4—
Representation and Criticism

If some mystical art lovers who regard every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logically, then "wow!" would be the best criticism of the worthiest work of art. Certainly, there are criticisms which say nothing more but only say it in a more rambling manner.
Schlegel, "Critical Fragments," no. 57

The fragmentary impulse of allegory and irony prevents the interpretation and analysis of Romantic texts in terms of their narrowly defined documentary purposes. Representation is inseparably bound to the question of commentary. In agreement with Kant's view that understanding in a universal sense is the ability to define limits, Novalis sees criticism as a process of translation where an abstract language or mode of signification is redefined in terms of concrete poetic employment: "Criticism shows precisely the necessity of limitation, determination—pause—and points to a definite purpose and transforms speculation into a useful and itself poetic instrument" (1960, 3: 442, no. 906). Criticism as the analytic of representation constitutes a willed invention of rhetorical theory that inscribes itself in the interstices of various disciplines. As an interdisciplinary activity, criticism, as Roland Barthes observes, does not aim

to rediscover the 'essence' of the work, for this essence is the subject itself, that is to say an absence: every metaphor is a sign without a substance, and it is this far-off quality of the signified that the symbolic process, in its profusion, designates: the critic can only continue the metaphors of the work, not reduce them. . . . It is sterile to bring the work down to pure explicitness, since then immediately there is nothing more to say about it . . . but it is hardly less vain to seek in the work what it might be saying without actually saying it and to suppose that it has a final secret, to which, once discovered, there would equally be nothing to add: whatever one says about the work, there always remains in it something of language, of the subject, of absence, just as there was at the moment of its inception . (1987, 87)

The ambiguous status of representation resides in this residue of "language, of the subject, of absence." Here reason cannot pene-

trate the mystery of language. In an essay on irony, "Über die Unverständlichkeit" (On incomprehensibility), Schlegel argues that the welfare of humanity depends in the final analysis on the possibility of that mystery:

But is incomprehensibility really something so thoroughly contemptible and evil? I think the salvation of families and nations rests on it. . . . Even the most precious thing a human being has, inner happiness itself, depends, as anyone would easily know, in the last analysis, on some such point that must be left in the dark, but that nonetheless carries and supports the whole and would lose this strength the moment it were subjected to reason. Truly, you would fare badly, if as you demand, the whole world were to become totally comprehensible in earnest. And isn't this endless world itself formed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos? (1958, 2: 370)

In every form of mediation in language a gap remains, an absence which, as both Schlegel and Barthes show, is where representation represents its own impossibility. The realization of this paradox constitutes "the final stage of intellectual formation [Geistesbildung ]." It involves the ability to posit the very "sphere of unintelligibility and chaos. The understanding of chaos inheres in this recognition" (ibid., 18: 227, no. 396). The realization of this paradox is the self-reflexive gesture of representation. Norbert Bolz maintains that the hermeneutic practice of early German Romanticism is not an attempt to "make intelligible the unintelligible" (ein Verständlichmachen des Unverständlichen ) but an elicitation and elucidation of what Schlegel calls the "hidden unintelligibility" (ibid., 2: 371; Bolz 1979, 107).

What this self-reflexive practice demonstrates is that in Romantic hermeneutics the act of understanding becomes its own object of inquiry. This is analogous to Kant's philosophical critique where the presentation of philosophy constitutes an investigation into the conditions and limits of philosophy and to Fichte's elevation of philosophy to a philosophy of philosophy. The intensified reflective status of interpretation in Romanticism establishes criticism as reproduction or as doubled production of the work of art. If writing is a mode of construction then reading and criticism are strategies of reconstruction. Consequently criticism is a reflection on construction and therefore qualifies as a potentiated form of writing.

Criticism is perceived as an ongoing activity or production. As such the value of the work of art is no longer dependent on its adherence to a set of externally determined criteria but on its potential to generate reflection.^[1] "The critics always talk of rules," notes Schlegel, "but where then are the rules which are really poetic, not merely grammatical, metric, logical, or applicable to all works of art?" (1957, 44, no. 286). The most important aspect of criticism is, in Schlegel's words, the ability to present "a reflection of the work, to impart its characteristic spirit, to represent the pure impression in such a way that the form of representation itself verifies the artistic civic rights of its originator." Criticism is not merely "a poem on a poem," nor is it "merely the impression that a work made yesterday or today on this or that person but that which it should make on all educated people [alle Gebildete ]" (1958, 1: 499).

Since representation always points to the absence of full truth, criticism takes on the task of demonstrating that the word does not designate a determinate referent. "The letter is the bound spirit," Schlegel writes, "reading is freeing the bound spirit, in other words, a magic action" (ibid., 18: 297, no. 1,229).^[2] The "magic" of criticism is often couched in metaphors of alchemy, for it is an attempt to transmute a baser activity into a higher form of understanding, into a universal solvent. Metaphors of chemical processes and experiments serve as convenient analogies for acts of testing language and freeing it from fixed meaning. Schlegel, for example, compares philosophy to chemistry, because neither is "a means of invention of truth" but rather "of purification and combination" (ibid., 19: 38, no. 349). In other words, philosophy and its product, criticism, are not in the business of inventing truths but analyzing and synthesizing them. Furthermore, the Romantic idea of endless transformation of form accommodates as does chemistry the principle of contradiction: "Those who have a sense for the infinite and know what they want to do with it see in it the result of eternally separating and uniting powers, conceive of their ideals at least as being chemical, and utter, when they express themselves decisively, nothing but contradictions" (ibid., 2: 243, no. 412). Schlegel sees the philological analysis of the text as the "enthusiasm for chemical knowledge; for grammar is certainly only the philosophical aspect of the universal art of dividing and joining [Scheidungs- und Ver -

bindungskunst ]" (ibid., 2: 241, no. 404). And the masterful work of criticism requires "the ability for absolute synthesis and absolute analysis" (1957, 41, no. 251).

The idea of the text as a field where conflicting forces of fusion and diffusion are in full play implies that the act of writing itself is informed by the chemical processes of synthesis and analysis. Schlegel delineates two model texts based on two different approaches to writing:

The analytic writer observes the reader as he is; he then makes his calculations and sets up his machines in order to make the proper impression on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader as he should be; he doesn't imagine him calm and dead, but alive and responsive. He lets whatever he has created take shape gradually before the reader's eyes, or he urges the reader to discover it himself. He does not try to make any particular impression on the reader, but enters with him into the sacred relationship of the most profound symphilosophy or sympoetry. (1958, 2: 161, no. 112)

The reader of the synthetic writer is the transformative model of the text itself. Schlegel's typology corresponds to Barthes's famous distinction between the lisible (readerly) text designed for passive consumption and the scriptible (writerly) text, where the writer and the reader jointly tease out a diversity of meaning. The idea of the text as a field of encounter between analytic and synthetic activity dislodges that center which in traditional texts arrests and grounds meaning. This decentering gives rise to a plurality of meanings. In Barthes's words:

the text is not coexistence of meanings but passage, traversal; thus it answers not to an interpretation . . . but to an explosion, a dissemination. The Text's plurality does not depend on the ambiguity of its contents, but rather on what could be called the stereographic plurality of the signifiers that weave it. (1979, 76)

Romantic idealism creates the conditions for the possibility of this dissemination. "True idealism," states Schlegel, "does not merely state that we make the object; rather it constructs the universe and shows how we make it; it constructs infinitely many objects and worlds" (1958, 18: 140, no. 219). The creative reading of a text, a genuine aesthetics of reception has to be, in Schlegel's words, "the solution of a critical equation, the result and represen-

tation [Darstellung ] of a philological experiment and of a literary research" (ibid., 2: 241, no. 403).

The Romantic concept of the text as a context for the formation, dissolution, and re-formation of meaning is the object of Novalis's miniature essay "Monolog" which analyzes the conflicting dictates of representational autonomy and referential validity in language. In order to be able to discuss the critical potential of this essay, I quote it in its entirety:

Speaking and writing are fundamentally very peculiar things; real conversation is a mere play of words. One can only be amazed at the ridiculous error of those who think that they speak for the sake of the things said. Precisely that defining characteristic of language that it is merely concerned with itself, no one knows. That is why it is such a wonderful secret, that when one speaks merely to speak, he says the most wonderful, most original truths. But when one intends to speak about something specific, then capricious language makes him say the most ridiculous and contradictory stuff. From this arises also the hatred that many serious people feel for language. They are aware of its mischievousness but are not aware that idle chatter is the infinitely serious aspect of language. If one could only make people understand that it is with language as it is with mathematical formulae—they constitute a world for themselves—they play only with themselves, express nothing but their own wonderful nature, and are, therefore, so expressive—precisely because of this, the strange play of relations is reflected in them. Only because of their freedom, are they links of nature, and only in their free movements does the world soul express itself and makes of them a delicate measure and fundament of things. The same is also true of language—whoever is sensitive to its use, its measure, its musical spirit, whoever feels the delicate effect of its inner nature, and moves his tongue and hand accordingly, will be a prophet; on the other hand, whoever knows but has not adequate ear or sense, will write truths like these, but will be tricked by language and mocked by people, like Cassandra by the Trojans. If I believe that I have hereby given a most accurate account of the nature and function of poetry, I nevertheless know that no one can understand it, and that I have said something quite silly, because I wanted to say it, and in this way no poetry comes into being. But what if I had to speak? and this drive to speak were a sign of the inspiration and effectiveness of language in myself? and what if my will also wanted everything that I had to do, then this could, without my knowledge and belief, be poetry after all, and could make a secret of language understandable? and so I would be called a writer, for a writer may very well be a person inspired by language? (1960, 2: 672–673)

Novalis puts to task the crude understanding of representation attributed to language. The representational status of language is not built on a system of correspondences with the objects of the world but, following Fichte's theory of knowledge, on language's ability to reflect on itself. Language guarantees no referential security. It simply represents itself to itself. This activity is not controlled by an agency even if the agent is the speaker. Language defies the referentiality and intentionality conceived by the subject. Novalis's own reflection on language demonstrates that he can speak of language in language only ironically. The operative trope of the essay is irony. This form of irony is, in Schlegel's words, "the tone and style of analytic philosophy" (1957, 60, no. 453). The first part of the essay argues that language rejects all mimetic links to the world of experience and exists in a state of free play with it. If the speaker attempts to fix meaning by suspending language in time, meaning will elude the speaker every time. Once language extends beyond the conscious control of the subjective agency, it speaks wondrously. Novalis argues that language resembles mathematical formulae in so far as it creates its own world.

Because language refers only to itself, it is able to reflect the strange configurations of things. This is a paradox, but such is the real nature of things. Language is a self-generating activity. In Fichte the activity of the self is manifested in free representation. Both mathematics and language reflect in their freedom of expression the ever-changing spirit of life and nature. Once Novalis demonstrates the elusive disposition of language that duplicates the flux of experience, the text performs its own conceptual play in a final staging of irony. If language is to reflect on language and if meaning defies permanence, then Novalis's eloquent description of poetic language itself becomes a hollow formula. This paradox, nevertheless, does not claim to negate or transcend representation. Language itself, couched in irony, constantly brings up the question of representation. However, the danger posed by the unstable ground of representation is diminished in aesthetic enthusiasm. Novalis believes that this danger does not deter the poet, "a person inspired by language" (ein Sprachbegeisterter ). Language itself inspires the poet to language, even though the absolute eludes language. "The poet must have the ability to imagine other thoughts and represent ideas in all forms of their consequences and in manifold expressions,"

writes Novalis elsewhere, ". . . he must invent conversations, letters, speeches, tales, descriptions, passionate expressions full of all kinds of possibilities by thousands of different persons in various circumstances, and put these on paper in suitable words. He must be in a position to speak of everything in an entertaining and meaningful way and speaking and writing must inspire him to speaking and writing" (1960, 3: 689, no. 685).

The paradoxes of language eloquently articulated in "Monolog" strive toward a resolution in the concept of dialogue. A long, critical fragment by Novalis dating from 1798–1799 maps out the route that leads from Kant's systematic formulation of critique through Fichte's undifferentiated field of self-activity to the Romantic view of hermeneutics as an ongoing social conversation where the subject-object dichotomy yields to an epistemology that links the participants. Since this fragment situates Romantic hermeneutics in a well-defined historical and philosophical context, it deserves closer critical inspection:

In effect, criticism —or the method of exhaustion —which includes the method of interchange, the theory that refers us, in our study of nature, to ourselves, to inner observation and experiment, and in our study of ourselves, to the external world, external observations and experiments, is, in a philosophical sense, the most productive of all indications . It lets us perceive nature, or the external world, as a human essence—it shows that we can and should understand everything only in the way we understand ourselves and our beloved, understand us and you .

We see ourselves in a system, as a link in ascending and descending lines, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large—human beings of infinite variations.

Naturally, we understand everything strange only through self-estrangement, self-change, self-observation.

Now we see the real bonds of connection between the subject and the object, see that in us there is also an outward world which is in an analogous relation with ourselves as the outward world is with our outward selves, and that the former and the latter are connected like our inner and outer selves.

That is, we can only perceive the inner self and the spirit of nature through ideas, as we do the external self and the body of nature through sensations.

Now the so-called transcendental philosophy—the reference to the subject—idealism, and the categories—the relation between object and

representation appears in a completely new light. Demonstration why something belongs to external and internal nature—demonstrability of each existence and its modification. Nature is the ideal . The true ideal is possible, real, and necessary at the same time.

The principle I is simultaneously the true social and liberal and universal principle—it is a unity without being a limit and determination. Rather it makes all determinations possible and sound—and gives them absolute context and meaning. Selfhood is the ground of all knowledge —as the ground of permanence in change—and the principle of highest diversity—Thou. Instead of Not-Self, Thou [Statt Nicht-Ich-Du ]. Generality and specificity. Everything can be Self [Ich ] and is Self or should be Self. (ibid., 3: 429–430, no. 820)

Critical practice aims at "exhausting" all the formal relations between the self and the world of experience. Any form of commentary represents an alterity, that is, it distances itself from a given text, becomes its transfiguration through critical reflection. Criticism is the other, the mirror reflection of the ideal, of self-positing, of the external world, or of art, just as history is the other of the present. The pre-texts of criticism, however, eventually become forms of self-representation, for "everything strange" can only be grasped through "self-observation." In itself, nature is incomprehensible, because it is external to us. In the final analysis we can understand only that which is a part of ourselves. But we can understand something alien or external, like nature, by relating it to the self, by intuiting it, so to speak, analogically. Conversely, we comprehend our inner selves in analogy to the external world. Through critical and intuitive reflection, the encounter between the self and the foreign other results in self-understanding, which is the prerequisite of understanding in a universal sense. The world is no longer a differentiated sphere of experience in the Kantian sense, nor is it posited by the self as Fichte construed it; rather, it represents a potentiated form of self-understanding. This concept plays an important role in the later development of hermeneutical theory.

These relations point to the practical implications of transcendental philosophy "in a totally new light." The light issues from the lantern of "magical idealism." In a letter written in May 1798 to Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis uses the term "magischer Idealismus" to designate the "very great, very fertile idea, throwing a ray of light of the highest intensity on the Fichtean system" (ibid., 4: 254). Novalis grounds the concept of reality not in observable facts but

in the idea of the poetic self and the productive imagination which is an integral part of this empirical self. This poetic (or practical) understanding, which presents Fichtean idealism in a new light, reveals that the "genuine ideal is possible, real, and necessary at the same time." In this poetic epistemology, necessity and freedom are reconciled. Transcendental poetry now reveals itself as an empirical experiment of an inverted order. It does not "demonstrate" the world—as an experiment confirms a hypothesis—but arrives at a symbolic synthesis of it.

Unlike Fichte's theoretical Ich, Novalis's poetic Self admits of no restriction imposed upon it by a posited world. Novalis defines selfhood as "the ground of all knowledge," of "permanence in change," and as "the principle of highest diversity." For Schelling, the reconciliation of opposing modes of human understanding—idealism and realism, permanence and change, knowledge and action—was only possible in art that represented the pure essence of things beyond the confines of time, because in representing them for all eternity it took them out of time. On the other hand, Novalis's concept of the self as poetic subjectivity is temporally marked, for it represents an ironic and allegorical consciousness of reality. One of Schlegel's many definitions of irony underlines the eternal mutability of this trope (1958, 2: 263, no. 69). Schlegel also argues that each subject understands something external to it through a sense for diversity which comprises not only "a comprehensive system" but also "a feeling for the chaos outside that system, like humanity's feeling for something beyond humanity" (ibid., 2: 262, no. 55). Furthermore, each sequence in the act of understanding represents a mutation in time, each successive stage in the generation of knowledge marks a temporal jolt: "The life of the universal spirit is an unbroken chain of inner revolutions" (ibid., 2: 255, no. 451). Similarly, Novalis sees understanding as temporally not ontologically grounded, since it is constituted in a dialogic relationship between the self and the world, which now appears as "thou" rather than as an objective third person. This dialogue is an open-ended activity; it flows continuously through time. Only in this temporality do the self and the other reach reciprocal understanding and knowledge.

Novalis no longer sees identity as a primordial principle that engenders a subject-object split. It is now the joint activity of equal partners in a communicative enterprise. Furthermore, in Novalis's

writing Fichte's Ich is transformed into a social body. The full privileges of the first principle are now directly transferred to society. The spaces between the self and the world, I and thou, and objects and representations shift from the theoretical to the practical domain informed by a dialogic and textual reality. There is no longer an escape from language; we are enmeshed in a web of words that define our very being. Referential validity cannot be external. It inheres in the dialogue between the self and its partner. The implications of this notion reach into the core of all critical activity. Criticism can only be understood as a dialogue with the original text. As such, poetry and criticism have to share the same language: "One cannot really speak of poetry save in the language of poetry," writes Schlegel (1958, 2: 285). This critical sentiment is frequently reiterated by both Novalis and Schlegel.^[3] Romantic criticism transgresses the boundary between poetry and commentary. The latter becomes the self-representation of poetry. Once more the opposition between a first principle and its other is canceled, and representation subsumes them both.

By breaking down the barriers between different forms of knowledge and merging philosophy, rhetoric, criticism, science, and religion, the Romantics transformed the world into a universal text.^[4] As Bolz observes, the world represented for them a gigantic book where life was recorded in every detail (1979, 89). As such, life became an act of writing and reading the world of experience. This notion of the progressive textualization of the world challenges the categorization of works in terms of period, oeuvre, and genre, thus undermining what Foucault has called the "discursive unities." The significance of a text constructs itself only in the context of a complex set of relations it has to other discourses, such as philosophical and scientific heritages, works of art and literature, readers' horizons of expectations, beliefs, and social practices and customs. This network of relations challenges the notion of boundaries that define, for example, the "unity" of a book. Such boundaries can never be universally applicable. As Foucault observes, "the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network" (1974, 23). In other words, the unity of a work as scripted by a certain

author or belonging to a certain period or genre loses its self-evidence.

The Romantic penchant for the textualization of life found one of its most explicit expressions in the project of a universal encyclopedia.^[5] This project involved the compilation of all forms of philosophic discourse, all disciplines of natural sciences, and all genres of literature. As early as 1797 Novalis envisioned the unification of the arts and sciences that had been separated by diverse traditions and discourses: "We owe the greatest truths of our age to those combinations of the long separated parts of total knowledge" (1960, 2: 368, no. 27). In this reconfiguration of knowledge Novalis considered each idea in relationship to its overall context as a "philosopheme." Everything strange or foreign could be explained and appropriated by a "total encyclopedic scientific observation" (ibid., 3: 306, no. 365). To the question "what is nature?" Novalis responds, "an encyclopedic, systematic index or plan of our spirit [intellect]. Why should we content ourselves with the mere catalogue of our treasures? Let us examine them ourselves and process and use them in manifold ways" (ibid., 2: 583, no. 248).

The major paradox that the encyclopedia project as a systematizing principle faced was the question of its form. In an entry in Das allgemeine Brouillon, the draft of the universal encyclopedia, Novalis states that he plans to write to Friedrich Schlegel regarding the form the Romantic encyclopedia should be cast in: "Should it be a study (or an essay), a collection of fragments, a Lichtenberg commentary, a report, a recommendation, a story [or history], a treatise, a review, a speech, a monologue (or fragment of a dialogue )?" (ibid., 3: 278, no. 218). There is something inherently contradictory about the content and form of the project. It aims at a totality and a coherent system. However, set in the larger framework of Romantic discourse, it is best presented in fragments, perhaps as a dialogue. In fact, Schlegel considers the style of the fragment most applicable to the encyclopedia (1958, 19: 36, no. 332). If, for example, the most appropriate form of the project is the "fragment of a dialogue," then we can assume that all forms of knowledge can only be represented as a kind of conversation. This conversation is possibly interrupted, exists in a temporal reality, and is disseminated across time. It is therefore impossible to

determine knowledge for all time as if it were an atemporal and invariable given. An encyclopedia constitutes an endless book, a text that subsumes all knowledge-generating activity. For Schlegel the allegorical model of the encyclopedia is the Bible:

Even what we call the Bible is actually a system of books. This is, after all, no arbitrary turn of phrase! Or is there another word to differentiate the idea of an endless book from an ordinary one than Bible, the book as such, the absolute book? . . . In a similar way, in a perfect literature all books should be only a single book, and in such a book that is eternally in a state of becoming, the gospel of humanity and education will be revealed. (ibid., 2: 265, no. 95)

Similarly, in Das allgemeine Brouillon Novalis considers the study of the Bible not a mere reading of the Scripture but an understanding of a system of self-extending books. This system resembles a "complete, well-ordered library —the schema of the Bible is also the schema of the library" (1960, 3: 365, no. 571). In reference to his incomplete (but infinitely scriptible ) novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis states that his book "must contain the critical metaphysics of reception, of authorship, of experimentation, of observation, of reading, writing, etc." (ibid., 3: 361, no. 552). In other words, it should be "a scientific bible —a real and ideal model—and the seed of all books" (ibid., 3: 363, no. 557). The Bible serves as the extended metaphor of the open-ended Romantic text whose visions become re-visions in its varying receptions over time. Schlegel believes, however, that the infinite progressivity of the Bible in reception was given somewhat short shrift by Martin Luther. It was beautifully predisposed to being a "national novel that could have been endlessly serialized ; it was Luther's mistake to fix it and to cut off the legends" (1957, 60, no. 458).^[6] In fact, the novel, where all genres mix and mingle, is itself an encyclopedic project. It is related, as Schlegel notes, to philosophical dialogues, travelogues, confessions, conversations, anecdotes, and biographies (ibid., 71–72, no. 581). In the same encyclopedic vein all the novels of an individual author, for example, constitute a system of works which repeat and complete one another (ibid., 59, no. 447). Thus the encyclopedia, the Bible, and the novel all constitute material representations of the ideal Romantic text.

The concept of the text as a strategy of conceptualizing the world cuts across traditional lines of writing and reading. "There are so

many writers," observes Schlegel, "since reading and writing are now only different in degree" (1958, 2: 399, no. 10). The text moves away from the work, which is a concrete structure, into the hermeneutic field of activity. Here the reader or critic engages in a dialogue with the text that results in its re-presentation. "Interpretation [Auslegen ] is not infrequently an insertion [Einlegen ] of something that is desirable or expedient, and many deductions [Ableitungen ] are actually traductions [Ausleitungen ]" (ibid., 2: 169, no. 25). Novalis explicitly refers to reading as the continuation of writing:

The true reader has to be the extended writer. . . . And when the reader assays the book according to his idea, then the second reader would explicate [läutern ] it even more, and in this way the reworked material would be cast into molds of fresh activity and finally become an important part, an organ, of the effective spirit. (1960, 2: 470, no. 125)

In this way criticism becomes the ultimate ideal of Romantic poetry. It is a progressive act which expands to take in all modes of epistemic and aesthetic activity. Schlegel noted:

the good critic and characterizer must observe correctly, conscientiously, and thoroughly like the physicist, measure acutely like the mathematician, carefully arrange in columns like the botanist, dissect like the anatomist, separate like the chemist, feel like the musician, imitate like an actor, embrace practically like a lover, review like a philosopher, study cyclically like a sculptor, acutely like a judge, religiously like an antiquarian, and understand the moment like a politician. (1957, 76–77, no. 631)

Critical re-vision attempts to account for all past paradigms of understanding and incorporates them into new narratives. Literary history thus finds a new avenue of representation in the Romantic "new mythology," which in turn is ushered in by idealism, "that great phenomenon of our age" (1958, 2: 313). Consequently, Romantic criticism constitutes an encyclopedic paradigm: "Rhetoric belongs to criticism, as does compilation. Genuine rhetoric is interpretive, popularizing. This and compilation and archaeology together [constitute] literature —linked to encyclopedia" (ibid., 18: 491, no. 191).

Ernst Behler has argued that in contrast to Hegel's Enzyklopädie, which from the onset reveals a strictly systematic orientation, the

Romantics' encyclopedia has a more fluid movement that follows the path of "infinite perfectibility" (1982, 17: 180). Thus, both in conception and in form, the Romantic project represents a challenge to the idea of absolutes and hierarchies of knowledge. It presents knowledge not as a uniformly applicable and acceptable body of facts but as an asystemic system of historical and aesthetic contingencies. "A systematic encyclopedia" has to be historical, maintains Schlegel (1958, 18: 352, no. 377). He also states that next to poetry it is history that most fully incorporates the encyclopedic character (ibid., 18: 380, no. 717). The fragmentary nature of the encyclopedia suggests a resistance to and questioning of attempts at system building and as such represents a critique of totalizing modes of knowledge. It operates in the mode of Romantic irony by generating as well as by dissecting, disputing, and doubting. Therefore, the encyclopedia becomes an apparatus of critical interpretation. In its use of fragmentary and elliptical forms and through its operation in the tropological mode, the encyclopedia project of early Romanticism stakes out territories that pose problems of knowledge and contextualizes them in the larger problem of literary representation. Schlegel sees the encyclopedia as both "the totality of ideas" and "constitutive reason" and "revolutionary imagination" (ibid., 18: 434, no. 80). The Romantic encyclopedia represents a complex and expansive equation whose solution, as one may expect, is ultimately given in the poetic mode: "The realization of the encyclopedia," writes Schlegel, "requires that all art and knowledge and criticism be resolved, in the final analysis, in poetry" (ibid., 16: 419, no. 34).

The Contemporary Relevance of Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics

Critical ideas are practical mathematics, absolute analysis and absolute hermeneutics.
Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, no. 564

Wilhelm Dilthey maps the path of hermeneutics as starting at the point of artful interpretive skill, progressing through the rules for a canonical interpretation, and reaching a decisive station when the act of understanding itself becomes the subject of reflection and theoretical investigation in Romanticism (1914–1977, 5: 317–

331). Hans-Georg Gadamer describes a similar development that reaches a major turning point, when in Romantic hermeneutics interpretation becomes a critical reflection on interpretation itself (1960, 162–185). Friedrich Schlegel's notebooks On Philology, which constitute the first documents of a new hermeneutics, date from 1798, when he shared living quarters in Berlin with his friend Friedrich Schleiermacher.^[7]

It is in the work of Schleiermacher—whose name literally means veil-maker—that the problem of language and texts is most systematically unveiled. He is due the credit for defining for the first time the question of understanding as a strictly philosophical problem. In his hands hermeneutics, long ago cast as a minor branch of biblical studies, expanded its purview, reaching out to take in all manner and means of interpretive activity and theory. True to the Romantic spirit, Schleiermacher's critical enterprise systematically reflects on it own premises. Like Novalis's grand-scale conception of the universal encyclopedia, Schleiermacher's hermeneutic project locates the domain of human cognition in the framework of the transcendental critique where the general and particular constituents of knowledge alternately define and expand each other's boundaries: "Everywhere complete knowledge is in this apparent circle where each particular can be understood only from the general whose part it is and vice versa. And each instance of knowledge is scientific only when it is formed in this fashion" (1977, 95).

Schleiermacher's Dialektik^[8] is an attempt at transforming Kant's critical philosophy into a transcendental dialectic of knowledge. Knowledge is posited in relation to the rational order of the universe, and being encompasses the rational order. The structures of knowledge are not founded solely on a priori principles of cognition nor are they based on the priority of practical reason. Rather, they are grounded in the general coherence of a system which reveals itself in knowledge and is reflected in the products of knowledge. The first argument for this system of knowledge concerns the agreement of all thinking subjects in the process of knowing. The primordial drive for knowledge contains two transcendental presuppositions, which themselves cannot be objects of knowledge, but determine all knowing. These are the two moments of sensible and suprasensible cognition. They constitute the agreement among all thinking subjects and the interdependence of thought and being. Both these elements, the sensory and the intellectual, the real and

the ideal, are correlated as the transcendental presuppositions of all human knowledge. The thinking subject does not experience itself simply as a nexus of accidental perceptions and unconnected thoughts. Rather, that which is given in sense perception is formed and transformed in thought.

This transcendental dialectic figures prominently in Schleiermacher's formulation of hermeneutic principles. The analytic of understanding and interpretation, which subsumes the question of representation, is the ongoing concern of Schleiermacher's earlier lectures and writings in Hermeneutik und Kritik . The precondition for all interpretive activity is the correspondence between thought and language and grammar and hermeneutics:

The alliance of hermeneutics and grammar rests on the fact that each speech is comprehended on the presupposition of the understanding of language. Both have to do with language. This leads to the unity of language and thought. Language is the way and means for the realization of ideas. . . . Since hermeneutics should lead to the understanding of thought, and since thought is only real in language, then hermeneutics, as the knowledge of language, rests on grammar. (ibid., 77)

Furthermore, in acknowledgment of the diachronic or historical coordinate of language, Schleiermacher contends that "each speech can only be understood further by the knowledge of the historical totality that it belongs to or the knowledge of the history related to it" (ibid.). Thus, Schleiermacher locates the axis of understanding at the intersection of the structural and historical paths of language. Furthermore, since the human spirit and by extension language are greatly influenced by biological and physical aspects of humans and the earth, hermeneutics is also based on physics. In this larger context hermeneutics moves beyond descriptive analysis to the broader question of the conditions for the production of meaning in language. This modern hermeneutical concern transforms language and text into a field of investigation that cuts across the traditional lines of subject and sign, speech and writing, and physics and history.

Schleiermacher's innovation rests not so much on linking thought and language and diachronic and synchronic forms of understanding as it does on the cancellation of their differences to produce something new: an explosive, generative text where no lan-

guage is privileged over the other. This text marks the site of interdisciplinary activity in hermeneutics. As Barthes put it:

Interdisciplinary activity, valued today as an important aspect of research, cannot be accomplished by simple confrontations between various specialized branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinary work is not a peaceful operation: it begins effectively when the solidarity of old disciplines breaks down—a process made more violent, perhaps, by the jolts of fashion—to the benefit of a new object and a new language, neither of which is in the domain of those branches of knowledge that one calmly sought to confront. (1979, 73)

Schleiermacher lays the foundation of modern hermeneutics as an interdisciplinary project by fusing the traditional lines of thought into a new field of understanding without relinquishing the subject. This is the utopian ground of subject and language in the hermeneutic circle. One of Schleiermacher's more important critical insights, one that links his work to early Romanticism's concern with representation, is the recognition of the multi-referentiality of language. His critical reflections on language are informed by a clearly articulated awareness of the fallacy of total representation. All representation stands under the sign of mediacy: "There exists no word in living speech or writing of which one could say that it could be represented [dargestellt ] as pure unity" (1977, 108). Thus, understanding can only be situated at the approximate intersection of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, the semiotic and the intuitive: "Art can develop its rules only from a positive formula and this is 'the historical and divinatory (prophetic), objective and subjective reconstruction of the given speech'" (ibid., 93). In this perception the object of understanding as speech (Rede ) or writing (Schrift ) moves from a formal or organic whole to a methodological field, that is, a field of activity, construction, and transformation.

Although Schleiermacher does not explicitly distinguish between understanding and interpretation, he reserves the methodological procedure for the interpretive process. The process comprises "grammatical" and "psychological" (also designated as "technical") analyses. Initially Schleiermacher situates understanding in the concept of the hermeneutical circle. Here understanding and cognition are contained in an apparent circle, so that every object of inquiry can only be understood in relation to its general context, and

the whole is only graspable as the common denominator of all its parts. The hermeneutical circle excludes the possibility of direct and total representation. Schleiermacher translates this philosophical concept of the circle into concrete interpretive praxis by introducing the methods of grammatical and psychological interpretation. Neither method is prior to the other, for "understanding is only a fusion [Ineinandersein ] of both these moments." The two moments of the interpretive act "are totally equal, and one would only unjustifiably call the grammatical interpretation lower and the psychological higher" (ibid., 79).

Schleiermacher posits two "canons" or classes of grammatical interpretation. The first places language within a system, as part of a network of synchronically shared rules. The second canon rests on the notion that every word has a whole sphere of possible meanings and that the appropriate meaning must be determined from the context. The interaction between one grammatical canon and the next and between grammatical and psychological interpretation proceeds dialectically. The psychological (or technical) interpretation involves the understanding of the individuality of the text and therefore addresses the question of style: "The whole objective is to be defined as the complete understanding of style" (ibid., 168). The grammatical interpretation with its emphasis on language as a system had relegated the subject to the background. The psychological interpretation restores the subject to its place in language. It is probably more correct to say that language and subject simply exchange roles in an ongoing play of interpretive categories, since neither has a prior status in Schleiermacher's schema. He is quick to point out, however, that relegation or displacement of either language or subject can occur, if both categories are treated separately as opposed to being employed complementarily:

Grammatical. The person [subject] and his activity disappear and appear only as an organ of language. Technical. The language in its determining power disappears and appears only as an organ of the person [subject] in the service of his individuality, just as in the former, personality was in the service of language. (ibid., 171)

It is noteworthy that Schleiermacher anticipates critical positions that parallel those of structuralism and poststructuralism. In the former, as in grammatical interpretation, the subject disappears and is replaced by the sign (language), whereas the latter, like technical

interpretation, questions the priority of the sign and restores the question of subjectivity or the subject in language. The ideal interpretive position grants both subject and sign legitimacy by its operative dialectic. The emphasis on the reflective and dialectic operation of critical activity prevents Schleiermacher's project from becoming a hermeneutics of closure but does not necessarily produce a hermeneutics of indeterminacy. Furthermore, by carefully separating and defining the respective interpretive operations of the grammatical and the technical or the psychological, Schleiermacher demonstrates that figural language is not a mere extension of grammatically explainable forms and that an unproblematic and unquestioned continuity between grammar and rhetoric cannot be assumed.^[9] Whereas the grammatical rests more or less on the certainty of direct representation, the rhetorical or the figural problematizes that very certainty.

On the whole, Schleiermacher uses the terms psychological interpretation and technical interpretation interchangeably but sometimes points to a minor technical difference between them. The psychological interpretation proceeds by comparative and divinatory methods. The concept of the divinatory, which has been the unfortunate and unwitting source of various misconceptions in the reception of Schleiermacher's work, makes in fact perfect sense in the larger framework of both Schleiermacher's proposed interpretive method and of Romanticism's concern with the problem of direct representation. In the divinatory method the interpreter seeks to understand directly, attempting to transcend the sensible form or limits of Darstellung . The divinatory is probably best understood as the perception of a suprasensible representation in imagination. Schlegel considers "divination" synonymous with "hieroglyphics and allegory," in so far as it represents a mystified scepticism or the impossibility of expressing the infinite (1958, 19: 5, no. 26). Schleiermacher also repeatedly stresses that the divinatory derives its coherence and certainty only from its other half, the comparative. In a certain way the divinatory and the comparative constitute the modus operandi of intersubjective understanding. Although language is a system of codes designed for communication, the codes are convertible and form zones of resistance to understanding. In other words, the codes are representational and therefore polyvalent. By imagining the invisible beyond the boundaries of sensible representation and consulting the context of meaning in figural lan-

guage, the psychological interpretation points to a potentiation of understanding in reception:

The task is expressed as "to understand a speech just as well and then better than its originator." Since we do not have a direct knowledge of what is in it, we need to try to bring much that can remain unconscious in it to consciousness. . . .

Presented in this way the task is endless because what we want to see in the moment of speech is an endlessness of the past and the future. (1977, 94)

The concept of understanding an author better than he understood himself is introduced at the beginning of the "First Book of the Transcendental Dialectic" in Kant's first Critique as justification for his deviation from Plato's doctrine of ideas. "It is not at all unusual," observes Kant, "that in comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed about his subject, whether in ordinary speech or in texts, we understand him better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has occasionally spoken or even thought, in opposition to his own intention" (1983, 4.2: 322). Kant's statement most likely refers to an author's lack of self-reflection and is intended as a questioning or correction of authorial intention. Fichte develops a similar notion in his Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Some lectures on the vocation of the scholar), when in his observation of certain contradictions in Rousseau he assures his audience that they will be able to solve the contradiction and understand Rousseau better than he understood himself (1962–, 1.3: 61). The task of resolving the contradictions of a text by reading it according to its spirit rather than its letter authorizes the reader to recreate the text in a productive way.^[10] Schleiermacher goes beyond Fichte's idea of the infinite perfectibility of understanding and defines the task of the reflective interpreter as bringing into consciousness what remains unconscious in the text.

This creative task of interpretation involves yet another difficult methodological feat. It becomes a self-correcting program that can only operate in a genuinely reflective and systematic hermeneutical mode. Schleiermacher sums up this dialectical method:

Addition . General methodological rules: a) beginning with a general overview; b) simultaneous conceptualization in both directions, the

grammatical and the psychological; c) only when both coincide in a single place can one proceed further; d) necessity of going back, when they do not agree until one finds the mistake in calculation. (1977, 97)

Today we see such self-correcting methods in artificial, computer languages. This sophisticated methodological insight certainly exorcises the demons of mystification often associated with hermeneutical understanding. What Schleiermacher draws here is the structural model of a spiral—rather than a circle—as a picture of the endless signification process of language. The model grants no temporal or logical priority to any one operation but defines the process of understanding as a dialectically progressive one. And in the ruthlessly analytic spirit of deconstructive criticism, which insists on questioning the notions of originary truth and time-worn assumptions embedded in language, Schleiermacher rejects the idea of a point of origin in language: "We have great spaces of time in front of us in which a language lived, and we can move backwards from any point but not to the origins, for these are not given anywhere in time" (ibid., 109).

In contrast to Schleiermacher, who situates criticism within the larger framework of universal hermeneutics and outfits it with sophisticated interpretive methodology, Schlegel understands criticism as the infinitely perfectible self-representation of the literary work which constitutes a special branch of hermeneutics. "Art," writes Schlegel in an early essay, "Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie" (On the study of Greek poetry), "is infinitely perfectible, and an absolute maximum in its steady development is not possible; only a conditional, relative maximum, an insurmountable fixed proximity [fixes Proximum ]" (1958, 1: 288). In the work of criticism, the work of art infinitely re-presents itself: "The question of what the author intends can be settled," states Schlegel, "not, however, the question of what the work is" (ibid., 18: 318, no. 1,515). As Walter Benjamin correctly observes, Romantic criticism has, "in total contrast to the present understanding of its character, not judgment as its central purpose but perfection, completion, and systematization of the work on the one hand, and solution in the absolute on the other. Both processes coincide in the final analysis" (1972–, 1.1: 78).

Criticism, in other words, is no longer the handmaiden of liter-

ature but its self-representation. However, criticism also declines to be a handmaiden of philosophy by refusing to use its rigid grammar and syntax: "Critical prose has to be fluent (flowing) and floating and fight against a rigid terminology, for then it would acquire an illiberal look, as if it only served philosophy" (Schlegel 1957, 81, no. 685).