The Paradox of Aesthetic Discourse: J. M. R.

Lenz's "Anmerkungen übers Theater"

Author(s): Patrizia C. McBride
Source: German Studies Review , Oct., 1999, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Oct., 1999), pp. 397-419
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies
Association

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 The Paradox of Aesthetic Discourse:
J.M.R. Lenz's Anmerkungen iubers Theate

Patrizia C. McBride
University of Minnesota

Since the late eighteenth century, aesthetic discourse has sought to describe art as
a mode of signification that stands in opposition to cognitive practices grounded in
conceptual thought-most notably philosophical inquiry and the enterprise of
science.1 And yet theoretical reflection on art cannot dispense with rhetorical and
discursive strategies rooted in conceptual thinking, in other words, with the very
structures deemed inadequate for grasping the specificity of aesthetic meaning.
When considered from this perspective, modem aesthetics appears to be founded
on a paradox. Even as it seeks to demonstrate that conceptual thought cannot fully
comprehend art, it has no alternative except to employ the tools of rational
discourse. This dilemma raises a fundamental question about the legitimacy and
status of aesthetic discourse. What can be gained from a reflection on art, which is
compelled to operate within a cognitive and discursive mode that is ultimately
incompatible with aesthetic experience? This question is confronted by one of the
first documents of modem aesthetics, J.M.R. Lenz's Anmerkungen iibers Theater
(1774), whose paradoxical answer is inscribed in its apparently idiosyncratic style.
Lenz's treatise on drama is commonly regarded as a landmark in the development
of a distinctively German dramatic tradition over and against an Enlightenment
aesthetics imbued with the spirit of French neoclassicism-a proj ect that began with
Lessing's dramaturgy in the mid 1700s and culminated in the practice of the Sturm
und Drang. Within this frame, the Anmerkungen emphasize the specificity of art,
particularly drama, as a system of signification that escapes the rational discourse
of French aesthetics. The essay is also known as an extreme example of the
unconventional rhetoric and mercurial style that distinguish Lenz's theoretical
writings. Indeed, it seems to live from the tension arising, on the one hand, from the
dogged determination with which Lenz pursues his objectives-the recognition of

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398 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

art' s distinctiveness and the advocation of a truly German drama-and, on th

the idiosyncratic form of his discourse, which threatens to undermine his p
endeavor. While critiquing French aesthetics for its reliance on concep
discursive structures that are not applicable to art, Lenz is compelled to ackn
that his text unfolds within an analogous mode of discourse, and that ther
real alternatives to this discourse. If it is considered within the overall argu
the Anmerkungen, the text's self-undermining style appears as a rhetoric
that reflects the paradoxical nature of its aesthetic endeavor. In particular,
to highlight the author's awareness that the reflection on art's distinctivenes
take place outside of a conceptual and discursive mode which is bound to
extraneous to art.

Within the German context, this insight is commonly associated with the
speculative experiment of early Romanticism. In their compelling account of the
genesis of Romantic aesthetics in Germany, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-
Luc Nancy maintain that the short-lived experience of the Jena Romantics was
fueled by their insight into the gap that separates an aesthetic practice anchored in
a nonconceptual, nonrational terrain and an aesthetic reflection grounded in the
conceptual. When filtered through the philosophy of idealism, the Romantics'
awareness ofthe aesthetic paradox resulted in the notion ofirony.2 Early Romanticism
marked the culmination ofthe eighteenth-century turn from the normative aesthetics
of the Enlightenment to a moder understanding of art as the spontaneous, time-
bound production of an artist. To be sure, this turn was made possible by the new
aesthetic thinking that flourished in the sensualist and historicist currents epitomized
by Hamann, Herder, and the authors of the Sturm und Drang. Nevertheless, the
Romantic project owes much of its momentum to the philosophical discourse that
originated from Kant and culminated in the practice of idealism. It is this reflection
that established itself as the leading aesthetic paradigm over the course of the
nineteenth century.
Lenz's reflection predates this framework. As a consequence, his formulation
of the aesthetic paradox does not appear immediately recognizable, for it is located
outside the philosophical straitjacket that has restrained aesthetic thinking since
Kant. His primary frame of reference remains an understanding of art as the
depository of the historical, i.e., particular and not fully generalizable, experience
of a people, an idea which finds its epitome in Herder's notion of Volkspoesie.
Within this horizon, art appears as the primarily sensuous-i.e., nonconceptual-
medium for conveying the meaning of finite human existence. Georg Braungart is
among the critics who have drawn attention to the often overlooked potential of this
tradition. As he notes, the emphasis this discourse places on the materiality of the
artwork and the sensuous nature of aesthetic experience makes it largely immune
to the linguistic skepticism and epistemological nihilism that haunted Kantian and
post-Kantian aesthetics-and were subsequently inherited by twentieth-century
aesthetics in general, and poststructuralism in particular.3 Lenz's reflection clearly

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Patrizia C. McBride 399

benefits from faith in the sensuous character of aesthetic meaning. This grounding
is, in fact, what enables him to ponder the paradox of aesthetic discourse withou
being paralyzed by the logical contradictions engendered by this endeavor. As th
Anmerkungen demonstrate, one possible way to cope with these contradictions is
to forge a discursive mode that exhibits its limitations in its form, without
relinquishing its force and authority. What Lenz's treatise can teach us today is tha
insight into the limits of the reflection on art does not necessarily undermin
aesthetic discourse, but rather witnesses to its frankness and accountability.
Helga Madland has summed up two centuries ofLenz reception by juxtaposing
two prevailing images of the dramatist, namely, the talented, but eccentric and
unstable poet who left an uncertain literary legacy, on the one hand, and the
misunderstood artist and social outcast whose significance could only be grasped
by posterity, on the other.4 As she notes, only in recent years have these image
begun to give way to a more nuanced understanding of Lenz as a self-consciou
thinker whose contribution to the anthropological and aesthetic debates of his time
stands on its own feet and whose uncompromising realism and sharp-edged blend
of comic and tragic elements display a timeliness lacked by other Sturm undDran
authors.5 I would like to endorse this latter image and suggest that Lenz's timelines
primarily resides in the paradoxical nature of his reflection on literature, as it i
exhibited in the unconventional style of his theoretical texts and explicitly reflecte
in the Anmerkungen.

II

Lenz's treatise on drama is customarily placed within the eighteenth-century

line of theoretical reflection that sought to address fundamental issues of literar
discourse through the analysis of literary genres. Its frame of reference were th
historic debates on a specifically German cultural tradition that were initiated by
Lessing's "Literaturbriefe"6 and played out, in the second half of the eighteenth
century, in the writings of Herder, Wieland, Gerstenberg, and the young Goethe
among others. Thanks to its form, however, Lenz's text stands isolated within th
tradition, which encompasses a wide spectrum of conventional and stylistic modes
ranging from Gottsched's highly structured taxonomy in Versuch einer critische
Dichtkunst7 to Lessing's more fragmentary and colloquial Hamburgisch
Dramaturgie.8 What, at first glance, sets Lenz's text apart from contemporary
works of genre theory is its unconventional exposition and rhapsodic, associativ
style-formal features that elicit an impression of complexity, disorder, and
insufficient intellectual rigor. This impression is reinforced by the apparent lack of
a single line of argumentation in the text, which instead pursues several, interlockin
objectives at once.
Its overarching concern appears to be an all-out assault on the edifice of French
aesthetics, undertaken because of the fundamental anachronism of its foundation
Aristotelian poetics, for contemporary drama. Lenz frames this discussion within

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400 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

a reflection on the time- and place-boundedness of drama and of aesthetic pro

in general. Within this context, drama is promoted as the genre that best
what aesthetic experience can accomplish, namely, an unbroken, synthetic
of historical-i.e., inexorably finite and particular-human experience. Bu
objectives described above require drawing a qualitative distinction betwee
meaning extracted from aesthetic experience and the knowledge provided by
cognitive practices, most notably the philosophical aesthetics ofFrench der
As it becomes clear from Lenz's argument, what disqualifies French nor
poetics-its reliance on discursive structures bound to conceptual though
resurfaces in the inevitable sequentiality and logical discursivity of Len
text.9 To understand the implications of this aporia and to analyze the
strategies employed to cope with it, we must take a closer look at the argu
some of which are quite well known-which the Anmerkungen deploy to es
the specificity of aesthetic meaning and to denounce the inadequacy of the
model. As we will see, the linchpin of Lenz's case for art's distinctiveness c
the primacy of the visual sense as the anthropological foundation for the int
cognition to which art grants access. It is the optic sense that defines bot
synthetic gift of the artist/genius and the mode of drama's reception, ov
against the linear unfolding of conceptual thought.
The treatise opens with a theatrical display of world drama, which ser
introduce an investigation of the domain of"Poesie." For Lenz "Poesie" em
the broad field of literary production that culminates in drama. It draws fro
unites) "Nachahmung" and "Anschauung," the main principles which info
"sch6ne Kiinste" and the "Wissenschaften" respectively. Inscribed in this dist
is the functional separation-but also the symbiotic relationship-with whi
eighteenth century reinterpreted the medieval polarity of artes liberales and
mechanicae.?1 While the sciences-which encompass the natural sciences
as philosophy-are concerned with the pursuit of truth, i.e., represent the re
knowledge, the fine arts fulfill a quintessentially educational task. Follo
mimetic procedure whose coordinates are ultimately based on the know
afforded by the "Wissenschaften," the fine arts make reality's deep mean
harmony conspicuous by means of sensual representations.
Lenz is not afraid of overstepping the bounds of contemporary wisdo
reappropriating the canonical distinction that separates the discourses w
produce knowledge from the practices which mediate this knowledg
entertaining and instructive fashion. His account astutely seizes on familiar c
for the purpose of recasting the polarity of "sch6ne Kiinste" and "Wissensch
Whereas, in the standard opposition, "Poesie" constitutes one of the "re
Kiinste," and is therefore located within the sphere of the "schone Kiinst
Lenz's model "Poesie" becomes an overarching domain that shares in the adv
of both the fine arts and the sciences. By merging the two sources in the one
of poetry/literature, Lenz invests "Poesie" with a different (and arguably

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Patrizia C. McBride 401

cognitive potential than the "Wissenschaften" can claim." To illustrate the advantages
of"Poesie," Lenz takes recourse to an anthropologic theory that views the human
mind as essentially torn between the sequential mode of the mind's perceptions and
operations, on the one hand, and its innate yearning for a synthetic picture of reality,
on the other. Because the faculty of understanding, which presides over the
generation ofknowledge, operates on the basis ofa temporal sequence of perceptions,
the human desire to grasp and render heterogeneous reality as a meaningful whole
cannot be satisfied through the rational dissection of experience alone. By contrast,
"Poesie" proposes itself as the privileged human faculty that can tap into the
cognitive source of the "Wissenschaften" while circumventing their shortcomings.
Drawing on the mimetic procedure proper to the fine arts, "Poesie" succeeds in
offering a sensual, synthetic picture of human existence (332-38).12
A more detailed analysis of the way the two principles presiding over the fine
arts and the sciences-"Nachahmung" and "Anschauung"-interact within the field
of "Poesie" will prove helpful in further defining the specificity of aesthetic
meaning, particularly as it applies to the activity of the artist/genius. It must first be
noted, however, that when Lenz speaks of imitation he has in mind something other
than the neoclassicist injunction to reproduce reality according to a set ofuniversal,
suprahistorical rules imposed by reason. As Karin Wurst has shown, for Lenz the
mimetic process that sustains artistic production does not entail a mechanical
reproduction based on rational dictates, like those of neoclassicism, but is rather
consigned to a refractory mechanism centered on the reorganization of perceptions
and sensual stimuli in the artist's soul.'3 What the artist is called upon to imitate is
not an external picture of the world, but rather the internal images reality summons
in his soul. It is by means of this fundamentally creative process that the artist shares
in the divine nature of God, the supreme creator. Along these lines, the artist/genius
is defined as the individual who has access to an all-encompassing grasp of reality,
a penetrating insight, which is equated with the gaze of God:

Wir nennen die K6pfe Genies, die alles, was ihnen vorkommt, gleich so
durchdringen, durch und durch sehen, daB ihre Erkenntnis denselben Wert,
Umfang, Klarheit hat, als ob sie durch Anschaun oder alle sieben Sinne
zusammen wire erworben worden. (336)

As this passage shows, the insight of genius is associated with a type of

cognition ("Erkenntnis") whose uncommon scope and clarity depend not on the
involvement of the intellect, but rather on the simultaneous activation of all senses.
Lenz defines this cognition as "Anschauen," the intuitive, nondiscursive apprehension
ofreality. At issue is the idea of an "anschauende Erkenntnis," a cognitive mode that
allows for the meaningful organization and synthetic presentation of the contents of
experience before the intervention of intellect.14 At this point it is not difficult to
discern the fundamental interplay of 'imitation' and 'intuitive knowledge' in

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402 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

aesthetic production. The two principles help identify the specific gift of
namely, its ability to imitate-to give sensual manifestation to-the images
evokes in his mind. These images are distinguished by their synthetic, 'in
quality-a quality lacked by intellectual operations.
An investigation of the semantic ambivalence that characterizes the no
"Anschauung" in theAnmerkungen yields further, crucial insights into the spe
of aesthetic meaning. At first glance, Lenz's usage of the key terms "Ansc
and "anschauen" appears erratic-at times they denote a nonconceptual m
cognition, while in other instances they designate the optic sense in a most c
fashion. This inconsistency is the source of a disturbing conceptual confus
may be seen as one instance of that intellectual carelessness, which for many
Lenz as a brilliant but undisciplined thinker. Yet if one follows clos
development of the argument surrounding "Anschauung," one finds that
exploitation of the term's ambiguity is thoroughly deliberate, and in fact ser
purpose of grounding the text's claim about drama's superiority over other g
It is the insistence on the primacy of the visual sense-only implicit in the no
an "anschauuende Erkenntnis"-that contributes to specifying the distinct
and import of aesthetic experience.
Martin Rector has highlighted the central role visual imagery plays
Anmerkungen, suggesting that the text's inquiry into the essence of literature
be adequately understood if one neglects to reconstruct the essentially v
discourse the text stages. This, Rector argues, is a discourse on seeing as the
sense perception. As he shows, Lenz once again appiopriates the vocabula
Enlightenment cognitive discourse while effectively turning its rationalist th
its head. Indeed, the idea of visual, poetic cognition outlined in the Anmer
has little in common with the rational, framing gaze ofthe Enlightenment. Fo
poetry grants access to a metaphysical "Wesenschau," i.e., an essen
comprehensive vision of human experience that eludes the temporal and s
constraints that limit intellectual cognition.'5 Rector emphasizes how Le
argument on seeing inserts itselfwithin a long-standing tradition that seeks t
the literary genre by drawing parallels to the visual arts-a tradition revived
mid 1700s by Lessing's Laokoon.'6 Indeed, the Anmerkungen take up the co
dichotomy between the static/visual and the sequential/conceptual, whi
Lessing defines the specificity-and the mutual boundaries-of the visual ar
poetry, critiquing Lessing's model with arguments that echo Herder's objec
the first of his Kritische Wdlder.'7 Like Herder, Lenz rejects the polarization
the one hand, a literary genre that operates within an endless temporal con
and is therefore necessarily partial, and, on the other, a range of visual arts t
render the image of a whole, but only by freezing it within an atemporal
Against this dichotomy, Lenz conceives of poetry as a genre that succee
presenting a synthetic picture of reality in spite of its sequential mode of ope

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Patrizia C. McBride 403

It is significant that the text does not limit itselfto endorsing Herder' s argument,
but instead takes it one step further-a step that appears decisive in defining the
centrality of the optic sense as the mediator of a synthetic, nonconceptual mode of
apprehending reality. Lenz's claim on the preeminence of seeing does not apply to
all fields of literary production alike, but rather serves to ground the advantages of
the genre which relies primarily on the visual sense for its reception, namely drama.
This argument is what provides the foundation for establishing a hierarchy of
genres, in particular, for maintaining the superiority of drama over epic poetry:

Wenn wir das Schicksal des Genies betrachten (ich rede von Schriftstellem) so
ist es unter aller Erdens6hne ihrem das bangste, das traurigste. ... Was kann der
Epopeendichter tun, unsere Aufmerksamkeit festzuhalten ... Der
Schauspieldichter hat's besser, wenn das Schicksal seine Wiinsche erh6ren
wollte... (346-47).

Lenz's comparison of drama and epic poetry rests on the peculiar modes in
which the two genres are received. Drama's advantage over epic poetry lies in its
being presented and watched ("vorgestellt" and "angeschaut," 347), as opposed to
just read. In virtue of its visual mode of reception, drama lends itself to mediatin
the simultaneous picture of a whole, and is therefore more likely to capture the
attention of a modem audience. The impact of epic poetry, by contrast, is weakened
precisely by the sequential mode in which it operates and is received. Along these
lines, Lenz maintains that he does not want his plays to be read, but watched ("Trost!
Ich wollte nicht gelesen werden. Angeschaut. Werde ich aber vorgestellt und
verfehlt-so mocht ich Palett' und Farben ins Feuer schmeiBen..." 347). Implicit in
this reasoning is the belief that the paradox of a sequentially operating literature
which nevertheless grants a simultaneous vision of reality, is best solved by drama,
which relies on the visual as a primary mode of reception. If genius is endowed with
a godlike, all-encompassing gaze for grasping reality in its totality, then the mod
of communicating this vision to an audience must be quintessentially visual. In
other words, the appropriate counterpart for genius's own "anschauende Erkenntnis"
must be a mode of reception centered on "anschauen."

III

Defining the gift of the artist/genius becomes the cornerstone in Lenz's case
against French normative poetics. The crux of his argument lies in the contention
that the rationalistic categories of French discourse cannot account for the genius's
ability to share his nonconceptual vision with an audience. This discussion echoes
many of the theses driving the eighteenth-century debates aimed at redefining the
mechanism and the function of aesthetic activity-debates that crystallize, in th
latter part of the century, around the Shakespeare revival in the theoretical writings

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404 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

of Lessing, Herder, Wieland, Goethe, and Gerstenberg, as well as the inn

dramatic practice ofHeinrich Leopold Wagner and Friedrich Maximilian K
Shakespeare is reappropriated as the model of an artistic production ground
historically bound, cultural tradition of a people. The insight into the h
specificity of art produces the innovative aesthetic category of "popular
which comes to embody a situated reference point that cannot be transla
abstract, atemporal rules of reason. French neoclassic aesthetics is rejecte
blindness to the historicity and particularity ofart, which results in an obses
universal, suprahistorical aesthetic standards derived from the texts of
antiquity.
Lenz's critique of French drama is modeled on these arguments. In the
Anmerkungen the French are reproached for their naive faith in the authority of
Aristotelian drama. Through their self-imposed enjoinment to Aristotle's yoke the
French have chosen to elevate a historically specific, dramatic form to an ideal
model.19 But in so doing they must ignore the specific cultural soils in which the
drama of the Greeks and that of the Germans have grown, indeed, the distinctive
"Volksgeschmack" (359) that nurtures the two traditions. It is this "taste" that
provides the basic criterion according to which the drama of a people should
develop, and explains why the tragedy of modem Germanic peoples centers around
a remarkable personality, while remarkable events lie at the heart of Greek tragedy.
Within this context, the artist/genius becomes the mouthpiece of his people's
distinctive tradition. Hence, "Die Italiener hatten einen Dante, die Engellander
Shakespeam, die Deutschen Klopstock, welche das Theater schon aus ihrem
eigenen Gesichtspunkt ansahen, nicht durch Aristoteles' Prisma" (348). Unlike
these peoples, the French have enslaved themselves to the observance of foreign,
external rules, and therefore have not produced any great poet.
The conclusions to be drawn from Lenz's discussion of the new categories of
taste and genius are exemplary for Sturm-und-Drang poetics: Art's nonconceptual,
communicative potential resides in its rootedness in the finite historical experience
of a people. However, for Lenz this rootedness also grounds art's distinctiveness
with respect to other cognitive practices and explains the shortcomings of French
aesthetics, which has subordinated aesthetic production to philosophical speculation.
This becomes clear when one considers the way in which Lenz's text endeavors to
come to grips with the conundrum that haunts the aesthetic of genius. Implicit in this
aesthetic is the danger that art will be reduced to the imaginative, yet arbitrary play
of a talented individual. But another, more fundamental inconsistency threatens to
undermine the new aesthetic model at its foundations. Its most sophisticated
formulation is found in Kant's discussion of a sensus communis in the Kritik der
Urteilskraft. In raising the question of how aesthetic taste may be communicated
and shared, Kant draws attention to the communicative riddle underlying the idea
of an artist/genius whose creations are original and incomparable, yet remain
immediately accessible to an audience.20 At issue is the difficulty of identifying the

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Patrizia C. McBride 405

principle that makes the product ofthis process, the artwork, intelligible to an artist's
audience, once one has ruled out a universal language of reason as the ground of all
aesthetic activity. In Lenz's case, the dilemma can be restated as follows: Which
faculty enables the audience of a play to perceive the fundamental link between the
medium of representation and the object being represented, between the drama
unfolding on the stage and the human experience it symbolizes?
It is with an eye to this problem of reception that Lenz insists on accounting for
the way genius fulfills its prescribed task. If the poet is called to render reality
according to the inner image it summons in his soul, he is not licenced to operate
according to whim, but is instead called to choose a standpoint from which to
observe and represent the real. This standpoint will dictate what he should do: "Der
wahre Dichter verbindet nicht in seiner Einbildungskraft, wie es ihm gefallt, was die
Herren die sch6ne Natur zu nennen belieben.... Er nimmt Standpunkt-und dann
muB erso verbinden" (336-37). Lenz's much-celebrated notion of "Standpunkt" is
central to understanding genius's ability to not only render the multiplicity of
reality, but also to make this image accessible and meaningful to his audience. The
link between artist and audience is not found in atemporal, universal principles of
reason, but rather in the finite, historical horizon in which both artist and audience
participate. It is the ability of genius to draw on this finite, situated 'standpoint'
which in turn explains the difference between the artist and the "sch6nem Geist"
(338). The latter is the term Lenz uses to describe the scholar, the man of science
schooled in traditional (philosophical) aesthetics. As "Zergliederer" and "Kritiker"
(336), scholars derive their knowledge from a predominantly rational, conceptual
framework, which leaves no room for the inclusion of finite human experience, for
the particular tradition of a people. Hence, they will never succeed in reproducing
reality in its inevitable historicity (338).
The historical argument provides a powerful weapon for defusing the charge
of unaccountability and unbridled subjectivity levied against genius accused of
resisting the transparent constraints of reason. This very charge is leveled against
the French themselves, whose contemporary dramas are judged to be nothing more
than idiosyncratic, highly subjective flights of the imagination. As Lenz argues,
because the French follow artificial rules that are not anchored in any popular
tradition, French authors find themselves compelled, whether knowingly or not, to
pour their subjectivity into their works in order to impart them with substance.
Hence, in works by Rousseau and Voltaire one can hardly overlook the fact that "der
Dichter malt das ganze Stuck auf seinem eigenen Charakter" (352). Nurtured by the
individual psychology of the artist rather than by the cultural horizon of a whole
people, such plays end up reflecting not reality itself, but the artist's own personality
("Sein ganzes Schauspiel ... wird also nicht ein Gemalde der Natur, sonder seiner
eigenen Seele" 351).
And yet, the impressive case the treatise mounts against French aesthetics
cannot conceal the fact that the Anmerkungen walk a tight rope between the demand

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406 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

to articulate the differences of distinctive dramatic models-the Germanic

Greek-in an accessible and persuasive fashion, and the fundamental assum
on which this demand relies, namely, that these differences can never b
grasped within the discursive mode within which the text remains inscri
problem is that in the endeavor to define that which cannot be articulate
conceptual discourse one is constantly faced with the risk of saying too m
formulating the 'untellable' in too positive a manner, and thereby of commit
same fallacy one set out to refute. Hence the frequent self-interruptions, th
corrections, the retractions that punctuate the text's exposition, as thou
speaker were cautiously walking along the edge of a conceptual precipice. If
purpose of proving the French wrong the text sets out to describe the di
structuring principles in Greek and modem German drama (unitary ac
opposed to a central extraordinary personality), at the same time the read
continuously reminded that there are limits to what this investigation can acc
for the shared standpoint from which the whole of reality can be appreh
drama cannot be itself described, let alone reduced to a formula. It can only
by the artist and his audience:

Und was heiBen denn nun drei Einheiten, meine Lieben? Ist es nicht d
die wir bei allen Gegenstinden der Erkenntnis suchen, die eine, die u
Gesichtspunkt gibt, aus dem wir das Ganze umfangen und iibers
konnen? ... Was heiBen die drei Einheiten? hundert Einheiten will ich
angeben, die alle immer doch die eine bleiben. Einheit der Nation, Einh
Sprache, Einheit der Religion, Einheit der Sitten-ja was wird's denn
Immer dasselbe, immer und ewig dasselbe. Der Dichter und das Publ
miissen die eine Einheit ftihlen aber nicht klassifizieren. Gott ist nur Ei
alien seinen Werken, und der Dichter muB es auch sein.... Aber fort m
Schulmeister, der mit seinem Stibchen einem Gott aufdie Finger schla
45).

There is a unity to experience that drama can grasp and enact, that can be felt,
but not spelled out in conceptual terms. In fact, "Verstand," the faculty that presides
over conceptual thinking and forms the prerogative ofthe "Schulmeister," can only
operate sequentially and is therefore unable to render synthetically the unity
underlying the disparate richness of reality. More importantly, understanding
operates through classification ("klassifizieren"), i.e., by reducing the individual
instance to a universal class, and is thus fundamentally blind to the finite historical
horizon that grounds the inner coherence and meaningfulness of modem drama.
Because they are historically situated and culturally specific, the reality drama
discloses and the method the poet follows cannot be reduced to universal rules.
Hence it follows that the dictates of French neoclassicism, as well as any constraints
based on a suprahistorical understanding of art, are to be rejected. In their

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Patrizia C. McBride 407

universalizing, atemporal pretensions they purport to rule a domain-the aesthetic

-whose multiplicity and unity they cannot capture. Lenz's argument amounts to a
critique of the attempt, undertaken by a fundamentally rationalistic aesthetics, to
impose its norms and guidelines upon the domain of art.

IV

Lenz's critique of the French neoclassicist model, which the Anmerkungen

dismiss for its reliance on a conceptual mode fundamentally alien to its intended
object of investigation, begs the question of the legitimation of the discursive mode
in which his own critique unfolds. There is hardly a commentator who has not
remarked on Lenz's idiosyncratic style and its conspicuous deviation from eighteenth-
century rhetorical standards. In one of the most complete and theoretically informed
investigations of rhetoric in the Anmerkungen, Michael Morton relates the text's
unconventional form to a pattern by which "the text's discursive substance merges
with the form of the exposition intended to communicate it."2 As Morton argues,
far from obsequiously reproducing rhetorical and stylistic conventions of its time,
the text's formal gesture attempts to replicate or reinforce the objectives it pursues.
For instance, it seeks to affirm the superiority of the dramatic genre over epic poetry
by means of an exposition that is ostensibly theatrical in nature.2 Hence, the
Anmerkungen open with an overview of drama's historical development as the
opening of dramatic chambers and the display of theatrical performances on the
stage ofthe speaker's imagination ("ich zimmere in meiner Einbildung ein ungeheures
Theater," 329).
But Lenz's deviation from contemporary norms does not limit itself to the
theatricality of the text's exposition. It is also inscribed in a meandering, self-
undermining style, which seems to place into question the soundness of the
arguments advanced and thus indirectly challenges the validity of the text's overall
enterprise. Critics have generally agreed that the high degree of idiosyncracy and
uncertainty, which marks the style of the Anmerkungen, cannot be accounted for
merely in terms of the essayistic practices that flourished in the eighteenth century
in opposition to the highly structuredprose ofEnlightenment rationalistic discourse.23
In this respect, early commentators have been inclined to view the 'deviant'
character of Lenz's form as the unintended outcome of the author's insufficient
mastery of his ideas, or even as a token of his own self-doubt concerning the
soundness of his arguments.24 By contrast, more recent scholarship has sought to
underscore the deliberate and constructive character of Lenz's stylistic choices,
often establishing a link between the overall intellectual endeavor oftheAnmerkungen
and their apparent formal capriciousness. Along these lines, Karin A. Wurst sees in
the text's meandering style the unfolding of an exploration leading to a knowledge
different from that based on systematic perceptions and conceptual structures-a
knowledge that requires a distinctive mode of writing and argumentation.2 I would
like to take Wurst's suggestion a step further and propose that Lenz's self-

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408 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

undermining style follows as a logical necessity from the critique o

conceptual discourse, which represents one important aim of the Anm
Key to understanding the relation between the text's endeavor and i
the degree to which Lenz is impelled to accept the presuppositions of the
mode he denounces, if he is to seriously engage the mode of thinking
disprove. This entails that his argument on art's distinctiveness remain
within a conceptual and discursive mode that, at the same time,
inadequate for grasping art's fundamental alterity. If considered from this
the Anmerkungen incur a performative contradiction, in that they a
encompass a realm that they simultaneously declare to be inaccessible t
conceptual and discursive strategies. The problem Lenz faces is a fun
dilemma that arises when one postulates the existence of cognitive rea
beyond the conceptual. How can one articulate and argue for a cognitive d
anchored in the conceptual, and simultaneously avoid falling back into
argumentation grounded in conceptual structures? Is there a language
expressing and preserving the utter alterity of the nonconceptual?
Lenz's quest for grasping the Other of conceptual knowledge wit
medium of art foreshadows in significant ways the Romantic experiment
the epistemological framework of Romanticism is no longer the sensua
of Enlightenment thought that extends from Hamann and Herder to the
Drang, but rather the elaboration of Kant's critical method in Schell
Fichte's idealism. The common ground shared by the empiricist, anti-
currents epitomized by Lenz and the Romantics is perhaps most eviden
Benjamin's account ofthe genesis ofRomanticism. ForBenjamin, the sta
of Romantic aesthetics lies in the post-Kantian insight into the impossi
unmediated, simultaneous, all-encompassing knowledge-that prec
"Anschauung," which forms a cornerstone in Lenz's model (and l
preeminence in Kant's Kritikder Urteilskraft, though under different epi
premises).26 The Romantics tried to solve the problem by pushing the
contemporary philosophy and positing a thinking that achieves imm
encompassing self-knowledge within the aesthetic medium. For this task
on the idealist project of grasping the 'foil' of conceptual thought, its in
yet unknowable Other-the "tain of the mirror" of reflection, as Rodol
vividly put it.27
Ifthere is one lesson that speculative Romanticism bequeathed to later
reflection, it is the realization that the inquiry into the nonconceptual is p
from the perspective of the conceptual-an insight that, as I will argu
already present in nuce in Lenz's Anmerkungen. However, this recognitio
to undermine any intellectual investigation of the aesthetic medium, for
question of the soundness of an enterprise which purports to illumina
the nonconceptual aesthetic-from a position utterly alien to it. Thus
surprising that since the advent of early Romanticism in Germany, a

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Patrizia C. McBride 409

articulate that which lies 'outside' the conceptual has been haunted by the suspicion
of a return of those conceptual structures that were to be banned. Given the
impossibility of finding a viable alternative to the mode of conceptualization
characteristic of Western discourse, any attempt at arguing against this tradition
becomes entangled in a paradox, in that it is compelled, at least to some extent, to
employ logic and argumentative strategies that pertain to the conceptual mode
under scrutiny. In a similar way, much of contemporary poststructuralism is
animated by the desire to sidestep the logical paradoxes that plague Western
philosophical discourse.28
I believe that this aspect ofLenz's endeavor can best be illuminated by referring
to the systems-theoretical framework developed in recent decades by Niklas
Luhmann. Drawing on the sociological model of Talcott Parsons and the logic o
G. Spencer-Brown, Luhmann interprets the unfolding of modern consciousness a
an attempt to cope with the inherently paradoxical nature of cognition. In his
account, human knowledge is primarily defined by its inability to synthetically
grasp the distinctions within which it operates. This entails that cognition is haunted
by a structural blind spot. In its inability to grasp its enabling Other, it remains
permanently partial, incomplete, contingent. Nevertheless, the quest for graspin
the blind spot through an infinite series of regression constitutes a paradoxical, yet
necessary feature of all knowledge. Luhmann identifies two primary ways for
dealing with this paradox. The first involves making it invisible, pretending it does
not exist. This is by far the dominant course pursued within modernity, a dissatisfying
choice to be sure, for the repressed paradox comes back to haunt the moderns under
the cloak of a metadiscursive critique caught up in an endless regression. In this
light, a second path appears far more promising. It consists in acknowledging the
paradox, underscoring its inescapability, and thereby recognizing in it an essentia
condition of possibility for any investigation into the structures of knowledge. Thi
second path entails that acknowledgment of the double bind does not invalidate the
inquiry into the Other of conceptual thinking, but instead forms an essential
condition for its possibility.29
This, I contend, is the path Lenz chooses to take. Far from seeking to conceal
the contradictory nature of his endeavor, Lenz resolves to emphasize it through his
style. It is this choice which makes his text remarkable, perhaps unique for its time
Evidence of Lenz's awareness about the paradox his textual discourse canno
escape is found in the frequent passages that document the unfolding, within th
Anmerkungen, of a coherent, critical reflection on the text's own discursive mode
These commentaries seek to highlight the limitations of the conceptual discours
inscribed within the Anmerkungen, while at the same time acknowledging the lack
of alternatives to this discourse. In what follows I will reconstruct the development
of this reflection, by analyzing the passages that function as a metacommentary on
Lenz's exposition, often relativizing or even calling into question significant textual
claims.

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410 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

The panoramic presentation of world drama which opens the essay, a theatrical
peformuance which seeks to capture the attention and the favor of the audience,
closes with what appears to be a fairly traditional declaration of intents: "so erlauben
Sie mir, meine Herren... Ihnen eine miiBige Stunde mit Anmerkungen iiber Theater,
iiber Schauspiel anzufiillen" (332). This passage emblematically displays the
dialogical quality of the text's discourse, aimed at encouraging the reader to become
actively involved in the text's investigation. In the apologetic tone of a captatio
benevolentiae, the speaker underscores the modesty of his textual intent. Rather
than claiming for himself the right of defining an ultimate objective for the
observations he is about to present, he invites his audience to join him and take active
part in shaping the textual inquiry. In this way, they will perhaps be able to articulate
the text's objective themselves: "so untersteh ich mich nicht, Ihnen den letzten
Endzweck dieser Anmerkungen, das Ziel meiner Parteiginger anzuzeigen. Vielleicht
werden Sie, wenn Sie mit mir fortgeritten sind, von selbst darauf stoBen..." (332).
This emphasis on the openendedness of the textual endeavor lends itself to
multiple readings. It can be viewed, on the one hand, as a gesture with which the
speaker seeks to pay homage to his audience-albeit with an obsequiousness that
is not without irony. On the other hand, it can be taken more literally as an admission
that the speaker does not quite know where his reasoning will take him. A third
possibility is that we are confronted with a rhetorical stratagem for signaling a
discrepancy between the discursive mode that sustains the text and its object of
investigation. If conceptual discourse is quintessentially linear and aim-oriented,
progressing inexorably toward an argumentative goal, failing to state an objective
at the onset may be seen as a way for the speaker to distance himself from this
discursive mode, with which he is nevertheless compelled to engage.
This hypothesis finds support in a passage that openly thematizes the critical,
analytic discourse within which the Anmerkungen unfold. At the beginning of the
second section, the speaker makes apologies for his insufficient mastery of critical
reflection. He blames the shortcomings ofhis exposition on his youthful restlessness,
which runs counter to the analytical forbearance and precision required in the
enterprise he has undertaken:

Denn ich fiirchte sehr, das Jugendfeuer werde die wenige Portion Geduld
auflecken, die ich in meinem Temperament finde, und die doch einem Prosaisten,
und besonders einem kritischen-In der Tat, da die Kritik mehr eine
Beschiiftigung des Verstandes als der Einbildungskraft bleibet, so verlangt sie
ein groBes MaB Phlegma-(337)

At first glance, the speaker appears to be asking his audience for leniency in its
appraisal of the text, which unfolds within a mode of reflection with which he does
not feel at home. At the same time, his apologetic tone can hardly mask his distaste

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Patrizia C. McBride 411

for the role of"Prosaist" he has chosen to espouse, particularly for the apatheti
lifeless mode of reflection that goes with it. As suggested in this passage, critica
activity pertains not so much to imagination as to the intellect, and thus requires a
great deal of detachment and impartiality. By implication, the speaker identifie
himself as a man of imagination-the juxtaposition of "Verstand" an
"Einbildungskraft" here being a way to refer to the domains over which the two
faculties preside, namely, conceptual thought and aesthetic activity. In other words
the speaker presents himself as an artist at a loss with his role as a critic. What
appears remarkable, in this context, is his unwillingness to abandon the plane o
discursive critique, i.e., to disavow the critical role ofthe "Prosaist" altogether. This
is tantamount to an admission that there is no alternative to the conceptual mode o
critical discourse, indeed, that this terrain constitutes the only ground on which th
Anmerkungen can unfold. If this tacit acknowledgment helps define the text
discursive mode, it also contributes to establishing distance, a fundamental misgiving
toward this mode of discourse.
The question that arises at this point is whether the speaker's apprehension
with regard to the rhetoric of the Anmerkungen originate from an awareness of h
inadequacy in handling this discourse, or should rather be seen as symptomatic o
a problem inherent in the discourse itself. A passage in the first section seems t
support the first hypothesis, in that it dramatizes how the speaker manages to lose
his bearings in the web spun by his own thoughts. The context for this 'incident' is
the speaker's attempt to characterize "Dichtkunst" by means of a description of the
mental processes presiding over the formation of knowledge. But what starts as a
account ofthe way in which sensual stimuli are organized and subsumed to concepts
soon becomes a digression which recounts how the collected impressions take on
a life of their own in the mind. Michael Morton has aptly characterized this
digression as a performative enactment of the very processes the text seeks t
expound, noting that the description of a self-generating train of thought is staged
and demonstrated in the text's own digression.30 What is more, to make sure that th
digression will be recognized as such, the speaker wraps it up with the gesture o
catching himself at straying from the intended path, which in turn allows him
reestablish the original train of thought: "Doch bald geb ich selbst ein solches
[Beispiel] ab-ich finde mich wieder zurecht, ich machte die Anmerkung..." (333)
While ironically evoking the image of an ill-equipped and inexperienced
writer, this self-conscious, self-reflexive passage suggests a high degree o
sophistication and textual control. In playing the part of a writer who gets caught in
the tangle of his ruminations, the speaker does not really intend to cast doubts on h
own adroitness in handling this discourse, but rather to uncover the limitations
the discourse itself. There is a gap, as it were, between the way the mind works an
the characteristics of the discourse employed to represent mental processes-
traditionally, the conceptual discourses of science and philosophy. While the
critical discourse of the "Prosaist" follows a linear, aim-oriented development, th

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412 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

mind is simultaneously involved in multiple, partially autonomous operatio

tension engendered by the conflicting exigencies of a primarily conceptu
and its object of investigation can be resolved in two ways. Conceptual dis
can either reduce the multivalence of the mind's operations to a monolithic
narrative. Or else, it can attempt to reproduce the associative, digressive unf
of mental processes, and thus renounce its demand of linearity and con
clarity. This latter endeavor in effect hijacks the discourse, taking it off tra
weakening it, according to its own standards.
But there are further, even more serious ramifications to Lenz's tex
experiment. As it turns out, the attempt to turn thought onto itself, the mind to
on its own operations, actually sidetracks thought in that it ends up engen
those same operations that are being examined. These new operations get in t
of the initial objective of the mind's self-reflection, taking it in a different d
and eventually subverting the examination altogether. This type ofincident eff
challenges the idea of self-transparent thought that has represented a corners
rationalistic epistemology since Descartes' Meditations,3 in that it shows that
is no neutral position from which the mind/thought could observe itself
altering its own operations. But if pure, unaffected self-observation is imp
the myth of clarity and impartiality surrounding rational discourse is pl
question.
If, at the level of the text's argumentation, the conceptual discourse of French
aesthetics is critiqued as being inadequate for grasping the simultaneity and
particularity of aesthetic signification, the shortcomings ofthis discourse are further
highlighted through examples that challenge the very grounding of this discourse,
its postulates of objectivity, neutrality, and self-clarity. In this regard, the self-
interruptions, the sudden changes of direction, the occasional irresolution that mark
the text's argumentation serve the purpose of calling attention to the limitations of
a discourse that continuously runs the risk of being seduced by its own self-assured,
generalizing gestures. This restraining and relativizing function is especially
pronounced at critical junctures in the Anmerkungen. For instance, the emphatic
exposition of the notion of "Standpunkt," which represents the culmination of the
rhetorically masterful discussion of genius, is weakened at its conclusion by a
sudden disorientation in the speaker, who appears to have once again lost his train
of thought: "Wollte sagen-was wollt ich doch sagen?-" (337). Other passages go
so far as to underscore the deliberate nature of such self-effacing gestures. A case
in point is the lengthy tirade against French dramatists, whom the speaker lampoons
for subjecting themselves to external rules of structure and diction in the hope that
this might help camouflage the hollowness of their creations. As the speaker self-
reflexively observes, however, his own contentions on this point fail to rise above
the level of abstraction and generality for which he is reproaching the French. This
calls for amending the argument that was just advanced: "DaB ich dieses trockene
Stiick Rasonnement mit einem Nigelchen spicke, will ich-" (354) Through this

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Patrizia C. McBride 413

statement, which ends in one of the self-interruptions that are so typical for th
Anmerkungen, the speaker himself resolves to punch a hole in the balloon of
reasoning he has inflated before the reader's eyes. The way to correct th
abstractness is to introduce concrete examples of the problem at issue. The flaws of
the French models must be demonstrated hands-on, instead of through abstract
calculations. The text proceeds to illustrate the shortcomings of the French mode
by means of a detailed comparison between Shakespeare's and Voltaire's rendition
of a proverbial dramatic theme, namely, the death of Julius Caesar.
The discursive critique, which the Anmerkungen unfold, culminates, at the
text's conclusion, in the speaker's open admission of the deficiencies inherent in th
discursive mode with which he is compelled to engage. In the same tone o
exaggerated deference found at the beginning of the treatise, the speaker voices hi
regret for having tried the patience of his audience with such lengthy ruminations

Das war's nun, meine Herren! ich bin miide, Ihnen mehr zu sagen. Aber wei
dochj eder Rauch machen mu3, der sich unterstehen will, ein Feuer anzuziinden
Ich bin gewiB, daB es noch lange nicht genug war, Aufmerksamkeit rege zu
machen-nichtsdestoweniger straft mich mein Gewissen doch, daB ich schon
zuviel gesagt. Denn es ist so eine verdriilliche Sache, von Dingen zu schwitzen
die sich nur sehen und ftihlen lassen, fiber die nichts gesagt sein will-(361)

At first these remarks seem to amount to nothing more than self-reproach. The
speaker expresses his feelings of guilt for having said too much-and thereby
ironically undermines the preceding statement claiming he may not have said
enough to arouse his audience's attention. The subsequent remark takes th
reasoning in an unexpected direction, however, suggesting that it does not really
matter how much or how little one says on such a topic; one always ends up saying
too much, given the fundamental inadequacy of language for discussing it ("for
is irritating to talk about things about which nothing can be said"). The problem
resides in the discursive mode within which the task of speaking is carried out.
once again points to the insufficiency of the text's mode of argumentation for
grasping the specificity of drama, and, in turn, of the aesthetic domain.

VI

These are only few examples of the commentary the Anmerkungen present on
their own discourse. From these and other passages like them, there emerges the
awareness of a fundamental inadequacy of the critical discourse for its object of
investigation. As I have argued, this awareness stems from the insight that any
inquiry into the aesthetic-as the Other of conceptual practices-remains implicated,
at least at the level of discourse, in these same practices. Faced with this paradoxical
condition, Lenz refuses to brush the problem aside or yield to linguistic scepticism
or epistemological nihilism. Instead, he chooses to follow the second path described

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414 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

by Niklas Luhmann: He inscribes in the text's splintered, self-reflexive st

awareness of the paradox that any cognitive investigation into the struct
knowledge engenders. Through recourse to a professedly rhapsodic, delibe
self-contradictory style, Lenz creates a highly idiosyncratic discourse that
undercutting the universal claims still present in the structure of his argumen
It is a discourse that attempts to express the particular, nongeneralizable kno
to which the aesthetic grants access, and in the same gesture points to the in
erasure of the particular that conceptual discourse entails.
Lenz's reflection grows out of that current of Enlightenment thought
recognized in the contingency and ultimate incommensurability of histo
epochs a discrete realm of meaning, and held the aesthetic to be a privileged
which this meaning could be redeemed. In taking up the task of theorizing ar
domain of signification distinct from conceptual knowledge, the Anmerk
register the paradox that underlies the endeavor of delineating the two realm
the position of the conceptual. Lenz chooses to confront this paradox by enve
his reflection in a pointedly unconventional and self-contradictory style.
way, he creates a mode of signification that calls attention to its limitations, w
however, renouncing the task of telling, in the awareness that contradiction i
not an ontological category, but rather a by-product of precisely that r
discourse his deliberately fragmentary style attempts to circumvent. As one
thinkers engaged in theorizing and creating a modem German literature
struck at the heart of a paradox that has loomed over aesthetic theory ever si
paradoxical attempt at an answer displays a freshness and timeliness that
undiminished more than two centuries later.

'One of the most compelling accounts of the rise of modem aesthetics within the G
context is found in Peter Burger's analysis of the historical transformations that shap
"institution" of modem literature during the eighteenth century. Drawing on Max
sociological framework, Biirger interprets the emergence ofthe modem "Autonomieast
in the works of Kant, Schiller, and Moritz as a reaction to the increasing specializ
modem societies, and to the ensuing fragmentation of experience in disparate life sph
value systems. In the wake of these transformations, art is theorized as the doma
unscathed by the all-pervasive rationalization that characterizes modernity. As su
identified as a realm which still holds the unitary meaning of a disjointed human expe
In virtue of its opposition to the rational principles that permeate all domains of life, in
religion, art is perceived as the medium within which the nonrational, deeper mea
human life manifests itself. Particularly the new institution of literature becomes a fu
equivalent of religion, in that it offers a prerational insight into the sense and pu
existence, which religion is no longer able to produce. Peter Biirger, "Institution Litera
ModemisierungsprozeB," Zum Funktionswandel in derLiteratur, ed. Peter Burger (Fr
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 9-32. See also Gunter Grimm's discussion of the origins of
literature in the critique of dogmatic rationality and erudite intellectualism, which cu
in the historicist movement epitomized by Herder's reflection. Gunter E. Grimm, Letter

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Patrizia C. McBride 415

Wissenschaftskritik und antigelehrtes Dichten in Deutschland von der Renaissance bis zum
Sturm und Drang (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1998).
2Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy characterize the project of early Romanticism as a blending o
literary theory and practice fueled by the desire to grasp the essence or "truth of [literary]
production" in itself, by staging "literature producing itself as it produces its own theory
(12), that is, a literary absolute. Though the ultimate aim of this project was to transcend the
coordinates of present-day idealistic philosophy and thereby disclose a realm beyond the
confines of contemporary thought, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy emphasize that the Romantic
project of a "literary Absolute aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the
Subject" (15), that is, it winds up reinforcing the horizon of contemporary idealism. Far from
uncovering the sought-for, new terrain of an absolutely self-present, self-cognizant literary
'consciousness,' Romantic thinking lapses back into the very structures of thought it sought
to displace. According to the authors, this represents the main reason for the collapse of the
experiment undertaken by the Jena Romantics. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy, The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans.
Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). See in particular th
"Preface," 1-17.
3Braungart's aim is to outline the historical development ofthe discourse unfolding alongside
the dominant strain of moder aesthetic reflection-extending from Kant and the Romantic
to modernism and poststructuralism. Braungart argues that the philosophical framework o
this latterreflection-its exclusive grounding in language andthought-makes it prone to the
danger of a divorce between word and meaning, signifier and signified. Where meaning an
sign lack a stable connection, language loses its reliability and risks to dissolve in an endless,
self-referential play of signifiers. Novalis's "Monolog" represents an early document of thi
awareness, which explodes within the language skepticism of modernism and th
"Sinnpessimismus" of poststructuralism. Braungart insists that this is not the only avenue
available to the reflection on art in modernity. He traces the origins of an alternative discourse
to Herder's theory of corporeal expression-which encompasses both aesthetic production
(aesthetic sense is present in the materiality of the body, which does not function as a 'mere'
sign) and the reception of art (the senses, and not the intellect, provide the medium for
conveying and grasping aesthetic meaning). The grounding in the material character of the
artwork allows for an articulation of aesthetic meaning as contingent and finite, but definite
present, and communicable. According to Braungart, the overlooked strain of aestheti
reflection beginning with Herder and Moritz lives on in the physiognomic theories of the
nineteenth century and asserts itself with force in the thinking of key modernists
Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and D6blin, among others. Georg Braungart, Leibhafter Sinn. De
andere Diskurs der Moderne (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1995). See especially the introductio
(1-8) and the sections dedicated to Herder's theory of plastic expression (53-107).
4Helga Stipa Madland, Image and Text: J.M.R. Lenz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 14-15.
sIn this respect, see Alan C. Leidner's insightful appraisal of Lenz's work in the context of
Sturm und Drang aesthetics in The Impatient Muse: Germany and the Sturm und Dran
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), particularly the "Introduction" and
chapter 7 ("The Patient Art of J.M.R. Lenz"), 1-12 and 92-106.
6Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend. Werke undBriefe, vol.
4, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985).
7Johann Christoph Gottsched, Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst. Ausgewdhlte Werke, vol.
6, ed. Joachim Birke und Brigitte Birke (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1973).

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416 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

8Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Werke und Briefe, vo

Wilfried Barnert and Klaus Bohnen (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1
9As Michael Morton has argued, underneath the surface chaos that ensues from th
unconventional exposition it is not difficult to detect a fairly conventional, tr
organization that structures the unfolding of a logical argumentation. Michael
"Exemplary Poetics: The Rhetoric ofLenz'sAnmerkungen iibers Theater andPandae
Germanicum," Lessing Yearbook 20 (1988): 121-51, here 122-23.
'?For an insightful discussion of the evolution ofthese distinctions in the eighteenth
nineteenth century see Gerhard Plumpe's account of the genesis of modern asthe
Asthetische Kommunikation der Moderne, vol. 1 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verla
26-36.

"According to Wanda von Dusen, the opposition Poesie/Wissenschaften is implicitly

introduced in the short opening paragraph to the Anmerkungen, where the speaker is
described as an "objective dilettant" ("ein unparteiischer Dilettant"). Von Dusen argues that
the understood specialist, to which the dilettant here is opposed, is in this context the man of
science, i.e., the philosopher. Wanda von Dusen, "Reconciling Reason with Sensibility:
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz's Anmerkungen iibers Theater, Subversive Sublimities:
Undercurrents of the German Enlightenment, ed. Eitel Timm (Columbia: Camden, 1992),
28.
'2References to and citations from Lenz's Anmerkungen, identified by page number alone in
the text, correspond to: J.M.R. Lenz, Werke undSchriften I, ed. Britta Titel and Hellmut Haug
(Stuttgart: Goverts, 1966).
"Karin A. Wurst, "A Shattered Mirror: Lenz's Concept of Mimesis," Space to Act: The
Theater ofJ.M.R.Lenz, ed. Alan C. LeidnerandHelga S. Madland (Columbia, S.C.: Camden,
1993), 106-20, here 112. For a discussion of Lenz's position within controversies around the
notion of imitation in the eighteenth century, see also Helga Madland, "Imitation to Creation:
the Changing Concept of Mimesis from Bodmer and Breitinger to Lenz," Eighteenth-
Century German Authors and their Aesthetic Theories, ed. Richard Critchfield and Wulf
Koepke (Columbia: Camden, 1988), 29-43.
'4The notion ofan "unmittelbare, anschauende Erkenntnis" figures prominently at the closing
of Lenz's "Versuch iiber das erste Principium der Moral." Here it denotes the intuitive, non-
intellectual experience of the infinity of God (Titel/ Haug, 482-500, here 499-500). Britta
Titel and Hellmut Haug see in this "ein Lieblings- und Schliisselwort von Lenz" and relate
it to an analogous term employed by Wieland. In Lenz's usage, it denotes a nondiscursive
cognition that reaches into the essence of an object ("in intuitiver, nicht-diskursiver
Erkenntnis in das Wesen einer Sache eindringen," Titel/Haug, 652). The concept of
"Anschauung" comes to play a critical role in Kant's first Critique (1781), where it absolves
to the cardinal role of organizing and mediating raw sensual perceptions for elaboration
through the intellectual faculty. See particularly the first "Abteilung" of Kritik der reinen
Vernunft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1956), 107-82. Lenz had been a student of Kant in
Konigsberg between 1768 and 1771. For a discussion of a possible influence of Kant's early
philosophy on Lenz, see Ottomar Rudolf's Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Moralist und
AuJklirer (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1970), 52-5.
"Rector identifies the foundation of Lenz's dramaturgy in the idea of the "Gemalde," which
he considers to be the product of an original conflation of aesthetic and theological
considerations. Martin Rector, "Optische Metaphorik und theologischer Sinn in Lenz'
Poesie-Auffassung," J.M.R. Lenz. Studien zum Gesamtwerk, ed. David Hill (Opladen:

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Patrizia C. McBride 417

Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), 11-26; here 16. See also Rector's study "Anschauen
Denken. Zur Form von Lenz' 'Anmerkungen iibers Theater,'" Lenz-Jahrbuch. Sturm-un
Drang-Studien, 1 (1991): 92-105. For the importance of the visual as a structuring princ
in Lenz's plays and dramatic theory, see also John Osborne's discussion of the concept o
"tableau" in "Motion Pictures: The Tableau in Lenz's Drama and Dramatic Theory," S
to Act: The Theater of J.M.R. Lenz (Columbia, S.C.: Camden, 1993), 91-105.
'6Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon. Werke und Briefe, vol. 5:2, ed. Wilfried Bar
(Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985).
'7Johann Gottfried Herder, Die kritischen Wdlder zur Asthetik. Schriften zur Asthetik
Literatur, vol. 2, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 19
'8For a comprehensive account of Lenz's reception of Shakespeare within the broa
horizon of the Shakespeare renaissance in Germany, see Eva Maria Inbar's Shakespeare
Deutschland: Der Fall Lenz (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1982). See also the more recent study
John Guthrie, "'Shakespears Geist.' Lenz and the Reception of Shakespeare in Germany
J.M.R. Lenz. Studien zum Gesamtwerk, ed. David Hill (Opladen: Westdeutscher Ver
1994), 36-46. Lenz's effort to claim authorship for the new dramatic model centered o
Shakespeare is well-known. In a statement placed at the onset of the Anmerkungen, L
insists that his essay predates the publication of the programmatic document of Sturm-un
Drang aesthetics, namely, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, which contains Herder's fam
essay on Shakespeare. For a brief discussion of the controversy around the attribution
central tenets of the new dramatic theory involving Herder, Goethe, and Lenz, see In
Stephan's and Hans-Gerd Winter's )Ein voriibergehendes Meteor?< J.M.R. Lenz und sei
Rezeption in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1984), 134.
9A case in point is the rule dictating the unity of dramatic action, in which Lenz view
demand which may have suited the Weltanschauung of the ancient Greeks, but is inadeq
for the moder sensibility. If for the Greeks the whole of reality resided in an inexor
destiny, represented through the unfolding of a unitary plot, Lenz maintains that the mod
see reality as a multitude of events which all converge around a strong personality. T
moder drama achieves through the main character that unity which in Greek tragedy
provided by a unitary plot. Anmerkungen, 345.
20See in particular ?40, "Vom Geschmacke als einer Art von sensus communis," Imman
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Werkausgabe, vol. 10, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfu
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 224-28. For a succinct, yet insightful discussion of the issue of
communicability of taste in Kant's third Critique, see Jochen Schmidt's "Kant: Das Ge
in den Grenzen des human aufgeklarten Geistes," Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedank
1750-1945, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 354-80, especi
359-60.
21Morton, 125.
22Morton, 135.
23For a discussion of the rhetorical and ideological horizon within which the essayistic genre
develops in the German-speaking countries over the course of the eighteenth century, see
John A. McCarthy's Crossing Boundaries: A Theory and History of Essay Writing in
German, 1680-1815 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), particularly
chapter 8 on the essayistic experimentation spanning the period between 1750 and 1790,209-
63.

24In this regard, Fritz Martini holds Lenz's style to be the product of a linguistic crisis which
can be traced back to a general crisis of values in a transitional epoch. The rejection of

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418 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

traditional modes of thinking and interpreting experience would account for the
cogent, coherent reflection. Fritz Martini, "Die Einheit der Konzeption in J.M
>Anmerkungen iubers Theater,<< Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft
159-82. In a similar vein, Holger A. Pausch calls attention to the lack of coherence in
concepts of Lenz's dramaturgy. "Zur Widerspriichlichkeit in der Lenzschen 'Dram
Maske und Kothurn 17 (1971): 97-108. Recently, Alan Leidner has revived the
relating Lenz's self-interrupting style to his personal insecurity and psychological i
Alan Leidner, "Zur Selbstunterbrechung in den Werken von Jakob Michael Reinh
J.M.R. Lenz als Alternative?, ed. Karin A. Wurst (Koln: B6hlau, 1992), 46-63.
25As Wurst argues, "The searching, encircling linguistic gesture or form is its
circumscriptive mode ofthinking that approximates the problem or issue without mo
finalizing a position" Wurst, 107. See also Michael Morton's suggestion th
rhetorical attempt to entangle the text in different forms of contradiction aims at a pr
"multiplication of negativity," by which the text stages the paradoxical condition of
existence torn between the poles of determinism and freedom. Morton, 125-26 a
26Walter Benjamin, Der Begriffder Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik. Ge
Schriften, vol. I.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frank
Suhrkamp, 1974), 19. According to Rodolphe Gasche, Kant's notion of "intel
Anschauung" in the third Critique contains "the idea of a transcendental imagina
pure apperception which implicitly serves to bridge intuition and understanding." It
the quest for "an original and synthetic knowledge, a sensible understanding
becomes programmatic for German post-Kantian philosophy. Gasche's argument
what he considers to be the speculative seeds found in paragraph 76 of Kant's K
Urteilskraft. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Phil
Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 29.
27See "Towards the Limits of Reflection" in Gasche, 13-105.
28Emblematic in this regard is the exploration of linguistic and conceptual structur
work ofJacques Derrida and Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard. Derrida explicitly reflects the p
nature of this enterprise in his analysis of the styles of Nietzsche, the merciless
Western metaphysics. In confronting Nietzsche's writings, he endeavors to com
with the desire of overcoming metaphysical speculation and yet the impossibilit
so without using metaphysical categories and metaphysical reasoning. His an
Nietzsche's styles is conducted in a highly self-reflexive and idiosyncratic mode o
that aims at foregrounding the paradoxical nature of his textual endeavor and at hig
the recognition that any critique of structures of thought linked to the tradition o
philosophical discourse remains necessarily imbricated in these very structures.
Derrida, Spurs. Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
similar framework, Lyotard undertakes an immanent investigation into the limits of
In an enterprise envisioned as the continuation of Kant's exploration of reflective
in the third Critique, the faculty ofjudgment folds upon itself and attempts to outline t
of reflection, i.e., its own limits, in order to attain the premonition of an outside,
purely negative fashion. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
29For a discussion of the notion of paradox within a systems-theoretical frame
Niklas Luhmann, "Sthenographie und Euryalistik," Paradoxien/Zusamme
Dissonanzen, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt/M.: S
1991), 58-82. For Luhmann's characterization of modernity's attempts at coping

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Patrizia C. McBride 419

paradoxical structure of hum

(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1
Wissenschaft," 702-19.
30Morton, 125.
31Rene Descartes, Meditations
Cambridge University Press,

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