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Abstract
Beginning with a strange short story situating “the first globalization” in the ice age, this essay traces some of Alexander Kluge’s literary strategies for re-contextualizing and criticizing the term “globalization.” The essay builds on previous Kluge scholarship around issues of history and temporality by arguing that Kluge’s recent writing plays havoc with the rhetorical moves characteristic of Eurocentric history and social theory as they manifest in military and cultural enactments of “globalization as contest” (Connell & Marsh). Such critical work on globalization as a rhetorical frame both adapts strategies of German Critical Theory and links up with decolonial revisions of history in counteracting the “colonization of time” (Walter Mignolo). The essay argues this point through close-readings of short stories from Kluge’s Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (2006) and Weltverändernder Zorn: Nachricht von den Gegenfüßlern (2018, with Georg Baselitz), seeing these as specific adaptations of Klugean “Gegengeschichte.”
Acknowledgments
For their invaluable help and conversation during the drafting of this article, the author would like to thank Christoph Schaub, Alexis Radisoglou, Leslie Adelson, Paul Fleming, Mariaenrica Giannuzzi, Søren Larsen, Lauren Schwartz and Ryohei Ozaki.
Notes
1 Alexander Kluge, Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben: 350 neue Geschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 9. Hereafter Tür an Tür and in footnotes as TaT.
2 Kluge, TaT 7.
3 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). The tone of Harvey’s work on the topic is not celebratory: instead he analyzes globalization within the context of a sustained project of Marxist critique: see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). However, as Leslie Adelson argues, Appadurai’s typology of flows is attentive to the way “the very dimensionality of contemporary experience [shifts] under the force of globalization,” in a manner that is “more radically nuanced and open-ended” than Harvey’s space-time compression. Leslie Adelson, “Literary Imagination and the Future of Literary Studies,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 89, no. 4 (2015): 675. Moreover, Appadurai’s later work shifts its tone, in part in response to criticism: see Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013).
4 Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, trans. Dona Geyer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005) 2. Osterhammel and Petersson nonetheless themselves argue for a long history of globalization.
5 Osterhammel and Petersson name globalization a “second modernity,” adapting the term from sociologist Ulrich Beck. Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization, 5.
6 Alexis Radisoglou has argued that Kluge’s writings around globalization make for a “performative reconfiguration” of “humanity’s epistemological estrangement…from the ontology of globality,” using Gayatri Spivak’s concept of planetarity to articulate that reconfiguration. See Alexis Radisoglou, “Keeping Time in Place: Modernism, Political Aesthetics, and the Transformation of Chronotopes in Late Modernity” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015), 189—90. My analysis pursues a different kind of “reconfiguration,” shifting focus away from the “ontology of globality” towards geocultural concerns.
7 Adelson, “Literary Imagination,” 678, emphasis mine.
8 Devin Fore, introduction to History and Obstinacy, by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, trans. Richard Langston et al. (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 15—67, here 18.
9 Ibid.
10 This analysis will not, however, use de/colonization in Habermas’s sense of “colonization of the life-world.” See Fore’s discussion of the role this concept plays in Obstinacy and History, 17-22.
11 Anke Biendarra’s Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), the first monograph in English focusing on German literary strategies for negotiating globalization, especially in its socioeconomic dimensions (e.g., neoliberal conceptions of work), remains a key map of this sphere of contemporary German literature.
12 In addition to Radisoglou’s “Keeping Time in Place,” Leslie Adelson’s pivotal monograph on Kluge, Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge’s 21st-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017)—hereafter CM—and other studies use close readings especially attentive to forms of space, time, and perception in Kluge’s prose. Adelson develops the term “cosmic miniature” and argues that Kluge’s prima facie “global miniatures are also cosmic miniatures in disguise” (CM, 170). For Adelson, Kluge’s radicality lies in part exactly in his conjunction of the global and the cosmic. On the other hand, Gunther Martens has also approached globalization in Kluge’s work through “distant-reading,” cartographically demonstrating Kluge’s “trend towards globalization. ” Gunther Martens, “Distant(ly) Reading Alexander Kluge’s Distant Writing,” Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch 1 (2014): 29—41.
13 Much scholarship on Kluge has elaborated Kluge’s relationship to critical theory, especially to Benjamin and Adorno. See, e.g., Christoph Streckhardt, Kaleidoskop Kluge: Alexander Kluges Fortsetzung der Kritischen Theorie mit narrativen Mitteln (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2016).
14 See Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
15 For more on this topic, see the recent special issue of Diacritics (48:3, 2020), which brings together a number of contributions around the “politics of citation.”
16 Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988).
17 Kluge, TaT 24.
18 Cf. Adelson’s discussion of “unnatural narration” in Part One of CM, esp. 103–33.
19 Kluge, TaT 23–4.
20 The trope of “rosy-fingered dawn” is even among those cited by classicist Milman Parry as paradigmatic for the definition of the Homeric formula in his highly influential study The Traditional Epithet in Homer (1928). See The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1971) 13.
21 Various histories of the “Western” reception of Homer emphasize the Renaissance as a starting point for Homer reception, often beginning with Dante. See, for example, Georg Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit von Dante bis Goethe (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973).
22 Adelson reads Kluge’s “heliotropic miniatures” in relation to conceptions of hope and futurity in CM (cf. esp. 37–40, 173–5). My reading rather explores the implications of irony in this text, in a tone more critical than hopeful.
23 Kluge’s commentary on the 2003 Iraq War (and indeed on many of the themes important to his work) is certainly not limited to his literary output. In a 2004 television spot for dctp, for example, Kluge and his interlocutor Oskar Negt channel Clausewitzian war theory in describing the Iraq War as one without “real,” defined war goals, which can thus also have no legitimate end (“gewinnen kann man [diesen Krieg] nicht, weil man nicht weiß, wie kann man jetzt Frieden herstellen?”). This is an example of imperialistic war as “der Versuch, eine atavistische Gewalt noch einmal herzustellen, Grenzenlosigkeit noch einmal herzustellen.” “Im Dschungel der Kriegsgründe.” Dir. Alexander Kluge. News and Stories 9 May 2004. Development Company for Television Program GmbH [Düsseldorf]. Also available online through Cornell University Library’s Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue project, https://kluge.library.cornell.edu/conversations/negt/film/2136
24 Indeed, the use of archē in the sense of empire is more associated with the writings of historians like Herodotus and Thucydides than with Homer. See sense II of ἀρχή, Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 252. But what is at stake in this argument is of course not to contain Kluge’s associative chain within the Homeric text, but to poetically think a broader historical complex in which the reception history of Homer plays a big role. Thus, it is also key to stress that this reading does not argue that Kluge, or this text, rejects Homer as such.
25 Walter Mignolo (with Catherine Walsh), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 139–40.
26 Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh, Literature and Globalization: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2011), xv.
27 See Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch 6 (2019), dedicated to this theme.
28 See, for example, Adelson, CM, or Christian Schulte, “Kritische Theorie als Gegenproduktion: Zum Projekt Alexander Kluges,” gift: zeitschrift für freies theater 3 (2010): 37–44; or Harro Müller, “Kritische Theorie und Realismusbegriff: Horkheimer, Adorno, Kluge,” in Realitätsbegriffe in der Moderne: Beiträge zu Literatur, Kunst, Philosophie und Wissenschaft, ed. Susanne Knaller & Harro Müller (Paderborn: Fink, 2011), 229–46.
29 Mignolo, On Decoloniality, 139.
30 “Grundfragen des Krieges: wie endet der Krieg?” Dir. Alexander Kluge. News and Stories 21 April 2002. Development Company for Television Program GmbH [Düsseldorf]. Also available online through Cornell University Library at: https://kluge.library.cornell.edu/conversations/negt/film/2128. For more on Kluge and Negt’s collaborations, see Richard Langston, Dark Matter: A Guide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (London: Verso, 2020).
31 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 9.
32 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 314.
33 Allen, The End of Progress, 1–6. Allen also analytically pairs the decolonial potentials in Adorno with the work of Foucault; see esp. 197–202.
34 Matthew Miller, “Eigensinn in Transit: Reexamining a Concept for the Twenty-First Century,” Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch 2 (2015): 83–102, here 86.
35 For a broader discussion of this topos, see the Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch 4 (2017), which is organized around the topic of Kooperation.
36 Alexander Kluge, Weltverändernder Zorn: Nachricht von den Gegenfüßlern (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017). Hereafter in text as Weltverändernder Zorn, in footnotes as WZ.
37 See Adelson’s close-reading of the story “Lebendigkeit von 1931” in this collection, CM, 217–31.
38 Kluge, WZ 10.
39 Kluge, WZ 11.
40 Helen Müller has looked more closely at Kluge and Baselitz’s collaborative process and contextualized this praxis within Kluge’s career and thinking, especially comparing it to Kluge’s work with Oskar Negt. Müller emphasizes the meaning of collaboration for the tradition around the Frankfurt School. Helen Müller, “Kooperation. Zur Schärfung eines Begriffs anhand von Alexander Kluges jüngster Zusammenarbeit mit Georg Baselitz: Weltverändernder Zorn. Nachricht von den Gegenfüßlern,” Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch 5 (2018): 169–81.
41 Both unfamiliarity and distance are implied when the narrator of the autobiographical-seeming “DER WEITE WEG VOM »ICH« NACH FERNOST” says, “ICH WEIß ÜBER DEN MOND MEHR ALS ÜBER JENE FERNEN INSELN IM OSTEN.“ Kluge, WZ, 42.
42 Hokusi’s self-portrait curiously comes from the end of a letter written in 1842, currently held at the Rijkmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden. For a broader recent discussion of text/image relations in Kluge’s work, see Erik Porath, “Im Zusammenhang: Auge, Bild, Wort, Geschichte. Zu Alexander Kluges Einsatz der Bilder im Text,“ Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch 6 (2019): 61–80. For a discussion of intermediality as an “archaeological” method for interrogating history (in Benjaminian fashion), touching on colonial border-drawing as well, see Bernhard Malkmus, “Intermediality and the Topography of Memory in Alexander Kluge,” New German Critique 36.2 (2009): 231–52.
43 Kluge, WZ 33.
44 On this point, see also Dorothea Walzer, “Marx as a Model and Question: Alexander Kluge’s Critical Inquiries,” New German Critique 47, no. 1 (2020): 25–56.
45 Kluge, WZ 51, 53 etc.
46 See the story “Gibt es eine Welt ohne Ödipuskomplex?,” WZ 111.
47 Kluge, WZ 119.
48 It is with an obvious Weber reference which Horkheimer and Adorno define enlightenment: “Das Programm der Aufklärung war die Entzauberung der Welt.” Dialektik der Aufklärung, 9.
49 Cf. Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the question of humanitas and anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010): 441–64.
50 For Andreas Buss, Weber “wanted to validate his thesis that only in the Occident could modern rational capitalism have developed from indigenous sources” in his works on Asian religions. See Buss’s (editor’s) introduction to Max Weber in Asian Studies, Vol 1.2 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 4.
51 Whereas the Weber in Kluge’s story confronts the “development” of Japan after the Meiji Restoration (1868), Weber’s treatment of Japan—in his work on Buddhism beyond India—confined itself to the “feudal” Tokugawa period (1603–1868).
52 As Weber asks in the preface to the Protestant Ethic. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988), 1. Emphasis mine.
53 Joseph Vogl, “Kluges Fragen,” Maske und Kothurn: Internationale Beiträge zur Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft 53, no,1 (2007): 119–28, here 119.
54 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104, here 99. See also Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of critiques of Weber in The Future as Cultural Fact, 221.
55 The “Overcoming Modernity” symposium of 1942 is a prominent example of a Japanese counter-theorization of modernity imbricated in the imperialist project. See Richard F. Calichman, Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
56 Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices” 99–100. Subrahmanyam, somewhat euphemistically, opts for the metaphor of a “virus spreading,” rather than directly addressing colonial “civilizing” missions.
57 Adelson, CM 227.
58 For example, Kluge’s cinematic collaborations with the Filipino filmmaker and musician Khavn de la Cruz—including Happy Lamento (2018) and Orphea (2020)—or Kluge’s co-operation with the Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor at Literaturhaus Berlin’s 2021 event series, Festival der Kooperationen mit Alexander Kluge & friends: »Der Elefant im Dunkeln«.
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Juan-Jacques Aupiais
Juan-Jacques Aupiais is a Ph.D. candidate in German Studies at Cornell University. His research interests include contemporary German literature, German colonialism and colonial literature, post- and decolonial theory, critical theory, and translation and multilingualism.