ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the generality of 'discourse flow' or universal address. Women are channels, men their channellers. The clarity of this emphasis on productivity as masculine and consumption as feminine is startling and can be understood as part of a broader programme of 'gender hardening' as Ludmilla Jordanova has termed it. The focus here is on the 'early' romantic understanding of listening as a cultural-historical category in German-speaking Europe, concentrating on the first 10 years of the nineteenth century. The chapter explores the limits of romantic criticism and tries to think both Romanticism and romanticism as a set of productive critical topoi. The religiosity of attitudes to high cultural consumption in Wackenroder et al. is symptomatic, then, of a mode of production, like own bourgeois cultural consumption, designed to differentiate its consumption from other kinds of wealth display. Indeed, for Norbert Elias the 'history of manners' in the Austro-German context is also the history precisely of a class territorialization.
