- In the course of his essay "Aesthetic Formalization:
Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater," Paul
de Man describes the relation between violence and the
aesthetic as one in which the education carried out in
the name of the aesthetic conceals the violence through
which it is made possible. De Man writes: "Aesthetic
education by no means fails; it succeeds all too well, to
the point of hiding the violence that makes it possible"
(Rhetoric, 289). This remark reveals two
fundamental propositions. First, aesthetic education is
only possible through a violence that stands as its
originary act. Second, the purpose of aesthetic education
is to conceal this same violence. Why de Man insists upon
such violence and such concealment is more readily
ascertainable from the context of this remark: a reading
of the figure of the dance in texts by Kleist and
Schiller. The pattern of violence and concealment is our
guide into a reading that would reveal "some of what is
hidden behind Schiller's ideology of the aesthetic"
(Rhetoric, 265). What is then at stake is our
ability to read the textual role of a dance whose
originary violence is no longer concealed by an aesthetic
devoid of ideological claims. To put this more
succinctly, what is at stake is our ability to read or
discern ideology.
- To pose the question of our ability to read or
discern ideology is no small matter at a time when the
interpretative pendulum has swung towards increasing
textual transparency in the form of an insistence upon
historical and sociological concerns as arbiters of
literary significance. Nowhere has this stake been more
pressing than in Romanticism, particularly at a time when
the study of this period shows an increasing inability to
distinguish itself from other literary periods. Current
angst over the long term existence of this period is
directly attributable to the textual transparency that
has been enforced upon so much literary interpretation.
The irony that Romanticism should now serve as a means of
historical knowledge would not be lost on the Romantics
who so insistently reflected upon the means of knowledge
in those texts now enlisted as windows in the service of
social history. Here, the stake of de Man's remark in his
essay on Kleist cannot be separated from the work of
those who would readily oppose themselves and their work
to the de Manian project of reading. Such a congruity can
be realized if the aesthetic, which plays such a key role
in concealing violence for de Man, is renamed history: it
is ultimately the transparency of a text that authorizes
access to social history. Such transparency may even take
the form of what is not in a text, what is absent being
all the more readily discernible because it is not there.
If the question posed by Romanticism,and subsequently by
de Man in his essay on Kleist, is how to intervene in a
critical and historical discourse whose purpose is the
concealment of its own means, then, what is at stake in
discerning and determining ideology is the possibility of
criticism. In the decision about such a possibility, the
legitmacy of reading Romanticism appears as this period's
most insistent question about the current status and
purpose of literary study, about the extent to which an
education carried out in the name of history remains an
aesthetic education. As such, it is to the means of
criticism that one must turn, once again, to understand
this question.
- De Man's description of a violence concealed by the
aesthetic indicates the necessity that criticism locate
some kind of failure through which it may authorize
itself. However, de Man states that his purpose is not to
judge or criticize Schiller's text as having in some way
failed where Kleist's succeeds. In the sentence preceding
the one describing the concealment of violence, De Man
writes: "The point is not that the dance fails and that
Schiller's idyllic description of a graceful but confined
freedom is aberrant" (Rhetoric, 289). For de
Man, neither failure nor aberrance can be called upon to
limit the success of an aesthetic education. By the same
token, neither can be called upon to authorize a critical
position in relation to such an aesthetic education.
Since failure and aberrance cannot sustain such a
position, the problem we are left with imposes itself
precipitously. If aesthetic education is to be
criticized, and thereby limited in its historical and
political reach, from what position is it possible to
legitimize and thereby sustain such a criticism? Through
what opening does such a criticism become possible
without legitimizing precisely what it criticizes?
- The success of aesthetic education, de Man suggests,
is measured by its ability to conceal the violence in
which it originates. An incipient violence would then
appear to offer the means by which a critique of
aesthetic education may be undertaken. Yet, the mere
occurrence of violence does not substantiate violence as
a critical category. By itself, violence is not
inherently critical but one means through which an event
or act is made manifest. In this case, what violence is
has no priviliged role—as if, in the realm of
deconstructive reading, the mere mention of violence
possessed the textual transparency so necessary to
historical reading. In the case of de Man's remark, the
ability of violence to perform such a critical role
relies less on the fact of its empirical occurrence than
the concealment through which it is recognized as having
taken place. In order of significance, this concealment
has priority since it is both the means by which the
aesthetic establishes itself as a category and the means
by which violence is recognized as the unavoidable and
originary act of the aesthetic. In this case, any
critique made in the name of violence is a critique of
concealment aimed at the discovery of violence. The
critical force attributed to violence here depends on the
revelation of its concealment. In such cases, concealment
is read as the concealment of what threatens legitimacy
whether or not this be the legitimacy of aesthetic or
historical education.
- If the sequence enabling this critique is pursued
further, it becomes apparent that the discovery of
violence is only possible because aesthetic education
permits it and does so by failing to conceal its
concealment of violence. This failing may of course be
conceptualized as the condition of all such founding acts
thereby providing criticism with a source of authority
and legitimacy it otherwise lacks. In this case, violence
becomes the generalized condition that both authorizes
and affirms the presence of critique to the point that
one merely needs to mention violence to legitimize a
given critical position. The rest can be left
unsaid.[1]
In the case of aesthetic education, such violence appears
as the consequence of its failure to conceal its own
concealment. While this failing can certainly trigger a
critique of aesthetic education in the name of violence,
pursuing such a critique will miss the point completely,
will miss the point that, in promoting this critique by
its failure to conceal concealment, aesthetic education
will have successfully legitimized and thereby sustained
the project of criticism in an aesthetics of violence or,
rather, in a failure, like Schiller's dance, that can be
remembered for its beauty. In the realm of the aesthetic
nothing succeeds like the revelation of failure. Why the
aesthetic, through which this failure is first
articulated as its foundational gesture, should now be
said to have failed and thereby associated with ideology,
is a most telling example of this concealment of
concealment.
- In this context, to offer a critique of the aesthetic
from the perspective of violence is to practice a
complicity between the critical and the aesthetic which,
within the sphere of literary study, has taken the form
of a thematic criticism.[2]
Critique in this case would enact the fundamental lesson
of an aesthetic education even to the point of
authorizing a critique of the violence de Man regards as
its not quite concealed origin. The insistence of the
aesthetic as the underwriter of this critique indicates
the difficulty of developing a critique of the aesthetic
that would not, unwittingly and unavoidably, reproduce
the founding gesture of the aesthetic and the education
carried out in its name.[3]
The possibility of a critique of the aesthetic thus
becomes a question of the means by which this complicity
between the aesthetic and the critical is articulated, in
short, a question about the operation of an aesthetic
education that insists on yet conceals its presence as a
fundamental element in our literary-critical and
philosophical experience.
- Our failure to recognize or even bear witness to
education as an aesthetic project rather than the
inculcation of certain bodies of knowledge or, when an
appeal to content no longer suffices, as the source of
valuable analytic skills transferable to any number of
professions, is symptomatic of the current situation of
literary study and its confusion of knowledge with
specific modalities or disciplines of knowledge.
Arguably, this failure is already a sign of an education
no longer able to acknowledge its essentially aesthetic
character never mind the history to which it belongs.
Divorced from an emphasis on the means by which it is
carried out, education can easily foster the idea that it
is engaged in a serious undertaking whose means and goals
are far removed from the frivolous contemplation of
beauty as well as the contemporary critical sense that
any understanding derived from or through the aesthetic
is irremediably tainted with ideology. Such an occlusion
of the aesthetic as the means of education is motivated
by nothing less than a desire to realize the various
goals for which education has become a medium—not
the least of which is the formation of social, cultural
community, the political state. In the face of this
desire, it is only natural that the aesthetic not just
fail but must do so out of necessity. Such a desire
allows no other option particularly at a time when the
humanities, not to mention romanticism, experience so
much difficulty in articulating their significance. In
the end, the necessity out of which such a desire
emanates is nothing less than the necessity of securing
the critical project that has depended, since Kant, on
the aesthetic. As such, this desire (which can be
recognized as a striving or a drive [Trieb]
after Freud but also, already in Schiller's On the
Aesthetic Education of Man—and hasn't
education become a mode of striving, a means to another
end?) cannot be separated from the aesthetic project it
has submitted to such trenchant and polemical critique in
the name of ideology.[4]
Indeed, this desire is already part of an aesthetic
understanding whose programmatic unfolding includes its
own negation, whose purpose is assured by the negation
through which it becomes merely aesthetic and through
which it reasserts itself as the effect of its own
critique.
- If the possibility of a critique of the aesthetic is
already an effect of the aesthetic, then, the historical
persistence of this category will be unassailable as long
as critique is understood as the sole means of its
limitation. In this case, the insistence of the aesthetic
is the insistence of an era whose critical vocation, one
can also say, whose modernity, is guaranteed by the
repetition of the category it would otherwise separate
itself from by means of critique. To speak of the
aesthetic in these terms is to speak of an historical
unfolding governed by a critical project unable to
authorize itself by critique alone, even by the
invocation of a violence within its own operation. The
covert return of the aesthetic (in another form, under
another name, that is, aesthetically) as the means of
sustaining such a critical project indicates the extent
to which the aesthetic occupies a place of
uncriticizability by staging its own critique in the name
of violence. If this is all that were at stake in the
aesthetic, criticism could be left alone to enjoy the
fruits of its labor as it pursues the goal of a truly
beautiful critique, perhaps even a beautiful violence
such as that envisaged by Marinetti in a passage cited by
Walter Benjamin at the end of his essay, "The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility."[5]
However, more is at stake in this resistance to
criticism: an aesthetic that answers to no law save its
own even when that law shields itself behind a violence
it cannot help but criticize. Here, aesthetic education
envisages a freedom freed from the constraint of having
been dictated in the form of a critical limit. In fact,
as Schiller is the first of the moderns to recognize, the
aesthetic is in this respect resolutely oriented towards
this most political of problems, namely freedom, even if
this is a problem that politics has been powerless to
resolve. What is at stake, however, is that it should not
be resolved. Only, that it should fail, repeatedly.
- The second letter of Schiller's On the Aesthetic
Education of Man explicitly announces this stake as
follows:
Is it not . . . untimely to be casting around for a
code of laws for the aesthetic world . . . when the
spirit of philosophical inquiry is being expressly
challenged by present circumstances to concern itself
with that most perfect of artworks: the construction
of true political freedom? (Letter 2 ; 7)
The spirit of philosophical inquiry is to
receive some assistance from what Schiller describes as
the "code of laws for the aesthetic world." It is to
receive this assistance in order to construct a true
political freedom that philosophy, through its turn
towards ever greater abstraction, has been unable to
fulfill. When this fulfillment is attained, what will
emerge, according to Schiller, is the "most perfect of
artworks." Through this recourse to the model of the
artwork, Schiller's aesthetic project reveals its
affinity with the task of constructing a political
state described by Plato in the Laws when he
refers to the creation of such a state as authoring a
tragedy.[6]
The significance of returning to this Platonic example
is the fact that it takes place in the wake of Kant's
recognition of his inability to ground that most
sociable and communal of activities: aesthetic
judgment. The project undertaken by Kant's Critique
of Judgment would also have had the effect of
legitimizing the aesthetic in terms of politics and its
social program, by discovering, through the aesthetic,
the laws that govern the operation of judgment. Kant's
inability to furnish a ground for judgment in the case
of aesthetic judgment arises from a conflict within
aesthetic judgment itself. The solution Kant proposes
as a means of alleviating this difficulty is, simply,
to eliminate the conflict in which it originates, a
conflict that arises from the necessity of keeping
aesthetic judgments distinct from logical determinate
judgments that can be measured against a
concept.[7]
What Schiller undertakes is the authorization of the
aesthetic Kant invokes in the place of such
authorization. In this respect, Schiller pursues the
political project of Kant's critical enterprise by
fulfilling the political consequences of Kant's attempt
to ground judgment.[8]
What this amounts to in Schiller is, in effect, the
founding of the political state through the
legitimation of the aesthetic that marks the limit of
Kant's undertaking.
- Schiller's transformation of this limit into a force
of legitimation occurs in a footnote to his definition of
the aesthetic in Letter 20:
I add here the superfluous comment that . . . our
mind (Gemüt) in the aesthetic state
does indeed act freely, is in the highest degree free
from all compulsion, but is in no way free from laws;
and that this aesthetic freedom is distinguished from
logical necessity in thinking, or moral necessity in
willing, only by the fact that the laws according to
which the mind behaves are not represented
(nicht vorgestellt werden), and because they
encounter no resistance, never appear as a
constraint. ( Letter 20; 143 [trans.
modified])[9]
The laws that govern the aesthetic state
turn out to be aesthetic laws in the same sense that
the idea governing aesthetic judgment in Kant must be
an aesthetic idea. The solution that Kant recognizes as
the limit of his attempt to ground aesthetic judgment
becomes, for Schiller, confirmation of a law operating
within the aesthetic. Through the failure of this law
to find representation Schiller reconciles the conflict
between law and freedom that lies at the base of every
attempt to construct a state that would also be
meaningful for the individuals who belong to it.
Without law, there is no state, but without freedom,
there is no point to the state for its individual
citizens. Recognition of an antinomy between these two
aspects of the state leads to the necessity of what
Schiller calls an aesthetic education. The purpose of
such an education, it can be presumed, is to permit the
recognition of laws that are never represented, in
effect, the recognition of something that acts like the
law but can never take the form of a law. To put this
more succinctly, what is to be achieved, if the problem
of politics in practice is to be resolved, is the means
to represent the failure of the means of representing
such law. With such an achievement law is preserved
from critique since it remains protected behind the
event of its non-appearance even as the effect of this
non-appearance is recognized.
- Schiller argues that it is through the awareness of
beauty that the goal of this education will be achieved.
That beauty is a source of such laws is explicitly stated
by Schiller in Letter 23 when he defines what takes place
in aesthetic education: "aesthetic education . . .
subjects to laws of beauty all those spheres of human
behaviour in which neither natural laws, nor yet rational
laws, are binding upon human caprice" (Letter 23; p.
169). What these laws are, as the footnote to Letter 20
cited above indicates, is less important than the manner
in which they exist. As Letter 20 states, they are not to
be represented. The laws at work in beauty, the laws of
the aesthetic, are therefore laws constituted by the
withholding of their appearance in the form of law. As a
result, what these laws rely upon in order to perform the
role of a law is the recognition that they are
represented by not being represented. The ability to
recognize such laws is the education offered by
beauty.
- Why Schiller should be constrained to formulate a law
which in this formulation is protected from all
constraint can be understood most easily if it is
remembered that constraint in this context is the
necessity of a form of representation for the law.
Without this constraint, what articulates the laws of the
aesthetic is never placed in a position from which it may
be contested and thereby subject to critique. In this
respect, the representation of a failure to represent
these laws is the sign of laws that remain in their
concealment. To remain in this concealment is to obey the
aesthetic state to which these laws owe their existence.
Like the use of violence as a means of staging a critique
of aesthetic education, such concealment is the means of
positing a critical power. In both instances, the
aesthetic plays a crucial role by assuring the
possibility of such a power while removing it from all
critical reach.
- Not only does such a law retain its freedom to be
always lawful, but, by the same means, such a law
becomes, in effect, the law. In this respect, it
derives all its force as law from its failure to take the
form of law. This is the law at work in the laws of
Schiller's aesthetic beauty. As should already be clear,
the significance of this law does not reside at all in
what it decrees, that is, in what it is about or what it
represents, rather, its significance resides in the
uncriticizability it assumes by not being
represented.[10]
Only on account of this uncriticizability does it assume
the force of a law from which all other laws can be
judged. In this respect, the laws of the aesthetic in
Schiller exist according to a law that guarantees the
possibility of critique without ever submitting itself to
critique, without ever allowing itself to be measured
according to what it represents. The aesthetic in
Schiller is both the embodiment of this law and the means
of its recognition which, indicidentally, depends, like
the violence de Man describes as the possibility of
aesthetic education, on an awareness of its failure to be
represented.
- To the extent that any historical or political
position is, by its very nature, also a position of
critique (of another history or another politics) and is
made in the name of the truth of that position (even when
this takes the form of truly denying truth), the law of
the aesthetic, as Schiller presents it, is the
legitimizing possibility of that critique. This is also
why the critique of the aesthetic as an ideologically
charged category can in no way overcome the aesthetic or
even the ideology it associates with the aesthetic since,
as an example of critique, it can only appeal to the
category it would dismiss for its power of dismissal. To
undertake an ideological critique of the aesthetic for
failing to critique itself for its aestheticism (that is,
for being unable to be critical in any sense, for being
simply about beauty, or simply beautiful) is to affirm
precisely the means by which Schiller has secured the
possibility of critique.
- This law, through which the aesthetic itself is not
only recognized as the aesthetic but also founds the
power of critique in law, is instrumental in realizing
the political project of Schiller's text. As Schiller had
insisted as early as Letter 2, the aesthetic alone offers
hope to the political: "If man is ever to solve the
problem of politics in practice he will have to approach
it through the aesthetic, because it is only through
beauty that man makes his way to freedom" (Letter 2; 9
[trans. modified]).[11]
The problem of politics in practice—how to
negotiate the necessity of law and the necessity of
freedom within the same state—would here be solved
according to a law that is not represented yet still
recognized as law. Not only does such a law retain a
freedom by refusing to subject itself to criticism
through its refusal to be represented but this refusal
authorizes the critical power so necessary to the
realization of the political state. The securing of this
critical power through the aesthetic is, in effect, the
securing of the political. Securing the political through
a law exemplified by the aesthetic gives to politics the
force and power of a critique it is unable to attain by
any other means but which is essential to the existence
of the political. The necessity of this power is part of
the nature of a political or even historical position
since such a position is inconceivable except as the
critique of another politics or another history. The law
of the aesthetic, as Schiller presents it, is the
possibility of a modernity whose critical disposition can
only end in politics. The insistently political nature of
our critical modernity is itself a sign of this
law.
- To follow the aesthetic does not mean to remain bound
to the aesthetic and the sphere in which it operates.
Schiller makes this clear in Letter 4 when he
distinguishes the artisan and the artist from the
political or pedagogical artist:
When the artisan (der mechanische
Künstler) lays hands upon the formless mass
in order to shape it to his ends, he has no scruple
in doing it violence (Gewalt). When the artist of
beauty (der schöne Künstler) lays
hands upon the same mass, he has just as little
scruple in doing it violence. The artist of beauty
respects the material he is handling not the least
bit more than the artisan; however, through an
apparent (scheinbar) yielding to the
material, he will seek to deceive the eye which takes
the freedom of this material under its protection.
For the pedagogic and political artist
(pädagogischen und politischen
Künstler) things are quite different, man
is at the same time his material and his goal
(Aufgabe). Here, the purpose
(Zweck) turns back into the material and,
only because the whole serves the parts, must the
parts yield (sich . . . fügen) to the
whole. With a respect quite different from the
yielding which the artist of beauty pretends towards
his material, must the artist of the state
(Staatskunstler) approach his material; he
must preserve (schonen) its authenticity and
personality, not merely subjectively and for a
deceptive effect on the senses but rather objectively
and for its inner essence (innre Wesen).
(Letter 4; 18-20 [trans. modified]).
In this sequence, Schiller presents three
categories of production. The first two, the artisan
and the artist of beauty, are both viewed as practicing
violence towards their material. With the artisan there
is no concealment of the violence, but with the artist
of beauty, Schiller speaks of the appearance of a
yielding that would conceal the violence practiced by
the artist. In the third instance, the political and
pedagogical artist, no such appearance is permitted
lest it leave the trace of a violence that would
compromise the task of preserving the "inner essence"
of the subject of this artist. The political state in
which true freedom occurs is then one in which the
concealment of the artist is concealed to the point of
appearing not to exist. No other conclusion is possible
if Schiller's description of the law governing the
"construction of true political freedom" is taken
seriously: the law which does not appear as law, which
does not take the form of law yet rules all law.
According to such a law, not even violence can appear
as violence precisely because it is not given the means
to do so. Violence, in Schiller's account, only arises
when the material to be acted on is different from the
goal of this action. In the case of Schiller's
pedagogical or political artist, the means is
inseparable from the product. Solely on the basis of
the absence of this difference between means and goal,
Schiller will attribute no violence to the work of the
political artist. The absence of violence becomes, in
this instance, a sign that a true political freedom is
achieved. At the same time, this achievement marks a
massive critique of art and the aesthetic on account of
their violence. The emergence of the political artist,
the artist of the state, is then the emergence of the
position from which all art can be criticized as an
essentially violent undertaking because it is
essentially aesthetic. What Schiller precipitates here
is an overcoming of art and aesthetic in the name of a
politics that is synonymous with a freedom from
violence but this same overcoming is legitimized solely
by what it seeks to overcome. This is why Schiller can
only speak of true political freedom as the perfect
work of art: it lacks the violence that renders art
imperfect or, to put this bluntly, it is more
successful in hiding art's concealment of its violence
since the law that guides it is without representation.
The appearance of the political (which means here the
legitimation of the political by a law that is not a
law) is then achieved under the aegis of a critique of
violence.
- The whole possibility of a true political freedom,
including the possibility of both freedom and the
political, depends on an apparent non-violent moment in
which the critique of violence is established. This
critique of violence preserves for the political the
force of a law even as it would subject all other laws to
criticism on account of their violence which, in
Schiller's argument, characterizes a law unable to
preserve itself from the violent representation of a
means that is not also its goal. It is precisely this
falsification, this deception between means and goal that
ideological criticism has exploited and particularly in
the case of a Romanticism whose future is envisaged in
the form of historical correctness.[12]
- Within the project of the aesthetic education
envisaged by Schiller, to overcome the aesthetic is to
overcome the instrument Schiller declares in Letter 9 to
be precisely what will lead to true political freedom:
fine art.[13]
Fine art, as the exemplar of what the aesthetic produces,
can only be followed to a certain point. Here, the
greatest difficulty entertained by Schiller's text is
evaded. The task of overcoming the aesthetic in the name
of true political freedom necessarily remains an
aesthetic task. This is why the political critique of the
aesthetic is hopelessly compromised from its inception
since it is already part of an aesthetic project it has
forgotten how to remember. For Schiller to envisage this,
all that can be proposed is a politics within limits, the
limits of what Schiller himself is forced to call
aesthetic determinability.[14]
- This conclusion indicates several difficulties, not
the least of which affect the reading of what has been
known as the Romantic period. To engage in a critique of
the aesthetic on ideological, that is, historical and
political grounds, is to deny the role of the aesthetic
in enabling that critique since such an act is undertaken
in the interest of overcoming the aesthetic—in the
same way that the political and pedagogical artist of
Schiller would overcome the limitations of the work of
the artisan and the artist of beauty. At precisely the
moment that Romanticism would be subject to such a
critique for its fostering of the aesthetic, the
critical-aesthetic project of Schiller has successfully
transmitted its lesson that the political owes its
critical power to the aesthetic whose law is never to
represent its law. To the extent that this law
legitimizes the critical activity, it also legitimizes
Romanticism at the very moment of its critical rejection.
This situation is an essential aspect of a modernity
whose critical vocation is the legitimation of a
political freedom which, like politics and Schiller's
perfect work of art, ought to be meaningful to all. To
engage in a critique of this project, it would first be
necessary to open the question of a critique of the
violence through which the aesthetic legitimizes itself.
To engage in this critique is to risk, as Schiller has
done, a politics that can only be defined and only judged
by its success in concealing its own violence. Here, de
Man's remark, with which this paper began, also faces its
most difficult challenge: the challenge of ignoring a
history and a politics that remains inseparable from the
critical necessity that underwrites our understanding of
literature since the advent of Romanticism, the necessity
of the aesthetic. To accept this challenge is, however,
to entertain the end of Romanticism and, with it, the end
of the concept of freedom through which our history and
our politics is tirelessly refracted.
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