The Decline of Modernism E-Book

Peter Burger

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 380

Beschreibung

In this lucid and stimulating new book, Peter Burger, one of the foremost literary critics in Germany today, addresses the relationship between art and society, from the emergence of bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century to the decline of modernism in the twentieth century. In analysing this relationship, Burger draws on a wide range of sociological and literary-critical sources - Weber, Benjamin, Foucault, Diderot and Sade among others. He argues that in questioning the formal relationship between art and life which had dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the avant gardist movements of the early twentieth century brought about the crisis of postmodernism. Burger charts the establishment of literary and artistic institutions since the Enlightenment and their apparent autonomy of the prevailing political systems. However, he argues that the discovery of the obverse of Enlightenment, namely barbarism, revealed the interdependence of art and society and set the scene for the avant-gardist protest against aesthetics formalism.

Leseprobe

Contents

Part I

1 Literary Institution and Modernization

Rationality and irrationality of art as a sociological problem (Max Weber/Jürgen Habermas)

The institutionalization of the doctrine classique in French absolutism

The success and crisis of the Enlightenment concept of literature

The aesthetics of genius and the discovery of barbarism in art

Some analogies between the doctrine classique and the aesthetics of autonomy

The literary institution as a functional equivalent of the religious institution

2 Walter Benjamin’s ‘Redemptive Critique’: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Project of a Critical Hermeneutics

The interpretation of Benjamin in the work of Jürgen Habermas

Ideology critique and redemptive critique

The construction of a contemporary perspective

3 The Decline of Modernism

4 The Return of Analogy: Aesthetics as Vanishing Point in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things

Part II

5 Some Reflections upon the Historico-Sociological Explanation of the

6 Morality and Society in Diderot and de Sade

On the contemporary significance of the Enlightenment

Diderot

de Sade

de Sade and the Frankfurt School

7 Naturalism, Aestheticism and the Problem of Subjectivity

Preliminary remarks

The programme of French naturalism

The consequences of the naturalist conception of literature for the development of the epic material

Aestheticism and the turn to the subject. The ‘discovery of the self’ in Maurice Barrès

Problems of the sociology of literature

8 Dissolution of the Subject and the Hardened Self: Modernity and the Avant-garde in Wyndham Lewis’s Novel Tarr

9 On the Actuality of Art: The Aesthetic in Peter Weiss’s Aesthetic of Resistance

10 Everydayness, Allegory and the Avant-garde: Some Reflections on the Work of Joseph Beuys

The aporias of either–or

The transgressor

Material allegory

The return of symbolic form

Notes

Index

This edition copyright © Polity Press 1992

Chapter 1 © Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland) 1983; also published in German as Institution Literatur und odernisierungsprozess, © Suhrkamp Verlag 1983; chapter 6 © Suhrkamp Verlag 1977; chapters 2 & 7 © Suhrkamp 1979; chapter 9 © Suhrkamp 1983; chapters 4 & 10 © Suhrkamp 1987; chapter 3 © Telos Press Ltd 1984, first published in German as Benjamins ‘rettende Kritik’: Vorüberlegungen zum Entwurf einer kritischen Hermeneutik, © Suhrkamp 1979; chapter 5 © Peter Bürger 1991; first published in German as Überlegungen zur historisch-soziologischen Eklärung der Genie-Ästhetik im 18. Jahrhundert © Carl Winter Verlag 1984; chapter 8 © Peter Bürger 1991.

First published in 1992 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers

Reprinted 2007

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMaiden, MA 02148, USA

© 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag & Co. KGaA, Boschstr. 12, 69469 Weinheim, Germany

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-74560-622-4

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Chapter 1 is reprinted from ‘Literary institution and modernization’, Poetics, 12 (1983), © Elsevier Science Publishers BV, by kind permission. Chapter 3 is reprinted from ‘The decline of the modern age’, Telos, 62 (1984–5), ©Telos Press Ltd, by kind permission.

Part I

1

Literary Institution and Modernization

Translated by the author in collaboration with a native speaker of English, this chapter is a revised version of a lecture given in April 1981 in the course ‘Theories of modernity’ organized by the Inter-University-Centre of Doubrovnik and January 1982 at the Universities of Stockholm, Göteborg and Oslo.

Rationality and irrationality of art as a sociological problem (Max Weber/Jürgen Habermas)

The title needs an explanation. I intend to refer not to the theories of modernity developed in the United States,1 but to the German sociological tradition represented by Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas. For Max Weber, the distinctive mark of capitalist societies lies in the fact that in these societies the process he calls rationalization comes to full development. This process concerns, on the one hand, the faculty to dominate things by calculation, on the other, the systematization of world-views and, finally, the elaboration of a systematic way of life.2 The principle of rationalization shapes all areas of human activity. It determines not only scientific and technical processes, but also moral decisions and the organization of everyday life. The very fact that the critical social theories of the twentieth century refer to Max Weber makes obvious that his concept of rationalism is indispensable for the analysis of capitalist society. This can be seen as well in the famous chapter on reification in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, as in the Dialectics of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, and finally in Habermas’s recent Theory of Communicative Action. Besides, we can observe that a certain type of anticapitalist opposition from Rousseau to the ecological movements of our day can be characterized by its attitude towards rationalism in the Weberian sense. If this holds true, a cultural theory concerned with the social function of art or literature must study the relationship between art or literature and rationalization. Let us briefly examine the solutions to this problem proposed by Habermas and Weber.

In his Adorno Prize Lecture, Jürgen Habermas thus defines the relation between art and modernization (thereby recalling an idea of Max Weber):

As the [religious and metaphysical] world-views dissolved and the problems inherited from these – now arranged in terms of truth, normative correctness, authenticity or beauty – could be treated as questions of knowledge, justice or taste, so a clear categorization of areas of values arose between science, morals and art [ … ]. The idea of the modern world projected in the 18th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consists of their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, each according to its own inner logic. At the same time, this project intended to release the cognitive potentials of each of these domains to set them free from their esoteric forms. The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life, that is to say, for the rational organization of everyday social life.3

This construction, continuing as it does the Kantian tradition, is fascinating in two respects: (1) The inner logic of the development of art and that of modernization are congruent. The differentiation of art as an autonomous sphere of value corresponds to that of the spheres of science and morality; (2) Habermas reconciles the autonomous development of art with the utilization of its potentials in everyday social life. But this elegant construction is not without problems. Habermas does not take into account the historical changes in the status of art, the analysis of which seems to me necessary for a complete comprehension of its actual crisis. What is more important, Habermas’s harmonistic view risks concealing the contradiction between art (institutionalized as an autonomous sphere) and rationality (as the dominant principle of bourgeois society).