ABSTRACT
This study began by identifying an inconsistency in Habermas’s account of the societal role of literature, an inconsistency that it sets out to resolve. On the one hand Habermas recognizes the valuable contribution made by literature to the cultural and political public spheres, I argued. This recognition can be read out of his recent political essays and his exchange with and remarks on literary figures, particularly around the time of the GermanGerman literary controversy of 1990. On the other hand, I argue, Habermas’s theoretical work effectively restricts literary rationality to the realm of autonomous art and a concern for the truthfulness of subjective self-expression. In this regard, I have argued that Habermas’s account of literary rationality is a reductive account that leaves the communicative potential of literature underdeveloped. In consideration of his more positive appraisal of the contribution of the literary public sphere to the public sphere at large, I suggested that the historical and literary context of postunification Germany provides a backdrop against which elements of Habermas’s more political, less theoretical publications can help improve his own theoretical account of aesthetic rationality. A novel such as Hilbig’s “I” and its published reception show in parti-
cular how the literary institution performs the peculiar kind of “needs interpretation” that Habermas envisions for aesthetic practice: Hilbig’s portrayal of the lack of authenticity in the (pre-unification) German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the perspective of a post-unification Germany in which authentic personal and collective identities are also, although differently, stifled, is the portrayal of precisely one of the “normative deficits” of unification that Habermas criticizes. In looking briefly at Hilbig’s novel, it was not so much my goal to evaluate the novel aesthetically myself, as to show what is at stake in aesthetic evaluations of the novel: both the validity claims that critiques of the novel raise with regard to the novel and what about the novel redeems those claims. I wanted to demonstrate that to whatever extent critiques of the novel might refer to the latter’s aesthetic “well-formedness,” the criteria of subjective truthfulness, normative rightness, and descriptive truth all play a role in validating or invalidating the novel, and that these criteria play this role precisely to the extent that they
support or reject a claim of authenticity, i.e. a claim to portray a shareable experience, paradigmatic for a particular sociohistorical context. To the extent that Hilbig’s novel, in the performative stance it takes up with regard to its audience, challenges its audiences views on the objective, social, and their respective subjective worlds and on the relations between these, it has a communicative function. Whether or not a particular reader accepts the authenticity claim of Hilbig’s novel, is not, as TCA argues, the same as whether the reader attributes truthfulness to the author’s self-representation through the novel (see 3.1.2.1). While it is certainly true that the reader of a text does not approach the
reception of a literary text in the same way that she approaches practical problem-solving in the context of everyday situations-in other words, that she does not experience the problems encountered in a novel, for instance, as her own immediate problems-there is a sense in which the aesthetically valid text articulates an experience that she can reasonably imagine to be her own and furthermore enables the finding of a changed practical relation to the world in light of this relayed, shareable experience. For this reason, it is not enough to hold that aesthetic validity lies in mere world-disclosure, as Habermas does. And for this same reason I have tried to argue here that the operation of aesthetic rationality does not merely put forth ways of looking at the world, and that an artwork is not aesthetically valid merely on the basis of its successful reorientation of its recipients, but rather that the operation of aesthetic rationality also, through its reorienting effects, gives rise to ways of acting in the world. For these reasons this study gave an account of the literary institution as a forum for communicative reason, and the literary public sphere as a unique contributor to the political public sphere.
