Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the "Bildungsroman"

237 Pages·1996·6.106 MB·English

by  Marc Redfield

PHANTOM FORMATIONS
PHANTOM
FORMATIONS
MARC REDFIELD
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Aesthetic Ideology
and the Bildun sroman
g
'!'AB. V.
P'S.II.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
The illustration on the title page is from Peter Camper, Dissertation sur
les Variétés Naturelles qui caracterisent la physionomie des hommes des
divers climats et des differens ages (Paris: Francart, 1792). Reprinted by
permission of the Bancroft Library of the University of California.
Copyright © 1996 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission
in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit
our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 1996 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Redfield, Marc, b. 1958
Phantom formations : aesthetic ideology and the Bildungsroman /
Marc Redfield.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3236-1 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2316-2 (pbk.)
1.Bildungsroman. 2. German fiction—19th century—History and criticism.
3.European fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Aesthetics, Modern.
I. Title.
PT747.E6R43 1996
809.3′0094—dc20 96-17186
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Cover illustration: “The Sculptor Instructing Wilhelm,” wood engraving from
Goethe’s Works, Illustrated by the Best German Writers, vol. 5. Ed. George
Barrie. Philadelphia, 1885.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Aesthetic Ideology 1
2 The Phantom Bildungsroman 38
3 Ghostly Bildung: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 63
4 The Dissection of the State: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the
Politics of Aesthetics 95
Postscript: The Trouble with Schiller 125
5 The Aesthetics of Sympathy: George Eliot's Telepathy Machine 134
6 Aesthetics and History: L'Education sentimentale 171
7 Conclusions 201
Index 215
v

Preface
I
n a modest but ineluctable fashion, the specter of the Bildungsroman
haunts literary criticism. This genre does not properly exist, and in a sense
can be proved not to exist: one can take canonical definitions of Bildung
(itself no simple term), go to the novels most frequently called
Bildungsromane, and with greater or lesser difficulty show that they exceed,
or fall short of, or call into question the process of Bildung which they
purportedly serve. Even Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre can be (and has been)
excluded from the genre it exemplifies. Nor does one need to be a postmod­
ern literary theorist to encounter this paradox. Soundly humanistic Germa­
nists have been doing so ever since the term Bildungsroman began to circu­
late in the early decades of the twentieth century (for another odd feature of
this supposedly nineteenth-century genre is that its name barely appears in
the literary record prior to the publication of Wilhelm Dilthey' s Experience
and Poetry [ t906]: its currency is roughly coterminous with the professional­
ization of academic literary study). Yet despite, or because of, its referential
complexity, the notion of the Bildungsroman is one of academic criticism's
most overwhelmingly successful inventions. Few professional terms (let
alone German ones) have achieved comparable dissemination in Western
literary culture; and critics probably will go on talking about the Bildungsro­
man as long as the institutions of literary criticism as we know them sur­
vive. The Bildungsroman exemplifies the ideological construction of litera­
ture by criticism.
In consequence, the issues raised by this pseudo genre greatly surpass
the literal terms of the debate over whether it exists or not. My central
vii
viii Preface
argument in this book is that the notion of the Bildungsroman brings into
sharp focus the promises and pitfalls of aesthetics, and that aesthetics in
turn exemplifies what we call ideology. As a result, this book is not in the
ordinary sense a book about the Bildungsroman. It is certainly a work of
literary criticism and offers as central to its self-justification readings of
novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Flaubert. But since my analyses
discover in the rather minor professional embarrassment of the Bildungs­
roman the infinitely inflatable question of the aesthetic, I am also writing
about what we mean by culture, history, and humanity, what we do when
we read or teach literature, and why the twentieth-century institutionali­
zation of literature has generated the curious phenomenon of "literary
theory." In an indirect fashion this book is about the literary institution and
thus also about the political, technical, and cultural worlds which this in­
stitution at once excludes and commemorates. This breadth of ambition
stems from the peculiar difficulties of writing about aesthetic ideology.
Few narratives are more familiar to scholars of modern literature and
culture than the story of the appearance of aesthetics, both as a new philo­
sophical category and as a massively diffuse and influential discourse­
one that provided the post-Romantic Western world with meanings for
words such as "culture" and "art" that we now consider primary. The topic
of beauty is as old as philosophy, but the notion of the aesthetic as a particu­
lar sort of experience or judgment or class of objects does not begin to
appear regularly until the eighteenth century. At the same time, large-scale
historical developments were permitting, as is well known, the emergence
of art and literature in their modern sense, and the transformation of the
artist into the genius, the representative of universal humanity, whose pro­
ductions transcend the system of commodity exchange which enables
them. Aesthetics partakes of the emergence of the universal subject of bour­
geois ideology.
Indeed, aesthetics enables and exemplifies the production of this subject.
For though aesthetics has usually been subordinated to logic or ethics be-
cause of its dependence on a sensory element, this very hybridity of the
aesthetic makes it a privileged point of contact between the supersensible
and the sensory worlds, and also grants it inherent pragmatic and ped­
agogical force. Since its mission is to guarantee and promote spirit's artic­
ulation with the world, the aesthetic establishes "disinterested" space in the
service of a certain referential effectivity. In the harmonious free play of the
faculties which results when Kant's subject performs a disinterested aes­
thetic judgment, the judging subject becomes exemplary-capable, in its
formality, of representing universal humanity. Thus in Schiller's influential
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Kantian themes easily acquire
political and historical dimensions. Because aesthetic education is at once
Preface ix
the universal history of man" and the specific history of the acculturation
/1
of certain groups and individuals, aesthetics provides a powerful self­
validating mechanism for the representativeness of the social groups which
can claim to have achieved and inherited this understanding of accultura­
tion. The sheerly empirical qualities of being European, white, middle­
class, male, and so on become either tacitly or overtly essentialized as
privileged sites in the unfolding of an irreversible aesthetic history. Thus
from the sober precincts of philosophy one is led with disconcerting speed
to the large reaches of ideology; indeed, ideology then becomes a limit-term
difficult to control. For this aesthetic logic of exemplarity subtends power­
ful Western ideas and discourses of the self, the nation, race, historical
process, the literary canon, and the function of criticism; it informs the role
of the cultural sphere in modem Western societies, and the mission of the
humanities in the modem university. And aesthetics not only structures
crucial aspects of mainstream post-Romantic Western culture but also
shapes this culture's internal nightmare, as Walter Benjamin indicated in
his famous characterization of fascism as the aestheticization of politics."
/1
A lurid but necessary task facing any genuine critique of aesthetics is that of
engaging both the abyssal difference and the complex proximities between
the humanist tradition and what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy call "the Nazi myth" -a phrase coined to describe not the so­
ciohistorical actuality of German fascism but rather the decisive turns of an
ideology that transforms the representative subject of aesthetics into the
exemplarity of a master race, and the humanistic, deferred promise of
Schiller's Aesthetic State into the violent immediacy of a destiny.
Aesthetics thus poses the question of "ideology" itself in its vacillation
between philosophy and politics, and between the languages and practices
of high culture and those of modem propaganda. Furthermore, as a process
of and discourse about formalization, aesthetics is always also prepared to
function as a figure for the act of signification itself. The inflationary aes­
thetic spiral generates the limit-term of ideology as "language." As a philo­
sophical category, aesthetics is the place where the cognitive manifests itself
in the phenomenal-where the essential structure of the sign, in other
words, seems to unfold itself as an experience or intuition. Aesthetics trans­
lates into psychological or phenomenal terms the unintuitable difference
and repetition that allow a linguistic sign to mean and to refer. If Paul de
Man asserted that "what we call ideology is precisely the confusion of
linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism," it was
because he understood ideology as aesthetics. The full difficulty of such a
claim becomes apparent once we realize that it is asking us to conceive of
aesthetics as, paradoxically, at once structurally necessary, structurally in­
coherent, and historically contingent-a ghostly event, haunted by its own