First published in New Literary History 47 (2016): 109-134. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation Winfried Fluck I. Every literary and cultural theory must be based on certain explicit or implicit assumptions about the human condition, about what the human make-up is, what humans want, what they need, how society responds to these wants and needs, and what role literature and culture play in this context. Willingly or unwillingly, but always inevitably, such assumptions form the basis of every theoretical approach, although critics often do not want to acknowledge their premises or may not even be aware of them. As a rule, when we interpret a literary text or a cultural practice, we do not first ask ourselves what our underlying philosophical or anthropological premises are. We simply apply a perspective or a method that we know and prefer. We can do this because these approaches come with the authority of an established critical convention, and that is also the reason why we may not feel the need for an analysis and justification of the tacit assumptions on which they are based. However, these premises, whether consciously or unconsciously held, will decisively shape the focus and interpretive results of any approach. To be sure, a formalist may argue that she is only interested in describing formal features of a text in order to determine its aesthetic value, but such a project only makes sense in the context of certain assumptions about the role artistic forms or aesthetic objects play (or should play) in human life, or in social life under capitalism, or in processes of identity-formation, and so on. This, in fact, is my point. In the final analysis, critical disagreements are disagreements about premises, because these underlying assumptions shape all subsequent interpretive choices: the choice of my object of analysis, the research question with which I am approaching this object, and the interpretive method I will be using. If this is the case, however, 1 In most philosophical versions, alienation means to be cut off from man’s original or essential nature. In Marxist versions, alienation is attributed to the division of labor and to private ownership of the means of production “in which the worker loses both the product of his labour and his sense of his own productive activity” (Williams, “Alienation” 31). In consequence, the relation of the worker to his world is defined by the depersonalized logic of commodity relations and leads to a state of reification as a specific form of alienation. In postmodern and poststructuralist versions, in which the main project is to challenge the ideas of reason and the subject as foundational, alienation usually refers to the impossibility of the subject to know itself. then an important part of our work should not only be to offer judgments about how convincing we find a method, but how convincing we find the premises on which it is based. This may allow us to have a new and different look at literary and cultural theory and, more specifically, at some theoretical positions that have been especially influential in the field. This is the task I have set myself in the following essay, in which I want to focus on some key approaches in literary and cultural theory in order to demonstrate to what degree these well-known positions are shaped by a priori assumptions about the human condition. And since these premises do not always find expression in the form of philosophical claims or arguments, my analysis will also include the narrative forms that are used to give legitimacy to these claims and to make them convincing. Since literary and cultural critics are not philosophers, they will not always provide elaborate philosophical justifications of their choices. Often they import their premises in the form of narratives. These narratives are not necessarily very elaborate - in fact, in many cases, the word mini-narration seems more fitting here, so that a grand systematic analysis of different narrative genres in the mode of Hayden White’s MetaHistory is hardly possible. Nevertheless, there are characteristic story lines, lead characters, competing genres, and different dramatic conflicts; there are hostile forces, and there is resistance; there are villains and victims, success and failure, and, inevitably, crisis and solution. In fact, one of the surprising results of an analysis of this type is that there really aren’t that many different narratives to start with. Once one focuses on the question of underlying premises, it is striking to realize to what extent modern literary and cultural studies have been dominated and shaped by one theory of the subject in particular. I am referring here to narratives of self-alienation (Selbstentfremdung). These narratives see the subject in a state in which it is kept from fully knowing itself and determining its own fate, frequently with the result of a damaged sense of self or an inner division. 1 It is fitting to speak of these theories in the plural, because selfalienation, just like any other theoretical concept - such as, for a current 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 334 Winfried Fluck 2 See Rahel Jaeggi (2005), Entfremdung: zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Prob‐ lems and Peter Zima (2014), Entfremdung: Pathologien der postmodernen Gesellschaft. 3 A note on terminology: in discussions of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, a major source of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; 2001) (hereafter cited as DE), the terms instrumental reason and instrumental rationality are often used interchangeably. I prefer the term instrumental reason, because it captures the sense of betrayal of the Enlightenment ideal of reason on which these theories are built more succinctly. Horkheimer and Adorno blended Marxist theories of alienation, focusing on an effect of reification, with Weber’s theory example, transnationalism or the other - is not a stable signifier but can be used in different contexts for different purposes. 2 In the following essay, I want to trace different uses of the idea of self-alienation in four especially influential approaches in literary and cultural studies: the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, as it manifests itself most forcefully and most influentially in the chapter on the culture industry in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment; British cultural studies as it has been envisioned by its founder Raymond Williams; Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory; and an exemplary poststructuralist position articulated by Judith Butler. These critics disagree about how this state of self-alienation can be described, what its sources are, and whether it can be overcome, but the premise of self-alienation nevertheless continues to stand at the center of their approaches and provides many, if not most, narratives in critical theory with their opening scene. II. Frankfurt School Critical Theory At first blush, it may come as a surprise that these very different approaches should all be grounded in the starting premise of self-alienation. But the common point of departure can be helpful in pinpointing the differences. One widely known version of the narrative of self-alienation is Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which may still be one of the most influential books in critical theory ever written. The book and especially its much-discussed chapter on the culture industry provide a good example for my claim that discussions of an approach make most sense when methodological or evaluative disagreements are seen in the larger context of premises on which the approach is based. Because cultural studies have often been practiced as popular culture studies in recent times, discussions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s chapter on the culture industry have focused on the high/ low divide and the question of to what extent it must be seen as an expression of their elitism. But this “elitism” has to be seen in the larger context of a critical theory of modernity in which reason, as the major value of the Enlightenment, has been reduced to instrumental reason, 3 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 335 of rationalization and its focus on a means-end rationality, a point later criticized by Jürgen Habermas. 4 In the 1969 reissue of the book, Horkheimer and Adorno write: “The development toward total integration recognized in this book is interrupted, but not abrogated.” A correction of their main thesis is thus not necessary. The major point still is that the development “threatens to advance beyond dictatorships and wars. The prognosis of the related conversion of enlightenment into positivism, the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect and that which is inimical to the spirit, has been overwhelmingly confirmed” (DE x). The book is notoriously difficult to translate, and it may therefore be helpful to also provide the German version: “Die in dem Buch erkannte Entwicklung zur totalen Integration ist unterbrochen, nicht abgebrochen: sie droht, über Diktaturen und Kriege sich zu vollziehen. Die Prognose des damit verbundenen Umschlags von Aufklärung in Positivismus, den Mythos dessen, was der Fall ist, schließlich die Identität von Intelligenz und Geistfeindschaft hat überwältigend sich bestätigt.” (Dialektik ix-x). As a reduction of reason, instrumental reason signals the “self-destruction of the Enlightenment” (xiii). 5 In this system, the source of “manipulation” is technology itself: “A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself ” (DE 121). 6 See, for example: “The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth” (DE 130). In later writings, Adorno has built an aesthetic theory on the premise of negation. and instrumental reason has gained an ever increasing hold over the subject - reaching, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, almost totalitarian dimensions in the American society they encountered in the 1940s. 4 This development must also affect literature and culture. In those philoso‐ phies of history in which the idea of a growing reach of instrumental reason has provided the central narrative, (high) culture has usually been considered one of the few remaining counter-realms in which instrumental reason had not yet taken hold. The exposure to culture, understood as the highest manifestation of the human mind, was thus seen as a crucial antidote, if not the only remaining one. The sense of shock pervading Horkheimer and Adorno’s chapter on the culture industry is caused by the fear that this last bastion of resistance may now also have been invaded by instrumental reason. 5 In the standardized and commodified form of American mass culture, culture has become merely another industry with standardized production processes in which even culture is now instrumentalized for profit purposes. In this situation, only an aesthetics of negation can still offer any hope for resistance. 6 If we start from the assumption that self-alienation is caused by a relentless progression of instrumental reason, then literature can hope to have a critical function only where it keeps the possibility of a non-instrumentalized counterrealm alive; literature can preserve a utopia of nonalienated existence only 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 336 Winfried Fluck 7 For an excellent comparison, revealing surprising similarities between Adorno and Foucault, see Axel Honneth, “Foucault und Adorno: Zwei Formen einer Kritik der Moderne” (127-44). 8 See also the following passages: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (DE 138). “The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance” (DE 140). where it is organized by certain aesthetic principles that negate instrumental‐ ization. It is thus crucial, in fact, that it should be the main responsibility of literary and cultural studies to distinguish between a literature of affirmation and an aesthetics of negation in order to identify the kind of literature that will be able to set up barriers against instrumental reason. The narrative here is one of invasion, retreat, and the need for a heroic last-stand defense. There is only a small piece of territory left on the other side of the river, called high modernism, but it is getting smaller all the time; in fact, critics of this retreat into a hermetic negative aesthetics have often taken up the territorial logic of this narrative when they have asked, “Where do we go from here? ” We may push the argument even further and say that the scenario of fighting an overpowering enemy called instrumental reason that seems to encroach from all sides and crops up in the most unexpected places goes beyond a narrative of heroic retreat and resistance and already takes on conspiratorial and paranoid overtones. This brings us back to the state of the subject, because the most terrifying aspect for Horkheimer and Adorno is that instrumental reason has not only invaded culture but, worse, the psyche as the site of ego-formation that is seen as the basis for mature subjectivity. 7 Thus, trying to explain the attraction of a cultural phenomenon such as jazz music - which for Adorno, a student of the classical symphonic tradition, belongs to the category of entertainment music - the culture industry chapter draws on the psychoanalytic concept of sadomasochism in order to explain that a seemingly rebellious gesture can really function as a form of voluntary subordination: “Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, which simultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule” (DE 153). 8 Modernity has reached a stage in which instrumental reason has also infiltrated psychic life and thus subjectivity. Hence Horkheimer and Adorno can praise, quite unexpectedly, Alexis de Tocqueville in a formulation that turns Toqueville into Foucault: “The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 337 in the meantime proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly, it is a fact that ‘tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attacks at the soul’” (DE 133). Subjects thus willingly enact their own subjection as “free choice”: “Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them” (DE 134). Anticipating Foucault, the argument is that modern societies no longer use repression to discipline their subjects. But there is one major and theoretically interesting difference. Both approaches want to highlight the all-embracing nature of cultural forms of control by focusing on those dimensions of human existence that seem to be the most private, intimate, and subjective, the psyche and the body. But whereas for Horkheimer and Adorno the psyche is the realm where the deformation brought about by modernity is most consequential, because instrumental reason has now also invaded the last possible source of unruliness, Foucault goes even further and considers psychic life itself as only an effect of the disciplinary regime of the body. This shift of emphasis is significant. The psyche, no matter how deformed and manipulated it may be under conditions of modernity, still retains a last potential for subversion, because from the Freudian perspective, the unconscious can never be completely controlled. Foucault, on the other hand, erases even this last, though already faint, prospect for resistance by eliminating interiority altogether, so that the body, in quasi-behavioristic fashion, becomes the passive object of disciplinary discursive regimes. Horkheimer and Adorno’s agitated narrative of invasion can now give way to a dry documentary report on a panoptic prison routine where there are no longer any resisting subjects and the drama of a struggle for resistance has disappeared, because nothing has been repressed. As Foucault and Foucauldians keep emphasizing, power is not merely constraining but also productive. Without it there would be no subject. III. Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies It may have been its apocalyptic overreach that finally undermined the long unquestioned status of Frankfurt School critical theory, because it offered hardly any prospect for resistance to the forces of self-alienation. Thus, in the German student movement, its greatest influence was in the early phase of the movement when the goal still was to analyze “late” capitalism and to unmask its “repressive tolerance.” However, when the question became pressing of what the consequences of such analysis should be for literary and cultural studies, interests began to shift to another tradition, that of British cultural studies and, at least initially, of Williams and his two highly influential books Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, which should be seen together as part of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 338 Winfried Fluck 9 In order to arrive at the possibility of common meanings in society - for Williams the precondition for overcoming social distance -, art has to be liberated from the grip of traditional forms of aesthetic theory and reintegrated into the common life of society. For this, it has to be redefined as the organization of common experience, “acting on and interacting with our whole personal and social organization” (Long Revolution 50). “To see art as a particular process in the general human process of creative discovery and communication is at once a redefinition of the status of art and the finding of means to link it with our ordinary social life.” (Ibid. 53). The first chapter of The Long Revolution, entitled “The Creative Mind,” offers a theory of everyday life as inherently creative that bears striking similarities to John Dewey’s Art as Experience. 10 Cf. Williams: “Many highly educated people have, in fact, been so driven in on their reading, as a stabilizing habit, that they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity: Not only the cognate forms of theatre, concert and picture-gallery; but a whole range of general skills, from gardening, metalwork and carpentry to active politics. The contempt for many of these activities, which is always latent in the highly literate, is a mark of the observers’ limits, not those of the one project. In contrast to the uncompromising analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno, Williams is almost social democratic in his approach, but, somewhat surprisingly, he too takes his point of departure from a self-alienation of the subject and the question of what literary and cultural studies can do about it. In contrast to Dialectic of Enlightenment, for Williams it is not instrumental reason but industrialization that provides the key for understanding the selfalienation produced by modern society. The difference is significant. Industri‐ alization is not an entirely negative force for Williams. On the contrary, it has improved people’s lives, albeit at a price. It has led to class societies and thus to a social distance between members of society that threatens democracy and its promise of equality. Industrialization has produced a division of labor in all spheres of life, including culture, where it has separated cultural forms from their social contexts of use and created a separate sphere of value called aesthetic value that obscures literature’s social function. In Marxism and Literature, Williams characterizes aesthetic theory as a form of evasion that contributes to a separation of social spheres: “Art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained. Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion. (…) Thus we have to reject ‘the aesthetic’ both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function” (154-56). 9 From this perspective, the high/ low divide poses a problem, because it is one of the devices for creating social distance. Williams’s narrative of self-alienation is thus far less agitated and (melo)dramatic than Horkheimer/ Adorno’s. His narrative genre is not that of a dystopian story of invasion but of a social novel in which separate classes are taught to overcome social distance by taking note of each other. 10 Unfortunately, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 339 activities themselves. Neglect of the extraordinary popularity of many of these activities as evidence of the quality of living in contemporary society, is the result of partisan selection for the reasons given”. To look “at the matter in this way helps us to keep a just sense of proportion” (Culture and Society 309). 11 Discussions about the relation between democracy and “mass society” stand at the center of sociological theories of the 1950s. Their main theme is the question whether the alienated subjects of mass society undermine the possibility for a functioning democracy. One of the most influential of these studies, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, argues that a shift has taken place in modern society from inner-directedness to other-directedness. Riesman’s key term ‘other-directed’ captures the sense of selfalienation that mass society is said to have produced. the bourgeoisie still looks down at the workers and regards them as a threat to culture and democracy. It is this institutionalization of social distance that leads to self-alienation. Its most obvious expression is the use of derogatory terms such as mass and mass society that misrepresent those not belonging to one’s own class: “I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know” (229). 11 If we understand self-alienation as the result of a process of industrialization that divides social worlds into classes and establishes new, commercially based status orders, then the challenge is how to reverse this development. The goal must be to prevent culture from replicating industrialization’s division of labor by becoming a separate sphere of its own. One way to do this is to extend literary studies into cultural studies. In treating literature not as a separate, autonomous sphere, but as part of a whole way of life, one will have to pay attention to the cultural practices of other classes and learn how to read these practices as manifestation of particular structures of feeling, so that the social distance that separates social classes in capitalist society can be overcome. This is the reason (and not some vague anthropological purpose) why Williams redefines culture as a whole way of life. In doing so, he wants to put cultural studies in a position to capture an otherwise elusive quality of social relations, what he calls structures of feeling or lived experience. If we draw conclusions from the cultural objects that the members of the working class consume - for example, Hollywood movies or TV soap operas - and read these objects, in the fashion of intellectual history or critical theory, as expressions of the mind or psyche of their users, we will fail to understand what working-class life is all about. Its actual substance and values lie in its social relations that are characterized by solidarity, and this is a quality that cultural studies can only capture by focusing on manifestations of lived experience, not by looking at the cultural consumption of mass culture. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 340 Winfried Fluck 12 See esp. chap. 1 of his second major book, The Long Revolution, in which he wants to set up an alternative to the positions he had critically discussed in Culture and Society. In other words: although society as a whole may be characterized by a division of labor that can lead to self-alienation, a closer look at working-class culture - something Horkheimer and Adorno were never interested in - reveals that there actually is no general condition of self-alienation. Self-alienation is the product of a historical process that may still be reversed by the development of a common culture. The impression of a permanent state of self-alienation can only be produced by bad cultural studies, that is, by reading popular cultural texts as expressions of the minds or the psyche of their users. Once we apply a better method - namely, focusing on structures of feeling and lived experience - there is not yet any self-alienation in the working class. On the contrary, workingclass culture may actually become a model for how to avoid self-alienation, because in its culture of solidarity and cooperation it provides the best possible manifestation of the anthropological premise on which Williams’s theory of cultural studies is based: namely, that human beings are at heart social beings and that self-alienation sets in whenever social cooperation is undermined or if - and this is a case that has made cultural studies necessary for him - classes are separated and social misrecognition threatens to become institutionalized. Despite his later attempts to revive Marxism, Williams is more of a pragmatist in his early work. It was the logic of his project - to derive the call for cultural studies from the fact that we are social beings and thus have to take note of the quality and character of social relations - that forced him to resort to pragmatism’s premise of the creative potential of all human action and social relations. 12 In pragmatism, the subject is redefined as a self and the self is the product of social interaction. It is thus by nature driven to social cooperation, for it is only in social cooperation that it can gain an identity. Again, a comparison is interesting here. For Horkheimer/ Adorno, the mass media are a crucial source of self-alienation, because they deform subjectivity. Williams evades the problem by claiming that the mass media cannot tell us anything about the state of its users, only about a cultural division of labor that may lead to self-alienation but does not have to, depending on the state of social relations. Ironically, it is the solidarity of the working class that provides a model of how social cooperation can be achieved and self-alienation can be overcome. The apparently selfalienated object of history can thus become its subject. Undoubtedly, it was this narrative of cultural empowerment that made British cultural studies such an attractive alternative to Frankfurt School critical theory in the 1960s and ’70s. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 341 13 To describe the activities of the reader in the act of reading is the central aim of Wolfgang Iser’s major studies The Implied Reader; The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology; and The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. IV. Wolfgang Iser and Reception Theory Every approach dealing with literary texts and aesthetic objects also needs a theory of effect - that is, a theory of whether and to what extent an object or text can reach and influence the recipient. The theory of effect in Dialectic of Enlightenment is that of identification: because the subject is self-alienated in the sense of being cut off from its own nature, it has little resistance to offer to a culture industry that skillfully exploits its weakness to create emotional and psychic dependencies. In contrast, the theory of effect held by Williams is one of recognition: art as an intensified organization of experience will have its best and strongest effect if we recognize “what we have always known” (Long Revolution 46). In both cases, it is still the literary text or aesthetic object that determines the meaning and significance the recipient takes from the text. In contrast, reception theory was the first approach to question this assumption and to offer a more complex theory of effect, worked out most systematically and convincingly in the work of Iser. Literary texts, however elaborate and aesthetically valuable they may be, remain dead letters on the page, if they are not brought to life by a reader in the act of reading. But since the reader cannot erase his own subjectivity in reception, the result of the reading process will not be identical with the original version from which it set out. Clarifying the activities of the reader thus became a key project of reception theory. 13 Somewhat surprisingly, in view of the active role assigned to the reader in reception theory, Iser’s work also has its starting point in the premise of selfalienation. In his case, however, this premise derives not from the narrative of a relentless progression of instrumental reason, or a Marxist analysis of the socially divisive consequences of industrialization, but from an anthropological claim about the human condition. The claim is taken from the work of the cultural anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, who famously pronounced: “Ich bin, aber ich habe mich nicht,” a sentence Iser liked to quote. In Iser’s study The Fictive and Imaginary, the English translation is: “Our existence is incontestable, but at the same time is inaccessible to us” (81). As human beings we are incomplete - we do not know anything about our beginnings and our end, for example - and because we are incomplete beings, we become interested in fiction in order to fill that lack. We need fictions to make up for what we are lacking (and can never fully recover). In this context, self-alienation, defined as an anthropological 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 342 Winfried Fluck 14 See, for example, “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative: Reading as Transfer” and “Reading for Recognition.” condition, can, paradoxically, become a source of creativity, because our efforts to overcome our lack of self-knowledge can never be entirely successful and will thus stimulate ever new attempts. Iser’s anthropology of lack led him to the concept of the imaginary, but not in the sense of Lacan, where the imaginary is a source of permanent selfalienation, but in the sense of Lacan’s critic Cornelius Castoriadis, where the imaginary is a source of creativity - in fact, a counterterm and counterforce to the concept of interpellation. Castoriadis’s imaginary is uncontrollable and constantly undermines interpellation, because it consists of an unstructured flow of images, associations, affects, feelings, and desires that have no beginning and no end and constantly feed our self-images. As such the imaginary can provide an ongoing stimulation, and fiction, because of its openness of reference, is ideally suited to give this imaginary a form or gestalt and thus make its cultural articulation possible. This, in fact, can also explain why we never give up exposing ourselves to fictional texts, although we know that they are mere inventions. Fictional texts give a gestalt to the imaginary that drives us as human beings. To describe the ways in which this is achieved by an interaction between the imaginary and what Iser called the real became a main focus of Iser’s reception theory and opened up interesting perspectives for a redefinition of the process of reception as a transfer that I have further pursued in my own work. 14 But the important point here is what Iser’s anthropology of lack tells us about the state of the subject. Iser, in effect, realizes that he comes close to leftist conceptions of self-alienation in his own starting assumption and thus hastens to make sure that there is no confusion between his and a Marxist view of self-alienation: “Marxist self-alienation presupposes an idealist base in human beings through which a true self can be distinguished from the forms of its debasement” (Fictive 80). In contrast, for Iser, self-alienation is not a perversion of the human condition but rather its constituent. Iser’s subject is always and inevitably in a state of self-alienation, because it can never fully know itself and thus cannot reach a state of full self-knowledge and self-identity. But instead of trapping the subject in misrecognition, self-alienation becomes the source of a constant, never-ending drive of the subject to make up for the anthropological lack by which it is produced; this lack thus constitutes us as human beings who are, in different ways, untiringly productive and creative, never standing still. Ironically, Iser’s narrative of self-alienation is thus dominated by figures of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 343 15 See my analysis of the development of Iser’s work, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory”. constant movement. His preferred vocabulary - Zuschuss (to insert something), Anzapfen (to tap into something), Antrieb (impetus), Überschuss (excess), Spiel (play) - communicates a sense of the unpredictable but continuous emergence of playful world encounters (and the excitement generated by them) that is evoked by this vision of self-alienation as a constantly refueled source of creativity. Again, this has consequences for literary and cultural studies. If we attribute the self-alienation of the subject to an anthropological lack that can, unexpect‐ edly, also stimulate human creativity, because it pushes the subject to engage in ever new attempts to overcome this lack, then literature can become a privileged medium for a transformation of self-alienation into creativity. From Iser’s point of view, this can be most effectively done by texts structured by blanks and suspended connectivities, that is, by modernist or protomodernist texts that use aesthetic strategies to defamiliarize or negate realistic modes of representation, because the latter prevent us from becoming aware of what we are lacking as human subjects. But modernism now has a function different from that in Frankfurt School critical theory, namely to keep the channels of creativity open, and Iser therefore replaces an aesthetics of negation by an aesthetics of negativity. 15 Reception aesthetics focuses on modernism, not because of its status as an avant-garde movement, but because its aesthetic strategies challenge readers to exercise their own creativity and thus help to make readers aware of their own creative potential. The distinction between high and low remains crucial, but not for the purpose of an elitist distinction: the only way to transform self-alienation into a productive force is by challenging the reader; thus, literary and cultural studies should see its main task in identifying those kinds of texts that are designed to stimulate the reader’s involvement by formal strategies that resist easy consumption. Tying literature’s power to transform self-alienation to certain formal strat‐ egies or aesthetic schools would mean limiting literature’s creative potential, however. Thus, the challenge emerged to broaden the argument and to link literature’s transformative potential not only to specific aesthetic strategies and positions but to literature in general. Iser’s exemplary “ur-scene” can be found in a passage on playing the part of Hamlet: “In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not. In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his own reality to fade out. At the same 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 344 Winfried Fluck time, however, he does not know precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify a character who has never existed. Thus role-playing endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total determination” (Representation 224). Again, the starting point is one of unknowability. Not only does the subject not know itself, it also cannot possibly know a Hamlet who never existed. In order to overcome this unbridgeable distance, the reader cannot but draw on his own associations and experiences to come up with his own mental image of Hamlet. This mental construct will follow textual guidance but, in the act of doing so, it will also have to draw on the reader’s own associations, feelings, and bodily sensations in order to bring the abstract letters on the page to life and to provide the text with meaning. In the act of reading, the literary text thus comes to represent two things at once: the world of the text and the imaginary elements added to it by the reader in the process of reading. Our characteristic mode of reading will therefore be a constant movement back and forth between the world of the text and our own world, since we continuously will have to reconcile our own construct of the figure of Hamlet with its representation in the text - and vice versa. This ongoing interaction puts us in a position “in between” two worlds. For the time of reading, we are not completely identical with Hamlet - because we cannot eliminate our own engagement in the construction of his character - but we also go beyond our own identity, by being “both ourselves and someone else” at the same time (Iser, Representation 244). The result is a complex interaction of perspectives in which we mentally construct another world by drawing on our own world, and then look at our own world through the perspective of our own imaginary construct. Iser’s model of reading is that of an actor who uses fiction to create a doppelgänger-subject and thus transforms self-alienation into self-extension, not as a permanent condition, but as a welcome temporary experiment. V. Giving an Account of Oneself in Poststructuralism Like Iser, poststructuralism, too, takes its point of departure from the assumption of a permanent self-alienation of the subject. This explains the key role Lacan has played in the formation of poststructuralist theory. For the leftist reform movements of the 1960s that based their hopes for political change on the raised consciousness of the electorate, Freudian and Freud-inspired psychoanalysis still held a promise of overcoming inner repressions that kept the subject from joining the revolution. With Lacan, this therapeutical hope is coming to an end: because identity is formed in an act of misrecognition, the subject is trapped in 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 345 16 By emphasizing the central role of Lacan, I certainly do not want to claim that all poststructuralists followed Lacan. But he provided the most influential model for what links all poststructuralist theories of the subject, namely the claim that the subject is inaccessible in its “true” inner core. By eliminating the idea of interiority, Foucault made the same claim only in a different way. a permanent state of self-alienation, and this permanent self-alienation is more or less, with some variations, the state of the subject in poststructuralism. 16 Not dissimilar to Iser, the starting point is an anthropological lack, an incompleteness, but in contrast to Iser, this lack is not a source of creativity in which the subject tries to fill the gap but the source of a permanent illusionary state of misrecognition that prevents the subject from ever knowing itself. In poststructuralism, self-alienation has thus reached the point where the subject is alienated from itself, not merely by forces like industrialization or instrumental reason, but, much more fundamentally, as the paradoxical result of identity-formation. Without identity, the subject cannot know who it is, but the establishment of a false sense of identity in the mirror stage inevitably leads to misrecognition and, hence, perpetuates a state of self-alienation. Thus, in poststructuralism, the subject cannot really know itself and remains opaque to itself. This is the starting point, for example, of Butler’s essay “Giving an Account of Oneself,” which tackles the crucial question of what it is that the subject may still do, once we acknowledge that it is opaque to itself (22-40). Poststructuralist accounts have been happy to deconstruct the subject and to dismiss liberal illusions about it, but increasingly we also see a tendency to think about the consequences of this deconstruction - not only in poststructuralism, but in other forms of antifoundationalism as well. What can the subject still do, if it does not have the capacity to fully know itself ? One answer consists in the argument that even if we cannot arrive at full selfknowledge, we nevertheless must continue to provide accounts of ourselves. This makes sense but also creates a problem, for in liberal philosophy the idea of self-knowledge is crucial (and actually not so easily dismissed), because such self-knowledge is the basis for the possibility of moral responsibility. In a state of self-knowledge, I can realize and accept my own moral responsibility and cannot offer any excuses if I fail to do so. But what happens to moral responsibility if the subject is opaque even to itself ? Responsibility can only result from shared values and the only value that can still be shared is that of a recognition of difference and otherness. In this context, Butler touches on a crucial problem, namely to what degree this manifestation of responsibility, a recognition of difference and the other, should also be seen as a form of imposition by which a subject is positioned in a 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 346 Winfried Fluck particular identity. By accepting - or should one say submitting - to recognition by others, I am also accepting or submitting to criteria of recognizability that position me in a discourse of recognizability and that thereby define me as a subject. Because my subjectivity is opaque, even to myself, discourses of recognizability take advantage of my opaqueness in order to redefine me as a subject. They can thus be seen as forms of interpellation. Precisely because the subject is, in the final analysis, unknowable and opaque, it can be open to this form of recognition as interpellation. The point is interesting because we can catch a glimpse of an underlying premise here. In order to define recognition as identity imposition, Butler must presuppose that there is something outside the act of recognition, a subject that is misrepresented in recognition, and, ironically, she can make that claim because she is starting from the premise that this subject is unknowable. We enter here a catch-22: because the subject is unknowable, we have to recognize it without any condition, but whenever we try to recognize it, we misrecognize it, because we cannot really know it. In this process, self-alienation is transformed in its meaning and function. In Frankfurt School critical theory, from which we took our point of departure, self-alienation is a word for the damage modernity does to the subject. In poststructuralism, it has now become the strongest - in fact, the only remaining - argument for moral responsibility toward the other. For if we cannot know ourselves, then we also cannot know who and what the other is, and on that basis we cannot make our acceptance conditional; it must be unconditional. One interesting point remains: if the subject is opaque, even to itself, how can we still say something about it? In view of its unknowability, every representation must be a misrepresentation. Nevertheless, we must assume something, some elementary human condition that we feel we have to defend or save, for otherwise terms such as misrecognition or misrepresentation or imposition by recognition (or, in other contexts, disciplining) would not make any sense. They all imply that something is constrained or damaged or excluded that is crucial for understanding the subject. Obviously, the opaque subject that is subjected by a discourse of recognizability must have something that is ignored or violated and should be saved. Or, to put it differently: is there a part of the unknowable, opaque subject that is in special need of protection? And if this is the case, how do we know about this part and how does it manifest itself ? Butler basically provides two answers: one is that self-knowledge is not entirely opaque. There are some things that we know after all - for example, pain. Thus, we know that we are vulnerable, and this, it seems, we can safely assume - in fact, should assume - in our encounters with others. A similar 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 347 17 In her critique of Foucault’s use of the term power, Nancy Fraser has pinpointed the basic normative quandary of poststructuralism: “Clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power” (33). The same can be said about the various kinds of constraints that Butler and others identify. Are there any criteria for distinguishing between justified or unjustified, necessary or unnecessary, constraints on the subject? argument has been made by Richard Rorty, and its underlying rationale seems to be that this vulnerability is something like the lowest possible denominator on which we can still find an ethical consensus. But one may connect this argument with the second answer, and the second answer simply is that the subject is unknowable, but precisely because it is unknowable it should not be constrained, or, if it is constrained, as it inevitably must be by language, discourse, cultural identity, etc., then we should focus our analyses on the facts and mechanisms of this constraint, because these will lead us to what should not be constrained. The opaque, unknowable subject comes close here to a free, unfettered, unsocialized subject before the arrival of discursive subjectpositioning. Although poststructuralists would reject such a claim, one could nevertheless argue that it remains the tacit norm of their critical interventions. When Butler speaks of a subject that is deprived of its, as she puts it, singularity, the term must presuppose something that must have an existence apart from discursive self-positioning. But this singularity is unknowable; to claim to know it would be another imposition. The only solution is that knowledge of my own singularity can only be gained when I feel that it is violated; however, since it will be violated constantly, because we constantly encounter constraints and impositions, this singularity is literally produced by constraints. 17 Again, one may claim, although in entirely different ways, self-alienation is the driving force that does not lead to entrapment but to ever new attempts at resignification. For if a singularity that can never be fully expressed (and is therefore always misrecognized) is my tacit premise, it becomes even more important to keep that singularity alive by accounting for it through narratives (for example, in the form of life stories). These accounts will be incomplete and, in the final analysis, they will be failed accounts in terms of self-knowledge. But if a subject would give up accounting for itself, then it would be doomed to only exist in the form of cultural narratives that are imposed on its identity by others. Hence the emergence of a deeply paradoxical constellation. On the one hand, accounting for oneself will lead to misrecognition and contribute to its constant reinforcement. On the other hand, this situation of being trapped in an imposed identity can only get worse if I do not give any accounts of myself. Aesthetics 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 348 Winfried Fluck 18 Cf. Butler: “It may even be that to hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form is to require a falsification of that life in the name of a certain conception of ethics” (“Account” 34). is not of special importance in this context, although some poststructuralists would argue that certain formal features or aesthetic qualities are more effective in deconstructing an imposition of identity than others. However, Butler’s main reference is not to aesthetics but to narrative. The account of her attempt to connect her normative base of an unconstrained singularity with the claim of ethical responsibility has no characteristic, “dramatic” narrative form in itself. But the essay is centrally concerned with the question of narrative. If the subject is opaque to itself, there cannot be any fully accountable representation of the life of the subject. We may depend on narrative to give an account of ourselves, but inevitably narrative form will provide a falsification of that life. 18 How can we then still be accountable in ethical terms? By rejecting a totalizing narrative and giving an account that admits interruption and transference: in other words, a “psychoanalytic” narrative in the sense that the rambling first-person accounts of patients become the model of narrative self-accounting. They can become a model, because coherence and thus subjection to a norm of recognizability eludes them. There is an implicit response here to the argument put forward by Margaret Somers and other representatives of an ontological narratology, “that life already takes place in narrative form,” by arguing against such “recognizable norms of life narration” (Butler, “Account” 32). But Butler can only achieve this aim by opting for another narrative convention, another very “recognizable narrative,” that of psychoanalysis. For Iser it is fiction that helps us to positively transform the unknowability of the self; for Butler it is the fiction of psychoanalysis. What modernism does for Iser, psychoanalysis does for Butler. However, even these accounts of oneself cannot but create another misrecognition, and this process will continue ad infinitum. In fact, there is only one way out, and that would be to give up the founding premise of self-alienation altogether. And indeed, if we turn to another influential body of work in critical theory, this is precisely what has happened. VI. The Shift to Intersubjectivity in Critical Theory Narratives of self-alienation have been the dominant theory of the subject in critical theories and literary and cultural studies in the twentieth-century. It is therefore interesting to note that scholars of the second and third generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, such as Jürgen Habermas, and in the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 349 19 Cf. the German version: “An der Rezeption der Weberschen Theorie der Rationali‐ sierung von Lukács bis Adorno wird deutlich, dass gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung stets als Verdinglichung des Bewusstseins gedacht worden ist; die Paradoxien, zu denen diese Begriffsstrategie führt, zeigen, dass dieses Thema im begrifflichen Kontext der Bewußtseinsphilosophie nicht befriedigend bearbeitet werden kann” (Habermas 9). following generation, Axel Honneth, have taken their point of departure from a rejection of theories of self-alienation and have replaced them by a different theory of subject-constitution. Indeed, this repositioning is different to such a degree that the term paradigm shift may be appropriate here. For example, the second volume of Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Theory of Communicative Interaction) begins with an explicit rejection of the premise of self-alienation, here evoked in its Lukácsian version of reification: “A look at the reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization from Lucács to Adorno shows that the social consequences of rationalization are always conceptualized in terms of reification; the many paradoxes resulting from such a conceptualization indicate that the issue cannot be discussed satisfactorily in the context of a philosophy of consciousness [Bewusstseinsphilosophie]” (9). 19 Following this line of argument, Honneth has provided an in-depth discussion of the concept of reification in his Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. His goal, too, is “to reformulate a significant issue in Western Marxism” that, in the wake of Georg Lukács’s seminal study History and Class Consciousness, “moved an entire generation of philosophers and sociologists to analyze the forms of life under the then prevailing circumstances as being the result of social reification” (Reification 91-92). In both of these cases, Habermas as well as Honneth, a programmatic rejection of theories of self-alienation is designed to pave the way for an alternative theory of subject-formation: the shift is one from self-alienation to intersubjectivity, from a theoretical framework in which the subject is cut off from self-knowledge, either by forces of modernity or by an anthropological lack, to a theory of subject-formation in which the subject is constituted through intersubjective relations. From the perspective of such models of intersubjec‐ tivity, the theoretical gain is obvious. In a state of self-alienation we cannot fully know each other. In contrast, theories of intersubjectivity argue that we cannot not know each other, because we only learn who we are via interaction with others. Where a sense of self is formed in ongoing acts of communication and social interaction, subjects can no longer be seen as being helplessly exposed to outside forces. The social nature of subject-formation requires the subject to continually respond and act; it is, in other words, a source of quasi-inbuilt agency, however limited, because subjects have to define situations and adapt 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 350 Winfried Fluck 20 For an extended discussion of the concept of recognition, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. 21 Cf. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”. 22 George Herbert Mead’s intersubjective model of self-formation became relevant for critical theory, because it promised to show a way out of the dead-end of Bewusstsein‐ sphilosophie. Interesting discussions of the challenges that poststructuralist thought poses to Mead’s theory can be found in Robert G. Dunn, “Self, Identity, and Difference: their definitions in an ongoing flow of interactions in order to be able to act. In following this pragmatist line of argumentation, Hans Joas, who played a crucial role in establishing the paradigm of intersubjectivity in German social theory, can thus speak of an inherent creativity of action and entitle one of his major studies Die Kreativität des Handelns (The Creativity of Action). Habermas links communicative exchange and action in programmatic fashion in the title of his study Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Honneth, offering still another version of a critical theory based on the premise of intersubjectivity, has moved to a theory of subject-formation in which the formation of a nonalienated sense of self is dependent on successfully achieved intersubjective relations, for which Honneth uses the term recognition. 20 Honneth’s position is thus classified as an intersubjective theory of recogni‐ tion, in contrast to an intercultural theory most influentially propagated in Charles Taylor’s multicultural politics of recognition. 21 From the point of view of an intercultural politics of recognition, we “know” the other as a member of an ethnic group or gender-based community, and since we postulate that this membership is a key constituent of identity formation, groups constituted by cultural difference have to be recognized in their difference in order to keep the subject from being damaged or humiliated. From the point of view of an intersubjective concept of recognition, this argument is valid but tells only half of the story, since membership in a group is not the only, and often not the main, constituent of subject-formation. Even if my cultural difference is fully acknowledged, I may still lack sufficient recognition as a subject. Groups constituted by cultural difference may present a united front to the outside world, but internally they are also characterized by status orders and struggles over status, that is, by struggles for a full recognition as a subject. An intercultural concept of recognition, important as it may be, thus refers us back to an intersubjective concept of recognition and hence to the crucial role intersubjectivity plays in the process of subject-formation. Here we have to return to the premise of intersubjectivity that Habermas and to a certain extent also Honneth derived from the work of George Herbert Mead. 22 Joas, who has played a crucial role in the rediscovery of Mead, has 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 351 Mead and the Poststructuralists,” and Joas, “The Autonomy of the Self: The Meadian Heritage and Its Postmodern Challenge”. 23 Joas has entitled his own dissertation Praktische Intersubjektivität (Practical Intersubjec‐ tivity). 24 To describe the phases of the self ’s interaction with the other more precisely, Mead introduces the concepts of “I” and “Me” as two different components: “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitude of the others constitutes the organized ‘me,’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I.’” (Mead 175). called him “the most important theorist of intersubjectivity between Feuerbach and Habermas” (Mead 2). 23 Mead’s starting assumption is eminently plausible: without interaction with others, we could not possibly know who we are. In Mead’s theory, the subject can only be formed in social interaction. It can only gain a sense of self by looking at itself through the perspective of others. As an inherently social being, the self is not something that exists first (for example, in a state of self-alienation) and then enters (or fails to enter) into relationships with others. It is, on the contrary, only realized in relationship to others. It is important to note, however, that this interaction can take place on two different levels and that the term interaction can therefore refer to two different kinds of interaction. One level is that of the direct face-to-face encounter with others that can be conceptualized as an ongoing interactive process: “It is the social process of influencing others in a social act and then taking the attitude of the others aroused by the stimulus, and then reacting in turn to this response, which constitutes a self ” (Mead 171). As Habermas points out, the organism does not simply react to the other in behavioristic fashion. It acts in anticipation of what the reaction of the other will be (Habermas 13). This is most likely the type of interaction that we have in mind when we regard the subject as constituted by intersubjective relations. However, a comprehensive social theory cannot be based solely on faceto-face encounters. Mead therefore adds a second kind of interaction to his theory of self-formation, which he calls interaction with a generalized other. This generalized other is not a person but something like a social consensus; in this case, the self, in order to anticipate the other’s response, looks at itself through the perspective of society’s values and norms. Since the self cannot take a poll before it acts in order to find out what these values and norms are, it must have incorporated or internalized them. To be sure, the “I”-component of the self provides a spontaneous, often unpredictable response to the attitudes of others, including that of the generalized other. But the claims of the “I” are evaluated and channeled by the “me,” that is, the set of social and cultural attitudes that have been incorporated into the self. 24 This is the point where minorities may 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 352 Winfried Fluck ask the question whether an intersubjective theory of selfhood does not imply that identity is defined by a “repressive sameness” that may be used to justify exclusion. Habermas and Honneth have responded differently to the problem of how to keep intersubjectivity from leading the subject merely to another form of subjection - Habermas by the theoretical construct of an ideal speech situation characterized by symmetrical relations in the dialogue between participants, Honneth by concentrating almost exclusively on forms of empathetic personal interaction as the constitutive basis for selfhood. The self is constituted in in‐ tersubjective relations of recognition, and only personal encounters can provide an experience of genuine intersubjectivity. Moreover, these personal relations have to have a certain quality in order to be normatively significant. In his Tanner lectures on reification, Honneth speaks of an empathetic engagement, defined by affective sympathy and existential care towards other persons. This explains why almost all of the examples with which he wants to establish the constituent role of intersubjectivity for a nonalienated subject-formation are taken from studies of infant-parent relations, that is, from a phase in life in which close affective relations are indeed formative and indispensible. The fact that children soon afterward enter a phase where other influences, including cultural values, practices, and representations, become more and more important in the process of socialization and subject-formation seems to have been forgotten at this point. It is of course true that the small child needs recognition by parentfigures in order to develop a positive self-reference. But what sense of self it develops once it has grown older and begins to search for independence will depend on a whole array of social and cultural influences, including literary texts and cultural representations, that can play an increasingly important role as sources of self-definition and identity. This brings us to an important point: in the case of Honneth (but in the final analysis also Habermas), one price for exchanging a narrative of selfalienation for a narrative of intersubjectivity is to analytically disregard cultural representations and aesthetic objects as a sphere of subject-formation. In Honneth’s intersubjective theory of recognition, culture plays hardly any role at all. This is indeed a striking reversal in the development of critical theory. While culture is of central importance for Horkheimer and Adorno, both as a key source of self-alienation, but also as one of the few remaining realms that may still have the power to resist the forces of instrumental reason, literature and culture are now relegated to occasional footnote references. In a way, this is a logical consequence of Honneth’s starting premise. For if intersubjective relations are constitutive of the subject (so that they can keep the subject from 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 353 self-alienation), then it must be of central importance to focus on instances of fully achieved intersubjectivity and make them the normative basis of one’s social theory. And intersubjectivity is most successfully achieved when it is based on mutuality and relations are reciprocal. From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, this creates a major problem, however, since literature is regarded, by definition, as nonreciprocal. In reading literature, we do not encounter others who actively respond. Should literature then be left out of discussions of subject-formation? VII. The Persistence of Self-Alienation Recent critical theory may claim that intersubjectivity provides a more con‐ vincing theory of subject formation than classical theories of self-alienation. Why, then, has the concept found such limited resonance in literary and cultural studies? I see a number of reasons, all of them linked to the function of the concept in critical theories that looked for an alternative to narratives of self-alienation. The latter was ideally suited for a fundamental critique of capitalism or modernity. The second and third generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists wanted to move their social analysis away from such sweeping philosophies of history, but the concept of intersubjectivity could only be useful as a possible alternative, if it could still provide a normative basis for a social critique. Going beyond Mead, the concept of intersubjectivity was thus linked to social relations characterized by symmetry and genuine reciprocity - which had as one of its consequences that reading literature would not qualify. Moreover, the models of successfully achieved intersubjectivity provided by Habermas and Honneth, the ideal speech situation and an empathetic parent-child relation, did not exactly fire up the radical imaginary of revisionist literary and cultural studies and seemed to move away from present-day concerns (such as, to give but one example, race and gender). Critical theory thus lost its promise of a critical edge. Finally, if misrecognition and subjection stand at the beginning of subject-formation, as poststructuralism argues, then genuine reciprocity is a chimera anyway. For the most part, contemporary literary and cultural studies have thus continued to be based on the premise of self-alienation, although the concept is now narrowed in scope to a poststructuralist interpretation in which the subject is not simply alienated from its true nature but in which this true nature is unknowable and inaccessible. In view of the all-pervasive presence of power and discourse, the utopia of a nonalienated existence can no longer be upheld. Even Marxism, the last bastion of this utopia, metamorphosed into a version 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 354 Winfried Fluck 25 See the exemplary summary of the argument by Butler: “The desire to persist in one’s own being requires submitting to a world of others that is fundamentally not one’s own (…). Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s ‘own’ being. Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality” (Psychic Life 28). that subscribes - for example in the influential work of Louis Althusser - to the Lacanian premise of a permanent misrecognition that makes interpellation possible. Just as in the case of Foucault’s key term subjection, the argument is that the subject comes into existence only by an imposition of identity through normalizing discourses (for example of gender, race, or sexuality) or forms of interpellation that arrest the subject in a single, fixed identity. This provides a major difference to classical versions: alienation is no longer produced by overpowering social or economic forces that cut off the subject from its true nature; it is the result of identity-formation itself. The subject has no choice: if it wants to gain an identity, it has to agree to terms that are not its own. 25 Identity can do its work of positioning the subject in misrecognition because it provides the subject with a (false) sense of coherence. In a discussion of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Butler has summarized the argument pointedly: “If discourse produces identity through applying and enforcing a regulatory principle which thoroughly invades, totalizes and renders coherent the individual, then it seems that every ‘identity,’ insofar as it is totalizing, acts as precisely such a ‘soul that imprisons the body’” (Identity 231). But if selfalienation is produced in the act of identity-formation, are we then condemned to self-alienation? And if not, how can we still envision any kind of resistance to, or emancipation from, this fate? Is there any way out of subjection? This question has stood at the center of literary and cultural studies in the last decades. It has produced a number of responses that can be mentioned here only briefly: one way out, the argument goes, is to break the grip of a fixed identity by limit-experiences that may have an effect of disinterpellation; another one lies in the acknowledgment of multiple identities of the subject that create spaces “in-between” subject-positions; a third one lies in the possibility of performative resignification; and yet another option can be seen in an aesthetics of self-care, as propagated by Foucault in the last stage of his intellectual career. All of these answers have one goal in common: if a coherent identity is a source of self-alienation, then one way out must lie in undermining the coher‐ ence of identity, although such “nonidentity” can be achieved only temporarily at best. However, if the subject is alienated from itself by misrecognition to such a degree that it is not even aware of its own state of alienation, how is this 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 355 26 Cf. Foucault’s comment on Sartre: “I think that the only acceptable practical conse‐ quence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity - and not of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (351). 27 Cf. the full argument: “Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, but because a certain attachment to my existence is to be assumed, a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence. I am led to embrace the terms that injure me, precisely because they constitute me socially. One might understand the self-colonizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics as symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious term. As a further paradox, then, it is only by occupying - being occupied by - that injurious term that I become enabled to resist and oppose that term, and the power that constitutes me is recast as the power I oppose. In this way, a certain place for psychoanalysis is secured, in the sense that any mobilization against subjection will take subjection itself as its resource, and that an attachment to an injurious interpellation by way of a necessarily alienated narcissism will become the move toward nonidentity motivated? Why do subjects feel a need to undermine the force of normalization? Where does a motivation for resistance come from? Poststructuralists such as Foucault or Butler stress again and again that being subjected or interpellated by cultural norms does not necessarily mean that the subject will be completely determined by these norms. For Foucault, antiquity, that is, a time before the establishment of reason as a normative regulatory ideal, provides a model for an alternative vision: “In antiquity, this work on the self with its attendant austerity is not imposed on the individual by means of civil law or religious obligation, but is a choice about existence made by the individual. People decide for themselves whether or not to care for themselves” (361). On what basis are these choices made, however, if there are no regulatory norms that point the way? The only possible answer lies in the power of conviction of the choice itself, that is, it lies in an ultimately aesthetic criterion. 26 Fittingly, Foucault describes the new subjectivity he envisions as an aesthetics of existence. This is an ingenious solution but still leaves open the question why the self should be motivated to create his life as a work of art. In her essay “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification,” intended as a critical rethinking of subjection and resistance, Butler points out that interpellation may be the goal but that it is not always the result, because interpellation may be misinterpreted by the subject. Moreover, a single act of hailing cannot fix identity; for this, iteration is needed and this opens up a possibility of gradual resignification. But, again, why does the subject feel a need to engage in resignification? The most convincing answer Butler gives is when she speaks of an “alienated narcissism” that “will become the condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible.” 27 Because the subject 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 356 Winfried Fluck condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible” (Subjection 245-46). 28 Cf. Winfried Fluck, “Reading for Recognition.” has no other choice than identifying even with an injurious term in order to gain some kind of social identity, it will be driven toward resignification by ultimately narcissist reasons. In other words: the same condition of self-alienation that makes the subject an easy prey for processes such as interpellation or subjection is also the driving force in the search for resignification. It seems to me that the various reasons given in poststructuralist narratives of self-alienation as possible sources of resistance, diverse as they may appear at first sight, nevertheless have one aspect in common: they are all motivated by a lack of recognition. A multiplication of subject positions seeks to attract attention to sides of the subject that have been neglected so far; resignification intends to change the basis for recognition and make renewed - and improved - recognition possible; an aesthetics of existence aspires to construct a new basis for self-recognition that creates independence from others. The search for recognition is the driving force in all of these cases of “resistance.” The lack at the center of the subject does not only enable identity impositions by others, it is also the source of a permanent dissatisfaction with these impositions - which, in turn, provides the impetus for a renewed search for recognition. Ironically, then, the drive for resistance or resignification or an aesthetics of existence emerges from the very phenomenon that poststructuralists use as their normative basis for criticizing the subjecting power of recognition, the singularity of the subject. Because this singularity can never be fully acknowledged by any kind of recognition, it also produces the motivation for pushing the subject toward ever newer attempts in the struggle for recognition. The reason is simple. One can live without resignification or the possibilities of an aesthetics of existence, but one cannot live without recognition, however alienated a form it may take, because recognition stands at the center of subject-formation: without it, we would not know who we are. One of the most important cultural spheres for a search for recognition are fictional texts, aesthetic objects, and cultural practices that constantly offer new doppelgänger (doubling) experiences and identity options to the subject. In another context I have described the role literature plays in this pursuit of recognition. 28 “Reading for recognition” is an important part of the search for recognition. This claim allows us to reintroduce a dimension of intersubjectivity that points beyond self-alienation - to be sure, not in the sense of a fully achieved personal reciprocity, but in the redescription of reading as an interactive mode. As Iser has pointed out, in reading we are constantly moving between two 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0019 Philosophical Premise in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives and Self-Alienation 357 worlds, the world of the text and our own world to which we have to relate the text in order to make sense of it. In reading, we are thus always “in between” two worlds, being both ourselves and somebody else at the same time, and this reconceptualization of the act of reading as an interactive activity points to the aesthetic construction of a nonidentity that is not dependent on heroic narratives of transgression or limit-experiences. 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