In Praise of Nonsense

Kant and Bluebeard

Winfried Menninghaus, Henry Pickford

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780804783064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Shells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing—such are the examples Kant's Critique of Judgment offers for a "free" and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghaus's book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely "modern" phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and radicalize Kant's move.

Menninghaus shows parergonality and "nonsense" to be two key features in the spread of the arabesque from architecture and the fine arts to philosophy and finally to literature. On the one hand, comparative readings of the parergon in Enlightenment aesthetics, Kant, and Schlegel reveal the importance of this term for establishing the very notion of a self-reflective work of art. On the other hand, drawing on Kant's posthumous anthropological notebooks, Menninghaus extrapolates an entire Kantian theory of what it means to produce nonsense and why the Critique of Judgment defines genius precisely through the power (as well as the dangers) of doing so.

Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book "without any sense and coherence." Menninghaus's close reading of this capricious narrative reveals a specifically Romantic—as opposed, say, to a Victorian or dadaistic—type of nonsense. Benjamin's as well as Propp's, Lévi-Strauss's, and Meletinskij's oppositions of myth and fairy tale lend additional credit to a Romantic poetics that inaugurates "universal poetry" while performing a bizarre trajectory through arabesque ornament, nonsense, parergonality, and the fairy tale.

1

Introduction: Nonsense, Victorian Nonsense, Romantic Nonsense

Thesis

“All the richness of imagination,” Kant cautions in the Critique of Judgement, “in its lawless freedom produces nothing but nonsense.” ¹ Nonsense, then, does not befall the imagination like a foreign pathogen; rather, it is the very law of imagination’s own “lawlessness.” Kant therefore prescribes a rigid antidote: even in the field of the aesthetic, understanding must “severely clip the wings” of imagination and “sacrifice [ . . . ] some” of it. This politics of curtailment echoes the critique of the stormy genius well known since the 1770s. The “ideal” liaison between beauty and imagination, however, cannot be broken solely from the side of genius’s excessiveness and unreason. In the 1790s nonsense escapes—for a brief moment in the history of Romantic literature, extending from its beginning in 1795 to its denouement in 1797,—the Kantian imperative that it be “disciplined” and sets off in another direction. It finds refuge in the aesthetics of ornament, arabesque, and fairytale, and acquires the character of a hyperbolically artistic form rather than of a natural power prior to all culture. Novalis inaugurates the ideal of “poems [ . . . ] without any sense or coherence;” ² similarly, Tieck demands license for a “book without any coherence,” full of “contradictory nonsense” and “spectacles about nothing.”³ “To introduce a new nonsense,”⁴ seems to be the entire purpose of some literary productions. These citations introduce the central thesis of the present study: there exists an early Romantic poetics of nonsense. No-sense and non-sense [Ohne-Sinn und Un-Sinn] should be recognized as categories of the Romantic project in its earliest phase.

According to Kant, imagination in its pure form—which by the same token is its vitium-produces “tumultuous derangements” that shatter the “coherence which is necessary for the very possibility of experience.”⁵ On the other hand, as the “faculty of intuitions” ⁶ and of “presentation,”⁷ imagination is precisely the guarantor, indeed, the producer of all reality: without intuitions and without signs all of our concepts would be empty and thus without “reality.”⁸ Fichte, who along with Kant was a main source for early Romantic thought, established this as a central theorem in his 1794 Wissenschafislehre: “All reality—understandably, of course, for us, as in a system of transcendental philosophy it can only be understood—is produced merely through the power of imagination.” ⁹ On this basis, there are two avenues open to the Romantic poetics of nonsense. It can bring the imagination’s creative powers into opposition with imagination’s function of constituting reality. Inversely, this poetics can see in the displacement of meaningful contexts an “indication of reality”:¹⁰ reality “in itself,” which is otherwise unavailable, infiltrates the structures of the symbolic order, thus creating a phantom of the Real. The complexity of Ludwig Tieck’s championing of nonsense lies in its attempt to negotiate both of these polar trajectories of imagination at the same time.

Around 1800, according to the diagnosis of Friedrich A. Kittler, the cultural “discourse network” was refitted and reoriented on a variety of registers toward “sense”¹¹ as a power of meaning that permeates and orders all details of a discursive event into a totality. The distinction between the material surface of a discursive event and the depth of its meaning, accompanied by the preference for the intelligible pole of this opposition, became the characteristic framework for numerous social practices. These entailed a transformation in pedagogy and practices of promoting literacy as well as a reform in reading and study, in universities and in the bureaucracy. In academic teaching, the institutionalization of hermeneutics as the new vanguard science responded to this comprehensive revolution in the discursive network of writing and reading. This network’s new practices and its underlying assumptions surpassed the academic science of hermeneutics in its breadth, while at the same time undercutting its subtle problematizations. (Only in this less subtle sense does the following study speak of “sense,” “understanding,” and “hermeneutic.”) The poetics of nonsense arises within the horizon of this discursive system, in the border area between late Enlightenment and earliest Romanticism. In Foucault’s sense, this poetics can be read as one of the diverse “points of resistance” that are “present everywhere in the power network,” as countermovements that do not simply exist outside the new sense-paradigm, and yet are not merely its parasitic “underside.”¹² Long before today’s “humanities,” literature itself, at least in one of its genres, questioned the innocence of understanding and challenged the central fictions of the hermeneutical field.¹³ At least for a short period of time, a playful, even provocative suspension of the sense paradigm became the center of a genre theory as well as of a new literary rewriting of this genre. The name of this genre is the fairy tale.¹⁴

Systematic and Historical Relationship Between Sense and Nonsense

“Sense” is, in Nietzsche’s words, “necessarily [ . . . ] a sense of relation and perspective.” It can never be attributed to any phenomenon per se but is rather an effect of “interpreting.”¹⁵ “Nonsense” too indicates something that is thoroughly relative: all utterances, actions, and facts that at a certain time and in a certain context are adjudged not to correspond to a certain idea of “sense.”¹⁶ The borders between “meaningful” and “not meaningful” are transitory and unstable; they must be continually reconfirmed and are constantly being displaced. This ongoing (re)determination of borderlines is required for every articulation of “sense” or “meaning.” The liminal region, the margin where sense and nonsense collide and pass into each other, is the definiens not only of nonsense but also of sense. Gilles Deleuze therefore formulated his Logique du sens by means of an interpretation of the prototypical nonsense books of Lewis Carroll. ¹⁷ Nonsense does not merely imply, like any oppositional concept, that its contrary also exists. Rather, its Other always recurs within its own field. “Sense,” however, tends to posit itself as an absolute in its own field and in this ideological self-sufficiency it tends to efface the reminder of its being dependent on the difference between sense and nonsense. Walter Blumenfeld rightly noted that “nonsense is always related to sense (indeed, linguistically), as nothing is related to something, [but usually] not vice versa.”¹⁸ This asymmetry of an apparently symmetrical polarity shows not only that nonsense is parasitically dependent upon sense but also that it is a phenomenon that eminently articulates the entire difference between sense and nonsense.

The appeal to the border between sense and nonsense in general has a twofold character. Firstly, it enacts “a kind of taboo behavior.” ¹⁹ It identifies that which we cannot understand or meaningfully contextualize within a given framework and banishes it into the realm of the anomalous, the deviant, and the unreal.²⁰ Wherever this excluded Other that threatens the integrity of an inter-pretational scheme is presented positively, monstrous forms and shapes are begotten that can fall into the grotesque and the absurd. ²¹ Through a reflexive turn, however, the excluded nonsense can accrue the opposite value. If everything that we consider to be real and meaningful is in fact merely an effect of our own interpretive schemes, then that which evades those schemes can become for us the “authentic” and absolutely real in its transcendental givenness and unavailability.²² Indeed, it can even become from a religious perspective a proof of God’s existence (credo quia absurdum).²³

Demarcating the border between sense and nonsense makes interpretative frames reflexive and therefore serves as a catalyst for exploring the very parameters of learning: “To engage in nonsense, one must already have the ability to learn about learning; nonsense not only engages this ability, nonsense itself may be seen as an exploration of the parameters of contexts of learning [ . . . ] Nonsense is not simply a safe place to work out a response to the world of common sense, as it might be in simple reversals and inversions, it is also a field where one can critique the interpretive procedures used in manufacturing that world, and, with increasing self consciousness, a critique of the interpretive procedures by which nonsense itself has come to be.”²⁴ According to Walter Blumenfeld, it is “actually considered to be an indication of intelligence if someone has the capability to intentionally produce indubitable nonsense. Experiments to develop intelligence tests on the basis of this assumption are being prepared, and look promising.”²⁵ From here, interesting prospects unfold for an anthropology of nonsense (which will not be further pursued in the present work): on account of its close connection to learning, intelligence, language, and laughter—hence to qualities that are generally regarded as defining homo sapiens—the faculty of voluntarily producing non-sense is actually a distinguishing characteristic of the human being. Up until now at least, no other beings have been discovered that possess this capability.

The extent to which the distinction between sense and nonsense is subject to historical change is proven primarily by the dynamism of worldviews: what today is taken for granted was yesterday condemned as nonsense. Even the asemantic play of language with its phonetic material allows very diverse classifications. If the baroque’s phonetic playfulness is measured against the standard of the communication of meaningful sentences, it immediately falls under the category of nonsense. On the other hand, if it is related to baroque “theories” of sound and of the language of nature, such phonetic whimsy acquires a meaning and a function all its own. The same is true for counting rhymes (such as “eeny meeny miney mo”): even the most nonsensical ones are meaningful in the context of the counting exercise. Sense in this case, however, does not mean the specifically hermeneutical, comprehensive meaning of an individual text but rather the ability to perform a particular function within a given purposive context. With the varied coexistence of several, mutually irreducible levels of sense and nonsense one need not wait for Freud to speak of a “sense in nonsense.”²⁶

For literary history and poetics, an even more radical historicity of the discourse on “nonsense” is essential. Not only is the ordering of linguistic phenomena along the distinction of “sense” and “nonsense” historically contingent; the institution and the application of the distinction itself mark an eminent date in literary history. In fact, the distinction is no more than 200 years old and essentially belongs to the “discourse network 1800” that Friedrich A. Kittler traced from the perspective of the hermeneutical dictum of meaning (or “sense”). Kittler did not, however, consider its counterpart (in both senses of the word), namely “nonsense.” For more than two thousand years poetics, buttressed by rhetoric, has inquired into whether or not literature is beautiful, sublime, sentimental, overpowering, cathartic, pacific, soothing, or entertaining; whether or not literature fulfills certain virtutes dicendi in diction, phrase, and verse; and whether or not it attains canonical models. With the end of the rhetorical paradigm and the emergence of the hermeneutical paradigm, however, one claim above all is made upon literature: to be infinitely meaningful, Only with this claim does the correlative concept of nonsense become a relevant category of poetics. The system of literature first had to make the topic of “sense” its project as well as its criterion of quality before a counterpart could be created: a discrete genre that explicitly institutes the concept of nonsense as its proper name.²⁷

Nonsense as a positive category in poetics is not, as is generally assumed, a Victorian invention. It goes back, in fact, to early Romanticism where nonsense did not develop into a specific genre; nor did it have the same semantics and theoretical function as in Victorianism. Scholarship on Romanticism is largely ignorant of the fact that nonsense is a Romantic category at all and...