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The University of Chicago THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE PRESENT “AS IT REALLY IS” HISTORICISM AND THE THEORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT BY PETER A. ZUSI CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................... .iv INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... ..1 Chapter One THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE PRESENT: Lukács, Teige, and the Realism Debate ................................................................... ..6 I. The Historicist Novel ............................................................................... 12 II. The Idealism of Immanence ..................................................................... 21 Chapter Two THE EXPULSION FROM THE GARDEN Herder, Nietzsche, and the Critique of Historicism .................................................. 27 I. The Cultivation of Reason ........................................................................ 32 II. In the Presence of History ....................................................................... 53 Chapter Three FLEETING REVELATIONS Marx and the Deictic Dilemma ................................................................................. 63 I. The Conceits of Consciousness ............................................................... 67 II. Transparency and Inversion ................................................................... 72 III. Revolution as Revelation ........................................................................ 77 Chapter Four THE STYLE OF THE PRESENT Teige and the Question of Dualism ........................................................................... 84 ii iii I. From Socialist Gothic to Style of the Present .......................................... .88 II. The Dead-Ends of Dualism ...................................................................... .101 Chapter Five FORGETTABLE EXPERIENCES Benjamin and the Consciousness of Memory ........................................................... .115 I. Aura and Ornament ................................................................................. .115 II. The Calendar and the Clock .................................................................... .128 Conclusion FROM POSTMODERNISM TO POST-HISTORICISM? ....................................... .138 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... .147 LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Avant-Garde vs. Postmodern Temporal Biases .......................................... 145 iv INTRODUCTION The term “historicism” appears a natural foil to that of the avant-garde. Indeed it appears with surprising regularity in avant-garde theoretical writings, generally accompanied by a fair share of contempt. Despite the obvious connection – or tension – between the two terms, historicism has never achieved anything near the suggestiveness or authority enjoyed by the avant-garde as a category through which to reflect on contemporary culture. One of the reasons it has remained largely maligned or ignored as a critical category is the common presumption that the term is basically unambiguous. Whereas “avant-garde” is a term loaded with contradictions and implications that remain urgent and thought-provoking today (even though the era of the avant-garde is no longer our era), there is a strong tendency to assume that we know unproblematically what is involved or at stake with the term “historicism,” and that it has little to reveal to the present except insofar as it served as an object of critique for the avant-garde. This situation is primarily due to the decisiveness of the avant-garde’s victory in the narrative of twentieth-century culture and the firmness with which the avant-garde was able to establish its contentious position towards historicism as the whole truth of the matter. With a presumptiveness akin to Gertrude Stein’s, the avant-garde undertook to write the autobiography of historicism, and we have too often read this account without critical reflection on the biases it incorporates. In that account, historicism typically appears as a fearful resistance to contemporary trends, as a futile attempt to ignore the passage of time, or as a senile incapacity to create new forms of expression. Avant-garde theoreticians rarely felt the need to define the historicism they attacked in terms more precise than this. Historicism generally remained on the level of a codeword or negative slogan, the implications of which were clear to all and required no explication. It is important to bear in mind that the avant-garde discourse on historicism rarely associated the term specifically with the Rankean Historical School and its successors (although they would obviously also have been encompassed by the term). Rather, historicism 1 2 designated for the avant-garde a general mindset typical for the liberal bourgeois culture of Europe up until at least the end of World War I. Historicism was thus perceived as one of the crucial cultural pillars of the ruling society against which the avant-garde revolted with such vehemence. Yet precisely the vagueness and ubiquity of this avant-garde critique of historicism ought to provide grounds for pause.1 The intensity of the avant-garde hostility to historicism (whatever that was understood to designate) could be a symptom that more was at stake than just cultural-political competitiveness. Closer examination of the assumptions and implications of the avant-garde critique of historicism indeed reveals that the apparently inevitable conflict of positions between courageously forward-looking vision and hesitant backward glance disguises a more complex situation. If historicism was the alter-ego of the avant-garde, it was one that could not be easily avoided: rather than the remnant of an obsolete understanding of culture, historicism was more the inescapable shadow cast by the sharp light of the future. For avant-garde thinkers, historicism typically represented a sort of corrupt or degraded consciousness of history, which paralyzed the production of cultural forms appropriate to the present age. The response was to seek to recover effective forms of expression by vilifying the past as such. But precisely this moment – this translation of a critique of historicism into a rejection of history – is what requires closer examination. This translation was an essential feature of the avant-garde’s self- 1 Historicism is in any event a difficult term to pin down, having meant many different things to different people at different times. See the discussions in Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (S.l.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1983): 295-98; Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995): 4-5; Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland 1831-1933 (Frankfurt a/M.: Suhrkamp, 1983): chapter 2; and Karl Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus (Tübingen: Mohr: 1932). For useful general accounts of historicism, see, in addition to the above, Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996); Friedrich Jaeger and Jörn Rüsen, Geschichte des Historismus (München: Beck, 1992); Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977); Peter Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975); Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (München and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1936); and Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922). The point I am making here, however, is not that the term is difficult to define with any precision but rather that the avant- garde generally did not even find the attempt necessary. 3 understanding and also remains explicit or implicit in most present-day discussion on the topic of the avant-garde. Yet such a translation conceals the central paradox in the role that historicism assumed for the avant-garde: historicism represented not a surfeit but rather an absence of history. The avant-garde rejected the historicism of bourgeois liberal culture not because of the strength and vitality of the historicist understanding of tradition, but rather because of a perceived superficiality in that understanding, with its characteristic gestures of imitation and eclecticism. Historicism represented a culture grounded in the dusty encyclopaedia rather than in real life, a costume melodrama rather than true-to-life tragedy. Ultimately historicism appeared as an interruption rather than extension of historical continuity – a fact that considerably complicates the avant-garde ideology of radical historical instauration. The consequence of this paradox is that the avant-garde was able to attack historicism in terms that clearly reveal a certain historical nostalgia. The following chapters will explore these issues by tracing the background of this critique of historicism in the nineteenth-century and then examining the sorts of complications to which it led for theoreticians
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