This writing looks into Romantic irony,
an early avant-garde idea from Friedrich Schlegel
and the Jena romantics, and relates it to
contem-porary artworks. The study revolves around the
inconsistency and contradiction that Romantic
irony creates between cognition and practice.
The study is a Research Master thesis for the University
of Amstedam, the programme of Artistic Research.
Miklos Gaál is an artist based in Amsterdam.
P
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Miklos Gaál
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P
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nalysis of a
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umber of
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Research Master thesis University of Amsterdam,
2015
Faculty of Humanities, Art Studies, Artistic Research
10620664
supervisor Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard second reader Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen Typeset in dtl Fleischmann
hello@miklosgaal.com
Miklos Gaál
2 3
Romantic Irony
Schiller’s Education. Novalis’ romanticising.
Kritik as philosophy of art.
Schlegel’s irony: exercise of plasticity of mind. Dialectics of self-contradictory statements.
Caspar David Friedrich:
Ploughed Field
Romantic irony put to practice. Irony as like imagination and actuality.
Transition between the empirical and the Geist. Dictate of rationality and instrumental reason. Increasing weight of retrospective nostalgia.
Olafur Eliasson:
The Weather Project
Irony as like a contrast of natural and artificial, illusion and awareness, emotional and conceptual. Overcoming distinctions in perceiving and understanding. Romantic unity of joining faculties.
Christoph Schlingensief:
Please Love Austria
Irony as like saying another thing than believing.
Verkehrte Welt: art as political satire.
Strategies for critical spectatorship. Art as an intentional tool.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss:
Suddenly this Overview
Irony as like loving mockery. Circulation of stories.
Self-design and fabric of self-understanding. Ambiguity of irony and authenticity.
pp. 21–33 pp. 35–43 pp. 45–55 pp. 57–65 pp. 67–75
Prelude
The opening sequence of Michael Haneke’s Hidden
Introduction
Ontology of Romanticism. Complications of the Neuzeit.
Theory and practice of the Jena romantics. Romantic irony: poetic metaphors. Analysis of 3+1 case studies.
Bibliography
Contents
pp. 5–7
pp. 9–19
4 5
Prelude
Michael Haneke’s film Hidden (Caché), 2005,
begins with a view of a street, an uneventful
fixed camera shot of what seems to be a
com-monplace Parisian living area. It is spring,
there is some birdsong, while some occasional
bikers pass across the image frame. It is not a
busy street. The film credits start to list on top
of the image. This way the boring view turns
into a fill-in image that, without drawing much
attention to it, makes the viewers sink into
settings of a place and time proper to the
sto-ry while the mandatosto-ry register of production
references gets gradually listed on the surface
of the shot. The economy of means seems one
proper to Autorenkino.
The following shot, the beginning of the actual film, is a short scene that is left unexplained for the time being: A man goes out to a street from a ground-floor house, looking for something in the dim-ness of an early evening. It is the same location as the title image. He ponders around and talks with a female voice behind in a discus-sion that remains indistinct. Next, the first image of the street view is repeated. The man and the woman are now heard to talk about this view, and actually about the very image of it, while the image starts to fast forward. It is thereby revealed, as a surprise, that the image that was seemingly a neutral establishing shot is an actual picture, video footage that the couple is examining and discussing. They observe the man appearing in the image. The narration moves out-ward, and the couple is shown discussing the video material in front of a TV set. At this point the dialogue reveals that the footage is a video cassette that has been sent to them. It is made known that the
6 7
being placed in a voyeuristic position in relation to downright dread-ful issues and ambiguous manifestations of evil, while following the characters struggling within their personal range of limits. Certainly it is much about handling complication and conflict.
Haneke shifts all together between ways of storytelling, spec-tatorship and ethical questions alike, a manner complex enough to destabilise the viewer. The grand total amounts to disturbing, rad-ically unanswered questions, making the viewer stand on-guard. It takes strength and stamina to absorb it. This not only because of the obscene presence of power, the abuse and aestheticisation of it, or suspense of manipulating you, but also because the state of mind it brings about is consuming in itself. Its intensity is coming from a cer-tain contradiction of the combination of unreasoned violence and concern. It is like being of two minds, being hateful yet empathic at the same time, a structure of feeling that is lacking consistency and internal coherence, an anarchy in cognition.
The events of Hidden emerge slowly, eventually being about how the male protagonist is confronted with a guilt for something he did in his childhood. As like often in Haneke’s pieces, the way the un-folding is structured is a method of activating the viewer, ultimately involving an ethical implication. Simply, when the viewer is given no answers to an encounter with something that it does not know how to understand, it has to define the significance by itself. This is something that requires and allows the mind to adjust to a contradic-tory reality, instead fitting reality to its own parameters. As Haneke himself put it, you can take it as you like.
hours-long recording of their house is not accompanied by any fur-ther notice and does not indicate any intentions. For all one knows, the video cassette has a disturbing feel of secret observance, of stalk-ing, maybe for purposes of threat or blackmail.
The opening sequence starts the film off fitting the uneasy man-ner of Haneke. The initial image, perceived as a neutral view for identification at first, converts its standpoint from being immanent to the world into materiality carrying a menace from outside. This is something characteristic of the director’s vocabulary, being un-settling and abstracted in equal amounts, touching cognitively and emotionally, to say the least. It involves mindful image succession, camera viewpoints and audial construct employed as a structured arrangement of differing intonations in a timeline in the way like, say, the wide tonal range of orchestral music consists of distinc-tive resonances. While the procedure of these manifold elements is sometimes applied subtly, often times going unnoticed and felt only instinctively, the opening sequence of Hidden is more articulated: by foregrounding the apparatus through a malfunction in the illusion of an image, it likewise makes the viewer think in visual terms, but in a more identifiable way. It is a precise accent that saturates the over-ture of the film.
The symbolic and semiotic operations of Haneke’s formal device correspond to his general storyline that also contrasts the content of the narrative with its presentation in myriad ways. That is, it keeps up with the play of implied sentiments and their sensible ap-pearance. For the precarious composition in Hidden, it has cast such actors for the parts of the protagonists who are popularly profiled and associated with expectations of something embraceable, even if the film has elements of cruelty and violence. However, the film is not compatible with any genre of thriller or horror because its orig-inality conflicts with standardised forms of feature films; since the odd turnaround of the first image, the viewer has by now an insight that the director is going to use what unfolds in his own way. The portrayal of the social brings ethical motifs forward with a density similar to the image, nonchalantly and in dead earnest. The horrible and the shocking is dealt with quite casually, without explanations but only with hints of causes for such behaviour. The nonchalant mode of telling contradicts expectations. It remains deadpan even in grave circumstances, creating an aura of ambiguity, like of saying one thing but meaning another, anxiety over pretence and dissimila-tion. The viewer is regularly delivered the uncomfortable feeling of
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Introduction
This writing sets out to study Romantic irony,
a concept formulated by Friedrich Schlegel and
the Jena romantics in the turn of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century Germany, and relate it
to contemporary artworks. More particularly, it
is about Schlegel’s theory and philosophy of art
reflected in the publication of the journal
Ath-enaeum during the few years of it’s publishing.
Therefore, what is at stake is a specific event of
Romanticism,
1that will be related to some case
studies of visual art works of the present-day.
Romantic irony is, as I will go to put forward,
an avant-garde idea that arose as a part of a
wid-er cultural response of Early Romanticism to a
perceived crisis of modernity. Walter Benjamin
describes the Jena romantics’ work as a practice
combining poetry, literature, philosophy and
literal criticism,
2whereas Peter Osborne
pro-poses it to be a synthesis through which poetry
(literature) achieved a philosophical definition
in becoming the modern concept of literature.
3The ideas of irony from the Jena romantics
con-1 The bare term ‘Romanticism’ will be understood in this study to refer to German Early Romanticism, and ‘Romantics’ primarily to Jena romantics and to the joint work of its circle, concentrating on Schlegel’s ideas on irony.
2 Benjamin 1919, 117 3 Osborne 2014, 50
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“Religious disappointment is born from the realisation that religion is no longer (presuming it ever was) capable of providing a mean-ing for human life. It is a problem of meanmean-ing, which continually broach ethical and political issues. While God was metaphysically as the name for the supersensory realm of ideas and ideals, the ‘true world’ of Platonism, the declaration of the death of God is the acknowledgement that the supersensory no longer has any effective power. There is no more spirituality.9
This formulation suggests that Romanticism has an underlying relation to religion, or to the mystical. It had namely turned out that the radical change of the modernity damaged an ancient faith that the Romantics detected as a loss of ‘spirituality’, something they cherished as an essential human feature and missed in the Neuzeit. The central elements of the Romantic vocabulary that were lacking in the novel terms are intuition and imagination. That is, distinctive-ly individual and subjective terms that had become oppressed and less likely to be expressed in the new world view. As a reaction to this, Romanticism strives to reconnect with the mystical and to join manifold “human faculties” that had become omitted and alienated in the modernity. The Romantic spirit is a counterweight to a rea-soning working with calculative causality that from its point of view, cannot grasp the creative whole. Like Novalis’10 famous description
of “romanticising” as a “saturation” ultimately proposes, the roman-tic cherishes imagination as undoing the supposed dichotomies that structure the modern outlook: the creative and the responsive, the expressive and the mimetic, the antagonism between imagination and reality. Proposed by Charles Larmore, this maintenance of a connection between ‘reason’ and ‘morality’ is of a necessity in or-der to unor-derstand our deepest moral convictions as the objects of autonomous choice,11 something that the Romanticism proposed
a homeopathy against. Described by George Lukács, “the effect of rationalism had been dangerous and destructive enough, and those who had the courage to oppose it had nothing to guide them but the atomistic, anarchic emotional reaction.”12 Like affirmed in Novalis’
lyrics above, the Romantic movement is not about harmonising, but about qualitative raising to a higher power through art and philoso-phy.
The poetry and literature studies of the Jena romantics were preceded
9 Critchley 1997, 2
10 Pseudonym of Friedrich Hardenberg 11 Larmore 1996, 39, 44
12 Lukács 1907, 41
tributed to an autonomous and critical distinctively modern concept of art, introducing ideas such as reflective self-criticality and dialogi-cal relationship with the audience. In this brief, sketchy monograph, the concept is reconstructed from its historical era and related to evolvements in art thereafteras an attempt to bring together some ideas from poetry and contemporary art, history and philosophy.
The Early Romanticism in Germany4 was a counter-effect to
cer-tain social outcomes established by the development of the moder-nity.5 While the Aufklärung had emancipated the individual from the
authority of religion and aristocracy alike, its ideals contrasted with the brutal complications it had resulted in and further leading to a certain discontent of the world that had arisen from the seventeenth century onwards. Simon Critchley:
The problem to which Romanticism attempts to provide a solution is that of how to reconcile the values of the Enlightenment – secu-larisation, humanism, the primacy of reason of science – with the disenchantment of the world that those values of seem to bring about. The post-religious or post-traditional values of the seven-teenth century somehow fail to connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, with the stuff of everyday life, and lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relations. […] (T)he proper name for this breakdown is modernity, and the task of philosophi-cal modernity. Those familiar with the landscape of philosophiphilosophi-cal modernity will recognise this situation as a description of the prob-lem of nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.6
Thus the mental background for the Jena romantics is “the dy-ing eighteenth century of rationalism, of the fightdy-ing, in which the hope that nothing was ultimately out of reason’s reach was being de-stroyed.”7 Following Critchley, it was not the case that the
Frühro-mantik or the Jena romantics would oppose the moral values of frühe Neuzeit,8 but the way they had become a mere instrumentalised
ideol-ogy, leading not only to terror of violence, but also to terror of reason:
4 Early German Romanticism, Frühromantik, is usually defined as a period shorter than a decade, starting from mid-179os after the afermath of the French revo-lution and stretching to the next century. Beiser 2003, ix.
5 Following Rheinhard Koselleck, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ is not un-derstood here as having a fixed meaning of any specific era or time point, but a tenet being for progressiveness and opposed to tradition. These terms are used in this text parallel with ‘Enlightenment’. Koselleck 1979: 25
6 Critchley 1997, 2, 85 7 Lukács 1907, 42
8 Following Koselleck, the modernity until the French revolution is ‘frühe Neuzeit’, and thereafter ‘Neuzeit’. Koselleck 1979, 11, 255, 269. In addition, ‘Aufklärung’ is used at times in this text for ‘Enlightenment’.
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interruption of discourse that includes simultaneous affirmation and negation. This is done for specific ends: while the artist questions the impression or the thought created by the work, it generates an ambiguity that is in a dialogical circulation with its recipient. The general idea about it is, that the work employs confusion as a pro-gressive and creative process and criticality towards itself. Like im-plied in the passage above, for the poet Schlegel this stands for not being fully immersed in the sentiments or in the surrounding con-ditions created by the fabrication of words depicting them, but to maintain criticality towards them, to foster independency. The dis-tance of irony provides a detachment and outwardness that a critical understanding requires in general, a reservation that functions as a neutralising counterweight to the absorption in emotion and in the existing circumstances. It is an attitude of reflection that conforms the sense of where we stand as a constant approximation of our ide-als amounting to an awareness that belonging to a belief can never be total and all-absorbing. Thereby, better said in present-day terms, the ‘irony’ of Romantic irony is criticality and awareness.
Following Paul de Man, irony is more than a stylistic trope or an emphatic effect18 but an ontological meaning which takes beyond
ex-isting beliefs and given truths by problematising these by it’s specu-lative method. For Schlegel, both irony and enthusiasm (or any oth-er respective contrasting oppositions that would be juxtaposed) are worthless without the other. The process involves tempering oppos-ing tendencies, but is, however, not meant to tame them, for the Ro-mantic is about Potenzierung, enhancing distinctive features, that are thereby put in proportions. Without the “grounding attachment” of the ironic treatment, suggested by de Mul, the thought tends to become definitive, rigid.19 Perhaps this is what Schlegel meant with
his much quoted passage of how “it is equally deadly for the mind to have system and to have none; it consequently will decide to con-nect to both states.”20 Back in the day, the terms Schlegel applied
were ‘system’ as opposed to ‘intuition’. More fitting terms for the opposing elements in the current would be, perhaps, ‘latent’ versus ‘manifest’, or ‘conscious’ versus ‘unconscious’: namely, what is also central to Romantic irony is that it involves a specific involuntary spontaneity. This is due to it’s conviction that full awareness and
18 de Man 1977: 164
19 de Mul 1990, 10. See also Safranski 2007, 34 20 In: Szondi 1952, 61
by a literary movement that had begun a generation earlier with the influence of Goethe, Schiller, Sturm und Drang, and Johann Gottfried Herder.13 The concept of Romantic irony emerges in the group
found-ed by brothers Schlegel, who concentratfound-ed much reflecting on a philo-sophical standpoint characterised by way of his theory of irony.14
Irony is a means of maintaining several simultaneous meanings in expression that creates a certain self-opposing contradiction. In essence, it is to encompass opposing elements to introduce an inter-nal irresolvable contradiction or logical disjunction in a text. Jos de Mul summarises Schlegel’s irony as a unity of enthusiasm and per-suasiveness together with a distance of irony.15 Encompassing such
opposite drives is a specific means to temper a balance and keeping overwrought desires in check. This is reflected in the following indi-vidual passage of Schlegel’s numerous fragments:
In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it; the thought which is to be soberly ex-pressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one’s actual concern. As long as the artist invents and is inspired, he remains in a constrained state of mind, at least for the purpose of commu-nication. […]. Thus he fails to recognise the value and dignity of self-restraint, which is indeed for both the artist and the man, the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest goal. The most necessary: for whoever we do not restrain ourselves, the world will restrain us; and thus we will become its slave. […] (On the other hand), one has to be on guard against hastening too much towards self-restraint, but allow self-creation, that is, invention and enthusi-asm, to develop until it has matured and come fully into being.16
In Poesie, art in general as an aesthetic practice (the Jena Roman-tics did not make further distinctions between art and their practice in it), Romantic irony would often mean the author suggesting an illusion, while simultaneously questioning it. As an artistic “for-mal” device, it would often emphasise certain artificiality. For an art work this might mean playing with ideas and moods of dissimilar tendencies, or contrasting reality and fiction in a way that one does not know for sure which part is supposed to be taken “seriously”. Benjamin describes its artificiality as “an ironisation of form as-sailing the form without destroying it, but disturbing its illusion.”17
Schlegel frequently deploys a repeated shift of rhetorical register, an
13 Safranski 2007, xiii
14 Benjamin 1919, 161; Larmore 1996, 76, Safranski 2007, 34 15 de Mul 1990, 13, 25
16 In: de Man 1977, 170ff. 17 Benjamin 1919, 163
14 15
the view on Romantic irony might be conditioned by what Critch-ley describes as the nihilism of nineteenth century,25 or what Eric
Hobsbawm describes as the escalation of the Late Romantic period to sentimental baroque,26 as well as the later avant-garde movements
in art as counter-reactions to these alike. At the same time, Roman-ticism remains a phase in art that defines many things that still might resonate in different contemporary practices. As described by Peter Sloterdijk, the Romantic impulse was not irrational, but the last ef-fort to join capacities that diverted from each other27 in the
moderni-ty. Another elevated way to describe it is the postmodernist reading of it of de Mul, considering the Romantic spirit as a phase that is becoming self-conscious of its development.28
The potentiality of proposing a series of thought exercises around the relationship between Romantic irony and contemporary art, as I will go on to propose, is that the fundamental characteristic of involving polarities can overcome their conventionally perceived binary nature, in order to create a world based of their much more nuanced tensions, and to explore blurry lines between opposing terms or tropes. Essentially, the radical incompatibility of an in-ternal contradiction is overruled by artworks that create a complex structure of feeling that is evasive when tried to get nailed down, a critical “third state” of sorts.
In general, it seems sensible to read works of art with the Schlegelian principle to challenge conventionalities, as fitting art-works to any specified, reducing tendency is often posing a restric-tive polarity. Divisions, dichotomies, or oppositions can provide clarifying separations in some things, but remain often misleading as reproducing and repeating the given terms only, without giving an opportunity to overcome the oppositional organisation. As an example, this is reflected by Jörg Heiser while proposing affil-iations between the conceptual works of the 1960s and Romanti-cism: “Surely distance or self-awareness does not exclude emotion-al affect. Why could a work of art be not mentemotion-ally interesting (as in “conceptual”) and emotionally rich (as in “Romantic”)? Perhaps an emotional investment might focus rather than distract, support rather than undermine”.29 In a like manner, it must be the case that
in the rich experience of art the detachment of critical distance does
25 Critchley 1997, 2, 85ff 26 Hobsbawm 1962, 183 27 Sloterdijk 1987, 118 28 de Mul 1990, 18ff 29 Heiser 2002, 70
intentionality21 kills something, because they tend to evaporate the
exciting tension and to ground the meaning to the subjective and the purposive. Instead, it is of substance that the ambiguous circulation stays out of reach of the author – following de Mul, it is specifically because of leaving the meaning radically open that Romantic irony embodies the fundamental openness towards new experiences22 as it
hinders from falling into an illusion of an absolute interpretation of the world,23 celebrating the unknown and the unexplained.
Schlegel contests ideas of art and irony imposing an individual way of being that is not bound to circumstances, involving intui-tion and connecting to unattainable infinity. For him, art is a form of thought that asks what it is, enabling the subject to have access to the “truth”, and that attempts to determine the conditions and lim-its of the subject’s access to it. Whereas the meaning of the work of art contains an “infinite number of possible interpretations that cannot be comprehended by finite reason”,24 it can only surface in
the fundamentally open history of the aesthetic experience of that work. Schlegel’s theory of irony meditates itself in art, releasing an unattainable, abstract and speculative light that remains inevitably out of reach. It suggests that art is radiating an inner truth, or, in fact, it is not art at all.
To contest Jena romantics’ ideas of Romantic irony, I will contrast their ideas with art of the present. In order to do this, this writing will briefly look into the historical conditions of the Romantic’s time, the antechamber to our present epoch, to reconstruct an im-pression of the art of it’s time comparing it into later evolvements within art. Yet this writing is not about historical development, this is for the purpose of evaluation: after all, these are the terms that Romantic irony is estimated upon, being affected by the later devel-opments of modernity, just like there are many popularised views about Romanticism and around the character of its art. Certainly
21 With ‘intentionality’ I refer primarily to deliberate and purposive thought and gesture. It is a central element at work with Romantic irony, as like put forward above, being connected to a suggestion of awareness of itself, that on the other hand avoids a definite, fixed purpose, an on the other mindfully emphasises a fabricated, illusional nature of it within an art work. For the Jena romantics, these amount to the metaphorical nature of art that takes place in the reception of the work and by the recipient. Ultimately it is about performativity of aesthetic, a standpoint to a work of art, if one is to take the image as a creation of an author or the image as what it consti-tutes to us.
22 de Mul 2009, 171 23 de Mul 1990, 24 24 de Mul 1990, 10, 30
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beyond the mediation of pre-established categories.
In the next chapter I will account Romantic irony by comparing it to a lineage in the Romantic Geist, and thereafter from a viewpoint of its figurative mode of cognition. This relates to the succeeding case studies as they all involve a contrast of oppositions of some sort that cannot be taken literally because of their contradictoriness, but transfer a meaning individually. Like Schegel’s irony proposes, instead of cancelling each other, combining conflicting drives can show the relativeness of habitual constructs and describe the view-er’s experience that it creates between cognition and practice, that is not deductible from the elementaries. Therefore the analysis in comparison with the mode of metaphor.
For the case studies, I will go on to ponder Olafur Eliasson’s in-stallation The Weather Project that creates a theatrical stage of it’s own illusion, as it’s synthesis of affirmation and negation of irony, being informed by the conscious and the unconscious alike. The in-stallation challenges the traditional binary in the arts of the ‘intel-lect’ versus the ‘sensual’, the deep-rooted opposition of intuition and logic, as well as the predicate that illusory engaging art makes the viewer passive. The work creates a state of being of it’s own that joins different ways of comprehension both as a sensuous and aware experience.
Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria is likewise based on a certain contradiction, on a parodic turnaround as a critique of xen-ophobia. The work is considered through the possibility for art for a directed impact: as a form of art as activism, a public social process, the work is structured in a manner that makes the viewers confront and explain it according to themselves. For the viewpoint of Ro-mantic irony, it is proposed that it was specifically Schlingensief’s contradiction between how things are and how they are represented that declined the audience the opportunity to rely on any affirming standpoint to the Kunstaktion. Since the work had to be confronted without ready means of knowing how to understand it, it created conditions for acting out sentiments successfully without turning into propaganda.
The case study of Suddenly this Overview from Peter Fischli and David Weiss considers a simple but unorthodox state of mind: sin-cere irony. While the work seems to suggest both devotion and iro-ny, it is hard to accept for the sense that the ambiguity of irony is often subject to a disapproving stance, therefore making the work not have to mean lack of engagement, or that the somber does not
close off the nonchalant, or that the deadpan does not cancel out the ability to understand the feelings of another, while represent-ing threpresent-ings through a particular domination of a tendency omits a work of art as a consistent entity in itself. Comparing works of art with Romantic irony can be liberating in this respect as the com-plexity of art is not, evidently, designed to respond to existing ex-planations, but its autonomic experience creates an singular way of being. I am first and foremost interested in Romantic irony to test if it could be a capable tool to identify how the “internal aporia” of it, the challenge of the tricky combining of contradictoriness, can describe a complex structure of feeling that does not fit to reductive explanations. Perhaps a discrepancy makes a change of perspective challenging the viewer’s outlook, a meta-position possible that is, following Schlegel, not bound to circumstances.
The elasticity to meaning of Romantic irony overrules differen-tiations as incompatibilities, or inconsistent tendencies and allows things to act themselves, celebrating the unknown and the unex-plained, out of control of an author and the dictate of the finite. It implies a transposition from a technical to a metaphysical level, or as like in irony in general, an exchange between literal and figurative meaning – simply, since irony does not have a fixed meaning, it inev-itably makes a transfer in meaning because of being a metaphorical act that converts things in a way that does not resemble the source. Such are the dialectics of Romanticism. Like Lukács resonantly put it, “where everything is deeply lived and properly understood, there can be no real contradictions”.30
To this end, Schlegel’s Poesie is shifted to visual arts. The case studies give detailed comparisons to three instances of contempo-rary art works as analyses through Romantic irony. Romantic irony is interpreted in visual terms through works that involve some sort of internal aporia: the studied works are chosen in order to bring in orthodox contrasts of elements, sentiments and settled ways of thinking, such as natural and artificial, immersion and awareness, absorption and distance, involvement and detachment. The pro-posed comparison with contemporary art is both evident and far-fetched. Following the spirit of the Jena romantics, it is not really a question of shifting categories, or of the aesthetic to the episte-mological either, because the attitude of the Kritik and that of the artist are similar: both strive to study the world and its appearances
30 Lukács 1907, 44
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writing. Let us say that it is simultaneously the concluding chapter and the introduction alike, a visual Overtüre of the themes, unspeci-fied but comprehensive.
Note.
This text is a sketch of the study. I apologise the unfinished character and the defects in lan
guage.
perceived as contradictory. The effect of the ambiguity of the work is further reflected upon modernist circulation of stories, myths and images, being connected to irony being perceived as mode of com-munication and as a social tool in the self-representation of that an individual establishes with oneself in the modernity. The problem-atics that the work point out comes to be about a certain mistrust, of a settled way of associating irony with lack of concern and sympathy toward others. This way, what becomes revealed is that it requires confidence and courage to enjoy the rich and vivid state of mind that both have to offer.
There is also one case study example of historical visual art from Caspar David Friedrich. As a character appearing slightly later to the Jena circle, Friedrich can be seen as responding to some transi-tional operations of irony, while diverging in some others. From an antiquarian perspective, Friedrich’s plan of sensory imprinting de-ploying the form of his art is much conditioned by the incompatibili-ty between his experience and the thorough shift between early and late Romantic times. It is difficult to conceive Friedrich as Romantic irony today, since his works might appear to us like historical rem-nants, since the meanings of his elementaries have lost their original charge and is therefore only poorly compatible today with the effect that Romantic irony is suppose to evoke.
The preluding chapter in this writing about the opening se-quence of a Michael Haneke film introduces some recurring themes of the study, albeit in a way that does not specify the points of in-terest or relevance. In general, the chapters do not develop a sin-gle argument, but associations constitute an underlying body that draw upon the previous ones while presuming each other irregular-ly. Varying themes connected to the Frühromantik appear in a di-alogue between irony and art, romanticism and modernity; hence the allusion to reappearing motifs in the title. There is no separate conclusion.
Apart from this text, this thesis consists also of another book, a second “volume” to this study that is comprised exclusively of imag-es. It is a collection of individual pictures, small art works: photo-graphs and drawings, sketches and snapshots that represent varied ideas, observations and phenomena reflecting on some themes of the study. These are not done in comparison to Romantic irony (at least consciously), but nevertheless they have emerged from certain personal and artistic interests that, for me, resonate with Romantic irony. In fact, these have been a central interest for the subject of this
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Romantic irony
Schiller’s Education. Novalis’ romanticising.
Kritik
as philosophy of art. Schlegel’s irony.
Exercise of plasticity of mind. Dialectics of
self-contradictory statements.
The Jena romantics gathered around the literary journal Athenäeum1
backgrounded by the cultural movement2 of Early Romanticism.
The counter-effect to the crisis of modernity they subscribed to was attempting to “aestheticise” life, to bring art together with philos-ophy and morality. The circle of romantics in Jena consisted of a group of young friends and scholars with varying backgrounds,3
be-ing a prime example of joinbe-ing ‘art’ and ‘life’ themselves: they were active in poetry, literature, literal criticism, and philosophy of art alike; as Schöngeists they did not approach their objects only through pure theoretical thinking nor merely in measure of practice, but “art of living was one of self-adaptation, carried through with genius, to all events of life”.4
1 Athenaeum appeared twice a year for a short-lived period of some three years,
was the theoretical organ of the early Romantic movement in Germany. It was edited by the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and included contributions chiefly by Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the editors (Benjamin 1919, 186; Critchley 1997, 98). Other names associated with the Jena circle, many of them hardly known outside the circle of friends in their time, are Ludwig Tieck, Sophie Mereau, Friedrich Hölderlin, Clemens Brentano, Caroline Böhmer (Safranski 2007: 40). 2 Beiser 2003: x
3 What brought them together as a shared starting point was the bold evocation to become artists, opposing the wishes of their respective backgrounds. Some of the Jena romantics came from prominent backgrounds, while some of them were self-made men as the first high educated persons of their families enabled by the popular Enlightenment. Safranski 2007, 54, 69. The members of the Jena circle had varying records in education, many of them having attended and remained in contact with the Jena University, mainly involving philosophical and literal studies. (During this time, the German university in-stitution included philosophy as a composite name for many different disciplines divided into grammar, rhetoric including history as a part of it, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, being a base under three main faculties of theology, law and medicine). Beiser 2011, 19ff.
22 23
but it opens up something that the beholder has in itself, while this inner truth is brought into the world by the artist; or that art for the sake of any utility is not art but that only if it serves its own purposes can it happen that it also serves an utility outside itself. Besides their Romantic tone, these seem distinctively modern definitions of art alike.
Also Romantic irony, the concept that became a central theory about art for them, was much about the particularity of a work of art, and less about the specificities of the aesthetic experience. ‘Ro-mantic irony’ is a name given later, an affirmation to the elusive con-cept elaborated by Schlegel, one that however does not specify its character too informatively: ‘Romantic irony’ is a specific concept used and envisioned by Schlegel and the Jena circle (and not to be taken as any subcategory of any universal type of irony, because there is no general application about the ironic), an avant-garde con-cept out of the very heart of modern age. It is intelligible only in the light of Romantic philosophy, its epistemology, ethics, and politics. Essentially, Romantic irony is a method of reflection and criticali-ty. It is a form of contemplation and pensive thought that discloses the world beyond practical, theoretical or ideological structuration. The maverick of it’s proposal is that it questions the habitual rela-tion between the work of art and the spectator in a manner that is distinctively aware and critical of itself, and it is for that reason that it is critical – it can change the existing framework of experience and constitute the terms for experiencing it anew. Similar to Critch-ley’s description of “true” humour, it “changes the situation, tells us something about who we are and the sort of place we live in, and perhaps indicates to us how it might be changed.”10 Or like Rancière
would put it, it is ultimately a matter of the “politic”,11 an idea that
questions the whole fabric of how things are established, effacing it-self in the coupling of consensus and infinite justice.
To be sure, the bold ideas from Schlegel and the Jena circle reflect a meta-perspective of sorts, towards art and referring to itself. The movement was, in general, a critical angle to modernity, opposed against its impacts. By the end of the dying century the reason-ing paradigm established in the Enlightenment had resulted such a rapid effect that the static hierarchical ideal of the past seemed tre-mendously remote, and the present had turned out to be radically destructive. The frühe Neuzeit had been a set of events and social,
10 Critchley 2002, 11 11 In: Bishop 2012, 28
The closer backdrop for the group was literature, and more spe-cifically, it was much about philosophy of literature. As like Walter Benjamin proposes, literature was for Jena Romantics means of crit-ical study of art,5 in which ‘art’ tends to mean primarily poetry as an
all-encompassing form of it. Benjamin:
The Romantics use the term Kritik in multiple senses. […] It means criticism as the criticism of art, not as epistemological method and philosophical standpoint. […] (Through their practice) the word was elevated to the latter meaning at that time in connection with Kant as an esoteric term for the incomparable and completed philo-sophical standpoint.6
Friedrich Schlegel, a poet, formulated an idea of art as a meth-od of awareness and attentiveness having much similar aspirations, demands and tasks as philosophy, a method of reflection that was centred in the practice of criticism. Literature is raised in
Kunstkri-tik to a second potent: because the evaluation criteria is constituted
specifically by the work of art itself, by art passing the judgement on the work in itself, criticism is not evaluation rather than method of consummation.7 Thus, criticism may be nothing else than
reflec-tion opening in and transmitted by an artwork itself. That is, if that would be the case. Namely, in Schlegel’s view, many art works did not represent the true being of art, being an experience on its own right, and if his elusive criteria for this “autonomous pocket” would be not satisfied, it would be not interesting art, and, in fact, not art at all.
While the work of Jena romantics is sometimes referred to as Romantic criticism, for their contemporaries their proposed ide-as would go simply by the name of Romantic poetry (romantische
Poesie)8, and sometimes their overall work is referred to discretely
as the Jena romantics.9 Altogether, the Jena circle formulated
sev-eral things that could be recognised as distinctively Romantic no-tions of art: such as that art educates and changes the beholder by revealing things and making one become something that one has not previously been; that art is not to repeat what people already know
5 In ordinary usage, however, Kritik carried the sense of a well-founded judgement. The term “art critic” came to prevail over the older term “art connois-seur” with the Romantics. Benjamin 1919, 142
6 Benjamin 1919, 117 7 Benjamin 1919, 153, 161 8 Beiser 2003, 106
9 In many cases it is not possible to identify a single originator from the co-authorship of the group. “The Romantics were concerned with emphasising the directions and lines of thought common to them all, and sometimes they synthesised the most widely differing ideas in the form of an aphorism” Lukács 1907, 47
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Gottlieb Fichte in philosophy. On the whole the Early Romanticism set up a reaction against some paradigms posed by modernity, like the utopist, unconditional trust in rationality, opposing against its concept of a linear progress of a future not only changing society at an increasing rate, but also improving it, as it were, destined to be so. What was problematic about this for the Romantics was that it had embedded in itself a belief that human society and individual man could be brought to perfection by the same application of rea-son that made man’s scientific knowledge and technical control over the physical world. It drew its force and methods from science, in this instance chiefly the mathematics and physics of the seventeenth century scientific transformation,16 and had become an ideology.
Obviously, there was crisis involved in its unconditional beliefs. The promising ideas of shaking off the oppression and the hierarchies based on religion or birth or some other now irrelevant criterion had lead to uncontrollable disasters. The French revolution had ended up betraying its own humanitarian ideals and the ground-breaking British innovations had kicked off an unpredictable and turbulent series of events resulting in increased inequality and disorder of an industrial age. Mentally, the Aufklärung was to set all human beings free, but the overwhelming primacy of rationale omitted certain as-pect of the subjective experience of the individual, leading to divi-sion and narrowing down of the very self of humanness. The Early Romanticism picked up what they identified as fragmentation of the mind in the bourgeois society that had come to stand under the dic-tate of utility and separated roles.
This development and critique was already reflected in the work of Kant in his three “Critiques”, 1781–1790, aiming to explain the rela-tionship between logical thought and human experience, the intuition and the concept,17 in distinctive terms, but as like Safranski proposes,
it is Schiller’s On The Aesthetic Education of Man (Über die ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen), 1794, that is the opening to the Romantic
revolution in literature.18 According to Schiller, an essential facet of
human nature19 had become oppressed in favour of domination of
the-oretical and practical reasoning, ensuing a foundational alienation:
16 Hobsbawm 1962, 235
17 Martin 2007b, 40; de Mul, 4; Osborne 2014, 54 18 Safranski 2007, 12
19 The German der Mensch Schiller uses is a reflection of humanity in general, as like in ‘human being’, ‘human kind’ whereas Erziehung refers to promotion and support of emotional and intellectual development of an individual in order to find own potential (in distinction to Bildung, that has an alike meaning of shaping and forming through education, but more inclined towards culture in general).
political and cultural transformations in which the reception and ef-fects of new information started an accelerating development lead-ing to scientific and mental revolution.12 Originally initiated by ideas
coming from protestant seafarer nations of England and Holland, it had been in France that the Esprit philosophique allowed scholars to identify an unity among the variegated scientific and technologi-cal breakthroughs, and to describe the transformation they brought about specifically in the capabilities of an individual. As a conse-quence, borrowing Hobsbawm’s lyrical phrasing, “two simultane-ous eruptions of a twin crater” took place, the French revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous British industrial revolution: it was by this time the ideals of the Enlightenment had kicked in effect, and the two revolutions were “only a natural outcome” of them, taking place in the two leading centres of the active, self-made, reasoning and progressive citizen of the future, representing a larger regional volcano of its era.13
By this time no one could fail to observe that the world was trans-formed more radically than ever before, and no thinking person could fail to be awed and mentally stimulated by them.14 Yet, there
was also an eruption occurring in Germany, so to speak, a more con-templative revolution of a philosophical-aesthetic kind. The Ger-mans constituted back then a somewhat backward, rural province, but more a local culture, where political and societal issues would not be that acute by that time. Despite of being a patchwork of sep-arate protectorates subject to duchies and kingdoms and not a unite state, there would be a certain German identity, a Geist that defined the German “revolution”, influenced by moderate liberalism and ide-alism organised around the value of totality15 rather than that of
com-mitment, and concentrating on the construction of elaborate general systems of thought.
For the movement of the Frühromantik, the influence of the French revolution and it’s brutal after-effects contrasted with the inheritance of German idealism, of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Johann
12 Edelstein 2010: 25, 26
13 Hobsbawm 1962, 2, 21. Annotation: what is excluded in here is the two prior revolutions of the Enlightenment taking place outside Europe: the establishing of the United States of America as independent from England, France and Spain in 1776, and the Haitian revolution of 1791, a coup d’état by the creole population against its French establishment.
14 Hobsbawm 1962, 293
15 Lukács: “…while at German universities one book after another under-mined and destroyed the proud hope of rationalism.“ Lukács 1907, 42.
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paradoxical dialectic.24
The Romantic response to this was to draw the revolution into the literary-philosophical world as a productive principle of abol-ishing the socially constructed split in the field of mind and spirit. The creativity and intuitiveness it cherished aimed to rediscover an animating energy, the unity that had become lost somewhere on the way. This is reflected next by Novalis in a passage that is widely held as the central definition of the ‘Romantic’:
By giving higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious stature to the everyday, the value of the unknown to the known, and the appearance of the infinite to the finite, I romanticise them. And, by inverting the process with regard to the higher, the unknown, the mysterious, and the infinite […] they receive an ordinariness of expression.25
Like this, to romanticise, to aestheticise the world does not mean to idealise the reality, or to create harmony, but to “saturate”. The saturation begins from the individual itself; it is to extract an essence of a being, to radiate something that is already inherent. Similar to Schiller’s Spieltrieb, it proposes communication between different “faculties”, in which art is not a sterile, separate field of aesthetic, but entails a reality inseparable from the creative imagination. Ac-cording to this view, imagination plays a central role in structuring our very sense of reality, simply because it creates forms of under-standing by which we articulate our experience. This way life re-quires imagination, because rational principles are not displayed in human motifs, so intuitive operations are required to be applied to concepts in which order does not present itself, finding a hidden uni-ty by following the steps what the intuitive reveals in the varieuni-ty of nature. In this, according to Novalis, the poet’s (artist’s) task is to show the position of the imagination, that Charles Larmore propos-es in his account on Romanticism to be ultimately a moral qupropos-estion: because the deepest moral convictions cannot be understood as the objects of autonomous choice, it is necessary to maintain a connec-tion between ‘reason’ and ‘morality’.26
The Jena romantics’ concept of irony emerges from this scenery, becoming a central theme for Schlegel especially. In like manner, he labels his age a “chemical” one, consisting in separating and mixing
24 Critchley 1997, 10. Annotation: and prior to this, Hölderlin and Hegel. 25 In: Beiser 2003, 20; Benjamin 1919, 153; Larmore 1996, 8; de Mul 1990, 7; Safranski 2007, 30
26 Larmore 1996, 10, 15, 69. See also Lukács 1907, 50
“(A)n enlarged experience and a more distinct thinking necessitated a sharper separation of the sciences, while on the other, the more complicated machinery of states necessitated a stricter sundering of ranks and occupations. Intuitive and speculative understanding took up a distrusting attitude in opposite fields; and by limiting its operation to a narrow sphere, men have made unto themselves a master who is won’t not unfrequently to end by subduing and oppressing all the other faculties.” 20
According to Schiller, it was an effect of the Neuzeit to impov-erish the individuals with regard to the development of their indi-vidual capabilities and varied inclinations, and put forward that this conflicted with the natural intuitiveness and creativity of the man-because of the logical thought works with concepts of causality and cannot grasp the creative whole. Instead, for Schiller, one needs to reconnect with a natural intuition and imagination proposing a theory of “play: only when the individual abandons himself to his aesthetic Spieltrieb can nature and freedom, and thus also theoretical and practical reason be reconciled, and only then can the individu-al become a human individuindividu-al in the full meaning of the term.21 For
Schiller, it is art, precisely, that can educate and refine our sensibili-ties, capable to make man free22 by putting us in a contemplative
re-lationship to the finiteness of our lives that we actually, even if only for a mere moment, transcend it.23
His Education was a manifesto that singled out how the “theo-retical culture” of the Enlightenment had became a mere terror of reason, in which gradual processes of societal and cultural rationali-sation and economic capitalirationali-sation had lead to an irreversible break-down of traditional practices. This effect of alienation would con-tinue thereafter as an omnipresent development in throughout the modernity thereafter. Critchley puts its later dialectics casually on the table:
The historical pathology of which nihilism is the diagnosis consists in the recognition of a double failure: That the values of modernity or Enlightenment fail to connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, but – worse still – they lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relations through processes that we might call, with Weber, rationalisation, with Marx, capitalisation, with Adorno and Horkheimer, instrumental rationality, and with Hei-degger, the oblivion of Being. Such is Enlightenment’s fateful and
20 Schiller 1794, letter vi. In: Safranski 2007, 15 21 de Mul 1990, 7
22 Safranski 2007, 13
23 See also: Rancière on Schiller. Rancière 2002, 133, 134ff
28 29
things have to be expressed in existing circumstances that are their conditions; the conditions, however, are not to be taken as the prem-ises or any justification or understanding, because the experience is something that raises above them. It starts in curiosity and disap-pointment alike, of not finding reason, meaning, or justice respond-ing to the experience of the world, reachrespond-ing to somethrespond-ing that the existing terms are insufficient for.
For Schlegel, the richness of reality could only be appreciated in a multiplicity of perspectives. Therefore the multiple-mindedness of Romantic irony. It strives to overcome what de Man describes as po-etry being condemned to be literary to the extent that it is dependent on figuration:34 the conviction of irony, instead, of not expressing
things in dead earnest is to guard the belief that the reality is more complex, elusive and undefinable that a any single, determined view on it could present. This way, irony amounts simply to the awareness that belonging to a belief can never be total and all-absorbing35 but
in-stead, Schlegel’s idea was to involve confusion as an addition of gen-erosity36 to a fixed view. The maintenance of concurrent meanings is
a method of relativising that requires openness to meaning and abil-ity to understand and enjoy confusion and doubt. The structure of a feeling with uncertainty and bewilderment makes Romantic irony a quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex aesthetic and emotional influences. It is an exercise of plasticity of mind. Similar to what might often be associated with the ‘ironic’ in every-day speech, Romantic irony maintains several meanings at the same time. It is, basically, something said being contradictory to how things are in reality, a tension between the surface and an underly-ing meanunderly-ing. It responds to the metaphorical capacity of language as described by de Man, that, in all traditional definitions, a turn-ing away from the meanturn-ing as a deviation between literal and figural meaning.37 This entails a certain ambiguity: one cannot determine,
without doubt, how to relate to what is expressed, whether it can be trusted to be what it appears to be, but it will ever remain open which aspects of the circulating figures of speech should be taken se-riously or sober, “literally” or “prosaic”, and which parts of it should be ignored in order to sustain an “intelligible” line of meaning. At all events, it involves a transfer of meaning: something is called to
34 de Man 1978, 50 35 Larmore 1996, 77 36 Safranski 2007, 34 37 de Man 1977, 164ff.
where “all relationships have been destroyed or at least have become questionable and subject to reflection”.27 Schlegel’s proposal to his
perceived alienation was to employ irony. Irony was his rendering of the Spieltrieb, a resolution that can emancipate the mind from regulated thought to yet unknown applications and to an abundant sphere of surprising meanings, “to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination.28 For romantic works, Beiser
summarises Schlegel settling on a characterisation of three definitive qualities: ‘fantasy’, ‘mimesis’, and ‘sentimentality’:
A romantic work should be fantastic in that the author’s imagina-tion recognises no law above himself and combines materials freely plays with elements freely; it should be imitative in that it should contain a portrait of its whole age or reproduce the fullness of life; and it should be sentimental, not in the sense of expressing feelings, but in the sense of resonating the spirit of love.29
This is not to say that Schlegel would be interested to make precise and exact definitions, because his idea about art was specifically about eternal strive for an unreachable ideal – the general Roman-tic spirit of speculativeness is manifested as a central characterisRoman-tic in his irony, consisting in a mixture of inclinations and appetites of the Romantic vocabulary in order to fuse poetry and philosophy, as a longing for infinity and an attempt to portray the individual and a whole age.30 Schlegel’s irony is a practice that naturally involves
contemplative thought and questioning, by reason of the same de-mand for awareness, attentiveness and wonder. For Schlegel, irony is a constant approximation to our ideals between the unconditioned and conditioned, the aesthetic version of the philosopher’s eternal striving for truth31 being the
origin of all poetry, to suspend the notions and the laws of rational thought and to replace us within fantasy in the original chaos of human nature, for which ‘mythology’ is the best name.32
Benjamin proposes that the “criticality” of the Jena romantics was to elevate thinking beyond restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight of these re-strictions.33 The thesis about Romantic irony is thus very simple:
27 In: Szondi 1952, 58 28 In: Safranski 2007, 45 29 In: Beiser 2003, 13 30 Beiser 2003, 110 31 Beiser 2003, 129, 130 32 In: de Man 1977, 181 33 Benjamin 1919, 142 Romantic irony
was for which irony provide that would
30 31
things. Being a combination of timing, rhythm and unexpected as-sociations, Romantic irony detects previously unseen connections and alliances caught off-guard. These affiliations between Schlegel’s irony and general attributes of humour are especially with Schlegel’s technique of writing in fragments.41
de Mul’s characterisation of Romantic as a combination of enthu-siasm and distance of irony42 is fitting in the way it describes a strive
to find unity in conflicting drives and desires. The ambiguity of Ro-mantic irony is much about the way how this kind of a proposed con-trast of elements interact in a synthesis, both themselves and in the recipient alike. In the contrast of opposites, their referents become compared to each other, the involved elements balance with the an-other, trying to disapprove and overrule the other in a fight of prima-cy. This ambiguity of the relation in-between creates a tension that makes Romantic irony to remain beholding contradiction. It gives a transition of meaning from one to another through a sort of double shift in meaning: it is a juxtaposition of elements challenging each other, while a layer from of the perceived mixture of their interplay eventually creates a new meaning. Firstly, we cannot know whether it is one or the other, because it is one and the other, and secondly, ultimately about their synthesis of being in multiple minds. So, not either-or, but both-and.
Romantic irony remains permanently unsolvable because it over-rules and questions itself. Its inherent questioning and tone of reser-vation brings about a floating state that is a dialogical relationship: as the discrepancy of its content is irresolvable, it is open for interpre-tation, something that takes specifically place in the reception. This way there can not happen any directed intentionality with it: it is a mix of impressions and inclinations, as well as the outlook of its re-spective interpreters, and because it does not have a fixed meaning it cannot be basic currency for communication. Instead, like Safranski says, it allows the spirit to circulate amongst, without forcing con-victions to others.43 This makes it “collective creativity” free of
in-tersubjective communication, allowing things to act out themselves without the control of an author. It is elastic to imposing interpreta-tions, sentiments, intentions in which, in Novalis’ words, “the true reader must be an extension of the author.”44
41 Critchley 1997, 99 42 de Mul 1990, 13, 25 43 Safranski 2007, 36 44 In: Safranski 2007, 35
mind as an allusion, without mentioning explicitly, in a way in which a complex play of substitutes and repetitions takes place between in-tertextual tropes. It is not in actuality what is indicated, but some-thing that characterises like the one implied, that can convey more economically by the symbol than by lengthy abstract explanations.38
Because irony cannot be taken solely at its face value, as an argu-ment, a creation, or a representation, also signifies that its meanings are not the same for everybody but that it remains a subject to singu-lar interpretation. Like de Man puts it, all hypotheses of figurative-ness of irony are symbolic and not schematic, which means that they are not reliable from an epistemological point of view.39 It’s category
shifts are radically undistinguished, and at any rate, these transitions of meaning tend to be differing between dissimilar interpretations about them, or, better said, it never falls to a single explanation, so in the end one does not know what is meant and what is not.
Adding to these general characteristics about irony, an essential element to Schlegel’s irony is also its relation to the unconscious. Striving to go against the train of reasoning thought, the ideal sta-tus of Romantic irony is something fundamentally pre-reflexive and a priori to the awareness of its object. Trying to avoid reflec-tive awareness of a consciousness is in favour of keeping away of self-awareness that tends easily to corrupt and instrumentalise, to narrow down to a specific purpose. Here, obviously, lies also a certain paradox: because Romantic irony is ideally conscious and unconscious at the same time, it can actually never be reached and remains infinitely elusive, much corresponding to the Romantic promise of an unreachable infiniteness. Critchley proposes that the best Romantic irony is not being fully aware of itself, but should, instead, connect to the spontaneous with a brevity and speed of wit.40 It is this way similar, say, to unintentional humour that it is
enjoyable by the same token, precisely by not being conscious and not been done on purpose but amounts in a comic effect through the Bergsonian absent-mindedness of the automatic and the mechanical. Unintentional humour is a type of inconsistency, a lack of compat-ibility between insufficiency and mindfulness in a situation. Like unintentional humour, Romantic irony is less enjoyable, or actually has seized to exist when it is conscious of itself. It cannot be pur-poseful. Further, Romantic irony is not unlike to the staccato fea-ture of humour, the “formal” aspect of timing that enables surprising
38 de Man 1978: 47 39 de Man 1978: 47 40 Critchley 1997: 113
32 33
from commitment or derogatory appropriation displaying cynicism. The openness of Romantic irony is similar to what de Man de-scribes as the openness of metaphor being a question of ontology, of things as they are.50 It responds to Romantic irony because its the
subversive pull of the figurative mode does not have a determined meaning, and therefore requires making one’s own conclusions in-stead of relying to any given command. The openness to meaning is not evasiveness and the ambiguity is not about of self-interest, but about cherising. The maintenance of simultaneous concurrent meanings is a method of relativising that fosters sensibility out of the subjective. It requires of mind to enjoy confusion and doubt, to ap-preciate and respond to complex emotional influences. Eventually, the outlook of embracing the unknown, the ability to enjoy ambigu-ity, contradiction, contrasting meanings as like in Romantic irony, is predicated on trust. Ultimately it is a condition that is at once artis-tic, ethical and political.
50 de Man 1978, 39
As already put forward, Romantic irony is much about criticality. A certain denunciatory capacity is implied in how Benjamin describes how it can free from all affairs because being midway that which is represented and him who represents it.45 It is not stemming from
the not from the will of the artist, but the spirit of art arising from the relation to the unconditioned.46 The inherent contradiction of
Schlegel’s irony, being committed and reserved at the same time, promotes a sense of ourselves that lies outside. It leads out of the subjective. Or, again, similar to Critchley’s illustration on jokes, it fosters enjoying the reality from a distance with the delusory, where one can suspend the actuality and yet engage in reality testing47 in a
conceptual perspective-taking. It goes beyond the command of cir-cumstances, because already the awareness of things in itself, to see oneself from a standpoint of a third, can release from being dictated and defined by the conditions around.
As art, Romantic irony is being critical about art and itself; as a Romantic extension of the enlightened humanity, it puts its own reason to use without subjecting itself to any authority, but encour-ages an own will from the individual. This way the Frühromantik contrasted the modernist aspiration for unity, totality and univer-salism, posing a critical angle to and radicalising modernity. The postmodern reading of this angle of Romanticism finds alliances: de Mul proposes Romantic irony as a precursor of postmodern scepti-cism because it challenges the modern aspiration for totality with a postmodern pluralism,48 whereas Jameson advocates Romanticism
as a manifest of a mode in which modernity continuously recasts and rewrites its own self-understanding that has existed since its incep-tion.49 Perhaps there is something in the floating state of Romantic
irony that can be seen as similar to postmodernist frivolity: the elas-ticity of Romantic irony is much about the pleasingness of taking things light-hearted and the ability to enjoy things carefree; linger-ing from flower to flower without gettlinger-ing too inflexible affiliated to any premises or to personal investments in these. Distinguishing it from later modernism, however, the Romantics remained aspira-tional – the restoration of the split of the reason and the spiritual ex-perience never fell into disbelief of its possibilities, and the irony of Jena romantics is sincere and believing in what it says and not fleeing
45 Benjamin 1919, 150 46 Benjamin 1919, 164
47 “The comedian is psychotic, whereas his audience are simply healthy neurotics.” Critchley 2002, 88
48 de Mul 1990, 15, 18ff, 246 49 Jameson 1984, 56
34 35
Caspar David Friedrich:
Ploughed Field
Romantic irony put to practice. Irony as like
imagination and actuality. Transition between
the empirical and the
Geist
. Dictate of
rational-ity and instrumental reason. Increasing weight
of retrospective nostalgia.
Popularity was one of the Jena romantics highest aims with an aspi-ration to produce a communion1 between writers and readers. (The
Romantics’ individualism was by no means not meant to isolate them – in this sense they were unlike to the later avant-garde that would withdraw itself from the judgment of the public). Johann Goethe, deeply admired critical mentor to the Jena group, was extraordinary also in this respect. His novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die
Lei-den des jungen Werthers), 1774 and 1787, and Wilhelm Meister’s Appren-ticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), 1795, are examples of literary
sensations that were both widespread and unconditional works of his art at the same time.2 For the literary output, neither Schlegel,
the other romantics, or even Novalis,3 redeemed their ambition for
an artwork that would be a literary absolute4 of their ideas and the
desire for a bestseller. A Volksbuch was never attained. Schlegel’s sole published novel after his intense work on irony, Lucinde, 1799, became rather a theory of his irony than irony in practice.5 Ludwig
1 Lukács 1907, 49. Annotation: running the printing of their journal made the Jena romantics also practicing publishers. This was much in the spirit of a cross-over practice of Enlightenment, of scholars and self-made entrepreneurs casting about for applications with improbable ideas.
2 Benjamin 1919: 172, 178; Lukács 1907, 44, 46
3 In Lukács’ estimation Novalis was the sole real artist of the Jena circle: “Novalis is the only true poet of the Romantic school. In him alone the whole soul of Romanticism turned to song, and only he expressed nothing but that soul. The others, if they were poets at all, were merely Romantic poets; Romanticism supplied them with new motifs, it altered the direction of their development or enriched it, but they were poets before they recognised Romantic feelings in themselves and remained poets after they had completely abandoned Romanticism.” Lukács 1907: 53 4 Critchley 1997, 94
