W infried f luck Shadow Aesthetics What do Literary Studies do? Ever since literary studies was defined as a field of study in its own right and institutionalized at colleges and universities, the field had to grapple with questions of legitimation. I am thinking not so much of attacks by natural scientists who questioned the field’s status as a science, or of die-hard positivists and empiricists in the social sciences who questioned how literary scholars could ever hope to provide hard evidence for such elusive concepts as aesthetic value or aesthetic experience. I am thinking of the challenges, often voiced from within the field, what the relevance of the field is. Ever since I was a student in the 1960s, these debates have stood at the center of the field, which explains why I have returned repeatedly in my own work to questions about the function of literature and the changing functions of fiction. The Hegelian Answer When I look at literary studies from this perspective, I see three major stages in the self-legitimation of literary studies. The first may be called Hegelian and was long the dominant paradigm for the study of literature and for its justification as a field of study in higher education. 1 From a Hegelian perspective, questions about the relevance of literature are easy to answer, since the literary text embodies the spirit of its time 2 and can thus be taken as a supreme expression of a national or regional identity, or, in the Marxist 1 Hegelianism also stands at the beginning of the discipline of art history. On the constitutive role of Hegelianism in the formation and institutionalization of the humanities see my essays on “Transatlantic Narratives about American Art” and “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings.” 2 More precisely, human history is the process of a gradual self-recognition of the universal spirit that manifests itself in different cultures and nations at different times. In “Transatlantic Narratives About American Art,” I have provided a description of the three central assumptions on which a Hegelian approach is based: 1) the assumption that art can be read as a historical manifestation and significant cultural expression of a nation, society or particular group; 2) the claim that art is an instrument of selfrecognition of that nation, society or group and can thus provide superior insights into their identity; 3) the assumption that the historical development of art is organized by unifying principles that give certain historical or social formations their characteristic identity. The challenge for the interpreter therefore consists in identifying this unifying principle, often called the “spirit” of a nation or period. 12 W infried f luck appropriation of Hegelianism, of the spirit of capitalism or of a particular class identity. These Hegelian claims were ideally suited, not only to justify the study of literature, but to put it at the center of a humanistic education. Expressing the inner spirit of a particular historical or social formation - such as, for example, of the Renaissance or of “America” or of the American South or of the middleclass - the literary text gains national or social representativeness and becomes something like a key to understanding a nation, region or social formation. In effect, not only a key, but a privileged key, because the study of literature offered two advantages that strongly recommended it for a liberal arts curriculum. Not only could one circumvent the otherwise complex and cumbersome study of historical or social formations by focusing on one of their representative self-expressions. This turn for example to the study of a nation through its representative texts also held the promise of a deeper understanding than social or empirical studies could provide. 3 For as an expression of the spirit of a nation or particular region, the representative literary text provided something like a condensation of the essential features of this formation, that is, a key medium of self-recognition. To study a nation through its representative literary texts thus also promised to gain a deeper understanding of that nation since, as a condensed articulation of its essential spirit, the literary text or the work or art could bring us closer to the true spirit of a nation than any other form of expression. Hegelianism in American Studies In American Studies, this line of argumentation can be found in exemplary fashion in the founding period of the field. Much of the work of this period stands in the tradition of intellectual history and is firmly grounded in an underlying Hegelianism, although I suspect that many, if not most, American scholars were not necessarily aware of this philosophical underpinning. The basic assumptions of Hegelianism seemed so self-evident and were so readily 3 In the formative years of American Studies, this promise of a “deeper” understanding was a regular feature of theoretical reflections on the theory and method of American studies. Formalism is considered inadequate to help us understand American culture, but so is sociology. See, for example, Henry Nash Smith: “We are no better off if we turn to the social sciences for help in seeing the culture as a whole. We merely find society without art instead of art without society. The literary critic would cut esthetic value loose from social fact; the social scientist, despite his theoretical recognition that art is an important aspect of culture, uses techniques of research which make it difficult or impossible for him to deal with the states of consciousness embodied in serious art” (Smith 203). Cf. also Robert Spiller’s musings on the failure of an interdisciplinary seminar in his essay “Value and Method in American Studies: The Literary versus the Social Approach”: “The social scientist strives to isolate the social fact from its cause and its consequence so that it may stand up and be counted; and the literary critic strives to free the work of art from both intention and effect so that its supposed meaning may be read from its own being, the text, unconfused by what are considered to be extraneous circumstances. Not only is the artist once more being deliberately alienated from his society, but society is being deliberately robbed of its aesthetic experience” (21). Shadow Aesthetics 13 accepted as the basis of intellectual history that they shape the work of scholars of all political persuasions, from the left liberal progressivist Vernon Louis Parrington, who focused on Main Currents of American Thought, to the liberal conservative Perry Miller who studied The New England Mind, from the liberal radical F.O. Matthiessen who wanted to describe the true spirit of American democracy in his seminal study American Renaissance, 4 to such influential intellectual historians as John Higham or cultural historians like Warren Susman, who set out to determine the unifying principle that gave the Progressive Period, the Twenties, or the Thirties their distinctive character. In one way, the myth and symbol school rebelled against this tradition, but only on the basis of a metaphorically condensed Hegelianism: instead of studying the mind of a nation or region, for which Perry Miller still needed two packed volumes, it became now possible to understand a nation like the United States through one of its key myths or symbols. Again, the promise was not merely to provide an important insight, but a better, deeper understanding. In a key essay of disciplinary self-definition called “American Studies - A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” the major theoretician of the myth and symbol school, Leo Marx, argued, for example, that the study of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick would provide deeper insights into America than any sociological study: “I would submit that the argument for the usefulness of Moby-Dick in the kind of inquiry I have described is identical with the argument for the intrinsic merit of Moby-Dick as a work of literature. It is useful for its satisfying power, its capacity to provide a coherent organization of thought and feeling, or in a word, for its compelling truth value” (89). However, the essay by Leo Marx also highlights the main problem of Hegelianism which brings us to a second major stage in the self-legitimation of American literary studies. The problem of Hegelianism is how the representativeness of a literary work can be determined. After all, Hegelianism’s whole reasoning depends on the assumption that the literary work is nationally and culturally representative. But how can we determine whether and to what extent a literary text is representative of a particular historical period or social formation? From a Hegelian perspective, the literary work should be put at the center of a humanistic education, because it expresses a deeper truth; it expresses a deeper truth, because it reflects and condenses the spirit of a historical or social formation. However, not every literary text can do this. Many texts, especially in the realm of popular culture, only blindly reproduce prevailing conventions or ideologies. Only the work of art can provide this kind of deeper insight. The question then is what a work of art is, and the Hegelian answer is circular at this point: art distinguishes itself from other texts and cultural objects, because it has successfully managed 4 There is some uncertainty whether Matthiessen should not be classified as a formalist. But in his study on Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman, Günter Leypoldt claims correctly that “Matthiessen staged aesthetic excellence as a mark of cultural expressiveness, implying that the art of America’s Whitman ‘illuminates’ its cultural essence better than the conventional writing of her Longfellows (that is, representatives of a second-order literature that merely ‘reflects’ contingent cultural surfaces)” (251). 14 W infried f luck to capture the spirit of a nation. In other words: the text itself cannot tell us whether and to what degree it is truly representative or not. In the final analysis, it is the critic or scholar who determines what counts as a deeper insight, and, as a rule, he or she will do this on the basis of already existing assumptions about what the deeper truth is, for example about America. One of the reasons for the longevity of Hegelianism is that it is a self-confirming system that can be easily used for positive self-definitions of a social formation (or, at the other end of the spectrum, for stinging critiques). Most myth and symbol scholars were left liberals, who used literature and its use of myth and symbol to argue against the threat of a materialistic, superficial, and conformist American consumer society. By doing this, they used the authority of the literary work of art for the confirmation of their own left liberal critique of America. The Formalist Answer When I began my studies in the early 1960s, intellectual history was already on the way out, however, not only because it works with sweeping generalizations about the national mind, but also because it easily lent itself to nationalist apologies. Thus, any alternative would have to meet two criteria: it would have to be less speculative, more firmly grounded in evidence, and it would have to be more resistant to ideological misuse, perhaps even provide an antidote to it. If one looks for an explanation for the almost complete dominance formalism had in literary studies for several decades, whether in the form of Russian formalism, Czech structuralism, American New Cricitism, French “Explication de Texte,” or German “werkimmanente Methode,” then one answer is that formalism turned out to be the perfect counter-perspective to Hegelianism. Whereas Hegelian American Studies argues that the analysis of a literary work should focus on the national or regional spirit by which it is shaped, for formalists it is the work’s artistic form that distinguishes it from other texts. Instead of relying on broad generalizations about the mind of a nation or region, only a close reading of a literary text’s formal structure can therefore do justice to its meaning and cultural significance, and hence its specific value. Formalism therefore placed the legitimation of literary studies on a professional expertise that only experts, who had systematically studied literary form and linguistic expression, could apply competently. The interpreter was no longer an intellectual who indulged in large-scale generalizations, for example about America, but a trained professional who insisted on close readings as the only reliable source of insights. Close reading became an almost magic word, as if it could already in itself produce ideologically untainted knowledge that had been obscured before. The basis for this shift lay in a redefinition of the field’s function. Its importance, that is, the reason why it should be studied, did no longer lie in its national representativeness but in its aesthetic value. This aesthetic value seemed to exist independently from national or ideological content; in effect, Shadow Aesthetics 15 the fact that it transcended national and ideological borders (so that readers in other nations or political systems could also enjoy it), was now considered one of the main reasons for its status as a supreme cultural value. If the value of a literary text no longer lies in its national or cultural representativeness, it must lie somewhere else, and this somewhere else are the text’s formal strategies that determine the reading experience. Every literary text has characteristic forms of expression, but not in every case these forms are valuable. Formalism thus also needed an aesthetic theory that would help to determine what kinds of literary forms were especially valuable and possessed aesthetic value. The idea of aesthetic value became central and crucially important for the justification of the field, not because of an ingrained elitism, as has sometimes been argued, but because of expectations connected with the idea of a humanizing power of art that can make us better, more self-aware and selfreflexive human beings - and thus immune to the pitfalls of ideology. But what were the aesthetic qualities of art that could produce such an effect? Are there formal elements that have an inherent aesthetic value? As it turned out, formalism drew its idea of what constituted aesthetic value largely from the literary modernism of its time, which meant that certain forms of expression - myth and symbol, ambiguity, irony, paradox, semantic indeterminacy, and, frequently, defamiliarization - were considered supreme aesthetic values and became almost identical with the idea of the aesthetic itself. One casualty was American realism, which had an increasingly hard time to qualify as an aesthetically valuable form of literature and lost the high cultural status it had had in the 1930s. In order to qualify as art, a literary work had to have structure, but the term structure was not simply used to describe any type of formal organization (as would later be the case in structuralism). Structure here refers to a unifying formal principle that gives the literary text its own, semantically self-contained Gestalt which is the precondition for its autonomous status. 5 Formalism in American Studies Formalism’s role in American Studies was never one of entirely unquestioned authority. During the heyday of the myth and symbol school, it was considered an indispensible part of the professional tool-kit of literary studies, including American literary studies, but not sufficient as a method. Two problems remained. One was that for formalism cultural significance was dependent on aesthetic value; only if a literary work possessed aesthetic value could it be considered culturally significant. The other problem was that formalism equated aesthetic value with a New Criticism-version of it 5 This is the reason why formalism is not identical with close reading. The latter can be done in the service of many different approaches; the former is based on a specific view of literature that locates its aesthetic value in organizing principles that provide the literary text with a self-contained unified structure that a close reading sets out to reveal. For an analysis of this logic see my essay on “Aesthetic Premises in American Studies.” 16 W infried f luck that excluded not only realism, but a whole body of texts, ranging from ethnic literatures to African-American literature or female traditions such as the sentimental and the domestic novel. I have traced the consequences of this conflation of the category of the aesthetic with a particular New Critical version of it in my dissertation on the history of reception of Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Fluck 1975). The example is of special interest, because after World War II a general critical consensus existed that Twain’s novel was one of US-America’s literary masterpieces. However, if it was a masterpiece, it must be distinguished by specific formal qualities that provide it with a unified structure. Thus, in the heydays of formalism, we encounter about twenty-five years of Huck Finn-criticism in which ever more questionable claims are made about the compositional unity of a literary text that had been carelessly crafted over a period of altogether seven years and shows all kinds of formal flaws and inconsistencies. Never mind, if one wanted to call the novel a literary masterpiece in order to justify the book’s central role in higher education, one had to find an argument through which one could attribute a unifying aesthetic structure to the book. Or, to put it differently, in contrast to Hegelianism, formalism may make claims for a more objective, “unbiased” method, but in the final analysis it is merely projecting different assumptions into the literary text. No matter how “close” and appreciative a formalist reading is, it will nevertheless confirm the premises from which it took its point of departure. The Revisionist Turn The formalist legitimation of literary studies, based on the idea of aesthetic value, began to collapse in the 1970s, and with this collapse we are beginning to enter a third stage in the self-legitimation of literary studies. It is a stage in which the field’s legitimation is put on entirely new grounds. This third stage has been ushered in by a far-reaching revisionist turn in the wake of the 1960s. It has produced a broad spectrum of different approaches within literature departments that range from Cultural Studies to a new form of structuralist Marxism, from Foucauldian discourse analysis to New Historicism, from poststructuralism to Race and Gender studies, all of them also shaping American literary studies decisively. However, despite their many differences in theory and method, these approaches share two basic assumptions. One is a rejection of the category of the aesthetic as a key concept for literary analysis, the other is a shift from aesthetics to the politics of literature as the main criterion of relevance. Both aspects are logically intertwined. The concept of the aesthetic is dismissed, because a focus on the aesthetic dimension of the literary text will obscure its politics. Contrary to the claims of formalism, the aesthetic and the political do not constitute two distinctly separate realms; rather, throughout its history literature has also had important political functions, and a discussion of literary texts primarily in terms of their aesthetic dimension has helped to hide this fact. Literary studies have thus Shadow Aesthetics 17 played a major role in obscuring power relations or being in complicity with them. What formalists have praised as the power of art has thus really been the art of power, to quote Mark Seltzer’s chiasmatic bonmot about the politics of the novels of Henry James. Views of the role and relevance of literature have changed radically in the new revisionism. Before, literature was praised for its supreme potential to embody ideals and values that had not yet been subjected to (political or other forms of) instrumentalization and could therefore be enjoyed “for their own sake” and on “their own terms,” that is, without asking for a practical use value. The ability to resist or evade instrumentalization was a virtue celebrated with terms like “disinterestedness,” “play,” or references to a “utopian” dimension of literature. In contrast, revisionist critics argue that one cannot stand outside of politics or of other power relations and that aesthetics therefore cannot be separated from its politics, so that an analysis in which the literary text is approached primarily or even exclusively through the category of the aesthetic must be seen as a screen for ideological and political interests. In order to draw attention to a literary text’s politics, one must get rid of the aesthetic as a central or privileged analytical concept. Thus, Walter Cohen, in an essay on “Political Criticism of Shakespeare” published in the mid-1980s, can already state that “political interpretation has become central to work on Shakespeare (…) to the point where political approaches arguably form the cutting edge of academic criticism in the United States” (18). The same can be said about interpretations of American literature. This rejection of the aesthetic is part of a wider shift in political and intellectual perspectives that began to transform American humanities in the 1970s. It has dominated American literary criticism and American Studies ever since. With Leo Marx we may speak of periods before and after the divide. 6 Before the divide, the politics of American literary criticism and American Studies were basically liberal. Then, in the 1960s and its Marcusean critique of “repressive tolerance,” this “liberal tradition” - although certainly not homogeneous in itself - was replaced by a new form of radicalism that, in contrast to the political radicalism of the 1930s, may be called cultural radicalism. In political radicalism, the source of political power (and hence of political repression) lies in political institutions like the state or the judicial courts or the police that are controlled by the ruling class. Change can thus be envisioned only where control can be wrested from these forces, for example by a leftist party or the labor unions. In this scenario, literature may be used to enlighten and move the masses in the right political direction. On the other hand, the cultural radicalism that emerged in the 1960s took its point of departure from the puzzling fact that workers in the post-War Western world did no longer show any willingness to get engaged in such political struggles. Cultural radicalism’s explanation was that before questions of political engagement could even arise, the identity of the oppressed (and hence their perception and interpretation of reality) had already been decisively 6 Cf. his important essay “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies.” 18 W infried f luck shaped by culture. Culture thus becomes the actual source of power, because it constitutes subjects and their identities before they are even aware of it - either, and this is where the varying positions within cultural radicalism differ, by language (the subject is spoken by language), or by discursive regimes (Foucault, New Historicism), or by misrecognition in the mirror stage of subject-formation (Lacan, Althusser, New Materialism), or by race, gender, or sexual preference as regulatory cultural norms. 7 Whiteness Studies offer an exemplary argument for the latter: the key aspect about racial discrimination is not legal discrimination, as liberalism claims, but “whiteness” as a basic constitutive norm of identity. 8 For the perception of the aesthetic, this shift from liberalism to cultural radicalism had to have consequences. In liberalism, the aesthetic has a high status because, as a “disinterested,” that is, not-yet instrumentalized form of communication, it can counter the self-alienation produced by modernity or by capitalism and help the individual to become aware of its potential as a subject. For cultural radicalism, this is a naïve liberal illusion, for if the subject is already constituted or “interpellated” by culture, it is not free to develop its potential; on the contrary, as part of the cultural system, the only role of the aesthetic is to contribute to this type of subject-formation. Whereas in liberalism the aesthetic, as a seemingly disinterested mode of experience, is the antidote to ideology - in fact, the place where ideology is successfully undermined or rejected -, it can now be an especially effective agent of ideology. It must therefore be the starting point for revisionist literary studies to expose the illusory character of the liberal notion of art and of the aesthetic. While intellectual history claims to have an important function 7 An interesting consequence of these different positions is that they attribute the crucial constraints on the subject’s freedom to very different social forces. For political radicalism, the source of the problem is capitalism, for liberalism it lies in mass society (as an unforeseen perversion of democracy), and for cultural radicalism it lies in modernity and its project of enlightenment. 8 For Terry Eagleton, the aesthetic is another one of these cultural power effects through which the sensuous nature of the subject is “reconstructed from the inside”: “For before ‘interpretation’ in its modern hermeneutical sense was brought to birth, a whole apparatus of power in the field of culture was already firmly in place and had been for about a century. This was not an apparatus which determined the power-effects of particular readings but one which determined the political meaning and function of culture as such. Its name was and is aesthetics.” It will “be part of my argument that the ‘aesthetic,’ at least in its original formulations, has little enough to do with art. It denotes instead a whole program of social, psychical and political reconstruction on the part of the early European bourgeoisie” (327). “The aesthetic, in other words, marks an historic shift from what we might now, in Gramscian terms, call coercion to hegemony, ruling our and informing our sensuous life from within while allowing it to thrive in all its relative autonomy” (328). “It is easier, in other words, for reason to repress sensuous Nature if it has already been busy eroding and subliming it from the inside and this is the task of the aesthetic” (329). “Structures of power must become structures of feeling and the name for this mediation from property to propriety is the aesthetic. (...) What matters in aesthetics is not art but this whole project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law” (330). Shadow Aesthetics 19 in supporting a nation’s self-recognition, and formalism sees itself as guardian of superior values that prevent us from being instrumentalized by mass society, revisionist literary studies set themselves the task of recovering the political or social subtext that the literary text and its aesthetic surface hide. Revisionist literary studies have developed several ways of pursuing this project. In fact, the history of literary theories in the last decades could be rewritten on the basis of their changing conceptualizations of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. In the following section of this essay I will trace different attempts to eliminate the separation of the aesthetic and the political and focus on three especially interesting examples, namely British Cultural Studies, Structuralist (=Althusserian) Marxism as one of the strongest proponents of a hermeneutics of suspicion, and the New Historicism. Although these approaches have been frequently discussed, they deserve another look in the context of our discussion, since most discussions have focused on how political these approaches really are. In contrast, I want to focus on what happened to the aesthetic in some exemplary approaches that stand at the center of the revisionist turn in literary studies. Symptoms of an Absent Cause Although Cultural Studies did not constitute itself against the aesthetic but against the limitations of literary studies more generally, it did so in part because it considered literary studies to be an uncritical champion of social distinctions based on the idea of aesthetic value. In his book Marxism and Literature Raymond Williams argues, for example, that the emergence of aesthetics as a separate philosophical branch and the increasing importance of the concept of the aesthetic in literary studies must be seen as a result of the division of labor established by industrialization which has led to the creation of a class society. Whatever the merits of a particular aesthetics may be, the category itself leads to a separation of social spheres that were originally part of a whole way of life. In order to overcome this social separation one has to reject the idea of the aesthetic as a separate value and ontological sphere. For Williams aesthetic theory is a form of evasion: “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). Similarly, Fredric Jameson argues at the beginning of his study The Political Unconscious, certainly one of the most influential books of the revisionist turn, that “the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that the structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the 20 W infried f luck private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the ‘individual,’ (…) maims our existence as individual subjects” (20). 9 Stephen Greenblatt provides an apt summary of this argument when he writes: “A working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not - that is, an aesthetic domain that is in some way marked off from the discursive institutions that are operative elsewhere in a culture - becomes for Jameson a malignant symptom of ‘privatization.’” (1989, 2) Both Williams and Jameson reject the aesthetic as a concept that deepens class distinctions and obscures the absent cause by which social relations are perverted. But there are also important differences. Both argue against the separation of the aesthetic from the political dimension, but they do so for different reasons and on the basis of different views of the role of culture in society. These different views also lead to different reconceptualizations of literary studies: on the one hand as Cultural Studies, on the other hand as a revised form of Marxism. For Willliams, the aesthetic has been elevated to the status of a separate sphere because of its usefulness as a form of class distinction, and hence for the consolidation and maintenance of a class society. For Jameson, the aesthetic has come to take on an important role in the humanities, because it can help to hide the “absent cause” that shapes society and culture decisively - which is capitalism and its mode of production. For Jameson, the separation of the aesthetic and the political therefore has an even deeper effect than the humiliation produced by a new, classbased status order. It “maims” the subject by arresting it in a state of permanent self-alienation that stands in the way of any potential revolutionary self-awareness. As a consequence of these different views, Williams and Jameson also go in different directions in their methods of interpretation. For Williams, it is crucial to recover the sense of a whole way of life in which artificial separations are overcome and the aesthetic dimension becomes part of a common culture again. As he argues in The Long Revolution in (unacknowledged) pragmatist fashion, everyday life is inherently creative and hence potentially “aesthetic.” In this sense, culture is “ordinary”: the fact that certain texts are privileged for their special aesthetic value has historical reasons and can be undone by a careful historical reconstruction, as Williams himself shows in his history of the changing meanings of culture in his Culture and Society. The method best suited to put the aesthetic back into the context of a whole way of life is a Cultural Studies approach for which as Dick Hebdige has shown in his book Subculture. The Meaning of Style even a mundane everyday object like a safety pin can be turned into an aesthetic object, depending on the cultural context in which it is used for particular purposes of resignification, and possibly, resistance. 9 In Jameson’s argument, to focus on the aesthetic as a separate sphere leads to a perpetuation of self-alienation, whereas, for example in the Frankfurt School Critical Theory of T.W. Adorno it is the only remaining antidote against self-alienation. Shadow Aesthetics 21 Jameson’s position must be seen in the context of a transformation of classical Marxism into a Structuralist Marxism, inspired, above all, by Louis Althusser. In a radical revision of the Hegelian premises of classical Marxism, ideological analysis is moved from a focus on content to one on form, from the analysis of a spirit that expresses the whole to the postulation of a structure that constitutes the whole. 10 But in bourgeois society, this truth cannot be told, so that the determining structure cannot be represented and can only be traced through its effects. The aesthetic is such an effect. In analogy to Lacan’s description of the mirror-stage in which the mirror provides the child with a mistaken sense of wholeness, literary texts can be effective in providing a mistaken sense of reality - not necessarily because of a particular ideological content, but because literary forms can create coherent images of the world. In a stunning reversal, classical realism, in Marxism long considered a privileged literary form to provide at least some degree of critical insight into the “true” nature of capitalist society, is now seen as the ideologically most harmful literary form. The political determines culture, and the aesthetic is merely a symptom of its hidden presence. However, although the aesthetic is now reduced to the status of a symptom, there is a shadowy aesthetic implied here. If a realist aesthetic of truthful mimesis is the epitome of ideological deception, then anti-mimetic forms, no matter whether they reflect a conscious choice or are produced inadvertently, may have a subversive or deconstructive effect, because they can undermine the illusion of the “reality effect.” In American literary studies this has led to a revisionist revival of the genre of the “American romance,” but the problem with this strategy is that the politics of the romance are often dubious. Jameson thus pursues another way in The Political Unconscious. It lies in the deconstruction of realist claims for successful mimesis by regarding textual surfaces as symptoms of something that cannot be openly admitted and has to be repressed. This absent cause may be hidden, but since the literary construction of a false totality is, by definition, a forced imposition, the literary text will never be entirely successful in hiding all traces of this repression, and the strain of this failed attempt will show up in cracks, ruptures, and tensions of the text that emerge where the illusion of a false totality can no longer be successfully maintained. The result is a shadow aesthetics of semantic heterogeneity that undermines representational claims for coherence and homogeneity, but should not to be confused with a poststructuralist aesthetics of heterogeneity, as propagated by Roland Barthes and others. Jameson takes pains to distance himself from Barthes’s aesthetics of semiotic liberation; heterogeneity, for him, is only useful where it can be read as symptom of an absent cause. One may therefore also call his shadow aesthetics an aesthetics of the absent cause. I have elsewhere discussed this approach as an example of a hermeneutics of suspicion in which the textual surface is analyzed as only a screen that hides an absent political cause. This absent cause can only be retrieved by 10 For a more detailed analysis, see my essay on “Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings.” 22 W infried f luck seeing the textual surface - and hence the text’s form as symptom of an underlying reality that cannot be openly acknowledged. In their essay “Surface Reading,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have pointed out to what extent such symptomatic readings in search of the absent political cause have come to dominate contemporary criticism: “The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature. Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages” (Best 6). To this list of influential, agenda-shaping texts in queer studies and African American Studies, Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism (1994) may be added as a paradigmatic work in postcolonial studies for example, when Said claims that Jane Austen’s social and literary world is grounded in the absent cause of imperialism. Race, queerness, empire, or the nation-state have been the dominant absent causes in revisionist literary studies of the last decades. It is interesting to look at the interpretive practice that has developed from this claim. Whereas myth and symbol critics like Leo Marx are still in - an often desperate search for a formal element of the literary text that can provide unity of structure, so that the literary text can be interpreted as a condensed expression of a national spirit, political revisionists are in search of the hidden political reality of a text, and for this purpose, it does not really matter whether a formal element is carefully crafted or not, or whether a literary composition is skillfully patterned, or whether a literary text is held together by a unifying principle. The starting premise of a New Americanist book like Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture is that imperialism is the absent cause that is everywhere and shapes every aspect of the literary (and, in her case, also filmic) text, so that it can be found in the often most surprising aspects of the text. It is, under these circumstances, irrelevant at best and suspicious at worst, to use categories like the aesthetic. Once one no longer accepts that the aesthetic and the political belong to different spheres, the question arises how their relation can still be described. All approaches within the revisionist turn reject the formalist claim of separate spheres, but they differ significantly in their reconceptualization of the relation. For Raymond Williams and British Cultural Studies, the separation is an artificial one created by historical forces. It reflects the division of labor ushered in by industrialization which has led to a perversion of the idea of culture in its original meaning as a whole way of life. However, for Williams industrialization is not a negative force per se. Whether it is positive or negative depends on whether and to what extent its negative consequences can be controlled by politics. The separation between the aesthetic and the political Shadow Aesthetics 23 may therefore be overcome by a cultural politics that takes the aesthetic back into the context of a whole way of life in which it is one manifestation of creativity among others. For Jameson, on the other hand, the separation between the aesthetic and the political is not merely a deplorable result of historical developments that have been insufficiently controlled but may still be corrected. Rather, the separation is an inherent systemic feature of capitalism, needed to obscure its true nature. As such, it is an indispensable part of capitalism’s ideological system, and cannot be overcome (unless one finds a way for systemic change). Whereas the Cultural Studies-scholar wants to eliminate cultural class divisions by revealing the creative dimension of everyday cultural practices, including popular culture, all the Structuralist Marxist can hope to do is to undermine the ideological hold of the aesthetic by using interpretation to lay bare the contradictions that the unacknowledged absent cause produces. In Cultural Studies, the conceptual separation between the aesthetic and the political is overcome by dissolving the aesthetic into culture, so that it can be reinserted into a whole way of life. In Structuralist Marxism, the separation is not overcome, but dissolved by interpreting the aesthetic as only a deceptive, “symptomatic” surface manifestation of a political subtext that has to be recovered in interpretation. The separation between the aesthetic and the political is erased, but at the price of redefining literary studies as a form of political criticism. From Absent Cause to Criminal Continuity Structuralist Marxism rejects claims that the aesthetic and the political can be seen as belonging to different ontological spheres. The New Historicism agrees but goes even one step further in radicalizing the claim. Thus, Mark Seltzer also argues against “the critic’s eagerness to define the literary as the reverse of the political and thus to posit the freedom and resistant autonomy of the literary” (160). However, to overcome this dichotomy, New Historicists have taken a course that is different from other revisionists, moving from a vertical reflection model, in which the aesthetic is merely a reflection or symptom of the political, to a horizontal model of relations, in which the aesthetic and the political are on the same level. In consequence, as Walter Benn Michaels has put it, “the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it” (Michaels 1997, 27). Such a part cannot stand for a larger whole (as in Hegelianism), it cannot represent superior or alternative values (as in formalism), it cannot reflect, and therefore provide insight into, the economic base (as in Marxism), and it cannot even exemplify the creative potential of culture (as in British Cultural Studies). The literary text can only 24 W infried f luck exemplify the culture of which it is one part among many, and that means, more precisely, the systemic logic that is at work in this culture and shapes all of its parts. 11 In New Historicist studies of American literature this reasoning has led to an almost complete dissolution of the concept of the aesthetic. If everything is shaped by the same systemic logic, and there is no escape from it, then the aesthetic cannot stand out as having a different quality or function. In Walter Benn Michaels’s book The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, this pervasive, all embracing logic is that of the market; in Mark Seltzer’s study Henry James and the Art of Power, together with Michaels’s book one of the best known New Historicist studies of American literature, the logic is that of power as defined by Foucault. Seltzer’s rejection of the separation between the aesthetic and the political is thus based on a “Foucauldian view of the politics of the novel” (147). To be sure, the Jamesian novel hardly shows overt instances of the exertion of power. But it is, in its content as well as in its form, enacting the very technologies of power that Foucault has identified as the central aspect of modernity. Since power pervades the system even on the microsocial and micropolitical level, and since literature is part of the system and cannot stand outside of it, there exists “a discreet continuity between literary and political practices” (15). 12 Worse, since the Jamesian novel is not suspected of having any political aims because of its status as an aesthetically especially valuable literary form, it can be especially effective in its politics. What has long been celebrated in literary studies as the power of art is thus really an art of power. 11 See Walter Benn Michaels’s essay “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism,” where the title already indicates that literary naturalism will be explained by a logic that shapes it decisively as a literary movement. At the end of the essay, Michaels emphasizes that the positions that he has discussed do not interest him per se: “I want only to locate both these positions and their negations in the logic, or rather the double logic, of naturalism, and in so doing, to suggest one way of shifting the focus of literary history from the individual text or author to structures whose coherence, interest, and effect may be greater than that of either author or text” (129). 12 See also one of Seltzer’s programmatic opening statements: “I explore the ways in which James represents social movements of appropriation, supervision, and regulation and examine how both the content and the techniques of representation in James’s works express a complicity and rigorous continuity with the larger social regimes of mastery and control that traverse these works” (13). At other points, Seltzer pushes his rhetoric even further and speaks of a “criminal continuity”: “It is the criminal continuity between art and power and the ways in which the novelist and critic through an aesthetic and theoretical rewriting of power have worked to disown it that I want to examine. The novel does not simply refer to an ‘extraordinary’ history of politics that lies beyond it; nor is history merely a ground or background of the literary text. The movements of power do not lie in some hidden depths, but are visible on the surfaces of the literary discourse; and the historicity of the text is to be sought not in the grand designs and teleology of an absent History but in the microhistories and micropolitics of the body and the social body, in the minute and everyday practices and techniques that the novel registers and secures. What follows is an attempt to define these practices and techniques and to trace the immanence of power in the novel” (24). Shadow Aesthetics 25 In replacing a vertical relation between the aesthetic and the political by a horizontal continuity, Seltzer seems to have escaped the Marxist dilemma of describing the aesthetic merely as a surface that hides political reality. As he claims at one point: “The movements of power do not lie in some hidden depths, but are visible on the surfaces of the literary discourse…” (24). But he comes closer to an Absent Cause-Aesthetics than this programmatic statement indicates when he says: “I mean to suggest that James’s art of representation always also involves a politics of representation, and one reason for suspecting this link between art and power is that James works so carefully to deny it” (16). 13 Instead, the novel “secures and extends the very movements of power it ostensibly abjures” (18). What we need, then, is a hermeneutics of suspicion that can help us realize that “the assumption that the novel, necessarily and in principle, provides a haven or escape from power has become one of the ideological supports of that power” (194). And, in an argument also familiar from Absent Cause-Aesthetics, the literary genre that does this ideological work most effectively is the realist novel, “the genre that so closely resembles the police report and judicial dossier … not merely in its detailed and ‘criminal’ content but also in its form” (172). 14 The aesthetic dimension has not entirely disappeared, then. Although it only continues to exist in a state of radical shrinkage to a shadowy existence, it is still needed to prove that power is really everywhere, even in literature. In the same vein, interpretation is also still needed; however, not to decipher suspicious surface symptoms to arrive at a deeper truth, but to demonstrate that even those elements that seem to be unaffected by the logic of the system are really only another manifestation of it. Michaels’s interpretation of Sister Carrie, for example, has the purpose of showing that desire is not undermining the system but that it is one of its driving forces. In the same “it’s exactly the other way round”mode of argumentation, Seltzer’s attempt to trace “the dispersion of the political into the most ordinary and everyday relations” in The Golden Bowl (67) comes to focus on the personal and intimate relations among the novel’s characters, and more specifically, on the “extent to which supervisory mechanisms have been embedded in procedures of caring, curing, instructing, and nurturing in the novels” (76). This claim can be made, because if “power is a relation, then every exercise of power is inevitably doubly binding (…) and the bond thus formed is reciprocally coercive” (70). Even “the ability to put oneself in the other’s skin underwrites the infiltration and displacement of the other fellow, even as this colonization proceeds in the name of benevolence and sympathy” (72). 13 See also Seltzer’s claim that the criminal continuity between art and power is the secret of the Jamesian novel: “It is this ‘same criminal continuity’ between art and power that is the artfully dissembled secret of James’s art” (146). 14 In the same vein, literary form, for example in “the Jamesian imperative of organic form,” “underwrites and ratifies” a “system of supervision” (61). The literary form that so many critics have praised is thus only another “social mechanism of policing and regulation” (19). 26 W infried f luck Such political claims have interesting interpretive consequences. If single aspects of the text do not stand for a larger whole, whether metaphorically or metonymically, but must be seen to stand in continuity with other aspects of the system, then every single textual aspect can only exemplify a logic that characterizes all other aspects as well. Interpretation can thus only lead to a potentially unlimited set of equations: “Far from being opposed, love and power in The Golden Bowl are two ways of saying the same thing” (66). 15 Love is only another form of exerting power, and so is care, just as benevolence and sympathy, not to forget the novel’s “organic form,” as well as its literary techniques. In effect, the whole point of Seltzer’s interpretation is to dispel the illusion that any of these things could still stand outside of power. But if they are all part of the same web of relations and stand in a seamless continuity, then the literary form of expression does not really matter; it is only another technology of power, and all that needs to be said about its function is that it “registers and secures” (24) manifestations of power. Ironically, to claim that single aspects of the literary text do not reflect reality but are merely a part of it, does not liberate these aspects from their representational burden, but condemns them to always mean the same thing. The aesthetic becomes identical with the political to such a degree that it has no longer any signifying power or experiential potential of its own. The only task left for the interpreter is to point out this logic again and again and thus to turn the literary text into an allegorization of a privileged political theory, in this case of Foucault’s theory of power. Circulation and Exchange This is where New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt differ. To be sure, in his case, too, the starting point is a critique of the separation-model: “Inquiries into the relation between Renaissance theater and society have been situated most often at the level of reflection: images of the monarchy, the lower classes, the legal profession, the church, and so forth. Such studies are essential, but they rarely engage questions of dynamic exchange. They tend instead to point to two separate, autonomous systems and then try to gauge how accurately or effectively the one represents the other” (11). In reality, however, it is impossible to keep these two spheres apart so neatly. The historical and political spheres always have an aesthetic dimension, and the aesthetic object always and inevitably has a historical context and a political function. Hence, the relation between these spheres should not be seen in terms of separation but as a continuous exchange. At first sight, this may look like another 15 See also the following argument for an equation of aesthetics, love and power, all “saying the same thing”: “Finally, if my reading of the criminal continuity between love and power in The Golden Bowl is correct, the traditional notion of the Jamesian novel, and of the aesthetics of the novel that it has been appropriated to support, must be thoroughly revised. In James’s late fiction, love and power are two ways of saying the same thing, but criticism of The Golden Bowl, and of the novel generally, has worked not only to keep these two terms separate but to see them as absolutely contradictory” (94). Shadow Aesthetics 27 conflation of the aesthetic and the political, so that a reading would have to focus on erasing the (illusionary) difference between the two, as Walter Benn Michaels and Mark Seltzer do. But although Greenblatt agrees that the aesthetic and the political do not constitute ontologically separate spheres, he does not want to give up a claim of difference; in fact, he - cautiously raises the question whether it is “not possible to have a communal sphere of art that is distinct from other communal spheres” (3). This brings our discussion to an interesting point: even if one agrees that a strict separation between the aesthetic and the political is untenable, because art and society do not constitute ontologically separate spheres, does this also mean that the aesthetic and the political can no longer be kept apart analytically? Greenblatt does not challenge the priority of history as a determinant of aesthetic phenomena. He, too, sees capitalism as determining this history since early modernity. But in Greenblatt’s view, capitalism has different effects than those emphasized by Williams and Jameson. It does not produce a single, monolithic ideological structure but, on the contrary, an array “of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those domains into one another” (8). In other words, capitalism, in a typical pattern of boundary making and boundary breaking, is the force that constitutes the aesthetic as a separate realm and category, while, at the same time, it is also the force that stands in the way of any autonomy of the aesthetic. The two spheres remain thus tied to each other; in fact, “only capitalism managed to generate a dizzying, seemingly inexhaustible circulation between the two” (8). This is an important paradigm change. Formalist and Marxist models of the relation between the aesthetic and the political are uni-directional, so that one realm determines the other, or has dominance over it. In contrast, the term circulation implies a continuous process of exchange. But if the aesthetic and the political are in a process of continuous circulation and exchange, then this also means that there is no stable pattern of relation - which also means that there is no clearcut causality, no clear-cut hierarchy of influences. Circulation and exchange no longer follow predictable patterns. 16 Relations cannot be determined on the basis of a model known in advance. Instead, they are now characterized by often unforeseen, unexpected linkages, subject to change at any point, so that Greenblatt can characterize their changing relations as dynamic, if not dizzying, and seemingly inexhaustible. At one point, he even speaks of a “restless oscillation” (8). For the interpreter, this unpredictability of relations opens up entirely new possibilities. Possibilities of linkage multiply, and so does the freedom to establish connections between unexpected and seemingly random elements. As a consequence, the aesthetic can be set in relation to practically every historical or cultural phenomenon. New Historicists can seize “upon something out of the way, obscure, even bizarre: dreams, popular or aristocratic festivals, denunciations of witchcraft, sexual treatises, diaries and 16 Cf. Greenblatt: “The mistake is to imagine that there is a single, fixed, mode of exchange; in reality there are many modes, their character is determined historically, and they are continually renegotiated” (Greenblatt 1988, 8). 28 W infried f luck autobiographies, descriptions of clothing, reports on disease, birth and death records, accounts of insanity” (Cohen 33-4). The main methodological critique leveled at the New Historicism has therefore been that of establishing its analysis by means of “arbitrary connections” that allow the interpreter to set up any - often utterly unexpected, “anecdotal” combination between the aesthetic and the political. In his essay “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” Walter Cohen has described this principle of “arbitrary connectedness” pointedly: “The strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of a society is related to any other. No organizing principle determines these relationships; any social practice has at least a potential connection to any theatrical practice. Hence new historicist studies of Shakespeare have a radically unpredictable quality” (34). In contrast to other New Historicists, Greenblatt has extended these theoretical considerations to also address the question of aesthetic value. Why, he asks, do literary texts often possess more appeal than other “textual traces” of the past in our attempts to make history speak to us? 17 What is it about Shakespeare’s plays that provides them with such a “compelling force” (5)? Formalism refers to the powerful effects well-crafted formal strategies can have. Greenblatt looks for an explanation in “the social dimension of literature’s power” and finds it in “the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered” (4). All literary works are embedded in their culture and draw on “the collective genres, narrative patterns, and linguistic conventions” (5). A writer like Shakespeare is no exception. The question then is “how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption”(5)? Why should the circulation of cultural materials produce aesthetic enchantment or works of compelling force (two of Greenblatt’s favorite terms of praise), so that we may still enjoy them today? Does something happen to them when these cultural materials are moved? (7) Is there any kind of aesthetic reinscription? Does the answer lie in the experience of mobility itself that can affect us with a sense of the “social energy initially encoded in those works”? (6) But that would be true of literary texts in general and would not yet explain cases of particular aesthetic force such as Shakespeare’s. No explicit answer is provided, but one is implied that fits Greenblatt’s (in contrast to Seltzer’s radicalism, faintly) Foucauldian view of modernity. On the one hand, since Shakespeare’s plays are fueled by a circulatory energy, they draw force from their capacity for boundary-crossing; on the other hand, since this boundary-crossing takes place in a particular social institution, the theater, these plays also have an ideological effect that takes political advantage of their “air of improvisatory freedom” (17). Circulation and exchange may provide aesthetic experiences of boundary-crossing, but if this claim is carried too far, it would suggest that the aesthetic can have an oppositional function and force of its own. On the 17 The by now often quoted first sentence with which Greenblatt begins the book is “I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (1). Shadow Aesthetics 29 other hand, if the plays would merely have an ideological function, then any claim of difference between the aesthetic and the political would be lost. In true New Historicist fashion, Greenblatt wants to eat his cake and have it too. One reason why Greenblatt cannot be more concrete at this point becomes clearer when one looks more closely at the force that drives the process of circulation and exchange. Greenblatt calls this force social energy: “What then is social energy that is being circulated? Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religions lure, free-floating intensities of experience” (19). In short: everything that is somehow culturally active and holds some kind of imaginary attraction. But if the aesthetic is the result of a circulation of social energies that remains undefined, but is somehow appealing to the imagination, then the only conceptualization of the aesthetic still possible is to use attributes that evoke some intensity of experience like forceful or powerful. 18 The attempt to overcome the separation between the aesthetic and the political through “mobile,” flexible terms like circulation, exchange, negotiation, or transaction leads to a conceptualization of the aesthetic as something that - somehow - is so powerfully driven by the energy generated by imaginary attractions that it affects us and has some kind of impact on us. If the aesthetic is generated by the circulation of social energy, then the “Shakespeare-effect,” the fact that we value his plays more highly than other texts, must be attributed to the fact that they provide an especially powerful or compelling expression of social energy. This means to take back the aesthetic to manifestations of force or energy that do not have any characteristic contour of their own, and can only be identified by their impact, described with terms like power, force, effect, resonance or intensity. But how, then, do we distinguish a play by Shakespeare from other fictional texts such as, for example, a bestseller by Mickey Spillane, that also has a strong impact on many readers? In the final analysis, Greenblatt’s argument only works within an institutional context that has already determined that Shakespeare is a superior writer. Shakespeare is thus ideally suited to authorize a political criticism, because the political lesson Shakespeare teaches us (in the view of the New Historicists) has more force and authority than that of a writer like Spillane who does not have the same cultural authority. Ironically, the extension of the sphere of the political cannot leave the political unaffected and leads to an aestheticization of politics. Aestheticization of politics means that the authorization of politics is no longer provided by a systematic analysis of the political, social or economic system but by privileged forms of cultural representation. The attempt to overcome the separation between aesthetics and politics has the effect that the boundaries between them become 18 See also Greenblatt’s definition of his key word energy: “English literary theorists in the Renaissance needed a new word for that force, a force to describe the ability of language (…) to cause ‘a stir to the mind’; drawing on the Greek rhetorical tradition they called it energia” (Greenblatt 1988, 5-6). 30 W infried f luck permeable. The political extends into the aesthetic dimension but the aesthetic dimension also extends into the sphere of the political and transforms the political into cultural performance, that is, into an aesthetic object. 19 Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and Practice Greenblatt’s de-essentialization of the aesthetic as something that is subject to constant changes in appearance and function and therefore cannot be defined as an inherent quality or value of an object, shows surprising affinities to developments in contemporary artistic practice and aesthetic theory, where the problem of a separation of the aesthetic from political or social reality is thematized more broadly as the separation between art and life. This debate in which the boundaries of art are questioned starts with John Dewey’s redefinition of the aesthetic as aesthetic experience, and it has been radicalized by Jan Mukařovský’s concept of aesthetic function. 20 In both cases, the goal is to get away from an identification of the aesthetic with particular forms or qualities of the object. The aesthetic is not an inherent property of a literary text or an aesthetic object, so that a text or object either possesses aesthetic qualities or fails to do so. Instead, the aesthetic is constituted by an attitude we take towards an object. 21 It is thus not a word for a particular formal quality but for a distinct communicative potential. We can, in principle, look at any object as an aesthetic object. As Dewey points out in his example of five people approaching the Manhattan skyline on a ferry, passengers can all look at the same object but nevertheless see different things in it, depending on the attitude they take towards it. 22 However, if we can take different 19 For more extensive analyses of these mechanisms see my essays on “Radical Aesthetics” and “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” 20 The term “aesthetic function” refers to a specific communicative potential (the German “Wirkungsbedingung”). It does not yet tell us anything about “real” functions art may have had in history (something only a detailed analysis can bring to light); it only tells us something about the specific communicative conditions for trying to realize these functions. 21 On the concept of taking an aesthetic attitude see Jerome Stolnitz: “An attitude is a way of directing and controlling our perception. We never see or hear everything in our environment indiscriminately. Rather, we ‘pay attention’ to some things, whereas we apprehend others only dimly or hardly at all. Thus attention is selective it concentrates on some features of our surroundings and ignores others” (78). 22 Cf. Dewey, Art as Experience: “Some men regard it as simply a journey to get them where they want to be a means to be endured. So, perhaps, they read a newspaper. One who is idle may glance at this and that building identifying it as the Metropolitan Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and so on. Another, impatient to arrive, may be on the lookout for landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination. Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view. He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying. Another person, interested in real estate, may see, in looking at the skyline, evidence in the height of buildings, of the value of land. Or he may let his thoughts roam to the congestion of a great industrial and commercial centre. Shadow Aesthetics 31 attitudes towards one and the same object, among them an “aesthetic attitude,” then this also means that this object can be an aesthetic object at one point and something else at the next. Take a subway map of Berlin, for example. 23 I can look at it in terms of its practical use value (how many subway stops do I need to get to the Free University) but, in the next moment, I can switch attitudes and can look at the same map, but now as a composition that draws attention to itself as a form of expression. All of a sudden, I begin to notice that the subway network resembles a spider’s net or that one of the subway stops, strangely enough, is called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” However, at the next moment, I can switch attitudes again and look at the subway map in terms of the information it provides. At one moment, I may regard it as purely referential and rely on its truth-value; at the next moment, I may bracket the referential function for the time being and look at the pattern of subway lines as an aesthetic object that transcends a merely referential function and, for that reason, appeals to my imaginary; finally, in a third moment, I may reflect on what this strangely irregular pattern can tell us about the historical growth patterns of Berlin and its subway system. In other words: referential and aesthetic dimension do not occupy ontologically different planes. They interact and complement one another. In even more radical fashion than Dewey, for whom aesthetic experience marks a culminating moment in which fragmented elements of daily experience are successfully reintegrated, the aesthetic, for Mukařovský, is created by a temporary and, possibly, fleeting shift in a hierarchy of functions that is in constant flux, so that each of the functions remains present and can, at every given moment, regain dominance. 24 Consequently, the aesthetic can no longer be defined as separate sphere. 25 Neither does it present a counterworld, nor does it come into existence by an act of transcendence or a retreat from reality. While looking at the subway map as an aesthetic object, I cannot completely suppress my awareness that it is a subway map. In fact, only on this background does the hieroglyphic pattern take on significance as an aesthetic object. It is not that we find hieroglyphic patterns pleasant or interesting in themselves. On the contrary, without reference to that which has been turned (temporarily) into a hieroglyphic pattern, the transforma- He may go on to think of the planlessness of arrangement as evidence of the chaos of a society organized on the basis of conflict rather than cooperation. Finally the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically, as a painter might see” (140). 23 The following example is taken from my essay “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” 24 Cf. the summary of Mukařovský’s position by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: “Art is not a special kind of object but one in which the aesthetic function, usually mixed with other functions is dominant” (153). 25 Cf. Mukařovský’s description: “The border lines of the aesthetic realm are thus not firmly drawn in reality. On the contrary, they are highly permeable. (...) We all know people for whom everything takes on an aesthetic function, and, on the other hand, those for whom an aesthetic function hardly ever exists; in fact, we know from our own personal experience, that the relations between the realm of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic (...) may shift with age, health or even our current mood” (1966, 14, m.t.). 32 W infried f luck tion would be pointless. 26 Many forms of recent art, such as, e.g., pop art, junk art or abject art, therefore set out by declaring everyday objects or, increasingly, thoroughly “profane” objects to be art objects in order to dramatize the redefining power of shifting attitudes that can transform even the “lowest” the most vulgar, junkiest or most repulsive materials into aesthetic objects. Contemporary art has pushed this practice to extremes. Avant-garde movements like Performance Art or Concept Art are constantly confronting us with objects and phenomena that would not have qualified as aesthetic objects in the past in order to demonstrate that everything can be turned into art, once we are willing to take an aesthetic attitude towards it and consider it as an aesthetic object. And the purpose of this transformation is not to escape reality but to have another look at it, so that aspects that may have been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed may be seen in a new light or perhaps for the first time. 27 Jürgen Peper therefore describes the aesthetic function as “experimental and experiential epistemology” (296). There is an interesting similarity here to Greenblatt’s concepts of circulation, exchange, and transaction in that in both cases the relation between art and life is not stable but can shift. But there is also an important difference. In Greenblatt’s argument the separation between art and life becomes possible, because this separation has already been overcome in the constitution of the object itself. Since the object is animated by the circulation of social energy, it is inherently “transactional.” The theorists discussed here would not deny this, but they go one step further by arguing that it is not the object itself in which the separation is overcome but the freedom that we have as readers or spectators to set one of its potential functions - such as its referential or aesthetic function - dominant. The difference - and its consequences for interpretation can be clarified by returning to the example of Shakespeare. If we want to explain the compelling force of Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of Greenblatt, we have to focus on the cultural materials that circulate in his plays. Beyond that point, the argument gets nebulous. Since in principle all literary texts are subject to the circulation of social energy, what did Shakespeare do differently than others? The powerful effect of his plays, it seems, is attributed to the 26 Or, to draw on Mukařovský’s argument: as an in comparison with other functions - “empty” function, the aesthetic function depends on other functions in order to manifest itself. 27 In his essay “Die Bedeutung der Ästhetik” (The Importance of Aesthetics), reprinted in the collection Kunst, Poetik, Semiotik, Mukařovský gives the example of an observer of gymnastics. As long as our perception of physical exercise is dominated by practical functions (gaining strength, strengthening certain muscles etc.), we will focus on aspects which are helpful for achieving those goals and will judge the single exercise in relation to how well it helps to realize the desired result. Once the aesthetic function becomes dominant, on the other hand, the exercise takes on interest in itself as a performance or spectacle. The various movements, the sequence of movements, and even the “useless” details of the periods between different exercise may now become objects of attention for their own sake. The significatory dimension of reality is foregrounded and the sign is of interest sui generis. Even the “wrong” movements may now be of interest as movements, not just as “wrong” movements. Shadow Aesthetics 33 cultural material and its transgressive potential. This may be one reason why Greenblatt made an attempt to change the name of his approach from “New Historicism” to “Cultural Poetics.” In contemporary aesthetic theory, on the other hand, even this tie of the aesthetic to an experience of boundary-crossing is severed, so that the concept of the aesthetic becomes an empty signifier that can be put in the service of different aesthetics. Once we consider a text or object an aesthetic object, the aesthetic function becomes the precondition for the realization of other functions, because these other functions depend on the specific potential of the aesthetic. However, what that potential consists of is a matter of changing views and definitions. Perceptions and evaluations of literary texts are thus constantly changing. What the reader or critic sees in Shakespeare’s plays, once he focuses on the aesthetic dimension, will depend on the explanatory frame and the aesthetic values he brings to the object, so that even the plays’ “compelling force,” Greenblatt’s shadow aesthetics, cannot be firmly tied to a particular feature such as a mobility attributed to social energy. To look at an object in terms of its aesthetic function, then, does not mean to interpret it in terms of a stable explanatory frame called the “aesthetic.” Rather, it means to determine ever anew what we consider to be the source of aesthetic experience in particular contexts and cases. The aesthetic attitude allows us to take into account that the aesthetic itself is constantly changing in fact, that this is one of its major attractions and reason for enjoying and studying it. As contemporary artistic practice shows, new ways of looking at the world will then also lead to the formulation of a new aesthetics. To give up definitions of the aesthetic in terms of inherent qualities thus does not mean to give up attempts to explain why we are affected by certain literary texts and consider them valuable. Shadow Aesthetics The story we have traced so far is that of a growing flexibilization of the relation between aesthetic and the political and, linked with it, of an increasing retreat in definitions of the aesthetic. New Historicists like Greenblatt on the one hand, and contemporary artistic movements like Performance Art or Concept Art on the other, stand for a major development in contemporary views of the aesthetic. Aesthetics is no longer defined by qualities like the beautiful or the sublime. It is reconceptualized as aisthesis, that is, as a sense perception that is epistemologically prior to conceptual knowledge, because it includes psycho-somatic processes. Vivian Sobchak’s influential phenomenological reconceptualization of film experience as an embodied experience in her study The Address of the Eye provides an example, as does Richard Shusterman’s well-argued case for somaesthetics in his Pragmatist Aesthetics in which somatic affect moves to the center of aesthetic experience. 28 In contrast, American Studies, by and large, has continued to deal with the 28 See also Rita Felski’s argument for a neo-phenomenological aesthetics, superbly argued in her book Uses of Literature. 34 W infried f luck aesthetic from the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion in which the aesthetic hides an ideological purpose, so that interpretations - for example of Moby-Dick - should not let themselves be sidetracked by focusing on the aesthetic dimension. Instead, their focus should be on the novel’s political meaning and function. But this is where an unintended irony sets in. For in order to be able to describe how a novel like Moby-Dick does its ideological work effectively, one has to provide some kind of description of its working principles, that is, its aesthetic dimension. Many texts do ideological work, but obviously some do a better, more effective job than others. No matter whether one considers the aesthetic dimension crucial in itself or not, one still needs to point out how the literary text can do its cultural or ideological work. Even where a political reading dominates completely, an analysis of the literary text must be able to say something about the source of the impact the text has had - and may still have on its readers. Hence the basic paradox or dilemma of revisionist literary studies: on the one side, it wants to legitimate itself by going beyond aesthetics, on the other side, that “beyond” - in most cases the political meaning or function - has gained its effects, including its political effects, by a particular structure or organization of the text that cannot be ignored and is in need of description and analysis. But if this is so, it is also impossible to dismiss the aesthetic as a category of interpretation. At one point, interpreters have to say (or to imply) why they are focusing on certain texts or certain aspects of texts and not on others. Even where they claim that the text has been canonized only for the purpose of gaining cultural capital, there has to be a reason why a particular text can fulfill this role and why it can do so better than others. Raymond Carver’s status as a minimalist may have been constructed in programs for creative writing but not every text by Carver is equally interesting or equally useful for explaining the impact he has on readers. Similarly, every line Herman Melville wrote may be, in one way or another, political but not every book or tale of his is equally interesting (and thus effective in communicating his politics). Among other texts, political criticism continues to focus on Moby- Dick, and in doing so, there has to be a reason provided what the difference is between Moby-Dick and, say, Mardi or Israel Potter. Canons, aesthetic evaluations and judgments of taste may be institutionally constructed or shaped, but in order to do so successfully, lines of argumentation and legitimation have to be developed that can justify these constructions of value or specific function. Obviously, some arguments are more convincing than others, and although this impression may not necessarily be due to the force of argument itself but to its institutional context, there nevertheless will have to be some kind of reference to an aesthetic dimension that others find convincing, acceptable, or wrong. This is what I mean by using the term “Shadow Aesthetics.” Shadow Aesthetics 35 The Example of Moby-Dick One of the paradoxical phenomena of the decades-old revisionism is that scholars have continued to put their main focus on canonized works and have thereby contributed to keep works at the center of curricula and their own interpretive activities that they often consider sites of ideology, of unseen power effects, or interpellation. They have thus also put pressure on themselves to explain their choices. On what basis were these choices made? To be sure, when one asks a revisionist scholar why he or she is still dealing with Moby-Dick and not Pierre or The Confidence-Man, although the latter texts may provide a much better basis for a critique of American society or American capitalism, the answer most likely is that Moby-Dick is the more powerful text. But what makes it more powerful? Is it the ideology expressed, or the political critique the novel entails, or is it the fact that they are more powerfully expressed? And if so, what are the textual sources of this more powerful effect? In the introduction to a more recent edition of Moby-Dick, reprinted in his essay collection Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said asks “What is Moby-Dick all about? ” and, somewhat predictably answers: it is not about whaling but about the “imperial motif that runs consistently through United States history and culture,” and that the novel has caught, as Said phrases it, “very accurately.” How has the novel caught it accurately? Said speaks of the “greatest and most eccentric work of literary art produced in the United States.” Because it describes the imperialism ascribed to the U.S. accurately? No, that would make it a mere political pamphlet. What Said emphasizes again and again is the intensity of the novel which, by implication, must also mean the intensity of the reading experience. This aesthetic dimension, he claims, gives it a specific American quality: “No novel in Europe was ever so undomesticated and so unruly in its energies…” Thus far, we would have two sources of the novel’s significance, its focus on the new American imperialism and its aesthetic intensity, and it is a logical next step to link the two, so that the “energy unloosed” in the novel dramatizes the energy unloosed by imperialism: “And the point becomes, I think, that you can neither apply brakes to such a juggernaut nor expect things to remain the same. Everything discrete, clear, distinct is transformed by the energy unloosed in such a drive to fulfillment even unto death or total destruction.” What Moby-Dick manages to do in this way is to emphasize the ambivalence Melville and Americans had toward imperialism. He admired its energy unloosed but also realized its destructiveness, for example in the figure of Ahab. For Said, this ambivalence is a gain, not a loss; it provides genuine insight, but it can do so only through its aesthetic dimension, the “terrifying intensity” and unruliness of its representation. In contrast to Leo Marx’s reading of Moby-Dick, the aesthetic dimension is not described in very elaborate fashion; in fact, it consists of hardly more than a repeated reference to the powerful reading effect the novel has. Actually, we are back to Hegelianism at this point, but in a reverse order: the aesthetic value - Said’s 36 W infried f luck energy unloosed is not the key to a national condition, but a national condition - namely American imperialism - is used to explain the aesthetic power of the text which now has its source in politics. But in order to make this point, the aesthetic side has to be reduced to a skeleton-like, almost allegorical dimension, that is, a shadow existence. This dimension is needed - for otherwise Moby-Dick would be merely another book about imperialism - but it also has to be reduced in order to be able to function as an expression of the political meaning of the book. Similarly, Don Pease in an essay on transnational perspectives in American Studies “From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality,” and Timothy Marr in his study The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism see Moby-Dick in a primarily political context - that of the state of exception and of nineteenth-century Islamic Orientalism -, but both also emphasize that Melville’s novel opens up the possibility of going beyond these ideologies, for Pease by dis-interpellation, for Marr by the “artistry with which he used these stereotypes.” What constitutes this artistry? In both cases, it is an aesthetic dimension that makes the difference, but in both cases, this dimension is only hinted at, not described or elaborated, because to do so may raise the suspicion of indulging in aesthetics for its own sake. Both interpretations confirm that political readings cannot do without an aesthetic dimension, but that, as a rule, this aesthetic dimension does not go beyond the level of a shadow aesthetics. In all three examples, we encounter a tendency that we have already described before, namely to move the aesthetic away from formal qualities and to redefine it as strong, powerful effect. This may be in keeping with developments in the contemporary art world, but as description of an aesthetic object it remains shadowy. However, the usefulness of this shadowy power aesthetic is not hard to grasp: the aesthetic effect has to be strong and powerful, because only in this way can it determine and affect the reader’s subject position, and the reader’s subject position or identity is where aesthetics and politics meet in cultural radicalism. From the point of view of cultural radicalism, the main political impact literature has is to determine the reader’s subject position. But in order to be able to do this, the aesthetic object has to have a powerful effect, no matter what the source of this effect is. The argument for a forceful interpellation is one of the reasons why aesthetics cannot be given up altogether, for otherwise it would be hard to make a case for the literary text’s political function. But at the same time, descriptions of the aesthetic cannot go beyond “power” terms, for otherwise the aesthetic would gain too much of a life of its own. Contrary to its own dismissal of the category of the aesthetic, political criticism needs the aesthetic, but although it needs the aesthetic, it must stay away from describing the aesthetic object and its effect in any detailed and elaborate fashion. In current cultural radicalism, aesthetics has to be smuggled in through the back door, and as a result it does not present itself in a very developed form. Shadow Aesthetics 37 The Aesthetic as Cultural Capital As we have seen, the revisionist turn in literary studies, inspired and driven by the shift from a liberal consensus to cultural radicalism, has provided a major challenge to definitions of the aesthetic as a separate sphere. It has insisted that the aesthetic cannot and should not be separated from the political and the social sphere to which it is inextricably linked and by which it is crucially determined. In consequence, it has become the main project of American literary studies to recover the political and social reality that is hidden by the aesthetic dimension of the text. But this revisionist political criticism has not provided the only challenge. Another one has come from the sociology of literature in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that the idea of aesthetic value has been created by bourgeois society to acquire cultural capital in order to gain social distinction. The political function of the aesthetic is no longer to hide the true nature of capitalism or the all-pervasive presence of power, but that of providing prestige based on cultural capital, that is, dispositions, knowledge, and practices in the realm of culture that may justify claims of a particular class or social group for social superiority and dominance. For Bourdieu this class is the bourgeoisie. But, typically, members of the bourgeoisie are not working on interpretations of Moby-Dick. The challenge for literary studies therefore was to redefine the cultural-capital-seeking class, a redefinition ushered in by John Guillory’s book Cultural Capital, in which the class using the idea of the aesthetic for their own social distinction are academics who belong to a new professional-managerial class. In order to strengthen its own social status and professional relevance, this class has had a vested interest in providing objects of analysis like Moby-Dick with the authority and social prestige of the aesthetic. In doing so, they have only done what writers have been doing all along, namely to make use of literature and art for gaining cultural capital. Thus, writers like Melville have been pioneers of the professional-managerial class; the reason why they have been canonized is thus not due to a particular aesthetic value of their work, but because they have already done what today’s academics also have to do. They have set an example for the professional-managerial class for how to strive for cultural capital. Do we still have to talk, then, about the literary forms of works like Moby- Dick or about the reasons why they are experienced as compelling or powerful by readers? Melville may have been subject to status anxieties as an author and therefore may have tried to elevate the novel to a new level of aesthetic innovation in order to gain professional distinction, but in the pursuit of that goal, he wrote very different novels and tales which are not yet sufficiently explained by seeing them as pursuits of cultural capital. Similarly, it may be convincing to claim that, sociologically speaking, American modernism, including the art novels by Henry James, was the product of “beleaguered gentry” writers (McGurl 18), but it does not yet explain the different forms 38 W infried f luck produced in response to this status anxiety. 29 Not every beleaguered gentry member that tried to use art for the purpose of gaining cultural capital and social distinction succeeded. Does that have something to do with the different literary texts they produced? The question, then, is: are there links between the literary text and its usefulness for a search for cultural capital? As far as I can see there are three answers given to this question. One is exemplified by Mark McGurl in his study of the Jamesian art novel, 30 The Novel Art, in which central narrative strategies of James are no longer discussed as aesthetic forms designed to provide certain reading experiences or to achieve certain aesthetic effects, but as ingenious forms of product innovation and product differentiation: “It was in dialectical relation to this audience, and working for the most part within the institutions of an expanding mass market, that the novel would attempt to reinvent itself as fine art. The rise of the art-novel thus becomes visible as a version, of sorts, of the widespread contemporaneous phenomenon of product differentiation - that status-conscious aspect of mass consumerism in which, for famous instance, the mass-produced regularity of the black Ford Model T gives way in the 1920s to the multicolored hierarchies of automotive distinction” (5). If the purpose of such formal features as color is to provide some kind of product differentiation in order to provide consumers with the illusion of going beyond mass-produced regularity, then it is no longer necessary to look at the colors more closely, because their choice will be determined by the need for differentiation and not by any expressive quality of their own. If objects have been red so far, the new one will have to be blue. Applied to James, this means that a whole array of formal innovation can be taken down to the level of mere product innovation. Aesthetic innovation is good for establishing cultural capital, and whatever one may think of James and his writings, he was certainly successful in establishing his brand. To say that a literary text is canonized because of its usefulness in the search for cultural capital does not yet say anything specific about the text itself and its characteristics. A theoretically more ambitious approach would be to show how these textual characteristics can be linked to the search for cultural capital. 31 Such an attempt is made in John Evelev’s analysis of 29 As a member of the gentry, James was “beleaguered” throughout his life, but the anxiety that may have been linked with this social status led to the development of an aesthetic project that went through several phases and is impressive in the variety of different aesthetic forms it produced. 30 Because James was one of the heroes of the long dominant formalist tradition in literary studies, his work poses a special challenge to radical revisionists. 31 A second answer to the question whether there is any link between literary text and its usefulness in the search for cultural capital is provided in Bourdieu’s own work when he claims that the dominant segment of the dominating class - for example merchants and the dominated segment of that group such as artists or intellectuals, have developed very different aesthetic preferences that mirror their class position. Merchants prefer decorative uses of the aesthetic, whereas intellectuals, mirroring their status as poor relatives, prefer more ascetic forms. But this interesting suggestion has remained on the level of a very general claim and has so far not been taken up in literary studies. Shadow Aesthetics 39 Melville’s work in his study Tolerable Entertainment, in which he discusses Melville’s literary career in the context of a middle-class professionalism that began to emerge in the antebellum era and established new status regimes. Evelev is not content to merely state that Melville produced his literary work in the search for cultural capital. He also wants to provide closer readings of how this search has shaped a novel like Moby-Dick. His starting premise is that “Moby-Dick participates in a broader ideological project to establish new terms for cultural hierarchy in American life, shifting authority from the earlier dominant forms - both Jacksonian working-class cultural democracy and patrician cultural stewardship - to a new professional middleclass dominance” (12). As the Astor Place Riots showed, Shakespeare could be useful for this purpose and was skillfully appropriated by Melville in the scenes involving Ahab. On the other hand, Ishmael, for example in the cetology-chapter, uses the strategies of the Lyceum and public lecturers who contributed to a new culture of professionalism based on specialized knowledge. 32 In other words: the very strategies that most critics have described as a special aesthetic achievement of Moby-Dick turn out to be, at a closer look, really tools to make use of literature in the search for professional distinction, a practice that is then repeated by those intellectuals and academics who rediscovered and canonized Moby-Dick in the 1920s: “Modern American critics and scholars who have written about and taught Melville’s work as a means of defining literary merit and national identity have, in the process, used Melville to legitimize a version of their own professional authority” (180). Even though Evelev, in contrast to reductionist uses of Bourdieu, makes an effort to focus on formal strategies of Moby-Dick, the novel’s aesthetic dimension is thus defined through its effectiveness in establishing a professional ideology. Moby-Dick has been canonized in the twentieth-century because a professionalized literary academy recognized its own professional values in the novel, namely a “search for distinction on the basis of ‘complicated acts of distinction, differentiation, discourse analysis, and interpretation’” (144). Moby-Dick’s challenge to the reader is thus not an epistemological or existential one, but one that uses “difficulty” as an instrument of professional class politics - so that Evelev can claim: “Ostensibly an ‘epic’ about whaling, Moby-Dick is more concretely an epic about professional-class cultural politics, a veritable lexicon of the distinctions to be made between other available models of cultural politics and the skills needed to construct one’s self as a cultural professional” (144). The major reading experience it provides is that of being introduced to the “subtle work of cultural distinction,” (136) to “subtle acts of interpretative distinction,” (141) or to “a veritable lexicon of the 32 Cf. Evelev’s characterization: “In Moby-Dick, the narrator Ishmael uses elaborate rhetoric and oratorical strategies to establish exactly the kind of relationship with his readers upon which the antebellum popular lecturers depended” (125). “This process of challenging readers’ epistemological impulses and demanding ‘subtle’ interpretative work is repeated throughout the cetology. The cetology, in effect, instructs its readers in the benefits (and pitfalls) of professionalism’s investment in the ‘subtle’ work of cultural distinction” (136). 40 W infried f luck distinctions to be made…” (144). In other words: readers are introduced to the subtle cultural work of establishing status distinctions on professional grounds, and the fact that they are sometimes also encouraged by the novel to look at these strategies critically only seems to enhance the novel’s effectiveness as a “professional epic”: “Reading Melville’s work allows us to see the best and worst possibilities of modern middle-class professionalism and, with that, consider our own investment and/ or complicity in the distinction of work and culture that structure our own class landscape” (x). To be critical is part of the role of the professional after all. At no point does Moby-Dick address the issue of professionalism explicitly. As in the case of cultural radicalism’s “absent cause”-readings, the “actual” political and social reality that is supposed to inform Moby-Dick is not visible on the textual surface and thus not immediately apparent. Rather, it is embedded in its literary forms. Generations of interpreters have taken the sea adventure as a counter-world to the lives of a professional-managerial class. But none of these interpreters seems to have realized that the novel’s subtle distinctions and interpretive complications, usually seen as formal equivalent of an expanding romantic subjectivity, are really forms that interpellate the reader into a professional subject-formation. The novel thus draws its impact from a rehearsal and replication of a professional habitus. The only way, however, in which Moby-Dick can do this work of interpellation is through the reading experience - an experience that is shaped by the novel’s literary forms, that is, its aesthetic dimension. It is a dimension, however, that is again boiled down to the rudimentary level of a shadow aesthetics. In this respect, cultural capital-criticism does not offer any alternative to the political criticism of the revisionist turn. A shadow aesthetics, we have said, is an aesthetics that cannot be named (because it is supposed not to be there), but that also cannot be entirely ignored, because there must be some way in which the literary text realizes its politics in the act of reading. The political criticism of the revisionist turn and the search-for-cultural-capital argument provide examples for this inevitability. But they fail to acknowledge it, most likely, because they would then have to say more about this dimension and go beyond the aesthetically impoverished readings that have become the rule in American literary studies. What do Literary Studies do Now? Studies like Evelev’s or McGurl’s are very much books for our time. In political criticism, the legitimation for studying literature lay in an uncompromising analysis of political and social power structures. Now the focus has shifted and there is only one of these power structures left. As Evelev puts it: “It is one of the central premises of this book that Melville is so important to twentieth-century visions of nineteenth-century American literature, because he, more than any other writer, embodies and works through the tenets of professionalism, the values that have guided the twentieth-century Shadow Aesthetics 41 and present-day American literary academy” (19). These values are no longer intellectual, aesthetic, or even political values; they are the values of a professional class that is doing literary studies for professional reasons. This may indeed be the reality of American academic life today, but should it also be the goal by which literary studies define themselves? Political criticism tried to overcome the separation of art and life in order to give literary studies relevance as a political practice. This provided a profession once associated with the dust of archives with the allure of an avant-garde existence in postmodern times. In comparison, it is interesting to ask what the new role is that is created by a redefinition of the intellectual as professional? The prevalent tone, it seems to me, is that of an often cynical self-deprecating. As an intellectual critic in the Hegelian mode or as an expert voice on non-instrumental values in the formalist mode, the literary scholar was moving beyond cultural boundaries and social conventions. But the truth is, as McGurl and Evelev point out almost in self-disgust, that literary scholars are really members of a professional-managerial class and thus, like it or not, they represent technobureaucratic values. The starting point of this essay has been the question how literary studies can legitimize itself as a field of study. As we have seen, the field started out with grand visions and promises. As the result of an ongoing intellectual self-scrutiny, these grand visions have been taken down one by one. What self-legitimation can the field still have, then? Its current self-justification seems almost entirely parasitic: it justifies itself by “deconstructing” the cultural capital others have accumulated. 33 At one point, however, one may begin to wonder why we need a discipline like literary studies in order to study subtle acts of distinction or to analyze product differentiation in a body of works that are rapidly losing importance, because there seems to be no longer any good reason to study them. At present, it seems, literary studies is in danger of losing its ability to make a convincing case for why one should still study literary texts. The problem is condensed in the phenomenon of the shadow aesthetics. That is why I have put it at the center of this essay. Why do people read literary texts? I think it is reasonable to assume that literary texts are not merely chosen for the pursuit of cultural capital, but also, or even more so, because they open up imaginary spaces that invite intellectual and emotional explorations. Even if we de-essentialize the aesthetic as far as possible, the term is still needed to describe this potential. To be sure, this aesthetic potential may become the basis for ideological and other political (mis)uses, but that should not be a sufficient reason to dismiss the potential of the aesthetic itself. For, 33 For example, when Betsy Erkkila analyzes visions of democracy in the work of Melville and Whitman, she must tacitly assume that these works are of more importance for discussing the issue than, say, the work of T.S. Arthur. But why should the vision of democracy in the work of Melville or Whitman merit special attention, unless these works themselves merit attention? Erkkila’s analysis of how politics inform and shape the work of these authors is only meaningful on the basis of a prior assumption about the works’ special value. 42 W infried f luck after all, what is the consequence of the fact that the aesthetic does not constitute an autonomous sphere of value? As we have seen, contemporary artists have been in the avant-garde of making the point, but their conclusion has not been that one should stop producing art. Similarly, what is the consequence of the fact that literary studies have become a profession like others? Does it mean that literary texts should now be read in a professional manner or does it mean that they should be read as expressions of managerial professional values? In the story we have traced, a novel like Moby-Dick or the late novels of James have become more and more reduced in meaning and in their potential to provide an aesthetic experience up to the point where the only aspect that still distinguishes literary texts from other discursive manifestations of capitalist ideology, or the market, or power, or imperialism, or orientalism, or status distinction is a shadow aesthetics that is ill equipped to serve as a justification of the field of literary studies. 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