W INFRIED F LUCK Hermeneutics of Change I. Why should we pursue the study of literature on a professional basis and in an institutional setting? To draw attention to the aesthetic experience literary texts can provide has furnished one answer, to draw attention to important social functions literature can have - including its contribution to change - has furnished another. Can literature contribute to cultural change? The question remains one of the most challenging problems in literary and cultural studies, and it is fitting that Herbert Grabes - to whom I want to dedicate this essay - played a crucial role in returning REAL to this topic. Throughout his long and distinguished career in the field of English and American literature, he reminded us time and again to bring our debates back to the questions that mattered. I have greatly profited from his original and philosophically sophisticated contributions to literary theory and literary studies. Is literature decisively shaped, if not determined, by social conditions or ideology, or should it be seen as a “largely autonomous subsystem of culture” (conference invitation) with the power of having an impact on other subsystems? The question never seems to go away and has had a comeback in the recent transnational turn in American studies. On the one hand, literary ‘transnationalists’ argue that going beyond the borders of the nation-state can lead to flexible and, possibly, multiple identities in the reading public and thus push society towards an acceptance of more diversity. On the other hand, critics argue that such movements only mimic the transnationalization of production and the transnational flow of capital in a neoliberal stage of globalization. What one side celebrates as a liberation from the exclusionary practices of the nation-state, is for others only a naïve reflection of neoliberal demands for a mobility and flexibility that globalization imposes on subjects. For such critics, the fact that many of these workers are migrants only provides additional evidence that today’s workers have to be mobile and are easily disposable, whereas for convinced transnationalists migrants are the true culture heroes, the personification of hybrid identities. These different views of the present state of Western societies must also have consequences for literary studies and lead interpreters into opposite directions. For proponents of the transnational turn in literary studies, literature dealing with migration and transnational mobility can make an important contribution to W INFRIED F LUCK 16 cultural change. For critics of globalization, it is precisely this change that poses a problem which transnational literature obscures in its uncritical celebration of hybridity. One and the same phenomenon - globalization - is conceptualized differently, and so is literature’s relation to it, depending on one’s underlying assumptions about what the true meaning of globalization is. One may call this problem the hermeneutics of change. Before beginning to discuss what the impact of literature on social, political, or cultural change has been or should be in the future, or, conversely, how social and cultural developments have determined literature, we need to remind ourselves that, although we are talking about phenomena that may exist outside of interpretation, they only gain meaning and significance within certain explanatory frames, that is, when they are constructed in interpretation. 1 Where they are part of an argument in literary studies, reflections on a priori assumptions usually go in one of two directions: either we encounter reflections on the underlying view of society or on the concept of literature that informs a particular method of interpretation. In this essay, I want to wander off the beaten either-or path and focus on a third set of assumptions that logically links literature and cultural change. I am referring to (often tacit) assumptions about the state of the subject. Literary texts want to have an effect on readers, but in order to arrive at a theory of effect that will shape the writer’s aesthetic strategies, s/ he has to have an idea about what constitutes the reader. Cultural change will only be produced by literature when readers are affected and become actors; questions about the subject’s potential for agency thus often stand at the center of literary studies that are inspired by critical theory. But even formalists assume that certain aesthetic qualities will have a transformative effect, for otherwise it would not make any sense to argue about aesthetic theories and participate in heated debates about the canon. In other words: different views of society will lead to differ- These interpretations, in turn, will be based on a set of underlying assumptions about society, culture, and literature that provides them with a particular focus. If I look at society on the basis of Marxist assumptions about what determines society and culture in a particular historical stage - for example, a shift to the transnationalization of production - then my narrative about change and its relation to literature will be quite different from an interpretation based on systems theory that may see globalization as just another chapter in a story of systemic differentiation. To discuss the relation between literature and cultural change must thus also include a consideration of the underlying assumptions on which the argument is based. 1 Phenomenally, they have, of course, an independent existence, but as soon as we want to make sense of them, they will be seen through an explanatory frame that we bring to the object. Hermeneutics of Change 17 ent narratives about literature’s potential for change, but these narratives will also vary depending on their underlying assumptions about the state of the subject and his or her chances for agency. Or, to put it differently: theories of the subject are foundational, not only in philosophy but also in literary studies. This is the question I want to pursue in the following essay. In its first part, I want to argue that narratives about literature and cultural change are based on a priori assumptions about the state of the subject - what it is, what it needs, what it is prevented from having, and how that situation can be changed. This prior assumption will determine what role literature can play in subject formation, how it can contribute to cultural change, and what aesthetic strategies may be needed to realize this goal. Hermeneutically speaking, theories of the subject are therefore the logical nexus that connects society and literature, the politics of literature and aesthetic theories. Theories of the subject will therefore be my starting point and, since my space is limited, I want to focus on four examples that I consider highly representative of the approaches that have dominated literary and cultural theory in the last decades. In the second part of this essay, I will discuss responses to those theories of the subject, in a third part, I want to offer a reformulation of these theories that is also intended to open up a new perspective on the relation between literature and cultural change. To justify my focus on theories of the subject, let us recall that the humanities were conceived and institutionalized in response to certain historical developments that were said to have a negative effect on the subject and its potential for self-awareness and self-determination. Literature and culture in the emphatic sense of the best that has been thought and said gained such a high status in the nineteenth century because they were considered the best antidote to these developments. One may thus claim that literary studies, as well as other fields in the humanities, have been created with the intention to help the subject overcome the constraints to which it has been subjected in history. This may be said to be their purpose and project: they want to help the individual to realize its potential as a subject. II. Once one focuses on the question of underlying premises, it is striking to realize to what extent modern literary and cultural studies have been shaped by one theory of the subject in particular that has dominated literary and cultural theory in the twentieth century almost completely. I am referring to W INFRIED F LUCK 18 narratives of self-alienation. 2 These narratives see the subject in a state in which it is kept from fully knowing itself and hence determining its own fate, frequently with the result of a damaged sense of self or an inner division. 3 At first blush, it may come as a surprise that all of the very different approaches I mentioned should have a narrative of self-alienation as their founding premise. But the common point of departure can also be helpful in pinpointing the differences. For Frankfurt School critical theory of the first generation, the self-alienation of the subject is the result of a long-drawn historical process in which reason has been reduced to instrumental rationality that has gained an ever increasing hold over all areas of life - reaching, in the view of Horkheimer and Adorno, almost totalitarian dimensions in the American society they encountered in the 1940s. This development must affect literature and its potential for change. In those philosophies of history in which the idea of a growing instrumental rationality has provided the central narrative, (high) culture has usually been considered one of the few areas left in which instrumental rationality had not yet taken hold. The exposure to culture, understood as the highest manifestation of the human mind, could thus be seen as a crucial antidote, if not the only remaining hope - at least where culture was not yet instrumentalized itself and submitted to the logic of the market. The sense of shock pervading Horkheimer and Adorno’s However, it is fitting to speak of these theories in the plural, because selfalienation, just like other theoretical concepts we use in the field, is not a stable signifier but can be used in different contexts for different arguments and different purposes. Nevertheless, although defined differently in each case, narratives of self-alienation provide the founding premise not only of Frankfurt School critical theory and related Marxist approaches, but also of such apparently very different approaches as British cultural studies, as represented by Raymond Williams, Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics, and poststructuralism. These will be the four theoretical positions which I will use here to illustrate the links between narratives about the subject and narratives about cultural change. 2 For a more extended analysis, see my essay on “Philosophical Premises in Literary and Cultural Theory: Narratives of Self-Alienation,” New Literary History 47.1 (2016): 109- 134. 3 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” (Raymond Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1976), 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. Hermeneutics of Change 19 chapter on the culture industry in their Dialectic of Enlightenment is caused by the fear that culture, seen as one of the last bastions of resistance, is now also invaded by instrumental rationality. In the form of American mass culture, culture has become merely another industry based on standardized production processes in which culture is instrumentalized for profit purposes. For Raymond Williams, on the other hand, it is not instrumental rationality but industrialization that provides the key for understanding the selfalienation produced by modern society. Industrialization has led to a class society and thus to a seemingly insurmountable separation between the classes that threatens democracy and its promise of equality. In contrast to Frankfurt School critical theory, however, the social misrecognition (and, hence, self-alienation) resulting from class society is not attributed to an irreversible historical process and thus it is, in principle, still possible to change it. Once culture and society are redefined as a whole way of life, as British cultural studies have done programmatically, and interpretations focus on structures of feeling like solidarity as key value of a culture (and not on standardized mass culture), the working-class subject may still be successfully reconstituted as non-alienated. Somewhat surprisingly, Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics also has its starting point in the premise of human self-alienation, in this case derived, however, not from Max Weber’s theory of instrumental rationality or a Marxist analysis of the dehumanizing consequences of industrialization, but from Helmut Plessner’s anthropological claim that human beings are constituted by a lack. 4 4 To describe the activities of the reader in the act of reading is the central aim of Iser’s major studies The Implied Reader (1974); The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978); Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989); and The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (1993). We therefore need fictions to make up for what we are lacking (and can never fully recover). In this context, self-alienation, defined as an anthropological 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. In poststructuralism, finally, following Lacan, identity is formed by misrecognition, so that the subject is arrested in a permanent state of self-alienation. Not dissimilar to Iser’s reception aesthetics, the starting point is a lack, an incompleteness, but in contrast to Iser, this lack does not become a source of creativity through which the subject tries to fill the gap. Rather, it leads to a state of illusionary self-perception that prevents the subject from ever knowing itself. Consequently, in poststructuralism, self-alienation has reached the point where the subject is alienated from itself not merely by forces like industrialization or instrumental rationality but, much more fundamentally, as the paradoxical result of identity formation. Without identity, the subject W INFRIED F LUCK 20 cannot know who it is, but the search for self-knowledge will inevitably lead to misrecognition and, hence, to renewed self-alienation. There is an inextricable link in literary and cultural theory between theories of the subject, theories of the function of fiction, and narratives about cultural change. Thus, the different narratives of self-alienation I have sketched out also lead to different narratives about what relation literature can have to social and cultural change. If we start from the assumption that self-alienation is caused by the relentless progression of instrumental rationality, then literature can have a potential for change only where it keeps the possibility of a not yet instrumentalized counter-realm alive; however, literature can evoke a utopia of non-alienated existence only where it is organized by certain aesthetic principles that have a common denominator in their rejection of instrumentalization. One of the logical consequences of critical theory’s narrative about self-alienation is a model of cultural change that may still be familiar to all those who witnessed political debates in the 1960s and 70s. If instrumental rationality is affecting ever more areas of life, then the only hope for change lies in radical resistance - initially in Horkheimer/ Adorno conceived as a kind of heroic last stand, but then increasingly also understood as a model of action. In this process, the idea of resistance was gradually extended beyond high culture to also include pop culture, so that first youth cultures and then ethnic subcultures were presented as possible sites of resistance, and rap music would eventually replace Beckett and Kafka. At the same time, however, the resistance model was undermined, most effectively in the writing of Foucault and its most skilful adapter in literary and cultural studies, the new historicism, where resistance was redefined as only another, especially cunning script of the system. Still, one may claim that the final blow to the resistance model is being struck by the current art market where paintings by Picasso and others - that is art with aesthetic strategies designed to resist commodification - have reached staggering levels of market value. Paradoxically, this art has gained its obscenely high value because of its status as art of defamiliarization, that is, as an object whose value derives originally from its promise to radically resist commodification. In the final analysis, resistance has thus only increased the commodity value of the aesthetic object. How different in comparison is the approach by Raymond Williams and British cultural studies, although they too see themselves in a Marxist tradition. 5 5 In the following discussion, I will focus on the classical texts by Williams: Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). And yet they draw very different conclusions from the founding premise of self-alienation and go in an altogether different direction in responding to it. The difference already begins with their historical analysis. In placing Hermeneutics of Change 21 industrialization at the center and not instrumental rationality, the source of self-alienation changes: it is no longer the result of a relentless logic of instrumentalization but of a division of labor ushered in by industrialization. Just as the work of the craftsman is split up into a set of mechanical operations, industrialization undermines social coherence by a newly emerging class system. However, in contrast to instrumental rationality the effects of the social division created by a class society may be overcome by a democracy that truly deserves its name - overcome not in the sense of redistribution but by leveling social hierarchies and creating equal recognition and full acceptance for the working class. Thus, British cultural studies emerged as an interpretive approach and institutional project to empower, originally the working class but then increasingly also the lower classes more broadly defined. In order to be able to participate in democracy, they have to be encouraged and empowered to lose a sense of inferiority. This is where culture and its redefinition comes in for Williams. Its purpose is to take away the stigma of inferiority and reveal the creative potential of mundane and often seemingly banal cultural activities. “Culture is ordinary” is the programmatic title of one of Williams’s essays, repeated in various ways in British cultural studies. That is why the key to understanding Williams is not the last chapter of Culture and Society but the first chapter of The Long Revolution where he develops, in pragmatist fashion, a theory of the inherent creativity of everyday action, what Hans Joas would later call “Die Kreativität des Handelns,” that is the inherent creativity of action, even action of a seemingly banal, everyday nature. As a logical consequence of his basically pragmatist theory of the subject, Williams’s model of change is not one of resistance but of an ongoing process of communication. Class society divides us, therefore we have to learn to take note of each other again, and this should include even the most ordinary aspects of culture. This is the route British cultural studies have taken in following Williams, and again, the logic of the development has led to an increasing emptying out of the concept of the aesthetic. Williams himself already regarded aesthetic theory as a result of the division of labor and thus as a tool of social separation. If every act is potentially creative and democracy is the realm where we should acknowledge different forms of creativity on an equal basis, then the major virtue needed is the willingness to understand and recognize the creative dimension of even the most mundane cultural practice or cultural object. The model for change here is to improve our awareness and our understanding of the culture of others, for only in this way will we be able to conceptualize society as a common democratic project. This, in effect, is the only norm; other than that, there is no normative aesthetic dimension that could be set in any meaningful relation to cultural change. On the contrary, we may speak of a delimitation of the aesthetic, and W INFRIED F LUCK 22 it is notable that recent developments in art have gone in the same direction, as can be seen in the fact that most of the current avant-garde art is concept or installation art, that is, art featuring ordinary, mundane objects that can only be transformed into aesthetic objects by a narrative in which they are acknowledged as art. This dehierarchization has a democratizing effect, not only in the sense of leveling status orders, but even more so in its potential to take the aesthetic object out of a cycle of commodification and redefine it anew as a cultural object with an unforeseen value of its own. Whereas critical theory and British cultural studies attribute selfalienation to historical forces, reception aesthetics and, in a way, also poststructuralism trace it back to a basic human condition, in Iser’s case, an anthropological lack. In the heydays of the debates about reception aesthetics, especially at American universities, Iser was often accused of being apolitical. But inevitably his theory must also entail a theory of change (and hence be political) because, in the final analysis, it was also created in response to a narrative about the state of the subject and what we can do about it. However, if self-alienation is considered a basic human condition, the answer would seem to be: not much. If I see self-alienation as being produced by historical conditions, then there is at least the theoretical prospect that this condition may be changed and that literature may contribute to that change either by resistance or by cultural democratization. But if self-alienation is part of the human make-up, then it seems that we are stuck in always the same condition and can only endlessly re-enact the same experience. However, what looks like a major shortcoming can also be seen as a potential gain, for it provides the subject with a continuing motivation to go back to literature and to draw on its potential to activate our imagination. What can change still mean in this context? Partly in response to the heated political climate at German universities in the 1960s, Iser shied away from public political statements, but there can be no doubt that he saw the imaginary creativity literature provokes as an important ingredient of a living democracy in which subjects participate actively through their struggles for self-awareness. As long as they do so, society is in good shape. Where the struggle stops, on the other hand, because the subject is trapped in firm ideological convictions, the productive potential of self-alienation is lost. Ironically, the tables are turned at this point: whereas in critical theory, selfalienation can only be overcome by fundamental systemic changes, and in British cultural studies only by a long revolution in which class divisions are gradually leveled, in reception aesthetics the fact that self-alienation can never be overcome entirely is precisely the reason why it can be counted upon to lead to productive and creative results. This sounds like another version of pragmatism, but there is one major difference. To be sure, readers are always creative, simply because they have Hermeneutics of Change 23 to bring the words on the page to life in the reading experience by means of their imagination. But not every form of imaginary activity is equally productive for Iser. Literature is most productive where it helps to gain some degree of self-reflexivity, and in order to achieve this, certain aesthetic strategies such as blanks or suspended connectivities are considered especially helpful. Literature’s potential to respond to self-alienation productively is thus closely linked to a particular aesthetic, that of a modernist aesthetics of negativity. For a long time, Iser therefore had problems with postmodernism. Eventually, however, he could not be satisfied to tie his theory so closely to a modernist aesthetics and began to move away from it by drawing on vocabularies of self-organizing systems like the ‘play of the text,’ the ‘feedback loop,’ or, as a key word and value in his final years, the concept of ‘emergence’. With this terminology, the productive potential of an anthropological lack is moved away from specific aesthetic strategies and attributed more generally to the subsystem literature or fiction. But, ironically, what looks like a liberation can also become a trap, because Iser ends up where he did not want to go, in a process of continuous re-enactment. Due to the unpredictability of emergence, we never quite know what will happen next, but since it lies in the nature of emergence to never come to a halt, one effect will quickly be replaced by another in a potentially endless series of quick substitutions. To be sure, this may prevent us from becoming trapped in self-alienation, but it also has the logical consequence that the change which is constantly produced in this way remains without any direction. Change is linked here to a state of potentiality that can never be realized, because that would merely reproduce self-alienation. Something similar may be said about poststructuralism, where change and repetition are also linked. In a way, things look even bleaker, however, because the subject is not even aware of the fundamental misrecognition that constitutes its identity. Thus, it can only be reenacted again and again and in ever new ways. And yet, we are by now familiar with the claim that reiteration creates difference and that difference can be the entry gate for resignification and hence for change. Precisely because self-alienation is a permanent state of being, it must lead to reenactment, and this reenactment, if only for the fact that no iteration can result in exactly the same thing, can be linked to change, although only in the form of slight modifications at best. As in the case of Iser, the fact that self-alienation is a basic human condition leads to the need for a constant reenactment. But there is a major difference: in reception aesthetics, development and change become possible because literature can draw on the imaginary, whereas in poststructuralism the imaginary is the major source of misrecognition. This difference is, in the final analysis, the difference between phenomenology and poststructuralism. W INFRIED F LUCK 24 If we ask what possibilities a poststructuralist theory of the subject opens up for the explanation of cultural change, Judith Butler’s essay “Giving an Account of Oneself” can provide an instructive answer. To start with, Butler provides a helpful clarification of the normative basis of poststructuralism’s critique of misrecognition: the subject is alienated from itself because its singularity can never be fully expressed. But if my founding premise is that of a singularity that can never be fully expressed (and is therefore always misrecognized), 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. In contrast to reception aesthetics, aesthetics 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, the main reference points are no longer fictional texts or aesthetic objects but narratives, and these narratives can be of all kinds and genres; at the end of the day, they will all enact the same dilemma. The main sources of insight are thus not the narratives themselves but readings that reveal to what extent misrecognition is at work and draw attention to the rhetorical means and narrative devices through which this misrecognition is established. However, these readings cannot but create another misrecognition and this process cannot but 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 and has opened up a wide gap between Frankfurt School critical theory on the one hand and literary and cultural studies on the other. III. Scholars of the second and third generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, such as Jürgen Habermas and in the following generation Axel Honneth, have taken their point of departure from a programmatic rejection of theories of self-alienation and have replaced them by an altogether different theory of subject formation. This, one may claim, is a key development in critical theory and beyond. For example, the second volume of Habermas’s major study Hermeneutics of Change 25 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action) begins with an explicit rejection of the premise of self-alienation, here evoked in its Lukácsian version of reification (Verdinglichung): A look at the reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization 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, my translation, WF) 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. Again, the goal of his discussion is “to reformulate a significant issue in Western Marxism” (91) that, in the wake of Lukács’s seminal study History and Class Consciousness, “moved an entire generation of philosophers and sociologists to analyse the forms of life under the then prevailing circumstances as being the result of social reification” (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. The theoretical gain is obvious. In a state of self-alienation we cannot fully know each other. From the perspective of theories of intersubjectivity, we cannot possibly not know each other, because we only learn who we are in the interaction with others. However, if intersubjectivity is to fill the gap that concepts of self-alienation can never close, this can only be done on the basis of a normative claim, for obviously, not every form of social interaction has positive effects. On the contrary, there are all kinds of pathological relations, and they can only be kept in check by successfully achieved forms of intersubjectivity, such as, most importantly and most emphatically, the relation between infant and parent. Change is thus dependent on the creation of conditions for successful intersubjectivity, also called recognition, and for this form of intersubjectivity literature does not seem to qualify because it can only simulate personal relations. In fact, this is the reason why Frankfurt School critical theory in the second and third generation has practically lost all interest in literature. 6 From the perspective pursued here, this is an epistemologically naive position to take, however, based on an untenable opposition between reality 6 Up to Honneth’s more recent book Das Recht der Freiheit, his literary references remained largely limited to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. In Das Recht der Freiheit, scattered literary references, often in footnotes, have increased, but they only serve a particular function, namely the illustration of social pathologies. W INFRIED F LUCK 26 and the realm of the imaginary, that is, between a world of actual social encounters, for example between parent and child, and our imagination through which we try to make sense of such encounters. Obviously, the two phenomena cannot be easily separated: two participants in the same encounter will often give us two different versions of the event, because they have experienced and interpreted it differently. Critical theorists like Habermas and Honneth cannot acknowledge the role the imagination plays in making the encounter meaningful (and thus, perhaps, formative), because it is their goal to make intersubjectivity the normative basis for judging the state of society, and this is only possible in their view, if intersubjectivity is defined in strictly social terms. From this point of view, the measure of success is whether intersubjective relations will have the potential to lead to social recognition. Critical theorists may thus ask the government to take responsibility for the creation of social conditions that make recognition possible, such as, for example, preventing unemployment because work is an important element of social recognition. But one cannot ask the government for fictional forms of recognition. Thus, the intersubjective dimension of subject formation is of interest only where it can provide criteria for social critique and calls for social reform. But the price is an impoverished version of intersubjectivity. The point becomes clearer when one goes back to the theoretical source of critical theory’s concept of intersubjectivity, the description of subject formation in the work of George Herbert Mead. The rediscovery of Mead proved tremendously important for a particular branch of social theory in the 1970s and 80s, because it promised to point a way out of the equally unsatisfactory choices between Marxist economic determinism and idealist scenarios of the subject’s autonomy (and hence achieved self-consciousness). On the one hand, Mead rejects concepts of an autonomous subject by pointing out that identity (and self-awareness) can only be gained in social interaction; without opposite others we could not possibly know who we are. In Mead’s theory, identity can only emerge in social interaction: “The self is not something that exists first and then enters into relationship with others...” (Mead 182). The self is only realized in its relationship to others. Consequently, the subject is reconceptualized as a self and renamed accordingly. On the other hand, self-constitution in the interaction with others does not mean that the subject is defined by others. Because of the interactive nature of the process of self-formation, the self always retains some degree of agency: in order to be able to act, the self has to make sense of the other, and it can only do so by actively interpreting the other’s responses. A narrow behaviorist conceptualization of social interaction in terms of stimulus and response is thereby replaced by an intersubjective model of self-formation: “It is the social process of influencing others in a social act and then taking Hermeneutics of Change 27 the attitude of the others aroused by the stimulus, and then reacting in turn to this response, which constitutes a self” (Mead 171). However, the model of social interaction described here is a model of face-to-face encounters, and one cannot restrict analyses of modern societies to face-to-face encounters. By adding the concept of a generalized other, Mead concedes that the perspective through which we look at ourselves is not always and not necessarily that of a real person with whom we interact. It can also be a perspective provided by cultural norms or attitudes. Since we cannot possibly meet all of the other others that form society, we have to mentally construct their perspective. We have to come up with a mental construct of the generalized other and, inevitably, this construct will also be shaped by the imaginary. One may even go one step further and argue that the difference between face-to-face encounters with ‘real’ persons and abstract others is not really clear-cut: although we may see a person directly in front of us and may be able to observe his or her responses, there will nevertheless also be a certain degree of imaginary construction at work through which we try to make sense of the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of this other person. We ‘take the attitude of the other’ in an imaginary anticipation of his or her response, and the image to which we respond already presents an interpretation and not simply an encounter with a ‘real’ person that is selfevident. But if the response to others is always, and by definition, the result of an interpretive construct, then the imaginary will be involved each time, no matter whether we are talking about face-to-face encounters or imaginary interactions with a generalized other. Although the child may experience ‘real’ warmth in the contact with parents, it nevertheless also constructs them as objects of its own emotional and imaginary desires. In that sense, Lacan has a point when he claims that the child’s identity formation is grounded in an act of imaginary misrecognition - of self and other, one may add -, although I do not see a need to interpret this misrecognition only psychoanalytically as an effect of the mirror-stage. But no matter whether one links misrecognition to the mirror-stage or to social interaction more generally, in each case the imaginary construct of the other will be guided and shaped by the self’s own needs and desires, and the response of the other will be interpreted on the basis of this need. In other words: if we take the role into account that the imaginary plays in the process, recognition will always also be a form of self-recognition, and, in view of the role the imaginary plays in both social interaction and in reading, there is, at a closer look, no clear dividing line between self-recognition gained through social interaction in everyday life or through reading literature. Of course recognition by others will, as a rule, be rated more highly, but self-recognition through literature may be more easily and reliably attained. W INFRIED F LUCK 28 However, we do not usually think of these two options in either-or terms. Both can provide something that the other cannot to the same degree, and they should thus be seen as complementary possibilities in the search for recognition. As a rule, self-formation will not only be based on social interaction. Culture, including literature, also plays an increasingly important role as an agent of socialization. IV. Theories of self-alienation, secondand third-generation Frankfurt School critical theory argues, ignore the fact that human existence is shaped by intersubjective relations in which recognition becomes the pre-condition for a ‘healthy’ self-formation. It is, in other words, recognition that may overcome self-alienation, but only if it is intersubjective recognition, that is, based on social interaction characterized by genuine reciprocity. From that point of view, literature cannot be of interest; the unidirectional reading process can provide self-recognition at best. But if one does not want to accept this strict opposition - as I have done here by referring to the role the imaginary plays in both social interaction and in reading -, then it is necessary to clarify what self-recognition means in the context of this discussion. In what sense may literature be said to provide self-recognition? To start with, it is necessary to clarify what I mean by the term. In the context of my argument it does not mean some kind of high self-evaluation but, much more matter-of-factly, any self-reference that finds resonance in the self. Selfrecognition, then, should not be confused with narcissistic self-affirmation; rather, it is the construction of any self-image that can contribute to a sense of self. This is not supposed to mean, however, that the search for recognition through reading always results in self-acceptance. In many instances, the search for recognition, social or ‘fictional,’ will encounter irritating challenges, unexpected frustrations and angry disappointments. Self-recognition, in other words, is used here in the sense of any form of self-reference. It is not a psychological term but refers to an elementary form of self-constitution; it simply means to be able to construct a sense of self. But how can this sense of self be gained in the act of reading literary texts? I have addressed the question in other contexts and can only provide a summary of the argument here. 7 7 See, for example, my essays on “The Second Narrative” (Fluck 2013a) and “Reading for Recognition” (Fluck 2013b). My point of departure lies in an example Wolfgang Iser has provided in an essay on literary representation, where he speaks about the act of reading Hamlet. Since we have never met Hamlet and do in fact know that he never existed, we have to come up with our own Hermeneutics of Change 29 mental images of him. 8 In the act of reading, the literary text thus comes to represent two things at once: the world of the text and imaginary elements added to it by the reader in the reading process. 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. And it is exactly this double positioning of the reader that allows us to do two things at the same time: we can, in the words of Iser, be “both ourselves and someone else at the same time” (244). The literary text allows us to enter a character’s perspective and perhaps even his or her body; on the other hand, we cannot and do not want to completely give up our own identity. In reading, we have the possibility of creating other, more expressive versions of ourselves. This mental construct will proceed along textual lines but, in the act of doing so, we will also have to draw on our own associations, feelings and bodily sensations in order to bring the abstract letters on the page to life and provide them with meaning. If a character is said to be melancholic, this characterization will not make any sense to us unless we can draw on our own knowledge about, or perhaps even on our own experience of, melancholia. This is achieved, however, in a much more complex way than suggested by the term ‘identification’. 9 8 See Wolfgang Iser: “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 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. [...] Staging oneself as someone else is a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is also the means whereby representation is transferred from text to reader.” (“Representation: A Performative Act,” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), 244.) One may assume for the sake of argument that it may be possible to ‘identify’ with a character, but one cannot identify with an entire text. It is the text, however, that provides the reading experience, not just single characters in it. In actualizing the text in the act of reading, all 9 On the confusions surrounding the term ‘identification’ in the interpretation of literary texts, cf. Rita Felski (2008: 34): “Identification can denote a formal alignment with a character, as encouraged by techniques of focalization, point of view, or narrative structure, while also referencing an experiential allegiance with a character, as manifested in a felt sense of affinity or attachment. Critiques of identification tend to conflate these issues, assuming that readers formerly aligned with a fictional persona cannot help but swallow the ideologies represented by that persona wholesale.“ Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). W INFRIED F LUCK 30 aspects of the text have to be brought to life by means of a transfer from our own life-world, including the text’s language, its plot, mood, author-figure and other structural features. The ‘more expressive version of ourselves’ is thus not a simple case of self-aggrandizement through wish-fulfillment but an extension of our own interiority over a whole (made-up) world. Such a model conceptualizes reading as a process of making selections through which readers create meaning and significance by transfers between the world of the text and their own world. Since we cannot possibly relate to all aspects of the text in equal measure, we will focus on aspects to which we can relate in one way or another. The explanation why there will always be new readings of any given literary text, not only in different historical periods but also among readers or viewers of the same period, society, or class, lies in the fact that readings (including professional interpretations) work by means of structural or affective analogies. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why in reading literature we can relate to figures like outlaws or misfits, or even criminals and murderers from whom we would shy away in reality - that is, characters that we may consider pathological in real life. We do not identify with such characters but establish analogies to those aspects of their persona that we want to incorporate. 10 We take the defiance or heroism of the gangster and ignore the criminal context. 11 Depictions of pathological behavior in fictional texts should thus not be taken literally, and it is part of the paradoxical effects literature can have that phenomena that we may reject in real life can become elements of selfdefinition and thus self-recognition in the act of reading. 12 10 Attachments to particular characters or single aspects of their persona can thus easily cross gender lines. The same applies, of course, to ethnic and racial identities as well as sexual orientations. Self-recognition, then, can be gained through forms of self-reference that can be drawn from interaction either with social others or, by means of a transfer, from the process of reading. The matter is further complicated - but also clarified - by the fact that this self-reference does not have to affect the reader as a whole per- 11 Using the term analogy to grasp the relations that can be set up between reader and text means to go beyond mimetic assumptions of direct likeness or resemblance, but even beyond metaphorical affinity. Thus, readers’ responses can be unpredictable: “Antigone has intrigued straight men and lesbians, Norwegians and South Africans; you do not need to be an Irishman to admire James Joyce” (Felski 2008: 43). Felski continues: “We all seek in various ways to have our particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us. The patent asymmetry and unevenness of structures of recognition ensure that books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgment” (43). 12 This paradoxical effect of aesthetic experience is most obvious in the case of the sublime: to be on a sinking ship or to look at the painting of a sinking ship are two very different experiences and can illustrate how aesthetic experience can transform a real-life threat into a gratifying aesthetic experience. Hermeneutics of Change 31 son (as is implied in the German term Selbst-Achtung). The transfers that may be used for self-references can be segmented, partial, and piecemeal in their dimensions. If we activate a sense of defiance through a transfer linked to an outlaw figure, this will not have the result that we define ourselves from now on as an outlaw or a defiant person. It simply means that we stress, if only temporarily, a particular dimension of the self and toy with the possibility of thereby expanding our sense of self. The transfers that are at work in our reception of literary texts could then be seen as an interactive activity that offers particular possibilities in the search for recognition (Fluck 2013b). In defining the reading of literature as a form of interaction, two aspects have to be kept in mind. One is to acknowledge the inherently interactive nature of the reading process that is part of any attempt to make sense of a literary text. The result is a complex interaction of perspectives in which we construct another world by drawing on our own world, and then look at our own world through the perspective of our imaginary construct. Seen this way, the reading subject is thus intersubjectively constituted in the act of reading: we can be both ourselves and somebody else at the same time. Secondly, what is important to stress in this context is that this interactive process will not leave the two perspectives that interact unaffected. Our construct of the text will not be identical with the literary text itself; it is always already an interpretation and extension of it. At the same time, looking at our self through the perspective of our reading experience will affect and possibly change our own self-reference. The reading process thus brings a dimension to our self that we have been lacking, and this self-extension can be seen as a search for recognition on new grounds. V. One purpose of this essay has been to argue that recognition is a concept that links both of the theories of the subject we have discussed, the theory of selfalienation and theories of intersubjectivity. In the case of the latter, the significance of recognition is explicitly thematized; in the case of the former, it is implied. In intersubjective theories of the subject, the search for recognition is seen as a quasi-anthropological need: without interaction with an other, we could not possibly know who we are, and the discussion that has emerged from this basic assumption is one about the best possible sources for recognition. In the theories of self-alienation discussed here, the search for recognition is not explicitly thematized, but it can nevertheless also be seen as a driving force. Self-alienation means to go through an experience of lacking something, of being cut off from part of oneself, and hence a need emerges to overcome this condition. For Raymond Williams, this is achieved through cultural practices like class solidarity that counter the misrecognition created W INFRIED F LUCK 32 through class divisions. As a source of recognition, class solidarity is timehonoured and indispensable; this is the reason why Williams set his hopes on its persistence (and outlined a cultural studies approach in support of it). For Iser, the feeling of being incomplete is the driving force for creativity and, hence, for ever new attempts at gaining self-awareness; this is the reason why Iser set all of his hopes on forms of literature that constantly refuel this creativity. For Butler, the misrecognition inherent in being labeled gay is the driving force for pursuing processes of resignification that can transform misrecognition into recognition. Although such recognition can only renew selfalienation in her view, it is nevertheless indispensable for accounts of oneself in order to assert one’s singularity. Finally, the only logical way out of selfalienation in Frankfurt School critical theory is to overcome the masochistic psychic structures that are the effect of an all-pervasive instrumental rationality, and this cannot be achieved by negation alone. It must be complemented by psychoanalytic attempts to gain some degree of self-awareness. This is the reason why, in contrast to Foucault, Adorno never gave up psychoanalytical concepts as an integral part of critical theory. 13 But what about those theorists like Foucault who offer even more radical versions of the subject’s self-alienation (so that there is no self left and the subject’s subjection seems complete)? With their claims, these theorists present a major difference to classical versions. Self-alienation is no longer produced by overpowering social or economic forces that cut off the subject from its true nature; it is now 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. 14 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 succinctly: “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’.” 15 13 For an excellent comparison, revealing surprising similarities between Adorno and Foucault, but also major differences, see Honneth 1988. But if self-alienation is produced in the act of identity-formation, are we then con- 14 See the exemplary summary of the argument by Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 28: “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.” 15 Judith Butler, “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault,” The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman, (London: Routledge, 1995), 231. Hermeneutics of Change 33 demned to permanent self-alienation? And if not, how can we still envision any kind of resistance to, or emancipation from, this fate? In her essay “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification,” intended as a critical rethinking of subjection and resistance, Butler makes the important point that interpellation may be the goal but that it is not always the result because interpellation may also 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. 16 But why does the subject feel a need to engage in resignification? The most convincing answer is provided when Butler speaks of an “alienated narcissism” that “will become the condition by which resignification of that interpellation becomes possible.” 17 VI. Because the subject 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 like interpellation or subjection is also the driving force in the search for resignification. Or, to put it differently, the search for recognition is not only the entry gate for subjection or interpellation, but also the driving force 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. How is all of this related to the question of cultural change? If we are positing a theory of the subject in which a never-ending search for recognition is the 16 This may provide a possible answer to the question Herbert Grabes asked in his essay “The Aesthetic Dimension: Bliss and/ or Scandal,” REAL 12 (1996): 17-29, 21: “how is it possible that art and literature may indeed exert some changing influence within a culture when artists and writers produce it from ‘inside’? ” 17 Cf. the full argument (Butler 1995: 245-46): “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 condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible.” W INFRIED F LUCK 34 driving force and basic condition of being in the world, then this must also have consequences for the question whether and in what way literature can have an impact on cultural change. Because of self-alienation, we said, the search for recognition is never-ending; often, one should add, it is also unrepentantly self-centered - not because the modern world is populated with egotists but because it lies in the nature of a struggle for recognition to aim at a positive self-reference. In literature, this struggle often begins with experiences of misrecognition, of a sense of inferiority, weakness, or injustice; the narratives that develop from these states of injury depict struggles that can either be successful - often, in fact, triumphantly successful - or end in defeat, which, in a paradox typical of aesthetic experience, can nevertheless provide strong experiences of self-recognition. 18 One of the main challenges for social theories, for example theories of justice, consists in the task of integrating different claims into generally acceptable norms of equality, fairness, and justice. The search for recognition in literature, however, may often be highly effective in dramatizing severe cases of social injustice, but their depiction represents the views of an individual or group that want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition. But in each case the claims for recognition can be - and often will be - radically subjective, self-centered, and partisan. 19 18 An exemplary genre is the melodrama in which it is victimhood that leads to recognition as a very special being. In contrast to philosophical or social theories, literature can articulate individual claims for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified. Hence, one of the major differences between literary texts and normative accounts is that literary texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority. If a novel is skillfully crafted, we may even find ourselves on the side of a killer, as for example in Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, because Dreiser claims that what goes on in Clyde Griffiths gives us insights into the human condition that cannot be taken into account in court. This unashamed and unrepentant partisanship is actually one of the strengths of literature, because literary texts can articulate aspects of individual experience that are erased by broad social classifications, so that new dimensions of subjectivity can be revealed. 19 In his essay “Culture or Literature,” Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 160, Herbert Grabes claims that in reading literature there is “never the impression of being compelled to agree or disagree that is bound up with the claim to general validity inherent in conceptual discourse. There is good reason why, within the institution of literature, we tend to grant greater freedom ‘to say everything,’ for whatever may be said does not necessarily pertain to us or even make claims to validity in face of our convictions.” Hermeneutics of Change 35 Thus, while normative accounts of justice try to integrate different claims in order to arrive at a convincing normative principle, the subjective accounts of literature go exactly in the other direction by producing an ever expanding plurality of claims. We encounter normative accounts on the one hand, open and often unashamedly subjective calls for recognition on the other. It would be a mistake, however, to posit one side against the other. Both operate on different levels and are, in the final analysis, complementary. As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition. As an acknowledged part of the public sphere, it has played a crucial role in introducing such claims into a culture. Philosophical and social theories, on the other hand, are involved in an ongoing debate about the legitimacy and normative implications of such claims. In a time of pluralization, fictional texts constantly introduce new claims; in doing so, they put pressure on philosophical and social theories to reconsider and, where necessary, to extend their normative accounts. This, in a nutshell, is literature’s most important contribution to cultural change. VII. In Frankfurt School critical theory, the function of literature lies in the negation of instrumentalization. In British cultural studies, it should battle the social consequences of the division of labor. In the reception aesthetics of Wolfgang Iser, the function of literature lies in the constant activation of a creative imaginary. In Judith Butler’s poststructuralist account, the function of literature can only lie in the defense of singularity against the imposition of cultural identity. In my own account - motivated by, among other things, the failure of theories of intersubjectivity to give a satisfactory account of the ways in which literature can be seen in interactive terms - all of these approaches have one basic assumption in common. In their very different ways, they all describe a human condition in which individual claims for recognition are the driving force. In Frankfurt School critical theory, instrumental rationality alienates the subject from itself, and its negation has the purpose of finding a way to still being recognized as a subject that is not yet fully subjected to instrumentalization. At first sight, Williams seems to go into exactly the other direction by emphasizing the common identity of the working class and establishing solidarity as a social norm. But the whole point of solidarity is to recognize all members of a group as subjects who deserve respect and support, no matter what their personal flaws may be. As in the family, working-class solidarity is constructed as an (in principle) unconditional form of recognition. In Iser’s reception aesthetics, which is closest to my own argument, the experience of an anthropological lack drives the sub- W INFRIED F LUCK 36 ject to overcome this lack; for this purpose the potential of literature to create a doppelganger-subject holds the promise of self-expansion and selfrecognition by means of a transfer. Finally, the approach that rejects the concept of recognition most forcefully, Butler’s poststructuralist account, is providing almost the best example of how central and constitutive the search for recognition is: she rejects cultural recognition because it keeps us from a full and unconditional recognition of a singularity that defies recognition. One problem remains, however. Calling the search for recognition the driving engine of cultural change might be seen to push our argument in the direction of a narrative of individualization, and although this narrative may still have some credit left in the social sciences, it is by now completely discredited in literary and cultural studies. In Honneth’s intersubjective theory of recognition, the aim is to fully recognize the individual; in poststructuralism such a recognition is the entry gate for interpellation and subjection, because it is only possible at the price of an imposition of identity. Recognition positions us in culturally prefigured plots and norms, and these then become the forms in which we see ourselves in an act of self-recognition (that is really a form of misrecognition). One many argue, however, that these cultural plots have to be adjusted and re-written to fit a person’s selfnarrative, so that his or her own narrative identity can be provided with a certain, at least minimal, degree of continuity and coherence. This appropriation is more than a mere reiteration of always the same subject position. Inevitably, it leads to a re-writing, and this re-writing also opens up the possibility of a reconfiguration in which norms can become subject to resignification. That which constantly puts constraints on our singularity, the stories that connect us, can thus also become a source of stimulation for the assertion of singularity. Ironically, then, the drive for resistance or resignification emerges from the very phenomenon that poststructuralists use as their normative base for criticizing the subjecting power of recognition: the singularity of the subject. 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