modern historicization around 1800. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human ­Sciences (published in French in 1966) (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 5 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Unsere breite Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010). 6 See Alexander Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Natura­ lismus,” in Denis Diderot, Philosophische Schriften, ed. Alexander Becker, trans. Theodor Lücke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), pp. 205–269. 7 Denis Diderot, “Clavecin oculaire,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1753), p. 511f.

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offers us the ­possibility of a kind of meta-reflection on the theoretical object where perception and thought coincide as analogous processes. In the course of this, the act of making analogies is revealed as a kind of procedure. The epistemological framework is reshaped in such a way that the entendement and raisonnement are brought into a relationship which is simultaneously complementary and contradictory.8

Tempered: Analogy between instruments and people The act of thinking in analogies accentuates the dilemma of needing—in the words of the mathematician D’Alembert in Diderot’s dialogue—to have at least two “things” present at once: “it seems that at least two things are required.”9 The figure of Diderot offers this answer in the first dialogue: “I believe so, and for that reason I have sometimes been led to compare the fibers that make up our sense organs with sensitive, vibrating strings. The string vibrates and makes a sound for a long time after it has been plucked.” (100) This simultaneity is the point of departure for a polyphonic form of thought reliant on temper and thus on the harmony of disparate elements which only survive time through recording and the work of memory. Only in this way does the formation of analogies as the basic movement of thought become possible; only in this way do philosophers form new ideas—“his ideas arise out of their own necessary connections while he meditates in darkness and in silence.” (100) This is an alternative to the Cartesian

8 See also Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie. Science, pensée et écriture (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), p. 299. 9 All page numbers refer to “D’Alembert’s Dream,” in Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (Indianapolis, New York, and Kansas City: The Bobbs Merrill Company, 1964), pp. 92–175. In French: Denis Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), pp. 343–402, here p. 350.

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­ editations, an alternative entangled in a peculiar visual and m acoustic absence—in “silence” and “darkness.” Resonance is Diderot’s central figure of analogy and thought, a figure which, by being conveyed purely through acoustic media, apparently functions without direct physical contact, thus being able to serve as the best model for an abstractly conceived form of thought. The transmission of an acoustic signal at a certain pitch through the air (e.g. on a tuned string) is a model of how a new acoustic source can emerge without direct physical contact. This also concerns a process used, for example, by the object artist Hans Krüsi in collaboration with the recorder player Conrad Steinmann, who attaches a dozen “beepers” to his jacket during concerts, each of which reacts to a different tone.10 By also using the phenomenon of resonance as a model of experience, recent social philosophy is consciously referencing a “purely relational quality” of acoustics and not “a purely bodily relationship to the world,” which “is clearly based on a physical resonance effect mediated by sound waves and the movement of air.”11 Starting from a model of perception, Diderot, as a character in his dialogue with D’Alembert, arrives at the model of resonance to explain the fact that thoughts sometimes follow each other incomprehensibly: “a newly awakened idea can sometimes provoke a sympathetic response in a harmonic that

10 “For the entire length of the piece, an uninterrupted whirring and flickering” “drowned out” the actual performance, as the recorder player reports of the opening reception of the performance on the occasion of Hans Krüsi’s 70th birthday in 1990 in the Lagerhaus of St. Gallen. Conrad Steinmann, Drei Flöten für Peter Bichsel: Vom Zauber der Bockflöte (Zurich: Rüffer & Rub Sachbuchverlag, 2016), pp. 104–109, here p. 109. 11 Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp / Insel, 2016), p. 162f. [In English: Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).] Rosa starts less from an acoustic model of the Enlightenment and more from a “comprehensive ‘musicalization’ of the world since the 20th century as an unavoidable correlate (because effective in effect) to an increasing reification of our double-sided bodily relationship to the world.” Ibid., p. 164 [Translated from German].

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is almost inconceivably remote [à un intervalle incomprehensible].” (100) Referencing Leibniz’s “flying thoughts” (fliegende Gedanken, one of the few German expressions in the newly published New Essays Concerning Human Understanding12), D’Alembert’s conversation partner makes clear the degree to which thought is dependent on outer and inner (sensuous) impressions. This makes the simultaneity of disparate elements incomprehensible because the sequence of thoughts does not exist in a rational relationship—“in a harmonic that is almost inconceivably remote.” (100) Diderot thus falls back on the intense aesthetic debate concerning musical attunement, which questioned the rationality of pure pitch in the simple numerical relationships of tones with one another (e.g. 1:2 for octaves, 2:3 for the fifth) through the advent of tempering in the 17th century, with its slight deviation from these rational relationships. “Ratio” is given up in favor of modulation capability and tonal character. Jean-Philippe Rameau argues in a rationalistic Cartesian fashion in his Traité de l’harmonie (1722), explaining the tones of a chord as natural tones, or overtones to a fundamental bass, and thus as a “principle.” However, he becomes increasingly interested in the physiology of the corps sonore (“sonorous body”). The physiological correspondence between the musical instrument and the human being breaks away from a matter-bound four humors theory and arrives at a specifically resonative model, which Diderot developed in close cooperation with Rameau in 1748.13

12 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “De la faculté de discerner les idées,” in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (Amsterdam and Leipzig: Rud. Eric Raspe, 1765), Livre deuxième, chapitre xxi, §12. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans. Alfred Gideon Langley (Macmillan: London, 1896), pp. 181–182. Leibniz’s essays refer directly to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (published 1689) and were written in 1703–1705 but not published until 61 years later, posthumously. 13 See Thomas Christensen, “Diderot, Rameau and resonating strings: new evidence of an early collaboration,” The Work of Music Theory. Selected Essays (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 343–364.

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The divergence of tempered tuning from just tuning with its rational relationships guarantees the sensuousness and thus the relevance of acoustic analogies between body and instrument. Or to speak with Adorno: “All relations that appear natural, and are to this extent abstract invariables, undergo necessary modifications before they can function as aesthetic means; the modification of the natural overtone series by tempered tuning is the most striking example of this.”14 The space of naturalness thus shifts into the “capability of producing art,” the question of which art form best corresponds to human perception. The analogy between instrument and human being serves simultaneously as a model for analogy itself—although (or because) Diderot repeatedly emphasizes its hypothetical character.15

Materialistic: Aísthēsis as metaform of thought Diderot’s dialogue centers on D’Alembert’s dream, which is framed by a first dialogue between D’Alembert and Diderot and a third between Mlle de L’Espinasse and the doctor Bordeu. In French, both the first and the third dialogue are captioned with the word “Suite”: “La Suite d’un entretien entre M. D’Alembert et M. Diderot” and “Suite de l’entretien précédent.” To the extent that the caption of the third dialogue refers to the preceding, the first remains ambivalent, as we do not know what was previously discussed. Rhetorically, this is a beginning in media res. The dialogue thus starts with a rejection of Descartes’ soul organ in the pineal gland as put forth in Passions of the Soul

14 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 292. 15 In his “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” especially, Diderot frames his formation of analogies in the hypothetical mode. This is expressed most succinctly in connection to the harmonic model of perception. Diderot thus “never forgets the hypothetical character of his consideration.” Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Naturalismus,” p. 212.

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(1649). Nonetheless, D’Alembert raises doubts about the figure Diderot’s materialistic thesis of a comprehensive sensibility extending all the way to rocks: “For if you put some principle of sensitivity or consciousness in its place, if you say that consciousness is a universal and essential attribute of matter, then you will have to admit that stones can think.” (92) In contrast to the start of the third dialogue with its laborious introduction, this beginning appears completely abrupt. But this highlights that thinking about thought cannot be separated from the form in which thinking is thought about. This leads to a homomorphy between the subject treated—the spatial interminability of the subject (with analogies like a swarm of bees or a spider web)—and the open literary form.16 Resonance reinforces metathought about its form with thought itself. In the first dialogue, the interlocutor Diderot assumes the active role of the Socratic questioner:17 he establishes the major topics and assumes the task of reasoning, while D’Alembert simply confirms, doubts, questions, infers, and evaluates. Diderot distinguishes in this way between “actual” and “latent consciousness,” (93) the transition from the latter to the former being achieved via food (94) or Locke’s “tertiary quality,” for example when the sun causes wax to melt via heat (102).These were of course familiar theses for an audience of the time. Decisive, however, is the extent to which both conversation partners comment upon the course of the conversation itself and are themselves sometimes surprised, for example when the more active conversation partner Diderot objects: “But we are losing the thread of our original discussion,” (97) whereupon the more passive D’Alembert admits to a certain fatalism: “What of it? We can decide later whether we want to go back and pick up the thread again [or not]” (“nous

16 Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Naturalismus,” pp. 243– 245. 17 Barbara de Negroni, “D’Alembert’s Dream. Notice,” in Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques, pp. 1207–1223, here p. 1210.

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y reviendrons ou nous n’y reviendrons pas”). (98) In French, Diderot uses the same self-reflexive syntactic structure in his next thesis, “nos animaux d’aujourd’hui se reproduiront ou ne se reproduiront pas”18 (“our plants or animals of today would or would not reappear”). (98) These resonance phenomena are located somewhere between self-reflexive dialogue and scientific thesis, especially in the musical model of the “philosopherinstrument” (101) with replies by D’Alembert like “I follow your line of thought.” (101)19 The musical analogy can be extended: the “La Suite” of the first dialogue’s French title, for example, in contrast to the third, refers not only to the “preceding” dialogue but just as much to the thought “sequence” within the dialogue, like the progression of dance movements in a Baroque dance suite. The formation of a series on the time axis intrinsically makes the coherence of idea formation a subject of discussion while simultaneously problematizing it. This is because succession consistently undermines the tableau of classical representation.20 Diderot’s dialogues are modeled on Plato’s in that they provide the individual characters with specific positions and

18 Ibid. 19 “J’entends” (literally “I hear”) in French. The ambiguity of “entendre” in the sense of “hearing” and “understanding” might not be that obvious here. But Diderot makes it explicit in the subtitle of his Lettre sur les sourds et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent (“Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, for the use of those who hear and speak”) and also over the further course of this letter. 20 Foucault sees a “foreign” element here in the linguistic sign function as it was understood in the 18th century: “What distinguishes language from all other signs and enables it to play a decisive role in representation is, therefore, not so much that it is individual or collective, natural or arbitrary, but that it analyses representation according to a necessarily successive order: the sounds, in fact, can be articulated only one by one; language cannot represent thought, instantly, in its totality; it is bound to arrange it, part by part, in a linear order. Now, such an order is foreign to representation.” Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 90–91. If we take Foucault at his word, the problem is not with the general sign function but in the specific syntagmatic-acoustic element of the phoneme (“les sons”), which can only be arranged successively.

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ways of speaking corresponding to their professional and social positions: Diderot as philosopher, D’Alembert as mathematician, Mlle de l’Espinasse as wife, and Bordeu as physician. Nevertheless, Diderot does not leave his dialogues in the ancient form of maieutic truth seeking: he is more interested in the formation of arguments and analogies per se, in thinking itself.21 Diderot brings the progression of thoughts, the “suite,” into the overall view of the tableau via certain resonance phenomena as techniques of memory by turning the visual into the auditive: succession is conceived of as interrelation, which in turn temporalizes melody. Referencing Diderot’s previous comment on the philosopher listening to himself in silence, D’Alembert points out the dilemma which Diderot wanted to avoid: that the philosopher cannot be both instrument and listener at once, and is thus reliant on some higher entity like the Cartesian res cogitans. “But if you don’t watch out, you will end up saying that the philosopher’s mind is an entity distinct from the stringed instrument, a sort of musician that listens to the vibrating strings and draws conclusions about their harmony or dissonance.” (100) D’Alembert’s objection again highlights that listening to the vibrating strings relates to a model of tuning which distinguishes between consonance and dissonance. It is admittedly not clear whether a tempered tuning model is played off against a model of pure tuning. But in this context the question does not seem to be highly relevant. Instead, D’Alembert, in contrast to Diderot, is thinking of a harmonic model where the strings tone simultaneously. The “philosopher-instrument” manages without memory, with Diderot countering: “The philosopher

21 Cassirer defines the critical and post-systematic Enlightenment of the 18th century in self-reflection and self-observation: “[T]he thought of this age is even more passionately impelled by that other question of the nature and potentiality of thought itself.” The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 4–5. [In German: Die Philo­sophie der Aufklärung (1932) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007), p. 3.]

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instrument has sensations, so he is simultaneously the performer and the instrument. Because he is conscious, he has a momentary awareness of the sound he produces; because he is an animal, he remembers the sound. This organic faculty, by linking together the sounds in his mind, both produces and preserves the melody.” (101) The purely physical question of the oscillation relations between the strings is differentiated by Diderot the interlocutor: on the one hand, there is—on the part of sensibility and thus the general perceptibility of aísthēsis— the momentary consciousness of the present tone; on the other, Diderot recalls the organic faculty of memory as an animal. Characteristically, the tones in the “philosopher-instrument” form themselves not into accord but into melody. This is, in contrast to momentary accord, memorizable and repeatable, in that our senses are struck like keys from within: “Our senses are merely keys that are struck by the natural world around us, keys that often strike themselves.” (101) The “philosopherinstrument” receives its sensual impressions from both outside and inside. A sensual impression cannot however be reduced to a moment (“indivisible instant”) but instead endures and is superimposed by a subsequent one: “Then a second impression follows the first, arising similarly out of an external or internal cause; then there occurs a second sensation. And these sensations all have tones—either natural or conventional sounds— that serve to identify them.” (101) By means of the acoustic model we can explain how self-reflection stands in a direct relation to sensual perception and is dependent on temporal delay and sequence. Voice articulates itself not only in time (in the musical form of melody); polyphony thus implies both the simultaneous sequential tuning of the tones (through “natural tones” in rational relationships and “conventional,” i.e. tempered, tunings) and temporal unfolding in the form of protention and retention of melody. Self-recursion is reliant on both vertical accord and horizontal melody.

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Eccentric: Text as polyphonic score Self-recursion in D’Alembert’s Dream takes place on three levels: thematic, commentative, and stylistic. One cannot summarize the essential element of the treated themes and bring them to a point. The actual connecting pieces of aesthetic theory are not thetically integrated but rather outsourced and multiplied. The connection only arises in a paradoxical countermovement of interruption—which is true not only on a thematic level but above all on the commentating and stylistic levels. It concerns the interdependence between contiguity and continuity.22 Without the dialogue form chosen by Diderot, this interdependence would be unthinkable. The dialogue is not simply continued in the central second part under the title “D’Alembert’s Dream.”23 Instead, the first half consists of a report in which Mlle L’Espinasse has written down the dreams (“la ­rêvasserie”) of a fevered D’Alembert and now reads them to Bordeu. These dreams are obviously connected to the previous dialogue between D’Alembert and Diderot, to the vibrating strings and sensitive nerve fibers.24 But this thematic continuity is subject to a formal contingency, as that which is being told must cover the double medial break of the nocturnal writing scene and the reading scene in the morning. The acoustic is turned into writing and then re-translated into as literal a reproduction as possible. The resonance model which was a subject of the first dialogue is implicitly taken up again. Mlle L’Espinasse thus begins her reading by asking Doctor Bordeu to listen (“Écoutez…”). And she concludes her first speech by ­questioning her ­interlocutor

22 The transfer from contiguity to continuity is also addressed in Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Naturalismus,” p. 242. 23 With the repetition of the title of the overall text as the heading for the middle part, resonance is projected onto the stylistic level, in that the relationship between the whole and the part is transferred to the time axis and repeated. 24 Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” p. 158.

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whether he has understood: “Doctor, can you make any sense out of all that?” (110) In the second dialogue, self-recursion is addressed via the unity of the individual and the reflection point of self-perception—or as Doctor Bordeu puts it: “the various forms of sensitivity, the formation of a conscious being, the unity of such a being, the origins of animal life, its duration, and all the different problems connected with this matter.” (120) This complex and “serious” subject is avoided by referring to the mathematician’s dream, with Mlle de L’Espinasse saying: “As for myself, I’d call that a nonsensical hodgepodge, something that may be alright to dream about when you are asleep; but I can’t see why a wide-awake person should bother his head about it, assuming that he has any common sense.” (120) Both main protagonists of the dialogue, Bordeu and Mlle de L’Espinasse, occupy two irreconcilable positions with respect to the dreams: one affirmative, one highly negative. Over the course of the dialogue, however, the positions change, starting when Mlle de L’Espinasse uses the example of the spider in its web, with the purpose of later demonstrating that unity is the perceptive center of the spider, in contrast to the swarm of bees.25 Characteristically, though, she is initially unable to present her example, as this is the first moment in this central dialogue when D’Alembert seems to wake from his sleep and himself take part in the conversation while still continuing to dream. She introduces her example by mentioning the stylistic difference of her own thought: “Women and poets seem to reason mostly by examples [comparaisons]” (122) The use of examples or comparisons as a mode of thought is a medium of style which Mlle de L’Espinasse contrasts with

25 “[E]ach thread of the sensitive network can be hurt or tickled at any point along its entire length. Pleasure or pain arises at this point or that, in one place or another, along one of the long “legs” of my spider—I keep getting back to my spider. Well, the spider is the central meeting place of all the ‘legs’ and these only transmit the pleasure or pain to such and such a place, but without themselves feeling either pleasure or pain.” Ibid., pp. 136–137.

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the complex mode of expression of the “philosophers.” Instead of speaking of a “fallacy of the ephemeral,” she references the literary image of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who, in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (“Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,” 1686), speaks from the perspective of a rose for whom the lifespan of a gardener seems to last an eternity. (120) Hardly has Bordeu hinted that he can fully understand (and even expand upon) Mlle de L’Espinasse’s analogy before she continues with her reading—whereupon he suddenly becomes uncertain and asks: “Is that you speaking or him?,” receiving as an answer: “That’s what he said in his dream.” (110) The blending of voices and the difficulty of attributing them provoked by the reading scene is characteristic of the second dialogue—if we read it as a musical score in Roland Barthes’ sense, namely as an acoustic realization of an ambiguous and polyphonous textual space.26 It often remains unclear whether D’Alembert is taking on the role of a mathematician or a philosopher in the dream—particularly when he unites a dialogue within his voice. If Diderot the author puts audacious theses in the fevered mouth of the dreaming D’Alembert, he is not doing so as a precautionary measure intended to prevent attribution of them to him as an author, threatening political sanction and disavowal. Instead, the dialogue is designed with resonance in mind, demanding that contingency and continuity be thought together. The playground of Diderot’s aesthetic theory is the openness and transferability (also in the sense of “continuity”) of text, score, subject, material, and life. The one cannot be separated from the other because the aesthetic intersection is sensual perception, “sensibilité.” Aesthetics is here situated in its resonating performance.

26 “The area of the (readerly) text is comparable at every point to a (classical) music score. The divisions of the syntagma (in its gradual movement) correspond to the division of the sonic flow into measures […].” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 28–29.

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Resonance as a double phenomenon of physical resonation (as familiar from the resonant and/or sympathetic strings of the lute) and melodic memory (“mémoire”), can thus offer a model for the use of both “rational-natural” and “tempered-conventional” interval relations simultaneously (in the sense of the classical tableau and vertical harmonics) and in succession (in the sense of an incipient modern genealogical epistemic order) as meaningful thought processes. Two epistemai are thus active at once. But the third and last dialogue, “Sequel to the Conversation,” which figures solely as a short appendix, resolutely sets aside the nature vs. culture dichotomy in Adorno’s sense above, when D’Alembert and Mlle de L’Espinasse speak of self-gratification without a natural purpose or the breeding of hybrid creatures like the hare-hen. (166) And finally, the entire text ends with an anti-colonial statement, when Bordeu demands that human beings not be used for undignified slave labor: “And in the colonies we would no longer have to reduce the natives to the condition of beasts of burden.” (174)

A leap of thought: Theory as acoustic body The second dialogue ends with the departure of Bordeu, who has to keep his next doctor’s appointment. D’Alembert attempts to make sure that he and Bordeu have understood each other: “Doctor, do we really understand ourselves? Do we really make ourselves understood?” (165) The answer to this question is an acoustic one, aiming at the “sympathy” of harmonious strings—but in their negation: “Nearly all conversations are like reckonings […] [a]nd for the simple reason that no one man is exactly like any other, we never understand one another exactly.” (165) From the diversity of human beings emerges an abundance of opinions. They do not, however, result in the cacophony of nonbinding pluralism. The opposite is true: it is precisely the incomprehensible interval, the leap into genealogy, which generates new connection points—like in the homo-

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phonic correspondence in French between “sots” (idiots) and “sauts” (leaps): MLLE DE L’ESPINASSE: Please, Doctor, just one more question. BORDEU: All right, let’s have it. MLLE DE L’ESPINASSE: You remembers those leaps [sauts] you were telling me about? BORDEU: Yes. MLLE DE L’ESPINASSE: Well, do you suppose that idiots [sots] and men of genius may have leaps [sauts] of that sort in their heredity? (166) The continuity of temporal causal chains will eventually become an epistemic cornerstone of the incipient modern order of knowledge. It is the foundation of both biological genealogy and the “grand narratives” of historiography. Diderot rejects this in many ways in his aesthetic theory of resonance. He is not at all interested—as we might want to assert today—in offering a counternarrative to the supposedly rational worldview of the Enlightenment. Rather, intense skepticism is paired with a materialism that dares to think the incomprehensible together with the disunity of the perceiving and knowing subject. This “holistic thinking” cannot be pure. Or expressed in the musicological terms of the time: thought of this kind must be tempered and, fully aware of its own intense artificiality, present itself as nature. The non-rational interval, the leap of thought, the “flying thought” is thus not simply operationalized but instead thought of as an opportunity for initiating further thoughts which cannot be linked logically or causally. The acoustic level of the text is decisive for this configuration. As a written text, it is first of all oriented towards visual perception. But the change of media into the acoustic provokes the potential of the linguistic sign. Resonance is integrated in both the music-theoretical and (subsequently) the physiologicalaesthetic tuning and tempering discourses of the 17th and 18th

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centuries. It enables semiotic connections which can be doubly projected back onto the semantics of the text: first as resonance in the sense of reverberation, and thus as a figure of memory in the succession of linguistic signs, and second as resonance in the sense of echo and resistance, which is inherent to the linguistic sign in its visual-auditory doubling. For it is exactly this feedback and back reference to the other medium which generate the space of theoretical (self-)reflection as a continuum of inner reflexivity.27 However, resonance also simultaneously links theory back to the body (“corps sonore”) and is the actual relay to thought, which escapes technical reproducibility and externalization by the human person. Resonance also always implies a textual body which achieves its semiotic effect only in the change of medium.

27 See especially the comments on auto-referentiality in Louis Marin, De l’Entretien (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1997), p. 72f.

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Elisabeth Bronfen Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

Fantasy work as narrative management: three formulas of thought Sigmund Freud conceived of the work of fantasy as, in essence, the correction of a disappointing reality. This wish fulfilment is satisfied through three decisive formulas of thought. The first concerns the relationship of fantasy to time. A wish triggered by an event in the present draws on the memory of an earlier experience and in doing so creates a situation referencing the future, one which presents itself as the fulfillment of this wish. Past, present, and future are consequently strung together on the thread of the continuous wish. By naming the prototypical content which happily obsessed the daydreamer in childhood, “the protecting house, the loving parents and the first objects of his affectionate feelings,” Freud admits that this process concerns a story of relief.1 The family romance, which he sees as the perfect example of this hovering between three moments in time, also shows the degree to which the work of fantasy requires a narrative. The idea that one is accepted as a child uses the narrative of a noble heritage only apparently as revenge on the actual parents, while this subsequent new invention simultaneously focuses on memories of the past which are just as narratively shaped. This exchange should be understood not only as an expression of regret that this supposed happier time has disappeared. Rather, that fantasy which seeks to sooth 1 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906–1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 141–154, here p. 148.

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an unsatisfying present by way of one of these compensating stories is an “overvaluation that characterizes a child's earliest years [which] comes into its own again” in the fantasy.2 The psychological processing of present dissatisfaction by way of a happier narrative glorifying the past is more than just nostalgic. The work of fantasy creates a meaning-generating narrative for the present which also helps reorient one towards the future. But this formula of thought also contains a hint of tautology. The explanation which Freud offers for the ensnaring power of fantasy also acts in service of that fundamental theoretical narrative on which his own psychoanalytical work is based. The development of the adult subject demands not only breaking away from the past—however painful that might be—but also recognizing the ineradicable traces which this past has left behind. As an insight into the psychological reality which Freud learned was just as meaningful as any actually experienced reality, fantasy work is productive for him because it mirrors his own theoretical work. If an instance of wish fulfillment appears in the dreamwork of the fantasizing person, then the same also happens for the analyst, who folds this event into a further interpretive narrative. Fantasy work shares with the work of the analyst more than just the use of storytelling for the management of experiences: at the heart of this narrative governance—and this gesture of relief is our second decisive formula of thought—there is also a hero (or heroine). We may say of fantasy work that this hero (or heroine) functions not only as a sympathetic figure but also seems to be protected by a certain providence which allows him or her to master any dangers or strokes of fate. “[T]hrough this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of every story.”3 Both the focus on the one who fantasizes 2 Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” ibid., pp. 235–242, here p. 241. 3 Freud, “Creative Writers,” p. 150.

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and the feeling of security which this person always has are also—and this shall be traced in the following—true of the analyst Freud. As a re-teller of that which has been told to him in a distorted way, he proves to be more than simply the person who brings all inconsistent information into focus, weighing and ordering it. He is never in danger of being impacted by the story, as he never loses his interpretive distance from any potential repercussions. We might even claim that the more the material to be interpreted threatens to escape his grasp, the more stubbornly he insists on his explanatory psychoanalytic formulas. And in doing so, he reveals himself as the hidden hero of his own analytic narratives. Ultimately, we can detect a kind of oppositionality at the heart of both the fantasy work and Freud’s theoretical work, which leads us to a third decisive thought formula: our ambivalent relation to death. The history of the development of psychological processes which is at the center of Freud’s aesthetic and culture-theoretical writings takes this as its vanishing point. Although we are all inevitably heading towards death, we find this fact more than just unimaginable: we also tend to leave death out of our own accounts of our lives. If this constitutes a loss for Freud, the world of fiction proves to be the place where we look for a replacement for this hidden knowledge. “There we still find people who know how to die—who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else.”4 The narrative mastery provided by fiction consists in our ability to experience dying (or killing) through our imaginative identification with the hero (or heroine) and also to survive his (or her) death, in order to then die another time with another character. By virtue of this transference, we are able to reconcile ourselves to death because this death, as a narrative death, does not touch our actual lives. 4 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, pp. 273–300, here p. 291.

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Wish fulfillment in this case thus does not consist in the correction of a disappointing present. Rather, our empathy with the deaths of fictional characters confirms our belief in our own integrity while returning to our life, as Freud expresses it, its full content. If, namely, the curbing of the destructive drive in favor of a personal as well as a collective civility amounts to a restriction—even if a necessary one—to psychological life, the fantasized identification with the death of a literary character compensates for precisely this deficiency. Because we were allowed to experience death as the narrative destiny of a hero (or heroine), we can confidently allow ourselves not to deny it. At the same time, however, we can reassure ourselves that it does indeed concern us but will not directly affect us.

Freud retells Shakespeare Freud uses his idiosyncratic reading of the casket choice scene in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to clarify knowledge of personal mortality, which aesthetic texts express in a distorted form as Schutzdichtungen (a play on words in German meaning both “protective fictions” and “protective valve.”) The piece’s narrative point of departure is the romantic and financial destiny of a Venetian heiress. The father of the beautiful Portia has ordered from beyond the grave what should happen with his property. She must marry the man who chooses the leaden casket instead of the golden or silver one—the leaden casket which alone contains an image of her. This operates not only on the basis of an equation between the female body and the casket but also of a discrepancy between true interior and external appearance. Because Portia is not allowed to say anything during the theatrically staged choice of Bassanio, who is courting her, her silent figure corresponds to the leaden exterior of the casket, with the result that both—the casket and the woman—embody the law of the father as a homicidal inscription.

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Portia would have something to say but is not permitted to speak. Bassanio not only chooses her—he also chooses in place of her. A double narrative is attached to the leaden casket. The inscription on the lid proclaims a message which will simultaneously demonstrate the fittingness of the groom: “who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” (2.7.9).5 Bassanio’s decision is also not free. If Portia is completely unable to choose, then this young native of the city proves to be her suitable spouse because he—and this was the father’s gamble—could not, as a Venetian, make any other choice. But if he alone is able to correctly read the inscription on the casket (which corresponds to the bride and is the means by which she shall be won), this also means that he must be able to read them correctly. Because Bassanio undergoes the selection ritual as a third party, nothing else remains for him dramaturgically than to select this casket. Freud’s astonishing interpretation of this scene primarily focuses, however, on the connection between the silence of the heiress and the pale color of the casket. He indicates that Bassanio announces his choice through his attraction to that conspicuous paleness: “thy paleness moves me more than eloquence, / And here choose I” (3.2.106). The shift in Freud’s theoretical retelling is just as significant. Portia is to be understood as a goddess who has taken the place of the goddess of death. Her beauty, as a kind of protective image, offers something of a counter to both insignias of death—silence and paleness—and dissolves the immutable law of human mortality while simultaneously bringing it into expression. Once again, the question of the ambivalence of feelings— critical for Freud—comes to the fore in how Freud brings this aesthetic scene to its theoretical point: “Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the 5 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), pp. 1011–1175, here p. 1141.

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wishes that reality does not satisfy.”6 By referring his reading exclusively to the groom selecting the casket while ignoring the heiress who is being selected, he finds confirmed that transformation—characteristic of fantasy work—from an anxiety-causing state of affairs into its gratifying opposite. “In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually,” he explains, adding: “No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.”7 We can actually identify two shifts in the narrative coping which Freud ascribes to Bassanio with this formulation. As love goddess, Portia not only replaces the image in the casket: she also inverts the relationship between pale exterior and beautiful interior, though her beauty conceals the mortality which she secretly embodies as death goddess. At the same time, her desirable appearance stands for that wealth which will doubtlessly brighten the mortal existence of her spouse (to whom this wealth will be transferred). What is overlooked here is the reverse side of the choice scene, aesthetically shaped by Shakespeare. If the beauty of the bride allows the groom to translate this choice scene into a narrative which allows him to suppress knowledge of death, then it amounts for Portia to the killing off of her ability to act in a double sense. The heiress is, in a figurative sense, dead, as she can only be chosen and cannot herself choose. With the wedding, she literally surrenders her sovereignty together with all of her property. She must obey the obligation which the law of the dead father has laid upon her and, moreover, cannot ennoble her loss of power with the narrative that she would have had a choice.

6 Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, pp. 289–302, here p. 299. 7 Ibid.

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The fact that Freud does not perceive the other side of fantasy work in Portia’s sober acceptance of her fate points to a wish fulfillment which affects his own theoretical work. To prove the validity of a psychoanalytical understanding of fantasy as a defense mechanism, he invents a narrative from the casket choice scene which simultaneously limits and contains the ambivalence of the piece. To the extent that his retelling serves as a justification for his theoretical formulations, it also serves as an aesthetic vehicle. In his retelling, Portia’s silence stages precisely that unpleasant knowledge of the insurmountable illness which the symbolic law, by limiting the desire of the individual subject, inflicts on the subject, but which simultaneously seeks to transform fantasy work and—in the sense of a protective fiction—to shore it up or replace it with wish-formations of integrity. Freud’s theoretical narrative replaces Portia with a fantasized mythical double-figure of the death and love goddess, but we can still hear, even if only ex negativo, the voice of Shakespeare’s intelligent heroine. As the dramatic person who functions only as a figure of a double replacement—death for life, necessity for choice—in Freud’s retelling, Portia, through the erasure of her independence, directs our gaze back to what fantasy work leaves blank as a gesture of relief. Portia’s silence guarantees a knowledge which we may not, according to Freud—and this is precisely the ambivalence of his theoretical work—not recognize. We must accept that disability which fundamentally constitutes life. Our mortality is ordained, and we must obey this law of death. The wish fulfillment achieved by fantasy work might be gratifying, but contradicts at the same time the aesthetic insight of the Shakespeare text. If the Father receives a power transcending death, wounding Portia in her narcissistic fantasy that she can shape her own destiny, then the casket choice scene—as intimated by the inscription on the leaden casket—leads to a recognition of her own fallibility. She, the one being chosen, can only give herself over to the risk which the wedding represents. But it is also the goal of ­psychoanalytic

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work to hold on to the necessity of fantasy work while nevertheless—or therefore—recognizing in it a protective illusion.

Returns in psychological development Concerning the question of narrative management running through Freud’s culture-analytical writings, it is helpful to take another look at his continuously reformulated grand narrative of the development of psychological processes. This theoretical grand narrative also links three temporal moments, although with less emphasis on how the past is remembered in an idealized way. Rather, Freud again directs our attention to that psychic material which can never be overcome and thus necessarily returns from repression. Just as the past always plagues the present and a course for the future can only be charted by means of this backwards-looking reference, the overcoming of primal psychological states is always only temporary, the recurrence of the material relegated to the unconscious. In his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud’s deep disappointment with the outbreak of the First World War moves him not only to realize that faith in the civility of cultured nations must be understood as an illusion—it also leads him to the speculation that the deepest essence of the human person lies in so-called “primitive” drives which are restricted and redirected through prohibitions and cultural regulations. These suppressed drives can remain latent for years before again being reactivated. And precisely the influences of the war are among those powers which can produce a regression, if this disturbance of the everyday “strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us.”8 With this formulation, Freud not only makes an analogy between “primal man” (the Urmensch) and the deeper layer of the psychological life of modern persons (the unconscious). His 8

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Freud, “War and Death,” p. 299.

Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

grand narrative of the development of psychological processes starts from repression as one of the most important cultural defense mechanisms, while always conceiving of it together with regression into those primal emotions and ideas which are supposed to be repressed. For Freud, this means that unpleasant psychic material lives on unchanged in the unconscious. It survives any relegation, whether in a supposed prehistory or in the unconscious. Freud’s narrative does have a thoroughly mythical character to the extent that he postulates a ghostly persistence of prehistory. But at the same time, the assertion that conquered drives have an afterlife allows Freud to guide our attention to those moments where repression fails. Fantasy work, like dreamwork, is so important for his analysis of neurotic illnesses because that which should be kept hidden again becomes evident. The disruption of everyday life—where fantasy work can be linked to neurotic symptoms—is necessary for analysis to begin at all. It is a sign of a dissatisfaction which needs to be interpreted. Once again, a literary motif serves to clarify this theoretical narrative formula. Freud’s turning to the uncanny as the epitome of the return of the repressed one year after the end of the war only makes sense if the desire for destruction ignited by the world war caused the European homeland to also appear foreign. Freud is writing again in a time of peace. However, the ambivalence of feelings which he ascribes to both the field of literature and to the experience of war continues to exist, as if the earlier text were afflicting the following one. His engagement with frightening fantasies which originate in familiar yet estranged knowledge also contains a trace of the war which has supposedly been overcome, and those violent drives which seem to again be stemmed by cultural prohibitions overshadow the newly won civility of peace. “[T]his uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien,” goes Freud’s famous assertion, “but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated

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from it only through the process of repression.”9 The substitute which is at stake in this case is one in which the known and trusted is replaced by something strange and alienating. If in the experience of the uncanny, according to Freud, the familiar coincides with its opposite, then he is simultaneously clarifying that which he referred to, in the context of the family romance, as an overvaluation of childhood. The habituated, trusted home was never fully homelike, but always already pervaded by hidden fissures. The home was always, even if only secretly, already partially unfamiliar. At the same time, Freud takes up the mental figure of the Double from his retelling of the casket choice scene, thus reversing the interplay of fantasies of immortality and knowledge of death. The doppelgänger does have a history of development in which a concept coincides with its opposite, but this mythical figure was “originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego.” The idea of the doppelgänger, he adds, “has sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man.”10 The analogy not only brings a further category—the childlike inner life understood as psychological prehistory— into that series of repressed elements connecting the unconscious with prehistorical human beings. Because this concerns an emphatic repudiation of the power of death, it is easy to recognize the hero of fantasy work in the previous idea of the doppelgänger. This figure also asserts of him- or herself that nothing bad can happen to him or her. For the grand narrative of psychic development which Freud wants once more to extract from this literary motif, it is crucial that the overcoming of the original narcissism (like prehistoric thought) accompanies a change in the sign of the

9 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917– 1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217–256, here p. 241. 10 Ibid., p. 235.

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doppelgänger: “From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” Freud uses “the surprising evolution of the idea” to reveal a protective fiction conducive to repression.11 In the same way as the beautiful Portia, as a double of the leaden casket, blocks out the necessity of recognizing death, this imagined self-doubling hides an unpleasant knowledge. Whether the love goddess replaces a goddess of fate in the one wish fulfillment, or the terrible harbinger of death a friendly figure of survival, each concerns substitute ideas. Knowledge of mortality, which returns in the form of the uncanny doppelgänger, while being able to be happily protected against in the figure of the rich bride, is in both cases not only prior: the disruption as return of the repressed, as revealed in the uncanny, also reveals that we are dealing with old, familiar knowledge. It should have remained hidden but has become manifest, specifically because this prior knowledge of human infirmity must necessarily come into expression. The return, which interests Freud as much as the power of fantasy work, means: repression must fail. As much as the arrangement supports and defends in everyday life, it is also an illusion which can only ever be partially and temporarily sustained. Freud returns repeatedly in his late writings to a history of development based on the development of the pleasure principle into the reality principle, as well as on the negotiation between individual desire and the demands of society which restrict it, and this trajectory can repeatedly be reduced to one narrative formula. In general, the development of the individual as well as the culture places, as the essential content of psychic life, the struggle between the life drive and the drive to destruction, between Eros and Thanatos, between dream work and loss of happiness. In this struggle, the return of the second term and the restoration of the first are always held in balance.

11 Ibid., p. 235.

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A case study as narrative fragment Freud’s will-to-narrative is nowhere more concisely expressed than in his case studies, and here, too, various time levels coincide. The foundation is first of all the medical history which concerns both the genesis and the development of a psychological disturbance. Secondly, the purpose is to fit together the often contradictory and gap-filled stories which Freud hears in the course of analysis into a coherent narrative, and to furnish them with his own commentary. Thirdly, the treatment history as narratively managed by him serves the purpose not only of documenting the outcome of the analysis but also of demonstrating the validity of his psychoanalytic method. Freud published “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” ten years after the 18-year-old woman whom Freud pseudonymously named Dora sought him out, suffering from a nervous cough, loss of voice, and quarrelsomeness with her family. The abrupt abandonment of therapy also allowed Freud to reflect on the fissures which result from the triple translation of psychosomatic illness into a narrative language. To fill in gaps in her medical history and solve Dora’s riddles—she suffers partly from amnesia, partly simply withholds information—Freud needs a logical, comprehensible, and orderly account of the many disparate events which contributed to her illness. Revealing connections and determining a necessary causality for these would be, for Freud, equivalent to a restoration of memory. Nonetheless, a cure also requires that Dora agrees with this clarifying narrative, that she accept it as her own, even if—and the fragmentary character of this case study depends on precisely this discrepancy—the narrative does not entirely align with her own desire. At the same time, the corresponding piece “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” turns out to be an expression of Freud’s own fantasy work. To the degree that he understands the dream as a detour which would circumvent repression, the written case study also serves the fulfillment of his desire that dream interpretation

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could be recognized as particularly suited for the treatment of psychological disturbances. Because he attempts to supplement and clarify what Dora tells him with theoretical models, the demonstration of which caused him to retell Dora’s story in the first place, we receive an uncanny double portrait. The honesty of Freud as narrator consists in the fact that he reveals the discrepancy between what Dora tells him and what he hopes to hear. Dora’s story can also be regarded as a family romance, however one in which the fallible parents are not replaced but rather carry on a lewd friendship with another married couple. The mother, with whom Dora has long had an unfriendly relationship, hardly appears at all in Freud’s narrative. Instead, everything in his account revolves around the father’s affair with Frau K., which comes to a point in a scene on a lake where Herr K. makes a declaration of love to the daughter of his rival. As a result of this, Dora hits him in the face and runs away. The daughter astutely insists that she is fully aware of her status as an object of barter. She is, she says, delivered to Herr K. “as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife.”12 For his part, Freud believes he has discovered in the accusations which she expressed towards all involved parties a pre-existing deep romantic love for her father, who has been replaced in her fantasy by Herr K. Again and again, Freud attempts to convince Dora that the purpose of her hysterical symptoms—loss of voice as well as inconsistency—is to turn her father away from Frau K. At the same time, in the final session, he also makes the suggestion that her amnesia is leading to this: “that Herr K.'s proposals were serious, and that he would not leave off until you had married him.”13 Although Dora, for her part, repeatedly refused to agree with his conclu12 Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, pp. 1–122, here p. 34. 13 Ibid., p. 108.

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sions in the previous sessions, Freud insists: “Dora had listened to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and—came no more.”14 By reading Freud’s narrative against the grain, we are able to understand the symptom of loss of voice as a counter-narrative inscribed into his text. This concerns on the one hand the fact that her speaking had lost its value because neither her father nor Herr and Frau K. wanted to listen to Dora. On the other hand, with her refusal to agree—whether in decisive negation or as silence—Dora directs our attention to that fallibility of Freud which moves him to not take into account the highly specific character of the relationship. At one point he does note that Dora is, he claims, feeling and acting like a jealous wife. He immediately dismisses the idea that the actual object of love could be Frau K., whose delightful white body Dora repeatedly praised, and claims that the inclination towards same-sex desire is nothing more than an earlier, overcome whim. Even the fact that Dora spoke of Frau K. more in the tone of a lover than a vanquished rival and never spoke a hard word against her is quickly rejected by Freud as inconsequential. The text of the case history, however, allows a reading which reveals precisely this intimacy as the actual core of the hysterical daughter’s displeasure. Freud even deciphers one of the dreams that Dora tells him as a defloration fantasy, where she takes the place of the lover penetrating the female genitalia. Her resistance to Herr K. would thus be understood as nothing other than a cover story hiding both her being in love with her father as well as an unconscious love for Frau K. Contrary to the manifest interpretation offered by Freud, the text offers another narrative for the case study, one in which Dora’s love for Frau K. is a conscious fantasy, even if one kept secret. Only in one of the final footnotes does Freud openly admit: “I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her 14 Ibid., pp. 108–109.

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homosexual […] love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life.”15 He rejects until the very end what his own text reveals, because it does not fulfill the wish which he imagined for this story. If the scene on the lake had had another conclusion, “this would have been the only possible solution for all the parties concerned.”16 Instead, Freud reads the fact of Dora’s breaking off therapy with him after three sessions as an act of revenge, in order to then seamlessly process it in a daydream, where his fallibility enables him to simultaneously appear as a hero. In the main text of the case study, Freud distracts us, by way of an admission of another failure, from the fact that he did not want to see Dora’s most significant object of love: “I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time,” he concludes, adding: “At the beginning it was clear that I was replacing her father in her imagination.”17 The sudden abandonment of therapy is again a slap in the face for him. Perceiving this as a personal offense, he links the abrupt end of the analysis to the scene on the lake, not only in order to propose himself as a substitute for Dora’s disappointed love but also to take on her position as a victim of unfaithfulness. She “took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by him.”18 By becoming the actual focal point of the frustrated analysis, he is not only speaking about and for Dora, but rather about himself. Like in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the aesthetic procedure of this case study is shown in a pointed way, Dora’s silence is her own form of articulation. Like the father and Herr K., Freud also seeks to control the hysterical woman. Her reaction in both cases—with a neurotic loss of voice in the first and a mild silence in the second—suggests an absence of

15 16 17 18

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Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 119.

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consent. The text in turn enables—in opposition to the manifest intention of the narrator—a reading where Dora, fully aware of her analyst’s fantasy (that he is her imagined object of love, to find his theory of dream work confirmed), cunningly played along, providing him with the dream material corresponding to his wishes. Just as the clever Portia had faith that only Bassanio would be able to correctly read that Venetian code which her father invokes with the leaden casket, the sharp-sighted Dora recognized that Freud, obsessed by a will-to-narrate, can only interpret what she is telling him through the lens of those love stories whose pathological effects he is trying to explain. The brilliance of Freud’s recourse to aesthetic methods, not least to that uncanny double voice arising from the disconnect between the main text and the footnotes, lies in the clues he lays which enable a revealing glance into the theoretical construct of his fantasy. Portia entices the spouse whom she can do nothing other than accept into a trap with a game of rings, in order to secretly gain the upper hand in this marriage; Dora lures her analyst into a narrative loop from which his text cannot escape. She has not only slipped away from him; she has also led him to record—with a preface, a medical history, the interpretation of two dreams, an afterword, and thus an entire series—how he has gotten pulled into the current of his own fantasy, how he can only compose a case study whose success lies in its own failure. He was in fact at risk of being impacted by the story, but his narration makes up for this fallibility. The opposite of this is the decisive aesthetic gesture.

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Sandro Zanetti Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin La mésaventure du vilain style est arrivée à plus d’un philosophe – à tous peut-être : la chose est bien connue. Jean-Luc Nancy

There exists no theory in which language, or communication more broadly, is exclusively an object of analysis. However narrowly we want to define “theory”—as a more or less systematic way of looking at things or as a methodological foundation for the development of something—the explanatory potential of a theory never results solely from what is thought in or with the theory, but always from how this thought occurs as well. In the case of theories, this how is in turn necessarily reliant upon symbolic mediation. That means, however, that theories always simultaneously feature a sensually perceptible (medialmaterial) side, and an immaterial side which has been brought into representation with or through it. Each side always refers to the other, or at least opens onto it—and the how of a theory exists (not only, but also) in the way this reciprocal relationship receives concrete expression: which pattern, which principles, and which forms of development it follows. If we take as our starting point the sensually perceptible side of theory itself and associate the concept of aesthetics with the characteristic of such perceptibility or perception-relatedness, then we can affirm: every theory exhibits a certain aesthetics. Even if a theory, in terms of its object, has nothing at all to say about aesthetics, the theory itself must in a certain way be formulated, presented, and thus perceptible—to the extent that it is to be communicable or comprehensible at all. In the sense of αἴσθησις (aísthēsis: “perception”), every theory, considered

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in terms of its own concrete expression, is perception-related and in this sense aesthetic. Even mathematical theories are reliant upon perceptible signs. This is not a direct reference to the actually quite revealing fact that “theory,” as derived from θεωρία (theōria: “view, contemplation, perspective”), is itself a form of looking, of contemplation, perception, intellectual “insight.” Crucial, rather, is that the way of (theoretical) looking which theories contain or outline itself demonstrates a perceptible structure.1 This aspect is usually ignored when speaking of “aesthetic theory.” If we take the formulation “aesthetic theory” seriously—not least with a view to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory—then the point, in a purely grammatical sense, is not that there is a theory that is concerned with aesthetics as its subject or with individual aesthetic objects or events. Neither does the term “aesthetic theory” express that theory in this case is identical with the concept of aesthetics (and certainly not with the restricted concept of an aesthetics that would be a simple doctrine of art). Instead, “theory” here proves to be fundamentally, in the sense of aísthēsis, aesthetically qualified.2 The question is simply which type of aesthetics a theory implies, and even the specific mode of rejection of (a certain) aesthetics would still need to be composed or contoured in an aesthetic way.3 How, 1 We touch here on the phenomenon that theories allow something to be seen (show something) and at the same time can show how this allowing-to-be-seen (or, more precisely, this showing) happens. Sylvia Sasse’s contribution in this volume considers this situation under the keyword of the “theoretical act.” 2 This fact is reflected in the title, if less in the individual contributions, of Joachim Küpper et al., eds., The Beauty of Theory. Zur Ästhetik und Affektökonomie von Theorien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013). 3 From the perspective of literary studies, a terminological problem stands out here: why speak of “aesthetics” and not of “rhetoric”? The question would merit more extensive engagement, but here a brief comment: the battle lines which are occasionally drawn in literary theory (especially in the case of Paul de Man) between rhetoric and aesthetics make strategic sense. They also, however, create an often extremely abbreviated understanding of aesthetics. Here, rhetoric could itself be defined as a way of describing the aesthetics of linguistic articulation

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then, are theories aesthetically composed or contoured? And how in individual cases? This raises further questions: is there a specific attractiveness to theories which can be attributed to their aesthetics? What makes a theory attractive? For whom? Why? How exactly? Are there linguistic characteristics which we can read as signs of an attempt to increase a theory’s attractiveness? And what poetics might such attempts to increase a theory’s attractiveness follow?

Benjamin’s theory of the aura These questions will be addressed in the following alongside several passages in Walter Benjamin’s theory of the aura. This theory is not formulated in a single conclusive text but is instead scattered throughout his work, in highly diverse observations, discussions, and fragments. One finds remarks on the aura above all in Benjamin’s writings of the 1930s, i.e. in his late work. These remarks first appear in the hashish studies (1930),4 then in the “Short History of Photography” (1931),5 then in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological R ­ eproducibility” with a view to its style and effects. In any case, the tropes and figures familiar from rhetoric—which is to say all stylistic forms of articulation—themselves exhibit a perceptible and thus aísthētic dimension. It would therefore be false to essentially define rhetoric as an- or anti-aesthetic. The question is rather whether there is not an ideology of the rhetorical (insofar as it is based on a limited, historically-situated concept of aesthetics and in the process excludes its own perceptible aspect). 4 Walter Benjamin, “Haschisch Anfang März 1930” (“Hashish, Beginning of March 1930”), in Gesammelte Schriften 6: Fragmente, Autobiographische Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 587–591 (Part of “Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen”). The Gesammelte Schriften (“Collected Works”) of Benjamin are referred to in the following as GS Volume·Subvolume, page number. All English translations are direct translations from the cited German by Brian Alkire. 5 Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (“Short History of Photography”), GS 2·1, pp. 368–385.

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(1935ff.),6 as well as in the Baudelaire studies (1939),7 and finally in parts of the Arcades Project (1927 to 1940).8 Benjamin’s theory of the aura is, if there is in fact such a theory, a scattered one. This already relates, however, to our subject: clearly, there are theories which do not exist in a closed, systematic form. Some are not even very rigorously or comprehensibly formulated. Benjamin’s theory of the aura—the aura of works of art and other things—belongs to this category. Benjamin’s relevant statements are certainly perceived as theory both in the research literature and by an interested public. Benjamin’s theory of the aura has even repeatedly been seen as a particularly attractive—if not uncontroversial—theory.9 The thesis of the following remarks is that the attractiveness of Benjamin’s theory of the aura consists precisely in the fact that the elements of this theory contain, first, strong, marked, and well-citable claims (assertions) and leave, second, a great deal open, unclear, unstated for critical reception—which means, conversely, that the critics can see themselves impelled to cooperate intelligently at the level of interpretation and (de-) enigmatization, as well as continue the theoretical work gener-

6 Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”), GS 1·2, pp. 471–508. 7 Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”), GS 1·2, pp. 605–653. 8 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (“The Arcades Project”), GS 5·1, p. 560. 9 Further information in this context can be found in Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 406–413 [Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert-Hullot Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997) pp. 274–280]; Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): pp. 336–375; Boris Groys, “Die Geburt der Aura. Variationen über ein Thema Walter Benjamins,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 264, 11 Nov. 2000, p. 83; Josef Fürnkäs, “Aura,” in Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, eds., Benjamins Begriffe, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 95–146; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Walter Benjamin und sein Werk. Ein neu zu erkundender Kontinent,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 284, 6 Dec. 2014, p. 59; Robert Kaufman, “Aura, Still,” October 99 (2002): pp. 45–80.

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ally. There are obviously theories whose attractiveness lies not in their comprehensive explanatory potential but rather in their ability to stimulate interest while simultaneously generating a partial, intermittent—and maybe only intermittent—satisfaction of this interest. One possible explanation for the attractiveness of theories which can be considered attractive on the basis of their only ­partially redeemable explanatory potential is offered by Hans Blumenberg in his Theory of Nonconceptuality.10 There, Blumen­berg discusses where the specific attractiveness of concepts comes from. He derives the concepts’ mode of function from anthropology, making an analogy between concepts and traps: just as a trap is designed (prospectively) to capture something which is intended to be contained by it in the near future (the animal to be captured), concepts, according to Blumenberg, are designed to capture something conceptually (or mentally), something which is intended to form its content in the future. (Blumenberg believes, at least, that the original function of concepts is based on this kind of intentionality.) In the course of this, traps or concepts must prove to be attractive to their respective content(s) (through which they also become attractive to their users). If they were not attractive to potential content(s), they could not capture anything. One of the most important basic conditions for this is that traps and/or concepts be sufficiently large: that their form exhibit a greater extent than their potential content(s). Concepts may thus, like traps, not be conceived on too small a scale. They may not be designed or outlined as too small of containers or enticements for possible contents. Otherwise there would not be enough space in them. Stated another way: concepts must be imprecise to a certain extent. They may not, however, be too imprecise, too 10 Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, ed. Anselm Haver­ kamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), p. 11f. Blumenberg’s theory has also only been transmitted in a scattered form. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit (“Theory of Nonconceptuality”) was posthumously published.

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large, too arbitrary, because they would then likewise miss—or lose hold of—their prey. We may transfer the model sketched by Blumenberg of conceptual leeway to that of theories, which of course consist of concepts and establish connections between them. We could, for example, apply the model to Michel Foucault’s use of the term “dispositive” or “discourse”—it is easy to see that the success of these concepts is due in no small part to their relative imprecision, their specific indefiniteness, their relative openness. Concepts which are defined too narrowly—and here is the problem—might make sense in a very clearly-defined range of application. If, however, a concept is to prove itself more broadly meaningful, then it must possess a certain degree of imprecision. For if everything which can be said by means of a concept is actually said, then we could presumably no longer use it anymore. It would have already, in itself, used up its entire explanatory potential. But back to Benjamin. Unlike Blumenberg’s imprecisions and indefiniteness, and also in contrast to the trap model, Benjamin’s theory does not only or primarily concern imprecisions and indefiniteness. It rather concerns the opposite: an excess of definition or an overemphasis on clarity precisely where it is not immediately obvious. Here we arrive at the question of the use of language in Benjamin’s theory: how does Benjamin write about the aura—or of the aura, or concerning the aura? How does Benjamin’s engagement with the aura unfold chronologically? Which ruptures or changes appear in the course of this? How does aura as a topic relate to a possible aura of Benjamin’s own theory? Is there a relation? And if so, which possible effects are precipitated by the corresponding statements of Benjamin, with their respective linguistic-aesthetic features at the level of reading? The primary focus of Benjamin’s engagement with the concept and the phenomenon of the aura is, in the hashish studies, the way things appear:

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First of all, the authentic aura appears with11 all things. Not only with certain things, as people like to imagine. Second, the aura undergoes a thorough and radical change with every movement of the thing to which the aura belongs. Third, the authentic aura cannot at all be thought of as the leaked spiritual magical radiance which vulgar mystical books illustrate and describe. Rather, the specific feature of the authentic aura is: the ornament, an ornamental envelope (Umzirkung) in which the thing or essence lies like a sheath. Nothing, perhaps, gives us a more correct idea of the authentic aura than the late paintings of van Gogh, where we could say that the aura is painted along with the things themselves.12 Here already, the aura is not an intrinsic quality of an object but rather something that appears with or around things, and even, according to Benjamin, with all things. The “authentic aura,” according to Benjamin, “appears with all things.” We can already see here Benjamin’s typical handling of words which are not yet concepts: the word “aura” is not used in an already familiar sense, nor is it defined—instead, it is simply employed. More precisely, “aura” is employed as a word in such a way that it appears itself as an “ornament,” as an “ornamental envelope,” an accessory, an additive to other words. For nowhere does Benjamin say what the aura is. He only says that it appears and, specifically, with things, with all things—taking as an assumption that words, too, can be things. Furthermore, we are told how the aura should not be conceived: not as a “leaked 11 The German preposition used by Benjamin here and in the following is “an” (“an allen Dingen”), which we have chosen to translate as “with” rather than “in” or “on,” emphasizing the way in which the aura accompanies the phenomenon without being “in” the phenomenon. It is important to note, however, that the preposition “an” in German implies direct physical connection in a way that “with” does not. The aura not only accompanies the phenomenon: it is also in direct, physical contact with it. 12 Benjamin, “Haschisch 1930,” p. 588.

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spiritual magical radiance.” A “magical radiance” of this kind would have to be qualified as an inauthentic aura, in contrast to the “authentic aura” Benjamin has in mind. At the same time, the criterion of authenticity does not offer a further explanation of the aura. Instead, it simply introduces another element into the reflection which itself requires explanation. The only way Benjamin sees of forming a “correct idea” of the “authentic aura” can be found at the end of his remarks— but again only maybe—in the “late paintings of van Gogh”: of all places in artistic artifacts which show something (sunflowers, ears of wheat, etc.) not directly but rather indirectly via painting. This showing also simultaneously shows the material of showing: the luxuriant brushstrokes, colors, the vividness of the application of color. Taken together, the material of the painter (in its self-reference) and that to which the material refers (externally, to materially concretized and contextualized and thus semanticized phenomena: sunflowers, ears of wheat) are in this case the intermediate space that Benjamin names the “aura.”13 Van Gogh, in his late paintings, seems in turn—and here Benjamin is writing in a recognizably cautious way: “we could say”—to have painted this “aura […] along with the things themselves.”14 Aura as an intermediate space—as a “genuine” intermediate space, here between a material aspect (self-reference) and a semantic and/or referential aspect (external reference) which are in a relationship which has not already been reproduced— this could be one possible interpretation of the aura. Such an 13 See Dieter Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), pp. 90–99; and Ereignis und Aura. Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 44–53. 14 In the terminology of this collection, we could also say: van Gogh’s late paintings already of themselves imply an aesthetic theory of the aura by simultaneously showing the aura (representationally) and making identifiable an open space between materiality and semantics. Benjamin in turn could be characterized as someone who, in all caution, admits to this “painted”—and in the cited passage only to this “painted”—theory the possibility of gaining a “correct idea” of the “authentic aura”: through a specific guiding of seeing.

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interpretation is near at hand in Benjamin’s text. It is not, however, present in an explicit form. With this, we arrive at a specific reading of Benjamin, of which there are plenty—and they are often not the worst among the philological or philosophical access points to Benjamin. What happens, though, if we continue thinking through Benjamin’s terms, clarifying their possible implications, and in the process become ourselves the constructors of Benjamin’s—but is it still Benjamin’s?—theory? What happens is that we are pursued by a provocation in Benjamin’s texts. We have entered into that “ornament” fashioned by Benjamin, the ornamental “envelope” into which we must go if we want to understand anything of these texts, or better: take anything away from them. But we have simultaneously entered into a region which is, in a strict sense, not already illuminated by the author Benjamin. Why Benjamin’s suggestion of correctness, validity, and importance nevertheless captivates us—or at least some of us—will be addressed towards the end of this essay with a possible answer. But first, we should very briefly tread the path which emerges in the various stages of Benjamin’s engagement with the aura. In both the short outline “A Short History of Photography” and in the “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” we find the formulation, as succinct as it is enigmatic, that the aura is the “unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.”15 Without commenting more on this formulation here, it should be clear that the aura is again—as

15 Benjamin, “Photographie,” p. 378. This passage is an echo of ­Rilke’s 1925 poem “My eyes already touch the sunny hill, / going far ahead of the road I have begun. / So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; / it has its inner light, even from a distance – / and changes us, even if we do not reach it, / into something else, which, hardly sensing it, / we already are; a gesture waves us on, / answering our own wave… / but what we feel is the wind in our faces.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Harper Perennial, 1981), p. 177. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2: Gedichte, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and the Rilke Archive, prepared by Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966), p. 161.

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in the hashish studies—described as a mode of appearance. What is new in the essays on the history of technology is only that Benjamin begins to take an interest in what inserts itself between the appearing things and the subjects perceiving these things, or what can be determinative from there: the technologies of perception and their media. The premises of Benjamin’s engagement with the aura have in the meantime, to be sure, become negative: he speaks now,16 though appreciatively, of the “decay” and “disintegration” of the aura. There are however a series of elements which remain the same and which can be summarized as follows.17 The term “aura” always refers to an open space in which a relationship emerges between (on the one hand) something

16 In the Paris photos of Eugène Atget, which count for Benjamin as precursors of surrealist photography, he sees the “liberation of the object from the aura” and then defines the aura as “a strange tissue composed of space and time”: “He [Eugène Atget] introduced the liberation of the object from the aura which is the incontestable merit of the contemporary school of photography.” (Benjamin, “Photographie,” p. 378—contrasted with “retouching” as mere simulation of an aura on p. 377.) “What exactly is aura? A strange tissue composed of space and time: a unique appearance of a nearness, however distant it might be. Calmly following a mountain range on the horizon or on a summer afternoon, or a branch which casts its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour participates in their appearance—this means breathing the aura of these mountains, this branch.” Ibid., p. 378. “[T]hat which withers away in the age of mechanical reproduction is its aura.” (“Das Kunstwerk,” p. 477—see also the remarks on the “Decline of the Aura” and the “Withering Away of the Aura” and the repetition of the passage from the “Photography” essay: “On a Sunday afternoon […],” p. 479). And further: “The definition of the aura as a ‘unique appearance of a distance, however near it might be’ presents nothing else than the formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of spatiotemporal perception. Distance is the opposite of nearness. The essentially distant is the unapproachable. In fact, inapproachability is a primary quality of the cult image. It remains by nature ‘distance, however near it might be.’ The nearness which one is able to gain from one’s material does not harm distance, which it preserves according to its appearance.” Ibid., p. 480. 17 Both of the following paragraphs reproduce notes from a seminar that I held in the summer semester of 2003 together with Davide Giuriato at the University of Basel on the topic of the “Shattering of the Aura.”

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which records or receives and (on the other) something which has been recorded or received—or is to be recorded or received. The thing which records can, as in the case of early photography, be a machine. The thing which receives can, however, as in the case of Benjamin’s depiction of the perception of natural phenomena, also be an observer who enters into a contemplative relationship to the thing perceived. The conceptual challenge is that the “aura” is not from the outset related to the relationship between person and person or person and thing. Instead, “aura” is the “medium” in which a relationship—and in fact a specific relationship—between entirely different correlates can develop. For this relationship to be auratic, both counterparts must, first, stand in a relation to each other simultaneously and (in the estimation of the perceiver or recorder) with a certain duration. Secondly, the relationship must display a certain leeway or latitude which is determined by a historically-situated technology (including where it might not be expected—in natural phenomena, for example). And thirdly, the relationship is such that the perceiver or recorder acts passively with respect to the thing perceived or to be perceived (deliberately or otherwise): the perceiver or recorder, affected by the appearance, is exposed to or subject to it (empowerment of the appearance). Accordingly, “aura” should be defined as a concept which only makes sense if one further specifies the relationship to which “aura” refers.

Experiencing the aura—while reading Decisive for the following considerations is the fact that a shift in emphasis occurs in Benjamin’s remarks after “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” This shift occurs in the studies of Baudelaire. In these studies—composed shortly after the works on photography and the work of art—the aura is still something which appears. The central question is now, however, much more firmly to whom it appears—and why

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it appears to this whom, primarily a human person, in a specific manner. In other words: it is no longer simply assumed that the phenomenon of the aura is something that appears with things (with all things); instead, the question is raised concerning the preconditions of the aura, for whom it appears and how it appears. What does it mean, Benjamin now asks, to experience the aura as a phenomenon? Particularly revealing in this context is the following passage from the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939): “Experiencing the aura of a phenomenon means loaning (belehnen) it the property of opening the gaze.”18 The difference from Benjamin’s previous comments consists in the fact that the aura is now defined by a dialogic, if not dialectic interplay between an observer and that which appears to him or her. We may assume that the anthropological components of the definition of the aura were already present in the early remarks on the topic. In the essays on photography and the work of art, the auratic potential of a phenomenon, as linked to human beings, was already recognizable ex negativo: to the degree that the relationship between film or photography and the thing perceived/ 18 Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” p. 646. This sentence occurs in the following context: “The gaze, however, consists in the expectation of being returned by that to which it gifts itself. Wherever this expectation is reciprocated (which can, in thought, be attached to an intentional gaze of attention just as much as to a gaze in the simple literal sense), the experience of the aura appears to him in its fullness. ‘Perceptibility,’ as Novalis judges, is ‘an attention.’ […] The perceptibility being spoken of here is nothing other than that of the aura. The experience of the aura is thus based on the transfer of a socially familiar form of reaction to the condition of the inanimate or from nature to human beings. That which is seen, or believes itself to be seen, opens up the gaze. Experiencing the aura of a phenomenon means loaning it the property of opening the gaze*.” And the asterisk explanation: “* This loaning is a source of poetry. Where a person, animal, or inanimate object, leant to by the poet in this way, opens its gaze, it pulls this into the distance; the gaze of a nature awoken in such a way dreams and follows the poet in his dreams. Words can also have their aura. Karl Kraus described it thus: ‘The closer one looks at a word, the more distantly the word looks back.’ (Karl Kraus: Pro domo et mundo. Munich 1912. [Selected Writings, 4.] p. 164.)” Ibid.

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recorded concerns a machine and not a human person, the aura is subject to the process of breaking or falling into disrepair. A positive definition of the aura only occurs again in the Baudelaire studies. There, the observer is conceived such that he or she is not merely a passive recipient of a phenomenon. Instead, the observer is that person who must do something or at least permit something in order for a phenomenon to be able to gain an auratic quality. What does the observer have to do or permit for that to happen? He or she must “loan a property” to the phenomenon—i.e. give the phenomenon something, ascribe something to it, which it does not have of its own accord. Benjamin defines this as the property of “opening the gaze.” In other words: the impression one can gain that something is looking at someone, that something concerns someone (“cela me regarde” in French),19 is defined, for one, as a quality of the aura; it is also simultaneously defined as a quality which only comes into place if there is someone prepared to ascribe this—human?—quality to the phenomenon. In the piece “Central Park,” which is part of the observations surrounding the Baudelaire studies, Benjamin does not hesitate in calling this event a “projection”—a “projection” emerging from and corresponding to a social experience: “Derivation of the aura as projection of a social experience among humans in nature: the gaze is returned.”20 This projection corresponds exactly to that loan which Benjamin also called a “source of poetry” in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” where he explains: Words can also have their aura. Karl Kraus described it thus: “The closer one looks at a word, the more distantly the word looks back.”21 19 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992). 20 Benjamin, “Zentralpark” (“Central Park”), GS 1·2, pp. 655–690, here: p. 670. 21 Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” p. 646.

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Karl Kraus’s quote emphasizes the increasingly important role of reciprocity for Benjamin’s concept of the aura. This concept is equally decisive for the process of projection (and its retroactive effect) and for that of loaning or returning a gaze. However, Benjamin does not offer a precise definition of the aura in these late remarks either—and the Kraus quote is more of a bon mot than an explanation. The observation that “words can also have their aura” is, however, a good starting point for answering the question of the relationship between the aura and language, and that not only in a general sense but specifically with respect to the way Benjamin himself works with language. According to Benjamin’s own observations on the topic of the aura, it is basically impossible to define the aura as a property of things. Aura is something that appears with or around things, but, according to the later remarks, only if there are people who grant to that which appears to them a power of reciprocating the gaze—an opportunity to answer. With respect to the appearance of words, this means that the aura in this case cannot be defined as a property of the words themselves. Rather, there can only be an aura to words if there is someone—like Karl Kraus’s reader—who is prepared to examine a word very closely. What can then arise for the reader is precisely this difference between the materiality of things—in this case words—and their sense. This difference is called the distance of the returned gaze in the Kraus citation—and in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” it is expressed in the phrase “appearance of a distance, however near it might be.” An aura so understood no longer has anything to do with that “leaked spiritual magical radiance” which Benjamin criticizes in his first observations on the aura. Aura only exists where there is a difference between that which one is able to perceive and that which the perceived thing can mean on the basis of its being perceived. The uniqueness of the aura proves to be unique in each case, as the experience of difference is fundamentally dependent on the

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continually changing constellations, which are always in need of redefinition, between the perceivers (the subjects) and the thing appearing to them. If we assume that enabling such an experience of difference—in an epistemological sense also—is something basically desirable, then the question arises for writers, as well as for all who write, perhaps, whether one can provoke such an experience through writing. Again: there are no words, and thus no texts, which would be auratic of their own accord in the sense that they would have already “absorbed” that experience of difference which is so important for Benjamin. An experience of difference can at most—vis-à-vis potential readers—be encouraged, suggested, provoked. One frequently encounters such enabling moments in Benjamin’s texts, however—both in those on the aura and others. “The closer one looks at a word, the more distantly the word looks back,”22 as Karl Kraus put it. And Benjamin cites the passage to make clear what the aura of words can consist of for him. What does one need to do, we could ask, if one wants to enable such an experience of the aura in and with words? One must write texts that provoke their own close reading; texts whose words are traces, which make their deciphering appear valuable.23 One must write texts which are not immediately comprehensible, but instead

22 Ibid. 23 “Trace and aura: The trace is the appearance of a nearness, however distant what it leaves behind might be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however near what it elicits might be. In the trace, we apprehend the thing; in the aura, it seizes us.” Benjamin, “The Arcades Project,” GS 5·1, p. 560. In written correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin, the idea of the trace is connected to the aura: “Is the aura not also the trace of forgotten humanity in the thing?” Adorno asks in a letter on February 29, 1940 (GS 1·3, p. 1132). Benjamin answered on May 7, 1940: “Tree and shrub, which are being loaned to [belehnt], are not made by human beings. There must be something human in things which is not created through work.” Walter Benjamin, Briefe 2, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), p. 849.

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only indirectly,24 and this not coincidentally includes working with citations.25 Benjamin himself seems to follow this kind of writing program: whoever uses words—like the word “aura”—in such a way that they are not defined or explained but instead continually suggested and used in an idiosyncratic way, provokes a closer examination of these words. Those texts of Benjamin’s which follow such a poetics, reduced in their specific esotericism and terseness to the ability to be cited, hardly reveal anything if one is not ready to perform a close reading of them. But whoever is prepared to do so might very well find this poetics, and the aesthetics of these texts, based on a combination of abrupt usage and conceptual openness, attractive. Not every reader knew what to do with this kind of aesthetics and theoretical poetry. Bertolt Brecht found Benjamin’s remarks on the aura specifically to be a peculiar kind of “spleen,” or, more pointedly, “it is pretty dreadful.”26 And Adorno famously had a very difficult time with the Baudelaire studies: “Unless I am seriously mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation (Vermittlung).”27 This lack of mediation is, 24 In his readings, Benjamin himself seems to favor those poetics which elude direct understanding. For example, the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” begins with this conclusion: “Baudelaire counted on readers for whom the reading of poetry would be difficult.” Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” p. 607. 25 Quotations like those from Karl Kraus or references like those to the late works of van Gogh should—depending on the attitude towards them one gains while reading—be read as invitations to auratization or de-auratization. In the quotation, something distant (the cited thing) appears quite near. Benjamin’s (scattered) theory of the aura has a counterpart in his theory (both scattered and provocatively performed) of the quote and quotation. See Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), GS I·2, pp. 691–704, especially p. 701. 26 Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal (“Working Journal”), vol. 1: 1938 –1942, ed. Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 16. 27 Adorno’s letter to Benjamin on November 10, 1938 from New York, in Benjamin, Briefe (“Letters”), p. 785. The cited passage is prepared by the following: “Motifs are collected but not carried out. In your accompanying letter to Max, you presented this as your explicit perspective,

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however, exactly the necessary precondition for a textual experience oriented towards enabling an experience of difference for the reader—an experience of the aura.28 The auratic effect during a close reading of Benjamin’s texts (like those on the aura) can begin in various ways. Analogously to conceptions of the aura in the hashish studies, one can begin with the assumption that it is the texts themselves which of themselves display an auratic effect. We find a more methodologically promising option, however, in Benjamin’s own shift of emphasis in the remarks on the aura in the late Baudelaire studies, especially: the option of conceiving of the possible auratic effect of Benjamin’s texts as the effect of an interplay between usage and provocation in the text and attributions and concessions by the reader. Whoever conceives of both Benjamin’s provocations and our own projections as elements which, in their productive interplay, form the basis of the poetics and aesthetics of ­Benjamin’s texts also contributes to not simply being at the mercy of the aura—evoked by language—of this theory. Knowledge only emerges once the potential auratic effect of the texts is broken through: that is, once the aura is simultaneously recognized for its potential and destroyed in its possible tendency towards incapacitation. Whoever recognizes this is possibly even more

and I cannot fail to recognize the ascetic discipline that was at work there to everywhere omit the decisive theoretical answers to the questions and even to only allow the questions to be visible to the initiated. […] Flaneur and arcades, modernity and always the same without a theoretical interpretation—is that a ‘material’ that can patiently await interpretation without being consumed by its own aura? Does not the pragmatic content of those objects conspire in an almost demonic way against the possibility of its interpretation?” Ibid., p. 783. 28 It would be worth considering whether enabling this kind of experience of difference is not a fundamental feature of literature—or could be. Benjamin’s texts would then have to be read as literature in an emphatic (not affirmative, but rather difference-oriented) sense. This kind of “reading-as-literature” would then, however, have to be considered for all texts whose readings turn out to be theoretically relevant.

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intelligent than the texts: texts which might have provoked this intelligence but did not themselves necessarily contain this intelligence in the first place.

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Klaus Müller-Wille Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

Academic postlude1 In 1952, the Danish painter Asger Jorn sent a first print version of his aesthetic study Held og hasard. Dolk og guitar (Luck and Chance. Dagger and Guitar) to the recently appointed professor of philosophy Bent Schultzer at the University of Copenhagen.2 On this occasion, he asked whether the study might be accepted as a doctoral dissertation by the faculty of philosophy. In a reply addressed to “Mr. Painter Asger Jorn,” Schultzer kindly but firmly pointed out the problems which would make such a process difficult or even impossible. Apart from the formal hurdles, he referred to the unscholarly, even anti-scholarly style of the treatise. Eventually, he allowed himself to make a few instructive comments enlightening Jorn on the fundamental difference between art and scholarship:

1 I thank Lucas Haberkorn of the Museum Jorn in particular for his generous support in the research of this article. 2 Basic biographical information about this episode can be found in the standard introductory works. See Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn 1914–1973. Eine Biographie (Cologne: Walther König, 2001), pp. 222– 227; Ruth Baumeister, Asger Jorn in Images, Words, and Forms (Zurich: Schiedigger & Spiess, 2014), pp. 46–47. Held og hasard exists in three Danish editions. After the extremely rare first edition which Jorn sold as a private edition, the book was published in 1963 by the publisher Borgen, which reissued the book in 1980. Asger Jorn, Held og hasard. Dolk og guitar, Silkeborg 1952 (private printing); Asger Jorn, Held og hasard. Dolk og guitar (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1963). Cited in the following is, where possible, the German edition (translated into English by Brian Alkire): Asger Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers. Heil und Zufall 1953. Die Ordnung der Natur 1961–1966, trans. Thyra Jackstein (Munich: Edition Galerie van de Loo, 1966).

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The book is well written and attests to talent. Note, however, that I am using a word which one normally uses for the characterization of a work of art rather than the judgement of a scholarly work. You seem to me to be an artist, an excellent artist as far as I can tell from your book, but are you a scholar? This question answers itself on p. 93, 2nd paragraph, and I fear I must agree with this answer. The strengths and weaknesses of your book lie precisely in the fact that you are not familiar with scholarly methods (or even ridicule them).3 Considering the careless and even erroneous handling of sources, the lack of conceptual clarity, and above all the volatile associative form of argument which characterizes Jorn’s work, Schultz’s evaluation should not be surprising. Even Jorn seems not to have taken his academic ambitions very seriously, as he reacted immediately and withdrew his unofficial inquiry. But he does not miss the chance to again address the somewhat more deeply thought-out relationship between artistic and theoretical aesthetics, which is the central focus of his study: The relationship is such that aesthetics plays a much larger artistic than academic role, and it seems to me that the chasm between the utility-aesthetics of the artist and the university’s academic aesthetics is so great that it is impossible for them to enter into conversation. If my book, as you rightly note, treats with disdain the scholarly handling of my material, I maintain that it concerns an attempt at approach.4

3 Letter of December, 1952 from Bent Schultzer to Asger Jorn, Archive of Museum Jorn. All English translations are based upon the German translations of Klaus Müller-Wille from Danish. 4 Undated letter from Asger Jorn to Bent Schultzer, Archive of Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.

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Interestingly, Jorn firmly insists that he wrote the study as an artist. That does not mean, however, that he questions its claim to philosophical validity. He vehemently opposes Schultzer’s attempt to simply play off the literary quality of the text against its scholarly failings. Jorn attempts to overcome the simple dichotomy between art and theory with a more complex constellation where philosophically-inspired and thus genuinely aesthetic artistic methods can interact with artistically-inspired philosophical praxis. The corresponding philosophical-artistic and artistic-philosophical modes of thought are ultimately distinguished from a traditional understanding of scholarly and academic work: I want to be a scholar just as little as I want to be a literary author, but art today is dependent on theory, specifically theory which deals with the essential, and for me this concerns an attempt to emphasize that which the artist must regard as essential, namely that the central essence of philosophy, in an intellectual respect, must be regarded as artistic and constructive and not scientific, and furthermore, that the aesthetic phenomenon has its origins in the introduction of the unknown into a sphere of interest.5 In the following section, I will address the strange-seeming definition of the aesthetic which Jorn plays with in this letter. For the moment, let us simply note that Jorn is consciously attempting to legitimize artistic praxis as a special type of thought which is thoroughly in possession of a claim to scientific validity, even if this claim is not coterminous with the understanding of research and science embodied in the institution of the university. Schultzer seems to have simply overlooked the hair-splitting argumentation in which Jorn consciously plays off various concepts of science, philosophy, and art against each other. 5 Ibid.

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That is the only way of explaining why he reacts to Jorn’s letter with significant relief: “I’m delighted by your clear confession of where you’re at home.”6 The way he again attempts to address the fundamental opposition between art and science shows, furthermore, that Jorn was in fact unable to make himself heard with his subtle form of argumentation: Roughly and schematically, I would say: art is a concrete mode of observing the whole. Science, in contrast, is abstract and analytical. We thus stand before two attitudes which can only be bridged with sympathetic understanding, but such understanding has nothing to do with academic theory. Philosophers with an artistic attitude have therefore paid a high price for their thoughts, namely their scholarly validity.7 This concluding reproach is likely aimed at Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who undeniably play a major role in Jorn’s study. But the reference to both of these literary philosophers of the 19th century conceals the actual matter that concerns Jorn. In the course of his study, he repeatedly draws attention to the necessity of an entirely new form of “theoretical research aesthetics”8 which has as its goal “transforming work in the theory of art into a science of experience, taking into consideration the antiempirical character of aesthetics.”9 Central to this is the concept of the artistic experiment, which Jorn does not relate specifically to image-centered kinds of artistic experience, instead attempting to deliberately use this concept for farther-reaching 6 Letter of January 29, 1953 (mistakenly dated to January 29, 1952) from Bent Schultzer to Asger Jorn, Archive of Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. 7 Ibid. 8 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 22. 9 Jorn, Held og hasard (1952), p. 93. In the second edition, Jorn characteristically strikes the corresponding passage, while expanding it in the German translation into a chapter which is solely dedicated to the relationship between art and research. See Jorn, Gedanken eines ­Künstlers, pp. 147–157.

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speculations concerning the theory of art. Jorn obviously does not consider the book Held og hasard a traditional aesthetic treatise, but rather an aesthetic experiment which is intended, in an unconventional way, to lead to new insights into the theory of art. The distinctiveness of this aesthetic experience is not based, in my view, on the exceptional literary form alone, but rather above all in the unique material design of Held og hasard.10 In order to pursue the specific meaning of this material design, I will, for heuristic reasons, first present a short analysis of the book-as-object, followed by an initial reading of the text Held og hasard. Ultimately, however, my interpretation will lead to a third section where I will attempt to show that the specific aesthetics of Jorn’s study are in fact based on a complex interplay between theoretical argumentation and the materiality of the book.

Held og hasard as book-object Held og hasard clearly exhibits a highly demanding typography. In the 96-page book, Jorn works not only with various typefaces, font sizes, and text colors (red, green, and black), but also with many instances of italicization and an elaborate paratextual accompanying work which is characterized by the excessive use of a total of 41 headings, 133 mottos, and 147 margin notes, 10 For a definition of corresponding research experiments which are defined by moments of performativity, seriality, and materiality, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experiment, Differenz, Schrift. Zur Geschichte epistemischer Dinge (Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken-Presse, 1992). For more information on the immediate circle of Jorn and accompanying attempts to think of aesthetics and epistemology together, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Der Kupferstecher und der Philosoph. Albert Flocon trifft Gaston Bachelard (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2016). For extensive information on the relationship between Jorn and Bachelard, including in relation to his engagement with Flocon, see Karen Kurczynski, “Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra,” in Natalie Adamson and Steven Harris, eds., Material Imagination. Art in Europe, 1946–1972 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), pp. 44–65.

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as well as a corresponding amount of blank space (different indentations and a relatively wide margin. (Fig. 1) The quality of the page layout is particularly surprising when you consider that the penniless artist’s book emerged from the correction press of the provincial printer Emil Stecher in Silkeborg. With the page layout of his aesthetic study, where he works above all with the spatial grouping of numerous separate text blocks, Jorn is certainly referencing the Bauhausbücher tradition, which also used this technology to bring theoretical argumentation and typographic design into a calculated interrelationship.11 He was also, starting with his close collaboration with Le Corbusier on the World’s Fair of 1938, exceptionally well-informed about related developments in French architectural theory, where questions concerning the theory of space were developed with the help of an ingenious design of book and text spaces.12 Nevertheless, we may also name significant differences which distinguish Held og hasard from the various functionalistic currents which characterized the entanglement of book design and theory in the 1920s and 30s. Jorn, for example, did not typically work with a modernity-signaling sans serif font, and in this book he also dispensed with photographic images and related montage techniques, in contrast to the articles he published in the late 1940s in Danish, Swedish, and Dutch architectural magazines. Both of the dominant fonts which Jorn uses in the main text and in the headers remind one of commercial graphics of the 1950s. The craftsman-like design of the print layout—the various print colors, the noticeable traces of the

11 Jorn himself refers to the Bauhausbücher as implicit models in an unpublished afterword to Held og hasard, which is available in the Held og hasard file in the Archive of Museum Jorn. 12 Concerning Le Corbusier as a central catalyst for Jorn’s book art work, see Klaus Müller-Wille, “From Imaginary Exhibitions to Urban Book Spaces – Asger Jorn and Le Corbusier as Architects of the Book,” in Ruth Baumeister, ed., What Moves Us? Le Corbusier and Asger Jorn in Art and Architecture (Zurich: Schiedegger & Spiess, 2015), pp. 88–93.

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Fig. 1: Text pages from the original edition of Held og hasard.

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Fig. 2: Cover of the original edition of Held og hasard.

printing process which the sheets, printed on a simple press, demonstrate—evokes association with early book p ­rinting, which of course is still strongly oriented towards the form of medieval codices. Jorn enhanced this impression even more by placing 79 small colored linoleum prints in the margins of the

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Fig. 3: Cover of the second edition of Held og hasard. Fig. 4: Text page of the second edition of Held og hasard.

main text. These vignettes, where figural elements are linked to anthropomorphic and animalistic features with an ornamental framing, vaguely remind one of the medieval style trends of Scandinavia. The two different images which make up the design of the cover (which Jorn made by recycling two earlier linoleum printing plates) also point in this direction. (Fig. 2) That this was inspired by early book printing is also suggested by the fact that the colors of the vignettes vary in the individual print versions and that the book, printed in a very small edition of 119 copies, was produced in three series with substantially different cover designs and paper quality. Each individual copy exhibits so many differences from the others that they can each be considered a unique specimen despite the fact that they were produced as a series. Interestingly, Jorn published the book one more time in 1963 as a kind of inexpensive version. (Figs. 3 & 4) It appears in a substantially smaller format as a paperback book, which enters into Jorn’s writing series Scandinavian Institute for

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­Comparative Vandalism. The new edition is accompanied not only by textual changes (Jorn adds several chapters and a series of prefaces to the study while striking several sections on the history of philosophy and large portions of the afterword), but also by wide-ranging changes to the design of the book. The most noticeable feature of these changes is the removal of the text margins and marginalia. The marginalia are added to the text as smaller subheadings, where they take on an entirely new function. The vignettes which were originally placed in the margins are redistributed and added to the texts as images. Most of the vignettes have been substantially enlarged, now covering half a page, or even the entirety of a page. The linoleum prints are now stereotyped and no longer appear in color but rather in black-and-white. These details illustrate the substantial change in the overall character of the book. A German translation of the book, published in 1966 by the Gallery van de Loo in Munich, appeared during Jorn’s lifetime. Jorn again intervenes massively in the text of the edition: chapters are combined and expanded upon, entirely new sections are added. Overall, the central concept of genuine aesthetic research is more intensively developed. Here, it seems to me decisive that Jorn supplements the original heading “Academic and Artistic Aesthetics” of the third part of his study with the concept of an “Aesthetics of Aesthetics.”13 The “aesthetic of aesthetics” is noticeable again in the unique design of the book, which is substantially larger than the Danish second edition. In this case, too, the book is animated by the play with paratextual elements. Particularly noticeable here is how these elements (translations, mottos, vignettes) fill entire pages and thus contribute to properly rhythmizing the book. The first edition of Held og hasard is characterized on the whole by a curious stylistic heterogeneity. The attempt to draw a connection to Renaissance book printing art (reminding one of the Arts and Crafts movement) is in substantial tension with 13 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 75.

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the elements that remind one much more of the modernist urge of the avant-garde or simply book design of the 1950s. The impression of heterogeneity is enhanced by the re-publications of the book, both of which are strongly distinguished from the original. In the following, I will explore the question of whether and to what degree there is or is not a connection between the notable aesthetic of the book as object and the aesthetic theory developed in the framework of this book.

Jorn’s extreme phenomenology of the aesthetic The pivot point of the speculative theory developed in the context of Held og hasard is Jorn’s critical engagement with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and its understanding of beauty as the object of disinterested pleasure. Jorn does not polemicize directly against this definition but instead uses it as a starting point for counterintuitively defining the aesthetic as the nonbeautiful. Unlike Kant, he is interested in judgments evoked by a contradictory feeling of displeasure which simultaneously release a desire. This specific definition of the aesthetic already points to the fact that Jorn will be occupied with Kant’s analysis of the sublime over the course of the rest of his argument. In contrast to Kant, he does not restrict his engagement with the sublime to the realm of experiences of nature, instead relating it to other phenomena. Stated concisely, he engages Kant’s idea that the crisis of imagination triggered by an encounter with sublime phenomena ultimately contributes to a strengthening of the supersensory nature of human reason. Jorn criticizes precisely this form of “sensual megalomania.”14 Like Kant, he is interested in those phenomena which lead to conflict between sensuality, imagination, understanding, and reason. Differently from Kant, however, he does not derive from this conflict 14 “[L]ystbetonede storhetsvansinne.” From the foreword to the second edition. Jorn, Held og hasard (1963), p. 13.

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the premature reinforcement of understanding and reason, instead defining aesthetic experience as a productive destruction which would allow critical reflection on sensual and rational conventions as well as a standardized faculty of desire. In this way, art is strikingly brought into connection with a crisis of the ego which can express itself in madness, intoxication, and other existential experiences. The passages where Jorn reflects on the interest in intensive existential experiences triggered by aesthetic phenomena are certainly among the passages most marked as belonging to their time. More interesting is his effort to develop an “extreme phenomenology of the aesthetic.”15 Here, the aesthetic is defined by way of a detour into an idiosyncratic reading of the “analytic of the sublime” in Kant’s Critique of Judgement as the “formless,” “abnormal,” “unlimited” or simply the “unknown.” This definition allows Jorn to radically distance himself from an idea of the beautiful which is simply in service of formal conventions and thus gives rise only to judgements of taste which are characterized by “disinterested pleasure.” This conclusion, too, is hardly surprising. More surprising is the persistence with which Jorn spells out the consequences of his idiosyncratic definition of the aesthetic as the “introduction of the unknown into a sphere of interest.”16 The turn away from a Kantian formal aesthetics is accompanied first of all by an upgrading of sensual perception and the concrete and material dimensions of aesthetic phenomena, which challenge accustomed sensual processes. In this sense, Jorn explicitly speaks out in favor of a rehabilitation of Baumgarten’s aesthetics as against Kant’s. The turn from the idealistically-framed aesthetics of Kant is moreover linked to the idea of a consistently material aesthetics which attempts to

15 Jorn, Held og hasard (1952), p. 5. 16 Undated letter from Asger Jorn to Bent Schultzer, Archive of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.

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abstain from any idea of the “supernatural,” whatever form it might take. The upgrading of the material dimensions of aesthetic phenomena is accompanied by an approach to experimental strategies which are intended, analogously to corresponding procedures in the natural sciences, to generate new substances and materials. Jorn starts from the idea of contingent events, similarly to research experiments in the natural sciences, the function of which is not to answer questions or hypotheses but rather to generate new and interesting questions and problems in the first place. Jorn works in this context with the idea of a continually rediscoverable “unnaturalness” of “the natural,” with which idea he again turns away from concepts of the “supernatural.” Here, artistic experiments are defined, in contrast to scientific experiments, by the fact that the researchers are themselves part of the structure of the experiment and thus confronted with the “unnaturalness” of the ideas they have of their own selves. The strongly performative character of Jorn’s aesthetics is already expressed in the key concept of the experiment. Aesthetic experiments take place serially via “unanticipated occurrences”17 which always have only a retroactive effect on the experimental structure. Jorn makes the performative character of his aesthetics clear by explicitly defining aesthetic phenomena as practices and placing them in a relationship to corresponding strategies of play, theater, and celebration. But these three key concepts, which we may link with the keywords sensuality, materiality, event, and performativity, are also not enough to cover the full scope of Jorn’s theoretical speculations. Jorn is fully aware that his critical engagement with Kant also problematizes Kant’s concept of an autonomous aesthetics. As a representative of an avant-garde movement, Jorn advocates for a disorderly concept of the aesthetic which is not defined separately from ethics, religion, economics, or 17 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 34.

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s­ cience, but rather the opposite: it is conceived of as an integral component of the ethical, the religious, the economic, and of science. In the relevant sections, Jorn repeatedly points out— fully in line with the spirit of the anthropological turn of the 1950s—that art has its origins in primitive—magical, ecstatic, and ritualized—cult practices, the potential of which has, however, been repressed. With his interest in experimental artistic strategies which are applicable outside of art institutions and which are intended to exercise influence on everyday life and politics, strategies already formulated in Held og hasard, Jorn anticipates essential attitudes which he will later formulate in more depth in the context of the Situationist International. Even this rough paraphrase of the work suggests that it would have been thoroughly rewarding for the University of Copenhagen’s philosophy department to seriously engage with the aesthetic positions developed in the study. At the same time, this paraphrase seems to me to be lacking the core of Jorn’s theory. In both his correspondence with Schultzer and over the course of the book, Jorn again and again draws attention to the fact that his primary goal with Held og hasard was to established a different—genuinely aesthetic—form of theoretical construction.

Word disputes and the printing process: theory as performance To begin with, we can assume that Jorn attempts to illustrate the relevance of his philosophical argument simply through the specific design of his treatise as an artist’s book. Naturally, the recipients of the book are confronted, through its specific material design, with an immediate sensual experience, focused primarily on the colorful vignettes. In his later writings, Jorn will insist on the independence of a corresponding figurative logic which embodies its own kind of rationality precisely on

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the basis of its lacking conceptuality.18 In this sense, one could claim that Jorn completes his discursive conclusions through a purely figurative argumentation of the vignettes. Jorn’s thoughts on materiality and event may also be wellillustrated by the small linoleum prints. Knut Stene Johansen, for example, was able to demonstrate in an inspiring section of his Jorn monograph that Jorn was repeatedly modifying the linoleum prints over the course of book production, during which he also used surprising techniques, for example putting imprints of small wooden boards underneath the linoleum prints.19 In other words, these linoleum prints follow the performative logic of series in which contingent events occuring during the printing process are used for continual reworkings and modifications of the printing plates. A danger of related, graphics-focused interpretations is that they ultimately threaten to confirm exactly those differences which Jorn vigorously opposes in the study. Held og hasard is simply not understood to be an aesthetic treatise but solely an artistic experiment. It also seems problematic to me to interpret the vignettes as a kind of illustration of the theoretical text, or the theoretical text as simple commentary on the vignettes. This way of reading the book would shift our attention to the other form of theory construction around which Jorn’s discursive argumentation revolves. In this sense, the question of the aesthetic design of the text itself seems to be just as relevant as that regarding the design of the vignettes. It would be simple to draw attention to the literary character of the study, which, as mentioned above, is marked by loose leaps in thought, associations, ambiguous uses of terminology, and frequently confusing cross-linkages to p ­ sychoanalytic, 18 For more detailed information, see Helle Brøns, “In the Beginning was the Image,” in Museum Jorn, ed., In the Beginning was the Image. Asger Jorn i Canica Kunstsamling (Silkeborg: Museum Jorn, 2016), pp. 14–41. 19 Knut Stene-Johansen, Nødinnganger. Studier i Asger Jorn. Essay (Oslo: Strandberg, 2014), pp. 45–62.

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economic, and anthropological discourses. Contemporaries of Jorn simply considered his writings unreadable due to their chaotic form of argumentation. In the book itself, Jorn attempts to explain the calculus of his writing style. In a capital with the characteristic title “A Dispute About Words,”20 he suggests modifying how we think about our targeted handling of language: Language is the key to understanding the new because it changes context and sense in the old as soon as new experiences appear. The word must thus undergo a constant shift in meaning.21 How exactly Jorn thinks about the performative use of language also becomes clear in a connected section, where he compares the idea of the word-as-beginning of the Gospel of John with the idea of an act-as-beginning: “The act gives rise to thoughts.”22 Decisive for my interpretation of the text is the fact that Jorn himself attempts to make use of the performative principle of the shifting meanings of words in Held og hasard. The text clearly places the shifts in the term “aesthetics” at center stage, a term which is continually developed in new contexts and is thus constantly being redefined. This primarily occurs with the help of a series of 18 one- or two-page chapters whose headings all begin with the identical “Aesthetics as…” before defining the term through a cascade of different concepts. In an italicized passage, Jorn brings this situation of shifting meanings to a head with a series of paradoxical formulations and oxymorons: The truth of aesthetics is nothing more than the naturalness of the unnatural, the humanity of the inhuman, the health in the abnormal and sick, the clarity of darkness, the happiness of 20 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 101. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 102.

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unhappiness, the worth and power of the unworthy and powerless, the meaning of the meaningless, the trace of the traceless, the reality of the unreal, the rights and truth of reluctance, of disgust, disloyalty, disrespect, disobedience, injustice, recklessness, cynicism, distrust, disingenuousness, falseness, amorality, irresponsibility, untruthfulness, of crime and lawlessness, the order and utility of the moody, volatile, dreadful, doubtful, uneven, uncommon, and misplaced, as well as of the inapplicable, useless, unfit, disorderly, and impractical, in short, which is uninteresting except through its immediate effect, the new, radical, original and experimental, the fertility of the earthquake.23 In the foreword to the second edition of the book, Jorn attempts to explain the affinity of this type of performative language play with his critique of Kant’s aesthetics and, not least, with his attempt to practice a different form of theory construction. He draws attention, at least indirectly, to the creative form of his ongoing “theatrical” conceptual work, which is significantly defined in connection with the feelings of pleasure and displeasure: Kant emphasizes “that there is no transition from concepts to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure”—and I gladly admit this. At the same time, I do want to maintain that there is a transition from the feelings of pleasure and displeasure to concepts, that there has never been a newly generated concept which has not been experienced as a symptomatic demand, provoked by the feelings of pleasure and displeasure.24

23 Ibid., p. 37. 24 From the foreword to the second edition. Jorn, Held og hasard (1963), p. 13. (The quote alludes to Chapter Six of the Critique of Judgment).

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This passage, from a paratext which was added later, also indirectly illustrates that Jorn is not at all restricting his experimental writing style to playing with concepts. Throughout the text, he works with continual shifts in meaning. The new edition, for example, is supplemented not only with the series title “Meddelelse fra Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende Vandalisme” (“Message from the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism”) but also with an extensive cover blurb and a new foreword. These new paratexts allow the entire study to be perceived and reinterpreted from a different perspective. The importance of Jorn’s play with different paratexts can also be illustrated by the genesis of the text, which he characteristically archived in great detail. The typescript of the first edition, accessible in the archives of the Museum Jorn, has a total of four further forewords which deviate from the one in the published edition. Particularly interesting are the forewords to the apparently planned Swedish, German, and French editions, which show how purposefully Jorn attempts to modify the overall character of the study in terms of its framing. Jorn’s experimental use of language relates not only to semantic questions but also to the handling of the material of signs itself. His semiotic awareness should not at all be surprising. As early as 1944, he published the rather long article “De profetiske harper” (“The Prophetic Harp”), where he explicitly considers the visuality of written language and a related textimage aesthetics.25 Jorn justifies his interest in written ­language 25 Asger Jørgensen (Jorn), “De profetiske harper,” Helhesten 2, no. 5/6 (1944): pp. 145–154. See also Klaus Müller-Wille, “Prophetische Harfen, analphabetischer Illettrismus und Gastrophonie. Asger Jorn und die Dinglichkeit der Sprache,” in Sandro Zanetti, ed., Themenheft “Wortdinge/Word as Things/Mots-choses,” figurationen 14, no. 2 (2013): pp. 101–115. Jorn’s artistic engagement with the visuality and materiality of writing is summarized especially in the peinture-mots which Jorn completed in 1953 together with Christian Dotremont. See Klaus Müller-Wille, “From Word-Pictures to the Wild Architecture of the Book. Asger Jorn’s early Book Art (1933–1952),” in Dorthe Aagesen and Helle Brøns, eds., Asger Jorn. Restless Rebel (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst / Munich: Prestel, 2014), pp. 94–109.

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with the semiotic argument that it is in possession of a higher degree of complexity than other signs. Writing can be read, heard, seen, felt, and always interpreted differently depending on various modalities of perception. Held og hasard, too, with its conspicuous typography, stimulates reflection on the phenomenon of writing’s visual and figurative dimension. However in this case—and this seems decisive to me—the other (let us call it immediate-sensual) perception of the image of writing is accompanied by a reflection on the (often repressed) material basis of theoretical texts. This points to a general aesthetic dimension of theoretical texts, which are always linked to a specific page layout or paratextual phenomena like headings, marginalia, or tables of contents.26 But the unique design of the book does more than just make the recipient aware of the literally material foundation of theory: Jorn also uses experimental procedures to continually modify the materiality of the book to effect a change in its character. Interestingly, the writing and printing processes seem to directly overlap during the production of the book. This can at least be inferred from the anecdotal notes of one of the two printers, who reports how Jorn continued working on the manuscripts parallel to the printing process.27 The material in the archive confirms this account.28 While the first typescripts still 26 See also Johanna Drucker, Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 27 Chas Stecher, “En sjælden bog,” in Troels Andersen and Aksel Evin Olesen, eds., Erindringer om Asger Jorn (Silkeborg: Galerie Moderne, 1982), pp. 121–126. 28 The material preserved in the archive of the Museum Jorn enables a reconstruction of the overall writing and printing process of the various editions of Held og hasard. Alongside manuscripts and typescripts for the first edition, which include a total of six files, various print versions of the first edition (with and without vignettes) are accessible, along with a dummy with glued-in text blocks and drawings of the second edition. In addition, a few letters between Jorn and the printing office Stecher are documented. Thomas Hvid Kromann informed me that Jacqueline de Jong’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (New Haven) also contains some drafts to the second edition of the book.

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present a consistent text which largely overlaps with the main text of the edition, the correlation between the typescript and the printed book visibly dissolves. The condition of the typescript itself also markedly changes. Overall, the text becomes more fragmentary: in some cases, only slips of paper remain bearing individual text blocks or quotes. Over the course of the text, Jorn transitions more and more to recycling text blocks which he takes from already-published essays. I consider this reference to the specific genesis of the text highly significant. First of all, the archival material makes clear that Jorn is applying the experimental procedures which he uses for the printing of graphics explicitly to the process of text production, where he also attempts to make productive use of the particular dynamic which characterizes the printing process. The resulting interactions between the printing and writing processes may be relatively well demonstrated. The first typescripts present a pure running text to which details regarding headers and marginalia are only subsequently added. In later typescripts, in contrast, the visual appearance of the book’s text is directly transferred to a typewriter with the mottos, marginalia, and headers. Even the variety of different print versions of the book illustrates that Jorn is consciously attempting to employ the manual labor of the production process as an experimental procedure. After an initial printing of the book without vignettes, which was bound into several booklets, an edition with several linoleum prints was produced, before books were ultimately printed where the margins are littered with vignettes. The cover of the book, too, was in a constant state of change. The critical element in all of this is that the book came into being not in Jorn’s head but instead over the course of a continual dialogue with the employees and machines of the printing press. It is not surprising that Jorn acknowledges the role of the typographer Johs. Gregersen and those of the correction press of the Emil Stecher printing house in one of the paratexts to Held og hasard. Likewise, it seems no coincidence to me that Jorn documents and archives the genesis of the study itself as

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an essential component of the concept of aesthetic theory construction developed in it. Ultimately, the significant interventions in the reissue and translation of the book show that Jorn is attempting to intensify his considerations of the materiality and processuality of aesthetic modes of procedure in his experimental engagement with the written material of his own study of art theory. One open question is the extent to which this procedure ultimately forced Jorn to reformulate essential positions of his aesthetics. In this sense, too, we could claim that both Jorn’s attempt to rehabilitate the concept of form in Pour la forme (1957) and his politically-motivated situationist theories are already laid out in the “Aesthetics of Aesthetics” which he practices in his continual reproduction of Held og hasard.

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Sylvia Sasse The Theoretical Act Literature is “not simply the use of language but rather its artistic knowledge [poznanie]”1 wrote Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid1950s in a text which remains only as a fragment. With this sentence, he is saying something—almost as an afterthought— not just about literature: he is formulating his philosophical interest in literary texts. For him, literature is not just a specific “speech genre” which sometimes generates linguistic or theoretical knowledge, but one which, above all, makes this knowledge perceptible. To capture this idea conceptually, Bakhtin calls the artistic perception of literature an “obraz of language, as the artistic self-understanding of language” and the “third dimension of language.”2 In Russian, obraz means “image” or “shape,” this shape being conceived of by Bakhtin as something not static but process-oriented, as a theater of language. He thus writes in this text of a simultaneous seeing (videnie) and experiencing (pereživanie) of language through language, which he conceives of as a reflexive interrelation between a language which shows and a language which is shown. Bakhtin thus takes as his starting point that we are simultaneously in this image and outside of it: “We live from inside of it and see it from the outside.”3 With his use of the term seeing (videnie), Bakhtin is intentionally alluding to one of the possible etymologies of θεωρία (theōria), which connects theater and theory, seeing and/ as thinking. Theōria can refer to various things: seeing as an 1 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Jazyk v khudozhestvennoi literature,” in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, Raboty 1940-kh – nachala 1960-kh godov (Moscow, 1996), p. 287–297, here p. 287 [translated from Russian]. 2 Ibid., p. 287. 3 Ibid., p. 291.

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event (θέα—thea) or, relatedly, experience (θεώμαι—theōmai), e.g. with “amazement,”4 or more concretely θεωροί or θεαροί ­(theoroi), the term in Ancient Greece for viewers or observers, envoys sent in an official capacity by the state to consult oracles, attend rituals, and to report on these and ensure their observance. My intention is not to overstrain these associations or this etymology, but instead to more closely evaluate this theoretical act of looking and thus to foreground the performative dimension of theory.

“Inner reflexivity” From this point on, I will no longer refer to the reflexive event as described by Bakhtin as the “image” or “shape” of language but rather as a “theoretical act.” A theoretical act of this kind is immanent not only to literature but also to other forms of artistic expression. The fact that Bakhtin uses the terms “image” or “shape” or “object” while nonetheless speaking of an event, of an act of seeing, or, in other contexts, of an aesthetic activity or aesthetic act, already indicates that he thinks of the image (obraz) itself as a kind of image-act, although less in the sense of an image that performatively generates a reality and more in the sense of an image where something happens, where theory takes place. The philosopher and art historian Louis Marin points out a similar event in art, especially in painting. In his book Opacité de la peinture, he writes of an “inner reflexivity”5 of art but refers to this inner reflexivity as a “theoretical object.” By inner reflexivity, Marin also means an event, an implicit collection of expressive content concealed in the “historical object” which says 4 See the contributions by Dieter Mersch and Benno Wirz in this ­volume. 5 Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation en Quattrocento (1989) (Paris: Éditions de l'École des hautes études en ­sciences sociales, 2006).

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something while simultaneously showing something, namely showing itself to be a thing which shows. It is also uncommon for Marin to name that which he describes as act, i.e. art which shows itself as art, which performs this reflexive act of self-reference. Here we could also mention Hubert Damisch and Mieke Bal, who both take up the topic of the theoretical object of art. In Damisch’s The Origin of Perspective, for example, he analyzes the artistic methods which generate a central perspective that can be seen, while at the same time generating a way of seeing. He sees here a model of thought, a “specific (visual) form of reflection.”6 Even if Bakhtin and Marin characterize that which I call here a theoretical act as an image or object, they are describing a reflexive process, a relational act between form, content, material, and performance which emphasizes the perception of art as art. In the early 20th century, under the heading of artistic self-reflexivity or auto-reflexivity, there was already major interest in this or a similar process in literary studies as well as in film and art theory. But this “inner reflexivity” emphasizes other features which we could call, using the vocabulary of Russian formalism, not an “attitude towards the utterance” (ustanovka na vyraženie) but an attitude towards the process of reference, towards the performance of referentiality. It was Roman Jakobson who, starting in 1921, spoke of “poeticity” (poetičnost’) and later the “poetic function of language,” ideas which would go on to have a major impact on literary theory. But Jakobson was not primarily focused on the act or process of self-reflection. While self-reflexivity, according to Jakobson, draws attention back to the material, “inner

6 See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1995); Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 48; Marcel Finke, “Denken (mit) der Kunst oder: Was ist ein theoretisches Objekt?” 4.11.2014, wissenderkünste, https://wissenderkuenste.de/texte/ausgabe-3/denken-mit-der-kunst-oder-was-ist-ein-­ theoretisches-objekt/ (accessed: 1.11.2018).

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r­ eflexivity” instead concerns the question of how art refers to itself as art and how in doing so it reveals itself as art. Jakobson, who distinguished between a referential, poetic, and metalinguistic function, the attitude towards the code, did not see an inner reflexivity at work in the poetic function or self-reflexivity which would cause an act of self-showing as art to become an artistic-theoretical act. Marin and Bakhtin, on the other hand, were interested in precisely this theoretical act, in the “inner reflexivity” of art as art. Bakhtin distances himself from formalist and structuralist theories, although he remains thoroughly interested in the idea of literature as the artistic knowledge of language. He thinks differently from Jacobson, however, especially when he writes that we are both “inside” and “outside” of language. According to Bakhtin, the essence of artistic perception lies in the doubling of experiencing and seeing. If we think through the implications of what Bakhtin writes, literature, as artistic perception, implies a reflexive act. This consists of simultaneously moving within language and of showing an outside, a seeing (videnie)7 of language or a view onto language in literature. This model can also be applied to other art forms and their respective media. The relationship between the medium which shows and the medium which, in being shown, shows itself, is revealed in the theoretical act. Only in this way, I suggest, can we continue to think through the implications of the self-referentiality of artistic works.

7 Bakhtin uses the word videnie, which literally translated means “seeing” or “sight,” in a more comprehensive sense, specifically as an active aesthetic perception. He also however translates Kant’s term “Anschauung” (perspective) with videnie. Rainer Grübel and Ulrich Schmid point out that Friedrich Theodor Vischer had already referred to Anschauung as the “foundation of active creative fantasy,” in Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (second edition) (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), p. 375. See “Stellenkommentar,” in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Autor und Held in der ästhetischen Tätigkeit, ed. Rainer Grübel, Edward Kowalski and Ulrich Schmid, trans. Hans Günter et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), p. 288.

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These works no longer simply refer to themselves as something which has been made, as works of art; instead, this act of reference becomes a more clearly central element in artistic activity, precisely because it characterizes theoretical activity. It then no longer suffices, as so often happens, to speak of simple self-referentiality, as this expresses nothing in and of itself and even sometimes devolves into a mere pose. We must instead conceive of and analyze the act of self-reference as art as a practice or method, an implicit theoretical accomplishment of art. Furthermore, this theoretical act itself should not be thought of as one which takes place in isolation within an artwork, but rather as a reflexive one which functions dialogically, participatively, and with reference to other artistic works. The theoretical act—to continue to think with Bakhtin—thus concerns not only an “inner reflexivity” but also at the same time an “outer reflexivity” which places a text or work of art into a relationship with other works of art and thus also with theories and other theoretical remains8 or acts.

Reflexive relationships Bakhtin became famous not for his thoughts on literature as the artistic perception of language but rather for his dialogism theory, which Julia Kristeva popularized in 1967 with the term “intertextuality.” For Kristeva, it was Bakhtin who understood literature as a continual and inconclusive process of writingreading (écriture-lecture) and showed how texts enter both spatially and temporally (khronotopos) into a permanent reflexive relationship with other texts. Kristeva understood this writingreading process as an absorption and permanent transformation of existing texts in literature and through literature, a process which is also relevant for the production of theory. But although she speaks of absorption and transformation, she 8

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mainly reads Bakhtin as a structuralist, reading him through the lens of Roman Jakobson and thus simultaneously obstructing our view of process and event, which is what concerned Bakhtin above all. Bakhtin found it important to emphasize that texts, in their relationship to other texts, always contain the event of this relationship, this act of other-reference, as another reflexive and epistemological act which we could refer to as an outwardoriented reflexivity. A text which refers to another text, which cites, continues, and rewrites it, can only place itself and the other text into a reflexive relationship which aims at both selfand other-recognition. Or even: writing is necessarily dialogic; writing and thinking are impossible without referentiality. For this reason, Bakhtin also insisted on claiming that the word is in and of itself dialogic. Roland Barthes, who shortly after meeting Kristeva spoke of “intertextuality” in an interview and then adapted Kristeva’s idea of writing-reading in his famous text on the “death of the author,” focused his attention much more on the act character of this writing-reading . In this interview, Barthes initially speaks just like Kristeva of texts which “enter into dialogue with one another,”9 but in “The Death of the Author” he links writing-as-reading with ideas from speech act theory. He writes that writing is a performance, and that an utterance has “no other content than the act by which it is uttered.”10 This interweaving of speech act theory and intertextuality, already begun in Barthes, aims at the dialogic act as a reflexive act, at an act which brings into view how a word, a sentence, or a text constitutes itself in relation to another text as text. That which I call “outer reflexivity” here, is a reflexivity which hap9 Roland Barthes, “Énonciation, intersubjectivité, intertextualité et analyse psychanalytique et linguistique de la lecture” (1967), sprache und literatur 47 (2018): p. 95–107, here p. 104. 10 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, 5+6 (1967). Presented by Ubu: UbuWeb: http://www.ubu.com/ aspen/aspen5and6/index.html.

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pens through contact with another text, another word, another utterance. In Bakhtin, it is literature itself (and not literary theory) which knows that this understanding of language or the word is always already dialogic: literature depicts this relationship. It is in Dostoevsky that Bakhtin discovers this knowledge, after lamenting that aesthetics and theory are unable to conceive of themselves as dialogic and inconclusive. For Bakhtin, this knowledge is revealed in Dostoevsky in every word, portrayed in the characters’ utterances, in their relationships to one another and to the narrator. Dostoevsky understood (Bakhtin claims) that the activity of aesthetics (and theory) can only be “realistic” and “ethical” if it does not turn the other, or the subject treated, into an object but instead enters into dialogue with it. Turning someone into an object can only occur in theory, aesthetics, or the law. Only there is it possible to “close off” the other from a position of total “exteriority.” These moments of “closing off” are what bother Bakhtin about theoretical and aesthetic activity and action. To think ethically about theory and aesthetics (ethical in Bakhtin’s sense) requires thinking from a position of relational “exteriority” which is always hidden from the other and which can only grasp its subject incompletely, inconclusively, and in a process of becoming. Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s novels almost as a stage for Dostoevsky’s presentation of his theory of language. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky shows that literature, and verbal utterances generally, are always dialogical and that they always take up another text or another word, transform it, repulse it, struggle against it, etc. Bakhtin thus sees in Dostoevsky the realization of the terminological point of the words “responsibility” and “event,” a terminological point which had already interested him in his early philosophical writings. Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, conceived of “responsibility” as a responsive act or event, sobytie in Russian, as a form of “co-being.” Being responsible then means taking part in being in the here and now, means not referring to Being as a theoretical ­construct

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or making up an alibi, i.e. pretending that one is not taking part in the action that one is actively performing—as if one were somewhere else. Bakhtin thus distinguishes in Toward a philosophy of the act between an aesthetic or abstract-theoretical act and an ethical act. In the here and now, it is impossible to fully penetrate and see the other as a whole; something always remains hidden from the observer. As Bakhtin sees it, Dostoevsky transferred this relationship between self and other in his novels to the relationship between narrator and character. For Dostoevsky performs a perspective or position change which enables the transition from “he” to “you,” to a “fully valid ‘thou,’ that is, another and other autonomous ‘I’”: 11 The author’s design for a character is a design for discourse (slovo). Thus the author’s discourse about a character is discourse about discourse. It is oriented toward the hero as if toward a discourse, and is therefore dialogically addressed to him. By the very construction of the novel, the author speaks not about a character, but with him.12 What Bakhtin demanded of theory and aesthetics was that both also think dialogically and thus conceive of theory and aesthetics themselves as—in Kristeva’s terms—an écriture-lecture which must necessarily reflect upon the fact that it is not only something artificial, but also that references are made to previous texts, genres, ways of writing, materials, and narration in this moment of artifice and thought, references which also generate new meanings.

11 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 63. 12 Ibid. p. 63. Emerson’s English translation chooses the word “discourse” as a translation of slovo (“word”), a translation which already points at a postmodern form of reading. German translations, on the other hand, typically choose to translate it as Wort, “word.”

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But it is not at all necessary, as Bakhtin does, to focus on the presentation of the dialogical as an immanent theory of literature. It is also useful to pursue other possible forms of realization of theoretical acts. Barthes, for example, begins his essay on the “Death of the Author” with Mallarmé, whom he not only reads as a subject of study but as an author who, as Barthes writes, above all saw and foresaw “the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it.” Barthes, too, sees in Mallarmé’s texts something staged: a knowledge that “to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality […] that point where language alone acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘oneself’.”13 Regardless of whether we share Barthes’ reading of Mallarmé or Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevsky, both saw that which they called theory already “realized” in literature. The relationship between literature and literary theory can be more closely or more evidently observed in the parallel emergence of Russian Futurism and the Formalist School of Russian theory. While Velimir Khlebnikov presents the “poetry of grammar” in his texts, e.g. in his “incantation through laughing,” a poem composed exclusively of variations of the morpheme “laugh,” Roman Jakobson attempts to understand exactly this form of presentation in his texts on literature. Khlebnikov’s poems will later become an example of what Jakobson calls the “poetic function” of language: he translates Khlebnikov’s method into the language of theory. Looked at another way: Jakobson analyzes Khlebnikov’s method and gives a name to that which the poet does and shows, how his poems are structured according to poetological principles, by reading Khlebnikov’s neologisms as a “poetic etymology.”14 In contrast to Bakhtin, the division between

13 Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” 14 Roman Jakobson, “Novejshaya russkaya poeziya,” in Selected Writings, Vol. V, On Verse, Its Masters and Explorers, ed. Stephen Rudy et al. (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton, 1979), p. 299–354, here 334.

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poetic (self-reflective) and metalinguistic (code-relating) utterances is constitutive in Jakobson. He also notes in his late writings that the “poet’s metalanguage may lag far behind his poetic language.”15 Jakobson recognizes metalanguage in Khlebnikov not in the poem itself but in its paratexts, and specifically only when the content also explicitly refers to the code. A non-discursive (i.e. performative) reference to Jakobson’s code thus remains unnoticed; it is also not thought of as a poetic reference. It would be interesting, though, especially in Khlebnikov’s case, to read self-referentiality and referentiality as a poetic act. For Khlebnikov’s language of stars transforms the act of referentiality as a whole into a poetic process. Thought of in this way, we are dealing with a process which does not negate referentiality per se, by reading this as a type of thought concerned with identification or as an always already failed representation or mimesis, but rather as one which in turn conceives of the process of referentiality itself as an artistic utterance—incomplete, relational, and repetitive. By more explicitly reading dialogism, self-reference, and even reference as an act of self-reflection as well as reflection on other texts and media with extra-literary subjects, the eventness of literature can come more clearly to the fore.

The theorist as character Literature and art do not just articulate—with more or less clarity—their own potential theoretical acts: they draw attention to the act-like character of theory. The artworks of the Moscow conceptualists are the best example of this. The Moscow conceptualists, a group of underground artists and writers in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1990s, were not only inspired by 15 Roman Jakobson, “Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry,” in Selected Writings, Vol. III, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton, 1979), p. 236–147, here p. 139.

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the theory of the French poststructuralists and Bakhtin—they also produced (artistic) theory themselves. This was partially for practical reasons, as working underground meant that there was no public and thus that no analyses, interpretations, or theoretical works about their own art could develop. So the artists themselves discovered theory as a genre and experimented with typical modes of writing or even invented new ones. The group Collective Actions, for example, developed a “practical aesthetic” (Andrei Monastyrsky) and experimented with the event, time, space, and the relationship of audience and actor in an empty field near Moscow. The focus was no longer on the argument but on the action, and theoretical texts were themselves part of these actions. Yuri Albert and Ilya Kabakov then discovered the theorist as character. Yuri Albert emerged himself as a theorist of his own work, posed questions to art or posited theses about art which appeared in the form of actions, drawings, paintings, or installations. Kabakov added fictional persons to his work who commented on his (Kabakov’s) work. A highly diverse set of interactions emerged between the text of the interpreting persons and the object of description, an “open multitude of ambiguous, imperfect, indefinite, and mutually exclusive commentaries which cannot be combined into a unitary discourse.”16 In the early 1970s, Kabakov ultimately arrived at the idea of having the work emerge via the commentary or interpretation. An example of this is his project Exhibition of an Image (Vystavka odnoi kartiny), where Kabakov’s single exhibition object was an almost blank, white-enameled painting with hardly visible light green spots hung in an otherwise empty room. Kabakov tape-recorded the reactions of the viewers to the almost blank picture and later, in a second exhibition, hung them up as commentary next to the picture. Initially, the viewers invented a semantics of the image, saying that the almost invisible green 16 Günther Hirt, Sasha Wonders, “Legenden, die nicht enden,” ­Schreibheft 42 (1993): pp. 35–45, here p. 40.

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spots were “green tufts of grass in flight.” Another time, they spoke of forms with art historical significance. The group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics—Pavel Pepper­­­ stein, Sergei Anufriev, Yuri Leyderman—radicalized this commentary technique by turning art historical commentary, aesthetic theory, into a literary genre. We could call their method theory parody, a parody of theory which revealed the performativity of theory through exaggeration and deferral. The Inspection Medical Hermeneutics group avoided the processes of écriture-lecture, made almost extravagant use of intertextuality and in this way showed its nonsensical, absurd, and purely artificial side. Reference and citation themselves became the site of literature. Dimitri Prigov ultimately developed the paratextual literary genre of the so-called “pre-statements” (preduvedomleniia) which he placed before every poem, finally releasing a volume consisting solely of pre-statements, pre-statements whose reference body, the poem, was totally lacking. I would like to more closely examine one of his pre-statements from 1997 with the simple title Pre-statement, as it can also be read as a scene of aesthetic theory. Prigov asks what his pre-statements have to do with his poems. He writes that they are correlated with a poem, but not in the same way as biography or confession is related to a poem, “but rather as poems with poems,” and if they happen to explain something then that is because the explanation of Jaza the Turkmen is hidden with them. Jaza the Turkmen, Prigov tells us, answered the question of why some Turkmen have narrow eyes and others round eyes: Ha ha! Some Turkmens live in the desert and others in the mountains. Those who live in the desert pinch their eyes together—you see everything, you see far, you see everything as far as the ends of the world and everything well! And the others look around themselves—only mountains

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around, nothing to see around! And so they develop round eyes.17 Jaza the Turkmen’s explanation is thus one which explains seeing and the gaze in terms of what one sees or looks at. We could call this scene a kind of inverted alienation: art not only changes the sight of the observer, the artist (or the theorist looking at art) is herself changed by or shaped what she sees. Prigov’s pre-statements do more than just explain the poems: the poems produce the ability to see the pre-statements in the first place, and vice-versa, as the pre-statements themselves then become poems again. Prigov remarks: “Poetry is in fact not in the word but in the gaze, the focus.”18 If we also take into account that the Russian word “focus” (fokus) itself has three different senses—trick, perspective, and magic— then the gaze is both word and act, and also, because it is both simultaneously, magic. Theory, i.e. the seeing recognition of the subject, is thus already contained within the subject. And, as theory, it again becomes the subject of the poem.

Dialogue with theory Bakhtin’s relationship to literature was itself dialogic. He did not—in his own words—write about literature but instead carried out a dialogue with literature. He did not look at literary texts as objects but as “speech genres” which he could enter into a dialogic relationship with. The term speech genre originates in his work and announces that speaking has a genre history which relates not only to sentences or theses but also to the mode of their expression. By taking this relationship into account, we can recognize that writing or speaking with art is 17 Dmitrij A. Prigov, Sbornik preduvedomlenij k raznoobraznym veščam (Moscow, 1996), p. 5. Translated by Sylvia Sasse. 18 Ibid.

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part of a two-way interaction which is both dialogic and never fully controllable. Bakhtin had this in mind for himself, and he—like Nietzsche—always saw his own writing process as part of his theoretical activity. It is thus no surprise that he uses exactly those terms which constitute dialogism or literature for him. He referred to his texts as “unfinished.” With this, he takes up an aspect of dialogism which is not directed towards the past and towards re-reading but rather to the possible future of art and of theory. For Bakhtin, it was always important to leave his own texts open for potential re-reading, both for his own re-readings and those of potential others. Inconclusiveness, according to Bakhtin, is what enables future reception, and specifically one which can give that which has already been written a new, different future. A re-reading of this kind does not mean the repetition of an established thesis but rather the possibility of re-actualizing and shifting something which has been said into another spatial and temporal context. Bakhtin calls that “writing with a backdoor,”19 writing with an exit into another time and another space—a form of writing or speech which, for example, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man performed. Kristeva and Barthes are in many ways the ideal readers of this idea: they transport the texts into entirely different contexts, where they can be rewritten and renewed. I am thinking here of dialogism as an act of reference, as Bakhtin’s remarks are also relevant for performance theory and have even already indirectly influenced performance theory. Rebecca Schneider reads performance as repetition and reiteration, as reappearance and response-ability of gestures and social practices and thus makes the re- the center of all process-oriented phenomena in art. Like Bakhtin, she describes these processes as transgressive, spanning concrete performance in both 19 See Sylvia Sasse, “Hintertüren. Dostoevskij, Nietzsche, Bachtin,” Die Welt der Slaven 58 (2013): pp. 209–231.

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spatial (cross-spatial) and temporal (cross-temporal) senses. With this, Schneider freed performance and performance theory from the aura of the unique, isolated event and read acts and processes which, like texts, are based on a reading-act, i.e. which constantly take up, repeat, and transform other acts. However, instead of simply stating this reiteration, as is often done in the reading of literature, performance theory directs its attention— due to its subject—entirely to the act itself, thus emphasizing the form of reference, reiteration as an act. Here, too, the act is conceived of to a certain extent as a theoretical process. Here, Schneider cites the theater theorist Anita Gonzalez, who writes: “Performance Theory can be delivered through a hand gesture or sketch, embedded in a lecture, or disseminated within a pause of a sound score.”20 Schneider expands upon this idea of Gonzalez’s by saying that every moment of a performance or theory “relocates” something by answering, by transposing the repeated into another time and/ or space. As a performance theorist, she is interested in the act of relocation itself as act, as performance, and as theoretical activity. If we think back to the early stages of literary theory which, beginning with Bakhtin, “read” performance as a permanent act of re-reading, and then think of current performance theory, which conceives of performance as a constant re-performance, as attempts at critique of ontological theories based on originality and singularity in both artistic practices, then we discover not just a single medial transfer of theory but rather a thesis, especially for literature, which does not appear in the rereadingbased theories named so far. Literature is not just rereading; in a text, it is not just the act of writing-reading which becomes visible: literature is also re-performance, a re-performance of

20 Anita Gonzalez, Black Performance Theory (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 6. See also “‘In our Hands: An Aesthetics of Gestural Response-Ability,’ Rebecca Schneider in Conversation with Lucia Ruprecht,” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): pp. 108–125.

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methods and practices, a re-performance of non-discursive elements of and in literature. Conceiving of literature as performance, or a theater of language, enables both the reflexive interplay between representing and represented language and the reflexive interplay between texts and other media. Literature both becomes the stage of language and reveals dimensions of it in the sense of evidentia. That is what Bakhtin had in mind when he wrote of literature as the artistic perception of language. By insisting on the viewing of language through and in literature, his point was not to say that theory is always already aesthetic, always already requires a representation of thought—that was his presupposition. Instead, he wanted to draw our attention to the moment of this viewing and thus to the event-like nature of theoretical and aesthetic perception.

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Dorota Sajewska Necroperformance: Theory as Remains Contemporary art, a significant feature of which is its affinity to strategies of repetition and documentary practices, has contributed to the establishment of hybrid forms where a boundary between artistic practices and aesthetic theories can hardly be drawn. Artistic phenomena which make use of diverse media and performative strategies, characterized by intensive interdisciplinarity, interdiscursivity, and interculturality, can be seen as forms of investigation into the relations between and among the arts as well as between the discourses of (art) history and (art) theory. The focus on processes of mediation or communication in the artistic act causes a shift in emphasis: from the artefact to the situational experience of the work in its spatiotemporal dimensions. Every artistic process (not only those with a supposedly transient character like theater, dance, or performance art) may thus be treated as an event. The emphasis on processes of interaction and mediation transforms the analysis of art into a sensual experience and simultaneously into an intellectual reconstruction of a complex and fragmentary epistemological process. The execution of artistic practice and aesthetic reflection thus occur outside of the principle of representation, themselves becoming a form of performance in which sensual and bodily elements cannot be separated from that which is being discursively and technologically communicated or mediated. In this way, contemporary performative art can exert an influence on the form of theoretical (art) discourses, modify their structure, and generate new categories. And thus this very discourse—whether of artistic practice or art theory—becomes productive and capable of surpassing its own limits. The new mixed forms which go beyond clearly definable genres and domains of art (like film, video, theater, dance,

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or performance) and which are intensely engaged with selfarchiving processes and medial interdependencies also lead to the (further) decentralization of already-existing theories of performativity. In artistic practices of repetition—e.g. reenactments, re-performances, remixes, performative reconstructions, or medial-processual installations—we can observe a stimulating critical engagement with different concepts of performativity which focus on storage possibilities and processes of the mediation of the event (the performance). Such practices may be understood as epistemological processes not only because their methods contain their own interpretation but also because they are irreducibly connected with art history and theory: the particular refers to the paradigmatic, and the theoretical concepts are grounded in concrete matter. Contemporary art thus formulates—in practice and in the language of art—a series of fundamental questions which were of central interest to performance art in the 1960s and 1970s and which are also the core of current theoretical debates concerning performance and documentation. In the art world today, however, theories of performativity no longer function as a comprehensive field of research which is given precedence over practice: rather, as I intend to show in the following, they function as remains, as a dead, withered fragment—as a necros which is brought back to life in art and can itself come to life as an autonomous entity.

Performance and documentation The “ontology of performance” maintains that performance is something ephemeral, a singular phenomenon which escapes any kind of recording, conservation, or preservation and is constituted through its ephemerality—precisely in the moment of absence. Peggy Phelan clarifies the concept of ephemerality and non-reproducibility in this way: “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does

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so it becomes something other than performance. […] Performance […] becomes itself through disappearance.”1 Because every form of mediation of the acting body through media (text, image, video) is described as a negation of performance, the body also, with the performance of an act, “disappears” as a bearer of meaning and energy and as a medium of sensual experience. A total disappearance in the present—without visible traces or material remains—is, according to Phelan, what makes performance performance. The “anthropology of performance”2 states in contrast that performance emerges in repetition, even is repetition, as every form of human action is characterized by “restored behavior.”3 Performance, Richard Schechner insists, means never happening for the first time. “Performance means: never for the first time; for the second to the nth time, twice-behaved behavior.”4 Restored behavior is itself not a performative event but rather material stored in the body, a bodily remnant of a past process and at the same time a medium for the production of a new act— the performance. It should be understood as a living behavior like clips of film in the hands of a movie director, which can be “rearranged or reconstructed.”5 From an anthropological perspective, performance is a self-reflexive act which occurs in the repetition and re-experiencing of already-existing cultural

1 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146. 2 This term refers to the interdisciplinary research program developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Richard Schechner and Victor Turner. See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) and Performance Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982); Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1974) and Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987). 3 Richard Schechner, “Restoration of Behavior,” in Between Theatre and Anthropology. 4 Ibid., p. 36. 5 Ibid., p. 35.

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attributions and social values. Because it does not depend on external, alien documentation (other than the body itself), performance also evades the principle of representation. We can detect in both positions more than just the juxtaposition of performance and a mediatized culture associated with the reproduction and circulation—primarily image-based—of performative capital.6 Both the ontology of the Here and Now and the anthropological theory of performance are based on a radical division between live experience and the mediation of an event through physical media, between bodily co-presence7 and the passive existence of the remnants of an event. Performance is understood as a bodily act—whether ephemeral or repeatable—which, however, is radically distinguished in its materiality from the material of the remnants. In critical engagements with performance, we notice on the one hand an emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between direct experience and experience as conveyed by media. Philip Auslander stresses that only once a performance is documented do we have evidence of a performance’s existence.8 Medialization then appears as an effective agent against the tracelessness of performance art. For Diana Taylor, in turn, performance is a “vital act of transfer” of social structures, forms of cultural memory, and identity politics, expressed in a complex interplay between the archive (i.e. meanings firmly inscribed in texts and other medial documents) and repertoire (i.e. ephemeral social practices, gestures, and rituals).9 In none of these concepts, however, are medial forms of preservation themselves seen as a living fabric. Instead, with these theories of the performative,

6 See Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 7 On the topic of bodily co-presence, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). 8 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): pp. 1–10. 9 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

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a cultural myth of the acting human body (subject) is created which places things and places as dead objects in opposition to organic remains and undefinable abjects. We can consider this division as a manifestation of the dualisms inherent to Western culture and philosophy: subject-object, human-nonhuman being, living-nonliving.

Necros as remains In contrast to this, my intention in this text is to conceive of performance as an integrated functional relationship between homogenization and differentiation, as a complex interaction between the procedures of academic research (and cultural theory) and artistic practices. To do this, I will outline and develop the concept of necroperformance. This concept refers to the relation between living and non-living matter in the context of the practice and theory of performance as well as in relation to theories of the archive. To indicate this “threshold body” I suggest the term necros, already established as a category in the field of Dead Body Studies, a term which encompasses the differentiated levels of the meaning and interpretation of the relationship between life and death, and which also implies the potential for action of biologically and technologically reproducible matter.10 The relevance of the term necros for performance studies has long been overlooked, even though the problem of disappearance as well as agency and the idea of matter’s potential for transformation—a certain ontology of the body, in other words—link both fields of research. In the following, I will develop a theoretical outline of the reciprocal relationship

10 See Ewa Domańska, Nekros. Ontologia martwego ciała (Warsaw: PWN, 2017). In this monograph, the concept of necro-vitalism is developed while suggesting a methodically aware, systematic engagement with the problem of the dead body in the context of the post-anthropocentric turn.

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between necros and performance11 which has emerged from analysis of contemporary performative (and often inter- and/or trans-medial) arts. The etymology of the word element necro- is i­ lluminating in this respect, particularly in the context of art’s critical engagement with the processes of archiving performative practices. The Greek word νεκρός (nekrós) includes the following meanings: dead person, corpse, dead body, cadaver, something lifeless. In Proto-Indo-European, the predecessor of the Indo-­ Germanic languages, the word has the root *nek-, which can be variously translated as: perish, die, decay, be destroyed, disappear, cease, dissolve. As an autonomous linguistic unit, necros does in fact designate inanimate matter; as a determiner in composite words, however, it is connected to an ability and power to act as well as to processuality. Necromancy as the invocation of the dead, necropsy as the display of the dead and the opening up of corpses, necrocausty as the burning of corpses, necrobiosis as the gradual dying off of tissues and cells—these are just some of the striking examples which point to the performative character of necros. The term does not just indicate a passive remnant of a past process: it should also be understood as an active medium in the creation of a new event. The concept of necroperformance suggested here not least of all attempts to undermine the archive as a traditional institution, one based on the authoritarian division of the remains of documents12 as well as on the controlled distribution of

11 I first developed the concept of necroperformance with the help of historical material in my postdoctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift). See Dorota Sajewska, Nekroperformans. Kulturowa rekonstrukcja teatru Wielkiej Wojny (Warsaw: Instytut Teatralny, 2016); engl. edition: Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstructions of hte War Body, trans. Simon Wloch (Zurich: diaphanes, 2019). 12 This relates to the conventional distinction in historiography between tradition and remains, meaning the difference between sources with and without an intention of historiographical transmission to posterity. See also Alfred Heuss, “Überrest und Tradition. Zur Phänomenologie der historischen Quellen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 25 (1935):

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­ nowledge and power. According to Jacques Derrida, there is k an interference between the mediality of archival techniques and their power-political implications.13 The act of archiving itself, which is subject to the archontic principle of “standardization, identification, and classification”14 and is “to be understood not as arbitrary but as a lasting, ordered preservation,”15 is seen simultaneously as a processual event and a necropolitical praxis of power. The ordering of the archive, as Achille Mbembe convincingly explains, is realized by means of a series of rituals which transform the archive into a place resembling a temple or cemetery: “fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper and preserved like so many relics.”16 These fragments of life are material and immaterial remains, which, through archival rituals, are not only ordered but above all definitively separated from life and from the present. Some parts are removed from the archival space from the outset as unusable remains, while other parts are classified as preservation-worthy17 documents whose ontological status as objects is not to be called into question. From this perspective, the act of archiving is not simply an

pp. 134–183; Ernst Bernheim, Einleitung in die Geschichts­wissenschaft (third edition) (Berlin and Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1926). 13 The term “archive,” which is derived from the Greek word for authority, ἀρχεῖον, and from the Latin word for a safe location for preservation, arca (meaning something like box, case, chest, casket), already indicates the political power of the archive. See Jacques ­Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996). 14 Ibid., p. 12–13. 15 Rainer Hering and Dietmar Schenk, “Einleitung,” in Wie mächtig sind die Archive? Perspektiven der Archivwissenschaft (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2013), pp. 15–18, here p. 15. 16 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive (­Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 19. 17 The word “preservation-worthy” here relates to the concept of “worthy of life” and is conceived with reference to Judith Butler’s concept of the ontology of precarious bodies. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

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act of intervention in the past: more than anything, it is a process—one based on violence—of generating the past, as only the archived remains of the experienced present become the basis of history. The archive itself, on the other hand, becomes a space where the line between life (bios) and death (nekro) becomes especially precarious, with the result that politics transforms into necropolitics.18

Necropolitical performance The conversion of pre-selected remains into archival sources entails treating them as lifeless objects, belonging henceforth only to the past and—like a dead body—surrounded by the taboo of untouchability. The archive appears from this perspective as a place where remains are, in a certain sense, interred— a semi-religious ritual which occurs under the mask of rationalism and historicity in modern societies. A necropolitical performance thus takes place in the public institution of the archive: an act of violence which is committed against historical remains similarly to a dead body. The corpse itself—as the French thanatologist Louis-Vincent Thomas insists—is of itself empty of meaning and must be transformed into a dead cultural object with the help of burial rituals: a process equivalent to the transition from biology to anthropology.19 According to Jean-Didier Urbain, the coffin is what symbolically eliminates the opposition between body and corpse in favor of the former: in this way, the body takes the place of the corpse.20 With this, the cultural body—declared to be enduring and imperishable—becomes a more reliable body than the biological body. 18 See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): pp. 11–40. 19 See Louis-Vincent Thomas, Le cadavre. De la biologie à l’anthro­ pologie (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1980). 20 See Jean-Didier Urbain, La société de conservation. Étude sémio­­ logique des cimetières d’Occident (Paris: Payot, 1978).

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In contrast to the biological body, it is not subject to the decay process of organic material, which would bring along with it a disintegration of meanings and semiotic structures. From an anthropological perspective, the corpse must become a body, become a representation of the body, in order to again be integrated into the culture. Archival remains are subject to a similar process: they are perceived only as traces, as an incomplete representation of the past, and require the attribution of an identity as document in order to again be recognized as a part of society. The archive, Mbembe clarifies, does in fact define itself through the materiality of the collected objects, but the goal of the archive lies in the research of extra-material processes—in the construction of history. The conversion of material remains into documents is a precondition for the writing of history, which conversely lends the remains the credibility of a document. Through the institution of the archive, an assembly of fragments also occurs which creates an “illusion of completeness and continuity.”21 Nevertheless, things which are robbed of their thingliness in the process of archiving can regain their materiality as a result of theoretical and artistic experiments.

Rematerialization of remains In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault interrogates the concept of the document as a passive object and opposes the document of history—something to be interpreted—to the “monument”: named, following Husserl, a “sensual fundamental” (Sinnesfundament), a living tissue which one must treat like an archaeologist treats her sources. The “monument” should not be treated as a sign of something else nor as something which “must be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it 21 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” p. 21.

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is held in reserve.”22 We must instead accept our discontinuity and explore the relations within the document itself, in order in this way to track down “formal analogies” and “translations of meaning.”23 For Foucault, the horizon of archaeological research is marked by “a tangle of interpositivities whose limits and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a single operation,” the aim of archeological comparison never having “a unifying, but a diversifying, effect.”24 From Foucault’s perspective, history thus means the transformation and mobilization of documentary materials—and so a performance of documentation which is itself always a discontinuous form of existence, which includes the body as the most vital tissue. Remains and documents are, in and of themselves, material which may be examined apart from their possible representative function in a situational, subjective, and sensual experience of matter, which is the basis of necroperformance. Necroperformance is thus above all a non-normative, situationoriented concept defined by way of network-like connections of action, a concept which can be located at the interface between various times and spaces, enabling a fragmentary and performative experience and reconstruction of history. Necroperformance thus becomes a tool for reflecting upon and specifying the relationship between body and archive as well as between body and documentation. This approach allows us to deconstruct the cultural and theoretical prejudice that performance and the body are to be conceived as something purely ephemeral which eludes every form of preservation, leaving no lasting traces behind. More than this, the focus is directed towards the experience of death inscribed in the performance itself as well as the performative possibilities of resurrecting that which has disappeared.

22 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 138. 23 Ibid., p. 163. 24 Ibid., p. 159–160.

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Remains as positive Reenactment can be considered a particular kind of necroperformative praxis, a kind of epistemological act which can be situated in the context of its double practical-theoretical status in the sphere of reflection concerning the relationship between performance and archive. A reenactment is, according to Rebecca Schneider, a repeated event which—despite the cultural myth of the ephemerality of performance—leaves behind “remains.” These take root in the body, which is woven into “a network of body-to-body transmission of affect and enactment.”25 From this point of view, the bodies of the participants in a reenactment become a kind of ruin, or rather—in performative repetition—living relics of history. By describing the body of the reenactor in the excess of repetition as evidence of the death of someone long dead, Schneider creates the idea of a body-based witness grounded in experience and not in historical demonstrability. Schneider conceives of bodily communication as a form of “counter memory.”26 She does not just see performance as a form of documentation; she also wants to conceive of the gesture of archiving as itself a performance subject to the order of the ephemeral. In her pioneering theory of performativity, Schneider also points to the incompleteness of repetition, to the fragmentary and ruin-like nature of past events which can return or be resurrected in the form of remains. With the help of these remains, one experiences what Schneider calls crosstemporality, an interweaving of past and present. At the same time, this chiastic conception of time enables an understanding of reenactment as a kind of transaction whose goal is a “ritual negotiation”27 of the event through the production of an active and reflexive 25 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 100. 26 Ibid., p. 105. 27 Ibid., p. 102.

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r­ elationship to the past and the dead. According to Schneider, remains can turn up in a “forgotten encounter,” in an echo of that which has disappeared: “the reverberations of the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten.”28 With the concept of remains, Schneider refers to both material and immaterial remains (“material evidence, haunting trace, reiterative gesture”),29 in which various temporalities are interwoven. Her attention is, however, focused mainly on the laboratory of bodies which performatively engage with the incomplete past: “bodies striking poses, making gestures, voicing calls, reading words, singing songs, or standing witnesses.”30 This bodily laboratory is placed in opposition to the normalizing archive and consequently confirms the experience of time as a key experience of performance art or “time-based art.” The concept of necroperformance might also point to a complex relationship between space and time, since the archival process, as “deposition somewhere, on a stable substrate”31 always also implies a topological allocation. Thus the material and apparently enduring documentation of a performance—in the form of photos, films, objects, and event locations—is conceived of as a potentially active phenomenon: an acting necros. Specifically, this archival material can be decoupled from the source text and gain an autonomous power which is in a position, as Schneider also maintains, to blur the semantic difference from the original (to the original event)32 in order to set in motion a new process, a new performance. In this respect, the acting body no longer appears as a foreign body constantly threatened by death, as something which eludes the logic of the archive in its transitoriness. Consequently, the technologies of storage are no longer simply seen as violent practices of the 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 37. 30 Ibid., p. 33. 31 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): p. 10. 32 See Schneider, Performing Remains.

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archive: instead, matter itself appears on the scene along with its own identity and history.

The archive as the site of necroperformance The archive is here thought of as an experimental space which precedes the creation of a (theoretical or artistic) narrative of historical events. Thus, as Bruno Latour has stated, an archive resembles a laboratory which, in the presence of the researcher, becomes a site of action where non-human factors come to light of their own power.33 In the archive, namely, a peculiar performance happens which assumes the form of an encounter with the past: a crossing of the threshold from the present—life— into the space of time past—of death—is a kind of rite of passage. The initiatory character of this entrance into the archive is usually connected with the first, sometimes fully arbitrary selection of material, which from now on will be subject to mediations and negotiations, in order to ultimately create the image of the past construed by the researcher. The documents located in the archive are then no longer perceived as dead objects of research which enable a supposedly objective reconstruction of the past or the filling of a priori assumptions with concrete material. The documents instead become living matter, which possesses not only a history of interpretation and use but also its own biography, a past which is subject to temporal change. To a certain extent, things from the archive can, in the presence of the researcher, “take on a body” and behave as active factors in the interaction. Robin Bernstein explains that things contain scripts which provoke certain forms of behavior and actions and can thus call into question the separation of archive and repertoire (i.e. performance):

33 See Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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Scriptive things are simultaneously archive and repertoire; therefore, when things enter a repository […], the repertoire arrives with them. Scriptive things archive the repertoire— partially and richly, with a sense of openness and flux. To glimpse past repertoires through the archive requires a revision of what qualifies as “reading” material evidence. A scholar understands a thing’s script both by locating the gestures it cites in its historical location and by physically interacting with the evidence in the present moment. One gains performance competence not only by accruing contextualizing knowledge but also, crucially, by holding a thing, manipulating it, shaking it to see what meaningful gestures tumble forth.34 Physical contact with archival material is not limited to the sense of vision, which arranges, in an objectifying fashion, for a precise division into research subject and research object and as a result commonly leads to a loss of the temporality of things. In the archive, the senses of touch, hearing, and smell are also activated, thanks to which things can regain their materiality (key word: foundation of sense, Sinnesfundament) and can thus become a performative necros. The presence of multiple sensory components can lead to an affective relationship to the document and consequently to “a passionate construction of history.”35 Only once senses other than the visual are brought into play can a situation appear in the researcher’s activity where material from the past can come into light on its own by becoming a subject that actively takes part in the investigation. Random and fragmentary material in which, as Bjørnar Olsen rightly notes,36 various temporalities and historical references 34 Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): pp. 67–94. 35 See Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989). 36 Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archeology and the Ontology of Objects (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

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are present can, in interacting with a human person, not only shape his or her experiences and memories but also act as matter as such and transform itself in time without the influence of human factors. This multitemporal experience, participated in by multiple senses, allows us to treat the archive as the site of a specific performance, which the interaction proves to be particularly important for: participation and bodily presence, and not the objectifying observation of the researcher, which is often subject to an a priori assumption. It is precisely this interplay of the supposedly dead with the living that makes necroperformance a special event in the process of performing research with archival materials which possess their own body and their own history. Necroperformance is a cognitive state which also erodes the border between theoretical and artistic work by dissolving the opposition between researcher and researched, between subject and object, theory and praxis. It is a concept in which existing material gains its power to act and reveals itself in its concrete shape in the presence of the investigator or even provokes human action itself. Necroperformance does not, however, refer to a metaphysical dimension of things but rather—to speak with Latour—to a certain “network of actors” between human and nonhuman factors which enables the emergence of necroperformance. Things summon us because we open ourselves to their material and historical existence, to their body and their performative power. We, with all of our contingencies—not just in the sense of research but also social, economic, and political—also enter into a relationship with things as an acting agent. A body thus answers to the appeal of another body by again prompting this body to answer. In this way, a reciprocal event arises in which the usual dualisms and/or oppositions are called into question and in which not only the past materializes but instead our relationship to the past. Necroperformance entails that the process of communicating and transforming the past—which enables an analysis of cultural practices—can never be considered definitively concluded.

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Art as necro-archive The archive as a site of artistic intervention plays a decisive role in the concept of necroperformance, as the terms necros and performance can enter into a particularly complex interrelation in contemporary art specifically. The necros is here a comprehensive material documentation of the past, treated as an agent: objects and places, but also—in extreme art—abject remains and organic detritus, as well as a reproduction of the remains of the past, subservient to medial and technological archiving, which are preserved in witnesses living “then and there,” in older as well as contemporary performative, visual, textual, and audio works. The necros is more than just directly experienceable archival material located in institutions which preserve and classify collections: it also returns in artistic performances, in the reanimation of the remains of the past as discussed above with respect to reenactments. When treated as living material, the relics of the past are not thereby restricted to a tangible presence and activity of things. Just as important is the re-medialization of matter, a renewed performative use of storage technologies, for only by way of repeated mediation are the processes of transubstantiation revealed, processes which would otherwise be destroyed under the influence of documentation, preservation, and the forms of usage of archival materials. This other archive—art—in this way preserves the memory of the actual space of the archive as the house of the Archons and simultaneously enables a critical engagement with archival processes. And precisely here—in the tensions between matter, technology, and form, as well as through the displacement of the senses during the transformation of the material—a space opens up for necroperformance. The intensive engagement of contemporary artists with the possibilities of an intervention in the archive through practices of repetition—reperformances, restagings, remixes—leads to experiments striding the border between art and science, praxis and theory, history and political present. The striving towards

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the performative reconstruction of events, images, and past situations by means of remains preserved in diverse media (and archives) enables more than the mere updating of past events, but instead, above all, artistic reflection on the mechanisms of memory and forgetting, on the status of sources, witnesses, and documents, on the fictional character of documentation and the performative potential of archival processes. The interest in practices of repeated playback and scenic repetition by artists from different fields of activity, using different media, also leads to the emergence of hybrid forms which elude both traditional documentation and theoretical categorization. Contemporary trans-medial and processual artistic practice not only goes beyond the limits of particular fields of art: established theories, with their accompanying defined art objects (film, theater, or performance theories) also undergo a radical transformation. Theory, including the theory of performativity, functions in itself simply as remains. From the perspective of contemporary performative arts, which engage with the body as a medium of storage, with medial archival processes, and with the history of performance art, every theory of performativity proves to be an incomplete and fragmentary system. Insights of the ontology of performance art, anthropological concepts of repetition in social behavior, theories of ritual relating to foreign and non-foreign cultures, engagements of the philosophy of language with textuality and orality, or medial reflections on the storage media of human acts—all of these are a subject of discussion in current performative practice but, at the same time, are subject to essential corrections in art. The new hybrid forms reveal that art is something mediated in a multiplicity of ways, something highly self-reflective and simultaneously fragmentary, easily subject to processes of transformation, re-staging, and deformation. They also show that art itself is a decentralized and ­performative necro-archive.

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Fabienne Liptay Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge Disclaimer: I am not a theoretician.1 William Kentridge Practical Epistemology / By which is meant / Jumping on the King’s bed / Using the wind to rescue speech / – / – / – / –.2 William Kentridge

Pacing, procrastinating “Walking, thinking, stalking the image.”3 With these words, the South African artist William Kentridge describes the activity of producing his drawings. He continues: It is not so much a period of planning as a time of allowing the ideas surrounding the project to percolate, a space for many different possible trajectories of an image, of a sequence, to suggest themselves, to be tested as internal projections. This pacing is often in relation to the sheet of paper waiting on the wall, as if the physical presence of the paper is necessary for the internal projection to seem realizable. The physical size and material enforce a scale, a

1 William Kentridge, “Fortuna: Neither programme nor chance in the making of images,” (1993), in Wulf Herzogenrath, Anne McIlleron and Angela Breidbach, eds., NO IT IS! William Kentridge (Cologne: Walther König, 2016), pp. 68–76, here p. 68. 2 William Kentridge, “Death, Time, Soup,” (2012), in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 102–114, here p. 107. 3 William Kentridge, “Artist and Model: Parcours d’atelier,” in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 22–23, here p. 22.

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particular starting-point, a composition. The myriad of possibilities is called into order. This pacing sometimes occupies ten minutes, sometimes a morning. (And the pacing is sometimes replaced by sharpening of pencils, gathering of materials, hunting for just the right music—all different forms of productive procrastination.)4 Kentridge is describing a process of image creation which emerges in the interplay of contradictory and fundamentally irreconcilable movements: the realization of the image in an act of progressively reducing options while keeping these options open in an act of postponed realization. His pictures are both drawings and withdrawings. They are advances and retreats and the studio is a stage where the antagonistic play of these opposing forces is resolved and made visible. In the collage Parcours d’atelier (2008), the withdrawal of the drawing, the retreat into a field of myriad possibilities, becomes a subject of the drawing itself. The drawing shows the traces the artist leaves behind in walking around the studio—between “lassitude” and “shallow breathing,” between the “insupportable weight of eyelids” and “6½ minutes sleep,” between “emptiness” and a “distant view of a thought leaving.”5 (Fig. 1) All of this—preceding, delaying, or even preventing the image—becomes itself a part of the drawing. The activity of drawing thus seems like inactivity, the drawing like notation, a choreographic movement script which records the acts of productive procrastination. Kentridge himself speaks of a kind of

4 Ibid. 5 The collage was created in connection with Kentridge’s multimedia presentation The Nose (2010) following Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera of the same name on behalf of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It shows the process of work in the studio, where the small red rectangle in the center of the image represents the camera set up in the middle of the room, and the larger red rectangle on the right side shows the drawing pinned to the wall.

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Fig. 1: William Kentridge: Parcours d’atelier, 2008.

“thinking on one’s feet”6 where processes of understanding are triggered by the physical activity of artistic production. He compares the studio with a space of thought measured by pacing around it: The studio is an enclosed space, physically but also psychically, an enlarged head; the pacing in the studio is the equivalent of ideas spinning round in one’s head […], impulses that emerge and are abandoned before the work begins.7 One cinematic investigation into the artist’s studio is the sevenchannel installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003). It shows Kentridge in his studio in short scenes subject to the

6 William Kentridge, “Thinking on One’s Feet: A walking tour of the studio,” (2013), in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 25–30, here p. 25. 7 Kentridge, “Artist and Model,” in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, p. 23.

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magic tricks of early cinema: a torn self-portrait seamlessly puts itself back together, loose pages and well-worn books fly back into the hands of the autodidact. From an ink blot image, folded and unfolded again, a flawless self-portrait appears. Paper blackened by charcoal and coffee is turned white again through treatment with cloth and a feather duster. (Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c and 2d) Tying the fragments together is the aesthetic experience of time running backwards and the associated promise of transforming the image into a tabula rasa of its own endless possibilities. The white sheet of paper is not actually empty here: it is a space of projection filled with all imaginable drawings.

Moving in circles, walking backwards There is a connection between Kentridge’s characteristic drawing technique of erasing and the film technique of reversal in that both build up an image which is then made to disappear. All artistic decisions, whether good or bad, are suspended, i.e. simultaneously reversed and preserved for the future in a paradoxical movement. All of the espresso pots and typewriters, megaphones and rhinoceroses—motifs which the artist puts to paper in somnambulistic certainty—return to the universe of swirling thoughts, to the inexhaustible potential of artistic production which precedes every image. Kentridge looks into this universe in Journey to the Moon (2003), a narrative film which is a remake of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) and accompanies the 7 Fragments that are dedicated to him. In this film, the artist attempts to evade the decisions which the creation of drawings demand of him—in order to find out “that the studio, which [he] had hoped could be a whole universe, became only the enclosed rocket” that leads him back to his starting point:

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Fig. 2a–d: William Kentridge: Film stills from Tabula Rasa II, 2003.

to the landscape of Germiston, east of Johannesburg, where the artist’s studio is located.8 The artist is stuck in this rocket—an espresso pot—which becomes a symbol of his own limitations. If 7 Fragments celebrates the unlimited possibilities of the image, Journey to the Moon is an ironic commentary on this promise, plainly showing the limited capabilities of the artist. Here, Kentridge is basically once more enacting the dualism of conception and craft which has shaped much of art theory since the Renaissance. The artistic self which Kentridge presents in his films and readings is thus forced to mediate between intellectual and manual activity in such a way that it becomes properly doubled:

8 Ibid.

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There’s a real sense of split in that moment, in which the person observing the process seems to be all-knowing, and the person doing the drawing seems to be stupid and not getting it right, each frustrated that the other cannot be more sympathetic and attuned to what is shown him.9 What these films add to theoretically available knowledge about the premises of artistic productivity is its repeated revelation in the material of the medium itself. The work of the artist becomes just as much the attempt to comprehend this knowledge, to tirelessly adapt it into gestures and actions. The impression of effortlessness which the film in reverse evokes—transforming fissures into repairs and chaos into order in presenting an effect which almost magically brings the things together— corresponds to the physical efforts of the artist in producing this impression during its recording. He must throw the books as if he were actually trying to catch them, walk backwards as if walking forwards, etc. And he must rehearse, rewind, and review the course of these movements in a process of constant repetition.10 Kentridge impressively described this process of repetition and linked it at the same time to rotation as a basic principle of film. Both the cinematic technology of film transport via spools and reels and the pre-cinematic technology of the spinning cylinders and wheels of the zoetrope, praxinoscope, or phenakistiscope produce the illusion of moving images on the basis of rotation. They are reflected in the principle of the endless loop in which Kentridge’s films are shown in the exhibition space. The routes of analogical thought which Kentridge follows lead to the studio ultimately becoming a kind of zoetrope—a place where the repetition of ever more similar processes is

9 Kentridge, “Thinking on One’s Feet,” p. 26. 10 See William Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology: Life in the studio,” in William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 99–128, here p. 107.

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delivered just as much as the effort to escape them in order to prepare the way for new ideas and images: The studio has become the zoetrope, and the repetitive action cannot be escaped. Knowing that the activity is both avoiding the question to be found, and also essential. A productive procrastination.11 Decisively, the mechanical rotation of the film becomes a kind of metaphor which the artist uses not only for describing his work but also appropriates in the repetition of processes of movement. He is trapped in the zoetrope, in the orbit of the studio. The artistic act seems to be endlessly delayed until the very moment it succeeds in breaking out of this orbit. Rosalind Krauss interprets Kentridge’s “drawings for projection” entirely on the basis of the drawings themselves, which she reads as an expansion of the graphic medium on the merely technological basis of film animation. In doing so, she overlooks the decisive significance of the image’s rootedness in cinematographic mechanisms of motion.12 For Kentridge, film is not simply a technological substrate but a material foundation from which knowledge is gained that would not otherwise have been accessible. This knowledge is owed to a praxeology, a process of metaphorical translation and mimetic transformation of an aesthetic experience of media (here the backwardsrunning film)13—and in this sense describes not a form of modernist self-reflexivity but an actual praxis of aesthetic thinking. The artist must, as Kentridge stresses, lean forward when walking backwards, against his intuitive stance, in order to produce the impression of natural movement.14 The reversal of motion 11 Ibid., p. 123. 12 Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock:’ William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92 (2000): pp. 3–35, here p. 9. 13 See Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology,” in Six Drawing Lessons, p. 107f. 14 Ibid., p. 107.

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sequences which go against experience and intuition, against the routines of behavior, frustrates efforts to understand this praxis with the concept of implicit knowledge; the point is instead to escape this, to diligently unlearn what we implicitly believed we knew. Kentridge’s praxis is to this extent comparable to that of the Greek Cynics, which Michel Foucault described as a struggle against traditional modes of conduct, opinions, and customs.15 Cynical practice demanded, in the words of the oracle of Delphi, to “alter the currency” and to rework and revalue it.16 In Kentridge’s studio scenes, revaluation is carried out in acts of repetition and reversal, in small exercises against logic and skill, against knowing how and knowing that. These are scenes of “unlearning,”17 the invention of forms of resistance which serve to unsettle traditional methods of artistic production. The impression of mastering the scene, the impression of skillfulness enhanced through cinematic magic tricks, is in fact due to an acceptance of one’s own lack of ability, the ponderousness and sluggishness of practice in the disruption of routines of action and thought.

Rehearsing, understanding The title of this essay is borrowed from one of Kentridge’s Rubrics (2012), a series consisting of fourteen silkscreens, with lettering in alizarin red ink on found book pages from an old Latin dictionary. (Fig. 3) It is also the title of one of the Six Drawing Lessons, which Kentridge presented in the framework of the 15 Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 269–290. 16 Ibid., p. 241. 17 For more on the Cynic practices of “unlearning” in Foucault, see Ruth Sonderegger, “Foucaults Kyniker_innen. Auf dem Weg zu einer kreativen und affirmativen Kritik,” in Isabell Lorey, Gundula Ludwig and Ruth Sonderegger, Foucaults Gegenwart. Sexualität – Sorge – Revolution (Vienna: transversal texts, 2016), pp. 47–75, here p. 62–72.

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Fig. 3: William Kentridge: Practical Epistemology, 2012.

Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 2012 at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and which he later published in book form. There, “practical epistemology” refers to knowledge production delegated to medium and material and its reconstruction by the artist. The studio is ascribed special significance here, as it not only guarantees insight into artistic processes—it is what organizes these processes in the first place, in interplay with gestures, materials, and techniques. It would thus not be appropriately described as a site of immediate insight into the creative process nor as a site of calculated self-presentation. What we see there is instead the production of an aesthetically-composed knowledge which evades the simple opposition between the documentation and presentation of artistic practice. It is in this sense that Monika Wagner and Michael Diers speak of the studio as a “reflexive model”18 which clarifies and simultaneously questions the conditions of the production of 18 Michael Diers and Monika Wagner, “Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform,” in Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform. Ham-

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art, whether intellectual or material.19 In the studio, images— preliminary sketches, sources of inspiration, notes, and halffinished or abandoned projects—seem to correspond and collide with each other, as if they were themselves taking part in the process of artistic production. We could speak with Dieter Mersch here of a “constellation,”20 an arrangement of things in the midst of which aesthetic thinking takes place. Within this constellation, thinking can be ascribed to neither the artist nor the observer but is rather to be located outside of them in the field of the “epistemic ‘power’ of art.”21 Kentridge compares the studio to a brain where the obstacle course of the pacing artist, the discursus, corresponds to the circuitry of the synapses. He thus outlines a model of artistic production where thinking and doing are related to each other via indirect routes which counteract the implementation of a preconceived idea in a work.22 It is a praxeology of knowledge which he performs in the studio, a process of understanding as implemented through non-intentional bodily acts and techni-

burger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte 7 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), pp. VII–X, here p. IX. 19 Visiting the exhibition NO IT IS! at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, which showed William Kentridge’s body of work, one was able to have the impression of moving within this reflexive model, taking a walk through the artist’s studio. On the way from 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003) to Drawings for Projection (1989–2011) and More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) to The Refusal of Time (2012), one passed two rooms where the studio itself was exhibited, namely as a hybrid room somewhere between wunderkammer and laboratory, globe and head, universe and capsule. 20 Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015), p. 11. 21 Ibid., p 27. 22 See Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology,” in Six Drawing Lessons, p. 124f., and William Kentridge’s Sigmund Freud lecture “A Defence of the Less Good Idea,” given at the Burgtheater, Vienna, 7 May 2017 https://www.freud-museum.at/en/news/william-kentridge-video-adefence-of-the-less-good-idea-205.html (accessed 30.7.2018). The lecture has been translated into German and published by Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, In Verteidigung der weniger guten Idee. Sigmund Freud Vorlesung 2017 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2018).

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cal procedures. The point is to explore the possibilities of aesthetic cognitive faculties in actu. Wherever the studio becomes the object of an exhibition, it transfers the works it frames into a state of potential incompletion. As long as these works have not left the studio, the effective space of the artist, they remain subject to possible alterations and dismissals. They exist, as Brian O’Doherty writes in Studio and Cube (2007), in the sign of the process, in different stages of work which are joined to a cluster of manifold tenses: Studio time is defined by this mobile cluster of tenses, quotas of past embodied in completed works, some abandoned, others waiting for resurrection, at least one in process occupying a nervous present, through which, as James Joyce said, future plunges into past, a future exerting on the present the pressure of unborn ideas. Time is reversed, revised, discarded, used up. It is always subjective, that is, elastic, stretching, falling into pools of reflection, tumbling in urgent waterfalls.23 For O’Doherty, this temporal turbulence is simultaneously trapped in the system of late modernity, where the work of art is constantly referring to itself. Against this background, the incessant circling, walking around in the studio can be understood as a Sisyphean labor for the artist, as the artist’s effort to escape self-referentiality. The intention is also to connect the work of the artist in the studio with that which has occurred outside of the studio, to broaden or exceed the narrow paths of the self-referential actions in order to produce a relationship to the world in artistic work:

23 Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the relationship between where art is made and where art is displayed (New York: Buell Center, Forum Project, 2007), p. 18.

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Understanding, hoping, believing, not out of conviction, but from physical experience, that from the physical making, from the very imperfections of technique—our bad backward walking—parts of the world, and parts of us, are revealed, that we neither expressed nor knew, until we saw them.24 This also addresses the political responsibility of the artist in the context of South Africa’s history of apartheid.

Reversing, repairing Exhibiting the studio itself, as Duchamp, Brâncuşi, Schwitters, Bacon, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Acconci, and others did, is a signature gesture of modernism, which no longer directed its gaze towards the work of art but rather towards the artistic act, which was in equal need of a stage where it could visibly appear.25 Kentridge positions himself in this field when he names as his inspiration the films showing Bruce Nauman or Jackson Pollock in their studios.26 Kentridge worked on his Méliès films remotely from his own studio in Johannesburg during a guest stay at Columbia University in the fall of 2001 and spring of 2002. It is here, in New York, that he entered into dialogue with post-war American artistic production and made his films in direct reference to the studio practices of Pollock and Nauman. In a talk he gave at the invitation of the Dia Art Foundation in December 2002 in the “Artists on Artists” series, he spoke about Nauman, whose video installation Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (1991), also consisting of seven screens, 24 Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology,” in Six Drawing Lessons, p. 128. 25 See Michael Diers, “atelier/réalité. Von der Atelierausstellung zum ausgestellten Atelier,” in Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform, pp. 1–20. 26 See Kentridge, “Artist and Model,” in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, p. 23.

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could be seen in the exhibition spaces of the collection of the New York Foundation for the Arts in the same year.27 This installation shows Nauman’s studio from seven different angles in infrared recordings which document the nocturnal activity of mice and a cat. The artist himself is absent.28 The installation seeks to engage with the artist’s own previous works of the late 1960s where Nauman filmed himself in his empty studio, walking, sitting, laying down, playing the violin while walking around, or bouncing two balls between the floor and the ­ceiling.29 The studio here seems to be a place where the activity of making art no longer produces a work but rather replaces it, even in its most quotidian and banal gestures: “My conclusion was,” noted Nauman of this time, “that I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.”30 Kentridge places his New York films in this tradition of the performative exploration of the artist’s studio and simultaneously attempts to maintain distance from this tradition. The

27 There exists a second version of this work: Mapping the Studio II with color shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage), Tate, London 2001. There are edited versions of both: Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) All Action Edit, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2001, and Mapping the Studio II with color shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) All Action Edit, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2001. 28 See “Bruce Nauman on Mapping the Studio,” in Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2002), un­­ paginated. 29 For example the films Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio, Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square and Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance), created in 1967/68 in the studio of his teacher William T. Wiley in Mill Valley, CA, as well as the films Wall-Floor Positions, Stamping in the Studio, Walk with Contraposto, Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), Bouncing in the Corner No.1 and No. 2, Revolving Upside Down and Pacing Upside Down, made in Southampton, NY, in the winter of 1968/69. 30 Bruce Nauman, in Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere, “Bruce Nauman Interviewed,” Vanguard 8, no. 1 (February 1979): pp. 15–18, here p. 18.

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self-understanding of the artist who sees everything he does in the studio as art, including doing nothing, is met by ­Kentridge with both wonder and rejection: what was possible in the United States would have been impossible on the periphery of South Africa with the political conditions that art unavoidably needed to take a stance towards.31 The backwards movement which Kentridge adds to the catalogue of artistic actions in the studio, following Nauman, should be understood as a kind of magic in this context, one which should temporarily relieve his gestures of the burden of South African history.32 For he does not himself seem to move backwards, but instead the flow of time, which effortlessly takes back everything which was created through physical and intellectual effort. Drawings seem to emerge of their own will and to disappear like spirits which the artist had, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, just called. In the context of practical epistemology, this backwards movement also refers to a form of active thought. The American art historian Leora Maltz-Leca, who dedicated an entire study to the metaphorical relationships between drawing and thinking in Kentridge’s work, reads the reversal of the flow of time in his Méliès fragments along with Hannah Arendt: as a question of the possibility of making amends.33 The irrevocability of that which has already been done, the insight that it cannot be undone, is placed by Arendt alongside the human capacity for forgiveness:

31 See “William Kentridge on Bruce Nauman,” Artists on Artists Lecture Series, Dia: Chelsea, 19 December 2002, https://diaart.org/media/ watch-listen/audio-william-kentridge-on-bruce-nauman/media-type/ audio (accessed 30.7.2018). 32 See Harmon Siegel, “Feats of Prestidigitation,” in Margaret K. Koerner, ed., William Kentridge: Smoke, Ashes, Fable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 142–170, here p. 155. 33 See Leora Maltz-Leca, William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises (Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. 83f.

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Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.34 In the Méliès fragments, knowledge about the irrevocability of acts is erased by the visual impressions of the film running in reverse. The film shows, according to Kentridge, “a utopian perfection of one’s skills,”35 which consists of undoing an image event, art being able to rescind as if by magic. At the same time, though, it shows the inability of the isolated artist to place his skills in the service of making amends to the extent that this can only happen, according to Arendt, in the presence of others, subject to the conditions of coexistence and mutual action.36

Forgetting, forgiving With all of this, we must take into account the political institutionalization which the human capacity for forgiveness experienced in the context of South African history. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by Nelson Mandela in 1996 took on the task of exposing political crimes in the apartheid regime and motivating the accused to admit their crimes with the promise of remitted sentences. Kentridge vividly illustrates the effect of amnesty (ἀμνηστία, forgetting, forgiving) in his work when he links the act of erasing to forgetting and that of reversing to forgiveness. In this context, his films should also 34 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 237. 35 William Kentridge, “Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon,” (2003), in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 4–10, here p. 9. 36 See Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199.

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be understood as a reflection of the dilemma of being unable or unwilling to offer a “remedy against the irreversibility”37 while needing to fulfill the responsibility of taking a stance towards what has already taken place and been done. This reflection cannot be had without work in the studio. It is neither the starting point nor the result of this work and is thus at neither its beginning nor its end, instead being performed in this work. Erasing and reversing thus produce aesthetic effects which generate meanings when they become understandable for an audience in the context of South African history, as traces of a politics of forgetting and forgiving. Before any generation of meaning, however, they are traces of an artistic effort to allow pictures to emerge in a process of progressive rescinding. Doubt and uncertainty and the acknowledgement of not knowing mix together in this process. Kentridge repeatedly referred to his father’s career as a lawyer and judge to define his own artistic activity in the difference between the activities. In the Treason Trial, Kentridge’s father was the defense attorney for the accused opposition leaders who were being tried for treason, among them Nelson Mandela, causing them to be set free. Kentridge opposes to juridical thinking and judging an aesthetic form of thinking which operates on the basis not of logical operations but of analogical ones.38 The gestures of the artist in the studio, his artistic acts and techniques, are given significance as metaphorical acts of historical action. The artist’s favored animation technique of imperfectly erased charcoal sketches, the persistent registering of traces of their revision and deletion, serves artistic engage37 Ibid., p. 236. 38 William Kentridge conceived of the particularity of aesthetic thought in various ways, for example in conversation with Rosalind C. Morris: “I think the activity of being an artist rather than, say, a philosopher consists in trying to maintain a place—which one does as a matter of survival, not as a matter of theoretical argument—where it should be possible to find meaning, although not through the processes of rationality.” William Kentridge and Rosalind. C. Morris, That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations (London: Seagull Books, 2017), p. 19.

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ment with forms of censorship through whitening rather than blackening. The paper becomes a basis of history where the drawn landscape bears the traces of the repressed and forgotten with respect to the experience of violence in post-colonial South Africa. J.M. Coetzee’s comment about Kentridge’s films, which he called an “investigation into the troubled, amnesiac white South African psyche,”39 is instructive in this context. Kentridge himself gave shape to this psyche, e.g. in his film Weighing … and Wanting (1997–98), which shows cross-sections of the brain of the protagonist Soho Eckstein, a white South African mineowner and industrialist whose days of wealth are numbered with the first democratic elections at the declared end of apartheid (like those of the Babylonian king Belshazzar whose Old Testament story the film adapts). (Fig. 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d and Fig. 5a, 5b) His brain transforms into a rock, into a scale which weighs the rock, into the head of a man who is sinking onto the rock under the weight of his thoughts. This rock, which is a symbol, repeated throughout Kentridge’s work, of the history of apartheid,40 is subject to the operations of the balancing, calculating, and weighing of historical guilt. In the Méliès fragments, it is opposed to the motif of the overcoming of the laws of gravity, the (futile) attempt to escape the economy of Western rationalistic thought in the arts. In this way, the question of the specific nature of aesthetic perception is linked to the possibility of justice, which can only be sought separately from the logic of rational argument—in the sense 39 See J. M. Coetzee, “History of the Main Complaint,” in Neal Benezra et al., eds., William Kentridge (Chicago and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2001), pp. 82–93, here p. 93. The designs and ideas of South Africa are white to the extent that they originate in people who are “no longer European, not yet African.” J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 11. 40 See “Conversation with William Kentridge” in Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, William Kentridge (Brussels: Société des Expositions du ­Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1989), p. 75, and Krauss, “The Rock,” p. 4.

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Fig. 4a–d: William Kentridge: Film stills from Weighing … and Wanting, 1997–98.

that Derrida spoke of justice in terms of the gift,41 and in the sense that forgiveness is not a matter of settling guilt with a sentence but of for-giving it. “Practical epistemology” is thus also the name of a genuinely aesthetic thought which claims validity “beyond the law, calculation, and transaction.”42 To procrastinate, suspend, forgive—these indicate an entire spectrum of procedures and gestures where aesthetic and ethical dimensions of artistic production come into contact. This includes the activity of walking around the studio and the ­principle of 41 See Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (first published in French in 1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 26. On the topic of forgiveness, see Jacques Derrida, “Le siècle et le pardon,” Le Monde des débats 9 (1999): p. 10; Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in John D. Caputo, Michael Scanlon and Mark Dolley, eds., Questioning God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 21–51. 42 Ibid.

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Fig. 5a–b: William Kentridge: Film stills from Weighing … and Wanting, 1997–98.

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rotation as the basis of (pre-)cinematic technology, as well as the reverse movements corresponding with them: ­walking and projecting film backwards as a magical effect which is achieved through arduous practice, and moreover as a revision of an irrevocable act, as recognition of the impossibility of making amends and the capacity for forgiveness. Each action is repeated and mirrored, performed as if belonging to the inverted temporal order. This mirroring signifies a reversal, a form of reflection where knowledge is gained not through distant observation but through the examination and overcoming of available knowledge in acts of doing.

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Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot The first shot—if there can be a first shot in a video loop—presents the desktop of an Apple computer with an image of the Andromeda Galaxy as a background.1 Icons hovering in the cosmos symbolize storage devices entitled “Data,” “Système,” and “History of Universe,” and one video file in particular named “Grosse fatigue.” What we see at the opening of the 13-minutelong video, created by French artist Camille Henrot in 2013, is a mise-en-abyme of this very video, Grosse fatigue, as if the history of the universe already contained itself and the video represented just one cosmology amongst others.2 Abruptly, two overlapping windows pop up featuring two pairs of female hands, each of which opens a book—in one frame, a volume of photos about African body painting in the style of National Geographic, and in the other a publication about Pop artist Keith Haring, whose colorful mazes suggest a Western appropriation of tribal culture. (Fig. 1) This physical contact with knowledge, the hands flipping through the pages of the book, is compared to the internet as a cosmos which, through the juxtaposition of images, opens an essentially associative visual perspective onto the world. Henrot’s video, and its recitation of different histories of the universe, are analyzed here as an exemplary form of artistic reflection on the aesthetic quality of theoretical conceptions of the world.

1 The Andromeda Galaxy is a mosaic by Robert Gendler (https:// apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150830.html) (accessed March 4, 2019) 2 Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue (2013), color and sound video, 13 min.; original music by Joakim; voice by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh; text written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg; producer: Kamel Mennour, Paris; with the additional support of Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris; production: Silex Films.

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Fig. 1: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

Henrot developed the video during an Artist Research ­ ellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the largest F complex of scientific collections in the world. While her project could at first sight be labeled “artistic research” presenting the results of her investigations into these immense collections, as well as of her nocturnal explorations of the internet, it first and foremost exposes the aesthetic framing of scientific theories. The images from popular ethnographic and art historical literature presented in the first minute of the film are framed several times: first by the Mac windows where they appear, then by the books, displayed on a bright monochrome background, and finally by the hands turning the pages, fingernails painted in the complementary colors green and red.

Graspability Hands are shown repeatedly throughout the video, sometimes those of Smithsonian staff showing objects from the collections and archives, but more often female hands, whose styled fingernails are painted as if to mirror the objects they present, ­emphasizing the aesthetic presentation of scientific objects

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and pointing to the stylization of scientific models. (Fig. 2) This “graspability” of knowledge is also understood as a technique of reducing totalizing schemes of knowledge to human proportions. Through the display of decorated hands and the manipulation and montage of images and objects, Henrot alludes to Aby Warburg’s notion of the Handbarmachung of knowledge, to which she directly refers in a short article entitled “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems.”3 The rationality of such universal systems is confronted by the “intuitive unfolding of knowledge” performed by the hands and the continuous and playful juxtaposition of images found on the internet and scenes shot in different locations. Henrot seems, above all, to investigate the idea that a theory strongly depends on the material and sensory form of its presentation and its publication in specific media.4 She not only reflects on systems for the classification and mediation of knowledge, as Mark Dion does for example in his installations of pseudo-scientific wunderkammern—she is also interested in the aesthetic framing of knowledge through formal relations.5 Apart from the hands interacting with books, journals, maps, and objects, the video consists of a series of other dispositives of visual and tactile representation: drawers (Fig. 3), light boxes, monochrome backgrounds, objects with color control patches and, most prominently, the quick succession of overlapping Mac windows that create a growing stack of visual correspondences. 3 Camille Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” Art in America 101, no. 6 (June/July 2013): pp. 44–45. 4 Mathieu Copeland, “Conversation avec Camille Henrot/Camille Henrot in conversation,” in Camille Henrot et. al., Camille Henrot, (Paris: Éditions Kamel Mennour, 2013), pp. 28–33, 34–39, here p. 32: “vivre la connaissance comme une expérience physique.” See also Jonathan Chauveau, Grosse fatigue (http://www.camillehenrot.fr/en/ work/68/grosse-fatigue) (accessed March 4, 2019). 5 See for example Iwona Blazwick, ed., Mark Dion. Theatre of the Natural World (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2018); Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel, eds., Mark Dion. The Academy of Things. Die Akademie der Dinge (Cologne: Walther König, 2015); Lisa G. Corrin, Miwon Kwon, and Norman Bryson, eds., Mark Dion (London: Phaidon Press, 1999).

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Fig. 2: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

Recreating theory Referencing Roland Barthes, Henrot identifies the rectangle, the most prominent form of ordering in her video, as the basic shape of rational power and as a “mark of the division between man and nature.”6 However, the rectangle is only one of several elementary shapes that Henrot identifies as part of a “morphology of totality”7: egg, circle, triangle, spiral, and other linear forms are also understood as recurring elementary shapes (Fig. 4) that structure narratives about the origins of the world, spread across science, religion, mathematics, philosophy, and mythology, which makes them not only rational but also “mystical forms.”8 According to Henrot, the structure of cosmogonic narratives at times resembles that of creative artistic processes, such as drawing a circle (Fig. 5) or modelling formless ­material.9 ­Morphology,

6 Camille Henrot, Elephant Child, ed. Clara Meister et. al. (New York: Inventory Press / London: König Books, 2016), p. 54. 7 Ibid., p. 21. 8 Ibid., p. 68. 9 Ibid., p. 18: “Attempts to comprehend the origins of the universe always bear resemblance to the artistic process, from the first sketch to the first overwrought failure. For limitless ideas to be grasped, they

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Fig. 3: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

stemming from the developmental analysis of natural history, is also a crucial notion for modern art history and aesthetics, as exemplified by Henri Focillon’s Vie des formes, re-emerging in Henrot’s work as a fundamental artistic methodology.10 Indeed, it is art that produces the elementary forms and signs for visualizing complex ideas, including the ones expressing totality. Exposing this vocabulary questions the distinction between scientific, mythological, and aesthetic synthetizations of world history.11 For instance, Henrot alludes to the world egg or cosmic egg, a common mythological symbol of creation, by peeling the shell from a black-colored Easter egg, revealing its marbled inner ­surface (Fig. 2). The egg acquires the same e­ pistemological ­status as the Whole Earth photograph shot in 1972 during space must be rendered visible, they must be sketched with elementary shapes.” References, for instance, to Rhoda Kellogg’s analysis of children’s drawings or to Paul Klee’s pictorial theory of form reveal an interest in grammars of art, elemental theories, a structuralist approach, and Gestalt. Ibid., pp. 20, 44. 10 Henri Focillon, Vie des formes (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1934). 11 See also Camille Henrot and Federico Nicolao, “Je veux voir. Camille Henrot en dialogue avec Federico Nicolao,” in Guillaume Le Gall, ed., La persistance des images (Paris: Le Bal/Éditions textuel/Centre national des arts plastiques, 2014), p. 130–149.

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Fig. 4: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

mission Apollo 17 which she shows at the end of the video, where, again, a female hand with black and white fingernails presents and rolls an orange and finally lets it disappear, as if science’s divine hand determined the future of the planet Earth (Fig. 6).12 Henrot’s Grosse fatigue refers to a universe defined on the one hand by cosmogonic theories stored in and developed by institutions like the Smithsonian and mirrored on the other hand in the flow of images through the internet, by which structuralism’s hyperrationalism seems to be put in correspondence with the web’s hypertextual network.13 Much like the filmed scientists who open drawers, display specimens, or explain illustrations, models, and machinery, the artist opens and arranges windows to give the general public aesthetic access to the universe of knowledge (Fig. 7). Instead of following the 12 Compare the caricature of the Whole Earth in the hand of “science” as analyzed in Robert Jacobs, “Whole Earth or No Earth: The Origin of the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9, Issue 13, no. 5 (March 21, 2011): no pagination. Other scenes refer to the myth of the Earth as a disc while illustrating the “creation” of the earth by showing hands with a rolling pin spreading out dough or by presenting a DVD. 13 See Henrot’s statement on this connection in Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45.

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Fig. 5: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

logic of archival classification, represented by the boxes, drawers, and exhibition rooms, Henrot follows an intuitive order and includes views of the employees’ offices and laboratories populated with banal personal objects, such as a Darwin puppet, cartoons, sticky notes, pinned photos, and a birthday balloon floating beneath an office ceiling, as if ironically alluding to the laws of physics or to Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds and the Experiments in Art and Technology of the 1960s. By revealing the actual contexts in which scientific theories of the world are constructed and the objects of their evidence stored, Henrot is suggesting that world histories have authors and their own material history. Instead of didactically presenting the scientific theories put forward by the Smithsonian, Henrot makes them materially and aesthetically accessible ­ without shrinking from banal formal analogies: in one sequence we see a scientist commenting on an image of a star system whose white spots are then juxtaposed against another similar yet moving image of white spots on a black background, which then turn out to be someone in spotted black jeans. These jeans are then juxtaposed against a famous photograph showing Jackson ­Pollock dripping paint on a canvas—an ­artistic method which has been compared to the rituals of American Indians

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Fig. 6: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

painting with sand. Various creation myths and theories are playfully associated and combined here by reference to their origin in the formless material of the spot. In a later sequence, bubbles of lather visualize the Big Bang nucleosynthesis called out by the video’s voice, while a white froth on the dark skin of a female body falling down on a dark ground symbolizes the creation of the Milky Way (a name which shows the shared visual and metaphorical roots of science and mythology). Similarly, chemical evolution is evoked through images of the ocean and liquids in test tubes, alluding to the theory of the “primordial soup,” mythological narratives of the “dark ocean” or the birth of gods from the foam of the seas. Instead of presenting scientific models from the Smithsonian’s archives or collections, Henrot combines images with a strong sensory impact— multicolored marbles rolling and hitting each other on a table (Fig. 8), representing chaos, or an explosion of matter alluding to the Big Bang—without, however, providing any explanations. While black ink beautifully expands in a glass of water into self-generated clouds of color, hinting at the physical processes of diffusion that shape the universe, this sequence primarily serves to expose the degree to which both scientific and mythical models are aesthetically conditioned (Fig. 9).

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Fig. 7: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

Physical experience But focusing on visual analogies in Henrot’s Grosse fatigue reveals only half the picture. The powerful effect of her video and its flow of images is enhanced by a powerful, hypnotizing soundtrack. It gives the opening sequences an electrifying beat that structures the subsequent dynamic rap narration in the style of the forerunners of hip-hop in 1970s New York.14 The poem was written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg and is spoken with great intensity by the performer Akwetey OrracaTetteh. Its text is a joyous syncretism of scientific history and creation stories made of samples taken from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Kabbalistic, Freemasonic, Dogon, Inuit, Navajo, and other traditions: In the beginning there was no earth, no water—nothing. There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha. In the beginning everything was dead. In the beginning there was n ­ othing,

14 Chauveau, Grosse fatigue.

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Fig. 8: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath. In the beginning there was an immense unit of energy.15 The spoken words and beat create a rhythm that accelerates and decelerates in step with explosive evolutions and entropic devolutions of the universe. The rhythm of the narration also echoes the artist’s obsessive clicking through the internet. Theories and myths about the creation of the universe, the evolution of species, and of knowledge about them are woven into a dense multilayered narration accompanied by visual associations. The speeding up and slowing down of the beat evokes a strongly sensual, even orgasmic sense of the energy of natural processes and of the lustful, compulsive desire for scientific knowledge: The Creating Power then took many animals and birds from his great pie bag and spread them across the earth. First came self-promoting chemicals, and then fat formed membranes, and then came the green algae colonies in the sea, and then the oxygen, oxygen. Eight-faced air, air to 15 The poem is reproduced in separate blocks in Henrot, Elephant Child, p. 13

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Fig. 9: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

make winds and breezes, air filled with sounds, air carrying oceans, […] And mankind discovered the knowledge of history and nature, of minerals, vegetables, animals and elements, the knowledge of logic and the art of thinking […] pathology, astrology, aerology and more.16 As Henrot states in an interview, she does not want to present theories as a form of knowledge to be acquired, but as a physical experience.17 The rhythm of the sound, setting in motion the universe and its history, creates a “synthesis” with the v­ ideo’s images and confers an experience of totality that the artist explicitly borrows from religious practices. From a postcolonial perspective, she deliberately makes use of primitivist references and performs a pensée sauvage, “a kind of hyperrationality.”18 16 Ibid., p. 80. For Henrot’s interest in the “compulsiveness of acquiring knowledge,” see Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45. 17 “Ce qui m’intéresse ainsi est de faire vivre la connaissance comme une expérience physique, et pas comme un savoir à acquérir.” Copeland, “Conversation avec Camille Henrot/Camille Henrot in Conversation,” p. 32. 18 Henrot states that anthropology’s approach “to totalization reflects what Claude Lévi-Strauss called la pensée sauvage, a kind of hyperrationality.” Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45.

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By this she reveals that the scientific theories she refers to cannot free themselves from their primitive, religious, or mythological underpinnings. Henrot explicitly refers to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée sauvage, suggesting that artistic and scientific practices are both driven by an inherent primitive force and contain a prehistorical aspect which impels them to scrutinize and historicize themselves.19

Passages between fact and fetish Keeping in mind Bruno Latour’s statement that “we have never been modern,” we might say that Henrot’s intention is not to separate science from faith, fact from fetish.20 On the contrary, her project explicitly opposes the faith in facts which constitutes modern science. As Latour argues in his article Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, Western science is defined by the separation of knowledge and faith and by the axiom that only that is “real” which is not constructed or fabricated. By demonstrating, however, that facts are just as fabricated as the fetish, Latour shows that neither modernists nor postmodernists have ever freed themselves from their respective credos: while modernists fetishize the fact, he claims, postmodernists believe that reality is wholly constructed and mere appearance.21 Henrot seems to take a cue from such observations in creating a syncretic narrative explicitly merging science, myth, religion, and art. By this she directly addresses our fetishist view of the objects of the world and their reproductions on the internet. Her video presents aesthetic equivalents of what Latour calls the faitiche, a hybrid of the fétiche and the fait, in line with his statement that processes of model-making in laboratories 19 Ibid. 20 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 21 Bruno Latour, Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, suivi de Iconoclash (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte, 2009).

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are fundamentally shaped by shifts between “reality” and “fabrication,” between “fact” and “illusion.” Henrot’s narration of anthropology thus exposes mystic aspects of science by creating aesthetic forms which make such shifts tangible. Henrot approaches theory solely as an aesthetic product that provides access to complex systems in a similar way to mythology and religion. By using and stylizing the aesthetic elements of theories, she also tries to find that which all totalizing systems have in common and to make these systems accessible. As she states herself: BIG SYSTEMS, TAXONOMIES and totalizing structures inspire in me a sort of fascination and distrust I find stimulating. They compel me to wonder how to dismantle them and then rebuild them myself.22 In this sense, theory is understood as a system in constant formation. Henrot’s desire to rebuild the big systems of world history not only demonstrates her own distrust in and dismantling of its mythic quality, but first and foremost conceives of history as a process, a constant movement of the recreation of life. In Henrot’s work, theory appears as dynamic “formation” in opposition to a fixed “form,” according to the artist Paul Klee’s definition of “formation as movement and action” and “formation as life.”23 Henrot’s video Grosse fatigue ends with a lethal fatigue which, nonetheless, leaves some ends open which can metamorphose into new forms of life. The critical potential of her work consists in our being confronted today with an “excess of systems,” a neurotic “passion for systems” which ultimately converges with “the need to rebuild the religious illusion, to re-establish God’s existence.”24 22 Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 44. 23 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre, I.2/78, 8.1.1924. (Archive of Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), Inv.-no. BG I.2/78.) 24 “In this moment there is an excess of systems that fit into one another, and this nesting becomes a malady, a ‘passion for systems,’ a

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­ owever, the very idea of God generates “the passion for cateH gories and divisions” and eventually “scientific rationalism.”25 Dialectically, moreover, “the obsession with order creates disorder.”26 Thus, any unified and totalizing system contains its own destabilization which in turn reintroduces chaos. The artist’s critical strategy consists in representing, re-enacting, and especially overacting absolute systems: “Over-systematization is a way of sidestepping the system by transforming it into a game.”27 Henrot explicitly links creation myths to poetry and child’s play since they are all “about encompassing everything in one space, within which connections and exchanges can be made.”28 The appealing effect of the video ultimately lies in its ambiguous capacity to deconstruct the excesses of systems and their primitive foundations while at the same time using those aspects to re-enchant theory and to make it intuitively accessible. While the archive seems to flatten the world by storing mute objects and abstract documents, Grosse fatigue resuscitates the dead and reanimates cosmogonies.29

neurosis that merges with the need to rebuild the religious illusion, to re-establish God’s existence.” Henrot, Elephant Child, p. 61. See also: “And there was violent relaxation, The arrow of time. Heat death of the universe. Pan Gu laid down and resting, he died.” (p. 168–177), and Henrot’s comment “Pan Gu’s death is not a pure finality, it brings with it new beginnings: his body parts transform into different features of the world […],” p. 176. 25 “In the end, it is not scientific rationalism that led to the death of God. It’s the reverse: the idea of God is what creates the passion for categories and divisions. The idea of God as a universal, indivisible being creates the need to categorize and divide.” Ibid., p. 49. 26 “Just as the obsession with peace creates war, the obsession with order creates disorder.” Ibid., p. 52. 27 “Over-systematization is a way of sidestepping the system by transforming it into a game. This is how the exhibition The Pale Fox was schematized.” Ibid., p. 165. 28 Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45. 29 Copeland, “Conversation avec Camille Henrot/Camille Henrot in Conversation,” pp. 32–33.

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Barbara Naumann Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt The film installation Manifesto (2016)1 by the Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt unfolds in the framework of an aesthetics of transference. Rosefeldt presents transference as an intermedial movement in multiple senses of the word. Manifestoes become film scenes, simultaneously implying a historical transfer between the historically-situated manifestoes and contemporary circumstances, scenes, and film settings. This transference also occurs between texts strongly animated by questions concerning the politics of art and scenes of everyday life. In Manifesto, the face of the protagonist, Cate Blanchett, appears in every scene. Her face is given a decisive function in Rosefeldt’s aesthetics of transference, as this face embodies the texts of the manifestoes and their situational alienation. This face becomes the site of transference. The often-dogmatic character of the manifestoes is thus shifted into another perspective. The aesthetics of transference is also evident in the nature of the knowledge produced by the film installation, a knowledge which is not only conceptual or intentional but also suffused with a rich spectrum of sensual experience. Rosefeldt’s Manifesto brings the filmed, mobile human face into a particular relationship with the text. The artist dedicates himself to the staging of artistic and literary manifestoes, referencing texts from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Kasimir Malevič, André Breton, Wassily Kandinsky, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Sturtevant, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, Jim Jarmusch, Stan Brakhage, and Lars von Trier, among others. The installation consists of twelve films, preceded by a thirteenth introductory film sequence without 1 Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto: A film installation in twelve scenes (London and Cologne: König Books, 2016).

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actors. They are presented in endless loops. Each individual film scene lasts ten minutes and thirty seconds; the introduction takes up four minutes. The individual films show concrete situations from everyday life: a homeless person, a choreographer, a curator, a worker in a waste processing plant, a conservative Southern American housewife and her family, a puppeteer, a stock broker, a physicist, an elementary school teacher, a punk singer, a news announcer, and a funeral speaker. In each of the twelve films, the protagonist speaks in monologues which are collages of manifesto texts. The Australian actress Cate Blanchett plays the main character in every scene. In working with the continually re-imagined face of the protagonist, the camerawork reminds one of the classical iconography of portraiture by emphasizing the person’s characteristic traits (see Fig. 1). As the face is often shown in close-up, it turns into a scene of the transference of image and text—of visual roleplay and a manifest concept of art—and thus dissolves the traditional alliance between the portrait and the representation of character. This intermedial presentation of the face suggests the mechanisms at play when texts, not people, are “given a face” through the cinematic representation of a face.2 (Fig. 2) The installation defines a space where the medium of film is used to induce the audience to move through the room. Through their own movement, the observers feel themselves involved in the performative art form of the exhibited films. In each of the 2 Manifesto: A Film by Julian Rosefeldt (Germany, 2017). The film version played in European arthouse cinemas in the autumn of 2017. Manifesto was supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and produced in cooperation with Bayerischer Rundfunk. The project was filmed in Berlin from December 9–22, 2014. The film was awarded the German Film Prize in 2017. The first exhibition of the 13-part film installation took place on February 9, 2015 in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. The German premiere took place on February 9, 2016 in the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin. Further exhibition locations included the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Taidehalli Helsinki, the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the Villa Stuck in Munich, and many other locations.

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Fig. 1: Poster for the installation Manifesto.

twelve roles, text collages from historical and contemporary art manifestoes become the main characters’ monologues. On a textual level, it is significant that a wealth of heterogeneous manifestoes from diverse historical periods are assembled into monologues for the respective protagonist—no less than sixty different art manifestoes are included. Cate Blanchett, in accordance with her different roles, articulates the texts in ways typical of the respective career and genre, and with different social and regional accents (the conservative Christian housewife’s Southern drawl, the punk woman’s London cockney, etc.). Walking from one film to the next, the installation observers/visitors are drawn to the individual films, becoming more and more immersed. At the same time, the spatial arrangement of the film screens always allows a partial visual and acoustic

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Fig. 2: Manifesto: Official Installation View, The Armory Show, New York.

perception of the other stations. In moving from scene to scene, the spectator perceives both the films as individual audio-visual events and the simultaneous presence of multiple media. In contrast to a cinema, the audience’s autonomous movement through the room enables an individualized guiding of attention. This becomes particularly significant when contrasted with the often imperative rhetoric of the manifestoes. Yet another moment joins in the audio-visual event of the films: the independently-running films are each synchronized with each other during one specific passage. At this point, the protagonist, in a close-up, directs her eyes straight into the camera and rhythmically intones the text. This obviously violates classical film conventions, which include avoiding a direct glance by the actor into the camera. (Traditionally, this glance would be used only as a conspicuous dramaturgical move.) At the same time, this sequence of simultaneous intonation is a break in the illusion of each respective film sequence. Blanchett uses a different tone for her rhythmic speaking in each of the twelve films, resulting in a twelvefold accord and the spatial and acoustic impression of choral song. After this short interval, all

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of the films return to their intradiegetic narrative level and the actress returns to her role-specific speaking voice. Each of the twelve film scenes, with the exception of the introductory thirteenth film, is dedicated to a different set of manifestoes. This is one of the striking methods of Manifesto: the assembled manifesto texts do not relate in either content or reference to the setting of the film scenes, nor to the role of the protagonist or other characters. Instead, Rosefeldt transfers these into various specific locations and social and aesthetic contexts. As already mentioned, the visual element connecting all of the film scenes is lead actress Cate Blanchett’s face. Although this face undergoes transformation through the change of masks—even to the point of unrecognizability—we remain able to recognize it not least because this face has become iconic through popular films, theater, and advertisements. As a key iconic, visual, expressive, and performative element of the exhibition, Cate Blanchett’s face makes an essential contribution to the continuity of Manifesto as a work of art.3 As viewers, we certainly know whom we see on the screen in front of us. This background knowledge is actively incorporated into the transference events of the artwork itself, for the figuration and defiguration of this face takes place within the film and the presentation of texts with one (and through one) face.

3 For more on the relationship between face, mask, and portrait, and on the portrait as mask, see Hans Belting, Faces. Eine Geschichte des Gesichts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013). Belting observes in contemporary everyday culture a “hidden interplay between prominent faces which the media continually brings into circulation and the anonymous faces of the masses” (p. 215, translated by Brian Alkire). Rosefeldt’s installation also plays with a “prominent face,” but his installation does not seek to engage with the iconic faces of so-called celebrity culture, instead accentuating the variants of the masks fundamentally as an enabling of speaking and roles. This fundamental dimension is activated in the artwork in the movement of transference from manifesto texts to everyday (film) scenes.

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Fig. 3: Blanchett as Clochard.

Art manifestos—rhetorical gestures Most art manifestoes are characterized by a concise rhetorical gesture: they address their audience directly; they are appellative, demonstrative, action-oriented, confrontational. Art manifestoes often do not shy away from glorifying machines, weapons, and war, lending to the artist’s perspective a socially revolutionary and even bellicose character. A very succinct example of this can be found in Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto or in the Surrealist manifestoes of Breton. Anna-Catharina Gebbers and Udo Kittelmann explain: The affirmative nature of their language, their apodictic imperative style, their declamatory tone, […] hyperbole and superlatives, […] are all intended to serve an appellative function and […] create an emotional impact.4

4 Anna-Catharina Gebbers and Udo Kittelmann, “To Give Visible Action to Words,” in Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 85.

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Regardless of their social and aesthetic orientation, regardless of which art movement they belong to or establish, manifestoes repeatedly insist on a strong self-positioning in art, in the times, in history, and in society. They introduce a rupture; they present themselves as a disruption with reference to the past and future. Manifestoes fully discard that which has been made and thought up to the present. With them, the authors and artists present themselves as being able to practice from now on a new artistic action unburdened by the past. In this sense, disruption is always accompanied by a phantasmatic double orientation: manifestoes call for an end to an obsolete past while simultaneously proclaiming and opening up an artistic future exclusively oriented towards their principles.5 Even if these proclamations are frequently pragmatic and action-oriented, they assume a theoretical stance by formulating a historical position, an a priori of future art, and drawing out a consequence, understood as an imperative, from this position. Rosefeldt’s aesthetics of transference has a different attitude toward the manifesto. He makes use of scene, performance, staging, and spectacle, and draws our attention to nothing less than the fluidity and contingency of these concepts of art in the moment of transference. Manifesto begins with a quote from the very manifesto which would have a decisive influence on almost all future manifestoes, including artistic ones: the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in 1848. The Communist Manifesto may be regarded as the prototypical historical model; it sets the tone, the rhetoric, and the action-oriented nature of future manifestoes. The short introduction to Manifesto shows a burning fuse accompanied by a background voice quoting: “All that is solid melts into air”—from the first chapter of the

5 See Alex Danchev, ed., 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists (London: Penguin, 2011).

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Communist Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians.”6 A fierce attitude, associated with a gesture towards a radical new beginning, a devastating critique of the old order, sets the stage for the powerful self-determination and self-invention of the artist. This always occurs in the light of the new, the unprecedented, or previously unthought of. As many manifestoes, above all Futurist and Surrealist manifestoes, are closely connected to political and artistic utopias, they are prone to the characteristic impatient and aggressive tone of “angry young men.” In André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, we read: Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: […] Surrealism is the “invisible ray” which will one day enable us to win over our opponents.7 In 1909, Marinetti established artists’ standards of self-positioning with formulations like: We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialist, self-serving cowardice. […] Art, indeed, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice. […] We have understood! … Our sharp duplicitous intelligence tells us that we are the sum total and extension of our forebears.8 6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (London: Workers’ Educational Association, 1848). The first edition was published in German and anonymously. A facsimilie is available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/fs1/object/display/bsb10859626_00001.html (accessed 28.10.2018). 7 André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, pp. 241–250; here p. 247 and 249f. 8 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909), in Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, pp. 4–8; here pp. 5, 7, 8.

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The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, published in 1910, shares the view that the old institutions of viewing and transmitting art should be destroyed: With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will: […] regard art critics as useless and dangerous.9 Academics, and especially university professors, have a particularly poor status for many manifesto writers: […] because we wish to free our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archeologists, tour guides and antiquarians.10 No! No! Do not believe that we will ever return to you with phrases of love: comrades, brothers, you traditional plaster heads, dull professors, alcohol-drained civil servants’ brains, contaminated dermatologists and shrinks: No! we hate, hate, hate you!11 Alongside their radical action-oriented nature, even the gesture of refusal and non-action is suffused with what Tom Wolfe appropriately called the “radical chic” of the new beginning:12

9 Umberto Boccioni et al., Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910), in Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, pp. 10–13; here p.12. The manifesto was signed by the following artists: Umberto Boccioni (Milan), Carlo Dalmazzo Carrà (Milan), Luigi Russolo (Milan), Giacomo Balla (Rome), Gino Severini (Paris). 10 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909), in Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. 6. 11 Yvan Goll, Zenitistisches Manifest (1921), in Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, eds., Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen Avantgarde 1908–1932 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), p. 254. Translation by Barbara Naumann. 12 Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, pp. 27–56.

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“Why are you writing a manifesto?” you scream at me. I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.13

Excursus: Texting the face, Lavater Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments represent a significant moment in the history of the relationship between face and text, and also in the history of the “readability hypothesis” of the face. For our purposes, it suffices to recall that Lavater’s goal was to systematize the readability of the human face. His starting point was a “certain experiential truth” according to which an “analogical character” between the “nerves and fibers or the heart and the head” emerges, and in such a way that physiognomic details can reveal the connection between “the blood in the head and the blood in the heart.”14 Lavater’s endeavor to draw direct conclusions from physiognomy to human character in the sense of a unifying interpretation of the human face is grounded to a not inconsiderable degree in his religiously- and metaphysically-influenced conviction that the face of God can be found in the face of the human person.15 Lavater conceived of physiognomy as an Enlightenment undertaking, although he continually sought to bring it into harmony with his religious convictions and his office as a Christian, Protestant pastor. In this tension, he makes claims about nothing less than the “truth” of the human person: to 13 Philippe Soupault, Littérature et le reste (1919–1931). Quoted in English in Rosefeld, Manifesto, p. 5: “I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.” 14 Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe. Eine Auswahl mit 101 Bildern, ed. Christoph Siegrist (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1984), p. 29. Translation by Barbara Naumann. 15 See Karl Pestalozzi and Horst Weigelt, eds., Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, Bd. 31: Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen, Zugänge zu Johann Kaspar Lavater (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994); Johann Caspar Lavater: das Antlitz, eine Obsession (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 2001).

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discover this and to move systematically from the external appearance of persons to their “truth,” Lavater sees himself as no longer bound to the refined portraiture of his time, although he appreciated successful portraits. For him, visual media of varying quality (and produced with various technologies) would suffice, like silhouettes, profiles, engravings of paintings, often copies of copies. If we conceive of Lavater’s epistemological interest in a unifying reading of the human face as a both dubious and nowclassic position among the various facial readability hypotheses, we may also say that he undertook an act of texting the face. He sought a systematic way of reading the face, to create a text from a face. Julian Rosefeldt’s treatment of the face is different, and in fact the exact opposite: in the Manifesto installation, Rosefeldt confronts the text with faces that have no causative relationship to the meaning of the text; he informs the text with a face: facing the text.

Decontextualization, performance, dissonance Rosefeldt concentrates in particular on the decision-oriented and authoritative gesture of the manifestoes in order to play with it and transfer it to completely changed contexts. In the part explicitly dedicated to film manifestoes, Rosefeldt has a primary school teacher say as one of the first sentences: “Nothing is original.” This formulation, taken from Jim Jarmusch’s 2002 manifesto Golden Rules of Filmmaking,16 introduces a series of statements which the teacher conveys to her class, as if these statements were the subject of a lesson to be learned. (Fig. 4 and 5) The children are allowed to draw with colors during the class period; only then, while drawing, do they 16 Jim Jarmusch, Golden Rules of Filmmaking, http://www.faena.com/ aleph/articles/jim-jarmuschs-golden-rules-for-filmmaking/ (accessed 30.06.2018). Also in Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 51ff.

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begin to act somewhat as artists. But what they receive from the teacher, in an ironic inversion, is a theory of the fundamental impossibility of creating an original work, or even simply of thinking in an original way. The class is urged to repeat and rhetorically confirm these instructive principles, causing them to take on the function of an unalterable doctrine. Jim Jarmusch’s manifesto Golden Rules of Filmmaking provides most of the text for this film sequence. This manifesto consists of five sections with apodictic and imperative principles defining what a filmmaker has to do and allow. The rhetoric of the sentences can easily be associated with the rebellious and frivolous, provocative and self-ironic gesture which defined both the rhetorical and habitual self-presentation of the director at that time: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. […]. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. […]. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”17 By using these guidelines as a doctrine to be memorized by children, they ironically transform into their opposite: instead of letting them “speak directly to your soul,” the children must now memorize and follow an order. As in other film sequences in Manifesto, the adaptation of the manifesto texts to the heterogenous scenery, to situations of everyday life, produces a performative impression. By doing so, it loses the original completely appellative context. Consequently, the films aim at a kind of semantic friction between the textual semantics of the manifestoes, the setting and scene,

17 Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 52f.

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and the main character. The term illocutionary dissonance18 will perhaps best describe this form of sustained inconsistency, an inconsistency that comes across when there is a gap between the actress’s action and what her text actually says. Sometimes slight, sometimes blatant, the illocutionary dissonance occurs as a transfer effect between text and heterogenous scenes. In some of the twelve film sequences, this dissonance develops into something humorous and ironic—as in the case of the primary school class—while in others it foregrounds a potentially menacing and uncanny element. This is particularly notable in the films about a punk (based on Stridentist and Creationist manifestoes), a curator (Vorticism, Abstract Expressionism), or a waste management worker (Architecture)—to name only a few examples. The dissonance becomes especially conspicuous when the ironic and uncanny sides of the performed texts coincide, as in the film about a conservative fundamentalist Christian housewife in the American South. (Fig. 6) Another play with famous facial expressions can be noted in Cate Blanchett’s teacher’s mask and clothing: the face of Mia Farrow in the 1980s (when she frequently starred in Woody Allen films). The teacher’s mask thus in several senses turns out not to be “original,” instead allowing us to recognize “where it is taken from.” Jarmusch’s manifesto was written in 2002; the primary school teacher’s hairstyle and clothing are thus anachronistic, referencing the 1980s. Citing a double image—Cate Blanchett as teacher, Cate Blanchett with the clothing and hairstyle of a 1980s Mia Farrow—initially seems to do justice to the demand of the manifesto to the extent that Rosefeldt “steals from anywhere” in the history of film and cites the iconic faces of stars. Through the prominent presentation of the face and simultaneous recontextualization of Jarmusch’s film manifestoes (and of those of other avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage) in 18 My thanks go to Ludwig Jäger of Morphomata College, Cologne, for this reference.

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Fig. 4/5: Primary school teacher.

a primary school classroom, this film scene also achieves a resemanticization of the texts it is based on. The change is not restricted to the simple emergence of a new work in another medium with a film about a primary school class. It does not merely mark the change of medium. What we see is a cheerful, even funny everyday scene. Statements from film theory with

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revolutionary demands and a dogmatic gesture are turned into a film with minimal narrative elements. While the dogmatic core of the manifestoes does remain in the teacher’s speech, the film scene as a whole enters into performative and illocutionary conflict with it. A novelty appears here: it is incorporated in the friendly face of the teacher, in the pedagogical address, the child-friendly, unaggressive, even G-rated atmosphere. Jarmusch’s manifesto, in contrast, firmly adheres to its initial statement: “I am at war with my time.”19 But the film scene, like the class period, flows along easily. No one here is at war, and the continuity of the scene is not interrupted by the break or disruption which the revolutionary gesture of the manifesto requires. The doctrinal character of the text is given an opposing perspective, the cheerful, fluid performance, where an ironic break emerges between what the teacher says and the childlike context in which she says it. (Fig. 4/5) An even more suggestive effect can be found in Rosefeldt’s recontextualization of Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 “Pop Art” manifesto.20 Sitting together with her conservative Southern family, socially and regionally identifiable through their accent and the strict arrangement of their communal lunch (“Lunch is ready!”), Cate Blanchett speaks the following sentences of ­Oldenburg like a Christian meal prayer: I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all. I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals. 19 Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 54. 20 Claes Oldenburg, “I Am For an Art…” Environments, Situations, Spaces (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961), reprinted in an expanded version in Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams, eds., Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theatre (1962) (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), pp. 39–42.

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Fig. 6: Housewife.

Saying grace is a ritual. For the children, it becomes a particularly agonizing exercise in patience. The film shows the family deeply embedded in a tradition which in itself has no provocative characteristics. (Fig. 7) The mother’s face with its out-offashion glasses serves to express piety and a strong demand for self-control and obedience to tradition. Oldenburg’s text, in contrast, almost relishes the provocative gesture. Similarly to Jim Jarmusch’s attitude, the artist presents himself as an agent of radical innovation. He seeks to undermine a traditional, bourgeois notion of art, which seems to him to be associated with precious materials, separate and exquisite art spaces like museums and galleries, and to be related to connoisseurship. He instead seeks to open up an artistic field for heterogenous, unpretentious everyday objects. For Oldenburg, proclaiming “Pop Art” means tearing down the walls between different artistic materials, everyday junk and garbage, between cathedrals and “dog turds,” between art and non-art.

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Oldenburg makes use of a repetitive rhetorical device, anaphora: “I am for an art…I am for…” Anaphoric speech lends the text a liturgical, prayer-like character, even if its gesture remains oriented towards a break in convention. Oldenburg’s irony obviously sets itself against the supposedly petrified arts and their equally fossilized audience. Although the manifesto itself ironically attacks convention, it remains rooted in the discussions concerning the definition of art and art’s pseudoreligious attitude. Whereas a “dog turd” is supposed to function as a “majestic cathedral” of art in the manifesto, the film scene presents the rigid routine of religious practice. (The family dog is included in the scene as a kind of metonymic image, an element creating contiguity.) Here, too, the scene undermines the dogmatic opposition of the manifesto’s formulations. The mother’s prayers like the following are indeed striking: I am for an art that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips …, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum, … that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.21 In her speech, utterances like “spitting and dripping” and “sitting on its ass” effortlessly relate to the family’s shared meal. Overall, the content of her prayer and the offensive language at the table constitute a blatant violation of the norms of prayer and the strict moral conduct of the family. Thus, the film again ironizes the attitudes of the manifesto. It brings to the fore its serious, doctrinaire, and rigid arguments and lays bare their unacknowledged art-religious attitude. In its transformative refraction through the face of the conservative praying mother, the manifesto—which initially seems so casual and clever, so “cool”—reveals its limits, showing its rigid and dogmatic face.

21 Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 40.

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Fig. 7: Housewife and table scene.

Resistance, break, transfer: Facing the text The conventional assumption about the readability and informative value of facial representations assumes that the portrayal of a face communicates something essential about the person portrayed. In 18th century physiognomy, one frequently encounters the opinion that the study of the individual face allows one to arrive at conclusions about person and personality, to read character. Julian Rosefeldt’s installation Manifesto takes the opposite stand: its cinematic presentation of the face finds a face for the text. It masks the filmed face for each respective role and turns it into a scene of transference. In the face, and the presentation of the face, the relationship between image and text, visual role play and a manifest concept of art undergo a change: facing the text. Whether in a strict psychoanalytic sense of resistance or in a more general one, the moment of transference develops against resistance and forces the constellation of the participants to change. In the context of Rosefeldt’s aesthetic of transference, we can identify a significant and motive-generating resistance

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in the disruptive gesture of the manifesto texts. Generally, aesthetic transference ignites and takes place in moments of resistance and disruption. Rosefeldt uses the textual resistance of the manifestoes; he knows how to fundamentally alter the constellation of (manifesto) text and (film) image by performing the transfer into film and into the continuity of the featured scenes from everyday life. The same is true in Manifesto for the relationship between the representation and semanticization of the face. Whenever the protagonist’s face scenically interprets the manifesto texts, it lends them a new, different meaning. The continuity of the performed scene also alters the appellative, hypertrophic, disruptive, and dogmatic character of the manifestoes. The performative, play-like character of the film sequences is the result of this process. Rosefeldt thus dissolves the traditional alliance between the depiction of the face and the representation of character. Facing the text, then, takes on multiple meanings: on the one hand, the observers are confronted with the manifestoes as spoken monologue scripts in a staged setting that originally had nothing to do with the texts of manifestoes. On the other hand, the face of the speaking protagonist becomes, in a semiotic sense, a text: the face performing itself. Face and scene relate to the causes and history of the manifestoes in completely heterogenous ways; Rosefeldt does not allow any causative relation between the two. In their recontextualized setting, the didactic, appellative self-presentation of many manifestoes seems immediate, commonplace, distant from the debates of art and the original context.22 To the degree that the transference of the 22 Burcu Dogramaci speaks correctly of “speaking, acting, transforming. The manifesto as Metamorphosis.” She names three moments which characterize Rosefeldt’s aesthetic of transference. However, the concept of transference, unlike metamorphosis, makes clear that and how the underlying reference texts and forms of representation can still be recognized, which is why this crucial term is preferred here for Rosefeldt’s aesthetic. Burcu Dogramaci, “Speaking, Acting, Transforming: The Manifesto as Metamorphosis,” in Rosefeldt, Manifesto, pp. 92–95, here p. 92.

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texts into faces and scenes works against the dogmatic resistance of the texts, the performative individual strength of the film scenes develops. As the installation poster shows (Fig. 1), the face of Cate Blanchett has a decisive impact on all twelve variations with their various roles (and masks) on the performative character of the films. It is noteworthy that the audience always sees two or sometimes even three faces at once: first, we perceive the role and mask of the respective film character; this, however, remains transparent on the famous and popular face of the actress and on the face which in turn underlies this, the individual physiognomy of Cate Blanchett. At the same time, the individual face continues to shine through all of these masks. It even undermines the widely-recognized “general”—i.e. iconic—face of the “star,” made famous through the camerawork of film. The individuality of the actress is never fully concealed through masks and roles in any of the films, instead remaining in the mode which we could, with Walter Benjamin, call “distorted similarity.”23 Instead of a film celebrity acting, we rather perceive a face in twelve different masks. The artwork Manifesto only becomes coherent through the fact that it does not present twelve different actresses and twelve different faces embodying the twelve roles, but rather one face in all of its masks. This arrangement helps to rework and foreground the performance 23 “Distorted similarity” is a variation of Benjamin’s concept of “nonsensuous similarity.” See Walter Benjamin, “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” in Gesammelte Schriften 2: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 210–213, here p. 212. [In English: Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Selected Writings, 1926–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), pp. 720–722, here p. 721.] On this variation, see Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit. Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), and Barbara Naumann, “Bilderdenken und Symbolisierungsprozesse in der frühen Kulturwissenschaft,” in Claudia Benthien and Brigitte Weingart, eds., Handbuch Literatur und Visuelle Kultur (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), pp. 86–113, here p. 100.

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of the recited manifestoes as an independent element of film staging. At the same time, however, the dogmatic demands and appellative, aggressive character of the manifestoes recede into the background. Rosefeldt’s aesthetic of transference examines the mechanisms at play when texts are given a face by the art of film. In a sense, transference into everyday film settings makes space again for playfulness, for the imagination of locations, scenes, images, and masks. And against this background, the artistic treatment of traditional and new forms can begin anew: not as war, not as dogma, but as self-conscious play.

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Rahel Villinger Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge In 2003, Alexander Kluge published a slim volume entitled The Art of Making Distinctions (Die Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen) containing texts—oral compositions1 and reprinted stories from the Chronicle of Feelings2—which, as announced on its cover, concern a specific power of human feeling. In these works, Kluge aims to “track down,” “uncover,” and provide support for the “mass production” of what he calls the “ceaselessly active faculty of distinction.”3 Now we might consider the “description of feelings as the producer of faculties of distinction” in general as “one of the axioms of Kluge’s artistic as well as theoretical work.”4 The Art of Making Distinctions, however, places special emphasis on one aspect of the overarching topic of feeling in Kluge’s work which I intend to explore in the following, namely the relationship of feeling as a faculty of distinction to an art which makes distinctions.5 1 These consist of transcriptions of excerpts from a conversation with Reinhardt Kahl in the Literaturhaus Hamburg. They were revised, expanded, and edited by the author for the print edition. 2 Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle 1. Basisgeschichten 2. Lebensläufe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). 3 Alexander Kluge, Die Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 2. All citations in the following have been translated directly from the cited German source. 4 Philipp Ekardt, “Gesten vor Gericht. Gefühl und Unterscheidung nach Alexander Kluge,” Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch 4 (2017): p. 177–189, here p. 181. In his essay, Ekardt refers especially to Kluge’s film Die Macht der Gefühle (“The Power of Emotion”) and the book with the same title which was published in 1984 as an accompaniment to the film by the German publisher Suhrkamp. 5 Kluge’s repeated re-compilations and re-issuings of his stories under various titles, in various visual framings, serve the purpose of emphasizing different or new perspectives on a topic. The individual stories are thus able to be read in new historical constellations. In the table of contents of Chronicle of Feelings, for example, the title “Moment of Decision” cannot even be found. This story, which is the

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As I want to argue in this essay, Kluge here endorses a theory of feeling—or, more precisely, a theory of the ability to make distinctions, to judge through feeling—which, in the tradition of aesthetics after Kant, is known as “aesthetic judgment” (ästhetische Urteilskraft). Several fundamental affinities between Kluge’s critique and Kant’s Critique of Judgment are immediately noticeable (these affinities begin with terminology, as for example Kluge’s use of the 18th century term “faculty” [Vermögen]). For an aesthetic power of judgment in Kant’s sense also makes distinctions simply through feeling, without adhering to given rules and without determining concepts through its judgment. To the extent that it judges art, it is further promoted as a “free”—as a non-conceptual—faculty of distinction. Kluge’s concept of feeling also includes both the bodily affect of immediate sensory perception and non-sensory feelings in a narrower sense (e.g. various moods like sadness and joy), without drawing a clear dividing line between them.6 For Kant, similarly, the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful, which is the power of aesthetic judgment, is not only a bodily sensation7 but also the subject’s “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl)8 as well as the principle through which moods and feelings can, without terms or concepts and solely through artistic form, the manner of representation (Darstellung), be shared with others.9 subject of the following, does not appear there, as it does in The Art of Making Distinctions, as an independent story, but rather as Part XV of “The Embezzled Front Theater: How does art work?” 6 Compare a similar situation in Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch. Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), which investigates the history of a specific feeling, namely the feeling of being alive. 7 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 158f. Here and in the following, the original German of Kritik der Urteilskraft will be cited in brackets according to Volume 5 of the Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften: (AA 5: 277f.). 8 See ibid., p. 90 (AA 5: 204). 9 Ibid., p. 194f (AA 5: 317): “[G]enius really consists in the happy relation, […] to express what is unnamable in the mental state in the case of a certain representation and to make it universally communicable,

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Kluge’s stories present us with a similar kind of non-conceptual effectiveness and feeling’s power to distinguish through art—together with all of their aporias. The connection to Kant here is equal parts affirmative and critical. In the following, I intend to show what that means by proposing and developing seven dimensions of the faculty of aesthetic judgment treated in The Art of Making Distinctions, which, as we shall see, form an integral part of Kluge’s theory of narrative: 1. Kluge’s work analyzes the ways in which art (poetry, opera, cinema—and, in its own critical way, narrative) makes a distinction in the life of its recipient due to its (lingering) affective influence. 2. Art can thus stimulate the desire to live differently, for example with respect to time, to feelings, and to interactions with other people—even if we do not (yet) have a precise idea of how this different life might look. Through aesthetically-mediated feeling, we can at least begin to integrate not-yet-existent or (discursively) not-yet-comprehensible or -classifiable events into our lives and into a world shared with others, and to recognize their desirability (or undesirability), or at least imagine their possibility. 3. Aesthetically-mediated judgment is, or intensifies, the ability to judge connections and differences between fictionality and reality. Here we are presented with a potential answer to the question of what kind of “art” is referred to with the selfreflective and programmatic title The Art of Making Distinctions: evidently, on the one hand, an anthropological faculty (an art of living, a Lebenskunst) and, on the other, the critical art of storytelling (which, for Kluge, is part of the art of living). Without fictions which enrich the reality of life with other dimensions, without telling stories, “we are in fact unable to live as human beings”—this is the “anti-realism of feelings,” as Kluge says in

whether the expression consists in language, or painting, or in plastic art.”

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a lecture titled “The Handicraft of the Storyteller.”10 For Kluge, the specifically critical element of the art of storytelling always consists in producing the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction; this is what distinguishes it from uncritical producers of feeling (for Kluge these include for example 19th century opera and 20th century Hollywood cinema). 4. The impossibility of deriving a free aesthetic judgment from concepts can be seen in its spontaneity (Ursprungshaftigkeit), which in Kluge is also simply a volatility (Sprunghaftigkeit)—the how of the critical decision remains strangely open, a leap (Sprung) from nothingness in the sense that the judgments of protagonists in Kluge’s stories often cannot be explained causally, by reference to anything that preceded their actions. 5. In Kluge’s stories, that which is conveyed about the power of feeling is not due to the reader’s being able to mimetically empathize with certain represented feelings and thus feel these feelings themselves. His protagonists’ expressions of feeling are often surprising, contradictory, difficult to interpret, taciturn, or opaque.11 Instead, Kluge negotiates art’s ability to communicate via the specific form of exemplarity which Kant discovered in the structure of aesthetic judgment. In the following, I will thus also be concerned with a form of narration which is composed in such a way—namely in an exemplary way—that the reader sees herself addressed in it and can thus connect with it, although or precisely because that which is represented or narrated appears strange, extraordinary, and possibly even enigmatic, incomprehensible, or unexplainable. 6. In the story that I will be mainly concerned with, “Moment of Decision,” Kluge places before us, narratively and figuratively, the events and effects of an aesthetic experience which opens up a space shareable with others (and takes place via the

10 Alexander Kluge, “Das Handwerk des Erzählers” (“The Handicraft of the Storyteller”), die kleine filmfabrik, 7 Feb. 2012, https://www.­youtube. com/watch?v=medmyVcsMdo/ (accessed:19.9.2018). 11 See also Ekardt, “Gesten vor Gericht,” p. 185f.

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feelings, imagination, and judgment of a recipient experiencing an artwork, which become visible and audible in her expressions—her wishes, desires, disclosures, claims, and demands on others). The representation of this experience causes a doubling of the virtual space of an aesthetic encounter (of an experience of art), while the site of something which is experienced in the first place (the work of art, which is what this is all about) remains peculiarly empty. Like Kant, for whom pleasure in the beautiful becomes perceptible only through the free play of the subject’s faculties (imagination and understanding), the beautiful thing in itself remaining indeterminate, Kluge is also not describing an artistic work but rather the fictional re-presentation of such a work and the affect it produces. 7. Kluge goes critically beyond Kant not only in the fact that his theory of aesthetic experience is itself aesthetically composed (staged, narrated, or otherwise re-presented), but also in the fact that the power of aesthetic feeling is, here, only negatively noticeable, specifically through a failure of its communicability (of Kant’s principle of aesthetic judgment). That to which an aesthetic judgment would, according to Kant, necessarily lay claim, that our feeling of pleasure in this beautiful thing is shareable with others, is exposed in Kluge as an unfulfilled, disappointed wish. And yet the representation of this disappointment to the reader in all of its negativity now presents, in a very general way, something communicable through feeling. The story entitled “Moment of Decision” (“Moment der Entscheidung”)12 demonstrates these seven theses narratively. It begins with a citation from the Flying Dutchman: “If you assent to your father, tomorrow he shall be your husband…” While a complex of themes already appears—concerning love and critical life decisions—the disoriented reader still does not

12 Alexander Kluge, “Moment der Entscheidung,” in Die Kunst, pp. 45–48. (Reprinted from Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle 1. Basisgeschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 816–818). Cited in the following according to page number.

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know that she is witnessing the thoughts of Hilde, the story’s protagonist, moved by a visit to the opera—who is thinking back of the Wagner libretto and posing herself questions about it—and then also, in direct speech continually interrupted by an authorial narrator, the conversation with her fiancé Emil. The story thus begins with confusion: who is being quoted here? Who is speaking? And where are these speakers located? Even subsequently, almost nothing can be said with certainty about what decision—as specifically announced and referred to with the definite article in the title—this story is actually about. Further uncertainties are connected to this: when (in which narrated moment) and how was something decided here? Let us take a closer look at these questions in order. Only in the last third of the story, after the dialogue with Emil has concluded, does it become clear that the decision in question might concern, for Hilde, an entire life; that it is about a decision for or against a life together with her fiancé. Specifically, we learn that Hilde was “disappointed by the conversation” (47) which she had had with Emil after the opera. And furthermore: At that moment, when she was finally able to open the door of a taxi, she had to decide whether she was obligated to consider Emil superficial (not holding her in regard, but also hectic with respect to his own feelings) or whether she might have certain “approaches” which would allow her to go on living with him. Then she leapt after him into the back of the car. (Ibid.) The banal, everyday action of getting into a car now becomes— as emphasized by the authorial italicization of the last sentence—an imitation of the exemplary love plot of Senta in the Flying Dutchman, who “plunges after” her lover “into the harbor waters” (45) to die together with him and in this way to save him. The italicized sentence also literally cites Hilde’s and Emil’s previous conversation a few minutes earlier, in which

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she had repeatedly asked him whether he would “plunge after” her into the “cold harbor waters of a Nordic bay […] to save [her]” (45). This conversation is so disappointing to Hilde precisely because she is unable to believe Emil’s “I would plunge after you” (ibid.): their fiction, mutually produced in conversation, of an act of love determinative of life and death is nowhere near as convincing as the one in the opera they have just heard. Both mutually betray each other because they do not act in the way the lovers in the opera do, but instead only talk about what if—which repeatedly exposes the pretense, thus denying and negating it.13 What we find here is thus, in a literal sense, a repeated dis-illusionment, produced by the intention of discursively determining feelings. And yet: in the titular “moment of decision” described in the above-cited passage, Hilde actually decides, by “leaping” into the taxi, to “go on living” with her fiancé. While Hilde’s desired mimesis of art—the idea that her fiancé, too, would prove his love like Senta—remains unfulfilled, is disappointed by the discourse of reality, the language of facts,14 she herself accomplishes, without being aware of it in the moment, a mimetic act of love. For the question remains open not only how (for what reasons) Hilde decided to get into the car—Hilde is also herself completely uncertain of what kind of decision (a decision for what?) this was.

13 Hilde, who accuses Emil of lying and unbelievability, herself speaks ambiguously and untruthfully whenever she wants to end the fictionality in their play of imagination (“Be honest. It has no influence on our relationship if you don’t do it” [ibid.]). Emil, in turn, also denies the fiction in order to justify his own unbelievability: “It’s not like you’re the Flying Dutchman, either.” 14 “How should I, for the purpose of being saved, come with you out of the dirty harbor waters in Munkmarsch harbor—to name an example we both know well—where we couldn’t even drown during low tide because the water is too shallow, and then, in the direction of land, ascend into the sky, when we both very well know that above us is the stratosphere, and afterwards the Van Allen Belt, and then the airs of outer space, and no kind of home?—You can’t say AIRS OF OUTER SPACE, Emil answered.” (46)

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We subsequently read: “later, it cost her days to figure out what it meant that she wordlessly followed Emil” (ibid.). It is, however, not only the what and how of a wordless decision which remain open here. Differently from how it might seem at a first glance, the story of Hilde and Emil concerns not only a single moment of decision, nor a single decision. Kluge’s juxtaposition of reality and fiction, everyday life and the extraordinary, banality and sublimity has already been much discussed.15 In this story, the many small moments of daily life together, which unwittingly testify to their love and each of which—each of the endlessly many moments of their time spent together—represents a decision for continuing to live with each other, are referred back to the “great” and conscious act of love in a single, extraordinary moment, as described by the opera. Art and life are thus not only (negatively) compared: instead, a complex and interconnected relationship emerges between them which involves mimesis, transference, and communication. We can already see this in the overall subject: from beginning to end, the narration contains nothing other than the feelings of a protagonist who has been moved by a visit to the opera, feelings which are articulated in her memories, thoughts, speech, and affective acts. This is also apparent in the fact that the thematic question primarily occupying Hilde is not at all the question of whether she wants to continue living with Emil. Rather, it is the question of “what art had communicated to her and to him” (47). Over the course of the story, Hilde repeatedly poses this question and it remains unresolved until the end. At the end of the evening, Hilde is extremely disappointed—more so even than before; the last sentence of the story is “Hilde could have wept” (48)—and this because of the by now totally apparent inability of either to decide “whether art had anything 15 For a very apt discussion of this, see Bernd Stiegler, “Die Realität ist nicht genug. Alexander Kluges praktische Theorie und theoretische Praxis der Montage,” Alexander Kluge. Text+Kritik 11, no. 85/86 (2011): pp. 52–58.

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to say to them” (ibid.). How does this inability manifest itself, though? What causes the failure of Hilde’s and Emil’s aesthetic judgment? Let us first take a closer look at the last paragraph of the text, which gives the cause of Hilde’s extreme disappointment at the end of the evening: And so that evening they began to doubt whether art had anything to say to them, were hesitant in their judgment, only because he so single-mindedly wanted to go to the Leopold, and that only because he had promised to make an appearance there. As they walked into the Leopold, no one looked at them for very long. Their friends assumed as a matter of course that they would, as promised, show up. Take a seat, Emil, someone said. Hilde could have wept. (48) Clearly, the inability to decide “whether art had anything to say to them,” an inability which causes Hilde so much pain, is connected to Emil’s poor planning for the evening. It allows neither time for lingering with the “mood” conveyed by the opera nor even for a discussion of it. Moreover, the absence of an affective demonstration of feeling in the everyday world—to which the engaged couple all too quickly returns—is contrasted in the most disappointing way with the desire, aroused by the opera, for more (time for) feeling. That is already apparent in the fact that Emil laconically dismisses Hilde’s questions hoping for the reality of “greater feelings,” only to grab a taxi as quickly as possible. The urgency which Emil demands of her is not reconcilable with her desire to linger with the memory of the intensity of the feelings which were conveyed in the piece simply through the sheer length of the glances (while “no one looked for very long” at Hilde).16 16 “Does that mean that there are no places or occasions for weightier feelings? Clearly art wants to say that to us, answered Emil, who still wanted to stop by the Leopold. To do this he needed to hail a taxi; the

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What art thus emotionally conveyed to Hilde is a different relation to time. The purely quantitative More of time for nondiscursive communication forms (through glances and gestures), which is given to them in art, proves to be a qualitatively felt More of feeling for the observer. In this way, the haste of the opera-goers to get to the taxi stand, which Emil demanded of her, already seemed “absurd” to Hilde (46), completely unsuited to that which she “believes art wants to communicate to us” (47), and that which would be appropriate behavior after the show they had just seen: “The opera seemed to her suited for A LONG BREATH IN THE TEMPO OF FEELING” (47). This expression, emphasized by the author with capital letters, is also the caption under the small drawing printed on the last page of the story which simultaneously comments upon and frames it. The image can be read as a motto of the parable, which is here told, as is so often the case with Kluge, through a confrontation between stories and images. The image likely shows the interior of an old cinema, or possibly a theater or opera house17—in any case a room filled with spectators during an ongoing show. (Fig. 1) This space is represented in a cutoutlike way from the perspective of one of the rear rows. A single woman stands in the middle of the sitting mass of spectators, dispute prevented him. Hold on! said Hilde, you can’t just brush me off like that. She was lingering inwardly with the glance of Senta, who did not move for some time, the glance directed at the appearance of the ghost showing up in the doorframe of the Handelshof, but now the fiancé wants to hurry to the taxi stand to single-mindedly get to the Leopold, where they would meet people that Hilde didn’t want to see because they didn’t fit in with anything in the basic mood of the opera, neither with the ghost sailors nor with the Nordic trade depot.” (46) 17 This indistinguishability visualizes another common feature in much of Kluge’s work: the non-dialectic or uncritical development of the power of feelings through the opera (as leading artistic medium or paradigm of 19th century art) on the one hand and through Hollywood cinema on the other (as leading artistic medium or paradigm of 20th century art). Their distinction lies, according to Kluge, in how a drama ends. While the opera offers the recipient (in this case Hilde) a belief in fate, Hollywood cinema concludes with a soothing and idealized happy ending.

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thrilled by what she is witnessing on the screen or stage, her arms thrown desperately in the air, as if rushing to help the person drowning in distress at sea or herself calling for help (as if she were in mortal danger). The eccentric, even ecstatic expression of her excitement attracts the irritated attention of some of the audience members sitting near her. One wonders whether she takes the world represented by art for reality or is simply extremely moved by the artistic representation. Kluge’s story decides the question which the picture itself left open. Precisely because she has been emotionally moved, Hilde feels the dis-illusioning difference between art and reality more intensely than any of the other people who appear in the story. The title “Moment of Decision” thus also stands for the totality of that which is narrated beneath it: for the exit from the opera, from the world of art, from the fiction of feelings, into the reality of everyday life. The story is about the moment of de-scission, of being cut apart, Ent-Scheidung in German, the division and disconcerting difference between the two, which has become significantly more noticeable in Hilde’s own life through the alienating aftereffects of art—audible in conversation, visible in her tears. The figure of the woman shown in the image which lies under the story like a motto, a woman who has jumped up from her seat visibly excited by the artistic performance, represents against this background the power of the feelings conveyed by art to make a distinction. Standing upright, the woman rises above the mass of spectators, behaves in a nonconformist way—and thus also represents, as we will now see, the form of exemplarity of artistic representation itself. Agamben, in the context of his reflections on exemplarity, notes the particularity of the example,18 which is specifically not to be thought of as one of many individuals, one of which would embody the general case just as well as any other one (and, in this decisive respect, would be indistinguishable from all other 18 I use “example” and “the exemplary” as synonyms in the following.

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Fig. 1: “A long breath in the tempo of feeling.”

possible examples of this generality, namely qua example of the one generality), but rather is itself singular, particular, and thus anything but normal: What the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits it […] The example is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it. The example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is “shown beside.”19

19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 20. See also Agamben’s take on Kant’s concept of the exemplary validity of an aesthetic judgment in Giorgio Agamben, “What is a paradigm?,” in The Signature of All Things: On Method (2008), trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), pp. 9–32.

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As Agamben argues, exemplarity is paradoxically structured. The exemplary stands as an example for something else, something general, precisely because it does not appear as a normal case. By “exhibiting” its embodiment of the general, by becoming clearly visible, noticeable, and thus conspicuous, this embodiment is no longer normal but instead exemplary. Thus the proverbial “perfect example” exemplifies a quality or relationship in a model—admirable, imitation-worthy—but also possibly admonishing or regrettable way.20 With this, numerous registers of the aesthetic are already addressed (exhibition, imitation, astonishment, wonder, pity). The aesthetic is also the original domain of the exemplary in Kant, who, however, approaches the subject in an entirely different way: not by way of the figurative mode of presentation on a public stage (the “showing itself,” or more precisely “showing itself beside itself” of the paradigm according to Agamben), but rather by way of the question of the possibility of aesthetic judgment.21 20 Compare the expression “making an example of someone.” In order to explain to her students the role of the example in Kant’s thinking on imagination and judgment, Hannah Arendt not coincidentally chooses the example of the Homeric hero Achilles, who exemplified the characteristic of courage precisely by demonstrating extraordinary, even superhuman courage. Arendt argues in this context that an example never possesses validity a priori but instead only in the context of a specific historical tradition. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 84. I have elsewhere attempted to outline Arendt’s thoughts on the exemplary with and after Kant. See Rahel Villinger, “Der blinde Dichter. Hannah Arendts Theorie des Exemplarischen,” in Andreas Cremonini and Markus Klammer, eds., Bild-Beispiele. Zu einer piktorialen Logik des Exemplarischen (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2019) (forthcoming). 21 In Kluge, these two paths of entry are linked to one another: he places the history of Hilde and Emil and their questions to art alongside the image of the excited spectator. While the woman “is completely out of order”—causing a disturbance, blocking others’ views—she also stands in her conspicuous behavior for something which the experience of art originally possesses: pathos, affect, the affectedness of the recipient which can, in extreme cases, rise to the level of ecstasy. Kluge transfers in this way an archaic relationship to art into an investigation of its ability to critique, of a critical engagement with art and the feelings conveyed by art.

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For Kant, the power of judgment is the general ability to think, criticize, and negotiate the various possible relationships between the particular and the general.22 In acts of cognition, the power of judgment serves to either subsume an individual phenomenon given to perception—this here—under a given general concept and in this way to define or determine it (determining judgment), or to find a common concept for a collection of new phenomena (reflective judgment). Here, examples function as “leading strings” (Gängelwagen)23 for the power of judgment—biologists, physicians, or lawyers can orient themselves in them; the good, paradigmatic example can guide the classification of similar phenomena (legal cases, clinical pictures); the new example can shed new light on related phenomena, and even suggest the further sub-classification of a field of comparable phenomena, to investigate and conceive of them with a view to other aspects. In all of these cases, however, the power of judgment stands in service of generally verifiable scientific knowledge, in which the particularity of individual phenomena must ultimately (again) disappear, absorbed by their general concept. The aesthetic judgment of taste, however, is also based on a reflective activity of the power of judgment. In this case—in aesthetic judgments—the individual, particular object which is judged to be beautiful is not brought under a specific concept, nor is a concept found for it. Its particularity, its singularity is not erased but is precisely that which is judged in the aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgment in Kant is thus strictly distinguished from epistemological judgment. But how does Kant conceive of the judging activity of reflection in the field of aesthetics, where reflection (judgment) is free and autono22 See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 66f (AA 5: 179). An initial version of the interpretation of judgment in Kant presented in what follows appeared in my book Kant und die Imagination der Tiere (Göttingen: Konstanz University Press, 2018), Chapter III, p. 171ff. 23 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 269.

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mous—and thus not in service of the knowing understanding, of finding, defining, and reclassifying concepts, but rather following the purely aesthetic pleasure principle? What is being reflected upon here and what is the end of reflection if not the discovery of a specific concept under which the particular can be subsumed? Kant writes: Taste is […] the faculty for judging a priori the communicability of the feelings that are combined with a given representation (without the mediation of a concept).24 That which is judged via aesthetic judgment is thus the general “communicability of feelings” which, as Kant writes here, are “combined” with a “given” representation (e.g. through a work of art). That does not mean, however, that an aesthetic judgment is always a judgment of whether and to what extent an artist succeeded in representing feelings. Much more fundamentally, it means that aesthetic judgment is an ability to judge something not through general concepts but rather through a mere feeling; namely a feeling for the general communicability and shareability of that same feeling which communicates itself through the aesthetic representation. Aesthetic pleasure, the basic principle of aesthetic judgment, is a pleasure in its ability to be shared with others, in its ability to speak.25 Kant thus also calls this principle “common sense” (sensus ­communis):

24 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 176 (AA 5: 296). 25 Because pleasure—even the disinterested, free pleasure of Kant— always contains the desire for more, specifically more of just this (disinterested) pleasure, the pleasure of aesthetic judgment contains a desire for more of such a feeling of pleasure which is shareable with others. Here, and not in reason (Vernunft), is where Arendt identifies the origin of the political, the origin of human community according to Kant. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

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[…] grounding our judgement […] only on our feeling […], which we therefore make our ground not as a private feeling, but as a common one.26 Kant says: we make aesthetic judgments only by way of subjective feeling. This is why the validity of an aesthetic judgment cannot be proven and the agreement of others with it cannot be compelled in the way that logical proof requires. Nevertheless—and this is what is so enigmatic, astonishing, and paradoxical about this specific kind of feeling, which Kant identifies as an ability to make (aesthetic) judgments—in making an aesthetic judgment, we always demand the agreement of others. For we judge purely aesthetically merely through the feeling of a shared common sense, through nothing other than the feeling that our feeling of pleasure in this beautiful thing is not private, but shared with others: through a feeling that our pleasure is communicable. Kant also expresses this in the following way: aesthetic judgments make a claim to a merely “exemplary validity.”27 Or: the “necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment [can] only be called exemplary.”28 That means, as Kant explains, that it is conceived of as “a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce.”29 Common sense is thus, according to Kant, the faculty of a reflexive, self-referential and simultaneously political feeling. Through common sense, we have a feeling for the communicability of a subjective feeling: a feeling for the exemplarity of (still) unconceived and particular phenomena, perhaps even newly appearing in history (texts, works, forms, relations), which many others (in many different ways) could connect with and react to and which, in all of their indeterminacy, opacity, and

26 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 123 (AA 5: 239). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 121 (AA 5: 237). 29 Ibid.

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particularity, can be made subject to criticism and thus transparent to something which points beyond themselves, through which they allow our common world to appear in a new light. It is in this sense that the woman in the image which Kluge’s story comments upon, excitedly taking part in the show and ecstatically standing out from the mass of sitting (bourgeois) spectators, is exemplary of the moment when art’s transgressive potential to change our lives becomes recognizable. In a shared world—in the world in which the standing woman is connected to those sitting, even simply because she is in the same room as them and is attending the same performance—it makes a difference. That which aesthetically moves one viewer does not only pertain to her but to many others as well. More fundamentally, Kant’s thesis of the pleasure in the beautiful as a form of common sense, which Kluge takes up and negotiates, means that aesthetic feeling provokes and nourishes the desire, even the claim and demand that it be able to be shared with others. For that is of course the reason for Hilde’s disillusionment: Emil does not want to linger with her at the opera. And for her this reluctance is equivalent—in a highly Kantian sense—to a failure of aesthetic judgment, an inability to judge “what art had to impart to them.” While the piece showed Hilde what it could mean to rehearse a “long breath in the tempo of feeling,” while she lingers with the images of the performance and wants to extend and transfer this lingering into real life by at least attempting to mutually share her feelings with Emil, Emil’s reactions, arrested by the reality principle, cause this attempt to run aground. Kant’s sense of the shareability of feelings in the contemplation of art is exposed here as fiction, as illusion. In Kluge, the world of art divorces from the world of actual life through bitter disillusionment; their difference becomes painfully clear. While the emotional production of Wagner’s opera does not allow Hilde to distinguish between the fiction of feelings and the demands of reality, Kluge’s narrative art uses the negativity of disappointed feelings, the non-fulfillment of

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desire, to “produce” the faculty of distinguishing between reality and fiction. The critique of feelings which is thoroughly positive in Kant becomes, here, negatively dialectic. If the story enacts the failure of aesthetic communicability, then the capacity of non-conceptual communicability, the decision-making power of feeling (including Hilde’s feeling of love) is salvaged in the end in its failure—and through the negativity of the failure itself. For nothing about Kluge’s story appears so familiar, so comprehensible, and thus also so generally communicable as Hilde’s disappointment in Emil’s behavior in reaction to her desire for a mimesis of art in real life. * The pieces in this collection concern aesthetic theory in a double sense: not only in the sense of aesthetics (as a subject or kind of content) but also in the sense that the aesthetic theories discussed here are also themselves aesthetically composed. This in turn implies the interrogation of the aesthetic methods of texts and other works for their theoretical potential: their capacity for thought and their way of thinking. Kluge works with the principle of difference or distinction—with breaks, confrontations, contrasts—between various media, forms, times, methods, but also between art and life, facts and fictions, realities, desires, and feelings. That happens in “Moment of Decision” primarily through a negativity of representation—the representation of a lack, a disillusionment of feeling. The author here makes use—as every aesthetic theory does in its own way, perhaps—of the principle of the exemplarity of aesthetic judgment. Only by way of this principle is a subject or phenomenon presented (“exhibited”) in its singularity or particularity, which is never fully graspable in concepts—made observable and judgeable from different angles. By himself aesthetically presenting his critique of the faculty of feeling, Kluge draws out the last consequence of Kant’s aesthetics: transforming aesthetic theory itself into a non-conceptual, exemplary

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r­epresentation of a shareable experience. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis were already able to show, in direct connection with and following Kant, that the critical reader of a literature which is art must become its second author. In “Moment of Decision,” Kluge brings this insight to a point by going a step further: the aesthetic-poetic representation of the experience of art does more than just amplify it; Kluge also presents the aporias of the original aesthetic sharing, the failure of sharing, which now in turn become shareable and communicable.

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Preliminary remarks: How to read The following remarks aim at a revision of the classical topos of the epistemological power of aesthetics, with particular reference to the relationship between art and knowledge. This classical topos can be traced back to Alexander Baumgarten’s foundational Aesthetica and above all to the aesthetic theories of Georg Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Josef Schelling. I will examine and develop this concept with a view to the difference between scientific “truth” and the language of philosophy (in the sense of propositional speech and discursive argument), and a genuinely constellational mode of operation in the arts which derives its compositional dimension from a logic of conjunction, linkage, and montage. An “operation” of this kind takes place in a sensual or perceptive sphere, opening up that which Adorno referred to in his musicological writings as “synthesis without judgment”1 and which is specifically defined by being at once conjunctive and disjunctive. The “language” of art, to speak metaphorically, is consequently one of division and connection which, in the sense of composition and difference, recalls and reassesses the etymologically-related expressions of κρίνειν (krínein) for “separating,” “judging,” or “dividing” and κριτική (kritikē) for critique and criterion, in addition to θεωρία (theōria). The focus is thus less on the prominent connection—still dominant in Adorno and Heidegger (if only indirectly)—between art and “truth,” and more on the question of what kind of thought artistic praxis generates and to what extent 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993). See esp. pp. 31–33.

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it can be conceived of as a particular, even singular form of thought, in contrast to a notion of thought linked to linguistics, which philosophy has privileged since Kant at the latest. This type of linguistically- and rhetorically-distinguished notion of thought is already present in Kant’s dualistic attempt to systematically separate perception (Anschauung) and concept (Begriff) from each other and to bind knowing to the form of judgement, which is analytically based on a “propositional act.” This has become something very much like an uncritical general paradigm since the linguistic turn and the analytic philosophies connected to it at the latest. Its norm applies equally to those theories which unhesitatingly assume the precedence of structure, textuality, or semiotics. The following remarks may also be read as an objection to the prejudices of the linguistic turn and its implicit dogmas. For when art generates a “different” form of thought, all of these discourses become relativized to the aesthetic in such a way that not only is their validity called into question; they are also continually provoked, frustrated, and evaded by its stubbornness.

Art, judgment, knowledge What, then, does art know? This question was recently raised by Alexander Garcia Düttmann with a view to interrogating their specific epistemological form. For the arts do not produce autochthonous “forms of knowledge” but are instead defined, according to Düttmann, by their particular ability to “exceed” every kind of knowledge.2 Art thus disrupts not only its own selfattribution but also its traditional attribution as knowledge, as a practice of knowing. Art shares this particularity with philosophy, but Düttmann’s intervention applies only to a pre-deter2 Alexander Garcia Düttmann, “Was weiß Kunst,” in Was weiß Kunst. Eine Ästhetik des Widerstandes (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2015), pp. 191–212, here p. 194.

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mined concept of knowledge, which conceives of knowledge as “scientific knowledge” in a public sphere shared by all, a sphere which art opposes with its idiosyncratic excesses. By choosing to insist in the following on the epistemological power of the arts, which appears fundamentally equal to the sciences and must be classified alongside them, we are operating in a sphere very near to Düttmann’s dictum while at the same time being required to postpone his question. It is not the emphasis on the “what” of knowledge, its content, that appears decisive but rather the question of how does art know with the explication of its methods, praxis, and mediality, which, as I intend to show, cannot be compared with the discursive methods of scientific justification. The modes of production of the arts are thus at the same time the focus of my remarks to the extent that they lead to the initial possibility of knowledge. More even that that, this postponement includes the further, even more fundamental question of how art thinks and in what the particularity of its thought consists, keeping mind the necessity of distinguishing between forms of knowledge and thought (Wissen and ­Erkenntnis). The knowledge of the arts asserted with this maneuver is, however, not a knowledge of the kind which philosophy is used to speaking of and which may be posited in the form of theses and defended with arguments; instead—let us add this from the beginning—it takes place in perception and thus expresses itself aisthetically. The difference between art and philosophy or science lies, then, both in the procedures of legitimizing an always already discursively structured knowledge as well as in a “knowledge” of perception (conceiving of “knowledge” here as embodied thought) which possesses the character of knowledge to the extent that it is assigned its own form of evidence. It at the same time touches a reflexive “knowledge” of the aesthetic itself, as it were, a “knowledge of knowledge” of art’s capability since art is also always about art. This does not require communication in the medium of discourse, in the sense of judgements primarily conveyed through language, but rather the presentation or exhibition of these aesthetic “knowledges,” i.e. the t­ransition

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from saying to different modes of showing, which also shows itself and points to itself.3 Discourses are certainly not foreign to figuration: they in fact require rhetoric, and thus aesthetics, for their articulation, but figuration here operates as medium. It is, however, based on the proposition, although it is impossible to make a strict distinction between propositionality and non-propositionality, and thus also between “proper” speech and “improper” speech as excluded by metaphysics: their difference would rather be attributable to propositionality itself.4 In contrast, the arts manifest themselves in other ways and in other media, e.g. in the form of a sensual “language of things,” as Walter Benjamin put it,5 i.e. through phenomena themselves, their appearance and materiality as well as their respective configuration. At the same time the arts transgress given modes of mediation and turn them into new and yet unknown forms of revelation. The question is how the arts handle such phenomena, their arrangements and transgression, in order to evoke the moment of that which is classically linked with θεωρία (theōria), i.e. the view or perspective (An-Schauung), and where, I claim, the specific forms of aesthetic knowledge, which can be also named as self-reflexive knowledge, are condensed. Both, the aesthetic as well as the reflexive, constitute that which we call art’s true θεωρία (theōria).

3 For more on the motif of a difference between saying and showing, see my writings since the mid-1990s, esp. Dieter Mersch, “Wort, Bild, Ton, Zahl. Modalitäten medialen Darstellens,” in Die Medien der ­Künste: Beiträge zur Theorie des Darstellens (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 9–49. 4 See Dieter Mersch, “Nicht-Propositionalität und ästhetisches Denken,” in Florian Dombois et al., eds., Ästhetisches Denken. Nicht-Propositionalität, Episteme, Kunst (Zurich, diaphanes, 2014), pp. 28–55. 5 Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Gesammelte Schriften 2: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 140–157, here p. 156.) ­[Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press, 1996).]

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- - aísthesis, Episteme, theoria By returning to the sources of the classical term “theory,” my intention is not to identify origins but to expand upon the semantic dimensions of the term. If we trace the word θεωρία (theōria), which has many meanings ascribed to it in Ancient Greek, back to its roots, we see that it refers first of all to θέα (thea), “perception,” and secondly to the practices of θεάομαι (theaōmai), “astonishment” and “admiration” with reference to the divine and which is particularly associated with θαυμάζω (thaumazō), the “astonishment” that Aristotle placed at the beginning of his Metaphysics.6 This type of astonishment and wonder also applies to the θεάματα (theámata), desirable sights or dramatic performances which were offered on the θέατρον (theatron), or stage—in fact, we are everywhere here confronted with the same etymological root. The θεωρία (theōria) opens up both the wide horizon of art and that of sight and insight, the word θεωρίος (theōrios) also being used to refer to spectators or messengers who were dispatched to question the oracle. All of these terms thus originally belong to the realm of theater, of public festivities and rituals, just as Apollo originally bore the epithet θεωρίος (theōrios) in relation to the oracle. Only later, starting with Plato, were the terms related in a more restricted sense to conceptual perception and metaphysical knowledge, which found their ultimate formulation in the θεωρήματα (theōremata), the central propositions of “theory.” Even if the emphasis here is always on “sight” and the eye, the general sense of theory has primarily passed over into that which is described as “intellectual perception” (intellektuelle Anschauung) in the vocabulary of German Idealism, which we try to trace back to the chiastic opposite of a perceptual intellectuality. If, in the following, art is shown to be a form of thought belonging to θεωρία (theōria) in the broadest sense, then the intention is above all to undo these narrow definitions and, in this sense, 6 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book A, 980a (21).

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to return to the aesthetic—or the aisthetic—its own irreducible weight in the framework of ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē). The decisive question remains, however (and it can only be given unsatisfactory answers, ones formulated, moreover, in a thoroughly non-artistic medium): what exactly is this kind of decidedly “aesthetic thought”? What is the basis of its particularity or untraceability? And, how can it both be asserted outside of the bounds of discursive-argumentative speech while simultaneously being shown or demonstrated through speech without being robbed from the very beginning of its power or character? The claim, then, is that if a kind of thought, a knowledge on the part of art exists, then we are dealing (simultaneously) with a “non-theoretical θεωρία (theōria),” i.e. a paradoxical non-conceptuality which Adorno similarly attempted to define through the aporetic concept of “synthesis without judgment.” “Judgment itself,” we read in a passage of Aesthetic ­Theory, “also undergoes metamorphosis in the artwork. Artworks are, as synthesis, analogous to judgment; in artworks, however, synthesis does not result in judgment; of no artwork is it possible to determine its judgment or what its so-called message is.”7 All forms of “saying” prove to be problematic to the extent that they include distinction, or the logic of differentiation; we should instead take as our starting point “showings” in the multiple senses of the word “showing,”8 which are based on opening up, bringing into view, or announcing something which other forms of exposition close off. The core of my claim is, then, that there are forms of knowledge which elude discursivization— sui generis modes of knowing which cannot be reformulated 7 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, (London, New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 123. 8 See Dieter Mersch, “Sichtbarkeit/Sichtbarmachung. Was heißt ‘Denken im Visuellen’?,” in Fabian Goppelsröder and Martin Beck, eds., Sichtbarkeiten 2: Präsentifizieren. Zeigen zwischen Körper, Bild und Sprache (Zurich: diaphanes, 2014), pp. 19–71, and Dieter Mersch, “Ambiguitäten des Zeigens,” in Katharina Sykora et al., eds., ­Valenzen fotografischen Zeigens. Das fotografische Dispositiv 3 (Kromsdorf: Jonas, 2016), pp. 50–73.

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in concepts or even discovered in the medium of discourse as proposition, modes of knowing which take place instead solely in and through the senses, through αἴσθησις (aisthēsis) or perception, which is to say through their mediality.

Thinking in, with, and through art With respect to the most general formulation of this question— i.e. how art thinks, or what it would mean to think in, with, or through the arts—what we are of course not asking is how an artist thinks or what he or she is thinking about over the course of the erratic process of developing a work of art. Thought is undeniably bound to subjects who are thinking something, but this does not mean that every thought is simply subjective. We are instead conceiving of thought as an event. It—sometimes— manifests itself in objects or bodies, acts and performances. The idea is that this quality of being an event is also capable of raising, in the interspace between gestures, acts, or things, their specific tensions and differences, with the result that it originates not in an author but in a praxis, a constellation between them. It is consequently sufficient to connect the articulation of a thought to such “scatterings” of “stars” (con-stellare) and their com-positions without giving precedence to an agent or author. Constellations or compositions do not necessarily obey rules or a syntax. Instead, aesthetic thought occurs in the shape of juxtapositions, distinctions, or connections and their “distances”—whether of sounds, images, sculptures, or figures. This also includes sequences or series like tones and silences, the quality of colors or the bodily physicality exhibited in performative acts, their frailty like the conspicuousness of the naked body, or strategies of social participation, as well as the literary practices of the delirious speech, the improper comparison, or of catachrestic excess. As media of thought, all of these refuse to cooperate in their own reconstruction through concepts, just as language in turn becomes exasperated with them. The way of

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thinking in the arts, in comparison to that of the sciences or the practices of philosophical debate, then reveals itself to be forms of exteriorization to the extent that, as Adorno also expressed it, the phenomena or things are “applied” and their “facta bruta” are brought into the tableau.9 And the ways of doing so also transform practically possible understandings of aesthetic interlinking as such. From this it does not follow that art, science, and philosophy diverge in all of their dimensions, just as it does not mean that “the” aesthetic form of thought exists without the diverse practices of philosophical or scientific discourse, and art criticism and its judgements. What is meant is: if there is an irreducible, genuinely aesthetic dimension of thought, then this dimension exists without needing to rely on the difference between discursivity and non-discursivity and its basis in speech, as the border between the discursive and the non-discursive is—like that between propositionality and non-propositionality—itself discursive. Nevertheless, the view of philosophy since the linguistic turn is clear: thinking means “having thoughts” (Hegel) which are expressed in propositions, which are formed into sentences which lend the thought its contours in the first place. Thinking is language-dependent, or more precisely: thought and knowledge take place in the medium of propositional definitions centered on predication, the logic of which culminates in the small yet decisive grammar particle “is,” which performs the determination in the sense of an “as-function.” The “is” and the “as” thus include from the very beginning a division and a doubling, a repetition and duplication through the form: Something is something as “p”—a formulation which simultaneously separates and conjoins the “something” via both a difference and identity. In other words: the “as” functions as the actual generator of signification. However, art and artistic thought differ from these basic structures of determination. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 11.

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Other-than-discursive thought Philosophy thus normally ascribes a specific form of statement to the output of thought as it arises from the model of propositionality. We think in the formats of judgement, which allow us to make and justify distinctions, to put forward claims, to strengthen or reject our convictions and so on. All of these acts or functions of speech—however figuratively defined and delivered—are in service of the constitution of a kind of knowledge which has already gone through semiosis, or the syntax of language and its semantic conditioning. Furthermore, we think by developing understanding, communicating meanings, or exchanging views about the world, i.e. speaking about the world, to simultaneously review and test our desires and understandings against other desires and understandings. Thinking—and this was basically Plato’s insight—is tied to exchange and dialogue in obedience to the λόγον διδόναι (logon didonai) and aiming at ἀλήθεια (alētheia) or bringing out the truth. This occurs by means of questions, models, and metaphors as well as through fictionalization or anticipative trial actions, which is what causes someone like Ludwig Wittgenstein to concisely write: “A thought is a proposition with a sense.”10 “Sense” proves to be tied here in particular to the logical form of language, which is why thinking, expressing meanings, or representing knowledge are primarily considered rational activities—which means that if art thinks, it must think in another way, a way which is not founded on the sentence or the copula “is” or the “as,” and ­consequently remains sensually ambiguous. The devaluation of the arts vis-à-vis the sciences is located precisely in this prejudice (i.e. “pre-judgement”). But maybe the question of what thinking means in professional artistic practice cannot be sought in what is usually 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London, New York: Routledge, 1961), p. 22, proposition 4.

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ascribed to representation (μίμησης, mímēsis in the broadest sense) or conceived of as the product of design, figuration, or fabrication.11 For this purpose, it is above all the works of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde arts which can provide us with an introduction. It is less the figure that plays the decisive role than its resolute defiguration, less “construction” than decomposition and deconstruction of traditional aesthetic categories—just as abstraction or forms of installation, assemblage, and performance seek to fundamentally discard representation and its “laws.” What would be representational about a Piet Mondrian painting or the “protocols” of Jackson Pollock’s “drippings”? And can we really say that the paradoxical provocations of Jasper Johns’ Flags (starting 1954) are exhausted in the exact reproduction of an American flag? What can it mean to be confronted with an Edward Kienholz environment, to enter into it and become a part of it only to be accused in the very same moment of being a voyeur of its design? And what should we think of compositions like those of John Cage or Jannis Xenakis which are based solely on “framing,” on the “dice throw” of chance or the results of stochastic functions, i.e. which follow no intention at all but are rather the radicality of a statement which releases itself in the happening of sounds and silences? Clearly we must surrender the idea of the traceability of art and thought to the modes of representation or the idea and instead assume that art itself, the work or process, manifests a kind of thought, that it formulates a θεωρία (theōria) in itself and that in a different way than can be expressed in a discursive sentence or be embodied in an image or something similar. This sentence is provocative because of the scandal presented by rigorously non-linguistic thought, which unfolds its possibilities solely in the medium of acts and things or of prac11 Kendall L. Walton interpreted the process of representation as a virtual game of “make-believe” where objects become “props” which can mean anything at all. See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as MakeBelieve: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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tices of combination, its joints, associations, and connections, in order to erect entire structures of alternative “argumentations” from bodies, light, material, and sound—“something other than discursivity occurs,” to take up and adapt a formulation of Emmanuel Lévinas. Their content is in no way opened up through translation, i.e. by virtue of transformation and appropriation by the linguistic sentence; rather, they correspond to a validity of their own law, a meaningfulness of their own order which cannot be expressed in any other way, i.e. which cannot correspond to any other form of articulation. The claim is that there is a non-discursive or even non-propositional form of knowledge which challenges the economies of speech—which is to say that there is a kind of thought which manifests itself outside of its own linguistic framings, an other-than-discursive thinking which both remains a type of thought and at the same time is suited to overthrowing the traditional conceptual contours of that which is known as thinking and to pushing them in new directions. Philosophical thinking about thinking cannot remain unaffected by this; we could even prophesy that the aesthetic is in a position to “dis-locate” thought and its fossilized “de-finitions,” to open up new paths for thought or to give it back its “freedom” by unsettling its former medium and its propositional narrowness and simultaneously bringing other media into play. It also makes other things thinkable by following its own formats and in this way relativizing and unsettling the claims to validity of speech as they have so far existed.12 12 Can it be taken for granted that linguistic figuration is the only medium that provides us with determination or meaning? Can we also consider a sculpture, an acoustic manifestation of one single tune interrupted by silences or noises or an image as a medium of expressing significant ideas or arguments? Even more, can artworks serve as discovery of unknown phenomena or aspects of the world—such as the appearance of different color-qualities caused by the use of different materials? The criticisms of science which are intrinsic to the “researching arts,” which enable the conception of art as a type of research on a par with the sciences, can find an unmistakeable model here. See the relevant contributions in Jens Badura et al., eds., K ­ ünstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015).

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Practices of conjunctionality But what, to continue this line of questioning, does this “other” of discursive thinking consist of which cannot be reconstructed after the pattern of the copula, the classic function of synthesis and its power to identify? The following suggestions are composed of two fundamental steps: first, the aesthetic dimension and its medium are not based on the grammar of discourse, even if the medium of the aesthetic is language, as in the case of literature. Correspondingly, signification is not formed primarily by way of the “is” or “as” but above all through the practices of conjunction and disjunction, as expressed through the particles “and,” “or,” “both … and,” “not only … but also” as its very medium etc. These practices extend to spatial tableaus just as they can be formed in time through serialization. Their conjunction takes the place of the copula. Secondly, for artistic θεωρία (theōria)—as distinguished from the aesthetic in general and the “work of the concept” (Hegel)—such constellations are in turn crucial which affect such series or sequences which not only refer to something but—as a fundamental function of thought— refer to themselves and thus become reflexive. That art expresses itself through constellations is one issue; that, at the same time, art uses these very constellations to reveal a way of combining or tying material, things, or practices together is the other. Revelation here is caused by separation through connection and connection through separation. Linking things together by tearing them apart implies the production of distances that allow for reflection. This mode of reflexivity—and thus self-reflexivity— is immanent to artistic practice. Here, self-reflection does not require language; it is sufficient to place the things, their perceptibility or materiality, in such a way that sudden moments of aesthetic self-experience leap from them which relate to the type of constellation itself. When we speak of aesthetic θεωρία (theōria) as a praxis of artistic thought, it is such “leaps” that we are referring to. They induce “in-sights” in a literal sense, which can only be completed in such a way but equally possess the power of, as

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Rilke expressed it, changing a life.13 They reveal themselves to be events of literal re-flection (Latin, “bending back”) in perceptions (αισθήσεις, aísthēseis) which can be as little controlled by the artist, the subject of its “discoveries,” as it can be the result of explicit planning or intention. The first thesis, then, is that where art proceeds via thinking, the praxis of conjunction is decisive, in the sense of compositions (from Latin, “putting together”) of things, materials, images, sounds, bodies, actions and their performances, or similar. The prefix com- (“with”) addresses their interconnectivity, the juncture. Conjunctions connect and separate simultaneously, and even separate through their connection and connect through their “keeping separate,” resulting at the same time in disjunctions. More pointedly stated: that which is connective about them is their difference (Unter-Schied, “placed under [unter] a separation [Schied]”). We thus begin from a principle of aesthetic difference. The praxis of aesthetic thought is consequently fulfilled not in an identification but in that which Heidegger refers to as “Unter-Schied” and Jacques Derrida with the neologism différance, except that its differentiality does not take place in language and its hermeneutics, nor in writing, but instead in the “aesthetic,” the “percepts” (Deleuze) of perception. Art can in this sense be identified as a sui generis praxis of difference. The equation of their conjunctionality/disjunctionality corresponds to the formula 1 + 1 = 1, where we receive three constitutive elements including the plus sign: a 1 and a different 1 which respectively represent different singularia, as well as the + or “and” of their respective conjunction or composition, which result in the newly created 1. The 1 is unique. The “and” thus generates an excess, which cannot be captured in concepts. This is true particularly for all aesthetic formats, although the how—or more precisely the specific modalities of its connection/division—is decisive. 13 “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” trans. Alfred Corn, in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, no. 12 (1987), p. 50.

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Catachrestic “leap” This simultaneously suggests the second thesis: for the specifically artistic epistemology as θεωρία (theōria), as distinguished from the praxis of the aesthetic in general, we in turn require the constitution of a specific constellation, as the aesthetic is more fundamental than art, which is why art conversely turns out to be that which is limited or conditioned and which may also fail. This ability-to-fail characterizes art, just as its limitations also make clear that an additional “criterion” is needed to separate art from non-art. The distinction is based on the specific modalities of a reflexivity which only arises through—by springing forth from—the conjunctional-disjunctional praxis of composition, and namely the form of its configuration. This also means that it lies in the forms of its constellation itself, a reflexive moment which springs forth from it, becoming visible as can be seen in Pablo Picasso’s seminal work Tête de Taureau from 1942 or the Dadaistic Merz-Images made by Kurt Schwitters. While the merely aesthetic normally conceals, smooths over, or clarifies, the arts “notch” (Deleuze/Guattari) the smooth and expose nuances or disruptions—that about them which is “unjoinable”—instead of eliminating them. Put another way: “re-flexivity” in the aesthetic means emphasizing the joinings of its junctures and allowing the praxis of differentiality, its roughness and incompleteness, to appear in the same act of its completion, i.e. simultaneously announcing the frictions, imperfections, or unrealized dimensions and their remains. A reflection of this kind consists in the exposition of a double perception because it also makes something perceptible, just as it exhibits the perception of this perception, the showing of self-showing, as it were.14 In this way, it effects something related to the duplicate

14 See Dieter Mersch, “Die Zerzeigung. Über die ‘Geste’ des Bildes und die ‘Gabe’ des Blicks,” in Ulrich Richtmeyer, Fabian Goppelsröder and Toni Hildebrandt, eds., Bild und Geste. Figurationen des Denkens in Philosophie und Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), pp. 15–44.

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order of the “as”: namely, the simultaneity of a doubling and division, the core of which is the intensification of differences and their contrasts, the model of which could be the “anti-figure” of catachresis or even the sudden heuristic of the leap. If, then, art thinks, it does so in the shapes of such improbable yet risky and at times unfounded leaps, which together “release” a kind of knowledge which cannot be otherwise shown. Stated yet another way: if we ask, How does art think? or What is the basis of art’s specific form of knowing?, the answer is that it does not consist in the increase of positive knowledge about the world, which may in turn be affirmed or denied, i.e. whose truth or falsehood is in question—the purpose of the arts is not to explain, but rather to open up new dimensions which evoke reflexive knowledge which could not otherwise be gained. And that ultimately means that aesthetic or artistic knowledge is closer to the nature of philosophical knowledge than scientific knowledge.15 The “friendship” between philosophy and art, invoked repeatedly since Schelling and the Romantics, stems from this. The aesthetic’s reflexivity relates, however, to more than just its materiality or thingliness, the practices or tools it uses, and thus its medial dimension and conditions of production: it also always implies an engagement with its own history. Art, where it takes place, “ex-centers” its place and moves to another location. The ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē) of art thus implies a knowledge of and by art just as much as a knowledge about art. So when we speak of the specific expressiveness of the arts, of their “epistemology,”16 we are always speaking both of knowledge production in the medium of its compositio and of a “discourse”

15 See also Dieter Mersch, “Kunst als epistemische Praxis,” in Elke Bippus, ed., Kunst des Forschens. Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens (Zurich: diaphanes, 2009), pp. 27–48. We have to keep this in mind if we talk about artistic research. Research, here, does not aim at certain results but at ‘search’ and its sudden findings. 16 See Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics, trans. Laura Radosh (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015).

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of art with itself. Nowhere does this generate an unambiguous synthesis with a unity which seems to suggest the “work,” which is in reality never one; rather, it resembles a transposition of texture, a repositioning of a tangled fabric, an unsettling complex of effects which remains in constant turmoil, thus simultaneously unsettling the aesthetic itself. Its fundamental structure is characterized by ambiguity. For this reason, too, it is not sufficient to present or compose anything at all: instead—and this is what our second thesis concerns—it requires a transcendence and surpassing within composition itself, a reference to something beyond itself or alterity, from which the particularity of artistic thought initially arises—as that “leap” or unspeakable place where, to speak with Rilke’s fifth Duino Elegy, the “tiresome nowhere” leaps “from the pure Too-Little” into “that empty Too-Much […] [w]here the s­ taggering bill / adds up to zero.”17 This change corresponds to Wittgenstein’s “aspect change,” but also to a change in the aesthetic itself. Differently from the discursive sentence, which always falls into a judgement, formulates a conviction, or implies a logical consequence, this change marks that location of the “aesthetic sentence” where its epistemological evidence appears, which can prove to be actual sites of a non-subjective reflexivity. Only once such moments occur does art happen, as well as that which makes up the particular nature of artistic thought. Decisive are thus the respective modalities of conjunction/ disjunction, the form of their construction (Fügung) or conjoining (Ver-Fugung), and my claim is that these can generate knowledge to the extent that their organization proceeds “catachrestically.” Catachresis is a rhetorical term which refers to those rhetorical figures as “non-figures” which are based on irregular connections which enable the expression of the initially inexpressible. This thus concerns an impossible figuration surrounding the speaking of the unspeakable or the representation 17 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 39.

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of the non-representable itself. For this reason, catachreses are often excluded from the classical canons of rhetorical terms for art, with the result that we are dealing with something which undermines genres or forms. They are therefore responsible for a “saying otherwise” or “exasperation” which is primarily entangled in contradictions, in order to create some new, third thing from their paradoxes, something which can only be hinted at.18 Intemperate in a certain respect, catachresis thus refers to the monstrous, which points to a heteronomy the sign of which cannot be given and yet must nevertheless be situated: semiosis of a non-semiotic element, or asemiosis of a semiosis as an indissoluble chiasmus, which cannot be reconciled from any angle.

Conclusion To summarize: aesthetic thought, and artistic thought in particular, does not take place in the form of significations which are governed by the copula “is” and its correlate “as,” but rather through conjunctions which give rise equally to both loose couplings and continual disjunctions. In this sense, we are ­confronted with an abundance of relations—e.g. addition, association, linkage, constellation, serialization, limitation, repetition, interruption, etc.—which are not traceable to the systems of logic, rationality, and their respective grammars but are instead owed to their own intrinsic logic, which unfolds in variable and incomprehensible modalities. This logic is characterized by the paradoxical simultaneity of enclosure and exclusion. Decisive for the evocation of aesthetic reflections, i.e. for a specific “knowledge of and by the arts” and their θεωρία (theōria), is thus the creation of moments of reflexive experience (which may equally be called a “catachrestic” or contrary constellation, 18 For more on catachresis and its non-figurative use, see Dieter Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), p. 28ff.

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primarily articulated in chiasms, contradictions, or paradoxes and defined by its differences, its διἀστασις (diástasis), its divisions or its “confusions,” its διάβολον (diábolon) of opposites in the sensual sphere)—moments which would otherwise not be representable. These are sudden openings or disclosures, similar to the sudden and forceful revelation of the previously hidden in moments of unpredictability. Such openings or disclosures may be referred to as “leaps” which, like Heidegger’s sentence about the sentence which makes a leap, allow us to leap towards something where we have not yet been, which we could not even imagine being. The arts’ form of thought and its epistemological power can be found in this. It would be, however, a mistake to assume that an interpreter would be needed to unlock these dimensions, or that the specific aesthetic reflexivity is a strategy of the artist or even a property of the things themselves—but such knowledge does indeed arise from the potential of the constellations and their relations, the elements and their structure itself. Analogously to such sentences, the productivity of which, to yet again speak with Heidegger, lies in their “showing,” they are not the result of an allegorization but rather the performativity of those connections which they are in a position to juxtapose, transform, reverse, and multiply. We thus return to the beginning of our considerations and to Düttmann’s dictum that art does not produce its own kind of knowledge but rather exceeds it. As I see it, it is the excess of conjunctionality/disjunctionality which enables reference to something beyond in the sense of a leap outwards, through which, however, and to the same degree, a reflexivity can be established which causes the initial mobilization of the specific epistemological mode of the arts and the thought which the arts perform.

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The foundation of theory and the use of figures of thought In the transition from the sixth to the seventh book of Plato’s Republic, we witness one of the most significant foundational acts of philosophical thinking. The sun plays an essential role in the foundation of this kind of thinking, which Plato names θεωρία (theōria) and which is concerned with the highest forms of being and knowledge. My thesis in this essay is that Plato uses the sun as a “figure of thought” which will enable us to gain important insights into the figure’s conception. The focus will be on the interplay between theory and aesthetics, crucial both for ­theory’s way of thinking as founded by Plato and for the concept of the figure of thought. Plato’s foundation of theory is centered on the idea of the good (ἀγαθον; agathōn) and on the explication of its privileged position as the first principle of philosophy, where all theory and praxis find their ground and justification. The order of the ideal state—a guiding theme of the Republic—is oriented towards this idea. Plato refers to it as the “greatest study” (505a)1 and as that which “every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything” (505e). With respect to this primordial position, it is indispensable for Plato’s inquiry to define what the good is and what privileged position this idea is owed. Plato does admit that defining the idea of the good is a ­difficult undertaking. It can be seen “only with considerable

1 All citations refer to the respective passage in Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

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effort” (517c).2 Plato deals with these difficulties not by attempting to define the idea of the good as such but rather by, as he writes, telling “what looks like a child of the good and most similar to it” (ἔκγονός τε τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ φαίνεται καὶ ὁμοιότατος; ekgonos te tou agathou phainetai kai homoiotato ekeinô) (506e).3 He replaces the idea of the good with the sun. With this replacement, Plato introduces the analogy of the sun, the foundational act of theory. Plato places the sun in a relationship to the everyday event of seeing, presenting a constellation of relationships involving light and sight which compose the analogy of the sun: the sun illuminates, giving light; light welling up from the sun is what enables the event of seeing, the sun itself remaining unseen because looking at the sun leads to blindness. Starting from this central position of the sun in connection with the light/vision constellation, Plato introduces a series of arguments by analogy where theoretical thinking emerges in its fundamental conceptual, structural, and dynamic features. In the same way that seeing is only possible when the object in question is in the light before our eyes, a light which comes from the sun, in thinking we can only recognize things with the mind and produce true knowledge if we are in possession of ideas as principles of being and knowledge with their ontological and epistemological foundation in the idea of the good (508c-509b). In his layering of analogical arguments, Plato founds theory on three different levels: on the conceptual level, he systematically associates the Platonic fundamental terms—being, mind, 2 Here Plato raises the problem of the aporia of final justification. The idea of the good cannot be defined in recourse to something else but only through itself. See Emil Angehrn, Die Überwindung des Chaos. Zur Philosophie des Mythos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 100–109. 3 According to Lidell and Scott, the adjective ἔκγονος (ekgonos) means “born of, sprung from”. The noun ἔκγονος (ekgonos) means “child, whether son or daughter” or, in plural, “descendents.” Henry George Lidell and Robert Scott, Greek-English-Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 503. ἔκγονός τε τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ (Ekgonos te tou agathou) (506e) thus relates to descent. Plato accordingly refers to the idea of the good as a “father” (πατρός; patros) (506e).

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knowledge, and truth—with the idea of the good as first principle; on the structural level, he shows the primordial position of the good in theory; and on the dynamic level, he outlines the acts of thinking connected to the fundamental terms, which feature theory as thinking about the highest forms of being and knowledge. It is decisive that the sun, its light, and the connected acts of seeing function as more than a template which is discarded after the establishing act. Instead, the sun, light, and vision enter into the established theory and there continue to have effect. The idea of the good “provides” light, it “is” the source of light, and in this radiant sense it represents the inexhaustible ground of being and knowledge after the model of the sun (509b). Since Plato, philosophy has functioned as a way of thinking which not only works with concepts but is characterized by its light-like quality, even its affinity to light. To this day, one of philosophy’s main interests is bringing light into the darkness with its work on and with concepts—clarifying and enlightening.4 In the Republic, Plato thus founds theory as a way of thinking which is concerned with the highest forms of being and knowledge and which is at the same time interwoven at every moment with the constellation of sun, light, and seeing.5 This 4 The notion of truth as an event of illumination and disclosure also attests to this quality or affinity of light. This event, as Heidegger tirelessly reiterates, corresponds to the original meaning of truth (ἀλήθεια; alētheia) as “unconcealment” (508d). See Martin Heidegger, Platos Lehre von der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1997). [Martin Heidegger, Plato's Doctrine of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)]. Plato thus essentially contributes to the establishment of the Western tradition of thought which privileges vision over the other senses in ontological and epistemological questions. In the context of the sun analogy, he refers to spirit, for example, as the “eye of the soul” (533d), and being is conceived of as that which is before the eyes and is seen (507c). 5 Jacques Derrida also recalls this when he speaks of philosophical engagement with the metaphor of the “heliotrope.” Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 207–271.

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double character is accompanied by a problem relating to the idea hypothesis, which is an integral component of theory. This idea hypothesis, which Plato recapitulates immediately before the foundational act of theory (507b), is founded on the difference between two spheres of being: the sphere of vision, ὁρατός τόπος (horatos topos) and the sphere of thought, νοητός τόπος (noetos topos).6 For Plato, this difference marks a hierarchy in the order of being and knowledge. The modes of being and knowing in the sphere of vision are, because oriented towards the senses or the mixture of the sensual and conceptual, of a lower type than those of the sphere of thought. This hierarchy is turned upside down in the foundational act of theory. Through the use of the sun as the “child” of the idea of the good, the sphere of vision becomes the model for the shape of theory, for both its structure and the dynamics of thinking. Moreover, both spheres intermingle in theory, which strictly divides the idea hypothesis. Fully in line with the etymology7 of θεωρία (theōria), thought and vision overlap: theory is thinking which sees as well as thinking vision and, to the extent that the event of seeing can be considered an aesthetic event, theory is always “aesthetic theory.” This way of thinking, as Plato presents it, is anything but “purely” theoretical. It always moves in a field of tension where claim (the division between theory and aesthetics) and realization (the interplay of theory and aesthetics) diverge. This field of tension is not just problematic with respect to the consistency of the theory established by Plato—it is also a matrix for innovations and new foundations, both with respect to the thinking of theory and to the related concepts and acts of thinking. For the foundational act of theory does not conclude 6 In Phaedo 79a, Plato speaks of “two types of being.” See Emil Angehrn, Der Weg zur Metaphysik (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000), pp. 214–266, here p. 214. 7 For more on the etymology of θεωρία (theōria) and the consequences for theoretical thought, see the contributions by Dieter Mersch and Sylvia Sasse in this volume.

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with Plato. Thinkers through all ages have repeatedly made use of the possibilities provided by the constellation of sun, light, and vision whenever concepts like being, mind, truth, or knowledge need to be defined, placed in a new systematic context, or when the dynamics of theoretical thinking need to be restructured. What is Plato doing at the transition from the sixth to the seventh book of the Republic when he replaces the idea of the good with the sun, when he establishes theory as aesthetic theory and repeatedly brings the sun, together with light and seeing, into play (or leaves it in play) over the further course of his argument? I would argue that Plato is using the sun as a figure of thought. The central question here is: what do we mean by figure of thought? This question is even more urgent in light of the term’s increasing importance over the last decades in the humanities (especially in the German-speaking world), where it is still poorly defined and requires clarification.8 We can arrive at a tentative definition on the basis of the analysis of Plato’s foundational act, a definition which I will attempt to clarify and make more concrete in the following. In contrast to a simple metaphor, where a “non-actual” expression (like the sun) stands for something else which is “actually meant” (the idea of the good), through which the meaning of the expression is communicated, reproduced, sensualized, and

8 This reluctance to find a remedy is also the undertaking of a series of publications: Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit. Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch,1997); Eva Horn and Michèle Lowrie, “Vorwort,” in Eva Horn and Michèle Lowrie, eds., Denkfiguren. Für Anselm Haverkamp (Berlin: August, 2013); Caroline Torra-Mattenklott, “Denkfiguren,” in Joachim Küpper et al., eds., The Beauty of Theory. Zur Ästhetik und Affektökonomie von Theorien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), pp. 59–76; Ernst Müller, “Denkfiguren,” in Roland Borgards et al., eds., Literatur und Wissen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), pp. 28–32. Further literature on the topic of the figure of thought can be found in the following, especially the reference to the conference of the Berlin Graduiertenkolleg on “Schriftbildlichkeit” on February 25–26, 2011: Was sind Denkfiguren? Figurationen unbegrifflichen Denkens in Metaphern, Diagrammen und Kritzeleien.

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illustrated, I understand a “figure of thought” to be a theoretical vehicle which can be used for the formation of concepts, the elaboration of systematic relations between these concepts, and for the constitution of acts and ways of thinking, where these processes of formation are repeatedly performed anew without arriving at a point of conclusion. They originate in an image-related and thus figural material, as in the case of the sun and the idea of the good.9 Over the course of these processes of formation, this material is processed into concepts, systems, and ways of thinking (as in Plato’s arguments from the analogy of the sun), enters into them, and, as a part of this constellation, remains available as potential which is open to being processed further, with the result that the concepts and systems formed and defined by way of this potential can be continually reformulated and redefined. The figure of thought sets in motion interminable processes of formulation and definition from which traditions of thinking emerge and then vanish, are revived and then forgotten, only in order to be reactivated and reconstructed again. Taking this provisional definition of the figure of thought as my starting point, I would like to offer several further aspects which could contribute to the concept of the figure of thought, while constantly keeping Plato’s foundational act of theory in mind. As a first step, I will examine its “operativity.” This allows me to bring the concept of the figure of thought into fruitful conversation with Eugen Fink’s notion of “operative concepts.” As a second step, I will add two further programmatic aspects to this conception which should help better understand both the figural and the cognitive dimensions of the figure of thought. 9 Wolfram Groddeck, Reden über Rhetorik. Zu einer Stilistik des Lesens (Basel: Strömfeld, 2008), pp. 185–202; Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, “Einleitung,” in Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, eds., De figura. Rhetorik – Bewegung – Gestalt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), pp. 7–31; Daniel Müller Nielaba, Yves Schumacher et al., “Figur/a/tion. Möglichkeiten einer Figurologie im Zeichen E.T.A. Hoffmanns,” in Daniel Müller Nielaba, Yves Schumacher et al., eds., Figur, Figura, Figuration: E.T.A. Hoffmann (Göttingen: Königshausen & N ­ eumann, 2011), pp. 7–14.

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The operativity of thought figures (Eugen Fink) In Eugen Fink’s text Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology, figures of thought are not an explicit matter of discussion.10 But with the concept of “operativity,” he describes a central characteristic which can be fruitfully read together with the concept of the thought figure. What does Fink mean by operative concepts? His remarks begin with the difference between thematic and operative concepts. Thematic concepts are concepts in the usual sense of the word, where all possible content is fixed and defined.11 Operative concepts, in contrast, play a decisive role in the formation of concepts: But in the formation of thematic concepts, creative thinkers use other concepts and patterns of thought, they operate with intellectual schemata which they do not fix objectively. 10 Eugen Fink, “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in William R. McKenna, Robert M. Harlan and Laurance E. Winters, eds. and trans., Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), pp. 56–70. (In German: Eugen Fink, “Operative Begriffe in Husserls Phänomenologie,” in Franz-Anton Schwarz, ed., Nähe und Distanz. Phänomenologische Aufsätze und Vorträge (Freiburg, Munich: Karl Alber, 1976), pp. 180–204.) The text is a transcript of a talk Fink gave in 1957 at the 3rd Colloque International de Phénoménologie in Royaumont. The talk was highly influential in France while largely ignored in the German-speaking world. Jean-Pierre Schobinger referred to Derrida’s fruitful reading of Fink: “The talk is a key text in understanding Derrida’s deconstructive form of reading, which he developed in the 1960s.” Jean-Pierre Schobinger, “Operationale Aufmerksamkeit in der textimmanenten Auslegung,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 39 (1982): pp. 5–38, here p. 19. For more on Derrida’s reading of Fink, see Jean-Claude Höfliger, Jacques Derridas Husserl-Lektüren (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). 11 As examples of thematic concepts, Fink lists a number of famous philosophical terms which have entered into the history of philosophy along their creators’ names: Plato’s idea, Aristotle’s ousia, dynamis, and energeia, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s transcendental, Hegel’s spirit or absolute idea, Nietzsche’s will-to-power, or Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity. Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59

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They think through certain cognitive presentations towards the basic concepts which are essentially their themes. Their understanding moves in a conceptual field, in a conceptual medium that they are not at all able to see. They expend intermediate lines of thought to set up that which they are thinking about. We call that which is in this way readily expended and thought through in philosophical thinking, but not considered in its own right, operative concepts.12 This difference results from the different way it treats concepts. “Creative thinkers,” as Fink calls them, use concepts in an operative way as cognitive material for the formation of concepts where the respective cognitive content becomes subject matter. What can function as material in this process is determined by its usability. It is not restricted to conceptual content alone: content of every kind comes into consideration, giving rise to the question of whether “operative concepts” can even be referred to as concepts.13 Fink himself mentions “other concepts and thought models,” “intellectual schematas,” and “cognitive ideas,” thus targeting everything which can be used in concept formation as a “conceptual field” or “conceptual medium” or in the form of “lines of thought.”14 The formation of thematic concepts thus takes place in the use of the cognitive material which provides the operative concepts. Fink refers to this work as operating. Here we see a first trait of “operativity”: operative concepts have the character of a medial dia, indicated by Fink’s notable use of the prepositions “through…towards” (durch…hindurch) as well as the German prefix “ver-,” indicating a process of becoming.15

12 Ibid. 13 One reason for this is that the material provided by operative concepts does not per se exist but is instead always material for thematic concepts as concepts in the common sense of the word. 14 Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59. 15 Dieter Mersch, “Meta / Dia. Zwei unterschiedliche Zugänge zum Medialen,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 2 (2010): p. 185–

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Operative concepts are instruments or tools used to produce cognitive content. Fink accordingly defines them as “readily expended and thought through” and then lists a second trait of operativity, calling it that which is “not considered in its own right” in philosophical thinking. The assimilation of the material into specific content takes place in the formation of concepts, without, however, needing to be thematically or specifically reflected upon. The material becomes, on the one hand, an encountered material; on the other, it enters into the content which is formed from it. Operative concepts are, with respect to thematic concepts, prior and simultaneous instruments: they are the starting point of this conceptual process and that which the process concerns as well as that which enters into the result of the process. With the concept of operativity, then, Fink examines a pre- and non-conceptual layer which precedes thinking with concepts and which remains effective even after the processing of the material into specific content. It is, according to Fink, “metaphorically speaking, the shadow of a philosophy.”16 With this formulation, Fink expands his remarks on operativity, marking the difference between thematic concepts as “clarified, shadowless”17 and operative concepts as “shadow[s] of thought.”18 By making this contrast, he reactivates the Platonic use of the sun as a figure of thought in the foundational act of theory and emphasizes the rhetorical and aesthetic quality of the unreflective and productive “dark side” in this new interpretation. Fink also refers to a further analogical argument which Plato introduces in his analogy of the sun. The light radiating from the sun can be blocked, becoming shadow, at night for example, or due to an obstruction, which leads to the event of sight becoming, not impossible, but negatively impacted (508c). In this argument by analogy, shadow functions as a

208, here p. 201–202. 16 Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

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­ eficiency of light, which Plato uses to (dis)qualify becoming d as a deficient form of being, and varying opinions as deficient forms of knowledge (508d), in contrast to the light of the ideas as the highest forms of being and knowledge. With his comments on shadow, however, Fink is doing more than just emphasizing the pre- and non-conceptual essential feature of operativity, where conceptual thought is only possible through the processing of pre-existent material which is itself not comprehended. He also reverses the deficiency in capacity to the degree that the material provides the possibility of determining specific content: “The clarifying power of a way of thinking is nourished by what remains in the shadow of thought. […] Thinking itself is grounded in what remains unconsidered. It has its productive impetus in the unreflective use of concepts which remain in the shadow.”19 With the term “operativity,” Fink thus has in view the stratum from which definition can emerge in the performance of conceptual thinking. It is the layer of definability.20 The suffix “-ability” indicates both the foundation of “what remains unconsidered” in the sense of a matrix from which specific content can emerge through the processing of preexisting material, as well as dynamics which inhere in this process as a development of the potential in the material into concepts with specific content. Fully in the tradition of Plato, Fink sees this capacity of operativity as equally characterized by a certain deficiency. For both the productivity of the matrix and the dynamics of concept

19 Ibid. 20 Samuel Weber emphasized the relevance of the suffix -ability in the context of his readings of Benjamin. Weber sees the formulation of a sense of possibility there which is also manifest elsewhere in Benjamin with respect to “translatability” and “recognizability.” These are names for potentiality. In this respect, it is the writable hyphen, and not the audible one, which is decisive, which allows the suffix -ability to be linked with highly different entities: “A Bindestrich […] does not bind it to anything in particular and yet requires it to be bound to something else.” Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 3.

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formation remain separate from conceptual thought itself. The multilayered “shadowing” (Verschattung)21 of operativity is a fundamental trait of conceptual thinking, which cannot be overcome with work on and with concepts, whatever content they might have. Fink does grant that this “shadowing” can to a certain extent be overridden, although “operative shadows”22 always remain behind. This makes operativity an almost unbearable fact of conceptual thinking: “For philosophy itself, this is a constant scandal and a disconcerting embarrassment. Philosophy tries again and again to jump over its own shadow.”23 Fink determines that “the central concepts” of Western philosophical thinking “remain in the twilight” to the extent that they are “used more operatively than they are thematically clarified.”24 He continues: “The presence of a shadow is an essential feature of finite philosophizing. […] Only God knows without shadows.”25 Fink also applies this perspective, which opens up by means of the concept of operativity, to Plato, pointing to the interaction of theory and aesthetics in the foundational act of theory. While the idea of the good appears in the “radiance of the sun,” everyday objects are “declared […] to be a mere shadow-image of the idea.” 26 For Fink this means that “Plato took the conceptual means through which he devaluated earthly reality from that sensuous world itself; it is in the sphere of sensuous light that there are shadows. He referred operatively back to the ‘horatos topos’ [ὁρατός τόπος] while he transgressed it in the theme of his thought.”27 In this way of reading, the visual and cognitive spheres merge to the extent that the former is interpreted as the operative layer of the latter. Despite this transgression, theory

21 Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59. 22 Ibid., p. 66. 23 Ibid., pp. 59–60. 24 Ibid., p. 69. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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remains connected to vision and thus to “aesthetic theory.” The aesthetic functions as the “operativity” of the theoretical.

Aspects of a conception of the figure of thought Fink’s remarks on operativity add the moment of shadowing to the provisional definition of the figure of thought as a vehicle for the formation of concepts, systems, and ways of thinking. It is a pre- and non-conceptual tool which is unreflectively used in the endless, inconclusive processes of formation. As such, it has the status of definability and accompanies the concepts, systems, and ways of thinking formed through it as a productive, material matrix and as a driving and renewing force. In the shadowing of operativity, we already notice that the figure of thought possesses a genuinely aesthetic and a specifically theoretical moment which I would like to briefly address in conclusion. This moment aims at better understanding the figural and cognitive dimensions of the figure of thought and thus also at grasping the interplay of aesthetics and theory which has been part of Western thought since Plato’s foundation of theory. The figure of thought has the character of manifestness. It gives occasion for thinking and makes sense because it possesses an aesthetic dimension which constitutes the figural element of the figure of thought. The figure of thought is aesthetic in a double sense. First, it infuses sensual material into theoretical thought through the process of concept and system formation. The process thus does not take place on a purely conceptual level: instead, the concepts are always reinforced and enriched with sensual components and continually interact and engage with them. Second, the figure of thought is thoroughly “artistic”: like an artistic figure en miniature, in that a representation or mise en scène takes shape on its material basis which addresses both the senses and the understanding and allows an excess of sense to be produced. The figure of

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thought should thus be referred to as aesthetic not only on the basis of its sensual material but also its “artistically” processed material, which it provides for the formation of concepts and systems and which enters into them in a processed form. The aesthetic can be found in the material which is figural to the extent that it exists in a concretion whose sensual and cognitive potential can be used for the formation of concepts and systems. The latter do not emerge via discursive processes of definition but rather by attaining representation in the content, structures, and dynamics of the image or figure. The figural dimension of the figure of thought is thus the fact that it is a form of representation whose potential can give rise to concepts, systems, and ways of thinking. Plato’s sun excellently manifests the aesthetic dimension of the figure of thought. It is the representational form of the idea of the good where, in a sequence of processing steps, theoretical thinking is established, the structure of its basic concepts outlined, the dynamic of its thought processes developed, and the foundation of this thought rooted in the idea of the good. But this sequence is neither concluded nor exhausted with the foundation of theory. Plato refers back again at the end of the analogy of the sun to the representational form of the sun, in order to again reconceive of the foundational character of the idea of the good. For this purpose, he reshapes the figural concretion of the sun by moving from an image of the sun as an inexhaustible source of light, whose brightness enables all vision without itself being able to be seen, to an image of the sun as the foundation of all emergence into being and passing out of being, a foundation which itself never emerges or vanishes. Starting from this figure, Plato gives another twist to the privileged position of the idea of the good, to the extent that all being and knowledge originates in this idea while “the condition which characterizes the good must receive still greater honor” (509b). Other thinkers after Plato have also repeatedly taken up this sequence set into motion by the foundation of theory,

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emphasizing other aspects of the sun for the formation of concepts, the production of systems, or the constitution of ways of thinking. They constitute a specific tradition of the persistent reformulation of the sun as representational form. The aesthetic dimension imprints and provides a sensual-artistic foundation for the concepts and systems formed with the figures of thought. It also provides them with a history characterized by the continual movement, renewal, and change of thinking with its concepts and systems. On the basis of its aesthetic dimension, the figural element of the figure of thought causes a specific kind of ambivalent thinking. As theoretical vehicles, figures of thought help in forming concepts where thought determines and defines its own content. Its function of definability lends them an affirmative character. As pre- and non-conceptual tools, figures of thought remain, however, notably indeterminate. That is the basis of their negativity. As a tool, they enable definition without themselves being defined. An irresolvable indeterminacy remains: a surplus, a capacity, something unclear, incoherent, something disorderly, unstructured, something resistant or incongruous which cannot be defined by a concept or brought into a system. This lends figures of thought an uncontrollable character which is not only precedent to and involved in concepts and systems but which proliferates and contaminates that within which they reside. In their ambivalence, figures of thought have a simultaneously foundational and unfathomable character for the thinking of theory. They are foundation (Grund) and abyss (Abgrund) in one. Part of their negativity is also that figures of thought do not appear directly or immediately. They function subliminally, as Fink writes: they “operate” to the extent that they themselves are integrated into concepts and systems and to the degree that they provide the material for their formation. Plato’s foundational act of theory is in this respect unique: we can follow step by step how the thought figure of the sun is processed and remains effective, how it impacts and develops the concepts

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related to it, a self-differentiated system, a way of thinking with specific structures and dynamics. Figural analysis is often restricted to retrospectively following the traces of the figure in the concepts, orders, structures, and systems formed by it, and ultimately in all possible strategies. The analysis of figures of thought should, however, not be restricted to the retroactive reconstruction of their material’s processes of development into concepts and systems in theoretical thought. This analysis should also be interested in breaking up entrenched, even calcified formations, definitions, constitutions, and structures, in regaining the potential of their definability in the material of the figures of thought, for the purpose of continually shifting, translating, and inventing the conceptual, systematic, and cognitive elements of theory so that this potential can again be updated and reformulated in each respective present. The analysis of figures of thought is simultaneously reand deconstruction. It requires a doubled form of attention which can be called, in a reformulation of Fink, “operational attention.”28 For whoever analyses figures of thought focusses equally on the content-related specifications which occur in concepts and systems with respect to definition, as well on all factors29 which are at work in the development and expression of these content-related specifications, e.g. the aesthetic-figural in this case. Accordingly, the perspective opened up by the analysis of figures of thought is not foreign to theoretical thinking. It corresponds entirely to its leading interests, although it adds an aesthetic-reflexive angle to it. The analysis of figures of

28 This expression, and the connected mode of reading of operationally-attentive interpretation, was influenced by Jean-Pierre Scho­ binger. See Jean-Pierre Schobinger, “Operationale Aufmerksamkeit,” in Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 39 (Fribourg, Switzerland: Aschendorf, 1992), pp. 5–38. 29 Following Fink, Schobinger calls them “operative factors.” Ibid., p. 6. These are “textural factors” (ibid.) which form an “operative layer” (ibid.) in a text which may be referred to as textuality.

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thought enables theory to reflect on its own praxis of thinking, on its treatment of conceptuality and systematicity, and opens up a space of possibility for its concepts, systems, constitutions, structures, and orders to repeatedly gain new relevance. By founding theory in the sun and, as Fink emphasizes, in shadow, Plato provided Western thought with an aesthetic turn which is repeated again and again. In this ever-turning dynamic, a tradition of thought emerges which will not end with the analysis of figures of thought. Operational attention to figures of thought does, however, open up a perspective on Western thought through which we will be able to investigate the aesthetic potential of theory and the theoretical potential of the aesthetic with respect to the formation of concepts, ­systems, and ways of thinking.

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Sandra Frimmel Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking The paintings in Yuri Albert’s series Paintings for Stenographers intentionally provoke doubt about art. The large format color canvases with their scrawl-like, clumsy, and indecipherable lettering can be seen as abstract art or, if we are able to read stenography, as statements about art. On the surface of the paintings we read I love contemporary painting (Fig. 1), I like art very much (Fig. 2) or I hate the avant-garde—statements about art which consciously play with simple affirmations and negations. Two further canvases are, however, both a commentary on the series and also its theoretical foundation: Incomprehensible in form, comprehensible in content (Fig. 3), and Comprehensible in form, incomprehensible in content (1989) (Fig. 4). Both of these inscriptions draw attention to the reception dilemma of the series: some of the viewers, likely the majority, see the works as abstract forms, not able to understand the text; the others—those few who can read (Russian) stenography—see a text which for them is not necessarily art. The works are part of an extensive series called Elitist-Democratic Art. Yuri Albert began working on this series in the late 1980s and addressed it to both the Soviet public and to international art theory. Apart from Paintings for Stenographers, there are also Art for the Deaf and Dumb, Paintings for the Blind, and Art for Sailors. All of these works not only satirize the classical, oft-posed question “What did the artist mean to say by that?”1— they also stimulate doubt about art through art. It is exactly this doubt which Yuri Albert sees as the driving force of contemporary art and thus also the impetus for his figurative thinking. The question of art’s status as art becomes itself a work of art: “If a work, an action, or anything else provokes 1

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Also the title of a work from the series Art for the Deaf and Dumb.

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Fig. 1: Yuri Albert: I love contemporary painting, 1987.

doubt and discussion among the viewers about whether it is art or not—then that is art, without a doubt.”2 Doubt about what has been seen is also, he argues, that which distinguishes “true” art from “contemporary” art. With respect to “true” art, he claims—Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh for example—the observer (today at least) does not have the opportunity to doubt the works’ status as works of art; in the case of “contemporary” art, however, the opposite is true. Yuri Albert thus attempts to create “skeptical”3 art, art which intends nothing other than simply being art, thus demonstrating the range of thought in figures and through figures. When Yuri Albert began to work as a conceptual artist in the late 1970s in the unofficial Soviet art scene, there was not yet a public for this art. Conceptual art was excluded from the staterun culture industry, i.e. from the official museum and exhibition space infrastructure. The public was at the same time also prevented from seeing unofficial art. It was essentially the same group of friends and acquaintances who had the opportunity to see these artworks, to comment on them, interpret them,

2 Yuri Albert, “Prolog,” in Sandra Frimmel, Sabine Hänsgen and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, eds., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst (Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2018), pp. 11–15, here p. 14. All translations into English by Brian Alkire. 3 See Yuri Albert, “Facebook-Einträge 2012–2018. Auswahl,” in Frimmel et al., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 259–294, here p. 274.

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Fig. 2: Yuri Albert: I like art very much, 2017.

and criticize them. This led to a situation where the processes of presentation, commentary, and theoretical reflection themselves became part of artistic practice, as well as where the missing audience became a theme and subject of art. Sometimes, according to Yuri Albert, it was enough to simply say what you had intended for a potential work for it to be seen as completed.4 Artwork and commentary combined with each other to a point of indistinguishability: texts became artworks, and artworks often existed solely as texts. In their form, these artworks resembled their conditions of production in cramped communal apartments or the countryside around Moscow: their format was small, made of easily obtainable materials like paper or plywood, easy to store and easy to hide, almost ephemeral. The Paintings for Stenographers series emerged starting in 1987 as a reaction to a changed reception situation. With the start of perestroika, previously unofficial art could suddenly be shown in larger exhibitions accessible to the public. Observers who had for decades, in obligatory exhibition debates and through entries in visitor books, become used to and internalized the values of Socialist Realism—an orientation towards “the people,” ideological loyalty, class consciousness, and

4

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See Albert, “Prolog,” p. 14.

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Fig. 3: Yuri Albert: Incomprehensible in form, comprehensible in content, 1989.

i­dealism—in the form of disputes,5 were now confronted with an art that could hardly be recognized as such, which was at first glance incomprehensible and which they first needed to learn to read. Yuri Albert vividly describes this phase of change: When I started to occupy myself with art, exhibitions of contemporary art were still illegal in the Soviet Union. The observer as mass phenomenon thus did not yet exist. My friends functioned as observers—and I was in turn an observer of their works. The issue was just that no one had had the opportunity to see forbidden contemporary art. Only after perestroika, at the time of the first legal exhibitions of contemporary art, did the first “real” observers appear who did not know me personally. With them arose the problem of a broader public’s “not understanding” contemporary art. Those who grew up with the paradigm of “Art must be realistic and comprehensible” asked us: “We don’t understand. How is that art?” Only a very narrow circle of insiders did not ask questions like that.6

5 See also my text “Beurteilen oder Verurteilen? Vom Richten über Kunst und Künstler im sowjetischen Kunstbetrieb,” in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (forthcoming). 6 Yuri Albert, “Elitär-demokratische Kunst,” in Frimmel et al., Yuri Albert: Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 144–145, here p. 144.

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Fig. 4: Yuri Albert: Comprehensible in form, incomprehensible in content, 1989.

Although the works were now able to be seen by many people, it was still the same few friends and acquaintances who acknowledged and “understood” what was shown. Yuri Albert’s series Paintings for Stenographers ironizes this situation. It produces a new, different “elite” in the reception of art, which is not based on belonging to a social class or to an artistic underground, but instead on a system of signs and images which is otherwise completely irrelevant to art: stenography.

Elitist-democratic art For Yuri Albert, contemporary art is a “mechanism which serves to create a new elite by dividing the public into those who understand and those who do not”:7 Imagine an “average” sort of person who finds himself at an exhibition opening. He sees strange things: more or less smoothly painted surfaces, giant canvases with messy brushstrokes, geometric figures, photographs. People with wine glasses in their hands wander around exchanging impressions and judgments. They seem, in short, to more or less understand these strange objects. They are able to “read” the artist’s message. The average person from the street of 7

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Albert, “Prolog,” p. 15.

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Fig. 5: Yuri Albert, What did the artist mean to say by that?, 1987.

course feels like a complete idiot in such a situation. This was the exact situation I tried to reverse. The “insider” will interpret these works as traditional artistic messages in the language they are used to: Action Painting, geometrical or monochromatic abstractions, conceptual photography. But the “insider” is wrong of course: this time he is the idiot, as only a stenographer can understand these works.8 In Paintings for Stenographers, the initiated connoisseurs of contemporary art who like to think of themselves as an elite are now lacking the requisite knowledge for understanding the works— instead, a group of people normally considered distant from art is in possession of the initiated knowledge. Starting with this one non-artistic professional language, Yuri Albert expanded his humorous attempts to produce alternative artistic elites to other codes like braille, shipping signs, and sign language. “At first glance, all of the works in this series have an effect similar to works in recognized schools of art […]. They look like works of art, and that is very important.”9 Art spectators immediately recognize the formal language of Abstract Expressionism or NeoGeo, for example. But only those who understand sign language can ask the question together with Yuri Albert: “What did the artist mean to say by that?” (Fig. 5). And only those who are in a position to read braille will be able to decipher the following 8 9

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Albert, “Elitär-demokratische Kunst,” p. 145. Albert, “Prolog,” p. 15.

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Fig. 6: Yuri Albert: Is it possible to create an absolutely incomprehensible work of art?, 2017.

Fig. 7: Yuri Albert: How should this work look for you to like it?, 2017.

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Fig. 8: Yuri Albert: I understand nothing, 1988/2001.

questions—as integral components of the artwork—with their hands: “Is it possible to create an absolutely incomprehensible work of art?” (Fig. 6) or “How should this work look for you to like it?” (Fig. 7) Yuri Albert subjects both the individual semiotic systems and art in general, their comprehensibility and accessibility, to analysis. This is only an apparent democratization of art, however, its reception revoked from elite circles and transferred to other groups of observers, as the attempt to break down the formation of elites simply leads to a deceptive understanding of the artworks and to new elites. Who, that is, understands what? And how do we bring the various levels of understanding together? In Yuri Albert’s thoughts on art there is thus a third term between understanding and not-understanding: a “proper not-understanding” which turns the observers into the artist’s co-authors and keeps conversation about art going in a perpetuum mobile. In the work I understand nothing from 1988/2001, (Fig. 8) from the series Art for Sailors, for example, understanding and not-understanding coincide in a unique way in the abovementioned “proper not-understanding”: whoever cannot read

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this flag-waving alphabet understands nothing, but those who understand this alphabet also understand nothing, or understand that they understand nothing, leading to an interpretation where “elite” and “democratic” understandings of art essentially coincide. Yuri Albert’s works thus always reflect the situation of their readability and observation, which the concrete observers must inevitably take an attitude towards. In the artistic work, then, an intentional reception emerges which the actual observer cannot leave out of account. Yuri Albert as artist consequently becomes a stand-in for the observer, and preferably an observer who, as he puts it, “doesn’t like contemporary art and doesn’t understand it.”10

Art as a form of reflection on art Reflection on art, the continual incorporation of the observer into the artwork, and the always humorous interrogation of his own position as artist also characterize another work of Yuri Albert’s which emerged in the continuation of the ­Elitist-Democratic Art series: 1995’s Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes. (Fig. 9) This installation consists of 88 descriptions of paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh from his letters to his brother Theo. The descriptions are presented on the wall as white text panels and the texts are printed in braille. This is in a sense an actual Van Gogh for the Blind, as the descriptions are from van Gogh himself. In this installation, various observers encounter each other, “or more precisely: various forms of notunderstanding,”11 as Yuri Albert put it. Furthermore: The experienced museumgoers are unable to read the texts in braille, but they are probably capable of c­ ategorizing the 10 Ibid., p. 14. 11 Yuri Albert, “Selbstporträt mit geschlossenen Augen,” in Frimmel et al., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 180–181, here p. 180.

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Fig. 9: Yuri Albert: Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes, 1995.

exhibition in the context of modern art. The blind v­ iewers in turn, who presumably do not often go to museums, can indeed read van Gogh’s texts but will misinterpret them as the main event of the installation. Finally, I cannot even imagine how van Gogh’s impressive and picturesque descriptions could be received by people who are unable to distinguish between colors. What sort of incomprehensible images will be born in their consciousness?12 This also reflects the significance of narratives about art in the unofficial Soviet context, specifically of narratives about one’s own art, which, as already mentioned, often constituted the work itself, as well as of narratives about contemporary art beyond the Iron Curtain. Information about art from nonsocialist states was hard to obtain. Some catalogues and books were transported in diplomatic luggage, but first needed to be translated and interpreted. Because the artists were not ­familiar with the conditions of the Western art market, there 12 Ibid., p. 180f.

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Fig. 10: Museum Tour with Blindfolded Eyes, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, November 4, 2018.

were a large number of translation and interpretation errors, as Yuri Albert comments: “The fact that we were only familiar with contemporary art in Moscow through stories, imprecise translations, caricatures, and blurry reproductions played an important role in the development of my working methods.”13 Confronted with this situation, Yuri Albert set about looking for the ideal observer: one who becomes aware of his own not-understanding and thus his own status as observer. Here he goes beyond the Soviet context of his works and attempts in a very general way to stimulate art in the heads of the observers: “I was always of the opinion that art that you imagine or remember is better and more interesting than art which you can actually see.”14 His body of work includes a performance where the participants are thrown back onto exactly this ques-

13 Albert, “Prolog,” p. 13. 14 Yuri Albert, “Museumsführung mit verbundenen Augen,” in ­Frimmel et al., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 188–189, here p. 188.

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tion, the Museum Tour with Blindfolded Eyes (Fig. 10). Over the course of an hour, a museum guide who is able to see describes and explains works of art while the temporarily blinded performance participants attempt to imagine or remember these works of art. The attempt to understand art again produces art: shifted and blurred but significant and legitimate images in one’s mind. The reception process is not just a part of the work: the work is the reception process. The emphasis on the significance of talking about or telling stories about art instead of the observation of works of art causes the borders between art, art criticism, and art theory to blur in Yuri Albert’s oeuvre: “I have always considered the type of art which I occupy myself with as a practical experiment in the field of art criticism, art theory, and art history. And vice-versa: I see many of my theoretical and critical texts as artworks.”15 In his works, Yuri Albert the art historian reflects the works of Yuri Albert the artist through the texts of Yuri Albert the art critic. For him, art is thus always also a form of reflection on art: what remains of art in the narrative, both the narrative of eyewitnesses and in the narrative of those who only repeat others’ narratives? Can one only speak about works which exist as tangible objects, or also of works which only exist in the mind? Must art take on a material form or does the concept alone suffice? Is an artist who talks about works which he or she has planned but not realized a worse artist than one who has already realized the work? In this sense, van Gogh’s letters are not worse than his paintings, according to Yuri Albert: “To what degree does art consist of visual impressions and to what degree is it an intellectual construct? What do you need to know to understand a work of art? Do you even need to understand it? Or is it better for it to remain incomprehensible?”16

15 Yuri Albert, “Predislovie,” in Yuri Albert and Ekaterina Degot, eds., Čto etim chotel skazat’ chudožnik (Moscow: Moscow Museum of ­Modern Art, 2015), pp. 11–14, here p. 11 (exh. cat.). 16 Ibid., p. 12.

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Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes ultimately attempts, like Paintings for Stenographers, to combine two groups into one by excluding one group of viewers (the seeing art connoisseurs) and including another (blind people and/or those who can read braille), which should hopefully occur in conversation about their respective impressions in observing and/or touching the art. It also manifests Yuri Albert’s childhood dream of being a “true artist with a romantic biography like Vincent van Gogh”17 until he was dissuaded from this by the models of Soz Art and Moscow Conceptualism. The installation is ultimately the self-portrait of a “contemporary” artist through the work of a different, “true” artist (who was himself once a “contemporary” artist, however). To this day, the opposition between true and contemporary art, separated primarily by the presence of doubt, is fundamental to Yuri Albert’s artistic work.

The productivity of doubt, or art as a form of reflection on more than just art Who is in a position to make doubting what one has seen productive for engagement with art (and more than art)? In an unexpected update to this question, Russian society is also currently searching for answers. Since perestroika, following the decadeslong hegemony of Socialist Realism, language purists, morality police, and orthodox Christians are attempting to read and understand contemporary art. Each of these groups perceives only one part of art. In contrast to the stenographers, sailors, blind people, and deaf people in Yuri Albert’s Elitist-Democratic Art, who can only partially experience art due to bodily disability or a specialized professional knowledge, the language purists, morality police, and orthodox Christians are limited in their perception by political blinders. They only see what they take for offensive: religious symbols used in a non-religious context, 17 Albert, “Prologue,” p. 12.

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the representation of “non-traditional sexual relationships,” or the use of swear words. Instead of using their not-understanding in Yuri Albert’s sense, which makes dialogue with art productive and allows something new to emerge, to expand the horizons of their own understanding, these groups introduce new restrictions on artistic freedom and other civil rights through new laws based on their not-understanding. Here, not-understanding leads not to doubt and conversation but to a supposed knowledge of how things—art, morals, social order, the relations between the sexes, etc.—are supposed to be. In this moment, aesthetic judgment turns into political judgment. The relationship between art and politics, between the aesthetic and the political, between artistic and political freedom is of major importance to Yuri Albert, as reflection on art is for him always also reflection on society and its political and legal condition. It is for just this reason that his works are simultaneously art and (aesthetic) theory. Artistic freedom is allegedly only made use of by an elite of specialists. But in fact, political freedoms and rights are needed by all. How artistic freedom is handled is in this sense always a symptom of the condition of society—which art and theory in turn react to.

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List of illustrations Klaus Müller-Wille Fig. 1: Text pages from the original edition of Held og hasard; Fig. 2: Cover of the original edition of Held og hasard; Fig. 3: Cover of the second edition of Held og hasard; Fig. 4: Text page of the second edition of Held og hasard. All images © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/2019, ProLitteris, Zürich. Fabienne Liptay Fig. 1: William Kentridge: Parcours d’atelier, 2008, drawing, mixed media, 19,6 x 26 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c und 2d: William Kentridge: Film stills from Tabula Rasa II, 2003, from the 7-channel installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, 16mm and 35mm film transferred to video, black and white, silent, 2 min. 10 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Fig. 3: William Kentridge: Practical Epistemology, 2012, silkscreen ink on pages from Septem Linguarum Calepinus (1746), 37,47 x 50,48 cm, edition of 16. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Fig. 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 5a, and 5b: William Kentridge: Film stills from Weighing … and Wanting, 1997–98, 35mm film transferred to video and laserdisc, color, sound, 6 min. 20 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julia Gelshorn and Tristan Weddigen Fig. 1–9: Camille Henrot, Still from Grosse Fatigue, 2013, Video (color/ sound), 13 min, Original music by Joakim, voice: Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, Text written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, Producer: Kamel Mennour, Paris/London; with the additional support of: Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris; Production: Silex Films. All illustrations: © ADAGP Camille Henrot, Courtesy the artist, Silex Films and Kamel Mennour, Paris. Barbara Naumann Fig. 1: Poster for the installation Manifesto. Fig. 2: Manifesto: Official Installation View, The Armory Show, New York. Fig. 3: Blanchett as Clochard. Fig. 4: Primary school teacher. Fig. 5: Primary school teacher in the classroom. Fig. 6: Housewife. Fig. 7: Housewife and table scene. Reproduction of Figure 2 with the kind approval of James Ewing: © James Ewing/OTTO. All other reproductions in this essay with the generous approval of Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst: © Julian Rosefeldt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018.

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List of illustrations

Rahel Villinger Fig. 1: “A long breath in the tempo of feeling,” in: Alexander Kluge, Die Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 48. Courtesy of Alexander Kluge. Sandra Frimmel Fig. 1: Yuri Albert: I love contemporary painting, 1987, from the series Paintings for Stenographers, oil on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, Foto: Yuri Albert. Fig. 2: Yuri Albert: I like art very much, 1987, from the series Painting for Stenographers, oil on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 3: Yuri Albert: Incomprehensible in form, comprehensible in content, 1989, from the series Painting for Stenographers, acrylic on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 4: Yuri Albert: Comprehensible in form, incomprehensible in content, 1989, from the series Paintings for Stenographers, acrylic on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 5: What did the artist mean to say by that?, 1987, from the series Art for the Deaf and Dumb, black-and-white photographs on hardboard, acrylic, 5 parts, each 100 × 350 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 6: Yuri Albert: Is it possible to create an absolutely incomprehensible work of art?, 2017, from the series Paintings for the Blind, wood and enamel on hardboard, 120 × 200 × 4,8 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 7: Yuri Albert: How should this work look for you to like it?, 2017, from the series Paintings for the Blind, wood and enamel on hardboard, 120 × 200 × 4,8 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 8: Yuri Albert: I understand nothing, 1988/2001, from the series Art for Sailors, inkjet print on paper, hardboard, 10 × 120 cm, A. Chilova, Photography by Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich. Fig. 9: Yuri Albert: Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes, 1995, embossing on paper, mounted on hardboard, 88 parts, various sizes between 10 × 27 cm und 40 × 81 cm, installation photographs from Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, exhibition copy, location of original unknown, photography by Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich. Fig. 10: Museum Tour with Blindfolded Eyes, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, November 4, 2018, performance and photograph by Yuri Albert. All reproductions courtesy of Yuri Albert.

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About the authors Frauke Berndt is Professor of German Literature at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include literary theory, literary mediology (rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics), and literature and ethics (gender and queer studies). Publications include: (with Lutz Koepnick) Ambiguity in Contemporary Art and Theory. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Special Issue 16 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2018) and Facing Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Literary Theory, translated by Anthony Mahler (forthcoming, 2020). Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English at the University of Zurich. Research interests: Shakespeare and serial television, crossmapping and visual culture, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Publications include: Hollywood und das Projekt Amerika. Essays zum Kulturellen Imaginären einer Nation (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018); Mad Men (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015) and Crossmappings. Essays zur visuellen Kultur (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2009). Sandra Frimmel is an art historian and the research coordinator of the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) at the University of Zurich. Research interests: Russian art, art and power/law/society. Publications include, as editor: Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst (Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2018); Kunst vor Gericht. Ästhetische Debatten im Gerichtssaal (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018); as author: Kunsturteile. Gerichtsprozesse gegen Kunst, Künstler und Kuratoren in Russland nach der Perestroika (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015). Julia Gelshorn is Professor of Art History at the University of Fribourg. Research interests: art from the 18th century to the present, processes of artistic appropriation, repetition and translation, artistic concepts of subjectivity and authorship, images of the body. Publications include, as author: Aneignung und Wiederholung. Bilddiskurse im Werk von Gerhard Richter und Sigmar Polke (Munich: Fink, 2012); as editor: Legitimationen. Künstlerinnen und Künstler als Autoritäten der Gegenwartskunst Kunst­ geschichten der Gegenwart, Vol. 5 (Bern: P. Lang, 2005). Fabienne Liptay is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. Research interests: aesthetics and iconicity of film, interrelations between the visual arts and media, format as a theoretical and aesthetic category, exhibition practices and contexts of films, models and processes of aesthetic production. Publications include, as author: Telling Images. Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Films (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2016); as editor:

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About the authors

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015); Artur Żmijewski. Kunst als Alibi (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2017). Dieter Mersch is Professor of Aesthetic Theory and Director of the Institute for Theory at the University of the Arts Zurich. He has been a guest professor at the universities of Chicago, Vienna, Budapest, São Paulo. Research interests: contemporary philosophy, philosophical aesthetics, art theory, image theory, philosophy of music, and philosophy of media. Recent publications: Ordo ab Chao / Order from Noise (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2013); Epistemologies of Aesthetics (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2015), and essays on media philosophy, art theory, artistic research, image theory, musicology and digital criticism. Klaus Müller-Wille is Professor of Nordic Philology at the University of Zurich. Research interests: Scandinavian Romantic literature, avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, theories of text and writing, scissors as an instrument of writing. Publications include, as author: Sezierte Bücher. Hans Christian Andersens Materialästhetik (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016); as editor: Skandinavische Schriftlandschaften (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2017). Barbara Naumann is Professor of German Literature at the University of Zurich. Research interests: literature and the arts (interart), conversation and gossip in 19th century literature, physiognomy and portrait in literature and other media. Publications include, as author: Bilderdämmerung. Bildkritik im Roman (Basel: Schwabe, 2012); Musikalisches Ideen-Instrument. Das Musikalische in Poetik und Sprachtheorie der Frühromantik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990); as editor (with Alexandra Kleihues and Edgar Pankow), ­Intermedien. Artistische und kulturelle Dynamiken des Austauschs (Zurich: Chronos, 2010). Boris Previšiƈ is the Swiss National Fund (SNF) Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Lucerne. Research interests: interculturality, comparative literature, theory of space, alpine spaces, AustriaHungary, and musical paradigms in literature. Publications include, as author: “Es heiszt aber ganz Europa…” Imperiale Vermächtnisse von Herder bis Handke (Berlin: Kadmos, 2017); as editor: Musikalisches Erschreiben. Topographien der Literatur (Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge 2/2017); Stimmungen und Vielstimmigkeit der Aufklärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017). Sylvia Sasse is Professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Zurich. Research interests: literature and performance art in the 20th century, literary and theater theory, literature/theater and law. Publications include, as author: Michail Bachtin zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2010); S ­ ubversive Affirmation (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2019); as editor: Nikolai Evreinov: “The Storming of the Winter Palace” (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2017).

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About the authors

Dorota Sajewska is Assistant Professor of Interart (Eastern Europe) at the University of Zurich. Research interests: hybridity in contemporary figurative art, performativity of artistic archival processes, historicization of theater anthropology, decolonization of knowledge. Publications include: Pod okupacją mediów (Warsaw: Książka i Prasa, 2012); Necroperformance. Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body (Zurich: diaphanes, 2019). Rahel Villinger is Research Assistant in German Literature at the University of Basel. Research interests: aesthetics; poetics; reality, fictionality and the capacity of judgment in contemporary literature; the imagination of animals since the early modern period; nature in modernism; ecocriticism. Publications include: “Gedankenstriche. Theorie und Poesie bei Novalis,” in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (DVjs) 86:4 (2012); “Tod von oben. Naturgeschichtliche Poetik der Einbildungskraft in Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht,” in Poetica 48 (2016); Kant und die Imagination der Tiere (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2018). Tristan Weddigen is Director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome) and Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Zurich. Research interests: Early modern Italian art and art theory, history of art theory. Publications include, as author: R ­ affaels ­Papageienzimmer (Berlin: Imorde, 2006); as editor: Heinrich Wölfflins Ge­­ sammelte Werke (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2019). Benno Wirz is the Coordinator of the Cultural Analysis program at the University of Zurich and Co-Coordinator of the doctoral program “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices.” Research interests: cultural analysis of philosophy, the turn to media, material, theater and politics in thought, sensual knowledge and aesthetic epistemologies. Publications include, as editor: Wiederkehr und Verheissung. Dynamiken der Medialität in der Zeitlichkeit (Zurich: Chronos, 2011); Philosophische Kehrseiten. Eine andere Einleitung in die Philosophie (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 2014); Leben verstehen. Zur Verstrickung zweier philosophischer Grundbegriffe (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2015). Sandro Zanetti is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich. Research interests: literature and art of the avant-garde, literary writing processes, processes of translation and transmission. Publications include, as author: Avantgardismus der Greise? Spätwerke und ihre Poetik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012); as editor: Schreiben als Kulturtechnik. Grundlagentexte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012); Transaktualität. Ästhetische Dauerhaftigkeit und Flüchtigkeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2017).

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