Phantom Formations

Front matter

MARC REDFIELD

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON and the Bildungsroman

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Ghostly Bildung: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

The Dissection of the State: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the Politics of Aesthetics

Postscript: The Trouble with Schiller

The Aesthetics of Sympathy: George Eliot’s Telepathy Machine Aesthetics and History: L’Education sentimentale

Index

125 134 171 201

Preface

In 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 postmodern literary theorist to encounter this paradox. Soundly humanistic Germanists have been doing so ever since the term Bildungsroman began to circulate in the early decades of the twentieth century (for another odd feature of this supposedly nineteenth-century genre is that its namebarely appears in the literary record prior to the publication of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Experience and Poetry [1906]: its currency is roughly coterminous with the professionalization 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 Bildungsroman as long as the institutions of literary criticism as we know them survive. The Bildungsroman exemplifies the ideological construction of literature 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 Bildungsroman 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 institutionalization 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 institution 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 philosophical 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 particular 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 productions transcend the system of commodity exchange which enables them. Aesthetics partakes of the emergence of the universal subject of bourgeois ideology.

Indeed, aesthetics enables and exemplifies the production of this subject. For though aesthetics has usually been subordinated to logic or ethics because 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 pedagogical force. Since its mission is to guarantee and promote spirit’s articulation 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 aesthetic 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 of certain groups and individuals, aesthetics provides a powerful selfvalidating mechanism for the representativeness of the social groups which can claim to have achieved and inherited this understanding of acculturation. 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 powerful 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 modern Western societies, and the mission of the humanities in the modern 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.” 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 sociohistorical 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 modern 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 aesthetic spiral generates the limit-term of ideology as “language.” As a philosophical 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 translates 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 incoherent, and historically contingent—a ghostly event, haunted by its own x Preface inauthenticity, yet, despite its impossible and repressed dependence on linguistic difference, possessed of enormous social and political impact.

Polemical formulations are sometimes useful so long as one keeps in mind their limitations, and clearly the most polemical way to describe this book would be as an argument for the cognitive and ethical force of “deconstruction” as a critical activity. More specifically, as is perhaps already clear, this book situates itself in the tradition of rhetorical reading associated with the work of Paul de Man. I am certainly as aware as anyone that the profession has no great wish to hear more about this critic. Indeed, it may happen that even those who value de Man’s project will feel a certain creeping lassitude at the invocation, yet once more, of this exhaustingly hypercathected proper name. Nonetheless I must ask readers to consider one more time the paradoxes of rhetorical reading: these paradoxes precisely and critically repeat those of aesthetics, and thereby allow us to begin measuring the true sociopolitical impact of aesthetic ideology. If my book has a single overriding purpose, it is to demonstrate that rhetorical reading is cultural critique and that, in the absence of a deconstructive or rhetorical analysis, cultural criticism will remain blind to the rationale and sometimes to the entire existence of the violent gestures with which aesthetic systems seek to exorcise their inability to ground their claims. Only by exposing aesthetics to the rhetorical predicament it both conceals and exacerbates is one able to explain the provenance, power, and instability of the aesthetic terminology—the language of type and stereotype, model and imitation, beauty and ugliness, prefiguration and exemplarity—that saturates the various discourses with which post-Enlightenment Western cultures have construed themselves as historical narrative, which is to say as aesthetic narratives of racial, sexual, and class identities and differences.

Both from cultural critics and Arnoldian humanists one frequently hears that the pursuit of political issues requires the sacrifice of literary concerns; yet the truth is the opposite: it is in its involuntary proximity to the self-reflexive and self-disruptive institution we now call “literature” that criticism comes into its own as ideology critique. The notion of literature, to be sure, forms part of the eighteenth-century emergence of aesthetics and may in fact be said to provide aesthetics with its most fully realized model. In the fully modern form it attains in the writings of the Jena Romantics, literature is criticism or theory: such is the full meaning (and the historical genesis) of the commonplace of the “self-conscious text” on which the scholarly and pedagogical edifice of modern criticism is built. Literature produces itself as the theory of itself, and it thereby becomes a “literary absolute,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s terms: a self-productive reflexivity that “aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the Subject.” As a mirror and model for an autoproductive, proleptic, and synecdochic con-

Preface xi sciousness, literature serves aesthetics andthe institutions of aesthetic pedagogy, most visibly as the imaginary totality of the canon and its quite real scholarly and pedagogical apparatuses.

But literature is also paradoxically incompatible with the institutions it requires and sustains, precisely because it “aggravates and radicalizes” aesthetics. In doing so, literature records the impossibility of the aesthetic synthesis— which is why literary criticism and its institutions have always inhabited a state of half-acknowledged crisis, and why any fundamental critique of aesthetics has to pass through the space of literature. At this point it is perhaps clear why I have focused this study on the Bildungsroman. The notion of this genre functions as a pragmatic, aestheticized rendering of the notion of the “literary absolute.” It translates the literary absolute into the empirical terms of human consciousness and action, proposing to confuse “reference with phenomenalism” directly and thoroughly by aestheticizing a life and thereby aestheticizing history. The Bildungsroman names a faith in the congruence of literature and aesthetics (or, in other words, a faith in the integrity of aesthetics per se) that criticism is neither able entirely to uphold or to do without. And since criticism depends on a model of literature that is already its own criticism, further light on this paradox may be obtained only from a reading of the literary texts themselves.

Given that the Bildungsroman exists only as a phantom, the choice of texts to be read is in some ways an open one but in other ways comes burdened with specific responsibilities. For any number of historical and theoretical reasons, Wilhelm Meisters Lehr jahre lies at the heart of this spectral genre. It is no coincidence that Schiller reacted with mixed enthusiasm and anxiety to Goethe's novel when he read it in manuscript about the time he was finishing On the Aesthetic Education of Man, or that Friedrich Schlegel's review of the Lehrjahre contains his most concisely paradoxical formulation of the relation between "literature" and "criticism." The issues I pursue here lead directly and insistently back to this novel and its reception. And while it is true that from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre many possible routes of inquiry spiral out, even at this point my choice of texts claims a certain rationale. I have included a chapter on Wilhelm Meisters Wander jahre, Goethe's curious "sequel" to the Lehrjahre, not just because of Goethe's importance in discussions of the Bildungsroman, but because the Wanderjahre takes the plot of Wilhelm's Bildung in directions thatlead to a searching critique of aesthetics as a political model. Subsequent chapters on George Eliot and Flaubert partly record my wish to demonstrate that aesthetics is not simply a “German" problem, but more specifically seek to track major possibilities or alternatives latent in aesthetic discourse. Eliot's Middlemarch represents the culmination of a discourse of sympathy which originates with Shaftesbury and eighteenth-century psychological aesthetics, whereas Flaubert's L'Eduxii Preface cation sentimentale takes to the limit the aestheticization of irony as pure, impersonal form. Both texts, however, demonstrate the spectral origin and potentially violent destiny of aesthetics as a politico-pedagogical model, and both suggest the irreducibility of history to aesthetic narrative.

My discussions of Eliot and Flaubert thus claim to develop issues which my discussions of Goethe adumbrate; and all of the readings seek to document, elucidate, and develop the claims I set out in the opening chapters on aesthetic ideology and the Bildungsroman. Though it is not always the case with books built on close readings, Phantom Formations does intend its chapters to contribute more or less sequentially to an ongoing argument, and I can only hope that readers interested in this book’s thesis will be willing to work through readings of three rather different, though of course also deeply related, nineteenth-century European oeuvres. With one exception the chapters are centered on canonical texts; and since Wilhelm Meisters Wander jahre is no longer much read even in German departments, I have done my best to anchor my discussion of it in plot summary. Indeed, this book’s purpose will be largely served if it manages to turn a few critical eyes, particularly in the English-speaking world, toward this last, strange, deeply political novel of Goethe’s: a text that speaks with uncanny prescience to the disastrously pragmatic techno-aesthetics of our era. That literature cannot cure history has been a source of endless, sometimes comical frustration over the last two hundred years; yet texts of this sort can at least help explain why we have invested so much in literature’s critical performance, and why it is neither simply erroneous to do so nor even a matter of choice. Literature may be a ghost, but the aesthetic machine that it discreetly haunts continues to play a major part in the production of norms of cultural identity. We can no more cease reading, or misreading, this predicament than we can cease being historical beings.

Marc REDFIELD Claremont, California

Acknowledgments

Modified portions of chapter 1 have appeared as “Aesthetic Ideology and Literary Theory,” Centennial Review 39.3 (1995); a compacted version of chapters 2 and 3 as “Ghostly Bildung: Gender, Genre, Aesthetic Ideology, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehr jahre,” Genre 26.4 (1993 [1995]); another section from chapter 3 as “Gender, Aesthetics, and the Bildungsroman,” Wordsworth Circle 25.1 (1994); a version of chapter 4 as “The Dissection of the State: Wilhelm Meisters Wander jahre and the Politics of Aesthetics,” German Quarterly 69.1 (1996); and a small piece of chapter 5 as part of “The Fictions of Telepathy,” Surfaces 2.27 (1992). I am grateful for the editors’ permission to reprint this material. The image on the title page of this book is taken from Peter Camper’s Dissertation sur les Variétés Naturelles qui caracterisent la physionomie des hommes des divers climats et des differens ages (Paris: Francart, 1792), and shows a progression of skulls from monkey through various racial “types” to the Apollo Belvedere. It is reprinted courtesy of the Bancroft Library of the University of California.

Work on this book was aided by a Fletcher Jones Research Grant for the summer of 1992. The manuscript took final shape during a sabbatical year in France, while I was enjoying the support of the Borchard Foundation during the fall of 1993 and the Camargo Foundation during the spring of 1994. I am grateful to these foundations and their respective directors, W. A. Beling and Michael Pretina, and to Provost Murray Schwartz of the Claremont Graduate School, for making this year possible. The book's publication has been assisted by a grant from the CGS Provost's Office.

xiii xiv Acknowledgments

I thank Bernhard Kendler for his support for this project, and Teresa Jesionowski for her skillful editing of the manuscript. Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Neil Hertz, and J. Hillis Miller have given me invaluable advice and encouragement over many years, as have, more recently, Marshall Brown, David Clark, Constance Jordan, Wendy Martin, Gregory Polletta, Arden Reed, and my fellow Fellows at the Camargo Foundation. My sincere thanks as well to the students of the Claremont Graduate School’s literature program; special thanks to Anita Bennett, Darcy Buerkle, Kimberley Cortner, Michael Ernest, Joel Lamore, and Daniel Scoggin, who provided crucial help with transatlantic requests for books, photocopies, and publication data; and to Kelly Douglass and Janet Retseck, who helped prepare the manuscript. Charles, Margaret, Peter, and Thomas Redfield provided constant intellectual and emotional support. My deepest debt is to Molly Ierulli; she has been part of this book since before it began. It is offered to the memory of Bill Readings, extraordinary scholar, colleague, and friend.

M. R.

If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.

—Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Critical accounts of contemporary Western literary culture invariably confront at some point the difficulty of explaining the vicissitudes of literary theory. It is hard to account in rational or pragmatic terms for the degree or kind of attention this rather forbidding academic discourse has attracted, particularly in the United States, where the threat, and even to a small extent the glamor of "theory" has achieved a certain sporadic recognition throughout higher middlebrow culture. One imagines that, somewhere, material interests must be involved: as Louis Althusser once remarked apropos of "Marxist theory," would there have been "the storms, the denunciations, the passions which we have witnessed, if nothing had been at stake except a simple quarrel over words?"! But though Althusser can discern a historically efficacious specter—“Leninism” —behind the polemics he indicates, literary theory seems a specter without substance, a phantom whose ability to scare or seduce resists easy translation into the realities of power. Critics unsympathetic to theory have thus commonly characterized it as, paradoxically, both awful and inconsequential.

But the puzzle of theory's popular reception does not lie simply in the disproportion between a hysterical reaction and its occasion or referent. Theory's representation has been far more ambiguous than, for instance, Marxism's was in the U.S. media during the McCarthy era. It is perhaps unsurprising that the hue and cry over theory has resulted in little one would wish to call official repression or censorship, given how little appears to be at stake; but the mode of resistance which theory inspires seems less tempered by tolerance than complicated by obsession. To be sure,

1. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Locke (London: New Left Books, 1976), 114; cited in Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1987), 268.

opposition to theory can manifest itself in straightforwardly violent ways; but generally speaking a thread of fascination weaves through the texture of this resistance, as though theory were the object of a hysteria inseparable from a certain fetishism. Indeed, theory may be said to have profited from its demonization, against the backdrop of which it displays its glamorous cast of master theorists—figures in whom the fetishistic drift of theory finds embodiment. With the event of theory the culture industry’s star system achieves manifestation in U.S. universities. And because theory may plausibly be said to have as its rationale the demystification of the kinds of illusions the star system exemplifies, theory has always also seemed at once radical and compromised, both from the perspectives of those practicing it and those opposed to it. The sort of hysteria that theory generates seems to encourage theory’s relative success, but this success in turn immediately gets represented as theory’s failure.2

Besides setting in motion contradictory hyperboles of power and impotence, representations of theory also entail certain obsessive associations. It is not prima facie obvious that theory should be so insistently qualifiable as “literary.” Even if for argument’s sake one assumes that something called theory was destined to enter the spotlight as the activity of a rather fictional “Yale School,” one might have expected theory to assume a more philosophical or interdisciplinary public identity over the subsequent two decades, and to the extent that it has not, one remains faced with the question of theory’s link to literature as a pedagogical institution. This problem leads to a related question, that of the popular media identification of “theory” with “deconstruction” —in one sense a wildly inaccurate equation, of course, but nonetheless not a straightforward case of bad reporting either, despite the unquestionable existence of a plurality of mutually hostile critical approaches with a claim to theoretical stature in the academy. Versions of the conflation of theory with deconstruction occur in professional as well as popular contexts, as does the further identification of the dyad theory / deconstruction with the proper names Jacques Derrida and, above all, Paul de Man. The fact that the actual influence exerted by these critics falls very short of their totemic stature offers us another version of the disproportion between theory and its hallucinatory projections. “The immense symptomatic significance of the figure of de Man,” John Guillory notes, has been confirmed by the intensity of the furor accompanying the discovery of de Man’s wartime journalism: “It would not have been necessary for so many theorists and anti-theorists, de Manians and anti-

2. See Barbara Johnson’s chapter on this paradox, “Nothing Fails Like Success,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

de Manians, to ‘respond’ to these revelations if theory itself were not perceived to be implicated in de Man. The easy condemnation in the media of theory along with de Man only confirmed a symbolic equation already present in the professional imaginary.”3 Theory is deconstruction and deconstruction is de Man: this fetishistic sequence may have no obvious link to institutional or discursive reality, but it goes into the making of the specter of literary theory.

And we may add at least one more term, or cluster of terms, to Guillory’s equation. Mainstream journalistic and conservative academic portrayals of theory associate it with deconstruction on the one hand and “political” criticism on the other.4 Once again, the actual debt that certain sorts of feminist, gay/lesbian, or Marxist critical practice might owe to (for instance) Derrida or de Man is hardly the issue. Anyone working seriously in the field knows the complexity of such filiations, and certainly also knows how few of the many critics presently engaged in some sort of cultural critique would term what they are doing “deconstruction.” Even more rarely would one expect to hear de Manian deconstruction touted as the rationale for the gestures toward curricular expansion or reform that are often summed up under the rubric of “multiculturalism” —unless, that is, one is willing to listen to the ideological murmur that links these seemingly inappropriate things. When given full throttle, the resistance to theory extends Guillory’s “axis of imaginary identification” to achieve the sequence: theory-deconstruction-de Man-politics. Embodied and epitomized in the master critic, theory is the deconstruction of the canon, of aesthetic value, of “culture” itself. This in no way prevents theory from being charged with

3. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 178. For a particularly energetic instance of the equation of de Man with theory, see David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon, 1991). The popular success of Lehman’s book reflects its ability to rework its story about theory into a story about a charismatic professor who embodies theory, but such personalizing gestures also crop up repeatedly in professional discourse on de Man: on the positive side, see the memorial writing collected in The Lesson of Paul de Man, Yale French Studies 69 (1985); on the negative, Frank Lentricchia’s much-cited characterization of de Man as the “godfather” of the “Yale Mafia” in After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 282-83. I examine the imperative to humanize theory (and thus to some extent de Man) in this chapter; for more extensive accounts of de Man's totemic role in the organization of such questions in the contemporary critical scene, see my “Humanizing de Man,” Diacritics 19.2 (1989): 35-53, and “De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception,” Diacritics 20.3 (1990): 50-70.

4. Anexample of this imaginary sequence unfolded in 1993 in the United States Senate, where, during his confirmation hearings, the candidate for the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities announced his vehement opposition to “deconstruction,” understood in this case as the theory that all enunciations are political. See Stephen J. Burd, “[Sheldon] Hackney Attacked and Praised for Criticizing Literary Theory,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 June 1993, A21.

sterile inconsequentiality or aestheticism, since the “deconstruction” of value can always also be called a mere game of words. And we may add that if we press a little further into the political haunts of theory, we find ourselves once again traversing a Möbius-like surface in which accuser and accused tread each other’s heels: the cultural critic or multiculturalist will more often than not share to some degree the conservative ideologue’s suspicion of “theory” and echo back the sequence theory-deconstructionde Man-politics, the only difference being that theory’s politics will now be understood as nihilistic (and impotent) in a reactionary rather thana revolutionary mode. Between left- and right-wing political poles theory shuttles as a specter of the politics of the other. This pattern was observable well before the scandal of de Man’s wartime journalism, which in one sense merely gave the screw one more turn by allowing the polemics surrounding theory to draw energy from our culture’s rather suspect fascination with Nazism.

What are we to make of the phantasmatic paradoxes of literary theory? This book argues that they may be derived from those posed by the larger cultural and theoretical enigma of aesthetics. I shall eventually funnel the question of theory more narrowly into the puzzle of the Bildungsroman, a genre that my next chapter unpacks as the idea of a fully “aesthetic” literary genre. At that point I shall address head-on the question of theory’s literariness; for the moment I propose to subordinate that question—without entirely forgetting it—to one concerning the relation between the specter of theory, as sketched, and a discursive entity called “aesthetics,” which the rest of this chapter seeks to elucidate. I have already suggested ways in which this relation is at once well publicized and obscure. On the one hand, it seems the height of obviousness to say that theory represents aesthetics as ideology: indeed, scholars relatively indifferent to theoretical debate may well know that de Man’s late work theorized something called aesthetic ideology, or may know about or even own Terry Eagleton’s academic bestseller, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. The populist version of this knowledge, of course, casts theory as the assassin of aesthetic value. But on the other hand, as we have seen, theory is also persistently denounced as “aestheticism"—as though too large a helping of either aesthetics or theory turned it into its opposite. The hysteria coloring the topic of literary theory derives from this uncertain intrinsication of theory and aesthetics, which, as Fredric Jameson suggests in his dust-jacket blurb for Eagleton’s book, has as its historical dimension the fact that theory originates “in the contradictions of philosophical aesthetics.”5 This indispensable genealogical insight

5. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

proposes aesthetics as a schizophrenic entity productive of the theory that critiques it—a theory, however, which then repeats within itself the self-consumption of aesthetics, turning away from itself as “aestheticism,” which is to say, once again, “theory.” Under such circumstances theory’s demystification of aesthetics as ideology becomes an uncertain enterprise, though perhaps also an unavoidable one.

These considerations suggest some of the difficulties facing an analysis of aesthetics. We may add that in approaching aesthetics as ideology we are setting out to examine a vast and amorphous discursive disposition, in which the aesthetic lure wobbles between philosophy and politics, anthropology and psychology, and between the languages and practices of high culture and those of journalism, advertising, and propaganda. A critique of aesthetics, as we shall see, entails a critique of profoundly metaphysicial and efficaciously political notions of modernity, history, and human identity; it will be necessary to undertake an analysis that is at once wide-ranging and technically detailed, and this chapter returns to the problem of literary theory only at the end of a rather long trajectory. This last has been organized into four stages. The first section summarizes the development of aesthetics as a specific discourse in the eighteenth century, while also drawing attention to the peculiar difficulties raised by this discourse; the second looks closely at portions of Kant's Critique of Judgment which will help us confirm previous generalizations and locate certain sites of tension; the third rapidly surveys the post-Kantian development of aesthetics as a full-scale ideology and political model; the fourth returns laden with the fruits of a close reading of Kant to the late twentieth-century problem of "theory," and seeks to explain why theory functions as a name for persistent and disruptive difficulties in aesthetics. That these difficulties turn out to be representable in linguistic or rhetorical terms will allow us to understand why Paul de Man's work plays the role it does in contemporary debates about theory, and will prepare us for the claim, developed in chapter 2, that aesthetic education, or Bildung, finds its example, and its most intractable problem, in the idea of literature.