{"id":2940,"date":"2023-03-07T10:59:10","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T08:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=2940"},"modified":"2025-02-11T15:58:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T13:58:48","slug":"kirk-wetters-the-short-spring-of-german-theory-ii-we-have-always-been-postcritical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2023\/03\/07\/kirk-wetters-the-short-spring-of-german-theory-ii-we-have-always-been-postcritical\/","title":{"rendered":"Kirk Wetters: The Short Spring of German Theory (II): WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN POSTCRITICAL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theory, Critique, Critical Theory<\/span><\/h4>\n

In the retrospect of almost a decade, the year 2015 seems to offer at least two openings which can help us better understand and localize the \u201cend of theory\u201d narratives that began to take hold sometime around the end of the millennium. Rita Felski\u2019s much-discussed and much-maligned 2015 book, The Limits of Critique<\/em>, construed the long history of \u201ccritique\u201d as largely continuous with the more recent (postwar) idea of \u201ctheory,\u201d which allowed her to question the presupposed progressivity and utility of the dominant critical-theoretical discourses of late 20th-century North American academia. In the same year, Philipp Felsch\u2019s Der lange Sommer der Theorie<\/em> (which was recently published in English as The Summer of Theory<\/em>) went so far as to assign specific dates, 1960\u20131990, and tended to define theory not as a purely academic product, but as a much wider cultural movement.[1]\u00a0<\/a> Between the two books, questions of the difference between theory and critique, their specific institutional locus within and beyond academia, became objects of acute concern.<\/span><\/p>\n

Academic Asynchronies<\/span><\/h4>\n

Because this particular conjuncture simultaneously emerged on both sides of the Atlantic, in Germany and North America, its full dimensions may only be perceived retrospectively. Thus, it now appears that by 2015 the movement of historicization, as well as its results, had acquired their own irresistible momentum, already prior to the multiple post-2015 global crises, which produced even more urgent and ongoing reconsiderations. A future realignment is anticipated in the historical accounts that reveal deep divides between different national, institutional, and disciplinary traditions of theory and critique. New chances of synchronization can proceed from the recognition that theory was always out of sync with itself, governed by the complex asynchronies (Eigenzeiten<\/em>) of reception, dissemination, and institutionalization, which make it always potentially \u201ccurrent\u201d and aktuell<\/em> at the same time as it always remains dated and historical.<\/span><\/p>\n

Critique and Crisis (Felski and Koselleck)<\/span><\/h4>\n

Felski\u2019s The Limits of Critique<\/em> includes an obligatory nod to Koselleck\u2019s 1959 Critique and Crisis<\/em>. Felski, in a manner typical of a certain mode of Koselleck reception, offers a de-fanged version of his thesis, focusing on its conceptual history: <\/span>\u201cCritique and crisis are intertwined historically as well as etymologically.\u201d[2] <\/a><\/span>Such a \u201ctimeless\u201d evocation of the theoretical source ignores Koselleck\u2019s wider argument and its particular postwar\/Cold War context, as well as the book\u2019s strangely impassioned and almost strident tone. The central claim that Felski omits, here reduced to its sharpest point, is the argument that we have always been postcritical, ever since the end of the Enlightenment. \u201cCritique,\u201d for Koselleck, was the original \u201cwokeness\u201d\u2014a misguided and self-misunderstood movement on behalf of a supposedly apolitical idea of critical reason, which, as an unintended side effect, never stopped producing oppositional, politicized concepts of collective action, instrumental <\/span>Kampfbegriffe<\/em>, and ultimately bloody revolutions in which the future of humanity was at stake.<\/span>[3]<\/a> Thus Felski follows, apparently naively, in the wake of a claim that was often perceived as anti-Enlightenment, if not outright conservative.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Postcritical University<\/span><\/h4>\n

However, Koselleck\u2019s thesis remains important and, in its own time, remained without an immanent sequel. The historical irony of Felski\u2019s affective affinity with Koselleck lies in the fact that she seems to share many of his goals, transposed onto the critical excesses of the U.S. humanities, graduate education, and English departments. Felski\u2019s evidently cathartic assault on critical narcissism, hypocrisy, and academia\u2019s industrial reproduction of clich\u00e9s is not unjustified, but it leaves unanswered countless questions concerning the wider historical situation of theory, critique (and ultimately also postcritique) as legacies of the European Enlightenment, which were problematically institutionalized within the modern university (whose mandate is, one might argue, science and truth, with critique as a possible secondary effect). Regarding the location of critique, the degree to which Felski\u2019s analyses are salient depends on the very different disciplinary inheritances and critical practices of the humanities and social sciences. Philosophy, English, American Studies, Sociology, Political Science, Classics\u2014to name just a few random examples\u2014would each have a different story to tell about their relation to Felski\u2019s Koselleckian concept of \u201ccritique and crisis.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

French and German Pre-Histories<\/span><\/h4>\n

Felski takes it for granted that she primarily focuses on the institutionalized academic reading practices of (literary) hermeneutics, without offering a thesis on how this might relate to a longer and broader history developed by Koselleck (who focused primarily on the French Enlightenment). Whereas Koselleck identified critique as a revolutionary political force, Felski questions the role of critique in institutions of higher education. Felski follows Ricoeur in attributing the rise of \u201cthe hermeneutics of suspicion\u201d to German thought (Marx-Nietzsche-Freud). Though this is not an incorrect ascription, it does reinforce misapprehensions insofar as it associates German-language scholarship and German literary studies (Germanistik<\/em>, deutsche Philologie<\/em>) primarily with left-leaning and leftist traditions. Certainly it can look that way in North America (where every German department teaches a Marx-Nietzsche-Freud class), but it is also not the case that Germanistik <\/em>or the North American field of German Studies have consistently or predominantly pursued the modes of Ideologiekritik<\/em> that Felski is keen to unmask. As a result, Felski\u2019s book appeared to be more anti-Left than it probably intended to be, while also proposing a German story that doesn\u2019t fully fit the facts.<\/span><\/p>\n

German Theory<\/span><\/h4>\n

The situation of theory in the BRD is the central topic of Felsch\u2019s book, which also led some commentators to invoke Koselleck\u2019s famous 1959 thesis: to the effect that Koselleck may have overrated the degree to which critique (now as a pseudonym for theory) was the actual motor of a \u201chistorical megatrend\u201d (Hartmut B\u00f6hme). Responding to his critics, Felsch elsewhere also names Koselleck in order to make the point that the exorbitant promise of critique as a real political force now appears more improbable than ever. But he also adds: \u201cVielleicht kann die Erinnerung an diese Ausgangssituation dabei helfen, die Lage der Theorie in der Gegenwart besser einzusch\u00e4tzen.\u201d[4]<\/a> The reference to Koselleck complicates the \u201cinitial situation\u201d (Ausgangssituation<\/em>) of theory and critique, which simultaneously overlaps with the \u201cmegatrend\u201d of the Enlightenment and the very possibility of historical progress at the same time as it locates the stalling or derailment of that trend, its turning against itself, not only in the twenty-first century, but also within the Enlightenment itself, and in the decades following the Second World War.<\/span><\/p>\n

Theoretical Microclimate<\/span><\/h4>\n

In Felsch\u2019s account of the rise of theory, cutting-edge West German academia of the 1960s was represented by recuperative projects such as: Gadamer\u2019s Wahrheit und Methode <\/em>(notably a positive touchstone for Felski); conceptual history (initially under Gadamerian supervision); the foundation of the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik<\/em>; Hans Robert Jauss\u2019s reception aesthetics; Habermas\u2019s succession of Horkheimer in Frankfurt; Blumenberg, Habermas, Henrich, and Taubes as the editorial team behind Suhrkamp\u2019s \u201cTheorie\u201d series. Far from reflecting the dominance of critical theory or the critique of ideology, the German 1960s retrospectively appear as a troublingly peaceful, pseudo-idyllic decade of unsuspicious hermeneutics in which the relation of meaning and intention is supposed to be, if not completely stable, at least potentially stabilizable.<\/span><\/p>\n

At any rate, this is often the surface impression of the years leading up to 1968. Rather than working with a concept of critique that seeks to overtly challenge the status quo by speaking truth to power, this period has a relatively quietist self-understanding (even in the Frankfurt of Adorno and Horkheimer). It understands itself as a time of critical-methodological refoundation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and rebuilding academic and theoretical infrastructure in the wake of Nazism (a background which was at the same time intensely repressed and disavowed). As Felsch shows, the theory of the period was a nascently popular phenomenon, as in the case of the literary success of Adorno\u2019s Minima Moralia<\/em>. However, its primary locus was academia and academic publishing. These initial German developments of the 1950s and 1960s were transformed by the overwhelming success of theory as a post-68 French import. Felsch shows that the wave of French theory, though important within academia, was also a first-order cultural event, which touched on countless aspects of everyday life and society.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201clong summer\u201d metaphor thus does not suggest an \u201cend of theory,\u201d but a change in its status and institutional setting after 1960\u2014and again after 1990. It further implies that there was a \u201cshort spring\u201d of West German theory, which preceded the French heat wave. If this wave has indeed ebbed (or been contained, purged of its excesses), then the most crucial implication of the seasonal metaphors is the need for a more serious reconnection of present-day academia with the status quo ante<\/em>. To put it unmetaphorically: With the rise of social media, the \u201cpositivism\u201d of the digital humanities, and, perhaps most of all, in reaction to the overwhelming global success of theory as a mode of cultural-critical public<\/em> discourse (and accompanying concerns about ideology, radicalization, and \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d), academia was forced to rethink its role as a producer and consumer of theory in relation to a rapidly changing medial and discursive landscape. This, in part, means the re-academicization of theory within academia, and not as a defeat or \u201cend\u201d or \u201cdeath,\u201d but in a way that is largely consistent with the way that theory has always been academically handled: not as a dogmatic or strictly methodological input to be \u201cfollowed,\u201d \u201cadopted,\u201d or \u201capplied,\u201d but as a genre with its own specific poetics and rhetorical moves, accessible to literary-critical, philological, philosophical, and historical reconstruction. The radical absolutism of the claim to \u201cpure\u201d or autonomous theory is thereby offset\u2014but not eliminated\u2014by scholarly industriousness (and the risk of \u201cscholasticism\u201d) which, for better or worse, very much resembles that of the German 1960s. At the same time, it allows for the re-entry of French theory and new theory hybrids into the slower moving paradigms of academic disciplinarity\u2014and it makes it possible to identify many \u201ccurrent debates\u201d precisely as re-entries<\/em> in relation to older problems and different contexts.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kirk Wetters is Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures at Yale University. Sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation<\/span><\/em>, he is a visiting scholar at the ZfL and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach from April to August 2023.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

[1] <\/a>Philipp Felsch:\u00a0Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte 1960 bis 1990<\/i>. Munich 2015; The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960\u20131990<\/i>. Translated by Tony Crawford. Cambridge & Medford MA 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Rita Felski:<\/span> The Limits of Critique<\/em>. Chicago an<\/span>d London 2015, p. 44.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> The key elements of this rather stylized reading are indirectly confirmed by J\u00fcrgen Habermas\u2019s response, first in a sharply worded review (\u201cVerrufener Fortschritt \u2013 Verkanntes Jahrhundert: Zur Kritik an der Geschichtsphilosophie.\u201d Merkur<\/em> 14.5 (1960), pp. 468\u2013477) and then in his 1962 classic, Der Strukturwandel der \u00d6ffentlichkeit\u2014<\/em>which essentially adopts and inverts Koselleck\u2019s central thesis while defending the progressive core of the Enlightenment conception of critical reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Eva Horn, Philipp Felsch, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hartmut B\u00f6hme, Karin Harrasser, Rembert H\u00fcser, Arnd Wedemeyer: \u201cDebatte.\u201d Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften<\/em> 1 (2016), pp. 120\u2013145: 130 (B\u00f6hme), 123 (Felsch).<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Kirk Wetters: The Short Spring of German Theory (II): We Have Always Been Postcritical, 7.3.2023, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2023\/03\/07\/kirk-wetters-the-short-spring-of-german-theory-ii-we-have-always-been-postcritical\/<\/a>].<\/span>
\nDOI: <\/span>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/202300307-01<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n