Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.

by Hans Robert Jauss; Timothy Bahti; Paul de Man Review by: Michael Sprinker MLN, Vol. 97, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1982), pp. 1205-1212 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905985 . Accessed: 28/10/2013 03:40
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nicate or not to fornicate:that is the question" (842a). "A cohabitationof Sigor confusion"is mentioned (23 la). mund Freud and Jesus,not withoutconflict See "Montal, Robert" (542b), writtenby Frickx's friend and sometime collaborator, Robert Burniaux. The other three contributorswith entries are CzeshawMilosz, Philippe Sellers, and Paul de Wispeleare. and InnerExile: Authoritarian On Espaia peregrinasee Paul Ilie, Literature Spain, 1939-1975 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Peyre also punches Romain Rolland ("inelegant style,"psychological"shallowof the modern age in an ness") and Michel Foucault (who "has retoldthe history fashion"). Peyre's grand gesturesbrightly dispel the illuimperiouslyarbitrary sion thatone scholar alone, grown great withlearning,can speak for all of 20th centuryFrench literature. The geographic exclusivity of the German surveyomitsany mentionof Frisch's and Diirrenmatt'sconsiderable influence throughout postwar German literature.

Translated byTimothy an Aesthetic Hans RobertJauss, Toward ofReception. Bahti, withan introduction by Paul de Man of Minnesota Press, 1982. xxix + 218 pages Minneapolis: University "Forevery secondin timewas which thesmalldoorthrough theMessiah might step." -Walter Benjamin The appearance in English of a collection of Hans RobertJauss's essays was probably overdue. As Timothy Bahti remarks in the Translator's Preface to the present volume, the already well-knownwork of Jauss's colleague Wolfgang Iser has led to a somewhatskewed understandingin the English-speakingworld of the nature of the collectiveproject of the Konstanz group, an understandingthat has largelyobscured "the more historical position"(p. xxvii) representedbyJauss. With Bahti's translation translation of the five Jaussessaysincluded here, and withthe forthcoming und Literarische by Michael Shaw of Jauss's collection,Asthetische Erfahrung Hermeneutik (to be published in the same series on Theory and Historyof is the LiteraturefromMinnesota,of whichTowardan Aesthetic ofReception second volume to appear), the picture should change considerably. and differencesamong the Though there may be importantdistinctions members of the Konstanz group-according to Paul de Man's introducunited by methtion,theyare "a liberal associationof scholars,informally odological concerns that allow for considerable diversity"(p. vii)-it is doubtful that any adequate description of the common methodological referredto as Rezeptionsdsthetik, commitment thatunites them,customarily could omit consideration of the programmaticrevision of conventional literary historythatJauss's work undertakes. Moreover, as numerous instances from current debates withinliterarytheory and philosophy will

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attest,the nature of historicalunderstanding remains among the most vexed areas of inquirywithinthe human sciences.Jauss's particularintervention withinthe field of literarytheory meritsdetailed consideration therefore,not merely because of its association with what is most often but for the signal clarificacalled in America "reader response criticism," to theory. tions it can offerconcerningthe relationshipof history theorists The claim of the Konstanz group on the attentionof literary on their"boldrests,as Paul de Man suggestsin hisjudicious introduction, ness ... in callingtheirapproach a poeticsas well as a hermeneutics" (p. x). It is the attemptto achieve a general theoryof "literariness"withinthe confines of the historical discipline of hermeneutics that causes the Konstanz programmeof research to stand out against the background of whichhas been and traditional more ahistoricalformalisms history literary and in hermeneutics The sources Gadamer's (in generally positivistic. theory) phenomenology)and the implications(for aestheticand linguistic of thisprogrammeas exemplifiedin Jauss's workare described in Paul de and so it will not be necessary to duplicate that deMan's introduction, it may be more useful to examine in some detail here. Rather, scription which de Man does Jauss's critique of those formsof historicalcriticism not treat at length. In particular,Jauss's polemic against Marxism, here representedby Lukacs, deserves careful consideration.The question will be complicated by the fact that Jauss often cites with approval Walter Benjamin, whose associationwithMarxismis by no means unproblematic, are undebut whose credentialsas a theoreticianof historicalmaterialism niable. That Benjamin's criticismwould offer no aid or comfortto an aestheticsof reception (as Paul de Man argues), reinforcesthe suspicion that the polemical positionJauss takes with respect to Marxist aesthetics as merelyoppositional. cannot be understood straightforwardly in manifesto-like the of Lukacs comes essay that opens Jauss's critique Toward an Aesthetic "LiteraryHistoryas Challenge [Provokation] ofReception, to Literary Theory." Before turningto thisessay,however,it willbe useful to consider Jauss's later critique of Marxism ("LiteraryHistoryas Challenge" was writtenin 1967), "The Idealist Embarrassment:Observations 7 [Autumn on MarxistAesthetics," (trans.Peter Heath, NewLiterary History art from Greek on the famous The 1975]). passage essay opens by citing Marx's 1857 "Einleitungzur Kritikder politischenOkonomie." This, Jauss the idealistcore argues (and enlistsMarcuse in supportof him),constitutes of Marxistaestheticswhich later reflectiontheoryabandoned and which even contemporaryneo-Marxian theoryobscures by situatingall art produced between Greek antiquityand the communistsocietyof the future withinideology ("The Idealist Embarrassment,"p. 193). Jauss cites the Economic and Philosophical of1844 to show that"the workof art Manuscripts could become a paradigm for nonalienated labor whichcould uphold the in periods of alienidea of free productivity and sense-changing receptivity ated material labor" (p. 199). This concept of the work of art "does not

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remove the idealist embarrassmentof Marx's passage about constructing according to the laws of beauty,but elevates it into an indispensable comaesthetic. . ." (p. 200). But such a properlymateriponent of a materialist of art works, alist aestheticmust also account for the historicaleffectivity and it is over this question that Jauss splits with contemporaryMarxist accounts of receptionthatconstrue the reader "as an idealized consciousness." Focusing on the work of Manfred Naumann and a group of them for theoristsfromthe German Democratic Republic,Jauss criticizes theirneglectof "the concept of concretization"and concludes: "Intersubjective categories are entirelylacking on the side of reception, so that it comes to seem as though receptive predetermination[Rezeptionsvorgabe] reader..." . . . refersto the individual receptionof the workby a universal of the in terms framed here is debate The (p. 205; Jauss's emphasis). economic categories of the Grundrisse, production and consumption,and Jauss's case hinges on Marx's assertionthatnot only does production produce consumption,but that "Consumption thus appears as a factor[Moment]of production" (Marx, "Einleitung"; cited by Jauss, p. 206). The whichcan onlyspeak of the of Marxistaesthetics, "idealistembarrassment" workof art in its productivecapacity,is thus overcome througha recognition of "the reader's share," through a historicalinquiry into the actual eras and cultures. readings that works of art have provoked in different Marxistaestheticswould seem to demand, in principle,the supplementaof reception. tion of the history This formulationleads directlyto the critique of Lukacs in "Literary to refleccourt Historyas Challenge." Lukacs's aestheticsis assimilatedtout of grasping the tion theory,whichJauss claims forecloses"the possibility characterof art. . ." (p. 14). This lost possibility reemerges revolutionary in Jauss's argument through an examination of Russian and Czech Foror malism,forit is the Formalists'fundamentalconcept of "estrangement" the constitutive "defamiliarization" opposition between poetic (ostraneniye), work and and ordinarylanguage, thatdrives a wedge between the literary of reflection itssocial ambience and thus undoes the authority theory.The is also extensionof Formalistpoetics in a theoryof literary further history praised byJauss,who discernsin theiropposing of "a dynamicprincipleof to the classical concept of tradition" evolution (p. 17) the firststep literary toward the historical criticismhe advocates. Jauss's brief against Formalism,however,charges that the limitationof literaryhistoryto a "succession of systems"does not adequately account for the historicalspeciof literaturedoes not end withthe of literary works:"The historicity ficity like that the evolutionof literature, successionof aesthetic-formal systems; of language, is to be determined not only immanentlythrough its own but also through its reunique relationshipof diachronyand synchrony, Both Formalismand of the to 18). lationship general process history"(p. Marxism fail "to bridge the gap between literatureand history"because they "conceive the literary fact withinthe closed circle of an aestheticsof

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of a In doing so, theydeprive literature productionand of representation. dimensionthatinalienablybelongs to itsaestheticcharacteras well as to its social function:the dimension of its receptionand influence"(p. 18). The projectof an aestheticsof receptionprovidesthismissinglinkbetweenthe to the genwork and its social functionand makes a contribution literary eral progress of historyas "the ongoing totalizationof the past through aestheticexperience [Erfahrung]" (p. 20). That historyis indeed "progressive" and that it can be seen to be so from the standpoint of the present is the enabling condition of Jauss's postulationof an understandingof literaryhistory:"The step from the of literaturehas of receptionof the individual work to the history history the historical to lead to seeing and representing[zu sehenund darzustellen] of literathe coherence and as determine of works clarify they sequence ture, to the extent that it is meaningful for us, as the prehistory ihrer of its present experience [als Vorgeschichte Erfahrung]" gegenwdrtigen of historical this of In understanding, Jauss theory support (p. 20). cites the concluding sentences of Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay, "Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft," as he earlier had invoked Benjamin's Uber den Begriffder Geschichte against Ranke's historicism. As the earlier passage makes clear, Jauss's critique of historicismis aligned with Enlightenmentphilosophy of historyand with Schiller'sfigureof the universal historian:"In its turningaway fromthe sacrificednot only the historicism Enlightenmentphilosophy of history, also the methodological but universal of construction history, teleological foremost first and to Schiller, that, distinguishesthe according principle universal historian and his method: namely, 'to join [zu verkniipfen"to knotor tie"] the past withthe present'-an inalienable underliterally school could not standing,only ostensiblyspeculative,that the historicist brushaside without payingforit.. ." (p. 8). The note to thispassage directs of on the the reader to the seventhof Benajmin's Theses ofHistory, Philosophy there "delivered from which it is asserted that the critique of historicism leads unnoticed beyond the obthe standpointof historicalmaterialism, (p. 192, n. 19). Elsewhere conceptionof history" jectivismof the materialist it is apparent that Jauss is eager to dissociate Benjamin from Marxist theory (see "History of Art and Pragmatic History," pp. 65-66 in the presentvolume), presumablysince,forJauss,Marxismcan only produce a and an essentialist theoryof art. But to teleological philosophyof history cite thesisVII as evidence of Benjamin's overcoming(even if "unnoticed") denObjectivisiiber unvermerkt of the materialist (fiihrt conception of history mus der materialistischen hinaus) is surely an oddGeschichtsauffassung though revealing-misreading of the text. In thesisVII, the explicittargetof Benjamin's polemic is the supposed thatturnsout to be thinly an objectivity of historicism, disguised objectivity For the enabling conditionof historiempathywiththe victorsof history. of "cultural treasures" (die Kulturgiiter), cism is preciselythe transmission

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the "spoils" (dieBeute)of culturalprogress(Fortschritt). The visionof history as continualdisasteris of course closelyallied withthe image in thesisIX of the angel, Klee's "Angelus Novus," whose wings have been caught by a into the stormblowing from Paradise: "This stormdrives him irresistibly towardwhichhis back is turned,whilethe heap of ruinsbefore him future, growstoward the heavens. That which we call progressis thisstorm."But "progress" has yet another name in the Theses:Social Democracy. Benjais also a politicalintervention min'scritiqueof historicism againstthe SPD, a in the coming to power of Fascism. Against recognitionof theircomplicity thiscomplicity, historicalmaterialismstruggles by opposing the facileidea of historical"progress," which includes the embracing of technological development by Social Democracy and the corresponding notion of universal history in which historicism culminates(thesis XVII). of No one could be more explicitly opposed to the "ongoing totalization the past throughaestheticexperience" than the Benjamin of the Theses.He writesin thesis XVII: "The historicalmaterialistapproaches a historical he recogobject only where he encountersit as a monad. In thisstructure of events,or, to put nizes the signof a messianicplacing at rest[Stillstellung] it another way, a revolutionaryprospect [Chance]in the strugglefor the a determirepressed past. He seizes it in order to spring [sprengen] nate epoch from out of the homogeneous course of history; thus he springs a determinatelife fromthe epoch, a determinatework fromthe lifework. The yieldfromthisprocedure consistsin the factthatin the work the lifework, in the lifework the epoch, and in the epoch the entirecourse of history is deposited and cancelled yetpreserved[aufgehoben]." ForJauss, the historical object, the work or text,is not a monad but an event,which, is integrated ratherthan being "sprung" fromthe continuum of history, into the "coherence of literature"(p. 22) in the historicalprocess of its or subjective,can be obreception.This process, far frombeing arbitrary jectified with systematic rigor: "If ... one defines the initial horizon of whichis of a textas paradigmaticisotopy, expectations[Erwartungshorizont] of an horizon into immanent expectationsto the transposed syntagmatic extent that the utterance grows, then the process of reception becomes describable in the expansion of a semioticsystemthat accomplishes itself A corresponding betweenthe developmentand the correctionof a system. also deterof horizons of and the continuous process altering establishing mines the relationshipof the individual textto the succession of textsthat formsthe genre. The new textevokes forthe reader (listener)the horizon whichare thenvaried, of expectationsand rules familiar fromearliertexts, corrected,altered, or even just reproduced" (p. 23). As in the Husserlian theoryof perception fromwhich it is derived,Jauss's model of reception collapses the temporal displacement produced by the act of reading into what Benjamin called "homogeneous, emptytime." The misreading and misappropriationof Benjamin extends to other most notably in the of Reception, essays included in Toward an Aesthetic

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concluding essay on Baudelaire's "Spleen," where Benjamin's positing of the allegorical structure of the Baudelairean lyric is interpolated as a historicist model connecting the present with the past by means of an aesthetic mode: "To [Benjamin] we owe the insight that brought to light the buried connection [den verschiitteten Zusammenhang] between the older tradition of allegory that declined after its last flowering in the baroque, and its reawakening in the Fleurs du mal" (p. 178). That allegory in Benjamin may not be an aesthetic (that is, phenomenal) mode at all, that it is, rather, specifically linguistic, is argued convincingly by Paul de Man (pp. xxii-xxiii). The consequences of this accommodation in Jauss's theory to the "classical phenomenalism of an aesthetics of representation" (p. xxii) are by no means trivial, either for the reading of the Baudelaire poem in question or for the general theory of history which Jauss proposes. For to produce an authentically historical account of the text Rezeptionsdsthetik as event, it would have to abandon just that postulation of the phenomenal stabilityof the text which is characteristic of the aesthetic as such and upon which its practice is founded. Despite Jauss's considerable animus against Marxism, it is to a Marxist philosopher and his critique of historicism that one turns most readily for the means to "spring" the event from the continuum of history made homogeneous in Jauss's aesthetic totalization. To engage the work of Louis Althusser with that of Jauss, one may compare two passages in which each seems to be making the same claim for the "relative autonomy" of art. The firstpassage is taken from the conclusion to Jauss's essay, "History of Art and Pragmatic History": the history of art is distinguishedfromother spheres of historicalrealityby the carried out through of the immortalis not onlyvisibly factthatin it the formation the productionof works,but also throughreception,by itsconstantreenactment of the enduring featuresof works that long since have been committedto the

past. The historyof art maintains this special status even if one concurs with the Marxistliterarytheorythat art and literaturecannot claim any historyof their own, but only become historicalinsofaras theyparticipatein the general process of historicalpraxis. The history of art keeps its special positionwithinpragmatic historyto the extent that,through the medium of perception and by means of zu machenvermag]the interpretation,it can consciously bring forth [bewul3t in which human praxis incorporatesimpulses historicalcapacityof "totalization, Totalization,in fromthe past and animatesthem throughthis veryintegration." the sense of "a process of production and reproduction, animation and of art (p. 75). rejuvenation,"is presented in exemplary formby the history I do notrankreal artamongtheideologies, although art does have a quite particular and specificrelationshipwithideology.... Art (I mean authenticart, not works in the strict of an average or mediocre level) does not give us a knowledge sense,it therefore does not replace knowledge (in the modern sense: scientific knowledge), but what it gives us does neverthelessmaintain a certain specific of art is to "make us withknowledge.... I believe thatthe peculiarity relationship

The second passage is from Althuser's "Letter on Art":

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see" [nousdonnera voir],"make us perceive," "make us feel" somethingwhich alludesto reality.... What art makes us see,and thereforegives to us in the form is the and 'feeling"(which is not the form of knowing), of "seeing,""perceiving" as it detaches itself it in it which from which is which from bathes, born, ideology art, and to which it aludes.... Balzac and Solzhenitsyngive us a "view" of the fed, a view ideology to which their work alludes and withwhich it is constantly fromthe veryideology from an internal distantiation which presupposes a retreat, which their novels emerged. They make us "perceive" (but not know) in some the very ideology in which they are distance, sensefromtheinside,by an internal held (Louis Althusser,"A Letteron Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," in Leninand and Other Essays,trans.Ben Brewster[New York, 1971], pp. 221-23). Philosophy

That thissecond passage can be susceptibleto an idealistreading is evident fromTerry Eagleton's tersejudgment: "It is as though the aestheticmust stillbe granted mysteriously privileged status,but now in embarrassedly and Ideology [London, 1976], p. 84). Nonetheless,a oblique style"(Criticism more careful reading may disclose a quite different conceptual operation in Althusserfromthat in Jauss. Here, as elsewhere, the crucial distinctionfor Althusser is between and science (whichproduces knowledge).The Althusseriancritique ideology of empiricismcharges traditionalepistemologywith a confusion in the object of knowledge: "For the empiricistconception of knowledge, the whole of knowledgeis thus investedin thereal,and knowledgenever arises real distinct between the inside itsrealobject partsofthat really except as a relation object"(Louis Althusserand Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster[London, 1970], p. 39). Althussercounters by claimingthat the real object is not the same as the object of knowledge: "the real object, of whatit is, afteras which knowledge is to be acquired or deepened, remains transthe knowledgeof this real object is achieved by a labouroftheoretical it is since affects the which only necessarily objectof knowledge, formation applied to the latter"(ReadingCapital,p. 156). This object of knowledge is never,like the real object, simply"there,"thatwhich"is given,"but always appears in the form of "the peculiar raw material": "i.e., matteralready elaborated and transformed, preciselyby the impositionof the complex it as an object whichconstitutes structure of (sensuous-technical-ideological) however crude, which constitutesit as the object it will transknowledge, it willchange in the course of itsdevelopmentprocess in form,whoseforms but will order to produce knowledges which are constantlytransformed in the sense of object (ReadingCapital, alwaysapply to itsobject, ofknowledge" p. 43). In the passage from the "Letter on Art," Althusser carefullydistinguishes between the empirical process of perception (seeing, perceiving, thus all propfeeling,alluding-all formsof phenomenal representation, erly aesthetic functions),and the quite differentcognitive operation of Art presents the beholder or reader with phenomenal cogniknowledge. tions (Erkenntnisse) that place ideology at a distance-roughly the displacebefore the process of knowledge which involves it .. .; the deepening of

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horizonof expectationsaccomplishedbya work mentof the contemporary likeMadameBovaryin Jauss's account of its reception("LiteraryHistoryas Challenge," pp. 27-28; 42-44). But in order fora workof art to become it is not sufficient an object of knowledge (Wissenschaft), simplyto describe "the receptionand the influenceof a workwithinthe objectifiablesystem of expectationsthat arises for each work in the historicalmoment of its appearance .. ." ("LiteraryHistoryas Challenge," p. 22), forthiswould be to take what can only be an object of knowledge ("the objectifiable system in other words,positsthe of expectations")as a real object.Jauss's theory, to understandingin a perception of that background against accessibility which the work of art is going to stand out. The work of art, which,per is not knowablewithin the horizonof expectations of itsoriginal definition, appearance, becomes an object of knowledge in the science (Rezeptionsdszu of a subsequent epoch, which"can consciously [bewuf3t thetik) bringforth the real (phenomenal) object persistingthroughtime. machen vermag]" This operation is exactlythat formof thoughtstigmatized by Althusser under the label "historicism," of whichit is said thatitsoperation of "inevif the present attains the science of itable retrospectionis only scientific itself [auss's "consciously bringing forth"],criticismof itself,its selfwhich makes the essence section' i.e., if the present is an 'essential criticism, be model can finally That historical visible" Jauss's (ReadingCapital,p. 122). Marxhas accused he himself with of which the "essentialism" charged very ist aesthetics(and withthe aid of a Marxistphilosopherto boot!) confirms the intuitionexpressed by Paul de Man that this procedure may not so easily "claim to free itselffrom the coercion of a model that is perhaps more powerful,and for less controllablereasons, than its assumed oppothatcould indeed free nentsbelieve" (p. xi). The methodologicaldemarche model and allow the historicalstudy from the coercion of the historicist dismiss event to be "sprung" fromthe continuumof history cannot lightly the alternativeto historicismpresented by Althusser himself. The unwould be of even doubted interpretive achievementsof Rezeptionsdsthetik reoriented in if were interest the of theoretical history reception greater lightof the theoretical(rather than empirical) concepts of "mode of production" and "structural causality"elaborated in ReadingCapital.To say so of the is to recognize the necessaryrejoining,despiteJauss's reservations, historMarxism. The of with programme Rezeptionsdsthetik contemporary ical conjuncture that remained a missed opportunityin Germany in the of a theoretical 1920's mightwell be realized today in the prisede position programme that refuses the temptationof an aesthetictotalizationmasquerading in the guise of a materialist conception of history. Such a programmewould being withthe challenge posed by the Althusserianslogan: "Historyis a process withouta telosor a subject." A slogan that decould possiof the object of knowledgethathistory mands a reconstitution bly be.
OregonStateUniversity MICHAEL SPRINKER

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