The Protoliterary

THE PROTOLITERARY: steps toward an anthropology of culture

K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS



The Protoliterary



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writing science  Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht



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THE PROTOL I TE RARY steps toward an anthropology of culture

K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig The protoliterary : steps toward an anthropology of culture / K. Ludwig Pfeiffer. p. cm. — (Writing science) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8047-3463-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Theory (Philosophy). 2. Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series. b842 .p47 2002 111'.85—dc21 This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Original printing 2002 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/12.5 Sabon

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For Fu-chan and Wolfgang Iser

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Acknowledgments

This book was conceived and written in many different places. For help, hospitality, and encouragement I am indebted to friends and colleagues at Stanford University (in obvious, though very different, ways to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Helen Tartar), the University of California at Irvine and Santa Cruz, Colorado College, and Kansai University (Osaka, Japan)—persons whom I do not want to name for fear of forgetting others to whom thanks are due in equal measure. I owe a particular gratitude to the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which granted me a fellowship during which important parts of the book gained their more or less final shape. In spite of its manifold origins, the book clearly seems to betray a heavily “German” prejudice. (That prejudice originally showed a more than heavy hand also stylistically. As we know, style is never just style. I am greatly indebted to Bud Bynack for intervening on stylistic and more than stylistic levels.) The book hopes to be interdisciplinary. With the term “anthropology,” however, it presents a stumbling block, especially for American and perhaps generally English-speaking readers, right in its subtitle. In the fifth assumption of the preface I have tried to do something about that. Suffice it here to say that the diversity of human and cultural phenomena, brought into sharper focus by exactly those disciplines that conventionally either carry the term anthropology or in which it looms large (ethnography, cultural, structural, evolutionary anthropology—on the European side one might add historical in contrast to traditional philosophical anthropology), has not cancelled out but rather reinforced a search for more than just historical patterns of experience— patterns shaped but not determined by local historical and cultural conditions. Present-day debates about the violence rampant in advanced cultures provide us with an ineluctable if not so welcome example. Likewise, while general definitions of culture are precarious, feed-

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ing, as they mostly do, attitudes of cultural pessimism or the optimism of progress, an analysis of culture(s) along the lines of typical media patterns does not run that risk so easily. On a more personal level, this book has been long in the making because of the imposing presence, for me both personal and theoretical, of Wolfgang Iser and his literary anthropology. I will frequently refer but by no means do justice to it. Given the rigor of Iser’s theorizing, my book could also be seen as a flight from the enchanter into the murkier realms of culture and media. Finally, two notes concerning technicalities. For various reasons, I have mostly left the spelling and the order of, for instance, Greek and Japanese names the way I found them in my sources. Also, since it is well-nigh impossible in Germany to get at English translations of works written in other languages, I have normally translated all quotations from such works myself. In some cases (Adorno, Luhmann, LeroiGourhan), standard English translations were accessible and used; ironically, though, the available volumes of the Stanford Nietzsche edition (work in progress) do not present those Nietzsche texts with which I have mostly worked. K.L.P.



Contents

Preface: Eight Assumptions Introduction: Speculative Sketches—Critical Theory, Exegesis, Interpretation

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1

Part I. Dimensions: Theoretical and Illustrative 1 First Exemplifications: The Novel and the Self-Therapy of the Medium

11

Wilhelm Meister: The Cultural Potentials and Failures of Theatricality, 16 Joseph Andrews and Painting, 24 The Bride of Lammermoor, Opera, and Madame Bovary, 28 The Maltese Falcon: The Novel and the Film, 36 Provisional Consequences, 40

2 Theory: Trends, Past and Present

43

The Eighteenth Century: G. C. Lichtenberg and Media Analysis versus the Literary System, 43 The Nineteenth Century: Systems, Play, and the Anthropological Return of Experience, 50 Systems Theory: Implications, Historical and Otherwise, 53 Games and Play, 65 Experience and Play Again, 66 Nietzsche, 68 Images of Evolution, 72

3 The Shrinkage of Fact and the Expansion of Performative Discourse The Poietic-Poetic Dilemma: “Drama,” “Audience,” Representation, 85 Tragedy and the Production of Social Realities, 90 The Play as a Model Discourse: Oedipus, Knowledge, and Power, 100

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Part II. Spectacular Dynamics: Paradigms of Anthropological Import 4 Appearances: Shadowy Substances and Substantial Shadows

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5 Between Sociology and Anthropology: Trends, Past and Present

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Ambivalences of Western Spectacles, 125 Japanese Theater and the West: A Quasi-Theoretical Outline, 129 Spectacular Theater, Sumo , and the Labors of “Literature, 143

6 Fragments of an Absent World Theater: “Baroque” and the Implicit Denial of Segment Culture

173

Other Histories, and Their Theory, 173 Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Dryden: Alternative Episodes in Western Cultural History, 177 The “Rise” of Opera: A Logical Coincidence in Media Development, 182 The Operatic Principle Extended, or: From Dewey via Hegel to Adorno, 194

Part III. The Spectacular and the Vanishing Body: Sports and Literature 7 First Steps—Theoretical and Practical

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Outlines and Perspectives, 225 More Examples: A Tennis Novel and Soccer Poetry, 233

8 Symptoms: Exposed Flanks in Older Cultural Theories

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A Brutal Prelude and Its Implications, 239 Schiller: Conceptual Frictions and Cultural Discontinuities, 244 Marcuse: Aesthetics, Politics, and Atavisms, 253 Systems Theory against Itself, 259 Dance in Literature: The Poetry of the Body?, 263

9 Ecstasy, Violence, “Literature”: Early Western Cultures and Codes of Vitality

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Situations and Context Switches: Greek Models, 274 Rome: Culture Complex, the Imaginary, and Sports Reporting, 278 Sequels: More of the Same, but More Complicated, 286

10 The Persistence of the Obsolete Byron and the Romantic Denial of Romantic Maximations, 297 Literary Skating; Or, Culture as Compromise, 300 Nietzsche (Once More) and the Fusion of Plausibility and Nonsense, 314

Notes 323

Index 397

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Preface Eight Assumptions

In the long history of poetics and aesthetics, these two domains in the vague division of cognitive labor within the realm of culture have been troubled by conflicting demands. Concerned with the seeming uniqueness of making and experiencing art, they have tended to accommodate themselves to the apparent resistance to concepts that the objects of art display. At the same time, exposed to the pressures of systematic thought, of which they are themselves prime instances, they have tended to sacrifice specificities such as genetic and receptive particularities to overriding general, but also therefore narrowed-down, interests. In accommodating themselves to the resistance of art’s objects, they are in danger of becoming superfluous. In imposing categories imported from elsewhere, whether epistemology or sociology, they are liable to transform themselves into service enterprises for disciplines remote from the sphere of art. While they certainly cannot do justice to what Adorno called, in his Aesthetic Theory,1 the full aesthetic content of art, that term itself, in invoking domains of the unsayable or inexpressible, may deteriorate into a myth. That situation has a long, somewhat uninspiring, and discouraging history. The question today is whether Max Bense’s demand for a “sensibility of theory” remains an open option, or whether theory must continue to hide its discontents with the habitual authoritarian gestures characterizing even the opponents of authoritarianism. For Bense, any aesthetics is a theory (although it is difficult, according to him, to say what a theory consists of) in which a concrete state of affairs has to be wrested “logically” from affective experiences without being damaged in the process. Even if one holds that modern art touches the mind, and not the emotions in the trivial sense, the touch must be described in terms of “spiritual excitement.”2 The dilemma of theoretical sensibility consists in the pressure to re-

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main close to the empirical destinies of media and media clusters without ignoring underlying, more general regularities, without sacrificing the distancing, systematizing, sense-making legitimacy of theory itself. Is it possible to plunge into the accumulated pitfalls of aesthetic theory, to be trapped in their constructed histories, without being completely engulfed by them? Here, at the beginning of just such an undertaking, it should come as no surprise that the answer is in the affirmative, even though such an enterprise can no longer share the optimism that characterized the scene of literary studies, for instance, before the advent of deconstruction.3 Theoretical purity—provided it ever existed—has become, especially in assertions that it is still possible, more of a liability than an asset. I am pursuing the “spiritual excitement” of a theoretical sensibility by a more rough and ready approach, seeking inspiration from—or rather, manhandling—theories as diverse as those of Hegel, Dewey, and Adorno. What I call “manhandling theories” is not deconstruction. Labels like “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism” play a small role in the concerns of this book. Instead, however much or little they may be explicitly quoted, the disiecta membra of existing aesthetic theories are pushed into directions suggested but not determined by anthropology and media theory, which themselves are more diverse enterprises than might perhaps be desirable. Writing, in particular writing of the type called critical, ineluctably carries theoretical implications. To look at histories of theoretical efforts, however, is to become aware that theory can no longer claim selfevident discursive priorities. Above all, the conceptual or other purity of theory and methodological orientations has been lost. It is doubtful whether, apart from certain periods and authors, it ever existed. Theoretical and analytical writing, then, inevitably will be manhandled, pulled in various directions. The present enterprise, devoted as it is to notions and media of emphatic, if ideologically suspect, experience, will have to suffer that fate with a vengeance. We “all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in theories, and act fatally on the strength of them.” In the sentence, from book 1, chapter 10 of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I have replaced “metaphors” by “theories.” The replacement does not, of course, indicate any preference “against theory.” It merely suggests that the status, the reach and range of theories, like that of intended statements of facts, emerges in configurations of argument. Theories are symptoms. Something—something we cannot reliably grasp—is always lurking behind or below them. Writing, then, produces sympto-

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matologies. It is goaded on by senses (the term is intentionally kept ambiguous) and feelings for the pertinence of theories (definitely in the plural) and the persistence of facts. Something resembling conceptual purity may emerge in the course of argument. It cannot “really” be established in the wake or as the consequence of initial definitions. But the contemporary situation of theory, as I see it, is such that it has become extremely difficult to decide which kinds of arguments are (in)compatible with which kind of theory. In the present context, theoretical remarks, especially those called “anthropological,” will appear as more or less explicit afterthoughts in the wake of analyses informed, but perhaps not completely controlled, by what is called theory. Rumor has it, and reports keep pouring in, that the personal computer is replacing, or already has replaced, articles like teddy bears, manual toys in the old sense, baseball bats, soccer balls, or older types of writing and drawing utensils as preferred and paradigmatic transitional objects. If that is the case, as it may well be, the present work will find itself in a decidedly awkward situation. My position would somewhat, if not dramatically, improve if it turned out, as I think it will, that computers will not really be multimedia-capable because their potential for involving the body or powerful body codes remains insufficient. This book presumes that the rumors are not yet true and that they may never fully come true unless some biotechnological revolution concerning humans occurs. In any case, the book may strike many readers as wildly speculative and sometimes almost transcendental on the one hand, yet haphazardly and unprofessionally empirical on the other. Such impressions may occur because theories and their history must follow their own standards, must claim a considerable if only partial validity of their own. They construe their objects and yet they must be measured against an idea of what these objects, as one would have said in former times, are in themselves. We do not say so anymore, but we are still in the grip of the paradox involved. We are constructivists and yet do not want to accept any theoretically legitimate construction. This is why theories must be respected, but not necessarily in the closed form in which they and their history have been conventionally transmitted. Above, I have described this as the manhandling of theories. In this book, therefore, the speculative, theoretical, quasi-transcendental orientations may at times even seem to oddly merge with the empirical. The book may also seem to treat many of the theoretically and popularly current distinctions in the domain of the “arts” in cavalier fashion. Distinctions concerned with authenticity and consumerism, with high and popular or mass art, with so-

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ciological explanation or the criticism of ideology, all will receive short shrift, even if their relative validities are not at all called in question. Instead, my concerns point elsewhere. There are eight central assumptions underlying the following text. (1) The term “media,” in spite of its fulsome fashionableness, is better suited than the traditional term “the arts” to suggest the direction of an inquiry into aesthetics. In the course of its conceptual and cultural history, the notion of “arts,” from techne via ars and artes, has been subjected to specific interests and to a narrowing of its range. That development frequently culminated in the privileging of “high” and “higher” arts, which, in its turn, necessitated dubious compensatory conceptual compromises (“arts and crafts,” “industrial arts,” “applied arts,” etc.). This is not to say, though, that the analysis of the arts in the narrower or higher sense does not frequently yield interesting results. (2) Cultures need media in order to provide engrossing, fascinating experiences, without which social and private life would become drab and its burdens overwhelmingly oppressive. This is not a unified systematic claim but an assertion that draws on variegated but persistent evidence in many theories directly or indirectly concerned with culture and/or human consciousness. We could think of Schiller’s notion of play—play being necessary for a fully human existence, that existence, in its turn, being a prerequisite of culture. We could think about Nietzsche’s distinction between an ordinary culture demanding adjustment and a culture, or rather cultural experience, lifting humans out of ordinary culture and history for a short while. Or we could think, in contemporary terms, about Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow and optimal experience with its combination of engrossment (concentration) and ease as an escape from boredom (and anxiety). Anthony Storr (a psychiatrist and a musicologist) has perhaps summed this up best when he criticized Freud for a lack of concepts and notions taking care of “stimulus hunger.” Even systems theory, which does not grant a systematic place to persons within the machinery of social systems, somewhat grudgingly admits that there may be a need for more attractive forms of an “irritation” of human consciousness than those demanded by the systems themselves. All of this will be elaborated later on. (3) Experience consists in interactions, constructive and indeed constructivist enactments, with all kinds of situations and things. Experience, when it is aesthetic experience, is heightened—that is, aesthetically crystallized and refined—vitality. Again, as with the preceding assumption, various strands of traditional and contemporary thought provide

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heterogeneous but persistent evidence. One would, almost automatically, think of Bergson and his definition of the comic where mechanical procedures take possession of “le vivant.” One might think of the whole and diverse, but mostly problematic, school of a philosophy of life (“Lebensphilosophie”)—problematic mainly because it sought to locate the intensity of life in its presumptive immediacy and not in its aesthetic (and also more harmless) media enactments. Hegel, in his Aesthetics, has developed the crucial notion that the arts, that is, media, are the prime realizations of a partly spiritualized human vitality, that human beings convey the impression of being fully, perhaps radiantly alive more in art than in life itself. In so-called life, some deficiency will always jump forward and mar that impression. More radically, Nietzsche declared that the world and existence could only be justified as aesthetic phenomena. In a more sober vein, the pragmatist Dewey saw the need for a transition from the ordinary to the fully human being. The assumption then is that heightened vitality comes into play when enactments take place in or are intimately connected with and shaped by media. Consequently, the media of aesthetic experience extend throughout the realm of everyday life. Only in pure, or only seemingly pure, form (“literature” or some forms of “absolute” music and painting are perhaps the most conspicuous examples) do media represent forms of an extremely specialized, “merely aesthetic” experience. In spite of its concern with the concept of media, this book makes little attempt at defining what a medium is or what the media are. As a kind of orientation, however, I would suggest that a medium, or mediality, or often intermediality, and with them some heightened mode of experience emerge when an ordinary process of life changes direction for some reason, when elements of some kind of “staging” come into play, and when that enactment gains some kind of formal or material-technical stability.4 All of this can happen very easily within everyday life; all of this can also be extended and rarefied into the most remote realms of art To put it another way, in the pages that follow, it is John Dewey’s way of relating experience and art (and in the wider sense media) that functions as a background to be taken more or less for granted. In discussing Dewey’s aesthetics, Richard Shusterman has emphasized the position that will be assumed as a given here: That aesthetic experience extends beyond the historically established practice of art should be obvious. It exists, first of all, in the appreciation of nature, not least that part of nature which is the animate human body. But we also find it in ritual and sports, in parades, fireworks, and the media of

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popular culture, in bodily and domestic ornamentation, from primitive tattoos and cave drawings to contemporary cosmetics and interior decorating, and indeed in the countless colorful scenes and moving events which fill our cities and enrich our ordinary lives.5

Clearly, in thus extending the range of aesthetic phenomena, the concept of media may easily get out of control. To regain control, the present book will try to limit the range by looking at culturally attractive media to which neither the status of art nor some kind of remarkable empirical success has normally been denied. In the third part, this will take the form of an investigation into the concerns that a culturally canonized, often elitist and spiritual or intellectual form of art (literature) has entertained with respect to a commercialized (and also in other respects very problematic) mass phenomenon of physical culture (sport). In all of these cases, Dewey remains helpful because he seized the duality of involvement, in the more active performative enactment and the more passive experience, in a paradigmatic fashion. Human beings, then, come most fully alive when there is a coalescence between a biologically grounded but heightened vitality and a spiritualized “detachment” or “disinterestedness.”6 This merger in the layers of involvement translates into a crucial distinction between a “work” and a (mere) “product” of art and into a privileging of the former over the latter: When we say that tennis-playing, singing, acting, and a multitude of other activities are arts, we engage in an elliptical way of saying that there is art in the conduct of these activities, and that this art so qualifies what is done and made as to induce activities in those who perceive them in which there is also art. The product of art—temple, painting, statue, poem—is not the work of art.7

If, like Dewey, we insist on the continuities between everyday and aesthetic experiences, even if the cultures and discourses that appear to have held sway for a while seem to argue in the opposite direction, rankings of higher and lower, “ethereal” and technological arts or media are “ultimately, out of place and stupid,” as he puts it. Distinctions must be made, but they cannot be made in the manner of Kant and his implicit or explicit disciples: Kant was “a pastmaster in first drawing distinctions and then erecting them into compartmental divisions.”8 This is one pitfall of theory we will endeavor to avoid here. The question looming and lingering in Dewey’s aesthetics, but not really coming to the foreground, however, is one of culturally and therefore also personally significant and attractive media configurations. A

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product of art may consist in the single text or other isolated aesthetic object we encounter. If it is to turn into a work of art, demanding and procuring a broader range of personal involvement, it must embody, contain, or suggest a broader range of appeals. These may be provided by artistic techniques, by topics treated or subjects symbolized. But they will also reside in what the term “media” also and prominently refers to: the material and performative aspects of works that facilitate and often initiate involvement. I am thus extracting a position from Dewey that he himself did not openly embrace: that histories of the single arts are not or are no longer possible. If that is so, certain notions of culture will also crumble. They will be destabilized especially in those cases (frequent in the West) in which culturally relevant levels of aesthetic organization are mainly derived, implicitly or explicitly, from “literature” in the sense normally taken for granted, but not at all firmly established before the nineteenth century. It is the nineteenth century that came to elevate “imaginative” literature in the shape of the printed book into the paradigmatically precious vessel of (mostly national) cultures.9 If literature is relativized, it is also restabilized in a shrunken but wellnigh ineluctable cultural-aesthetic niche. This means that a central theoretical problem of media theory must remain open: the question how media may balance the easily conflicting demands of challenging complexity (tending often, but not necessarily, toward elitism or “monomedia” specialization) and simplistic (“popular,” mass) appeal in which, behind the facile excitement, boredom looms large. If one looks at the broader range of cultural phenomena, one will normally see that the purification and “spiritualization” of media configurations into single media is paid for culturally by grosser developments on other fronts. Thus, the highly differentiated segmentary Western cultures have to grapple with forms of violence that one would have liked to think banished into the museum of evolutionary archaisms. (4) Media tend to show up most often in the form of at least implicit or hidden combinations: in “intermediality,” hybridization, in McLuhan’s sense.10 In saying this, I am restating in somewhat fashionable European terms what I tried to extract from Dewey above. I am also revitalizing what an older European tradition tried to analyze as the mutual illumination of the arts. McLuhan, though, has put this in a forceful way that has not at all received the attention it deserves, more than ever, in this so-called “multimedia” age. “The crossings or hybridizations of the media,” he says, “release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. . . . The

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fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages.”11 While the etymology of the term “aesthetic” cannot be preserved in any seemingly pure form across the centuries, its central component—the arousal of the senses—remains a central issue for an anthropology of media. In emphasizing intermedia enactments, the notion of “experience” thus is decoupled from older concerns about its authenticity, artificiality, and the like, and instead it is the dynamics and the range of its “aesthetic” dimensions that come to the forefront. For example, if we drop Hegel’s notions of Absolute Spirit, infinity, and freedom, we see that his criticism of terms like “arousal” as philosophically insufficient breaks down.12 When it does, questions about “dramatic liveliness” (in painting, for instance), an “idealism of life” and its media, the “ideality” of the “animation” of the parts of an organism, or the animation of universal ideality, the appearance and display of the “living soul” in motion, all these assert themselves powerfully. Walter Schulz appropriately denies, therefore, that Hegel presents what he is usually thought to offer: an aesthetics of contents (Gehaltsästhetik). The “contents” are instead so multifarious that only “regional” distinctions, for instance between crafts, techn(olog)ical, and fine arts, are possible.13 (5) Although modes of strong experience and fascination occur in what could be said to be “cultural” forms, an inquiry into aesthetics can best be pursued from a point of view that could be characterized as “anthropological.” Using this highly and variably charged term, I have to say immediately what it does not mean. Anthropology does not mean ethnography practiced, especially in the United States, in the wake of Franz Boas, A. L. Kroeber et al. Although forms of cultural comparison will occur in this book, they are supposed to steer clear of the imperialistexoticist mixtures that have all too often beset or supposedly been exorcized from ethnography. While the present book will betray a certain Eurocentric bias, that bias is strictly intended as operational, not ideological. To a far greater extent than the movement called deconstruction was aware of, the deconstruction of European ideologies is built into these ideologies themselves. Furthermore, anthropology here is not to be identified with the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the evolutionary anthropology of, say, William H. Durham.14 They, as well as much of what is commonly called cultural anthropology, are concerned with formal structures of social exchange and interaction or systems of information inheritance, with secondary values that do not stem from individual experience, but rather from social conventions and social history, like marriage rules or rules by which the reproductive inter-

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ests of a household are governed or even the cultural evolution of basic color terms—not with the ways and especially the media in which persons, through cultural mediation, organize their most gripping experiences. The descent, the dilemma, and the distinction of the anthropological mode of thought I would like to practice can be traced to Kant and, from there, down to the “pragmatic” forms of anthropology of people like Helmuth Plessner or Arnold Gehlen. Kant felt obliged to write an anthropology “in pragmatic respect” because a lot of important human matters could not be squeezed into the transcendentalist systems of the three critiques. (Incidentally, Kant’s effect as an academic teacher and his public reputation were based on his anthropological lectures, which he gave for thirty years, not on the critiques.15) These matters were mainly concerned with how persons, as free agents and through civilizing, moralizing procedures plus various modes of mental and other cultivation, could transform themselves into reasonable human—that is fully humane—beings. Even if such approaches, from Kant in 1798 to Gernot Böhme in 1985, do not really presuppose a substantial or constant human nature, they remain tied to speculations about substantial aspects (like childhood, birth and death, sexuality, body, work, etc.—see Böhme’s chapter titles). When focusing on such issues, isolating them as topics, one tends to invest them, in spite of the serenity of Böhme’s “oblique” anthropology (cf. Chapter 19), with a kind of existential(ist) tinge. On the other hand, the impulses to be derived, for instance, from Böhme’s work (and the book written with his brother Hartmut on Kant) are too manifold and too strong to be neglected. In the present work, then, the existential tinge is transformed into questions of human selfenactment in and through culturally significant media. At this point, though, some approaches in (what I would like to count amongst) American anthropology come in very strongly. One must mention, I suppose, Victor Turner and the work of those who, like Richard Schechner, have used Turner’s mode of thought for the analysis of theatrical enactments in both the ordinary and broader senses. In such a way, the anthropological approach will also connect to older forms of media theory, that is, aesthetics. Experiences take place on predominantly biological-physiological, emotional, and cognitive levels of awareness. They are less concerned with the highly variable codes ruling consciousness. Thus, the human body is indeed an anthropological referent. But it has no meaning or significance in itself. Rather, the continuous presence of changing and culturally variable body constructs is an anthropological symptom steadily

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transformed into problematic sense or, more germane to my purposes, into attractive scenes. Historically, this means that there are very different shifts in media development that are hidden by the usual histories and theories of the “arts.” This is why, for instance, relations between sports and literature, far apart as they appear, will play a major role in this book. The relative interchangeability and equivalence of what seem to be highly heterogeneous media tend to become clearer when one looks, interculturally, as it were, at the relative position of similar media in different cultures or at identical functions of different media in different cultures. This does not mean that “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Equivalence and interchangeability are instead an anthropological version of and variation on the (Deleuzeian) theme of repetition and difference. For example, Paul Veyne’s research into the central cultural role of the concept of generosity in ancient Greece and Rome has demonstrated the historian’s compulsion to see “invariants and peculiarities which overlap in historical processes and are modified by historical contexts.” Veyne singles out mental illness and outstanding achievements or performances in the list of such modified invariants. Societies are susceptible to such achievements, irrespective of the preferences they may bestow on one or the other. In the United States, Veyne holds, private patronage flourished in spite of a basic layer of Puritanism when clever antique dealers held out the example of Italian Renaissance princes to flattered billionaires. Systems of gift-giving are cultural invariants even if they occur, of course, in always modified forms. In Veyne’s approach, history looks less like a set of continuities and gradual change and more like a series of discontinuities and relative (modified) exchange. Thus, we are dealing with an overall “plasticity” for which historical options are “islands in the ocean of possibilities.”16 Veyne does not speak much about media (one example he singles out, though, is the Roman circus). But in downplaying the alleged uniqueness of historical options, he upgrades their intercultural— and in that sense anthropological—equivalences. The combined effects of biological and cultural evolution that I would like to capture with the notion of “anthropological” trends eventually may be altered because the onslaught of electronic (multi)media and cyberspatial pastimes may indeed have a profound effect on the human nervous system. As I have said, I prefer to think that, for the time being, this is unlikely to occur. (6) Media are the supreme instruments in anthropological processes

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with engrossing, fascinating effects because—in spite of their apparent “fictionality,” and in spite of the enormous amount of talk about simulation these days—they tend to neutralize those distinctions like self/society and reality/fiction that have come to haunt (and, in spite of deconstruction, continue to haunt) at least Western civilization. They tend to neutralize, indeed, the conceptual distinctions between works of art and life. Nicholas Negroponte is right in saying that the digital superhighway “will turn finished and unalterable art into a thing of the past. The number of mustaches given to Mona Lisa is just child’s play.” But he neglects to mention that the very notion of “unalterable art,” conceptually and epistemologically difficult to sustain in any case, has characterized only the relatively recent past of relatively limited cultural domains. Emphasizing aspects of participation in or “interference” with supposedly finished works of art indeed does not mean the “total vulgarization of important cultural icons.” It is something that has been going on, in some areas latently and often with a bad cultural conscience, in other areas, however, quite openly, for most of cultural history. The “work of art” to be appreciated and analyzed in an alleged final and unalterable shape is only one crystallization within media configurations of involvement and interference. And it is also true, as we will see later, that musical elements, in their combination of technologies and immediacy of appeal, constitute a crucially important medium “for moving gracefully between technology and expression,” between fragments and wholes.17 (7) In spite of the historical heterogeneity of media configurations (especially at the present time, when anything can be made into a temporarily successful fashion or fad), talk about the relative anthropological functionality of media is still meaningful. There can of course be no claim that any medium exercises definite “anthropological” functions. I am instead interested in the anthropological (that is, more than sociological) import that what I call media clusters or media configurations develop. In some cases, as with opera and its descendants down to rock music, one medium can be looked upon as a media cluster (“hypermedium”), as a (however culturally twisted) representative of anthropological import in itself. In other cases, apparently more typical for Western cultures, the implicit status of single media within clusters and their significance must be assessed in more devious ways. (8) Although the genesis and forms of media are inextricably related to specific historical, sociological, technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not—at least not to the same degree. They oscillate between specificity and a trend toward limited universality.

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Opera buffa, for instance, perhaps the central event in opera history, according to Wolfgang Osthoff, is a specific eighteenth-century Venetian development. It may be genetically explained by the needs for selfreflexive laughter in which an aristocracy and a rich bourgeoisie could still enjoy its somewhat endangered and obviously no longer self-evident status. But it also combines forms (intermezzi, commedia dell’arte, show elements, etc.) that place it squarely into the development leading to later comic opera, the operetta, the musical, and some of the variety shows of our time. It is one of the central but unresolved concerns in Reinhard Strohm’s book on eighteenth-century Italian opera, for instance, to reconcile the specificities with some more general “vital functions” in which forms and media from opera down to mass sports events can occupy a relatively unified space.18 In what follows, therefore, representative anthropological trends vibrating within shifting forms will loom large. These interests have determined the shape of the present book. In Part One, I start out with speculative sketches into the problematic relations between theory and cultural—that is, media—production. Right from the “beginning,” with Aristotle, this relationship is a troubled one. With the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, it develops a literary bias that, to put it mildly, does less than justice to cultural production at large. One can detect that cultural break in the novel—the paradigmatic (modern) literary form—itself. To a much greater extent than literary history has made us aware of, the novel is concerned with partly covering up its own reduced mode of communication (normally, though significantly not always, silent reading) with variegated appeals to the power of other media in which body codes play a major role (Chapter 1). On the theoretical side, the issue is then pursued in a confrontation of cultural as plurimedia awareness (Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, Leroi-Gourhan, amongst others) with the contemporary theoretical avatars of cultural segmentation (especially systems theory). On the historical side, Greek tragedy, vanished long ago as a concrete combination of cultural event and literary form, is probed for its potential as a generalizable media model (Chapters 2 and 3). The results are embedded, in Part Two, into an epistemological excursion into the status of appearances and an analysis of their cultural transformation into spectacles. At this point, cultural comparison must come in, even if stereotypes cannot be eluded. The confrontation of Western splits between literature and other media with different versions of the same problem in Japan prepares the way for a new evaluation of somewhat submerged or underground areas in Western cultural history. Central to that is the cultural status of opera and the

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question to what extent the “operatic principle” (Herbert Lindenberger) can serve as an epitome of media problems (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). This is also where the full, the anthropological impact of traditional or more modern forms of aesthetics, from Hegel via Dewey to Adorno, comes to the forefront. While such connections have been established more or less vaguely before, the book finally, and perhaps most provocatively, takes on the risk of seeing systematic connections where, at best, motif connections have been admitted into critical consciousness: in the latent affinity of hostile opposites, in the relations between bodiless literature and body-exploiting sports (Part Three, Chapters 7 to 10). In these chapters, I am trying to develop and fortify the concept, indeed the paradox of “protoliterary” (or protopoetic) discourse. Interpenetrations between fascinating experience, the imaginary (whether derived psychoanalytically from Jacques Lacan, or “sociologically” from Cornelius Castoriadis or some other authority insisting on its basic, magma-like fluidity), and discourse are anthropologically unavoidable; the extension of protoliterary discourse (visible from epic formulas down to sports reporting) into an organized system or institution of literature is not. More often than not, the protoliterary plays out its appeal within forms of theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. A final warning: it goes without saying that such an enterprise cannot adopt any unified methodology. As theory has lost its innocence, so has methodology lost its purity. Readers will have to judge themselves whether the arrangement and mixture of theories, and of that mixture with both intuitions and empirical assumptions, yields results at least as interesting as those produced by a rigorously “disciplined” approach.



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The Protoliterary



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introduction

Speculative Sketches Critical Theory, Exegesis, Interpretation

Theories and criticisms of the arts, and of literature in particular, have been flourishing for a long time. This will continue, for reasons that are not, as Beckett might have said, unknown, but that are not entirely clear, either. What is clear is that literature needs exegesis, commentary, and interpretation. The “fabrications” literature “verbalizes can be processed only by way of cognitive frames of reference” and the techniques developed for such a purpose.1 A kind of identity or intimate symbiosis between literature and writing (and, since the eighteenth century, print) has indeed normally been taken for granted. But the appearance of a symbiosis between literature and writing is a relatively recent phenomenon. And although theory and criticism may have flourished because of this symbiosis, their supposed mode of existence as secondary arts, doubtful variants of science, parasitic enterprises with respect to both the arts proper and to ideological commitments of diverse sorts, may well be equally recent. The presumed link between literature and writing has occluded a larger and broader link—between literature and performance in general, and therefore between literature and more comprehensive, anthropological modes of analyzing and understanding it. Aristotle, in his Poetics, held that the written play, and not its performance, constituted the essential mode of theatrical being. It is doubtful, however, what kind of theater Aristotle knew from his own experience. It is also unclear what effect the discourse of philosophy had upon conceptions of art. Plato still played with the implications of orality and writing, questions of relative authority and power among them. The academy and, to a minimal extent, even the later institution of the university may have cultivated philosophy as the performance of a life form, a community of experience.2 With Aristotle (who was still of course also a teacher), however, philosophy seems definitively to have been committed to a hegemony of writing and reading. If philosophy is still and also

2

Introduction

conducted as a form of life, it is more clearly separated and removed from culture at large. If Aristotle practiced an empirical method, his use of that method focused, with respect to art, on the very restricted number of works he knew well. The great dramatists were gone, “and he seems to have known a number of egoistic actors, like some of our modern stars, who made plays into vehicles of their own personalities.”3 In addition to dismissing dramatic performances, Aristotle also apparently did not feel qualified to discuss architecture or music and its performance. Yet the intertwining of music and classical drama had been crucial. Even Plato, in the Republic, had laid down very precise rules for the kind of rhythms and keys allowed in his state. Nevertheless, Aristotle did not draw a systematic distinction between the fine and the useful “arts,” nor did mimesis, for him, aim primarily at imitation or even representation, as we have frequently come to see it. Art, whether fine or practical (politics, medicine, and the like), was instead supposed to step in when the creative force of nature seemed to fail. It is, as S. H. Butcher put it, “a rivalry of nature, a completion of its unfulfilled purposes, a correction of her failures.” Yet the tendency toward the dichotomization of “art” and “nature” looms large and would assert itself later on.4 We owe the normalization of that dichotomy, and with it the supposed parasitic relationship between literary criticism and literature, I would suggest, primarily to the eighteenth century. Literary exegesis, commentary, and interpretation relate to and compensate for problematic reorganizations of cultural realms. They are not natural, benign growths issuing forth spontaneously from the humane heights of literature. In the eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth, advances in the development of social systems were accompanied and orchestrated by an emphasis on the need for sociability. Discursive professionalism, including the professionalization of aesthetic domains, was balanced by a “natural” ethics and aesthetics of performative behavior in polite society in general. Thus, David Hume could declare that “the social virtues must . . . be allowed to have a natural beauty and amiableness, which, at first, antecedent to all precept or education, recommends them to the esteem of uninstructed mankind, and engages their affections.”5 Claims of that sort resonate through the hermeneutic theories of the English and German eighteenth century.6 Put in modern jargon, social systems do not only produce and reproduce themselves; they also produce a need for domains and types of experience in which more than the processes gen-

Introduction

3

erated by the ruling systemic self-references (whether legal, economic, scientific, religious, etc.) are possible. As we will see later on, while systems theory sometimes also tends to see art as a self-referential system, it shrinks back from classifying culture—in which the arts would after all appear to be somehow embedded—as such. We can certainly speak, in an economic and commercial sense, of a system of (e.g., modern electronic entertainment) media. We can be less sure, though, to what extent the experiences generated by it are entirely conditioned by the commercial backdrop. Developments from the eighteenth century to the twentieth have subsequently exercised an enormous retroactive power in normalizing distinctions between social realities on the one hand, art and aesthetic illusion on the other.7 Systems of aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries still acknowledged the total range of the arts. To take the appearance of the differentiation and specialization of the arts for granted, however—which in the eighteenth century was by no means empirically self-evident—was to restrict their cultural vitality. The later split of aesthetics into specialized literary (and other art) histories also contributed heavily to a misleading homogenization of literature. At the same time, the border between “literature” and the nonliterary has proven easy to cross and impossible to police, although traffic has been mostly in one direction. Secular, increasingly literary systems of hermeneutics (in a very general sense) have appeared in increasing numbers since the eighteenth century. And it is possible, with Michel Butor, to believe in the imperialistic tendency of highly articulated, especially literary languages in the nineteenth century. The hegemony of literary language, Butor thinks, expanded in fact into painting. One does not only look at paintings, but talks and writes endlessly about them. Anything, then, seems surrounded by “a gigantic halo of discourse.”8 Everything can be assimilated to “literature,” then “read” and interpreted. This is the situation in which literary studies have thrived and in which they now suffer. The generalization of reading and interpretation implies that, within the domains now reasonably called “literature,” no other genre can really enforce a different type of behavior. It is true that, as Wittgenstein had it, images (mental and otherwise) and pictures need language in order to shed their inarticulate “nakedness.” But for him, words remain naked, too, unless we know their “applications.” Among these, pictures (mental images and perceptions) loom large.9 But the hegemony of highly organized, stylized forms of discourse has hidden the advance, in culturally less controlled ways, of im-

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Introduction

ages and other forms of performative or organized spectacles. Entrenched academic disciplines have had and are having a hard time acknowledging the cultural status of these performances. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the rise of the novel shows how we have arrived at this state—how the triumph of “literature” came to occlude the link between literature and cultural performance, between passionate, even physical involvement and intellectual detachment. Since then, “popular” literature tried to pull the reader in one direction, while “high” literature tended to challenge readers in the other. Thus, the novel did not achieve a secure place within the existing networks of public cultural communication and performance. Its qualities as a medium, of course, invited private, silent reading over long periods of time. But it is more significant for the way it addressed this problem of its loss of command over public communicative and performative power. The eighteenth-century novel may be the strongest example of the ways in which aesthetic as sociable, at least partly performative experience and a merely imaginative, interiorized reading of “fictions” part company. The novel does not show up in Hume’s scheme of sociability, for which, on the whole, his notions of poetry are more important. The “great charm” of poetry consists in lively pictures of sublime passions, which, even when they are “most disagreeable,” are observed “when excited by poetry, to convey a satisfaction, from a mechanism of nature, not easily explained.”10 The novel does not, in principle, exclude that kind of experience. But rather than working as a stylization of passionate self-experience within limited social groups, it is symptomatic of systematic disturbances in communication and interaction in larger, more diffuse social contexts. For Hume, benevolence, though not at all a simple quality, emanates from “a direct tendency or instinct” and is inherently pleasant.11 In Fielding’s Tom Jones, however, where it has to compete with other tendencies or instincts, benevolence, when applied directly, occasionally verges on stupidity. Other things are going on—or rather, failing to go on. Ian Watt plausibly portrayed Samuel Richardson as one of the first victims of the “urban neurosis” produced by physical proximity without communication and by vast social distance. This disturbance of humane communication (which is displaced by a “goose-like gabble”) and of sociable interaction is conjured away by the fiction of intimate letters.12 The novel thus simulates modes of communication, interaction, and cultural performance in which earlier “poetic” media had participated more or less directly. The fight of the novel for aesthetic recognition—

Introduction

5

Schiller still called it the half-brother of poetry—was the fight of a medium that combined, in an almost paradoxical fashion, fictitiousness with an apparent all-encompassing realism. Culturally, this combination has perhaps never been completely naturalized. The term “fictionality” represents the conceptual, scholarly compromise for discussing a communicative mode that excludes performative cultural participation and yet deploys its powerful effects. In its heyday, in the nineteenth century, the novel even tried to outmaneuver, to a limited extent, the impoverishment imposed upon it by its communicative mode. With serial publication and public readings, it harkened back to a time when communication was a public event. Up to the eighteenth century, literary effects could be described as subdivisions of rhetorical ones, as elements of a social or cultural semiotics embedded in an anthropological psychology. However, the novel propelled the formation of new and specific cultural techniques of reading to do justice to “skillful” and “probable” forms of lying. And from a media perspective, literature’s loss of status as public, performative, and in that sense real, led to complementary demands for fictional realism.13 It is ironic that once the effort to fulfill those demands finally broke down (at the latest with Henry James), the novel finally achieved an undisputed literary-aesthetic reputation. It may be even more ironic that its communicative mode, a type of concentrated, interpretation-oriented reading, has been retroactively generalized into the paradigm of “literature as such.” For us, it may have become self-evident that narrative “literature,” indeed, “literature as such,” has been in existence since Homer. It does not at all follow, however, that these narratives were taken as invented fictions.14 The resistance the novel met with as “fiction” must be distinguished from the sometimes ferocious opposition to which English Tudor drama, for instance, had been exposed. Tudor drama had met with a strong religious, Puritan resistance and with a mixed reception within the literary culture of the aristocracy. Striking a precarious balance between crude entertainment and “literary” complexity, however, it had secured a place, or several places, within a broad social, cultural, and even political spectrum for which public visibility and participation had been essential. The distinction between these public shows, including pageants and rituals, and the stage shows that maintained constant contact with an active audience may also be extremely clear to us, but therefore likewise should not be treated as a transhistorical given. Shakespeare’s enactments of ritualistic elements in Henry V, The Tempest, and parts of

6

Introduction

many other plays are highly sophisticated indeed, at least to our perception. Their own possibly ritualistic effects, however, are much harder to gauge. That such effects probably radiated from the plays would at least help to explain why the later Stuart court masques could be so easily changed back into court rituals.15 This is why, to take the example of a nineteenth-century classic of cultural history, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy emphasizes the performativepublic culture of festivities and spectacles (Festwesen) as the central mode of self-experience for a society that had established a certain common ground between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Even education and erudition, according to Burckhardt, partook of and instantiated the visibility of a performative culture. One of the more extreme examples may have been Machiavelli, who, putting on formal clothes to enter his study, staged his reading of the sages of antiquity as a public act of state. Thanks to this emphasis on the public and the performative, when writers did not achieve the visibility of recognition and public status, the hypertrophy and concurrently the melancholy of writing might easily assail them.16 In short, the normalization of the “literary” by means of the novel should, contrary to our habits, be seen as exceptional, not normal, even if the exceptions allow for analogies or even repetitions. Although the serious English theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, has made it into literary histories, owing perhaps to vague dictates of continuity and some specious closeness to Shakespeare, a look into the monumental eleven-volume collection on the London stage from 1660 to 1800, to which I will return at greater length, suffices to raise doubts whether a “literary” treatment of them is warranted. And the situation of the theater in England between Byron and Shaw indicates a different set of constraints with respect to encodings and engagements of human potentials. The theater has thus formed part of a spectrum of performative visibility that extends to and well beyond the “literary.” Whether we are dealing with a sacrificial ritual, a political speech, or a comedy, the relation between the representing individuals and the represented content is less important than the values imposed, in highly aesthetic fashions, on “actors” and “audience” alike. It is true that modern (Western) societies have elaborated reliable distinctions between what is really lived and what is merely represented. Nobody would confuse a ball with a ballet, a mass in Notre Dame with the mystery of the Passion. It is not so easy, however, to distinguish secular and religious ceremonies, theater and

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7

context, for the great traditional festivities of the imperial courts in China and Japan.17 For an anthropology of media, and for the anthropology of media that follows, resisting the normalization of the literary means that instead of concentrating on a field misleadingly dominated by a generalized notion of literature, one has to be on the lookout for media changes in which more powerfully engaging forms assert themselves in less and more than literary ways. If there is no human essence, there must be media in which the historically encoded forms and illusions of human totality can be engaged.

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part one

Dimensions Theoretical and Illustrative

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chapter one

First Exemplifications The Novel and the Self-Therapy of the Medium

Western cultures have established institutions and personalized institutional roles empowered to ascribe higher values to art—moral values, imaginative values, humane values. Art has been taken to be collections or canons of specially meaningful, although fictional, objects and products. These, as they were produced, have been at the same time removed by this ascription from the more immediate, transitory practices of cultural production and consumption. This ascription of higher values to some cultural products has amounted to a split in culture. We have come to describe it as a split between “mass” (effective, “successful” culture, “the culture industry”) and “high” (valuable, but not necessarily effective) culture. The split has been aided by the many-edged potentials of writing and printing. In the form of literacy, the split has functioned as a means of both civilization and social control.1 In the form of “literature” (manifest as literariness) it has seemed to establish the domain of the aesthetic, now taken as the fictional, in its own right. As the position of high culture has eroded, the split between high and mass culture has come under fire empirically. The misleading trend of the distinction can be seen most clearly in theoretical contexts not derived or distilled from high culture itself. D. W. Winnicott, for example, repeats within psychoanalysis Nietzsche’s notion of culture as something that will take the single human being out of the pushing and pulling, the crushing effect of the historical flow in order to make that being understand that s/he is not just a historically limited, “but also a totally extrahistorical-infinite being with which all existence began and will stop,” rather than “something that creeps, with dismal industry, through life, learns, calculates, politicizes, reads books, produces children, and lies down to die. . . . This is probably only an insect larva, something despicable and transitory and nothing but surface.”

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Dimensions

But Nietzsche, of course, knew that such a concept of culture is difficult to preserve. It is always in danger of being swallowed up by what he calls “a sort of straying culture that, having lost its way and befriending the world of becoming, zealously tries to enclose human beings into the domains of their historical existence. Culture then is precisely supposed to liberate the spiritual powers of a generation to such an extent that it may become most useful for the existing institutions, the state, commerce and traffic, church, society.”2 Sociologists interested in aesthetics, like Daniel Bell, have described the split between mass and high culture as just such a disjunction within social realms, but Winnicott thought he had grounds to contest this segmentation of reality. Working in the therapeutic context of child psychoanalysis, Winnicott was looking for circumstances where life is not sacrificed to socially or scientifically imposed distinctions. Although, like Vaihinger, he sometimes seems to fall prey to a residual positivistic concept of social reality, Winnicott assumed that he could locate “life” in quite different events and media. With Winnicott, we may describe the split between mass and high culture as a cultural crisis of transitional objects and intermediate zones. Winnicott had posited intermediate zones as areas of child experience in which the original, symbiotically close relationship with the mother is replaced by still anxiety-free, but imaginatively intensified activities in a fluid process of self- and other-negotiations. He had conceived transitional objects—like teddy bears and toys of all kinds, especially those with which close physical interaction could be maintained—as the prime fillings populating intermediate spaces and keeping anxiety-provoking rigid distinctions between the self and the other, between subject and object, from asserting themselves as long as possible. The cardinal question for “adult” culture, then, is whether such types of zones and objects can be found or established there, too. Approaches like Winnicott’s, and those of Victor Turner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Roger Caillois, do not serve any specific, restricted aesthetic purposes.3 Any engaging, “autotelic” activity, anything done for its own sake alone, however heavy its “ideological” background or frame may be, occurs through both inner (mental) and outer (cultural, physical, media) stimulation, and probably by the combined, engaging effects of several of them at once. Winnicott ascribes the experience of transitional objects in intermediate zones indiscriminately to all kinds of cultural experience: “listening to a Beethoven symphony or making a pilgrimage to a picture gallery or

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13

reading Troilus and Cressida in bed, or playing tennis.”4 In doing so, however, he has neglected two important issues, and these need to be added to the picture of experience Winnicott paints. The first concerns the relations between cultural experience, play, and the body. The second concerns the privilege accorded to “literature” as the configuration of media in which the first issue has taken shape. Can we really impute the same type of powerful experience to playing tennis, listening to Beethoven, reading Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and also perhaps to going to a rock concert, mountain climbing, flying, possibly even performing surgery? Yes and no. Winnicott’s conception of immediate experience as an experience of transitional objects in intermediate spaces does not refer to a mythic-mystical state in which distinctions between subject and object or, if you like, between observers and systems, are abolished. Likewise, as an experience of intermediate space, an engaging cultural experience does not take up arms against the sea of social, scientific, and other, more systematically defined forms of observation or action to oppose and thus end them. Such an experience also may either stimulate or inhibit forms of social or even political action. But by and large, intermediate zones are areas of political and social indifference, dismaying as such an assertion may be to many theorists both social and literary. Although cultural media may well increase distinctions and complexity, this increase tends to blur, to suspend, to neglect, if not to ignore the usual political and social concerns. It is important, therefore, in embracing claims like these, to notice that they cut across dichotomies like work/play, reality/fiction, without necessarily eliminating them altogether. The relations between cultural experience, play, and the body, in short, are somewhat more complex than Winnicott suggests, especially when viewed in a historical perspective. Critical questions in that respect have been asked by Morris Berman. What Winicott failed to ask, Berman holds, “was this: what kind of culture? If the same impulse lies behind heroin addiction, lying and stealing, organized religion and the paintings of van Gogh, then I suggest that there is something seriously wrong with a culture which includes all of these things.”5 The cultural crisis of the present then does not consist so much in the absence of intermediate zones and transitional objects, but in the fact that there are too many, especially of the highly dangerous sort. An anthropology of media written in perspectives also of cultural comparison might allow us at least to situate that crisis in a more differentiated way. Berman diagnoses the cultural history of the West as both dichotomizing and at odds with the dichotomies it produces. Thus, ac-

14

Dimensions

cording to him, “Western religious experience is essentially schismogenic in nature,” leading to dichotomies such as the mind/body split. It therefore has continually provoked “sectarian” movements that have tried, by more or less fanatic and thus often equally schismogenic means, to overcome those schisms, to recover some supposedly more fundamental level of interiority as true spirituality (the Cathars, romantic love, and the like). The relative disappearance of heresy between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, however, would also point to a relative lack of that type of interiority and its compensatory mechanisms, including the “artistic” media we have come to take for granted, which had characterized so heavily, say, Augustine’s Confessions. Interiority reappears only in the wake of the institutionalization of the Church, the later centralization of nations, and the rise of science and capitalism, which contributed to forms of normalized and segmentary cultures, with their supposedly specialized arts, all “profoundly cut off from body experience.”6 Many different configurations of both the experience characteristic of intermediate spaces and the dichotomies that frame those spaces thus are possible. This account of the relations between cultural experience, play, and the body is also implied in the more sober treatment of human and cultural evolution by André Leroi-Gourhan. In considerably less Romantic terms than Berman, he notes that while in general social development and differentiation tend to push aside the biological levels of culture (the mixtures of aggressive-creative, engaging “vital” impulses) and to overemphasize the “symbolic functions,” cultures (here taken in an “ethnic” sense) may organize their physiological, social, technological, and figurative preferences in very different ways. They normally reach stages of specialization in which there is an increasing “disproportion between the producers of aesthetic materials and a growing mass of people consuming prefabricated and prethought art works.” One doesn’t dance, one watches dancing from one’s armchair. Consequently, “the beautiful, good, and the supreme values will assume . . . more and more intellectual shape. If one reads a poem in tranquillity, one may forget that any image triggered off by the words is meaningful by its reference to all the experiences once made in concrete situations.” But while that process of cultural “exteriorization,” a loss of individual performativity, may be inevitable, the aesthetic does not really shake off its basis in a muscular, indeed visceral, or at least performance-oriented sensibility: “Any concrete experience has the physical basis as its first reference . . . judging aesthetic and spiritual utterances of higher levels, we must not lose sight of that.”

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On the one hand, then, life as something intensely experienced at least occasionally may be replaced by what is merely represented. Aesthetic experience in an anthropologically broader and dynamic sense makes way for distanced objects of art and their collection, be it in museums or in the form of inventories and histories. The path for that has existed since the first hunting report, “and even more so since the first novel and the first travel report.” But while humanity may face extinction from ethnic and military violence, it may also face the problem of its own “rehumanization,” which crucially includes the instrumental character of art: the crosier, the love song, the patriotic hymn, the statue in which the power of the gods materializes, the fresco recalling the terrors of hell, “all respond to ineluctable practical needs.”7 Leroi-Gourhan’s account is much more definitely couched in media terms than those of Berman and thus also gives a clearer perspective on the various configurations of media in which the complexities of these “ineluctable practical needs” and the experiences that serve them take shape. This is particularly crucial for the concept of “literature,” which must strongly concern us here, but which did not concern Winnicott very much. Western literature, and in particular the novel as its epitome, have exploited the advantages of writing systems to the utmost. Anthropologically, the functional richness of Western writing systems is impressive. They combine imagination and information, symbolism and flexibility of interpretation. To that extent, we may agree with Iser that literature has been the written medium in which the continuous transcendence of social or other human limitations has taken place, that literary writing has made visible vital potentials of anthropocognitive equipment that, without such writing, would remain inaccessible.8 In our period, however, we have also become aware that this was not possible without concomitant drawbacks. Literature “provokes the desire” but “takes away the performance,” as the Porter in Macbeth says of strong drink. In their linear structures, Western writing systems also tend to fade out archaic associative halos preserved by many Eastern, seemingly more pictorial systems, copresences of multifarious elements and performative potentials.9 The heavy emphasis on metaphor in Western literary languages, as opposed, for instance, to the seeming sober literality of Japanese haiku, has traditionally tried to make up for these losses. Finally, although literature may delineate unlimited complexities of interiorization (observation, interpretation, nuance, among them), this is achieved in a fictional mode—a “purely” fictional mode, one might say, because at some point it no

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longer works, in Leroi-Gourhan’s sense, instrumentally, as an aesthetic reinforcement of experience. If we begin, as I have suggested, from the belief that novels diagnose and then in some way remedy impoverishments in cultural-performative competence, that they are forms of cultural self-description in which a sense of impoverishment and its potential cure are kept alive, we will begin to be able to see dimensions of performativity otherwise suppressed by the concept of “literature” and its paradigm. When we do so, we will begin to see the work of art as an implicitly mixed medium, and see this mixture—this intermediality—as the normal and not the exceptional case. To begin, let us consider some examples.

‘Wilhelm Meister’: The Cultural Potentials and Failures of Theatricality Unlike the novel, other forms of cultural self-description can do without the images of possible cures for the problems they diagnose. Sociology, for example, although initially amalgamated with other, narrative or economic layers of discourse, now takes theoretical custody of the feeling, unavoidable in modern times, that society appears to be coextensive with and to structure all manifestations of life. Sociology, however, simply presents this as positive knowledge. Exceptions like Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (which for them started with the Odyssey) notwithstanding, sociology rarely treats the hegemony of social forces as an impoverishment to be supplemented by whatever relics of humane feelings and interaction may still be available. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), on the contrary, is concerned, among other things, with doing exactly this. The novel is written because it is the medium in which the impossibility of the vital cultural function of art—in this case, the impossibility of a “national” theater—can artistically, that is articulately, be described. Goethe’s novel, and perhaps the novel itself as a medium, tests out possibilities, domains, and media of engaging experience. There are tendencies, socially urged on, toward extremes. One, with a background both vaguely religious and gendered, is the hegemony, indeed the exclusiveness of reading. The “beautiful soul” who tells her story in the sixth book of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre has read and studied immensely (unsäglich gelesen).10 But reading does not produce a really engaging “unusual state of feeling.” It contributes to a state in which, she says, “my soul thought without the company of the body.”11 This may nourish

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ideas of a sublime ego. A doctor tells the lady, though, that it will “hollow us out and undermine the ground of our existence.”12 The retreat from life may be transfigured by some higher, “religious” certitude. The abrupt ending of the confessions and the limitations of the personal perspective do not, however, substantially weaken the more pessimistic tones. The alternative—a life of business—does not appear to be more attractive. Werner, Wilhelm’s friend from early youth onward, is worn out by it. In the end, Wilhelm has difficulty recognizing him: “The good man seemed to have gone back rather than forward. He was much meagerer than before, his pointed face seemed to be finer, his nose longer, his forehead and crown stripped of hair, his voice high, violent and screaming, and his flattened chest, his prolapsing shoulders, his colorless cheeks left no doubt that an industrious hypochondriac was present.”13 In what might be called an oblique commentary on Lacan, Natalie, quoting more or less the educational doctrines of the Abbé, holds that education should animate, stimulate (beleben) our (“natural”) drives (Triebe, Anlagen, Instinkt), not produce desires (Wünsche). For their constructive unfolding, drives depend on activities. Those, it appears, should not be of a type marked by the exclusiveness of business or study. A mass book culture is either impossible or bad. The world may be flooded with useless writings, but they do not meet the standards of dignified products of the spirit (würdige Geistesprodukte). The “golden age of authorship” is apparently over. But what remains in a world in which business, in fact, as the Turmgesellschaft demonstrates, already is practiced on an international scale, since “property is nowhere really safe anymore”?14 Theatricality as a life form used to characterize the aristocracy. Inherited riches prepare the ground for an ease of existence (Leichtigkeit des Daseins, p. 292) in which the nobleman acquires a “certain general, I may say personal education” (p. 362). Intercourse among the nobility requires the superior performance of refined behavioral roles (vornehmen Anstand, p. 362). On that basis, the nobleman can give everything through the (re)presentation of his person. He is supposed to “shine” (scheinen, p. 363). The bourgeois (Bürger), however, has to be useful for specific purposes. For that, he must develop specific abilities, must work and produce (p. 363). For that type of person, a split between interiority (cultivated, moral, but not really essential for the mastery of life) and the exterior world of “business” is unavoidable. To achieve at least the semblance of a full person, the bourgeois needs the theater in the

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ordinary, specialized sense: “On the stage, the educated person appears in his/her personal splendor, as in the upper classes” (p. 364). The empirical situation of this type of theater, on the other hand, is not really conducive to that noble aim. In theory and for a while, of course, Shakespeare’s dramatic illusions can assert themselves as “the open, tremendous books of fate” (p. 275). To take Shakespeare as one’s godfather, however, amounts to “self-deception” (p. 291). To study, interpret, and produce Hamlet—one of the favorite activities of German professors and producers throughout the centuries—for the higher glory of a future national theater (vaterländische Bühne, p. 296) helps one to forget the problem for a while. Yet the mania of the moment (Wahn des Moments, p. 303), when delusion takes over fully and becomes momentarily real, is rudely shaken—for instance, by a gang of robbers (pp. 303– 5). The shadows of dramatic images (dramatische Schattenbilder, p. 324) may intensify personal feelings. But these feelings are separated from the stage fiction. They must be ensconced in the secluded interiority of the (bourgeois) person (ein eigner tiefer Schmerz, p. 324). The performance of Hamlet is powerfully successful (p. 400), but it cannot be repeated, that is, it cannot be institutionalized. In any group, Goethe’s narrator says, whether in a theater society, in a circle of friends, an army, or an empire, changes in personnel and circumstances are crucial (p. 409). For the possibility of the theater in the book, they are fatal (p. 410–12). After its success, the theater must be closed for a few weeks (p. 412). After another brief success with Emilia Galotti, mainly due to Aurelie’s playing herself in the role of Orsina (p. 419), its life span is exhausted. Consequently, the institution of the theater collides with the potential of dramatic performance. Jarno’s continuous criticism of stage practice (“to play for hollow nuts with hollow nuts,” p. 260) need not, in principle, exclude subtle effects of acting. These, however, would consist not so much in dramatic speechifying (Aufführung durch Worte) as in a mute or subdued acting (das stumme, halblaute Spiel). Here, it is primarily the body that would show, or suggest, the feelings (p. 212). There is, then, an unresolved, in fact embarrassing, tension between the also, perhaps even primarily, bodily languages of emotions and their stylization on the stage as the social institution of dramatic speech. This is why opera fares better. Operas are less tied to the realistic claims of dramatic speech. In them, therefore, young Wilhelm finds “more opportunities to locate my David and Goliath, which did not seem possible in regular theater” (p. 128). When music guides the movements of the body and gives life to them, Laertes, the actor, is “a totally different person

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than if I have to create everything in prosaic drama” (p. 222). Being at that point fixed upon the theater, Wilhelm does not appreciate this. But the notion of opera lives on persistently. Musicians appear, maintaining that an actor cannot develop a distinct concept and feeling for his art without a love of music. Since acting (in the sense of agieren, a word exploiting the ambiguity of “to act”) is easier when gestures are accompanied and guided by a tune, the dramatic actor, too, must “compose a prosaic role” by treating it according to (musical) time and measure (p. 323). The institutionalization of an opera stage, replacing “prosaic” theater, meets with more success anyway (pp. 416, 525). The effect of literature epitomized in the novel thus resides not so much in its purely literary qualities, but in its flexibility to evoke the effect of other media as well.15 The strength and weakness of literature, in particular a novel, seem to result from the intensified and sophisticated use of language. The multifunctionality of language, especially of literary language, its imagistic and rhythmic potential, is able to create the impression, at least in fortunate cases, that literary language is not mere pale representation, but a lively icon or evocation of vitally important scenes.16 It is necessary to use literary language in that way because there are no commonly valid mental and behavioral patterns. But this use is also problematic because it furthers the neglect of performative, “mute” or semantically subdued, and yet expressive types of activity. As aesthetic media, verbal theater and opera differ significantly in the scope they grant to those activities. Generally, and in spite of the social distinctions between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie made above, the novel almost paradoxically exploits dimensions of theatricality as domains of life. In Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, the child’s play with the puppet theater leaves indelible impressions for life, whether we call it a mere pleasurable pastime or more, and “his passion for the stage chimed in with the first love of a female creature.” The shaping of the personality is tied up with projection into dramatic roles—here those of David and Goliath, which, as mentioned before, are more powerfully materialized in opera. In his early development, Wilhelm in fact manages to change novels back into plays because, at that period, the “dramatic” effect (in the double sense) of the theater is stronger. The parental argument against the “uselessness” of the theater is turned by Wilhelm into a criticism of the bourgeois interlacing of money and the aesthetics of everyday life: business profits are used for silk wallpaper and English furniture, but “are these not useless, too,” like “our theater curtain”? In order to render Wilhelm susceptible to the appeals of business life, even Werner empha-

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sizes its theatrical qualities: it is the “spectacle of courageous enterprises” and the “sight of a ship” returning with a rich catch that fascinate. Profit and happiness do not lie in numbers only: “happiness is the goddess of living/lively human beings, and, in order to feel her grace truly, one has to live and see people who make lively efforts and enjoy with all their senses.”17 Given Werner’s own development, this is a dubious claim. Yet it remains true, for Wilhelm at least, that “external objects,” generally the fragmentary nature of our existence (das Zerstückelte unser Daseins), indeed reason itself (Vernunft) do not make up the totality of existence (die Summe unserer Existenz). The strange fraction (ein wunderlicher Bruch) that always remains, what is it made of?18 The unknown person, conveniently but not seriously called a parson or priest, criticizes the decline of mute, subdued acting, yet opts for active/acting participation in theatrical companies as a preparation and training for life: “It is the best way to lead people out of themselves and, via a detour, to lead them back into themselves.” It turns out that he is a member of the Turmgesellschaft, a more or less secret society that has perfected the combination of business (of a partly international stature, indeed), politics, and a high, sometimes mystifying theatricality of behavior. Wilhelm’s initiation into real life might have been taken out of some melodramatic plot: he is led through the variously decorated rooms of a castle; a picture of the King of Denmark, out of Hamlet, speaks in the voice of his real father; a letter of instructions with oracular sayings is handed over to him, Felix turns out to be his son, and so on. In the atmosphere of the society, Wilhelm’s planned marriage to Therese and the relations between the sexes in general are shrouded in a peculiar mixture of appearance and mystified realities: in the theatrically enacted process of mating, people and love, coincidence and fate become interchangeable. Therese is finally married by Lothario. The latter imposes the “secret condition” that Wilhelm marry his own sister, Natalie (whom, of course, he had “really” wanted anyway), and Jarno (and not Friedrich) “takes care” of Lydia, since he cherishes the heart capable of love in principle, but does not mind so much to whom that love is “personally” addressed.19 In a series of subsidiary episodes, the novel keeps on weaving interpenetrations of acting, disguises, dissimulation, make-believe, and “realities” suddenly elevated to that dignified status. The count, for instance, adopts a completely religious life after he has seen Wilhelm in his own clothes and his own room, and has therefore taken him as his dop-

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pelgänger. Wilhelm had donned these clothes during a kind of private playacting with the countess, in which, however, his and her “real” or at least incipient feelings for each other were involved. The distinction between “empty gallantry” and “more serious enterprises” is suspended, although, as the metaphors for “passion” suggest (“a bliss granted only by the first bubbling foam of a freshly poured cup of love”), it may not be completely irrelevant. One of the stranger episodes, not least because it evokes no comment and remains completely unexplained, shows Wilhelm repairing to his bed after a performance of Hamlet, still under the influence of a heated theatrical imagination, suddenly embraced by the tender arms and lively kisses of an unknown (?) woman whom he does not dare to push away.20 Mystified and mystifying theatricality of these kinds cannot claim, of course, a systematic position in life. In particular, madness, on which there are many debates, or rather phenomena bordering on it, and an uncontrolled habit of “imitation” as practiced by Serlo seem to indicate that theatricality has indirect limits. On the other hand, if Serlo’s imitation and mimicry of everybody and everything are the product of an “inner coldness,” they are also due to his perspicacity (Klarheit seines Blick). His gaze “deconstructs,” one might say, the pretense of serious interiority.21 And whatever the status of mystified or even manipulated theatricality may be, it yet remains the context for an oracular program of life: “Think of how you may [‘really’] live” (Gedenke zu leben).22 Goethe’s novel presents a peculiar communicative situation. Its media qualities—extensive prose—spin out implications and attractions of modes of communication and experience that they themselves cannot claim. The novel engages in the paradoxical effort to delineate contours of something that the historical importance of the novel, in fact its sheer existence, seems to rule out for modern Western societies. As a communicative mode, it does justice to modern complexities. These are ineluctable. Insofar as the novel is also a story about something, however, it uses the complexity, and thus the manipulative scope of narrative to hint at areas in which complexity can be escaped from or performatively pushed into the background. Literature, in a modern sense, uses languages that are also used for purposes far more mundane—theoretical, practical, factual, referential. It is essential, therefore, for modern societies to avoid confusions between what is theoretically or practically true and what may be imaginatively valid. The form of the medium used by literature—language— comes dangerously close to the languages of reality and seems in fact to

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coalesce with them. This is why it is easy, for early novels, to assert first historical-factual, then probable, or at least representative truth values23—assertions in which the fictitiousness of what is being said is playfully hidden. This is also why, conversely, some literary periods, like early English Romanticism and others, have been able to claim a real, that is, a profoundly referential, import for their poetic languages—that import supposedly being unrivaled, indeed unsurpassable by everyday or scientific languages. German “mystical” theories of poetic language come to mind in their connection, as well. Once literature has to abandon that claim—and the claim is of course quickly parodied by literature itself, even within Romanticism—it turns into the opposite: the very paradigm of fictions mitigated or compensated by variously described important effects. The price literature pays for being able to “represent” almost anything consists in an open dynamics, a corrosive wear and tear of what very quickly appear as mere arbitrary, interchangeable styles of representation. Joyce, in Ulysses, presented their encyclopedia. Hegel has captured the ambivalent complementarity of literature quite concisely. For him literature (“poetry”) abolishes, in varying degrees, the importance of the materials, or the medium, out of which it is made. Its language, prima facie, is abstract, devoid of the imposing sensuousness that is preserved and played out, in various degrees of intensity, by the other arts. Of those, architecture presents the heaviest materiality, in both a literal and a figurative sense. Materiality correlates with public-political functions and provides the scope of their performative enactment. Literature, in its turn, is elevated, but also dematerialized, into the most “general art” in which anything may be represented, in which nothing, on the other hand, can be taken for real. Hegel’s passage is worth quoting in full: Therefore, however completely poetry produces the totality of beauty once and for all in a most spiritual way, nevertheless, spirituality constitutes at the same time precisely the deficiency of this final sphere of art. In the system of arts, we can regard poetry as the polar opposite of architecture. Architecture cannot so subordinate the sensuous material to the spiritual content as to be able to form that material into an adequate shape of the spirit; poetry, on the other hand, goes so far in its negative treatment of its sensuous material that it reduces the opposite of heavy spatial matter, namely sound, to a meaningless sign instead of making it, as architecture makes its material, into a meaningful symbol. But in this way, poetry destroys the fusion of spiritual inwardness with external existence to an extent that begins to be incompatible with the original conception of art, with the result that poetry runs the

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risk of losing itself in a transition from the region of sense into that of the spirit. The beautiful mean between these extremes of architecture and poetry is occupied by sculpture, painting, and music because each of these arts works the spiritual content entirely into a natural medium and makes it intelligible alike to sense and spirit.24

Murray Krieger, in Arts on the Level, presents a modernized summary of that situation: the poem cannot be turned into an aesthetic yet materially precious object. “The words’ spiritual—or at least immaterial, airy—appeal does not permit us to speak of it as a medium except metaphorically.” It is the relative lack of materiality (and in that sense, of more striking qualities as a medium) that triggers the activities of interpretive energy (or, in the absence of performatively anchored cultural functions for literature, interpretive compulsion) as a reification of (cultural) signs into aesthetic objects—indeed, into fetishes. The “deracination of art objects,” which have been cut off “from performing any vital cultural function,” thus appears not just in the rise of museums, where specific art objects are exhibited as cut loose from such functions, but in the way literary works are read and interpreted, following the development of specifically interiorized reading habits. These reading habits are, of course, tied up with the disciplining effects of education in schools, but also in private families, as Friedrich Kittler and others have insisted. They are techniques for dealing with something that, though undeniably fascinating and important for the human “soul,” suffers from the ascendancy of socially or scientifically defined concepts of reality—and is therefore called fiction. Krieger deplores that situation and wants to remedy it, at least partly, by the revitalization of a notion of “the poem” for all “imaginative literature.”25 In the present work, however, that diagnosis is exploited instead for an investigation into culturally less deracinated forms of intermediality. Methodologically, an easy way to do this is to look for paradigmatic perspectives on intermediality in novels themselves. I would like to repeat that, in doing so, one has to be aware of course that writers themselves frequently used “literature” in order to extol the virtues of other media. Early German Romanticism is full of theorizing about music. In many writers of French Realism and Naturalism, an ambivalence—both disdain and fascination—is noticeable with respect to photography and precinematic ways of seeing.26 Here, I am more concerned with illustrative case studies. Consider, for example, the intermediality of “literature” and painting in the novel.

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‘Joseph Andrews’ and Painting In early novels, in which the representative and representational power of the new medium still appears paramount, the elevation and dematerialization of literature is couched in optimistic terms. Even so, a “literary” writer like Fielding cannot restrict himself to justifying the novel in solely intraliterary terms as a new genre. Cultural change necessitates intermedia reflections. Novel writing, “this kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language,”27 and novel reading imply a reorientation in the relationships between the performative (body-related) and the imaginative parts of our behavior. Its precise modalities are difficult to assess. Bodily and imaginative awareness and their dynamics do not continually depend on direct, external stimuli. The “life of the imagination,” in particular, and its bodily reverberations may present themselves in quasi-autonomous forms. In comparison with older forms of “literature,” however, the novel had to grapple with different and more intricate dimensions of visuality, that is, visible, “telling” appearances and invisible but effective social and moral constraints of life. It is clear that Fielding was acutely aware of the problem. He certainly begins, in the preface to Joseph Andrews, with seemingly intraliterary distinctions. Above all, the action of the new “comic epic-poem in prose” is “more extended and comprehensive, containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of character” than comedy or, on the serious side, tragedy. But the quantitative literary distinction conceals a problem of representation that has to do with the decreased visibility of the new subject matter. Fielding goes on “to illustrate all this by another science,” painting.28 While painting, and particularly caricatura, was (and to some extent of course still is) able to present, in striking visual forms, the monstrous, the inhuman aspects of human beings, modern art, according to Fielding, has to tackle the ridiculous. This, however, is a rather evasive quality. It cannot be pinned down in striking pictures, whether literally painted or verbal. One may say that older forms of lyric poetry and drama, in having recourse to a relatively stable and limited repertoire of metaphors and in profiting by more strongly performative modes of enactment, were still able to control, in an implicit but yet striking visuality, the relations between the desirable and the deviant. This would seem true even for later forms of poetry and their contexts of sociability. Shakespeare’s Richard III can “paint” himself and perform as a freak of nature. In the

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Sonnets, the organization of the psychic around and through strongly visualized metaphors of analogy, natural and otherwise, is so emphatic that the apparent concreteness of the inner life is preserved even though that life is beginning to transcend metaphorico-analogical boundaries. Moreover, a sophisticated play with tautologies keeps visibility alive in the very act of subverting it. Poetry, in seemingly “One thing expressing, leaves out difference” (105, line 8). But in great contrast with modern poststructuralism, Shakespeare keeps an attractive machinery of deconstructive and yet somehow expressive tautologies in motion. Howard Felperin has described these procedures as Shakespeare’s wandering between (playful) “hyperconcretization” and an extremely self-conscious “metamimetic project.”29 A few years before Shakespeare, Sidney had still propounded doctrines of “true lively knowledge” to be “figured forth” not so much in “the regular instruction of philosophy,” but in the “feigned image of poesy.”30 The control of visibility through analogically powerful metaphor became untenable once literature was supposed to bring historical or political domains into focus. Once conflicts no longer are the transitory form of a basically stable hierarchy, visualizing, explanatory metaphors get out of hand, may in fact run amuck. This occurs in Shakespeare’s more complex history plays. Northumberland’s generalized metaphorical vision of unbridled conflict, for instance, prevents him from seeing things in a possibly clearer light: “Contention, like a horse / Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose / And bears down all before him” (2Henry IV, 1.1.9–11; cf. 1.1.154–60). Morton has to tell him not to divorce “wisdom from your honour,” and Lord Bardolph calls his words a “strainèd passion” (1.1.161–63). But to little avail: there is hardly any character who can manage the realignment of metaphorical vision and political events. In presenting his case, Mowbray, for one, gets lost in a mire of overlapping and conflicting metaphors to such a degree that Westmoreland can simply cut him short: “You speak, Lord Mowbray, now you know not what” (2Henry IV, 4.1.128). But Mowbray is just the prototype of the ridiculous person, who cannot see to what extent image and information have parted company. The novel, of course, is no longer concerned with civil war, but with social deviance. In such a context, Fielding does not need the succinct but excessively simplifying effects of caricatura with which the monstrous had to be castigated. (That the monstrous, in social contexts not as goodnaturedly organized as Fielding’s slices of life, continued to be a problem for painting and literature need not detain us here.) The monstrous, then,

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“is much easier to paint than to describe, and the ridiculous to describe than to paint.” The descriptions of the ridiculous, however, feed on visuality without exploiting it directly. Even if, as R. F. Brissenden rightly says in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, “Fielding is not a remarkably visual writer,” indirect appeals to visuality as telling visibility remain the barely veiled basis of a novel that seems to rely, to a large extent, on arguments couched in the ironies of narrative commentary and events. Hogarth is frequently mentioned when facial expressions are to be imagined. Not only does Parson Adams “attract the eye,”31 and not only do quasi-allegorical names fall back onto the illustrative force of allegory proper. It is mainly in the introductory chapters to the four books of the novel that levels of novelistic plausibility and appeal are debated in intermedia terms. Book 1, chapter 1 (“examples,” not precepts) and book 2, chapter 1 (the division of the novel into books and chapters, with the vacant pages in between as “places of rest” where the reader may stay “some time to repose himself and consider of what he hath seen in the parts he hath already past through”) are not conspicuous in that respect, and book 4, chapter 1 is not at all so. No matter. The crucial chapter is book 3, chapter 1, supplemented by the debate between the poet and the player in book 3, chapter 10. In book 3, chapter 1, Fielding distances himself cautiously from notions of factual truth that the novel cannot live up to. He replaces that truth with notions of a typical, indeed archetypal, veracity of the characters portrayed. “I question not but several of my readers will know the lawyer in the stage-coach, the moment they hear his voice.” In order to prevent direct (“malicious”) applications, Fielding asserts that he is describing not men, but manners, not individuals, but species. In this typical form, “the lawyer is not only alive, but hath been so these 4000 years.” The means through which the ridiculous, or even “deformity,” are to be detected reside in a curious mixture of traditional literal visibility and a more recent quality of moral abstraction: “to hold the glass to thousands in their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.”32 The threat of a basically older type of visibility (“public shame”) is used to enforce a topical, inner, only occasionally visible moral reorganization. The novel plunges into interiority, but it looks back to the light of painting. In the “Discourse between the Poet and Player” (book 3, chapter 10), conventional arguments (good/bad plays versus good/bad actors) hover around the question to what extent emphatically defined and strongly visible traditional qualities such as the sublime can be represented on the mod-

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ern stage. That stage is placed in a social context in which human action no longer lends itself to artistic, tragic stylization. That context will therefore prefer cheap forms of stage visibility: “The town, like a peevish child, knows not what it desires, and is always best pleased with a rattle. A farce-writer hath indeed some chance for success; but they have lost all taste for the sublime.” The debaters, although unable to recognize their basic consensus, are both right: the great tragic actors of the recent past (Booth, Betterton) would have been frustrated by “such horrible stuff” as contemporary tragedies. Contemporary players, in their turn, apparently can hardly do justice to the great plays of the past by Shakespeare, Otway, Lee.33 Fielding, given what might be called his own complex position in between, is certainly heavily ironic. But that irony does not do away with a kind of systematic discrepancy between sprawling forms of social action and possibilities of a visually pregnant theatrical style. The novel abandons social and aesthetic visibility and the visibility of the aesthetic as social. These had been related as sublime action or picturesque or ridiculous manners particularly in tragedy and comedy. But it does not get rid of the ongoing problem of their relation. That problem, to all intents and purposes, no longer can be solved. It pierces through in an open dynamics of representational displacements. This is why J. Paul Hunter has spoken of Fielding’s and other novelists’ “uncertain methodology.” Fielding was busy “updating the world-as-stage metaphor, now pretending that its appropriate vehicle was a stagecoach in which writer and reader could confer amicably together and trace in harmony the larger outlines of the world’s government through a study of particulars that could be illuminated by commentary, interpretation, and the observation of response.”34 Hunter relates this to profound cultural changes in which the socio-aesthetic visibilities of a stage culture are progressively replaced by the closet and the interpretational obsessions, the “loneliness of the long-distance reader,” as the title of another essay by Hunter has it.35 But that cultural change, too, is an incomplete one. It remains replete, as the history of the novel shows, with appeals to visibilities without clear status. This is why, among other reasons, the novel is unthinkable without theory—in the novels themselves, in prefaces or special treatises, and not only in its difficult beginnings. Nowhere, to be sure, would a dependence on visual codes vanish altogether. Modern scholarship, for instance, has amply discussed Hardy’s “cinematic method,” his “framing” use of striking images. This method takes away some of the burden of narrative explanation in decisive situations, but also comes dangerously

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close to leaving the narrated world a heap of broken, empty appearances.36 In contexts going beyond Fielding’s more or less rural society (and the inlaid stories concerning London life demonstrate this as clearly as Hardy’s “ache of modernism,” the confrontation between rural and city life), visual codes, as forms of coherent ordering, become opaque, fall prey to erosion or fragmentation. By the same token, however, Fielding’s compromise—the smooth transitions between implied visuality and abstract morality—would not work for long. Confronted with the aesthetic impoverishment of the social, and the cultural impoverishment of the aesthetic in its literary form, the question would be whether there are media, aesthetic or otherwise, for powerfully intermediate experiences.

‘The Bride of Lammermoor,’ Opera, and ‘Madame Bovary’ One preliminary conclusion can immediately be drawn. Cultures need not and normally will not embody or provide intermediate zones, spaces for the coalescence of the real and the imaginary, for directly engaging both performatively and aesthetically organized activities. But they may preshape situations, areas of prefigurement and standards of performance, in which coalescences of the real and the imaginary become realistic possibilities. There is, of course, no theory of the varieties of human experience in which the satisfaction of experience is taken for granted. But one may indulge in the minimalist anthropological claim that desires for experience as uninhibited and fulfilled suspense are, metaphorically speaking, on the prowl, looking for cultural spaces or forcing them creatively and sometimes violently into being. The shapes of literal or metaphorized, crude or sophisticated “carnivals,” both rewarding and frustrating, are manifold. Where, in disciplining, “normalizing” cultures or societies their enactment is narrowly hedged in, their production often will take antirealistic or violent forms. Art, in its specialized modern sense, drifts toward cultural antirealism. Art, and not compliance with sociocultural trivialities, must vicariously suggest, in often “tragic” modes, forms of coalescence. It is true that the nineteenth-century Western novel in particular has partly complied with realistic pressures. But these were undermined by counterimages of the grotesque, the sordid, or historical forms of the pathological. The effort at realism and then naturalism proved more provocative for sociocultural standards than fantastic art itself (the trial of Flaubert, the revolt

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against Zola, etc.). It could happen that a poet laureate, Tennyson, wrote poetry suspected of having been written by a madman or to portray madness itself. Not surprisingly, the so-called novel of the Enlightenment was quickly superseded by the Gothic novel and its emphasis on abysmal experience. Fielding had intended to describe manners, not men, to absorb, to some extent, new pressures of socialization that neither traditional hierarchies nor images of a complex but controlled human nature could manage or account for. Fashion, fueled by money, threatened to assume the role of the great new equalizer or distinguisher and thus to drown the very notion of human nature as good.37 Almost ninety years later, Scott reversed the program, paradoxically using history for a portrayal not of manners, but of men.38 Scott vowed to throw “the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors;—those passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day.”39 It seems astounding that Fielding’s concern—to grant some scope to newly emerging social pressures and to claim some legitimacy for the notion of truly humane human beings—should have become a matter of indifference so quickly, as far as society as a problematic agent of socialization is concerned. The “historical novel” is thus a misleading term: Scott’s novels are rarely concerned with history, and never with historical reality. History, certainly, can boast events from which the title of “reality” cannot be withheld. But in Scott, history also, and more importantly, consists of the ideas formed incessantly around or about it. Both layers, in their turn, furnish the backgrounds on which—in comparison with the Gothic novel—diluted supernaturalism as a version of powerfully intermediate experience can be delineated. In The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), this program is carried out with a vengeance. Scott wanted a more plausible form of the supernatural than the Gothic novel put on display. Again, as it did for Goethe, the novel chases what, given its own media conditions, it cannot describe. It is important to see that the supernatural does not mainly consist in omens, prophecies, symbolic settings, witches, and similar machinery. The highly intricate self-referentiality of the narrative (intertextual abundance, ironic editorial tricks) is oriented toward a self-therapy of novelistic deficits. The text follows narrative conventions (storytelling in a seemingly historical context) on the surface and for a long time, but only in order to abandon them completely in the end. Whereas in terms of intermediality,

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Fielding had wrestled with the cultural functionalities of painting and writing, Scott, starting out with a similar configuration, transcended the medium of the novel in the direction of opera. Like other Scott novels, The Bride of Lammermoor unfolds within two frame narratives. They serve to undermine the notion of history as a controlling or referential framework and the notion of the written story as a medium in which the essentials of the characters’ experience can be progressively suggested. Scott’s own introduction, written in 1830, keeps harping on the rumorlike quality of the historical events. Events, whatever their “factual” core, engender halos of connotation from which the possible meanings of the events must be constructed. Meanings of that kind, more or less stabilized, function as narrative prefigurements of the novel’s own story: “it is said . . . ,” “Various reports . . . ,” and “another account darkly insinuated.” Furthermore, the introduction tends to submerge the possible historical basis in various popular texts, mostly “some highly scurrilous and abusive verses.”40 The other frame questions the adequacy of literary writing even more radically. The debate between the writer (and editor) Peter Pattieson and the painter Dick Tinto ends with the half-hearted admission of the writer that a “favourite propensity, however, has at times overcome me, and my persons, like many others in this talking world, speak now and then a great deal more than they act.” This, of course, does not mean what it seems to say. It is not the characters who talk, but Pattieson who writes too much—in that dubious process of a manuscript being “wove(n) into the following Tale.”41 There is, in other words, a need for the self-transcendence of writing. Tinto would like to achieve it with the “painting” of the visually striking moment, that is, with the evocation or suggestion of emphatic appearances. Writing (“these creeping twilight details of yours”) is incapable of presenting to the reader that instant and vivid flash of conviction, which darts on the mind from seeing the happy and expressive combinations of a single scene, and which gathers from the position, attitude, and countenance of the moment, not only the history of the past lives of the personages represented, and the nature of the business on which they are immediately engaged, but lifts even the veil of futurity, and affords a shrewd guess at their future fortunes.42

The times are clearly past when the maxim of the “ancient philosopher”—“Speak [or rather write, since it is always “the author” who “introduces” his characters to the reader], that I may know thee”—could claim validity.43

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The novel, in its ordinary narrative procedures, is certainly incapable of presenting powerfully impressive scenes speaking, as it were, irrefutably for themselves. For roughly three hundred pages, Scott demonstrates the fictive-fictitious qualities of fictional writing by spreading out the infinite and unstoppable complexities of psychological, genealogical, political, and historical exfoliations and their reversals. The complexity in question here is not controlled, but confused. The ineffectiveness of writing is highlighted by writing’s own main intranovelistic protagonist, the Lord Keeper (lawyer and politician) Sir William Ashton, whose “time-serving” meanderings (to use a term no longer really appropriate), in speaking but even more so in writing, swallow up a huge portion of narrative space. Any narrative thread, whether devoted to the relations between Ashton and Ravenswood (seemingly the main conflict, sharply exacerbated, however, by Lady Ashton’s own idiosyncratic perspectives and interests), between Ravenswood and his powerful uncle, the Marquis of A., even between Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton, branches continually off into regional and local contexts for which no common denominators exist. Particularly striking, in that respect, is the engagement between Lucy and Edgar, where the text sometimes aspires to the immediacy of powerful appearances (“an emblematic ceremony of their trothplight,” accompanied fittingly by an arrow that kills a raven seated near them at the fatal fountain), and the strong but incalculable differences between the lovers (in terms of family, religion, and their ways of encoding emotions), which, immediately afterward, begin to haunt their relationship.44 The problematic narrative way to counteract the narrative drift into confused complexity consists in falling back into the pseudo-immediacy of melodramatic events and situations. Scott makes ample use of them. However, they produce an atmosphere of sometimes trivial, sometimes facile suspense, not of powerfully telling appearances. Scott likes to hold back names, to keep silent on the possible meanings of relatively trivial events such as the duel between Ravenswood and Bucklaw. Intentions are likewise often shrouded in narrative fog—the Lord Keeper’s, for example, or Ravenswood’s when going abroad.45 Omens, prophecies, somber settings, and the like are generously dispensed—for whatever they may be worth. In an age of total intertextuality, it is of course impossible to overlook the self-conscious irony in a cure that is worse than the cause. Fiona Robertson has aptly commented on the ironies of intertextuality. But the accumulation of intertextual reference may also condense or break into

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forms of archetypal violence in which the narrative presents the stereotype without the connotations of cliché. Signing the marriage contract with Bucklaw, clasping her hands together, and sinking back on the easy chair “in a state resembling torpor,” Lucy starts out approaching the end in the wonted melodramatic posture: “To sign and seal—to do and die.” But in suggesting directions of her final career, Scott uses a distanced, sometimes almost medical language. It is further deprived of affective charge because it is related to and confronted with Lady Ashton’s even colder metaphors (taken, for example, from military and fishing contexts). Scott leaves the reader to judge whether the Lady’s procedure is diabolical or merely consistent with “the temper and credulity of those times.” Lucy, it is true, falls prey to the melodramatic imagination. But that imagination has been infiltrated into her by the “witch” Ailsie Gourlay. It is not identical with, but hostile to, her “rocklike” decision to stick to her contract with Edgar in the face of “heaven and earth and hell” should he not liberate her from it. This leads into quite a different “fate” from what the melodramatic imagination was supposed to arrange—an attempt at murder, and not fatalistic resignation. The use of the stereotype, without its connotations, applies also to Edgar. His (re)appearance is that of an apparition. But his language remains remarkably sober, sometimes almost indifferent. In the end, he falls more or less silent. Yet, this time, neither language nor behavior will tolerate the narrative oscillations that Scott-Pattieson has practiced up to that point. Is there, then, or is there not such a thing as “the ecstasy of real desperation”? When Lucy tries to murder Bucklaw, are we, or are we not supposed to diagnose “a wild paroxysm of insanity”? Whichever option we choose, we are left, in terms of writing and discourse, with a withholding of explanations that both the “historical” and the “melodramatic” layers of the preceding narrative normally would have supplied. Lucy dies without explanatory words. More surprisingly, even the normally talkative Bucklaw tries to banish any attempt at explanation. Ravenswood’s final course consists, likewise, in a series of acts more or less without words.46 In the end, then, even the totally visual scenes, which speak for themselves and which Tinto had tried to promote, tend to disintegrate. We are left with a few strong words (“ecstasy,” “desperation,” “horror,” insanity,” Edgar as the “murderer” of Lucy, the “closing” of his life),47 which, however, no longer conform to the narrative drift of the story at large. Emphasis on an immediacy without explanation, yet an immediacy capable of being embedded in some form of coherence—this is what the

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novel seems to be asking for. It is asking, in short, for the operatic principle. Herbert Lindenberger has used this concept historically—parts of nineteenth-century literature were eager to attain “at once the visible presence of the self-evidential sign and the immediate intuitive conviction of music.”48 The operatic principle is operative, if that word play can be allowed, also in the widespread opinion that large parts of nineteenthcentury verbal theater came to life only in their operatic transformation. Shaw, for instance, maintained that it was the chief glory of Victor Hugo as a stage poet “to have provided libretti for Verdi.”49 If there is a problem with such a perspective, it is that its historical generalization is all too easy. Lindenberger also quotes Hofmannsthal, who considered Shakespeare’s plays to be “pure operas.”50 In general, a historical consciousness of the operatic principle can be found—with relative frequency, as opposed to the scarcity of such perspectives in literary criticism—in cultural histories of opera.51 In terms of systematic, if frequently only implied, intermediality, however, the point to be underscored emphatically with Scott is that “literature,” in the sense of fictional entities (mostly in the shape of books), written (printed) and read, can hardly establish and maintain itself as a medium in its own right. I would like to argue, with Wolfgang Iser (in the wake of Castoriadis), that the human psyche is its own lost object. This presupposes, and entails, that a unified notion of human nature is not available; according to Edgar Morin, “human nature” is a lost paradigm.52 Starting from there, a “literary” anthropology will hold and end up with the assertion that literary “enactments” of experience neither confirm nor deny the socially conditioned form of experience, but instead unfold its unlimited varieties, holding evidence in play and at bay, but not granting it any form of conclusiveness.53 A culturally oriented anthropology of media will not contradict that assumption, but diverge from its literary homogenization. It will insist that culturally typical ways of staging experience depend to a large extent on the media used for it. Edgar Morin in fact once maintained that it is opera and especially film that demonstrate that human beings do not have a soul, but that they manifest “soul-like” qualities (“L’homme n’a pas d’âme. Il a de l’âme . . .”).54 What is at stake then is not the status or the legitimacy of powerfully engaging or intermediate experiences. Their status is always dubious, their legitimation well-nigh impossible. But a minimalist anthropological assumption may posit a cultural (and personal) need for transitory but gripping enactments in which a sense of re-

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ality and the heterogeneous drives of the imaginary may merge for a short while. Such enactments, in a corollary of that assumption, cannot very well hold their ground in cultural dynamics if they remain, as they do in “literature,” purely metaphorical or immanently mental. Language may conjure up sensuous images, but it also tends to liquidate them instantly: whatever is formulated is surrounded and overshadowed by explicit and implicit alternatives. Such a structure not only relativizes meanings, it tends to impede experience itself. This is what Tinto criticizes as literature in The Bride of Lammermoor: the pages of Pattieson are “mere chat and dialogue,”55 literally, mentally, or in their analogies of description and analysis. Culturally significant media will therefore enact or contain moments of visual, rhythmic, or generally dynamic immediacy, without being overly concerned about copresent ideological burdens. Modern media like film or TV may sometimes have a hard time performing that trick because, in spite of their technological modernity, they frequently still operate on an implicitly literary basis. McLuhan has made that point with respect to film: “Film, both in its reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture.”56 In opera, however, it is precisely the artificiality of enactment that renders superfluous, not to say absurd, questions of the legitimacy, plausibility, and “realism” of immediacy. Opera indulges in one of the traditionally dominant forms of transitional objects in performative contexts, what Oskar Becker called the fragility and the adventurousness of the beautiful. (See, for a very late example, Schiller’s notion of grace.) And it does not expose the beautiful to discursive competition. Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) prunes away exactly any such competition: the political situation (if one may call it such) is barely alluded to. It is reduced to a threat of a reversal of fortune for Enrico Ashton, Lucia’s brother. That threat is needed in order to provoke, or rekindle, Enrico’s passionate hostility toward Ravenswood, whose property he has more or less usurped. Ravenswood, of course, in contrast to the desired son-in-law Arturo Bucklaw, is unable, in political and material terms, to stem the waning of Ashton’s fortune. Scott spreads out masses of historical, political, and genealogical discourse largely attached to Lucy’s father and mother, neither of whom appears at all in the opera. One might be tempted to say that the opera, leaving out the rest, transforms the last forty pages of the novel into singing and music. In the novel, Lucy also is vaguely associated with these, and with the “emotions of this natural and simple class.”57

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In Scott, the possibility of a transfer of immediacy into what poses as “real life” is left in suspense, or rather dissolved in the quasi-autonomous events of the end. Flaubert, in Madame Bovary (1857), makes that transfer completely illusionary. Yet, paradoxically, in describing a production of Donizetti’s opera in Rouen, he also enhances the transitory but irrefutable immediacy of opera. The historical code in which this is couched remains, as in Scott, a discourse of the passions. In Flaubert’s description, they gain an existence almost independent of the persons uttering (that is, singing) them. The famous sextet (number 9 in a continuous series of musical numbers—according to other divisions act 2, scene 4, number 3) is evoked by Flaubert as an intensified, but also depersonalized, presentation of almost free-floating emotions: Edgar glittering with fury, Ashton flinging murderous challenges against him, Lucia letting forth shrill laments, Arturo “modulating” a medium pitch, the bass of the priest Raimondo droning like an organ, Alisa and the chorus of women repeating various of his “words” in a different pitch. Gesticulating and singing, “anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, pity and shock were flowing simultaneously from their half-opened mouths” (Madame Bovary, part 2, chapter 15). Emma loses herself completely in images of a life with Edgar—but only for a while. Her interest in the opera dies down immediately when she learns that Léon is also among the visitors in the theater. For her, operatic evidence and immediacy are as absolute and commanding as they are fragile and evanescent. And she also demonstrates to what extent the aesthetic and real life and/or their appearance can become interchangeable. That interchangeability is perhaps even more striking in E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Here, during a provincial Italian performance of Lucia, the “audience sounded drunk, and even Caroline, who never took a drop, was swaying oddly.” Harriet Herriton, on the other hand, cannot take it. Instead, at the climax, she wants to be taken out. While Charles Bovary, on seeing Lucia with her hair down, finally senses something fascinating even for him, in Harriet, common sense carries the day.58 Flaubert had struck a precarious balance between “literary” irony, operatic “Romanticism,” and everyday triviality. In Forster’s novel, however, illusion is the hallmark of everyday common sense (and, by implication, its literary refinement), but not of operatic artificiality.

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‘The Maltese Falcon’: The Novel and the Film It is important to keep in mind, in speaking about encodings of powerfully intermediate experience, that the question of how passions are lived or get into vital shapes does not imply anthropological givens as a basis of comparison. Nor, on the other hand, is the medium simply the message—a slogan that, though apparently coined by McLuhan, is not even an appropriate characterization of his own approach. McLuhan, in fact, frequently speaks in quite traditional metaphors: Media, “being extensions of ourselves [into the public domain], also depend on us for their interplay and evolution.” “All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.” My kind of talk, however, presupposes that anthropological trends (drives and directions of experience), unknown though their “reality” may be, are mainly analyzable, if not livable, in the shape of cultural media. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602) suggests an awareness that engaging action and experience always need some “Pandaring,” some arrangement of a more or less theatrical kind, some framing or staging combined with performance, as part of cultural knowledge. Love (scenes) may thus always appear as passionate or as an overplaying of roles. Achilles in Troilus and Cressida illustrates the empty anthropological core from which this derives, a kind of perpetual mirror stage, the permanent pressure emanating from the observation of and by oneself and others. (See in particular act 3, scene 3). This may also at least partly account for Hamlet’s compulsion to talk, in fact to manipulate himself into the passion requisite for an action that, as duty, is no longer self-evident. With Nietzsche, a theoretically explicit form of the awareness of a need for arrangements of a theatrical kind seems to have become unavoidable. This is why “real-life” experience and the experience of the “arts” may be far apart, but also tantalizingly close. They may fuse, more or less, because feeling and (self-)observation, immediacy and arrangement, cannot be neatly separated. The most interesting media are those that, while elaborating the arrangement even to high degrees of “artificiality,” yet seem to sponsor immediacy. Encodings of the “passions” change: allegorical essences, ruling passions, hobbyhorses, and moralized, biologized, or individualized drives, along with present-day scientific or everyday jargons, populate the scene. Yet their tensions with respect to the empty anthropological core, the lost paradigm of human nature, remain unresolved. Thus David Gates, in a review of Anthony Storr’s Music and

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the Mind (1992), can write “that we crave music both for the unruly passions it lets loose and for the rule it imposes upon them.”59 The erosion, the falling apart of such codes, may, however, go very far. Combinations of latent social anomie and high risk (e.g., a social life undermined by high economic risks or soaring crime rates), the opaqueness of big-city semiotics, may lead toward a leveling of motivation—to “money” or survival, for instance, as explicitly supreme values—and toward a flattening out of hierarchical, emotionally effective values. The question then is what the medium for a code that avoids the semantic burden of the more traditional expressive languages and images might look like, how drives can be acted out in the absence of an expressive code for them other than money. The novel, being in principle able to take up anything, has taken up this situation, too. But again, this requires a radical if implicit reorientation toward another medium. In the American novels of the so-called “hard-boiled” school, there may be something called “love,” “anger,” and “loyalty.” But there are no longer public forms in which their existence takes recognizable shapes, in which it can be verified, acknowledged, or used in order to legitimize action. In such a context, it is easy to see what “being nuts about you” might mean. “But I don’t know,” Sam Spade says in The Maltese Falcon, “what that [love] amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won’t.”60 The implied shift in medium in such a text—the shift that is the selftherapy of the novel—can no longer veer toward painting because the visual impressions of painting would be too static for the rapid change of situations. Nor can it appeal to the seeming expressiveness of music. The implied medium here is film. The comparison is, of course, not with any actual film version of the novel—a level of comparison by no means devoutly to be wished and, to be sure, somewhat naive because it tends to take the literary version of a story as the model one. Film is instead taken, abstractly, as it were, as a potential of dynamic, suggestive, and yet inconclusive images. The semiotics of the big city remain literally nondescript: “San Francisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy and penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at windows.”61 As a result, drastically reduced versions of the experience of immediacy can take shape only by employing body language. It is one of the ironies of implied intermediality that the “classic” 1941

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Warner Bothers film version of this novel, with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor, directed by John Huston, should not do justice to, but overdo, this situation. Again, the point is not the comparison of the novel and the film, but the implicit intermediality of both. By overplaying the connotational definition of images, the Huston film frequently though not always drives away the ambiguity or openness of images of the body and of interaction that the novel tries to cultivate. In opera, body language and singing “produce” passion and the appearance of passion. The Huston film, through stereotyped, “telling” images and language, is in danger of remobilizing codes of connotations that the novel had cut into enigmatic fragments. This criticism of the film does not, of course, rehabilitate the selfsufficiency of the literary medium. The novel instead remains a Beckettian type of prose expanded into some kind of story—an inventory of losses in expressive registers, combined with highly tentative “filmic,” deconnotationalized glimpses. The medium of film, as McLuhan stated, betrays a residual literary orientation in which the progressive underdefinition of images (their “nakedness,” as Wittgenstein said in the Philosophical Investigations) is partly curbed. In that perspective, the film version in question here amounts to an obsolete, stereotyped reliterarization—obsolete because it is overdefining. For the medium of literature, however, Hammett’s novel demonstrates that the suggestiveness of body language, but also the lack of a coherent semiotics for it, does not rehabilitate traditional literary codes. In the remote past, allegorizing habits, typologies literary, scientific, and social, explored expressiveness, the connections between surface appearance and depth meanings. For Hammett, these strategies no longer are available. The first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon appears as a piece of purely gratuitous description—we have no idea what the different forms of the letter V in Spade’s face might convey. There are, of course, appearances—like that of Miss O’Shaughnessy (or, possibly, the contents of Mr. Cairo’s wallet)—in which Bourdieu-like fine distinctions, indicative of social status or even personality, are operative. But for the most part, the movements of parts of the body (especially the eyes) are symptoms of mental alertness, latent tensions, open situations. They are not expressions of well-defined inner states. Where movements turn into a kind of full-fledged social ritual (“They shook hands ceremoniously. Tom and Spade shook hands ceremoniously”), the ritual functions as a

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cover-up for the emptiness, not for the meaning of the situation. Where emotions are formulated explicitly, emphatically, they are false.62 To present filmic perception—that is, suggestive but not conclusive dynamic images—in verbal language may have an extremely distancing effect, and it does have that effect in Hammett’s novel. The coherence of older literary languages is broken. The optical coherence and the “telling” pictorial plenitude at which films themselves may sometimes aim cannot be restored. Body perception in Hammett, in that way, comes close to contemporary theorems about the dismembered body. The fragmentation of body perception subverts the rough, but productive notions of personality on which perception normally feeds. The emphasis is on the quasi-autonomy of bodily parts. While this emphasis is evident in The Maltese Falcon (see, for instance, the description of Spade beating up the “boy” Wilmer),63 it turns into something like a narrative mania in The Glass Key (1931). Here, one has almost nothing but twitching and moving parts of the body, suddenly exploding into some kind of mostly violent action, without the corresponding person(alitie)s attached to them.64 In dealing with an author like Hammett, one is tempted to attribute a residual anthropological function to literary language. For most cultural situations of desire, there would seem to be a need for “spelling out” the potential implications of situations, not in any form of futile completeness, but at least to some extent. Immediacy of action, of experience, does not exist, at least in an “ontological” sense. But the filmic orientation of Hammett’s language suggests that traditional forms of literature may have overreached themselves in suggesting both completeness and fragmentation of meaning. Burdened with broken meanings in infinitely variegated formulations, dimensions of possible felicitous performance dissolve and finally collapse. Opera reintroduces unified passions in artificial situations of performance. Singing takes up, works on, and shapes bodily rhythms. It preserves their translatability into passion. In its combination of body work, rhythm, and artificial arrangement, it represents, like rock music later, a potentially powerful, and in that sense real, configuration of as-if immediacy and engagement. In that sense, it cannot be turned into the same object of interpretation as literature. In opera, as Deleuze has it in a felicitous phrase, “the body unfolds as its own stage.”65 This is what the self-criticism of the novel via opera amounts to in Flaubert and E. M. Forster. Film, in principle, tends to destroy that re-

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unification. But depending on the organization of images and their control or expansion through music and words, it may strongly suggest more complex forms of body/passion couplings. One of the functions of literature in the twentieth century is to insist on the immense difficulties of such couplings. Where these couplings are portrayed in modern literature, they tend to be rendered ridiculous. There is hardly any language in which the mere appearance of their integrity can be preserved. In literature, couplings of the body and the passions mostly show up, if at all, in the form of parody. But parody, while it has been for a long time an almost instinctive intellectual need, also points to the nonliterary vitality of what it decries.

Provisional Consequences Histories of the novel could be (re)written along these lines. Investigations into the codes of experience, focused upon in novels or other literary texts, but implied or produced by other media, have accumulated during the recent past of literary criticism. My own examples could be multiplied indefinitely. I would rather insist on the systematic hinge around which that situation turns. The novel is a literary paradigm, perhaps the literary paradigm, insofar as it handles, perhaps better than anything else, the crucial interlacing of complexity and potentiality that has characterized Western, more than other modernizing societies, at least from the eighteenth century onward. If life is no longer predefined and laid out in advance, for instance by rank and status, it gets caught in and gains opportunities from shifting social and interactive configurations. Shifting interactions are rich in possibilities. Compared with them, ideological and systemic controls look somewhat poor. In novels, by contrast, complexity and possibilities take the form of stories with several layers of suspense—which is why the detective novel is just a special concretization of the novel structure as such. On the other hand, and whatever the pressures of real-life simplifications, modernization also means that complexity takes at least latent command in real life itself. Thought systems, each of them simplifying the world in their own single way, produce complex relativities when looked upon simultaneously. With the nineteenth century in particular, the chaotic aspects of thought systems, worldviews, and standpoints supplanted to some extent the amenities provided by their simplifications. The systems are continually undermined not just by novels, but by “life” itself. Not only are there more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies,

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it also makes sense to say that stories written by life may appear stranger, more surprising, and more interesting than those of novels. Professional writing tends to exhaust complex interests rather quickly and to fall back into what one might call routinized, mechanized, specious versions of complexity—or into the artistry of self-reflexive writing: “modernism.” Media, much as they may reflect complexity and potentiality, must also provide scope for dedifferentiation, that is, for simplifications of a more attractive kind than those demanded by social and thought systems themselves. Such dedifferentiations are in fact hallucinated, but not enacted in novels. Such arguments are not supposed to imply a theory of compensation. Setting up anthropological claims, much as they may forgo any notion of human nature, one seems to commit oneself to treat something like the hallucination of otherness (passion, violence, etc.) as a compensation for its “real” impossibility. If the emphasis, however, is on the productivity of codes and media in and for experience, the category of compensation, while always possible, is not needed. Media configurations then represent the management of problematic shifts around hypothetical vital orientations. Some strands of aesthetic theory, indeed, can be viewed as forms of a speculative memory, however nostalgic, preserving and cultivating notions of vital ensembles in which the coalescence of the supposedly real and the allegedly imaginary may (have) take(n) place. Schelling ambiguously described the work of art as a produced totality, not as signifying (allegorically), but as being that totality (symbolically). In such a perspective, after all, philosophy was working toward its own destruction. For Hegel, who comes to mind here too, some of the arts of the past may have shone in the capacity Schelling described. But the arts of modern periods are removed from the more vital domains of cultural performance. Hedged in and practiced in realms of their own, realms dubiously similar to those areas of “solitude and freedom” reserved, in theory, for theory, for scholarly and scientific work, they no longer embody the highest form of (historical) truth—no longer have cultural relevance and status, even for Hegel, who knew only too well that we are children of our times. In early human times, art for Hegel is everywhere. The beautiful, like a friendly genius, is woven into all the affairs of life, from the crude ornaments of the “savage” to the splendor of richly decorated temples. Even so and even then, the end of life seems elsewhere. And in modern times, there is no object, situation, or problem necessarily related to art and artistic treatment. The idealism of lively vitality, active

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even in nature, is no longer caught by art. The novel is the genre in which the hypertrophy of interiority can, for a while, rewardingly be dealt with. Adorno, in his turn, lamenting the drying up of vital forms of experience such as the sublime in nature and society, would see art as their last, if derealized, refuge. Art turns into a conjuring up of the fragments of what life and experience might have been.66 I am aware, of course, that it is easy to see in these figures of argument the surviving remnants of Romantic or culturally conservative trends. There is a lesson, however, to be drawn from this type of aesthetic theory. Art is handed over to the open dynamics of cultural media. The ongoing cultivation of other ideologies of the literary aesthetic (the term is adopted from Terry Eagleton, but is not applied to the same range of theories) is a rather academically or socially determined relic, compared to the impulses detectable in Schelling, Hegel, and Adorno.67

chapter two

Theory Trends, Past and Present

The Eighteenth Century: G. C. Lichtenberg and Media Analysis versus the Literary System Literature enters the media scene at relatively early stages of sociocultural evolution, and in at least a double sense. Narration, narrators, and narratives start their careers as devices for coping with situations in which surprising events, inspiring joy, terror, or anxiety, overtax the capacities for direct, immediate, and concrete problem-solving. Storytelling, from the outset, mingles factual report and imaginative participation in various degrees until pure fiction with a mere semblance of reality and a seemingly pure imaginative appeal is reached.1 On a second front, progressive complexity, initially driven perhaps by the development of trade and the like, is linked with the development of writing systems. These, in their turn, seem to have a built-in potential for fictionality. Writing may be used in order to fix, as normatively and bindingly as possible, the meaning of things. But any such determination opens up alternatives, spaces of interpretation in which the normative comes to be seen as a product of variable normalizations.2 Whatever is written can be written differently. Whatever is said can be said differently, too. But speech, by and large, is more efficiently hedged in by its situational checks and balances. That would mean that litterae, the letters, words, and sentences in writing, are always on their way toward literarization, toward some form of (“imaginative”) literature in a narrower sense. Conflicts of interpretation (within medieval theology, for instance) flare up wherever writing is dogmatically institutionalized. Their proliferation may provoke efforts to abolish the authority of writing altogether. Luther’s revolt, and his translation of the Bible, did not aim at a more authoritative text, but at the recreation of a powerful linguistic way

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to hear the word of God and thus to initiate an experience of faith—in contrast to a belief in inconsistent dogmas multiplied and distributed by writing. In an age of print, the experience aimed at by Luther can hardly be kept unadulterated from imaginative experiences inspired by very different texts. From then on, seeing the Bible’s stories as literature has remained a systematic media temptation. In situations not sufficiently anchored in what individuals take as unquestioned, graspable or tangible, realities, varying degrees of sociocultural complexity or “abstraction,” as Dieter Claessens terms it, will stimulate corresponding forms of literature from which pseudo-concrete pictures of intangibles will emerge. Perceiving things in some literary way, in that sense, may therefore constitute an ineluctable modality of the real. Periods in which manias of writing and reading occurred are well known in the cultural history of the West. That fascination, however, was pushed into a precarious position once the printing press, the print industry, and the literary market took charge of it. While nobody will uphold a simple contrast between literature and reality, it is clear that a fascinating rhetoric—presenting intangibles in seemingly tangible and gripping, and at the same time sophisticated, form—is not easy to sustain. The rules of efficient oral rhetoric may be more or less limited. In the printing process, however, rhetorical traditions were gradually but inexorably dissolved. The eighteenth century was an age of writing and reading manias, of (limited) mass printing, but it also was an age when a more comprehensive glance at the intellectual and cultural spectrum made intelligent observers despair of the quick transitions of literature from pathos to bathos, from fascination to the repetitious stupidity of stereotypes. Although we cannot nail down normative and binding versions of reality, the multifariousness of what can be said and written around the empty cores of the real in interesting or gripping ways (that is, with some kind of felt “reality effect”) appears to be limited. If there is no reality, there may be some persistence of reality effects against which the abstract potential of writing, even if transformed in fascinatingly concrete forms in literature, may break down again and again. Complexity is no guarantee against triteness. First versions of the problem posed by the different reality effects of different media can be found in the works of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99). Their example is instructive because they clearly embody the differentiation of discourses and performative dimensions typical of the West. But Lichtenberg did not take these differentiations sim-

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ply for granted. He was not their dupe. Like Robert Musil in the twentieth century, Lichtenberg wrote a lot, and all the time. Like Musil, he did not write “real” books, but instead an ongoing series of both theoretical and empirically observative aphorisms, the Sudelbücher, and essays on the most diverse topics. He was a theoretical physicist, but also, in Göttingen, the first really to engage in experimental research, making indeed one discovery named after him. His tools, bought with his own money, would later form the basis of the Göttingen University scientific museum. Writing for him, first of all, is the only way of managing the varieties of experience (right down to sexual intercourse) without necessarily destroying their qualities as experience, however difficult these may be to ascertain. As such, it is a continual, but also continually broken, commentary on life, without which the qualities of life itself would vanish. It must strive to remain open toward what, in spite of all epistemological skepticism, can be called (nondiscursive) experience—“life” as seen by “people of the world and experience,” as one of Lichtenberg’s eighteenth-century phrases has it.3 Lichtenberg’s most brutal example victimizes the figure of Goethe’s Werther: the smell of a pancake should overcome all of Werther’s emphatically conceived reasons for suicide and make him stay in the world rather than drive him out, like those so-called reasons (4: 239–40). (Goethe himself was able to at least imagine a still cruder rebuttal even if he did not share it: in an unpublished epitaph-like invective he attacked Friedrich Nicolai, the Enlightenment optimist mentioned below who had written a parody of Werther, for his alleged assumption that digestive troubles were responsible for Werther’s despair.) Second, Lichtenberg insists that writing must not consume other media, but must remain open to their effects. This is why, in “explaining” some of Hogarth’s engravings in some longer essays, Lichtenberg provides information and some shrewd explanatory guesses, but mainly (re)tells in entertaining, funny, and sometimes playfully suspensive form the stories implied in the pictures. Clearly, Lichtenberg’s media anthropology, as I would like to call it, betrays historical prejudice. In telling stories with and about Hogarth, as well as in the notions of life and experience, Lichtenberg did not abandon the basic concerns of Aufklärung. Whatever appears as grossly unreasonable, like opera, is condemned. The ideal cultural institution would seem to be a theater in which reason comes fully alive. But the historical limitations do not invalidate his approach systematically. Devoted to enlightenment, Lichtenberg went far beyond German Enlightenment prototypes like Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) in Germany, who

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turned, supposedly for practical and educational purposes, any conscious mental event into nothing but endless writing. In Lichtenberg, the situation of writing involves a Beckettian dilemma. Leaving behind the narrow confines of everyday life, literature, in particular the novel, but also critical writing, establishes itself as a domain of its own. What would be called its near self-sufficiency or selfreference today, however, turns, more often than not, into tedious repetition. The artifice of words (Logodädalie) produces a mere turning over, an infinite transferral of what has been said a thousand times before. This may impress the members of reading circles, but not the true connoisseur of the human heart (3: 377–78). For Lichtenberg, literary selfreference is boring or infernal: it is easy to produce novels from novels, plays from plays, poems from other poems, descriptions from other descriptions, to behave, that is, like a hawker (or hack) dealing with second-hand, third-hand, or fourth-hand goods (1: 261, 3: 514). It is much more difficult to confront these with “nature.” Conversely, according to Lichtenberg, the really great writers, such as Shakespeare or Fielding, or actors like Garrick and painters like Hogarth—in short, geniuses—provide us with “natural” products (see 4: 214–15 and Promies’s commentaries and documentation). Experiencing the work of geniuses, we forget that we are dealing with media and codes. Shakespeare, like Homer, wrote well, but did not know it, perhaps because he knew little Latin and less Greek (2: 155; cf. 2: 429). He puts readers or audiences back into a state of innocence in which they start to feel themselves, to speak themselves—to exist as themselves— that is, also, to forget themselves (1: 115). In the enhanced, intensified self-awareness produced by great, “natural” art, or, for that matter, by drugs like champagne, coffee, tobacco or, again, by erotic fascination, the conventionalized, intellectualized modes of the individual vanish. Culture, then, would consist of the complex encodings of pleasurable sensuous and intellectual states of intensity, but not in their disappearance. With ordinary writing, critical or literary, this is not at all achieved. Most books are tiring in the sense that they deprive readers of any active desire. They leave them in a state of mental fatigue, a sorry state from which nothing short of coffee or tobacco will deliver them, Lichtenberg says (1: 49). This is very different from what idealistic aesthetic systems attributed to “poetry” a little bit later. For K. W. F. Solger, for instance, poetry incarnates the beautiful more than any other art because, in contrast to the activating, life-enhancing effects of grace and the sublime, it

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transfers us into a state of calm, of unity with ourselves, of satisfaction and the absence of needs or contradictions.4 Solger may have described some reading experiences very precisely. But the almost quietistic emphasis on the tranquilizing effect of reading (the experience of the beautiful in contrast to the more stimulating, exciting forms of grace and the sublime) casts an oblique light on the shunting of the “classical” forms of literature onto a cultural siding. Where it does not acquire “classical” literature’s higher but somewhat weak aura, literature tends to repeat the banalities of the literary market, as Lichtenberg claimed. Lichtenberg, in his turn, was far from being a simple hedonist. Literature and philosophy, he believed, taken in the right form and dose, in fact enhance the sensuous pleasures. The reading of Wieland is apt to “sublimate” both the drinking of champagne and sexual enjoyment (1: 58). And vice versa: with wine, even some bad literature may become digestible (1: 66–67). Unfortunately, the effects of ordinary literature and philosophy veer widely off that mark. Creative mimesis turns into sterile imitation, and imitation into forgery, in the sense of Gide’s Les FauxMonnayeurs (2: 156). Lichtenberg speaks playfully about a plan to write a comic-didactic poem on the topic of “bibliogeny,” the development of the world of books. One of the most important chapters would be devoted to literature as inbuilt malpractice: misprints, production errors of all kinds—wastepaper (Makulatur, 4: 923; cf. 3: 377). All too easily, then, literature functions as the wrong kind of drug. Living in the house of a printer and publisher, with mountains of rubbish above and below him, Lichtenberg knew what he was talking about— knew also that he himself was not at all immune to doing the same thing. It is extremely easy, as we all know, to write badly, or, as Nathanael Lee put it, “It is not easy to write like a madman, though it is very easy to write like a fool” (1: 141). The writing of reviews should be tolerated only if one wants to discourage or deter others from writing (1: 280). Books, then, are strange merchandise: printed and sold by people who do not understand them; reviewed, read, and finally even written by those who do not understand them, either (2: 430). The urge to write them—to make sense of what invades human beings as pressing thoughts and emotions—is understandable. Yet, in this way, writing is performed as a marriage of warm hearts and empty heads (3: 379; cf. 2: 147).5 For Lichtenberg, fascination in writing (and elsewhere) is produced (once again) by natural genius. There are peculiar writers like Jean Paul

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who present stories and characters that are not so much interesting in themselves, but rather symptoms of their own strangely fascinating mental meanderings (1: 931). Walter Muschg, in his Tragische Literaturgeschichte, has described types like Jean Paul in exactly the same way. Jean Paul’s books are “endless letters to his readers,” written in states of druglike mania, and “their main character is he himself; in the classicalobjective sense, they cannot be called works.”6 Such writers are the exceptions. Normally, Lichtenberg therefore was interested in media configurations, in contrast to the single-minded but boring self-reference of single media. It is only in those that thought, fantasy, and the senses all are challenged and intensified. Ideally, Lichtenberg was looking for a total theater, one fusing, to some extent, representation and reality, observation and participation, spectacle and significance. Historically, for Lichtenberg, Shakespeare may have implemented that theater to a degree. Garrick and some eighteenth-century London actresses sometimes successfully aspired to it. Also, and importantly with respect to these fusions, London itself may have provided a potential for total theater scenes in its dynamic mixture of street, social, and stage theater, which invited observation, participation, and attractive role playing. The notion of an ideal total theater indeed seems to occupy the place of a primary medium in Lichtenberg’s interpenetrations of the imaginary and the real. It would be identical neither with the ordinary triviality of everyday social “theater” (in the sense, for instance, of Erving Goffman) nor with the weakened bourgeois artistic-literary institution of the theater, with its absolute distinction between actor and spectator.7 It is not the ordinary stage that comes closest to that ideal, but rather the engravings of Hogarth, which struck Lichtenberg profoundly, absorbing and stimulating a broad range of his cognitive and imaginary activities. Hogarth gripped him not simply, or even primarily, as a painter or engraver. Instead, he seemed a better, more “dramatic” and lively storyteller than most storytellers or plays. For Lichtenberg, he was the real novel writer of the time, and Lichtenberg did not forget to mention that although Fielding was for Lichtenberg one of the natural geniuses, Fielding himself was aware of the competition he was entering with Hogarth (3: 343, 3: 361). Hogarth was not just a “cartoonist” (KarikaturZeichner) or painter of beauty (Schönheitsmaler). His art did not freeze into representation (description). Here, the comparison with work of the prolific German-Polish painter, engraver, and graphic artist Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801) is instructive. Lichtenberg cooperated with him in several Enlightenment

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plural-media enterprises. But Chodowiecki’s effort to convey a strong sense of the vices and virtues, for instance, deteriorates into representation and illustration. His pictures resemble allegorical illustrations. For Lichtenberg, little is left to say. Lichtenberg’s project to set up, with Chodowiecki, an orbis pictus capable of injecting some sense of the real and of characters into the inanities of contemporary literature (the geistlose Romane, etc., 3: 384) never was carried out and was doomed to fail anyway (3: 377–92). The joint products of the two bear ample evidence to that effect.8 Since Chodowiecki’s drawings of virtuous and vicious people tend to make the drawings say everything, they turn into examples of dogmatic physiognomic doctrines that, like Lavater’s for Lichtenberg, propounded an extremely simplified anthropology. Short of correcting his coproducer, Lichtenberg’s verbal part was therefore an extremely limited and affirmative one.9 With Hogarth, the situation is quite different. The pictorial signs are fascinating for Lichtenberg because they do not appeal by immediate transparency. Immensely rich in detail, they offer obvious visual connections, but no overall coherence. Lichtenberg therefore felt challenged to anticipate a “theory of Hogarth’s novels” (3: 1028)—a phrase in which both “theory” and “novel” are to be taken as fluid concepts. One can also say, and it has been said, that there are obviously direct moral meanings intelligible at first glance. There are also layers of more sophisticated or even arcane meanings to be tracked down only by well-educated persons.10 One could also detect a central problem in the sociology of bourgeois art: giving in to the temptations of pictorial (or, in Handel’s case, musical) sequences clashes with a bourgeois need for controlled meaning. Hogarth therefore glued such meanings onto pictures, going, in principle, far beyond them. Handel felt compelled to give up opera and to compose oratorios.11 However that may be, Lichtenberg took Hogarth as an example of the vitality, the liveliness, of genius and wit (Witz, 3: 667). That Hogarth meant something with his pictures is beyond doubt. What he might have meant is a “delicate” affair (3: 669). More precisely, the meaning of (or rather, on) the whole is obvious. It must be obvious: without it, no work of art of such a type could please. (This certainly is different for large parts of art in the twentieth century, which therefore necessitates very different forms of commentary than storytelling.) To clear up the obscurities of detail, on the other hand, demands a both inventive and detectivelike—and therefore pleasurable—engagement (3: 772). This engagement should aim at probable results, but it also allows, to some ex-

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tent, for the play of the interpreter’s own wit and rhetoric. Lichtenberg’s mixture of story-telling, interjections, invented dialog, and explanation, in producing a liveliness of its own, turns into a kind of cultural event (or media effect). (See, especially, the rhetoric devoted to the second plate of the Harlot’s Progress, 3: 748–57.) Obviously, the rhetoric, on the manifest level, is a merely verbal one. As such, it is aware of its deficits. But it does not recast these into a mystique of the unsayable, like theories of language and literature before and after. The unsayable boils down to a media problem (or rather a problem of intermediality). It can be circumvented by appeals to the semiotic power of other media within critical discourse itself, or rather, by reminders of them, not by efforts at imitation. These reminders consist of painting itself, but also of music (3: 752–53). In that respect, even opera and the castrati are useful, because they supply Lichtenberg, via negativa, with occasions to fly into a critical rage (3: 843–45). In spite of his opera criticism, Lichtenberg was aware of its power to drive people raving (Raserei), a state into which he catapulted himself occasionally with tobacco, alcohol, and similar aids.12 It goes without saying that Lichtenberg at least keeps up the pretense of appreciating “great Handel” (3: 846–47) while castigating one of his greatest singers, the castrato Farinelli. Of course, as I will argue below, the multimedium opera cannot be divided in this way into great art on the one hand and mass hysteria on the other. In any case, Lichtenberg stages a play of intermediality: pictures are not just looked at. Imaginatively, they are also listened to and perceived, as far as possible, with regard to what they convey to the other senses (3: 686–87). The blank verse imagined to be recited by Juno and Diana in the picture Strolling Actresses merges into a concert(ed) action, supported by the laments of a suffering cat and the singing of one of the actresses. The commands of thunder and the curses of the devil must be heard together with the plaintive song of a small nightingale.13 In short, a “Hermeneutics rings” all the time (3: 771).14

The Nineteenth Century: Systems, Play, and the Anthropological Return of Experience Although “literature” has more or less successfully created the impression of managing an aesthetic domain of its own, an impression that may have been very plausible for the nineteenth century, if we are to follow Roland Barthes and Michel Butor, the status of the literary, while of-

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ficially dominant, latently was subverted even in that period. On the “musical” side, notions of epic recital remained alive. The idea of a “reading rhapsodist” behind the curtain, the simulation of performative reading by silent reading, was propagated by Goethe and Schiller, harking back nostalgically to cultural situations that seemed to have become more or less impossible.15 At the same time, Richard D. Altick’s central thesis concerning reading behavior in the nineteenth century does not come as a surprise in the present context: “In the long view, the most influential novelty during this period was the growing emphasis on illustrations.”16 Hardy’s narrative descriptions and analyses, veering into decentered visuality, already have been mentioned. The lures of a visuality submerged by writing remained strong, almost overpowering. Thackeray, it has been said, “stands alone as a great author who illustrated his own books.” All his life, the same writer continues, “Thackeray preferred the pencil to the pen.”17 The writer, socially lionized and feeling basically at home with writing, yet felt the tremendous strain of both. Thackeray’s illustrations, tending as they do toward caricature, are, in terms of the awareness of intermediality represented for instance by Fielding, overly traditional. One can detect an almost premodern reduction of the complexity produced by writing. But the visual gesture is also modern, because caricature has remained an attractive coping device in complex situations. (And one might say that in this respect, a magazine like Punch is one direct link between Thackeray and ourselves.) Caricature takes away some of the burden of a peculiar problem of nineteenth-century writing. Since there are, in principle, no limits to the way that writing manages complexity, it can always be, and has been, plausibly criticized for its “paralysed realism.”18 Realism must be paralyzed as soon as it no longer aims at an emphatic, indeed “passionate,” reader involvement in the mode of Dickens or the Brontës. While Thackeray’s irony may function as a kind of involvement-detachment compromise, his writing yet has to stem itself against its own potential complexity, which would overrun even the ironic picture. In various forms, this is true of George Eliot, Meredith, Hardy, and Henry James. James, indeed, with the “art” of fiction, enters upon the self-referentiality of modern writing (Joyce, Beckett) in which complexity takes its course, while the emphatic, engrossing reading experience is blown to pieces. James claims to have brought the art of the novel to a level of selfassured aesthetic perfection that equals the seemingly self-contained artistry of prestigious traditional art. But that claim is also a rather weak de-

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fense, a shutting off of the novel against the irresistible appeal of other media. In the preface to The Golden Bowl (1904), James indirectly pays toll to the pressure that the publisher of the New York edition exerted with respect to illustrations. His own position oscillates in a way that must almost be called insincere. Each of the arts, he says, must be independent. Looking for illustrations should not amount to an additional charge of the narrative with meanings not inherent in the narrative itself. Even so, at the end, James admits in passing that “all the possible sources of entertainment . . . my and your fun” cannot be had by silent reading, but only by a “viva-voce treatment.”19 All this is to say that the nineteenth century, the century of literature in the West, evinces the desire for a different media orientation. In histories of literature, this development cannot show up. The rumblings of intermediality, then, keep haunting high literature. Mario Praz, in ways that again may appear as somewhat old-fashioned, has drawn connections between genre painting and the novel. He quotes Pater, for whom, in “Sebastian van Storck,” the “innumerable genre pieces—conversation, music, play—were in truth the equivalent of novel-reading for that day.” Praz describes the experience of genre painting much in the same way that Winnicott describes the experience of transitional objects in intermediate zones: “The feeling of satisfaction produced by the setting, by rare stuffs, polished glass, cunningly arranged objects, becomes ecstatic; the soul of the beholder comes forth from itself and plunges, unreservedly, into the thing seen.” Thus, according to Pater, the Dutch masters developed the sense for the interior, reflecting “in various degrees of idealisation, with no diminution of the sense of reality (that is to say) but with more and more purged and perfected delightfulness of interest.” In the person of Sebastian van Storck, Pater, however, also hints at the tendency of art, as a part of something more, to devolve into mere art: “Why add, by a forced and artificial production, to the monotonous tide of competing, fleeting existence?”20 Praz goes on to quote Lamb, who compares Hogarth’s graphic representations to books: “they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words.” But he goes of course too far when he takes genre painting to be the key for Dickens or the Victorian novel in general.21 It is instead the “power” emanating from composite techniques that is at stake. This is why, at the same time, genre painting itself frequently acknowledges the importance of reading in religious, scientific, scholarly, and literary contexts. The importance of reading may itself become a theme, or motif, in painting.22 In the Victorian period, this relationship appears to be re-

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versed: Victorian literature issues forth from the “sacred office of the writer” (George Eliot).23 But the sacred office may all too easily degenerate into the drudgery of the writing assembly line, as it did with Trollope. Implicitly, at least, Victorian literature betrays “the desire to express oneself in more than one medium.”24 In any case, the distance between the linguistic and the visual arts has continually decreased since the nineteenth century.25 One might cite, for that and related contexts, again examples from high literature. For Robert Musil, who certainly wrote one of the greatest, but unfinished and unfinishable, twentieth-century novels, “a great moment” belongs to the “reality of images, not of things”—or of literature. Here, we are dealing with fascinating images that oscillate between the two meanings of the term “image” employed by Maurice-Jean Lefebve. One, the physiological meaning common in hypnosis and hallucinations, makes us lose perceptual control. The other, the aesthetic or metaphysical meaning, supposedly lets us keep perceptual control.26 The distinction, while it may be established, however, is hard to maintain. We might instead appeal to an anthropological background to the old, broken yet continuing tradition of ut pictura poesis: Rudolf Arnheim, for one, has (re)phrased it in terms of visual thinking: “What we need to acknowledge is that perceptual and pictorial shapes are not only transformations of thought products but the very flesh and blood of thinking itself and that an unbroken range of visual interpretation leads from the humble gestures of daily communication to the statements of great art.”27 In fact, the movements of (indirect) visuality and the indirectness of body rhythms in music, in particular singing, have been perhaps the anthropologica most successful in their search for (“artistic”) media.

Systems Theory: Implications, Historical and Otherwise In his diaries, the young Musil described erudition as the intelligent death of the soul. People begin their lives with a living soul. In everyday life, that soul bogs down or is swallowed, sometimes in a happy fashion, by professional work. In the nineteenth and—partly—in the twentieth century, literature braced itself to become a bolder, more logically constructed life, an emaciating ardor or fervor for an intellectual and emotional goal, a form, even if only ghostlike, of vitality. But for Musil, the possibilities of literature, in its ordinary forms and for the present, are

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very often grossly overestimated. With regard to writing, the theoreticalessayistic utterance may have become, in our time, more valuable than the artistic. Nothing can be produced in literature that has not already been said before. “Extravagant arts” like opera, but also film, and maybe even multimedia today, are particularly clear and symptomatic thrusts toward the production of engrossing experience and fascinating effects beyond the imposed or alleged clarity of the social or scientific life and the dispersion of experienced significance implied in the medium of literature. The exploration of cognitive positions and modes of experience between the trivial semantics of everyday life, social systems, and the infinite connotations of literature has unearthed much more than the selected, sometimes haphazard collection of examples of intermediality collected here earlier. In many cases, however, there has been a lack of frameworks and perspectives in which intermediality might take on significance.28 This will make it difficult to describe aesthetic domains as systems or as welldefined and delimited (self-referential) areas of artistic practice. Consequently, talk about literature as system or literary systems may be possible, and for specific periods appropriate, but it is basically misguided.29 Yet, undeniably, the most powerful theoretical approaches of today have followed systems theory and concentrated on the autopoietic, systematic self-referential self-encapsulation of various arts and social domains. This is plausible (although far from completely clear) for social systems. It is also understandable with respect particularly to literature. Because literature, as Hegel already had it, may speak about anything, it seems to cry out not just for an adequate semiotics as a description of the structure and possible effects of its peculiar signs, but for a theory in which its apparent universality, supplemented by the universality of hermeneutics, might be explained. This is why in literary theory there have been efforts, however conceptually diverse, to define the astounding capacities of “literariness” throughout the centuries to an extent unknown in efforts to deal conceptually with the other arts.30 In general, systemic approaches have sprung up because self-referential drives, or, to put it more crudely, trends of professionalization in any artistic, discursive, scientific, or other enterprise, will almost inescapably impose themselves. It has become impossible to be, like Lichtenberg, interested in everything: mathematics, astronomy, experimental physics, and chemistry taught at university; literature, technology, politics, philosophy, pedagogy, theology, psychology, and more in the more general realm of discourses and events. The price to pay for this—and already

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Lichtenberg, according to one of his commentators, had to pay it—consists in holding very limited opinions, more than one opinion at the same time with respect to the same matter, or none at all.31 Systems theory, though, in postulating trends toward systematicity for any element identifiable as such, does not at all do away with the confusion of discourse and opinion Lichtenberg is sometimes accused of. Systems theory rather leaves multiplicity as it is—merely pushing it back onto a different plane of more negligible interest. The results are striking for those areas such as the sciences or law where internal consistency is in high demand. They are less impressive, and sometimes ludicrous, for those domains where consistency is less assiduously cherished. I am not pleading, of course, for critical discourse to imitate science or the law. But the relative resistance of art’s objects makes it more difficult to identify those elements on which systematicity and self-reference are supposed to build. Because it leaves aside the allegedly negligible because inaccessible multifariousness of “realities out there,” systems theory does not concern itself with any ontology or notion of total historical development. It therefore must harp upon the internal, self-referential organization of systems. (That notion, though, is clearly bolstered, if not genetically made possible, by some historical assumptions concerning the “evolution” of “system differentiation.”) As a rigorous perspective allowing for many distinctions, systems theory thus boasts all the advantages of theory. It is devoid of the material assumptions—ontological, historical, psychological, and so on—that constitute the disadvantages of more traditional styles of theorizing. The historical accumulations of those styles of theory can be demoted to the status of mere “semantics.” Systems theory thus can be seen as the postmodern guise of hallowed theoretical habits. Inevitably, we are told, we draw distinctions. They enable us to see more and more, especially if we keep our distinctionmaking machines going. But they do so by making us see less (and perhaps less and less). They work by exclusion. The dynamics of distinctions and exclusion would seem to endow systems theory with built-in deconstructive and yet orderly mechanisms, with some descriptive-diagnostic power into the bargain. For if systems are autopoietic and selfreferential, they have to maintain some contact with other systems (“interpenetration,” “resonance”). That diagnostic power is all the more remarkable because it is a negative one. It wards off the wrong but all too current habits of thought that would like to describe things in terms of influences, causes, and effects.

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Thus it comes about that the dismal prospects that some might see in store for a systemically oriented sociology, for example, are exorcised. Sociology had established itself—“historically,” if that term is still possible—in the wake of growing and irrefutable feelings, since Bacon, that dimensions of the “social” had come to permeate individuals and communities, “the real,” penetrating them to their innermost recesses.32 In order to preserve a residue of explicit or implied sociological realism, however, systems theory clings to a traditional epistemological gesture. This gesture has variously characterized many forms of skeptical, “critical,” radically constructivist or deconstructivist epistemologies: we may not know what reality is, but we know how realities are made up, cognitively, pragmatically. The owl of Minerva, for systems theory, does not begin its flight at dusk, when the forms of life (as Hegel liked to conceive realities in his more realistic moods) have grown old and have therefore become analyzable. It flies above a relatively dense cloud cover.33 It does not see reality but, owing to its virtuosity of distinction making, is sensitized for it like a radar system. If the theoretical design is labyrinthine, there is yet hope for analysis: systems theory does not doubt that time, in some way, exists, and that there are meanings, events, actions, expectations.34 The ways in which these are organized into manageable and operative procedures—negatively, as it were—might be compared to Bartleby’s rule in Melville’s story. Systems theory “prefers not to” stick to those old-European distinctions whose discriminatory powers seem to have become depleted: subject/object, individual/society, parts/whole, mind/soul, and so on. Unlike Bartleby’s, however, this refusal is not carried to the extreme of descriptive death. Rather than resign itself to a threatening mixture of paralysis or arbitrariness,35 it issues a strong, indeed seemingly unavoidable, theoretical recommendation: observers may not be aware of what they cannot see, but they would be well advised, in spite of that, to follow paths roughly marked out by a basic distinction between systems and environments. By this recommendation it must stand or fall. In several forms, the distinction between systems and environments has shown up as a powerful form of self-description for modern periods since the late nineteenth century. The use of systems terminology seems to have enjoyed a first heyday with Herbert Spencer. One might argue that with Spencer, the retreat from the culture(s) in which and about which the philosophical writer writes reached a first climax, as Dilthey asserted for Hegel. Spencer’s work is extremely rich in theories and observations concerning practical-technical matters and social differentia-

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tion in modernizing societies: the division of labor, increasing complexity and heterogeneity, combined with pressures toward normalization and integration, and so on. It is extremely poor, restricted, and dogmatic, on the other hand, when it deals with the “dynamic element in life.” Here, formulas like the adjustment of inner relations to external ones and the like are simply not enough. Spencer appropriately described himself as a bad observer of “humankind in the concrete.” Spencer’s notions of “how to live completely” are geared to the optimization of the struggle for life under specific industrial conditions. Any “aesthetic culture,” therefore, must be subordinated to “those kinds of culture” that “bear directly upon daily duties.”36 In Spencer, then, we encounter a symptom, an instance of a situation, beginning according to some with Aristotle, in which theory has lost contact with cultural production. Niklas Luhmann seems to display the same symptom when he defines culture as a stock of topics suitable for communication—called “semantics” when specifically stored for communicative purposes.37 Culture, then, even if not normative, is a “fixation of meaning,” not an arrangement or performance of powerful experience. Indeed, the notion of experience, where it occurs at all in systems theory, looks similarly impoverished. It has to do with the familiarization of trivial surprises: if the waiter is wearing jeans, you must therefore be in the wrong kind of restaurant. As the results of a “particularly impressive supertheory,”38 this simply will not do. Systems theory, in such ways, declares itself to be the theory of nice or, if one refers to the implications of historical friction between the beautiful and the sublime, beautiful social forms. Whatever does not adopt acceptable forms of meaning in the continuous ordering of contingency in systems is cut down to some meeker size. There are, it is true, other things besides meaning, manifested and gathered in the “contents of experience” of literature and philosophy under the titles of “pleasure, facticity, existence,” or described in religion as the “experience of transcendence.”39 But in the ubiquitous, self-referential systems, everything must take the form of meaning. Otherwise “it remains momentary impulse, obscure mood, or even a shrill terror without connectivity, communicability, or effect within the system.”40 That, precisely, is the question: can we really separate “terror” (in whatever form) and fascination or—as the title of a book within the German Poetik und Hermeneutik series had it—“terror and play” from the speciously smooth or moderately frictional self-referential functioning of (socioeconomic) systems? Apparently, the (notions of) distance between observers and matters

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observed are historically, culturally conditioned. As such, they have to be acknowledged. Their generalizing tendencies, however, must be broken. The observer position adopted by Spencer runs parallel to “the rise and fall of the man of letters,” from Fichte via Carlyle and Ruskin, whose declining years the nineteenth and then the twentieth centuries have witnessed. The rise of that type, later sometimes thought to be socially freefloating, is anchored in a demand for “high verbality”; the “clerisy” therefore frequently have been “reticent about music, and dismissive at times of dancing and the visual arts.”41 Exactly the same is true for Luhmann’s theory of art. Art may indeed provide special forms for communication about communications (in contrast to other social systems, where communication is concerned with something else, not so much with itself). But this does not characterize the quality or effect of that kind of communication. This is why it is highly significant that Luhmann, like Spencer and others in the nineteenth century, has (almost) nothing to say about music (and now film). It is the physiologically grounded effect of music, however, that has been central to many theories about it, such as Eduard Hanslick’s in the nineteenth century.42 There was a parallel though significantly different situation in ancient Greece, where some philosophers had a lot to say about (some kinds of allegedly orderly) music and its relation to the order of the soul (or even the cosmos), but next to nothing to say about the tantalizingly illusionary-realistic effects of painting and sculpture.43 The compulsions of theory also seem responsible for some curiously “unrealistic” positions that Luhmann, for one, feels obliged to take about the mass media and their “reality.” One can of course decree that the code of the “system” of mass media is the distinction between information and noninformation.44 But the compulsion to thus see news reports, advertising, and entertainment as a reduction of self-generated uncertainty despecifies “information” in the highest degree. In the wake of Gregory Bateson’s work, information certainly can be seen as a difference that makes a difference. But so can all kinds of other codes and effects. Luhmann himself envisages the possibility that advertising might instead belong to the economic system and that entertainment might function within a system of leisure consumption. This leisure system may indeed be “hard to identify”—perhaps, I would suggest, because it does not amount to a system in the sense of systems theory.45 The negation or partial irrelevance of the postulated code is therefore repeatedly hinted at but persistently played down. In advertising, “good form” may destroy

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information and thus the relevance of the information/noninformation distinction altogether. In entertainment, body and mind may be involved “in more direct ways.”46 In erotic or detective films, in sports, or in the “invitations of music to join in,” especially, experiences, hopes, and fears may be activated and psychic needs and capacities brought into play.47 Even so, such “psychological effects” (processes within the individual spectators, “nonlinear causalities, dissipative structural developments, negative or positive feedbacks,” etc.) are neglected because they are unpredictable, not to be controlled by program choice, and generally “far too complex and self-determined for the communication type of the mass media.”48 On the other hand, the effort to maintain distinctions between art and entertainment fails for complementary reasons. It is simply not true that entertainment—in an alleged opposition to art—necessarily eliminates the self-reference of information, the complex awareness of how the selection of specific information contributes to the artistic play of form in the work of art. Nor is it true that art always caters to this self-reference. (Luhmann indeed knows that art can be experienced in a “trivializing” way because the self-referential complexities may be forgotten.)49 In a strangely contradictory (and historically false) move, Luhmann himself postulates in other places that the suppression of self-reference characterized the “art of the novel” down to the middle of the nineteenth century; that novelists had to vanish behind their texts in order to make suspense (the “trivializing” experience) possible; and that the mechanism of text production was not allowed to show up in the text itself because otherwise self-reference and other-reference could not have been reliably distinguished.50 But where does that argument leave (for instance) that intermediate figure, the self-conscious narrator? In both its authorial and its “I” form, I take that narrator in particular to illustrate Nietzsche’s thesis, which goes against the very grain of systems theory, that experience does not rule out observation. Conversely, notions like systems theory gain appeal to the degree that the idea of cultural experience loses power. Engrossment (due to suspense and the like) and the observation of beauty and connotational networks (as the results of artistic self-reference) may turn into exclusive alternatives (as they do in Luhmann’s work,51 and frequently under institutionalized conditions of analysis), but they need not do so. Carl Einstein has pointed out that, in a basically bourgeois framework, theory seductively combines scientific rigor and intuitional liberties, and this seems to hold especially true for observer theory. Theory

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enables the man of letters living a mostly bourgeois life to claim the special position of a professionally possessed visionary.52 While such an assertion, taken literally, would do gross injustice to Luhmann as a rigorous genius if ever there was one, it may still cast an oblique light on the conceptual career of self-generating (autopoietic), self-referential systems. What else, in fact, should systems do but get themselves going by reference to their own elements and interests? In the psychological void left by bankrupt religions, theorems, as monopolizing superstructures, are separated from the performative complexity of what used to be called the real; they acquire, according to Einstein’s exaggerations, supreme values of their own.53 David Hume, in the eighteenth century, still practiced a relaxed use of the idea of systems (systems of belief and habits that we are pleased to call realities, etc.). But then, he moved in a context of cultural experience equally made up of learning, poetry, and polite society.54 To be sure, a notion of the human as the representative cultural experience cannot be resuscitated. Plans for that, especially literary ones (Musil’s Man Without Qualities or Broch’s Sleepwalkers come to mind), have been noble, but the facts have remained stubbornly melancholy. The evidence forcing us to admit the retrospective deceptions and the prognostic fallacies of what we might ascribe to ourselves as “experience” is staggering. We cannot, then, play off experience (to say nothing of even more desperate concepts like morality and ethics) against systems. There will be reasons, even if they remain reasons insufficiently known, for the increased emphasis on systemic notions. But if there are, does that mean that we “know” when, where, and how to apply the recommendation to start with distinctions between self-referential systems and what they project as their environments? These distinctions have come to be taken for granted because, since the eighteenth century, some systems have appeared to impose themselves on modern societies with a vengeance. This would certainly hold for economic and legal systems. Hence the assuredness with which those obscure objects of self-referential desires, the elements of systems, have been identified. But is the same confidence warranted with respect to art, or even religion, or, for that matter, those seemingly basic entities called social systems?55 Self-reference (via reference to the other and vice versa, to be sure) legitimately exacts some kind of logical (in some domains even empirical) priority. But there is no assured transition from (epistemo)logically plausible basic procedures to

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the identification of those elements through which, in cycles of self-reference, systems are allegedly generated. This becomes abundantly clear if one does not write, in the manner of Herbert Spencer (and Luhmann), books on single, allegedly selfsustained systems (from, let us say, the biological, economic, or legal down to the literary or religious). Instead, one can try to spread out a panorama of partly separate, but also diffusely interlocking, “living systems.”56 There is a lot to say about the systematicity of cells, organs, or even organisms and the operationally closed system of the brain. But we are less sure about organizations, societies, or transnational “systems.” Let us take a system of administration as an example. We may identify, as its elements, an open body of rules and binding procedures in (self-)reference to which the system produces and reproduces itself. But the number of continually increasing rules and procedures is immense, and the same is true for the “cases” to which they apply, which they identify, define, and treat. This will require extrasystemic qualities formerly described as competence, experience (in civil servants, for instance), and the like. While competence still seems to refer to a performative ability defined by systems—I do not think it really does—it makes sense today to add criteria like administrative intelligence, style, or even culture on personal and corporate levels. They participate heavily in the definition of what counts as an operationally good systemic act. In any case, extrasystematic references are built into the system. They gain importance to the—today common—extent to which a system has trouble keeping references to its actual or putative elements going. Conceptually, that creates havoc as far as the notions of autopoiesis and self-reference are concerned.57 To the extent that the rigorousness of self-reference is weakened, at least in operational terms, the notion of systematicity, based on an alleged identity or identifiability of elements, and the relations between alleged systems, become hazier, too. It is fair to say, though, that a systemic approach to narrative is much more warranted. Narratives are different from myths, legends, and fairy tales, in which the world and stories about it still coincide. For more modern prose forms, the difference between narrating and its objects, a certain autonomy or dynamics of writing, cannot be ignored. “Literary” kinds of narrative are therefore always compelled to devise steps toward a seeming reconciliation of this difference or an ironic exploitation of it. Again, however, the status of self-referential writing as a mode of cul-

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tural experience, or its organization of it, may vary enormously. One may guess that the writing games played by Fielding, Cervantes, or especially Sterne, form part of transitional cultural spaces between sociability and, as the historical term has it, “the pleasures of the imagination.” Besides many other things, Sterne also seems to assert that writing, “when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.”58 The passage at first glance seems to aim at a mode of writing: not to say everything, but to leave half of the matter to the imagination of the reader. On the whole, however, Sterne practices a type of writing for which the important thing is not what is said (or written), but (the written simulation of) performative speech acts. The goal is neither rhetorical victory nor philosophical wisdom, but “the pleasurable reenactment—and pursuit—of both” (Kenneth Burke’s “pure persuasion”).59 Such aspects, not yet sufficiently explored, would seem to be of the utmost importance in the philosophy of Locke and, even more so, of Shaftesbury: in their texts, writing imitates pleasurable and educated talk. And yet this imitation is not meant to be mere simulation. Musil’s Man Without Qualities, while still practicing some of the realistic novel’s habits, may say goodbye, in the chapters on “The Like of It Happens” (Second Part), to its claims, but Ulrich, for one, keeps on writing, producing images in his mind that at some point may enforce performative experience. Writing, in spite of Musil’s skepticism regarding the power of literature, may prove that one can live differently. Ulrich does not write a book; to do that would be proof that one cannot live differently. But he still participates in the almost mythic “biomorphism” of letters that had fascinated speculative thought down to Benjamin.60 What I am opposing in systems theory is that the notion of culture can be restricted to an observational stance adjusted to systemic perception—even if culture itself is not made into a system. This is exactly what happens in Luhmann’s most explicit treatment of culture.61 The development from auratic (e.g., religious or generally strongly performative) to purely “aesthetic” (contemplative?) art leads to a notion of culture as the modes in which observers observe other observers, a built-in social level for observations and descriptions.62 The notion of culture as a repertoire of themes outlined in Social Systems thus persists in different form. In the eighteenth century, culture is produced for print, made “visible as culture” in that observation-determined way. The idea is reinforced in the various forms of “cultural memory” in which “certain condensates of meaning” are favored and repeated. “Culture is [!] a perspective for the observation of observers. It directs observation to phenomena already

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given. . . . Therefore, it is not possible to fix ‘culture’ on the level of objects [or events] and to distinguish cultural objects from other objects.”63 For me, on the contrary, that notion of culture approaches the concept of theory, even if is not identical with it, since one could define theory as second- or third-level observers observing other observing observers. What we need instead is theory as an observation of Nietzsche’s “higher culture,” a duality of observation and “passion” enacted in media. We find suggestions toward that, for instance, in the precise diagnosis, unhampered by the constraints of systems theory, of Heinz Schlaffer’s Poesie und Wissen. Schlaffer knows that scholarship and analysis cannot do without observational distance. Rather than merging with aesthetic as/and festive experience, they will tend to decompose them. Yet it is also clear that the extreme distance that emerged in the eighteenth century between aesthetic experience and philology does not at all result from imperative rational standards, but rather from institutional conventions bordering upon the pathological. Due to those, philology establishes itself as a life form: its costs—from the loss of aesthetic awareness in the imposition of classical literary canons to psychosocial “peculiarities”— are considerable.64 These may go unnoticed for a while because they are shielded by the prestige of the classical canon served by philology. Literary writing, in this perspective, easily takes on aspects of the “tragic” because in it, the Nietzschean duality of observation and passion seems to be implemented to the utmost (the “flexibility” of literature), and yet is difficult to enact because of literary writing’s performative deficit, unless performance is taken in a metaphorical or “purely” mental sense. The biomorphism of letters, the magic associated with them of yore in various ways, certainly has been instrumental in feeding forms of obsession with the complex possibilities inherent in the medium. The richness of literature, however, is almost invariably associated with forms of poverty—writing, hankering back after the status of letters enjoyed by the seer, the visionary, and the magician never achieves, within complexity, the powerful, irrefutable effect for which the writer, in the act of writing, is gambling.65 In the greatest of modern writers, these dimensions seem inextricably intertwined. Goethe is the prime example: in a profound combination of the masochistic and the orgasmic, such writers do not really write for a public, but for themselves.66 For those, Beckett’s perspective in the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) is a generalizable model: writing must go on, although one is either saying too much or too little.67 With Ulrich, in The Man Without Qualities, the obsessive and finally

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exploding self-referentiality of writing comes to pass as the loose directionality of an activity tied to a certain medium, but also fed by what used to be called experience, sensibility, and intelligence. This is rather different from the double-edged professionalized aestheticism of, say, Henry James. The art of writing for James—apart from its difficulties of shutting out the appeals of other media noted above—is practiced upon the infinite meanderings of consciousness. The bearers of that consciousness are members of a rich (and sometimes not so rich) leisure class. They are caught in the corresponding forms of socio-personal self-reference. The latter, by preference, is projected into the attractive masks and rituals of aesthetic materialism. Writing, for James, and aesthetic materialism, for the leisure class, do not really admit of alternatives—quite in contrast to what, in former days, one would have called the “dialectics” of Ulrich. Yet they are undermined by the latent self-criticism of an “artificial” situation: “Well, we’re tremendously moral for ourselves—that is for each other. . . . What it comes to, I daresay, is that there’s something haunting . . . in such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege . . . as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions.”68 This playful self-criticism can be used, in an uncharitably evaluative mood, as a characterization of the self-referential tendency in James’s novel writing, too. The self-reference of writing here is only seemingly never transcended, because the self-reference of behavior—in terms of forms and persons walled in by material-aesthetic plenitude—need not, indeed often could not, be abandoned. Experiences of transitional immediacy, whether “real” or in the mode of “as if,” and the media in which they “materialize,” through which they are enacted and “staged,” are coping devices for and against systemic differentiation of more than contemporary relevance. An awareness of systems and their self-referential trends is imperative, but we also must pay attention to degrees of systematicity and, especially in culture, to the vagueness, the dispersion of elements to which systems self-generatingly might refer. The code of beautiful versus ugly may have culturally constituted, for a while, ensembles of objects that could be taken for systems of art. Such dichotomies, however, have not only become members of a much more variegated group; talk of “not-so-beautiful” arts or arts “beautiful no more” has been rampant for a long time. The dichotomies of such a code, treated as predicable, ascriptive concepts, also betray nothing about the cultural status and the dynamics of experience to which they relate. It is easy to analyze, for instance, the semantics of the term “sublime.” It is somewhat more complicated to

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see, in Kant, its connections to war or, in Edmund Burke, its embodiment in the French Revolution.69 There may be a plethora, and a confusion, of media (natural, social, aesthetic) in which the sublime manifests itself for the various theoretical traditions. But in that confusion, it obliquely directs us back into a feeling of our own energies.70 The sublime thus often figures as a code for the enculturation of intermediate zones.

Games and Play I propose to replace and enlarge the concept of system by the concept of games. There is a hint of that in systems theory itself: distinctions and differences do not determine systems, but enlarge their scope of selfdetermination.71 The concept of games takes this situation one decisive step further. Although they abide by relatively rigid sets of distinctions and differences as rules, games tend to subvert distinctions between (mere) play and (hard) reality. The more rigidly rules are enforced, the less the end product will be something called, in any strong sense, a system. This applies to a culturally important range of those games that are neither purely games (in the sense of card games or chess) or that become immediately deadly when rules are broken. It is those vast areas of action and experience in between that are interesting. For these areas, understandably, the notion of games, in mixtures of literal and metaphorical senses, has become popular in psychology and the social sciences. Here, the application of seemingly self-referential rules will create, and not rule out, the areas that Winnicott called intermediate zones.72 The more notions of play and game occupy intermediate and in particular cultural zones, in Nietzsche’s sense, the more systems terminology recedes. We are moving then in zones of varying intensities and risks of play. For present purposes, everything depends on avoiding the reentry of binary distinctions such as system and environment. Playing and games are not realities like social institutions, which may be seen, and experienced, depending on one’s position and perspective, as both hard and soft. Rather, they build up intermediate zones (sometimes even within society) as areas of intensity and “engrossment,” to use Kenneth Burke’s term. Whatever may be called “reality” elsewhere, there is no reality against which playfulness should “really,” that is, properly, be measured. Although he, too, wishes to avoid dichotomies, Iser lets one of them— literature versus nonliterature—creep back in. He does not want to see reality/fiction distinctions and the like as binding binarisms, but he

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claims an anthropological significance for literature—and not, as I would prefer, for a historical dynamics of media-enacted experiences in cultural intermediate zones. Under these conditions, the anthropological playfulness of literature can be salvaged only metaphorically. The metaphor is distilled from the literarizing reinterpretation of the sprawling terminology of playing and games as performative activities within intermediate zones preferred by Gadamer, who seeks inspiration in the metaphorical uses of play and games, where these are enacted without a controlling reality substratum, and by Bateson, who describes forms of played life as life where “rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.”73 Consequently, Caillois’s four categories of games (agon, alea, mimicry, ilinx) “need to be rethought if they are to be viewed as games in the text. This is simple enough. . . .” Definitely; but this also means that Caillois’s very broad range of play and games is lost out of sight. The notion of play is deflected from its most typical exemplifications or indeed prototypes (like gratifying the desire to temporarily destroy one’s bodily equilibrium in ilinx, a consummation hardly to be reached in and with literature).74 Literature thus seems to be dignified into a unique metagame. Possibly, such a conceptual trend can survive because, in spite of abandoned oppositions like reality/fiction, literature is still seen as dispossessing and invalidating those worlds of reference and discourse on which it feeds in order to build up its own play. Once these worlds of reference and discourse are partly liquefied in culturalintermediate zones, the cognitive, “paradigmatic” specificity of literature begins to dissolve.

Experience and Play Again In systems theory, events variously and often indiscriminately called “experiences” tend to be reduced to ascriptive fictions. In a gameoriented approach like Iser’s, literary experience assumes relevance as an aesthetically distanced dissolution of pragmatic and in that sense systemlike stabilities. While the emphasis in both approaches is on opposed poles, they are equivalent in asserting or implying that experience in terms of a personal-cultural effectiveness is a dubious matter. There is, however, a type of cultural anthropology in which an awareness of social-systems pressures is reconciled with the cultural effectiveness of enacted, and also (at least proto)aesthetically organized experience.75 Clifford Geertz, in his epilogue to The Anthropology of Experience, has called attention to the pitfalls and the necessity for that precarious com-

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bination. Certainly, in present-day social and cultural situations, this must be handled with ironic care. The inflation of so-called experiences (of “learning experiences,” for example, and the sentimental heaviness of “sharing” experiences) makes the prospects for an honest use of the word seem remote. But it is equally true that without it, or something like it, cultural analyses seem to float several feet above their human ground. If . . . the machinery of culture is not to spin on in some frictionless paradise where no one fears or remembers or hopes or imagines, nobody murders or rescues or revolts or consoles, it must engage some sort of felt life, which might as well be called experience.

There is a “perplexity” how to get “from cultural forms to lived life and back again in such a fashion that neither disappears and both are explicated, at least somewhat.”76 If play enters, according to Bateson, whenever there is (also) communication about communication, the boundary lines between “real” social drama and “mere” aesthetic enactments, between Turner’s liminal and liminoid enactments—between rituals and festivities, for example, and “literary” drama—become blurred. Richard Schechner states the problem concisely in the same volume, if only in a footnote: it is not clear to what degree, and in which intensities, Erving Goffman’s real-life presentation of the self and Victor Turner’s social dramas are theater merely in a metaphorical sense. Conversely, one may wonder to what extent people’s aesthetically trained and specialized consciousness of theatrical (or general literary) performance does indeed turn performance merely into a distanced, fictional process.77 “What, then, is the ‘ordinary behavior’ of humans? Neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but fundamentally betwixt and between. And deep enough to link all our brains, from the reptilian to the godlike.”78 Examining definitions of play and its distinction from reality, seriousness, and the like, one ends up questioning the circumstances under which activities and performances are subsumed under these labels.79 Such distinctions, necessary as they are, cannot be established and maintained consistently, not even within what normally counts as “a culture” (to say nothing of the difficulties such a notion presents in itself). The drift toward play would seem to be a prime anthropological motivation for media. Their effect depends on the cultural conditions and the media qualities that facilitate or impede play. This drift may operate in any domain. Thus, to take one example, Mabel Elsworth Todd, in her treatise on the thinking body, can speak of the “game of walking,” can suggest we “treat walking as a game,” that is, an interaction of imagery, con-

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scious movement, and feelings of psychophysical release.80 Beckett’s Watt, who walks in such strange ways, represents the tilting of “staged” movement to its nearly “absurd” extreme. Santayana long ago said, “Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.”81 That an exploration of life as free play ought to be couched in terms of comparative media analysis is amply suggested by the comprehensive effort of Charles D. Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene G. d’Aquili to synthesize Turnerian anthropology with neuroscience and Eastern assumptions about consciousness. A basic result is that “reality” consciousness and the life of dreams and fantasies cannot be strictly separated. Experience, they find, is not necessarily tied to “real” objects.82 More generally, it does not presuppose a well-defined reality status for what triggers, or is the “content” of, experience. Reverberations, evocations, and symbolic penetrations will unfold the reality of experience as well as so-called real objects and situations (as will of course drugs and direct brain stimulation). On the other hand, while Eastern cultures have developed techniques for that (techniques of mature contemplation and absorption resembling some transitional-emphatic experiences here), Western cultures have not. If, then, ritual, in a Turnerian vein, produces and controls experience, if techniques of symbolic penetration try to generate and control actively what is happening in vague and unsatisfactory ways all the time, it is unclear of what such rituals and techniques in Western cultures might consist. “In a very real sense we are being penetrated all the time. Any nearby object, sound, texture, chemical, and so on, may be a symbolic stimulus penetrating to intentionality.” Media, I take it, and their organizations of images, sounds, and movements are the main Western cultural forms in which symbolic penetration with very real results predominantly takes place.83

Nietzsche The overlapping or indeed fusion of approaches outlined above was anticipated by Nietzsche. This anticipation was facilitated by several factors. Notions of experience were no longer encoded or even represented by a philosophy that, like German idealism, could claim to be both transcendental and realistic. The decline of theater and, conversely, the cheaper, cruder histrionic layers of behavior in the social, economic, and political market (noted especially by Burckhardt) rekindled questions concerning the cultural roles of theatricality. The productivity of technology urged on inquiries into the fabrication of human

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qualities themselves or, for Marx, into the alienation of human beings.84 Thus, Nietzsche does away with all forms of immediate certainty— there are no facts, there are only interpretations, as one of the notorious aphorisms has it. But the criticism of (sensory, experiential) certainty in the name of a constructivist version of perception is compatible with an equally scathing critique of the theoretical stance propagated in the West since Socrates. “Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the theoretical man equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge, and laboring in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates.” We are beginning, though, to sense the limits of the Socratic desire of knowing and casting about for a coastline in the “wide waste of the ocean of knowledge.” Yet the nontheoretical person is such a strange being for modern people that they have trouble understanding Goethe, who extolled Napoleon as the incarnation of a “productiveness of deeds.”85 It is clear, though, that great individual action cannot remain the representative modern form of experience. Modern realities, whether systems or more fluid forms of organization, are too large to be effectively dealt with by individual action. If, then, no action or theory or “immediate certainty”86 can assert itself as a privileged mode of coming to terms with reality, how then do we in fact explore that huge area “betwixt and between”? In contrast to systems theory, Nietzsche does not draw operational confidence from binary distinctions. He instead immerses himself in a critique and a rehabilitation of appearance, both in the sense of emphatic, convincing appearance—German Erscheinung—and illusion—German Schein in its more pejorative sense. Posthumous fragments from 1885 present that kind of nonbinary, nomadic conceptualization very explicitly: “We are not easily satisfied with respect to ‘immediate certainty’; we do not find an opposition between ‘reality’ and ‘appearance/illusion’ [Schein], we would prefer to speak of degrees of being—or perhaps even better of degrees of appearance.”87 Probabilities, that is, degrees of appearance, emerge through the comparison of appearances.88 Nietzsche speaks out against “realism,” that is, against the crude prejudices of “sober people, who think they are protected against passion and imagination.” Even “in the most sober of states, we are still most passionate animals” who project “phantasms” into our very sensory impressions.89 The effectiveness—and in that sense, the reality—of appearances resides in their aesthetic appeal. The much-repeated sentence—“The world is justified [eternally] only as an aesthetic phenomenon”—tries to con-

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dense strongly appealing complexes of appearance, passion, and imaginary engrossment into a striking formula.90 Nietzsche must, of course, make fun of the Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness. For him, the aesthetic represents overpowering if vague and somewhat diluted interests. The aesthetic turns into the culture of surface as a manageable and attractive practice of dealing with depth—for those who have seen that other forms of depth interpretation, like religion, will normally yield rather unfortunate results.91 Nietzsche sometimes goes far, too far, perhaps, in identifying the passions as the constructive drive of the aesthetic—the desire for art and beauty then being proclaimed to be “an indirect desire of the delights of sexual drives.” But he generally steers clear of subscribing to an anthropology of substantial, constant human faculties or drives. Music, it is true, is sometimes called a self-enjoyment of the passions. But “passions” are little in themselves. They need enactments in order to “get in shape.” We “poetically create” (erdichten) the greater part of our experiences (Erlebnisse) and, as inventors (Erfinder), can hardly refrain from looking at and observing the processes in which we are involved.92 The favorite concept of systems theory, the observer, is thus built into the very notion of experience itself. Experience establishes relations with subjects, even if it cannot be literally ascribed to them, because the subject, in terms of an identity, cannot be identified. Engrossing experience keeps the subject in the game, even if we do not know what or who any particular subject is. In that type of experience, the subject, in any case, whatever he or she might be, is more than a mere environment of systems. Thus, in the absence of identity or well-defined individuality, we do not thereby get rid of urgency: the aesthetic is neither disinterested nor, as Schopenhauer would have it, a liberation from “will” and its share of sexual implications.93 It means instead that, whatever the urgencies may “really” be, they need “masks,” enactments and media, in which they may “appear” in aesthetically striking shapes. In that sense, we are dealing with historical tendencies, felicitous or unfortunate, to aestheticize the “passions,” but also to “passionately” empower the aesthetic. Nietzsche’s anthropology drifts, then, toward an anthropology of “acting.” We tend to assume the emotions and desires associated with roles. Art does not eject us out of this situation. Ideally, it provides media and forms in which, in both less inhibited and more limited, less risky ways, the enactment of roles becomes possible. The intellectual, theoretical person, in fact, rather than believing in theory, should be able to enjoy

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acting and masks more fully.94 It is fair to say that recent systems theory may have left open a way into these areas. There is an awareness that a world composed of observers relentlessly and incessantly distinguishing systems and environments and drawing consequences from those distinctions made without strong (“realistic”) motivations might get into (more than) interactional trouble. For Luhmann himself, the person has come back—even if is only in a shape of an ultimate system without clear contours.95 There is, consequently, an anthropological sense to human beings as actors and spectators that is different from, but certainly related to, the ordinary, specialized use of these terms. That use represents a certain, but only a certain, stabilized result of varying degrees of historical media differentiation. Those degrees may come and go, overlap and move apart. In terms of anthropological involvement, the spectator of a (literary) tragedy is not the same as the spectator of Greek drama or a play by Lope de Vega. These again differ from an opera audience. Everything is again radically different with readers of novels. In Nietzsche there is, it would seem, a certain priority accorded to media connected with music. Music alone, “set beside the world, can supply notions for what the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon may mean.” Tragedy, born out of music, yet moves away from it—and dies. It dies, in effect, when its development pushes its viewers into the role of (modern) spectators. That type of spectator is produced when Euripides increases aesthetic distance, or rather develops it in its modern specialized sense— when the play, that is, does indeed look like an imitation, a “realistic” one into the bargain, of somewhat trivialized social events.96 Under different historical circumstances, tragedy, in different forms, but also in its more “archaic” sense, may be revitalized—and die speedily again. Nietzsche draws attention, and rightly so, I think, to the immense changes in the genre during the reign of Elizabeth I in England, as well as to changes in other countries.97 The death of tragedy (of a type in which one can clearly see ritualistic functions in Turner’s sense) creates a void. The void, in its turn, normally provokes a frantic and heterogeneous production of other media in which enactments still seem to receive their chance.98 For a while, opera was able to occupy that place. It springs, in fact (and we will see that there is quite some historical evidence for this), from the drawbacks of the positions into which modern spectators and readers have been forced. Paradoxically, through many modern forms of art, spectators and readers, frequently proud of their (quasi-transcendental) aesthetic attitudes, are deprived of their potential to live—and to

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invent—their lives as aesthetic phenomena. Thus, cultures are coerced into reinventing a rhetoric of the passions. In our time, the supreme theorist of simulation, Baudrillard, has paid tribute to that coercion: Tristan and Isolde show that there is always something artificial in passion. Yet a “neo-romanticism of passion” will intermittently always assert itself.99 Opera emerged as the medium in which a specific, musical rhetoric of the passions was still acceptable. Since no discourse of the passions can hold its ground, the medium of opera escapes that discourse by stylizing it into a most artificial, but somehow also appealingly “natural,” form—singing. In that sense, “opera is the only full form of the modern human being . . . the only form in which that being is truly engaged.”100 But no fully engrossing medium can be culturally stabilized forever. In Germany, specifically idyllizing and, with Wagner, literarizing tendencies tended to take over. At the moment of its highest, most serious claims—the total work of art as a radical reconciliation of art and life in which the very existence of the modern state seems to be at stake—opera turned into literary mythology on which modern cognitive habits, scholastic interpretations (Deuteln), and symbolizing could again be expended with a vengeance: Wagner’s Ring consists of “closet plays in the strictest sense.” German music, Wagner’s “infinite melody,” in particular, runs the risk of ruining the sense of melody by emphasizing single pseudo-emotionalized “phrases.”101 With Wagner, paradoxically, it might seem, the actor within music is in the ascendant. Bizet’s music, by contrast, in particular Carmen, that “opera of operas” in Venice for a while, provokes the demand that we must “mediterraneanize” music (“Il faut méditerraniser la musique”). In not dealing, as Wagner did, with “far-fetched passions,” music may recuperate its passionate clarity in its implicit unity with dance.102

Images of Evolution The type of analysis practiced by Nietzsche, with its emphasis on generic changes and the emergence of opera, shows that, however hidden they may be, significant assumptions about cultural evolution are present in his work. Iser was aware of the dangers involved in taking for granted cultural evolution and rightly wanted to hold “evolutionary” or “teleological approaches” at bay.103 This would seem to be especially important in an intercultural perspective, since the establishment and stability of aesthetic domains (as distinguished from society or even culture in a general or everyday sense) will vary greatly in different civilizations.

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Some civilizations such as the Japanese distinguish very sharply between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic, but allow large scope for aestheticization in domains classified elsewhere as nonaesthetic. They cultivate artistic procedures in many everyday domains (the tea ceremony, food arrangements, calligraphy, clothes, gardens). In such cases, the aesthetic focus as exercised, for instance, with respect to plays need not differ much from the attention paid to beauty in more “prosaic” contexts. A Kabuki play may be watched “simply” for the ways in which a particular actor delivers certain postures, movements, or facial expressions; the attention to represented “contents” can shrink to a bare minimum. In cultures like the Japanese, readers thus may be granted the liberty to relate texts more directly to their own emotional situations than disciplined, interpretational reading techniques in many Western contexts would (at least theoretically) allow. In the West, some reactions against the alleged separation of art from life (the varieties of arts-and-crafts schools, for instance) have tentatively moved in that direction, too. Ruskin, for one, inveighed against the deceptive self-sufficiency of art. The mastery of fundamental crafts, work with “naturally” useful materials, the “pure gladness” of both aesthetic and (physiologically and socially) useful activities, in short, a somewhat queer mixture of vitalistic and moral demands, are sharply set off against the seeming but false autopoiesis of aesthetic trends—sometimes called “Pride” by Ruskin—luxuriating ornaments and decoration, bombastic fashions for clothes, and also tombs and morbid literature.104 By and large, however, one may suspect that Western cultures have become obsessed with self-sustained identities. Deconstruction may have undermined their linguistic, logical, or even metaphysical bases, but it has not much altered their cultural and experiential status. Western cultures continue to handle aesthetic and cultural phenomena as arrays of meaningful or symbolic objects. Meanings and symbolic values may be essentialistically construed or ideologically deconstructed. They are rarely seen as moments in engrossing but transitory performances. The postmodern drift toward spectacles seems to indicate, it is true, layers of unease within these cultures themselves. The frequent elevation of spectacles into monuments of significance or ideology (the Salzburg festival 1994 boasting of a Don Giovanni production “valid” until well into the twenty-first century; Woodstock in very different forms in 1969 and 1994), on the other hand, reconfirms the interpretational trends they are chafing at. In this somewhat confused situation, images of cultural evolution—if

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they are not couched in evolutionistic terms—may function as controlling conceptual schemes. And in ways however vague, by unavoidable but necessary simulation, they establish relations between cultures and the productive myths of their “ur-situation(s).” Evolutionary images need not function as causal cores, from which everything else has branched off. But they can impose conceptual colorings on strategies of cultural analysis. The orientations that will guide later analyses here consequently make use of, or perhaps play with, overlapping circles of anthropologicalevolutionary assumptions. Their perspectives may strike some as predominantly Western or Eurocentric. But they do not exclude, but rather encourage cross-cultural attempts. This holds particularly for the implications and consequences of writing systems examined by André LeroiGourhan. Western, abstract, linearized alphabets encouraged scientific as well as imaginative thought. But in exploring its possibilities, imagination, if perhaps not (yet) science, tends toward entropy. While imaginative possibilities cannot be limited, they appear, also and simultaneously, exhausted. Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine” aptly summarizes the situation. Western writing systems demand explicit efforts at interpretation, which they tend to invalidate at the same time. They do not, like Eastern systems (sometimes misleadingly called pictographic), sustain halos of multidimensional but controlled associative-imagistic complexity. In that respect, Western systems may have even become disadvantageous for science. In passages reminiscent of the pessimism of LéviStrauss, Leroi-Gourhan sees the total absorption of cognitive activities by writing systems as a dubious promise, to be redeemed only by a specially talented minority.105 Although Leroi-Gourhan appears to be dealing primarily with infinite branchings and specializations, no definite direction of evolution can be asserted on the basis of them. These branchings and specializations, however, have taken place, and continue to take place, in human organizations since the drastic changes brought about by walking upright, radically new hand-and-eye coordinations, increased brain weight, and presumably new brain wirings. This looks like an early, anthropologicaloid systems theory avant la lettre. But Leroi-Gourhan remains preoccupied with the need of societies, systems differentiation notwithstanding, to keep intact some “vital chains of action.” “Vital” here refers to an integration of action and imagination in which the ability to act and to experience cannot be separated from the “invention,” along the way, of creative symbols. A reflective imagination (the word taken neutrally) must

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ensure a layer of imaginary participation essential for the most elementary forms of experience. Historically and anthropologically, the development of this reflective imagination is a question of media development. He implies that enhanced social systems differentiation provokes counteracting media and techniques of cultural-psychic reconcretization. Although his evolutionary anthropology does not rule out that consciousness can enact experience, as it were, by itself, in the absence of any extensive and external media support, the degree to which this is possible may in fact itself be based on a media development, the silent reading of literature. The social pyramid became ambiguous in Western societies when, with the support of writing systems, it began to privilege symbolic functions over technological ones and, I would add, over performative functions as well. Cultures, indeed, must transform biologically anchored drives such as aggression and must model connections between brain, hands, and movement into creative performances. The biology of homo sapiens, in the twentieth century, does not differ much from that of the three-hundredth century b.c. But socially, the changes have been tremendous.106 The brain—and there are of course implications of a theory of the brain in all of these, as well as in modern constructivist approaches—therefore needs culturally differentiated “media landscapes” in which the irritability of the psychic apparatus (the “hysterical” tendency, according to Edgar Morin) objectifies itself into both controlled and rewarding forms.107 The centrality of media for experience establishes itself even more powerfully in the work of Konrad Lorenz. According to him, we have developed “organs” that respond in species-preserving ways to the pressures of the environment. (Some contemporary biologists would probably see the survival of the individual, and not the species, as the prime factor, but that does not invalidate the argument here.) The lifepreserving feedback from “out there,” however, is not restricted to elementary social organizations, engineering achievements, or scientific results. “Scientistic reduction” is, for Lorenz, just an epidemically returning sickness of the mind. The rationality of science (and probably also of substantial parts of social work) serves life insofar as it must be largely lived as a fight with nonhuman, that is, extraspecies, forces. In terms of intraspecies experience, however, the seemingly subjective emotions and value sentiments take on a cardinal importance, and the “indubitability” of such experience hinges on media—on forms of art. Here, however, Lorenz focuses particularly on the more “popular”

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genres and media. Almost paradoxically, he draws attention to the importance of kitsch: what seems like a flight from reality instead offers precise insights into, and somehow necessary allurements for, the enactment of our feelings. Commercialized media demonstrate clearly how objects, as triggers of emotions, can be simplified and become crude without losing their effectiveness. Theoretically, of course, we may distinguish between kitsch and art. But, to Lorenz, it seems a fact that serious and critical people often cannot escape the effectiveness of kitsch in its most primitive forms.108 This, to put it mildly, certainly looks like an oblique commentary on cherished distinctions between highbrow and popular art. All of these aspects come into play in what is arguably the most rigorously analytical, almost deductive work in radical, generative anthropology. The End of Culture, by Eric Gans, is written by someone who comes from, and remains concerned about, literary theory and interpretation. The book takes us back into that center in which cultural evolution and media anthropology will either join or part company. Gans’s assumptions are minimalist. “The heart of culture is the deferral of violence through representation. At first this is necessary only in isolated crisis situations; at the level of mature culture, it has spread to the totality of human interactions.” For this thesis, an originary, “minimal hypothesis” is required that explains representation as an anthropologically and culturally basic act. The originary scene of representation is construed with “the members of the group surrounding an object, attractive for whatever reason, and designating it by means of an abortive gesture of appropriation.”109 The object (game, or whatever) cannot be appropriated by any individual because this would lead to group-destructive conflict. Gans thus starts out with a hypothesis that is both abstract and concrete, and therefore capable of complex ramifications. It is compatible with many assumptions in evolutionary anthropology, including theories of the brain. Being more abstract, however, it does not incur their limitations. It therefore allows for an infinite spreading out of cultural scenes of representation in which the abortive gesture is either repeated (as ritual) or transformed into what is known as art. The hypothesis is powerful, also, because it is based on, but imposes a significant change upon, René Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry. Gans stresses the appetitive dimension, “which alone can render this object worthy of attention in the absence of structures of signification.” In a second, even more consequential step, he intimately links representation with desire. Desire is “appetite mediated by the appearance of its object on the scene of rep-

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resentation.” Thus, although “appetitive satisfaction—as Freud well knew—remains the ultimate goal of representation and of the desire it engenders,” the evolution of human culture will—and must—strengthen deferral and find desirable forms for its performance. Strictly speaking, then, desire is unfulfillable. In order to take shape or to be formulated, it depends on scenes of representation that differ from the real “precisely because [they defer] the real, which is to say, the appetitive.” In that sense, all desire is “desire for significance” (p. 160). The reality/fiction status of culture may oscillate, and fiction, that is “literature ‘proper,’ ” may indeed function above anything else “as the central cultural institution.” But, since culture, from the beginning, expands into a necessary “medium” for the “totality of human interactions,” the “research program” of Gans amounts to “a wager on the central social importance of representation, not only in the ethical but in the economic domain. Culture as the set of significant public representations is the focus of our interest because it is precisely these that are most sensitive to the everincreasing unification of the ethical and economic spheres.”110 This is a well-nigh ineluctable position. Doubts arise only if one envisages its transformation into cultural analysis. It then appears that, besides the originary minimal hypothesis and a “secondary hypothesis” concerning ritual and the sacred,111 a third minimal hypothesis, which guides cultural analysis more concretely, must come to the foreground. Even if desire is unfulfillable—the best paradise being, according to Proust, paradise lost—the probabilities of its representative orientations, that is, the cultural modalities of its “as-if” fulfillment (which, more often than not, are hard to distinguish from real fulfillment under conditions of cultural enactment), must be gauged. In these respects, Gans either remains ambivalent or falls back into what, after Nietzsche, might be called an extremely conservative theory of cultural (and media) institutions. That represented desires can, in some weak sense, be fulfilled is at least suggested. Producers will aim at the unique possession of significance, a desire that, “in its most radical sense, can never be fulfilled. Even the deified pharaoh cannot hope to be more than a partial and temporary focus of the desires of his subjects.” However, as “consumers, all can be satisfied, if only in a mediate fashion, through participation in and identification with the central desire object” or objects. There seems to be no a priori need, then, to be overly critical of “commercially accessible desire objects.” These are, indeed, “a most significant phenomenon in [their] own right.”112 To what extent cultural consumerism is a dominant feature only in the

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marketplaces of modern consumer society certainly cannot be decided on the basis of Gans’s two minimal hypotheses. Assertions of that kind require predetermined evaluations of what counts as high and not-so-high art. In this respect, Gans seems to take a conventional, literary picture of cultural differentiation for granted. He knows that “the earliest serious reflection on the phenomenon of culture, and in particular of its (re)birth in the Renaissance, took the plastic arts as its privileged domain.” Yet, immediately afterward, it is said to be “the discursive element of culture—that is, literature—that most clearly displays the problematic nature of cultural creativity.” While this would be acceptable if the thesis were couched in Hegelian (or Kriegerian) terms—literature as the most general and most unstable art—Gans embarks for a different destination. He does not take the work of Aeschylus as a culturally problematic media shift. He simply treats it descriptively and critically as “the first example of tragedy as a literary form, assuming that the lack of interest in the texts of earlier plays is a sign of their relative lack of literary value.” He also attaches great value to the “specificity of the creative Subject” from the Greeks onward.113 While all this may be true, it does not follow from the premises, but instead mirrors a conventionalized literary position. This applies particularly to a thesis concerning opera. Opera, “particularly in its classical heyday in the seventeenth century”[!], is held to be as remote as possible from Greek tragedy. This, given not only Nietzsche’s writing, but a lot of straightforward historical research, strikes one as a wild and somewhat weird thesis. Why cultures should have elaborated literary forms as the most attractive ways of the (mediated and in that sense pseudo-)fulfillment of desire remains mysterious. Even if Greek culture possessed some strong faith “in the power of discourse,” it does not follow that this culture was, in a modern sense, a literary one. Greek rhetoric, whether oral or written, relied even more on the power of discourse, yet its cultural status and performative drive are very different. I suspect that while Gans’s basic minimal hypothesis is both concrete and abstract, and therefore extremely fruitful, his notion of representation is not. It suggests a homogeneity of representations and their relation to desire that seems, to say the least, exaggerated. One reason for this is that representation, apart from ritual, is stripped of the stronger connotations of enactment and performance. Gans notes, correctly on the whole, that the “most obvious difference between ritual and art lies in the different relationships they promote between participants and nonparticipants.” Sharp-sightedly, he observes that, within his notion of art,

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“there is no simple word” that describes persons trying to engage in “creative participation in an artwork of any kind.” Terms like “spectators, audience, readership all specify the channel of relationship to the work rather than the relationship of the work as such. It is indeed characteristic of the whole esthetic vocabulary that it is pieced together from terms relevant to the specific arts.” The unresolved ambiguity resides in the relation between desire and the aesthetic: although it is inseparable from desire, in the aesthetic, desire seems to be neutralized into mere contemplation “in which not the private image of desired satisfaction but the ‘public’ image of the desire object is perceived.” This is no longer a hypothesis. It is a postulate seemingly validated in a type of culture that has perceived itself, perhaps since the eighteenth century, as a predominantly literary, that is, contemplative, one.114 The necessary third hypothesis—my hypothesis, this time—supposes that “literature” turns into the cultural paradigm only under certain circumstances, circumstances in which terms like “spectator” and “audience” also seem to be invested with nothing but connotations of aesthetic distance and the modern theoretical varieties of disinterestedness. In fact, however, we are back to where Lacan—and Winnicott—left the theory of desire. Lacan pursued the baiting of desire into the somewhat murkier areas of generalized and thus neutralized psychopathology. Winnicott, in his turn, tried to salvage the qualities of the intermediate in culture in general, the place where desire, medium, and object seem to coalesce. The arts, in Gans’s sense, may be privileged areas for that. But their representational dynamics as enactive, performative, and media-bound, and their cultural status will have to be examined afresh.

chapter three

The Shrinkage of Fact and the Expansion of Performative Discourse

Canonical drama, as we normally “see” it in the West, has become, by and large, a culturally marginal(ized) medium. Its marginalization can be probed in terms of sociohistory. But it also embodies, in a concentrated form, the theoretical issues of the present work. Herbert Blau, drawing on both theoretical sophistication and “practical” experience, has elaborated the subtlest and most intriguing positions in that respect. For him, aesthetic distance exists, but it cannot be defined. What we can envisage is ranges of behavior we may call “aesthetic” because they are mainly triggered by aesthetically pregnant media. Blau, like Eric Gans, notes that—quite in contrast to Balinese theater—we do not have “different names for different types or levels of audience.” The various “crises” ascribed to modernism have made us suspect that the audience is defined “by the reality of its dispersion,” by the awareness that “the event doesn’t begin when the audience assembles because the audience is what happens if . . . it happens at all.” If the Balinese theater has names for audience activities (“participation”), it is exactly because it is not chained to notions of representation. It is indeed striking to see Foucault dream, in the wake of Artaud, of a theatrum philosophicum of reversed Platonism where we encounter, “without any trace of representation (copying or imitating), the dance of masks, the cries of bodies, and the gesturing of hands and fingers.” That Balinese (or Chinese or other Eastern) theater should be completely devoid of representation smacks of Western romanticizing of the “other.” That trend, one surmises, must have set in because of the tiredness felt with respect to the demands and the simultaneous deficiencies of representational ideas. The pathos of representation—the feeling that while it is always broken, it is still necessary—is enunciated even by Derrida as its tragic “gratuitous and baseless necessity.”1 The ideal would be the representative performance as a performative representation.

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This is impossible. But why should we call the ambiguities and failures of representation “tragic”? The interesting thing is not the ideal, but the ways in which one may approach its empty center. In the history of the West, that mythic community for which participation (or its “mystique,” as Blau frequently has it) would have eliminated the representational dilemmas perhaps never existed. The “fictions of community” indeed are not just “grounded in suspicion,” and “are ever likely to be”—they always were.2 Nor, however, should we be overly troubled by representational compulsions—resulting, as they do, from Aristotle’s ambiguous and far from conclusive notion of mimesis. Mimesis appeared to be necessary because nature, as the world of things, did not seem to represent the cosmos in an adequate or complete fashion. Imitation, in other words, was supposed to bring out the best in nature. There is thus a strong elementary performative element in the notion of mimesis that, while it may periodically have been submerged, never has been really wiped out. After Aristotle, that “trace of performance” (Wolfgang Iser) acquires strength and prominence to the degree that mimesis refers less to the Aristotelian cosmos and more to perception. In any case, as Burckhardt had it, tragedy does not grow on the soil of “a mere imitation of life” called mimesis.3 In that respect, there may be, or may have developed, a fundamental media difference between tragedy and comedy. Comedy can afford the appearance of mimesis, representation, because it represents in a mode that is largely independent of representational content, but that is psychoculturally engrossing in its own comic right. Without browsing here through theories of laughter, it may be sufficient to remind ourselves that for Helmuth Plessner, laughter is a—liberating—crisis reaction of the body in a state of cognitive or emotional overstrain. To emphasize representation in tragedy, however, would expose it to a continuous conflict of values that would result in their mutual devaluation. This, indeed, was the situation when tragedy, with Euripides, took a stance of representational distance analogous to that of comedy. Since then, consequently, the lamentations on the death of tragedy have not ceased. In comedy, the emphasis is on the engrossing comic mode; in tragedy, the cathartic effect depends on the status of the values represented.4 While there is certainly always a “chastening difference between acted and real pain,”5 the theatrical experience is not—necessarily, exclusively—the experience of represented pain. The encoded, thematized, theatricalized feelings may have little to do with the experience of the audience. This position is put forward as an analogy to Luhmann’s dis-

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tinction, fruitful indeed, but also implied in notions like Aristotle’s catharsis (as distinct from the represented feelings on the stage), that the codes for emotions tell us little or nothing about the actual bodily or social processes going on with either actors or spectators. Feelings are internal adjustments to internal problems; their diversity, as we “know” it, is a matter of cognitive and linguistic representation, that is, of codes.6 Representation on the one hand and participation, particularly participation in its mystique, on the other, are then labels for techniques of presentation and degrees of engrossment wrapped around an unknown core. In “the worst possible case,” the possibilities of engrossment and distance turn into the (quasi-systems-theoretical) dilemma described by Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room: In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. . . . But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her. . . . And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment someone’s—anyone’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or to see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But not—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile.7

While the audience incarnates public solitude indeed,8 one may question whether the necessity of lonely choice must entail exile. The passages preceding those just quoted are more reminiscent of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary: “Then two thousand hearts in the semidarkness remembered, anticipated, travelled dark labyrinths.” The audience as a pseudocommunity, it is true, disintegrates into observers choked with observations. But to what extent, one can ask in a somewhat crude vein, is this the result of the modern stage technology, fostering (even if these are “platitudes”) “passivity, mimesis, the gaze”?9 Leroi-Gourhan has emphasized that, as I have quoted before, in modern societies, a distinction between what is really lived and what is “merely” represented has gradually emerged. Today, “we are unlikely to confuse a ball with a ballet or a mass with a performance of a passion play.”10 But not only do the great traditional celebrations still existing for Japan, for instance, not permit the same ease of distinguishing between the secular and the religious, the civil and the military, but

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conversely, it is possible to replace “real” social life by a merely represented one—Baudrillard’s theses to that effect are, in Leroi-Gourhan’s perspective, much less radical than they may appear. In a countermovement, again, modern artists may look for “a way back” and start decorating churches. In short, there are user-oriented, practical values to the arts, hidden as they may sometimes appear.11 The social history of audiences may not yield strong theoretical arguments. But we do know that audience behavior, far into the eighteenth century and especially in the opera, hardly can be conceptualized in terms of observers choked with observations. Hegel, of all philosophers, criticized German audiences for bringing an overly literary mode of reception to opera. “We Germans, on the contrary, take the greatest interest in the fate of princes and princesses in opera and in their speeches with their servants, esquires, confidants, and chambermaids, and even now there are perhaps many of us who groan as soon as a song begins.” The Italians, Hegel thought, rightly did not treat operas as aesthetic entities, but concentrated only on their most fascinating parts, eating, playing cards, or whatever during the rest.12 On the other side of the extremes, theater may, idealiter, do very well without an audience at all. To the position of George Steiner that tragedy does not require an audience because, fundamentally, its space is inwardness and the viewer aimed at is the “hidden god,” Blau adds the misgivings of “many who work in the theater” who feel the spectator to be a kind of usurper or intruder, some actors also feeling this about the presence of the director.13 Theoretically as well as empirically, there is no limit to the varieties of relations between the elements and variously engaged participants of a theatrical enterprise. This, however, may have but little to do with the cultural power of the medium as an encoding of anthropological drifts. That the relations have become theoretically unmanageable, that theory is able, like Iser’s literary anthropology, to spell out the structures and workings of the fictive and imaginary only with respect to a highly specialized and performatively restricted medium, may just be the other side of the cultural marginalization of theater and/as literature of which both Blau and Iser are also acutely aware. The direction of inquiry into which an anthropology of media feels itself propelled looms larger in Blau’s notion of “fascinatory effect.” Quoting Brecht and Lacan, Blau relates that notion to the experience of Chinese theater, the Peking Opera in particular. For Lacan, that type of theater wards off the “evil eye of the gaze”—the gaze, we must add,

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that tries to detect and to interpret the alleged representational (emotional) content of a play. Chinese theater instead induces “the splendid remoteness of the performer, the power of emotional distance.” Were it possible to conceptualize a term like “fascination” in systems theory, one could say that fascination and engrossment amount to a forgetting of observational, contemplative roles. They are the middle ground between attachments to an always disturbed representation and the anonymity of bodily and social processes, and that is why they are powerful in terms of cultural experience. A medium aiming at fascination does not succumb to the tendency that according to Blau has governed the Western theater since the eighteenth century. Since then, “the audience has been esteemed as the representative ideal of its own representations, the theater’s judge and master, deferred to as such and given the images of itself that it wants to see.” Fascination instead corresponds to the formulas of pathos (of intensity, not of any particular emotion) that Aby Warburg tried to salvage in the wake of Nietzsche under culturally difficult conditions.14 Fascination is also implied in Burckhardt’s term “excitability” (Erregbarkeit), with which he characterizes the Greeks’ involvement with music and dance—concerning which “the whole Occident, and even the South, appears dull.”15 Without constituting a definable audience, the Greeks could experience music and poetry as “questions of life,” as “powers” of national-religious importance. The problematic way to salvage formulas of pathos—themselves already reduced in performative intensity—is the way taken, since the eighteenth century, in the West: it is the futile effort to look for relevance, emotional or critical, in the representational illusions of the theater. Our relationship to that theater has drifted toward the voyeuristic.16 That term, negative as it sounds, should designate quite neutrally the interpretational mania of the aesthetically isolated gaze. But the situation is more complex than that. The European eighteenth century may well indeed have been the period in which “literature” emerged as a self-referential and self-regulating system. It was not only the novels discussed above (and others), however, in which selfreference became tantamount to an almost crippling loss in cultural power. Eighteenth-century theory itself, while it could not escape the pulls toward observation-oriented, contemplation-oriented representation, tried at the same time to stick to an aesthetics of engrossment. This impulse is felt even in Kant’s philosophy, where, as Rodolphe Gasché has shown, the (old rhetorical) concept of “hypotyposis,” putting before one’s eyes, takes on paramount importance. For Kant, rhet-

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oric is an inferior form of art. But it reacquires importance with respect to philosophical “representation.” Hypotyposis must “present” the concepts of reason and understanding in such a lively way that the powers of the mind (Gemüt) are set going, gather momentum, and get into their stride in order to be capable of cognition and moral practice. Without that, concepts would be lifeless and dull. The possibility of that kind of lively (re)presentation is owed to “imagination.” “Poietic” imagination is the faculty of an original, engrossing (re)presentation (and, in that sense, Dichtung).17 The question then is to what extent the “poetic” (turning into a “system” of literature) can still produce, or partake of, “poietic” effects, for which it is engrossment, comovement, and not observation that count.

The Poietic-Poetic Dilemma: “Drama,” “Audience,” Representation Here we may turn to the example of F. G. Klopstock. Winfried Menninghaus has noted that the concept of “representation” (Darstellung), hardly encountered in German theory before 1774, came into inflationary use after 1790, when the concept of imitation lost its hold on the European imagination because the performative contexts such as the theater in which it had functioned had been critically changing for a while.18 Poetic (re)presentation, for Klopstock, cuts across the boundaries of Aristotelian notions of the theoretical and the practical. In the theoretical domain, knowledge is self-sufficient; it does not require action. In the practical area, actions are supposed to fulfill a telos proper unto themselves. Aristotle’s poietic activity produces something characterized by its effect. Owing to Aristotle’s somewhat distanced theoretical stance, these effects do tend to acquire a somewhat contemplative hue: one of his prime examples (still used by Lessing) is painting. Klopstock wants more. For him, literary representation is supposed to be distinguished by an action that does not so much represent as present a dignity of its own: it seems to be what it represents. The action of the literary text resides in its rhythmic movement that, in its turn, necessitates a rhythmic action on the part of the “reader”—declamation. The literary text is in its performance, not in the words, their meanings, or what these represent. This poietic essence of the poetic text brings it close to dance, rather than to painting. The century of reading mania thus culminates in a theory of (re)presentation for which the central paradigms are dance, theatrical acting, and declamatory speech.19 All of

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these, whatever they may represent, are supposed to stimulate, to excite emotions and passions in the not at all passive “recipients.”20 Preserving residues of the even more directly physical power of presentation (for instance in Luther’s translation of the Bible, where somebody like Goliath presents himself [sich darstellen, shows himself in a provocative manner]), the notion of Darstellung combines action and physicality, even if, at the same time, the distinction between representation and represented cannot be naively ignored anymore. The poieticpoetic text, therefore, is not so much concerned with the invention of things, actions to be represented (contrary to more “enlightened” poetologists like Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Jakob Breitinger, and Lessing). It has to worry about irreducible action in its own right, without which the text would be a (verbal) body without a soul.21 The trouble is, of course, that Klopstock was unable to see this as a problem in comparative media history. The rhythmic text, bolstered by various other techniques of emphasis and intensification, runs into difficulties analogous to those of theatrical acting. In search of self-sufficient action, demanding rhythmically emphatic declamation as a direct correlate of psychic and bodily movement, the rhythmicized text easily degenerates into rant. Lichtenberg indeed was caught in the dilemma of an expanding but boring self-reference of literary texts and the vanishing fascination of acting as performed by Garrick. This is why he was looking for successors to Shakespeare, who wrote well without knowing it. In the eighteenth century, writing demanded an awareness of writing models without falling prey to literary self-reference—a consummation devoutly, but somewhat hopelessly, to be wished. Lichtenberg represents the Enlightenment, but he does not want to share its loss of power in the universalizing of texts. Klopstock, centrally located as his theory was, managed to turn himself very quickly, with his literary practice, into an object of parody. Lichtenberg makes fun of efforts to “act out” (voragieren) Klopstock’s odes. For him, the language of the Bible is more powerful than the language of the Messias. Klopstock, like Lavater, is the master of empty verbiage, in which new ways of expression and unexpected metaphors are supposed to provide a semblance of plenitude. In England, on the other hand, both a theoretical shift in favor of opera—in spite of its “incongruities” beyond “the Limits of Humane Nature” (Dryden)—and a practical trend toward theatrically, performatively hybrid media had been underway since the later seventeenth century.22 It appears that there may be quite something to the opinion of a

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somewhat strange person, the mystical biologist Lucas Simmonds in A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden. Talking about theatrical acting, he says, “Alarming thing, acting. . . . Culture excuses all, in modern eyes, but earlier folk knew better. Those old Puritans knew very well you could get taken over, the soma that is, the physical-chemical body, they knew it could be devil’s work. Dangerous to tinker with consciousness unless you’re very sure what you’re doing.”23 Richard Schechner might be one of the not too numerous modern theorists and practitioners to make sense of that. In most of his writings, he is concerned with the continually broken, but also continually reestablished, relations between rituals, social behavioral patterns, consciousness, and the “arts.” There is always, for him, a distance between the actor and his or her represented roles, between the audience and the representation. Transformations remain incomplete, do not make the distance vanish. There can be no reality on the stage, none of the bad utopias envisaged by the promoters of various forms of total theater, where slaughtering animals on the stage, for instance, was meant to have a ritualistically purging effect. Yet theater and life may be considered as a Möbius strip, each turning continually into the other. Schechner, indeed, almost like Byatt’s Simmonds, takes the actor as a paradigm for that “dangerous” or fascinating interpenetration, considering the social and the psychophysical activities of the actor especially after a performance as part of the performance itself. Performers are not, but also are not not what they represent.24 Classical Greek theater represents. It is also, to an extent hard to determine, an enactment of what it represents. Degrees of such amalgamations are among the tantalizing problems of an anthropology of culture as seen through its media. They have been dealt with, to some extent, in a series of works by Albert S. Cook on Greek theater, Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama, and French classic tragedy. Cook tries to ward off, or at least to limit as far as possible, interpretations of meaning, political and otherwise.25 He uses Freudian notions of a transaction, of being gripped or aroused (and the frequent lack of that in modern plays), in order to supply, instead, a conceptual model for the powerful effects of “enactment.” The notion aims at the affinity, by “analogic contagion” (C. L. Barber’s term), of tragedy with ritual and any assemblage of human beings in which more than a supposed neutralized aesthetic contemplation is at stake. This detachment of drama from what are called the pressures of reality does not turn it into a “mere” play, into the work of art “which post-Industrialization aesthetics would have it to

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be, and which [Bruno] Snell, with [H. D. F.] Kitto, reads back into Greece.”26 The theoretical and descriptive difficulties do not, of course, thereby vanish.27 The distinction between “literary” theater and ritual in its narrow, traditional sense, as social realities and their codes, must, of course, be drawn, and in fact it is easy to do so. More instructively symptomatic, however, are theories and analyses in which the distinction is both drawn and well-nigh suspended. Victor Turner’s concept of ritual does not relegate the phenomenon to early stages of sociocultural development. Rather, he emphasizes a general cultural need to impart some coherence, in orderly forms and fashions, to the open spaces of ceaseless social interaction. For their shaping, the favorite conceptual toys of sociology—structures and functions—do not suffice. Instead, we are involved in interrelationships between processes of regularization, situational adjustment, and areas of indeterminacy.28 In these interrelationships, zones of liminality, of the betwixt and between, take on paramount importance: the continuous shifts in dimensions of performative behavior in the arts, in sports, and play, and their links with the social “structure.” Turner himself, however, did not often go beyond a relatively conventional appraisal of art forms, in particular, theater and narrative. In the title essay of The Anthropology of Performance, it is true, he takes Dilthey (and implicitly many others) to task for setting up, in spite of better knowledge, distinctions, even oppositions, between mentalized worldviews on the one side and performative behavior on the other. Yet the function of theater, though forming part of spaces of public liminality, remains rather firmly restricted to commentaries on the social scene and on real life “in meaningful form.” Theater becomes “a way of scrutinizing the quotidian world”—not a way of its performative enactment itself. It seems to withdraw into domains of aesthetic distance that, self-evident as they are, can be scrutinized in their own turn. Turner, like Dilthey, seems to fall prey to a traditional, but not at all exclusively dominant Western mode of thought that, in principle, his theoretical approach had already left behind.29 Turner is modern, even postmodern, in his insistence on performative liminality. Theoretically, he tends to abandon a clear distinction between “liminal” and “liminoid” modes: play, in particular, being basically “elusive” (from ex-ludere), may be both.30 But he remains conventional in his distinctions between performative genres. To change that bias, we must reactivate the traditional concepts of (archaic) ritual and the notion advocated by Gans and others that modernization consists,

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in important respects, in developments toward largely deritualized societies. Not that we should take deritualization for granted. But we have to reconsider the dimensions of the transition from archaic ritual to a variety of performative-discursive modes—not simply to differentiations, to be taken for granted, between the social, the cultural, and the literary. Such an enterprise has to confront annoying conceptual problems. Our terminologies, as Gans has noted, reflect differentiations between the different arts and between the arts and society. Evidence pointing to the heavy historical relativity of these distinctions is often taken into account, but it has not really seeped into the terminology itself. Whenever theory is done—or should we say performed, sometimes perhaps celebrated?—history will normally serve the purpose of an ultimate conceptual Platonism. As a preliminary defense against that, one may refuse to opt for one of the competing aesthetic theories. Rather, the coexistence of theoretical positions and their historical shifts may be taken as symptoms: they betray the difficulties we encounter when we try (or do not try) to come to terms with manifold transitional dimensions. The survival of physiological theories of art (in Nietzsche’s aesthetics, partly in Dewey’s, partly in Gehlen’s, Adorno’s and Leroi-Gourhan’s) may remind us that we have not come to terms with the effects of aesthetically stylized rhythmizing—the breath-giving and breath-taking impulse-raising movements, open or implicit, the muscular or visceral radiations that the more conventionally aesthetic liminoid modes share with many others of a more clearly liminal kind. The disciplining rationalization of religion and the isolation of the aesthetic tend to hide a continuum of dedifferentiations operating within the ordered ranges of mental and vital awareness.31 Musil has Ulrich declare, in The Man Without Qualities, that the orderly civil(ized) person, physically well distinguished from his or her environment, as well as by its “will” and “soul,” must be pierced from time to time by experiences reminiscent of the mystic. Nietzsche tried to formulate the program of a physiology of aesthetics in which art reminds us of states of animal vigor: it is an excess and emanation of flourishing physicality into the world of images and desires, as well as a stimulation of animal functions by images and desires of an intensified life. That intensified life used to take place when art works formed part of the great road of human festivities. Nowadays, though, art must provide small respites for trifling transports and petty madness.32 In the posthumous works from the late 1880s, Nietzsche has joined the dynamics of muscular-intestinal awareness and stimulation,

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the subtle excitability of the body in and through art, with states of love and intoxication to form the grand mythic picture of continuous reciprocal action: without the “intestinal fever,” what would remain of lyric poetry, and even music? “Perhaps l’art pour l’art: the virtuoso croaking of frogs left out in the cold, despairing in their swamps.”33 Physiologically oriented aesthetics, dubious as its status has always been (“physiological Romanticism” might not be too bad a term for it), may be buttressed today by a multidimensional approach. If physiological theories preserve some essential intuitions that we should not completely renounce, media also can be seen as bordering on or embedded in social systems. The type of experience they allow for, though also social, is not, however, determined by the codes according to which systems proceed. Aesthetically determined media may produce and enact reality, private and public, public as private, and vice versa, because there may be no other medium in which an imaginatively pregnant sense of reality can be achieved. Such a mode of thought would go beyond the familiar forms of a sociology of art, to say nothing of the somewhat outworn criticisms of aesthetic ideology for which art (in a quite conventional sense) is the product (or mirror) of specific social conditions.34 One can think of ancient Greek theater as an institution both ritualized and fit for new discursive, “democratic” negotiations. One might rethink parts of the lyric poetry of Greece and the Italian and English Renaissance as a unique medium in which an enhanced mode of social communication, liberated from some of the everyday role pressures of interaction, could take place. Possibly, even the “uses” of nineteenth-century prose fiction as forms of “intercommunication” between the—then—diverging pulls of sociocultural realms could come in for a more performative treatment. In these cases, literary forms, although also discursively organized, function in strongly metadiscursive ways. “Meta” here points to performances both beyond and between the “ordinary,” more or less enforced pursuits of daily life. It differs, therefore, sharply from the more exclusively interiorized, mentalized operations that govern, according to variants of a third, usually dominant type of theory, the contemplative reception of works of art.

Tragedy and the Production of Social Realities The intellectualized transcendence of the pragmatic dimension, both social and emotional, the indeterminate imaginary transfiguration of

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the commonplace (as the title of one of A. C. Danto’s books has it) certainly characterizes important modes of aesthetic reception—but only under specific circumstances. That this mode has come to dominate the scene of theory is due, at least in large part, to the difficulties of conceptualizing, and possibly experiencing, the spaces in between. Yet all is not lost. An early book on ancient Greek theater, Roy C. Flickinger’s The Greek Theater and its Drama (1918), can stimulate theoretical guesses as to how this situation came about. Certainly, early and classical Greek tragic theater was used politically. The tyrant Peisistratos “stages” the Dionysia perhaps mainly because he wants to tie his supporters, the farmers—who made the imported Dionysos their main god—to his cause. Later, the polis exploits dramatic rhetoric and the shifting status of the gods for smoothing out processes of so-called democratization. But the sociopolitical history of tragedy tells us little about its general value as a media model. Flickinger assumes that the choreutae (the members of the chorus) in the dithyramb and early tragedy (and, mutatis mutandis, also the comus, originally a company of men behaving and singing in a happy and festive manner) performed actual forms of worship. That is, although the choreutae were clearly “actors” in some form, “there was no dramatic impersonation” (mimesis). The choreutae sang as human worshipers of Dionysos, “not in accordance with their character as sileni.”35 The latter were creatures with equine ears, hooves, and tails, like the satyrs, imaginary male inhabitants of the wild, comparable to the “Wild Men” of the European folk tradition, resuscitated perhaps to some extent in the United States by Robert Bly. The sileni embody various archetypal tensions (not oppositions). They counted as grotesque hedonists and were yet the immortal companions of a god; they were thought to be cruder than men and yet somehow wiser, combining lewdness with skill in music. Through their use in tragic ritual, they embody the tension between ordinary status and a role that spills over into the ambiguous status of “actors” throughout history. Thespis took the step of stylizing the coryphaeus, the leader of the sileni (and then the chorus) into an impersonation of Dionysos himself. Accordingly, the distinction between the choreutae and their (new) coryphaeus and the impersonator of Dionysos became more pronounced. The sileni lived up to their previously neglected character (as sileni or, later, as other “personages”). “Actors” came into existence. But in what sense? While conventional distinctions are always possible, “acting” appears to be composed of performing a real

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action and projecting imaginary roles. In so-called real life, we emphasize the reality or at least the consequences of an act. In the theater, we enjoy the projections of the roles. But both components are always there. In a conservatively literary perspective, Flickinger calls the type of Thespis tragedy around 530 b.c. “a crude, coarse, only semi-literary affair.” The difficulty, as usual, rests with the concept of mimesis, in whatever meaning we may take it. Aesthetic theory—and Flickinger is very candid about its (un)importance—has neglected the exploration of those large spaces of the “semi-literary.”36 The historical facts one might use to fill those spaces appear to be meager. Flickinger, among many others, underlines the continuing religious status of tragedy and the sociocultural status of the actors. The latter was intimately related to status and power in a sociopolitical sense, contrasting sharply with conditions in Rome, or France and England in later times. With the coryphaeus as “a quasi-actor,” Aeschylus, according to Flickinger, “took an easy and obvious step, or rather half-step” when he introduced a second actor. What are the implications of that step, of Sophocles introducing a third actor, or of Euripides bringing, according to Nietzsche, the spectator onto the stage?37 If we obtain, with Euripides, the spectator and the audience, these nevertheless would remain, for an indefinite time, mere words. They did not denote any constant, homogeneous entity, again according to Nietzsche. Can we draw any conclusions from the fact that the tragedies of Euripides, manifesting a decisive, often satiric or aggressive distance toward a trivialized sociopolitical scene, are frequently seen as the epitome of literary tragedy, but that they also mark a long-term break in the production of “genuine” tragedy as such? Glances at Athenian state strategies concerning the organization of tragic contests, or at the differentiations between poets, actors, and producers, make the picture even more complicated.38 All this is not, of course, theory in any rigorous sense. Yet it seems permissible, given materials of this kind, to characterize large parts of Greek tragedy as the medium of parareligious, parasocial experience. Its “legendary effect” may have been grounded in, or initiated through, the sensuous-musical immediacy of its language for which the difference between music and language did not exist. We must assume that “music” (mousiké) was an art that was woven into the very texture of Greek life, that musical-rhythmic structures were determined by the Greek language itself, which did not allow for any independent musical rhythmic

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setting, and that a rhythmically intensified, wild type, the “Phrygian” mode, according to E. R. Dodds—and not the supposedly quieter and educative Lydian recommended by Aristotle—was used both in the Dionysiac rituals of the Archaic Age and later in the Corybantic rituals of the fifth century b.c. To both of those, “cathartic” notions were attached—the idea that individuals could be purged of irrational impulses or even cured of madness if they temporarily lost all inhibitions and “let go” in an ecstatic fashion. Within that, however, a differentiation similar to the aria and recitativo of opera seems to have occurred.39 Tragedy, to whatever precise extent, certainly was squarely positioned in the medium of parareligious, parasocial experience. For Nietzsche, it was a genuine misfortune that the word “drama” had come to be interpreted and translated as “action.” Greek theater did not aim at the representation of action, but at scenes of pathos (“drama” meaning originally, according to Nietzsche, “event” or “story” in a hieratic sense). Tragedy, through the chorus, enacts visionary shapes. In that sense, originally, only the chorus is real (Dionysiac). The “actors” on the stage are rather like (Apollinian) spectators themselves. But even the “talk” of the actors is geared to the enjoyment of “good talk” in (passionate) situations in which language normally leaves the ordinary person in the lurch. It is the enjoyment of this kind of talk that has prepared us to accept the “unrealistic” singing on the stage in opera. Tragedy, like opera, does not primarily appeal to (intellectual) understanding, does not primarily instigate interpretation.40 One could thus call the tragedies quasi-representational. The “stories” presented were, as mere narratives, well known. But if they produced or provoked anything, it was not aesthetic distance and contemplation. There is a strong emphasis on elaborate rhetoric, it is true. But the rhetoric embodies the partly religious, partly self-sustained importance of almost magical voices. It does not propel the stories into the exfoliation of complex or self-relativizing perspectives. In spite of tragic debates, the rhetoric—not just with regard to the “singing” of the chorus—does not drive predominantly toward differentiation. Nor does it—again, in spite of the many debates—primarily aim at unfolding layers of conflicting implications. The effect, in particular also of stichomythia (that rapid exchange of one- or two-line utterances between two or more characters) is instead one of wordiness or redundancy. The “almost catechistic repetitions of what is surely clear to the audience,” Herbert Blau has said, carry “something of ritual purpose, and a perverse quotient of pleasure, in the deferral of the self-evident.”41 In terms

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of effect—a negative effect, neutralizing semantic interpretation—stichomythia is comparable, if one looks for a comparison, to the paradoxical effect of opera singing. Listening—or rather, going along with what is going on—is primarily fed by rhetorical technique, not representational “content.”42 Thus, to put it negatively, the effects of tragedy, tending toward the suppression of semantic differentiation, also tend to give short shrift to distinctions of meaning arising in the wake of social processes. They produce a common, public space. “Theater” as representation and enactment would then demand a type of analysis that keeps somewhat aloof from the varieties of humanistic exegesis and interpretation. How, though, can one focus on the institutional significance of quasi-representation, visionary rhetoric, and the enjoyment of good talk? Can one avoid falling into the traps of the kind into which even J. Peter Euben has fallen? Euben clearly sees tragedy as a part of public life, as an institution of democratic processes that, “for all its exploration of questions about mortality, fate, freedom, and wisdom,” remains tied “to the politics of a specific human community.” In that function, tragedy is vastly superior to philosophy and its subdivision into political theory. These must pose as a critique of political corruption, or as a vision of static ideals of state, as the experience of a shaping vision and as an enactment of political dynamics itself. Yet Euben’s analysis concentrates mainly in an interpretation of what he calls “substantive issues: justice, identity, and membership.” Tragedies, it is true, were public events, forming part of and helping to shape “the democratization of Athenian life,” analogous to institutions and events like the heliaia, the assembly of courts of law, boule, the council of the five hundred, or ekklesia, the assembly of the people, normally not more than six thousand.43 Yet they also were “as close as one could come to a theoretical institution” in which the critical consideration of public life took place. Relevant as this in fact somewhat Turnerian position may be, it deflects attention from the particular mixture of enactment and “consideration” in which the pressures of both myth and democratization are transformed into a “palatable” public event, into what Kurt Hübner has called an “effective presence.”44 That purpose is ill served by the sophistication of “substantive issues.” In fact, this terminology bestows a “misleading transparency” on ancient drama. Not only does it see these plays through the “detonating glass of modern fracture,” it also looks upon them only in “so far as the texts preserve” them.45 Jacob Burckhardt put it more bluntly: modern

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talk about ideas like fate in Greek tragedy is “wretchedly superfluous.” Burckhardt himself tried to demonstrate a kind of ridiculousness of representational content in Euripides—much in the way that opera lovers rest content with the representational absurdity of that medium or that Romain Rolland spoke about the unsurpassable indifference of eighteenth-century Italians with respect to opera plots and, simultaneously, their unbounded enthusiasm for isolated musical passages.46 So what do we imply if we look upon The Eumenides (as part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy) as the most magnificent appearance of the political in the fifth century, as Christian Meier has done? Meier’s position resembles Euben’s, and yet diverges from it in significant ways. Tragedy produces the political as a new type of reality, because older, seemingly more “immediate” realities can no longer monopolize what counts as real. Among the older institutions that begin to fail in this fundamental respect we may include the household, the hetairiae (associations particularly of upper-class young men combining social with political functions, supporting the ambitions of their leaders, offering mutual assistance in lawcourts and at elections, sometimes also to be seen as “comrades” in the military sense), the phratriae (“brotherhoods” to which only Athenian citizens could belong), but also the ingrained and habitual forms of well-nigh permanent small-scale warlike aggression and so on. Political reality must function as a more complicated negotiation of self-assertion and group assertion. Reality must partly be produced by explicit discourse attractive both as argument and as rhetorical good talk. Thus, political reality—and tragedy as an important part of it—presents itself as a first example of what would become the ineluctable discursive penetrations of the real. The more reality is taken over by discourse, the more the real becomes ambiguous, suspended between truth and fiction. With rhetoric, reality turns into an open field of truth claims and of powerful—or simply power—effects. Philosophy cultivates the field of truth claims, while rhetoric, and even more so tragedy, enact, and incarnate, powerful effects, thereby incurring the wrath of philosophy.47 If, then, tragedy is supposed to politicize public space in an overriding if vague way, and if this process is to be experienced as an event, in Euben’s sense, as something more effective than the arguments of philosophy, then tragedy cannot commit itself to specific meanings. Neither, on the other hand, can it rest satisfied with a noncommittal spreading out of possible implications. Put differently, tragedy will acknowledge, but also control and partly

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brush aside, doubts concerning the status—ontological and ethical—of both facts and problems. The “substantive issue” of the Oresteia, for example, Orestes’ guilt, and its factual “background,” the reduction of power at the disposal of the Areopagus, are well known. Neither fact nor problem, however, carries any obvious or undisputed meaning. In the Oresteia, and also, I suggest, in Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy (in particular Oedipus Tyrannus), indubitable realities have shrunk to a scarce resource. Similarly, the amount of events and actions that are accepted as both significant and well-understood facts is reduced to a minimum. We are normally dealing only with murder and other pronounced forms of aggression, such as efforts to conserve or to grab efficient power. The paradox of advancing civilizations, that the differentiation of realities entails increased difficulties in determining what counts as real, is clearly in evidence. Both Jacob Burckhardt, a long time ago, and Christian Meier, in more recent times, have drawn attention to a primitive, elemental, “diabolical” pleasure in destruction, within and without, in Greek urban, democratizing societies—envy, terror, robbery, piracy, the singleminded mutual hatred operative in the wholesale destruction of cities, the nakedness of enmity and hostility in the absence of uncontested, protective institutional forms of reality. The Greeks had to pay dearly for the little security that the city-states offered.48 It is only if one looks at this, the elementary level, that the plays can be understood, in any concrete sense, as representation. Of course, they still differ greatly from routinized forms of daily social, political, or private action—even if the meaning and factual status of these has become frequently blurred. The layers of rhetoric and sometimes negotiation that the plays build up around the dried-up core of represented realities constitute a sphere of aesthetico-social experience in their own right. To call it “parasocial” is to draw attention to a barely analyzable closeness and difference with experience in the sociopolitical sphere “proper.” Burckhardt, again, has described that sphere as a curious mixture of agonistic, ecstatic, and acting layers—or at least as the consciousness of their interpenetration. The aesthetic and the sociopolitical meet in the amalgamations of rhetoric and braggadocio, in the nervous tension that characterizes both political enterprise and ritual dance. Moreover, both everyday derision and the extreme mockery of old comedy testify to an unusual capacity of “self-objectivization” in the validity and undermining of pathos by superior (self-)mockery.49 If we do not, then, concentrate on the interpretation of Euben’s “sub-

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stantive issues,” on conceptualizations of problems like justice, freedom, and fate, the basic, structural impression one may gather from the Oresteia is the enormous discrepancy between elemental actions and minimal events on the one hand, and discourse and/as powerful rhetoric and good talk on the other. Discourse, in fact, tends to suck up actions and events. The full swing of that process shows up very clearly right from the beginning in Agamemnon. While the watchman is still hankering after some “signal clear and true,”50 Clytaemnestra is uncannily superb in defining situations in almost any desired fashion. Thus, for large parts of Greek tragedy, the experience is an unfolding of an aesthetico-parasocial experience in its own right. Aristotle may have tried to catch its historical quality when he described catharsis in psychohygienic terms as preliminary and aftermath to a “serious” political action. It is, of course, impossible either simply to follow or to diverge from him. Yet, we may legitimately suppose that the involvement of the more passive participants (the “spectators”) produced some kind of analogous experience. Partly, this may be derived from the status of the theater as a public institution of elemental and sociopolitical passions. Partly, and in a more traditional methodological fashion, it can, I would assume, be indirectly inferred from the structure of enactment in the plays themselves. Clytaemnestra is absolutely sure of her maximalist drives to minimalist action. In modern psychopathological jargon, one could probably speak of monomania. But she is equipped with a Machiavellian and rhetorical lucidity that makes her appear as uncanny. Siegfried Melchinger has called her, in an apt phrase, a royal beast of prey.51 Her ironies “conjure up the supernatural—she becomes infernal, the terror that walks in darkness.”52 The killings, and the various terrible visions relating to them, turn the play into an “archetype of the Theater of Cruelty.”53 The ordinary world thus loses parts of its anchorings as unquestioned reality: everything seems possible because everything can somehow be motivated and justified, as Clytaemnestra’s rhetoric shows. That Cassandra can prophesy the events that actually happen may point to a belief in fate or higher vision. But this is more or less irrelevant, since Cassandra’s language is, for the chorus, barely intelligible.54 While the ordinary world appears as an arbitrary one, then, the levels of—represented—“real” action tend to move away into an autonomous terrain of the subhuman or superhuman. One may at least say, with Melchinger, that nothing here is just readable—letter, book, or literature. If significance there is, it manifests itself as a tacit emergent quality of enactment.

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The situation changes with The Libation Bearers. In Orestes, ranges of human motivation begin to take shape. They are, it is true, still clothed in the objectifying images of gods (Apollo’s order to kill his father’s murderers), the Furies, and myth. But these images do not embody a given order of the world. In the absence of binding or necessary relationships between language, experience, action, and the world, they must be invoked, conjured up. Mythic images are thus transferred into the world; they do not inhabit it. Their efficiency has to be continually asserted: “Apollo will never fail me, no,” and a whole “credibility” list follows.55 Dreams may but do not necessarily have to mean something: “No empty dream. The vision of a man” (l. 521). Specific interpretations of dreams are simply accepted while Orestes plays the seer himself; analogies and legends are mobilized (ll. 527–633). It is from the joint effect of fictions like these that action springs—and falls back into its primitive, murderous shape. Reality, then, insofar as it is represented as irresistibly real, is out of the ordinary. It swerves toward the primitive, elemental or, with Clytaemnestra, toward some remnant of the supernatural. In that quality, of course, theater is indeed also representation—even if, as Flickinger points out, it would have been unthinkable in ancient Greece that a character, slain upon the stage, would, as in the Chinese theater, rise and casually walk off.56 Demarcations between empirical reality and tragic enactment can, of course, also be established along conventional lines. But once empirical routines take on the character of somehow materialized, implemented, or enforced fictions, hard distinctions between the significant processes and implications behind the everyday and the theatrical scenes are hard to draw—as Erving Goffman, for one, well knew. That blurring, one may suspect, becomes almost thematic in The Eumenides. Following Meier and Euben, the play can be seen as an effective ideological event in a specifically troublesome period of Athenian public life. But there is more to it. In the preceding plays of the trilogy, rhetoric and discourse expand, while, conversely, the domains of indisputable, representable realities shrink. In The Eumenides, that level of representation is almost completely absent. The play consists of a series of debates. In a discussion play, however, the notion of representation changes. If representation there is, it points to its own slipperiness. Aeschylus, it has been said, fought with his tragedies as if they were weapons that might keep his country free.57 But that fight here advo-

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cates the institutionalization of a civil court of law on the Areopagus. It is concerned with the establishment of an institution that has to decide, in the absence of compelling primary realities, between the pulls of divergent fictions. The decisions of the court will allow some fictions to be treated and implemented as realities. But the groundlessness of these realities remains all too clear. Representation here operates in a selfreferential loop. It does not deal, in whatever fashion, with the implications of something represented, but points to the elements of playfulness that, even if in different forms, govern representational efforts in theater and social life alike. By analogy, the main procedures employed in that respect are procedures of referral and deferral. Orestes is “handed on”—from Apollo and the Furies to Athens, from there to Athena and the court. This itinerary does not build up an ordered exploration or differentiation of what might be concealed in ordinary life. The purging of Orestes is instead a matter of magic and manipulation. For that, the elemental reality still embodied by the Furies—primitive magic forces and forces of revenge and retaliation—must be cut short and transformed into a mere possibility. They are civilized, if that is the word, into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones (see l. 805 to the end), into potentials of persuasion—into media in the old magic and in the incipient modern sense (ll. 893–94). Persuasion, however, primarily suspends realities while it aims at their selective “imposition.” That suspension is immediately evident in the vote of the court (“The lots are equal,” l. 768), interpreted by Athena as an acquittal. The suspension of realities was foreshadowed in Apollo’s procedural tricks—some commentators, indeed, as Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford note, have actually found the trial comic, tending toward a mockery of the proceedings, mainly because of Apollo. “The trial is a constructive parody, a re-creation of court procedure which reminds us of its flaws and flexibility; it can be poked but it regains its powers of control.” Apollo may serve to make the trial more momentous, and thus move the play, indeed, toward literary representation. But Athena’s commitments—to some new complex civilized state, religious pressures, or sexual politics, to “democratic” patriarchy as against the blood relations of matriarchy, or simply to Orestes as against Clytaemnestra—do not amount to more than a series of “negative preferences.”58 She bestows favors and privileges not for any real merit, but because the alternatives appear to be worse. The supreme theatrical trick—the chorus merging with the audience on the Areopagus—simulates the ultimate sanctioning of what, as a represented issue, must remain dubious.

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The Play as a Model Discourse: Oedipus, Knowledge, and Power However one may arrange the semantic or perspectival complexities of the play, they enact a theatricality that does not merely characterize the play’s staging. The trilogy, to a large if varying extent, shows strategies of situational definition, interpretation, and behavior at work. No undisputed ground of reality exists. This picture implies a basic fluidity of the real. It entails that, in a nonconventional sense, no cogent distinctions between the theatricality of the play and of “real life” are available. This is probably why plays were heightened intensities of real life rather than distinct, literary enterprises of their own. In a much weaker form, this is still true for Sophocles’ Electra, which covers the same ground, more or less, as The Libation Bearers. Here, representation, and therefore its underlying reality, are undermined because they tend to be submerged in the ceaseless, quasi-autonomous laments of the main character. The lamentations certainly spring from “causes . . . so dire.”59 But they are spun out in an almost autotelic way—much in excess of the facts, one might say—that is strongly reminiscent of professional mourners of yore and of today. In both cases, questions as to the reality of feelings, expression, and representation are deprived of referents that might be employed as controls of comparison. The lamentations are pursued, with dialogic interruptions, to be sure, almost through half the play. They are superseded by a long, invented story told by the Paedagogus about the death of Orestes. This tale, again, hardly serves any purpose of dramatic (in the double sense) representation.60 The same topic—is Orestes dead or alive?—is treated at length once more in a conversation between Electra and her sister Chrysothemis. It is as if the play were loath to turn into what Aristotle would afterward define as a play—the representation (in whatever sense) of some well-defined action with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A rudimentary preparation for that comes with Electra’s thoughts of killing Aegisthus. When Orestes finally shows up, his talk with Electra bears on many things—quite in contrast to The Libation Bearers. It hardly touches, though, upon the projected murders.61 These—the representation of Ares in swift action—are carried out with a brutal speed that, in its turn, appears to be completely severed from the longwinded verbal preliminaries. Neither the effect of “represented” elemental, mythic or magic actions (here “Ares,” or autotelic killing) nor the auto(no)matization of rhetoric can be properly caught by the usual

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distinctions between representation and represented “reality.” However, plays and social life certainly part company where compelling, personally or socially enforceable distinctions are at stake, and not just evidentially cogent experience. The acquittal of Orestes in The Eumenides is not a real acquittal, and for this assertion, the conventional meaning of “unreal”/“real” may suffice. The play, abandoning representation with the dispatching of archaic, elemental layers of the real, veers again toward representation of “realities” when, after the generalized theatrical strategies are exhausted, urgencies of empowerment and decision reenter the stage. It is striking, though, to what extent, even at that early stage, the represented debate that leads toward the regrounding of empowerment, decision, and thus the legitimation of what reality is supposed to be appears as an arbitrary and conventional affair. Much as the play as such may have been intended and received as a glorification of a new stage of civilized and political organization in Athens, Athena’s rhetoric remains one of persuasion, promise, offer, exhortation, and, in fact, magic, as the voice of Peitho speaks through her.62 Peitho evolves “from a destructive force to its most compassionate, constructive form, the power by which one wins an opponent over by reason rather than compulsion.”63 An old, once fairly abstract goddess is now endowed with institutional, political, “democratic” power. Her priestess was in fact granted a special seat in the theater of Dionysos. It is this goddess who now epitomizes the oscillating status of what will count, henceforth, as real. It is a status that Edgar Morin has described as the intertwining of magic and convention—unstable compromises between fantasms and the insistence, or persistence, of empowered, “tough” appearances.64 In the history of the West, conventionalized forms of empowerment have been privileged. Reasons for that are plenty. This is not to say with Pope that whatever is, is right, nor that the real is reasonable and vice versa, with Hegel, nor, for that matter, with Adorno, that the whole is the untrue. Conversely, the need to have generalized “theatrical” strategies and to consider them as effective cultural techniques and media, charged with the handling the fantasmatic sides of so-called realities, does not always appear to have been granted generous scope. In the Oresteia (458 b.c.), the fantasmatic (the Furies) is very real. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (429 or 425 b.c.), part of a trilogy in its own way, Antigone having been produced earlier than the other parts, conventionalizations of empowerment and knowledge have fully set in.

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This may not be so obvious if we look at the play as a literary tragedy, even if, to be sure, its representational independence (a story of the distant past as subject matter) seems much more clearly marked than in the Oresteia. In the perspective of traditional literary interpretation, the problems and their implied or unfolded complexity in the two trilogies resemble each other considerably (crime, fate, freedom, etc.). But the relationship between fascinating performance or rhetoric and conventional (here) political domains—between the reality appeal of magic and the reality pressure of conventions—has shifted toward conventions. The play remains “dramatic” because the conflict between the two takes form as a detective drama full of suspense. The Oedipus story was a well-known legend set in the distant past. In contexts of conflictual “democratization,” however, the story of a tyrannos (not really a king, as some translations have it) had taken on special topical significance. The Oresteia demonstrates clearly that negotiations between magic, empowerment, and conventionalization cannot be given up in seemingly more rationally organized contexts. The exploitation of magic, of charismatic forms of empowerment, to the detriment of conventionalization, or even, as Max Weber has shown, the near-paradoxical effort to routinize magic and charisma, stay on as highly tempting courses of action.65 The play, then, dramatizes the topicality of frictions we are only too well aware of: between charismatic magic and forms of routine or “rational” manipulation. But it also, more importantly and in a fairly unique way, develops a discourse capable of dealing with the knotting together of (political) power and knowledge. Because of the urgency, the near-nakedness of power issues, that discourse cannot be a philosophical one. Since it is the issue of supreme power, and not just local power, that must be dealt with, rhetoric, which is of course steeped in power issues of limited range, is largely ineffective, too. Oedipus came into power because he magically solved the riddle of the Sphinx. He clings to power, but the mode of solving his second great problem— how to find the murderer of the former king and thus to liberate Thebes from the plague—is an altogether different one. Michel Foucault, in lectures on Western efforts to relate power and knowledge in institutional forms originally given 1973 in Rio de Janeiro, sees Oedipus Tyrannus as the most prominent and, before Nietzsche, last example of a discourse in which the nexus of knowledge and political power is clearly established.66 In the beginning, Oedipus

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poses and is addressed as the ruler of magic power. He is certainly not seen as a god. But he is “a mortal set apart to face life’s common issues and the trials which the Gods dispense to men.”67 Oedipus quickly abandons that role when Creon announces the solution that a murderer must be found and punished. For most of the play, Oedipus behaves as a combination of detective and ruler in search of criminal or conspiratorial evidence. The comparison with a detective story is, of course, not new. John Jones in particular has stressed Sophocles’ procedure as unfolding “a cat-and-mouse situation of great horror while leaving the obvious psychological resources of anguish and dread and recurring false hopes strangely unexploited.”68 Oedipus explicitly links the murder and its possible effect on his own survival: “For whoever the assassin—he might turn his hand against me too.” In his attacks on Teiresias and Creon, he concentrates exclusively on what he sees as a plot to overthrow him—and, almost amusingly, on what he thinks to be amateurish efforts in that respect: “You go after a throne without money, without friends! How do you think thrones are won?” Even the chorus, normally lost in futile moral deliberations, occasionally lapses into the detective mood: “Can I test? Can I prove?” Creon, too, does not defend himself on grounds of morality or innocence, but adduces the rationality of his own power interest and the lack of proof. Likewise, Jocasta asks, “But can you prove a plot?” The questioning of the first messengers and the shepherd, in its turn, pursues the mode of detective inquiry with extraordinary intensity (pp. 21–26). Once Oedipus has blinded, that is, disempowered, himself, Creon, erstwhile a kind of partner in Oedipus’s greatness, takes over and immediately answers questions or demands with assertions of his newly acquired exclusive power.69 Removed from power, Oedipus, and later Antigone and others, find plenty of time to cultivate meditations on “higher” problems (ignorance and responsibility, law and justice, etc.). But issues of power keep reverberating through the “pages” of Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Oedipus feels he went too far in his despair and self-punishment. But then, it was too late, since the city and Creon had set about to drive him out “perforce,” to thrust him from his house and the land. Even his sons “have bartered their sire for a throne.” Negotiations and debates between Creon, Oedipus, and Theseus are framed and cut short by considerations and the use of (physical) force and power.70 That Antigone should not be considered tragic, in a Hegelian vein, because of a clash of state norms and family values, thus seems no longer an outsider

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opinion. Creon practices the wrong kind of power politics—he behaves like a tyrant in a situation where power cannot, or should not, be directly or unidirectionally applied. He thus shows, as the messenger puts it, that “there is no greater evil than men’s failure to consult and to consider.”71 Sophocles’ three plays, then, describe a curve that leads back to the Oresteia. The representation of Oedipus’s and Antigone’s legendary story under modern conditions reduces the “representative” value of the story. What is represented no longer works. A workable, efficient reality, on the other hand, is barely representable, since it emerges as the seemingly contingent product of magic, negotiation, and power. Conventionalization—in sociology later on frequently called “normalization,” and in real life called “real life”—will then create and impose nonmagic and simpler appearances of reality. In terms of appeal and imposing power, these cannot compete with the older forms whose terrible enchantments are enacted, that is, recreated and (re)produced, in Aeschylus’s and, partly, in Sophocles’ tragedies. Conventionalization provokes distance, at least as far as the developing “aesthetic” analogs of rituals in the narrow, archaic sense are concerned. This happens with Euripides. The first intellectual, “literary” dramatist, the scholar and writer, perhaps significantly, did not live in Athens, but on the island of Salamis. From that “distance,” he looked on, observed political life and characters critically. Aristophanes—in a way correctly—attacks him in The Frogs because Euripides has destroyed the magic-ritualistic splendor of tragedy. In The Bacchae, indeed, Euripides debunks the originally foreign Dionysos as an intoxicated deceiver. The wild women, spurred on by Dionysos, tear up King Pentheus. This primeval wildness is seen as cruel and deadly, but more importantly, also as grotesque and ridiculous. The distance toward what is enacted turns into what we have been accustomed to call aesthetic distance. While this is legitimate, one should not forget that, together with such distance, the never-ending complaints about a loss of tragic theatrical power sprang up. Distance, whether observational or, in whatever sense, aesthetic (comic, satiric, etc.), does not pose such problems for comedy. It may be significant that comedy, as a relatively mature form comparable to the tragic form of Aeschlyus and Sophocles, took shape relatively late. It therefore developed analogous forms of distance, but, in crucial contrast to Euripidean tragedy, preserved the body-based self-sufficiency of acting to a much larger extent. In this sense, comedy might be seen as a

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media compromise, reconciling aesthetic distance with the transformational, body magic of acting. Aristophanes’ career (not, of course, that I would consider him to be the first comic writer) starts distinctly later (in 427 b.c.) than that of Euripides (455 b.c.),72 in whom, as aesthetic theorists at least since Schelling have noted, the thinning out of the old, “genuine” tragic effect and presence goes hand in hand with a sharper profile of (satiric) distance toward represented conventionalizations. Even so, tragic effect and presence seem to have remained powerful and therefore disquieting enough for a while. In the Republic, Plato, according to Eric Havelock, surprisingly seems to assume that “the artist’s ‘act’ of creation, the performer’s ‘act’ of imitation, the pupil’s ‘act’ of learning, and the adult’s ‘act’ of recreation all overlap each other.” Moreover, Plato is frequently obsessed with “the psychology of response as it is experienced by the audience.” Even for poetry, the emotional effect seems to be described in terms of “an almost pathological situation.”73 In a speculative mood, one might see comedy as the very medium in which distance (to laugh at) and harmless forms of its breakdown (laughter as an also bodily way of dealing with cognitive challenge) can coexist. This may be why its availability as a medium for the fantasmatic of social reality remains intact throughout history in almost unimpaired forms. Serious drama, though, pushed more insistently into discourse from which there is hardly any relief, progressively deprived of the magic effect of presence, is slipping into a difficult situation. The literature on the “decline and fall of tragedy” is immense and, taken very literally, misleading.74 But the implications of the problem cut straight into the topic of this book. Frictions occur between an enactment of appearances with a (residually magic) power and, on the one side, the compulsion to distance conventionalized realities while, on the other, acknowledging their far-reaching hold on so-called real life. That triangle is posited here as a transhistorical and in that sense anthropological one, since, as Edgar Morin says, magic is not driven out, but just continually displaced. Under these circumstances, however, the notion of literary representation, however sophisticated, is deceptive. While it certainly does exist (reading novels may come closest to its realization), it is difficult to see how it can be more than a small and highly unstable part in the coalescence of imaginary and real transactions. This is the dilemma of a medium that has taken its characteristic form as drama in the West. Literary drama profits from the all-round repre-

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sentational potential of language exploited in the complex forms of literary writing. It also evokes, but does not normally exercise to the full, the charm of spectacles in which the opposition between magic and conventional realities, between enactment and “mere” representation, is at least blurred. The Greek tragedies we have been discussing, especially in what appears as their development from Aeschylus to Euripides, exemplify the span of this triangular problem, which would be exacerbated (as well as occasionally submerged) in later Western cultural development. Literary representation (including its dynamic tendencies of selfreferential autodeconstruction) owes its cultural (and theoretical) prestige and power largely to the potentials of (Greek and) Latin writing. That system of writing was the first in which an extreme flexibility and potential of expression, ranging over all domains of life, and not just the very restricted ones to which earlier, mostly “clumsier” systems of writing had been applied, was combined with the complete invariance of the formal system itself. In spite of its variety of uses and applications and processes for a dynamic people like the Greeks, and later others, the formal stability of writing also supported, indeed made possible, the immobility of central notions that were deemed necessary by philosophy in order to check the erosion of stable oral knowledge, among them notions of philosophy or literature as a cultural ideal.75 The triangle of frictions outlined above can then be rephrased in terms of the evolutionary coupure brought about by a specific writing system. But cultures always live before, with, and after writing, as André Varagnac has plausibly suggested.76 The evidence for that is overwhelming in a comparative perspective. There is plenty of it, however, also within dominating Western cultural trends. The question to be asked at this point, then, is to what extent seeing (and interpreting) writing has or has not wiped out seeing (and experiencing) strong appearances. For we need a concept in which habitualized urges and premature decisions concerning reality and representation or, later, reality and fiction, are kept at bay. In that respect, the conceptual fate of appearances is instructive. Its connotations range from the powerfully phenomenal to mere seeming, from irresistible evidence to the trivialities of social surface. But these connotations, in spite of “appearances,” cannot be ordered into a unilinear development. Methodologically, the concept of appearances instead grants the opportunity to accommodate, but not to succumb to, contemporary theoretical moods. It also gives us the chance to acknowledge the virulence of the past, but not to preserve it as an accessible tradition.

part two

Spectacular Dynamics Paradigms of Anthropological Import

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chapter four

Appearances Shadowy Substances and Substantial Shadows

The conceptual fate of appearances lies in their cognitive-cultural status. Its connection, from the outset, with the crucial aporia of audience and representation must be emphasized. The magical identification in Balinese theater, for example, is made, and made completely, “with the beauty of appearance,” as Herbert Blau puts it. There is something, it would appear, “in the dynamism of the world of appearances that demands that it be given audience.” In some playwrights like Ben Jonson, the claims of literary representation clash with “theatrical talent and his ability to work in the popular vein.” In spite of his work for the court masque, where illusion, by its very totality, is taken as real enactment, “Jonson refused to come to terms with the . . . deepest issue of form: the vitiating substance of theatricality.”1 It may be idealistic to believe that something like an instantaneous, powerfully persuasive evidence of appearances has ever culturally existed. Yet the notion of an interpretationally untroubled “momentary evidence” of appearances, sufficient in and unto itself, is anthropologically relevant, even if it may be philosophically precritical.2 If human reliance on and attraction by visuality has been much deplored in the name of a more comprehensive and integral use of the human senses, the appeal of appearances in a vague, general sense remains a deeply anchored modality. Ever since, presumably, the “Greek literate revolution” (Eric Havelock), the Western relation to what appears as either mere (and therefore mostly deceptive) and profoundly suggestive (and therefore truth-bound) appearance has veered uneasily between ephemeral fascination and chronic distrust. That split relationship is amply manifested in epistemological devaluation and culturally tolerated or cultivated but specialized and limited aesthetic upgradings. Given that situation, it has become well-nigh impossible to say good analytical words about appearances in an uninhibited way. The prov-

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erb has it that they are deceptive. And only Mephisto, in Goethe’s Faust, dared to claim that, while theory is gray, life’s golden tree is green, that life could be “had” only in brilliantly colorful shapes. Faust himself, however, kept on wrestling with representational dilemmas: “What a spectacle! But oh! only a spectacle!/ Where do I grasp you, infinite Nature?”3 One might assert that the second part of that “tragedy” does not present deep problems beyond appearances anymore. It mainly enacts the partial meaninglessness of evocative spectacles, leaving the Faustian epistemological urge behind. In Western cultural history, (the stereotype of) Goethe’s relaxed moves between appearance, interpretation, and theory is exceptional. In the remote past, codifications of visuality in allegory, emblem and “character” books, and physiognomy have been much more typical, as has been their disastrous fate in more recent times. At first compulsive in the Middle Ages, then desperate in the Renaissance and early modern times, then finally ruined, such efforts at codification bear witness to the paradox that the saving of appearances must be increasingly supported by counterintuitive, elaborate, or obscure systems of exegesis. Its final breakdown can be seen (almost literally) in the engravings of Chodowiecki, for instance, at the end of the eighteenth century. As we saw in the second chapter, Chodowiecki wanted his drawings, for instance of human vices and virtues, to be as telling and self-sustained as possible. And indeed they were—to such an extent that Lichtenberg’s exegetical commentaries became well-nigh superfluous. But Chodowiecki paid a high price. His painted appearances simplified matters to an almost ridiculous extent. The distancing of appearances, Nietzsche notwithstanding, began with the Greeks. They invented the “First Science,” whereby theorems could be logically deduced from postulated axioms. The Renaissance went on to produce the “Second Science,” systematizing a process of experimentation destined to go beyond what appeared as appearance. In the twentieth century, a “Third Science” has come to analyze the nature of the (almost im)material world in terms radically different from anything we experience in the medium of the senses.4 In the media age, its apostles at least want us to believe, appearances are fabricated on the assembly line, projected on all kinds of screens in treacherously seductive but totally insubstantial forms. In Shakespeare’s Othello, old (and surviving) yearnings for “ocular proof” may have found their first prominent victim. The sciences, as well as the humanities, but also literature (and even

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modern painting), have variously pierced appearances like balloons. In their stead, they have explored dimensions of depth, of decreasing vividness and increasing abstraction. Simultaneously, however, literature, and again modern painting—see, for just one perhaps ironically programmatic example, Asger Jorn’s In the Beginning Was the Image (1966)—also seem to continue to play the Mephistophelian advocate of appearances. We are again—and will be again—dealing with one of those symptomatic instances in which literature is describing and exploring, somewhat nostalgically, the power of media in which it cannot itself participate. In one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, we run into the sentence, “Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth. . . . But we seem to have no other.” It would appear that the endlessly explorative dialogues of these novels tend, in the long run, to confirm, not to disprove this—here foregone—conclusion. In Harold Brodkey’s Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, we are similarly puzzled by statements of the following kind: “I think that obsessions and theories are only useful if they add passion to a work that already has a formal structure.” Or, in a somewhat more direct and stronger formulation: “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. . . . It seemed to me Orra was proof that life was a terrifying phenomenon of surface immediacy.” If Othello experiences the treacherousness of the visible, he also incarnates the fallacies, indeed, the madness of suspicion, that is, of interpretation, critical or otherwise, with which the failings of appearances are supposed to be remedied. In an article called “In Praise of Appearance,” Alain made a pointed remark to that effect: “Intelligence throws itself at the ‘why’, and always too fast. We have to bring it back to the object present, not the object as we think it is, but as it shows itself.”5 It is one of the (self-deconstructive) ironies of Western intellectual history that the very theories, criticisms of ideology, and methodologies used to undermine, overcome, or transcend appearances have suffered, in the process, from an analogous loss of credibility. In the nineteenth century in particular, appearances, downgraded and degraded by the overbearing claims of theory and science, seem to have taken a ferocious revenge. F. H. Bradley, in particular, was caught in the deadlock in which appearances do no longer present the heart of things, but in which, on the other side, theory does not see into that heart, either. For Bradley, in a radical phenomenologistic stance, illusion takes over as soon as we leave a mode of “immediate experience” in which we do not distinguish between our awareness and that of which it is aware.

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As soon as we talk the language of things, qualities, relations, as soon as we then proceed to thoughts, judgments, truth claims, as soon as we abandon the emphatic if precarious appeal of primary appearances, we stumble, paradoxically, into “mere” appearance, according to Bradley. Simple sentences like “Sugar is sweet” or “There is a wolf” claim either too much or, with respect to the perceived phenomenal dynamics of a situation, too little. Relations, the linkage of qualities, also provoke these problems in a particularly obnoxious, almost counterintuitive form when applied to the self. Individual selves—and here, perhaps, postmodernists of the deconstructive denomination would be pleased—are no more than “phenomenal adjectives,” bundles of differences without a “solid principle of stability.” The immediate experience, in its turn, drawn as it is into all kinds of theoretical or practical interests, may have a name, but hardly a local and in that sense real habitation. But Bradley was no deconstructivist of the postmodern sort. To catapult himself out of his dilemma, he invented, or had recourse to, the notion of the Absolute as an all-inclusive and superrelational experience. This, however, according to himself, is an idea we can try to form, but cannot understand.6 I am, and I think we should be, far from making fun of this situation. In a form perhaps much more powerful but also much more difficult to expound, Alfred North Whitehead has grappled with this problem all through his Process and Reality. It would be easy to demonstrate how he uses Romantic poetry, in Science and the Modern World, in order to vindicate the relational dynamics of appearances and constructive perception—at least insofar as they are trampled upon by some forms of science. In Nelson Goodman’s modern philosophical classic, The Structure of Appearance, the apparent conflict between appearance-oriented (e.g., phenomenalist) and, say, methodologically (theoretically, experimentally) committed approaches ends in a draw. Goodman denies claims of “epistemological priority” to both the phenomenalist and, for instance, physicalist bias. Significantly, though, Goodman is primarily concerned with phenomenalist approaches, even if he does not espouse phenomenalism as a foundational doctrine. “A blue thing sometimes looks green, and may become red. In such a simple statement lie rich opportunities for confusion.”7 Appearances, though misleading and confusing, can hold some ground, although no “optimum theory” (for example, demanding daylight or similarly optimum conditions of perception) can legislate with respect to the perception of even simple properties like color. One can reasona-

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bly talk about the (self-)“presentations” of things (and presumably persons)—presentations “momentary and unrecallable,” yet “comparable in that they contain repeatable and recognizable qualia.” In cases of choice (and doubt), we may claim “an instinctive feeling of hitting the mark.” We may “favor the decree that makes necessary the least adjustment in the body of already accepted decrees.”8 I am barely alluding, to say nothing of doing justice, to sophisticated arguments. That sophistication may have added only finishing touches to long traditions of thought. These, however, appear strikingly modern when compared to some easygoing postmodern fashions. In an uncharitable vein, one might demote popular postmodern patterns of argument to simplifications of older philosophical problems under the pressure of contemporary cultural conditions. Today’s conditions are, of course, intimately tied up with the “media.” In the predominantly electronic media, appearances have turned into organized and commercialized spectacles and shows, into the “obscenity,” to use Baudrillard’s term, of never-ending image cascades. On the one hand, the contemporary explosion of images is the simple result of technologies that, from the nineteenth century onward, from photography via film and TV down to computer screens, have continually refined imagistic exploits. On the other hand, the ideologies around (both for and against) the image form part of the long history of conflict between image worship and iconoclasm.9 Iconoclasms— whether Jewish, Puritan, philosophical, or scientific—never stood much of a permanent cultural chance. The more literature turned, with longer printed forms, into an enterprise that, however thematically universal, was restricted by its medium, the more it reinforced iconoclastic trends. This holds true for its own imagistic explosions in “surrealistic” schools and for radical theories of imaginative autonomy. Both operate seemingly without the support of “external” appearances. In comparison with literature, then, the image bombardment by the media (also) resembles a return of the repressed. As in most cases, the repressed comes back with a vengeance. The cultural management of appearances provides paradigms of anthropological import. Cultures have to find ways of dealing with surface, whatever interpretational habits they may practice into the bargain. Physiognomic efforts, in various far-reaching or restrained, explicit or implicit forms, seem to belong to most cultural repertoires. The technologies of the image are tantamount to a hysterical imagistic overreaction (in Morin’s sense) in a period that both despises and en-

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joys images to an unprecedented degree. In the wake of technology, casting away the good with the bad, physiognomic suggestiveness, vividness, or vitality are either destroyed or hectically and deceptively stabilized by advertising and fashion. Thus, while an effective return to slightly older cultural modes of literary interiority can hardly take place, a nostalgia for the relaxed charm, the inner space of reading is felt today in some quarters and promptly exploited by the market.10 In some critical prophecies of media simulation and hyperrealities we can detect muffled tones of a different kind. “Things,” according to Baudrillard, have grown tired of the dialectics of meaning and significance to which they were continually subjected. And they have found ways to escape them. But what kind of existence are they leading? If the very presentation of passion and evil in the media is tantamount to the erosion or disappearance of passion and evil, the question remains to what extent they can and must be reinvented. Romantic love, after all, in Tristan and Isolde, is not a spontaneous human disposition, but the product of manipulation—the medium being, in the beginning, a drug, the love potion.11 The old, strong meaning of appearances, their function as an index for and symptom of truth, has, on the authority of the Oxford English Dictionary, almost died out. The efforts of salvare apparentia, of reconciling theoretical explanation with the preservation of phenomenal effects from antiquity to the Middle Ages, have been relegated to the museum of cognitive procedures.12 Saving the appearances has mainly denoted, for quite a while, the manipulation of sorry social façades. Strangely enough, though, it may also mean something very different. In 1957, Owen Barfield, a humanist trained as a lawyer, tried to stem the adverse tides that had been threatening to engulf appearances for quite a while. (A German version of that effort, interestingly in a somewhat anthroposophic context, came out as late as 1991.) In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Barfield defined idolatry as the appreciation of images and representations “in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons,” thus keeping open the option to search for better ways. Barfield denounced idolatry as the tendency “to abstract the sense-content from the whole representation and seek that for its own sake.” Against that, he pitted the appropriate participation in appearances. “Original participation is . . . the sense that their [sic] stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from man, a represented which is of the same nature as man.” To be intensely aware of participation is to feel the center of energy in oneself “identified with

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the energy of which external nature is the image.”13 Barfield seeks to apprehend, in a nonmystical but also nonscientific, nontheoretical way, an appeal of and in appearances. That appeal need not be unrelated to the reality or representational status of the subject or object from which it irradiates, but neither need it be dependent on that reality. Appeals are initiated, but not exhausted, by surface. They stimulate perception to go beyond interpretation, but do not necessarily encourage it to do so. Terms like “charisma,” “aura,” “halo”—all of them, to be sure, ideologically suspect—preserve, in whatever haphazard fashion, the drive of Barfield’s notion of original participation as the imposing suggestiveness of appearance. Appearance is more than sense content, but it remains on this side of discursive interpretation. There may be few hopes for a cultural “logic” of appearances, in which they are neither totally demystified nor overly remystified. For a while, though, we may suspend disbelief. We may assume that, once upon a time, people responded to the power of appearances. To respond is not to observe or to interpret. It logically implies, of course, those latter activities. It does not push them, however, into an explicit personal or institutional habit. A relatively pure form of such a situation is encountered in Homer’s Iliad. Appearances, as fields of vision, demand responses and summon to action. My “anthropological” assumption is that this kind of world, submerged as it may often be, did not completely vanish in the course of cultural histories. While it may have become totally irrelevant in some scientific quarters, we are more often entangled in the coexistence of different, differently useful, competing, or incompatible modes of cognitive and affective operation and the relative worlds they call forth. In other words, taking these concepts as relative operational indicators only, we are continually handling domains of variously abstract or concrete designs.14 Can we single out some more modern, possibly contemporary leftovers (hangovers as it were) of operationally challenging appearances? In a somewhat careless way, the emphasis on personal interaction and “chemistry” in a world of immensely complex, “abstract” and intangible business relations could be taken as an—unfortunately frequently ideologized—symptom. One might adduce, more rigorously perhaps, the language of theatrical spectacle in Erving Goffman’s sociology of interaction. It is comparable to what Wesley Trimpi has called the “strangely haunting reply” of Plato, in the Laws, to a group of tragic poets who have asked

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permission to perform their tragedies in his state: Respected visitors, we are ourselves authors of a tragedy, and that the finest and best we know how to make. In fact, our whole polity has been constructed as a dramatization . . . of a noble and perfect life; that is what we hold to be in truth the most real of tragedies. Thus you are poets, and we also are poets in the same style, rival artists and actors, and that in the finest of all dramas, one which indeed can be produced only by a code of law—or that at least is our faith.15

This idea—to literally see the meaning in the appearance, the performance, the spectacle—is alive in behavioral, not necessarily behavioristic, theories. These theories are frequently grounded in, but not determined by, biological images of human evolution. Biologists like Melvin Konner (The Tangled Wing) and Rupert Sheldrake (The Presence of the Past) have warned against overrating the genes and the nervous system. Genetic biochemical functions do not account for the importance and the effect of material (and pseudomaterial) forms. In more popular versions, we find this in body-language pictures like those of Desmond Morris. In controversial fashions, the whole discipline of human ethology is permeated by it. Disputes keep on raging, of course, between biological and social explanations of behavior.16 But an insistence on the transformations, or transpositions, of inherited and learned behavior into patterns of appearances cuts across the front lines of such disputes. It is the idea that behavior, whether grounded biologically, culturally, or in both or even more sources, is more fruitfully seen in its transformation into patterns of appearance, that is into behavioral styles. That idea ekes out a more or less miserable existence in manuals of practical psychology. Here, we are dealing with do-it-yourself courses in the visibility (called also, with a symptomatic metaphor from the earlier days of magic literacy, readability) of human character. Older approaches like physiognomy (to say nothing of phrenology), and more recent ones like psychiatric theories about the implications of physical constitution (for example, those of Ernst Kretschmer, William Sheldon, who influenced Aldous Huxley a lot, and others) use appearances to bolster up theory with “telling” cues. They use them to jump in—not where angels fear to tread, but where science seems unable to touch base with tempting perceptions of human forms and styles. In literature proper, of course, literary “portraits” and techniques of descriptive “painting” have always struck a precarious balance between a sense for appearances and incursions into the invisible.

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In modern philosophy, Kant seems to have (re)initiated a momentous split. In the transcendental perspective, he bars us from going “really” beyond appearances. But he also invests great energies in order to master, to overpower them for the benefit of higher purposes—a procedure denounced as his great contradiction by Schopenhauer. Science and morality assert themselves as the major instruments in this enterprise. The sovereignty of the human mind shines in glorious form in the subduing of the sublime. Although we seem powerless against their overwhelming appearance, sublime phenomena cannot really defeat the mind. They instead provoke a sense of inviolability, in spite of all the appearance of raging oceans or wars to the contrary. That, at least, is the escape route The Critique of Judgment tries to take. The price Kant paid for the demotion of appearances is high. His notions of morality and aesthetic disinterestedness have not held their ground. They cannot, in spite of the aloofness of many modern aesthetic phenomena, shake off completely their origins as integral parts of social and individual existence, indeed, of survival or latently sexual values. Such opinions are not drawn from some crude materialism, but form part of aesthetic theories like those of Adorno, who, like Kant, insisted on some kind of aesthetic autonomy. The taming of the sublime, as Hayden White or Paul de Man have convincingly shown, looms large in the mainly unsuccessful Western domestication of the more disruptive tendencies in groups and individuals. In a different perspective, the immediate, often pressing presence of human beings, including the manifestations and urges, bodily and otherwise, cannot be handled by Kant’s transcendental, scientific, or moral claims, as Gernot and Hartmut Böhme have shown. Appearances, only in Kant’s “noncritical” writings to be sure, take revenge. In his “pragmatic” anthropology and elsewhere, Kant practices an obsessive pathology of the perceptible. He subjects physical manifestations to incessant and, seen in the light of his “critical” philosophy, downright superstitious observations. Flatulence, emaciated buttocks, digestion and constipation, stomach pains and headaches, hemorrhoids, thin legs, muscle atrophy, and so on—Kant talks tirelessly about these in friends and himself. His flat and narrow chest leaves little space for the activities of the heart and the lungs, and, therefore, he thinks, it has laid the basis for his “naturally” hypochondriac bent. In his revision of Kant’s pragmatic anthropology, Gernot Böhme has tried to rephrase obsessions as perspectives. For him, concepts like bodily affection and presence or excitement by beauty take on paramount

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importance. Emphatic bodily presence is not identical with the body gazed at, with the gaze frequently, as in Sartre, changing abruptly into desire. Neither, however, can it be left behind in the alleged ascent to the soul. And the excitement about a beautiful woman may lead to, but need not coincide with, the excitement produced by sexiness.17 Critical philosophy and the criticism of ideology have certainly abolished the “true” world. But, as Nietzsche insisted, they did not leave us with a merely apparent one: “We have abolished the true world: which world remained? an illusionary one perhaps? . . . But no! We have abolished the illusionary with the true world.”18 Before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had revolted against Kant’s blatant “contradiction.” Kant’s categories, in Schopenhauer’s view, spelled out the world of appearance (Erscheinung). At the same time, a nonappearancelike intelligible cause was ascribed to it. In his countermove, Schopenhauer developed a peculiar philosophy of pregnant appearance. The cognitive, including the emotional movements between dimensions of perception (Wahrnehmung and Anschauung), ideas (Vorstellung), and conceptual knowledge (Wissen) spring from the vital powers of the will. But the will also, and more fundamentally, continually objectifies, indeed, often visualizes itself into, the perceptible action of the body. The body is not directly accessible, or immediately communicative. It is, like everything else, transformed into Vorstellung. Yet the body also claims a less mediated status. While the interaction between bodies may not always translate into a readily “readable” semiotics, the reading, in principle, remains a prerequisite of knowledge. Stronger forms of interaction, those producing blushing, faster heartbeat, perspiration, forms of easy or strained movement, yield the basic elements of bodily grounded cognition. “Each true, genuine, immediate act of the will is, immediately and unmediatedly, also an appearing act of the body.”19 Not every motion of the will results in bodily perceptibility. But the drive toward appearance remains remarkable, particularly in its negative form. All inner movements, which are tied to concerns of conceptual knowledge only, will have no productive influence on the organism. The exclusive activity of the intellect will instead tire the brain, exhaust and, in the long run, undermine the organism (a diagnosis Schopenhauer applied with particular glee to Kant’s allegedly premature senility, in spite of which, we may say with hindsight, Kant reached a higher age than Schopenhauer, who, in his turn, was confident he could reach ninety or more). This goes to prove that “knowing is of a secondary nature . . . but does not constitute the inner core of our being.”20

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Talking of an inner core, Schopenhauer seems to commit himself to the dualistic tradition he tries to unhinge. But his case is different. The inner core of living organisms expands into an urge toward pregnant appearance. Arnold Gehlen is probably right in describing one of Schopenhauer’s ultimate concerns as “the intuition of the living organic form, the physical, silent being of what has been given shape. Whoever was gripped, in looking at an animal, a leaf, by the perplexed wonderment that something like this exists, has understood one of Schopenhauer’s prime experiences.”21 This may partly explain why evolutionary biologists, without identifying with him, frequently have recourse to Schopenhauer. Sheldrake asserts, for instance, in The Presence of the Past, on biological heredity, that DNA inheritance does not sufficiently explain the evolution of forms, that brain and genes—as abstract, invisible media, as it were—have been notoriously overestimated. In parts of his model constructions of the Greeks, Nietzsche, in his turn, extolled “those Greeks” who lived prior or indifferent to the philosophical movement initiated by Socrates. He praised them for their ability to “live,” to see and to respond to shapes as unities of being and dynamic appearance: “Oh those Greeks! they knew how to live. For that, it is necessary to stay bravely with the surface, the wrinkle, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, sounds, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. . . . And are we not returning to this, we daring spirits who have climbed the most elevated and dangerous top of contemporary thought and have looked around from there?”22 There may be more evidence than Nietzsche’s pathos for these claims. The Iliad, for example, is dominated by dynamic situations. They are evoked in a language of images and similes that, for all the misleading connotations, may be called holistic. In ever-shifting fields of vision and action, psyche designates vital powers like blood and breath, nous appeals to the intimate connection between the perceiver and the field of perception to which the participant responds. Terms like these are not caught in oppositions like “perception” and “knowledge,” “observer” and “object,” “external world” and “interior life.” Oppositions there are, but they are very differently organized. Soma, for instance, is opposed to psyche in that it refers to dead bodies or their members only. Thymos, a central term later narrowed down to designate an emotionalized soul, aims at life as movement, agitation, activity, excitement. In the Odyssey, dualistic shifts of the well-known kind begin to assert themselves. But they have to coexist, in unstable relationships, with the older, “naively” phenomenological orientation. A

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wavering, uneasy relationship, working itself out into varying oppositions, always established and always undermined, would from then on keep its hold on Western cultures.23 The relationship is drawn apart into extremes in literary interiority, on the one hand, and organized sports on the other. Although writing, as this work has characterized it before, has contributed to the erosion of appearances, it cannot destroy completely the appeals inherent in or radiating forth from perceptible scenes and situations. Phenomena, in the emphatic sense, go beyond what one can see, touch, or handle. For that, they must exercise their power of affecting others or being affected themselves. Eric Havelock has drawn attention to its strong presence in tragedy—the “art” in which the catastrophic discrepancies between appearance, reality, and illusion are also exploited to the full. Hans Blumenberg has asserted that Plato’s doctrine of archetypes—entities accessible only in a strangely invisibilizing vision—still takes realities as self-presenting presences for granted. Wesley Trimpi has offered detailed analyses of how Plato, in the Sophist, tried to maintain, or to establish, distinctions between images as realities and imitative, representational, or fantastic images. The Eleatic Stranger recognizes that reality cannot be reduced to invariant principles of Being or to simple phenomena always in the process of Becoming. The main distinctions between realities and imitations, between accurate and fantastic images, however, are still stated in terms of “practical optics” concerned with distance, perspective, light. They still employ a kind of optimum optics that Goodman, without thereby getting rid of appearances, does not trust any more.24 A kind of “cohabitation” between appearances and theory is particularly striking in Aristotle. Universals or principles are hard to grasp because they are far removed from the senses. Yet there is hope. A builtin tendency drives perception, memory, and experience toward the universal. We perceive things to be members of species and classes. However, the threatening alternative of a “mystical vision” for higher principles and a “natural empiricism” for ordinary things opens wide scopes for negotiation.25 In Aristotle’s Physics, for instance, the ambiguities infesting matter and form leave “the scientist, the student of nature in the strict sense, with a world the variety and structure of which is subject to no metaphysical limitations.” “Forms in matter,” in the end, gain definite qualities only if their practical functions can be made clear.26 In the Poetics, as I suggested before, there is no strong distinction between the fine and

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the useful, practical arts; moreover, mimesis is not restricted to art at all. The instinct of “imitation” is at work from childhood onward. In situations of ordinary complexity, it is difficult to distinguish originals from imitations, genuine expression from mechanical or conscious acting. S. H. Butcher, in his renowned commentary, claims that the original, for art, is “human action and character in all their diverse modes of manifestation.” But since action and character are themselves products of manifold imitations, we are approaching a Goffmanesque world of universal mise-en-scènes. In architecture, of course, a building, as an “organic whole” in itself, does not at all call up an image of a world outside itself. Given the extensive theorizing in other authors, the near silence with which Aristotle passes over music may be even more ominous.27 Complications do not end here. In an almost psychoanalytic move, Aristotle locates the source of our most intense sense of the real in the dynamic enchainments between perception (aisthesis), phantasia, and action. Phantasia does not, of course, refer to some unconscious layer of the mind. Perception-based, it is a mode of critical distinction. Nous or theoria are disciplined and institutionalized but contemplative ways of knowledge; doxa degenerate mostly into social prejudice. Phantasia feeds on freer but no less “real” images. They are indeed “libidinal,” since they propel toward action. But this is no psychoanalytic model avant la lettre. Rather, the drive toward action (orexis) makes for an intimate connection between the images of phantasia and a sense of the real. Here, appearances, as images saturated with perceptual density, affective energy, and implicit action, are invested with an intensity of the real hardly matched elsewhere.28 Tragedy enacts the projection of phantasia into the sociopolitical domain. It is aesthetic above all in that its form of enactment is highly appealing and well defined. It is an illusion mainly in the sense that pressure is felt more distinctly, immediately, in “real” political situations. Western thought, then, finds itself in a split situation. A vital and universalized experience of vision does no longer materialize. Its place is usurped by strategies to present, in rhetorical arts and culturally effective media, individual and social concerns as “meaningfully” but also as “brilliantly” as possible. Western cultures are caught in the ambivalences of significance on the one hand, brilliance and intensity on the other. The notion that a theory, for instance, should not just be (possibly) true or operationally useful but also beautiful and elegant has kept its hold down to present-day philosophies of science. Appeals to ap-

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pearances, from hard evidence to dazzling illusion, may adopt the most diverse forms. For Plato and Aristotle, more abstract criteria of status remain a necessity, otherwise, there would be no aspect (eidos in a literal sense) under which something could present itself in sufficient clarity. But Aristotle also brings genos into a prominent position. Genos manifests the immediacy of typical differences between appearances in striking ways. In Plato, finally, the doctrine of archetypes and shadows coexists with appeals to bodily beauty.29 Plato and Aristotle prefigure the scope of problem variation to the present day. In a way, I am following the lead of Whitehead’s quip that Western philosophy has consisted, in the main, of footnotes to Plato. In history, as in scholarship and criticism, however, footnotes may contain (the) explosive stuff. Thus, Volker Grassmuck has tried to complete a circle from “animism to animation.” Between the two, roughly from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, periods of depth interpretation unfold—and peter out. George Meredith, in The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), had already written the allegorical obituary for the search of deep or ulterior truth: the search, posing as a plunge into depth, emerges at the surface in the end again. Certainly it has always been difficult to hold onto emphatic, substantial connotations of things as res. In an age of screens, surfaces may have lost all ground from which they can be distinguished. Surfaces, especially the more precious (and pricey) ones, like the more concrete appearances of yore, may be pleasurably, tastefully, excessively enjoyed. Grassmuck, for one though, fears that the heightened immateriality, the glossy elusiveness of postmodern surfaces, have increased epistemological and other forms of depression. Postmodern surfaces, or so it seems, do not offer the resistance from which, in a more recalcitrant world, both expansive energy and retreating melancholy may have sprung. Depression takes over when the wrestling with recalcitrance, both cognitively and performatively, has exhausted itself, when the paltry traces of what still seems real turn out to be mere spin-offs of hyperinformation.30 Phainomena in the emphatic sense have largely disappeared. But if the negotiations between appearance and significance have become more difficult, they have also become less important. Or rather, their importance has to be decided from case to case. Where significance and alleged deep structures are emphasized, as in many political-ethnic quarrels these days, their pathology and obsolescence, not their pertinence, are foregrounded. Moreover, the locus of appearance may wander between minds and external realities. Aristotle found it hard to distinguish be-

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tween perceptual and memory images. A memory image seems merely to represent, but it is also itself a living presence (zoon), for which the criterion of similarity does not unproblematically obtain. In baroque traditions, the flood of images, somehow pointing mysteriously to each other but not controlling reality, could not be referentially kept in check. Adorno’s aesthetic theory is a kind of concentrated and balanced restructuring of most of these motives. For him, the aesthetic certainly partakes of illusion (Schein). But to mobilize the aesthetic as fascinating illusion, and thus simultaneously to neutralize it, becomes important only to the degree in which human behavior, in the social domain, as Hamlet had it, loses the name of action and does not engage anymore the vital powers of human beings. Art as a system of illusionistic conventions makes limited, socially tolerable allowance for the vital powers of the aesthetic, for strongly appealing appearances. In order not to lose that appeal altogether, art must, from time to time, “deaestheticize” itself, throw off part of the illusionistic aesthetic package. In such moments, the archaic, indeed sexual core of the aesthetic rears its somewhat less “beautiful,” but sometimes also more threatening, sublime head.31 In feudal periods, “art,” in its many forms and media, deployed visualized performances and enactments, demonstrations, of politicalpersonal power, not just representations of it. The transition of strongly aestheticized power machineries into more elusive, partly invisible networks of social control and harmless aesthetic compensations characterized the development of Louis XIV’s reign in France. Louis—using the arts of Molière, Lully, and others, using his own body as a suggestive surface for ritualistic inscriptions—staged the state as a spectacularly overpowering machine. The petrifaction of rituals, the severing of the aesthetic from power, occurs in the wake of religious and political shifts. These impose more rigorous distinctions between political background and aesthetic surface. The former becomes operationally real, the latter illusionistically weak.32 The important point, in any case, remains that there “can be no such thing as an unambiguous expression of power, for it is precisely in ambiguity,” above all in the oscillation of the political and aesthetic, that power resides.33 In “bourgeois” periods, art loses some of its demonstrative power. It concentrates on the (re)presentation of stimulating illusions. Schiller tried to salvage a culture of play. But with grace superseded by dignity and duty (if in a less harsh form than in Kant), the literary interiorization and sophistication of morality got the better of the captivating appearances of beauty in movement. Nineteenth-

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century art pays homage to the reality standards of society (“realism”). Or else, on the other side, it breaks into transitory and harmless savagery. In what Adorno called “phantasmagorias,” phantasia’s drive toward action smolders on in both wild and weak forms. Hans Blumenberg, criticizing Plato’s cave parable, has offered some resistance to those views that take the departure of the appearances too readily for granted. In an evolutionary vein, Blumenberg speculates that caves turned into a provisional refuge once human beings had to abandon the close-distance environment of the virgin forest. For a while, caves provided protection and comfort. Then, life in the savannah, the upright gait, the visual handling of varying distances and its risks, enforced continuous negotiations of appearances, traces, and cues. Under advanced conditions, “rationality” and “madness,” regulated behavior and risky adventure, and the many shades in between came into play. In the more leisurely spaces between the struggle for life and survival, culture—the more graceful management and interpretation of appearances—gained ground. Humans, though, remained visible and visual people. They kept drifting between demands for more light, or insight, and defenses against excessive “enlightenment.” Blumenberg, like Goodman, does not of course opt unreservedly for the phenomenal or any other well-defined world. But for him, too, the grip of the dubiously phenomenal remains strong.34 As far as human behavior is concerned, we are no longer prepared, perhaps to our detriment, to accept Hume’s demand that the “social virtues,” as distinct from deceptive mummeries, must exhibit “a natural beauty and amiableness.” Nietzsche’s claim that human beauty, grace, and the goodness of human gestures are the product of long cultural work might strike some as even more unpalatable today. Yet there is more than the witty paradox to Oscar Wilde’s dictum that, in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. Appearances are suggestive, but not conclusive. Style, however, is the result of a sustained suggestiveness of appearances. Sustaining it over time does not overcome but can circumvent the annoying habit of playing off critical interpretation against “mere” appearance. Media, then, are the materialities of style. Distinctions between foreground and background, between aesthetic deception and hard fact, are not abolished. But their cognitive imperialism will, under such auspices, be weakened. The ability to pit fact and truth at least occasionally against the suggestiveness of media turns into the competence of specialists, scientists perhaps, and detectives.

chapter five

Between Sociology and Anthropology Trends, Past and Present

Ambivalences of Western Spectacles Spectacles are organized, dynamized appearances. While, as we have seen, the epistemological status of appearances is dubious, their place in cultural enactments and personal experience is secured by spectacles. The dubious epistemological status of appearances translates into the highly questionable ideological position of spectacles under most sociocultural conditions. Even so, no culture has gotten rid of them. Quite the contrary: The less we trust appearances, the more we enjoy—or are exposed to—their institutionalization in spectacles. Inevitably, elements of manipulation, differences with respect to free or mandatory, active or passive participation, differences of mood and of performative types will creep in. Spectacles, strictly defined, should be distinguished from “genres” like festival, ritual, or game. Much as this distinction is necessary, it is also rather hopeless, or has become so. John MacAloon’s definitional effort with respect to the Olympic Games is honorable, but in places also despairingly resimplifying or downright naive.1 One should keep the possibility of distinction in mind, but one cannot very often rigorously enforce or operationalize it. Spectacles can count on quasi-natural meanings even less than single, striking instances of phenomenal appearances in the “sensational” or physiognomic sense. The heavy suspicion of ideological use and abuse will hover about them all, not just those more or less clearly staged for some dubious political purpose. Frequently, on the other hand, criticism of spectacular ideology comes in questionable, heavy-handed guises itself. Efforts toward ideological exploitation notwithstanding, there may be a “significant meaninglessness” in spectacles, bordering on the grandiose and absurd at the same time, which Flaubert, for one, seemed fascinated with in Salammbô. Even rituals, mandatory as participation in

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them may be, need not operationally “really” carry the symbolic meanings often assigned to them. The example of professional mourners will bear witness to that. A mere semblance of significance will often do when sufficient scope for the expense of psychic energy or tension is provided. The distinction between Easter (ritual) and Easter parade (spectacle) is a possible but not a very strong one.2 The uneasy wavering between fascination and the suspicion of ideology is clearly recognizable in Guy Debord’s denunciation of the society of spectacle. Paradoxically, that book, written by a situationniste, set out to criticize modern forms of spectacle—their commercialization, the simultaneous trend toward ideology and a thinning out of their vitality in modern media contexts—from a more or less Marxist point of view. Debord was not able, of course, to apply that view, and to separate older, supposedly genuine varieties from modern, allegedly spurious ones consistently. What, after all, could be the essential difference between Elizabethan and Stuart court masques, the royal media and festival machinery of Louis XIV, and the Nazi Nuremberg rallies apart from a worsening of the political drift and, perhaps (but only perhaps!), an increase in technological equipment and sophistication?3 Debord anticipates most of postmodern theory. His is more interesting than what normally counts as postmodern theorizing in that he is still able to see a problem in the ubiquitous, diffuse trend toward the spectacular in modern capitalist affluence. His version of an ideological problem, however, is couched in very one-sided terms. Quite against the historical logic of his analyses, Debord looks upon spectacle as an affirmation of mere appearance in which the negation of life, and especially the bad dream, the desire for sleep in modern society, has become visible (pp. 8, 10). For modern times, the unity of misery lurks behind spectacular variety. While this is undeniably true, it is hard to assume that the unity of misery was absent in earlier forms of society. In his own way, Debord falls prey to a fundamentalist anthropology, the submerged forms of which have also marred many Marxist theories in general, in spite of contrary claims. Moreover, as I shall also argue later, it is a mistake to define spectacles in terms of visuality only.4 The visual—as well as the auditory, like singing in opera—is crucial. But it is crucial mainly because it is couched in codes activating the involvement of the body. It does not come as a surprise, in any case, that a systematic interest in spectacles and forms of participation in all kinds of festivals, happenings, and entertainment and leisure parks has infiltrated the scene of literary scholarship, has in fact penetrated into its erstwhile strongest hermeneu-

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tic footholds.5 Older and contemporary spectacles can be distinguished in many ways: sacral (sacred) versus secular, elitist versus democratic, use of technology for power versus use of technology as enjoyment. Shopping malls may well be the only functioning total works of art today, according to Wolfgang Lipp.6 Perhaps Disneyland will do as well. Looking at what has been going on in Bayreuth, both outside and inside the festival hall, it is difficult to resist that conclusion. In a very uncharitable mood, Nietzsche has described Wagner’s musical drama as “closet plays,” that is, as plays to be read and studied like texts, fraught heavyhandedly with dubious significance and violently pulled into the spectacular domain. This, of course, in the context of this work, is not a judgment; it is a heuristically possible perspective. In any case, Wagner might be said to incarnate the predicament of Western culture: its obsession with meaning on the one hand, its hankering after overpowering— mystical, mysterious, or more or less meaningless—spectacles on the other. Thus the unease with spectacles in Western cultures, the temptation to see them from perspectives of cultural or political criticism, does not really go away. While it would be an illicit pun to point out an etymological relation, in English, between spectacle and spectacles, between show and prostheses for deficient eyesight, pejorative connotations of spectacle may easily sneak in. A person or thing may be exhibited not just for admiration, but also for curiosity or, worse, contempt. Even MacAloon, who strongly contends for clear conceptual distinctions, has noted the ambivalent connotations of spectacle: William James, for one, reserved the term for the noble death of a friend and colleague.7 In German, the word Schauspiel, used both for the theater and for something worthwhile to look at, has kept its neutrality (even if Faust occasionally complains about something being a mere “Schauspiel”). On the other hand, the German word Spektakel has gone all the way from an exciting event via Schauspiel to some terrible or shameful scene and ultimately unpleasant noise. The situation seems to be more neutral with respect to French spectacle, more positive on the whole, it would not so surprisingly seem, for Italian spettacolo. But the pejorative sense—a low-level exhibition to be watched by hoi polloi, the crowd—may always strike. There is little doubt in my mind that the unease with respect to spectacles has to do with the repeated introductions of writing—and the “theory-cum-media culture” attached to it—into specific Western sociocultural situations. To take just one striking modern example: as a modern “Marxist intellectual,” Antonio Gramsci is highly critical of what he

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calls, for Italy, “la concezione melodrammatica della vita.” Melodrama refers, of course, to the spectacles presented by opera. They appear to be as artificial as cheap literature, which has frequently come to usurp the territory of a more original or perhaps more authentic sense of life. But as an “Italian,” Gramsci immediately corrects himself: “Artificioso” is the wrong word, because the popular medium of opera successfully presents the artificial in fascinatingly (“straordinariamente affascinante”) naive and touching forms (“forme ingenue e commoventi”), which act like a nourishing womb or matrix (“come delle matrici”) for the mentalemotional life. While for Gramsci, Verdi can be compared to the melodramatic novelist Eugène Sue on the level of plot and sentiments, that comparison cannot be drawn on a truly “aesthetic” level. In contrast to thinkers in other countries, Italian intellectuals performed their European task in the nineteenth century through music, not through writing (“gli intelletuali italiani continuano la loro funzione europea attraverso la musica”).8 To repeat: in most cultural configurations, writing (perhaps more particularly Western types of writing) profoundly disturbs interactive, appearancelike behavioral certainties. In a quasi-hysterical countermove, institutions depending on writing have exaggerated their own claims to truth or representational adequacy. I am taking Eric Havelock’s line of argument here. Plato can then be seen as the most paradigmatic philosopher in that respect. He criticizes writing because its potential of complexity endangers the normative repertoire of behavior, the oral encyclopedia, as it were. At the same time, he makes astounding truth claims, writing to the end.9 With Aristotle (“the reader”), writing and reading (“theory” being etymologically derived from seeing, in a significant change understood as looking at a written page) have become ruling cognitive activities. The telling immediacy of interactional and perceptual physiognomic evidence does not vanish. But in a society subjected to structural changes toward “democracy,” situational “momentary evidence,” as Hans Blumenberg calls it, is no longer self-sufficient. It must fit with relatively abstract standards, norms, and canons that are continually elaborated in the fusion of cognition and medium constituted by thinking, reading, and writing. Philosophy, rhetoric, and tragedy, those three complementary and sometimes hostile products of structural change as cognitive change, rapidly develop away from situational immediacies toward the open or implicit productivity of writing, albeit in very different degrees and with specialized functionality. For tragedy, that development spells out not its

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end, but its permanent instability as a medium. Not surprisingly, spectacle for Aristotle quickly turns into the least important element of drama, one toward which he remained suspicious.10 The ways in which that kind of history repeats itself can be taken as an index of anthropological import. Horace, from a canonical literary perspective, deplores the tastes for spectacle of “indocti” and other kinds of rough fellows. These people might want a bear fight or a prizefight in the middle of serious play dealing with higher matters. Tensions between written, codified truth and the happeninglike occurrence of faith, in preaching and experience, likewise have troubled the various Christian denominations from the beginning. English neoclassical criticism, representative of a highly literarized culture, was busy denouncing theatrical forms that tend, like opera, toward the spectacular. Opera, indeed, in one of these ironies of history, violated the anthropological norms of neoclassicism. Most interesting in that respect would be the case of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. He was afraid of liking Italian opera too well. Its “fine music” enthralled him, but the spectacular machinery in which it was embedded struck him as a symptom of sociopolitical decay.11 For him—England being at war with France—the parallels with the decay of Rome during the imperial period, wallowing in the most excessive exploits of the spectacular, were obvious. The royal theater seemed to be tumbling into a dangerous embrace with the popular circus and the bear garden. The levels for which the decay implied in the spectacular is diagnosed (cognitive, social, political or everything together) are interchangeable. But in any case, as it is today, conspicuous spectacularity is easily associated with late-cultural degeneration.

Japanese Theater and the West: A Quasi-Theoretical Outline At this point, we should be able to profit from an approach in cultural and media comparison. I want to turn to a culture where the spectacular, in the so-called theater as well as in so-called real life, is cultivated intensely. Moreover, while that intense presence always suggests spiritual overtones and perhaps even significance, it does not elaborate layers of meanings to which we have been used in various forms, from large-scale ideologies, refined configurations, satire, down to meanings offered only in order to be erased, in Western theater. In what follows, I am not trying to describe Japanese culture and media in any objectivist way. Instead, I am projecting a hypothetical coun-

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termodel in order to delineate the distorted universality of specific, particularly Western types of culture. Japan certainly is not being played off against the West—a futile enterprise anyway since, for many years and in several respects, Japan has been more Western than the West. I have chosen Japan because it unfolds a different version of modernization. In this version, levels of extreme (technological, media) modernization have not wiped out the persistence of the apparently archaic. I am not aware of any cultural area where that combination has been pushed to comparable extremes. I take it that this must be of central anthropological significance. It is difficult to adopt a suitable language for analyzing something both very different from and yet also latently related to one’s own habitual cognitive schemes. Therefore, the reader should not expect the coherence of progressive argument, but rather a roundabout mode of approach and reapproach. It seems difficult for Western cultures to leave the relations between the surface intensities of spectacles and the “deeper” or “higher” levels of either rationality or the affective life in a state of cognitive/affective dissonance, inconsistency, or simply indifference. The West may have come from fixed structures of predication to mere gestures, from localizations of meaning to continuous displacements and “dissemination.” But the form of the predicative impulse has remained intact, whether in poststructuralism, systems theory, or modern literature (where it has become, in Beckett’s work, for instance, a self-referential obsession). In that sense, poststructuralism and systems theory are as “old European” as the modes of thought they try to replace, and sometimes even more so. In Japan, allocations of meaning in the form of strict classification and hierarchy are practiced in much more conservative ways. In that respect, and especially in “practical” matters, Japanese predication appears to be much more traditional and socially entrenched than in the West. In domains more properly, but also rather vaguely, called “aesthetic,” however, both aesthetic effects and the ways of dealing with them seem to be tied up with the elusive but persistent qualities of yugen—No ’s strange mixture of surface and infinitely spiritualized beauty—and its various descendants. For Westerners, the sometimes frustrating experience of  gai is admired Japanese “literary” writing may be related to that: Mori O in Japan as a “stylist,” although in Western eyes he was mainly concerned with what has been called a literature of fact and biography. Marvin Marcus, for instance, endorses a line of “interpretation” that “conjures up the classical notion of yugen, the placid, monochrome surface that hints at ineffable beauty beneath.” That line speaks of the “pu-

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rity” of a narrative style “that was maximally factual and minimally interpretive, that achieved an aesthetic effect of depth suggested, paradoxically, by an unwavering focus on external detail.”12 Generalizing from that, I suggest it is misleading to apply the idea of a cultural system, or of the arts as single systems, to what is here, in an abbreviation, called Japan. The Japanese make many distinctions between different arts. But these arts are seen as various, highly specialized skills that produce strong but elusive impressions. The arts are still closer to techne and ars, closer to techniques, skills, and procedures. They are less well characterized, for instance, as the embodiment of fictional realms to be explained and interpreted with reference to something else. Aesthetic distinctions, well differentiated in terms of impressions, remain relatively neutral with respect to their systematic status in a larger cultural scheme. There can be no question, of course, of using anything as a mere illustration for tentative theses of that kind. But the main forms of Japanese theater—No , Bunraku, and especially Kabuki—and their ambivalent reception in the West might give us pause and stimulate reconsiderations. The opening gambit in Marcello Muccioli’s Il teatro giapponese (1962) consists in the following assertion: “In Japan, as in no other country of the world, the evolution of the theater reflects and sums up the history of the indigenous culture and manners.” Muccioli ends his account with the diagnosis that, on the whole, things have not changed that much throughout history. The theatrical scene seems to be amicably shared by native (spectacular) and the more interiorized Western traditions. But there were and are hardly any authors for the latter. Moreover, since the cultural scene everywhere is said to be moving (again) more toward entertainment, it is more vulnerable to the effect of film. Film may carry the same “content,” but with much speed and sophistication of imagery. Kabuki, on the other hand, is said to be gaining ground again (and that, by and large, is probably still true today). In what appears to be the most recent history of Japanese theater, The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, by Benito Ortolani, the space devoted to the “modern” Japanese theater (shimpa) and the “new drama” (shingeki) is indeed pitifully small.13 Kabuki spectacles thrive on the power and refinement of “visual and aural delight.” Though never totally devoid of what Western terminology would describe as literary elements, the literary aspect is subordinated to “theatrical effectiveness.” That means, for instance, that plays are tailored to suit the needs and special abilities of star actors, who must be interested in putting on a powerful show.14 Conversely, an emphasis

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on actor theatricality may entail corresponding forms of audience theatricality, as well. Above all, the audience calls out during climactic pauses (ma) or poses (mie), a practice to some residual extent still known in Western opera. Audience response is stimulated by the extreme stylization of physical movement in a both vague and strong sense, however minimalized or even implicit it may be: visual, aural, codified, encoded, and varied during generations of actors’ families. Audience response is triggered by and corresponds to levels of stylized exteriority connoting both crudely stereotyped and elusively spiritual sentiments. This institutionalized and open contact between actors (not plays) and audiences appears to be crucial. While the common distinction between the literary, text-bound theater of the West and the spectacular, textually simple theatricality of Kabuki is certainly correct, it does not target sufficiently the level of intimate media-culture couplings. The codes of Kabuki, in the more powerful plays, are elaborate codes staging the body. They enact the anthropological assumption—which is made here in opposition to much Western theory lamenting the dismembered, disappearing, suppressed, and otherwise abused body—that the body is present only when it seems to vanish in the intricacies of dress and makeup, in the apparent artificiality of movement. It is from the codes of the body that connotations, crude and vague, meanings, sentiments, and spirituality may spring. The audience can react only to the priority of body codes, and, it appears to me, is quickly bored when, as in the more “domestic” kizewamono and sewamono plays, that dimension recedes too much in favor of what may appear as Western illusionistic realism or naturalism. The response of the audience to body codes must be immediate, although it would be misleading to say it is impressionistic. There is no time and occasion for retrospective interpretation. The critical literature on Kabuki, where it is not dealing with its more factual-historical development, does not command options very different from that. One is left wondering, moreover, whether, in the West, exegesis, commentary, interpretation, theory, and their quarrels have not become laborious detours in which earlier modes of audience involvement in terms of taste, enthusiasm, and appreciation are intellectually, that is tentatively, recaptured. By contrast, Western theater (shingeki) in Japan, which has been produced, in both senses of the term, particularly during the so-called modernization of Japan since the Meiji period from 1867 onwards, was conceived and practiced as an enactment of intellectual tensions, not of

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theatricalized body codes, and thus as a polemic farewell to the “nonintellectual” Kabuki, in which representative plots seemed restricted to elementary situations of love, hate, jealousy, surprise, and sentiment. But while the long, drawn-out history of Western verbal theater may have pushed its cultural “media” problems into the background, shingeki, like another “new school,” shimpa, ran the gamut of these much more quickly and explicitly. The development of shimpa and shingeki, in little more than a few decades, looks like a compressed, and thus depressed, much more openly problematic version of the long history of Western spoken theater. If forms of Western theater are still more of an exception in Japan, Western theater in general could easily be seen as an exception within predominantly very different forms of world theater. From the staging of Ibsen and then other, generally European plays, shingeki turned to “experiment” and “social criticism.” These, it is true, were suppressed, first by the authoritarian government of the 1930s and after World War II by the administrators of the American occupation. Independently of political forces, the problems of representational theater, in both its more direct form as social criticism and its more sophisticated, self-reflexive, experimental forms, were abundantly obvious. In a conventional perspective, the difficulties of socially oriented theater in particular might be interpreted as problems of “literary” quality. In my perspective, they would be ascribed to the lack of imaginative hold that, in spite of the complexity-promoting urges of modernization, representational theater exercises upon a culture steeped in ceremonial spectacle, in the reverberations of hierarchized body codes. Although it would be unfair to make much of it, one may mention that the first and perhaps main Japanese author of shingeki plays, Tsubouchi Sho yo (1859–1935), was a Waseda University professor of literature and a translator of Shakespeare. Tsubouchi also wrote one of the first systematic treatises on the novel, Shosetsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885). He assumed that the novel was the contemporary genre, but that the novel writing undertaken by Japanese writers did not live up to its complex demands. He was also convinced, however, that Kabuki was the Japanese theater. These are clear indications, again, that frictions within cultural media configurations—and not single media—should be the main concern of cultural as anthropological studies. The lesson to be derived from the Japanese side consists in the strong impression that body codes cannot be as easily eliminated from the more “artlike” media that appear in the cult of ubiquitous aesthetic “immaterialities” in the West. It seems clear that a Japanese need for a Western kind of theater (and novel) was (not only,

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but also) an intellectual conception, thought out in a situation of cultural and other pressures. We would have similar cases today if systems theorists started writing plays and novels (which, in fact, some do). Significantly, angura (a Japanese form and abbreviation of “underground theater”), although in many instances very specifically committed, yet draws on the spectacular traditions (Kabuki), the nonliterary forms of comic entertainment (yoshimoto, especially in the manzai forms of comicclownesque dialog), on down to striptease and the like, or on Western self-denials of representation in surrealism, Dada, happenings, or agitprop.15 To repeat: it is not Japan that is being investigated here and opposed to the West, but representative cultural and media configurations and their symptomatic evidence. Thus, it would be preposterous to suggest that literature does not show up prominently on the Japanese—or generally Asian—cultural scenes. In specific respects, the status of literature may, or may have been, very high or indeed higher than in the West. Even so, Japanese forms of “literature” seem to run against the grain of main Western trends. This does not only hold for shorter lyrical forms like haiku. Concerning those, Barthes and others were rightly struck by the absence of an expressive urge that, in spite of rhetorical strategies undermining the drive toward meaning, seems to characterize the poetry of the West. The assertion equally holds for Japanese “novels” or for narratives in general that, in their looseness, their frequent lack of direction, their tantalizingly inconclusive suggestiveness appear to be wandering between the dichotomies of their Western counterparts (story/plot versus their denial, unified versus multiple points of view, realistic versus “modernist” or postmodernist types, fiction versus metafiction or antifiction, etc.). Japanese novels appear to be difficult in quite a different way from the uses made of “obscurity” or reading difficulties in the Joycean or Beckettian manner. One may ascribe this to an underlying, as it were, carefree, awareness of paradoxes. Within such an awareness, distinctions and fusions between subject and object, observation and matters observed, self and subject, spirit and matter are continually made. Put negatively, this excludes any Cartesian “clear and distinct” procedures and results of cognition. The conceptualization of the self and its “constructions” would block its intuitive and fluid constitutions. In this context, it is striking to be made aware of the heavy Judeo-Christian, that is, religious, bias that Karatani Ko jin holds (co)responsible for basic literary distinctions (like the somewhat desperate efforts to distinguish between reality and fiction) in the West. A Japanese term like monogatari, seem-

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ingly corresponding to the Western tale, story, or fiction, does precisely not denote these, but should be taken simply to refer to a pattern. In its older form, it bears witness not so much to the emergence of literature, but to the cultural precedence of song among the “literary” forms in Japan.16 The history of the “antecedents” of modern Japanese prose (the “novel” very roughly equivalent to shosetsu)—the tale, the diary, the monogatari, the essay—is “baffling, obscure, and complex,” as J. Thomas Rimer says.17 It is these antecedents that, in spite of all Westernizing trends implicit in a “logic” of professionalized writing, throw equally baffling and complex shadows on modern writing. We may feel that elusive concepts like monogatari are implied in Western fiction of the type represented perhaps by Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet.” Here the search for represented and representable meaning runs into a dead end. The criticism of meaning hunts is indeed scathing. However, tracking down meanings, unveiling hidden messages, looking for philosophies or basic views of life, for some extraordinary, perhaps formally conspicuous intention, is just one exchangeable, historical nineteenthcentury and partly twentieth-century feature of what James, in the preface to the New York edition, called “the literary life,” the life with which, in various forms, all the stories in volume 15 of that edition are supposed to deal. It is the picture of a life in which texts continually provoke other texts, forms of protracted and at least implicitly controversial explicitness. It is a life, too, in which the primary (“literary”) texts themselves, as the later James demonstrates to satiety, push implicit complexity to such a degree that any form of reading turns into an exercise of patience. Such exercises are attractive in relatively few and specific cultural situations. That is why even in the novels of James Joyce, where literary artistry and intertextuality reach a last climax, the self-referential, “pure” virtuosity of the literary is heavily interspersed with references to other, more directly effective media like opera. The climax of Western self-referential literary complexity is also its endgame: Beckett, who, acting as Joyce’s “secretary,” has described Joyce as the ultimate literary virtuoso, has analyzed the motivation and predicament of his own writing in terms of paralysis and obsession. Writing for Beckett, although it cannot end because the very notion of an end spawns new images, however residual, which writing seems condemned to hunt down, is on its way into very different areas. In Western contexts, it does not matter so much, then, whether critical

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explicitness is directed toward supposed meanings or whether it is transferred into theoretical quarrels on how to avoid the message hunt and replace it by other methods of getting at the “effectiveness” of texts, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s terminology. Meaning certainly is not an “object to be defined,” but “an effect to be experienced.” It is precisely because this thesis is so obviously correct that one might reject the implications of James’s story as simplistic. If it be no sacrilege to say so, James’s picture of the hunt for an objectlike meaning is misleading. It might appear as the self-serving construction and knocking down of the wrong kind of literary behavior in the interest of an allegedly purer one. The obtuseness with which, in “The Figure in the Carpet,” the narrator-critic is looking for the gist of a story is, to put it mildly, highly “artificial.” It does not even do justice to the more interesting forms of meaning injection and extraction practiced in the nineteenth century. James’s own literary practice has not improved the cultural situation of writing; it has exacerbated its problems. Conversely, if James’s picture applies at all, it applies structurally to the various forms of “close reading” in the twentieth century as well. Close reading, indeed, taking (at least theoretically) the whole text seriously in all its detail, marks professional, critical literary behavior in all its forms, from the criticism of ideology to deconstruction. The hunt for meaning is just one explicit, retrospective and discursively protracted form of response, of intellectually encoding what is experienced as effect.18 Generally, the differences in textual interests between readers in the East and West remain striking. If this sounds too obscure (and it is, of course, obscure in an obvious sense), the reader is referred to the many books on Japanese literature in which somewhat desperate or resigned commentaries on the features of Japanese texts and their critical consequences are made: most Japanese texts do not encourage the sensemaking activities (whether meaning hunts or some form of explicitly consistent response) to which Western critics are accustomed. In principle, Western readers may, of course, adopt that refusal to hunt for meaning, too, and have in fact occasionally done so. For historical reasons having to do with the erstwhile paradigmatic cultural status of literature, the “tacit component” (Michael Polanyi) of cultural perception (like reading responses), however, has been professionally and progressively pushed into the background. Perspectives like these continue to be relevant in spite of Japan’s heavy modernization. In the present work, therefore, the simultaneity of sameness and difference between Japanese and Western media take on theo-

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retical, not just culturally comparative, importance. Their observation should help us to understand an apparent paradox: namely that Western arts and media represent an exception within world culture, but an exception with a strong, seductive, yet also distorting potential for universalization. In the present inflation of cultural studies, such aspects tend to get lost in the frantic search for political correctness and its avatars. Ironically, comparative studies in capitalism appear to be much more aware of them.19 In the absence of directly obvious correlations between economic types and cultural media configurations, however, there are altogether too many possible starting points and avenues for analysis. One might look at Japanese museums as relative latecomers on the cultural scene. Following current Western trends, one might examine the continuum of everyday and remoter forms of the aesthetic. One might examine etymologies and conceptual histories. Etymology, real as well as semantic, and conceptual histories cannot, of course, replace theory or argue conclusively against it. But in dealing with Japanese artistic-aesthetic matters, an omnipresent dimension of Japanese life, it is hard to resist the assumption that the instability of central terms (“art,” “craft,” “technique,” “method,” “science” . . .) that, in the West, we have seemingly brought under control, is indeed more than accidental. In that respect, the theoretical and intercultural implications of Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976, 1983), for instance, have not yet been sufficiently exploited. In the West, the high instability and variability of central terms such as “art” do not seem to have prevented the formation of relatively coherent traditions of theory in which drives toward specific distinctions, although not warranted and borne out by words, concepts, and practices, have imposed themselves with an almost uncanny toughness. This is why the occasions, the carriers, and the performance of theory in the West—and not just its conceptual content or criticism—would have to be more thoroughly looked into. This cannot, of course, be done here. Instead, the contrastive approach is used as a shortcut. Three central Japanese terms, gei, geino, and jutsu, all denote forms of art (of the spectacular kind so easily waxing representational in the West), skill, ability, technique, method (or way), and science. No itself, used later for the theater of that name, originally refers to skills like playing instruments, shogi (the Japanese version of chess), or skills in writing and painting. (One might add waza, another word for skills and techniques from judo throws to entertainment tal-

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ents.) Gei may come closer to our notion of art, but it may apply to archery, horse riding, musical practice, including singing, and calligraphy. It preserves connotations of formal and implicit behavioral accomplishments. It forms part of geisha (originally men, and later women, noted for their artistic-entertainment accomplishments, not of course for sexual availability), of haragei, a basic sociocultural and even economic form of “nongame playing,” and of an artistic management of “vital” (that is “mind-heart-and-belly”-related) energies.20 Kogei would rather refer to “arts and crafts,” bungei, on the other hand, to literature. Of course, there is the writer (sakka)—how s/he writes, what s/he writes “about” is, as we have seen and will see again, much more difficult to determine. Geinin and geinojin designate entertainers of all kinds, from the rakugo narrators (parts of an old oral tradition) down to media stars or circus artists (a meaning preserved in the German word Artist). Geijutsu—a combination of the two crucial terms—can be used as a general word for art. Gakujutsu, on the other hand, would be a general term for the sciences, in a broad, non-English-American sense that comes close to the German Wissenschaften. Monomane, from Zeami onward, may mean “imitation” or representational role playing in theater and entertainment. Apart from the difficulties of its meaning, it does not occupy a central position in No . In the beginning, according to Zeami, No should elaborate on its basis, dance and song; in the latter parts, the speed and whirl of presentation should revert to it; only in the middle is there something approximating role playing. In modern entertainment, monomane refers more to the comic, parodistic, or clownesque imitation of, for instance, famous people, their ways of moving, dressing, speaking, or singing. In the West, binary oppositions between illusion (fiction) and reality, representation and represented have been undermined theoretically. We do go on, however, making functional distinctions—corresponding to forms of cultural practices—between theatrical and nontheatrical, literary and nonliterary (or less than literary) genres. In spite of conceptual and historical episodes to the contrary, we find it difficult to conceptualize the transitions between art and technique, the “processualization” of both representation and what is represented that we encounter for instance in Bunraku, the puppet theater. Here—as well as in many “arts” and techniques of cuisine—the makers, the manipulators, and their procedures are visible on the stage. There is no effort to “conceal,” to distinguish strongly the technique of making from the product made.21 Bunraku, indeed, appears like the exemplifica-

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tion of the deep but vague fascination that the puppet theater holds for Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and that Wilhelm, in the interest and pursuit of higher purposes, comes or perhaps merely appears to suppress in his later career. Bunraku hovers between a virtuoso physical-aesthetic selfsufficiency and incipient representation—incipient because its unfolding is checked by the sheer conventionality of the stories serving as representational foils. Frequently, therefore, mere episodes, fragments out of larger and heterogeneous lumps of material are performed without detriment. Bunraku distributes “expression”—and thus virtually destroys its unity, its attribution to a subject—to the puppets (with their technologically sophisticated movements and mimicry), the puppet manipulators (with their expressionless poker faces), the reciters (chanting, sobbing, grunting, screaming, and generally overarticulating the words until, in some instances, operatic coloratura arias seem to be performed), and the shamisen players (with their play running the gamut from weirdly isolated sounds to implicit but very dynamic dance rhythms). In Bunraku, it is especially the rigors of vocal training and performance in which a subject-related expression seems both present and totally absent. Expression and representation, in the manipulation of the puppets and the extreme meanderings of the voice, appear as matters of explicit mechanisms or autonomous virtuosity. They are not tied to the sociocultural dynamics and repertoire at large, from which at least impulses toward representational content and comparison might be derived. Consequently, they embody the fragility of aesthetic effects, not unknown to Western theory in a radical way: the audience may be deeply engrossed in some places, and fall asleep in others. Enthusiasm and indifference are equally possible, especially, but not exclusively, with younger generations and their very different—filmic or electronic—sources of gripping images. Generally, any “significance” attached to, inherent in, or emanating from Japanese theatrical procedures and forms is an accidental or conventionally given, more often than not a trite, second-rate element. On the level of plot, Japanese plays are comparable perhaps to those ancient classical tragedies based on myth. They consist of well-known stories in which some form of spectacular effect—ranging from ritualistic (or originally, according to Ortolani, shamanistic) ceremonial body techniques to “aesthetically” refined elegance—is decisive. One talks about the elegance, the iki in Kabuki, about yugen, the sophisticated, evanescent, and yet deep beauty and its entrancing-melancholy in No . There are evocations of hana, the flower, blossom, aesthetic

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climaxes of graceful surprise as well as perfection in which play and representation dissolve. Western plays, by contrast, may have subverted oppositions between illusion and reality, may enact the transformational power of staging in circles of self-reference and world reference. But if they have done away with the representation of illusionistically presented worlds, Western plays still remain tied to demands for complex significance. Aesthetic significance emerges in the surplus or withdrawal effects of significance that Western plays develop over and against a world constructed, in its own turn, as layers of meaning and significance. While much of the theatrical production in the West escapes from direct demands for significance, the theoretical temptation to see drama as a tragic, comic, or parodistic reenactment, as a complex or relativistic reencoding of meaningful structures, as an operation on the edges of worldly significance, has remained sufficiently intact. There is, it appears to me, a lot of hidden readiness to enjoy, but little theoretical willingness to acknowledge, the relative meaninglessness of formally powerful spectacles—to go all the way, that is, with Macbeth’s sound and fury, signifying nothing, with Adorno’s occasional bent to see the greatest music as an example of grandiose nothingness, to plunge, as Flaubert seems to have done in Salammbô (and perhaps not only there) into spectacles of meaningless magnificence. In that respect, the ambivalent Western reception and reworkings of No and Kabuki are instructive, No in the case of Yeats, Pound, and others. (As a more contemporary example one could cite No -like and Kabuki-like productions of Shakespearean history plays by Ariane Mnouchkine in the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris in the 1980s, etc.) That reception is normally located between the intermittent trends of European theater and literature toward aestheticism, symbolism, and efforts at the Gesamtkunstwerk, a term indeed often used in the German secondary literature for the characterization of No and Kabuki. These efforts are mounted in order to overcome the repeatedly felt shortcomings of verbal theater (in England, for instance, at least since Dryden). The reception of Asian forms betrays, in its own oscillations, an unease about representational trends, however sophisticated and self-subversive, toward which Western “literature” had been drifting. There is then the desire for a more powerful effect—a “participation” in, an entrancing evocation of, the invisible, immaterial, spiritual, sometimes supposedly inherent in certain submerged, hidden national or ethnic “sources.” These efforts, impressive as they frequently are, do not shake off a “typical” concern, problematic as that expression is: to keep the door

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shut, as Yeats said, against “a pushing world,” the theatrical reenactment of meaning here taking the equally characteristic Western form of an opposition between the “world” at large and the inner, more fundamental, mysterious world of the stage events, a dichotomy that is in fact characteristic of much of Western art. It is at that point—where meaning seems to degenerate into empty mystique—that an implicit voyage toward dead ends in Western theater becomes visible. Yeats’s and similar dramatic products have not met with much sympathy, and understandably so. In spite of the mystique, they do not get rid of usual expectations concerning conflicts between dramatic characters, whereas the waki and shite in No are not to be considered as protagonist and antagonist at all. Even Yeats’s Four Plays for Dancers do not go fully into the spectacular movement that is unfolded in No in the timing of dance and design (masks, scenery, costumes),22 where language, taking the form of recitative or “song,” as in opera, unfolds from a kind of libretto, not from speech fully elaborated as speech. An Orientalizing effort is made, but the strain, and the Western perspective from which the effort is made, are barely concealed. If science has ruined an old, magic world, if the world supposedly is out of joint for some (political, social, intellectual) reason or other, it is of course not art that can set it right. Yet such an ambition is discernible in Yeats, and in different ways, in Pound—two of the most enthusiastic Orientalists in modern poetic theory and practice. The diagnosis of deficits, gaps, and ruins provokes a relentless search for more comprehensive theories, produces comprehensiveness in poetry and drama as a mode of complex-as-learned profundity—or produces the alleged “provocations,” the violation of canonical texts in contemporary experimental forms. The intellectual ease, contemplative leisure, impressionistic openness, and a patient as well as potentially enthusiastic aesthetic appreciation demanded by Japanese art forms are conspicuous by their absence. Makoto Ueda is clearly wrong when he draws a close parallel between Basho ’s “haiku without other thoughts” and Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” (and it is significant that he compares explanations given by Basho with a Baudelaire poem). Baudelaire’s poem tends toward statement, even if it is a very “poetic” one; Basho ’s haiku poems tend toward the performance or enactment of a perception.23 It would of course, to say it once more, be naive and simply wrong to try to level out the extreme diversity of sociocultural, theatricalaesthetic, and literary behavior in favor of some alleged basic—and that would mean mythic—anthropological orientation. Yet I share Richard

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Schechner’s diagnosis that “the theater in the theater will probably continue to decline; but the theater ‘in life’ will permeate more and more activities, both ordinary and special.” Schechner relates this to “postmodern tribalism,” “medievalism under the auspices of technology.” I would simply like to soften the somewhat rigid period frame. Generally, and especially if we broaden our attention span toward media sufficiently, the efficacy of ritual, the high-cultural role of theater, and the entertainment function of its so-called popular forms are rarely opposed to each other. Whether one calls “a specific performance ‘ritual’ or ‘theater’ depends,” indeed, “mostly on context and function.”24 In that respect, Ortolani’s picture of Japanese theater as a development from shamanistic ritual to contemporary pluralism is both correct and wrong: it is correct because, empirically, pluralism there is. It is wrong because pluralism does not eliminate either social or theatrical spaces of relative reritualization. For ceremonially uninhibited cultures, in the domain of more narrowly theatrical performances, spectacles, dynamic, often visually striking performances prevent cultural sophistication from being taken too seriously. In that respect, while the effects of technology need not be disputed, they do not overthrow such deeply grounded, culturally coded anthropological trends. I dare assert, then, that one could describe analogously significant differences with respect to, say, Japanese, American, or German TV shows. In Japan, efforts toward complex seriousness rarely are made. Where they occur, they are couched in very restrained tones. The more comic shows strike many Westerners as characterized by what they perceive as a childish playfulness. For a European, the United States seems to divide its TV performances between utter jocularity of various kinds and some remaining efforts at (or pretenses of?) serious complexity. In Germany, the heavy-handedness of even TV humor is, with rare exceptions, notorious. In his L’empire des signes—a title suggesting the semantically neutral or even empty but visually powerful quality of Japanese signs—Roland Barthes had tried to set the differences and oppositions haunting the West in motion. He was less concerned with an often assumed Eastern otherness. Instead, with the help of more or less strongly felt differences, he wanted to penetrate or at least get closer to the West’s unease with itself. The effort was to go beyond the claims of (self-)enlightenment, to touch base with what he called our own opacity. Thus, haiku, that short Japanese “lyric” form, for Barthes makes effects of language happen without expressive strain. Bunraku, the puppet theater in which the puppet manipulators appear on stage almost in the same way as the puppets

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themselves, seems quietly indifferent toward distinctions between fictions and reality, between representation and its means, between illusion and its realistic pathos. A Western dramatist like Shakespeare may end up with something like that, but only after he has expended a lot of semantically sophisticated efforts that, at last, may collapse in sound and fury. In some traditions of Shakespearean scholarship, it is true, spectacular effects and semantically neutralized pathos have been emphasized. L. L. Schücking has propounded a doctrine of “episodic intensification”; Alvin Kernan has characterized Shakespeare as the magicianplaywright who bridges the gap between noble Renaissance conceptions of the poet and the actual conditions of playing in the public theater with techniques of both sophistication (“self-reference”) and enchantment;25 later, Dryden wavered uneasily between verbal theater and opera in order to produce the “higher pitch” to which Nature was to be wrought. And there exist indeed Western-Eastern overlappings in what Earl Miner has described as affective-expressive (Horace, etc.) or even antimimetic poetics. But the quest for represented or indeed representative significance, however relativized, has remained intact. Occasionally, we get the diagnosis, correct to my mind, that Western history, in its continuous ruin of intellectual-emotional projects and utopias, has depleted the driving forces, the medium potential of modern Western theater since the Renaissance. That potential consisted in the “aesthetic,” strikingly powerful crystallization of crucial sociocultural or even political trends. Sometimes, the remedy has been sought in a renewed confidence in the power of theatrical-imagistic language. There is no doubt that, periodically, theater has regained the power of a historically crucial image. The problem is that the very notion of theater has become extraordinarily diluted in the process. If we talk about speech theater, there does not seem to be any way in which its erstwhile “self-sufficiency and uniqueness as a medium” can be recovered.26

Spectacular Theater, Sumo , and the Labors of “Literature” Japanese No and Kabuki have struck observers as being opposed to each other on many levels. Both, however, escape the repertoire of poetological categories predominantly applied to the more canonized tradition of theater in the West. (That there always has been a strong underground countercurrent even in the mainstream Western theater does not—yet—concern us here.) The extremes of No and Kabuki touch each

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other in basic trends. In both cases, a sociological or even economic genetic account is possible—the aristocracy in the one case, the urban commercial classes in the other being the original sponsors. Equally, however, both forms demonstrate the rapid or almost instantaneous emancipation of (anthropologically grounded) effects from socioeconomic or even political constraints. (For “bourgeois” Kabuki in particular, the latter are found in the extremely tough censorship, exercised, for political-dynastic security reasons, by the “feudal” Tokugawa regime.) Parallel to that, their appeal, in spite of glaring differences of surface aesthetic organization, can be described in analogous terms. Yugen, the elusive and profound beauty of No , and iki, the more straightforward elegance of Kabuki, have already been mentioned. If one takes the teachings of Zeami as a basis for the description of No , one might see Kabuki as a de-essentialized analogy to it. Some would say that while the former is a spectacle of complex interiority, the latter is “mere” entertainment. The Japanese social system (estates, “classes,” hierarchies) was and still is highly differentiated, well defined, and in fact—in Western eyes—rigid. In spite or perhaps because of that, the chances of a group-oriented or class-oriented sociology, to say nothing of a sociology of art, have remained relatively modest. Japanese society illustrates the misgivings of Anthony Giddens vis-àvis popular concepts like feudalism, capitalism, and class very pointedly. For Giddens, it is not their status as concepts that is at stake, but their use as and for interpretive models. For him, the forces operative in class structuration are related to “market capacities,” which, in their turn, “refer to all forms of relevant attributes which individuals may bring to the bargaining encounter.”27 That means that the scope for market capacities can hardly be defined in terms of given notions of class. To an even smaller extent, media configurations and their appeal can be determined in advance. This is another reason why an anthropological direction of inquiry is meaningful. For Japan, it is less the forms of beauty themselves and more their emancipation from sociological or other constraints as nearly selfsustained forms of quiet or spectacular beauty that might be sociologically explained. There are sociological reasons for a lack of sociological relevance. In their own different ways, both the traditional aristocratic samurai culture and the bourgeois culture of prosperous merchants of the Tokugawa period (and, by extension, later periods) tended toward splendor and ostentation. Literature in the sense of extensive texts could do little more than follow or at least simulate that trend. Narrative texts,

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for instance, tend to function as “a means for sensuous pleasure,” whether comic or more directly sensual, or, in modern times, in the more re gai fined ways of the soberly dignified and the beautifully sad prose of O 28 or Kawabata. With No , but also with Kabuki and Bunraku, it is necessary to keep the ideal anthropological conception and its unstable cultural effectiveness apart. An anthropology of media cannot indeed ascribe a stability of effect to any single medium. This is particularly obvious in No and Kabuki, where, in terms of an aesthetics of reception, enthusiasm and total indifference seem to characterize the attitudes of the Japanese public to equal degrees. Sometimes, paradoxically, it is only a Western wave of enthusiasm for things Japanese that will make the Japanese themselves (again) interested in them. Thus, while there are still about nine No theaters in Tokyo alone, that type of play may mean nothing at all anymore to a very large part of even the well-educated population. On the other hand, and quite in contrast to the crisis terminologies in the West, this does not pose a cultural problem. Popularity and acceptance may depend on the most heterogeneous factors, including the popularity and prestige these theatrical forms may suddenly, for completely different reasons, enjoy abroad, especially in the West. By and large, and for the modern period, researchers and historians have painted the picture of a relatively peaceful coexistence in Japan between traditional spectacular and modern (“Western”) representational theater. I doubt that this is an appropriate perspective. In any case, however, the notion of (socio)cultural coherence or consistency must be abandoned. There is an emphasis on an aesthetics of the spectacular that, in its turn, may adopt the most heterogeneous forms. This emphasis is of anthropological import. Its forms, however, are mired in sociocultural contingency. The somewhat ritualistic beauty of No may aim at a transcendental, Zen-like state in actors and audience. The more direct forms of spectacle in Kabuki may provoke wilder forms of enthusiasm in the audience, especially so when elementary emotions and splendid acting freeze into a powerful picture (mie). In Sumo wrestling, emphasis and applause seem to be attached equally to the elaborate, long ceremonial and the mostly much shorter fights themselves. Finally, baseball as a sport has nothing to do with any “native” cultural tradition at all. But it is as popular as in the United States, from which it was imported, and in its contexts of ritualistic spectacle, it has become as “native” as anything else. In all of these, the conjunction of spectacle with sociocultural struc-

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tures does not really come off. Certainly, formalized traditions of spectacle change because they are not immune from sociocultural pressures at large. Yet it still makes sense to describe No (and also present-day No ) along the lines of its classic theorist and practitioner Zeami Motokiyo of more than five hundred years ago. By the same token, as any introduction to Kabuki will insist upon, appreciation of Kabuki depends to a large extent on the perceptive appraisal of the ways in which the famous actors’ families have executed—preserved and changed—climactic scenes, poses, and movements. The basic meaning of the term “No ” (“skill,” “accomplishment,” “capability”) would seem to supply a key, if there is any, to an analysis of the spectacular. In terms of conception, No strives away from representation and toward realization. The realization, in the form of what might be called a dramatic ceremonial, unfolds as a semiotics of signs, not a language of meanings or a plot in any significant sense. The extremely stylized signs, emanating from slow, in fact minimalist, but ritualistically precise movements and culminating in dance tied to masks and costumes, aim at the production of a series of separate but intense moments. They—together with equally, perhaps more important moments of silence—may vaguely evoke in the audience feelings of their deeper potentials. Within that process, language, in its peculiarly chanting presentation of feelings and moods, is a mere auxiliary. No , in fact, might be looked upon as an exercise in complex but deindividualized consciousness. Located normally in the waki (monk or priest, as such representing some kind of reality principle), consciousness is yet severed from his personality or representative references, which as such are unimportant. Thus, consciousness can wander, without any marked transition, to the shite (the main character). The shite’s voice may be generated from within the waki’s consciousness and then projected visually on the stage. The shite (the “maker”) may represent a spirit who, showing up in a dream or after death, incarnates archetypal human characters. The audience, in such a case, does not experience the shite as a “real” stage actor, as the impersonation of a “character.” Nor is the waki to be conceived as such. He instead acts as the medium for stories, fantasies, or dreams, materializing into visually striking stage presences looking like persons. In such scenarios, demands upon the audience may easily appear paradoxical. On the one hand, the meanderings of consciousness exact a rigorous audience participation. Without that, the play would be, as the expression goes, meaningless. In that respect, one might even assume

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that the basis of enunciation, the text, is fundamentally important. On the other hand, participation does not lead anywhere. It instead dissolves or is “sublated,” in the strong Hegelian sense of aufgehoben—if it works—into a kind of trancelike contemplative mood produced by the aesthetics of restrained movements, sounds, and visual effects enacted on a very small stage. One readily understands that such theater leaves many spectators baffled. This applies not only to Westerners, but to many Japanese themselves. They find it hard, to begin with, to grapple with the archaic language and the mode of its enunciation, which, apart from the limited opera analogy, seem to bear close affinities to the modes of chanting in ancient Greek tragedy. Ideally, though, the participation demanded aims at the momentary fusion of quasi-transcendental contemplation and aesthetic effect, of concentration and openness, of increased and abandoned distance. The audience should feel hana, blossoming.29 It is extremely difficult to grasp what Zeami is driving at because there seems to be a kind of essentialistic basis to his conception—a basis taken for granted, vanishing and somehow reappearing in the concentration of enactment. This is why the “method” of Hermann Bohner, for instance, seems still valid. In the continuous (here Japanese-German) elaboration and variation of what must appear, at their face value, as highly impressionistic terms, Bohner tried to bring them closer to a quasi-conceptual status.30 The essence appears to be kokoro, the heart, the deep reality of all things with which the actor, through intense concentration and its translation into both minimalistic and stronger movement, is supposed to be in contact. If, sacrilegious as it may appear, one drops that essentializing premise, Zeami’s doctrines could be taken as a more general theory of spectacular plenitude. Its core would consist in the achievement of nonacting through acting. In order to incarnate the “blossom” (hana), acting, role playing, “imitation” (monomane), much as they are necessary and inevitable at a conventional but transitional stage, must disappear at some point. Technically and structurally, this is achieved by limiting role playing to the middle part, relativizing it by the emphasis on dance and music of the initial and later parts. The “text” can take form and hold only after a musical conception has effectively materialized. Important as the text may be, it does not allow of a linguistic-poetic analysis in its own right. In such ways, a play without play(ing), that is, acting, may emerge. While the type of spectacular is very different, No as well as Kabuki, in the alternation of acting and nonacting, can be compared to perform-

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ances from acrobats and circus acts, from sleight of hand to the “higher” arts. The word No itself comprises all of these.31 Surface and depth levels of No ’s spectacular aesthetics can be heuristically kept apart. But the distinction—in spite of the notion of kokoro— collapses continually. Comparable to Schopenhauer’s more strongly psychologized and Nietzsche’s more nostalgically Greek conceptions, levels of depth must appear, or be connoted, in codes of the body. Put another way, the perfection that is (also) the interiorization of techniques capable of producing both Zen-like engrossment and fascinating surprise becomes tantamount to an intuition of something beyond. Then the actor moves and the audience is moved, but they cannot identify what they are moved by. In particular, any “sentimental,” “romantic,” or, on the other hand, intellectual relation is pushed aside. The point is not to see the enactment as a representation toward which an emotional or reflective stance should be adopted. Actor and audience are supposed to be caught up in the performance. That—the blossom, hana—has little to do with an attitude, emotional or intellectual, almost automatically taken with respect to a text.32 Bohner works hard conceptually to bring out an immanent element of song especially in the Chinese, and to a lesser extent in the Japanese language, and, in No , its basic rhythmic quality. In that quality, frequently elaborated into what may appear to Western tastes as somewhat lackluster music and dance, No , in my terminology, retains an essential relation with, and embodiment of, body codes and body enactment. This exactly has disappeared in the emphasis on spoken dialog and its production of (represented) topics. This also is exactly why the notion of a complete text does not make sense. In No , Bunraku, and Kabuki, bits and pieces of plays can be presented as such—in a way comparable to the Western habit of breaking arias or specific movements out of operas and larger musical “wholes.” In many cases, one does not know the complete context anymore. Small matter—“the atmosphere penetrating everything, the words, the poetry, rhythm and song transcend all that.”33 Sociologically, with the Tokugawas taking power and No turning into the exclusive medium of the Shogun and higher aristocratic families, that art has lost its contact with the population at large for three hundred years. It is possible to argue that, for larger audiences, Bunraku and Kabuki replaced No for some time. One could describe them as deessentialized No , were it not for the problem that the essence of No , kokoro, bears only the semblance of an essence—between nominalistic surface and elusive profundity—anyway. The sociological shifts—the

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merchants as the social sponsors of art, the problematic status of the actors as quasi-outcastes, and so on—are obvious. At the same time, and perhaps because of that, Kabuki quickly created a world where “social distinction did not count and only cash decided the issues.”34 One has to be aware of an official society of ranks or even castes and the ceaseless shifts, especially between merchants and samurai, behind a scene in which spectacular art instead functions as generalized entertainment. The extreme stylization of the spectacular in scenery, choreography, levels of acting, dancing, vocal and acrobatic skills in which the male impersonator of women’s roles in Kabuki, for instance, the famous onnagata, easily surpasses women in the presentation of a stylized femininity, overrides intellectual problems such as the relatively cheap romantic fantasy world readily associated with Kabuki.35 The perfection, in the productivity of stylization, reduces representational sophistication, including its self-referential deconstruction, to incidental by-products. This is particularly evident when a Kabuki actor plays a puppet from Bunraku: the perfect presentation of the mechanical in a manner similar to rap dance and other sometimes very touristy modes of “nature” imitating art today produces a liveliness barely reached in the representation of character, however complex. This means that Kabuki in particular, in spite of its obvious relations to the merchant world of Osaka, is not solidly anchored in some larger, coherent cultural context. If its spectacular potential is more directly powerful, it is equally unstable, liable to be lost or regained in rather haphazard fashions. That is why, once the essentializing tendency is dropped (and to some extent even within it, for instance in the farcical parts of No called kyogen), the spectacular can show up in many guises. No , Kabuki, and Bunraku embody this cultural trend perhaps in its most stylized forms. Generally, the thesis might run, spectacular media enact and encode powerful but unreferentializable anthropological dispositions, involving, especially, codes of the body. They relate less clearly to cultural discourses and their implications of cultural unity, identity, or complexity than primarily language-based arts. In a cultural context like the Japanese, elaborate spectacle and elusive interiority are the wandering poles of enactment. Spectacular and interiorized (i.e., “emotional”) effects may be produced by the apparently most heterogeneous media. Media in Japan, sharply distinguished by constraints of form and locality, tend to overlap considerably with respect to the range of effects that they envisage. Within formal and local constraints, almost any mode of the wandering poles can be evoked. In Western eyes, this may appear as

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willful heterogeneity and confusion. In an anthropological perspective, it amounts to a rejection of well-circumscribed domains of art. One may suspect that Western cultures are slowly but reluctantly growing aware of similar elements in their own past and the trends of their present and imminent futures. Debates on postmodernism have been dancing around such issues like cats on a hot tin roof. In a high-cultural, traditional Western sense, that is to say, to a limited extent, theater and wrestling, for instance, would be located on the very opposite ends of an average cultural spectrum, although, as I will try to show later, their history of (non)relationships can be written very differently, too. Connections on levels of ceremonial-spectacular body codes between, say, Kabuki and Sumo wrestling in Japan, on the other hand, are quite obvious. I do not intend, of course, to willfully confuse, confound, or conflate these two. However, even in the case of No and its more strictly traditional, essentializing, and quasi-religious context, the analogy is unavoidable, at least in historical terms. Bohner (among others) has repeatedly drawn attention to the almost identical ritualistic context of sacred spaces in early No and Sumo for early medieval Japanese aristocratic society.36 In that sense, present-day Sumo , like Kabuki with respect to No , may be looked upon as a de-essentialized version of its archaic predecessor. Without losing archaic connotations or its extensive ceremonial framework, the spectacle nowadays can be bent to serve more contemporary commercial or media interests. Dress or nonfight movement codes may appear reduced in Sumo ; the wrestlers mostly show up in a state not very far from nakedness. Yet the degree of ceremonial elaboration in No , Kabuki, and Sumo is more or less the same. Owing to the ongoing urgency, but also the cultural instability of body codes, it is perhaps small wonder that their cruder forms, such as Western professional wrestling, women’s mud wrestling, and the like, have taken, if anything, even “worse” turns in Japan than in the West. The argument may further be buttressed by looking at a comparable impulse, in the West, in early Brecht. His slogan of the “theater as a sports institution” or as sports itself starts from the diagnosis that people do not have fun in the theater because they go there for the wrong reasons. These are related to, if not identical with, the reasons and pressures to go to school, the church, or the courtroom. They are not geared—and neither are most plays and theatrical productions themselves—to the “fascinating reality” that the sports arena produces or “stages,” especially, for Brecht, in boxing. In reading Brecht’s remarks on sports itself, it is clear that fascination presupposes a relative freedom of these different

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forms of “theater” from “cultural values” and sophisticated significance. Where Brecht talks explicitly about the relation between sports and intellectual/artistic creative work, he plays with its negative inversion. If geniuses have steered clear of sports, they have instead gone into its seeming opposite: illness, bodily neglect, and ruin.37 But that opposition is at best a playful one, since sports themselves have little or nothing to do with health.38 It is reminiscent of an equally specious opposition Churchill made up when he opted against sports (“absolutely no sports”), and instead for cigars and cognac. Generally, one might plunge here into the extremely rich but theoretically unsatisfactory topic of artistic-literary creation on one side, suffering on another, types of drugs and levels of drug consumption on a third.39 In the practice of an immaterialized, intellectually interiorized literature, body codes—the return of the repressed (one might, but only might say)—may apparently veer into excessive types very easily. Sumo —like boxing itself, increasingly, in the United States—might seem to severely test the patience of even the most benevolent spectator. There seems to be something patently absurd about it—particularly in the mode in which the lives of the wrestlers are put in danger. The risk of losing one’s life in the Sumo ring is, in contrast to boxing and bullfighting, minimal. But the wrestlers, in order to gain an optimal fighting stance with low centers of gravity, have to put on weight in excessive, sometimes downright grotesque degrees. However that may be, the mention of bullfighting should also put us on another track. If one ignores, in both cases, the very short moments of decisive combat, one has to make sense, or nonsense, of the elaborate ceremonials surrounding it. In Sumo , the fights in the narrow sense certainly have little to do with theater in the restricted sense. Yet they absorb only very little time of the spectacle. Much more time is spent with ceremonial pageants and gestures, with aesthetic (“colorful”) displays and the often hardly perceptible buildup of a psychologically charged atmosphere. All this is apt to stimulate as much excitement and applause as the fights themselves. Like some movements in No , these aesthetic displays and ceremonials have some kind of “symbolic” significance: purification, chasing away of demons, promise of honest combat. But the magnificent ceremonial especially of the grand champions (yokozuna) may be watched and enjoyed without that kind of relatively trite foreknowledge. Also, the mixture of ritual, staging, and psychological tension inherent in what Western theory would classify as a kind of “foreplay” between two fighters before the actual clash (or rather crash) dis-

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plays a combination of elaborate externality and implicit suspense rarely found in Western professional sports. In these and other ways, the boundaries between fight and spectacular ceremonial are fluid. This is why Sumo ceremonial can and does easily spill over into areas of social life, including ceremonial appearances on TV, absolutely remote from the fights themselves. Quite as easily, and again in a parallel to the theater proper, serious and dignified ceremonial may change into its parodistic, indeed farcical, inversion. Ease and speed in the transitions from serious ceremonial to playfully “naive” comic inversions, from spiritual to material(istic) concerns (like money prizes openly, but ceremonially presented “on stage”), would appear to mark Japanese culture to a striking degree. In Sumo , the referees are fully integrated into the framework of the spectacular. Referees are an integral part of the spectacle, not at all accessories or even supernumeraries. Enshrined in their own formally distinctive hierarchies and ceremonial splendor, the referees are, in a full sense, the only real directors of the fights. The voices with which they chant the names of fighters, encourage, and excite them to fight are strongly reminiscent of the voices in Kabuki. Sumo and Kabuki then, it would appear, illustrate Schechner’s performance thesis very precisely: for Schechner, games, sports, and theater are “‘middle terms,’ balancing and in some sense mediating and combining” the more self-assertive and private fantasy world of play and the more self-transcendent, programmed, and binding domain of ritual.40 Schechner’s thesis here is a theoretical one: it describes ideal types. An anthropology of media is more strongly concerned with the cultural dynamics, the balances, shifts, and distortions of such ideal types. This is why in the third part, the relation between seemingly unrelated extremes—relatively naked body codes in sports and relatively pure intellectual-spiritual domains in literature—will be examined in more detail. Theater and Sumo approach each other on a further level on body codes. We have briefly touched upon this topic before, but we must return to it now more extensively. In Sumo , the referee is also conspicuous by his vocal performance. In a specific vocal style, he cheers on the fighters and chants the names of the winners. In the traditional forms of theater, stylized vocal performance takes on a central but again elusive importance. Apart from passages approaching a “realistic” speaking style more closely, Kabuki chant (like Bunraku’s), indeed, is often close to crying, sobbing, whining, and the like. However “literary” the qualities may be of some of the “texts” of Kabuki plays (for a long time, they were

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not fixed in writing), especially those by the “Japanese Shakespeare,” Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), their modes of utterance, whether by the actors themselves or the reciter-narrator sitting with the “musicians” at the side, more or less preclude one or another variety of literary commentary. Muccioli, who is tempted to elevate the “aria cantata” utterance type of No (utai or yokyoku, besides the recital or “recitative,” kotoba) into “real literary jewels with not only artistic, but also philosophical and historical value,” to grant, in conscious opposition to historical trends of appreciation, psychological complexity to the sewamono of Chikamatsu (the social, domestic drama, in contrast to the historically higher-valued jidaimono, the historical plays), yet shrinks back from the implications—hard to put into clear conceptual form—of the Shakespeare comparison.41 The oscillations between impressionism, value judgment, and purportedly neutral analysis into which we seem to be thrust in the analysis of Japanese spectacular forms is indicative of a latent theoretical unease or impasse. One of the reasons why I like to quote older secondary literature is that this problem shows up there in a much clearer form. It seems that theory has taught us to hide the impasse, but not to steer clear of it. The unease is also at work in the superficially paradoxical impression that the extreme artifice of enunciation, especially in Bunraku, but also in No and Kabuki, produces what older theories (for instance those of eighteenth-century Western semiotics) had desperately tried to conceptualize as natural sounds. For some representatives of European “Romantic” and theatrical semiotics, as we know, the temptation loomed large to see literary language or theatrical body codes as natural signs. In theatrical semiotics especially, the triangle of embodiment, expression, and mere representation, proving fairly intractable, was replaced by illusionistic models. The absorbing power of “realistic illusions” becoming speedily doubtful, the problem finally resurfaced in Artaud’s theater of cruelty. In No and Kabuki, the potential theoretical strain for the spectator or the analyst is minimalized, because the risks of acting and enactment are neither dodged nor directly taken on. They are instead distributed, and perhaps diluted, in elaborated modes of vocal, visual, and movement stylization. Mishima, who himself wrote “modern” No plays, has perhaps summed up the overall (ideal) effect of No —vocal stylization as a form of nature—very suggestively. One of the main characters in the novel Runaway Horses (Homba, 1969) is warned that the intonation of a famous actor might sound “like a goose being strangled.” The voice does

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sound to him, indeed, like the “rasping together of rusty, discolored metal.” The recitation is broken by interruptions, the style of chanting seems to be “tearing the beauty of the words to shreds.” Despite all this, “the mood inspired was like the outpouring of a dark and ineffably elegant mist, like the sight of a moonbeam shining into a corner of a ruined palace to fall upon a mother-of-pearl furnishing.” Honda (the spectator) at some point begins to “find it hard to tell whether the images that shifted to and fro before him were reality or illusion”: “What came to his mind was not the meaning of this line but the significance of the unaccountable shudder that he had felt when the shité and his companion had stood together on the bridgeway and recited it, the moment of recitation imbued with perfect stillness, the chant falling like quiet rain.” Another suggestive term, used by the contemporary writer Hata Ko hei, for the entrancement of the spectator aimed at by No is “bored ecstasy.”42 Whatever one may think of the tendencies of Mishima’s novel(s) in which this fictional Osaka No performance in the 1930s is embedded, it does seem to suggest as precisely as possible the tantalizing mixture of artificially naturalist, aestheticist, and ritualistic-symbolic components and the absence of representational drives. Likewise, it is hard to describe the modes of body enactment in Kabuki. It has nothing to do, of course, with the fighting core of Sumo . Yet a Sumo match danced in a Kabuki dance play (for instance in Oshino Fusuma Koino Mutsugoto) indicates a basic cultural affinity, not a literary motif. There is a common dimension of speed and slow movement, of ease and artifice, of a climactic emphasis on the single, decisive, and well-executed movement. One is confronted with phenomena that invite but also elude the application of Western theory. If No and the chanting of Bunraku may stimulate and frustrate the efforts of semiotics, Kabuki and Sumo might plunge us again into the conceptual tortures exercised by topics like artifice (nurture) and nature on Western theory traditions. The theoretical strain (in a double sense) of distinguishing between nature (for some time now seen as inaccessible) and the ambiguities of body cultures, between the cultivation, the living out, and the subjection of the body, has been very much in evidence, in the twentieth century and in the West. Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rudolf zur Lippe’s Naturbeherrschung am Menschen (a title difficult to translate, nature connoting physical, but not only physical, nature), theories of the vanishing body, the fragmented body, and the politics of its recovery—they all, and many more, may come to mind.

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To my mind, Paul Valéry, in his philosophico-poetic writings on dance, came closer to what is going on in both Kabuki and Sumo . Dance, implicit or explicit, the harmonious distortion of rhythm as a body code, is a major element embedded or openly performed in Kabuki. (As with No , the origins of Kabuki in popular and religious dances—kabuki odori—are obvious and undisputed. Today, one-third of the repertoire still consists of dance plays, shosagoto. Unlike Western theater, history and the present are much more clearly related to the forms’ origins in No and Kabuki.) Dance seems to coerce, or cajole, theory into tacit submission. It comes closest to a suspension of well-entrenched theoretical distinctions like the one between the dancer and the dance, as Yeats poetically has it, between subject and object or similar ontologies. In dance, artifice, the subjection of the body, turns into the productivity of the quasi-natural, once that subjection is practiced with perfect ease. In that respect, zur Lippe’s effort to distinguish between natural dancing, the dance raves, or “mad” dances in medieval or early modern Europe and the counternatural subjection of the body in the dances of absolutistic Europe has failed. Thus, anthropology can postulate the necessity of a stimulation, shaping, and encoding of body rhythms, but it cannot critically interpret or pass judgment on the codes themselves, even if these are elaborated in what appears as highly ideological sociopolitical contexts. I am not asserting, of course, a total lack of conceptual access to dance or to chanting. Conceptions, programs, and histories of dance can be written, and techniques can be analyzed. But in terms of cultural function, dance and voice, and by implication No and Kabuki, demand “appreciation.” In many histories of these forms, with Hermann Bohner’s scholarly pathos as the perhaps best example, there exists a huge gap between history, the technical analysis of music, masks, and dance types on the one hand, and descriptions of media effects or cultural status on the other. Were it not sacrilegious, one might dream of adjusting and applying the term “observation” monopolized for its own purposes by systems theory. “Observation,” for present purposes, could be defined as particular mergings of (fore)knowledge (technical-formal expertise) and quasi-spontaneous perception, as a play of distance and immediacy. It is possible, I think, to watch and “enjoy” Kabuki and Sumo , perhaps also Bunraku and No , without any foreknowledge in the ordinary sense at all. For a somewhat more concentrated appreciation, watching the (wrestling) techniques of Sumo and the crucial poses in Kabuki demands perhaps a comparative knowledge guiding perception (more popularly, one

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could say it demands expertise and enthusiasm or emotional readiness). It does not demand those forms of perception that are drawn compulsively into interpretation. The erasure of representational reliefs is perhaps best seen in those plays already hinted at that, like Date Musume Koi no Hi Ganoko, transform the historical neighborhood of Bunraku and Kabuki into a systematic media affinity. In such cases, a Kabuki actor, for instance, plays a puppet that is seemingly manipulated by stage assistants. The “puppet” may, toward the end, develop into a “human being.” While such plays seem to play representationally with ideas of puppets and human beings, they also display, much more powerfully to my mind, art as absolute, that is spell-binding technique. The fusion of art, skill, and “tricks” (concentrated in the word gei), the pushing of “technical” difficulties to an extent not at all demanded by some higher goal of representational sophistication (in handling the puppets, for instance), is in abundant evidence, particularly in Bunraku itself. In the Kabuki play just mentioned, the apparent, “representational” transformation depends on body techniques in which, much in the manner of contemporary rap dance and other techniques, the distinction between the mechanical and the human shows up only as a transient possibility. Representation, if one wanted to speak of that, is both reduced and elaborated into body-based techniques. By extension, one could speak of techniques of the self. In that case, in comparison with the Western metaphor, one would have to take the term “technique” in a somewhat more if not totally literal sense. Again, an opaque closeness with archaic forms of circuslike show-theater and folk performing art and their many suggestive details, whether religiously tinged or not, could be adduced.43 Thus, generally, Kabuki seems to drive home “effects” in what might be called elaborate immediacy. Stage machinery is complicated and imposing, costumes enormously ostentatious and varied, gestures and movements minimalized, striking, and also “exaggerated.” Machinery, stylizations, stunning and bodily demanding acting techniques work toward mie—the supreme pose, frozen, for a few seconds, into a kind of live still life. During special events, actors elaborate gestures, movements, and facial expressions that are literally made up, or rather contortions into extremes (Kaomise Kabuki). Written in three Chinese characters, Kabuki has come to mean song, dance, and extroverted, wild behavior. The visual feast of colors, forms, of fast or slow but in any case elaborate movements, does not reject sentiment. The backdrop of stories,

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taken from the well-known stock of history and legend, mostly indulges in the massage of feelings of the simpler, cheaper kind. Kitsch is never far off. Mobilizing the resources of the sociology of art, one could provisionally argue that both the exteriorization of aesthetic effects and the stereotyped simplicity of story and sentiment follow from the political censorship and pressure to which the theater of commercial parvenus and the newly rich was subjected. Sociologically, Kabuki, apart from being tied to the censured sphere of wealthy Osaka merchants, also derives from the dances, religious and otherwise, of neighboring groups of courtesans in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto. Here, with things transgressing not so much the limits of morality but the limits of social control, distinctions between the more intellectual and the more fleshly forms of pleasure were particularly hard to draw. Women actors were prohibited. Young male actors, employed instead, after a short while produced the same confusion. Older actors, in their turn, were still most easily recruited from homosexual prostitution. The sociopolitical pressures did not destroy but rather contributed to the emancipation of spectacular priorities: the onnagata, the male actor impersonating a woman, came to represent perhaps the most outstanding form of elaborate but subdued spectacular, body-based acting.44 The onnagata represents the structural core of the fusion of artificiality and elaborate immediacy in Kabuki. For him/her, approaches toward illusionistic forms of realism were historically prohibited and have consequently been ruled out aesthetically. “Reference” to politico-social implications being out of the question, Kabuki elaborated quasi-archaic topics, myths, or events into spectacular, representationally stunted shows. Sociologically, Kabuki and its highly expensive machinery move toward both extreme elitism and extreme popularity. From its beginnings to the present day, it has practiced the star system as cultural normalcy. In the great dynasties and families of actors (the Ichikawas, Nakamuras, etc.), status and income compare with Hollywood or opera stars. The elements of art (the severe, long-term training) and ritual (taking over the given name, that is the prestige-as-burden of a famous predecessor in the family), however, would seem to belong to a very different, more archaic socio-aesthetic realm. Again, the fusion of the contemporary and the archaic is conspicuous. Sociological observations in this domain, then, are historically pertinent. In the anthropological perspective, however, they are less than fruitful. The anthropological dimension, never totally clear, looms be-

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hind what one might call basic options in mentality and media orientations, perhaps motivated, but never totally determined, by social-political factors. In order to provide other contexts, one might point to nearly basic differences of long duration in the combination of political and socioreligious domains between Japan and the West. Western monarchies (the English, for instance) may occasionally have had nonmoralistic, nonreligious, “pure” interests of power and/as social control. More often, however, in some however veiled “Puritanical” or generally religious perspective, it was blended with so-called moral, self-reflexive concerns. “Protestantism” (embodied most precisely by the historical forms normally subsumed under that label) indeed, as a kind of core in JudeoChristian traditions, seems to constitute the religion of self-reflexiveness, later diluted into ethics and philosophy. It seems doubtful to me whether anything in the West is completely free from its tinges. If we take A. S. Byatt’s already quoted Lucas Simmonds in The Virgin in the Garden just a little bit seriously, we can assume that moralized self-reflection has been compounded with anxieties, not totally unfounded, that the fascination of “play” might undermine the peculiar mixture of political (social) and religious (mental) control practiced in various forms in the West. Western spectacular theater, where it existed (court masques in England, the royal theatrical machinery in seventeenth-century France), was therefore subjected to and hedged in by ideological controls, by a precise sociopolitical symbolism little and only initially or intermittently known in the much longer history of Japanese spectacular forms. An old maxim for Kabuki playwrights, if one wants to call them that, advised them to write the libretto (for this is what the text here amounts to) as if they were drawing a picture, not as if they were writing Chinese characters. That may seem superficial. But it is related to a—“Buddhist”—assumption that if there is anything that should be called concretely real, it is the moment “which like the image from a single frame of motion picture film is instantaneously followed by a new and different frame and image.”45 In fact, one might use that assumption to explain not only the workings of media (including, as we will see shortly, “literature”), but, in the absence of either ontologies or consciousness/conscience-based criteria of the real, the particularly persistent efforts of “superficially” ordering reality by imposing fairly strict everyday, formal behavioral controls in Asian countries. Buddhism—much in contrast to what its Western adepts and propagandists often seem to assume—has ceased to be a vital, immediate force in Japanese life. But, as Ernst has said, “its centuries of influence con-

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tinue to color the Japanese intellect and emotions.”46 As an attitude, or a form of awareness (perhaps not really consciousness in a strong Western sense), it is possible everywhere. It does not depend on the somewhat ridiculous efforts of Western disciples. Its implications with respect to modes of perception and experience would seem to drift toward the anthropological family of concepts such as flow, engrossing states, arousal, intermediary zones, liminal/liminoid, that are crucial to the present work. The fact that efforts at such cultural translation can all too easily fail is due to both the similarities and the alien qualities seemingly residing, in reciprocal observation, in the cultures compared. If one is not aware of potentials of basic similarities, the diverging elaborations of difference will continue to hold sway over cognitive habits. To seemingly talk about Japan (or Japanese theater) is not just to talk about that. It is, in Barthes’s vein, to focus on a larger anthropological potential and the roads taken or not taken by various cultures and their media within that potential. Thus we obtain the somewhat frustrating picture of cultural features both overlapping and radically diverging from each other: the vanity and mutability of earthly forms of order and claimed stability is a truism both for Christianity and more secular forms of thought in East and West. Extolling the evanescent reality of the attractive moment is a gesture not unknown to Western art. Lococentrism—in contrast to the somewhat overdrawn pictures of Western logocentrism—and “presentism” are linguistic and historical forces perhaps anywhere. The world has been visualized and conceptualized as “a stage” in both East and West. We can observe trends of Western self-deconstruction at work, undermining our dichotomies, not just in literature, but in philosophy as well. Thinking of that, we may feel, in a more cynical mood, some affinity with the Japanese irony that suggests Japan does not need deconstruction because it has always had it. In a nice gesture, Ortolani has drawn attention to the fact that Kabuki in Japan emerged simultaneously with opera in Florence and with the heyday of Shakespearean theater.47 We may take the chronological condensation as a both kairotically and neurotically symbolic moment in anthropological mutuality and cultural divergence. This is what this chapter and the following ones on opera and related Western phenomena are about. In spite of vague overlappings, diverging mentality and media drifts have remained operationally powerful in the very process of their theoretical undermining. Fredric Jameson may comment, with much sympathy and self-reflection, upon Karatani’s book on the origins of

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modern Japanese “literature.” But the comments, for all their insistence on difference, are gestures of appropriation in terms of theory and style of thought. Jameson belabors a difficult book heavy-handedly with the habitual Western theoretical and historical machinery. There is none of the playful (put negatively: vague) handling of comparative concepts like capitalism that we find in Asada’s “fairy tale” about Japanese capitalism and postmodernism.48 Underhandedly, then, trends toward consistency, relatedness, and coherence will hold their sway in the West. They may result from habits of thought however problematized; they may issue from market pressures however problematic. At first and second glances, the type of consistency connecting and especially separating Western culture in its higher and lower forms (let us say professional literature and professional wrestling) is very different from the connections existing or not existing between literature and Sumo wrestling in Japan. For the former, an analysis along the lines of Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment— parallel forms of a “rational” specialization and exploitation of the resources of mind and body with no definite limits—would do very well. Clearly, the body appears to be confined, in the West, to a cultural underground or underdog existence, rarely admitted, in its modes and codes of experience into the pantheon of higher art, frequently erupting, by contrast, in the seemingly totally opposed, and therefore often speciously harmonized, cultural codes of violence. In Japan, the body codes of art and violence are neither harmonized nor in total opposition to each other. The sliding scale of body art and body violence, both direct and implicit, is overarched by ritualistic, ceremonial, or playful spectacular constraints. Overdoing things, one might say that the body tattoo patterns of Yakuza gangsters may also aspire to high art; the relation between the art of tattoo and sexuality anyway has been deployed in Japanese films (e.g., The Tattoo Master). Japanese culture, then, would appear as a side-by-side culture. Spectacular noise and elusive interiority, intellectual seriousness and grossest nonsense, elaborate formality and negligent looseness, stylishness, both traditional in the kimono and contemporary in the latest Western outfit, and stylistic incoherence or lack of style coexist in assigned places, but can also be adopted on what appears as the spur of the moment. Spectacles, to some extent, may be charged with vague symbolism. But one has to reckon also with an ultimate magnificent meaninglessness. Flaubert, in his technique of so-called “objective poetry” in Salammbô (denounced

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as the product of a sadistic imagination by Sainte-Beuve), may have come close to that, absorbed as the text seems to be by spectacles of grandiose landscapes, gruesome battles, and religious mysteries. It is significant that a consistency-obsessed theoretician and historian like Georg Lukács, in his study of the historical novel, should have seen hardly more than a wrong way for the historical novel in Flaubert’s text. Karatani has drawn attention to the origins—in an artistic sense—of Kabuki in puppet plays. Painting the face of human Kabuki actors amounts, then, to an effort to preserve the mask, that is, to prevent the face from expressing any illusionistically individualized meaning. The mie, the frozen “overdone” poses, springing from a repertoire of basic emotions, transform the psychological “content” into a technical-spectacular display. They do not engage in its illusionistic elaboration into either character or its deconstruction. Again, this is a latent but culturally neglected dimension of Western plays, too. This was demonstrated to a considerable extent by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Shakespeare productions (especially Richard II and Henry IV) in the Paris Théâtre du Soleil in the 1980s. Here, too, the dynamic and visually splendid spectacle of intense movement fused with monotonously rhythmicized “music” and striking poses carried the day (almost literally, since the productions lasted for a long time, somewhat similar again to Kabuki).49 The aspects spread out in the preceding pages have been tentatively offered also with the intention of preparing the way for another discussion of “literature.” As I have noted, serious ceremonial spectacle in Japanese culture may almost automatically provoke parodic forms of comic and farcical inversion. In this respect, the variety of spectacles bespeaks both the urgency and the potential instability of “aesthetic” effects. Since they are not rooted in some stable or generalized significance, people may be bored very quickly. In “literature,” however, the instability of the aesthetic turns into the totally different problem of the cultural status, the general intentionality, of nonspectacular writing. By and large, the notion of an author emerged only toward the end of the nineteenth century in Japan. The author of a play or prose, together with the “man of letters,”50 was part and parcel of Japan’s so-called Westernization. Since this was an enforced, both radical and superficial modernization, the status of the author, and the profession of literary writing, has remained culturally unstable. This is not just a question of a Foucaultian authorial function difficult to personalize. Foucault takes the function of writing very much for granted (although not, of course,

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the individualized authors): the archaeology of knowledge depends in fact mainly on the archives of writing. In Japan, it is the cultural intentionality of this function that is at stake. That activity is of course in some sense self-evident; but it is far from going without saying. It is striking that in the early “modern” Japanese  gai the trend toward a (Western) exploration prose writers So seki and O of a disembodied but psychologically coherent interiority of writing is slowed down in the simultaneous commitment to Chinese poetry and/or the practice of ink-brush painting.51 Meanwhile, certainly, Japanese prose, as exemplified for instance by novels, has come to develop and display perhaps predominantly features similar or identical with Western types. The “logic” of (professionalized) writing, the production of multifarious perspectives within something representing or at least residually resembling a story, will see to that. This holds true, I think, even for a writing system mainly made up of the complex Chinese characters that, charged as it is with associational clusters and halos, does not yield so easily to expressive or representational pressures. Nowadays, it certainly has become more difficult to maintain the traditional judgment or impression that although the forms of Japanese prose look familiar to Western reading eyes, they also appear malformed with respect to Western expectations. Even so, the argument can always be bent backward. Rimer in particular, more insistently than Miner, has suggested areas where the mentality and media discrepancies talked about so far may keep pushing Japanese and Western “literature” in very different directions—so much so that a unified concept seems again to be called into question. This is due, to start with, to a different layout of the basic distinction between fiction and reality. The distinction has been theoretically and practically undermined in the West. In the most sophisticated forms of that erosion, however, second-level distinctions come back with a vengeance: it is often and sometimes exclusively literature that is mainly credited with the subversive work. (The position of Western philosophy—acknowledging to some extent relativism or even deconstruction, but clinging to the critical gesture—is even more precarious. Normative epistemologies have been dismissed, but forms of sometimes intensely critical, latently or openly dogmatic discourse keep plodding on.) This is far from a mode of perception elaborated in Japanese forms of literature that runs back and forth between the shapelessness of the real and suddenly crystallizing, vaguely profound or significant impressions.52 Such a dis-

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course type does not even pay an ironic or deconstructive lip service to pretended continuities of the self or the world. Traditionally in Japan, in the rarefied context of elite social interaction, the highest genre was lyric poetry, which was hardly distinguished from song. Its aesthetic effect—the absence of an expressive urge, for instance in haiku, on which Barthes has written persuasively—seems remote from any of the literary effects in the West. This is why central literary terms like mono no aware (the “ahness of things”)53 and yugen (mystery and depth), comparable as they may seem (the beauty of overtones, behind the surface), simultaneously move away from any Western poetics. Rimer quotes Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality,” writing about the “meanest flower,” which can give “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” Yet he rightly insists on a crucial difference: in Wordsworth, the transcendental, or at least transcending, experience produces thoughts, commentaries—a tendency toward expression. It is instructive to see how Ueda’s effort to define yugen, by contrast, veers out of control when he tries to employ notions like imitation (to be found, of course, as we have seen, in Zeami) and expression. At first, there seems to be a Keats-like or Yeats-like equation of “beauty and (hidden, profound) truth.” Then there is talk about a “remote, shadowy, and eerie world where primeval emotions aimlessly flow.” Later, an appeal to the perception demanded by painting and sculpture appears necessary; finally, a move toward “a definition of poetry.” No seems to escape that category altogether: many plays “are not good works of literature” because their themes are “commonplace, trite, and sentimental.” They are “saved only by their non-literary elements such as singing, dancing and mimicry.”54  gai, Taking such aspect clusters into account, it is no surprise that O heavily exposed to the West, especially to a Germany in which literature came to occupy an exalted place, should have wanted to write both Western-type novels and a “literature of fact,” true biographies totally incompatible with imaginative fiction. Taking both claims seriously, one  gai is regarded priwould have to say that he failed at both. In Japan, O marily as a stylist. He can also be seen variously as a philosophicalscholarly or even scientific-medical writer. He himself, trying for a while to live and write up to the logic of modernization, considered the Meiji period and its rapid Westernization as an age of and for the novel: “Yes, the world of Meiji has become the world of the novel!” Novel fever had

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 gai himself, however, supplanted the German “Dichteritis” of the past. O was forced to admit that although he had written a large number of “short stories as practice for greater things,” he had “failed when [he] was confronted with a novel.”55 Similarly, his systematic work in aesthetics—mainly translations and “adaptations” of German aesthetic systems—attracted very little attention. While such remarks sound trivially empirical, they also suggest that the Japanese cultural space provides less scope for a consistent theory and practice of “fiction”—and perhaps still does to a large extent. In dealing with Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If,  gai was unable to overcome what would be considered, in the West, O Puritan theoretical limitations. He translated Vaihinger’s “Fiktion” as “lie” (uso).56 The intellectual awareness that these were fully conscious lies apparently did not help. In such difficult conceptual situations, there is little help to be derived  gai “maintains the distinction [between fiction from assertions that O and reality] with a vengeance.” To take this literally (like his translation of Vaihinger’s concept of fiction above) would mean to credit him with extreme epistemological naiveté. By the same token, it does not pay to  gai is tempered, or overshadowed, by “the author’s say that “fact” in O 57 personal voice.” Rather than issues of fiction and nonfiction, literature and nonliterature, factual, personal, or “imaginary” orientation, it is the cultural intentionality of sustained, professionalized, but not immediately pragmatic writing that is at stake. Indirect evidence for that can be extracted from the state of institutionalized (for instance academic) theory and interpretation. The critical world in Japan tends to be “a miniature one. Small questions are answered brilliantly. Large ones are seldom posed. . . . As yet, Japan has produced no Lukács, no Adorno. . . . In sum, in modern Japanese literary criticism there exists a natural and tacit understanding that much can be assumed.”58 Deconstruction, as an official and explicit business, has had a hard time in Japan. Karatani and Asada in particular have made fun of the grim determination with which deconstruction is (or was) pursued in the West. Its possibility can always be assumed, its necessity is always in doubt.59 In reading Japanese “novels,” modern ones in particular, and the critical literature assaying and making some sense of them, a tantalizing impression may keep accumulating. Japanese texts seem neither to invalidate nor to offer themselves to logically, theoretically compelling or well-nigh unavoidable approaches. While one can apply all kinds of theoretical distinctions, they seem to be deprived of clear or habitual mo-

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tivations. Frequently, the Japanese critical vocabulary will tend toward the distinction of “kinds” of beauty: So seki’s haikulike novel, Kafu ’s Kabuki-like structures presenting a “series of static scenes—one is tempted to say ukiyoe scenes”—where reading seems to turn into viewing, Tanizaki’s extolling of Kabuki acting at its best as a place comparable to a masterpiece in painting or architecture, where one may feel spiritual beauty emerge from the face, eyes, or postures of the actor.60 But one can also call this, with Tanizaki, a tendency of that theater and of the literature frequently written by Tanizaki himself toward the hedonistic, sensual, fleshy. Implications of “aestheticism”—the tendency toward both crude sensuality and spiritual, evanescent refinement—may be said to be at stake, or floating around freely. Tanizaki, for one, opts for shadowy forms of beauty because they breed “fantasies.”61 An implicit, unresolved aestheticism might indeed account to some extent for the intertwinings and a certain exchangeability of traditional and modern prose. Prose, in one of its characteristic trends, works toward anticlimactic climaxes characteristic of haiku. That is why So seki’s Kusamakura can be called a haiku novel or a haikulike novel (haikuteki shosetsu).62 The protagonist stands still as events move impressionlike around him, rather than moving through those events himself. The novel is written in a kind of haiku prose foreshadowed in the travel diaries (1687) of the haiku master Basho . This is also why these effects are analogous to the development of atmosphere and central moments in No . The intensity can be said to stress interiority, but it is like an interiority emanating from a powerful portrait, not the interiority elaborated in a Western drama.63 Kawabata, indeed, seems to offer a combination of the Western (“Paterian”) aesthetic orientation and a rejection of its premise (professional writing). Writing records encounters with beauty, a beauty emanating, however, from a strongly lived vitality. That is why, apart from some writers, a strangely mixed group of little children, young women, and dying men seem best qualified to discover it. “Creative” writing, then, does not really tolerate its built-in tendency toward professionalization. Kawabata can occasionally see more “poetry” in the suicide notes of a leading long-distance runner (Tsuburaya, who killed himself at the age of twenty-seven in 1968—a kind of combination of child and dying man) than in most of the literature written in his time. Kawabata can theoretically demand the presence of plot and write novels in which nobody finds it.64 The most striking feature of Kawabata’s works, apart from their al-

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most clichélike combination of “lyrical” beauty and sadness, which seems to be the “topic” of a “novel” Beauty and Sadness (Utsukushisa to Kanashimi to, 1961; American version 1975), seems to be the fact that most of them have remained “unfinished” (Edward Seidensticker). For that type of text, again, distinctions between novel and factual report do not apply: Kawabata’s The Master of Go (Meijin, 1954; American version 1972) frequently even ignores the “logic” of narrative tense structure. One would be hard pressed to say what such a text is driving at: is it the spirituality of a sports contest? The disappearance of traditional Japanese values? In Beauty and Sadness, Kawabata seems, if only in passing, to relate the effectiveness of beauty with media potentials: The Tale of Genji and other old tales can never be perceived (“read”) in their original way, but even so, old editions give “a more intense pleasure” than modern ones. The question to what extent beauty is more adequately presented (embodied in painting, sculpture, or novels—the novel being mainly “about” people in these professions) is left dangling. Again, the famous Snow Country (Yukiguni, written between 1934 and 1947; American version 1956) seems remarkable mainly for the haikulike “brief flashes in the void,” as Edward Seidensticker characterizes them, generally, that is, for the challenge, both practical and theoretical, of bringing the novel into line with a type of tiny text from which any effort at representation or expression has vanished.65 Novels of that type seem to wander continually between representative constructs (plot and character elements, “psychology” of the more normal and abnormal kinds) and their incidental, not at all deconstructive erosion, between the urgency of concerns and irresolution in handling them. In Mishima, perhaps the paradigmatic writer in that respect, the urgency of a literature dealing with the friction between modernization and tradition increases, but so does a narrative irresolution that borders on pointlessness. Once one turns to and reinterprets somewhat submerged dimensions of Western aesthetics in the light of such impressions, the culturally broken but basic relatedness of media trends will become apparent. A culturally slanted anthropology of media is possible because it is handling the latent, fragmented affinities of culturally diversified forms. Distinctions like the “Faustian” quality of much Western art, the “passivity” of some Eastern art, the minimal or maximum differences between fiction and nonfiction66 then appear as shiftable motifs. The associational structure of many Japanese texts seems related to Western stream-of-consciousness techniques, but it does not reflect a “modernist” experience of modernity.

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As with the theater, a tentative conclusion can be drawn from these arguments with respect to the “novel.” In spite of the apparently strong presence of “fiction” on the Japanese scene, the status of the literary, embodied most paradigmatically in novels in the West, appears to be much more fragile. Radical or idiosyncratic ways of coping with the strain of writing, with both its urgency in a complex world and its ineffectual efforts in doing anything about it, appear to be much more in evidence with Japanese writers. Both in their writings and in their lives, Japanese writers pay heavy tolls to the costs of negotiating the psychological and physical black hole around which writing keeps weaving its tempting and failing attractions. “Tragic” qualities implied in the activities allowed and restrained in the medium of writing stand out rather more starkly than in the West. Kawabata used to support “fresh” writers at the beginning of their career, but in most cases quickly lost faith in their professionalized progress, often praising those who had died young. The effort of writing, performed in an atmosphere removed from the beauty of vitality, appearances, or engaging materials, keeps the nagging question alive whether writers, more than other artists, are not “selfdeluded sentimentalists.”67 We are thus dealing with a heavily charged self-reflexiveness of writing. For Shiga (who, like Kawabata, wrote a lot), it was easy to imagine a life without literature, tied as that medium seems to be to forms of disappointed life. Akutagawa, extolling a connection between the creative spirit and life force of sorts, could not free himself from the suspicion that the life force received more justice from other media (like painting). Feeling that he had lost his own, he committed suicide at the age of thirty-five. Dazai, only slightly older (thirty-nine), did the same—whether he did it or not because he came to see literature as an airplane that does not fly, a steed that does not gallop, or as food for losers does not matter very much.68 In Japanese contexts, where clichélike modes of suicide and their elaborate vocabulary have been culturally normalized for a long time, it may be pointless or crude to set up a further correlation between writing and suicide.69 Yet, compared with the West, the density of coincidence is striking. Kawabata might be a further case, even if the cause of his death—strange accident or suicide—has not been conclusively determined. Death accords with his feeling, toward the end, of having never written what he intended to write. In such a perspective, Western compromises between writing and parody could be radicalized, for Japan, into a basic dilemma of writing: writing provokes the intentional-expres-

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sive desire, but thwarts or spoils its performance. In that respect, it is indeed related to the porter’s view of alcohol in Macbeth. Analytically, in his autobiographical The Life of a Fool (1927) and in his essays Literary, Too Literary (1927), Akutagawa (1892–1927) has presented the case of the Japanese literary writer most clearly. Writing seemed finally to come into its own in the “liberal” Taisho period (1912– 26), after the struggles during the Meiji Westernization. The superiority of literature, its essence concentrated in Western models, appeared to be overwhelming: “Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.” Akutagawa, growing up in a family structure uncannily like Mishima’s (see below), devoured literary works to such an extent that any perception and observation immediately became couched in literary codes. In the Japanese telescoping of developments drawn out over centuries in the West, however, modernization very quickly changes into the fin de siècle, literary writing into self-referential, self-conscious artistry, the writer into what Akutagawa diagnoses as an emasculated being. In the concluding chapter of Literary, Too Literary, “The Literary Arctic,” he analyzes the effect of literature as the freezing of the soul in the ecstasy, the spell that literary writing initially provides. Whatever its purported realisms or commitments, literature will inevitably turn into a selfreferential, self-paralyzing weapon. Considering this and his suicide, delivered after the dispatch of suicide and farewell notes bespeaking lucid intelligence and deliberate irony, as well as a concern with poetic effects, it is somewhat ironic that a literary prize should have been named after Akutagawa. Even in Tanizaki, seen by many as the nearest embodiment of a Western concept of literature in Japan, the sense that “fiction” needs a world constructed or experienced in such a way as to function as a trigger for fictional discourse remained strong throughout his career. If one does not bear that in mind, one will normally wonder about how to make some sort of sense out of what appears as almost “too bizarre” for ordinary ways of analysis in Tanizaki’s novels.70 The most glaring, sensational configuration was, of course, supplied by Mishima (1925–70). Initially, a lofty conception of literature as an interpretation of the universe and a deep perception of humanity held sway. The notion appeared defensive from the outset, however. It ran parallel to a distrust of music, which Mishima compared to a ravening beast forcibly confined to a not so reliable cage. Another “cultural Achilles heel,” which also occasionally plagued Akutagawa, was Mishima’s almost complete inability to handle painting. Like Akuta-

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gawa, he was finally invaded by a felt total lack of power in literature. Literary awareness and the urgency of writing deteriorated, metaphorically, into an excess stomach fluid eating up the lining of the stomach. The writer as radiologist contaminates himself with the radiation he handles.71 Unlike Akutagawa, however, Mishima set up a program of “activist” stark contrasts that overshadowed the ongoing process of writing: the passion for traditional if not archaic sociopolitical goals, with a stronger role for the emperor at the center, to be implemented by a small private army (Tatenokai—the Shield Society), ironically trained occasionally by the Japanese official Self-Defense Forces, and the cult of the body in the form of bodybuilding, certainly inspired by Mishima’s Greek experience. In an ideal world, “Boxing and Art would shake hands.”72 In the real world, Mishima, at age forty-five, delivered the last installment of his last novel one morning and then committed his notoriously famous suicide in a building of an Ichigaya- (Tokyo-) based regiment of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. As for Akutagawa, a “feverish” literary career (literary historians like to call it “brief and intense”), with an immense production of novels, short stories, plays (including “modern” No plays), and other writings, came to a sudden halt. Speculations, to be sure, abound. Mishima’s biography, in any case, especially in Scott Stokes’s occasional documentary and diary style, makes for weird reading. The disrepute biographical criticism has fallen into notwithstanding, one cannot but wonder that Mishima, like Akutagawa and Dazai, would have provided one of the strongest instances for Muschg’s tragic literary history. With Mishima, one is tempted to the utmost to transform the general contours of a psychology of the medium into a definite psychoanalytical version: born into a problematic, to all intents and purposes “pathological” family structure, Mishima plunged into compulsive reading and writing as a manic projection of other worlds around the age of twelve. Dazai may have lost himself in the maze of direct confessionalism; Mishima, on the surface, moved into the other extreme, literature as verbal prolixity, preciousness, and overelaboration, fed by what John Nathan and many others have described as a nihilistic, sadomasochistic aestheticism.73 Stripping away layers of the sensational and of psychoanalytical determinism, one is yet tempted to see the simultaneity of the fascination, temptation, powerlessness, and pathology of writing at its strongest. Life lacking both the sophistication and clarity that can be so alluringly imagined, writing jumps in, as Barthes once said, fictitiously and yet also almost tangibly supplying both. But in a country where both beautiful,

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orderly enactments of behavior with the tacitly spiritualized perception of quiet forms of beauty and latent but sometimes brutally eruptive forms of violence are still fairly well entrenched layers of culture, where the perception of color (iro) still carries an immediate and full range of psychosocial connotations (beauty, mood, facial expression, tone, emotion, love, lust, passion, rank, etc.), the feeling of an ultimate futility of writing as professionalized, “mere” writing may rear its head very quickly. From the late 1960s onward, one may suspect, Mishima, feeling on the verge of “noncommunication,” had to come to terms with what he called “my failure as a novelist.”74 The representational lures of writing—their temptations and their problems—thus do not transform themselves as smoothly and continually into antirepresentational writing as in the West. In Western writing, the parody of modes of writing is itself a well-established mode: variations on Beckett’s “imagination dead imagine,” that is, on the productivity of what appears to be headed toward a dead end, have become culturally normal. The impossibility of representational writing has come to continually spawn or spark new possibilities, however short-lived in the West—or so it seems. In a Western perspective, Japanese writing, by contrast, may appear to hover uneasily between the extremes of its neardissolution in evocations of evanescent, “lyrical” beauty and an uncomfortably direct confessionalism, between unmotivated fragments of plot and surprisingly direct “philosophical” pretensions. The effort of Roy Starrs, for instance, to describe Mishima as a “philosophic novelist” in the manner of Goethe or Thomas Mann (or Gide) seems stillborn. Not only does that type of novel run counter to the more dominating Japanese taste for indirection, to the resistance to discussing ideas explicitly. It also provokes unsatisfactory and inconclusive, obviously self-defeating and self-refuting debates about Mishima’s “philosophic wisdom,” the quality of his “thought” and writing. Implicitly, Starrs abandons his approach when he says that “Mishima’s offering this public his rather heavy, German-style philosophic novels was somewhat as if a sushi chef had suddenly begun to serve them black sausage and sauerkraut.”75 Even with Mishima, one can keep interpretations at a middle and more generally analytical distance. In Japan (which, to repeat, is supposed to represent an ideal type, a cultural model, not an empirical culture), “fiction,” paradigmatically embodied by novels, is trapped and paralyzed much more than in the West by the whirling cultural implications of the spectacular—its potentially fascinating meaninglessness, as

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well as its potentially high ideological charge. The complexity of modern situations, in particular, seems to demand highly flexible, indeed “fictional,” discourses, because the direct connection between discourse and event turns out, in all too many cases, to be a short circuit. Fiction produces forms of both complexity and concreteness that can hardly be matched elsewhere. Yet, in some form, the costs of such an achievement must be accounted for. Japanese and Western forms of writing come closest to each other in what one calls the detective novel. It is not necessary to speculate about its boom anywhere or its indirect structural presence in a lot of sophisticated “great” literature in the West since the nineteenth century. One can assume that the detective novel takes care of an area of life in which Western and Eastern cultures have come to resemble each other most succinctly: in the mixture of modern complexity and the near archaic challenge of radically deviant behavior.76 The detective novel does not really deal with either complexity or archaic challenge: it instead defuses their tensions, on a level of facts and limited meanings, in single, nontransferable resolutions. “Ordinary” literature and spectacles, though, are different kinds of cultural touchstones. Spectacles, especially in their ceremonial forms, are formal and aesthetic ways of both acting out and containing energy. Whatever ideological connotations it may bear, this formalization is in itself a surrogate of and a defense against meaning. The history of the relationship between spectacles and forms of literature in the West is therefore a troubled one. Trends towards privileging literature therefore appear to be tied up with waves of iconoclasm on the one hand, and an overkill of images on the other hand. In Japan, the heavily “Westernized” Mishima embodies the fall from one extreme into the other. Mishima practices and embodies the mixture of obsession and professionalized routine (“pot-boiling”), of a hallucinatory fascination with literature and the violent compensations such “empty fictions” seem to cry out for. But he also shows that the flight from literature, once it seems to have become imperative, cannot simply embrace the dated forms of ritual. Ritualistic endeavors (whether bodybuilding, kendo, or the private “army” of the Shield Society), once pursued directly, turn into a stark contrast: a theatricality that remains empty even if it ends fatally. In his blind spots, Mishima spells and acts out the liabilities of culture. An anthropology of culture, in looking at media, will locate those liabilities, in a more harmless vein, mainly in the opposed drifts of the “theater” into interiorized literature on the one hand, noisy spectacle on

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the other. Theatrical self-awareness and self-reference, the traditions of plays within plays constitute Western parallels or at least allusions to the self-sufficiency of the spectacular in much of Asian theater. However, Western theatrical self-awareness normally works within the illusionistic framework. That framework may become highly complex and sophisticated in the process, but it is still taken for granted. Miner’s term of “residual mimesis” may apply here.77 The complications of self-observation and role playing—historically and culturally ubiquitous, but perhaps increasing in the West with the Renaissance—are projected, in a theater ruled by speech, into an expanding interiority. The Western actor tends to create and to impersonate complex, in some sense psychologically charged, roles. In Japan, “physical” and a certain surface aesthetic virtuosity seem to count for more. In those respects, the best theatrical masks—as well as highlights of the puppet-making and puppet-handling gei, the famous actors and Sumo wrestlers—are cherished as national treasures. In the West, the mask—the persona in a more archaic sense—has become a thing of the distant past, sometimes of intense nostalgia. To undermine the seriousness of interiorization and representational complexity has in itself turned into a major effort. In Japan, by contrast, no deeper “understanding” of the problems of life and their complexity is intended. In what follows, I will suggest that a notion of the “baroque” might serve as an asymptotic curve for both Western and Japanese—might serve indeed as a shorthand term for a “world”—theater.

chapter six

Fragments of an Absent World Theater “Baroque” and the Implicit Denial of Segment Culture

Comparisons between No, Kabuki, and opera have often been made. At the same time, it is striking that Western opera, apart from single enthusiastically celebrated events, has not made its way as a cultural institution in Japan itself.1 As an institution, given the native scene of spectacles in Japan, opera would be redundant. While opera is different from traditional Japanese theater, it is apparently not sufficiently different to warrant its institutionalization as a culturally characteristic medium. In the present framework, opera functions instead as the central Western form in which the frictions between literature and spectacle are suspended. In opera, more or less literary texts are preserved (or, at least, the question to what extent libretti should have literary qualities has always been a hotly debated problem); being sung, though, they are not invested with the assertive-expressive or representative drive they take on in verbal theater or written texts. In a playful allusion, to be fleshed out in serious historical and systematic detail, to Aldous Huxley’s soma drug in Brave New World (which supposedly has all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol but none of their defects), one might say that opera enjoys all the advantages of literature (the seeming representation of both expressive and sophisticated fictional worlds), but does not suffer from its defects (the dilution of effect in the written or printed and merely read word).

Other Histories, and Their Theory The comparative analysis of Japanese theatrical forms, pushing the scope between the spiritual and spectacular to limits where the two seem to fuse, does not imply, to repeat, a criticism of Western patterns. Western literature, in its prose, lyric, and theatrical forms, has achieved sin-

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gular degrees of sophistication and indeed greatness. That sophistication represents a powerful counterpart to the complexity of civilizations for which self-observation and self-description in many forms have become imperative. It is stupid to criticize literature as books written by dead white men. As “classic,” climactic, and problematic exploitations of the scope of a medium, these books continue to exercise a nearly unmatched intercultural fascination. In the perspective of cultural anthropology and media theory, the problem is a different one. The fascination with literature hides an unease that, as it might unfortunately appear, has come to the forefront only in the dreary forms of political correctness or contemporary media hypes. I want to show that this unease has a longer, anthropologically more interesting history. Sophistication, especially the type displayed in many forms of the Western novel and also plays (some of them being so sophisticated that they are never produced), has become the product, as Schechner puts it, of “single-mindedness.” Given the self-referential drift inherent in a medium, single-mindedness easily appears obsessive, “monoscopic, intensive and dialectical.” Single-mindedness produced by writing, in particular, will normally yield but “tame shows.” It may occasionally induce strong reactions, both emotionally and intellectually; but the writing and reading manias of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, and of the early twentieth century in Japan, for instance, appear, from the vantage point of today, more like short-lived or isolated episodes in cultural history. They do not compete with “charismatic churches, rock concerts, and some sports events.” Those are the Western equivalents of the “phatically speaking,” more strongly ritualized performances of “non-western cultures”—which is why, in the West, they do not ascend to the higher levels of art. This is also why many efforts to revitalize Western traditions by exotic imports (to which I have already alluded in the case of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Japanese-Shakespearean productions) bring out the problems of these traditions even more sharply. Schechner, without passing judgment himself, reports cases where the Western search for Oriental or other inspiration can also be seen as narcissistic, snobbish cultural piracy.2 On the other hand, no tradition is fixed and single-minded to such an extent that it does not somewhere imply or openly demand its supplementation by the “other.” In European theater, for instance, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba seem to have gone far in that direction, sublating the distinction between acting and extreme interiorization (for instance, in trance).

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There is, however, another Western history in which ritual, symbolic sophistication and entertainment can easily change into each other. I am not referring here to the many modern efforts by directors like Schechner, Mnouchkine, and others to tear down—without, of course, effacing—the separations between everyday behavior, socially playful activities, and aesthetic representations proper. The changes in stage techniques, theater illumination, and architecture, with their hard-to-gauge but certainly far-reaching effects on our notions of art and its interpretation, have been often pointed out.3 Schechner’s notion of “selective inattention”4 could be particularly expanded and differentiated into degrees of indifference or distance, of latent or open participation, variations of perceptual focus and observation, of elaborateness and institutionalization or relative absence of commentary and interpretation. For the mid– 1970s and afterwards, for instance, Schechner (fore)saw two divergent tendencies: one toward “the short, intense, you-must-pay-attention kind of work,” the other working toward longer, looser, episodic performances (and also texts) that, although apparently like Erwin Piscator’s or Brecht’s conceptions, “are more like the ceremonies and celebrations of non-western theater.”5 Schechner postulates, correctly to my mind, that verbal, mathematical, musical, pictorial, architectural, and theatrical “languages” are always interacting and transforming ritual body language. None of those can be compellingly called primary or secondary.6 If this is so, then we should be able to find pertinent evidence in a much stronger form than our Western histories of specialized, “single-minded” media would normally suggest. In such a history, ritual will not always be interactionally and symbolically serious, theater will not always be intellectually sophisticated, entertainment will not always be frivolous at best, superficial or stupid at worst. In such a history, explicit and institutionalized interpretation will not be the automatic corollary of reading. In such a history, Valéry’s recommendation to treat metaphysics with Rossini will seem to have sometimes been implemented already. In elaborating that history, I will interpret opera, as suggested above, as the Western self-denial of the “single-minded” Western theatrical-asliterary tradition. Sometimes it has been acknowledged vaguely as such; sometimes it has been, in the usual way, seen as just another special medium itself. In principle, there is no limit to which specializations of media may not go. The point of the enterprise called anthropological is to ask questions about the relative costs of a radical segmentation of culture viewed within a more comprehensive picture of the budget of hu-

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man experience as cultural experience. In that respect, as we have seen, the example of Kabuki, in particular, serves the purpose of highlighting a certain, at times considerable, unease of Western culture with itself. This unease is not to be confused with Freud’s notion of the built-in discontents of civilization—in itself a very Western and even in that context perhaps historically limited notion. The unease is epitomized, for the present, in the split between a highly sophisticated literary culture and a highly superficial cult of performance. The apologies and defenses of the past (e.g., literature as a rich “analogical” medium) have been superseded by digital angst or euphoria and by totalitarian claims (“being digital”) of one or the other kind. Western forms of the segmentation of culture, in other words, do not suggest a relatively relaxed coexistence of media. Western literary tragedy, in particular, enjoys the doubtful honor of having been pronounced dead, on the scene, as it were, at least since Coleridge and Schelling. At the same time, it continues to be cultivated in the theaters as a vital part of Western culture. In more limited ways, the novel recently has gone through episodes of death and resurrection. While this is not very illuminating, it carries with it somewhat unpleasant questions about cultural status and effectiveness. One could ask, though, in which sense, under which conditions, and for whom Shakespeare, for one, “wrote” something to be called tragedies. Since Nietzsche, the somewhat absurd-sounding claim has not vanished that Shakespeare, rather than writing literary tragedies, rather “composed” something more akin to a range of performative events broadly labeled opera. Gary Schmidgall has worked out structural parallels between Shakespearean drama and opera. For him, the great Shakespearean speeches are like arias: they are not performed in or as a context of coherent speech, but as effects of relatively loose pathos. The relative incoherence, in terms of overall speech consistency, in Hamlet’s great soliloquies could certainly be seen and has struck even literary scholars that way. Herbert Lindenberger, using verdicts by Hofmannsthal on Shakespeare, has in his turn identified literature fundamentally indebted to the “operatic principle.”7 In principle, therefore, Shakespeare could be used as a touchstone for most of the arguments propounded here. In the “flaring of complicating, contradictory energies”8 the plays both enact an allround theatricality and unfold a complex textuality. Romain Rolland’s contention that opera ruined French classical tragedy takes on a more negligible empirical and a more important systematic implication when one reflects that in several respects (plots, texts,

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stage presentation), opera uses and exploits absolute naiveté in order to elicit the strongest and most intimate movements of thought and emotion.9 Opera performs an artificial shift toward what appears as natural language (i.e., “song”). It thus remains neutral with respect to the notorious dissociation of sensibility that T. S. Eliot diagnosed for metaphysical poetry and that has haunted Romantic and other types of discourse in European cultural history. Since then, an acrimony of distinctions (reason versus emotion, right reason versus intellect, concreteness versus abstraction, rationality versus irrationality, etc.) has haunted European cultural history. Operationally dubious as such distinctions have become, they cannot be simply thrown overboard. In such a cultural double bind situation, Rolland’s thesis does not predicate the cultural demise of literary tragedy as such. But it points to the high instability of predominantly verbal, discursive representations. Historically, the unity and purity of texts was a doubtful matter more often than not; theoretically, that unity is difficult to maintain, since, in any text of some length, a reading doing justice to both the single words and their comprehensive effect is hardly possible. In terms of a psychology of attention, it could amount to a perhaps engrossing but more often rather catastrophic form of selfstimulation (compare Chapter 1, note 12). This is why the ways of text interpretation—say, from the New Criticism to deconstruction—have been more than just historically justified. Philological, hermeneutic, and indeed vicious circles can hardly be kept logically separate. The theory of textual gaps, propounded by Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, has prepared the way toward a theoretical farewell to the whole(some)ness of the text. Emergency measures—metaphysical ones for Ingarden, historical ones for Iser—were adopted in order to safeguard the “faithfulness” of reading.

Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Dryden: Alternative Episodes in Western Cultural History News of the death of the book is always much exaggerated. The book has been in danger of falling apart since the time when it first gained shape as a seemingly self-sustained unity. In the first heyday of textual self-sufficiency, when the notion of an author’s single and collected works begins to take on cultural significance, the instability of literature reared its head, too. Alvin Kernan’s historical outline of the unstable “romantic-capitalist copyright-creativity cultural constellation,” among

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others, has provided ample evidence for that.10 Ironically, while the canonization of the Shakespearean text has kept a whole textual and editorial industry busy, Shakespeare himself (whoever that mythical creature might have been) did not apparently attach great importance to his texts at all. Ben Jonson, who did, has never attracted as much textual and interpretational attention. Jonson, torn between text and multimedia, opted for the text and lost on both fronts. As texts, his plays do not at all fascinate in the ways Shakespeare’s do. Although this may appear to be a value judgment or a matter of taste, it is intended as a theoretical statement. Shakespeare’s texts fascinate, even in their mere textual form, by a peculiar combination that blends imagery, pathos, or wit with partial meaninglessness. In the same way as some Shakespearean characters are “drunk” with passion, Shakepeare’s language is imbued with parasemantic intensity. While one may not share his concrete analyses, Schmidgall’s approach, treating the great speeches as arias, makes sense in principle. Jonson’s texts, written along the lines of putative classical standards, were subjected to relatively high consistency and coherence. Because of that, they were deprived of a more multifaceted appeal. It is possible, moreover, to see the outrageousness of incident, from horrible and grotesque, perversely elaborate crimes to madhouse scenes and incest, of much English Stuart tragedy by Tourneur, Marston, Webster, and Ford, as an indirect, morally thinly masked exploitation of spectacular effects. Jonson, too, saw the power of spectacular appeal. But he wanted to reconcile it with high textual standards. With respect to the multimedium of the court masque, Jonson the text writer, however, was forced to see his priorities mishandled by Inigo Jones, the spectacular designer. I take it as a significant symptom in literary studies that, although the growing hostility between Jonson and Jones is treated at some length in almost any book on these two, it plays a small role, if any, in ordinary literary histories. There, the comparison with Shakespeare is paramount. For me, that comparison is a secondary matter as long as we do not really have clear ideas about the “literary” status of Shakespeare himself. It is not enough to polemicize against the proliferation of readings and interpretations of Shakespearean texts as long as stage productions themselves are measured along the lines established by some interpretational tradition. The sociological and the spectacular bases of the court masque have been magisterially dealt with by Stephen Orgel and others. There is also little urgency to go at length into the history of efforts by Jonson and

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Jones for more than twenty years to suppress each other’s importance in the “production” of masques—a quarrel into which even Chapman intervened with his last writing in 1634. If the masque was a “hotbed of professional intrigue” (surpassing even modern opera in that respect, it has been said by Herford and Simpson in their edition of Jonson’s collected works), it acquired that status because of its multimedia dimensions, requiring the joint labors of the poet, scene painter, architect, musician, and the designers of dresses and dances. Historically, the joint effect is the means for the self-enactment of the monarch(y). More than just historically, however, the masque takes care of a cultural need for impressive “shows.” The show dodges the demands of realistic verisimilitude. In pushing the artificiality of “as if” to extremes “gracefully” (one of the historical criteria), it neutralizes the distinctions between reality and fiction. A courtly power game in Stuart England or seventeenth-century France, the show unfolds the processual construction of emotions and meanings. It illustrates Nietzsche’s thesis that there need be no conflict between the observation of self and others and the intensity of life. The show, therefore, notwithstanding its symbolism, does not require much interpretation. As with Japanese theater, what is commanding interest, fascination, or subjection in one perspective may easily look absurd in another. In order to stabilize the appeal of text-based superior intellectuality, Jonson was driven into a highly characteristic self-defeating move. We might take it as an emblem of the fate of literature to come. Jonson wrote interpretations (characterizations) of some of his plays and appended them as prefaces or the like to the editions. In 1631, Jonson published an octavo version of The New Inn, equipped with argument, address, and commentary—with, in fact, “critical-academic apparatus,” as Rosalind Miles says. The play was released to be “judged,” and it was demolished accordingly.11 We are not dealing here with the social or psychological vicissitudes of artistic careers. In that respect, scholarship has unearthed plenty of materials dealing with Jonson’s feuds. The dispute with Jones, however, is more than the tip of a media-history iceberg. Its systematic issues have become temporarily submerged for reasons, such as Puritanism and other factors, that are not too difficult to specify, but too difficult to be dealt with adequately here. Yet those issues loomed large in the eighteenth century. Then, sociologically, the older distinctions of rank, taken more or less for granted as natural or even divine institutions, were being superseded by the formation of more dynamic and conflict-ridden

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social systems, “classes,” and denominations. The hot media issue then was opera. In opera, social exclusivities to which traditional theatrical texts have had to pay some kind of homage can be presented, and yet also diluted into mere aesthetic presence. Court opera, historically the successor of the masque in terms of show, could easily drift into forms of broader appeal. It reduces social standards, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, to backgrounds for the general aesthetic expansion of music and song. Frictions between social differentiations on the one side and internal media rearrangements on the other can concentrate easily in one “person.” While we have theoretically paid abundant tribute to the insight that psychosocial individuality arises from a multiplicity of roles, aesthetic individuality has been analyzed less than pointedly along these lines. In Dryden, the drama of media dynamics, split into two persons with Jonson and Jones, is enacted, for the first time perhaps very explicitly, in one.12 The first point to be noted is that the diversity of possible orientations both within “literature” (epic, drama, and poetry) and between the media (literature and music especially) necessitates increased theoretical efforts. Jonson and Jones put their quarrel into the form of satire and invective, these being of course also historical forms of theory. “Neoclassical” criticism in the English eighteenth century had to cope with both the intimate relations and the growing frictions between “literature” and the other arts. Consequently, Dryden’s picture of literature and music as sister arts walking amicably hand in hand is both correct and idealistic. In literary matters, Dryden prepares the way for, or is indeed himself a representative of, what is called neoclassicism. In terms of media configurations, however, he is sorely tempted to prioritize music. To define literature and its “kinds” or genres was urgent because, in the face of the literature handed down as classic texts, the contemporary media scene was confusing indeed. Looking at the documentary evidence collected in the gigantic enterprise by diverse hands, The London Stage 1660–1800, one hardly finds any of the “great plays” of the past not manhandled and radically “distorted” by music and dance. Claiming, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, that a “serious Play” is “Nature wrought up to a higher pitch,” Dryden can pretend to sneer at the machinery of “empty” operas, especially of the French kind. Sneering did not prevent him, however, from at the same time busily working on such operas himself. Certainly, the ordinary expectations of historical audiences, to whom opera may have meant entertainment with only the

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flimsiest of content, do not exhaust the media problem involved. In more relaxed moments, in his letters, that is, in forms of writing less driven by the narrow demands of theory, Dryden showed that he was acutely aware of the dead end into which plays, inescapably falling into representational traps, have brought themselves in the course of an ongoing history. Writing plays has become comparable to Sisyphean labor because it is reenacting, for no clear purpose, the foolish theatricality of the writer’s own, or others’ real lives. This may refer primarily to rhymed drama. But the issue is larger than that.13 If representation, or the drive thereto, cannot be escaped, it must be neutralized. A text may achieve this by enhancing its self-referential and intertextual complexity, undercutting thereby any representational intentionality. Such “metatexts,” however, do not make for very entertaining reading. The novel from Sterne onward shows that stronger effects in longer texts must be sought in more and more outlandish ways. From a modern, but also a neoclassical literary, point of view, Dryden’s boldest media move—the (re)creation of Milton’s Paradise Lost as an opera called The State of Innocence—is bordering on the absurd. From the point of view of a cultural anthropology, it makes sense—as much sense at least as the Florence Camerata’s effort to revitalize literary language by recreating Greek tragedy and thereby producing what turned out to become opera. There is some evidence that Dryden (together with Waller) visited the elderly Milton to get his permission for a rhymed dramatic version that could serve as an opera libretto.14 On the literary surface, the enterprise cut into the debate about blank verse and rhyme. This debate, however, in which Andrew Marvell was also involved, is an implicit media debate: it is concerned not with the meanings, but with the power of language. The move toward opera, while not abandoning the idea of “epic poetry,” cast aside its historical literary form and opted for a different medium altogether. This is not just a “creative” media shift. It also marks an incipient split in the cultural space laid out for the modes of aesthetically organized experience. Dryden’s move tried to keep literature, in its operatic version, within the modes of cultural consumption. For that purpose, the discourse type called poetics (“Aut prodesse aut delectare . . .”) had worked out recipes of artistic creation. With the eighteenth century, literature “proper,” embarking on a progressive self-referential complexity thinly masked by various “realistic” or reasonable demands, unavoidably kept transgressing the rules of poetics. Between the extremes of literature on the one side and spectacular

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genres on the other, it is in the eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, its natural or cultural locations, that an anticipated debate took place on intermediality, on the power of phenomena as heterogeneous as revolution, war, mathematics, literature, painting, and music. This debate occupied a middle ground between existing “literary” poetics and the developing systems of aesthetics that had to account for a broader range of aesthetic impact. Poetics disappeared, since a rule-bound production of texts was no longer possible. Instead, hermeneutics progressively took over the job of accounting for texts whose meaning and effect could no longer be taken for granted. Aesthetics, tackling a broader if not wild range of aesthetic potentials, did not really overcome the dilemma into which it inevitably fell from the outset: the friction between empirical and normative orientations. The rest is not silence, but an (as yet) never-ending story of displacements, of flights from the trinity of poetics, hermeneutics, and aesthetics—first into the control mechanisms of nineteenth-century philology, then into various constraints of interpretation, finally into the looseness of deconstruction or, on the other side, of cultural and media studies. Dryden foreshadows a cultural configuration that will center in Handel some decades later: for him, the sublime tends to condense in and erupt forth from music.15 Apparently, a lack of literary self-sufficiency and a concomitant need for music, exacerbated by the absence of an imposing native composer in England, must be taken for granted.16 Certainly, the shifting scene of British political and cultural power in the seventeenth century does not allow us to paint an unambiguous picture of the relations and competition between texts and spectacle. Even so, it was not primarily the increased refinement and sophistication of literary production but a media shift that was called for. The advent of Handel, an Italianized German turning British, constitutes a strange story if located in the context of national cultures and single media. It looks highly plausible, however, if one looks upon it as an event within the logic of culturally crucial media configurations.

The “Rise” of Opera: A Logical Coincidence in Media Development With opera, the media “logic” operative in the Jonson/Jones quarrel and in Dryden, the cultural unease with the text as mere text, comes full circle. Historically, opera can be seen as the almost accidental byproduct of textual unease, of a felt lack of power in the poetical language avail-

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able in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century, including Dante’s. In terms of a medium, it is, or has become, perhaps the strongest product of the search for the self-evident, the immediately convincing or moving sign. Again, there was no question that the distinction between aesthetic and other signs was to or could be abolished. But within organized forms of life on even moderately high levels of complexity, scenes where an enhancement and intensification of semiotic power can actually take place must be laid out. If necessary (and it is mostly necessary), this will take place in highly “artificial” ways. The natural sign is not given; it must be produced in and through the artifice of performance. Jonathan Miller has phrased the differences between a verbal play and an opera in that respect well: unlike “a play whose dramatic virtues can be recognized on the page—and just as often disperse on the stage—the quality of an opera is not readily detectable until it has been performed. An unperformed opera is literally a closed book to all but a very few musicians who can visualize the action and hear the music from the score alone.”17 Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the Camerata in Florence, fantasizing in a winter of discontent with poetic language about ancient Greek tragedy, tried to revitalize poetry’s supposed musical speech. That idea, as such, was not wrong. But implementing it under quite different historical circumstances produced necessarily very different results. The development of opera is due to a misunderstanding. The repertoire of musical effects and the differentiation of musical instruments and techniques, as well as of standards of discourse in latesixteenth-century Italian urban culture, pulled the effort to revitalize poetry away from what it was supposed to resuscitate: the chanting of Greek tragedy. Demanding increased power of speech under modern conditions amounted to a stronger distinction between the ordinary and the emphatic: it pushed the effort very quickly toward a widening gap between self-sustained music (orchestral music and elaborate singing, tempered for a while by the “verbal” recitative) and other standards of speech. In singing, as modern advertising well knows, things can be “said” that would meet with severe resistance as spoken or argued words. Anthropologically then, that media development took over a crucial task. Tragedy once had the function of enacting important, indeed fateful relations between persons and higher forms of mythological, political, or social order in various forms of heightened or “sublimated” ordinary speech. In periods of absolutism, whether real or to some extent only pro forma, the picture of a direct link between individuals and des-

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tiny meets with resistance. While languages of fate such as the wheel of fortune survive for quite a while, the resistance to the pathos of fate is evident in layers of political and psychological calculus and in strategies of risk avoidance from Shakespeare to French classical tragedy. The risk of risk avoidance, however, lies in the decline of tragic conflict. This is why tragedy has been declared dead continually since Euripides, in whom it took a definite literary, complex shape no longer suitable for emphatic, quasi-ritualistic enactments. It is also the reason why opera, in spite of obvious difficulties of its own, has fared better, on the whole, down to the present day: it replaces quasi-ritualistic enactment with a self-sustained, representationally neutral virtuoso performance. It eludes, like early tragedy, the competition of representational standards. Opera, one might say, takes for granted the trivialization of a crucial anthropological intuition: the relevance of persons, their emotions, intentions, and actions with respect to the “world” as cosmos. That intuition may be only a pretense or an illusion. But it has to be culturally taken care of. Media are attractive forms of such caretaking. Opera presents the trivialization of the pretense in a performatively virtuoso and therefore attractive form. Since human individual relevance is not given, opera creates it in a performative context where the seemingly natural (the voice and its “magic,” music, rhythm) and the highly artificial (stage technology) are inextricably mixed. Once the audience has crossed this threshold, questions about cognitive, emotional, or historical—in short, about “rational”—adequacy can no longer be asked. Opera strikes one as “natural” once and if one takes its “unnatural” premises for granted. In its early history, this dilemma is acutely experienced. In Dryden’s official literary doctrines, opera overstepped the limits of acceptable or merely plausible standards of humanity. Yet his text production frequently worked toward conditions of song. Generally, the Enlightenment, committed to textual argument, engaged in sometimes violent criticisms of opera—the climax being perhaps reached with the tonedeaf Alexander Pope. Even the more heterogeneously enlightened Lichtenberg, multimedia-oriented as he was, adhered to the privilege of textuality in the very act of denouncing it in the dull imaginative and critical literature of his time. For him, the pictures of Hogarth were interesting because one could spin gripping stories around and into them, much in the manner of a hermeneutic-semiotic detective on a crime scene. The stories of opera contained quite the opposite of that: they were simple, banal, and in that sense rationally damnable. Thus, by and

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large, the Enlightenment, even its more world-experienced thinkers, wavered between affective attraction/revulsion and critical discontent.18 It is significant that Enlightenment and general criticism is directed mainly against opera, less against oratorios, less also, however, against instrumental music. The case of the oratorio, the form to which even Handel returned after his somewhat tumultuous operatic career in London, is readily understood. Its expressive orientation being toward the evocation of a higher being, it was acceptable to both religion and philosophy in their broader varieties. In that sense, the oratorio is an acceptable version of epic for periods in which secular rationalities have not expulsed the need for overarching, if vague, “religious” significance. An analogous case can be made for instrumental music. It partakes, one might say, of some of the musical advantages of opera while steering clear of the latter’s disadvantages. Instrumental music is vaguely expressive. It can be taken, in particular and even if wrongly, to express noble sentiments. But it cannot be compelled to perform in that way. While opera relegates a problematic representational framework to the background, instrumental music casts it off altogether.19 The audience can, if they want, reinvent it at their own discretion. Cultural and/as media tensions, however, live on. Instrumental music, although it had existed for centuries in restricted, “instrumental” functions (arrangements of, introductions to, interludes between vocal music), came into full swing after vocal music in its religious and operatic forms had established itself. Charles Rosen has asserted that only the latter two had enjoyed the prestige of truly “public” music until the middle of the eighteenth century. While some claim that York Buildings in Villier Street, London, a building erected about 1678, contained the first specially designed music room, others, including Nicholas Pevsner, hold that Holywell Music Room (built from 1742 to 1748) in Oxford, still used today as a concert room, was the first building to be designed for the sole purpose of (instrumental) musical performance. Instrumental music chimes in with the movement toward the “work” or single “systems” of art, demanding, much more than opera and its tendency toward the brilliant, the “outstanding” piece, the complete perception of a fully coordinated structure from the recipient. But although the concept of such musical composition appeared self-evident in the nineteenth century, it remained an aesthetic ideal, “a postulate of limited historical scope . . . a dogma not older than the eighteenth century,” unconfirmed by perceptual facts (Carl Dahlhaus). That gap between what Nicholas Cook calls “musical” and “musicological” listening has never been closed.20

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Seen in this perspective, instrumental music represents a compromise. It dodges the potential embarrassment that may cling to the public or, in opera, quasi-public display of violent intensities, variously encoded as passions or emotions, in societies subjected to overpowering, systematically enforced disciplinary (“civilizing”) processes. This is of course why opera itself is continually enmeshed in quarrels about its literary, higher significance down to Wagner and the literary opera of the twentieth century. Certainly, instrumental as well as later “chamber” music is performed anywhere with great success. Certainly, also, operas have themselves been mostly domesticated in the concert hall. But it is hard not to see and feel the regret that this should be so. There is an overpowering nostalgia for what has become—rationally, realistically, almost impossible—those events and emotions that have no real place in, let alone an effect on, social systems anymore. Opera, more than instrumental music, is the medium of that anthropologically grounded nostalgia. It is a nostalgia for the imaginary and the real relevance of personal, inner drives, whatever their “sources” may be. Though musical forms are no universal languages, the appeals of music are yet species-specific. More precisely, then, opera is one of the “broader” media of an anthropologically grounded nostalgia. For while a gap between classical instrumental music and popular music has nearly become “unbridgeable,”21 while opera, operetta, and the music hall (e.g., the “Savoy Operas”), not to mention pop and rock music, cannot be termed forms of one medium, they can be seen as the closely related forms of a fairly basic drive. It is essential to reiterate that opera is not so much a medium as one of many analogous condensations of media trends. (Theoretically, it is impossible to really define one medium, whether by reference to the form of its elements or to its dominating “technology.” That is why most media studies are either technologically radical, that is, purist, or conventional, taking what is called a—new—medium such as TV for granted.) Such condensations show up in many different historical forms. If opera is, or seems to be, more or less absent from a culture, there will be equivalents—in baroque Spain, as we will see, for instance, the mythological fiestas. Hybrid media, or media clusters condensed in phenomena like opera, can always be differentiated in sociological or ethnic terms, such as the Balinese theater, or the “Beijing” or other types of Chinese opera, or the totally different “bourgeois opera.” That does not determine or delimit their cultural and potential anthropological import. Conversely, the continuing existence of opera in most Western

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societies hides the fact that its earlier cultural efficiency is nowadays overshadowed by rock music, or the overall effects of film, and probably sports events.22 Cultural and media history might have noted this earlier if some significant theoretical and artistic efforts had been taken more seriously. In the Bauhaus, for instance, plans and partial realizations of “total stage spaces” have played a major role, efforts in the face of “academic backwardness” to take seriously some sound instincts of the masses and to see the circus, water arts, operettas, varieté, and clownesque performances like those of Chaplin and Fratellini as great spectacles. Walter Gropius tried to establish, and to justify in even more recent times, flexible stage mechanisms that would allow for the various enactment of (verbal) theater, opera, film, and dance, but also for sports events in order to shake the public out of its mere audience or spectator inertia, to immerse it into the experience of dynamic spaces. In 1995, the German film director Edgar Reitz again preached the extension of movie theaters into areas of changing spatial experience. With equal plausibility, Horst Bredekamp and Mark Poster have insisted that as long as the question of physical presence in communication is not resolved in one way or the other, the Internet remains a realm of ghosts, of ghostly travels through ruined communicative utopias or bazaars of mere economic interest.23 It also seems clear that in contrast to its effects on other arts and media, the greater social distribution of affluence has not led to an increase in the composition and production of operas and in the number of opera houses, but to a decrease.24 Yet opera must be taken as one version in the pupation of impulses that are deeper than just cultural. In the complex issue of so-called physical presence and codes of the body, the difference between opera and spoken theater is essential, although at first glance appearing perhaps negligible. When we listen to spoken language, however gripping it may be, implicit and explicit comparisons with our foreknowledge derived from “real life,” texts, and other sources keep accumulating. Inevitably, gratifying or frustrating tensions between these horizons, these representational outlines, will come into play. For Schelling, tragedy in particular illustrates the early decay that sets in when, with Euripides, drama takes on definite “literary” features. In Europe, this process has occurred repeatedly. Musil described it for the theater since the Renaissance as a transition from early spectacular and, sociologically, aristocratic enactments of self-stylization toward a more problem-oriented, representational, bourgeois theater. In contrast to self-stylization, bour-

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geois drama enacts idealized versions of self-communication, sometimes in the form of self-enlightenment or its tragic failures. Since the underlying problems are not solved on the stage, this type of drama, for Musil, quickly falls into an empty rhetoric accompanied by more or less expressive and impressive gestures.25 Their first-class burial is then the business of modern theater. Shakespeare’s characters, one might perhaps say, are frequently so powerfully different and gripping because they are aware of both the problems and the idle theatricality in which these must appear on the stage and in life. They present themselves as the “actors,” and the victims, in forms of life falling apart into unprofitable theatricality and incalculable risk. The characters are fascinating because they are acting out problems both as victimization and parody. That consummation, devoutly to be wished, is difficult to maintain. One might suspect that it was Garrick’s acting and production techniques that brought conventionalized plays back to a level of Shakespearean intensity. His is perhaps one of the rare cases where the acting of spoken theater has dwarfed the representational dilemma. Lichtenberg for one forgot, in watching Garrick, the problems of represented character. Forgetting himself too, he perceived the effect of a play on levels remote from their textual basis. In spite of Garrick and other powerful actors, the effect of acting depended on structural changes in the plays themselves, too. There is the search for songs, the text of which might be plucked from the most heterogeneous sources. There is the hankering after “exotic” castrati populating the production of plays, not just of operas. For a 1756 “adaptation” of The Tempest, Theophilus Cibber, from a literary (certainly a narrowly literary) point of view, condemned both of these tendencies as a “castration” of the play “into an opera.”26 From a literary point of view this judgment is correct, but from a media point of view, on the contrary, opera castrati function as castration reversals, revitalizations of otherwise representationally paralyzed plays. Castrati are one of the more obvious symptoms of what we already have seen is a central media trend of opera: degrees of what, under ordinary conditions, would be considered as absurd, meaningless, nonsensical, or, worse, have to be accepted as a self-sustained performative premise from the outset.27 I am fully aware of the “opera reform” debates, accompanying opera from its beginnings with Monteverdi down to the present day (with Gluck and Wagner perhaps as outstanding stations in this trajectory), in which injections into opera of literary complexity, significance, and in-

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teriority were either demanded or denied. I am equally strongly tempted to deny that injection has ever taken place, both on a more objective level of the “works” and the more subjective one of their reception. As with Kabuki, the type of attention (interpretation) devoted to opera concentrates on the episodic or overall effect of techniques themselves, not on their representational reverberations, complexity, or “realism.” The physical presence of singing radically departs from the goal orientation, idealized or blocked, the meticulousness, and the articulateness of literary spoken dialog. In spoken drama, it has been frequently said, people are either amazingly (and successfully, brilliantly) talkative or, in being talkative, are making fun of its both literary and everyday conventions (as in Beckett). In opera, both of these trends are drastically reduced in the redundancy and repetition characteristic of the performative autonomy of aria. Before arguing this in more direct detail, a detour via Spain, where opera in its characteristic (“Italian”) form did not take hold for quite a while, might be instructive. I am taking this detour because, anthropologically, the most “occasionalist” media and forms of art are the most durable. What we have come to know as opera takes shape when occasions such as the Spanish fiestas, commissioned by royalty, slowly dissolve together with the imperial(ist) power of the Spanish monarchy; when their comprehensive theatricality is replaced, under the different conditions of semiaristocratic, semibourgeois affluence in Italy, by a stricter separation of social reality and fiction; when the fictions of opera, however, assume and exert a spellbinding power not encountered in printed literature. Shakespeare created or was made into a literary paradigm, while the theatrical machineries of Versailles, the comedies of Lope de Vega (1562–1635), the mythological, festive plays (fiestas) written for specific occasions by Calderón (1600–1681), have fallen more or less into cultural oblivion. The reasons for that are not altogether clear. Presumably, Shakespeare’s “texts,” in their combination of imagistic rhetorical power and teasing obscurity, possess more of a generalizable appeal than the somewhat monotonous, religiously framed truisms of, say, Calderón’s language. In the heyday of Romantic reinventions of an emphatic notion of the “poetic,” and for a very brief while, Calderón’s fiestas were ennobled, by A. W. Schlegel, for instance, with a higher literary aura. He called them “poetic operas,” spectacles in which “poetry” and “imagination” achieved by themselves what music and machinery had to perform in opera. Goethe, in his characteristically vague solemnity,

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may have hit the same mark when, an “old truth” dawning upon him, he described Shakespeare as the climactic fusion of nature and poetry and Calderón as the most intimate merging of the highest culture and poetry.28 In that vague cultural-poetic fascination with Calderón, an imagined spectacular charm plays a major, if poeticized role. The transition from that fascination to Calderón scholarship reads like a cultural detective story. Sebastian Neumeister portrays a series of efforts, first by cultural elites as literary elites (the Schlegels, etc.), then by more or less marginalized scholars (Walter Benjamin, Max Kommerell), and finally by institutionalized literary scholarship, to come to terms with works in which an obvious and very specialized combination of spectacular machinery and significance unfolds around texts certainly not inaccessible, but also not predestined to literary interpretation. Kommerell seems to have gone farthest in acknowledging the combined effect of stage and word miracles, producing the mood of astonishment and fascination that characterizes the autos sacramentales (plays staged for Corpus Christi festivals) in a more religious way, the fiestas in a restricted monarchic-secular way, and finally opera in a more general way.29 The relative precision with which the effect of words can be described contrasts strongly, especially in literary-theatrical authors like Corneille, with the frustrating vagueness into which the reproduction of multimedia impressions apparently must be couched.30 In a strictly defined religious context in which the autos sacramentales are composed and produced, a relative correspondence between dogmatic meanings and their reception by the flocks of the faithful can be assumed. With the fiestas, loaded with mythological materials, but also illustrating the restrictive structures of political power, the situation is, to say the least, quite unclear. It remains open to what extent, by whom, and when detailed interpretations should be undertaken, even if they are possible in principle. The obvious discrepancy between a potential plenitude of meanings and the both elitist and populist modes of reception easily provokes idle speculations about the levels of audience education. It is difficult to go far beyond Karl Vossler’s description—which in turn struck Musil—of the “strange” audience of Lope de Vega. With his multilayered comedias, each of them hardly staged more than a few times, Lope de Vega kept his audience spellbound and enthusiastic for half a century while that audience, in turn, idolized him. Vossler calls that a “spiritual community with this wonderful and terrible audience.”31 I suspect that the closest comparison would be with the druglike

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effect that, in a totally different context again, Heiner Müller has ascribed to Wagner’s music.32 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in his history of Spanish literature, has tackled the relationships between the spectacular and the literary in the siglo de oro in more striking ways. A history of literature is also a history of multimedia explosions of literature. This is especially true for the role that Lope de Vega and Calderón play in that history. Gumbrecht repeatedly contrasts their spectacular worlds with the complex games of perspectives and relativities in the prose of Cervantes. In contrast to Cervantes, Lope and Calderón eliminate or “derealize” everyday life in favor of what Gumbrecht calls the theatricalization of the world, or, even more strongly, the ontologization of the imaginary. That trend is strongly associated with the decline of the Spanish empire, which, symbolically and factually setting in with the defeat of the Armada against the British in 1588, is ignored, latently acknowledged, and finally admitted in a laborious dialectic of social, political, and cultural maneuvers.33 Gumbrecht thus puts the case of a link between the spectacular and cultural “decadence,” yet warns against comprehending the exploitation of the spectacular as a deliberate use of ideology. The form of behavior may be more important than its content and function. The sumptuous forms of theatricality in Lope de Vega and Calderón are the spectacular extremes to which verbal theater may be pushed. In the collective fascination that they exercised in a unique way, they run parallel to the analogous craze for opera that raged, in various forms and periods, in Italy and England—but also, within Spain, they run parallel to the cultural problem into which bullfighting had started to develop since the sixteenth century. Gumbrecht’s remarks, made in a seemingly casual way, are highly significant. They point to the crucial anthropological issue of how both to stage and to conceptualize the urgency of body codes culturally.34 Again, the theater seems to occupy a middle position in the spectrum of codes. Engaging in verbalization, it yet does not grant that verbalization a more than trivial role. Concerning Lope, Gumbrecht speaks of a mocking negation of Aristotelianism and of a laughing affirmation of popular taste, and later, concerning Calderón and his contemporaries, of the monotony and “abstraction” of the theologically dominated verbal dimension. At the same time, weakening the strict correlation between spectacle and decadence, Calderón was in fact embedded in a period where decadence was slowed down.35 I would assume that it is in fact impossible not to detect strong signs of what may be labeled decadence

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in any dynamic cultural period. Any other position would be compelled to ascribe not only factual pressures, but also a dignity of values to everyday and social life hard to sustain especially in the reflexive worlds of literature or cultural thought. That, indeed, is the reason why literature itself mirrors the trend toward spectacle in its own way. Thus, the simultaneity and tension between spectacle and the negotiation of plurality in verbally more sophisticated literature (in, for example, Cervantes) would appear to be, by tendency, normal. It is rather the situation of Don Quixote in the novel—both his body and his imagination being misled, at least to some extent, by literature—that illustrates the potential pull of literature toward one-sidedness.36 Consequently, the relative sociocultural positioning of autos, comedias, fiestas (or court masques for that matter), and opera marks again, in a very concrete way, the shakiness of sociological perspectives. Fiestas are occasionalist in the highest degree, even if, in the attendance of the ruler, courtiers, foreign diplomats, city dignitaries, and even the “people”—for whatever that term may be worth—a limited generalizable appeal might be detected. Here, the meaning of “occasionalist” is heavily sociological, or even national. The dissolution of this type of occasion into what eventually takes shape as opera happens in very different social situations: Italian city states and German cities or courts that are embedded in very different social and “national” situations. But at these occasions, the specific social origin, which is very clear in court opera, for instance, carries a higher potential of generalizable, limited transcultural appeal.37 This potential allows Ute Daniel to interpret theater and opera as central elements in the prehistory of cinema. Clearly, though, the position of opera is preeminent: it is “the most opulent and strongest, in terms of the effect of illusion available for the satisfaction of the voluptuous desire to see and to hear before the advent of film.” If today we no longer perceive opera as entertainment it is because we have been trained, since the nineteenth century, to look upon the theater as secular temples and stages for intellectual self-staging. And, of course, “entertainment” is itself more of a shorthand term for the mixture of trivial entertainment, sociability, social representation, and (according to Horkheimer) the cultural apparatus for the production of joy. In Germany, the transformation of courtly pleasures and popular entertainment into educationalintellectual theaters was achieved only early in the twentieth century when, for instance, in 1918, court theaters were abolished, taken over by civil, city, and communal governments, and freed from the compul-

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sion to legitimize their existence by income, a point of view shared even by Goethe the theater director, not the writer of Wilhelm Meister.38 The development of the theater as a site for intellectual self-staging presents strong historical endorsements for Dewey’s thesis, in the first chapter of Art as Experience, that intellectualized, spiritualized conceptions of art, with their lack of continuity between “the refined and intensified forms of experience . . . and the everyday events, doings and sufferings,” are due, in the main, to the “objectifying” cognitive trends implied in something like bourgeois capitalism, with the collector as the capitalist-aesthetic prototype. Even the old moralists were aware, for instance “that the eye is not an imperfect telescope designed for intellectual reception of material to bring about knowledge of distant objects,” that “sense is allied with emotion, impulse and appetition.”39 While as an “extravagant art,” to use Herbert Lindenberger’s term, opera remains occasionalist, it should by now be clear that the meaning of “occasionalist” now refers to what I would describe as anthropological events. In contrast to fiestas and court masques where the social contexts weigh down and massively overshadow the possibly general appeal, such occasionalist events can be described as anthropological on a primary level. Distinctions between court opera and bourgeois opera and so forth come in as secondary distinctions that, by and large, have rarely generated remarkable descriptive gains. In the medium of opera, the mutual interpenetration of high aristocracy, court aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie is a fact, even if this fact has to be concluded from a long and complex history.40 The appeal of spectacle as an emphatic event suffers, of course, from the conventionalizing of both court and bourgeois institutionalizations. But again, by minimalizing representational wear and tear and by maximizing performative autonomy, opera escapes that dilemma more easily. The preceding arguments could be rephrased in terms of an anthropology of the baroque. One could see that kind of baroque as an abbreviated and partly reunifying embodiment of the tendencies that have torn “world theater” apart. The fact that Schechner can draw up charts in which the huge array of (“real life” and “artistic”) theatrical forms, from modes of trance and ecstasy down to extreme self-reflexiveness, is both distinguished and related, separate and overlapping, must be due to a fictitious core that I call baroque.41 Applying a somewhat Marxist zoom lens, Guy Debord, in his Society of the Spectacle, has formulated an uncannily precise insight to that effect: he defines baroque as the lost unity of artistic creation found again, in sadly changed form, in

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today’s arbitrary consumption of all of past and present art. The indiscriminate consumption of art turns itself into a degenerative metaform of the baroque. The potential “recollection” of total art history designates the end of the world of art, with art ending up in museums and libraries.42 Both the surviving or newly created spectacles and the forms of present but also (to go beyond Debord) past art consumption seem to underlie the persistent survival of notions of the baroque. Mobilized for purposes of historical description, they have survived in spite of their oftencriticized speculative, idealistic, and worse tendencies. In a situation of conceptual dead ends, it even makes sense to call Kabuki baroque, too. In fact, I have chosen and isolated Kabuki and No as the main representatives of non-Western theater because they show the way in which the spectacular effect may, but need not, be on its way to intellectual sophistication. An aesthetic, theatrical spirituality might be the common “baroque” denominator of Eastern and Western (and certainly other) forms. This can be linked with those “definitions” of the (historical) baroque that, although meant historically, carry the burden of generalizable connotations very easily. Thus, for Richard Alewyn, baroque theater enacts the gliding between appearance and being, these, of course, being culturally conditioned terms not readily generalizable but replaceable by rough equivalents in different cultures. For Dagobert Frey, one of the few aesthetic theorists combining very concrete descriptions of theater architecture with cultural interpretation, the “feeling of reality” in the baroque period is concentrated in a general theatrical conception. For him, as well, the architecture of baroque theaters does not support a clear distinction between the life world of the spectators and the aesthetic reality of the spectacle, which is why the stage can be used for social spectacles as well. Social and stage acting tend to converge in ceremonial; ceremonial, in its turn, as Hofmannsthal said, is “the spiritual work of the body.”43

The Operatic Principle Extended, or: From Dewey via Hegel to Adorno Conceptions of music in literature, and especially in images and texts from the Middle Ages onward, have resuscitated the long-time nearmoribund field of the mutual illumination of the arts.44 In most publications, however, one can detect a split, in most cases unacknowledged, into interpretations clearly indebted to the literary model and an empha-

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sis on the vicinity of opera and spectacle. The interpretations range from the criticism of ideology to sheer impressionism. The advocates of the spectacular explore the wide area between the pathos of spectacle, Verdi’s “invention of truth,” in contrast to its mere description, and spectacle’s absurdity.45 My own procedure will pursue the direction taken in the initial examples of part 1. The logic of opera inherent in the connection between Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, extending to the depiction of that opera in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is concentrated in a desubjectified, deindividualized, freely floating affectivism. As much as opera seems to trade emotions, it does not make much sense to take those as the expression of emotions attached to, or emanating from, consistently individualized subjects acting within the confines of a normally coherent plot. Although it is unwise to take sides in historical quarrels grown stale, there appears to be much more evidence for the position of Eduard Hanslick than for the program of his opponent, Richard Wagner. Wagner, in his Oper und Drama (1842), criticized European drama since the Renaissance for its “rhetorical” weakness, depriving the emotions of their public relevance. Opera (for Wagner, Italian opera mainly), by contrast, works for cheap effects without any attention to a sophisticated probability of the inner life at all. This criticism is correct. Wagner was completely wrong in his assumption, however, that there is a way out of that situation. I seriously doubt that Wagner himself can have believed for any considerable time in the implementation of his program. As he well knew, it would have necessitated the revolutionary abolition of the modern state, with its social structures, in which a synchronization between fairly public systems and the luxuriating inner life has simply become impossible. There is little immediacy in Wagner’s musical rhetoric, in the combination of musical power and depicted inner or outer action, not even in the Leitmotive. While the music may occasionally function like and as a drug, as Heiner Müller has said, its relation to action has provoked types and quantities of interpretational work normally reserved for the type of literature Wagner criticized himself. Not only did Nietzsche, polemically but significantly, to be sure, compare the Gesamtkunstwerke to closet plays, but Adorno also spoke of a declaration of bankruptcy in Wagner’s aesthetics. Hanslick, by contrast, subjected the alleged expressiveness of music to an almost scientific test, comparable perhaps a little to the positivistic

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tests Carnap carried out with respect to the propositional content of Heidegger’s prose. No sequence of sounds acquires meaning, emotional or otherwise, without heavy prejudice: it is instead a body- and rhythmbased imagination that easily “usurps” the readily available and preencoded emotions.46 Movement, for Hanslick, is a quality of feelings, but not the feelings themselves. It is so easy to mix up movement with feeling because movement, in music, shows up as rhythm, as something not just cultural, but also physiological or “natural.” A continuous transformation from physiological to sensual and then spiritual levels may take place, but a rhythm-related physiology takes precedence and accounts, for Hanslick, for the surplus power of music over the other arts. While music of the most worldly kind may be spiritualized, like Italian opera tunes in churches, any music, even the best specimens, can also be much more easily used for culinary purposes of the crudest sort—table music facilitating the digestion of a pheasant dish, for instance.47 As a consequence, the old quarrel about the priority of music or words (or “drama”) in opera is pointless. Opera may enact a meaningful drama, but it is necessarily music.48 As such, it is activity as movement in which, as Gilles Deleuze nicely (and quite similarly to Hanslick) put it, sounding molecules act across singing and listening bodies, which unfold as their own stage.49 We may doubt whether ordinary aesthetic theory has ever done justice to this movement. Although it is massively ironized, we might again take Emma Bovary’s behavior in the opera house of Rouen as a hint. Her, as well as her husband’s, attention and implicit participation, whether by identification or not, are aroused in moments of intensity to which they can relate for some—contingent—reason or other. The participatory attention may vanish and reappear at any moment. The Bovarys, in other words, do not perceive and digest the opera as a work of art. In this central respect they demonstrate what Oskar Becker, in a much more pathetic combination of phenomenology and existentialism, called the “fragility of the beautiful” produced by the “adventurousness of the artist.” For Becker, the work of art—to say nothing of collected or complete works—is a conventionalized construct first isolated and then dissected by epigones.50 In a phenomenological-existentialist (“Heideggerian”) context in which basic fragilities were all too easily concretized and consumed in sudden radical (and often heavily political) outbreaks, this may come as no surprise. As I have said before, we might be more impressed by the sight of a systematic philosopher like Hegel, who approves of the

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“unsystematic” and to some extent seemingly aesthetically inappropriate behavior of Italians in the opera, chattering, eating, playing cards, but all attention when a striking aria begins. This behavior has been, one might say, stretching Lindenberger’s term, an integral part of the operatic principle down into the nineteenth century. In weaker forms, it is not unknown to the twentieth century, either. The indiscriminate mixture of aesthetic and social forms of behavior in the audience (and sometimes the actors, too) vanished from spoken theater much earlier and more consistently. The London Stage, devoted to the period between 1660 and 1700, in relating some of the more hilarious incidents in theater life and lamenting the frequent lack of the “proper esthetic atmosphere for actors and audience,”51 does not make the point that its own materials abundantly suggest: the connection between actors (singers) and audience in the body-related, serious and parodistic staging of dynamic poses of the self. For that, the term “carnival” can at least be used metaphorically.52 There are few periods in the history of the English stage, van Lennep says, “when so many changes occurred within the span of a generation and a half.” But they clearly have to do with the machinery of music and dance toward which a consistently and purely “receptive” aesthetic behavior can hardly be maintained.53 In the seminal essay “The Grain of the Voice,” Roland Barthes tried to find a way out of the threatening dilemma that we either predicate (interpret) too much or, intimidated by what seems ineffable, say nothing at all. There are elements in singing that can be put in the service of communication, representation, or expression (rules of the genre, coded forms of melisma, style of interpretation, etc.). There are others related to the grain of the voice, that is the “very materiality,” indeed the “voluptuousness of its sound-signifiers.” A cultural tendency toward the first levels will normally produce a sentimental clarity, of which, for Barthes, the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is the supreme example. That type fits an “average culture” that demands expression and takes art to supply its most sophisticated forms. The so-called “Three Tenors,” holding sway over large parts of the public in the mid1990s, satisfy that demand in cruder forms. The problem is not at all the populist behavior of top opera singers. Rather, the fascination of the grain of voice—that is, the “friction between the music and something else,” “the body in the voice as it sings . . . the limb as it performs” is lost because the voices are no longer at their best.54 The problem of the Three Tenors is not their mass appeal and commercialism. Rather, they

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violate the performative, virtuoso autonomy that is the hallmark of the medium. Virtuosity here turns into social clowning: there is little of the aesthetic-demonic virtuosity of voice (and mimic) “manipulation” so abundantly provided by, say, Maria Callas or Giacomo Lauri-Volpi at their best. Barthes’s notion of the grain of the voice can perhaps be better paraphrased once the dominant versions of aesthetics as either the epistemology of the lower faculties, the senses, or the caretaker of higher and somewhat elusive intellectual-spiritual qualities are fully abandoned. Ideally, one could choose aesthetic theories like those of Schelling or some sophisticated “Romantic” semiotics for steps toward a both basic and comprehensive “real” productivity of the arts. Unfortunately, the ideal turns idealistic, as I have said before, insofar as hardly any work of art, for the theorists themselves, lives up to the conception—another instance of a noble plan beset by melancholic facts. Schelling’s criticism of Greek tragedy (decline following on the heels of its beginning) is one example; Ruskin’s almost total dismissal of the largest parts of art and literary history is another. To build irony into conception and practice themselves, like F. Schlegel and others, is intellectually attractive. It does not increase, however, but rather weakens the cultural effect an art or medium may have.55 Operationally, it seems better, therefore, to exploit theories where both epistemological and historical skepticism with respect to a general cultural productivity of art does not rule out an emphatic appreciation or claim for specific instances. In variously instructive forms, this happens in aesthetic theories— Hegel’s, Dewey’s, Adorno’s—that I made bold to use, or rather manhandle, as points of departure. Dewey is perhaps richest in instructive frictions. His insistence, in and through art, on a vitally necessary sophistication of experience, implying both passion and detachment, and on the productivity of the media employed in both making and enjoying it, is crucial. In that, the full spectrum of organic, emotional, and intellectual processes comes into play, from everydaymaterial to spiritual-ethereal. The notion of “sense(s),” in particular, covers the wide range from the sensory, sensational, the sensitive, sensible, the sentimental, and the sensuous—in short, everything from physical-emotional shock to sense itself. On the other hand, Dewey plausibly takes it for granted, too, that any medium carries the “specialization and individualization of a particular organ of experience” to a “point of independence” “wherein all its possibilities are exploited.” Yet the conviction stubbornly persists that one is really dealing with a glid-

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ing spectrum of interconnections. In particular, for instance, the separation of architecture or music from painting or sculpture “makes a mess of the historical developments of the arts.”56 Moreover, and crucially, because of the immediacy of a bodygrounded effect, “the appeal of music . . . is much more widespread, much more independent of special cultivation, than that of any other art.” While music allows for specializations appreciated only by the connoisseur or expert, or after quite some auditory training, it can also, in its more elementary rhythmical or more easily popular forms, be resorted to for all kinds of purposes, including, as Havelock Ellis noted, sexual orgasms. It is, in fact, “the peculiarity of music, and indeed its glory” that it can appeal to the most intensely practical senses and body functions and yet, through formal relationships, transform these into an art “most remote from practical preoccupations.” It strikes, in short, a rare compromise between the “primitive” and complexity.57 In contrast to that, literature is unique because, for instance, the sounds symbolized in print are not treated as sounds. “The art of literature thus works with loaded dice.” Its material, charged with meanings from immemorial times, has an intellectual force superior to any other art. But in order to claim some sensuous force for both the collective wisdom and the individualized intellectuality of literature, Dewey must resort to the severely Romantic theory of a somehow preserved musicality of poetry. Art, in literature, becomes fine more than anywhere else because it “draws upon the material of other experiences and expresses their material in a medium which intensifies and clarifies its energy through the order that supervenes.”58 The clarification may be readily granted; but the intensification is a pious wish, understandable perhaps in a time when the prestige of poetry was both historically strongly entrenched and yet also undermined in Dewey’s own context. Both the New Criticism and its refutation loom large here. Because of this oscillation, Dewey is able to assert, without specification, that the “energy” of “art” can “move and stir,” “calm and tranquillize.”59 Hegel, supposedly much more speculative, seems more realistic here. I have already quoted Hegel’s idea that, exactly because of what Dewey describes as its seeming capability of drawing upon any experience, poetry runs the risk of eliminating itself altogether from art seen as heightened vitality. Hegel’s thesis about the end of art does not assert, of course, that art has come to an end. Rather, for “us art counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself.”60 For

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us, of course, Hegel’s move to replace art by philosophy is even less feasible. Hegel may have known how to fantasize, visualize, and conceptualize notions of an absolute and other forms of spirit. But, as Arnold Gehlen said in his Habilitationsschrift, Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist, it would be preposterous, and not just arrogant, to assume that we can do the same.61 The crumbling away of the notions of absolute spirit, truth, infinity, and freedom, of the speculative background necessary for certain of Hegel’s concerns, liberates the Aesthetics for “lovers of art and historians of art,” those, in fact, whom it should primarily interest, as T. M. Knox has asserted in his preface.62 The arts and their media produce forms of a second nature—something necessary, but not given. Forms of a first nature, whether nature in its trivial sense, animals, or the human body, beautiful as they may be, unavoidably also thrust their obvious deficiencies upon the observers. “The purity of the sky, the clarity of the air, a mirror-like lake, smooth seas” will delight us, but their beauty remains abstract. Animals may be lively or funny, but their appearance testifies to a lack of soul. The human body is betrayed—to say the least—by its skin. The inner life, the “soul” shines through, “still nevertheless the poverty of nature equally finds expression on this surface by the non-uniformity of the skin, in indentations, wrinkles, pores, small hairs, little veins, etc.” We encounter too many “worn faces on which all the passions have left the imprint of their destructive fury; others afford only the impression of inner coldness and superficiality.” There is, sad to say, “no end to the haphazardness of human shapes.” In children, to be sure, “none of the manifold human interests has engraved forever . . . an expression of its exigency.” But in their “innocence,” the “deeper features of the spirit” are absent.63 There is, in short, no pure, emphatic appearance in human beings that would impress the observer with both individuality and essence (the “soul”). From the surface of human beings there irradiates, though, a sensibility that calls for an “idealism of life” absent from life itself. That idealism is taken care of and produced to the full by art. Idealizing tendencies exist in nature, but their “universal ideality,” the “ideality of their animation,” is always on its way to art.64 The idealizing (but not idealistic) “display” of the “living soul” shows itself “principally in spontaneous movement”—not necessarily in literal movement, of course, but in suggestive appearance. Such an assumption, clearly relatable to Dewey’s ideas of the organic-intellectual continuum, reveals its media implications more sharply than in Dewey. Due to their media and material qualities, the arts pull people into en-

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actments of an idealism of life as animation, spiritual cheerfulness, and the like, into what Dewey called “heightened vitality.” Even where they seem static, inviting mere contemplation, they demand “dramatic liveliness” such as group activities in a specific situation in painting. In painting, the highest degree of “liveliness,” a “magic of pure appearance,” can be expressed only in color. The best portraits in particular (Titian, Dürer, etc.) “meet us so individually and . . . give us a conception of spiritual vitality unlike what a face actually confronting us gives.” The “longer one looks at such a picture, the more deeply one immerses oneself in it, all the more does one see emerging from it.” What emerges is not meaning, but something clear, pregnant, and vivid.65 Certainly, Hegel would have had a lot of trouble with many forms of modern art (although one wonders, for instance, whether pictures like Asger Jorn’s 1966 Au commencement était l’image would not fit Hegel’s preferred categories quite well). If Hegel’s categories no longer apply sufficiently (to painting, for instance), it is because they apply to something else—to a shifted media configuration in which the pregnant vitality of the image is taken care of elsewhere. This becomes more obvious for a literary genre that, although still relatively new in Hegel’s time, revealed traces of high instability from its beginning. The novel (which Hegel called “romance, the modern popular epic”), although perhaps the most universal art in its capacity to shape and express “any subjectmatter capable at all of entering the imagination,” presupposes “a world already prosaically ordered.” This means that the “liveliness of events” or “individuals and their fate” is difficult to suggest. Insofar “as this is possible in view of that presupposition” of a prosaically ordered modern world, it is an open question whether the novel “regains for poetry the right it had lost.”66 Thinking of Lichtenberg and of Muschg’s tragic literary history, novel writing is systematically close to literary hack work, much as it may transcend that in individual instances. Again, that does not mean that novels cannot be, should not be, or are not written anymore. It rather means that, in spite of everything being produced all the time, one can detect media shifts that are culturally significant, if often only very implicit. For us, thoroughly immersed in a prosaically ordered world, novel reading has become a second nature. Hegel’s questions have remained more clearly visible, though, in the domain broadly called “theater.” Spoken drama has emancipated itself from music and dance—frequently, it is only read. This entails an increased emphasis on representa-

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tion on the part of the audience, an increased attention to the status of problems treated. The “barbarity of human sacrifice,” for instance, “may be comfortable to us in opera” (like the Iphigeneia operas of Gluck), “but in tragedy this must be turned altogether otherwise.” Apart from the inadequate reading of plays, problems arise whenever the “live production” relies primarily on the actor’s word. In principle, the actor’s art seems to do full justice to the “spiritual expression of spirit,” which suffers under music, masks, and dancing. Actors, then, are rightly called artists; they can no longer be denounced and treated as moral or social blots. In order to make up for the more dynamic movement in music and dance, the actor’s art must display a “great deal of talent, intelligence, perseverance, industry, practice, and knowledge.” Indeed, at its height, it needs “a richly endowed genius.”67 In a way, then, acting constitutes the Achilles’ heel of modern drama. The actor may and must take over when and if the vulnerability of performance (in the sense of James L. Calderwood’s “metadrama”), the representational self-consumption of tragedy in particular, becomes conspicuous. “Genius” in acting, as we saw in examining Lichtenberg and the “Garrick” motive, may drive away representational problems. Kalman A. Burnim, with the help of contemporary paintings, has indeed “painted” the picture of an “enthusiasm for good life, a sort of unnatural naturalness, an aesthetic existence, handsome, tranquil, free of sordidness or conflict,” embodied by the apotheosis of Garrick, the genius of acting. In the most evocative of these paintings, a “fusion of Arcadian metaphor with naturalness, tinged with a glow of sensibility” may occur.68 Where this socio-aesthetic fusion does not happen or cannot be solidly fantasized about, representational problems themselves, especially the status of conflict, tend to turn themselves into another liability of drama. J. Paul Hunter has precisely nailed down the historical nearparadox in Britain that “the triumphant performances of Betterton, Booth, and Garrick were then among the most distinguished ornaments of English culture.” The plays, on the other hand, in which they had to act for a large part were conspicuous for their literary poverty and their “limits of creative energy.”69 As we saw, the “Discourse between the Poet and Player” in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, debating conventional arguments concerning good/bad plays versus good/bad actors, is mainly troubled by the question to what extent emphatic, “dramatic” (in Hegel’s sense, spiritually lively, animated), and strongly visible traditional qualities such as the sublime can be represented on the modern stage.

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That stage is placed in a social context in which human action no longer lends itself to artistic, for instance tragic, stylization. Hegel’s prosaically ordered world will therefore prefer cheap forms of stage visibility: “The town, like a peevish child, knows not what it desires, and is always best pleased with a rattle. A farce-writer hath indeed some chance for success; but they have lost all taste for the sublime.”70 Fielding’s debaters, unable to recognize their basic consensus, are both right. The great tragic actors of the recent past (Booth, Betterton) would have been frustrated by “such horrible stuff” as contemporary tragedies; contemporary players, in their turn, apparently can hardly do justice to the great plays of the past by Shakespeare, Thomas Otway, and Nathaniel Lee.71 The tragic writer, as Lee, quoted gleefully by Lichtenberg, has said, can hardly write like the traditionally inspired madman, that is, like one of Muschg’s visionaries, singers, and semidivine maniacs. But he can very easily write like a trivial fool. More than most other media, various forms of enactment broadly called theater are a crucial and indeed basic medium of culture. They exhibit the fascinating potential of human transformations in which both living actors and living spectators are involved in a fundamental open interplay of bodily, emotional, and intellectual levels. That function, however, has always come under fire from two opposed directions. Where it works (too) well, philosophers, moralists, and social critics from Plato to Rousseau rush in because unbounded transformations appear to pose threats to the reliability of knowledge and the stability of social structures. Where the transformations lose power of appeal, for instance because of an emphasis on the intellectualized representation of themes or problems, other media step in and push theater, especially spoken theater, into a peripheral position. These two tendencies form the poles of what Jonas Barish has described as the antitheatrical prejudice throughout the cultural histories of both East and West.72 My “anthropological” assumption is that the scope of transformations, of “acting” cutting across the lines of the fantasmatic and the conventionally real, is experienced as both highly fascinating and threatening. Or, in Adorno’s terminology, the tension between the constructive and the mimetic73 is always open to the two opposed, but often of course mingled, forms of criticism. In the absence of a definable human nature, human self-production in and through “acting” may appear both as a fundamental necessity and an attraction. It can appear as fake theatricality, the facile lapse of the aesthetic into the silly or clownesque diagnosed by Adorno, the ham acting castigated by

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Stanislawski, Craig, and others, or it can appear as a danger, as it has from Plato to the Puritans. I submit that Diderot’s notorious paradox of the actor should be related to this context. For Diderot, the actor must be totally coldblooded, devoid of common sentiments, because otherwise he or she cannot exploit the range of metamorphoses. The alternative would be the extreme on the other side: a total mobility of the abdomen (“une mobilité d’entrailles”) vaguely related to questions of diaphragm control in which the magic of acting would find its most physical or physiological basis. Diderot is skeptical, though, because the transformation of this sensibility into boringly common, social forms and codes of emotion may occur all too easily. As in Lichtenberg, Hegel, and others, Garrick provides the supreme example for the cold-blooded production of emotion in the slow motion of the body. Garrick is supreme because, although he also feels strongly, he is yet able to project himself into the grandeur of any, for instance Homeric, phantom.74 In the media history of serious spoken theater, the appeal exemplified by Garrick is difficult to produce and rarely achieved. This is why opera, or rather a generalized operatic principle, appears to be latently or openly built into theatrical history. As a historical dramatic genre drifting toward the display of externals and accessories (décor, ostentatious costumes, etc.), opera easily becomes a thing of luxury. Its “visible magnificence” is, in its turn, a sign of “the already growing decadence of genuine art.” Opera easily lacks “any intelligible connection.” Yet, with music in command, the emphasis on externals and the lack of “real seriousness” (the “Arabian Nights” atmosphere) can be accepted, more readily than the emphasis on the intelligible in spoken tragedy, as Hegel’s examples also show (Mozart’s Magic Flute in contrast to Schiller’s Maid of Orleans).75 In other passages, already alluded to, Hegel is even more relaxed about the “details of poetic execution” in the libretti of opera. These details can be “meagre and of a certain mediocrity.” The “Italians” provide the paradigm here—and not just for opera. It is striking that Hegel should again single out Schiller, whose poems “prove very awkward and useless for musical composition.” Poetry in itself, like spoken drama, however, tends to push the use of language in problematic directions even when the comparative effect of music is not taken into consideration: it veers all too easily toward “all too ramified complications,” “too difficult thoughts or profound philosophy,” toward something like “the grand sweep of ‘pathos’ in Schiller’s lyrics.” Represented thought and

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pathos, it would appear, whether on the stage or in poetry proper, are pulled into the wear and tear that language, thought, and pathos are exposed to in real life. Language allows for sophistication and pathos, but in language, these may easily appear arbitrary and pathetic. The “bungling compilation” of Schikaneder’s libretto for the Magic Flute, on the other hand, “is amongst the finest opera libretti. The realm of night, the queen, the realm of the sun, the mysteries, initiations, wisdom, love, tests, and along with these a sort of commonplace morality excellent in its general principles—all this combined with the depth, the bewitching loveliness and soul, of the music, broadens and fills the imagination and warms the heart.”76 Hegel has been taken to task by Adorno for privileging the beautiful in art over and against the beautiful in nature: “a crass, almost unthinking taking sides for the subjective spirit.” That criticism, conceptually correct as it may be, however, increases the precarious position of what the bourgeois period in particular has elevated into high art even more. Not only must that art compete with those forms of natural beauty that, in spite of their touristic and other trivialization, are still strong enough to make us forget the necessity of art—Adorno almost romantically dreams of those cloudless days in the European south that, intimately linked with unspoken truth, are somehow just waiting to be perceived and absorbed in their fullness. High art itself cannot be appropriated in distanced contemplation or interpretation as objectlike or objectified works of art, that concept being a product, as for Dewey, of a bourgeois-capitalist world. Aesthetic behavior and experience are instead linked with the child’s familiarity with nature and with archaic or basic modes of experience such as the sexual. These modes, in a kind of cultural rescue operation, are transferred by adults into the “artefacts” of art. In the adult experience of aesthetic artifacts the effect of the early modes is preserved in weakened, but culturally acceptable form. In art, the early modes retain something of their phylogenetic and ontogenetic violence, eruptive suddenness and discontinuity, in whatever refined forms. Hegel’s ideality of animation thus takes on somewhat more specific and definite forms in Adorno. The “higher” the really powerful forms of art aspire, the more they shed the quality of interpretable works—they turn into magnificent nothingness. Adorno gives Beethoven as an example. It would be easy to think of representatives of modern literature as well.77 Adorno’s train of thought is bound up with the crisis of what Hegel had called “pure appearance.” Once appearance appears to have be-

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come mere appearance, works of art are kept struggling in a precarious position. The nineteenth century has demonstrated, unintentionally to be sure, that any effort at “realism” as a way out of the crisis of appearance provokes countermovements of “phantasmagorias,” esoteric or nearly perverted cultures of play. In such a perspective, much of the socalled children’s literature of that time, for instance, appears in a somewhat uncanny light. Lewis Carroll would be only one example. The crisis of appearance, depriving works of art of their proper function of embodying appearance in its most striking form, may be so strong that art, seeking refuge in play, runs over into sports.78 Implicitly, Adorno’s joint theoretical and historical efforts also amount to a remarkable self-correction of central tenets that Horkheimer and Adorno had set up in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, in a central chapter, they had presented a scathing criticism of the “culture industry,” entertainment as big business. In Aesthetic Theory, however, Adorno’s distinction between art and the entertainment industry more or less breaks down. The distinction cannot be maintained because Adorno does not want to jeopardize the crucial role of appearances. Only appearances can achieve the fusion of heightened vitality and spiritual suggestiveness. To such fusions we cling, psychologically and culturally, even if we can no longer make sense of them theoretically. Hegel, for instance, in describing Dutch genre painting in terms of “spiritual cheerfulness” or the “ideal feature[s]” of “heedless boisterousness,” apparently had little trouble in finding a language for significant aesthetic appearance. Adorno is certainly not immune from using such language, which may now strike the reader as impressionistic. In order to make his point more forcefully, however, he yokes together, in the examples of the avant-garde and the music hall, what conventional wisdom would normally like to keep apart as art and entertainment.79 Most prominently, of course, strong trends of that kind appear in Adorno’s writings on music. It is significant, indeed, that Adorno does not only continually mix philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic analysis. In aesthetic analysis itself, he keeps shifting between the various media—a consistent focus on only one is formally maintained only in single essays. In that respect, as has been frequently observed, Aesthetic Theory is and remains Adorno’s most important and significant work.80 In the first part, I have drawn attention to Adorno’s criticism of Wagner. The criticism is not so much a criticism of music. It instead pins down the domineering role that techniques of “literary” significance had

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come to usurp in Wagner’s aesthetics. Such a criticism of “literature,” foreshadowed in Nietzsche’s notion of Wagnerian “closet plays,” that is plays primarily to be read or explored in their semantic dimensions, may seem paradoxical in the light of Adorno’s many literary analyses. In those, the concern with the importance of that medium is in abundant evidence. The paradox can be explained by pointing to Adorno’s basic, though not always open, predilection for a large spectrum of music, from twelve-tone to tango. Adorno would have preferred the role of a twentieth-century Beethoven to that of a modern Hegel. It does not come as a real surprise, then, to see Adorno committed, in the short essay on “bourgeois opera,” to a rehabilitation of that mongrel as “a prototype of the theatrical.” Opera, which in some of its origins and in many of its social contexts can be called bourgeois, seems to be a desperate media gesture by some Western cultures to recapture the vital tension between the musical, the scenic medium, and language of which a theater dominated by speech had been depleted. The gesture is desperate because opera, tied to mythical situations of the past, seems to articulate only retrospective, nostalgic, or ideologic needs. Opera is the basic medium of what Morris Berman has called the re-enchantment of a (bourgeois) world subjected to the disenchanting pressures of science and rationality, perhaps from the later classical Greeks onward.81 The operatic principle, to go again somewhat beyond Lindenberger, would consist in elaborate “aesthetic” techniques trying to preserve a magic element in the world. Wherever we look, there is what I call overstylization and “costume” in the opera, even and especially in the voice, that seemingly most natural human property. Overstylization moves inevitably toward parody. It is in that highly artificial mode of utterance, however, according to Adorno, that opera comes fully into its own. Again, the fundamental role of opera buffa is highlighted. The capital idea here is that it is only by overstylization and implicit parody that we can glimpse masks of the natural. Ironically—and indirectly, of course, he is serious—Adorno can say that, in opera, the bourgeois person transcends into a general (and in that sense “true”) human being. Carl Dahlhaus, in a more strictly defined musicologist’s context, has described this as the tendency toward the unreal, the absurd vindicated by pantomimic intelligibility, immediate plausibility, and the magic of relations (Beziehungszauber) springing from it.82 For opera, things started to go wrong when it was subjected to realistic, literary, or higher claims. Realistic demands hit with verismo in Italy, where Pietro Mascagni and Ruggiero Leoncavallo, inconsequen-

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tially but to their benefit, also stuck with the older and basic, in the double sense, “melodramatic” “cloak-and-dagger” principle. Higher spiritual claims were proffered by Wagner, producing a difficult mixture of narcotic and ideological appeals. Adorno therefore mobilizes considerable subtlety in order to deal with modern “literary” or musically difficult opera such as Schönberg’s and Alban Berg’s. Generally, like Hegel, Adorno describes opera as a prototype of the open work of art. Opera is a kind of answer to the question Lukács posed in his Theory of the Novel: How can life become essential again? By definition, this does not happen in the writing and reading of novels, or does so only in extremely oblique ways. It does not happen in and with opera, either. But singing suggests at least the enunciation in Greek tragedy, which was an enactment of the essentializing mode of myth. Singing in opera, under very different historical circumstances, is the maximum that can be reached in the intertwining of myth and Enlightenment.83 Obviously, I have presented an extremely selective picture of Adorno’s writings on music. The astounding quantity and richness of his essays and books on opera alone, however, should be eloquent in itself in a writer who is ordinarily predominantly associated with a school excelling in the criticism of ideology and the irreversible damages of modernization. Adorno was extremely suspicious of anthropology, but his writings on opera themselves spring from an anthropological impulse, however ironically veiled. Self-irony, indeed, must be the mode in which anthropological inquiries are conducted. Given that premise, it becomes possible to take up the anthropological import of “tragedy” once more. I want to draw attention once again to what appears to me as the striking and crucial fact. In the literature on tragedy, assertions concerning both its essential position in Western culture and its early failure, or even impossibility, with and after Euripides, are simultaneously at least implicitly present.84 Tragedy, whatever its sociocultural origins, for instance in ritual, stages a basic, anthropocentric intuition. Its scenes translate into strong images an intimate and meaningful connection between persons, their actions, and some kind of (“higher”) order. In those, the pathos of significance is preserved, perhaps even intensified, when action fails. The intuition, deep-seated as it is even for those, I would think, who have accustomed themselves to the cynicisms of “meaninglessness” and the like, is always assailed on at least two fronts. As soon as several persons are populating the stage (and tragedy’s population becomes more numerous, tragedy more “literary” with Euripides), discrepancies in and between

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themselves will arise. This results fairly automatically from the fact, almost a logical one, that they must play the roles of both observers and actors. Observational possibilities are always in excess of action. They easily split up the unity of motivation as well. As I hope to have shown in part 1, this discrepancy can be downplayed and submerged but not eliminated in strong scenic effects and the absolute theatricality of character. Images of order, in their turn, are easily destabilized (not, of course, necessarily invalidated or abolished) once sociocultural conditions change. Renewed changes may bring chances of various reencodings. In such a dynamics, the impression frequently to be found in theories and histories of tragedy that there have been only a few periods in which tragedy flourished (ancient Greece, Shakespearean times, seventeenth-century France, perhaps also late-nineteenth century Europe) is certainly plausible. By and large, however, the idea of a meaningful or even intimate connection between persons and life, let alone the cosmos at large, has run into trouble. Sociologically, the illusion is easier to sustain in aristocratic or feudally dominated contexts. In the “calculating” world of the bourgeoisie, fate changes into risk (which insurance companies have had to take care of since the eighteenth century). Notions such as fate or some world order, fairly immediate in the intuitive grip that they seem to exercise on persons, have had to compete for a long time with the theoretically stronger force of concepts connoting the penetrating pressures of social systems and discourses. Caught in their nets, individual enterprises may indeed lose the name of action. Hamlet’s conscience is the name for an acute but defensive awareness that the individual can neither ignore nor impose its own stance on. Conscience may try and develop binding norms on its own, and tragedy may again result from their clash with other claims. More often than not, however, alternatives or multiple options creep in that will make, as Brecht had it, tragic inevitability look somewhat stupid. Bourgeois, domestic tragedy, again since Shakespeare’s times and more particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has had a hard time escaping that verdict. Still, the intuition—the anthropocentric pretense—runs deep. At the same time, the developmental conflicts in the continuous discourse and dialog of tragedy counterproduces or at least favors an antitragic awareness of relativity. In order to remain effective, the pretense must be formalized, divested of discursive explicitness. Pathos and emphasis, semanticized effects, should not cling to the conflict itself. They must instead emerge from a semantically neutralized mode of presentation. This

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happens best in singing. While opera, too, may overdraw the balance toward “heroic” seriousness (Handel’s “fate” in early-eighteenthcentury London), opera seria and opera buffa did not drift apart into the opposition normally separating tragedy and comedy. And the compromise “tragicomedy” is itself a symptom of the problem. In opera, the intensity of the anthropocentric pretense turns into irresponsibility. Opera preserves the pretense without making claims about it. In that respect, it simply dodges the stark contrasts set up, by Lukács for instance, between the epic, tragedy, and the novel: order and authenticity given in the epic are claimed in tragedy, even in its failures, and they vanish in the novel. Opera avoids these alternatives by severing the coordination between plot and emotions. Plots, mostly confused and silly anyway, provide a rough framework for a space of expanding and freely floating emotions. Taken literally, most operas would be exercises in crass sentimentality, the dubious quality that has haunted bourgeois literature across its various genres. Again, Hamlet could be taken as a hypothetical starting point in an officially still aristocratic realm. For T. S. Eliot and others, both the emotions of that prince and his reflections about the lack of a world order are not sustained by an objective correlative, barred as he is from the exercise of power, from at least the illusion of direct action. They are idling at high speed. That is why, in the manner of Gary Schmidgall, his soliloquies can be taken—and could be spoken, or rather, “ranted”—like arias. As in film, where mass availability is greater and visuality more dramatic, opera makes us aware that there are theatrical, transsubjective layers in the seemingly most intimate and personal emotions. One can look upon opera history in very critical moods. It is indeed also a history of continuous efforts at opera reform. Conversely, however, Shakespeare, perhaps the central figure in the history of “drama,” can also be taken as the encompassment of both the maximum expansion and the crumbling of theatrical possibilities, at least insofar as these are not tied to strong, and therefore anthropologically self-sufficient, comic effects. This is why there is some justification for Schmidgall’s efforts, in the wake of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and others, to attribute a nondiscursive expressivity to the main passages of the plays, in spite of Shakespeare’s discursive intensity—to see major soliloquies and dialogues, their pathos and verbal wit, as moving away from and out of the checks and balances tentatively exercised by topics, themes, and problems. It would of course be silly to attempt anything like a consistent over-

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all interpretation of Shakespeare along these as well as along any other lines. But it certainly is not so clear what the (re)presentational drift in Shakespeare consists in. Shakespearean literary criticism itself has oscillated between the extremes of praise for the plays as mass entertainment and as the highest “literary” sophistication imaginable. Likewise, it has hovered uneasily around the implications of “All the world’s a stage”: the reality of performance and the performance of reality, the role of playwright-magician and the role of illusionistic trickster, may lead into each other in strange loops. In some plays, the very possibility of representation seems to be at stake. Sometimes, as in Henry V, this occurs in the midst of what appears as ideal representation itself. The presenter, in presenting, pointing to the representation of a supposedly ideal history, may use a traditional didactic device. Given the semiopen complexity that history acquires in the process, the device becomes ambivalent. Or, again, the reality of performance may imply the impossibility of representation. Prospero, in The Tempest, is the supreme player, who knows how to mix the cocktail of appearances and realities for both the other characters and the spectators, but his very virtuosity at switching levels (if it is that) can also be taken as an indirect comment on a basic futility of and as a farewell to the theatrical enterprise. The potential of theater, then, is not a cultural given. It depends on continually shifting media conditions. One could say that a whole spectrum of them is condensed in Shakespeare’s plays, and that the plays rehearse the possibilities from straightforward representation to absolute play. In such a perspective, the theatrical potential of (some of) Shakespeare’s pre-Tempest plays would hinge precisely on the degrees to which they remain distant from or come close to the all-round theatrical awareness of the supreme player, Prospero. In the Renaissance intellectual, Hamlet, representation approaches but does not admit its breakdown: Hamlet is loath to set the “plot” assigned to him in motion. Yet the fragments of surrogate actions, of unstable self-dramatizations in which he and others keep plunging, instead makes the representational machinery go on. In spite of that, the functionality of theatrical play, for Hamlet, is systematically disturbed. While his intentions in staging the play within the play—the gaining of evidence for Claudius’s guilt—may appear wrongheaded anyway, the task of determining a better function for plays is thereby not made easier. In the other “tragedies,” forms of individual overreaction, “dramatic” actions demanding quasi-naturally a distancing, clarifying reen-

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actment on some stage, push the question of functionality into the background. The situation is different in the histories. The inherent dramatic quality of individual political action in Elizabethan times, therefore the urgency to present it on a stage and not just catch vague glimpses of its elusive, sordid, or trivial aspects in “reality,” corresponds to the more personalized “sensationalism” of action in Shakespearean and even more in contemporary or later Stuart tragedy. On the other hand, the theatricality of political history itself, often analyzed in Elizabeth’s poses and pageants, establishes a continuum of stage and history as well. In the histories, individual action may be dramatically urgent. But it runs against political situations whose complexity has outgrown the reach of individual motivation and calculus. Hotspur in Henry IV is perhaps the most “dramatic” and powerful example of the personal urge (“temperament”). But that urge is not sufficiently complex. Hotspur is accordingly ejected from the political world. In its other representatives, including Henry IV and also, I think, Hal (Henry V), that world, if complex, looks fairly drab and undramatic. The open structure of Henry IV, in its two parts, suggests that political action is quick to lose the dramatic and the representative qualities that made theatrical representation one of its quasi-natural media in the first place. In that sense, the figure of Rumour that opens the second part assumes the role of a crucial index. In its perspective, the sound and the fury of the political world must be judged. Rumour succinctly illustrates the situation of the theater: in a world dominated and victimized by rumors, the dramatic correlation between individual action and public systems does not make much theatrical sense. A commentary on our present-day relations between politics, the theater, and the hegemonic media representing the technologized versions of Rumour could hardly be more apposite. Shakespeare certainly does not abolish the frame, the boundary that separates the audience from the stage, that makes the audience aware that they are neither immersed in a dream nor plunged into reality. The plays are overall and explicit “metaphors” only. But Shakespeare frequently “heightens the metaphor by approaching as closely as a coherent plot allows to the inner logic of a dream.” He makes “likeness (of stage event to life in the world outside the stage door) and difference (of the stage make-believe from reality) comment on the outside world, a kind of positive and superabundant presentation of meaning-cappingmeaning while meaning-subverts-meaning.”85 The relations between addressers and addressees (the self in soliloquy, others in dialog, or implic-

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itly the audience) are highly pluralistic, also because Shakespeare allows for the effect of pluralistic theatrical-as-cultural traditions such as folk festivals and the like. The axis of signification is pressed to such an extent that it yields “intimations of how arbitrary it really is.”86 This provides, in the contemporary code, wonder and delight. In Cook’s scheme of things, that axis of signification is kept stiff in Greece and Japan by something like a “ritual concentration.”87 One can see it that way. But it means that the axis of “signification,” in these cases, is not a representational one. French classical tragedy offers an interesting intermediary case: the ritual order can be formalized because the tragedies unfold within a superimposed framework of absolute, or rather absolutistic, spectacle, le roi-machine of Jean-Marie Apostolidès. It follows that Shakespeare’s plays are in a barely contained process of transcending representation altogether. Barthes described this process as the separation of representation and “style.” Because of its biological origin, style, in Barthes’s Degré zéro de l’écriture, tends to overstep the boundary that, in the case of a play, the theater formally keeps maintained. That, however, presupposes that a level of biological appeal or “strangeness” can be designated in which the “intercalary hour” of theater is neither quite ritualized nor completely divorced from ritual either. Cook apparently thinks that in Shakespeare, music embodies and unleashes that appeal. That again is why Shakespeare’s plays, historically, are embedded in what Cook calls contexts of “analogic contagion.” Those can be located in shows as diverse as royal pageants, folk festivals, holiday church processions or even church services, schoolboy plays, bear baitings, cruising prostitutes, public executions, or visits to Bedlam.88 In Shakespeare’s world, the “entry of music . . . is random,” it has “a private, intimate side.” It cannot yet override the more public dimensions of representation, much as these are also eroded from the other side of a “hypercathectic verbal magic,” a seemingly gratuitous “investment in mere language.” That investment is made in response to the “intolerable pressures” in the imagined drama and the self-dramatizations that, without the safety valve of ranting and raving, would drive Hamlet and others really mad.89 Implicit admissions to that effect can be extracted from histories and theories of serious verbal theater itself. Apart from taste and value judgments, one rarely gets an answer to the question why, with respect to Britain as perhaps the clearest example, there is a large attention gap with respect to serious drama that stretches almost from Shakespeare to

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Shaw—why, as Coleridge put it, an exhausted nature has produced only tragic dwarfs after Shakespeare. Marx officially privileged class action. But that urge was undermined by a latent anthropology of basic and fixed human needs. Freud delved into the recesses of the generalized human unconscious, and sociocultural concerns shrank to the perennial discontents of civilization. Darwin did everything to escape any commitment with respect to the sociocultural consequences of evolutionary biology. In contrast to that, striking (“theatrical”) images of individual action were particularly called for, I would suppose, because the urgency and extent of social problems within the heavy, indeed dramatic industrialization of the nineteenth century clashed with the low speed of their bureaucratic administration. For Britain, massive frictions between the colossal stature of both social problems and bureaucracy constituted, in paradigmatic form, relatively simple historical facts. Shaw accordingly wrote plays. Verbal art seemed to have become a powerful image of history, in Adorno’s sense, again. Yet, even for Shaw, the anthropological pretense of opera proved more “endearing.” There is work in progress (by Jonathan Wisenthal and others) that looks upon Shaw’s plays themselves as music-drama. Shaw’s aphorism that the principal merit of Victor Hugo’s plays consisted in their providing libretto materials for Verdi90 can be analytically extended. British romantic closet plays in particular have supplied particularly striking examples of a paralyzed, self-referential cruising of theatrical discourse, examples of the vain search for a corresponding cultural, historical, or social object. In order to explain the run-down state of much of British lateeighteenth-century and early- and mid-nineteenth-century drama, reasons have been adduced galore. They include questions of legal status: since there were, in London, only two legal theaters for verbal drama, lots of “illegal” theaters were forced to circumvent the law by offering something else. Low-level but popular “melodrama” took over for apparently very simple reasons. In France, an analogous if less strongly marked split between a théâtre littéraire and spectacles oculaires is said to have taken place.91 Explanations of that kind, however, proceed on a mixed basis of positivism and prejudice. By contrast, Richard Wagner formulated some uncannily symptomatic conclusions concerning a media history, in contrast to a genre history. According to Wagner, Shakespeare, in an “age of the theater,” as the slogan goes, was able to condense materials into plays that, because of their sprawling nature, had already basically taken the

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road toward the novel. Shakespeare barely concealed the dissolution of the public dimension represented by the chorus in Greek tragedy into individuals involved with the action in only personal and contingent ways. Scenic deficits, however, suggest that there is a problem even in Shakespeare. Racine, for Wagner, did away with the public dimension of individuality: ultimately, and consistently, he abandoned the theater altogether. Schiller, in the completely different German cultural and political situation, confronted with the sprawling of the public and the private in opposite directions, purged both to such an extent that an appearance of “history” as the organic involvement of individuals in the public domain returned back on the stage.92 For Wagner, that appearance—a “mere” appearance certainly—means that Schiller’s plays are suspended in thin air between heaven and earth. The price to be paid for this on the subjective side—variously criticized as pathos, idealism, and moralizing—was high. Wagner is emphatic: in such plays, we do not and cannot have real drama. It is small wonder, then, that even Schiller, to say nothing of Goethe, put “a certain trust” in opera. In opera, quite in contrast to serious verbal theater, the ideal could “steal its way onto the stage,” as Schiller put it, through the stimulation of the senses. Goethe thought that such hopes had been fulfilled by Mozart’s Don Giovanni; unfortunately, Mozart’s death had forestalled the hope that such “events” might occur again.93 In Italy, again under specific circumstances of which advanced citystates are certainly important elements in the earlier history, the media knot of theatrical culture had been cut through with opera. Opera, perhaps the most conspicuous early multimedium, was the incidental, practical result of a debate that could not be consistently conducted in the realm of monomedia theory. If tragedy, according to Nietzsche, owes its birth to the spirit of music, Italian opera was born, in conception and in practice, out of a misunderstanding of the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy. The propelling force in the Florence Camerata around the turn from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century was a discontent with the “expressive-representational” power of literary languages. In the early modern Italian epics of Ariosto and others, the connection between literary language and aristocratic emotive norms was pushed, for a last time, into subtle complexities. In the self-ironic play of parody, however, these complexities tend to cancel each other out, to suggest the impossibility of the genre. For the Camerata, the discontent with literary language concentrates in the feeling that the sound qualities of language, which make poetic declamation fail or succeed, must be re-

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vitalized. It is in the “resounding” effect of language that the presence of both emotions and the world is immediately felt. In that respect, apparently even Dante’s language had come to leave something to be desired. Italian opera is perhaps the most succinctly elaborated medium of what Gramsci called the Italian “melodramatic” conception of life. Ruth Katz has told the story of “a melodramatization of 150 years of social and cultural history,” tracing the ways in which Italian Renaissance literature turned literally into an “invitation to music” to join in. In various ways, the (pseudo-)orality of the novelle, the well-nigh expiration of poetry in pastoral drama (e.g., Tasso’s Aminta), the emphasis on the “grand production” in the sacre rappresentazioni, and the spectacular but barely “literary” pathos of Senecan-Roman tragedy veered toward or demanded musical interference or far-reaching musicalization.94 There is, furthermore, a large and ill-defined space between representational conceptions of language, for instance those of the Neoplatonists, and specialized, either religiously charged or relatively neutral polyphonic music. “Sung tragedies” fashioned after the supposedly Greek model95 were intended to occupy the space in between. The Greek way of “singing,” however, changed drastically within the mixed, urbanized context of the Florentine aristocracy and the higher, professionalized bourgeoisie. Greek tragedy, in some of its early and classic representatives, may have come close to the implementation of an anthropologically “pure” or basic medium, the hypothetical unity of ritual and art. That brittle unity, or the impression of it, can be reproduced only in the form of highly “artificial” procedures of staging. Opera, then, is a way of staging that neutralizes representation. The enchantment of performance and its very artifice is supposed to blur the boundaries between representation and enactment. This explains why opera, especially in its later Italian, shamelessly “popular” form, has provoked a split of the potential audience into enthusiasts and enemies, much more so than verbal theater. Conversely, it also has spawned— apart from the literary closet plays of Wagner (Nietzsche)—many fewer interpretational controversies. Despite the fact that opera has always exploited verbal theater for topics, themes, and plots, the difference in medium appeal is tremendous. This is most conspicuous in those forms that, for a very short time, tried to strike a balance between the two. That effort was made, for instance, in the many “intermediate” forms on London stages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Purcell’s (1659–95) “semi-operas” are the best, but symptomatically short-lived, examples. In the semi-operas,

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song and dance alternated with spoken passages. Roger North, who died in 1734 and may have coined the term, has described the dilemma of alternation quite precisely: parts of the audience despise the music because they are interested in the represented problem. The others look upon the spoken passages as mere interruptions of the music. North, quite plausibly, opted for a separation of the “genres.”96 The problem of semi-operas is abundantly, indeed “intolerably,” obvious in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (1692–93), a transformation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Since Shakespeare’s text, even in the spoken passages, cannot be reproduced in its entirety, paraphrases become necessary. In those, the incongruity of media drifts are glaring. On the other hand, Purcell’s full opera, Dido and Aeneas (1689), was conceived, written, and performed as a chamber opera for a very limited audience of schoolgirls. But Dido’s musicalized “message” in arias like “Ah! Belinda, I am prest” or “When I am laid in earth” seems to have engraved itself into the world’s memory, as Schreiber says with self-ironic pathos: the suffering of the world is condensed in the lament of a person. It is a message, though, “from which all verbal fat has been boiled away.”97 This “perfection” of opera, as Romain Rolland called it, arises because the language of song does not call for the disenchanting questions that spoken language might provoke. In opera, culturally critical questions concerning the authenticity—and the relevance—of emotions and motivations need not be asked. In verbal theater, such questions may easily slip into the focus of attention. In that respect, opera can never be really up to date. It will always treat the problems of yesterday and of yore. But it enacts them in a mode that makes the obsolete appear universal. In that sense, there seem to be central forms of human behavior that receive their individual and general significance only in opera. Conversely, that significance can easily degenerate into the meaningless and the absurd. Consequently, it is pointless to ask, with Adorno, how bourgeois opera can shake off its obsolete and nostalgic images of desire and regain the status of a relevant, powerful image for the present. Or rather, such a question stems from a layer of thought, the criticism of ideology, that, in matters of media, is thoroughly misapplied more often than not. In the great representatives of opera, perfection is tantamount to absolute naiveté.98 It is the immanent dynamics of an unintended transition from various mixtures of singing and speaking, from various versions of semi-opera or less than semi-opera to the full-blown operas of Monteverdi and their “universal” appeal, that the Camerata witnessed in as little time as ten

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years, roughly from 1600 to 1610. In 1607, Monteverdi’s Orfeo was produced in Mantova. In urban society, the chanting we associate with Greek tragedy would have been archaic, as it is for us, suggesting abortive rituals, but not poetic intensity. This is why the difference between ordinary and “poetic-dramatic” speech had to be increased. The result was singing as a highly specialized technique of is own. For a while, the Camerata group tried to replace literary-dramatic speech by what they called recitare cantando—clearly a compromise formula intended to reconcile the diverging pulls of realistic speech and “poetic” intensity. Soon monody—an individual switching to singing in critical and important situations—took over. This proved to be an insufficiently complex mode, and the emphasis shifted to a mixture of recitative and singing in which speech standards seemed to be preserved and yet subordinated to the lead of melody.99 That highly unstable mixture split, in due course, into what since has been called recitative and aria. The recitative has kept close to dramatic speech. It takes care of the need to maintain at least the impression of a meaningful continuity of action. Arias soar away into expressive independence. In opera, the division of labor between recitative and aria has always been precarious. In the nineteenth century, in particular, the parodistic and playful handling of this division implied in opera buffa was subjected to more serious demands. Recitative then appeared as musically worthless. The independence of singing (belcanto), for Wagner on the other hand, was hard to distinguish from meaninglessness.100 On the whole, it was of course the “boring” recitative that lost out. Once the artificial naturalness of aria is accepted, the recitative, much as it seems to represent the normalcy of speech, tends to appear artificial and unrealistic in its own way. The aria, then, is the modern version of an archaic core. The presentational self-sufficiency of performative enactment pushes the representational convention into a neutral background. This is not to say, of course, that any aria is not couched in conventional codes itself.101 The internal dynamics of opera history is indeed made up to a large extent by efforts to improve conventions and codes. There has been, since the days of the Camerata, a continuous stream of opera and libretto reforms: the quarrels about the “priority” of words or music starting with Monteverdi; the parody of heroic opera by the various forms of comic opera (Handel versus Gay/Pepusch in early-eighteenth-century London); Handel’s own later switch to oratorio; the repeated efforts to present fusions of character, plot, and song, to bring opera in line with “realistic” stan-

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dards occupying the nineteenth century; failing these, the twentiethcentury ambition to have a really “literary” opera; and so on. Opera is the early modern form in which self-sustained performance, unhampered by criteria of consistent representation, reasserts itself. For average types of rationality, this is hard to digest. Aaron Hill complained in a letter to Handel that, in opera, the “excellence of sound” is normally “dishonour’d by the poorness of the sense it is chain’d to.” Hill was right, but Handel was the wrong addressee, certainly not the one on whom hopes for betterment could be built. It was Handel who, with the best of intentions, finally implemented Dryden’s plans for a Paradise Lost opera on a smaller scale. Handel took a leading part in the 1740 operatic raid on and rape of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” supplemented by the writer Charles Jennens with “Il Moderato.” From a literary point of view, there are grounds for lament. But Hill’s position can easily be reversed. It then appears that Handel was able to “inspire Life into the most senseless Words.” Handel himself, in a letter to Jennens, at least appeared to be highly satisfied with that mixture: I opened with the Allegro, Penseroso, & Moderato, and I assure you that the Words of the Moderato are vastly admired. The Audience being composed (besides the Flower of Ladyes of Distinction and other people of the greatest quality) of so many Bishops, Deans, Heads of the Colledge, the most eminent people in the Law as the Chancellor, Auditor General, &tc. all which are very much taken with the Poetry. So that I am desired to perform it again the next time.102

Impressions and value judgments of that kind are of course highly controversial. Among other criticism, some gentlemen found out, very much to their annoyance, that the “damn’d stuff” was the words of Milton in some strange shape.103 But impressionism and value judgments mask a problem that cannot be theoretically solved: the acceptance or rejection of what I have called the anthropocentric pretense. It is condensed in the metaphor of “Life” with which, in various forms, the aesthetic thought of Hegel, Dewey, and Adorno is centrally concerned. In opera, the anthropocentric pretense is powerfully present, although it is neither seriously implied nor explicitly invoked. Consequently, such painstakingly precise historians as Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, in their book on Handel, torment themselves in vain with specious distinctions between an alleged timeless grandeur of certain Handelian figures (Cleopatra’s “eternal seductiveness” as a “central facet of human experience”) and the split between “splendid moments” and “mere” “puppet” qualities in others.104 Or rather, they

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do not see that they are frequently switching between descriptivetechnical analysis and value judgments. Similarly, Dean, in his equally informative and instructive book on Georges Bizet, labors under the delusion that it is possible to balance the good and bad points of opera life. The bad points in such a picture are found in the star system, entailing the destruction of dramatic and psychological integrity. They show up glaringly in the sorry state of music criticism in Bizet’s time, and in the distance that separates music and literature. His good points reside particularly in the “dramatic” improvement of character conceptions, to which Dean devotes a whole chapter. But Dean is not at all dealing with consistency of character. He is concerned with a lack or increase in “dramatic,” of what may or may not be taken as a full or fragmentary character in Don José and Carmen. Therefore, a dose of the playful self-irony that Nietzsche applied when he tried to make the impression of Bizet’s musical-dynamic “superiority” plausible is always to be recommended. The directions taken by Prosper Mérimée’s writing and Bizet’s opera are entirely different, and, perhaps, seen from a present-day vantage point, neither should be burdened with notions of character: Bizet concentrates on a series of strong impressions that may or may not be attributed to “characters,” while Mérimée delineates the slow and gradual falling apart of what had once appeared, as Dean has it, as a “decent human being.”105 By contrast, Anna Seward in 1788 did have a theoretically interesting point when she regretted that Milton and Handel were not contemporaries, that “the former knew not the delight of hearing his own poetry heightened as Handel heightened it.” Milton’s poetic status after his death was preserved to some extent by the music for which it was occasionally exploited. The musical, in other words, facilitated the reliterarization of Milton’s cultural status during the latter part of the eighteenth century.106 The systematic point in its most telling historical form was made by Carl Dahlhaus. Dahlhaus draws attention to what might be seen as a strange or contradictory coincidence: the operas of Rossini, his opere buffe in particular, being often taken as the lightest of musical fare, and the Beethoven of the late string quartets, in which, after the symphonies, music seems to have attained almost metaphysical qualities. The discrepancies in musical content in Rossini and Beethoven are, however, more than made up by the “common properties of form.” Both wrote “music about music.” Implying a musical drive toward what could be called “metamusic,” Dahlhaus envisages that self-sufficiency of musical

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enactment with which I have been so much concerned. In Rossini, in particular, “substance,” the meaningfulness of musical motives, counts for little. These are pulled, in both opera seria and buffa, into the “whirls and the delirium,” the turbulence of “irresistible crescendi.” It was only a play like Goethe’s Faust that successfully resisted this kind of treatment. Nowhere else has the collapse of genre distinctions within opera become as evident as in the demonic farces of Rossini.107 Descriptively, Lindenberger’s distinction between the mimetic and the rhetorical orientations of opera108 can be applied to both verbal and musical theater. But the status of the mimetic, its fragments and semblances, its tendency toward indeterminacy, mostly takes very different turns. Literary-dramatic texts can be reasonably analyzed in terms of the indeterminacy into which their topics, situations, and problems, their elements of potential reference, are shifted. In opera, indeterminacy tends to approach irrelevance: the apparent referents function as triggers of unrelated, but therefore also unrelativized and somehow very real, effects. The effects are bonded not with the referents or their indeterminacy, but rather, to simplify drastically, with the nervous system. Any emotion seemingly stimulated by opera may, but need not, be attributed to anything like the destiny of characters. In that sense, Shaw’s verdict that “the superior intensity of musical expression” makes Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana “far more real” than Verga’s play of the same title would be theoretically plausible even if Shaw’s impression were shared by no one else.109 The same would hold for Ernst Krenek’s view according to which the animal(istic) effect of Weill’s music in the operas by Weill and Brecht may simply push into oblivion their intellectual or socially critical “content,” whether determinate or not.110 Efforts to identify irrelevance, that is, something that may or may not be “there,” thus easily take on strained and forced qualities. Kierkegaard, to take a famous example, in his analyses in Either/Or, defined Mozart’s Don Giovanni as the erotic-sensual genius. For Günter Schauenberg, Wagner maneuvers between the stimulation of the erotic and the repression of the sexual. For Adorno, Wagner’s Ring presents the problematic fusion of humans dominating nature and being dominated by it.111 While controversies in literary interpretation have lost their erstwhile importance, even advanced literary theory would not dispute that the medium of literature provokes and may even need extended interpretational activities. Opera implies that it is the curtailment of their claims toward truth, correctness, and adequacy that is at stake,

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not their existence as such. In opera, the type of activity called interpretation frequently, if not always, seems misplaced. The stretching of scenic immediacy toward the self-sufficiency of a magic of relations112 in a context of unreality or even absurdity does not of course preclude interpretation. It does make clear, however, that the appropriateness of interpretational forms depends on the medium onto which they are projected. Much more than literary criticism, opera criticism runs the risk of unintentional self-parody. I am not just referring to those numerous critics who, while adopting highbrow attitudes concerning the holistic pathos of works of art, are also working for the sellout of these works in choice arias sung by the great stars. Opera history is similar to literary history in that distinctions always impose themselves. Verdi and Wagner, and their history of a nonrelation, have come to embody such distinctions in an almost compulsive form. At the same time, distinctions are on the verge of collapse where the effect of different musical techniques and procedures is at stake. Thus, Herbert Dieckmann comes to downplay the very distinctions between Verdi and Wagner that, at other times, may provoke almost warlike sentiments of mutual aggression.113 The same tendency is strongly present in Werfel’s novel Verdi: Roman der Oper. Reinhard Strohm, in his turn, has emphasized the tautological and redundant aspects of literary debates about opera and its reform. Change consists, for the larger part, in the fact of criticism itself, not in its content.114 This is why there are quite some points to the unashamed but also serious parody of discourse on opera epitomized in Eckhard Henscheid’s Verdi Is the Mozart of Wagner.115 In opera, we turn into witnesses of our compulsions toward history. We also experience their fragility and their intermittent collapse.

part three

The Spectacular and the Vanishing Body Sports and Literature “When I read that the Greeks educated their young people on poetry, gymnastics and music I feel I know what that means, and I constantly read (and profit by) the writings of most learned professors of Greek, who I’m sure don’t know what they are talking about.” C. L. R. James, writer and black cricket player from Caribbean Trinidad, in Beyond a Boundary (1963; London: Serpent's Tail, 1994), p. 32.

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chapter seven

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Outlines and Perspectives Suggestions to the effect that film and rock music can be seen in different ways as the modern embodiment of the media problem of opera have been frequently made. Analytically, however, there would be little sense in sketching a history of that shift. One would get hopelessly mired in topical and shifting concerns. I therefore leave the matter with opera, which I take as an amply pregnant if traditional media model that is merely varied in different ways by modern film and rock music. Film tackles the anthropological import of human image orientation in a radicalized way. In the dynamic movement of images, technological magic recaptures and perhaps surpasses the old magic, the elusively real and haunting persistence of images, icons, fetishes, and the like, in such a way that it is possible to see film, with the American “opera” composer Philip Glass, as the single really new medium of the twentieth century. French film theory in particular, from Edgar Morin to Gilles Deleuze, has been brilliantly concerned with this. However, a basic proviso of this work must be called to mind: putting it into the words of a passing remark by the German film director Alexander Kluge, I would say that film theory limited to film (that is, to its visual side) is as impossible as a music theory limited to music or a theory of literature restricted to literature. A striking instance of the generalized sweep exercised by multimedia configurations against historical, local, moral, and legal factors and against single media could be supplied by the history of the British music hall, especially in the later part of the nineteenth century. Originally a working-class entertainment with relatively specific forms, it tended to incorporate progressively elements of tragedy, comedy, farce, opera, classical music, dance, and other more “physical” forms of art. In some of the halls, even “literary” recitals—by Dickens and others—took place. Music halls were indeed the first institutions to make use of film, thus

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feeding a media rival and working toward their own obsolescence. As that example also tends to corroborate, however, such respecifications of a sprawling media arrangement like music halls will not normally lead back or forward to the purity of single-media situations.1 Single-media theories therefore normally are able only to bring out the particular emphasis into which a so-called medium tends to push more comprehensive configurations of experience, expression, or enactment. In that sense, film rehabilitates and intensifies the magic of images, which are not just images, but reflect, in Alexander Kluge’s sense, the “strongly rooted relations which the child’s eye has set up with “objects.”2 Howard Gardner’s remarks about the early commerce of the various media during a certain age, evoked at the beginning of this work, come to mind again. Rock music in its turn stresses, organizes, and provides the more or less vaguely emotionalized stage for the urgency codes conceived or felt as body rhythms. Compared with opera, the transition from implicitness to explicitness and the acting out of emotionalized body codes is drastically intensified in rock music. That intensification is probably due to the fact that average and everyday sociocultural contexts of the twentieth century, apart from the highly specialized worlds of fashion, seem to offer no self-evident, easy-going, or elegant public ways like the dances and festivals of yore of encoding and acting out the urge of the body toward rhythmic shape or performative splendor. In the “beat” of rock music, that rhythmic urge takes a both simplified and emphatic form. In sports, on the other hand, the visual dynamics and performative potential of the body is pushed to the foreground. It is the thesis of the present work that the “body,” understood as body codes and forms of body involvement, is not yet superseded or eliminated as a basic center of orientation continually translated and rarefied into so-called abstractions.3 In their extremes, as in Zen or perhaps some forms of asceticism, the dimensions signaled by the shorthand terms “body” and “mind” converge toward some zero steady state. Far-reaching as the inroads of medical and other sciences have been, we “know” despairingly little about what continually goes on in these domains. More urgently, we would have to know how they correlate with those half-bodily, half-spiritual states of being and feeling in which existence is continually filtered, and out of which the tonus of life is distilled. This means that for the time being, whatever may “really” happen to our bodies and minds, the need for codes and displays, in short, for cultures of the body and what they may connote, far from having been eliminated by cloning or cyberspace, has in fact increased.

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At stake in all these domains is a general issue: the ways in which both the display of the body and the rarefying translations of semiphysical states of being into the complexities of mind are enacted and encoded. Rather than taking the road of ordinary media histories and going into film, rock music, or what appears to many as the revolutionary potentials of electronic multimedia arrangements, I propose to grasp the issue at the junction of two well-shaped, seemingly opposed, but secretly and often openly related areas: sports and literature. Although it may appear that the Olympic Games, for instance, are nothing apart from their TV versions these days, I am leaving “the media” out of this confrontation. On the one hand, in terms of visuality, but also the less literally spectacular issues of business, sports and the media are obviously much closer to each other than sports and literature. On the other hand, the affinity tends to be tied to surface levels, however fascinating and “dramatic” these may be. Traditional spectacular drama, while exploiting visuality, does so on a basis of story and its built-in psychological suggestiveness. The problem of drama is to what degree these can remain implicit or have to be dragged into explicitness, turning, in extremis, into “philosophical” or similar problem plays, that is to say, into “mere” reading matter. Sports, or athletics (for the time being I am not worrying about the historical adequacy of terms) in their turn, once their relation with mythic gods and heroes is cut, do not dispose of these connotational resources anymore. They instead seem to push body performance into one-sided, connotationally impoverished extremes. This is what visually oriented media are mostly doing. However, the coupling of high-performance body codes and levels of consciousness remains urgent. And it demands that media go beyond the tyranny of the visual. One can phrase that demand with the words of Eugene F. Kaelen (although the term “continuity” is misleading): “Continuity between body and mind is thus one of the facts of human existence. The question arises, however, as to the best manner of expounding this relationship, and here we have a choice.”4 Even in an age of organ transplants, dealing with sports and literature appears to me as one of the better manners of approaching that relationship. Eleanor Metheny has indeed set up an explicit analogy between sports experience and the way in which Wallace Stevens, for one, defines the workings of poetry: “Like a flow of meanings with no speech—and of as many meanings as of men.”5 This explains why, after almost two centuries of relatively “pure” literary history and theory, the floodgates of research into sports and literature

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have been opened during the last twenty-five years or so. In particular, anthologies of literary texts somehow concerned with sports and bibliographies of sports motifs in literature have been pouring out for a long time.6 Western literature, theater, and semiotics, tormented since the eighteenth century by the quest for natural signs, their possible presentation or enactment, often seem plausibly tempted to identify the overdetermined codes of sports as quasi-natural signs. In dealing with problematic forms of the coupling of sports and literature, of body codes and levels of consciousness, the present work will betray again its dominant Western bias. Again, I would like to claim that the bias is merely, and fruitfully, an operational and heuristic one, not an ideological one. The approximation, for “Japan,” of theatrical and athletic forms of ceremonial spectacle in Part Two was meant to suggest that a possible basic discontinuity (acting codes versus combat codes) does not matter very much: the body as such being unknown, the interest shifts toward the extremes into which the “serious” or “playful” heterogeneity of its productions can be pushed. In both cases, elements of psychology (character or consciousness) are intensely implied, but not openly focused upon. Western literature, as a medium of reading that enforces the priority of explicit consciousness, necessarily downgrades body codes to some extent. That extent, however, in analogy to the selftherapeutic stances outlined in Part One, is codetermined by the indirect but often frantic pursuit of what is tendentiously excluded. One may suppose, and it has been said, that in so-called first-class authors, indirectness, amounting often to what appears as a total lack or literary unsuitability of body urgency, takes command, that “sports literature,” literature openly concerned with sports, must be counted among trivial pursuits. The scope for the elaboration of complex intellectual-emotional perspectives, distancing the crudely pressing materiality of lifeworld concerns, is immense. Its dynamic can be extolled as the hallmark of literature deserving that name. Even so, there is no denying the fact that, more than the cultural appeal of literature, the power of sports enactments plays across cultural distinctions. Indeed, that power wipes out cultural or intellectual distinctions so radically that it provokes their later or often prophylactic reinstatement in dogmatic forms. I suggest that it is this pull, the anticipatory and retrospective overencoding of sports, that all too often seems to turn sports into a literary misfit. This is of course where the “media” would mainly come in. The display of the body in sports is so striking in its appeal that subsequent

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translations into social (or biosocial), cultural, or even national and racial terms are hard to avoid. Muhammad Ali, for example, appearing paralyzed and shaken by Parkinson’s disease at the ignition of the Olympic flame in 1996, has been analyzed by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jan Philipp Reemtsma (heir of one of the biggest German tobacco companies, which he left to turn writer and sponsor of the—not necessarily academic— humanities). With due emphasis, Reemtsma warns against the transfiguration of atavism that he sees in the boxing literature of Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, and others. Predictably and in due course, however, Reemtsma falls prey to that transfiguration himself. Defeat, whether in sports, business, or love, is declared to be intolerable as such. The model to cope with it adequately seems to be Aias in the Iliad, who, after the arms of Achilles have been given to Ulysses and not to him, first kills a flock of sheep and then himself. What fascinates in Ali, according to Reemtsma, is that his boxing style in the narrow sense (fast and variable combinations) is a manifestation of archetypal Proteus-like qualities and the “absolute” will to dominate.7 These qualities may be archetypal, but they also foreshadow a type of personality we hardly yet know or have well-nigh lost sight of: the personality in which the unstable historical compromises of the “balanced individual” (first clearly visible with Ulysses, perhaps) are no longer cultivated. In present-day, overly complex societies, the virtues of the (well-) balanced individual do not pay anymore. In sports, and for the time being only in sports, the fundamentally personal basis of so-called personal achievement gains visibility. In Ali, then, the aspects of race, religion, and politics (“I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong”) are the changeable masks of the “modern, perhaps postmodern” multiple, dissociated personality.8 Its core—not its (nonexisting) identity—is enacted in sports.9 Reemtsma’s position tallies with the way in which Horkheimer and Adorno have elevated Ulysses into the first representative of an “Enlightenment” mentality. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, and in spite of the far-reaching extension of Enlightenment features, the historical picture remains relatively open. The overencoding of striking sporting display and performance overlays a both more problematic and flexible code potential. Western cultures, Horkheimer and Adorno have said in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, are tinged with a love-hate relationship with the body. In this view, almost from time immemorial, the

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body has been used and exploited for various purposes and has ceased to be a culturally authentic or self-evident human medium (connoted by the German word Leib in contrast to Körper, the former completely pushed into irrelevance for many people in the age of organ transplants). In Foucault’s terms, myriad techniques of power, including especially those of “discourse,” have shut out humans from any form of originary experience, for which they are longing in spite and because of that. Longing creates surrogates, and from this results a split of history into the more manifest political, social, and common cultural events and the subterranean destiny of distorted passions and instincts concentrated in the images of the body.10 One can see things that way. But one can also see modern sports as a mere duplication of the worlds of work, business, nationalism, and race, as many studies have done. I do think, however, that mixed love-haterelationships (if we stick to that vocabulary for a moment) are both basic and culturally symptomatic—if indeed anything is. Within love-hate relationships, there certainly are strong differences between the dominant positions taken by Christianity, for instance, the enthusiasm however problematic of spectator sports crowds, and the complex leanings toward the unavailable body manifest in all kinds of ways in the literatures of various periods. It seems clear, even if the assertion amounts to a simplification, that Christianity has been drifting more toward body hatred than body love, that sports tend to stage the body and its implications in the somewhat simplistic forms of enthusiasms that imply or encourage fanaticism, and that “physical educators,” among others, have espoused the ideals of mind, character, or social utility in order to justify the education of the body.11 By contrast, literature tends to explore and expand the simplified ambivalence of religion and sports to a degree in which the semantics of love and hate, of originary and manipulated experience, of work and play, devotion and business, and so on no longer makes much sense. This perspective is as far as possible removed from the ridiculous assumption, manifesting itself in the (almost always manipulated) “mens sana in corpore sano” tradition, that physical culture and the strong, healthy body have to be cultivated as prerequisites for creative intellectual or spiritual work. Writers like Bertolt Brecht, in an essay “Sport und geistiges Schaffen [Sport and Intellectual Work]” (1926), and Gottfried Benn, in an essay “Genie und Gesundheit [Genius and Health]” (1930), have done away with what must appear as a silly slogan, once merely quoted out of its Roman context (and even there it was of course always

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problematic). The question is instead how the body—a ubiquitous, latent referent deprived of any self-evident semiotic power—remains culturally “in play.” The road to origins, fullness, and authenticity is blocked. It probably never existed anyway. The body remains an ambiguous object, always stylized and rationalized, but never so in any stable or permanently satisfactory way. This is why sports—embodying the futile but rewarding struggle of the adult human baby to cling to the bosom of an imaginary Mother Nature, as Robert Musil has said—have been from the ancient Greeks onward on the way toward excess in all directions. Sports are the problematic cultural shapes of a dream, Musil again has said, that does not remain imprisoned in the brain, but that, as the cultural condensation of an (imaginary) mass soul, takes shape in “ideoplastic” ways. Sports are fascinating, according to the early Brecht, precisely because they resist the ordinary pressures of sociocultural acceptability. Sports are risky, uncultivated, not reasonable or healthy, to say nothing, these days, of the gigantic commercialism they, as well as, to be sure, literature in its turn, have been subjected.12 Literature, then, is interested in the makeup and the making up of relations between degenerated origins or utopias of a “wild” form of the body and the finer psychological or social shades of cultivated existence. In that sense, sports can be counted among those “dangerous” areas of experience “in between” where appeal and problem, fascination and ridicule cannot be separated. Consequently, even if they are philosophical, efforts to raise sports to the level of an eighth (fine, high) art will not work. Hans Lenk, a member of the gold-medal-winning West German rowing eight in the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, afterward professor of philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe and a prolific writer on the philosophy of sports, as well as on organizational problems of modern sports, has rightly criticized many sports theories for being either too individualistically or too socially oriented. In such theories, sports are seen as being condensed either in the motivation and experience of athletes or in the social (commercial, national) facts these in their turn supposedly mirror.13 But the confrontation between human potentials (individual performance, self-discipline, the beauty of movement or total effort) and deformations, some of them set in archaic times (aggression, war surrogates, pseudohunts, prestige, “dopium,” markets, media) does not yield promising results. It is true and very important, I think, that the achievement of the individual person in sports stands out in clearer form than in any other so-

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cial activity, that, in other words, achievement, success, and failure can be ascribed more accurately to the single person. This is especially important in modern societies, which, taking so much pride in being societies of achievement and performance, have a hard time distinguishing between achievement, success, and deception in work and business. By contrast, it is indeed much more difficult to cheat in order to establish a 10,000-meter record or to climb the highest mountains.14 Even in Sumo (and even if there is cheating there, too), traditional basic principles of Japanese culture (seniority, group orientation) are flouted for the benefit of a relentless priority of individual achievement from one tournament to the next. It may also be true that, for the average practitioner, there is joy or pleasure in modest sports achievement hard to gain elsewhere, that, on those well-nigh universal forms of light neuroses, activities like running may have a better effect than any other form of psychotherapy. But this does not, by itself, elevate sports into a dignified cultural affair. Rather, sports remind us that cultures apparently hanker after fascinations, however problematic, that escape and surpass its official and more elitist standards and their looming effect of higher boredom. It appears undeniable that the fascination of sports emanates more from the striking achievements of the really outstanding athletes. In these achievements, however, there is hardly any negotiation, to say nothing of a reconciliation, between physical extremes, “gentlemanlike” performance or graceful ease, and the more intellectual or spiritual forms of culture. Discontinuities stand out in stark contrasts. It is equally difficult to see how modern societies can be weaned from their habit of praising the top achiever and forgetting him or her once the time of record setting is over. Lenk hankers after the old ideal of the “ne quid nimis,” the golden mean, a wisdom that, in particular, older athletes are supposed to acquire.15 I take it, in short, that the more common and restricted notions of culture are temporarily but fundamentally suspended in sports. I submit, moreover, that literature itself often takes this as a chance to escape from the intellectualized cultural roles to which, as a medium of reading, it is predominantly assigned. The present topic, then, is intended as a radical, body-implying step beyond the limited multimedia “first exemplifications” of Part One. If its treatment is possible, it means that a comprehensive if somewhat wild anthropology has not yet abdicated in favor of either restricted disciplines or “immaterial” electronic networks.

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More Examples: A Tennis Novel and Soccer Poetry “The main mortal enemies of the natural and naive sport of boxing are those scholars sitting close to the ropes and collecting the points into their hats,” says Brecht, and “The goal of sport is not physical fitness, but the goal of physical fitness may be sport.”16 Even if Brecht exaggerates, poses, and provokes, Lenk might have gleaned from him that neither ordinary people nor literature pays more than lip service to the golden mean, to the questions of health, scientific explanation, or cultural ideals. The average person may be talked into sports for health reasons. Pleasure and excitement, if they emerge at all, are produced elsewhere: in the manhandling, indeed dismemberment of bodies and the moods and frames of mind that go along with it. With the Olympic Games, in particular, it has become possible to pronounce crass stupidities about the international community, for example, with great confidence without destroying the appeal that somehow radiates from them. In a cynical mood, one might accuse Lenk of unintentionally illustrating Nietzsche’s dictum that older people like to give good advice because they have become unable to set bad examples. There is indeed a big difference between the sportsman turning philosopher and the sportsman turning into a (kind of) literary writer, or trying to do so. Much more than in the standards of culture, international understanding, or even fairness tentatively or frantically imposed on sports, the talk of athletes, especially about the mental conditions of sports, though equally cliché-ridden, yields starting points for images of mind-body couplings that sports produces and that literature explores. In 1985, Ilie Nastase, a former Rumanian world-class tennis player (and unsuccessful candidate for the post of lord mayor of Bucharest in 1996) published his novel Break Point.17 The novel, hardly by any standard to be called a good one, is replete with things not dreamt of in Lenk’s philosophy. While there is a lot of the “relaxed megalomania” that Wolfgang Lülfing describes as the mental prerequisite of good play, there is also the opposite of that relaxed state: murder. Nastase pushes the saying that sports are murder (a rhyming German slogan: “Sport ist Mord”) into a new and literal dimension. Break point, sudden death, means death. Nastase offers whatever cheap novels and the yellow press normally have to offer to a sensation-greedy world. At a French Open tournament, a Peruvian player dies during a quarterfinal match—killed, it appears, by heat and a whole array of drugs that he has routinely taken, from tranquilizers and their opposite to aphrodisiacs. The wife of

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a famous French lawyer, having risen to that position from the lowlands of prostitution, appears to be the last person to have seen the player alive the night before. There is a suspicion of murder. But while the Peruvian’s death turns out to be due to a fatal concatenation of coincidences, especially the confusion of various drugs, a Polish player is really killed at Wimbledon. The Pole, a lover of firearms, is murdered with a shotgun, his own latest acquisition. In an anonymous letter, the murder of another top player at the U.S. Open is announced beforehand. Security measures are taken, but to no avail. After the men’s final, the Canadian player Laville, who unexpectedly wins against the top-ranked Greek Pantakoras Belynkas, or Koras for short, is almost killed by a remote-controlled bomb hidden and exploding in the winner’s trophy. He does not die but is blinded and has to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. It turns out that Laville himself had concocted and worked out the plan—on the extremely probable assumption that he would lose the final against Koras, whom he had never beaten before, and that Koras would therefore receive the trophy. Laville had killed the Polish player, who was not a dangerous tennis rival, in order to set up a wrong track. So much for the course of the novel. Nastase has decorated it with all the ingredients that are supposed to make life in the modern world interesting. Politicians, managers, and media stars, including Woody Allen, are omnipresent. A famous medical professor takes care of the dying Peruvian on the court, but only after he is sure the TV cameras are focusing on him. The great names of men’s tennis of the 1970s and 1980s show up in only thinly disguised forms. With Arthur Tray (Ashe), racial issues loom large. Social and national distinctions—a German countess, questions of superior intelligence in the French and British police forces, the rivalry between the FBI and state police in the United States—all share a fair portion of fictional space. Emotional or cultural issues in a seemingly purer or narrower sense are not excluded, either. The reader witnesses the pangs of motherhood in Laville’s wife and of love (Koras falls in love with a young archaeologist, starts to study the literature on Caesar in order to be able to talk to her in educated ways, and perhaps loses the U.S. Open final because of the joint strain love and education impose on him). The reader is made aware of the fact that the professionalization of sports (its “Americanization”) has done away with the fair-play style of the gentleman.18 Nastase plunges into these issues with a peculiar persistence. The accumulated topicalities may leave the reader wondering about the trivi-

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ality of both the novel and the issues themselves. Misguided as Nastase’s novel may be, it does exemplify the anthropological perspectives we are concerned with here. It does so with a certain crudeness not easily outmaneuvered. In sports, no doubt, social, racial, national—or media— problems have been pushed into the foreground. Indeed they were hard to ignore even before the advent of modern organized sports. A lot of theory, criticism of ideology, and also literature has been devoted to that. Socioracial questions have emerged with particular intensity, of course, in black American literature. It has also been possible to speak of baseball as America’s national pastime, even if the emotional energies it absorbs and the loyalties and antipathies it provokes, from high school to the major leagues, seem to be of equal or higher intensity in Japan, where a native tradition can hardly be postulated. Philip Roth, in any case, has written The Great American Novel as a (kind of) baseball novel.19 In spite of such an overwhelming mass of evidence, the present study will be only marginally concerned with that type of (social, racial, political) encoding of the sporting body. Burning as such issues often are, the facility with which they can claim attention makes for a certain triviality. They may penetrate sports almost automatically, but whatever sports may be, they are not that. This is why the exaggerated assiduity with which Nastase plunges into aspects of race, drugs, crime, media, and politics could also mask a parodistic intent. In any case, Nastase blithely, almost brazenly, changes the main field of action from ideological topicalities to topical archaisms. Besides a German countess, there is a Roman countess who initiates Koras into forms of body experience not so easily translatable into or corruptible by the realities of modern life. Again, this, too, may be feasible only in what looks like or is indeed parody, since a language of authenticity must be avoided. But a combination of Zen and body techniques yields states of being about which little can be predicated. There is talk about a state of “animal relaxation,” not merely as a passive state, but also as a prerequisite for the “genius” of successful arm movement.20 While this may sound comic, we must remind ourselves that Musil (or Nietzsche, for that matter) has resorted, if mostly in halfserious and half-joking quotes, to the same language. What is happening, Musil asks, when a tennis player or a race horse is called a genius, when a soccer player is credited with a “scientific game” or a fencer with ingenuity, or when the defeat of a boxer is called tragic? Musil comments: “Something will be correct in that. . . . Something else, and much more, will of course be wrong.”21 In Nastase, in any case, concen-

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trated immobility and the state of consciousness, or rather awareness going with it, appear to be the other face of total mobility and ease. There is a second level. It is cast in a somewhat lower key, although that does not protect it, in the context of contemporary entertainment and amusement, against heavy intellectual suspicion, either. One of the older players, Tigrid, with his best time ten years behind him, having dropped to a number-forty-eight world ranking, still keeps on playing. Asked about his motivation, he can only point out that the earlier pleasure of play has not left him. Even simpler, and worse: he likes to play tennis—“the only explanation which counts because it is the simplest,” and he enjoys the awareness of feeling the unity and ease of an arm and racket in movement. The self-sustained dynamics of play affects even the somewhat coarser mental makeup of the Canadian woodcutter Laville. He, too, experiences the racket as an extension of his own will, the immunity of the play’s beauty against the noise of modern civilization.22 Certainly, to a large extent tennis, like other sports, is in the hands of money and managers, for whom the players may be little more than pawns on a financial chessboard. The trouble is that the managers themselves have learned how to argue about the ineffectualness of that kind of criticism. Criticism in terms of ideals, ideology, or higher, more sophisticated cultural values is ineffectual because the spectacular body remains an ineluctable modality of human orientation. Tennis in Nastase’s novel is identical neither with exploitative social systems nor with any original or fundamental value of its own. Yet, empirically, it forms part of the first, and ideologically part of the second, domain. The problem then does not so much consist in sports, but rather in the theoretical-critical ways in which we are normally dealing with them. At some point, phenomena like doping, commercialism, and political exploitation become outrageously bad. To assume that, by adducing cultural, ethical, or medical standards, something of which Lenk, among others, is fond, one can draw a line early on that will contain them is to assume that things can be had without risks or that risks and hazards can be therapeutically brought under control. I do not share these assumptions. In fact, the health risks—and that means, much more clearly than today, the death risks—in early Greek or medieval knightly sports were definitely higher than today. Therefore a lighter and in itself more playful kind of treatment seems more appropriate. That kind of treatment is prefigured in literature. If the parodistic element in Nastase’s novel is unclear (and he may be dead serious for all we know—clear narrative signs are lacking), it is more than obvious in

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the soccer sonnets and a host of hybrid other texts of the German writer Ror Wolf. With his “Rammer and Breaker Sonnets” (“Rammer & Brecher Sonette”)23 Wolf has chosen a traditional, prestigious poetic form for a relatively “dirty” subject. Yet that subject turns out to be as elusive as the subject of love before. Wolf therefore keeps the metaphorical strategies characteristic of earlier love poetry. These are strategies in which the subject, in both the sense of a topic and of a human being, is continually but inconclusively visualized. On the other side, Wolf employs as the sources and vehicles of the metaphors a vocabulary that must be considered highly unpoetical by almost any standard. The action often takes place in morass, mud, and fog (No. 2). Coaches keep swearing (No. 3), spectators keep giving vent to feelings and words of the cruder sorts (No. 4). The action imposes itself upon perception mainly as elementary physical aggression: feet are broken, legs are bleeding, shirts torn, opponents mowed down (Nos. 6, 7, 10). The action thus bears similarities to a pandemonium: its relics, after the event, are blown away by the wind and washed off by the rain (Nos. 11, 12). This does not preclude, though, perceptions of a very different order. It would of course be ridiculous to say that, once in a while, the beauty of soccer (or “football”) rises like Phoenix from the ashes. While there is no smooth transition, there are sudden leaps from blood, sweat, and dirt to the elegance of whirling and dancing movements (No. 3). The rammer, digging his shoes into his adversary, ripping open the covering of the defense, produces a “wonderful” goal seemingly coming from heaven. The crowd falls into a rave, the players later celebrate with champagne (No. 6). The stupid cliché—“soccer can be so beautiful”— looms large. It is always, to put it mildly, ironically undercut—unintentionally so by the media reporters and their mostly uninspired efforts to say something where little can be said (Nos. 8, 10). Generally, since any sentence may be just a quote (including allusions to Rilke’s “You must change your life,” No. 3), the reader—while the players are wallowing in dirt—is floating in prefabricated discourse fragments. Even so, the fact that soccer urges a writer toward a collage of fragments produces something like an erratic poetic block. This would hold even for the main parts of the book, in which Wolf has arranged texts from the most heterogeneous sources, claiming “no word is invented.” The reader is bombarded with extracts from newspapers, from radio and TV reports, with tape recordings of conversations with and between fans, and with pronouncements by players and

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coaches. The result of such confrontations can be truly appalling: the mixture of aggression, prejudice, tautologies, and sheer stupidity seems like a consummation devoutly to be avoided. The inanities and absurdities of reporters’ talk are staggering, especially a telephone conversation between two reporters broadcast on TV and consisting mainly in variously worded assertions that they cannot hear—and understand—each other. The cover picture, in a mixture of realism and cynicism, shows a player wearing a ball in place of the head. Yet the overall effect is equally hard to distinguish from what Wolf himself calls a “never-ending total theater.”24 In fact, Wolf presents soccer as a protopoetic potential. The transitions from watching soccer to producing something like poetry are preprogrammed. The “experiments in the extension of naked words” take language at a level where literal meaning and metaphor are barely kept apart. That level contains a suggestiveness that almost automatically produces something like a poetic effect once elementary, literal metaphor is syntactically widened. Wolf expands that procedure in a collage of newspaper reports on a match. The result might be described as a double-edged effect of tautological nonsense and intermittent poeticity.25 Troilus, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, complains about “Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart” (5.3, last lines). Wolf’s technique shows that the distinction does not hold: words are neither mere words nor, in contrast to much contemporary discourse theory, are they without heart. They can both fail and touch “poetically” and sentimentally at any time. They function as triggers for resonances and reverberations that may or may not be related to soccer “itself.” One could also say that the writer capitalizes on a dynamics hard to observe elsewhere. It does not matter so much, or perhaps it matters not at all, whether the results of verbal elaboration bear a merely flimsy or a more “substantial” relation to the phenomenon itself. Neither does the overwhelming stupidity of spectator and reporter commentaries prevent hooligans from analyzing, with perhaps more insight than many sociologists of sports can muster, the relation between sports and violence.26 Soccer itself may be, of course, a form or at least an outlet or safety valve of violence. But it may also merely supply a scene or context in which social violence, having accumulated elsewhere, can be easily acted out. The “reality” of soccer—and by implication of many other forms of sports—oscillates between sudden moments of fascination, hard to analyze and to describe, and the compulsion to produce discourse around it—criticism, nonsense, or poetry.

chapter eight

Symptoms Exposed Flanks in Older Cultural Theories

A Brutal Prelude and Its Implications “I do not know a writer who does not believe he is a boxer,” Nelson Algren declared.1 Hamlet’s words “There is a divinity that shapes our ends/ Rough hew them how we will” (5.2) are also spoken by the professional boxer Cashel Byron in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Admirable Bashville; Or, Constancy Unrewarded (1908) before Byron sets out to maul an opponent. Shaw has dutifully noted in a longer subtitle that the play is a blank verse reworking of the boxer novel Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886). Neither play nor novel figures prominently in the official Shaw canon, although it may be doubted whether Shaw wrote anything funnier, equally absurd, and yet also as culturally symptomatic.2 In such older texts, the protopoetic process enacted in Wolf presents itself in its conventionally elaborated components. The blank verse makes for poetic qualities that the clearly parodic intent destroys. But even in Shaw, where boxers are called professors (some time ago, the former heavyweight world champion George Foreman, still fighting while approaching age fifty, also was announced as “professor of pugilism” in the poster for a fight), where blackening the other’s eye is called battering “the image of divinity,” there are surplus effects. They are as difficult to reconcile with the social or evolutionary dramatist and critic Shaw as his remarks on opera, with which we have dealt before. Shaw, of course, was highly critical of the relatively well developed world of professional boxing. The intelligent prizefighter, we read in the prefaces, “is not a knight-errant: he is a disillusioned man of business trying to make money at a certain weight and at certain risks.” Cashel indeed, educated by his mother, an actress, in Shakespearean diction, displays a thoroughgoing financial realism. The unintelligent prizefighter is much worse off: he is mostly the “helpless tool of a gang of gamblers, backers and showmen, who set him on to fight as they might set on a dog.”3 It is

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hard to see what further insights might be offered by our own contemporary boxing spectacles. In various ways, however, Shaw equally makes fun of what is often taken as his most serious concerns. There is talk about the survival of the fittest. A character named Lucian has a hard time convincing the Zulu king Cetewayo of the genius hiding behind each “pallid English face” (“Are these anaemic dogs the English people?”). One might risk the assumption that Cashel Byron is perhaps the best, because the most heterogeneous, incarnation of Shaw’s mythic life force available in the long series of his plays. He exhibits consummate fighting skills, as well as considerable intelligence. That intelligence is tried and tested, but Cashel succumbs to none of the ready-made psychological or social ideas bandied about. If he ultimately assumes the position of gentleman due to him by birth and quits boxing himself, he yet goes on to turn the “admirable Bashville” into an even better champion than he is.4 Shaw steers clear of both the Romantic-pathetic image of the boxer to which Clifford Odets ultimately falls prey in Golden Boy (1937) and the brutal version of the struggle for life offered in Budd Schulberg’s novel The Harder They Fall, to say nothing of the cheaper amalgams of brutality and heroism in the Stallone Rocky films. Some indirect evidence concerning the status of these dramatic perspectives may be cautiously gleaned from Shaw’s personal mixture of criticism, expert knowledge, curiosity, and sentimental ties with respect to boxing and boxers. He valued the boxing “art” of Georges Carpentier, a French boxer of the twenties, and he was a personal friend of Gene Tunney’s, again one of the more artistic of heavyweight boxers. At the age of ninety, Shaw was still interested to know whether Joe Louis was “the wonder they say he is.”5 Down to Norman Mailer, boxing has particularly challenged literature and even more so cultural criticism because of the utter discrepancy it displays between brutality and art, absurdity and fascination. A lot, if not everything, may be and may have been wrong with professional boxing since the ancient Greeks. As long as we cannot say what is wrong exactly and convincingly, however, both cheap boxer films and “serious” literature will be tempted into full-blown or half-hearted mythologies. Shaw’s parodic blank verse in the play, however, does not leave out boxing, but does not specifically target it either. Rather, it interferes in the complacency with which ideas of social norms and position on the one hand, and on the other instinct, including motherly love and the love

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of one’s mother, and conceptions of life both are frequently held. The boxer is neither a “sylvan god” nor a “soulless mass of beef and brawn.” Contrary to ordinary prejudice, he does not occupy a definite social position, either, even though Cashel turns out to be of aristocratic birth. A notion such as the struggle for life, while plausible, also lacks definite meanings: the idea of the survival of the fittest turns out, in the confrontation between Zulus and English, to be downright misleading. Implicitly at stake, then, is the notion of culture as the attempted management of biological, social, and (incipiently) global pressures. Lydia’s parodically simplified version reads: “Books! Art! And Culture! Oh, I shall go mad. / Give me a mate that never heard of these.”6 The ways in which boxing, or more broadly, the cultural contemporaneity of atavism, may affect the most delicate and elaborate literary sensibility, creating unforeseen short circuits between brutality and imagination, is perhaps best illustrated by the “Romantic” essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Hazlitt is mainly known for his sensitive and imaginative evocations of Shakespeare’s characters and older poetry, which he invested with a peculiar cultural presence. Both in an essay “Indian Jugglers” and more so in a “report” “The Fight” (a fight that took place between Tom Hickman and Bill Neat near Hungerford on December 11, 1821), Hazlitt seems compelled to lower his discursive guard and lapse into quasi-impressionistic directness: “Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to come. . . . After the first blow is struck, there is no opportunity for nervous apprehension; you are swallowed up in the immediate interest of the scene.” It is tempting, as Hazlitt demonstrates, to ennoble the inarticulate immediate interest with the nicer images that the literary imagination has made available: “Between the acting of a dreadful thing/ And the first motion, all the interim is/ Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.”7 For cultural criticism, it is equally tempting to adopt the opposite strategy and to banish that interest from the imagination altogether. Cultural theories, especially older ones, are uneasily torn between these options. Mostly and ultimately, they tend to give preference to the latter. In order to at least dodge that unattractive alternative, a systematic approach concerning literature and sports must display at least the awareness I hope I have demonstrated so far that the historical and cultural shapes of what is referred to by these terms is by no means clear. I am also aware, of course, that in including sports, I am stretching the term “medium” to the utmost. Concerning the concept of sports itself, Shaw demonstrates that diffi-

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culties may be reduced if one starts with modern professionalized and commercialized sports. Much as they resemble the ordinary social systems of contemporary societies, they differ from them in one crucial, not to say fundamental (or somewhat paradoxical), respect: they embody one of the central self-descriptive tenets of Western (but not only Western) societies more clearly, attractively, and unambiguously than the ordinary systems themselves. I am referring to the tenet of (individual) achievement or performance. The differentiation of and the infinite divisions of labor in contemporary societies have produced large zones of indefiniteness and opaqueness in what is supposed to count as the substance of individual achievement. As (almost) everybody knows, to a large, if, again, indeterminate extent, the evaluation and individual ascription of achievement must be fabricated by “media” of all kinds (including the old and dignified one of rumor) or by reference to mountains of prior, suitably interpreted materials. In other words: social systems are complex and often, in spite of their very concrete effect, relatively intangible (the bureaucracy syndrome). Based as they are (at least ideologically) on individual achievement, they make personal performance very difficult to survey and to evaluate. As I have suggested before (a thesis taken from von Krockow’s sociology and philosophy of sports), modern sports, much as they are a product of social differentiation, are comparatively immune to the paradox that social systems cannot control the very principle on which they profess to be operating. Although sports seem to be subjected to the demands of media convenience, money and doping, achievement in sports, to large extents in both its sociocultural function and its modes of individual experience, has remained unambiguously and indeed increasingly powerful, as well as, for a sufficient number of people, highly attractive, and some would sometimes even say beautiful in the bargain. Sports, much more than play or games, do need a welldefined and organized social context for their enactment. They need these to such a degree that many critics have seen the enjoyment, the special libido of play and games, vanish in the mass spectacles of sports. I am asserting that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, this is not (yet) the case. Accordingly, I do not embrace that type of criticism in which modern sports appear as a kind of trap into which earlier, nicer, or more authentic forms of play and games have fallen.8 As the chapters on systems, play, and experience in Part One suggest, qualitative distinctions between play, games, and (social) culture at large along these lines can be

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variously drawn, but not maintained consistently. Occasionally, to be sure, they must be taken for granted. On the whole, however, they have to be set up from case to case: reading literature may be a playful enjoyment, but also hard work; and serious work, whether physically or mentally oriented, may be exhausting or, in the case of flow experience or of Winnicottian play, also basically pleasurable and invigorating. A ritual carries a lot of compulsory elements, but its experience under productive circumstances may downgrade compulsion for the benefit of play. In older types of cultural theory, symptomatic difficulties with bodyinvolved forms of play are much more in evidence than in the somewhat purist, not to say scholastic, conceptual rigors to which many modern theories have frequently come to bow. Social, discursive, and theoretical developments have certainly provided ample reasons for this adjustment. Conversely, though, no cultural theory can really ignore or escape from the fascination of body-based but obviously not purely bodily play. Theory as such, and cultural theory in particular, has long been dominated by tendencies of dualistic conceptual arrangements. These, in their turn, are strongly anchored in long-term developments of Western languages and the combined effect of religiously, ethically, or epistemologically grounded mentalities. Philosophers of language, classical philologists, and even brain researchers concur in assuming that farreaching verbal-conceptual splits may or must have happened on the long way toward Greek “democracy.” Their problem is that these dualisms dominate thought and color perception without, however, wiping out the fascination of what they can no longer sufficiently grasp. In “early” Homer, in the Iliad, that is, a term like psyche connotes vital substances like blood or breath, while nous envisages the interconnection between perception and its field, not the consciousness of a socalled thinking subject or the blind spot predicaments of contemporary “observers.” Soma stands in opposition to psyche, it is true, but not in the way we have come to view that opposition, especially in the Christian tradition. Soma is the opposite of a living, vital substance, a dead body or dead limbs. Thymos, an important term later and especially in Aristotle, narrowed down to something like an emotional soul and then disappearing from the philosophical vocabulary altogether, refers to life as movement, excitement, power. In the Odyssey, the use of thymos already decreases, and the meaning of psyche and so on is either emotionalized or intellectualized. With the seventh and sixth centuries, the selfsufficiency of the mental domain has—more or less—established itself.

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In Pindar, Heraclitus, and others accordingly, psyche and nous tend to coalesce. This has reinforced the systematic, autotelic appearance of the mind. It has also left us at a symptomatic loss, however, how to manage and relate the internal distinctions, the semantics of emotions, intellect, reason, and so on of that system, and of its relation to a “body” spinning out of systematic, connotational, or semiotic control.9 Cultural theories have therefore exerted themselves to mediate between what is obviously separate, but intuitively also somehow related. Their conceptual decisions have, of course, been influenced by and lean toward the cultural trends of which theories themselves, too, are the symptoms. This means that play, even where it takes body-involved play into account, is mostly conceived in mental or mentally dominated metaphorical terms. In revenge, though, the feeling that culture cannot be continually and consistently defined—or practiced—as a culture of the mind and the emotions only has invaded even the more rarefied domain of philosophy. Nicolai Hartmann, for instance, is haunted by the anxiety that the heights reached by the cultivation of the mind have to be paid for dearly by what he (in certainly no Nazi or similarly suspicious context) called “vital degeneration.” The culture of the mind, taking a turn for the worse in cultural studies themselves, takes its toll and finds itself on a slide toward becoming a surrogate for life. The livelier, freer, and richer forms of life are, at some point, no longer on its side.10 In such contexts, play then normally connotes playfulness, a playful mental attitude and at best implicit behavioral steps toward a less rigid handling of sociocultural affairs. The priorities sedimented in the pull toward a higher mental culture are hardly challenged at all. Rather, theories of a mental-libidinal playfulness emerge when a cultural system appears to demand too much in terms of individual adjustment. Thus, in Germany, in the time of the student revolt, Hermann Glaser, for many years the chief of cultural and school affairs in Nuremberg and a prolific writer on cultural matters from literature to politics, sketched a theory of a social scope of playfulness within an “aesthetic state.”11

Schiller: Conceptual Frictions and Cultural Discontinuities Cultural theory might perhaps have spared itself some trouble if it had looked into the unresolved tensions of paradigmatic earlier models, and not so much at their seductive but their sociopolitically un-

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translatable, utopian postulates. The case of Schiller (1759–1805) is a most instructive one in this regard. By any historical or sociological standard, his writing took place at a crucial period. Culture had to pay toll to the first effects of new forms of social-system differentiation. On the other hand, the memory, however nostalgic or illusionary, of a different “sweetness of life” (“la douceur de vivre” in Talleyrand’s famous phrase) was fresh, and the anticipation of new possibilities urgent. Writing itself, at this point, developed into the fragmented center of heterogeneous cultural and media trends. Poetry, in order to maintain an expressive stance, was forced into the often-criticized misalliance with “philosophical” thought. Plays, no longer fully sustained by theatrical magic, spectacular acting, and rhetorical power, were analogously burdened with the deployment of “problems.” These, in their turn, seemed to find a more adequate medium in historical and theoretical discourse. At the same time, and quite notoriously so, Schiller was fully aware of the charm of grace, semiphysical and semi-“metaphysical,” in the original sense, and of graceful movement in particular and the more demonic (“sensual”) aspects of sensuousness. On the whole, following Elisabeth Lenk, one can say that Schiller diluted the notion of playful body experience to the extent that it could be incorporated into a more restricted notion of an aesthetic culture of mentally or morally controlled play. Creative, intellectualized art for him is the medium in which images of a purer world of feelings come to neutralize a threatening crudeness of the senses and the deadening effect of social systems. Images of the senses, not the senses themselves, are supposed to ease the burden of spiritualized culture.12 First of all, the suspicion of a culturally unproductive or even detrimental function, a kind of culturally marred self-referentiality characteristic particularly of theoretical writing, keeps overshadowing the essays. Schiller claims therefore that he is writing on aesthetics as an artist, not as a philosopher. In the original version of the “Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind,” he seems to suggest that a lack of theoretical culture may be responsible for the degenerate state of eighteenth-century culture (its Verwilderung). He changes that position in response to objections by the Duke of Augustenburg, to whom the “Letters” were originally addressed in gratitude for a three-year scholarship. On second thought, then, the remedy might lie in a culture of refined, ennobled, purified taste. In no way should the path of the merely theoretical culture of the Enlightenment be further pursued. Sensual man can turn into an animal, but enlightened man may turn into a devil.13

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Such paratextual epistolary remarks set up a symptomatically ambivalent framework. Schiller condemns the theoretical culture of the Enlightenment not just because of its theoretical orientation. Instead, Enlightenment theory is masking a sensually sophisticated epicureanism that, in its turn, entails passivity, lack of vigor in action, narrowness of thought, and general mediocrity.14 Positioning himself with respect to Burke’s “sensuous-subjective,” Kant’s “subjective-rational,” and Baumgarten’s or Mendelssohn’s “rational-objective” theories, Schiller describes his own approach as “sensuous-objective.” These are crucial, and by no means merely scholastic, distinctions. They imply, again with respect to the supporting framework of the essays, that beauty is an object for us. We create it, partly by reflection, and then we contemplate it. However, it must also be called a state (of being) of the subject, a feeling into which we find ourselves projected, even if we have, strictly speaking, also created it. Beauty, then, is form, insofar as we contemplate it, but it is also “life,” because it does have a strong effect upon us. The sensuous-objective approach thus conceives of beauty as a mediation between the drives of life (the sensuous and perhaps also partly sensual drives, Begierde) and the drive toward form (Formtrieb), that is, as “living form” (lebende Gestalt, in the famous fifteenth letter, which also introduces the urge to play, Spieltrieb; cf. also 20: 394–95). The problem lies in the negotiation of those terms. In modern jargon, Schiller submits to the necessity of distinctions but does not take any of them for granted. And it is not the distinctions but the symptomatic way in which their unavoidable frictions are handled in which I am interested. Especially in defining grace, Schiller seems to emphasize its sensuous, transitory, and, in terms of examples (persons), relatively unrestricted aspects. Grace is a flexible (beweglich) kind of beauty. In subjects who exemplify it, its charm emerges and vanishes by apparent coincidence. While Venus is always beautiful (a “fixed” beauty), she loses her graceful charm once she gives her belt away. This is the beginning. In the end, however, the reflective side of beauty creates an almost quietistic peace of mind that can then see itself as the lawgiver of matter and the senses.15 How is that trajectory negotiated? First, grace, restricted as it has been to human beings traditionally, as well as for Schiller, is charged with the expression of moral sentiments. Movements that are merely sensuous belong to nature (not to human nature). The distinction is of course plausible. At the same time, Schiller commits himself to a semantic system difficult to sustain in cultural history. It is not movement itself

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that produces grace. Instead, the “soul” must be the prime mover (die Seele das bewegende Princip). While it would be generally plausible to say that grace is produced by the “subject,” the exchange of “subject” in favor of “soul”—plausible as that concept may be in terms of any historical semantics—amounts to a risky step into normative anthropology. It is followed by the equally risky assumption that even the “architectural beauty” of the body, the proportions of the limbs, the quality of skin or voice and the like, is higher in human beings than in other creatures endowed with senses (Sinnenwesen). Although that beauty is determined only by nature and luck, nature, in human beings, is codetermined by the “idea of humanity” (Idee seiner Menschheit). From there it is only a step, and a circular one in the bargain, to the claim that beauty, in order to be acceptable, must please reason: “daß das Schöne der Vernunft gefällt.” Graceful beauty is born in natural, transitory movement. Beauty in general is a birth or gift of nature, an effect of the senses. But in order to be beauty, it must also be “adopted” by and in the world of reason.16 The metaphor of adoption is indeed a treacherously adequate one. Predictably, it is stretched in one direction only: the “domain of the spirit” (Gebiet des Geistes) is indefinitely extended, ending only “where organic life disappears in the formless mass and where the animal forces cease to work.” Schiller admits that there are connections between movement and the affective-mental life (Gemüth). Any change in that life manifests itself as a movement of the senses. But Schiller is much less persistent in that kind of conceptual effort than Schopenhauer because he forces the idea into the straitjacket of oppositions like freedom/nature, will/desire, and spirit/senses. Schiller appears to take for granted the metaphorical semantics of these oppositions: freedom governs beauty; nature provides the materials of beauty, the soul supplies the beauty of their interplay. Architectural beauty is a natural talent, grace a personal merit, and so on.17 The conceptual machinery rolls on, even if Schiller pauses occasionally to say that what philosophy must tear asunder is not necessarily separated in reality, and even if the conceptual emphasis seems to fall sometimes more strongly on the one side, sometimes on the other. Sometimes grace is a mere favor that morality grants to the senses. Sometimes, however, nature suffers merely because it has to ask for the legitimation of reason. Strictly speaking, nature would be a competent judge in its own domain. In spite of these waverings, the oppositions remain intact. Schiller accepts Kant’s moral philosophy. He would just

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like to mitigate its rigor and rigidity. In Kant, the idea of duty is preached with a harshness that scares away all the muses, and that might tempt a weaker spirit to try his or her luck in the monastic darkness of asceticism. The moral mode of thought should not be conceived of as a repression of pleasure, Schiller holds; it should reconcile pleasure and duty, and work that reconciliation into (a second) nature.18 But the terminology of repression looms large in Schiller’s own language, too. First of all, grace is above all a feminine form of beauty. Women, much more than men, are able to combine the necessary flexibility of body with the harmony of emotions. The “tender fiber” of women adjusts, like a thin reed, to the slightest trace of emotion. In men, the beauty of character that is dignity, a mental quality at best shining forth in bearing and deportment, is much more important. That beauty, however, the “most mature fruit of humanity” as a reconciliation of natural and moral beauty, is merely an ideal. The physical conditions of existence would frustrate any attempt really to reach it. Although moral sentiments are not supposed to victimize an aesthetically, sensuously grounded appearance, there is no way in which moral sentiments can be part of the world of the senses. Although the will should not lead to force or violence, violence may be necessary to overcome the tenacious and powerful resistance of the senses. This is regrettable and not favorable to beauty. But the crudeness and greediness of animal nature challenges both the moral and the aesthetic sense, and Schiller’s language is almost overwhelmed by and overwhelming in its metaphorical demonization of this quality.19 Schiller certainly tries to retreat to the reconciliation of reason and the senses, duty and inclination, in the “beauty of play.” But freedom of the spirit results only from the “domination of the sensual-sensuous urges” (Beherrschung der Triebe) by moral strength, not by the dubious later compromises called physical education or culture. Dignity is the expression of that moral achievement in appearance. Vital urges, which were granted some scope in the grace of conduct, in the end must be curbed, even if that means suffering. The calm patience, perhaps the imperturbability of suffering (Ruhe im Leiden) is the hallmark of dignified existence and moral freedom—it is not just a question of being dignified when one suffers occasionally. Strictly speaking, virtue should be gracefully executed and inclinations enjoyed with dignity. Although they occupy different domains, they do not per se cancel each other out. Yet we rarely find them united in the same person. We instead see that union only in the noble and graceful majesty of antique statues.20

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Schiller’s analyses, apart from such passing references, leave rather vague the relation of grace and dignity to general or historically specified conditions of culture. This changes in the “Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind.” Schiller here himself idealizes the Greeks: “Both full of form and fullness, both philosophizing and educating, both tender and energetic, the Greeks, in our view, combine the youth of imagination with the virility of reason in a magnificent humanity.” This idealization comes almost inevitably, since the picture of modern culture is painted in dark colors indeed, in the fifth and sixth letters especially. Modern culture has not given scope to the freedom of will, reason, and morality. It instead develops, in conjunction with any ability or power it produces, a bondage to new, in particular physical, needs. The metaphor that recent culture has struck a “deep wound” is elaborated into a precise diagnosis, a fusion of traditional cultural pessimism with systems theory avant la lettre.21 The problem resides in differentiation: of the sciences and the arts, of ranks and classes, and of business. It lies in the opacity of complex structures, in the intricate mechanisms of modern states and laws. It also shows in semantic differentiations—between intuition and reason, between imagination and abstraction—that do have real if unclear effects. The abstract thinker does seem to have a cold heart, whatever his elusive basic disposition might be. Speculative reason, looking for possessions never to be lost, has become a stranger in the world of senses and has lost track of matter in the pursuit of form. Gradually, then, the notion of a single and concrete life is wiped out (vertilgt). Under such conditions, gymnastics may produce “athletic bodies,” but not beauty, which results from the free and homogeneous play of the limbs.22 Given such references to “physical culture,” it is imperative, then, to keep in mind from the outset that the celebrated notion of “play” is itself marred by a split. Ideally, the full human being in its living form (lebende Gestalt, beauty) realizes the unity of its physical and moral being in play, and in play only. But play, as a mode of being and activity, is admitted only where beauty already and actually exists. Schiller rules out that we can play with “extra-aesthetic” entities such as the state, religion, or morality—or with the body. While beauty ideally refers to the living form of human beings and thus potentially to a culture of harmonized physical (“athletic”) and moral striving, it is actually restricted, at least for post-Greek cultures, to the aesthetic sphere in the narrower sense of art, or what Schiller historically perceives and conceives as such. To prevent that kind of play from ever becoming “serious,” spilling over

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into “real” domains, Schiller decrees that we should play with beauty only, and only play with it. Schiller is fully aware that, in restricting play to a culturally restricted concept of beauty, he is going against empirical notions of play (Erfahrungsbegriff des Spiels) and running the risk of dealing with “mere play.” In a strikingly arbitrary way, however, he prefers to call that not a restriction, but an extension (Erweiterung) of the concept of play: “What you call restriction . . . I call extension.”23 For him, then, the unlimited freedom of play is possible only in an inner culture of the imagination.24 As far as “physical” and athletic culture is concerned, Schiller draws a line between the ancient Olympic Games and the Greek chariot races, generally the unbloody Greek contests of talents in all walks of life on the one side (one surely wonders which reports on those Schiller might have read and taken seriously), and the deadly fights of Roman gladiators, or, for that matter, the eighteenthcentury races in London, the bullfights in Madrid, the spectacles in Paris, the gondola races in Venice, the animal baiting in Vienna, or even the cheerful and beautiful life on “the Corso in Rome” on the other. It is only in Greece, then, that the ideal of beauty has materialized in physical ways.25 In what follows and to some extent precedes these passages, Schiller performs laborious conceptual maneuvers in order to justify and elaborate the sudden and arbitrary distinction between empirical notions and his normative concept of play. First of all, the causes of human degeneration are reinterpreted. The variously differentiated systems and the impoverished rationalities corresponding to them are no longer pilloried. Far-reaching as their grip may be, they do not hold sway over a “courageous will and a living feeling.” The “energy of courage” is mobilized against the “inertia of nature and the cowardice of the heart.” Schiller is aware of the threatening circularity of his reasoning, turning theoretical and practical culture into prerequisites of each other. But while we are conditioned by our times, we, and especially the artists among us, are not determined by them.26 As we know from a lot of twentieth-century debates, these are arguments we may accept or reject, depending less on their presumed internal strength but rather on the conclusions drawn from and the applications justified by them. Schiller’s argument works only because, taking an irreconcilable split between physical and spiritual culture tacitly for granted, it proceeds on the basis of the latter: “beautiful culture” is localized in “the arts of the imagination.” That means that stubborn empirical evidence must be outflanked. Schiller concedes that, in any pe-

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riod where these arts flourished, humanity at large appears to some extent degenerate. He therefore resorts to a “beauty as a concept of pure reason” (“if such a concept can be demonstrated”). That concept, in its turn, presupposes “a pure concept of humanity.” In that ideal realm, the concept of play can be reformulated as the double experience of spiritual freedom and felt existence, as the fusion of material and formal drives.27 Even so, disturbing empirical evidence keeps dogging Schiller’s conceptual efforts. Even the example of Juno (Hera) Ludovisi, which Schiller cites as the physical materialization of ideal beauty, and which charms its beholders into a state of both supreme calm and intense movement, a state for which the intellect has no concept, language, or name, does not, in the long run, sufficiently bridge the “infinite” gap between matter and form, suffering and activity, feeling and thought. Schiller consequently withdraws into the formal realm itself. Art, it is true, is supposed to produce an aesthetic mood in which the mind is neither physically nor morally coerced into anything, and yet is active in both respects. It is expected to bring out the totality of the powers of both the senses and the spirit. But the real touchstone is the “supreme equanimity and freedom of the spirit” with which the experience of genuine art leaves us. Schiller allies or alloys that experience with “strength and vigor” (Kraft und Rüstigkeit ).28 This, however, is a cryptic or empty formula that loses any content it may have been intended to carry once Schiller adduces illustrations—works of art seen as media— in order to describe the aesthetic state more concretely. The mood in which we are supposed to find ourselves in the experience of art gets better as it gets more general. That means that music, for instance, which tends toward the creation of excitement, or at least intensity, may all too easily remain in an undue closeness to the senses. In the postulated drift toward a general aesthetic state of mind, the various arts must come to resemble each other progressively. One could say that to the extent that Schiller focuses on the media qualities of the arts, they differ in their closeness or distance to the senses. To the extent that they aspire to the desirable status of pure arts, they lose these media or material qualities. The “master” artist neutralizes, in fact extirpates (vertilgt), the seduction of (subject) matter through form. In the most intense storm of emotion, the freedom of mind must be spared. In the aesthetic mood, the power of sensations is broken by “autopoietic” reason (Selbsttätigkeit der Vernunft) even within their own domain. This is why, for Schiller, we move “infinitely more easily” and legitimately from the aesthetic to the moral state than from aesthetic to physical ex-

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perience. We may be pleased by a living female beauty, perhaps more so than by a painted one. But that pleasure has nothing to do with pure aesthetic emotion.29 Looking at aesthetic theories in Germany after Schiller, one can see clearly that Schiller’s idea of a general identity of the arts with respect to the aesthetic mood they call forth is a generalization of the effect preferentially produced by the reading of literature.30 Schiller is crucial for my purposes, because he is aware both of the importance of bodily grounded experience and its urge toward imaginative, (proto)literary verbalization. But since he cannot find a culturally self-evident space for that experience anymore, he replaces it by its pale, “tranquillized” reflection in literature. Hegel, perhaps because of his double-edged realism—a cultural realism appreciating gripping spectacles; a political realism perhaps (but only perhaps) degenerating into state worship—was still able to ward off the interiorization of experience into “mere” literature. But the dominating drift in culture and aesthetics, especially in the Germany of the nineteenth century, goes the other way. Karl Wilhelm Solger in the early part of the nineteenth century and Friedrich Theodor Vischer in the later part clearly overemphasize the positive aspects of literature as the medium of complex human interiority.31 In contrast to Kant, and in basic agreement with Schiller, the beautiful for Solger is not a theoretical idea. It is real only in relations. These relations, however, are couched in a quietistic light: “In the existence of the idea, we feel the perfect life in which our individuality is dissolved. The consciousness of supreme knowledge must be tied to the perception of the beautiful, by which all need is sublated and all contradictions vanish. Thus the effect of beauty, which produces a feeling of the unity with ourselves, of calm, of perfect satisfaction.” Beauty and dignity are the golden mean because in them appearance has saturated itself with the idea, that is, with tranquillity. Grace and the sublime are the extremes on the aesthetic spectrum because they tend toward various forms of excitement, albeit controlled excitement, to be sure. The privileged medium of the preferred tranquillity derived from the idea, on the other hand, is poetry (Poesie, a somewhat ambiguous notion of literature that would clearly include the novel only with Vischer). Poetry is the universal art because it is the idea in the process of modifying and determining itself.32 Vischer is even more explicit. For him, poetry is “the most adequate form of art.” Architecture, sculpture, and painting exhaust space in various ways. Painting is located higher in the hierarchy than the other two because it transforms “bodily existence” better into “pure appear-

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ance.” The more any art approaches pure appearance, the better it is. Music deploys the depth and warmth of inner emotional space, but neglects the “objective”.33 Only poetry reaches the heights of “subjective-objective form of art.” It tones down the harshness of materials and the urgency of feeling in favor of a “spiritual unity,” an “ideally transformed sensuousness.” One might ask therefore why all art has not turned into poetry, and Vischer puts that question, foreshadowed in Schiller, in all seriousness. The answer is that the forms of natural beauty have had to go first through their peculiar periods and material specificities independently. Poetry, however, sums it up and spiritualizes all.34 Vischer knows that he is writing a “metaphysics of the beautiful” for which historical developments can serve only as somewhat deficient examples. In retrospect, however, such a metaphysics presupposes a spiritualization of which only fairly “modern” literature has become the champion. For a long time, then, “textual authority” in Germany reigns supreme, pushing “performative agency” into the background.35 But this seemingly special German cultural case continues to represent a model of anthropological tensions.

Marcuse: Aesthetics, Politics, and Atavisms In contrast to both the criticism of ideology and the somewhat complacently conformist exegesis (practiced, for instance, in the Nationalausgabe), my approach concerning Schiller has been to bring conceptual frictions into relief as fruitful symptoms. These may spring up once an overall cultural development toward system and mentality differentiation is obvious. This is a development that, while it imposes distinctions concerning social systems and rationalities, leaves the cultural status of body codes and emotional discourse in the lurch. Schiller’s difficulties arise because he tries to relate both the systematic and the historical aspects of distinctions in a fairly consistent (“harmonious”) way. He does not really deal with what can easily appear as chronic discontinuities, once one discards the idealized picture of the Greeks. All of these discontinuities, imposing and unavoidable in their own right, then are not so much related as attracted to each other, latently or openly, like the proverbial opposites, precisely because they are both discontinuous and selfevident. The problem is to accept discontinuities, to grant anthropocultural value to problematic codes without falling into the traps of either utopian harmonization or the self-appointed criticism of ideology.

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Due to accumulated experience, of which present-day “terrorism” is perhaps the most pressing example, the twentieth century has been beaten into a grudging but always revocable acceptance of discontinuities. This motivates a perspective here in which the unity in difference of history is not one of controlled, gradual, or revolutionary change, but of the virulence of atavisms within the ever-moving self-reference and differentiation of systems. This is also what makes the talk of the 1980s, renewed in the electronic hype of the 1990s, about both the disappearance and the return of the “body” understandable, if not overly intelligent. Since the body, that is, body codes and body enactment, has not disappeared, there is no occasion for it to return. Herbert Marcuse, in particular, and also somewhat independently from his role in the context of the late 1960s and 1970s student movement, has insisted on a cultural space for a primarily nature-based human heritage. History, we read, has a naturelike ground. Marxist theory, for Marcuse, has no reason to abstract from a metabolism between human beings and nature or to look upon a theory of that kind as merely existentialist conceptualization.36 At the same time, Marcuse demonstrates how easily an awareness of discontinuities can be transformed back into both the critical and the harmonizing habits illustrated by Schiller. In Marcuse, we see that the habit of projecting images of sociopolitical change and goals and of trying to implement them methodically has indeed become much more ingrained since Schiller’s time. This, in principle, would not seem to bode well for a theory of Marcuse’s type, in which the two orientations full of frictions in Schiller seem at first sight to be headed for a clash. In retrospect, Marcuse’s “splendor and misery,” indeed, appears in the drive for widely separated goals and an increasingly hectic metaphoric-conceptual tacking about intended to do justice to them both. Marcuse starts by enriching Schiller’s framework with more concrete notions of body experience. Imagination, into the ultimate literary tranquillity of which Schiller and subsequent aestheticians had repaired, still supplies the link between the deep layers of the unconscious and the most superior products of consciousness (in art), between dream and reality. It thus plays a decisive role in mental life. But it must interact with the more “erotic” components of the “vital drives” (Lebenstriebe). A mature culture is not merely an aesthetic one, in Schiller’s or even in a somewhat enlarged sense. The libidinal, cathectic relation with one’s own body must be tapped in order to establish an analogous relation with the outside world—a formulation that could be taken as a defini-

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tion of sports, too, although it is not meant as such. Ultimately, that tapping is supposed to allow for a sort of paradise regained—for oceanic feelings and the like. Marcuse is very much aware of what happened with the cognitive potential of sensuous or body experience in philosophical aesthetics, and not only there. He knows that the etymological destiny of basic terms (“sensuousness,” “sensuality,” “sense perception,” and “knowledge”) mirrors a long-term process of control to the direction of repression and sublimation. For a long time, the oscillating notion of the “soul” was exploited to compensate for the moral and cultural position of the body. Theology and philosophy had used that term continually and were kept busy handling the conceptual predicaments into which it had brought them. Even literature, parts of the literature of the Renaissance, Marcuse says, had thrived on the riches that seemed to be contained in the relation between the soul and newly discovered interactional social and wider worlds: the lively soul, stimulated by the riches of the world, was empowered to partly absorb, contain, co-express, and cover up the expanding scope of the body.37 Those promising if ambiguous steps, however, were abruptly stopped when Europe got caught in the nets of refeudalization, religious conflict, and later the Industrial Revolution. Schiller’s notion of play, according to Marcuse, was meant to ease the burden of these more recently established “inhuman” conditions of life, if not to do away with them altogether. Marcuse detects an explosive quality in Schiller’s notion of play: that notion, Marcuse thinks, is meant to reshape life fundamentally.38 But he definitely fails to go beyond Schiller in the physical grounding of that noble effort, “the liberation of the body.” He rejects the sensuous mysticisms of Norman O. Brown’s (un)holy mixture of kabbalah, tantric doctrines, I Ching, Lenin, and R. D. Laing. For Marcuse, Brown’s resurrection of the body is a subcultural myth in which political revolution gets lost.39 But Marcuse himself does not even get close to the systematic, “psychoanalytic” efforts of Alfred Lorenzer, for instance, to reach the body-image level of unconscious fantasies. For Lorenzer, early infant body experience literally leaves material imprints, materials with which the fantasies, codetermined by the forms they tend to assume socioculturally, then work—or play. Consciousness can then be seen as an addition of verbal inscriptions to the bodily inscriptions preceding them.40 Put provocatively, one could say that the anecdotal survey of the “true joys of all time” by Walter Umminger—a series of sketches of collectors, players, hobbyists, jokers, amateurs, and hedonists—has become, in due course, more instructive

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than Marcuse. Umminger takes up Schiller’s dilemma, to reconcile the arts proper with the art of life. His list of those who, according to him, have more or less made it in that respect may appear naive. Yet in this naiveté as in any other, there are traces of a realism that are sorely absent in Marcuse.41 In contrast to Marcuse, who is conceptually vague but politically determined, Lorenzer—his peripheral and ambivalent connection with the Frankfurt School being noticeable—leaves it open to what extent the relation between fantasies as bodily inscriptions, their sociocultural forms, and culture at large is a balanced, harmonious, or catastrophic one, or whether one should not worry too much about discontinuities. The crucial interest in some more “literary” versions of the problem is indeed that such a compromise, if it is one, can easily explode. We are then left with the cruder transformations of conceptual postulates (bodily inscriptions and forms of fantasies) into sports and civilization. These semiliterary, semitheoretical writings, in many ways twentieth-century versions of Schiller’s type of discourse, are less interested in conceptual foundations than in the reverberations of what they take as cultural atavisms in a civilized world that does not know how to handle them. One of the bluntest statements to that effect by a thinker and writer certainly not to be accused of any lack of sophistication is by Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), himself for a while an active and moderately successful sportsman: “Sports are the only means which preserves the qualities of primitive man. Sports guarantees the transition from the past stone age to the future stone age, from prehistory to posthistoire. Thanks to sports, the misdeeds of civilization might leave no trace.”42 More pointedly, Gerhard Nebel (1903–74), a teacher, sportsman, and cultural critic, has described civilized “man” as a fettered beast of prey. Nebel makes explicit what remains somewhat clouded in the novels of Hemingway; for instance, that the Spanish bullfight is one of the more “authentic” forms of sports, because here death still supposedly purifies the soul. If savagery (euphemistically called aggression in social theory) is tamed too much into forms of sport like soccer, it will create outlets in the peripheral savagery surrounding sports. (Present-day hooliganism would indeed argue more for Nebel than Elias and others who tend to assume that a sport like soccer automatically qualifies as aggression control.) For Nebel, sports in fact tend to lose their meaning where they are supposed to make up, within a few hours, for what they should perform as the basis of life forms. Such arguments resemble figures of thought in writers like Maurice

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Maeterlinck (1862–1949, Nobel prize for literature in 1911) and Henry de Montherlant (1896–1972). Here, sports and war are related to each other as archetype and potential application. Maeterlinck’s ideal human being, “the beautiful and healthy animal,” for instance, needs the sword or at least the fist in order not to fall into war. A daily use of the fist in a world where legal justice is a farce would do away, he claims, with large-scale organized war and its illusions of significance within a few years.43 Even in a novel like Siegfried Lenz’s Brot und Spiele (1959), war, death, fear of death, aggression, and flight instincts develop into more than just a background for the postwar career of a 5,000-meter runner. For Nebel, on the other hand, Greek athletics was more than just training for war. For him, it is wrong to interpret Pindar’s “theology of athletics” as the mere cover-up of massacre, raw aggression, and the expansion of family or clan power. Athletics is culturally more important than war because it manifests the mythic meaning of war, but also more than that: the experience of life as total, exciting, but not necessarily lethal suspense.44 I am not advocating, of course, Nebel’s or similar ideas. But I am using them in order to suggest at least why an approach like Marcuse’s not only proved historically ineffectual, but is systematically so, as well. In spite of paying toll to atavisms, Marcuse tried to establish continuities between physical, aesthetic, and political domains. Nebel’s type of discourse, on the other hand, like that of Giraudoux and Maeterlinck, opts for an expansion of form-controlled atavisms whose main example is sports, and whose dimensions are explored in literature. An expansion of discontinuity, a radicalization of Schiller into the other direction, that of a more or less disembodied aesthetic grace, by the same token, is less promising. Those who aestheticize sports are wiping out the body-based tension that Nebel tries to make psychoculturally fruitful. This happens, for instance, in Raymond Bayer’s Esthétique de la Grâce (1933) or Pierre Fraysinnet’s collection Le Sport parmi les Beaux-Arts (1968). Bayer quotes the “metaphysical” theories that had tried to couple physical movement with psychological or moral expressivity (Winckelmann, Schiller, Lord Kames, Schelling). He rightly criticizes Schiller for his moralizing, Herbert Spencer for his mechanistic drift.45 But in his very long-winded arguments, he himself splits the problem up, almost in a scholastically formalist way, into nearly unrelated sections on grace and movement, grace and psychomental events, grace and the arts, and the like. Fraysinnet, in his turn, mentions the mythic and ecstatic aspects of sports with the ancient Greeks and in pre-

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sent-day so-called archaic societies. Once in that mood, he even declares intoxicated-intoxicating enjoyment to be the only justification of sports. But, warming to his title’s tune, he quickly forgets about that. Modern sports are then defined as a kind of autonomous form of art. Fraysinnet achieves that quite easily with the help of abstract structural definitions of the work of art as a score or text depending on performative realization.46 One may accept that kind of analysis, but its reach is minimal. Generally, all the kinds of analysis mentioned so far are plausible in that they are efforts to make some sense, in the absence of any unified notion of experience, of a violently lively field of activity in order to save at least the relics of body-based or aesthetic intensity. Nebel’s type of discourse can be and has been exploited for bloody purposes, indeed, although Nebel himself was radically against war, was dismissed as a teacher by the Nazis, but served in World War II, and was a high school teacher again from 1945 to 1955. The aesthetic phenomenology of grace, on the other hand, is altogether too harmless and insipid. Theoretically, we are thrown back to Winnicott, for whom the scenes of intense life may shift from sports to rock music and from there to literature. Practically, this means that the conjunctions between sports and literature must be explored in more detail. That conjunction is indirectly suggested but not envisaged in Peter Sloterdijk’s erstwhile famous Critique of Cynical Reason. In his perspective, there are many forms of cultural theory, criticism, and aesthetics pretending to take care of the vital rights of what is normally decried as low, base, or vulgar. But these theories more often than not exploit what is normally decried as low, base, or vulgar for countercultural or political purposes of their own. Genuine Sturm und Drang periods, in which the mind and the totality of the senses join forces, are rare. Many theorists are ogling “life” because they know that life will indeed, from time to time, try to cash in on the demands of the senses.47 It is indeed true that bourgeois culture, as Sloterdijk affirms, often seems reduced to only fictional images of sensuous-sensual totalities. But the converse aspect should not be lost sight of, either. Gert Mattenklott, for instance, has taken up Lessing’s idea that books may teach much more than what is written in them. Reading cannot replace the life of the senses, but by enhancing it step by step, it can go beyond that life. An occasional conjunction of reading—even if it is “work”—and an ecstatically experienced life is not altogether impossible. For D. H. Lawrence, this meant that reading, like the experience of other, sensuously more powerful arts, must hit the solar plexus. André Leroi-Gourhan, certainly

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in command of a far-reaching anthropological competence stretching from Paleolithic to postmodern times, has said that reading is meaningful only insofar as it maintains relations with a body-based lived experience in concrete situations, a “support corps.” For him, this means that modern abstract art is frequently only pseudo-abstract and instead an indirect stimulation of Paleolithic states.48 Sports certainly form one of the important masks in which archaic dispositions come to play in modern societies, and it is not even very important that we actually know what dispositions these are. In myriad ways, however, atavisms have been tied for centuries to the meanderings of the conscious mind taken care of, predominantly, by literature. It would be utterly ridiculous, of course, to propagate the writing of sports literature because of that. Such a counsel, taken seriously, would lead, and has led, to catastrophic literary results. But the symptomatic plunge of literature into atavisms encoded in terms of sports or its historical body analogies certainly provides some relief from the threatening futility of literary self-reference or from the narrative, poetic, and semantic traps into which the ever-present literature of love (to take another important domain) has for quite a while tended to fall.

Systems Theory against Itself Systems theory is the champion of distinctions. In its perspective, sports and literature would be interesting, if at all, as distinct systems, not as mysteriously related concerns. Conceptually, that position is understandable. Theoretically, in a wider sense, it reflects an impoverished range of interest. It is true, of course, that a lot of nonsense can be produced where conceptual clarity is difficult to obtain. All too frequently, especially when cultural decay is seen as bodily decay, forms of sport have been elevated to something like the last metaphysical activity of human beings. This may have happened in Norman O. Brown’s response to Marcuse. Brown says, correctly to my mind, that there is no definite turn from social darkness to real social freedom. For Brown, in contrast, the body is the measure of all things. Brown uses dance in order to illustrate that: in dance, as Yeats and others also said, the dancer (subject) cannot be distinguished from the dance (object). Ordinary ontologies, in other words, break down.49 (I do think there is something to that. This does not prevent the offering of downright stupidities, as in some futurist authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, as supreme wisdom in the matter of body, technology, and culture.)50

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The fruitfulness of systems theory, however, does not only and perhaps should not primarily consist in the boldness with which “old European” distinctions are replaced by supposedly timelier ones. If one assumes that hoary intuitions in the field roughly called the humanities or sciences humaines have remained suggestive, then the formidable tools of systems theory might also be used not to discard them, but to see them in new combinations. I take Edgar Morin’s massive effort of his La Méthode (5 vols., 1977– 2001) as an example.51 Morin’s reworking of aspects from all the life sciences and cognitive sciences into systems terminology aims at a “bioanthropo-socio-cultural” theory. This may be enough to deter anybody from reading it. If one reads, one can possibly detect a huge number of tautologies, more than anything else. Yet if there are tautologies, they still reflect the compulsion to reformulate elusive but not simply unconceptualizable intuitions. In some ways, we certainly have left behind Schiller’s complaint that the soul does not speak anymore once the soul speaks. Morin celebrates the infinite variability of life normally abolished by alternative conceptual models like geneticism or environmentalism. Following to some extent Humberto Maturana’s lead, he describes even the simplest vital organization as endowed with autopoietic “thought.” The simplest biological processes contain cognitive dimensions or potentials (an idea also pursued for instance by Francisco Varela) because otherwise the notion of consciousness is caught in the traditional philosophical traps. Morin tries to use the term “animus”— reminiscent of Lorenzer’s “unconscious fantasy”—for the simplest level for which biological and the cognitive aspects can somewhat confidently be predicated.52 This does not amount to much in itself. But the notion of elementary, self-referential vital-cognitive “systems” (using that term without great conviction) remains a stubborn, erratic block within complex cultural organizations. For culture, that means that many activities will serve both that vital-cognitive egocentrism as well as broader social needs. This becomes readily apparent in the coin-flip relationship between food supply and hunting or war and less risky forms of fight, all of them establishing themselves as “vital goals.” (In the less risky forms, in particular, individuals remain the locus of autopoietic self-reference or loneliness, but also expand into the connected poles of semantically fairly neutralized and therefore more gripping forms of communication.) In Morin’s cultural theory, the notion of “vital goal” (finalité vitale) re-

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turns in the image of cultural turbulence or heat very different from the images of cultural identity often so assiduously sought.53 Biology thus encourages the belief that the transition from elementary (in ordinary parlance, merely body-related or unconscious) experience to highly developed forms of self-awareness and self-consciousness is a sliding scale. Cultural theory, however, has frequently defined culture by consensual, semanticized images, that is, by normatively tractable abstractions. Such abstractions tend to exert heavy pressure on vitalcognitive egocentrisms. That pressure, in its turn, must be eased by culturally acceptable, idealized, or metaphorized versions of play. Thus, theories of play have come into existence that, for all their richness, ultimately prefer to treat play as a relief of cultural burdens, as a domain singled out and removed from so-called ordinary life, although there is plenty of evidence that even strictly regulated rituals are hardly performed without strong elements of what must appear as playful behavior. There seems to be, in fact, plenty of evidence that the emancipation of a physically and mentally saturated, playful behavior from ritualistic, military, or educational constraints, that is, the development of selfformation in terms of enjoyed movement or suspense, set in during very early periods of human development.54 Instead of distinctions, it thus seems better to speak of changing emphases in forms of interaction and achievement. If stressful complexity increases, the need for both active and restful relaxation increases, too. There are, of course, socially preferred or imposed places for both. But the desire of “living in order to live” may cut across such drawing of lines.55 While it is certainly difficult and often impossible to see an empirical potential for play in modern (or past) work, it is fairly clear, at least, that sports, especially modern sports, heavily partakes of both. Theoretically, elements of play cannot be ruled out in the compulsions of work, either. In the long run, activities are hard to maintain in which there is no experienced satisfaction derived from transitory but intense commitment. Sports, though, provides some of the better places for that because it allows for the discovery of the range, the variety, the flexibility, the feeling, and the imaginative aspects of body-based movement. The desire for an intensified acquaintance with oneself and with “things” may have become obsolete in the computer age. But the improbable mastery of improbable circumstances still may exert an almost metaphysical charm stemming from the ideally effortless transformation of “nature” into “art” and back.56

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In so-called archaic societies, but also in early high cultures, that kind of experience often was embedded in mythic or religious images. In many mythologies, contests, or more generally, analogies of what we call sports, form part of the mythological web itself. In a condensed form, sports exemplifies the relations and conflicts with higher powers for classical Greece. The personification of natural forces often portrays those as players or athletes. From time immemorial, the hero has been an outstanding athlete.57 In the 1980s, in particular, a lot of speculation, based on some evolutionary evidence, was devoted to the mythic and later metaphoric meanings of running. Marathon was seen, for instance, as a specific “myth” (in the modern sense) of a prehistorically established maximum of performance. To say nothing of a heavy amount of thinly veiled propaganda, books were written on topics ranging from the running practices of Native Americans down to connections between long-distance running, the hormones, aggression, and euphoria. What emerges with some clarity is that the relation between athletics and cults hardly posed a problem for earlier civilizations. The suggestiveness of physical performance, aesthetic appeal, and psychological suspense can be easily filled with sacred implications. The charm of a masquerade can be taken to enact basic human phenomena, and athletic contests may attractively embody and illustrate conditions of survival. Suggestiveness, appeal, and suspense have not been lost and are, therefore, frequently found as elementary definitional elements of sports, even in theories critical of its development in industrial society.58 But under so-called high-cultural or late-cultural conditions, the relations, or apparent nonrelations, between sports and culture (that is, high culture), the cultural disciplining of physical performance, suspense, and even aesthetic appeal, have become much more difficult. In such times, high culture and religion are often seen as the means of a transcendence, or at least a transfiguration of, ordinary life, as A. C. Danto has pointed out. Activities of what must appear, in the light of such decisions, as a semitranscendence (Gehlen’s Halbtranszendenz), not so much beyond but below official culture, face trouble and resistance—unless they are declared metaphorically to be the ultimate significance of life.59 Modern sports thus rarely make it into more than a loudly hyped yet temporally and spatially very limited kind of commercialized carnival. One of its most glaring examples is one perhaps not so frequently thought of: modern dance. Cultic and ecstatic dances have existed everywhere, and danced body ecstasy held even large parts of Europe in its sway in the late Middle Ages. Europe in the nineteenth and early twenti-

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eth centuries, on the other hand, has had great trouble in accommodating the waltz and the tango into its cultural repertoire. Learning ballroom dancing nowadays means subjecting oneself to a drill close to ridicule. In disco dancing and its derivatives, the multifaceted overlappings of movement, body effort and ease, contact, and interaction seem to have given way to more solitary forms of drugging oneself. Spanish flamenco has turned into a market of its own. But—as (not only) the Carmen film by Carlos Saura shows—it may also remain a fascinatingly ambivalent affair. The relations of literature to dance will prove then a test case.

Dance in Literature: The Poetry of the Body? Dance, of course, is not exempt from the simplifying, often ridiculous overencodings of the body. It may be elaborated into most artificial, ideologically charged, and professionalized displays. As rhythmic movement, however, it also remains close more easily, however, to elementary forms of movement, at least in principle, and often also to protosocial, interactive forms of behavior. In dance, there seems to occur a normalized self-transcendence of everyday, purposeful movement toward self-referential but to some extent “intoxicating” activity, and from there to sportslike elaborations. While the forms of dance are culturally determined, they yet would seem to refute the idea of a onedirectional, one-dimensional effect by civilization. Disciplining, indeed geometrifying, the body, as zur Lippe calls it, does not necessarily amount to its subjugation, if only for the simple reason that unless we are dealing with clearly exploitative forms of work and sports, we do not know what there is to subjugate. Thus zur Lippe, in the introduction to his long work on domination as an expropriation of human “inner” and “outward” nature, comes to doubt whether such distinctions can really be maintained—distinctions between nature as “meditative processes of bodily self-reflection in rest as well as in movements of surprising physical logic building up possibilities of self-assurance and ease,” as for example in the practice of yoga, Zen, and archery on the one hand, and, say, ballet drill or sports in general on the other. In ballet, to say the least, schematic, “more or less stupid” drill makes possible “certain discoveries”: movements may produce not just fun, but a “definite experience.” It is possible but not imperative to see Taylorism’s time-motion studies, assembly lines, and modern office organization as an extension of the geometrification seemingly imposed by dance patterns under, for

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instance, French absolutism. To prove that, however, one would need a glimpse into a totally different, fully humane human future.60 Little of that is visible, and less is probable. The speed with which ideological overencodings and lapses into anthropologically quasi-pure forms can alternate is striking indeed. In Homer’s Iliad (book 18, lines ca. 470–617), the dance images on the new shield of Achilles are squeezed between images of agriculture, city life, war, festivals, and jurisdiction. This does not amount to an apology for war, for instance. Instead of being “functionally” related to each other, all of them seem to suggest a self-evident status in a diversity of life taken for granted. If war both enhances life and also cuts it short, festivals and dance provide a relatively risk-free intensification of the unity of “animal” spirits and the atmosphere or feeling of life. The last image, a Cretan round dance, is neither geographically nor socially localized. Movement and music, while complicated, appear as an ideal experience in which physical, protosocial layers and levels of awareness merge. One can but does not have to call that with Reucher “a situation of the pure joy of life.”61 Couched in connotations of a far-away, dreamlike reality, the scene maintains a solid appeal, even if Achilles will use the shield in the ultimate butchery. By contrast, Sir John Davies’s Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing (1596) conveys a very different impression. Dennis Brailsford has rightly commented that the appearance of physical accomplishment is mainly used as a manifestation (though not merely as a symbol) of a wider, consistent, and in that sense functionally related, social and cosmic harmony. The “non-physical components” paradoxically turn into the essence of physical movement. It seems doubtful whether this can be taken, in the manner of E. M. W. Tillyard, merely as the image of an ideal Elizabethan world picture. In looking at the earlier The Boke named the Gouernour (1531) by Thomas Elyot, one may notice that the practice of dance is an ideal image of the way in which the smooth functioning of social, hierarchical, virtues can be safeguarded. Elegance and ease are the more pleasant forms of coercion and pressure.62 Likewise, in Roger Ascham, the military emphasis, in this case for archery and other sports, is pronounced. Such textual emphasis in authors like Elyot and Ascham is, of course, easily explained in terms of the “practical” turn that English humanism took in a context of centralized nation building. In these texts, the absence of a self-contained semiotics of dance does not argue against its latent presence. Types of relatively comprehensive physical activities are

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not easily put into the exclusive service of ideologies or practices of social power. Elyot is too much interested in dance and its history not to be somewhat carried away by its unofficial attractions. King David, he reports, danced in front of the Ark of the Covenant. Homer ascribed equal importance to dance and martial abilities.63 By contrast, according to Jonathan Goldberg, the writing hand in the English Renaissance was mystified and harnessed for the uses of literacy in support of political regimes.64 Even so and even with writing, the question of an aesthetics of writing (and of its psychophysical implications) remains open.65 We may assume, though, that Renaissance writing, even in its more elaborately “calligraphic” forms, does not accord with the both normative and yet psychophysically-aesthetically exploratory dimensions of Asian calligraphy whose bodily scope seems much more comprehensive.66 Thus, as soon as the discursive-intertextual space expands, the latencies in Elyot and Ascham come to the foreground. Dance acquires multifarious layers that cannot be suppressed, even if an ideological intention tries to push them back. Within a framework of somewhat Puritanical prudence, this happens in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). In spite of assertions to the contrary, Burton feels compelled to demur to the criticism of dance proffered by certain conservative ancient Romans: “Nemo saltat sobrius, Tully writes, he is not a sober man, that danceth.” Given the riskiness of life, Burton certainly opts for sobriety in all things. But the sobriety he recommends for dance is in itself a very moderate one. Burton subscribes to the not overly prudent Lucian’s dictum “’tis an elegant thing, which cheereth up the mind, exerciseth the body, delights the spectators, which teaches many comely gestures, equally affecting the ears, eyes and soul itself.” Given Burton’s intertextual range, it is small wonder that the “censure” returns to an endorsement of the “sober and modest” Christian dances as against the “tempestively used” ones of the pagans, which provide “a furious motive to burning lust.” But in between, the discursive exhilaration of a full page seems to draw inspiration from the rhythms of dance themselves. Within the “disease” of love melancholy, dance is less subject to the verdict of “artificial allurements” than the uses to which, among others, gestures, clothes, “conference,” presents, bribes and promises, protestations, and tears are normally put.67 Likewise, Richard Wagner, writing in a very different but equally mixed context of aesthetic theory as implicitly intermedial theory and ideology, declares dancing to be the “most real” of all the arts. On at least a musical basis, to be sure, the artistic “matter” of dance is a whole

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human being, and not just parts seemingly isolated in one-sided specializations. Dancing requires all the conditions that must obtain in the manifestations of the other arts: in order to sing and to speak, a person must act as a bodily being. This in turn seems fairly close to John Vernon’s not altogether new and somewhat metaphorical thesis that the words of poetry, in order to come into their own, must really embody and enact their implicit “life,” must be spoken as if they were dancing. Not surprisingly, of course, earlier forms of “literary” language, as in the German period from 1150 to 1450 for instance, contained about 225 words taken from dancing. Dance as “supreme manifestation of physical life” and as “the supreme symbol of spiritual life,” as Havelock Ellis puts it, are hard to keep apart.68 Although it is difficult to avoid an unpalatable mixture of essentialistic speculation and the trivial history of motifs, some symptomatic value must appear in the fact that the presence of dance in European literature, especially the heavily literarized drama, increased dramatically again from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Starting with Georg Büchner and culminating perhaps in Strindberg, drama in particular seems to stage not a return, but at least a strong, and strongly ambivalent, reminder of its origins in festive dance. In a cultural context in which the exuberant celebration of life in death is hard to replicate, the ambivalence of the festive topples over into the macabre. Dance does not so much suggest or briefly enact the real potentials of life, but instead the built-in decay of what appears as their momentary bursting forth. In Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836–37), dance and sexual passions are preludes to death. In Strindberg’s Dance of Death (1901), the sword dance of the captain is merely a brief interlude, a specious proof of vitality, in a deathlike routine of mutual torture. In the last scenes of a much later play, Howard Brenton’s Hitler Dances (1972), dance functions as a perverted celebration of death. In such scenes, dance illustrates an itself somewhat conventionalized version of the ways in which the conventions of culture tend to stymie the impulses of life. Again, however, this is only one kind of version. Again, the relation between body codes and their implications and culture at large may be both coherent and discontinuous. This is why histories of motifs could also be written in the opposite way. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1897), in the web of late-nineteenth-century “life lies,” that is, Nora’s rehearsal of her dance, directed by her repressive husband (and not of course merely a rehearsal), both reflects her social docility and initiates her liberation from it. An indication of the ambivalent cul-

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tural status of the theater, however, lies in the fact that Ibsen does not have the tarantella danced on stage. In the two parts of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu (1895, 1901, published as one play in 1913), dance in a heavily sexualized context effectively challenges and unmasks the bugaboo called bourgeois morality. Again, “nature” cannot muster any substantial claims. When Lulu finally performs in order to make Dr. Schön aware of his sexual bondage, the alleged autonomy of dance perishes and is absorbed by something that comes to resemble a decadent sexual power play finally ending, again, in death. Salome’s motivation to dance before Herodes in Oscar Wilde’s play of that name (French version 1893, English translation 1894) may be more enigmatic, but ultimately dance is transformed in a similar way. Such motif hunting can be indefinitely pursued. Whatever interpretation one may give to them, the literary motifs of dance draw attention to the problem, in itself of course a trivial and common one, that a conceptual and behavioral remanagement, a reorientation in the cultural mediation between an unknown but somehow rumbling human nature and rigid social habits, had become imperative. Whereas, in Flaubert’s Hérodias (1877), Salome’s dance, although sensually powerful, does not push political and private manipulation from the play’s center, Wilde’s play, like Richard Strauss’s musical drama after him, focuses on dance as the nodal point of a love-hate relationship between Salome and John the Baptist. Flaubert’s contrast between suggested sensuality, narrative sobriety, and a lack of explanation indirectly traces a way out of the motif maze. Whatever the context, one could say, dance can pose as a self-contained mode of experience. This is worked out at some length in the seemingly more straightforward but actually very sophisticated “dance legend” of Gottfried Keller (“Ein Tanzlegendchen,” published in 1872). Musa, a dance enthusiast and a graceful, pious virgin, reconciles prayer and dance—she even dances in front of the altar. This harmony is broken when King David (himself a famous dancer, as we know, and not only from Elyot) persuades her to abandon earthly dancing because it cannot compete with the bliss of dance in heaven. Thereupon Musa leads an ascetic, saintly life. After her death, she joins the heavenly ranks of dancers. In heaven, dance is purified of its treacherous, worldly mixture with both consciousness (self-observation) and passion. Once in a while, however, the muses, who normally sit in hell, are allowed to ascend to heaven and to help with the festivities there. On one occasion, one of their carefully prepared songs sweeps away heav-

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enly harmony and (re)kindles in Musa a powerful nostalgia for earth. Heaven’s practices, it appears, are not perfect. It is earth, in its futility and weakness, that is the true haven for human beings. Naturally, heavenly order is restored. But this is brought about only through the intervention of the supreme Trinity.69 The double context, heaven and earth, makes for an awareness that neither norm nor form, neither the absolute nor the body, can pose as absolutes or totalities. In the absence of those, they can assert, however, imperative occasional claims. On some such occasion, Yeats’s much-quoted last lines from “Among School Children”—“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—though poetry, could be used as the closest approximation toward description one can come. Even Nietzsche’s notorious gospel of the nobler human being, the full and free life, preached in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85)—which is nonsense once taken as a general doctrine—might make some occasionalistic sense in that respect. The anthropological importance of the occasional (semi-)transcendence and the downplaying of overall claims for any medium come full circle in the writings of Paul Valéry. I am pushing him to the forefront here because, like Lichtenberg in the eighteenth century, he combines creative and comprehensive discursive competence or genius (in poetry, drama, including “libretto,” and essayistic theory) with a piercing awareness of media potentials and shortcomings—the most famous instance being perhaps his scathing dismissal of novels that, as is the case with most of them, use phrases like “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” The dismissal amounts to a radicalized decision concerning the dubious role and the problematic redundancy of “littérature” and the important but very unstable status of “poésie.” Maurois reported that Gide (who confessed to being afraid of Valéry’s “penetrating” intelligence) had said, “If I were prevented from writing, I would kill [somebody]”; that Valéry had answered, “If I were forced to write, I would kill myself.” In other words, “I don’t want to be a literary producer. I remember having spent four years in order to write twelve pages of prose. I began my poem la Jeune Parque in 1913, I finished it in 1917.”70 Literature cannot take over the role of poetry, in the older, more general and emphatic sense that the word has in European languages. In that, Valéry is similar to Hegel, who (unlike aesthetic theorists like Solger and Vischer) tried to blur the distinction in order to salvage the old, supreme position of (“multimedia”) poetry for the single-minded modern world. Valéry is unlike Hegel, though, because for

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him, the intermittent practice of poetry as an occasionalist, unstable, but magic art remained meaningful. In Valéry’s writings on dance and the materials surrounding them, Valéry’s rigorous conception of poetry, which one can call elitist, hermetic, and whatnot, springs from an underlying concern with an anthropologically relevant intermediality. Poetry should be “chant”— without of course falling into the trap of ordinary songs. This motivates Valéry’s criticism of opera, which, according to him, erroneously tries to marry poetic with “realistic” elements such as action. Valéry is not quite correct here: the concern for psychological plausibility in opera is mainly an effort to circumvent what must otherwise appear as arbitrary or chaotic events and persons held flimsily together by music and difficult for most people to digest. Valéry’s counterconception of “mélodrame” is harking back to the older Italian term “melodramma” (in effect, again, opera), the products of which Hegel, in his turn, had appreciated so much. The counterconception, misplaced in its criticism of even conventional opera, is theoretically cogent: “Mélodrame” is meant to consist in the fusion of music, movement, and forms of vaguely evocative declamation.71 Valéry had been ruminating over such a conception since 1894. As he was well aware, there can be only problematic approximations to that fusion. In practice, the conception, for which Amphion and Sémiramis were written and partly set to music by Arthur Honegger, was bound to founder on that bedrock of “stupidity,” represented by at least minimally “realistic” expectations of art consumers.72 In any case, some system of “a coordination of several arts” is a simple fact: “it exists and demonstrates its existence each day.” What with opera dying (too bold a judgment, as it turned out), and with the theater in a condition “which deprives it of any poetry,” with film forcing people to be satisfied with the depth of a screen, the concept of intermediality must recall, even if it cannot duplicate “the liturgic convention.”73 This, in somebody as “atheist” as Valéry, is a striking conception indeed. The basis for such a conception would consist in a musically sustained notion of dance. The dialog “L’Ame et la Danse” projects that notion in rhapsodic form: dance as the art where, for instance, the instant engenders form, and form makes visible the instant, where, in a pure process of metamorphoses, sometimes something seems to be represented, but where in fact, nothing is represented. It is an art grounded in the body, but an art that makes the body disappear as an identifiable object, moving away toward some elusive universality of the soul.74

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The brief essay (or talk) “Philosophie de la Danse,” and, in passing, the long discursive mixture represented by “Degas Danse Dessin” frame this conception of the dance in an approach strongly reminiscent, in its latent theoreticity, of Arnold Gehlen’s or Edgar Morin’s philosophicalanthropological-sociological efforts. Its starting point is the idea that we have more energy and “elastic strength” than we need for everyday purposes. Walking for walking’s sake, swimming for swimming’s sake, are activities in which our feeling or awareness of energy is modified. From that follows the discovery that some movements, in their rhythmic repetition and amplitude, provide “a pleasure which reaches some kind of intoxication and is sometimes so intense that only a total exhaustion of our strength, a kind of ecstasy of exhaustion can interrupt its delirium, its exasperated motor waste.” Insofar, dance is never just an exercise, an entertainment, an ornamental art, or a social game. At the same time, the road to ecstasy does not exclude self-observation or thought—a Nietzschean idea, as we have seen in the beginning. Dance is a basic way of observing ourselves as we live intensely. This is why, in the way of “resonance,” the self-awareness of dancing can flash over to spectators: watching dance, we may feel ourselves “won over by the rhythms and virtually dancing ourselves.” In that respect, a poem is an act aiming at the production of an analogous state: “To speak lines of poetry is to enter into verbal dance.” Dance then could be seen as “the general poetry in the action of living beings.”75 Valéry would not be Valéry if he were too serious about that. The general poetry of being intensely alive on the margins of everyday life can be reached by other means and media. Valéry himself notes ironically or just playfully that in giving his talk, “somebody” pronounces on dance who does not dance himself.76 The relative exchangeability of media in discontinuous contexts is again in evidence. One may not dance, but dance remains one of the paradigmatic, not to say archetypal, fusions of form and “life.”

chapter nine

Ecstasy, Violence, “Literature” Early Western Cultures and Codes of Vitality

At least since Plato and Aristotle, as I have repeatedly emphasized, discourse and theory have had a somewhat distant relationship to the media of their own time. The same holds true for their relation to athletics. Aristokles, also and better known as Plato, supposedly received his famous name—broad(-shouldered)—for his victory in the wrestling competition of the Isthmian Games.1 In his and Aristotle’s theories, however, physical fitness, certainly devoutly to be wished, is merely supposed to provide the basis of an overall energy to cope with life at large.2 It is very doubtful, however, whether this attitude—in analogy to Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on literature and the theater—bears much relevance for cultural configurations. In both philosophers, art and athletic criticism are pawns in the philosophical-pedagogical struggle to ward off the supposedly dire consequences of failing traditional, predominantly oral-interactive guarantees of knowledge and guides of behavior. I assume that the cultural thresholds for a relatively risk-free and controlled acting out of both lustful and violent-aggressive impulses shift crucially only once the guarantees of knowledge negotiated in philosophy are superseded by the controls of behavior imposed by the power mechanisms of states or similar institutions. Thus, as we will see, both the status of athletics and the notion of literature, including its practice, changed significantly during the power and culture shift from ancient Greece to ancient Rome. That change occurred although the Romans, for quite a while, professed some enthusiasm for Greek games and Greek culture in general. Repeatedly, Greek-type games were organized without acquiring paradigmatic status. In Roman urban literature, we run across various references, but are confronted mainly with a mixture of nostalgia and indifference. Consequently, it is fairly obvious that no homogeneous picture (concerning a linear process of civilization or the like) will emerge.

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We have to ask, though, when it was that European societies felt gradually constrained to comprehend “society” as a problem of human organization and control, to see behavior not so much as right or wrong from case to case, but as a task of continuous rationalization. In that perspective, a somewhat different history of sociological thought can be delineated. It is not so much concerned with sociological ideas as such. Instead, it tries to sift out the ways in which sociological ideas are first geared toward topical problems (by Machiavelli, for example, or Bacon) and then, more “systematically,” oriented toward the question of society in general. In the eighteenth century, the transition from the topicality of social thought to the notion of an overall “social blanket,” wrapping up human life, that is to say, society as a system, came gradually to the forefront.3 For the same period, roughly speaking, clear evidence for the professionalization of sports and printed literature also can be mustered. Professionalization, with all that it habitually entails, does not by itself determine the cultural vitality of any medium or activity. Ancient Greek sports was professionalized to some extent, and Roman practices took, if anything, turns for the worse. Much as play, games, and sports are expressive models of the societies in which they are practiced (a correct thesis encountered in authors as different as Caillois and SuttonSmith), much as sports can be differentiated according to the social carrier groups practicing them, such theses may easily mislead the credulous investigator. If we must distinguish between the effect of social structures as a series of “mere,” if often severe, situational pressures and those same structures as agents of pervasive rationalization, sucking up whatever people may believe they possess in the way of a Shavian life force, that distinction is far from clear. Moreover, it is difficult to operationalize. A notion of pervasive rationalization would come close to Foucault’s more immaterial concept of power: instruments wielded in often nice and elusive but very effective ways, which is why Foucault has ironically spoken of the confidence with which many modern states have taken care of individual “welfare.” Transforming such a plausible assumption into descriptions is quite another matter. I am therefore rather assuming an asymmetrical relation between social structures and modes of experience. This asymmetry makes motiflike inquiries such as the preceding analyses of dance in literature both possible and problematic. Huizinga, in his Waning of the Middle Ages, provides an instructive example. For him, the chivalric tournaments of late-medieval knights were staged in the interest of aristocratic self-

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stylization (or, in Greenblatt’s term perhaps, overelaborate “self-fashioning”). That self-stylization no longer was “really” warranted by aristocratic social power, which was drifting toward the centralized authority of kings or the economic power of the urban bourgeoisie. Tournaments frantically try to maintain mere appearances—the illusion “of unhampered freedom in ideal directions,” William James calls them. Huizinga holds medieval fighting sports to be much less “natural” than those of ancient Greece or even European modernity. Real life does not offer much, so tournaments therefore stage fights as a fairly harmless “social game” in which splendor, luxury, erotic tension, and physical arrogance seemingly merge into each other. Tournaments turn into a kind of “applied literature.” Like the epic poetry of the later Italian Renaissance (for example Pulci’s Morgante, 1483, Boiardo’s L’Orlando Innamorato, 1486, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, 1516, and to some extent even Tasso’s La Gierusalemme liberata, 1581), a beautiful life is created in mere play.4 Two things might be critically noted here. One is that the appearance of deceptive splendor and a lack of social power do not in themselves allow us to draw conclusions as to the “reality” of highly “artificial,” ceremonial, aesthetic-physical-erotic enactments. The other is that the “closeness” between these kinds of sports and literature is productive, rather than detrimental to sports or to literature, or to both. The point is that forms of physicality need semantics of the most fluid kind. This does not mean that the discourses in which such activities are couched are mere semantics, illusions in comparison with allegedly more substantial forms of reality. Consequently, in early modern bourgeois literature, the references to physicality of a wider sporting kind, including sexual ones, may imitate aristocratic models or adopt some seemingly more direct style. Either way, they do not just reflect the fantasies sweltering in severely repressive modes of life. Groundless fictions may be conjured up from drained cultural reservoirs. But they may also act as pupated modes of handling the only vaguely directed surplus energies produced in almost all societies.5 Cultural configurations and tensions are sedimented, I take it, in the highly variegated modes in which sports motifs and themes show up in literary texts. There may be matter-of-fact references in which problematic phenomena are simply taken for granted. Related to that is the ease or unease with which texts handle the discontinuities of experience and sociocultural norms. There may be techniques of indirectness or circumstantiality in which suggestions are evoked that, in elaborate discourse,

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might look like the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. We have succeeded in culturally normalizing, “humanizing,” the brutalities of war and athletics in “Homer” and other Greek writers. We have perhaps greater difficulties in accepting analogous conditions in the literature of our time, such as the bullfight in Hemingway or Montherlant’s Bestiaires. Bullfight, to put it bluntly, is not a cultural problem, but the peculiar cultural version of an anthropological fact that exists somewhere between combat and ritual. Consequently, Hemingway’s pathos or Montherlant’s thesis about “fight and voluptuousness” (combat et volupté) being brother and sister, about the coming and going of desire, is more significant than criticism directed against it. Montherlant, for one, is quite able to sustain the apparent contradiction, or discontinuity, between a predilection for universal ritualization and distanced self-irony.6

Situations and Context Switches: Greek Models In dealing with Greek athletics and its “literary” repercussions, one cannot get around the agonistic principle that has been used by many as the key to ancient Greek culture. One would do equally well, however, to remember that agon is easily used as a euphemistic metaphor for a culture of male narcissism, and that it covers up what one should instead call chaotic, or at least disruptive and nonproductive, conflict in a society that long had been based on slavery.7 Homer’s Iliad (perhaps around 750 b.c., and committed to full writing much later) may reflect predominantly a more or less mythological past. Yet its depiction of war and athletics is generally viable. There is no point in confronting that viability with the later “decay” of athletics in professionalism, specialization, and alleged corruption, or with the socioeconomic consequences and the prestige gains coming in the wake of important victories.8 Homer’s epic, to be sure, is permeated by images of war. The function of the epic preserved in writing seems to be simple. It celebrates a mythologized lifestyle centering in martial heroics. As such, it occupies a shaky position as an ideal of relative unity in times torn asunder both cognitively and socially and as a quaint relic of bygone days. As an image of society, the epic is drifting into obsolescence and must therefore, later on, be allegorically reinterpreted. Athletics is embedded in the context of war. Physical achievement, continually present in a whole array of fixed epic formulas, is primarily performed in martial combat. Embedding, though, does not mean identification. There are situations and persons breaking through the war

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fixation. Paris, while a warrior in principle, definitely prefers “love”— this, of course, is too well known to need comment. Losing a fight against Menelaos, he immediately switches to the other context (3/437– 47).9 He is accordingly criticized by martial Hector (13/768–73). But Hector himself, noblest of the Trojans, is told by Pulydamas that war is not the father of all things (13/725–40). It must compete with dance, music, song, and also intelligence. It can claim priority only for practical, compulsive reasons. On the Greek side, Menelaos, although having the strongest personal motive for war, is capable of finer perceptions, too. He asserts or pretends that it is only the Trojans, not the Greeks, who cannot do without war. There is satiety in everything, even in sleep, love, play, and in the round dance. But these one would normally covet more than war (13/630–39). I have already referred to the many layers of images that Hephaistos forges into the new shield of Achilles (18/481–608). Most impressively, however, the funeral games, held for Patroklos and filling almost all of book 23, keep unfolding the partial identity, and, more importantly, the essential difference between war and athletic contest, the experience of successful performance and the feeling of life resulting therefrom. The funeral games do not of course lock out death. Not only do they mourn and celebrate it, but death may occur in the games themselves at any time. In the fifth contest, with the spears, the “cutting-weapons” (23/803), death is a risk taken for granted and a result almost certain. Achilles, pressed by the Achaeans, merely breaks off the fight between Aias and Diomedes after that “goal” has not been reached for a while (23/822–26). Boxing and wrestling, the second and third contests, are, to say the least, “bruising” or “grinding” (23/654, 701). The combatants imply what we know: that deaths have occurred during Olympic and other games. Epeius (23/689) alludes to that when he boasts that he will rip up the skin and smash the bones of his opponent. The undertaker, who came for Patroklos, is asked to stay on for other victims (23/672– 75). Such rhetoric, blown up as it may be, demonstrates the sheer enjoyment of violence: Epeius’s opponent, Euryalos, does indeed fare badly. He is not killed, but after vomiting blood he has to be carried out (23/688, 697). The wrestling bout between Aias and Ulysses, that extremely clever one, offers analogous perspectives. Aias, lifting Ulysses, is kicked in the hollow of the knee. Both fall. Ulysses, in his turn, lifts Aias only a little bit. Again they fall, and both must share the victory. Of violence then, lethal or not, there is plenty. Even so, perspectives keep shifting. In the chariot race, the focus is mainly on forceful, dy-

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namic driving, on cleverness and technical expertise. Running, on the other hand, turns into a funny affair. Aias slips, loses his footing, and falls into the cattle droppings lying around. His mouth and nose are “plastered, plugged with muck.” But he can still use his wit and blames Athene, who allegedly always helps Ulysses. The contest ends with jokes and laughter (23/780–84). Laughter also colors “iron” (discus or quoit) throwing, when Epeius “heaves” and does not correctly hurl the iron (23/839–40). However critically one may belabor such discourse, however much of its description may be merely due to the epic repetitive formulas, it seems clear that the coupling of athletic contest and war is both plausible and misleading. We may not be able to reach out beyond dubious discourse. But whatever personal experience or attitudes and group or interactive values may “really” consist in, their scope in athletics is wider than that of war. I am asserting that this thesis holds even if we take “Homer’s” situations, and the ease of switching between them, as merely ideal or nostalgic images, as a makeshift patchwork covering up political-social disruption and economic priorities. In athletics, participation is voluntary, but in war compulsory. The best warriors are not necessarily the best fighters. In boxing, the somewhat unpleasant braggart Epeius wins, who admits himself that he lacks in martial abilities but defends that lack with the argument that one cannot be a top performer in all fields (23/667–71). Achilles, notorious for his uncouth behavior, surprisingly acts as the guardian of good manners in sports. His whole personality seems changed during the games.10 Other layers of discrepant evidence, such as the complications in the long description of the chariot race, where cleverness, trickery, and technique seem to merge, are more difficult to evaluate. In athletics, action, in spite of being furiously pursued, loses some of its intentional or pragmatic determinants. The transcendence is partly aesthetic, partly a matter of the personal or social mood or atmosphere in which the contests take place. This makes for an instability that is easily absorbed by external, controlling interests. Consequently, Robert Lipsyte scores a strong point when he describes the depiction of cricket by C. L. R. James, from whom the motto of this part is taken: “C. L. R. James gets to the root of the exhilarating liberation from class and race and future that exists during the transcendent moments of play; but he never forgets that this liberation exists only within the boundaries of the game, and then only for the gamers. Lurking beyond the boundaries of

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every game are the controlling interests . . . the liberation and the oppression are inextricably bound.”11 The Odyssey, much more clearly than the Iliad, could be taken as an illustration of that opinion, with the emphasis much more clearly on the controlling interests. It is perhaps the first front-rank cultural document in which the elusiveness of the exhilarating liberation of play has become obvious (and the key text of European civilization for Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment). The Odyssey is replete with all kinds of distancing procedures by which any immediacy is wiped out: thought turns into calculation, emotions (between Ulysses and Penelope) are displayed on a latent basis of coldness and even cheating. In book 8, after the Phaiákians have competed among themselves (see the factual, mostly “unimaginative” description, 8/111–38), Ulysses is invited to take part in the athletic contests of the Phaiákians.12 In theory, there is no greater honor than that brought by “footwork and the skill of hands” (8/155–56). Ulysses’ experience, however, is too rich, and partly too oppressive, to admit any privileged status of “track and field” (8/162). His stance is immediately subjected to aggressive interpretations and allegations by “Seareach,” who says that Ulysses has neither the training nor the status of an athlete. In his caustic reply, Ulysses takes more or less for granted a separation between intellectual and athletic prowess (8/174–94). In his turn, he interprets Seareach’s words as a provocation he has to answer on its, that is, the athletic, level. He throws the discus much farther than anybody else (aided perhaps by the ever-present Athena [8/203]). After that single event, the action is reduced to verbal exchange, this time Ulysses boasting again (8/213–45). Interestingly and ambivalently, the Phaiákian king does not take up his challenges on the athletic level, but proposes a more neutral and more enjoyable dance and song festival (8/248–69). Here, the “exhilarating liberation,” barely noticeable in the athletic games, and disappearing in verbal aggression, finally materializes. Not much, though, can be made of that, either: the Phaiákian life form, removed from the world at large, has shrunk into an idyllic reservation.13 With Pindar (probably 518–446 b.c.), a full sense of the real has been ceded to the management of shifting “realities.”14 Far from promoting sociopolitcal unity, the various games, for prestige reasons staged by an increasing number of cities, tended to serve highly particularistic interests. Exorbitant prizes were awarded in order to compete with the pres-

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tigious traditional games. Pindar, accordingly, frequently wrote his odes to order, and elements that did not fit the idealized image of victors were normally left out.15 But again, the mixture of myth, ideology, and fascination produces transitory configurations of the emphatically real. Olympic victory figures in a continuous line starting with the deeds of gods, half-gods, and heroes. Touches of the religious remain intact, even if social life at large has more or less severed close connections. Pindar remains untroubled by what Sophocles, in a description of a chariot race in Electra, demotes to mere appearance. Contest, whatever the context, produces supreme moments in which, as Goethe once noted with respect to dance, discourse and especially literature become superfluous. The supreme moment is highly unstable and transitory, and for that reason pushes the other arts into somewhat stabler but also weaker exertions.16 Sophocles’ Electra (about 413 b.c.) exhibits a mentality in which sports occupies a much less self-evidently important position than in the Odyssey. The divine order to kill Aigisthos and Clytemnestra propels events ahead. But existence, with Electra, has turned mainly into the affair of the single person: Orestes has to manage pretense and sincerity in ways perhaps even more carefully or calculatingly than Ulysses. Thus, the chariot race in Delphi, spread out in the messenger’s report in the second main scene, is part of Orestes’ strategic murder scheme. The race itself does not even take place.17 But the invention, in its mixture of feigned observation and imaginative enrichment, pays homage to the motif to an extent not warranted by and disconnected from the scheme. The intoxicating splendor of supreme moments, it is true, does not play a prominent role. But the narrator portrays the fictitious race from an imagined close distance. By remote inspiration, as it were, a gripping mixture of fight, toughness, cleverness, luck, and mishap emerges. Ineluctably, it would appear, sports is transformed into and transfigured by a protoliterary imaginative discourse.

Rome: Culture Complex, the Imaginary, and Sports Reporting Turning to Rome, one is in for a surprise. In Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid, Roman literature furnishes the most extensive, eloquent, and evocative descriptions of athletics, but mainly as nostalgic homages to Greek models of games. In the “real” Roman adoption of Greek games and their change to bloody forms of mass spectacles, their cul-

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tural status was drastically modified. Such is at least the image handed down by most historians: Rome imported professional Greek athletic spectacles, fighters, and athletes, but its politicians exploited them mainly as sops to the masses. Conservative upper-class Romans were afraid that aristocratic youth might take part in games and lose their dignity. They tried to divert the attention of youth instead with the paramilitary training on the Campus Martius. The same attitude, according to Lucan, asserts itself in Caesar’s speech to his troops before the battle of Pharsalus. Juvenal, for all the cliché of “mens sana in corpore sano” (which in him was a pious hope at best), has nothing good to say of Greek athletics. By contrast, he is clearly aware of the political uses of “panem et circenses.”18 Some emperors themselves fought in the games. But then they indulged in at least a tastelessness irreconcilable with aristocratic standards.19 Horace, in his odes and epistles, seems to despise what he saw as the pointless indulgence, that is, a lack of public function, of the Greeks in athletics. Consequently, he treats athletics as a symptom of decline. In Roman literature, we do encounter passing references in a variety of authors to many sports practiced in Rome, including, by preference, Greek-type games. In general, however, a lack of “literary” interest in what appears to be the most important, notorious, or infamous contributions of Rome to the sports of antiquity is striking. The most emphatic—and specious—tribute to the chariot races, according to Ingomar Weiler, the most important and typical Roman contribution, seems to have come from Lewis Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880) or the twentiethcentury film of that title.20 Wallace’s novel, to be sure, reflects nineteenth-century interests. Ben Hur races primarily against his enemy and erstwhile friend Messala. The race is embedded in a story of tragic involvements and happy endings. It is far removed from Roman cruelty— or, for that matter, the equally cruel indifference of literature regarding the gladiatorial and similar spectacles in the arena, an indifference that has outraged the more sensitive souls of both humanists and aestheticists. That outrage, and not just the sentimentalism of Wallace, was strongly articulated in the nineteenth century, too. The ludi gladiatorii have been called an “apotheosis of sadism and perversion.”21 The disgust is felt, for instance, in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885). On the whole, that novel steers clear of definite commitments and criticisms. But Marcus Aurelius, in the amphitheater, not only sits impassively through the “bloody contests,” he actually averts his eyes from the

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show, “reading, or writing on matters of public business.” He apparently lacks a sense of evil as “a real thing” and, in a significant conjunction, appears to be “a despiser of the body.” In Roman literature, though, that attitude has its parallels. Ovid, in the Ars amandi, recommends the visit of the circus arena because the physical closeness of the spectators facilitates initial moves in lovemaking better than the also-mentioned forum and the theater.22 More typically, however, as in Wallace, later periods have painted an idealizing picture. The racers occasionally resort to tricks and cheating. But on the whole, the race takes part in, and illustrates more strongly than anything else, the intensity of experience and the dignity of life that the nineteenth century found bountifully in antiquity and rarely in its own time. Again, some cultural stereotypes must be risked if we want to assess both the specificity and the general implications of Roman conditions. Jasper Griffin, in his introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid, has characterized the Romans in a certainly broad-brush fashion as a “hard-headed, tightfisted race of farmers and soldiers.” Through its eastern conquests, Rome had come to confront “a culture which in all the arts, visual and literary, had produced works of a daunting formal perfection.” It therefore had to come to terms with “the phenomenon of Greek cultural superiority.”23 Michel Serres also keeps doubting whether anything apart from power politics and force, culminating in the building of the empire, can confidently be ascribed to Rome. If one does not curb one’s feelings, it is difficult to see much more than a “foolish people, rough and rude” that “neither had nor gave access to what makes our life worth living: real knowledge, science and philosophy, and the crazy mythology that lights up shadow ecstatically. . . . Rome does not speculate, does not speak, never converses about the latest refinement. . . . It builds, extends itself, preserves.” “Athens and Jerusalem dispense light, but Rome absorbs it, imprisons it, and barricades it, as an object does.” There was a little bit of philosophy and physics. But science “never appeared in Rome, nor did geometry or logic; never anything but politics.” Thus, Serres does not find any kind of unity in Rome, but rather various “multiplicities” controlled by force and power. The empire is perhaps the most powerful image of such multiplicities—potentially turning all the world into either slaves or Roman citizens. The empire created a vast inside, with the aristocracy as a class, but with the plebs “not a people, not a body, not a group,” but rather a “true collective,” “the pure multitude. Crowd, aggregation, population”—and with the enemy outside. Likewise, inside the army everybody is a friend or relative, while out-

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side, again, there is the enemy to be put to death. The Celts still cultivated the unique hero, but the hero of the Roman legion had the virtue of being nothing in particular. For Serres, Rome is “a mixture of outsiders” turned insiders. Apart from the exercise of power, it had “no unity; perhaps it never existed unitarily.”24 In such a civilization, literature will consist first and foremost in efforts to take over and perhaps equal the perfected Greek forms.25 It goes without saying that aemulatio cannot be mere imitation and develops a complexity of its own. At the level of “body culture,” for example, the Roman system of public baths represents an advanced version hardly matched today. But as a civilized routine, it shares the cultural position of the circus spectacles. Different as these are, they are subordinated to other purposes or pleasures. Much in contrast to the athletic contests or the dances of the Greeks, they do not command a mental attention calling for something like literary activity. Or, as H. A. Harris says, the Romans practiced chariot races, athletic meetings, gladiatorial combats, and fights with wild animals as mass “public entertainment” with an exciting, but therefore politically tranquilizing, function. They did not at all focus on the enjoyment and benefit of the athletes or onlookers united in relatively small groups.26 Howard Baker may be right in saying that the continuous expansion of the empire meant continuous war and produced an attitude of “grim seriousness.”27 When the barbarians came, when the supply of slaves (or wild animals, for that matter) dried up, when the paradox-ridden communication and postal system failed, Roman civilization crumbled away.28 This is perhaps why Serres, in somewhat elusive passages on warding off the plague, seems to suggest that although the gods love the dance and although everything begins with it, an apparent dancelike spectacle looks like dance only to Jupiter. What Jupiter calls dance, people call “lynching.” The body of the dancer is a whipped and contorted body approaching death. That dance, imagined by Jupiter but distorted on the stage of war or society, is a spectacle like all the other bloody ones—performed well or badly, throwing away the body reluctantly and despairingly or, in Pater’s picture of Marcus Aurelius, handsomely. That is why Livy, Plutarch, Macrobius, and even Cicero relate, without knowing it, the birth of dance.29 Jupiter’s vision itself may be nothing but an imaginary metaphor. Conversely, the regatta and the other athletic contests in the Aeneid (29–19 b.c.), arranged in honor of Aeneas’s dead father and called the “Trojan Games” (5/66), appear in fact like a replica of the funeral games for Patroklus (5/42–603) in the Iliad. A description partly

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mythical at the time of its conception, to say nothing of the time of the written composition, appears to be decidedly “derealized” and turned into a nostalgic image. Furthermore, elements of a compensatory “patriotic” myth are hovering around when Aeneas alleges that “Rome herself/ Received the tradition and kept it to honour her ancestors.”30 While, apart from the notorious circus spectacles, athletic contests including Greek games were indeed widely staged, the motivations, apart from the sociopolitical and military ones, would seem to be shrouded in cultural mist.31 But again, in emulating Homer, Virgil was not and could not be simply imitating the Iliad. Merely reading the text without much explanatory effort, one is struck by the intensity and richness of details, which I would not like to explain away as a mere effect of writing and the relative ease with which it can escape from formulaic repetition. If anything, Virgil increases the intensity of total effort and total appreciation on the side of the spectators.32 Gyas throws his helmsman Menoetes into the sea because Menoetes does not dare to get close to a dangerous rock (5/173– 80). Menoetes can save himself, but owing to his age and the weight of his soaked clothes, he might have drowned as well. The old boxer Entellus, who basically does not want to box anymore, is goaded on to such a degree, especially when he misses one punch, that he beats his young opponent Dares almost to death (5/455). Instead of Dares, Entellus, now “in highest spirit” (5/473) with his victory, kills the bullock, his prize, with one stroke of the iron-filled or lead-filled “gloves” (caestus; 5/477–81) Virgil also takes up the Homeric motif of the slipping runner. Nisus slips in the blood and the droppings of a sacrificed bull, but does not take this humorously. Instead, he gets up and sends Salius spinning down (5/327–36). The final decision, even if it is laughingly resolved by Aeneas, is hotly disputed. Virgil employs a close-distance description of events, however nostalgic or remote these may have been. In close-distance discourse, events take on both intensely imaginary and “real” qualities, even if their actual social basis consisted only in the Roman military and entertainment industry. Another aspect, however, is an increasing distance toward events, as well. The trajectory and appearance of Acestes’ arrow (in an archery contest again closely modeled after the Iliad, 23/850–85) is perceived as a “startling phenomenon . . . one of the utmost/ Significance for the future”(5/522–23). Accordingly, it is interpreted at some length (5/524–38). It foreshadows both the founding of Acesta and the deification of Julius Caesar.33 This of course is merely another way of saying

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that, for Virgil, the semantic-symbolic density of the Aeneid, and the pressure to create noble meanings out of events unclear in themselves, have increased. I take that as a model of “literature”: its strength as a close-distance, suggestive, and imaginative protopoetic discourse, and its weakness as a distanced and distancing form of semantics. This does not exhaust the relation between discourse and halfimaginary, half-social event, however. In Statius’s Thebaid, that relation is even more perplexing. The legendary materials dealing with the seven against Thebes are subjected to a whole machinery of gods, allegorical figures, and other injections of emotional, historical, and divine significance. In the center of all that, the founding of the Nemean Games, occupying the main part of book 6, is spread out. Again, the archery contest, for instance, must serve ominous purposes (6/934–41).34 In Statius, though, the symbolic machinery of gods, clans, and families, of the cultural progress illustrated by the shift from Thebes to Athens, is shot through with close-distance discourse even more insistently than in the Aeneid. Sometimes Statius concentrates on the nerves of fighters as the meeting point of the mental and the physical, often contradictory impulses (6/389–95). Sometimes the focus shifts to the conditions of perception in the heat and dust of action (6/410–13). Statius knows that running can be useful in war “should power of arm fail” (6/552–53). But he also depicts the peaceful contest down to the smallest and meanest tricks and deceits such as hair pulling (6/614–17), which can easily provoke violent and armed brawls. Boxing is described with an almost modern expertise—not just the blows, but also the dodging, watching, and sparring—“the exploration” of the caestus. After their long exertions, the fighters do not even get a “real” decision.35 We can cut this long story short. The Roman games no longer provided the subject for the type of literary discourse that develops into elitist, mostly culturally conservative literature. It is equally clear, however, that there remained a need for an imaginative discourse, represented, with reference to the past, by Virgil and Statius, in which a basic anthropological import and a broader cultural fascination with the games was captured. This thesis can be confirmed by reference to Paul Veyne’s book on Roman liberalitas, which seems to have been mainly condensed into the doling out of “bread” and the organization of games.36 Veyne places the games squarely in the context of ancient but anthropologically significant forms of upper-class republican or imperial generosity (liberalitas, “euergetism”). Veyne disagrees with Cicero, who believed in the insignificance of the games and preached moderation. He

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follows Aristotle, for whom the human mind needs the relaxation brought about by heightened and excited festive atmospheres. Moreover and importantly, festivities for Veyne try to do justice to the intuition that there should be a human imitation of the happiness of the gods. The anthropological relevance shows up as historical “multifunctionality”: its different layers did not have to be compatible with each other in any modern sense. In republican times, there remained a superficial layer of religious ceremony. But Veyne is adamant in his assertions that the “psychological” qualities of enthusiasm and joy both on the side of the organizing and paying magistrates and on the side of the consuming public were elements in their own right. Piety, festivity, and solemnity went hand in hand.37 Veyne seems to say that multifunctionality disappeared once the games lost their religious dimension. Yet he also seems to retain the notion in truncated form when he refuses to downgrade the games into “vulgar entertainment.” The cultural separation into plebeian amusement and elite art was not yet carried out. In imperial times, the “affective ‘disposability’ ” (that is, flexibility) of the lazzaroni, the loafers and lazybones, or the urban masses in general, may have put an end to real multifunctionality. But the general appeal of the games, which lasted for about four months annually, and their urgency, surpassing the demand for money or “bread” donations, the impressive visibility of relations between ruler and people, remained intact.38 My thesis is that the mixture of a socially though not very clearly entrenched practice of sports, various symbolic efforts, and observational closeness breeds or provokes a certain type of discourse into existence. I would like to call this discourse “protoliterary.” The functions of the social or political practice of athletics may be obvious or vague, and the meanings, the values as experience for participants and spectators, may be elusive. But the latter, in particular, are strong enough to generate a discourse tightly correlated with the more obscure and fragmented experiences of minds and bodies. As always, discourse is interpretation. In discourse, the elements of representation and construction, of the imaginary and of observation (or merely quasi-observation), can hardly be separated. The term “protoliterary” may or may not figure prominently in what we normally call literature—or elsewhere. In its perhaps oldest forms, in battle descriptions and the depiction of athletic contests in Virgil and Statius, that discourse participates in the ambivalences of the epic between orality and literacy. And it is significant, in that respect, that

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Veyne detects the possibility of play (and thus the problems of its description) even in war, when political goals become less important than heroic feats. In modern times it has taken its perhaps most prominent form in sports reporting, parodied and thereby yet confirmed as a discourse type, for instance in Ror Wolf’s protoliterary, formal stabilization of the protopoetic potential. If we strip Statius’s epic of its obviously traditional and conventional imaginary layers (the gods, the allegories and omens), for example, we are witnessing its transformation into sports reporting. We are dealing with a discourse that, in spite of its imaginary ingredients, pretends to be riveted to the observed dynamics of the event itself. It is, in fact, a paradigmatic engagement of the imaginary under conditions of observation. Observation itself reveals itself as a partly imaginary affair. Its fascinating, gripping elaboration assumes literary traits. Sports (and before that perhaps “epic” battles) offer a highly suitable medium for that important type of discourse. The feigned description of a chariot race in Sophocles’ Electra works because the Paedagogus handles the observational stance and its imaginative enrichment very skillfully, that is, in a “literary” way. The peculiarity (not to say uniqueness) of sports does not necessarily consist in some intrinsic essence (although one may try and talk about that), but in the fact that it keeps breeding continuous reporting in various genres and media. Sports reporting is protoliterary because it partakes of characteristic, “literary” fusions of the imaginary and the observational, but it does not respect the genre or media boundaries normally associated with that. Consequently, in spite of heavy differences in style, it is possible to compare Statius (and also Virgil or Sophocles) to the famous, “dramatic” report the Austrian commentator Edi Finger produced for the soccer match between Austria and Germany during the world championships in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1978. Its inclusion in Ror Wolf’s soccer texts, together with bungling efforts of the German commentator and other ingredients,39 is therefore amply warranted. In a similar vein, Roland Barthes has spoken of the Tour de France as an epic. (He meant, of course, primarily an event provoking an epic type of discourse.)40 In spite of the unending doping “scandals,” of which Barthes is aware and which, in accordance with the protoliterary essence of the Tour, he calls a “sacrilege,” Barthes’s scholarly poetry retains its validity. Confronting the difficulties of the tour: the racer dimly seeks to define himself as a total man at grips with a Natureas-substance, and no longer merely with a Nature-as-object . . . the racer is

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always represented in a state of immersion and not in a state of advance. . . . The Tour thus possesses a veritable Homeric geography. As in the Odyssey, the race is here both a circular tour of ordeals and a total exploration of the earth’s limits.41

Barthes’s own writing crucially illustrates the frictions and the unavoidable links between imaginary and observational dimensions. He is clearly aware of the importance of language and the “sovereign nominalism which makes the racer’s name the stable depository of an eternal value.” The Tour is depicted, he thinks, as an uncertain conflict of certain essences in which vestiges of an old ethic, feudal or tragic, and the new requirements of total competition (and public relations) mingle: “nature, customs, literature, and the rules successively relate these essences with each other, like atoms, they graze each other, hook together, repel each other, and it is from this interplay that the epic is born.” But once the realistic trap is treacherously set, interpretations of observations seemingly dictated by the events are hard to escape. Gestures during the tour such as kisses between racers and others betoken and express “a magnificent euphoria experienced in the presence of the closure and perfection of the heroic world.” This “fraternal happiness,” chivalry without sentimentality, is contrasted with the “sentiments of gregarity which seethe among the members of the same team; these sentiments are much murkier.”42 Thus Barthes, to some extent, partakes of the reporting discourse he is analyzing. The real epic unfolds in the Tour de France and the semiobservational, semi-imaginary styles of reporting. Their core is the protoliterary.

Sequels: More of the Same, but More Complicated The situations here associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans have framed the maximum scope of the problem of the protoliterary. With the Greeks, equivalences between heterogeneous cultural domains (in simplifying shorthand called “literature” and “sports” here) make for easy switches between them. Distinctions between athletes and spectators, between performing and writing, and the like did of course exist, sometimes (as in professionalism) to a large extent. At the same time, they did not count for very much. With the Romans, by contrast, the dissociation between the domains was pushed to extremes. An urban literature—urban even when it extols the virtues of rural retreat (the mythological history of Rome, “philosophies” of life, and the like)— copes with demands of formal perfection and general significance. It

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cannot care very much for mass spectacles staged for apparently obvious sociopolitical purposes, whatever hidden or “perverse” fascinations these spectacles may have exerted. Distinctions have become sharp. In particular, athletes (like gladiators) and spectators have drifted far apart. If anything, we are confronted with a development toward spectator sports hardly surpassed in modern times. With the pseudoprivate context of TV, the structure is still recognizable, even if it may also have changed considerably: for dispersed mass audiences, appeasement by appeal probably takes place, but its effectiveness in terms of both fascinatory and sociopolitical effect is less assured. On the other hand, those disparities breed discourse and media couplings. Whatever sports may be, it becomes inextricably tied up with forms of discourse here called protoliterary. These may develop into all kinds of distinct or mixed “genres” themselves, such as radio, newspapers, or poetry, for that matter (in Ror Wolf, the striking thing is poetry as a kind of textual and imagistic fusion of genres). More precisely: while there seems to be an anthropological urge toward the “poetic,” protoliterary verbalization of dynamic experience, its enactment in other media, more comprehensive than literature in its material appeals, is equally urgent. This double aspect in fact has motivated the design of this book. In insisting on the the fragility of literature as a medium, on the “fact” that its cultural status is undermined all the time by more powerful media in which codes of the body show up in more directly appealing forms, it tries to strengthen it, in its reduced size, as an anthropological niche. Thus, a core of attempted or pretended observational immediacy and imaginary elaboration can be detected in most of those other media—sometimes even in the often stultified and stultifying TV rituals, where the images seem to deprive many reporters of the ability to exploit the observational and imaginary materials frequently so ready for use. Consequently, sports actively practiced and “passively” consumed, the sports of athletes and the sports of spectators, of immediate or distanced observers (“thinkers”), for instance, may but do not need to find themselves in antagonistic positions. The same is true for the joys of the spirit and those of the body.43 In these respects, which I would therefore consider more important anthropologically and perhaps also culturally than the parallels that are habitually drawn between the Greeks and the Renaissance, the European Middle Ages resemble the era of the Greeks. The same rapid switches between what we are used to considering as separate domains can be gleaned from descriptions and analyses of all kinds.

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In the Middle Ages, according to the drastic formulation of Arno Borst, there was practically nothing in between subtle psychological calculation and brutal butchery: “The passion of the moment is decisive.” There was a lot of laughing and weeping, “in swift change and in full public.” Such formulations may appear, in an age of discourse criticism, as somewhat Romantic. Sometimes, though, it is hard to avoid the use of phrases like “the impulsivity of living together,” which gives greater weight to the “moment,” than we would normally grant. Climax, produced especially in the ceremonial yet undirected play of the tournaments, and catastrophe occur side by side. It is important to note that while the concrete events, the games and activities of which that lifestyle was composed, differed radically on the aristocratic and the lower-class sides, the systematic point would hold for both. One can therefore concentrate on the better-documented aristocratic level without walking into a simple sociological trap. Otto Borst has described the “whirl” and the rapid transitions between tournaments, the performance of acrobatic and “literary” arts, eating, drinking, music, and dancing, or viewing the show(s) offered by women. The reality of the body was not inaccessible, hidden, or denied, but rather perceived—not to say grasped—in the complicated arrangements of fashion. There also existed a close connection between the patronage of tournaments and the patronage of courtly literature, between the “literary methodology of chivalry,” as Maurice Keen puts it, and the style of life. To him it seems “only natural that the knightly world” that listened to the stories of the storytellers “should in turn seek to infuse into its sport and ceremony some reflection at least of the romantic interest with which these were charged in fiction.” The “interplay of life and romance is always a complex matter,” but it is not in doubt. For Keen, tournaments, ceremonies, theater, and play in a more general sense existed on a sliding scale into which literature can insert itself at any time. Historical and especially technological-military developments such as the ascendancy of urban-bourgeois or, more seriously, “Puritan” life forms on the one side, artillery on the other, wiped out such forms of interplay only with quite some delay. But did they wipe out the interplay of observation and the imaginary, protoliterary discourse as it condensed in the medium of sports, too? That is hardly the case.44 Despite the disillusioning, sometimes devastating realities of social competition, politics, and technologized war, the implied intensities of protoliterary discourse keep rearing their head. Consider, for instance, the planned duel between King Charles I of

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Anjou and Peter III of Aragon in 1282. King Edward I of England was supposed to act as referee in a fight through which the war about southern Italy and Sicily was to be arbitrated. Those august personages were of course experts at all kinds of trickery and dirty warfare. Talk about manipulation and stratagems flared up accordingly. Even so, preparations were made. Somehow, although the combatants seem to have appeared (at different times), the duel did not take place. The plan was enmeshed in the complicated feudal ideology and the special position princes occupied therein. Princes and kings took part in battles but did not normally fight duels—Edward even prohibited tournaments for his noblemen. Normally, kings did not move about themselves, they made others move and do. Peter, for one, went on his way disguised as a horse dealer. Yet the idea seems to have exerted a strong protoliterary attraction. Notarial acts were drawn up to regulate its execution. One can see then the whole thing as an empty spectacle and early international farce, and this is Huizinga’s position. One can also see to what lengths a ceremony, deeply anchored in the imaginary, may force even kings to go.45 Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and later periods may have theoretically distinguished between res corporales and res incorporales. But the predominance of performative activities overruns these distinctions continually. Consequently, it is an irony of history that advanced thought these days would banish such distinctions into the museum of theory, and that, on the other hand, our cultural habits and institutions, our ways of reporting matters of sports and culture, seem to keep such distinctions alive in fairly rigid forms. Theory cannot resolve the ironies of history; to handle them, we must treat them ironically in their turn. In 1336, as Petrarch (1304–74) ascends Mont Ventoux in southern France, physical exertion and the view of “Nature” engender a heightened state of the soul that threatens to degenerate into the admiration of earthly, futile things and yet is far from doing so. The project—undertaken, or so it seems, for the sake of the cupiditas videndi—instead furnishes the occasion for moral self-criticism. In a philosophical perspective, the problem can be conceptualized as a conflict between Christian norms and the self-awareness of “subjectivity.”46 I do not claim, of course, any self-evident connection between mountain climbing and the “experience” of nature. That connection was far from being taken for granted until well into the eighteenth century. But it is one of the molds in which observational-imaginary and protoliterary couplings may occur. In Petrarch, as well as many other cases, consciousness is steeped in the knowledge of norms. This is pre-

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cisely why an awareness of difference in search of a code can blaze up in the radical context shift of physical exercise and perception. Petrarch thus feels compelled to quote the authority of St. Augustine’s Confessions in order to win back the hegemony of consciousness: “Man goes and admires the summits of mountains and the boundless floods of the sea . . . but he does not pay heed to his own soul.” Compared with the soul, nothing is really great. Even so, in a repeated reversal of implications, including what Andreas Kablitz calls “strategies of selfdeception,” physical exertion and perceptual alertness continue to figure as a prerequisite for the ascent of the soul. Several centuries later, Robert Burton (1577–1640) tries to cut down the claims of difference by granting some narrowly hedged scope to it. “Puritanism” was not at all tantamount to a tabooing of games and plays. It tried to control them by depriving them of any risky special quality. With the example of dance, we have seen that Burton did not go to the length of Cicero who, in the utilitarian Roman context, denounced all transgressions of sobriety. Yet for Burton, games ought not catapult people into states of mind in which the checks and balances of everyday social existence are temporarily suspended, either. On the other hand, his encyclopedic survey provides a staggering amount of activities liable to engineer some such state. Significantly, “bodily exercises” and “sports” (referring of course mostly to the “sports” of the old aristocracy like hawking and hunting) are counted among the few activities in which the body-mind dichotomy is neutralized.47 In spite of its obvious historical and conceptual limitations, Burton spreads out what looks like an early and short version of Carl Diem’s world history of sports. Burton does not merely present a factual account, he also reproduces the evaluations that come alongside the supposed facts of sports in his sources. Therefore, forms of exuberance threaten to invade the text. Since they cannot be refuted, Burton has to content himself with warnings against excess and with an emphasis on pastimes and sports into which moderation seems to be built-in. The warnings are amply justified by the picture of maladies, anxieties, and risks of life that would be intolerably enhanced, in Burton’s view, by the gratuitous addition of uncontrolled intoxication. Therefore, Burton paints in glowing colors what will turn into the essence of leisurely and pleasurable bourgeois (or aristocratic) boredom: “strolling through pleasant scenery,” enjoying “the songs of the birds, the colours of the flowers, the verdure of the meadows . . . to disport in some pleasant plain, park, run up a steep hill sometimes, or sit in a shady seat.” This

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“must needs be a delectable recreation.” On a somewhat higher level, to “take a boat in a pleasant evening, and with music to row upon the waters” or “in a gondola through the Grand Canal in Venice” is recommended.48 Pleasant as this may be, the fascination lies elsewhere. Burton falls into the rhapsodic style when he talks about watching battles, real ones, or single combats. He is equally taken with the mass spectacles, athletic and otherwise, of the Greeks and Romans. Some of the latter, in particular, have found their parallel in “our bull-baitings and bearbaitings.” Much is allowed, including sober dancing and even drinking, if worse can be thereby prevented.49 Certainly, in due course, Burton returns to the praise of study. Clearly also, Burton privileges the role of onlooker, not that of the participant as far as battles and the rougher sports are concerned. But the problem with the Anatomy is that it is indeed merely an anatomy, merely about life in a formal sense. As a person and writer, Burton presents the radical and therefore relatively rare cultural model of life being replaced by the encyclopedic knowledge of the forms it has taken in others. He not only writes a book and inevitably neglects, as far as he himself is concerned, what we call “fitness,” he also opts for the exclusive role of (the writer as) spectator: in “Democritus to the Reader” he describes himself as a “mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts.” Burton joined Brasenose College, Oxford when he was sixteen. He spent most of his whole life there, at Christ Church, and as the librarian of his college. The fact that he worked for a year as a clerk of Oxford Market and for ten years as a parson or rector cannot dispel the impression that he took the spectator’s role with a vengeance. Conversely, rich as his Anatomy is, its fifteen hundred or so pages are basically cast as a reference work to browse in, not as a book to be coherently read. His selections made with respect to codes of body-mind couplings, however, are far-reaching. In most cases, culture, literary culture in particular, becomes well-nigh obsessed with culturally inflected forms of body culture whose implications are not really spelled out. This is not at all or at least not necessarily a matter of “repression” or “sublimation.” Partly, the implications are difficult to spell out because spelling out normally can mean only a change of code, not a grasping of some truth. Partly, the cultural prestige of literary writing, accruing from its observational, imaginative, and analytical potentials, simply tends not to support but to damage protoliterary potentials. A lot of nineteenth-century literary writing—in the United States, the ideal of

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manliness found in Cooper or Hawthorne, in Britain the cult of walking—can be read as the culturally streamlined utilitarian or individualistic masks of uncontrolled playfulness or intensity. Sometimes, as with King James I, the control exercised with respect to the various intensities sought and suspected in sports, open-air exercises, courtly masquerades, revels, and court masques—or tobacco—contrasts hilariously with an excessive indulgence of alcohol or the like. To take or not to take “drugs,” that is not the question. Aldous Huxley, for one, devoted a lifetime of writing to proving just that. The question is which drugs one should take, from “media” via “sports” to “drugs” in the narrow sense. In historical and sociological terms, James stands on the opposite side of the Puritans, but in terms of cultural-anthropological structures, he is one of them.50 Generally, of course, sociological and historical pictures have their validity. There have certainly been bourgeois or Puritan cultural movements for which the control of experience is more important than its exploration. The middle class, mythological as the term may be, is normally busy organizing life both materially and morally. In its literature, sports, if it shows up at all, tends to be reduced to a passing motif and an illustrative or amusing metaphor. And an aristocracy deprived of much of its effective power verges toward the sports of gentlemanly leisure. “Augustan” literature in Britain, like Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713), in describing aristocratic hunting, may allude to or even quote lines from Statius’s Thebaid. Residues of the dramatic suspense that permeated Statius’s sports report seem to be lingering on—and languishing away. The hunt mainly illustrates nationally, indeed dynastically, colored perspectives suggesting English cultural progress since the times of the barbarian Norman conquerors. Thus, divine providence masterminded the death of William I and members of his family during barbarian hunting expeditions in 1087. Even more distinctly, Pope seems to side with the opponents of William III, who also saw the hand of divine justice in William’s fall from a horse and subsequent death in 1702. The images of refined hunting pay tribute to the conservative regime of Queen Anne (1702–14), the bright goddess and chaste queen who protects the hunting grounds.51 Such preoccupations do not exclude a concern with the “mens sana in corpore sano” motif in serious prose writing. In The Spectator, Addison and a person called Budgell reemphasize the connection between “exercise,” “chearfulness of the soul,” and the well-being of all “Faculties of the Mind.” Budgell postulates an “active principle” in human beings

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that is best served by physical exercise. Addison, in a funnier and culturally more symptomatic turn, recommends boxing practice with one’s own shadow in order to mitigate the fanaticism of intellectual debates. On the whole, however, such trends are overshadowed by social demands: sports defined by class, like horse riding and hunting, must be practiced in ways that reflect the norms of class. Veblen’s leisure class, with its conspicuous practice of sports hiding the relics of barbarian character, and Bourdieu’s fine and not so fine distinctions are sending early compliments.52 It is difficult in such cases not to lapse into anecdotal complacency. To all intents and purposes, we seem to have gone a long way from Shakespeare. Shakespeare hardly focuses directly upon sports in his plays. Although it is grist to my mill, I do not really have to invoke John Dover Wilson, who claimed that the fencing bout in Hamlet (5.2) is a central element of the play, and not just in terms of finishing off the plot or perhaps characterizing the protagonists once more from a different angle. Shakespeare, Wilson insists, gave much thought “to the details of a sporting event which was one of the major attractions of his play” and for some spectators perhaps the only reason to attend the theatrical performance.53 Independent of such questions, the sheer richness, the density, and the quasi-spontaneity of allusive references are astounding. Characters speak with fluency and ease about sporting matters. Allusions to contests suggest an engagement normally demanded only by the more exquisite moments of life. The famous examples—the tennis balls in Henry V, presented as an insult to the warrior-king, Kent’s title of “base foot-ball player” for Oswald in King Lear—remain examples for that, too, even if their symbolic or allegorical import takes over for the moment. Such interpretations are easily possible because the literal meaning and the cultural status, even in its social differentiation, are taken for granted. Sports as a code of the psychesized body is especially important because in Shakespeare’s time, the traditional semiotics of the body clearly was beginning to fail as a center of orientation in other respects—characterological, military or representational, and state-symbolic.54 Whatever sociohistorical pressures may have been for Shakespeare and his time, they do not swallow up the anthropological potential on which they impinge. Where that does seem to happen, as in Pope, Addison, and of course on many other occasions, it is still possible to take the road into sporadic excess. I have suggested repeatedly (see above) that one could write at length about writing as a drug and a way

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of self-drugging—failing which, recourse to other drugs in wide and narrow senses may become imperative. The French monk, doctor, and humanist François Rabelais (1494– 1553) supplies materials for an early modern case study. In Rabelais, the religious orientation does not control life anymore. Humanistic erudition, though, and its array of implied or open moral norms encourage an analogous type of writing. That type—it is far from extinct—could be called a higher form of staking fastidious claims. In Gargantua et Pantagruel (1532–52; a fifth book with partly dubious authorship came out in 1564), for instance, Gargantua deals out instructions concerning life in general to his son Pantagruel (book 2, chapter 8). Gargantua’s educational doctrines are exacting. They demand, at least at the surface textual level, the study of all contemporary knowledge, of the seven artes liberales and more: the moral philosophy of antiquity, languages, geometry, arithmetic, music, nature, medicine (as handed down by Greek, Arab, and Latin authorities), law, and so on. Encyclopedic humanistic knowledge has come to occupy the place of the medieval Christian God: God is mentioned, but no longer really invoked. At first sight, this appears as merely a conceptual and material reshuffling of the ultimate authority of binary religious norms. Within religious and humanistic norms, body and mind are distinguished in basically analogous ways. Accordingly, little space seems to be reserved for a physical culture cutting across dichotomies. Pantagruel, it is true, is admonished to practice “chivalry and arms,” but only in order to protect his father.55 In contrast to Burton, however, who produces a moderated and slightly discrepant blend of humanistic norms and playful intensities, the active and nomadic life led by Rabelais’s characters cannot be contained within humanistic horizons. The more one knows, the more knowledge turns into a springboard for its own transgression. This we normally call creativity. Creativity is the positive name for a lack of comprehensive normative or semantic consistency that becomes conspicuous once the linguistic or normative corpus swells up. The productivity of language spawns the self-productivity of life. Consequently, Rabelais goes much further than even Shakespeare in a linguistic creativity fed but no longer controlled by total knowledge. Gargantua’s comprehensive but rarefied educational program is hedged in and overwhelmed by the codes of excess that surround it. The program is preceded by a chapter on the library of Saint Victor in which erudition dissolves in a long list of comically obscene parody. It is followed by the acquaintance with Panurge, whose special competence shows up in ob-

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scene body language, for instance in the disputation with an Englishman (book 2, chapters 18, 19). The practical joke played upon a noble Parisian lady—Panurge attaches the fragrance of a she-dog in heat to the lady, who turns into the not-so-obscure object of desire of street curs— appears as one of those instances where the distinction between code and intensity, though legitimate, no longer makes much sense. Panurge, a smooth customer of life, manhandles knowledge in his own ways. In writing his educational treatise, Gargantua seems in fact to have forgotten his own career. In his earlier life, intellectual studies started only after intense physical preparation. Gargantua used to turn about in bed in order to stimulate his “Esperitz animaulx.” Breakfast and the uses of bladder and intestine play an important role (book 1, chapter 21). In a sort of verbal intoxication, Gargantua is credited with the knowledge of more than two hundred entertainment games (chapter 22). The educational program of Ponocrates assigns copious space to all kinds of physical exercise in which utilitarian purposes tend to vanish. In all of these cases, historical or traditional codes are easily identified. Juxtaposed, however, they do not project any consistent order. Wild juxtaposition amounts to the implicit denial of conceptual or code control (chapter 23, especially pp. 68–71). This does not mean—an important point given contemporary concerns of ubiquitous discourse and discourse criticism—that the codes have become irrelevant. It does mean, though, that there exists a radical discontinuity between the relevance attributed to traditions of learning and knowledge and the control exercised by them. The efficacious attitude could be called an attitude of overall playfulness fully compatible with an awareness of the catastrophic seriousness of life. Confronted with such a model, it may dawn upon us that the modern emphasis on specialized and commercialized professional sports systems (or sexuality for that matter) does not really break loose from the discontinuities between the anthropological and the social or discursive dimensions. Compared with bodily ubiquity in Rabelais, its modern counterpart instead represents an overload or overtaxation of what is hardly perceived as an anthropological domain anymore. Behind enjoyed and endured discontinuities there lurks the suffering of indifference and boredom probably much more strongly than in the past. Triathlon, to take just one example, has been explicitly linked with the assumption that gripping experience, whether suffering or joy, wiping out unsatisfactory alternatives and boredom for a while, can be found only in extremes pushed further and further ahead. Earlier but

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perhaps more isolated models, more pertinent with respect to literature, could be located in people like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647– 80). Rochester specialized in sexuality and alcohol to such an extent that he boasted to have been continually drunk, or completely lacking any self-control, for five years. (The comparison with Paris in Homer, who easily swings from one to other domains, is quite telling.) The English “Restoration,” then, may be an early model of cultural specialization and hyperselective overload. Specialization and overload are easily and plausibly confused with a search for pure experience or sensation— whether in sexuality and alcohol, as with Rochester, or in mystical religion, as with George Foxe and Bunyan.56 Excess is possible but highly unstable—in Rochester, the historical, “literary” code for failure is the dance of death.57 In our time it is the still somewhat “pathetic” social or medical discourse on drugs.

chapter ten

The Persistence of the Obsolete

Byron and the Romantic Denial of Romantic Maximizations The great shadow covering conceptions of the beauty of life fell between the Renaissance and the periods following it, at least according to Johan Huizinga’s somewhat nostalgic diagnosis of modern culture in The Waning of the Middle Ages. Art, in the general, pervasive sense, and life begin to drift apart as soon as civilizations do not enjoy art as a noble part of pleasurable vitality in the midst of life. Art then turns into something to be separately respected or revered. People devote themselves to art in moments of elevation or leisure. In a different form, the old dualism separating God and the world comes back as the opposition of art and life. The great divide now runs through the pleasures of life as a distinction between their lower forms as “entertainment” or amusement and higher forms as “art.” In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, they were all denounced as either sinful or checked by humanistic concerns, yet also somewhat indiscriminately enjoyed. Thereafter, they have all been permitted, but extolled or denounced according to their alleged cultural dignity.1 The cutting edge of that diagnosis comes to light especially under two conditions. Literature, as an art remote from the visible beauty codes of the body, establishes itself as a cultural paradigm. At the same time, in moments of history not altogether infrequent, circumstances seem to conspire for revolutions in which a more natural or humane state of affairs—somehow reincluding the body—is envisaged. With Schiller and Marcuse, two such models have been outlined. When “poetry” finally turns into “literature,” and when, at the same time, a return to nature or an about-face of culture develop into options seemingly produced by the ruinous effect of civilization itself, then the bell of culture tolls for “Romanticism.”

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In its both emphatic and historically most characteristic form, British Romanticism, confronted with the strongest thrust of industrial modernization, the “great transformation,” in Karl Polanyi’s phrase, has explored a whole series of options: nature, philosophical religion, political commitment, body culture, and drugs. In Byron, the mixture of options, compounded by self-irony, has perhaps taken its most symptomatic form. Carl Diem, in his study of Goethe and physical culture, has concentrated not implausibly on Byron the “sportsman.” For Goethe, Byron, in spite of his club foot, furnished proof that, by exploring the potentials of physical culture, the sportsman might turn into the most productive human being. Byron swam, sailed, rowed, boxed, etc.2 Insofar as poetry is concerned, that productivity cuts two ways. Byron elaborates the strictly literary qualities of poetry—with Don Juan, the “novel” invades “poetry,” and vice versa. But he also ironically and cynically undercuts, in fact denounces, the elite bourgeois culture for which poetry had become a leading medium—as it had for him. I would suppose that this is one of the reasons why Byron’s efforts toward the maximization of intensity mainly took place in the excesses of private life. Excess here amounts to a series of broken and for some “perverted” semitranscendences: intimate (incest), cultural (Venice), political (Greece), all somewhat ironically ending with an unheroic death from fever. Without positing causalities, it is plausible, I think, to speak of a triangle in which the maximization of poetry as a medium, its rejection by bourgeois culture (which refused Byron’s burial in Westminster Abbey), and life-world excess are related. The portion made up by sports in this triangle reveals aspects of modern high-performance sports. Byron was too clever, of course, to celebrate efforts of that kind in poetry. This kind of thing remained in store for the cruder shortcuts between literature, technology, sports, and life in, say, futurism at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the other hand, masterly performance is too important to elude writing altogether. One way out of the dilemma consists in a noninvalidating form of self-irony. In the quasi-autobiographical poem “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” (1810; Byron in fact performed the feat),3 the speaker compares himself to Leander. But the “degenerate modern wretch” (line 9) into which he has turned to some extent cannot smoothly live up to the comparison. The modern sportsman needs the warm month of May in order to do what Leander did in December. In Leander’s death by drowning there is a mythical, tragic dignity that the cultural latecomer cannot hope for. He merely catches a fever (line 20).

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Even so, poetry mocks an achievement that carries an undeniably intense experience. Accumulated literary sophistication cannot take seriously nor can it invalidate a body-based performance that life needs in order to be aware of itself as experience. With such a procedure, Byron initiates a sharply defined form of a situation frequently encountered: the fascination of what is culturally excluded or hardly tractable. In a second step, Byron asserts the reality of the experience, but he reduces it to a phenomenon of childhood. It is thus protected from irony, but no longer a mode of mature experience. This is the initial situation in The Two Foscari (1821). Young Foscari, son of the doge and imprisoned for treason, receives a catchword when the guard somewhat surprisingly asks him about “your limbs.”4 The simple question meant as a form of “How are you?” calls forth a whole stream of psychophysical sporting recollections. Foscari holds forth on a life filled with gondola races, swimming, and diving (lines 93–129). For that, Venice and the Adriatic furnish a stylish natural-cultural scene where the enjoyment of contest pushes class struggles into the background for a while. Swimming and diving, in particular, produce feelings of a freedom of the spirit. It is unclear whether the guard’s “Be a man now” (line 122) is intended as a systematic or just a situational rejection of that spirit, or whether it is merely a matter of poetic diction. Likewise, the early poem “On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow on the Hill” (1806) may just be a poetic exercise of a fledgling writer. Still, school life is characterized quite significantly as the unity of heterogeneous dramatic moments as they occurred, at that time, in sports and the reading, or rather the theatrical acting out, of literary roles.5 This establishes again the systematic connection between the spectacular, the imaginary (and its literary forms), and the body. It also demonstrates their dissociation under modern conditions. In Byron, the dissociation manifests itself in the discrepancy between poetic diction and discursive, quasi-theoretical implication. That rift seems to be even more pronounced in “Childish Recollections” (also from 1806).6 Byron here plunges, in clichélike form but with analytical intent, into an early version of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. “Society” deforms all primary psychophysical impulses to the point where they lose the name of action and acquire a socially usable form (lines 55–76). Again, the aim of poetry cannot consist of such a deprecation of society (lines 79–80). Nor can it lie in the exclusive validation of a counterworld in which adolescent games play a major and repeatedly evoked role (lines 45–54, 131–36, 255–64). Society is what it is. The re-

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ality of adolescent games is gone. But their potential need not be negated: “While future hope and feat alike unknown, / I think with pleasure on the past alone” (lines 375–76). It need not be negated, even if it changes, as perhaps it did for Byron himself, into “mere” amusement.

Literary Skating; Or, Culture as Compromise Byron’s topicality consists in the ironic attitude of practicing, within culture at large, something no longer taken seriously within culture in a restricted, particularly literary sense. With the late eighteenth century in Europe, we have indeed reached a model instance of the various ways in which submerged anthropological dimensions show up, as it were, only in systematically distorted forms. For literature, as we have seen in the example of Klopstock, that implies a crucial transition from a basic poietic mode of being, based in the creative and/or performative, to a restricted, poetic, “pathetically” literary one. The literary text, ideally for Klopstock, is in its performance, not in the words, their meanings, or what these may represent. The late eighteenth century, that period of reading manias, culminated in a theory of (re)presentation for which the ideal paradigms were dance, theatrical acting, and declamatory speech. Klopstock’s and others’ efforts to transform that idea into poetic practice have met, at best, with a very mixed reception: since a “dramatic performance” (unless it is enacted in music not provided by Klopstock) will almost automatically provoke ridicule, one can only read these texts. That, of course, is exactly the fate they were meant to escape, because in reading, they lose their intended performative power.7 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, skating represents an activity transitorily doing the highly unstable job of mediating between the anthropological import of larger (often then called “popular”) practices and restricted (or elitist) cultural practices. Practiced, often literally, at the outskirts of culture, on ponds and the like easily identified with nature, and yet in full cultural gear, skating traced the vague outlines of an area where nature and culture appeared to meet. It was a “sport” in which the transitions between leisurely (often “gentlemanly”) pastime and degrees of professionalization were relatively fluid. Taking the context of late-eighteenth-century Germany, in spite or because of the remoteness of the example, we can see with perhaps exceptional, peculiar clarity the potential of what has become obsolete in terms of sociohistory. There is little need to go into the backwardness of

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“Germany” in those (as well as at other) times. A cultural, political, and economic lag (“the belated nation”) was made up for by heavy social, mental, and especially religious pressures. Therefore, it is not very difficult in most cases to locate writers sociologically, to put Klopstock, for instance, into the context of German pietism. On the other hand, it is also easier to see the gaps in that (as well as in any other) social blanket. At the very least, the gaps facilitate the task of evaluating the anthropological import of cultural curiosities and freaks. Eighteenth-century figures like Klopstock are instructive because they exemplify the cultural normalcy of the freak. Literary scholars may smile when one mentions Klopstock’s skating and skiing poems. These poems do not invalidate or transgress their religious and social context. In the strides they appear to take between experience and allegory, however, they enact its implicit interrogation and deconstruction of culture and its status. Apart from “literature” (if we must use the term), Klopstock’s personal culture comprised, amongst other “drugs,” skating, fencing, horse riding, and gymnastics. He enjoyed a relatively liberal education in which games occupied a large part, and lessons in the materials of knowledge a lesser one. Pietism initiated him into religion as an emotional experience, but did not shut him off from worldly experience either. For twenty years, Klopstock lived at the Danish court and fed on its patronage. This does not exclude a self-stylization as a citizen and poet of the world and of the cosmos. The latter notion, however, could no longer be phrased as a philosophical concept—eighteenth-century theism, in particular, had begun to run counter to what people conceived as experienced reality. Among others, Klopstock shows that, in contrast to the “dissociation of sensibility” T. S. Eliot thought he had diagnosed in seventeenth-century England, it is not a breaking apart of emotion and intellect but their interpenetration that is a perennial problem. It is only in terms of historical codes that it is sometimes couched in a semantics of unity and sometimes of separation.8 Games, nature, human nature, and literature cannot be made level with each other—nor can they be kept systematically apart. The backwardness that we would associate with Klopstock’s social and mental contexts or with his main literary works such as the “epic” Messias instead furnishes a well-shaped case of and for the relatedness of heterogeneity. In that relatedness, an oscillating anthropological potential makes itself felt in the more pliable, elastic areas of culture. I am asserting this in spite of the difficulties any modern reader may encounter with

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Klopstock’s odes, including the poem “Der Eislauf” (“Ice-Skating,” 1764).9 I take it that these difficulties mainly reside in the leaps between relatively concrete and suggestive details and the still clearly suggested order of the world. The strategy mediating between the two levels consists in the evocation of moods associated with significant details. The moods provide the connotations that prepare for the transition into “higher spheres.” In “Der Eislauf,” the speech situation is relatively vague. There is a speaker who proposes to praise the pleasures and the beauty of skating, of “ice dance” (lines 14–15). The speaker addresses someone else, presumably a skater who is admonished to do full justice to the potentials of experience embedded in skating. The poet must rehabilitate the forgotten inventor of skating and assign a proper cultural place to him (lines 1–4). Continuously, and right from the beginning, Klopstock weaves physical, emotional, and cultural layers into each other. The dance on ice is like the ethereal quality of flying (cf. lines 8, 15, 18). It suggests both beauty and animated, soulful dignity, both health, pleasure, and intimations of immortality (lines 16, 21–22, 9–10). Klopstock’s diction keeps soaring, and it is well-nigh amusing to see him come back and down to earth. After skating, food and wine are particularly enjoyable (lines 33–36). Thus, Klopstock moves almost effortlessly between the palpable, the robust, the ethereal, and the cosmic. He can talk in a few lines about the “crystal plain,” its fragrant light, and the starry brilliance of hoar frost and then switch abruptly to the greed for food or to technical matters of skating (lines 21–36). The same abrupt transition from the euphoria of movement and the splendor of nature to the enjoyment of various alcoholic beverages occurs in “Kamin” (“Fireplace,” 1770) in the last four lines.10 With equal swiftness, though, Klopstock can drop into a very different mood. The crystal plain is neither outside civilization nor incorporated into it. In order to skate, the skater must leave town and its fireplaces without really leaving them behind. The town remains present, at least connotatively (line 23). Skating thus takes place, as we already have seen, in an ill-defined area between real civilization and hypothetical nature. Experience on the periphery of civilization approaches nature—but it also comes dangerously close to the “abyss” of death. The four last stanzas of the poem are progressively wrapped into suggestions of death (lines 48–60). It is almost unavoidable to see more in these motifs than just the danger of ice breaking and people drowning. In terms of traditional literary

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procedures, it is tempting to see another vague but pervasive allegory at work. The resplendence of the gleaming “rink” (line 53), the easy, perhaps facile gliding of the skater (line 59) not only suggest an intensified, both physical and cultural experience. They may easily tilt into an allegory of life as an often carefree but always highly risky gliding on the surface. In this case, the purported fusion of nature and culture in play would not at all be capable of exhausting the depth of existence. At best, it would turn into a short-term interim in which the burden of life would relinquish its grip briefly but treacherously. The ice would act as a make-believe mirror, deluding people into joys that cannot cope with the precariousness, the fragility of life and its threats. The vital and expressive character of the poet-person cannot eliminate the religious worries similarly conjured up and away—but then in a totally play-free context—in the Messias or similar “main” works. In a theological perspective, indeed, sports represents a “magnificent and blissful world.” But it does not provide answers to the fundamental distress of life, to tribulations and anxieties, blows of fate and death. It is precisely because sports is fascinating, a theologian has said, that it may provoke the breakdown of those checks that must guide existence.11 Again, it is not so much the historical nature but the paradigmatic character of the situation that must be emphasized. Klopstock in these works is negotiating the dilemma of what has been called Enlightenment emotionalism. Rationalistic world pictures failed to satisfy a demand for order as both an intellectual conviction and an experienced emotion. The so-called emotions, however, are overtaxed once they are made into the guarantee of order. Forms of anxieties have normally resulted from such strains. A late poem of Klopstock’s, “Winterfreuden” (“Winter Joys,” 1797),12 thus recalls the animating, indeed curative experience of movement and security in almost ornate language: “Without the animation from thee, I would have seen fewer suns” (lines 3–4). A trivially serious incident turns the iron buskin into a “tragic” one—the speaker broke through the ice, but was saved (as in fact happened to Klopstock, too; line 25). For the speaker, confronted with the death of a friend and with death’s approach to him as well (line 30), the splendor of skating pales. Clearly, a skeptical-religious conception of life takes over. Poetry succumbs to the pressures for consistency that the earlier poem had outmaneuvered. Or so it merely seems. One could also say that in poetry, as other forms of discourse, a built-in tendency toward “statement,” toward implicitly theoretical levels, may occasionally, but not conclusively, get the

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upper hand. Poetic “statement,” whatever its explicit drift, need not invalidate the suggestions of heterogeneity that dominate the earlier poem. It is not so much experience that is at stake, but the changing pressures of its discursive handling. Thus, it may also happen that theory, insofar as it handles discontinuities flexibly, appears at bottom more “poetic” than a poetry that uses poetic trappings to aim at overall effects. I hope to have hinted that Schiller’s conception of his essays, if not their ultimate perspective, allows for some fleeting glimpses of such reversals. They are in stronger evidence in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). In it, the clash of theological-philosophical pressures, including some social correlates, with the anthropological, “archaic” evidence gleaned from a “history of mankind” as such, the clash of the poet, philosopher of culture, and Protestant general superintendent, presents conceptual challenges that are, if anything, even stronger than Schiller’s maneuvers between play and an ultimately spiritualized culture. Herder, like Klopstock, pays tribute to the idea of an ordered cosmos. Cosmic images, however, are infiltrated with evolutionary modes of thought. Human beings are not simply endowed with reason—although Kant may have thought or may have been understood to have thought that. Reason instead contains an indefinite amount of gradually learned material. The proportion and direction of ideas and abilities are shaped by the tough demands of life and its organization.13 That slightly protoDarwinistic tinge does not exclude a “Romantic” insistence that life exists through “vital warmth,” however. This may but need not be related to the “sensorium of the all-creator,” a “heavenly stream of fire” refined into ever-subtler forms. Human beings, absorbing as much as possible from this “electric current,” transform it into the delicate tools of “physical and mental sensation.” All living beings are thus permeated by an “invisible circle of light and fire” that unifies the forces of nature. Humaneness (Humanität) does imply a development toward reason and freedom, but also toward “more delicate senses and drives, toward a most tender and strong health, toward fulfillment and the rule of the earth.”14 One should not be distracted by the obvious, empty formulas and tautologies in such a language. They represent historical options in an ongoing conceptual struggle. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche would be its main representative. In the twentieth, to name only a few examples, the evolutionary framework of André Leroi-Gourhan, with its negotiation of tensions between body anchorings, a muscular or visceral

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sensibility, and spiritualization, Dieter Claessens’s mutual relativities of the concrete and the abstract, or Melvin Konner’s concern for the biological constraints of the human spirit can be seen as implicit reworkings of Herder’s approach within much more clearly defined theoretical frameworks. I have singled out these four because they have tried, perhaps more successfully than many others (Foucault would be a controversial case here), to elude the built-in trend of discourse toward the stabilization, and ultimately self-reference, of the intellectual domain. For Herder, this was difficult, since, with the establishment of philosophy, reason and the spirit had just embarked on the route to self-reference. This is why a tendency toward lopsided spiritualization is written into Herder’s approach. Humaneness and “religion” (however kept vague in theory) emancipate themselves into paradigms: their relation with “vital warmth” is severed. The growth of spirit shapes an “inner spiritual being” that uses the body only as a “tool,” and that remains true to its spiritual essence even if the physical organs are totally ruined. The most dreadful tortures of the body, Herder postulates, can be suppressed by a “single living idea.” Man (the gendering is perhaps to be taken literally) loses the feeling of time and of the power of the senses when a noble thought calls upon him and is pursued accordingly. Knowledge, or perhaps the process of its discovery, grants a “proper feeling of existence” unequaled by anything else—knowledge, that is, from which all “visibility” has vanished. Changes in the body are then felt as mere transitions that do not concern human essence. It is indeed the “economy of the senses” that calls for covering, veiling clothes, for a soulful charm, and for morality. Humaneness strongly involves feelings such as sympathy, but those must be tempered and guided by justice, truth, and decency. Humane education will consequently carry, in most cases, elements of compulsion. We are endowed with a capacity whose implementation necessitates very strong efforts.15 There is a price to be paid for a drive toward such humaneness. A fissure in the argument is visible in the positive connotations of vital warmth and the austerity of its suppression. The fissure becomes obvious once one collects Herder’s various remarks concerning body experience and its correlates. Herder is familiar with a “heightened feeling” best produced by practicing the “three virtues of life”—cleanliness, moderation, and movement, or, more precisely, “the cleansing of the mouth, repeated bathing, and love of movement in fresh air.” A healthy body and well-trained limbs provide the foundation for “a serenity and

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inner joy the loss of which speculative reason can hardly make up for.” Herder wants us to understand the Greeks, whose praise of the arts of dance, gestures, and acting must appear even stranger to us than their love of music. Herder is careful not to commit himself too much, however: dance, and its intoxicating effects in particular, may be the prerogative of archaic man. Even so, Pindar’s odes, which look like “eruptions of drunkenness,” must be seen in the context of song, festivities, and the almost religious significance of games. The Greek insistence on physical training as the “main part” of education admittedly adopted a “peculiar course.” But Herder does not venture further into criticism or neglect.16 In such fissures, the precariousness of Schiller’s ultimately metaphorical notion of play becomes obvious. Herder sympathizes with the more emphatic Greek forms and discourses of physicality. But he cannot endorse them fully because modern existence demands the normalization of behavior as the adjustment to a “reasonable” average. Acting out heightened, body-related feelings in the modern context comes close to the primitive or anarchic. A sportsman in private life, like Klopstock, Herder may have been wavering in his “theoretical” prose. But he also exploited the rhythmic power of poetry for the sake of regularization, not heterogeneity. Here, indeed, we have one exemplary instance of poetry, certainly devoted to ambivalence à la New Criticism or similar poetological tenets, working toward the homogeneity of existential domains. In Herder’s poetry (that is, in his creative translations from the Greek, etc.) the body turns into an allegory of moralized life or into the vehicle of a harmless social pleasure. Pleasure must be granted because the costs—the efforts, the strains—of the humaneness we cannot do without are difficult to ignore. Such tendencies are less conspicuous in a text like “Der Eislauf” in Herder’s collection of popular songs and his adaptations from the Greek. Similar at first to Klopstock’s skater, the skater here is said to dance and to float on the silvery crystals (line 2). The sun is clothed in fragrance, and in various configurations, the sun, moon, stars, and their reflections on the ice are condensed into an atmospheric space experienced both as nature and as part of human life. A scene in the sun is described in terms of a house with a golden roof and a diamond floor (lines 7–10, 13–15). Even so, the text lacks the connotational diversity exhibited by the earlier Klopstock. Conversely, Herder reinforces the emblematic levels of sun and ice. Rhythm, forced into rhyme, exerts strong

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regularizing pressures. Two refrainlike lines at the end of each stanza, introduced by a comparative or deductive “so,” take care of clear standards. Continually, skating is compared with something it definitely does not literally embody or enact. Allusions to dancing, floating, and the skates as wings (line 3) are certainly referring to an experience of movement. But the last two lines of the first stanza make sure of the emblematic tone: “Thus, brothers, we are gliding cheerfully across the unshakable depths of life” (lines 5–6). The second stanza, by staking exaggerated claims for the connection between experience and rhetoric (“golden house,” “diamond,” “hall of heaven”; lines 7–10), tends to rip that unnamable relation apart. The third stanza seems to maintain a descriptive stance more clearly, but cancels it in the emblematic final two lines “Thus, brothers, with cheerful spirit/ In the light of sun and moon, we are flowing through life” (lines 17–18). In the fourth stanza, these oscillations are repeated. In the fifth stanza, allegory takes over completely: life is an “airy [or aerial] hall” (line 25); “He” (that is, God, line 25, cf. 21) has given us feet of steel so that we can deal with the plights of life, has granted us a “warming heart” against its “frost” (lines 26– 27). Herder completes this procedure by taking up the word “unshakable” (ehern, line 9) again. In the couplet of the first stanza, the word had characterized the immutable depths of life. The relation to the depth of the lake was taken for granted. In the last stanza, the heart and reason (Sinn) of man must be unshakable in order not to drown in “the floods and the abyss” of life (line 30). Skating, then, predestined to mediate between nature and society as a cultural compromise, turns into a harmlessly relaxing pleasure or a mere image for the nobility of life. Herder’s recreations of Greek poetry, by contrast, seem to swerve back to the intensities of the purported originals. “Living art,” “light as the breathing spirit,” like Myron’s sculpture of a runner or Herder’s texts themselves, can function as a celebration of athletics.17 We may share the opinion of the editor that such adaptations had become, for Herder, a second nature.18 But any second nature is another, different nature. The adaptations thus may articulate sentiments not that much subjected to the restrictive standards of Herder’s times. But, similar perhaps to the situation in Roman literature, these sentiments turn progressively into a matter of the past, and merely of the past. Quite in contrast to the case of Rome, where an even more savage form of physical culture was set up, ill fitted for literary purposes, Herder’s allegorization of physical activity seems to strangle the very notion of physical culture altogether.

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This holds particularly for Herder’s “own” poetry. In some of his texts, such as “Die Schwimmer” (“The Swimmers”), one might detect a far-reaching remoteness from average cultural norms: “Throw your burden of cares into the sea/ We aspire more easily when we are naked” (lines 5–6). But more typical is a couplet such as the one found in “Die Gleitbahn,” where the skating course is transformed into an allegory of moral probation: “Lust is a thin ice / Happy he who knows how to glide across it.” While one could still say that this does not eliminate lust but merely leaves it underfoot, an annoyingly simple program is set up in “Das innere Olympia.”19 Four lines here evoke the atmospheric unity of spectators, athletes, judges, poetic song, and music in ancient Greece (lines 1–4). Four more, however, propagate the single-minded, isolated inner race for moral perfection in which the individual person acts as audience, musician, poet, runner, judge, and goal (lines 5–8). The preceding picture is highly selective. In particular, I have neglected the question to what extent the presence of sports motifs would be further diminished if we looked into other writings by Herder, especially into his adaptations from other languages than the Greek. Even so, the mythic notion of “physical education” keeps rumbling in an obscure cultural corner and asserts itself as a noticeable and symptomatic motif. This would suffice, it seems, to insist that culture, ill at ease with itself, represents at best transitory compromises. It would suffice to suggest that it is best enacted in an attitude of superior indifference and commitment to heterogeneity or discontinuity. “Our Goethe,” good for any exploitation, illustrates this as well.20 Goethe might be taken as the supreme example for how different the same can be. He can be seen as fully aware of, and to a considerable extent participating in, the movements of modernization. He handles literary and cultural traditions with rare sophistication. But he also blithely practices archaisms without being troubled by what the criticism of ideology would call “contradictions.” By and large, it has become public knowledge that Goethe composed plays of intricate humaneness in which cores of barbarity live on in merely poetic forms of moderation and harmony (e.g., Iphigenie auf Tauris). He plunges into the elaboration of texts seemingly detached from the world—fully aware that a few miles away, weavers in the clutches of early industrialism may be starving to death. In the writings of an author canonized into the high priest of German high culture, there is a multitude of (fairly elaborate, if often unpublished) references to physical culture. The sheer mass of these, unearthed

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by Carl Diem, easily surpasses the materials for many of the topics with which Goethean interpretations are mostly concerned. In Goethe’s texts, images of playful body experience show up with a matter-of-factness and frequency hardly encountered in the Greeks, in Shakespeare, or in the Renaissance in general. Herder acknowledges the attractiveness of physical education, but leaves its cultural status unresolved or allegorizes it away. Goethe, by contrast, has little trouble balancing the claims of high culture, intense writing, politics, and the body. He does so by a relative distribution of culture. Goethe establishes a kind of division of labor in order to explore a total scope of experience. Such a scope must not be confused with the harmonized totality of alleged classic norms often ascribed to Goethe by his literary interpreters. Writing, it is true, tends to explore mediations of individuality and culture on a high, that is, intellectualized, level. In doing so, it achieves an unprecedented complexity of the individual inner life and of perspectives projected on society and culture at large. In spite of that, the institution of authorship remains in constant danger of being reduced to mere decorative play. Tasso, in Torquato Tasso (1790, produced 1807), exemplifies the potential pathos of that situation, and its tilt into neuroticism. In most other texts, pathos is undercut by irony. For that, ample motivation exists: the change from older forms of patronage or remuneration for scholarly and poetic works to the intricacies of institutionalized authorship, with its pathos of inspiration or intellectual property, the exacerbation of copyright problems, and the nakedness of economic compulsions are replete with ironies and pitfalls.21 Goethe did not oppose the sociocultural trend favoring the advance of the writer into the role of cultural hero in the manner of Carlyle. But in his “private life” (an unfortunate term, even if one has to grant the growing significance of privatepublic distinctions), he also tried to keep open or enlarge a relatively free psychosomatic space. Such a division of labor does not occur, of course, in pure form. It is a trend at best. Goethe’s writing does celebrate spaces of vital freedom. In their poeticized, public cultural form, however, they tend to pale into things of a personal or historical past. The private Goethe indulges in a lot of psychophysical “sports” (of which wine drinking, again coupled with a well-timed attention to wine bills, is not the least), but also stylizes himself into a cult(ure) figure. Tracing such oscillations, one could do worse than choose another text on skating.22 “Die Eisbahn” (published later with two further parts as “Winter” at the end of “Vier Jahreszeiten”) proceeds in characteristi-

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cally involved ways.23 Goethe describes and metaphorizes at the same time. The two procedures merge, yet they also remain clearly distinct. Expressions like the “most recent scene” in the bright sun, the “significant images of life” floating in “lovely and serious manner” across the surface, the “circling lines of life,” people “striving and hurrying,” “looking for and fleeing each other” both describe impressions and suggest significance (lines 84, 85, 87, 88). In contrast to Herder, however, Goethe does not at all state the significance or the meaning of skating. Metaphor instead turns into a metalinguistic device: it says that there is significance (bedeutende Bilder) but does not even give a hint of what that significance might consist. This does not exclude, in other places, explicit historical or philosophical commentary in which meanings seem to be driven home with a vengeance. Without transition, Goethe uses the rink for what appears as an Enlightenment perspective: “Like that, we saw centuries in a frozen stare / Humane feeling and reason were hidden deep down” (line 86). Without apparent discursive effort, Goethe swings back and forth between psychosomatic self-sufficiency and interpretive, indeed allegorizing, trends. Skating reflects social distinctions (students, masters, or champions and ordinary people; line 89), but it also demonstrates performances not at all captured in the social mirror. Skating may be seen as or in fact may be an ideal process of learning. It presupposes effort and practice but makes these disappear in the grace of “achieved strength.”24 Goethe here moves within the confines of Schiller’s discussion of grace. Grace shows dynamically as a movement produced under the influence of psychophysical freedom. That movement suggests significance but does not formulate it. Reason, by contrast, automatically gets into trouble when it tries to assign meaning or status to it. Goethe’s text, poetic and yet implicitly theoretical, is beset, like Schiller’s, with the dilemma of privileging either the shapes of the living body or the thoroughly cultured human being following the dictates of perhaps not a social but certainly some higher morality. In such a dilemma, the relaxed acceptance of cliché does not provide a solution. It does circumnavigate, though, the limits of the proverb that says that you cannot have your cake and eat it, too. The serene enjoyment of perfected performance (stanza 12) produces a state of mind that, transformed into self-assured calm, can accept the troubled and contradictory course of worldly affairs (stanzas 13–16). This is a peculiar situation. Physical activity and what it may imply cannot be played off against social existence, or vice versa. Neither do

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games or contests figure as a more beautiful, cheerful, or ecstatic version of feudal warlike life. Finally, Goethe is also wary of the modern extreme in which sport is nothing but an expressive model of the society producing it. Play and games may be used for any purpose. But this does not annihilate the potential of a playful state of mind engendered by physical exertion.25 It is not necessary, but also not impossible, to attribute a “consciously anthropological gymnastics” to Goethe.26 Adolf Schöll would opt for what Brecht rejected—the alleged overall health value of sports. Rather than that, I think, we are dealing with an early and leisurely version of the semantics of fitness. Fitness, in the twentieth century, deprived of the values of manliness and its rather horrible avatars, has become the equivalent of physiological statistics. This is why, once one does not simply buy the health argument, there is no compelling answer to why one should be fit. That situation is anticipated and well illustrated in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–21). In its last novel, To Let, the athlete Jack Cardigan is asked why and for what end he is keeping fit. For that question, the athlete has no answer: “Jack Cardigan stared with all his health. The questions were like the buzz of a mosquito and he put up his hand to wipe them away. During the War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now when it was over he either did not know or shrank in delicacy from an explanation of his moving principle.” The irony of “moving principle” is biting. The actual answer, if it is one, is given by the antitype of the athlete, the Belgian expert in the art of living, Monsieur Profond: “But he’s right . . . there’s nothing left but keepin’ fit.”27 Speechless fitness is not of course Goethe’s situation. Goethe assigns personal and cultural priority to superior states of mind. But then the question remains how they are achieved. In that respect, the various forms of “sports” may provide a few, and only a few, models. Given cultural refinement and complexity, these are indeed models not easily talked about, and therefore come close to Cardigan’s speechless fitness. They are modes of production with ill-defined results, not cultural values with attributive status. Conversely, the problem of writing resides in its isolated situation. Its products, supported by and deceptively stabilized as books, convey the impression of being a cultural value more easily than the vanishing, unfixable shapes of sports. In reality, if that expression is allowed, writing as an anthropologically secondary mode of production is highly unstable. It normally depends therefore on states of mind supported from or produced by other sources. All the same, in modern societies, the distance between these modes

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of production and the discrepancies in stabilization will give the cultural lead to writing. Goethe’s works, where they mention or even describe extensively body-based modes of production, are therefore progressively shot through with mental and cultural reservations. In the novella “Der Mann von funfzig Jahren” (“The Man of Fifty”),28 skating continues to produce and to sustain superior states of mind and forms of peak experience. A “blissfully moved serenity,” “a “festive ease,” and the “magic of the surroundings” unite to call forth a euphoric feeling in which the person seems to approach the skies. That state of being is close to and amalgamated with the love ignited or at least advanced while Flavio and Hilarie are skating. In contrast to the earlier poem, skating this time implies a definite antisocial sentiment: “It would have been disgusting to meet somebody.” The frozen pond singles out a small island whose total effect cannot be transferred to or made felt in the social world. The psychophysical peak gets mired, and is ultimately frittered away, in a complicated, socially framed ritual of renunciation. The certainty of awareness and presence produced by an exertion that does not exhaust the skater cannot be maintained in love, and is totally destroyed in society.29 Consequently, the distance between body-based awareness and other psychological states or social forms of behavior is enormous. In his famous soliloquy in the fifth act of Egmont, the protagonist has couched that problem in terms of ontogenetic loss: Ill at ease, I couldn’t remain seated on my upholstered chair when, in the great assembly, the princes repeatedly kept deliberating matters easy to decide, when the beams of the ceiling oppressed me between the somber walls of the hall. Then I hurried away as soon as possible and, breathing deeply, mounted my horse. Speedily, I rode out into the fields where we belong, where all the benefits of Nature, steaming forth from earth, and all the blessings of the stars, floating through the skies, permeate and wrap us up; where we resemble the giant born from earth and gain strength by touching our Mother and pull ourselves upwards; where we feel humanity and human desire in all our veins; where the longing to advance, to win, to catch, to use our fists, to possess and to conquer glows in the soul of the young hunter; where the soldier, with quick steps, arrogates his innate privilege to rule the world and strikes like hail through meadows, fields and forests, sowing destruction, respecting no boundary traced by human hand. But you are only an image, a dream recollecting the happiness I had possessed for such a long time.30

Culture, Marcuse and others have accordingly said later, feeds on unhappiness, on the problematic redirection of vital potentials barely perceptible anymore. Put less emphatically, culture, in its exclusive, higher

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forms, tends to deplete the reservoir of energies one hardly knows how to describe.31 Consequently, culture depends crucially on outlets in which that depletion is partly suspended and “regeneration” takes place. In playful-ironic modes, Goethe toys with physical culture as an outlet or safety valve in the Venezianische Epigramme. Again, his personal situation may have acted as a trigger. In Venice, Goethe was encircled by massive amounts of cultural treasures, and waiting for the duke’s mother Amalie, he lacked any “real” occupation. However that may have been, the “magnificent treasures of art” demand “leisurely recuperation.” “Living grace,” in a mixture of elegant, erotic, and risky movement, is provided by jugglers and acrobats, a type of people in which Goethe had developed a life-long interest. In one sense, these are illusionists. In another, they offer one form of really real life. The pressures of serious life are such, however, that the speaker has to call himself—perhaps only ironically again—to order. For literature, singing the praise of jugglers and acrobats is a lost art. The modern poet pays dearly if he does not turn to more profitable things, to topics of social relevance, as we might say today or might have said in the recent past, topics such as kings, princes, apostles of liberty, demagogues, and the like.32 Goethe’s published writings thus are intensely aware of other states of mind. But they mainly tend to mitigate the exaggerated and yet unavoidable claims of official culture. In themselves, these states do not represent (part of) that culture. By contrast, their status is much more powerful in Goethe’s unofficial, private writings. The mere fact that Diem was able to amass such amounts of discursive materials is striking in itself. They do not need much interpretation and even less referentialization (which Diem himself copiously provides), nor is it imperative to manhandle them with the clubs wielded by criticisms of ideology. In the absence of a topology of anthropological and cultural realities, it is their connotational drift that is decisive. Physical exertion, in brief, tends to unleash the fluidity of imagination. This is why, as we have seen before, art and exertion merge in the case of dance. In his “Maximen und Reflexionen über Kunst,” Goethe draws extraordinary conclusions. They appear like an anticipating variation of Sloterdijk’s critique of cynical reason. In what Sloterdijk calls a “sensualistically” well-balanced culture, the importance of the intellectual arts would decrease. Following Goethe, the mimic art of dance, strictly speaking, would rightly ruin all the other plastic arts. “Luckily, the sensual charm it effectuates is so fugitive, and dance must exaggerate in or-

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der to enchant. Luckily, the rest of artists are scared away by that; but if they are wise and prudent, they can learn a lot.”33

Nietzsche (Once More) and the Fusion of Plausibility and Nonsense In nineteenth-century discourses, the imaginative and cultural productivity of body-based experience, its occasional embodiment of smallscale social imagery in personal or group interaction, turned into an extremely rarefied, volatile, or altogether vanishing element—or assumed a thinly veiled idealistic pathos. The development of sports as a mass phenomenon of modern societies threatened to do away with the reduced forms of sports as an outlet or a pleasurable safety valve in Goethe, too. Sports are charged with the task of balancing the psychosomatic deficits of modern societies. Organized along their very principles of technical specialization, commercial professionalization, and maximalized rationalizations of all kinds, this mission might appear as one that sports precisely cannot execute. In characteristic laternineteenth-century literary contexts, sports appear as a phenomenon remote from the often brutalized physical and social “dramas” they were historically turning into, activities well-nigh immune from the sharp segregation into active, professional athletes and masses of spectators plunged in surrogate activities, protected against the petty solemnities of club life. The remoteness may take the form of an amiable idealism, as in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown novels, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Tom Brown at Oxford (1861). In the intellectual inversions of Lewis Carroll’s “games,” it may seemingly lose contact with codes of physicality altogether. In the comic mode, sketched to some extent with Shaw’s Cashel Byron’s Profession, the suspect domain of sports is both allowed access to the cultural scene and neutralized as to any claims it might raise. Dickens provides the symptomatic case. In 1835, the publishing house of Chapman & Hall had invited a number of authors, and ultimately Dickens also, to write texts accompanying a collection of “cockney sporting plates.” Dickens, short of money, agreed. Arguing he was no great athlete, he insisted upon and got an extension of subjects, “a freer range of English scenes and people.” The project developed into The Pickwick Papers (1837), in which the sportsman Mr. Winkle and a cricket match in chapter 7 have shrunk into the comic relics of the origi-

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nal plan.34 In the same way, the boxing expert Daniel Skepsey is comically interesting and culturally neutralized in Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors (1891). An American variety—the neutralization of sports in a manliness steering clear of both crude sensuality and overly interiorized Puritanism— also has been extensively analyzed.35 Historically and technologically, the twentieth century has continued the trends of the nineteenth with increasing speed. Talk of “revolutions,” especially of the technological kind, is a device used to cope with the radical quality of the changes involved. Twentieth-century sports, appearing in literature, often seem completely devoured by the psychosocial effect of advancing civilizations. In Allan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), running remains productive in terms of states of the mind. But that creativity is completely diverted into “cunning,” a seemingly adaptive but in reality antisocial behavior. In other texts, such as Peter Terson’s Zigger Zagger (1970) or David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960; Storey was himself a rugby professional) or The Changing Room (1972), sports are caught in the panorama of aggression and its triggers, in desolate family situations and failing safety valves. The phantasma of unified physicality, beauty, grace, and intelligence, already dismissed as a thing of the past by Maupassant’s Sur l’Eau, for instance, in 1888, celebrates a short-lived and ugly comeback in early-twentieth-century Futurism, when a misunderstood Darwinian biology and the feats of technology in terms of speed and heights seemed to open up vistas of organic-technological vitality. Psychoanthropologically, however, the European (and to some extent the American) nineteenth century may be viewed as a moratorium, a respite overlaid with and almost disappearing into the “mechanization” (followed by the electronification) that, according to Sigfried Giedion’s book, “takes command.”36 Significant exemplars of twentieth-century literature are characterized not so much by the psychosocial deformations imposed from outside, but by the wide discrepancies between these and totally different modes of awareness. Hemingway’s Robert Cohn, in The Sun Also Rises (1927), performs the socially expressive model of sport. Boxing is supposed to cure the inferiority complex of the underprivileged Jew. For Jake Barnes and others, however, it is a way out of the exhaustion accumulating in ordinary life. Bullfighting finally enacts the fusion of myth and concrete social configurations (in contrast to the more elusive social systems), however precarious that fusion might be. One might object that Hemingway is remarkable because of exorbitant stances into which, in his personal case, like Norman Mailer’s, his

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boxing behavior and “ideology” have put him. It is remarkable, however, that the same or even sharper tensions between historical specificities and anthropological archetypes loom large in the more carefully wrought forms of highly literary German novels after World War II. In Siegfried Lenz’s Brot und Spiele (Bread and Games, 1959), alluded to before, the social context of long-distance running seems itself to have turned into a drug. The runner needs applause and cannot do without the many obligations and opportunities surrounding the brief athletic episodes and the torture of training. In the social thicket, however, pursuit and flight, archetypal cores of hunting, killing, and fear of death, keep surging up. In such a picture, where war, running, and social pursuits continually feed into each other, euphoric playfulness, flow experience, can barely assert itself. This is quite different in Das dritte Buch über Achim (The Third Book About Achim), a novel “on” an East German “state amateur” cyclist by Uwe Johnson (1961). In an atmosphere both heavily politicized and destabilized by surmise and guesswork, the quasi-technical purity of described experience stands in an odd and unmediated contrast to the heaviness of German-German relations in which Achim is caught up. The genesis of sports activities is multilayered. Coincidences of technical fascination, the suspense of races, the quasi-autonomy of talent, the attractions and repulsions of the social ballyhoo—all this does not yield coherence, yet each exists in its own right. Fragments of a phenomenology of the sporting experience may be gleaned—the atmosphere, the psychophysical feeling of movement, the intoxication of speed and trancelike states of mind. They neither add up to an essence of sport, nor does the relativism of possible descriptions peremptorily exclude it.37 In such texts, the striking thing is not just the richness of perspectives normally extolled by literary criticism. It is instead the implicit obstinacy with which the range of experience (whatever it may mean) in cultures (whatever their sociopolitical concerns) is envisaged. Forms of discourse and ranges of experience, their interpenetration as well as their irredeemable discrepancies, have found an earlier textual incarnation.38 Nietzsche, to be cited here a last though not conclusive time, might appear as a particularly ill chosen example. Plagued by nearsightedness, a clumsy gait, and progressively worsening unclear complaints of possibly clear (syphilitic) origin, he looks like the immobile, dyspeptic writer fantasizing about the joys of movement and exertion. Moreover, we may gather from Eric Blondel, in the perhaps most painstaking book on the topic, that the body might function in

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Nietzsche as a mere, but essential, physiological metaphor for the philological deciphering of culture as a text.39 The so-called evidence of the body, the body as guiding thread, “Leitfaden,” the emphasis on culture as activity, not as product, plunge the student of Nietzsche into metaphorical traps of all kinds. Culture represents the gap between nature and itself within human beings, while cultural peculiarity emerges in the ways in which the gap, along with the richness and range of problems it brings forth, are tackled. Goethe may have been one of the few people who somehow transformed an early naturalism into strict (though not, I would add, sensory-deprived) dignity. But Goethe’s model does not allow of any generalization. The metaphors of the body remain, first and foremost, metaphors of the body as a philological object, not descriptions of an experiencing subject. This must be kept in mind especially in the case of the many gastroenterological metaphors for which Blondel has drawn up an impressive list. Nietzsche, indeed, seems to shrink from the materialism looming in many of his propositions: stock phrases, which tend to reduce things to the physiological, are continually counteracted by others “in which the psychic has a causal effect on the physiological.”40 Even so, the thematizing compulsion presented by the body as an underlying if inaccessible text of culture cannot be metaphorically contained. Philosophy, philology, and science, indispensable as they are in their most rigorous forms, are also the products of a misleading ascetic ideal, an abstraction from “life.” No language captures that life, yet the “phenomenality” of the body and indeed “reality” keep imposing. If Nietzsche’s “metaphors regarding the primacy of the body are nothing original,” they are suggestive enough to force us into continual priority leaps that Blondel does not really follow up.41 Certainly, Nietzsche does not join hands with psychophysiology, one of the important discourses in the episteme of the European nineteenth century, because that discourse tends to take metaphors literally. But the metaphors are not mere metaphors, either. They exercise a kind of “literalizing” pressure. Yielding to that pressure may project Nietzsche into the madness of either metaphor or literalism embodied by the dancing Zarathustra. Or it may drive him into sketches of plausibility of both the historical and analytical kind. Theoretically, it is futile to assert that the “knowledge” of the body devaluates the mind into a mere quasi-mind, that the despisers of the body must be opposed with the slogan of voluptuousness. The dance songs in Zarathustra cannot be understood literally or metaphorically or allegorically. At best, they vaguely articulate

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symptomatic impressions. They do not make sense, and it does not require a positivistic perspective to see this.42 But other analyses of Nietzsche’s can be read in a straightforward historical or theoretical way. In the framework of my chapter on appearances, Nietzsche’s distinction in Human, All Too Human, between the desire for art in the Greeks and the “secondary need for art” in modern higher and highest ranks of society, takes on more than a metaphorical or philological significance. Modernity has produced a gallery of people unable to reach a state of unadulterated joy: well-educated or semiaristocratic people, wives, scholars, doctors, merchants, and civil servants, are longing for an art that drives away the unease, boredom, and forms of half-guilty conscience for a few hours. That type of art is capable of reinterpreting their errors of life and deficiencies of character as a grandiose rupture in the fate of the world, and that is its main function for these people, according to Nietzsche. The Greeks, on the other hand, produced art as an extension of well-being: they liked to see their own perfection once more outside themselves. They were driven to art through self-enjoyment. Modernity is driven to art by self-frustration.43 Whatever we may think of such a diagnosis, there are relative but suggestive codes for the coupling of art and the body, codes that even Adorno could not get rid of: “Art reminds us of states of animal vigor; it is a surplus and emanation of flourishing physicality into the world of images and desires; on the other hand, it stimulates the animal functions through the images and desires of intensified life; it is a heightening of the feeling of life, and a stimulation of it.”44 The sources of art can only be suggested. But if one suggests, inevitably and in Nietzsche decidedly, the language used carries connotations of psychophysical energy, of its surplus. Accordingly, the products of such states can hardly be squeezed into the tight compartments of aesthetic genre theory. Occasionally, Nietzsche casts such suggestions in overly positive or even idealistic terms. In general, though, states of unresolved surplus energy may strike out in any direction, depending on the situations, means, and media in which they are objectified. The artist as psychophysical wreck or drug addict, as described by Benn and Brecht, is as likely as the one hankering after athletic perfection or indulging in leisurely sporting pursuits. Art, then, springs from a somehow ecstatic, explosive state best visualized as an urge and compulsion to work out and to work off, by some form of muscular exertion, the exuberance of an inner tension. In its constructive and pleasurable aspects, that state combines surplus strength and intelligent sensuality:

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Strength as a feeling of mastery in the muscles, as elegant flexibility and enjoyed movement, as dance, ease and speed; strength as the enjoyment of proving strength, as a feat, adventure, lack of fear, indifference toward life and death . . . all these climactic moments of life stimulate each other; the images and ideas of one suffices as a suggestion for the other: in that way types of experience are finally interwoven which would have sufficient grounds to remain alien to each other. E.g. religious ecstasy and sexual excitement. . . . Artists, if they are worth something, are strongly grounded (also physically), animals of superfluous (surplus) strength, sensual.45

Nietzsche concedes that the “reason of life” may exact “relative chastity” from the artist. There is a danger of expending strength on the wrong occasions. This, however, does not at all legitimize the notion of art that has come to dominate what, simplistically put, we call modern “bourgeois” literature. In its “realist” as well as modernist orientations, in its constructive, sometimes idealizing, relativizing, and deconstructive tendencies, that literature remains tied to sociocultural images of the real. Such literature, weakened as it is, may occasionally enchant the reader. If it does, it is because even these images cannot suppress the “tonic” effect of art, which has nothing to do with them, cannot eradicate, for instance, the “intestinal fever” stimulated by “genuine” poetry. L’art pour l’art is a plausible historical misunderstanding. It justifiably purged art of sociocultural constraints. In the name of pure art, however, it also aimed at wiping out its “physiological” grounding. In that capacity, art for art’s sake resembles what Nietzsche called the virtuoso croaking of frogs left out in the cold, despairing in the swamps, or the worm biting its own tail.46 Before Nietzsche, Rousseau had diagnosed that situation well but opted for the wrong remedy. For him, civilization and the civilized arts had sapped human strength. In such situations, surrogate desires spring up that cannot be fully satisfied. Rousseau’s cure aimed at a “natural” education privileging “primary” experiences. Such experiences are best activated by physical training, inurement, and by games serving that purpose.47 But Rousseau does not at all rehabilitate such training as a value in itself. Life remains a highly moral affair. Civilization has merely sold out to the wrong kind of morality. For nineteenth-century European civilization, plagued by new social and industrial woes, Rousseau’s castigation of “artificial” moralities and arts could not work. It boiled down to another arbitrary version of “mens sana in corpore sano,” of which the nineteenth century produced its own varieties ad libitum, sometimes similar, such as manliness and fair play, and sometimes sinister.

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Rousseau criticized civilization in the social form that it had taken before the French Revolution. With respect to the Industrial Revolution— and the so-called various revolutions following it—that criticism is misplaced. Industrialism in its material, nineteenth-century, and its progressively more immaterial twentieth-century forms insists, according to Baudrillard’s appropriate evaluation in L’échange symbolique et la mort, on sheer production and productivity. It cannot attach much importance to distinctions concerning artifice and nature, illusion and reality. It is theory, as a type of discourse bound by its traditions, that by and large and until recently has been unable to shake off such concerns. Jolted out of its cultural lag by what appeared as a sudden onslaught of electronic media, it tried to catch up with developments by crediting electronic modernity with an epistemological revolution. Nietzsche’s theories (and even more so, for instance, Jacob Burckhardt’s criticisms of the nineteenth century) contain Rousseauistic elements. But Nietzsche’s interest in an artistic productivity propelled by psychophysical dynamics that are physiological, but by no means emphatically natural, definitely projects him beyond that. The more or less stable or fluid forms and media resulting from such productivity make up the heterogeneity of culture. In terms of form, literature and sports exemplify that heterogeneity in the highest degree. In terms of an underlying psychophysical productivity, the differences may be minimal. Discursively, in any case, descriptions of artistic surplus are often hard to distinguish from those of perfected performance in sports. “Like creative artists whose moments of splendor occur after months and years of work to perfect their craft,” William J. Baker has said in a very informal way, “athletes savor those rare, scintillating moments when mind, body, and soul function in triumphant unison.” Few athletes can run the four-minute mile, but many know the authenticity of Roger Bannister’s “moment of mixed joy and anguish” when there was “no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim.” . . . Yuri Vlasov, the great Soviet weight lifter hails the “precious, wide moment” of athletic prowess. “At the peak of tremendous and victorious effort, while the blood is pounding in your head, all suddenly becomes quiet within you. Everything seems clearer and wider than before, as if great spotlights had been turned on. At that moment you have the conviction that you contain all the power in the world, that you are capable of everything, that you have wings.” If this language sounds similar to the language of religious mysticism, sexual delight, or even a drug trip, so be it.48

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It should go without saying, at the end, that such descriptions remain palatable only if they are subjected, from time to time, to irony, satire, or parody (or even criticism of ideology). Forms of protoliterary discourse will continue to bespeak the virulence of what once was called vital phenomena. Such discourse, however, is liable to turn into an impoverished monomedium when it is institutionalized as a literature of mere printed words, when it plays, as Goethe had it, with hollow nuts for hollow nuts. That happens, and it does not happen altogether infrequently. In its turn, therefore, the protoliterary discourse will call forth richer enactments in which the semblance of performative materiality and the power of appearance assert themselves as tough competitors in the cultural game.

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Notes

Preface 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p. 51. 2. For Bense, see his Aesthetica: Einführung in die neue Ästhetik (BadenBaden: Agis-Verlag, 1965), pp. 11, 15–17. Bense’s assignment for aesthetics— to respect, and not to damage, complexes of response—is particularly striking because Bense is much concerned with the relations between aesthetics, physics, technology, and industrial design, as well as cybernetics. 3. For a document of that optimism, in which, despite latent misgivings, expressions like “the state of the art,” “the results of research,” “the truth claims of art works,” and the like were still handled with the solemn assurance of German-Teutonic scholarship see, for instance, Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Volker Sinemus, Grundzüge der Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft, vol. 1: Literaturwissenschaft, 7th ed. (1973; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983). For the above remarks, see pp. 105–6, 108, 115. 4. I owe this suggestion to talks with Natascha Adamovsky, Humboldt University, Berlin. 5. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), p. 47. And see, of course, John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Capricorn Books, 1980), pp. 19, 44, 60 (where the concept of media in the generalized sense occurs). 6. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 17, 19, 49, 257–58, and generally chapter 1. 7. Ibid., pp. 227 (cf. p. 228), 252. 8. Ibid., pp. 228, 252. 9. This is a wide and complex field. But see, for a succinct account, Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 183–88. 10. I am claiming this fully aware that, in a “cognitivist” perspective, the years between five and seven constitute for most people the age in which “perhaps for the first and sometimes the last time, an easy, natural commerce among various media” is possible. See Howard Gardner, Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 128. That this age should not mean the last easy commerce between the media

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should not only be obvious from the analyses that follow. It is also evident in the skepticism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, for one, evinced with respect to some of the dead ends of modernist monomedia developments. Cf. Gardner, pp. 36–37. 11. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 57. The “anthropological” point is obvious: insofar as media are extensions of ourselves, they “also depend on us for their interplay and their evolution” (p. 57). Examples for this “interpenetration,” as it is also called, are poems by T. S. Eliot and their indebtedness to film or jazz (p. 61). 12. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2 vols. (continuous pagination), pp. 106–7, 853, 120–21, 122. 13. Walter Schulz, Metaphysik des Schwebens: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Ästhetik (Pfullingen: Günter Neske, 1985), pp. 19, 23. Schulz has also drawn attention, quite importantly I think, to the “realism” (Lebensnähe) in the descriptive intensity and density of Hegel’s anthropological ideas. See his Philosophie in der veränderten Welt (Pfullingen: Günter Neske, 1972), pp. 364–65. For the subsequent argument in this section concerning media segregation, the relativization of literature, and the frictions between complexity and mass appeal, see again Williams, Keywords, s.v. “literature,” and his The Sociology of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), chapter 4. See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1991), especially pp. 41–42, 149. 14. See William H. Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). See especially pp. 33, 37–41, 187–89, 200–201, 213–17. 15. See Gernot Böhme, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht: Darmstädter Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 266. See also Hartmut and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). 16. Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976), quoted after the German edition Brot und Spiele: Gesellschaftliche Macht und politische Herrschaft in der Antike, trans. Klaus Laermann and Hans Richard Brittmacher (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), pp. 32, 38–40, 93, 99, 352, 609, 610. The same problems have crept up with a vengeance in the debate about changes in civilization and forms of sexuality (the sense of shame, for instance), especially between Norbert Elias and Hans Peter Duerr. See Duerr, Intimität: Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), especially pp. 14–20, 220, and 270–76. With respect to media (ex)change, Shirley Strum Kenny has provided the following simple but telling example: “The extravagances of the 1970s were fully anticipated in the Restoration and 18th century.” See “Theatre, Related Arts, and the Profit Motive: An Overview,” in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny

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(Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library; London: Associated University Presses, 1984), p. 18. 17. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Hodder and Stoughton Coronet Books, 1995), p. 224. 18. Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1979); see pp. 10–12, 22–23 and pp. 247, 251 for Osthoff and opera buffa.

Introduction 1. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. ix. 2. For this picture, see Otto Seel, Die platonische Akademie (Stuttgart: Klett, 1953), pp. 13–19. 3. Francis Fergusson, “Introduction,” in Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 30. Cf. p. 3. 4. Quotation from Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts: With a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, by S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (1891; New York: Dover Publications, 1951), p. 154. See also pp. 116, 118–19, 148–49. 5. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3d ed., rev. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 214. For a theory of sociability (geselliges Betragen) in Schleiermacher—including artistic and hermeneutic activities—and, derived from that theory, a criticism of parts of later “abstract” hermeneutics, see Norbert Altenhofer, “Geselliges Betragen—Kunst— Auslegung: Anmerkungen zu Peter Szondis Schleiermacher-Interpretation und zur Frage einer materialen Hermeneutik,” in Studien zur Entwicklung einer materialen Hermeneutik, ed. Ulrich Nassen (Munich: Fink, 1979), pp. 185– 200. 6. See, in Studien zur Entwicklung einer materialen Hermeneutik, the essays by Dieter Kimpel, pp. 9–47, and Norbert Altenhofer, pp. 165–211. 7. For an overview of theoretical and historical approaches, especially from E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960) onwards, see Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape, eds., Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990). The precariousness of such distinctions, though, shows up very clearly in Kendall L. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). See in particular the continuous conceptual revisions in chapter 2 on “Fiction and Nonfiction,” pp. 70–105. I would like to move out of these conceptual traps—into different ones, perhaps. Walton’s concise analyses concerning the conceptual logic of Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, for instance, leave him little room to discuss the implications of Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking. Although I am not discussing this book, its implications are compatible with my approach. 8. Michel Butor, “Literatur und Malerei,” Literatur im technischen Zeitalter (Supplement to Sprache im technischen Zeitalter) 27, no. 2 (1989), 6–10, p.

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7. Cf. again Williams, Keywords, on the crystallization of a relatively pure notion of “literature” in the nineteenth century. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), p. 111 (no. 349). See the many discussions on the interpenetrations of words, pictures, and (mental) images, especially pp. 11, 54–55, 120, 126, 142–43, 193–215 (the second part, no. xi). 10. Hume, Enquiries, p. 259. 11. Ibid., p. 303. 12. Cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp. 179–96. 13. See my article “Fiction: On the Fate of a Concept Between Philosophy and Literary Theory,” in Burwick and Pape, eds., Aesthetic Illusion, pp. 92– 104. Wolfgang Iser’s orientation in chapter 3, “Fiction Thematized in Philosophical Discourse,” in his The Fictive and the Imaginary, is different. In most cases (Bacon, Goodman, above all Bentham and Vaihinger), the focus is not “literary.” The rehabilitation of a general, as it were philosophical, need for fiction, on the other hand, does not say much with respect to its cultural effectiveness and, in that sense, real or illusionary qualities. See also the reference to Walton above. 14. For this see the detailed analyses by Christian Berthold, Fiktion und Vieldeutigkeit: Zur Entstehung moderner Kulturtechniken des Lesens im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993). 15. For an analogous situation in seventeenth-century France, see JeanMarie Apostolidès, Le roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981). This book repeatedly describes “complete spectacles” (p. 44) in which literature, sports, parades, allegorical pageants, and so on created a politically useful Gesamtkunstwerk that made it possible for people “to obey without being slaves” (p. 24). For England, one thinks of course of the works of Stephen Orgel and others. 16. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Basel: Schwabe, 1978). See also Helmut Pfeiffer, “Girolamo Cardano and the Melancholy of Writing,” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 228 for Machiavelli. 17. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Borstock Berger with an introduction by Randall White (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 355.

Chapter One: First Exemplifications 1. Lévi-Strauss has noted these ambivalences of writing most powerfully: to civilize means also to control. The school system is bound up with militarization and proletarianization. The use of writing for intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction is a secondary result, “possibly a means to reinforce, justify or veil” the other functions. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), pp. 298–300. The wording

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here is mine; I have retranslated this very important passage from the French original (Paris: Plon, 1955). 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874 [Fragments], Kritische Studienausgabe ( = KSA), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols., 2d rev. ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–1977; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), vol. 7, p. 813. Cf. the certainly problematic characterization of Wagner’s musical theater as “closet plays in the strictest sense,” relying on the inner imagination, lacking a real confidence in music, and therefore trying to inebriate by other means; cf. Fragmente 1875–1879 [Fragments], KSA, vol. 8, pp. 520, 535, 548, 557. For the use of the standard German Nietzsche edition (with my translations) here see the remarks at the end of Acknowledgments. 3. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1971). For the similar concept of “flow experience” as a total engagement in activities, be they chess, surgery, mountain climbing, dancing, or all kinds of work, see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Freedom and Anxiety—The Experience of Play in Work and Games (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975). See also Roger Caillois, Der Krake: Versuch über die Logik des Imaginativen, trans. Brigitte Weidmann (Munich: Hanser, 1986) and Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press, 1961). In Caillois’s logic of the imaginary (or imaginative), the notion of kraken-like relays cutting across ordinary distinctions between reality and illusion is crucial and important for my purposes. I do not believe that Iser’s restricted use of Caillois and others for purposes of text description (that is, literary text description) is justified. See Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, pp. 257–73 (in chapter 5, called “Text Play”). A restriction of use is legitimate, of course. In this case, though, it drastically changes the cultural-anthropological drift of the theories. 4. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 105. 5. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 51. 6. Ibid., pp. 148, 179, 219. See pp. 22–41 for relations between somatic grounding and ideologies, with references to Winnicott, Alice Miller, Géza Róheim, Michael Balint, Jacques Lacan, and others. 7. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, pp. 288, 360–61, 364; translation modified. 8. Murray Krieger, in all of his works, also takes great pains to justify his use of the term “poem,” which is supposed “to cover all ‘imaginative’ literature, or fictions, whether written in prose or verse.” But is this indeed “synonymous” with Aristotle’s poesis? See Krieger, Arts on the Level: The Fall of the Elite Object (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), p. viii. Aristotle does not really distinguish between the fine and the practical arts. See S. H. Butcher’s commentary in Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts: With a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, 4th ed. (1891; New York: Dover Publications, 1951), which emphasizes this in spite of the title Butcher has given to his edition.

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9. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, pp. 200–216, 403–4. 10. Quotations are from the Insel-Goethe Werkausgabe, edited by various hands, vol. 4, including Die Leiden des jungen Werther, ed. Hans-J. Weitz, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, ed. Erich Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1970). All translations from the text are mine. 11. See also Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go on Without a Body?” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 286–300. 12. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, pp. 467, 454, 473. Strikingly enough, one could rephrase this diagnosis of reading in terms of contemporary trends in the psychology of attention or indeed the (brain) physiology of reading. Suffice it here to say that in such perspectives reading does not at all appear as a ‘natural’ activity; that reading long texts may amount to an engrossing but more often than not also a catastrophic, form of permanent self-stimulation (cf. also n. 34 for J. Paul Hunter’s notion of the “loneliness of the long-distance reader”). 13. Ibid., p. 546. 14. Ibid., pp. 565, 281, 603. 15. This is why studies in intermediality have been flourishing. The interplay of the arts, the wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste seemingly laid to rest a long time ago, has come back. Romantic literature is suddenly seen to have been obsessed with a myth of the power of music—as if this had not been a crucial topic for “writers” as diverse as Milton and Dryden. Nietzsche’s concern with the inextricable relations between music and writing is rediscovered again and again. For examples see Rudolf Fietz, Medienphilosophie: Musik, Sprache, und Schrift bei Friedrich Nietzsche (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1992); Hans Joachim Kreutzer, Obertöne: Literatur und Musik: Neun Abhandlungen über das Zusammenspiel der Künste (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995); Christine Lubkoll, Mythos Musik: Poetische Entwürfe des Musikalischen in der Literatur um 1800 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1995). 16. In such media contexts, which we normally associate with the dominance of orality, the distinction between the perception of the real and “pictures” does not matter very much. In situations located between orality and a dominant literacy, “literature” starts by presenting the traditional semiotics, which, however, is inevitably caught in the tensions between reliable and deceptive signs. For the Nibelungenlied, for instance, Edward Haymes has said that as “soon as the final authority in a society shifts to written documents and becomes, in a society in which few members were actually literate, esoteric, it becomes possible to play off appearances against the secret ‘reality.’ It is this structure that forms the pattern available to the literate poet in the later middle ages.” Edward R. Haymes, The Nibelungenlied: History and Interpretation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 99. In religious quarrels, especially in the Reformation, that discrepancy became crucial indeed. 17. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, pp. 118, 120, 125, 128, 133, 117, 142. 18. Ibid., pp. 341, 342, 345. 19. Ibid., pp. 212, 603, 541–45, 580, 602 (cf. pp. 605, 639, 641).

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20. Ibid., pp. 272–74, 413–12, 273, 284, 395. 21. Furthermore, by acting the mocking sophist, he also disrupts serious conversation and theoretical debate (p. 347). 22. Ibid., pp. 412–14, 343–44, 437, 583. 23. For that development see also Christian Berthold, Fiktion und Vieldeutigkeit: Zur Entstehung moderner Kulturtechniken des Lesens im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), chapter 5, pp. 77–190, about the shifts in literary reference with respect to novels. 24. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (continuous pagination) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 968. 25. Krieger, Arts on the Level, pp. 12–13, viii. 26. In addition to Fietz, Medienphilosophie, Kreutzer, Obertöne, and Lubkoll, Mythos Musik, see Franz-Josef Albersmeier, Theater, Film und Literatur in Frankreich: Medienwechsel und Intermedialität (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), pp. 10–21. See also Joachim Paech, Literatur und Film (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), p. 51; Alex Aronson, Music and the Novel: A Study in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980); idem, Shakespeare and Rembrandt: Metaphorical Representation in Poetry and the Visual Arts (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1987). Both of Aronson’s books are rich in materials, but somewhat lacking in systematizing perspectives. 27. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 25. 28. Ibid., pp. 25–27. 29. Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 179, 193. 30. See Lothar Cerny, Beautie and the Use Thereof: Eine Interpretation von Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia (Köln: Böhlau, 1984), pp. 59, 61–63. 31. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, pp. 27, 18. 32. Ibid., pp. 39, 99, 185. 33. Ibid., pp. 246, 247, 248. 34. J. Paul Hunter, “The World as Stage and Closet,” in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), pp. 279–80. 35. Cf. pp. 285, 287, and n. 14. 36. See, for instance, Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process (New York: New York University Press, 1990), in particular pp. 66, 90, 93, 99, 113–14. Martin Seymour-Smith has joined those who see “an anticipation of pornographic cinema” in some of Hardy’s texts. Seymour-Smith, Hardy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), p. 89. 37. Cf. Joseph Andrews, book 2, chapter 13, pp. 158–59. 38. See Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1906; London: J. M. Dent 1978), chapter 1, “Introduction,” p. 64. For The Bride of Lammermoor, I have used the World’s Classics edition, ed. Fiona Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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39. Scott, Waverley, p. 65. 40. Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor, pp. 2, 5. 41. Ibid., p. 25. 42. Ibid., p. 24. 43. Ibid., p. 21. 44. Ibid., pp. 207–9, 215–16. 45. Ibid., pp. 78, 159, 291 ff. 46. Ibid., pp. xix ff., 301, 308–9, 312–14, 320, 322–29, 42–47, 324, 337, 339, 344–45, 347–49. 47. Ibid., pp. 343, 347. 48. Herbert Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 66, quoting John T. Irwin, “Self-Evidence and Self-Reference: Nietzsche and Tragedy, Whitman and Opera,” New Literary History 11 (1979), p. 188. 49. Quoted in Lindenberger, Opera, p. 26. 50. Lindenberger, Opera, p. 77. See, in immense detail, Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 51. See Joseph Gregor, Kulturgeschichte der Oper: Ihre Verbindung mit dem Leben, den Werken des Geistes, und der Politik, rev. ed. (Vienna: Gallus; Zurich: Scientia, 1950), pp. 184–277, 308–10, etc.; Helmut Schmidt-Garre, Oper: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Cologne: Arno Volk, 1963), pp. 46–59 on French classic theater and music, p. 169, etc.; Kurt Honolka, Kulturgeschichte des Librettos, rev. ed. (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1979), especially pp. 220– 25. For Victor Hugo, see in particular (from a literary point of view) Harald Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Zwischen kosmischer Offenbarung und Wortoper: Das romantische Drama Victor Hugos (Erlangen: Universitätsverlag, 1984). For a more thorough treatment of the operatic issues, see part two below. 52. Cf. Edgar Morin, Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 53. I have gleaned some points from Iser’s perspectives in literary anthropology. See The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 219 (the psyche as its own lost object), 296–303 (on staging as an anthropological category). 54. Edgar Morin, Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: Essai d’anthropologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1956, repr. 1995), p. 114. 55. Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor, p. 21. 56. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 250. 57. Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor, p. 39. 58. See Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera, p. xvii, from whom I have also taken the quotes. 59. Newsweek, December 28, 1992, p. 58. 60. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929; New York: Random House, 1992), p. 214. 61. Ibid., p. 12.

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62. Ibid., pp. 47, 23 (for Brigid O’Shaughnessy, see p. 35). 63. Ibid., p. 120. 64. I have dealt at greater length with that in my article “Mentalität und Medium: Detektivroman, Großstadt oder ein zweiter Weg in die Moderne,” Poetica 20 (1988), 234–59, pp. 253–55. 65. See Gilles Deleuze, Perikles und Verdi: Die Philosophie des François Châtelet (Paris: Minuit, 1988; Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 1989), p. 25 in the German edition (my translation). Interestingly, as we will also see later, this function is reserved for the types of music represented by Mozart or Verdi, not by Wagner, who can be interpreted as a return to a forced, literarizing mythology. Deleuze calls it “being infatuated with transcendence” (p. 24). 66. See F. W. J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, ed. Steffen Dietzsch (1800; Leipzig: Reclam, 1979), pp. 373–74, afterword by the editor. See also Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 9: “neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to our minds the true interests of the spirit.” Also pp. 9 ff., 103. In Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p. 69, aesthetic behavior is genetically related to the child’s familiarity with nature and also to archaic forms of experience. Separated from those, experience clings to artifacts. See also pp. 176, 197–99. Finally, see John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Capricorn Books, 1980), pp. 6–7 about the arts as original “enhancements of the processes of everyday” or “collective life.” While these enhancements have become rare empirically, that does not force Dewey, or any other of these theorists, to change a theory based for the most part on the assumption that if the arts are completely separated from these processes, something will go wrong with them. Bourgeois capitalism, with the collector as it prototype in aesthetic matters, while responsible for compartmentalized, seemingly spiritualized conceptions of art, in Dewey’s view, cannot totally impose and implement these notions. 67. The internally torn situation of the literary aesthetic is exemplified by Murray Krieger. He sees clearly that another type of aesthetics came into being in the eighteenth century (for instance with Baumgarten) and developed with Kantian notions of disinterestedness, in parallel with the establishment of museums. That type of single-minded theory also runs parallel to media specializations implied, for example, in the construction of public concert halls. Yet Krieger tries to preserve a generalized notion not just of art, but of literature. See Arts on the Level, pp. viii, 14. The culturally oblique position especially of the literary aesthetic accounts for both the critical and the apologetic rhetoric (including large parts of theory), to which “literature” has been continually exposed.

Chapter Two: Theory 1. For an “anthropological” approach of that sort see Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 165–69. Benjamin’s notion of the narrator

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presenting paradigmatic and in that sense culturally important experience could also be fitted into this framework. 2. Wolfgang Iser has cogently analyzed interpretational and other burdens of various types of writing in his The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 3. I am quoting from Wolfgang Promies’s painstaking edition of Lichtenberg’s Schriften und Briefe, 5 vols. (repr. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1994), 3: 377. 4. Cf. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, ed. Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse (2d ed. Leipzig 1829, based on Solger’s lectures in 1819; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 76, 90. 5. For more materials and thoughts, see also Wolfgang Promies, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964, 4th ed. 1992), pp. 70, 81. 6. Tragische Literaturgeschichte (Bern: Francke, 1948, 4th ed. 1969), p. 552; cf. p. 68. 7. On this topic, see Klaus Siebenhaar, Lichtenbergs Schaubühne: Imaginarium und Kleines Welttheater (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), and Promies, Lichtenberg, p. 51. It has been stressed for a while that Lichtenberg is among the first to notice the change, describable largely in theater terms, brought about by city life. 8. See Ingrid Sommer, ed., Der Fortgang der Tugend und des Lasters: Daniel Chodowieckis Monatskupfer zum Göttinger Taschenkalender mit Erklärungen Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs 1778–1783 (Berlin: Buchverlag Der Morgen, n.d.). 9. This is suggested also in a professional art historian’s account. See Klaus Herding, “ ‘Die Schönheit wandelt auf den Straßen’: Lichtenberg zur Bildsatire seiner Zeit,” in Jörg Zimmermann, ed., Lichtenberg: Streifzüge der Phantasie (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1988), 19–59, p. 35. Cf. also, with respect to the necessary cooperation between drawing and narration, p. 24. On the whole and clearly, though, my interests are somewhat removed from those of the professional art historian. This, however, was also the case with Lichtenberg, and he has been—seriously (!)—criticized for it. See Rainer Baasner, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), p. 126. Instead of seeing a historical-cognitive problem, Baasner, in another book (Lichtenberg: Das große Ganze [Paderborn: Schöningh, 1992], p. 8), similarly criticizes Lichtenberg for having been interested in almost everything and therefore often unable to adopt a well-defined standpoint. 10. Cf. Rudolf Wehrli, G. C. Lichtenbergs ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche: Versuch einer Interpretation (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1980), p. 88, quoting the very learned and sophisticated book by Werner Busch, Nachahmung als bürgerliches Kunstprinzip: Ikonographische Zitate bei Hogarth und in seiner Nachfolge (Hildesheim: Olms, 1977). 11. For such perspectives, see Herbert Schöffler, Lichtenberg: Studien zu

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seinem Wesen und Geist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 74 ff. 12. Because of connections like these, I have derived more benefit from a book by Horst Gravenkamp, Geschichte eines elenden Körpers: Lichtenberg als Patient (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 1989), written from a quasi-medical point of view, than from most of the secondary literature on Lichtenberg in literary or art history. 13. For further combinations of lively scenes and actions embedded in imagined sound see 3: 750–51. 14. It would be short-sighted to assume that Lichtenberg’s thought represents no more than the interesting, possibly fascinating ruminations of an at best eccentric eighteenth-century genius. In spite of media differentiation and the division of labor in scholarly and theoretical work, Lichtenberg’s concerns have kept rumbling on, in somewhat submerged forms, to be sure, in historically oriented and theoretically engaged scholarship. Seen as sequences, for instance, the works of “ordinary” professors of English like James L. Calderwood and Alvin Kernan could be taken as an ongoing illustration of Lichtenberg’s style of thought. Cf. Alvin Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). Calderwood, expanding his notion of “metadrama,” has written persuasively on disavowals and reaffirmations of the relevance of art to life, on the importance of the play for the audience as a complex experience in which illusions and realities are constantly on the move, but even more on the importance of the audience for the play, on the vulnerability of performance and representation, “this self-consuming bent of theater” (especially in Hamlet), with which actors, like Lichtenberg’s Garrick, want to and must interfere, sometimes stealing the show from the play itself. Likewise, according to Kernan, in the Renaissance, the magic of theater as total productivity flared up but could not be sustained. In Shakespeare’s multiple direct and indirect self-thematizations of “drama” and the stage, no image of a totally satisfying, absorbing theatrical performance can hold sway. Shakespeare did not go as far as Ben Jonson, for whom the “loathèd stage” turned into a kind of obsession. But the connotations of theatrical futility keep haunting the Shakespearean “text.” The playwright’s role, faltering and failing as a magician, was supplanted by the writer when the large-scale effect of the printing press facilitated the social and psychological empowerment of a book culture. For Kernan, the arch image of the writer’s role, in its potential and its melancholy setbacks, is provided by Dr. Johnson. The “death of literature,” however, is inscribed in the professionalization (or “monomedialization,” as it were) of writing. Literary activity may continue with unabated, indeed increased, vigor, but literature, as a continuous and stable cultural institution in its own right, has died. (As with Mark Twain, news of deaths are frequently

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exaggerated, but even so, Kernan’s point is well taken.) The “marginality” of literature as written poetry and fiction is not just a recent social or historical matter. It is rather the always possible consequence of its basic instability, its latent anthropological poverty as a medium. That poverty may always change into an unsurpassable potential of flexibility and imaginary suggestiveness, but may also degenerate, as with Lichtenberg, into tedious redundancy. 15. See the suggestive—and, with respect to the recent “repurification” of literary theory, very critical—essay by Dietrich Scheunemann, “Epische Gesänge, gedruckte Bücher und der Film: Vermischte Notizen zum Status und zu den Präsentationsweisen der Literatur,” in Germanistik und Deutschunterricht im Zeitalter der Technologie: Selbstbestimmung und Anpassung (Vorträge des Germanistentages, Berlin 1987), vol. 2: Politische Aufgaben und soziale Funktionen von Germanistik und Deutschunterricht, ed. Norbert Oellers (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 191–204, p. 195. 16. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 343; cf. also R. G. Cox, “The Reviews and Magazines,” in Boris Ford, ed., The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 6: From Dickens to Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 182. 17. Lewis Saul Benjamin (pseud. Lewis Melville), William Makepeace Thackeray, 2 vols., repr. Grosse Pointe, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1968 (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910), vol. 1, pp. 104, 105–6. While this is doubtless not a very modern authority, Benjamin, from time to time, touches on points easily forgotten in somewhat more sophisticated but also more restricted modern inquiries. 18. Cf., for Thackeray in that respect, the on the whole still rewarding analyses of Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), repr. 1969, pp. 204, 213. Praz’s criticism, however, is tied too much to a content notion of realism, with Thackeray stopping short before the darker aspects of family and sexual life. 19. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). See pp. 11–12 as against pp. 23–24. 20. Walter Pater, “Sebastian van Storck,” in Imaginary Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1910; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, Johnson Reprint, 1973), 79–115, pp. 84–88. 21. Praz, The Hero in Eclipse pp. 1, 3, 13. Dickens likewise sensed the tendency toward a misleading self-sufficiency in the single arts. He complained that the fine arts had become too genteel, too precious, narrow, respectable, betraying nothing more than “a little finite, systematic routine in them,” lacking living force and truth. For restrictions to be applied to Praz see Nancy Hill, A Reformer’s Art: Dickens’ Picturesque and Grotesque Imagery (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 6. 22. In that respect, the exhibition LESELUST: Dutch Painting from Rembrandt to Vermeer (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Sept. 25, 1993 to Jan. 2, 1994) was instructive.

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23. See Richard Stang for a collection of self-stylizing opinions of writers to that effect: The Theory of the Novel in England 1850–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), chapters 1, 2. 24. Hill, A Reformer’s Art, p. 5. See also the quote from Gombrich who, much as he is the theorist and historian of painting, suspects that the feeling of “truth” or “sincerity” is due to the “synesthesia of values,” p. 3. 25. For a collection of material without any great effort at perspective, see Bernhard Dieterle, Erzählte Bilder: Zum narrativen Umgang mit Gemälden (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1988), passim. For analyses of the earlier complex history of images and words between religious, rhetorical, and aesthetic functions see Carsten-Peter Warncke, Sprechende Bilder—sichtbare Worte: Das Bildverständnis der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987). 26. Cf. L’image fascinante et le surréel (Paris: Plon, 1965), pp. 22–23. 27. Quoted from Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 13, by Hill, A Reformer’s Art, p. 4. 28. For an exception in terms of both perspective and analytic subtlety see, e.g., Hans Joachim Kreutzer’s Obertöne: Literatur und Musik: Neun Abhandlungen über das Zusammenspiel der Künste (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). 29. For respectable efforts in that direction in Germany see, for instance, Dietrich Schwanitz, Systemtheorie und Literatur: Ein neues Paradigma (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990); S. J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), and others, like Gerhard Plumpe. 30. There certainly has been no dearth of efforts to constitute systems of other arts as well. To attain the self-sufficiency of a system, to compose, for instance, “absolute” music, may have been an ambition for the late Beethoven. The same effort to achieve a self-sufficient system may be attributed, in a very different domain, to the seeming autonomy of melodic orgies in Rossini. Both, according to Dahlhaus, composed music about music. Cf. Carl Dahlhaus, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, vol. 6) (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1980), pp. 47–49. But those efforts have been more difficult to sustain than corresponding movements in literature. Verdi, aiming at “dramatic” human truth, cared little about melodic selfreliance; Wagner, at least in theory, kept hammering away at the total work of art in which a genuine cultural function of dramatic-musical performance was to be recuperated. There is even a nostalgic feeling, among opera composers of the late twentieth century that, somehow, the musical-expressive, entrancing quality of nineteenth-century opera ought to be retrieved. However absolutely musical contemporary music and opera may be, there is, among other things, a lack of melody, and therefore of implicit body rhythm, that even inurement to modern disharmonies cannot sufficiently eliminate. Cf. the interview with Aribert Reimann, Der Spiegel 36 (Aug. 31, 1992), pp. 206–7. In painting, the aspiration to sever those ties that used to make it an important part of con-

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spicuous or private cultural consumption has produced almost the opposite: it is, for some observers at least, the market that will determine the status of those art objects that appear to be most committed to ideals of pure art. The first powerful statement to that effect, as far as I can see, was made by Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder: Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1965). The “passion” of collecting is, by and large, a genuine one. Whether financially or aesthetically motivated—and to what extent will collectors distinguish between the two?—collecting provides the link with those periods in which the aesthetics and economics of painting formed part of a larger practice of both private and public culture. 31. Baasner, Lichtenberg: Das große Ganze, p. 8. 32. Cf. Helmut Schoeck, Die Soziologie und die Gesellschaften: Problemsicht und Problemlösung vom Beginn bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1964), pp. 81, 85. Schoeck, taking Aristotle as an example, warns against the mistake of taking certain common concepts (or what, largely due to translations and the filter, for instance, of Roman state thought, appears as such) as indicators of identical problems and perspectives. 33. Cf. Niklas Luhmann’s poetical description of that situation: “The flight has to take place above the clouds, and we have to expect a relatively closed cloud cover. We have to rely on our own instruments. Occasionally, we can look down—glimpses of a territory with roads, settlements, rivers or coastal strips, reminding us of familiar things; or also a glance at some larger landscape with the extinct volcanoes of Marxism. But nobody should fall prey to the illusions that these clues are sufficient to guide the flight.” Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. li. 34. Ibid., p. lii. 35. See Luhmann’s essay “Sthenographie und Euryalistik,” in H. U. Gumbrecht and K. L. Pfeiffer, eds., Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche: Situationen offener Epistemologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 58– 82, p. 60. 36. Herbert Spencer, Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects (1911; London: J. M. Dent, 1966), pp. 6, 31, 88 ff. I do not hesitate to admit that my own—few—impressions chime in with the remarks in Will Durant’s “populist” history of philosophy, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), chapter 8. 37. Luhmann, Social Systems, p. 163. 38. Ibid., p. 5. For experience, see p. 382, n. 24 to p. 68. 39. Ibid., p. 63. 40. Ibid., translation modified. For a historical and theoretical location of that in the debates about the sublime see Ralph Kray, “Dynamisierung des Erhabenen? Kritisch-exemplarischer Rückblick auf eine fortschwelende Diskussion,” arcadia: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 29 (1994), 58–66, p. 66. 41. Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cam-

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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 225. Cf. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). A first partial farewell to the cultural role of the man of letters was written by John Morley, himself certainly one of the last Victorian men of letters, in 1884, in his review of Carlyle. The man of letters cannot be a guide to conduct or even opinion. See “The Man of Letters as Hero,” Nineteenth Century Essays, ed. Peter Stansky (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 59–72, p. 69. 42. See Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 43. Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Gesammelte Werke, vols. 5–8), vol. 3 (Basel: Schwabe, 1978), pp. 47–52. 44. Cf. Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 2d, enlarged ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), p. 36. My critical remarks are not meant, of course, to deny that this book, like all works of Luhmann, contains many powerful and strikingly original observations. A central one concerns the function of the mass media—occupying the social (and personal) territories that are not taken care of in science, law, and everyday life (p. 175). 45. Ibid., pp. 126–27, n. 9. Generally, one may harbor the suspicion that alternatives are not pursued because they do not fit predefined notions of system and systematicity (see below). 46. Ibid., p. 87; cf. also p. 91 for the alleged importance of “beautiful illusion,” which is problematic in another way. 47. Ibid., p. 109. Cf. p. 110. 48. Ibid., pp. 113–14. One wonders, though, why Luhmann does not use the notion of scheme, otherwise so important for him, in order to facilitate descriptions of “structural couplings” between the media and their consumers. 49. Ibid., p. 123. 50. Ibid., pp. 107, 106. 51. Ibid., pp. 107–8. 52. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973), pp. 118, 233, 241. 53. Ibid., pp. 20, 25, 43, 45. 54. More urgently, there is the question, for thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether the distinction between business (and also political parties) and existence still makes sense. For Jacob Burckhardt, in that respect, see for instance the introduction to his Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1960), p. 17. Burckhardt delves into culture— cultural history and limited cultural practice (sociability)—because the current forms of history, historiography, and current events have lost any interest for him. Political historiography in particular has become ideological; it has turned to the manufacture of tendentious significance for special interests. Political life itself, in the wake of diverse revolutions, has become crude and fanatical. No methodology, on the other hand, exists for Burckhardt’s type of cultural history. Neither does cultural history purport to save the sanctuaries of past

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culture (the highlights of Greek, Roman, or Renaissance culture) into a reprimitivized present. But the imagination of past emphatic experience—occurring mostly in dynamic times between two more static periods—can turn itself into experience, or at least its productive simulation. That experience, for Burckhardt, does no longer spring from even most of the “aesthetic” culture of his own time. Its newspapers anyway, but also its novels, devastate the mind. The theater and the novel have degenerated indeed into business and already with the Romans, the theater had turned into the object of blunted, dull pleasures of the eye, while, with the Greeks, it had thrown streams of light on Attic and Greek existence. Cf. Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, pp. 73–75. See also Irmgard Siebert, Jacob Burckhardt: Studien zur Kunst- und Kulturgeschichtsschreibung (Basel: Schwabe, 1991), pp. 11, 25, 78, 146, 153. While it is true then that Burckhardt labors under the feeling—which has not abandoned us—that it is unavoidable to live in a culture of unease or discontent, the virulence of the problem remains. Burckhardt sees Wagner as belonging in reality to the business-politics culture and therefore the options of Berlin. (Cf. Hermann Heimpel’s introduction in Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, p. 13.) Nietzsche, however, would almost against his will discover the attractions of Bizet’s Carmen and Italian opera in general. Thus, the search for “formulas of pathos” goes on. Pathosformel is Aby Warburg’s term: the ongoing “passionate” impact of antiquity, for him, has to be combined with an Enlightenment stance of composure and distance. See Yoshihiko Maikuma, Der Begriff der Kultur bei Warburg, Nietzsche und Burckhardt (Königstein im Taunus: Hain bei Athenäum, 1985). They must be found in “a true transition from life into art” (and back), which Burckhardt believed to have found in the festivals of the Italian Renaissance. Cf. Die Kultur der Renaissance, p. 273; for more extensive documentation see Maikuma, pp. 237–39. 55. Cf. Schwanitz, Systemtheorie und Literatur, pp. 30, 52–53, who treats the answers of systems theorists as statements of fact. How anyone can have a clear and confirmed idea as to the specificity of art and other “systems” as specific communications is somewhat enigmatic to me. 56. See James Grier Miller, Living Systems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). Some inspiration for that may also be gleaned from the series of books by Edgar Morin, La Méthode de la Méthode. See Part Three. See also the guarded remarks on historical degrees of systematicity by Rudolf Stichweh, “Die Autopoiesis der Wissenschaft,” in Theorie als Passion: Niklas Luhmann zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Dirk Baecker, Jürgen Markowitz, Rudolf Stichweh, Hartmann Tyrell, and Helmut Willke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 447–81, especially pp. 450–57. 57. And the “life of ideas” (and cultures) seems to defy the notion of system altogether. Edgar Morin’s metaphor of “cultural heat” (chaleur culturelle) is used in order to explode, not to stabilize, the image of culture as a systematized stock of suitable topics. Edgar Morin, Les Idées: Leur vie, leurs mœurs, leur organisation (La méthode, vol. 4) (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 28–30. This is why Dietrich Schwanitz’s book on English cultural history presents, unintentionally,

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systems theory overreaching itself. It is a curious mixture of odd details, banal stories, cultural prejudice, and high abstraction. Dietrich Schwanitz, Englische Kulturgeschichte, 2 vols. (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1995; in 1996, a shorter version, significantly “enriched,” however, with illustrations, was published by Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main). Morin’s metaphors for culture move in the opposite direction: agitation, instability, turbulence, processes of transitory configurations. From James Grier Miller’s Living Systems, on the other hand, one gathers the impression that system formation and the ascendancy of systemic structures are counterbalanced by (sometimes frantic) efforts to escape them. Cf. Miller on “coping devices,” pp. 436–59, or the organization of life in cities of increasing size, p. 688. Schwanitz’s bold moves in Systemtheorie und Literatur toward a “selfreference of drama” are tantamount to a petitio principii. He states, correctly to my mind, that drama draws its effects from a stylized representation of interaction programs and life-world “stagings” (Inszenierungen). Those can be regarded as “theatrical analogues” (rituals, ceremonies with symbolic values, simulations, intrigues, deceptions, manners, ambiguous communication, conflict, and, on a metalevel, as it were, drama itself). But why, in using those lifeworld “islands of performance/staging” is drama, right from its beginning, selfreferential (p. 110; cf. pp. 110–15)? Talking like that, one must have a very fixed, indeed transhistorically rigid notion of how framing processes (à la Goffman) go on. This is why Schwanitz has little to say about the implications of the theatrical metaphor (“All the world’s a stage”). That in the Renaissance and in the baroque period it turns into a commonplace “apparently expressing well the feeling of life” is not very illuminating (p. 115). 58. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 127. 59. Richard A. Lanham, Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 36; cf. p. 25. The chapter on “Strategien des Schreibens” in Wolfgang Iser’s Laurence Sternes “Tristram Shandy” (Munich: Fink, 1987), pp. 72–115, focuses more elaborately, but also more restrictedly, on the self-relativizing of writing and, through writing, of subjectivity. 60. Cf. Gundel Mattenklott, “Bergwerk, Tintenfluß, Palimpsest: Phantasien der Schrift,” in D. Boueke, N. Hopster, eds., Schreiben—Schreiben lernen: Rolf Sanner zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Narr, 1985), pp. 14–39; Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Gesammelte Werke, 9 vols.) (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), vol. 4, pp. 1278–79. 61. See Niklas Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” in idem, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 31–54. 62. Ibid., pp. 32–33, 39. 63. Ibid., pp. 36, 46, 54. 64. Heinz Schlaffer, Poesie und Wissen: Die Entstehung des ästhetischen Bewußtseins und der philologischen Erkenntnis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-

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kamp, 1990), chapter III/4. Cf. also pp. 160, 191, 213, 221, 224 (for the extreme example of Bernhard Suphan, Herder’s editor, who hanged himself, after the completion of his Herder edition, with the help of some of its volumes). 65. In a book almost pathetically exhibiting, in a mixture of scholarlyexistentialist discourse, the qualities of the object domain, Walter Muschg had made this into the gripping topic of his Tragische Literaturgeschichte (1948; Bern: Francke, 4th ed. 1969). Its main point does not consist in the fact that literary history, by and large, is the exercise ground of physically handicapped and psychologically damaged individuals who write like maniacs because they are locked out of “life” (pp. 423–24). Its inspiration is, importantly enough, derived from the “tragic” situation of writing embodied by Burckhardt and Nietzsche (p. 15): writing must be used in order to at least evoke worlds destroyed or submerged by the joint impact of writing and social conditions. The obsession of and with writing derives from the impact of magic, visionary poetry, and archaic song. Under modern, especially bourgeois conditions, the obsession is both diluted and torturingly kept alive via transitional forms in literature (priestlike writers, forms of enthusiasm, poètes maudits, etc.) and, more often than not, in hack writing (pp. 246–47). 66. Ibid., pp. 530–56. 67. While, certainly, similar books could be written about the practitioners of other arts, concerning especially the chronic discrepancies of artistic claim and social status (“classic” literature, in Germany for instance, being produced by an intellectual proletariat, p. 377), the media obsession and the impression of its threatening impotence seem peculiar to literature. It may easily develop, with Stifter or Flaubert as paradigms of a mixture of personality and medium, into an exchange of ascetic deskwork for a “tigerlike” sensuousness (pp. 399– 400). Scholarship and theory, as Schlaffer (n. 64) has abundantly demonstrated, can easily develop into a secondary model of that. 68. James, The Golden Bowl (1904), p. 362. This is Mr. Verver speaking. 69. See, for suchlike matters, my article (with Peter Gendolla), “Der gesellschaftliche Kommunikationsdruck und sein Anderes: Zur Spezialisierung des Erhabenen im zeitgenössischen Kriminalroman,” in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche, 292–315, pp. 302–5. To facilitate verification let me just refer the reader to book II, section B, § 28 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. 70. Cf., for instance, Carl Grosse, Über das Erhabene (1788), ed. Carsten Zelle (Saarbrücken: Christoph Weiß; Universität Saarbrücken), especially Zelle’s afterword, pp. 82–84. 71. Cf. Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität, 3d. ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 107. 72. For a slightly existentialist version of intermediate zones, see James S. Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981): there is no level of being or essence that can be taken as the ground of play. Play is its own ground; therefore, there is no end to it. Cf. especially p. 15. 73. Quoted by Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, p. 273. See pp. 236–37,

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251, 335, where general concepts of play are used, but later narrowed down to “Text Play” (pp. 247–80). 74. Cf. ibid., pp. 259 (with a long Caillois quote), 338, n. 27. 75. One form, as we have already seen, is represented by Paul Veyne’s recombinations of historical sociology and sociological history. Applied mainly, but not exclusively, to ancient Greece and Rome, his recombinations amount to an almost systematic disjunction between “individual interest” (or even “spontaneity”) and social roles. See Brot und Spiele: Gesellschaftliche Macht und politische Herrschaft in der Antike (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), especially pp. 23 and 307. 76. Clifford Geertz, “Epilogue,” in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 374, 375. This seems a remarkable position for someone who, like Geertz, is normally classified (e.g., by Durham, Coevolution, p. 5) as a proponent of the ideational, the “symbols-and-meanings” view of culture. The whole of The Anthropology of Experience, invoking mainly Dilthey [!] and Dewey as theoretical ancestors, is troubled by the gaps between “experience,” “expressions,” and “performances.” See in particular Bruner’s introduction, “Experience and Its Expressions,” 3–30, pp. 6–7, 11–12. Expressions and, in particular, performances, do not release preexisting meanings (which, for instance, might “lie dormant in the text,” p. 11) but create them. The anthropologists touch base with Iser or, for that matter, with Derrida, in granting performative qualities of that kind to (literary) writing and reading. But in their emphasis on “complex compositional form[s]” like “protoaesthetic” “social dramas” (Turner) or full-blown aesthetic forms like opera, the possibility of a purely literary anthropology seems blocked. See Bruner, p. 21, and Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience,” p. 39. This blockage is especially evident in Bruce Kapferer’s movement from the “major commonsense usages, that is, performance as the enactment of text” to “a concern with the interconnectedness of the directionality of performance, the media through which the performance is realized,” the latter being particularly “music, dance, drama, or a particular combination of these” (“Performance and the Structuring of Meaning and Experience,” pp. 191–92). We thus find ourselves at the meeting point of cultural anthropology, psychology/psychoanalysis (Csikszentmihalyi, Winnicott), and media theory. Turner significantly removes “the world of theater, as we know it in Asia and the West” from Aristotelian contexts of imitation (however sophisticated) of social dramas (pp. 40–41). Instead, he sees them as specific phases in the wake of social breaches and crises, in particular as redress, not merely of a symbolic kind—parts, that is, of a ritual process. Turner detects their operation even in “declining cultures,” where arts frequently have the function to present “the meaning . . . that there is no meaning” (p. 43). Theater constitutes a “liminal phase, which provides a stage (and I use this term advisedly) for unique structures of experience” (p. 41). Turner also stresses the relations between social change and media changes as changes in the enactment of experience:

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Rapid advances in the scale and complexity of society, particularly after industrialization, have passed this unified liminal configuration through the prism of division of labor, with its specialization and professionalization, reducing each of these sensory domains to a set of entertainment genres flourishing in the leisure time of society, no longer in a central driving place. While it is true that the pronounced supernatural character of archaic ritual has been greatly reduced, there are signs today that the amputated specialized genres are seeking to rejoin and to recover something of the numinosity lost in their sparagmos, in their dismemberment. (p. 42)

In a theoretically less sophisticated form, Turner had taken on the problem in an earlier article, “African Ritual and Western Literature: Is a Comparative Symbology Possible?” in Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols, ed. Edith Turner (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 66–88. In this essay, the concept of symbol still impedes a fuller view of performance implications, although they are clearly there. See the emphasis on the lack sensory and body involvement of literature, pp. 66–67. In his contribution to this volume, “The Argument of Images and the Experience of Returning to the Whole,” James W. Fernandez has condensed this matter into the question of whether relatedness (“a kind of conviviality in experience”—cf. Hume and polite society) is, after what Cassirer called “the consanguinity of things” and its breakup, still thinkable. He draws attention to theoretical residues of that in sociological theory or existentialist philosophy from Cooley via Schutz to Sartre (pp. 162, 163). In “Magnitudes of Performance,” Richard Schechner explores the same domain by moving from brain theory to theatrical enactments. It would seem, to repeat, that theoretical circles, at this point, overlap in a remarkable way. They converge conceptually in tying up notions of experience, play, and games. This time, however, it is the continuum of aesthetico-cultural experience, its modes and media of enactment, that is explicitly at stake. Schechner quotes Turner, for whom “play does not fit in anywhere in particular; it is a transient and is recalcitrant to localization, to placement, to fixation—a joker in the neuroanthropological act” (p. 356). Schechner, in Performance Theory, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Routledge 1988), pp. 13– 14, ties play, perhaps somewhat narrowly, to the purportedly “free activity” of private fantasy worlds, of the pleasure principle in the Freudian sense. But while there is no need to subscribe to the pathos inherent in Huizinga’s homo ludens, historical investigations—based on minimal psychological assumptions—have produced a lot of evidence that “ ‘play’ is in the wheelwork of history” and not just in private fantasy worlds. Veyne, for one, is aware that the adjective “playful” can be used all too easily and may be extended indefinitely. “But ‘playful’ may also mean that an activity provides a satisfaction of its own independent of the purpose which it serves.” Any work in which an “individual does not subordinate him- or herself to another person or anything else cannot, except conventionally, be distinguished from a game.” Veyne, Brot und Spiele, pp. 130, 131.

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77. Cf. p. 367, n. 2; see also the examples of “realities” and/as media events, p. 366: the Olympics, the hostage crisis in Iran, the shooting down of KAL 007. 78. Schechner, “Magnitudes of Performance,” p. 367. 79. In his chapter on “Games, Play, Seriousness,” R. A. Lanham first criticizes (with Jacques Ehrmann’s famous review in Yale French Studies of 1968) the, let us say, tradition of Huizinga. That one, for Ehrmann, sins because it isolates play out of the ordinary pursuits of culture. For Ehrmann (as for Turner), the play-work antithesis, for instance, is a product of industrialism. Then, however, Ehrmann is taken to task, too: games are played selfconsciously, culture is not; distinctions have to be made, with Huizinga, between something that, at a certain moment, is over (play, whether festivities, contests, performances), and something that is not. Tristram Shandy, pp. 41– 42. Lanham, in the end, moves toward a position adopted by Santayana long ago: “Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether” (quoted p. 158). 80. Cf. Mabel Elsworth Todd, The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man (1937; New York: Dance Horizons 1972), p. 211. 81. Quoted in Lanham, “Games, Play, Seriousness,” p. 158. 82. This will reveal particular importance in an evolutionary context like the one Eric Gans has established (see below). 83. Charles D. Laughlin Jr., John McManus, Eugene G. d’Aquili, Brain, Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness (Boston, Mass.: Shambhala, New Science Library, 1990), pp. 132, 134, 190–96, 213. See also the remarks concerning play as a loosening of context specificity, p. 179. The book is dedicated to Victor Turner. 84. For Nietzsche himself, even the newly invented typewriter—which he used for a while because of his eye troubles—may have represented the impact of technology upon thought. See Martin Stingelin, “Comments on a Ball: Nietzsche’s Play on the Typewriter,” in Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 70–82. In Nietzsche’s letters, the matter takes on, though, additional complications. 85. Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie [The Birth of Tragedy], KSA 1, pp. 116, 117, here quoted from Walter Kaufmann’s translation (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 110–11. 86. Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond Good and Evil], KSA 5, p. 29. 87. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, KSA 11, p. 637; see also p. 654: “appearance/illusion” as the “only reality of things”; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, KSA 5, p. 53 ff.: shades, tones, and valeurs of appearance/illusion. 88. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1880–1882, KSA 9, No. 441, p. 312. For the sake of brevity, but also because the term “illusion” is normally too strongly negative, I will ordinarily use only “appearance”; its semantic history is drifting toward “illusion” anyway—again perhaps too strongly. See the chapter on appearances.

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89. See an early draft to Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science] in KSA 14, p. 245. 90. See Geburt der Tragödie, KSA 1, p. 47, and the later “Essay in SelfCriticism,” KSA 1, pp. 17–18, where, in direct connection with that sentence, art is on the one hand declared to be the only metaphysical activity and, on the other, squarely located in the world—the only available world—of appearances and illusions. 91. Jenseits von Gut und Böse, KSA 5, p. 78. 92. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889, KSA 13, p. 325; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, KSA 5, pp. 92, 114. 93. Zur Genealogie der Moral [The Genealogy of Morals], KSA 5, pp. 347– 49. Even Kant, one might recall, was troubled by reverberations of that in his wrestlings with the sublime, in both art, nature, and society: as an experience that breaks our concepts it is yet supposedly powerless to endanger the sovereignty of the human mind. Finally there is Adorno, for whom the aesthetic is— also—a reminder of the archaic, the power and the discontinuities of life in an emphatic sense, and an analogy to the sexual. See Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1997), pp. 175–78. Adorno therefore suggests that the idea of works of art as something permanent is an ephemeral bourgeois notion, modeled after the idea of property, alien to many great artists (p. 177). 94. See Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, KSA 11, pp. 109–11, 481. 95. See, in Peter Fuchs and Andreas Göbel, eds., Der Mensch—das Medium der Gesellschaft? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), the articles by Fuchs, “Der Mensch—das Medium der Gesellschaft?” 15–39, and Luhmann himself, “Die Tücke des Subjekts und die Frage nach dem Menschen,” 40–56. In Fuchs’s Die Umschrift: Zwei kommunikationstheoretische Studien: “japanische Kommunikation” und “Autismus” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), doubts about the “purity” of systems autopoiesis have become stronger (pp. 10–11). Accordingly, for Japanese communication, the status of the person as a depsychisized and deindividualized but highly sensitive frame of reference becomes critical again—with problematic consequences for systems terminology (cf. pp. 52–53, 58–59, 72–73, 83, 86–87). Occasionally, Hume appears as a more appropriate thinker in such contexts (p. 64 with n. 52). 96. Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie [The Birth of Tragedy], KSA 1, pp. 152, 75–76. See also the remarks concerning the “public” as a mere word, not as a homogeneous and constant unit, and the application of that to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, p. 79. 97. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874, KSA 7, p. 35. 98. For a brief sketch, see also Nietzsche’s public lecture “Das griechische Musikdrama” [Greek Musical Drama], KSA 1, pp. 515–32. 99. See the chapter on the evil spirit of passion in Les stratégies fatales (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1983). 100. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874, KSA 7, p. 274.; cf. Der Fall Wagner [The Case of Wagner], KSA 6, p. 37.

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101. Letter, April 1886, to Carl Fuchs, in Sämtliche Briefe [Complete Letters], Kritische Studienausgabe, 8 vols., ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–84; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), vol. 7, p. 176. 102. Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie, KSA 1, p. 124; Nachgelassene Fragmente 1875–1879, KSA 8, pp. 552, 557; Der Fall Wagner, KSA 6, pp. 16, 37, cf. pp. 13–16. Nietzsche’s praise of Bizet may be semi-ironic. If so, it is because it has become difficult to describe music as a natural drug, as it were, in contrast to Wagner’s “artifical” musical drug machinery. See, for a halfacknowledgement of that, Norbert Bolz, Theorie der neuen Medien (Munich: Raben Verlag, 1990), pp. 20 ff. For Carmen see Sämtliche Briefe [Complete Letters], vol. 6, pp. 144, 147, 347. 103. Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, p. xi. 104. Theses and examples could, of course, be gleaned from all of Ruskin’s writings. Here, I am mainly referring to two shorter texts, The Political Economy of Art Or “A Joy Forever” (And Its Price on the Market) (1857) and Lectures on Art (1870). 105. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 205–16, 401–4. 106. Ibid., pp. 184, 129, 352. 107. Much in the same way as Turner, Morin thinks first of forms either strongly anchored in cultural consciousness (myths, religion) or capable of performative intensification (magic, rituals). Human brain development has produced extreme swings of a pendulum homo sapiens / homo demens. For these swings, neither direct social control nor an autonomy of the inner life—materializing, for instance, in the wanderings of the soul among literary masterpieces praised by Anatole France—will permanently suffice. Edgar Morin, Le paradigme perdu: La nature humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp. 118–26, 157–64; cf. also the same author’s remarks concerning the “real” in Le Vif du Sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 38–39, 143–45, 343–45. 108. Cf. Konrad Lorenz, Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), pp. 18, 22–26; Der Abbau des Menschlichen (Munich: Piper, 1986), pp. 87, 93, 98, 103–5. 109. Eric Gans, The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 147 (cf. 301), 19. 110. Ibid., pp. 20, 24, 27, 37, 7, 147, 93. 111. Ibid., pp. 41–46. 112. Ibid., pp. 160, 29. 113. Ibid., pp. 279, 233. Cf. p. 289, where tragedy, with Sophocles, supposedly becomes independent of civic considerations. 114. Ibid., 163, 164, 31.

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Chapter Three: The Shrinkage of Fact 1. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 379, 380–81; Artaud, quoted on p. 106 (cf. p. 111 for Deleuze); Derrida quoted on p. 258. 2. Ibid., p. 367. 3. See the subtle analyses of Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 286; cf. pp. 282–85. If, though, given the necessity to expand those traces of performance, human beings must be related to (a meanwhile vanished) Nature through a “multiplicity of works” (p. 284), the question is how that multiplicity can be exemplified by literature, whether it is best exemplified by literature, etc. Cf. also Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, vol. 3 (Basel: Schwabe, 1978), p. 189. I should add that Iser would certainly object to the ways in which the concepts of performance, or even perception, are handled here. 4. In passing, we may remind ourselves that one of the main activities of Greek comedy was to deride or perhaps even to “ruin” tragedy, as Burckhardt would have it. In the chapter on opera, remarks like these will be expanded into problematizing perspectives on comparative media history: Burckhardt’s point, concerning ancient comedy and tragedy, for instance, was made by Romain Rolland with respect to French classic tragedy and opera—the latter ruining the former, absolute naiveté, not corrosive debate, as in tragedy, being used by opera in order to elicit the most intimate movements of human thought. Rolland, Histoire de l’Opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti (Les Origines du théâtre lyrique moderne) (1895; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), pp. 3, 10. Finally, tragedy outgrowing ritual and drifting into representation remained an emphatic sociocultural event as long as it formed part, with its own competitive gestures as in Euripides, of an agonistic and competitive world—as long as, also, its difficult monodies (thus Burckhardt’s guess) were sung and resung like Italian opera arias by the Athenians. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 204; for comedy ruining tragedy see pp. 231–32. 5. Blau, The Audience, p. 163. 6. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 370–72. 7. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922; London: Granada, 1976), pp. 65– 66. 8. Blau, The Audience, p. 257. 9. Ibid., p. 376. 10. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Borstock Berger, with an introduction by Randall White (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 355. 11. Cf. ibid., pp. 355, 360, 364–65. 12. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (continuous pagination) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 901. 13. Blau, The Audience, p. 40.

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14. Ibid., pp. 315, 4. For Warburg, see here chapter 2, n. 54. 15. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 142. 16. Blau, The Audience, p. 86. 17. Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, “Überlegungen zum Begriff der Hypotypose bei Kant,” in Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig, ed., Was heißt ‘Darstellen’? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 152–74, especially pp. 159–63. 18. I am following Menninghaus, “ ‘Darstellung’: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstocks Eröffnung eines neuen Paradigmas,” in Hart Nibbrig, ed., Was heißt ‘Darstellen’? 205–26. 19. Menninghaus, “ ‘Darstellung,’ ” p. 209. 20. And it is, of course, clear that detailed theories of theatrical acting emphasize that point; cf., for instance, Franziskus Lang, S. J., Dissertatio de actione scenica (1727; Bern: Francke-Verlag, 1975). 21. Menninghaus, “ ‘Darstellung’ ”, pp. 209–11. 22. Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, 3: 531, 1: 68, 1: 389. Cf. Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 205–9, 225–29. Hume here strongly suggests that we have become, to our disadvantage and to the detriment of cultural history, the victims of the official segmentation of media institutionalized in scholarly disciplines; cf. pp. 227–28. There are also rich materials to that effect in Shirley Strum Kenny, ed., British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984). See also my chapter on opera. 23. A. S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 60. 24. I am relying here, somewhat riskily, on a German publication of Schechner’s writings called—most appropriately, for my purposes—Theateranthropologie: Spiel und Ritual im Kulturvergleich (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990), pp. 17, 20, 23, 29, 134–35, 232–35. Cf. also pp. 260–63 for a description of a theatrically sadomasochistic New York establishment. I have checked these references, as far as possible, against Performance Theory, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988). 25. See, for instance, Enactment: Greek Tragedy (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), p. xvi. 26. Ibid., pp. xix, 42, 43, 5. 27. The difficulties are made worse, in the present case, by the amateurish relation this writer entertains towards the subject of Greek tragedy. Its precariousness is compounded by the use of unavoidably problematic translations. In such a situation, I have adopted, as a general premise, Eric Havelock’s assertion that “Greek literature to Euripides is composed as a performance, and in the language of performance.” “Greek drama offers no propositions, beliefs, or programmed doctrines in the style of a Dante (still more of a Milton) but an expressive dynamism whether in word or thought.” Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Unversity Press, 1986), pp. 93–94. Cf. also The Literate Revo-

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lution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), where Havelock traces the development from theater as “a contribution to the social encyclopedia” to “an ingenious entertainment” (p. 266, cf. pp. 263–64), which, to a large extent, it has remained in literate societies. Shakespeare, though, Havelock thinks, has remained truer to the Greek practice (p. 266, n. 5)—and the cutural status of ingenious entertainments is, as we will see, far from self-evident. 28. See The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), p. 77; Turner is quoting from Sally Moore. See also Richard Schechner’s introduction to this book, “Victor Turner’s Last Adventure,” 7–20, p. 8. 29. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, pp. 72, 98, 26–30. See, e.g., p. 25 for a criticism of “Western views of ritual,” pp. 54–55 for overlappings with Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow experience, p. 79 for “an extensive breakdown of boundaries between various conventionally defined sciences and arts, and between these and modes of social reality.” 30. Ibid., pp. 79, 168. 31. See for instance Arnold Gehlen’s Anthropologische Forschung: Zur Selbstbegegnung und Selbstentdeckung des Menschen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961), pp. 120–26. 32. See Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 29 (cf. vol. 7, p. 793); Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [The Genealogy of Morals], KSA 5, p. 356; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science], KSA 3, p. 446; Nietzsche contra Wagner, KSA 6, pp. 418 ff.; and Friedrich Würzbach, ed., Umwertung aller Werte (1940), 2d ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), p. 379. 33. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889, KSA 13, pp. 293– 300. 34. I would extend that criticism to Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). He locates the importance of the aesthetic in both its talk about art and its virulence in the fight of (roughly speaking) the middle classes for political hegemony. The ideology of the aesthetic, especially in absolutistic times, challenges the existing order and offers an alternative to it. Valuable (especially when compared to German traditions of philosophical hagiography) as his analyses are, for instance with respect to Kant, Eagleton’s “Marxist” perspective fails to evaluate the specific, sometimes latent thrusts of much of later aesthetics (e.g., Adorno). 35. Roy C. Flickinger, The Greek Theater and its Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918, 3d ed. 1926, repr. 1928), pp. 162–63, 16, 21–22. I am referring to Flickinger’s relatively old work because of his strong awareness of ambivalent tensions. According to a new survey of Greek tragedy (and its scholarship), Flickinger can hold his ground even today. Edith Hall has recently praised his “excellent insights” (“The Sociology of Greek Tragedy,” in The Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 93–126, p. 94). If something like a total picture emerges from this recent volume it would seem to corroborate both Flickinger’s per-

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spectives with respect to Greek tragedy and my own with respect to media configurations. Sometimes, the tensions between tragedy as a ritualistic medium and a literary work are visible in one and the same author (for instance in the impressive and instructive essays of Simon Goldhill, “The Audience of Athenian Tragedy,” 54–68, “The Language of Tragedy: Rhetoric and Communication,” 127–50, and “Modern Critical Approaches to Greek Tragedy,” 324–47). The oscillating image of Greek tragedy has become a kind of guideline for me in the analyses that follow. In terms of media history, the Companion emphasizes the filiations from tragedy, not to plays called tragedy in Renaissance Europe and after but to “balletic and operatic performance,” “musical performance and pantomime,” which expand into an elaborate “entertainment industry” (P. E. Easterling, “From Repertoire to Canon,” 211–27, p. 211; cf. in somewhat less clear form Peter Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens: The Renaissance to the Present,” 228–83, especially concerning opera and film). Tragedy appears as the central medium of a “theater state” (Paul Cartledge, taking over Clifford Geertz’s concept coined for conditions in nineteenth-century Bali, “ ‘Deep plays’: theatre as process in Greek civil life,” 3–35, p. 5), combining relaxation, entertainment, orgy, and contemplation. It is the prime exemplification of a culture of performance on all levels (“Culture of Performance,” p. 6; cf. Goldhill, “Audience,” p. 54; for the “dialectical” affinity between tragedy and court rhetoric see Cartledge, “ ‘Deep plays,’ ” pp. 14–15, 34). It cannot be exported in its sociocultural and religious importance, but in various shifts (toward opera, film, etc.) of its essential media qualities. In 322 b.c., one year after Alexander’s death in Babylon, the Greek theater state and with it tragedy break down. The Macedonians replace Athenian democracy by an oligarchy, tragedy is superseded by comedy. From now on, Dionysos keeps migrating, adopting different media as his home base. He is marginalized and yet powerful in times like the ending twentieth century, “in which drug culture, rock music, sex and violence, the many varieties of modern ecstatic cult, and even football hysteria all find recognisable analogues” (P. E. Easterling, “A Show for Dionysos,” 36–53, p. 36). Whatever Dionysos may have “originally” represented in religious terms, he remains the “elusive but compelling god,” illustrating the human condition not as something given, but as continual metamorphoses in need of flexible media (cf. Cartledge, “ ‘Deep plays,’ ” p. 6). On the one hand, tragedy is a model of intertextuality, because its “texts” offer variations on a very limited set of themes only. These seem to demand interpretations of meaning that understandably have turned the texts into supreme cultural and human values for later periods desperately looking for them. Simon Goldhill in particular has drawn attention to the connection between the great achievements of philology resulting from that search in the shape of established (“critical”) texts and profound meanings and a basic futility of the interpretational enterprise already noticed, as we will shortly see, by Jacob Burckhardt (“Modern Critical Approaches,” pp. 326–27). In the Cambridge Companion, therefore, performance-oriented studies are dominant. 36. See his remarks concerning Aristotle’s position especially on spectacle,

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pp. xi–xiii. See also Flickinger’s remarks on the “poetization” [the scare quotes are Flickinger’s] of the dithyramb after the middle of the seventh century. 37. Flickinger, pp. 131–32, 190, 166–67; Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie [The Birth of Tragedy], KSA 1, pp. 76, 78–79. 38. See Flickinger, The Greek Theater, pp. 184–85, 203, 215–16, 318. 39. For an analysis along these lines and examples from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, see Frieder Zaminer, “Musik im archaischen und klassischen Griechenland,” in Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, vol. 1, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Frieder Zaminer (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1989), 113–206, pp. 157–64. It appears as one of the ironies of philological scholarship that Zaminer’s descriptions resemble those of Nietzsche (who, we may remember, had committed suicide as a scholar in the opinion of the orthodox classical philology of his day, because of his Birth of Tragedy). See also Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), pp. 14–15, 42–43. 40. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner [The Case of Wagner], KSA 6, p. 32, note; Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874, KSA 7, p. 191; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science], KSA 3, pp. 435–437. Cf. Simon Goldhill, “The Language of Tragedy,” pp. 135–36, quoting Jean-Pierre Vernant on words not establishing but blocking communication, on “zones of opacity and incommunicability” (p. 136). 41. Blau, The Audience, p. 107. 42. For such a type of analysis, especially comparisons with opera, again in the unacknowledged wake of Nietzsche and pace Gans, see Peter D. Arnott, Public Performance in the Greek Theatre (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 27, 75, 78–79, 80–86, 100–101, 114–15. I have gleaned similar evidence from John J. Winkler and Froma J. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). This volume, though, is too rich to be reduced to my formulas. 43. J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 46, 38, 55. See particularly also pp. 50–59, and Euben’s introduction to the volume edited by him, Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 17–29. 44. Kurt Hübner, Die Wahrheit des Mythos (Munich: Beck, 1985), pp. 212–13. 45. Blau, The Audience, p. 8. 46. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, vol. 3, pp. 206, 214–19, 226–31; Rolland is quoted in Otto Daube, Oper und Musikdrama: Wandlungen einer Kunstform von der Renaissanceoper bis zu Richard Wagner (Dortmund: W. Crüwell, 1955), p. 13. 47. I am taking up and elaborating impulses from Meier. He is not responsible, though, for the direction into which they are developed. See his Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), particularly pp. 152–54, 193–97, 209–11.

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48. See ibid., p. 79. Burckhardt’s picture, in particular, is exceedingly bleak. Whatever its indebtedness to a nineteenthth-century liberalism, it remains important as one of the few assessments of the costs, in terms of psychical disruption, institutional corruption, and financial burdens, of Greek life, inextricably linked up with its glories. Cf. vol. 1 of Griechische Kulturgeschichte and vol. 4, pp. 180–84 for the fifth century, pp. 276–82 for the fourth century, pp. 492– 505, etc. for Hellenistic times. For a contemporary evaluation of Burckhardt’s picture see Jochen Bleicker, Die athenische Demokratie (Paderborn, 1985), pp. 393–95. Bleicker sees very clearly that the neutrality of contemporary scholarship has made Burckhardt’s kind of “great outlook” impossible. What we should make of that neutrality, though, is another matter. 49. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, vol. 4, pp. 189–90, 196. 50. L. 29; I am using the Penguin Classics edition of the Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles, introductory essay, notes, and glossary by Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977). 51. See his Die Welt als Tragoedie, vol 1: Aischylos, Sophokles (Munich: Beck, 1979), pp. 74, 79–83, 117–18, 130–31, 138, 145–47; for similar characterizations of Clytaemnestra see Fagles and Stanford, pp. 27–29, of Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women see P. E. Easterling, “Form and Performance,” in Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 174–75. 52. Fagles and Stanford, p. 29. 53. Blau, The Audience, p. 135. 54. Agamemnon , lines 1062–1368. 55. The Libation Bearers, line 272; line 546: “Apollo the Seer who’s never lied before”; cf. lines 399–402 and 450–65. 56. Flickinger, The Greek Theater, p. 129. 57. Fagles and Stanford, pp. 94–95. 58. Ibid., pp. 80, 82. 59. See The Tragedies of Sophocles, trans. Richard C. Jebb (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1928), Electra, 223–75, p. 231 (roughly line 225). 60. Ibid., pp. 245–48. 61. Ibid., pp. 245, 248, 251–56, 259–68. 62. See ibid., 816, 839, 860–81, 866–78, 893–95. 63. Fagles and Stanford, Glossary, p. 328. 64. Le Vif du Sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 38–39, 143–45, 343–46. 65. For this context in fifth-century Athens see S. M. Adams, Sophocles the Playwright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), pp. 81–85. 66. “La vérité et les formes juridiques,” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 2, 538–646 (with discussion). 67. Quotations follow Oedipus Tyrannus, trans. and ed. Luci Berkowitz and Theodore F. Brunner (A Norton Critical Edition) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 3. 68. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press; London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 200, quoted in Berkowitz and Brunner, p. 137.

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69. Oedipus Tyrannus, pp. 5, 13, 14–15, 17, 14, 33. 70. See Oedipus at Colonus, in The Tragedies of Sophocles, 59–123, p. 76– 77, 87, 89, 90, 99. 71. Antigone, trans. Richard Emil Braun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 69; cf. Webb’s translation, which “proved consistently valuable” also for Braun’s (p. 18), Antigone, 125–72, p. 168: “ill counsel is the sovereign curse.” 72. For other interesting dates in that respect concerning primitive and old comedy see Flickinger, pp. 53, 333–35. 73. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (A History of the Greek Mind, vol. 1) (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 36– 37. 74. I myself have dealt with it in several essays, the last of which I will mention here: “The Tragic: On the Relation between Literary Experience and Philosophical Concepts,” LiLi: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 20 (1990), 24–35. See also the literature quoted there. I should emphasize what I already suggested in the text: namely, that the situation, in my framework, is very different for comedy as compared to serious drama, especially tragedy. In that respect I differ slightly from John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), although I share his thesis about “the deflection of creative energy” (p. 136), and also from J. Paul Hunter who, quoting Loftis, speaks about the “plausible case” for a thesis about “the demise of English drama,” which “could be made for almost any date after 1616” (“The World as Stage and Closet,” in Kenny, ed., British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, 271–287, p. 272). It is clear that “profound cultural changes” (p. 285) are reflected in the shift to the novel. But spectacular theatricality also lives on—though not, and this is equally culturally significant, in the form of tragedy. 75. For this see André Varagnac et al., L’homme avant l’écriture (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1959), pp. 414–15; see also again, of course, Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, in particular pp. 94–97 for “to be” and p. 111 for “theoria.” It may not be superfluous to point out, once more, the common etymological root of “theoria” and “theatron,” much as that commonality has gone lost throughout history—or has it only changed its appearance? Havelock’s Preface to Plato is also still relevant: Plato criticized writing because it undermined an orally stabilized social encyclopedia, but he needed writing in order to formulate quasi-transcendent ideas. 76. Varagnac, L’homme avant l’écriture, p. 420.

Chapter Four: Appearances 1. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 211, 213, 215–16. 2. The notion of the “momentary evidence” (momentane Evidenz) of appearing phenomena is due to a seminal essay by Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklich-

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keitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Hans Robert Jauss, ed., Nachahmung und Illusion, Poetik und Hermeneutik I (Munich: Fink, 1964, 2d ed. 1969), 9–27. The criticism that this notion is philosophically precritical was made by Dieter Henrich. I have published a previous and different version of this chapter (“Suggestiveness or Interpretation: On the Vitality of Appearances”) in Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick, eds., Reflecting Senses: Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture, and the Arts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 15–32. 3. Cf. Faust, First Part, “Night, Study,” and Second Part, 1, “Lovely Area.” Quotations in my translation are from the Insel-Goethe Werkausgabe, ed. by various hands, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1970), vol. 3, pp. 19, 140. 4. See C. H. Waddington, Behind Appearance. A Study of Relations between Painting and the Natural Sciences in This Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 1–2. 5. See Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant (London: Gollancz, 1972), p. 5; Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (London: Pan Books, 1988), pp. 49, 163; Alain, Propos (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), p. 543. Cf. pp. 175–76, 544. 6. Cf. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1893; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 69, 73, 96–99, 102–4, 226–27. See also John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 62–69, 159–61. 7. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance, 3d ed., with an introduction by Geoffrey Hellman (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977), p. 93. 8. Ibid., pp. xxiv, 95–101. 9. For a somewhat fragmentary sketch of iconographic and iconoclastic movements see Norbert Bolz, Eine kurze Geschichte des Scheins (Munich: Fink, 1991). 10. At this time, it seems pretty obvious, though, that the technologically unleashed image explosion, in spite of all the media hype, does not carry a decisively new version of anthropologically relevant experience. As might be expected, and as later chapters will make clearer, “real” power resides in media much more closely bound up with the human body. At this point, I would just bluntly state that experience parks like Disneyland and rock music or dancing raves embody effective contemporary cultural power much more strongly than the ubiquitous small-image factories. 11. See the beginning and, in the chapter on ironic strategies, the passages on the evil spirit of passion in Les stratégies fatales (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1983). The notion of, Nietzsche apart, a relative artificiality of passion would seem to inhabit most theories of romantic love, starting perhaps particularly with Denis de Rougemont and his L’Amour et l’Occident (1939; Paris: Plon, 1982). 12. For their history see Jürgen Mittelstrass, Die Rettung der Phänomene: Ursprung und Geschichte eines antiken Forschungsprinzips (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1962).

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13. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, n.d.), pp. 110 ff. 14. An important work that tries to work out some basic operational modes of the “abstract” and the “concrete,” a work which has not met with an adequate reception, is Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte: Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). 15. Quoted by Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 60. 16. See, for example, William Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). 17. See the descriptions and quotes in Hartmut and Gernot Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 391, 452. The arguments of the Böhmes may sometimes be too “concrete.” But that does not detract from the usefulness of their perspective. For Gernot Böhme’s rewriting of Kant see his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht: Darmstädter Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 116, 118–19, 124, 128–130, 194. See, moreover, Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982), 113–37, on the dubious mastery of the sublime in eighteenth century and later theory, and Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Gary Shapiro and Alan Sico, eds., Hermeneutic Questions and Prospects (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 121–44, especially on the introduction of the dynamic in addition to the mathematical sublime and the consequent questions of power and force, pp. 124–33. I have also found useful Anthony Storr’s first chapter (“Origins and Collective Functions”) in his Music and the Mind (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992). 18. Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung [Twilight of the Gods], KSA 6, p. 81. 19. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zürich edition [Collected Works], ed. Arthur Hübscher, 10 vols. (Zürich: Diogenes, 1977), vol. 1, p. 144. 20. Schopenhauer, Über den Willen in der Natur, Zürich edition, vol. 5, p. 228; cf. vol. 1, pp. 49, 143. 21. Cf. Gerd Haffmanns, ed., Über Arthur Schopenhauer (Zürich: Diogenes, 1977), p. 272. For the following see A. Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphogenetic fields and resonance as a modern effort in Schopenhauer’s direction, The Presence of the Past (London: Fontana, 1988), especially chapter 4. And see Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982) on the “wonder” to be reinjected into our perception of the world (pp. 435 ff.). 22. Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, KSA 6, p. 439. 23. See Theo Reucher, Die situative Weltsicht Homers: Eine Interpretation der Ilias (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), pp. 7–8; Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 69–73, 255–91; Bruno Snell, Die

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Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen, 3d ed. (Hamburg: Claassen, 1955), pp. 17–42. 24. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 94– 97; Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff,” pp. 10–11; Trimpi, Muses of One Mind, pp. 106–14. 25. Trimpi, Muses of One Mind, p. 102; cf. pp. 90–91, 103–5. 26. See the very detailed commentary by W. Charlton in his (translation and) edition of the Physics, books 1 and 2, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 70–79, 95–99, 137 ff. Cf. also Hermann Schmitz, Platon und Aristoteles (Die Ideenlehre des Aristoteles, vol. 2) (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985), pp. 400–437. 27. S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts: With a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics, 4th ed. (1891; New York: Dover Publications, 1951), pp. 15–16, 118–19, 138, 148–49. 28. I am drawing conclusions from chapter 3 (pp. 104–26) of Viviana Cessi’s detailed analyses in Handeln und Erkennen in der Theorie des Tragischen bei Aristoteles (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987). 29. For a “sociological” account of archaic and modern aspects in the academy see also Paul Ludwig Landsberg, Wesen und Bedeutung der platonischen Akademie: Eine erkenntnissoziologische Untersuchung, ed. (with a preface by) Max Scheler (Bonn: Cohen, 1923), pp. 20–27, 42–49, 57–59. 30. See Volker Grassmuck, Vom Animismus zur Animation: Anmerkungen zur künstlichen Intelligenz (Hamburg: Junius, 1988), pp. 12, 16, 18–19, 22, 55. 31. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Athlone Press, 1997), pp. 64– 72, 175–78, 345–49. 32. See Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981). The case of the early Stuarts in England is comparable, their failure speedier. Cf., for instance, Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (1983; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 32–33, with comparisons between Clifford Geertz’s description of Elizabeth’s style, Balinese state ceremonials/theater, and James I. For more details, see the passages on Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Dryden in chapter 6. 33. Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, p. 12. 34. Höhlenausgänge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 25–26, 32–33, 55–58.

Chapter Five: Between Sociology and Anthropology 1. See John J. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacles in Modern Societies,” in John J. MacAloon, ed., Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia, Penn.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 241–80, especially pp. 246–48 concerning differences between spectacle and festival in the Olympic Games.

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2. Ibid., p. 243. 3. See Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Edition Buchet-Chastel, 1967), p. 60. At the time of writing, only the German edition (a translation approved by Debord) was available to me. See Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels, trans. Jean-Jacques Raspaud (Hamburg: Lutz Schulenburg Edition Nautilus, 1978). 4. Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels, pp. 8, 10, 30. 5. For English and French cultural contexts this has been going on for quite a while (Stephen Orgel, Roy Strong, Jean-Marie Apostolidès, etc). For Germany, an early exception was Richard Alewyn (concerned mainly with the baroque period). But see the publication, by the group “Poetik und Hermeneutik,” of Das Fest, ed. Walter Haug (a medievalist), Poetik und Hermeneutik 14 (Munich: Fink, 1989), especially the essay by Wolfgang Lipp, “Feste heute: Animation, Partizipation und Happening,” 663–83. 6. Lipp, “Feste heute,” p. 682. 7. MacAloon, “Olympic Games,” p. 244. 8. See Antonio Gramsci (together with some more discussions of intellectuals, nations, literature, and music), Quaderni del Carcere, vol. II, Quaderni 6– 11 (Torino: Einaudi, 1977), pp. 969, 1137. 9. I have summed up some discussions of writing in my article “Schrift— Thesen, Theorien, Typologien,” in: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds., Schrift (Munich: Fink, 1993), 9–18. 10. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 1450b, 1453b. 11. See Thomas McGeary, “Shaftesbury on Opera, Spectacle and Liberty,” Music and Letters 74 (1993), 530–41, also for comments concerning Aristotle, Horace, and neoclassicism. 12. Marvin Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature  gai (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), p. 279. Cf. p. 80. of Mori O 13. Marcello Muccioli, Il teatro giapponese: Storia e antologia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), pp. 7, 326. See Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Ortolani’s suggestion of pluralism in his subtitle is hardly borne out by his actual analysis. It is further eroded by the fact that Tsubouchi Sho yo , the “founder” of shingeki, appears to have been more concerned, in his dealings with western theater, with a reform of Kabuki—for him “the theatre of Japan” (p. 244). See pp. 244–47. “Poor quality” (p. 247) and a “superficial acting-out of western curiosities” (p. 248) seem to be Ortolani’s leitmotifs in his brief dealings with Western forms of theater in Japan. Contemporary forms of theater in Japan, like the dance theater of buto, constitute reversals to native traditions after an exposure to the West. Ortolani describes this as circularity (pp. 277–78). 14. The strongest western plea in this respect has perhaps been made in The Art of Kabuki: Famous Plays in Performance, trans. with commentary by Samuel L. Leiter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). I have been quot-

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ing from the preface, pp. ix–x. See also the introduction, where Leiter tries to distinguish the (literary or ideological) vision of the Western director from the acting traditions of certain forms (kata) in the great actor families—a point of overlap being perhaps supplied by the late Stanislavski emphasizing “physical action” (p. xx). Leiter also has a useful glossary, pp. 255–87, significantly abounding with terms for acting, techniques, scenic, property, costume, wig, makeup, and music, offering little in more literary respects (genres). Similar positions are to be found in Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, pp. 187–92. See also the shorter book by Ronald Cavaye, Kabuki: A Pocket Guide (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1993), in which the theatrical is more strongly seen in the connection, to some extent institutionalized (kakegoe callers), between actors and audience: “Kabuki without kakegoe [a kind of organized shouting during certain periods of ma, those pregnant pauses in speech and movement] is lacking in the vitality that this extraordinary and unique contact between actor and audience demonstrates” (p. 126). Concise information is also supplied by Masakatsu Gunji (with photographs by Chiaki Yoshida and synopses of important plays) in The Kabuki Guide, trans. Christopher Holmes (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987). Gunji is involved with Kabuki training. 15. For convenient surveys see, for instance, the respective articles, mostly by Peter Pörtner, in Manfred Brauneck and Gérard Schneilin, eds., Theaterlexikon (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986). Ortolani sees angura mainly as an offshoot of shingeki and is therefore skeptical about its “vitality” (The Japanese Theatre, p. 264). 16. Karatani Ko jin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 161–64. For the cultural predominance of song, see H. Jay Harris’s introduction to his translation (with extensive commentary from which I have drawn some general profits) of The Tales of Ise (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), pp. 22 ff. In many respects, matters of that kind are extensively dealt with in Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). Cf., e.g., pp. 186–202, 225–26. In emphasizing theories of literature, on the other hand, many of the present concerns are not envisaged. Generally, though, the characterization of Japanese “literature” (one is tempted to say media or even culture instead) as being derived from a nonmoralistic affectivism (and not its dilution in representational dilemmas and intellectual tensions) is a crucial approach (p. 234; cf. pp. 68–69). A brief but subtle effort at handling the difficulties of Eastern-Western philosophicotheological comparison, including remarks on the apparent weakness of the Japanese in matters of systematic and speculative philosophy, can be found in Helmut Erlinghagen, Japan: Eine Landeskunde (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1979), pp. 90–106. A short and very concise standard work on (what must appear to Westerners as) the unsystematic and ahistorical ways of Japanese thought is Masao Maruyama, Denken in Japan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). 17. Cf. J. Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 62 (and all

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of chapter 4). Cf. also Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). I will come back to both Rimer and Ueda below. For Mishima especially see also John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), and Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (London: Peter Owen, 1975). 18. See Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition, vol. XV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, 1937), 217–77 (for the obtuseness see particularly pp. 231, 233–34, 275), Preface, pp. v–xviii, viii. The theoretically crucial commentary is by Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; paperback ed. 1980, 1981), pp. 9–10. In my framework, this book appears as the best theory of a specific literary (but not generally aesthetic) response. For the basic affinities governing Western types of literary response (that is, responses mainly to carefully wrought and printed “fictional” texts) see also Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), passim. 19. My own enterprise is basically more indebted to those, among them The Seven Cultures of Capitalism by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars (New York: Doubleday, 1993), than to some of the more fashionable trends in literary, media, or cultural studies. 20. A somewhat mythical image of haragei is presented in Michihiro Matsumoto, The Unspoken Way: Haragei: Silence in Japanese Business and Society (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1988). Cf. pp. 24, 36, 47. The best historical-philological discussion of these and other terms, based on a study of early sources, including Western ones (produced, for instance, by the Portuguese, etc., in Japan), is Thomas F. Leims, Die Entstehung des Kabuki: Transkulturation Europa-Japan im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). See pp. 23– 121, here in particular p. 83. 21. For analyses, in the wake of Barthes, to that effect see Philippe Pons, Japon (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 166. 22. For criticisms of that kind see Masaru Sekine (himself a trained No actor) and Christopher Murray, Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1990); C. C. Barfoot, “ ‘Distinguished, Indirect and Symbolic’: Yeats and Noh,” in Barfoot and Cobi Bordewijk, eds., Theatre Intercontinental: Forms, Functions, Correspondences (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 61– 82. Comparisons concerning No (and Kyogen, the wild and rough interludes between No plays, swerving between a Zen consciousness and everyday crudeness) have, perhaps more surprisingly, been made with respect to Beckett. For what follows, I have, apart from my own dubious experience, mainly drawn on Leims, Kabuki (see n. 20), Erika de Poorter, “Japanese Theatre: In Search of the Beautiful and the Spectacular,” in Barfoot and Bordewijk, eds., 43–60; Yonezu Hamamura, Takashi Sugawara, Junji Kinoshita, and Hiroshi Minami, Kabuki, trans. Fumi Takano (The Society of Traditional Arts) (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1956); A. C. Scott, The Kabuki Theatre of Japan (London: George Allen and

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Unwin, 1955); Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theater (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1974; original ed. Oxford University Press, 1956)—perhaps the best introduction; Toshio Kawatake, Das Barocke im Kabuki—Das Kabukihafte im Barocktheater, trans. Thomas Leims (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981). For comparative perspectives on Yeats and Pound see also Makoto Ueda, Zeami, Basho, Yeats, Pound: A Study in Japanese and English Poetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), particularly pp. 88– 89, 91. 23. Ueda, Zeami, p. 40. 24. Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 115, 120. 25. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 152–59. 26. I am quoting from the representative and impressive survey of the literature of the former Federal Republic of (West) Germany by Ralf Schnell, Die Literatur der Bundesrepublik: Autoren, Geschichte, Literaturbetrieb (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1986), p. 63. Schnell has a precise diagnosis; I am not convinced by the cure he suggests (cf. pp. 60–64: “The Theater: What for?”). For earlier periods see Miner, Comparative Poetics, pp. 53–58. 27. Cf. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1973), in particular pp. 19 ff., 102 ff., 198 (italics by Giddens). 28. There is a lot of interesting material to that effect in vol. 7 of the “Classics of Japanese Thought and Culture,” So kichi Tsuda’s An Inquiry into the Japanese Mind as Mirrored in Literature (The Flowering of Common People Literature) (Tokyo: Yushodo, 1970). Cf., e.g., pp. 33, 59. 29. Cf. de Poorter, “Japanese Theatre,” p. 60. 30. See Hermann Bohner, Seami (Zeami), Blumenspiegel (Kwakyo, Hanano-kagami), translation, introduction, commentary; here particularly the second part, “The Twelve Themes” (Tokyo: OAG , 1954; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1954). Ortolani basically adopts a similar method (The Japanese Theatre, pp. 109–26). There are several further volumes of Bohner’s concerned with No and Zeami’s writings: Die einzelnen No (Tokyo: OAG, 1956), a running commentary on what appears to be all the extant No plays; and No: Einführung (Tokyo: OAG, 1959; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1959), a more systematic treatment. 31. Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, p. 111; Bohner, Seami, pp. 13, 17, 65, 62, 94–95, 52, 68, 73, 50; No, p. 15. 32. Bohner, Seami, pp. 28, 41, 52; Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, pp. 122–23, 119; Bohner, Seami, pp. 43, 86–87. Although writing both in the heyday of scholarly and philological pathos and fascinated by the very different effects of Japanese theater, Bohner was sometimes forced to almost funny swerves in arguments. The prestige of the text exemplified by or ascribed to Western classics (like Goethe and Schiller) tempts him to credit even the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony with a transcending of music. For a moment, he

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is unaware of the fact that the status of the text in Beethoven sung indefatigably in a peculiar accent in countless choirs across Japan around Christmas and in Schiller is not the same. But only a few lines later, spoken language is seen, because of its limitations and muteness (Stummheit), as aspiring toward music (No, p. 85). Dance and music (however rudimentary they may appear for Western habits) should not suffer “the fate that those elements did have in rebus Graecis” (Die einzelnen No, p. D). 33. Bohner, No, pp. 87, 89–91, 424. 34. Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, pp. 169, 168. 35. See also ibid., p. 187. 36. Bohner, No, pp. 11, 38, 41, 43, 99. 37. Looking at Brecht’s evolution, one could say, of course, that he may also have held, or developed, completely different views with respect to the epic theater, the Lehrstücke, and their type of audience involvement or distancing. This ambivalence shows up particularly well in investigations of Brecht’s “Asian” theatrical trends—and it is one of the ambivalences that will haunt the investigations in the third part. 38. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, Der Kinnhaken und andere Box- und Sportgeschichten, ed. Günter Berg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 22–23, 32–33, 105, 98–99, 34–35. Most of the relevant texts are from the late twenties. 39. For this, see Walter Muschg, Tragische Literaturgeschichte (1948; Bern: Francke, 4th ed. 1969), especially pp. 405–41. For a modernized version of that topic see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft: Eine Geschichte der Genußmittel (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990). Coming from the other, the medical-pharmaceutical side, the references to writers and artists in Handbuch der Rauschdrogen, eds. W. Schmidbauer and J. von Scheidt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), are equally instructive. 40. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 14. 41. Muccioli, Il teatro giapponese, pp. 90, 190. 42. Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses, trans. Michael Gallagher (The Sea of Fertility: A Cycle of Four Novels, vol. 2) (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), pp. 210–12. Cf. the short article on No by Hata in 101 Key Words for Understanding Japan (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1995), p. 146. See also the articles on Kabuki by Hashimoto Osamu, p. 99, and on Yakuza, the gangsters, by Matsuda Osamu, p. 171. 43. See, e.g., Bohner, No, pp. 15–16, 39–52 on sarugaku, “monkey” plays. 44. Pons, Japon, p. 218. 45. See de Poorter, “Japanese Theatre,” p. 51; Scott, The Kabuki Theatre of Japan, pp. 32–33; Ernst, The Kabuki Theater, p. 75. 46. Ernst, The Kabuki Theater, p. 74. 47. Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, p. 216. 48. See the contrast in attitudes and conceptual seriousness of, on the one hand, Asada Akira, “Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and

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Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 273–78, and, on the other hand, Jameson’s Foreword to Karatani, pp. vii–xx. It is Karatani Ko jin, too, who sees no constructions in Japan to be deconstructed (see Alan Wolfe, “Suicide and the Japanese Postmodern: A Postnarrative Paradigm?” in Miyoshi and Harootunian, 215–33, pp. 224, 228–29). 49. Karatani, Origins, pp. 55–56, 58–59. 50. Cf. Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre, p. 199. 51. Karatani, Origins, p. 71. 52. Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction, p. 7. 53. Ibid., pp. 9, 14. 54. Ibid., pp. 16, 18; Ueda, Zeami, pp. 17, 25, 28, 126.  gai and the Modernization of 55. Quoted in Richard John Bowring, Mori O Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 63, 245.  gai considered as Cf. p. 35 for similar arguments of Tsubouchi Sho yo , p. x for O stylist, p. 34 for the “lower” status of literature. The recent book by Marvin Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary, covers similar grounds in a different perspective. Marcus’s point (with Denis Donoghue in the New York Times) that even in the West the fascination of narrative biography has basically supplanted the novel (p. 10) well deserves further pondering.  gai, pp. 156, 85–86. 56. Cf. Bowring, Mori O 57. Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary, pp. 137, 138, 142. 58. Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction, pp. 19–20. 59. Cf. Marilyn Ivy, “Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,” in Miyoshi and Harootunian, 21–46, pp. 39–42. Looking into Japanese dictionaries of aesthetics would corroborate these assertions—whether we take “native” or Western-based dictionaries as examples. 60. Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, pp. 45, 81. 61. Ibid., pp. 66, 81. Ueda is apparently unaware of the “contradictory” directions into which his analysis is taking him. 62. Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction, p. 39; Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, p. 11. 63. Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction, pp. 40, 120–21, 175, with reference to Kawabata. 64. Cf. Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, pp. 176–77, 185–87, 199, 203–4. 65. Cf. Beauty and Sadness, trans. Howard Hibbett (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1975), pp. 34, 78; Snow Country, trans. with an introduction by Edward G. Seidensticker (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1957) (Unesco Series of Contemporary Works, Japanese Series), pp. vii–viii. 66. Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, pp. 39–41, 86. 67. Cf. ibid., pp. 193–97, 215. 68. Ibid., pp. 120–21, 171. 69. For a list, certainly not complete, of modern suicide writers, see Scott Stokes, Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, p. 143. 70. Cf. Ken K. Ito, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds (Stanford,

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Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 213. Ito, for all his valuable analyses, loses sight of the cultural-theoretical problem involved. Cf. pp. 1–2, 43, 166. 71. Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, pp. 221, 227; Nathan, Mishima, p. 140. 72. Quoted by Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, p. 232; see also the “Gymnasium of Individuality,” a writer’s paradise and its ingredients, in ibid., pp. 234–35. 73. Nathan, Mishima, pp. 84, 89. 74. Scott Stokes, Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, p. 111; see pp. 162–63. 75. Roy Starrs, Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1994), p. 61. See pp. 60–61, 63, 69, 78, 83, 191. All of Starrs’s first part (“Mishima as a Philosophic Novelist”) is a mess; his parts two and three (“Sex, Psychology and Anti-Psychology” and “The Road to Violent Action”) are much more informative, because they trace the way out of the representational traps of writing—not into the Western kind of parodic writing, but into the theatricality, if not absurdity of real-life action. Comparisons, in passing, with Foucault’s theories as possibly related to his possible personal-political background are also suggestive. The extent to which one may have, in reading Japanese novels, to suspend all habitual Western categories or theories of literature and to relocate texts in deeply anchored but somewhat intangible yet emotionalized cultural mentalities is emphasized in Dennis Keene, Yokumitsu Riichi: Modernist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), especially chapter 1 (“Situation”) and pp. 160–61. Cf. also Arishima Takeo, A Certain Woman, trans. and with an introduction by Kenneth Strong (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978), pp. 1–4 (introduction). In Keene, the assertion I have repeatedly hinted at, namely that theory and literary analysis might be a long and laborious detour back to judgments of taste and value, is made quite openly. It is hard to see how one could escape his conclusions. For suggestive evocations of contemporary writing situations see the interviews and reports by Manfred Osten, Die Erotik des Pfirsichs: Japanische Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). 76. One of the most striking Japanese examples for that is Yasuo Uchida’s The Togakushi Legend Murders (Rutland, Vt.: C. E. Tuttle, 1994). Generally, Japanese detective novels seem much more concretely powerful than their “civil” counterparts. 77. Miner, Comparative Poetics, p. 58–60.

Chapter Six: Fragments of an Absent World Theater 1. Ironically, it seems possible that Kabuki, one of the main and relatively long-lived spectacular media of Japan, may have been “sponsored” and propelled into succinct forms by Western media that, by and large, have become submerged or peripheral in the West. Thomas Leims, in particular, has elaborated, in relatively minute historical and philological detail, some hints given in

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Heinz Kindermann’s gigantic enterprise of theatrical history both for the West and and more recently also for the eastern and southern regions of the world. The Goths who came to occupy the Iberian Peninsula adopted the more “theatrical” forms of the Greek-Syrian, that is, Oriental Christian, mass and other religious rites, such as processions and dances. This historico-religious conjunction again highlights a crucial theoretical point in the anthropological theory of ritual: we are normally tempted to overemphasize the normative meanings and to underestimate the dynamic, nonsemantic theatrical efficacy of rituals. Cf. Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 270–71. The theoretical problem shows up historically, for instance, in the conflicts between (dogma-oriented and controloriented) church authorities on the one hand and the practice and media of service (excluding or including fools’ festivals, for instance) on the other. In this respect, the differences in conscientious-interpretational interiority and “external,” performative efficacy between Catholic and Protestant varieties are striking. But the differences have caused trouble within the only mythologically unified Catholic Church itself. As a general structural tension, differences of orientation are latently or openly operative in the more secular domains of discourse and especially media. Leims, in any case, postulates an inspiration of Kabuki by Portuguese theatrical-religious forms entering Japan at Nagasaki. That may well be. More interesting, however, are the systematically easy transitions between a vaguely religious theatricality, professional or mass dancing (furyu—comparable to the carnival in Rio de Janeiro), and dancing in Kabuki or, more pointedly, dance Kabuki (kabuki odori). In short, we are dealing with oscillations between professionalized forms of religious and secular entertainment. In the religious form, an aura of significance will be normally more pervasive, yet it does not necessarily overshadow the performance as such. The “Iberian connection,” as one rudimentary incarnation of an alternative Western media history, will have to be pursued when we turn to opera. 2. Schechner, Performance Theory rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 219, 222, 135–37. 3. See also ibid., pp. 173–74. 4. Ibid., pp. 196–205. 5. Ibid., pp. 205–6. 6. Ibid., p. 232. 7. Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Herbert Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), especially pp. 66, 77. 8. Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 41. Much as Shakespeare has come to be treated predominantly in interpretational terms of some kind, the case for a theatricality of both reflexive sophistication and directly engaging humor or pathos (the latter in particular being comparable or analogous to opera) may not be completely lost. Graham Bradshaw’s case is most instructive here. He is committed, in the name of multifarious textual energies (“a Shake-

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spearean poetic drama as a powerfully generative matrix of multiple meanings, or field of forces,” p. 33) to a criticism of (“marxoid”) cultural materialism and to an evaluation of the more sophisticated approaches variously called “cultural poetics” (Stephen Greenblatt) or New Historicism. He thus squarely places himself into interpretational traditions of “study” and “reading(s),” suggesting “representational complexities” and opposing ideas about a monolithic audience that merely wanted to be entertained, with a queen in the background who wanted to be glorified; cf. pp. 34–35, 56. These complexities and their relations Bradshaw sometimes characterizes with the metaphor of “musicalization” (p. 75) and other structural metaphors taken from musical theory. But Bradshaw keeps being dogged by the question what kind of experience drama might initiate (cf., e.g., p. 109 for “divergent responses” to Henry V). Divergent “responses” are mainly triggered by the characters’ speeches (to themselves or others) and the heavy, well-nigh autonomous weight they may gain in specific situations. At such points, when the question of an overall relatability of textual elements may lose importance, Bradshaw’s metaphor of musicalization threatens to turn into a functional (and not just structural) analogy. It becomes at least conceivable, then, that a play consists largely of “Big Tunes and solo arias, like a Puccini opera or a John Osborne play” (p. 111). Bradshaw says that “reading it [Henry V] that way blocks out too much” (p. 111). What he—medialogically—should have said is that listening to the play in this way produces types of results (“experiences”) different in kind from the differences engendered by sustained interpretational readings. On the whole, then, Bradshaw’s book occupies a superior position in the traditions of sophisticated interpretation (with its inevitable elements of latent moralities, taste, and value judgments). On repeated occasions, however, and once in principle in a kind of self-parody of interpretation, Bradshaw is very much aware that “all these unsparingly analytical complications are a feature of your [his] own analysis, not of the play. But can’t you see how, if the play does match your account of it, that might be a reason for valuing it less highly than you do? Interpretation isn’t the only game in town. You write as if going round and round were the only good” (p. 124; cf. pp. 122–23). Othello’s speeches in particular, wandering as they do between pathos on the one hand, neologistic poeticity and nonsense on the other, would seem to support the interpretational self-parody. In such a perspective, Bradshaw’s reentry into the game of interpretation especially with respect to the (alleged) double time scheme and questions like Desdemona’s virginity or her way and time of losing it (more or less pp. 148– 222) turns, in spite of the sophistication and sensibility it demonstrates, into something like a letdown. Within Shakesperean criticism, the kind of operatic criticism I am offering with respect to Bradshaw in what follows, I am indebted, for instance, to some of James L. Calderwood’s books on Shakespearean “metadrama” (not couched so pointedly, to be sure, in terms of media theory, but well on their way to it). See especially To Be and Not to Be, e.g., p. 76 on the “triumph of sound over sense” and generally the notion of metadrama as the obsessive occupation, es-

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pecially of Shakespeare, with “dramatic art itself—its materials, its media of language and theater, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order” (Shakespearean Metadrama, p. 5), with convergences between plays and audience and the engrossment “in the epistemology of the theater” (p. 10; cf. pp. 12, 21, 33 n. 7, 133–36, 139–42). If, on the other hand, one pursues the type of approach (and its implied theory) practiced by Bradshaw, one might perhaps, in the name of intellectual rigor, curtail the amount of interminable and inconclusive interpretation. For a model of that rigor see Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Compared to such a book, cultural materialism does indeed look its age, and stands in no need of laborious refutation. 9. Romain Rolland, Histoire de l’Opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti (Les Origines du théâtre lyrique moderne) (1895; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), pp. 3, 10. 10. Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), especially pp. 108–25, 126–51. 11. For material, see C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11 vols.; from the sixth vol. onwards co-edited by Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 1, p. 59 (and pp. 59–61; cf. also vol. 10, 1950, pp. 689–97); Rosalind Miles, Ben Jonson: His Life and Work (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, 1990), pp. 254, 248, 257. The historical picture in other works remains the same. See also Jonas A. Barish, “Jonson and the Loathéd Stage,” in William Blissett, Julian Patrick, and R. W. van Vossen, eds., A Celebration of Ben Jonson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 27– 53. The stage designs of Jonson’s rival Jones are now beautifully available in John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 12. The most useful material for my purpose can be found in James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). But see also the materials in Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 207 (Dryden’s definition of opera as the first “posthuman” art), pp. 433, 482–83 (the Italian opera boom and the “deplorable condition” of tragedy), and Shirley Strum Kenny, ed., British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660– 1800 (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), especially the articles by Judith Milhous (“The Multimedia Spectacular on the Renaissance Stage,” 41–66), Robert D. Hume (“Opera in London, 1695–1706,” 68–91), and Stoddard Lincoln (“The Librettos and Lyrics of William Congreve,” 116–32). It is instructive to compare Hume (Development) on “the problem of meaning” in comic drama (pp. 144–48), on the “untidy sub-genre” of “English” opera within serious drama (pp. 205–9), and on “the attractions of operatic extravagance” (pp. 225–29). 13. Cf. Winn, John Dryden and His World, pp. 262, 269, 323, 264; Dryden, letter to Mulgrave, quoted by Winn, p. 260.

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14. Ibid., pp. 264–65. 15. It is extremely risky, or rather downright false, to say, as Winn does, that Dryden, despite his “radical compression of Milton’s material,” managed to “preserve not only the shape of the story, but much of its thematic complexity” (p. 266). Winn even thinks he can give examples of how Dryden manages to say “the same thing in four lines” where Milton, for reasons unknown or in any case not given, had felt compelled to use nine (p. 267). Such an assertion, together with Winn’s cheerful use of the term “content,” reintroduces the heresy of paraphrase that repeatedly seemed to have been ousted from literary studies and never had a place in musical studies. It implies not the creative fluidity but a basic superfluity of literary discourse. Analogously, “poems” like “Alexander’s Feast, or The Power of Music,” whatever they are, are not texts about music, as Winn claims (p. 493), even if, for want of knowledge concerning the setup of arias, recitatives, and ensembles, we may feel we must treat them as texts. In the long histories of conceptions and practices of the “lyric,” the idea that the lyric is closely associated with song, that it merges with it or must at least try to imitate its characteristics, has certainly deteriorated into a nostalgic myth often enough (the fiction of unity being perhaps first set up by Horace). But it is not just the names of many lyric genres (ode, hymn, song, etc.) that should make us aware that the contrary idea of the separation of the lyric and music can turn into an equally deceptive countermyth. There have been, after World War II, somewhat vague, partly “existentialist-irrational” theories of the lyric (Emil Staiger, Wolfgang Kayser, but see also the quarrel between René Wellek, Käte Hamburger, and others) that asserted its songlike qualities. In the dominant institutional-theoretical web of modern scholarship, they have not had much of a chance to intervene into and curb the interpretational habits of the profession. Quite on the contrary: the debate, for instance, between Heidegger and Staiger (continued by others) on the interpretation of a seemingly prototypic lyric poem by Eduard Mörike has made it clear to what extent the display of interpretations must apparently go on. In any case, the analogy with song is cut off, in these theories, from the sociocultural occasions in which the lyric as song, to all intents and purposes, was produced. They treat song as a mode of enhanced, floating interiority. Modern media-oriented studies of the lyric have harped, by contrast it seems to me, too much on the illusions, the hollowness of that interiorized lyric pose. 16. See also Winn, John Dryden and His World, p. 85. 17. Miller, “Introduction,” in Jonathan Miller, ed., Don Giovanni: Myths of Seduction and Betrayal (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), vii–xiv, p. vii. 18. Cf. also the case of Saint-Evremond, 1614–1703, and his essay “Sur les opéras.” 19. The latter points were made with particular force by Eduard Hanslick in his Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1854; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981). 20. Rosen and Pevsner are quoted by Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), pp. 65–66, who, on p. 65, sub-

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scribes to Rosen’s position. Nicholas Cook’s brilliant Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) would merit a much fuller consideration here. For the gap mentioned (for which Cook also quotes the late—and to my mind the greatest twentieth-century—German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, to whom I have already referred and will refer repeatedly again), see pp. 8, 68– 69, 152–53. In dealing with reception, Cook starts with the (literary) theory of aesthetic effect of Wolfgang Iser. Significantly, he feels compelled to depart from it in his application to music (cf. p. 171). Also of crucial importance is Cook’s discussion of the role of explicit or implicit kinesthetic elements in music and especially the role of “vocal awareness” even in purely instrumental music (pp. 95–97). 21. Cf. Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind, pp. 50–51, xi. 22. This, in fact, is the thesis of Reinhard Strohm’s Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert (Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1979), pp. 11–12, a book generally conspicuous by its meticulous historical and technical arguments (it is mainly written for the active musician, p. 7). 23. See Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnar, Die Bühne im Bauhaus (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1965), pp. 52–53 (MoholyNagy), and “Afterword” by Gropius, p. 92. See also the detailed scheme for “stage, cult and popular festival,” p. 9 by Schlemmer. See further the article, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (February 3, 1996), “Cyberspace, ein Geisterreich,” by Horst Bredekamp. 24. Cf. Strohm, Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert, pp. 11–12. 25. For Musil see “Noch einmal Theaterkrisis und Theatergesundung,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frisé, vol. 9 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1709–14, pp. 1711–12. 26. Cf. the 1979 introduction of Percy M. Young to William Coxe, Anecdotes of George Frederick Handel and John Christopher Smith with Select Pieces of Music Composed by J. C. Smith: Never Published Before (1799; New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), pp. xvi–xvii. 27. Cf. my “Il castrato digitalizzato: Farinelli and the Medical-Aesthetic Complex,” in Angela Krewani, ed., Artefakte, Artefiktionen: Transformationsprozesse zeitgenössischer Literaturen, Medien, Künste, Architekturen, Festschrift C. W. Thomsen (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000), 83– 95. 28. Both Goethe and Schlegel are quoted in Sebastian Neumeister’s Mythos und Repräsentation: Die mythologischen Festspiele Calderóns (Munich: Fink, 1978), pp. 11, 13–14. The theoretical and historical implications of Neumeister’s book are considerable and hardly exploited. Cf. also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Eine’ Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 350–458, on Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Cervantes, to which I will return. For the France of Louis XIV see Apostolidès, Le roimachine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981). 29. Neumeister, Mythos und Repräsentation, pp. 27–45, 62. It is striking that Neumeister himself, in spite of his general multimedia orientation, thinks

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he can handle the fiestas within the methodological array of literary scholarship (p. 45). His analyses—excepting some dubious opinions like the one about the heights of philosophical significance in Mozart’s Magic Flute (p. 72)—do not bear out that claim. Neumeister’s book in fact remains suspended between interpretation (both traditional and “open”), content analysis on the one hand, and the lures of spectacular but vague or only politically concrete significance on the other. (For the theoretical options see pp. 154–57.) An “inner” perspective is devoted to interpretation (chapter 5), an “outer” perspective to the (optical, scenic) sources of spectacular effect (chapter 6). The opposition between music as an “aesthetic” and music as a “philosophical” phenomenon simply takes a historicalconceptual distinction between a “sensually corrupting” and a “rationaldivine” music for granted (p. 175). The possibility that music must be moralized in both directions in order to make sense of its gripping but dissipative effects is not envisaged. 30. Cf., for Corneille, for instance, ibid., pp. 55–56. 31. Karl Vossler, Lope de Vega und sein Zeitalter, 1932, quoted by Musil in Tagebücher, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983), p. 808. 32. Cf. Hyunseon Lee, Günter de Bruyn—Christoph Hein—Heiner Müller: Drei Interviews (Siegen: Universität-Gesamthochschule Fachbereich 3, 1995), p. 56. 33. Gumbrecht, ‘Eine’ Geschichte der spanischen Literatur, pp. 390, 401– 2, 416. For Lope, see p. 350; for Calderón, p. 426. Cf. particularly pp. 356–57. 34. Ibid., pp. 367, 357, 366–70, 374. Cf. also the remarks concerning clothing, fashions, and El Greco, pp. 362–64. 35. Ibid., pp. 379, 443–44, 389. 36. Cf. also ibid., pp. 401–2 on the comparison of Cervantes’ novel with Lope’s life; p. 416. 37. Cf. Neumeister, Mythos und Repräsentation, pp. 12, 74–76. 38. Ute Daniel, Hoftheater: Zur Geschichte des Theaters und der Höfe im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995), pp. 10, 11 (cf. 463–64), 460–61. Daniel is also instructive where she describes the failure of efforts to ban opera because of its general appeal in absolutistic contexts keen on exclusive self-representation. Louis XIV in France, for example, besides tolerating, of course, the special French development achieved by Lully and Rameau, was not able to keep Italian troups permanently away, pp. 41–43. 39. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1980), pp. 3, 8, 21. 40. Daniel, Hoftheater, p. 118. 41. See Schechner, Performance Theory, pp. 122, 252–53. 42. Guy Debord, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (Hamburg: Lutz Schulenburg, Edition Nautilus, 1978), p. 106. 43. Quoted in Neumeister, Mythos und Repräsentation, pp. 213–14, 239, 269–70, 275 n. 36. 44. In recent years, investigations into opera by scholars coming from liter-

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ary studies have appeared in considerable numbers. Lindenberger, from whom the term “operatic principle” is borrowed, and Schmidgall’s book on Shakespeare’s “arias” have already been mentioned. In Germany, Jens Malte Fischer has edited a collection on Oper und Operntext (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985); Albert Gier one on Romanistische Beiträge zur Libretto-Forschung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1986); in Austria, contributions are numerous. 45. In the book edited by Fischer, for instance, the articles by Gunter Reiss and Norbert Miller remain clearly on the literary side, while those by Uwe Schweikert, Harald Fricke, and Claus H. Henneberg and Fischer himself take the desertion of literature by opera more or less for granted. Fricke points out that Verdi’s Don Carlos is more often produced in Germany than Schiller’s drama on which it is “based.” Verdi, in his picture, transforms an idealistic history play into “musical world theater” (p. 109). Henneberg, who wrote the libretto for Aribert Reimann’s Lear, goes even further in privileging “the theatrical quality of music” (p. 269). He leaves it open to what extent Reimann’s music turned one of “the most terrible enterprises”—the use of Shakespeare for opera—into a success. Reimann himself, as I mentioned before in Part One, is unable to decide whether the business of opera—the spectacle of basic human emotions—can be conducted with “complicated” modern music, whether opera, in some way, must return to a melodic orientation, must cater, perhaps even pander, to the needs, in Hofmannsthal’s term, of the spiritual body or, horribile dictu, sentimentality (see the interview in Der Spiegel 36 [Aug. 31, 1992], pp. 204–9). Similarly diverging trends are obvious in Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Walter Bernhart, ed., Die Semantik der musiko-literarischen Gattungen: Methodik und Analyse (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1994). I would definitely opt for what I consider the theoretical upshot of Robert Freeman’s Opera without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1675–1725 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981)—namely that while there is a lot of libretto reform, its transformation into material for literary analysis is possible only from a pre-adopted and generalized literary perspective, that is, from a perspective which this book tries to relativize. 46. See Wagner, Oper und Drama, ed. Klaus Kropfinger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), pp. 63, 123–24, 135, 158–59, 202, etc.; Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), pp. 43–44, 82–83; Hanslick, Vom MusikalischSchönen, pp. 8, 70. For “tests” see pp. 19, 22. 47. Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, pp. 16, 32, 85, 23, 73. 48. Ibid., pp. 28–29, with somewhat sarcastic remarks about Wagner’s selfcontradictions, pp. 28–31, and p. 45. As an aside, we may observe that Hanslick is acutely aware of the discrepancies between the history of art and a (utopian) aesthetics. 49. Gilles Deleuze, Perikles und Verdi: Die Philosophie des François Châtelet, trans. Thomas Lange (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1989), p. 25. 50. Oskar Becker, “Von der Hinfälligkeit des Schönen und der Abenteuer-

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lichkeit des Künstlers: Eine ontologische Untersuchung im ästhetischen Phänomenbereich,” in Festschrift: Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929), 27–52, pp. 29, 41. The similarity—in a seemingly totally different pragmatist context—with Dewey’s distinction between the product of and the work of art is striking (Art as Experience, p. 214). 51. The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 1: 1660–1700, ed. William van Lennep (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1979), p. lxv. Further related material in a different context in Hellmuth Christian Wolff, Die Venezianische Oper in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters im Zeitalter des Barock (1937; Bologna: Forni, 1975). Wolff, like Leims with respect to Kabuki, links the Venetian opera of that time with carnival (pp. 20–22). Historical facts, however, are less important here than systematic comparability outlined in the main text. See also Richard Friedenthal, Georg Friedrich Händel in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), pp. 62 (opera, masked balls, orgies), 75–76, 100, etc. 52. The historical genre of the eroicocomico represents for opera, according to Wolff, Die Venezianische Oper (pp. 7, 13–14, 70), a potentially generalizable form. Opera buffa, according to Wolfgang Osthoff, is the central event in opera history (cf. Strohm, Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert, pp. 247, 251) in that it epitomizes the potential universality of a specific—eighteenthcentury Venetian—creation. 53. Van Lennep, pp. xxx, xxvii–xxviii, cxiii, cxvii–cxviii. 54. Cf. Barthes, Image. Music. Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), 179–90, pp. 181–82, 185, 188. 55. Muschg, in his Tragische Literaturgeschichte (1948; Bern: Francke, 4th ed. 1969), pp. 459–60, quoting Schiller about Schlegel’s combination of specious infinite capability for love and horrible wit, goes so far as to call Lucinde the bungled product of an impotent hack [“Machwerk eines impotenten Literaten”]; even Schlegel’s friend Novalis leaned to this kind of criticism. 56. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 22, 27, 222, 196–97, 227–28. 57. Ibid., pp. 238, 239. 58. Ibid., pp. 240, 242, 244. 59. Ibid., p. 184. 60. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2 vols. (continuous pagination), p. 103. 61. Arnold Gehlen, Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist, Philosophische Schriften, vol. I, ed. Lothar Samson (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), p. 134. 62. Hegel, Aesthetics, p. v. 63. Ibid., pp. 141, 145–46, 151. 64. Ibid., pp. 4, 598, 120. 65. Ibid., pp. 122, 853, 866, 867. Cf. p. 866, and in somewhat different formulations pp. 155–56, 170, where Hegel talks of “spiritual cheerfulness,”

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“satisfaction and delight,” “this freshly awakened spiritual freedom and vitality in conception and execution.” 66. Ibid., pp. 1092, 967. 67. Ibid., pp. 1187–89. 68. Burnim, “Looking Upon His Like Again: Garrick and the Artist,” in Kenny, ed., British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, 182–218, p. 215. 69. J. Paul Hunter, “The World as Stage and Closet,” in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, p. 271. 70. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 246. 71. Ibid., pp. 247–48. 72. The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). For Diderot see “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” in Œuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1968), 299–381, p. 306 about an equal aptitude for all kinds of characters and roles (“une égale aptitude à toutes sortes de caractères et de rôles”). 73. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1997), pp. 118–19. 74. Denis Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,”, pp. 318 (cf. p. 323), 362, 346–47. See p. 328 for a detailed description. Interestingly enough, this prevented Garrick, according to Diderot, from acting in Racine’s plays because the autonomous strength of Racine’s language renders the actor almost immobile (p. 305, n. 1). 75. Hegel, Aesthetics, pp. 1191, 1192. Cf. the later passages on the “dithering figures” of modern tragedy, pp. 1228–30, with Shakespeare not always but often as the main exception because of “the formal inevitability” of his personalities, p. 1230. 76. Ibid., pp. 900, 901, 945–46. 77. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 73, 74–77, 177, 70, 178. 78. Ibid., pp. 100–103. 79. Hegel, Aesthetics, pp. 886–87; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 106. 80. For my needs, therefore, books like Heinz Steinert’s Adorno in Wien: Über die (Un-)Möglichkeit von Kunst, Kultur und Befreiung (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1989), and Die Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie oder: Warum Professor Adorno Jazz-Musik nicht ausstehen konnte (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1992), with their subtle analysis of Adorno’s theories and their cultural orientation, are far more important than the mountains of exegesis normally devoted to Adorno’s texts. For what follows see Adorno’s essay “Bürgerliche Oper,” in Schriften, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 24–39. 81. Adorno, “Bürgerliche Oper,” pp. 24, 37. This is also, incidentally, the starting point for Lukács in the first volume of his Ästhetik; Max Weber, of course, would provide further materials in that respect. 82. Ibid., pp. 24, 33. Carl Dahlhaus, Vom Musikdrama zur Literaturoper

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(Munich: Musikverlag Katzbichler, 1983), pp. 11 ff., 17. Similar remarks by the opera director Götz Friedrich, Musiktheater: Ansichten—Einsichten (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1986), pp. 15, 29 or pp. 193, 195 with respect to Rigoletto and Il trovatore. 83. Adorno, “Bürgerliche Oper,” pp. 30, 34–36. 84. See also my article “Tragik und Tragisches: Zur Tragikomödie eines Begriffsschicksals,” in Christian Wagenknecht, ed., Zur Terminologie der Literaturwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 363–72. 85. Albert Cook, Shakespeare’s Enactment: The Dynamics of Renaissance Drama (Chicago: Swallow, 1976), pp. 128, 130. 86. Cf. Cook, p. 131. Cook is here talking about the romances. 87. Ibid., p. 130. 88. Ibid., pp. 9, 135, 16, 40. 89. Ibid., pp. 135, 171, following C. L. Barber; my emphasis. 90. Lindenberger, Opera, p. 67. 91. Cf. the interesting material in Harald Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Zwischen kosmischer Offenbarung und Wortoper: Das romantische Drama Victor Hugos (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1984), and in the repeatedly referred to London Stage. 92. Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama, pp. 63, 123–24, 135, 158–59. 93. For these ruminations of Schiller and Goethe see Joseph Gregor, Kulturgeschichte der Oper: Ihre Verbindung mit dem Leben, den Werken des Geistes und der Politik, rev. ed. (Vienna: Gallus; Zurich: Scientia, 1950), p. 234. 94. Ruth Katz, Divining the Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), pp. 177, 135. See also pp. 87–95 on musical magic and pp. 102–7 on monody. My account of the Florence Camerata follows mainly Robert Donington’s The Rise of Opera (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). Ruth Katz’s story is, on the whole, less concise though sometimes more detailed than Donington’s (to whom she makes no reference whatsoever). F. W. Sternfeld’s The Birth of Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and my own analyses overlap mainly as far as the crucial topic of metamorphoses in and through opera singing are concerned. Among the many other works consulted I would like to mention Günter Schauenberg, Stereotype Bauformen und stoffliche Schemata der Oper (Ph.D. diss., Munich University, 1975), pp. 10–32; Helmut Schmidt-Garre, Oper: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Cologne: Arno Volk, 1963), pp. 18–29. The important original texts of and around the Camerata and French discussions (including opera patents by Louis XIV) are presented in Heinz Becker, ed., Quellentexte zur Konzeption der europäischen Oper im 17. Jahrhundert (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981). The state of research concerning the specific intertwining of “words” and “music,” of relations between poetry, music, and dance, in ancient Greece is well presented, I suppose, in Frieder Zaminer, “Musik im archaischen und klassischen Griechenland,” in A. Riethmüller and F. Zaminer, eds., Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, vol. 1, general editor Carl Dahlhaus (Laaber: Laaber

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Verlag, 1989), 113–206. Zaminer is also instructive on the beginnings of an independent “lyrico-literary’”language (p. 135). 95. Cf. Donington, Rise of Opera, pp. 82, 104–5, 112–13. 96. Cf. Ulrich Schreiber, “Halbe Opern: eine ganze Sache? Henry Purcell und die Anfänge der englischen Oper,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 4/148 (1987), 4–7, p. 5. In the present context, the most relevant introduction to Purcell is perhaps Curtis Alexander Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See in particular his discussion of the problematic, sometimes downright ridiculous, “interpretations” of the “allegory” in Purcell’s full (and still famous) opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), pp. 229–34. A. Hutchings, Purcell (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1982) also contains valuable materials and perspectives. See also Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas 1704–1726 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), where the semi-opera is rightly said to have “possessed little life or propensity for growth” (p. 141). For other sketches of the transition from various forms of “accidental” music to full opera, from the court masques to Purcell, see Reinhold Sietz, Henry Purcell: Zeit—Leben—Werke (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1955). Sietz draws attention, for instance, to the “Italianization” of court masques and to the development from there to d’Avenant and Dryden (pp. 93–98). 97. Schreiber, “Halbe Opern: eine ganze Sache?” pp. 6, 7; Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 226. 98. Hutchings, Purcell, pp. 56–57; Friedrich, Musiktheater, pp. 15, 29; Adorno, “Bürgerliche Oper,” p. 38; Rolland, Histoire de l’Opéra, p. 10. 99. Cf. Donington, Rise of Opera, p. 41, 91, 140. 100. Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, p. 27; cf. Schmidt-Garre, Oper: Eine Kulturgeschichte, pp. 31, 191. 101. For a historical-technical analysis in that respect see for instance Hermann Dechant, Arie und Ensemble: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Oper, vol. I: 1600–1800 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). In his preface, Dechant is also implicitly interested in theoretical perspectives concerning cultural and media history—he rightly criticizes, for instance, the twentieth-century neglect (relatively speaking) of Neapolitan opera buffa (p. x). His remarks concerning the general usefulness of the term opera (p. 9) and the differences in power between soliloquy and arias (pp. 11–14) are also important. 102. Quoted in Robin Manson Myers, Handel, Dryden, & Milton (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956), p. 56. For the preceding quotes see pp. 18, 33. 103. Ibid., p. 55. 104. Dean and Knapp, Handel’s Operas, pp. 18, 423. 105. Georges Bizet: Leben und Werk, trans. Konrad Köster (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1988; published in English as The Master Musicians—Bizet, London: Dent, 4th ed. 1978), pp. 60–61, 62, 228–318, 283–84. 106. Myers, Handel, Dryden, & Milton, pp. 77, 56–57. 107. Dahlhaus, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, vol. 6) (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1980), pp. 47–48, 51, 52. For

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the quasi-metaphysics of Beethoven’s symphonies, see p. 75; for the problems of later nineteenth-century opera, trying to settle mythical or historical accounts in Wagner and Grand Opéra, see pp. 106–10. 108. Lindenberger, Opera, pp. 25–26. 109. Quoted in Lindenberger, p. 25. 110. Cf. Schauenberg, Stereotype Bauformen und stoffliche Schemata der Oper, pp. 156–57. 111. Ibid., p. 233; Adorno, Wagner, pp. 128–29. 112. This is the direction which the analyses of opera are taking in Dahlhaus’s Vom Musikdrama zur Literaturoper, p. 17. Cf. also pp. 10–12 in an essay on the method of opera analysis (pp. 9–17), in which possibilities of coming to terms with the “unreality” and “absurdity” of opera are discussed. 113. Friedrich Dieckmann, Wagner, Verdi: Geschichte einer Unbeziehung (Berlin: Siedler, 1989). Cf. Verdi defining himself, with Don Carlo, as a Wagnerian, pp. 55–57 and the last chapter. 114. Strohm, Die italienische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert, pp. 308–13. 115. Cf. Verdi ist der Mozart Wagners: Ein Opernführer für Versierte und Vesehrte (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1992). For both serious and (self-)parodistic “definitions” of opera see pp. 34–35 (opera as “postmodern premodernity” for instance), 38, 128–31 (Verdi’s tension between the sublime and cozy sentimentality, between spiritual arias and pop songs), 70 (irony, cynicism, and utopian happiness in Mozart).

Chapter Seven: First Steps—Theoretical and Practical 1. See Alexander Kluge, “Die Funktion des Zerrwinkels in zertrümmernder Absicht: Ein Gespräch zwischen Alexander Kluge und Gertrud Koch,” in Rainer Erd, Dietrich Hoß, et al., eds., Kritische Theorie und Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 106–24, p. 116. For music halls, see for instance the (in several senses) instructive book by Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Setting out to analyze a working-class medium in its local varieties, legal context (with respect to the theaters “proper” and the changes in theater laws), and moral issues (alcoholism, prostitution, etc.), the book rather describes the “local habitations” of much more general structures of media appeal. Much more than the omission of film or rock music, to say nothing of TV, I regret that I cannot deal with sport and the more traditional arts of images and shapes. Limits of space and competence are reached here in a frightfully speedy way. Instead, let me mention two collections: Günter Witt’s Sport in der Kunst (Leipzig: VEB E. A. Seemann Buch- und Kunstverlag, 1969), very rich in “intercultural” materials; and Art et Sport, Mons (Belgium), catalogue of the exhibition “Art et Sport,” March 23 to June 3, 1984. The complexities into which one might have to go concerning sport in the arts and the modern media are amply suggested in the drawings, partly inspired by TV reports, on the art of hockey and its movements, of Katherine Sturgis (wife of the philosopher Nelson Goodman).

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2. Kluge, “Die Funktion des Zerrwinkels,” p. 116. 3. For a relatively recent linguistic version of this old topic see Harald Weinrich, “Über Sprache, Leib und Gedächtnis,” in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds., Materialität der Kommunikation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988, 2d ed. 1995), 80–93. 4. Eugene F. Kaelen, “Being in the Body,” in Ellen W. Gerber and William J. Morgan, eds., Sport and the Body: A Philosophical Symposium (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1972, 2d ed. 1979), 167–76, p. 170. The volume represents a fair collection of philosophical classics and modern (excluding of course postmodern) texts. 5. Eleanor Metheny, “The Symbolic Power of Sport,” in Gerber and Morgan, eds., 231–36, p. 231. 6. Cf., for English-language collections, for instance, Peter Schwed and Herbert Warren Wind, eds., Great Stories from the World of Sport, 3 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958); John Skull, ed., Sport and Leisure (London: Heinemann, 1970); Henry B. Chapin, ed., Sports in Literature (New York: Longman, 1976); Robert J. Higgs and Neil D. Isaacs, eds., The Sporting Spirit in Literature and Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Tom Dodge, ed., A Literature of Sports (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1980); for bibliographies Karl Schwarz, “Sport als Motiv in der Weltliteratur,” Die Leibeserziehung 9 (1965), 317–46; Robert J. Higgs, Sports: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), as well as numerous journals. 7. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Mehr als ein Champion: Über den Stil des Boxers Muhammad Ali (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995), pp. 8, 62–63, 121, 129–30. 8. Ibid., pp. 156, 160, 165. 9. Reemtsma’s typology, in his “little anthropological speculation” on the associated, the balanced, and the dissociated personality, is historically doubtful. I would emphasize instead the mixtures and the relative dominance of one aspect or the other. Independently of that, his view of sport agrees with that of Christian Graf von Krockow, for whom the identification of attractive achievement is primarily, if not exclusively, possible in sports. In addition, I would argue that doping to enhance performance does not impair such a view, because there is no strict boundary between optimal preparation and doping. Much as we may understandably lament extremes, there is no clear-cut limit to the strategies of achievement and “stimulation” necessary for any athlete who does not want to pine away as a perpetual talent. I cannot track down the witty change of Schopenhauer’s “the world as will and idea” into “the human being as pill and idea.” 10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1947; Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1970), pp. 247, 246. Cf. also Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 203–61; Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) and L’histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

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11. Cf. Kaelen, “Being in the Body,” p. 169. 12. Cf. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), p. 285. For the Mother Nature metaphor see vol. 2, p. 407; Bertolt Brecht, “Die Krise des Sports,” “Die Todfeinde des Sports,” in Günter Berg, ed., Der Kinnhaken und andere Box- und Sportgeschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 96–99. This volume also contains the short essay “Sport und geistiges Schaffen” mentioned above, 34–35. See also, from a phenomenological perspective, Ulf Mathiesen, Das Dickicht der Lebenswelt und die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Munich: Fink, 1983), p. 132. 13. Hans Lenk, Die achte Kunst: Leistungssport—Breitensport (Zürich: Edition Interfrom, 1985), p. 7. Cf. pp. 7–14. For what follows see also the important and somewhat more realistic book by Christian Graf von Krockow, Sport: Eine Soziologie und Philosophie des Leistungsprinzips (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1974), especially pp. 9–11, 22, 146. The thesis that modern professional sport merely duplicates the compulsions of modern professional work has been put forward perhaps most clearly by Bero Rigauer in Sport und Arbeit: Soziologische Zusammenhänge und ideologische Implikationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) and in other publications. A balanced “anthropological” introduction (both in a more ethnological “American” and a more speculative “German” sense) to sport, on the other hand, is provided by Kendall Blanchard and Alice Taylor Cheska, The Anthropology of Sport: An Introduction (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvy Publishers, 1985). 14. Lenk, Die achte Kunst, pp. 67–68. 15. Ibid., pp. 127, 130, 61–62, 131–32. 16. Brecht, “Die Krise des Sports,” p. 99. 17. Nastase, Break Point (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). I am quoting from the German translation Tie-Break (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1987), which has the same title as the French original Tie-Break (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), because the English-language version is out of print and was not available. Since then, Nastase has published a few more tennis novels. For a “psychologically” interesting tennis primer coming close to the “literary” dimensions see, e.g., Wolfgang Lülfing, Über ein Spiel mehr von sich selbst erfahren: Vom Tennis (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1985). See especially the notions like “relaxed megalomania”—definitely close to Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow”—used to characterize the “right” feeling of and in movement (pp. 12, 17, 19, 39, 105–7). 18. Nastase, Break Point, pp. 225, 63, 45, 117, 253, 129–30, 187. 19. I would like to mention here, from among an immense amount of critical, poetic, and fictional texts (in the ordinary sense), including journals devoted to sports and literature (for antiquity, the United States, etc.), some representative studies: Christian K. Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Neil David Berman, Playful Fictions and Fictional Players (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981); John M. Hoberman, Sport and Po-

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litical Ideology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). Mostly concerned with U.S.-American sports are Arnold Beisser, The Madness in Sports: Psychosocial Observations (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967, 2d ed. 1977), especially chapter 16 on “The American Seasonal Masculinity Rites”; and Donald Chu, Dimensions of Sport Studies (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982). Very interesting also in the balanced tensions between socioracial, political issues in Carribean cricket on the one hand and the state of mind in practising sport (cricket) on the other is the autobiographical text already mentioned by C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963; London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994). 20. Nastase, Break Point, pp. 15–16, 44, 83. 21. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. 2, p. 454. 22. Ibid., pp. 258, 18, 282, 297. 23. In Ror Wolf, Das nächste Spiel ist immer das schwerste (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1982), pp. 275–82. 24. Ibid., pp. 319, 107–19, 246–48. 25. Ibid., pp. 206, 239–41. 26. Ibid., pp. 79–80.

Chapter Eight: Symptoms 1. I have not been able to trace this quote, which I have translated from its German version in an article on boxing (“Die Schlacht der einsamen Körper”) by the German contemporary poet Wolf Wondratschek in the magazine Stern, no. 45 (1984), pp. 138–50. Wondratschek himself, writing about boxing writers from Byron via Jack London to Norman Mailer, sums up his own position somewhat polemically. Still, it is a pertinent commentary on what follows: “Sensitive intellectuals will find the world perfect only when this sport does not exist any more. Kick anybody who does not adjust to affluence, but no boxing punches, please. . . . Self-satisfied people will beat others, too, but they do it with their finger-tips” (pp. 140–41). 2. The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odhams Press, 1934), 1075–89, act 2, p. 1084. See The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw (London: Hamlyn, 1956), and Benny Green, Shaw’s Champions: G. B. S. Prizefighting from Cashel Byron to Gene Tunney (London: Elm Tree, 1978). For inspiration, I am indebted here to Reinhard Paczesny. 3. Shaw, The Admirable Bashville, pp. 1084, 1086; Prefaces, p. 694; The Admirable Bashville, p. 1082; Prefaces, p. 694. 4. The Admirable Bashville, pp. 1084, 1083, 1080–81, 1087–88. 5. Green, Shaw’s Champions, p. 187. Cf. pp. 99–101, 137–39. 6. The Admirable Bashville, pp. 1077, 1087, 1075, 1079, 1075. 7. Hazlitt, “The Fight,” in P. P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes (Centenary Edition) (London: J. M. Dent, 1931), vol. 17: Uncollected Essays, 72–86, pp. 79–80. See “The Indian Jugglers,” vol. 8: Table-Talk: or, Original Essays, 77–89, especially p. 83, evoking the connections between the “thrills in each nerve” and “trembling sensibility.”

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As of this time, a cool combination of writer, satirist, comedian, boxer, boxing reporter and commentator, chess player, and whatnot is perhaps best exemplified by the Austrian Werner Schneyder. Unfortunately, the more common form in cultural criticism as well as often in literature consists in establishing valuecharged dichotomies. For the “instincts” lived and the rituals acted out in sailing, for instance, and the rejection of a boring civilization see Guy de Maupassant, Sur L’Eau, Blanc et bleu, Livre de bord (1888), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 24 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1921). As in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), pseudophysicality turns into an archetype, myth, or metaphor of life. This is not what I am primarily interested in. 8. Brian Sutton-Smith’s Die Dialektik des Spiels: Eine Theorie des Spielens, der Spiele und des Sports (Schorndorf: Karl Hofmann, 1978) is a book that does not fall into this trap, but tries to maintain a consistent relationship between play and games and their increasing social, national, etc., absorption in sport. Cf. also Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), especially pp. 3–8. This is less clear in the work on soccer and aggression control in Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Sport im Zivilisationsprozeß: Studien zur Figurationssoziologie, ed. Wilhelm Hopf (Münster: LitVerlag, 1982). Elias and Dunning admit, though, that there is something like the pleasurable acting out of high group tensions. Similarly, Rudolf zur Lippe, in a “Habilitationsschrift” written in the disintegrating context of the Frankfurt school, sees the progress of civilization, especially from the Renaissance onwards, mainly as a defeat of the ambition to come, through both mental and physical “work” and play (dance), to a real exchange with the powers of human and nonhuman nature. Yet he remains intrigued by a possible third way between an unthinking acceptance of whatever appears as dictates of the body and its exploitation, or colonialization, in either work or sports. See Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1979, 2d ed. 1981), especially vol. 1, pp. 98–99, vol. 2, pp. 198, 204. More or less also in the Frankfurt school context, but, possibly because of a stronger psychoanalytically inspired orientation, much more clearly than zur Lippe, Alfred Lorenzer has insisted on the distinction between the instrumental, ideological use or exploitation of objects, activities, and projects and their significance in and as experience. See, e.g., Das Konzil der Buchhalter: Die Zerstörung der Sinnlichkeit: Eine Religionskritik (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1981), especially pp. 18, 32, 34–35. Similarly, Gert Mattenklott has insisted that “archaic” forms of body experience take on historically different forms without necessarily losing their distinctive qualities. See Der übersinnliche Leib—Beiträge zur Metaphysik des Körpers (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1982), pp. 236–37. In the 1980s, in Germany and France in particular, this type of discussion, ultimately dominated perhaps by the more cynical views of Baudrillard, was intense. 9. In spite of all the criticism directed to it, I still think that Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976) is an extremely suggestive and, in terms also of cul-

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tural theory, valuable book. For present purposes see in particular pp. 69–73, 255–91. Jaynes’s linguistic theses and their philosophical implications are fully borne out by the renowned classical philologist Bruno Snell. See his Die Entdeckung des Geistes: Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Geistes bei den Griechen, 3d ed. (Hamburg: Claassen, 1955), especially pp. 17–42, and also Theo Reucher, Die situative Weltsicht Homers: Eine Interpretation der Ilias (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983). 10. The latter expressions are by Arnold Gehlen. See his Urmensch und Spätkultur: Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen, 3d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaion, 1975), pp. 32, 114. For Hartmann, see his Das Problem des geistigen Seins, 2d ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1949). The history of this kind of self-criticism of institutionalized philosophy can be traced back at least to Schopenhauer. We will see presently that it shows up as a crucial motif in Schiller, too. 11. Eros in der Politik: Eine sozialpathologische Untersuchung (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1967, 2d ed. 1969), pp. 239–45. The utopian tradition is obvious. A decade later, the translation of psychoanalytical materials into politics had become again much more difficult. 12. Elisabeth Lenk, Die unbewußte Gesellschaft: Über die mimetische Grundstruktur in der Literatur und im Traum (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1983). In what follows I am using the Nationalausgabe of Schillers Werke, 43 vols., eds. Lieselotte Blumenthal and Benno von Wiese (editors changing in the more recent volumes), vols. 20 and 21, “Philosophische Schriften,” ed. Benno von Wiese in collaboration with Helmut Koopmann (vol. 20 with the text of “Ueber Anmuth und Würde,” 251–308, “Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen,” 309–412 [written in 1793 and 1794, published in 1793 and 1795 respectively], vol. 21 with the commentaries on these two essays, 210–31, 232–77) [Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962–63], with my own translations [“On Grace and Dignity,” “Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind”]. The commentaries are valuable also because they trace part of the conceptual histories (though not the cultural implications) of terms like “grace” and “dignity” and their ambivalences (in Lord Kames’s [Henry Home’s] Elements of Criticsm, 1762, Shaftesbury’s “moral grace”) and so forth, into which I cannot go here. 13. Schiller, “Letters,” vol. 21, 234–35, 253. 14. Ibid., vol. 21, 253. Conversely, Schiller sometimes criticizes ancient Greek culture as merely aesthetic (vol. 21, 254). Clearly, a short but telling German version of European culture could be written simply by comparing the idealization of the Greeks before and during the time of Schiller, Schiller himself, and the more radically physicalized Greeks of Nietzsche or Burckhardt later. 15. See especially the mixture of cosmic and inner-life metaphors in vol. 20, 394–95, toward the end of the “Letters.” 16. Ibid., pp. 256, 257, 259, 260. 17. Ibid., pp. 262, 264.

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18. Ibid., pp. 266, 278, 292–93, 283–84. 19. Ibid., pp. 288–89, 277, 279–80. 20. Ibid., pp. 282, 294, 296, 298, 300, 301. 21. Ibid., pp. 321, 320, 322. 22. Ibid., pp. 322–23, 326–27, 324, 327. 23. Ibid., pp. 355, 359, 357, 358. 24. Cf. especially the commentary in ibid., vol. 21, pp. 263, 265. 25. Ibid., vol. 20, p. 358; see also the description of Juno Ludovisi at vol. 20, 359–60—Schiller refers to what should be more properly called Hera Ludovisi, a Greek goddess with whom Juno, in her turn, it is true, one of the oldest Roman goddesses, was identified. 26. Ibid., pp. 330, 331, 332, 333–36. 27. Ibid., pp. 336–37, 338–39, 340, 356. 28. Ibid., pp. 360, 366, 375, 380. 29. Ibid., pp. 380–81, 382, 384, 385, 402. 30. One might extrapolate such a thesis also from Schiller’s various writings on the theater—from the pathos of the pre-Kantian writings, clearly claiming a kind of very powerful emotional impact for the theater, down to its more emotionally distanced philosophical justifications. 31. Cf. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, ed. Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse, repr. of 2d ed. Leipzig 1829, based on lectures in 1819 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969). 32. Ibid., pp. 72, 76, 90, 259. 33. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Die Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (1846–58), repr. of 2d ed., 6 vols. in 3 (1922–23; Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1975). See vol. 2(3), pp. 168, 203 192, 211; vol. 3(5), pp. 4, 7, 15, 277, 282, 414, also for further criticism of the lack of autonomy in architecture, the material way of seeing in sculpture, and the facility with which music, especially opera arias, can go wrong. 34. Ibid., vol. 2(6), pp. 1, 4; vol. 2(3), p. 168. 35. See the very instructive essay, for the German and European context, by Robert Weimann, “A Divided Heritage: Conflicting Appropriations of Shakespeare in (East) Germany,” Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 173–205, pp. 174– 77. 36. Die Permanenz der Kunst: Wider eine bestimmte marxistische Ästhetik: Ein Essay (Munich: Hanser, 1977), p. 25. See furthermore Kunst und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965), Konterrevolution und Revolte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), and his criticism of N. O. Brown’s Love’s Body (Munich: Hanser, 1973), at pp. 232–44 of the work. 37. See Marcuse, Kunst und Gesellschaft, pp. 56–101. 38. Marcuse, Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft, pp. 140, 146, 152, 167–68, 180–90.

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39. Marcuse, Konterrevolution und Revolte, p. 133; Brown, Love’s Body, pp. 232–44. 40. Alfred Lorenzer, “Was ist eine ‘unbewußte’ Phantasie?” in Alfred Schöpf, ed., Phantasie als anthropologisches Problem (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1981), 213–24, p. 221. 41. Walter Umminger, Die wahren Freuden aller Zeiten: Erlebt von Sammlern, Spielern, Bastlern, Spaßmachern, Amateuren und Genießern (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1966), p. 7. 42. “Le Sport,” in Gilbert Prouteau, ed., Anthologie des Textes Sportifs de la Littérature (Paris: Editions de la France, 1948), 207–12, p. 207. 43. Cf. Maeterlinck’s essays “Eloge de l’épée,” in Le double jardin (Paris: Fasquelle, 1909), 67–80, and “Eloge de la boxe,” in L’intelligence des fleurs (Paris: Fasquelle, 1910), 183–94, respectively. 44. Gerhard Nebel, Pindar und die Delphik (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1961), p. 44–46, 50–51, 59–60. Nebel has presented, to mention just one further example, an analogous and, to put it neutrally, very interesting study of relations between erotic-sexual drives, philosophy, literature, and God in his Hamann (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1973). 45. Esthétique de la Grâce, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1934), vol. 1, pp. 12–25. For Fraysinnet see his Le Sport parmi les Beaux-Arts (Paris: Dargaud S.A., 1968). The book edited by H. T. A. Whiting and D. W. Masterson, Readings in the Aesthetics of Sport (London: Lepus Books, 1974), contains many informative and instructive contributions but does not offer a clear perspective on the problem at hand. Comprehensive, but sometimes marred by the mechanical application of Marxist “insights,” is Günter Witt, Ästhetik des Sports: Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme und Grundlegung (East Berlin: Sportverlag, 1982). 46. Fraysinnet, Le Sport parmi les Beaux-Arts, pp. 23, 43–44, 67–68, 92– 93. 47. Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 216–17. 48. Cf. Mattenklott, Der übersinnliche Leib, pp. 108–9; Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Borstock Berger with an introduction by Randall White (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 288, 200. D. H. Lawrence’s essays “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious” and “Fantasia of the Unconscious” are well known; for further contexts see Wayne Shumaker, Literature and the Irrational: A Study in Anthropological Backgrounds (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1960), pp. 24, 33, 114–16, 118–21, 130–35. 49. Brown, Love’s Body, pp. 245–50. 50. For a succinct criticism of some of these tendencies see Wolfgang Rothe, “Sport und Literatur in den zwanziger Jahren: Eine ideologiekritische Anmerkung,” Stadion 7 (1981), 131–51. 51. See in particular the first two volumes, La Nature de la Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1977) and La Vie de la Vie (Paris: Seuil, 1980), and the fourth, Les Idées: Leur habitat, leur vie, leurs mœurs, leur organisation (Paris: Seuil, 1991). In a

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systems-theory-free conceptual environment, Melvin Konner has been driving at analogously fruitful reformulations of intuition (overlappings between old humor anthropology and modern hormone research, for instance) in his The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982). Cf. pp. 102–3, 337. Konner also well-nigh identifies, for example, the elation of having passed through danger, in sports and in forms of aesthetic contemplation and “awe” (p. 240). Likewise, the elaboration of “joy” cuts across work, learning, and play, even if it is clear that joy can be destroyed more easily in work and learning (pp. 242–43). One might also invoke Seneca: “Res severa est verum gaudium” (quoted, for instance, in Umminger, Die wahren Freuden, p. 294). 52. Morin, La vie de la vie, pp. 255, 349, 153–54, 161, 184, 289–90, 374. 53. Ibid., 2: 407, 186–87, 195; 4: 28–30. 54. For this trend, asserting itself in spite of contrary tendencies as well, see for instance the famous works by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), and Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash [Les jeux et les hommes] (New York: Free Press, 1961). They are naturally even stronger in works written from a more definite philosophical perspective. See Eugen Fink, Spiel as Weltsymbol (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), Heinrich Kutzner, Erfahrung und Begriff des Spieles: Versuch, den Menschen als spielendes Wesen zu denken (Ph.D. diss., Berlin, 1973), and James S. Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981). In particular, Caillois’s system of agon (contest), alea (chance), mimicry (disguise), and ilinx (intoxication, ecstasy) can be clearly used for both combination and isolation. Jacques Ehrmann, for one, has tried to oppose the decomposition of the “ontological make-up” of human beings. See his “Homo Ludens revisited,” in Ehrmann, ed., Game, Play, Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 31–57. Much of the discussion has been summed up in Messenger’s introduction to his book Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). For “physical culture” and playful self-formation in early periods see Gerhard Lukas, Die Körperkultur in frühen Epochen der Menschheitsentwicklung (East Berlin: Sportverlag, 1969), pp. 39–40. 55. Morin, La vie de la vie, p. 406. 56. I am here summing up ideas developed at much greater length and sophistication in the writings of the German anthropologist, sociologist, and philosopher Arnold Gehlen. 57. Perhaps the most comprehensive materials on that are still to be found in Carl Diem’s Weltgeschichte des Sports und der Leibeserziehung (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1960). Cf. also William J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982). 58. Cf., for instance, Henning Eichberg, Der Weg des Sports in die industrielle Zivilisation (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1975), pp. 25, 39, 85; von Krockow, Sport: Eine Soziologie und Philosophie des Leistungsprinzips (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1974), pp. 9–12, 22, 156–67.

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59. Cf. Fink, Spiel as Weltsymbol, pp. 228, 231. 60. Zur Lippe, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1979, 2d ed. 1981), vol. 1, pp. 17–18, 20, 31–32. A different but analogously ambivalent study in that respect has been written by Henning Eichberg, Leistung, Spannung, Geschwindigkeit: Sport und Tanz im gesellschaftlichen Wandel des 18./19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978). See especially pp. 189–90 concerning waltz, pp. 242–76 concerning relations and nonrelations between “movement behavior” and socio-industrial revolutions, pp. 300–301 for an “intercultural” criticism of unilinear notions about the process of civilization. 61. Reucher, Die situative Weltsicht Homers, p. 367. 62. Cf. Dennis Brailsford, Sport and Society: Elizabeth to Anne (London and Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul / University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 63; Elyot, The Boke named the Gouernour (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), chapters 19, 20, 26; Ascham, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. John Allen Giles, 3 vols., repr. of the London 1864–65 ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1965), vol. 2 (Toxophilus), pp. 52–60. 63. Cf. Ascham, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, chapters 16, 19, 20, 26. 64. Cf. Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), e.g., pp. 38–40 (Mulcaster), 42–43 (with reference to Elyot’s Gouernour and Ascham’s Schoolmaster). 65. See Goldberg, Writing Matter, e.g., pp. 101, 123. 66. In that respect, I do not think though that Goldberg does justice to Barthes’s L’Empire des signes on Japan, pp. 289–90. Conversely, his introduction tends to make parts of his own book dependent on a pathos slowly fading away from the contemporary cultural scene. 67. The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J. M. Dent, 1932), part 3, pp. 119, 121, 120, 88. 68. The chronological heterogeneity in these references is intentional. See Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, 1850, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, n.d.), vol. 3, p. 71; John Vernon, Poetry and the Body (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 1–2; for remarks concerning the presence of dance in German literary languages see Klaus Kanzog and Achim Masser, eds., Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, vol. 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), s.v. “Tanzlied”; Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923, repr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 36. For the meandering of historical dances between our usual oppositions see also pp. 37, 51, 63–64. 69. See Gottfried Keller, Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols. (Zürich: Rascher Verlag, 1947–48), vol. 7, 502–10. There is, of course, a lot of variously interesting critical work on dance in literature. Cf. for instance Arthur Henkel, “Gottfried Kellers ‘Tanzlegendchen’,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Neue Folge, no. 6 (1956), 1–15; Carl Enders, “Heinrich Heines Faustdichtungen: Der

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Tanz als Deutungs- und Gestaltungsmittel seelischer Erlebnisse,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 74 (1955), 364–92; Wolfdietrich Rasch, “Tanz als Lebenssymbol im Drama um 1900,” in W.R., Zur deutschen Literatur seit der Jahrhundertwende (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), 58–77; Kenneth G. Wilson, “The Dance as Symbol and Leitmotiv in Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger,” Germanic Review 29 (1954), 282–8; Klaus W. Jonas, “Rilke und die Welt des Tanzes,” Deutsche Weltliteratur (1972), 245–70, etc. 70. Œuvres, 2 vols., ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957–60), vol. 1, p. 1709. This was said in an interview concerning mainly Sémiramis, a “mélodrame,” in 1934. 71. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 1709–10. 72. Cf. M. Teste: “Stupidity is not my forte.” 73. Valéry, Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 1708, in a letter of 1933. 74. Ibid., pp. 148, 176, 172 (cf. pp. 170–71), 163–65, 155, 171. 75. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 1391–92, 1400, 1402; vol. 2, p. 1170. 76. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 1391.

Chapter Nine: Ecstasy, Violence, “Literature” 1. I have not double-checked this, relying instead on Gerhard Lukas, Die Körperkultur in frühen Epochen der Menschheitsentwicklung (East Berlin: Sportverlag, 1969), p. 108, and Günter Witt, Ästhetik des Sports (East Berlin: Sportverlag, 1982), p. 155. According to Lukas, Aristotle is supposed to have won at the Pythian and Isthmian Games (p. 108); according to Witt, Euripides in his turn was an Olympic boxing champion (p. 155). 2. Cf. Carl Diem, Weltgeschichte des Sports und der Leibeserziehung (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1960), pp. 136–37; William J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), pp. 23–24; Lukas, Die Körperkultur, pp. 109–10. 3. Within the many histories of sociology, I have found Helmut Schoeck’s Die Soziologie und die Gesellschaften: Problemsicht und Problemlösung vom Beginn bis zur Gegenwart, 2d ed. (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1964) most helpful. For the notion of the social blanket see p. 85. For other significant “steps” in the process outlined, see pp. 16, 32–33, 60, 68, 78, 81. Schoeck would also seem to support my thesis of a relative but long-term affective and rational uniformity in spite of all kinds of historical change when he says that the psychological component of sociological concepts changes much more slowly than their social component (p. 69). It is worth mentioning perhaps that Schoeck taught sociology for long periods both in the United States and in Germany. For instructive perspectives on the history of sociology see also Leopold von Wiese, Soziologie: Geschichte und Hauptprobleme (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964), pp. 16–21. In methodological terms, one might of course invoke the new historicism. Cf., for instance, the remarks on ignoring “certain familiar modes of organizing historical knowledge” in Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (1983; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. xii.

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4. Cf. Johan Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters (1941; Stuttgart: Kröner, 1975), chapter 5 (with the James quote on p. 99). See also Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), vol. 2, chapter 22 (“The Life of the Nobility”). In what follows, I am leaning more toward the version of Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), who sees a certain self-sufficiency in the ceremonial, erotic, and sporting complex of tournaments (pp. 87–101). 5. For early modern bourgeois literature in Germany see, for instance, Rüdiger Krohn, Der unanständige Bürger: Untersuchungen zum Obszönen in den Nürnberger Fastnachtspielen des 15. Jahrhunderts (Kronberg im Taunus: Scriptor, 1974), especially pp. 3–6, 63, 93–94, 118–21 or the related article by Joachim Bumke, “Liebe und Ehebruch in der höfischen Gesellschaft,” in R. Krohn, ed., Liebe als Literatur: Aufsätze zur erotischen Dichtung in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 24–45. 6. Cf. Henry de Montherlant, Les Bestiaires, in Romans, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), vol. 2, 381–583, pp. 442, 445. For the ritualizing tendencies see pp. 567–70; for humor and self-irony see the appendix, pp. 582–83. 7. This is the picure painted, by and large, especially by Robert J. Littman, The Greek Experiment: Imperialism and Social Conflict 800–400 BC (History of European Civilization) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), chapter 1 (“Disunity and the Greek Character”) and chapter 5 (“Internal Problems: Class Conflict and Civil War”), to a lesser but still noticeable extent by Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks (New York: Scribner, 1988), e.g., pp. 12–13. The fact of predominantly small-scale social organization (oikos [household], gene [clans], and phratries [brotherhoods]), however, would endorse Theo Reucher’s conceptual compromise. Reucher uses the notion of situation, mainly derived from and applied to the Iliad, in order to suggest the wandering centers of early Greek life. But it can help to make sense of some more general jarring impressions, both linguistic, conceptual, and cultural. Julian Jaynes, Bruno Snell, and others have pointed out that there is hardly any linguistic basis for the notion of an integral human person or social whole. It is rather parts (limbs) and subunits that are credited with the force of action. While this may remind us of (post)modern theories concerning the fragmented body and the deconstructed identity of the subject, it both resembles and essentially differs from that mode of thought. It differs because no identities being claimed, none can be deconstructed. Even in Aristotle, where conceptual distinctions are more strongly pulled together into what looks like total arrangements, the force or drive toward action derives from a diffuse overall energy or vitality (orexis) that knits vital powers and imagination (or thought) together into a field of perception and action (cf. chapter 4 on appearances). The general anthropological interest of ancient Greek conditions consists therefore in the duplicity of self-contained situations and contexts (psychological or social) and in the ease of switching from one to the other. Significantly, therefore, Littman’s evaluation of Greek “disunity” is not a negative one: “An Utopian United Greece

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might have produced a peaceful existence, but the vitality of the polis might have been lost” (p. 166). Given present-day conditions, it is perhaps not superfluous to at least suggest that the situation of women, degrading as it may often have been, did not obey one regime. The dramatically powerful and emphatic appearance of women in literature and mythology may reflect male anxieties as well as latent real power. In Sparta, at least, women took an equal part in all kinds of activities, including athletics (see Grant, pp. 30–31, 98–99). 8. Ingomar Weiler has rightly said that “archaic conditions” can hardly be interpreted by a “fair-play ideology” resulting from modern, illegitimately “universalized ideals of higher education.” Cf. Ingomar Weiler, Der Sport bei den Völkern der Alten Welt: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), pp. 118–19. Cf. pp. 92, 96, 103. There is an enormous amount of research on ancient sports. For another, culturally more restricted survey see H. A. Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972). All kinds of riches can be gleaned from journals like Nikephoros: Zeitschrift für Sport und Kultur im Altertum, published since 1988 by Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Hildesheim, and sponsored, amongst others, by the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research and the Volkswagen foundation. I am grateful to Werner Deuse for this information. 9. I have used Robert Fitzgerald’s World’s Classics translation, with an introduction by G. S. Kirk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). I have compared this translation with the one by A. T. Murray, Homerus: The Iliad (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), and with Wolfgang Schadewaldt’s German translation, Homer: Ilias (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975). I am omitting athletic motifs in the 6th, 8th, 18th, 21st, and other books. 10. Cf. Theo Reucher, Die situative Weltsicht Homers: Eine Interpretation der Ilias (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), pp. 416–20. 11. Robert Lipsyte, “Introduction,” in C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963; London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994), p. xii. 12. I am following the spelling of the edition I have used, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey (New York: Random House Vintage Classics, 1961, 1990). For uniformity’s sake, though, I am using “Ulysses” instead of Fitzgerald’s “Odysseus.” 13. However, Ulysses’ position and experiences, too, are fairly exceptional ones. Much as the narrative has been compared to a novel of adventure, the sheer physical and mental strain has been such that, especially with his age, Ulysses’ athletic fatigue is all too understandable. In Horkheimer and Adorno, we encounter a curious remark whose import, I think, should be reversed: by taking the boxing bout with the tramp Iros (18/79–133) and the bending of the bow (21/460–83) as demonstrations of “naked bodily strength,” they exemplify their own diagnosis of the love-hate or analogous dichotomies concerning the body in Western cultures. In the events mentioned, much more than mere bodily strength is involved: cunning, deliberation, aggressive humor, ease of movement reminiscent of Zen and the art of archery, and so on. Taking these

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events as indications how far “self-preservation and bodily strength” have come apart, leaving mythic unity behind, Horkheimer and Adorno unintentionally confirm what I have been asserting: that such conditions and activities must be viewed in both their cultural differences and their transcultural relations. 14. Cf. Gerhard Nebel, Pindar und die Delphik (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1961), p. 73; see generally pp. 49–85. 15. Cf. Pindar: Siegesgesänge und Fragmente, ed. and trans. Oskar Werner (Munich: Ernst Heimeran, 1967). Cf. also Walter Umminger, Helden—Götter—Übermenschen: Eine Kulturgeschichte menschlicher Höchstleistungen (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1962), chapter 1. 16. Nebel, Pindar, p. 73. Cf. also the events (factual or mythologized) and quotations in Hans Licht, Sittengeschichte Griechenlands, new edition by Herbert Lewandowski (Wiesbaden: R. Löwit, n.d.), chapter 4. For Goethe, see “Maximen und Reflexionen über Kunst,” here quoted because of the elaborate context from Carl Diem, Körpererziehung bei Goethe: Ein Quellenwerk zur Geschichte des Sports (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1948), p. 97. Cf. also joint remarks by Goethe and Schiller, p. 99. 17. See Sophocles, The Tragedies of Sophocles, trans. Richard C. Jebb (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1928), Electra, 223–75, and, for the race as told by the “Paedagogus,” by other translators also called “Tutor,” pp. 45– 248. 18. Cf. Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome, pp. 63–64, 212. 19. Cf. Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976), quoted after the German edition Brot und Spiele: Gesellschaftliche Macht und politische Herrschaft in der Antike, trans. Klaus Laermann and Hans Richard Brittmacher (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), p. 585. 20. Weiler, Der Sport bei den Völkern der Alten Welt, p. 245. 21. Quoted in ibid., p. 257. 22. Cf. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (London: Dent, 1934), pp. 137, 139, 170, and Ovids Liebeskunst, trans. Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm (Wiesbaden: Emil Vollmer, n.d.), book 1, 134–78. For an attempt at analysis and explanation of “cruelty and civilization,” see Roland Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972); the surprise at the indifference with which that cruelty is either mentioned or ignored in literature is still perceptible in Herbert Lewandowski, Römische Sittengeschichte (Wiesbaden: R. Löwit, n.d.), p. 223. 23. Virgil: The Aeneid, trans. (originally 1952) C. Day Lewis, with introduction and notes by Jasper Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). The other source of inspiration, very different, is Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991; Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1983). A third one is the book by Paul Veyne on “bread and games.” Other interesting perspectives, partly indebted to Veyne, and some of the paradoxes of power control in vast multiplici-

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ties of people and territories are outlined in Bernhard Siegert, “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” in: H. U. Gumbrecht and K. L. Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 303–18. 24. Serres, Rome, pp. 57 (cf. p. 59), 61, 64 (cf. p. 49), 153, 149, 217. 25. Griffin, in Virgil: The Aeneid, pp. xi–xii. 26. Cf. Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome, pp. 184–85. 27. Baker, Sports in the Western World, p. 31. 28. Cf. Lewandowski, Römische Sittengeschichte, pp. 297–98 (following Max Weber’s essay “Die sozialen Ursachen des Untergangs der antiken Kultur”); Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 6–7. 29. Serres, Rome, p. 228. 30. Aeneid 5: 600–601. 31. Cf. also Lukas, Die Körperkultur, pp. 138–47, Baker, Sports in the Western World, pp. 28–39. 32. Cf., e.g., Aeneid 5: 136–50, 190–98, 394–470. 33. Griffin, in Virgil: The Aeneid, p. 419. 34. Quotations and lines follow the edition and translation (with the Latin text) of J. H. Mozley, ed., Statius, Thebaid, Achilleid, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1969), vol. 2. 35. Ibid., book 6: 750–52, 760–64, 771–77, 816–25. 36. The reference to Veyne’s Brot und Spiele was misleading in that Veyne appeared to join the chorus of those who criticize the Roman games for the crude depoliticization of the populus and plebs. Veyne in fact rejects this both ancient and modern, both “left” (that is, properly political) and “right” (culturally conservative), criticism (cf. especially pp. 83, 88, 603, 605–7). 37. Ibid., pp. 389, 330, 326–27, 328–31. 38. Ibid., pp. 333, 335, 601, 605–7. 39. Ror Wolf, Das nächste Spiel ist immer das schwerste (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1982), pp. 149–70. 40. Cf. “Le Tour de France comme épopée,” in: Mythologies (1957), Œuvres complètes, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993–95), vol. 1, 630–37. One could also think, in this context, of many other of Barthes’s writings (for instance on the Eiffel Tower, cars, wrestling, etc.). 41. Ibid., pp. 631–32. Cf. the talk about Nature humanized and human beings naturalized, p. 631. 42. Ibid., pp. 633–34. 43. I am gathering inspiration here from two articles by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: “ ‘Mens sana in Corpore Sano’ und ‘Körperloses Spiel’ / ‘Sinnloses Treten,’ ” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 92 (Oct.–Dec. 1984), 262–77, especially pp. 265–68, concerning the Spanish Middle Ages; “ ‘Dabei Sein Ist Alles’—Über die Geschichte von Medien, Sport, Publikum,” Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature 4, no. 1(1986), 25–43, especially p. 27. For the following quotes and references see Keen, Chivalry, p. 92; Arno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Propyläen, 1973), pp. 97, 242; Otto

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Borst, Alltagsleben im Mittelalter (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), pp. 272– 82, 296, 300–302, 305–6, 429; Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter, 2 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 304–13. 44. I am finding myself, for a change, in agreement with Luhmann here: the body is a most appropriate vanishing point of meaninglessness exactly when it is seen not as a contingent fact, but when it is turned into the starting point of body-centered meaning constructions, particularly in sports. Sports, Luhmann rightly thinks, neither needs nor tolerates “alien” ideologies, although these may be invested in it all the time. Instead, the body, which has become an empty center of life almost everywhere, is presented by and in sports in highly attractive shapes. (Here, of course, one would have to allow for more possibilities.) Any meaning in sports, though unable to identify the body, yet points back to it, not so much to other domains of meanings. Luhmann is wrong, however, when he seems to see this as an exclusive problem of twentiethcentury sports. Also, it is not clear in exactly which ways, apart from the specificities of rhythm, sports are to be distinguished from dance-music combinations, which Luhmann would like to keep separate. I would see all of them as ways of “tuning the body” and, thereby, creating “surplus values.” Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 248. 45. Arno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter, pp. 479–84. 46. Petrarca, Dichtungen, Briefe, Schriften, ed. Hanns Wilhelm Eppelsheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1956), pp. 80–89 (letter to Francesco Dionigi, 1336). Cf. Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft,” in Subjektivität: Sechs Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 141–50. The situation is very complicated. For its depiction see Bernhard König, “Petrarcas Landschaften: Philologische Bemerkungen zu einer neuen Deutung,” Romanische Forschungen 92 (1980), 251–82, pp. 279–80, and especially the subtle philologicalphilosophical-theological analyses of Andreas Kablitz, “Petrarcas Augustinismus und die Ecriture der Ventoux-Epistel,” Poetica 26 (1994), 31–69, especially pp. 46, 56, 58–59. 47. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J. M. Dent, 1932, repr. 1972), part 2, 2.4, pp. 69, 72. 48. Ibid., pp. 74, 75. 49. Ibid., pp. 77, 79, 84. 50. See the rich and funny material in L. A. Govett, ed., The King’s Book of Sports: A History of the Declarations of King James I and King Charles I as to the Use of Lawful Sports on Sundays (London: Elliot Stock, 1890), especially chapter 3. The ambivalences of Puritanism have been well dealt with by Dennis Brailsford, Sport and Society: Elizabeth to Anne (London and Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul / University of Toronto Press, 1969), chapter 4; see also Gerhard Schneider, Puritanismus und Leibesübungen (Schorndorf: Karl Hofmann, 1968), especially p. 75, and, for a general sport survey of Britain, H. A.

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Harris, Sport in Britain: Its Origin and Development (London: Stanley Paul, 1975). For nineteenth-century American literature see Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), especially pp. 18–37; for British literature and walking Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1994). Meredith would yield ample occasion for a separate study. Crosswise relations between the divisions of the various histories and anthropology could be studied in particularly instructive form in Bacon. In the reach of his categories, codes, and awareness, he is much more limited than, say, Burton. See Francis Bacon, Essays, ed. Michael J. Hawkins (London: Dent, 1972), Essays XXX (“Of Regiment of Health”), XXXVII (“Of Masques and Triumphs”), and XLVI (“Of Gardens”). Cf. also Brailsford on Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and the devaluation of the Olympic Games, pp. 67, 87–88. 51. Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest, in John Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 195–210, 43–92, 79–84, 161–70. See especially Butt’s notes to the passages cited. 52. Cf. The Spectator, 4 vols., ed. Gregory Smith (London: Dent, 1907, repr. 1964), vol. 1, pp. 349–530 (July 12 and 13, 1711). 53. See Dover Wilson’s edition of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1936), p. 247 (and pp. 250–53). In passing, glancing briefly at Shakespearean scholarship, one may note that, in contrast to Wilson, the New Arden edition by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1981) does not say one word about the possibly deeper theatrical interest of the sporting bout. Almost the same is true, in spite of a picture of the duel (p. 65), of G. R. Hibbard’s World’s Classics edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Given the very moderate progress of textual improvement and the even less remarkable insights of interpretations in recent years, one wonders what, apart from the—legitimate—commercial interest of publishers, the purpose of more and more editions is supposed to be. I am not suggesting, of course, that editors should read an old M.A. thesis written in 1950 by Alfons Spiegel for the Sporthochschule Köln, Sport bei Shakespeare, although it is good to be reminded from time to time of materials one is likely to forget under present cultural conditions. Spiegel, incidentally, became one of the protagonists of German TV sport reporting in the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen in the 1960s and 1970s. 54. Cf. my article “Körper, Handeln, System: Henry IV und andere Beispiele,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West (1989), 178–95. 55. Cf. Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger, rev. ed. Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 202–6. For more careful research on the religious and legal aspects of Rabelais and other writers as well as historical cases, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), especially pp. 31, 66–67, 113.

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56. This has been argued by Vivian da Sola Pinto. See da Sola Pinto, ed., Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2d ed. 1964), pp. xxi–xxii (for the double standard—“double life”— breaking apart into boredom and excess), xxvi (for the comparison between sexual and mystical religious experience), xxvii, xxx. For a broader textual basis, characterizing a restricted but characteristically brief and intense cultural context (“the Restoration”), see John Adlard, ed., The Fruit of that Forbidden Tree: Restoration Poems, Songs and Jests on the Subject of Sensual Love (Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet Press, 1975). 57. Earl of Rochester, Poems by John Wilmot, p. 70.

Chapter Ten: The Persistence of the Obsolete 1. Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters [The Waning of the Middle Ages] (1941; Stuttgart: Kröner, 1975), p. 48. 2. Cf. Carl Diem, Körpererziehung bei Goethe: Ein Quellenwerk zur Geschichte des Sports (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1948), p. 470. Diem has also written a book rich in somewhat unstructured material on Byron himself, Lord Byron als Sportsmann (Cologne: Comel, 1950). For amusing episodes from Byron’s moments as a boxer see, amongst others, Peter Quennell, Byron: The Years of Fame (London: Reprint Society, 1943), pp. 27, 35, 182, 220. Quennell has also made sensible efforts to appreciate Byron’s “feelings of life” (e.g., p. 183). The following judgment is valuable, too: “Byron was the first English writer whose personal life, opinions and alleged private habits evoked a degree of curiosity nowadays reserved for film stars, famous athletes and other heroes of the popular daily press” (p. 189). Concerning Byron’s drift toward maximization, a comparison with Ruskin would be instructive. See for instance Wolfgang Kemp, John Ruskin: 1819–1900 (Munich: Hanser, 1983), pp. 132–33. Some of the ambivalences of a society despised and yet also taken for granted, to some extent neutralized, that is, with respect to other possibilities of experience, are analyzed by Peter W. Graham in Don Juan and Regency England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990). Byron’s texts are quoted from The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Oxford Standard Authors) (1904; Oxford University Press, 1966). 3. Byron, Works, p. 59. 4. Ibid., p. 494. 5. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 6. Ibid., pp. 33–38. 7. It is interesting to note, though, that a “revolutionary” poet of (German or perhaps only southern German) freedom, Ch. F. D. Schubart (1739–91), tried to recite Klopstock in public for quite a while with apparently great success. His own evaluation was that Klopstock was appreciated much more where “there is little than where there is a lot of culture”—culture taken, of course, in its restricted sense. 8. In what I have been saying about Klopstock so far, I have followed a “standard,” “traditional” work on this writer by Gerhard Kaiser, Klopstock:

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Religion und Dichtung (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1963). Peter Rühmkorf, Walther von der Vogelweide, Klopstock und ich (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975), pp. 86–88, has written and read Klopstock’s story in more down-toearth ways. The picture does not change much. Rühmkorf, a contemporary German poet and writer, famous rather for parodic and satirical writing, has focused on Klopstock’s social and economic situation. He has painted the picture of powerful self-representations (over)compensating a socially underprivileged position. For Rühmkorf, Klopstock is a true predecessor of a second Romanticism that refuses to distinguish consistently between the artistic and the private presentation of the self in literary and everyday life, between forms of thought and forms of life, between the picture of the world and the picture of the egotistical sublime. Klopstock drank a lot and played cards, at which he was not above cheating. Obscenities and an attention for girls somewhat scandalized his writer-colleague Johann Jakob Bodmer in the well-regulated city of Zurich and add further touches to a heterogeneous picture. The poet of freely flowing emotion and of the personal experience of God converts himself easily into a commercial speculator, but rather stays away from the representatives of official, prestigious culture. Rühmkorf, Walther von der Vogelweide, pp. 87, 91, 96. 9. In Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke, Karl August Schleiden, ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1962), pp. 109–11. 10. Ibid., pp. 119–21. 11. Cf. Adolf Köberle, quoted in Hajo Bernett, ed., Der Sport im Kreuzfeuer der Kritik (Schorndorf: Karl Hofmann, 1982), pp. 101–2. 12. Klopstock, Werke, p. 164. 13. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, vol. 13 Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (1877–1913; Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), p. 145. For Herder’s ideas on dance, music, and their relation to poetry to be dealt with below, see also Wolfgang Nufer, Herders Ideen zur Verbindung von Poesie, Musik und Tanz (1929; Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967). 14. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, pp. 175, 154 (cf. p. 150). 15. Ibid., pp. 184, 185, 187, 159–61. 16. Ibid. pp. 294, 297; cf. vol. 14, pp. 103 (cf. Nufer, Herders Ideen zur Verbindung, pp. 93, 96), 105, 115. 17. “Der Läufer am Ziel,” in Werke vol. 26, p. 83, line 8; see also the adaptations of Pindar’s Olympic odes in vol. 26. 18. Herder, Werke vol. 26, p. viii; a similar critical opinion holds that Herder’s collection of popular songs represents the highlight of all of his writings. 19. Ibid., vol. 29, pp. 4, 56, 159–60. 20. My own attitude of respectful irony (and less respectful self-irony) is similar to the one adopted by Eckard Henscheid and F. W. Bernstein, eds., Unser Goethe: Ein Lesebuch (Zürich: Diogenes, 1982), a collection of material not

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usually found in the literature on Goethe. But see also, for documents of cultural heterogeneity, Waltraud Wende-Hohenberger and Karl Riha, eds., FaustParodien (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989). For the following Goethe texts I am using the Berlin edition by various hands, third edition, 22 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1972–80). I have also consulted, again, the Insel-Verlag edition of the selected works (6 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1977). 21. These, like anything else, Goethe seems to have managed with the appropriate indifference toward so-called contradictions. Priding himself on his inspiration (which made his own works appear uncanny to himself), he yet develops into a well-seasoned negotiator for high honoraria. For a brief history of these intricacies, with Goethe (or at least his time) as a kind of center, see Heinrich Bosse, Autorschaft ist Werkherrschaft: Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981), especially pp. 79–80. It is also interesting, once more, to compare the cool economic stance of Klopstock, the poet of pathos, in propagating subscriptions to his “Deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik” (1773), with the moralizing qualms of Herder in a prize essay on the effect of poetry in 1781 (Bosse, p. 48; cf. p. 37). 22. Moreover, there is the famous picture of Goethe as a young skater. Diem has extensively described the skating practices of Goethe, Herder, and Weimar “good society” in Körpererziehung bei Goethe, pp. 289–93. 23. Goethe, Werke, Berlin edition, vol. 1, p. 267. 24. Ibid., p. 286, line 93. 25. In his diary, the matter-of-factness with which Goethe talks about his early morning swimming and, without transition, about his work at Iphigenie is striking indeed; see Diem, Körpererziehung bei Goethe, p. 258, and, for more material of that kind, pp. 47–48, 259. 26. Adolf Schöll, quoted in Diem, Körpererziehung, p. 50. 27. The Forsyte Saga (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 729. For a contemporary literary mockery of fitness as one of the sacred but basically speechless cows of the Germans see Ludwig Harig, Heilige Kühe der Deutschen (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1981), pp. 92–95. 28. See Goethe, Werke, Berlin edition, vol. 11, pp. 176–97, and Diem, Körpererziehung, pp. 316–18, for its long genesis and relation with Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. 29. Goethe, Werke, Berlin edition, vol. 11, pp. 224–25. 30. Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 556–57. 31. I have traced episodes in the self-criticism of philosophy (Schopenhauer, N. Hartmann) in that respect in my Wissenschaft als Sujet im modernen englischen Roman (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1979), pp. 5–7. 32. Goethe, Werke, Berlin edition, vol. 1, p. 229 (cf. the “Insel-Goethe,” vol. 1, p. 474), p. 232. 33. Ibid., vol. 18, p. 529; Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 216–17; for more material, see Diem, Körpererziehung, pp. 90, 343. 34. For this, see for instance the introduction to The Pickwick Papers by

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Alec Waugh (London: Collins, 1953), pp. 15–16. For Carroll, see the study by Kathleen Blake, Play, Games and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974). Blake’s account of Carroll’s games (of the mind and otherwise) as both playful and fiercely, “Darwinistically” competitive, is highly instructive. See pp. 37, 38 (with an extension of the concept of play as suggested in part one: “Why shouldn’t we enjoy things we ‘have to’ do?”), pp. 58–59 (for a game called “Natural Selection”), pp. 172– 73 (for ambivalences between hunting and sport in the narrower sense), p. 175 (sport “as the ultimate manifestation of an amoral and self-aggrandizing strain in play and games”), furthermore pp. 181–82, 185–86, 194–95, 198–99, 201– 2, 204–5, for differentiations concerning the Victorian ideology and practice of sport. For that, see also J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), especially for the “Machiavellian solution” for taming the “wildness of boys” (pp. 22–23), the ambivalences of “manliness” (pp. 135, 185–87), and the not-so-ambivalent aspects of morality and patriotism (chapter 8). 35. Cf. especially Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 36. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 37. See Siegfried Lenz, Brot und Spiele (the longer version of a novella “Der Läufer,” 1958) (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1964), pp. 13, 15–16, 22, 27, 32, 43, 52–53, 119, 128, 139, 155, 166–67; Uwe Johnson, Das dritte Buch über Achim (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), pp. 69–70, 72, 83– 84, 144–45, 147, 158, 161, 222, 251–52 and generally pp. 238–52 for relativistic but noninvalidating description. 38. The metaphor is inspired by Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig’s “resurrection of the body in the text” (Die Auferstehung des Körpers im Text [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985]), a book remarkable for its sophisticated interpretations, but also for its ambiguous refusal to indicate how far the metaphor is to be taken not literally, but at least seriously. Consequently, with respect to “the body,” Nietzsche is mainly represented by Thus Spake Zarathustra, a text, as I will argue, neither to be taken seriously nor to be neutralized as a mere metaphor. 39. Cf. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Philosophy as Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (1986; Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). 40. Blondel, pp. 28, 43, 48–49, 57, 135, 219, 230, 227. 41. Ibid., pp. 197, 201, 209. 42. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spake Zarathustra], KSA 4, pp. 163, 139–41, 282, 286. 43. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches [Human, All Too Human], KSA 2, p. 447. 44. I am quoting this and the following somewhat problematically from

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Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche: Umwertung aller Werte, ed. Friedrich Würzbach (1940; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2d ed. 1977), pp. 379– 86. Cf. in this edition the afterword by Heinz Friedrich. In the Colli-Montinari edition, the passages are printed in various places or, as far as I could see in some rare cases, not at all. 45. Ibid., p. 386. In passing and retrospect: Nietzsche’s approach has farreaching consequences for media configurations and analysis. It “explains,” for instance, why music is in constant danger of being charged with “expression.” Music is not really significant for our conscious inner life. But its long-term connection with poetry has made rhythm and qualities of tone liable to “symbolic” interpretation. Opera singing, for example, can thus be taken to express feelings attributable to a subject identified as character. Cf. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, KSA 2, p. 175. 46. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1888, KSA 13, p. 300; Götzendämmerung [Twilight of the Idols], KSA 6, p. 127. 47. See Emile ou de l’éducation (1762), ed. François and Pierre Richard (Paris: Garnier, 1964), especially the references to “Exercices physiques” and “Jeux” in the “Index général analytique” of the editors. 48. W. J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), p. 338.

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Index

In this index an “f” after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an “ff” indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., “57–59.” Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence. abstraction, 44, 110f acting, 19f, 85, 105, 147f, 153 actors, 19, 48, 71, 83, 87, 91, 202f, 209 Addison, Joseph, 292f Adorno, Theodor W., 42, 89, 140, 154, 194–222, 318; Aesthetic Theory, xiiif, 123, 206; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 16, 160, 229, 277 Aeschylus, 78, 92–106 passim, 117 aesthetic distance, 71, 80, 93, 104f, 147 aesthetics, xiiif, 3, 41, 182, 245; aestheticism, 64; aesthetic theory, 196, 198, 252, 331n, 348n Akutagawa, Ryunosuke, 167ff anthropology: of media, xx, 13, 45, 76, 83, 145, 152, 166; cultural, xx, 66, 87, 174, 181; evolutionary, xx, 76; literary, 33, 66, 83 appearances, 24, 28, 30, 69, 106, 115, 125, 206, 211, 343n archaisms, atavisms, xix, 101, 130, 229, 235, 241, 254–59 passim, 308 aria, 93, 153, 176, 178, 218 Ariosto, Ludovico, 273 Aristophanes, 104f Aristotle, xxiv, 1, 57, 81f, 85, 97, 120ff, 128f, 271 art, xiii, 11, 60, 318; high vs. popular, xv, 2f, 49, 76, 78, 205, 245, 284; arts, the, xvi, 52, 86, 89, 131, 180, 251, 137, 199f; applied arts, xvi, xx, 73; work of, xviiif, xxiii, 15, 41, 53, 59, 90, 197 Artaud, Antonin, 80, 153

artificiality, xx, 34ff, 135, 154, 179, 184, 207 Asada Akira, 160, 164 Ascham, Roger, 264f athletics, 271, 274–78 audience, 6, 79–81, 82f, 87, 109, 132, 180, 212f, 216; of tragedies, 71, 92 autopoiesis, 55, 73 autos sacramentales, 198, 192 awareness, 24, 46, 89, 236, 312 Bacon, Francis, 56, 272 Barfield, Owen, 114f Barthes, Roland, 50, 134, 142, 163, 169, 197f, 213, 285f baseball, 145, 235 Basho , 141, 165 Bateson, Gregory, 58, 66f Baudrillard, Jean, 72, 83, 113f, 320 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 246, 331n Becker, Oskar, 34, 196 Beckett, Samuel, 38, 51, 63, 68, 74, 130, 135, 170, 189, 358n Beethoven, Ludwig van, 205, 207, 220, 335n Benn, Gottfried, 229, 318 Bense, Max, xiii Berman, Morris, 13ff, 207 Bizet, Georges, 72, 220 Blau, Herbert, 80f, 83f, 109 Blumenberg, Hans, 120, 124, 128, 352n Boas, Franz, xx

398  Index body, 13, 90, 118, 229f, 236, 298, 386n; codes, xv, xxiv, 132f, 148–55 passim, 160, 191, 228, 253f, 266, 287; body rhythms, 53, 155, 226; body language, 37–39, 116, 175; fragmented, 39, 132, 385n; (over)encoding the body, 235, 263; experience, 245, 254f, 305, 309, 314 bodybuilding, 169, 171 Böhme, Gernot and Hartmut, xxi, 117 Bohner, Hermann, 147f, 155, 358n Bourdieu, Pierre, 38, 293 boxing, 150f, 239–41, 283 Bradley, F. H., 111f brain research, neuroscience, 68, 76, 328n Brecht, Bertolt, 150, 175, 209, 221, 229f, 233, 311, 318 Brown, Norman O., 255, 259 bullfighting, 151, 191, 315 Bunraku, 131, 138f, 145–56 passim Bunyan, John, 296 Burckhardt, Jacob, 6, 68, 81, 94f, 96, 320, 337n, 340n Burke, Edmund, 65, 246 Burke, Kenneth, 62, 65 Burton, Robert, 265, 290f, 294 Butor, Michel, 3, 50 Byatt, A. S., 87, 158 Byron, George Gordon, 6th baron, 297–300 Caillois, Roger, 12, 68, 272, 327n, 382n Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 189f, 191 Calderwood, James, 202, 364n Camerata, 181, 183, 215, 217f caricature, 24f, 48, 51 Carlyle, Thomas, 58, 309 carnival, 28, 197 Carroll, Lewis, 206, 314 Cervantes, Miguel de, 62, 191f chanting, 147, 155, 183, 218, 269 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 153 Chodowiecki, Daniel, 48f, 110 Cicero, 283, 290 Claessens, Dieter, 44, 305 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176, 214 comedias, 190, 192f comedy, 27, 81, 96, 104, 346n computer, digitalization, xv, xxii, 176 consciousness, xxi, 64, 68, 75, 87, 146, 227f, 236 Cook, Nicholas, 185, 214 coryphaeus, 91f court masque, 6, 126, 158, 178

culture, 11ff, 75, 77f; segment culture, xix, 14, 175f; cultural evolution, xxii, 14, 72f, 76 (see also anthropology); theories/concepts of, 232, 261, 338n Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, xvi, 12, 341n, 348n Dahlhaus, Carl, 207, 220 dance, 85, 96, 155, 157, 262–70 Dante, Alighieri, 183, 216 Danto, Arthur C., 91, 262 Dazai, Osamu, 167, 169 Dean, Winton, 219f Debord, Guy, 126, 193f deconstruction, xiv, 25, 112f, 136, 159, 164, 177, 182. See also postmodernism Deleuze, Gilles, 196, 225 Derrida, Jacques, 80, 341n detective story, novel, 102f, 171 Dewey, John, xiv, xvii, xix, 89, 193–222 Dickens, Charles, 51f, 225, 314 Diem, Carl, 290, 298, 309, 313 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 56, 88 Dionysian mysteries, 91, 104 discontinuities, psycho-cultural, 253f, 256, 295, 304 Donizetti, Gaetano, 34f, 195 doping, 236, 242, 285, 375n Dover Wilson, John, 293 drama, 5, 17, 24, 67, 71, 80, 91–106, 189, 266. See also theater drugs, 47, 50, 68, 151, 173, 195, 292, 296, 301 Dryden, John, 140, 143, 177–82, 184, 219, 366n Duerr, Hans Peter, 324n Eagleton, Terry, 42, 348n Einstein, Carl, 59f elegance, 139. See also iki Elias, Norbert, 256, 324n Eliot, George, 51, 53 Eliot, T. S., 177, 210, 301 Ellis, Havelock, 199, 266 Elyot, Thomas, 264f, 267 enactment, xviff, 33f, 67, 70f, 77f, 97, 105, 123, 149, 153f; quasi-ritual, 184; theatrical, 203, 211f, 254, 342n engrossment, xvi, xxii, 54, 59, 70, 73, 82, 84f, 148, 159, 177. See also fascination entertainment, 5, 58f, 134, 142, 148, 175, 180, 192, 206, 284

Index Euben, J. Peter, 94ff, 98 Euripides, 81, 92, 95, 104f, 106, 187, 208 fantasm, 101, 105 fascination, xvi, xxii, 47, 54, 83f, 87, 231f, 287. See also engrossment festivals, festivities, 63, 67, 125, 211, 213 fiction: fictionality, xxiii, 5, 11, 15, 31, 43; novel as, 5, 170f; and truth/reality, 22f, 65f, 77, 95, 138, 143, 162, 164; the fictive, 83; and nonfiction, 166ff Fielding, Henry, 4, 24–30, 46, 48, 51, 62, 202f fiestas, 186–92 passim film, 33f, 35–40, 54, 58, 113, 131, 192, 225 Flaubert, Gustave, 35, 39, 82, 125, 140, 160, 195, 267 Flickinger, Roy, 91f, 98 flow experience, xvi, 159, 242, 348n. See also Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Forster, E. M., 35, 39 Foucault, Michel, 80, 102, 161, 272, 305 Freud, Sigmund, xvi, 77 games, 65–68, 125, 242, 272, 290, 311, 342n. See also play Gans, Eric, 76ff, 80, 88f Gardner, Howard, 226 Garrick, David, 46, 48, 86, 188, 204 Geertz, Clifford, 66, 341n Gehlen, Arnold, xxi, 89, 119, 200, 262, 270 gei, 137f, 156, 172 Gesamtkunstwerk, 140, 195 Giddens, Anthony, 144 Gide, André, 47, 170, 268 Giedion, Sigfried, 315 Girard, René, 76 Giraudoux, Jean, 256f Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 45, 69, 170, 189, 193, 215; Wilhelm Meister, 16–24, 51, 63, 139; and writing, 51, 61; Faust, 110, 221; and bodily experience, 289, 308–14, 317 Goffmann, Erving, 48, 67, 98, 115 Goodman, Nelson, 112, 120, 124, 325n Gramsci, Antonio, 127f, 216 Greenblatt, Stephen, 273 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 191 haiku, 15, 134, 142, 163, 165 Hammett, Dashiell, 35–40

399

Handel, Georg Friedrich, 49, 182, 185, 210, 218ff Hanslick, Eduard, 58, 195 Hardy, Thomas, 27f, 51 Havelock, Eric, 105, 109, 120, 128 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 292 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xx, 56; on aesthetics, xiv, xvii, 268f; on the arts, 22, 41f, on literature, 54, 78; on opera, 83, 194–222 Heidegger, Martin, 196, 366n Hemingway, Ernest, 229, 256, 274, 315 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 304–9 hermeneutics, 2, 50, 54, 126, 177, 182. See also interpretation Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 33, 176, 210 Hogarth, William, 26, 45f, 48–50, 184 Homer, 5, 46, 115, 119, 229, 243, 264f, 274–78, 282 Horace, 129, 279 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 154, 160, 206, 229, 277 Hugo, Victor, 33, 214 Huizinga, Johan, 272f, 297, 342n Hume, David, 2, 60, 124 Hunter, J. Paul, 27, 202 Huxley, Aldous, 116, 173, 292 Ibsen, Henrik, 133, 266f iconoclasm, 113, 171 iki, 139, 144. See also elegance illusion, 111, 123, 138f images, 38f, 40, 85, 113, 119, 225f, 353n imaginary, the, 28, 34, 41, 48, 83, 105, 285, 288; imagination, 254, 313 immediacy, 31–39 passim, 64, 155f, 195, 199 Ingarden, Roman, 177 intensities, 46, 84, 100 interiorization, interiority, 120, 149, 165, 189 intermediality, xvii, xix, 16, 23–29 passim, 38, 50–54, 269 intermediate objects, zones, 12–14, 33, 36, 52, 65, 159, 340n interpretation, 43, 72, 74, 84, 102, 111, 136, 189, 205 Iser, Wolfgang, 15, 33, 65f, 72, 81, 83, 136, 177, 327n, 341n James, C. L. R., 276 James, Henry, 5, 51f, 64, 135f, 292 James, William, 127, 273

400  Index Johnson, Samuel, 333n Johnson, Uwe, 316 Jones, Inigo, 177–83 Jonson, Ben, 109, 177–83, 333n Jorn, Asger, 111, 201 Joyce, James, 22, 51, 135 Kabuki, 73, 131–34, 139, 143–66, 173, 176, 189, 194, 357n, 362n Kaelen, Eugene F., 227 Kant, Immanuel, xxi, 65, 70, 84, 117f, 123, 246ff, 252 Karatani Ko jin, 134, 161, 164 Kawabata, Yasunari, 165ff Keller, Gottfried, 267 Kernan, Alvin, 143, 177, 333n kitsch, 76, 157 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 85f, 300– 306, 392n kokoro , 147f Konner, Melvin, 116, 305 Krieger, Murray, 23, 78, 327n Kroeber, A. L., xx Lacan, Jacques, 17, 79 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 49, 86 Lee, Nathanael, 47, 203 Lefebve, Maurice Jean, 53 Lenk, Hans, 231ff, 236 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 14f, 74, 82f, 89, 258, 304 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 85, 258 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xx, 74 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 43–50, 54f, 86, 110, 184, 187, 201f, 204 liminal, liminoid, 67, 88f, 159, 341n Lindenberger, Herbert, 33, 176, 193, 197, 207, 221 literature: and sports, xviii, xxii, 153, 226– 33, 241, 273, 298–314; imaginative, xix; history, 3; popular, 4; western, 15, 135, 228; modern, 40, 51; theory, 50, 225; literariness, 54; Japanese, 160 Locke, John, 62 Lope de Vega, 71, 189f, 191 Lorenzer, Alfred, 255f, 260 Luhmann, Niklas, 57–61, 81 Lukács, Georg, 161, 208 Luther, Martin, 43f, 86 MacAloon, John, 125, 127 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 6, 272

magic, 101f, 105, 207 Mailer, Norman, 229, 315, 340 Marcuse, Herbert, 253–56, 259, 297, 299, 312 Marx, Karl, 69, 214 Mascagni, Pietro, 207, 221 mask, 70, 172 Maturana, Humberto, 260 Maupassant, Guy de, 315 McLuhan, Marshall, xix, 34–38 passim media: configurations, xviif, xxiii, 16, 48, 132–37 passim, 144, 182, 225ff, 287; single media, xix, xxiii, 48, 133, 145, 174f, 182, 225f; electronic, xxii, 113; multi/plural media, 49, 54, 78f, 184, 191, 215, 232, 268; mass media, 58, 76. See also anthropology, of media Meier, Christian, 95f, 98 melodrama, 31f, 128, 216, 269 Meredith, George, 122, 315 metadrama, 202, 333n, 364n mie, 132, 145f, 156, 161 Milton, John, 181, 219f mimesis, mimetic, 81, 92 Miner, Earl, 143, 162, 172 Mishima, Yukio, 153, 166, 168–71 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 140, 161, 174f modernity, 40, 130, 136, 166, 168, 208, 318 monogatari, 134f monomane, 138, 147 Monteverdi, Claudio, 188, 217f Montherlant, Henri de, 257, 274 Morin, Edgar, 33, 75, 101, 105, 113, 225, 260, 270, 338n Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 204, 215, 221 Muccioli, Marcello, 131, 153 Muschg, Walter, 48, 169, 201, 203, 340n music, 50, 58, 92f, 183, 185f, 207, 225ff music hall, 186, 225 Musil, Robert, 45, 53, 60, 62f, 89, 187f, 190, 231, 235 Nastase, Ilie, 233ff Nebel, Gerhard, 256ff Neumeister, Sebastian, 190, 368n New Criticism, 177, 199, 306 New Historicism, 273, 364n Nietzsche, Friedrich: notion of culture, 11f, 65, 77, 124; and observation, 36, 59, 63; on appearances, 68–72, 118f; Greek tragedy/culture, 78, 84, 92f, 102, 215,

Index 148; physiology (of aesthetics) 89, 235, 304, 314–21; and opera, 127, 176, 195 novel, 29, 40, 52, 59, 174, 201, 210, 215; medial problems of, 4ff, 19; Japanese, 133–36, 164f observer, observation, 13, 48, 70f, 82f, 85, 179, 285, 287f; in systems theory, 56, 58f, 62f, 155, 243  gai Mori, 130, 162ff O Olympic games, 227, 233, 250 onnagata, 149, 157 opera buffa, seria, xxiii, 207, 220 opera, 28–35, 39, 54, 71f, 83, 128f, 135, 173–80 passim; comic, xxiv; and verbal theater, 18f, 78, 93, 143; Chinese, 83, 186; rise of opera in Florence, 159, 181– 222; Savoy opera, 186; semi-opera, 216f operatic principle, xxiv, 176, 194–222 operetta, xxiv, 186f Ortolani, Benito, 131, 142, 159 participation, xxiii, 5, 48, 75, 81, 114 Pater, Walter, 52, 279f pathos, 84, 93, 176, 178, 338n Paul, Jean, 47f performance, 39, 41, 62, 73, 78, 229, 262, 299f; and literature, 1, 4ff, 16, 24, 28; theatrical, 36, 123, 176, 183f, 202 Petrarch, 289f phantasmagoria, 124, 206 physiognomy, 49, 110–16 passim pictures, illustrations, 49ff, 51 Pindar, 243, 277f Plato, 1f, 105, 115, 120, 128, 204, 271 play, 13, 88, 242ff, 290, 311; Schiller on, xvi, 249ff, 255; theories of, 65–68, 261, 272, 342n, 382n. See also games Plessner, Hellmuth, xxi, 81 poetics, xiii, 181f poetry, 22, 46, 162f, 199, 237, 252, 268f, 287, 297–300, 366n; and enactment, 24, 90, 204, 245 Polanyi, Karl, 298 Pope, Alexander, 184, 292 postmodernism, 122, 126, 130, 150, 161. See also deconstruction Pound, Ezra, 140f print (culture), 44, 113 professionalization, 54; of writing, 2, 41, 162–65 passim, 169f, 272; of sports, 120, 152, 160, 242, 272, 274, 295, 314

401

protestantism, 158. See also Puritanism protoliterary, the, xxv, 252, 278, 284–91 passim, 321 protopoetic potential, 238, 285 Proust, Marcel, 77 Purcell, Henry, 216f Puritanism, xxii, 158, 164, 179, 204, 288, 290 Rabelais, François, 294f reading, 243, 258, 328n; silent, xxiv, 4f; tranquillizing effect of, 47, 252; close, 136; reading mania, 174, 300 realism, 23, 28, 34, 51, 69, 132 recitative, recital, 153, 183, 218 Reemtsma, Jan Phillip, 229 representation, 2, 76, 80–90 passim, 109, 138f, 153, 211; performative, 24, 78, 94, 216; theatrical, 48, 80, 94, 96, 100–106, 146; self-referential, 99, 181 rhetoric, 44, 50, 78, 84, 93, 95f, 188 rhythm, 39, 85–92 passim, 155 Rimer, J. Thomas, 135, 162 ritual, 68, 142, 151, 154, 171; and theater, 5, 87f, 123, 125f, 208, 213 Rochester, John Wilmot, second earl of, 296 rock music, see music Rolland, Romain, 95 Rossini, Gioachino, 175, 220, 335n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 319f Ruskin, John, 58, 73, 198 Schechner, Richard, xxi, 67, 87, 142, 152, 174, 193, 342n Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 41f, 105, 176, 187, 198, 257 Schiller, Friedrich, xvi, 5, 51, 123, 204, 215, 243–57, 260, 297, 304, 310 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 189, 198 Schmidgall, Gary, 176, 178, 210 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 70, 117ff, 148 Scott, Walter, 28–35, 195 self-observation, 36, 174 self-referentiality, 29, 41, 55, 60f, 64, 84, 86, 106, 135, 140, 245 Serres, Michel, 280f Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 62, 129 Shakespeare, William, 5, 25, 110, 184, 238; and music/opera, 33, 161, 176f, 188ff, 217, 363n; and performance, 36, 48, 86f,

402  Index 143, 203, 293, 333n; and representation, 209–15 Shaw, George Bernard, 33, 214, 221, 239– 41, 314 Sheldrake, Rupert, 116, 119 shows, 5, 113, 156 simulation, 62, 72, 114 singing, 72, 94, 183, 189, 208, 210, 218 skating, 300–314 Sloterdijk, Peter, 258, 313 soccer (report), 237f, 285 Socrates, 69, 119 Solger, Karl Wilhelm, 46, 252, 268 Sophokles, 92, 96, 100–104, 278, 285 So seki Natsume, 162, 165 spectacle, 4, 11, 125–73, 182, 187, 190–95 passim, 213, 227 spectator, 48, 71, 79, 97, 203 Spencer, Herbert, 56ff, 61 sports, 88, 311, 242, 150; Greek, 262, 271– 79 passim, 306; Roman, 279. See also literature and sports; professionalization stage technology, 187 Statius, 278, 283ff, 292 stichomythia, 93f Storr, Anthony, xvi, 36 Strauss, Richard, 267 Strohm, Reinhard, xxiv, 222 style, 116, 124 sublime, 42, 64, 117, 181, 202 sumo , 143, 150–60, 232 surface, 122, 130, 148 systems theory, xvi, 3, 53–66, 69ff, 74, 84, 130, 134, 249, 259–63 Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro , 165, 168 television, 34, 113, 142, 186, 287 theater: as institution, 17ff, 45; social, 48; total, 48, 87; theater anthropology, 67; Elisabethan, 71, 87, 143, 159; Greek, 71, 87, 90; Balinese, 80, 109, 186; Chinese, 80, 98; Japanese, 129–43, 173, 179, 357n; western, 129, 132f, 145, 155, 158, 174, 187, 195, 228; of cruelty, 153 theatricality, 16–23, 68, 100, 171, 187, 191, 203, 209, 212 Tour de France, 285f tragedy, 27, 81, 176, 208–15 passim;

Greek, 71, 78, 90–106, 120, 139, 147, 182ff, 208f, 216, 218; classical French, 87, 176, 184, 213; Stuart, 178, 212; Roman, 216 transitional objects, spaces, xv, 12–14, 34, 52, 62, 68 Trimpi, Wesley, 115, 120 Turner, Victor, xxi, 1, 88, 94, 267f, 341n, 345n Ueda, Makoto, 141, 163 Umminger, Walter, 255f Vaihinger, Hans, 12, 164 Valéry, Paul, 155, 175, 268ff Verdi, Giuseppe, 128, 195, 214, 222, 335n Veyne, Paul, xxii, 283ff violence, xix, 28, 32, 41, 76, 96, 160, 238 Virgil, 278, 280–85 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 252f, 268 visibility, 6, 24–28, 297 visuality, 51, 53, 109f, 124, 126, 227 Wagner, Richard, 195, 214, 221f, 265, 335n; and literalization of opera, 72, 127, 186, 188, 195, 207ff, 216 Wallace, Lewis, 279f Wedekind, Frank, 267 Weiler, Ingomar, 279 Weill, Kurt, 221 Werfel, Fritz, 222 Whitehead, Alfred North, 112, 120 Wilde, Oscar, 124, 267 Williams, Raymond, 137 Winnicott, D. W., 11ff, 65, 79, 258, 341n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 38 Wolf, Ror, 236f, 287 Woolf, Virginia, 82 writing, 1, 44, 61, 63, 120, 167, 291, 340; (western) systems of, 15, 106, 128, 162 Yeats, William Butler, 140f, 155, 163, 259, 268 yu gen, 130, 139, 144, 163 Zeami, 138, 144, 146 Zen, 145, 148, 226, 235, 263, 358n zur Lippe, Rudolf, 154, 263