Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience Author(s): Hans Robert Jauss Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 375-388 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431108 . Accessed: 15/10/2012 00:18
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HANS ROBERT JAUSS

Tradition, Aesthetic
I.

Innovation, Experience

and

"THE CONFLICr over the dissociation of future developments and past origins may become the deadly prolegomenonof every metaphysicsthat seeks to develop in the future."1 With this bold ushered postwar Gerprognosis Odo Marquard many into a new phase of the timeless quarelof the ancients and the moderns. This time the debate drew representatives of the new academic trends in history and literarycriticism in addition to those schooled in progressive or conservative philosophy. In fact, the General Philosophical Society of Germany devoted its 1962 congress to the topic, focussing on the philosopherand the question of progress. There theorists representing opposing views in the history of philosophy and in social theory (Karl hiwith and Theodor W. Adorno, Helmut Schelsky and JurgenHabermas,Arnold Gehlen and Hans Blumenberg)hammeredout positions that have since dominatedthe discussion. Even that society's most recent meeting in 1984 on the topic of "traditionand innovation" did little but retracetheir positions. I have spoken to this issue from the standpointof literarytheory and criticism: My initial contributionwas a history of the "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes." This was followed with a history of the concept of "moderne/modernite," which I traced to its preliminary end in so-called postmodernism.2In this essay I want to respond to a series of questions:Will the fine artsbe able to overcome what will be an even sharper dissociation between past origins and future developments at the beginning of the next century?Can the conflict between a progressive and a conservative philosophy be settled
HANS ROBERTJAUSS is

professor of literary criticism

and romance philology at the Universityof Konstanz.

through the aesthetic preference for the new? And finally, will aesthetic experience be able to compensatefor the damage done by modernization in the victorious wake of technology? By way of answer, I would like to suggest that the separation of future developments from past origins is not a deadly aporia for literatureand art. Their mediation is much more a task which has repeatedly confronted the arts, which the arts have overcome in their own way-that is without force-and which they also hope to solve again today. The royal road of aesthetic experience is thus not the alleged aesthetic preferencefor the new, but the mediation of the new throughthe old! As my leading witness I would like to cite Paul Valery, who in an essay on Leonardo da Vinci, described aesthetic experience's mediating function: "Ii imite, il innove; il ne rejette pas l'ancien, ni le nouveau, pour etre nouveau; mais il consulte en lui quelque chose d'eternellement actuel."3 Imitation and creation, preservationand discovery, traditionand innovation have always determinedthe history of art. Failure to understand this symbiotic unity has plunged both traditionalismand modernism into ahistoricaldogmatism:Traditionalism is blind to the role of innovation and modernism can see only the new. They fail to graspthat the history of artconsists of a creative interplay between the two. While tradition in the life-world can be directly and freely handed down from generation to generation,4 artistic traditioncannot. In the arts, the old can only be preserved through ever newer realizationsthrough selection, forgetting, and reappropriation. This is true even when the epistemological preeminenceof the old over the new, of recognition over knowledge, of tradition over all innovationhas gone unquestioned.5 Even the Modern Age's aesthetic privileging of the new

? 1988 The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism

376 necessarily presupposesthe old as a horizon of understanding.And movements like the avantgarde which disclaim the heritage of the past and deny all past origins are no exception.6 In fact if we can even make a gross distinction between antiquity and modernity according to the epistemological priorityof the old over the new as well as the new over the old, it is only because we implicitly agree with Valery that mediation is always involved in both the pastoriented older arts as well as in the futureoriented newer arts. This notion of the mediating function of art manifests itself in the poetic license of the new that sidesteps traditionalism fails to take notice of it. On when traditionalism the classical the otherhand, it also characterizes cannon from which even the most rigorous modernismcannot escape (as the phrase "modem classics" reveals). Whereeverythingdevelops only regularlyor irregularly,therearises (as Valery once again observed) no real thought.7 Where art slavishly follows past origins as a norm, all that develops is imitative. Where it depends solely on what is new and newest, and believes itself capableof anticipatingthe future, there is only diletantism (or the tedium of science fiction). In the realmof the artstradition realizes itself neitherin epic continuitynor in a creatio perpetua, but in a process of mutual production and reception, determining and redetermining canons, selecting the old and integratingthe new. It is out of this interplay, this constant mediation between past origins and future developments, that the communicative function of aesthetic experience develops. I would like to call as my second witness an authorwho lived during the transitionfrom the Midde Ages to the early Modem Age, Dante Alighieri. At first glance Dante still remains totally indebted to the old-the rigor of legal metaphysics in scholastic theology. And yet at the same time, if one looks at the responseto his Divina Comedia, he paved the way for the new-the justification of individual and historical existence.8 With poetic license Dante established his own hermeneuticrealm of question and response by letting his wanderer questionthe dead about throughthe netherworld their earthly fate, their guilt or merit. In the timeless realms of perdition, penitence, and blessedness, Dante thus reinstatedthe freedom of human speech. He gave expression to some-

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thing which had remainedsilent in the dogmatic hierarchy of hell, purgatory, and heaven: the historicalexistence of individualpersons. In his unforgettable interpretation, Erich Auerbach claimed that a duplex sententia mediates here between the old and the new. This double sense allows us on the one hand to read the Divinia Comedia allegorically and canonically as an authoritative answer to the question of the hiddenjustice of God's wordly plan, and on the other hand to read it literally and historicallyas a mirrorof the earthly world. The final fate of the dead is the motif though which individual destinies are clarified and given concrete expression.

Although Dante unquestiongly presupposed the doxological backgroundof scholastic theology, he depicted the netherworldin such a way as to develop a highly personal canon: He conceived a series of exempla that provide a paradigmatic and unique conception of the whole of classical, Christian,and contemporary history. And he did not shy away from quietly assisting the divine election of grace in the process. Instead of peopling Limbo, that Elysium-like oasis in hell, with the Old Testament patriarchsthe Scholastics had supposed, he filled it with the poets, sages, and heroes of heathen angiquity (all good nonchristians). Later he even situated Ripheus, a minor character in Virgil's Aeneid, in paradise. He passes over Augustine in the canon of saints, but places Siger of Brabant,the guiding spiritof the Latin Averroism, at the side of Thomas Aquinas. He bans the contemporary Pope Boniface VIII among the Simonists, judges many prominent contemporaries cum ira et studio, and casts his political support for Emperor Henry VII in the guise of a prophecy abouta futuresaviourof Italy. He respectedand at the same time poetically transgressed the strongestbarrierof theological dogmatism, the requirement that the damned be denied all sympathy.Indeed, at the sight of Francescaand Paolo, he collapsed in a deathlikefaint, though he softened the scene by adding a rebuke from Virgil. And he allowed Odysseus, who embodies the ancients' spirit of adventure,to journey beyond the pillars of Hercules, and thus beyond the boundaryof the Old World.Of course in the end, he punished Odyssesus' willful transgression-as the hubris of an inordinate curiosity

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience about the world-with the shipwreck on the dark mountain of the great ocean (the earthly paradise denied him?). And yet he seemed to sense that this hubris prefigureda new form of self-consciousness, one that would discover the drive for knowledge and experience to be the noblest passions in man's nature. We are remindedof Odysseus' oft- quoted warningto his comrades:
"O brothers," I said, "who through a hundredthousand dangers have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains to us, choose not to deny experience, following the sun, of the world that has no people. Consider your origin: you were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge."9

377 internationalexhibition as well as in Le peintre de la vie moderne (1859). In these articles he did justice to the modernity of the much maligned "imaginary museum" in a way that probablycould have given a tolerant "Ancien" something to think about.'0 The worldwide pluralismof the exhibited productsof the industrial and mechanical arts with their often strange, inexplicably fascinating beauty, required a "modem Winckelmann." Confronted with objects that defy the "timeless" canon of the beautiful, the criticalobserverhas to learnto recognize the quintessence of the beautg universelle in the strange, the bizarre, and the individual:He has to learn to accept the new as the beautifulthat cannot be derived from a rule. Thus in answer to classical art's loss of aura, a new aesthetic experience restored it to art in exhibitions and museums! The accusation that this modem aesthetics is a mere abstractionof aesthetic consciousness is unjustified. This is so for several reasons: First of all, the imaginarymuseum, which contains a collection of treasures from remote places or past ages, frees things (as WalterBenjamin said so well) "from the necessity of being useful." It overcomes "the complete irrationality of (their) mere presence by including them in the collection, a new system created especially for this purpose, in this way establishing their presence in our space and hence making them again experiencable.'11 Secondly, in this museum, novelty as an aesthetic quality can become the key to decoding the strangeness of whatever is distant and old. And thirdly, even Baudelaire has already opposed aesthetic consciousness to empathy, i.e. the false consciousness of historicism which-I would like to add-the aesthetic experience of modernity inheritedat the same time. In the future, aesthetic experience will be able to deal freely with the temporally distant and the spatially unusual because the study of history will have filled the treasure house of memory. Moreover the historical understanding will have investigated the works of all eras in the diachroniccontinuumof history to such an extent that aesthetic understanding will be able to reach out toward synchronicview of human art. This will enable it to determine its own position in a new way. To echo a question Hans-Georg Gadameronce raised:Why should the "aesthetic distinction,"

If great poetry has repeatedly succeeded in mediating between the horizon of past experience and that of present expectations, if it has wedded the normative nature of past origins with futurepossibilities, then we arejustified in that the function of saying with Odo Marquard aesthetic experience is a "culiminationpoint in the problemof alienation." As such, it presents a way to solve that same problem today. And the exemption of aesthetic reflection from the antinomybetween conservativeand progressive philosophy certainly makes such a solution easier. Aesthetic theory can assert the preference for the new withoutdiscreditingthe old per se. Without falling under the sway of the hypertrophiclaw of progress, it can simultaneously promote the process of emancipation and preservethe canon of the past. At this point the history of the art is neither a history of progressnor a growing heritage. Even, when in the latter stages of the modern age, new art is created as a provocative reaction against the old, the new does not push the old-as in the paradigmshifts in the history of science-back into the museum of history forever. No, often the new is the only thing giving aesthetic consciousness access again to the old. For this reason I would like to cite as my third witness an authoron the thresholdbetween the historicism of the romantic period and the aestheticism of modernism. Baudelaire,generallyconsideredto be one of the most radical proponentsof an aesthetics of "nouveaute," was one of the first critics who diagnosed the shift from historicism to aestheticism. He noted it in his report on the 1855

378 which "chooses solely on the basis of aesthetic distinctions as such," necessarily end in abstractionand be harmfulif it is apparentlyalso capable of fulfilling a hermeneuticfunction that is indispensableto our age?"2 It would be temptingto recountthe history of aesthetic experience and to explain how time after time it has been precisely the aesthetic preference for the new that has made the old in a fresh way. Be it throughthe understandable of the critique, the quote, or the interpretation parody; be it through the nineteenth-century's imaginary museum or finally through this century's principle of intertextuality, the old has been made new. But I do not have space to rehearse that here. Instead I would like to explore two problems that straddlethe borderline both between aestheticsand philosophy and between aesthetic and historical experience: first, the role aesthetic preferenceplays, during transitionperiods, in the perceptionof the new (with respect to Hans Blumenberg), and secondly, the role it has in the "salvation of the past" (with respect to WalterBenjamin).13 II. "Il faut commencerpar le commencement!" The irony in this saying raises some intricate questions such as, why does the beginning become a problem, in everyday behavior as well as in historical actions, as soon as the habitualis supposed to be transcended,the new begun, or even the state of the world changed? Even the eyewitness to an event has this problem because he is not yet able to forsee what can develop when something new begins, if indeed it is a new beginning. The well-known quote from Wilhelm Meister, "All beginnings are happy, the threshold is the place of expectation," masks the problem in optimism. Its promise presupposes that the apprentice has already recognized the thresholdhe is standing before: the beginning of middle-class existence that is also the end of his aestheticeducation. In Goethe's case the thresholdwas markedby the right question at the right time ("Is Felix my son?"). Today historiansof all persuasionsare concernedwith these questions:Is it possible to identify actual beginnings or the division of epochs? Can contemporariesreally experience them or can they only be understoodretrospec-

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tively? To say that they can appears to be a privilege of arthistorythatthe rigorof historical pragmatismdenies: "There are no witnesses to the radical disruption of epochs. The transitional phase between epochs is an imperceptible boundary that is not clearly connected to any particulardate or event. But viewed differentially a threshold becomes visible that can be identified as either not yet reachedor as already crossed. "4 This thesis should be completely rejected. Its author, Hans Blumenberg, however, illuminatedthe structures of period shifts by introducing the categories "threshold of periods" and "reception" in his article "Epochenschwelle und Rezeption" (1958). Since then he has written literatureon the beginning of the Modem Age that uncovers the hitherto imperceptible boundarythat runs underthe surface of the chronology. Not even such pivotal figures as Nicolas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno testify with certainty about this even though it is the transitionalperiod par excellence. But granting that, one can still ask whether Blumenberg's criticism of the "rhetorical hyperbole about epoch-makingevents" (p. 458) is a bit excessive. One could be less vehement and still cast doubt on the extent to which we can demonstrate and experience the new in history. Blumenberg's new view is of the selfdevelopment of the Modem Age which "in contrast to the Middle Ages is not present in advance of its self-interpretation"(p. 468) or, in the earlier version, of the "singular situation of challenge and self-assertion from which springs the incomparableenergy at the beginning of the Modem Age."15 The crucial question, however, is whether this view has itself become subject to the "erosion inflicted by historical diligence." Is its fate any different from that of transitionalperiods that lose their explanatorypower when viewed from different perspectives; or from that of the founding figures who are swept away by the progress of historicalknowledge (p. 470)? Is it not also true precisely for the self-conception of the beginning modem age that an awareness of the transitionfrom the old to the new had to precede the initial boundarybetween the "not yet" and the "no longer," a boundarywhose shifts can only be charted ex eventu? If this transition could not be recognized and situated as a

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience threshold, then it could at least enter consciousness as a shift of horizon through the rupture between expectation and experience. For ReinhardKoselleck"6the asymmetry of expectationand experience has always been the hermeneuticalcondition for reconstructinghistorical experience. Even when we are missing explicit documentationof epochal disruptions, the discrepancy between the closed space of experience and the open horizon of expectation allows us to determine the threshold between old and new. New expectations that are no longer derivable from the sediment of experience can be produced through the "initiating force of events" as well as throughanticipation (in the form of prognoses, utopias, or imaginary omens). Thus the threshold of an epoch as an "absolute metaphor" does not become superfluous. It describes the consciousness of a period that expresses itself at first hesitantly or alreadyemphatically, prematurelyor belatedly, in terms of the simultaneity of the temporally disparate. It gives a special indexical value to the groups of images that articulatethe initial consciousness of the beginning of something new. In the case of the period shift from the middle ages to the modem age, one should recall not only the metaphorsof awakening and new light, of rebirth and resurrection, of renovatio and reformation,but also the Pauline paradigmof the conversio. This last paradigm was particularly importantin the early literature of the modem age. It was used especially for picking out the leading minds of periods and for delineating their contrastingconceptions of old and new. But its importance has not been sufficiently recognized by later scholars. My thesis, however, is that this paradigm best explains the reversal in the meaning of "epoche": Classically, it meant the point at which something comes to rest or a reversal takes place, but with the beginning of the modem age it acquireda new meaning, that of a beginning event which irrevocably changes things. Although as a metaphor,"the thresholdof an epoch," seems so sensible, so difficult for historiography to do without, it involves a dilemma. We immediately notice it if we use the word literally rather than metaphorically: What spaces does the threshold divide? When we cross the threshold, where did we come

379 from and where are we going? Every history book (at least up to the high point of the Nouvelle Histoire) parcels the past into periods as if the dividing line was as real and noticable as the metaphorof the threshold suggests. The metaphor'spower arises from its mythical analogies in rituals of purity or rebirth: the holy gateway that changes him who walks beneath it, or the porta triumphalis which, as the general and his army pass through it, takes away all the defilement and guilt of murderous war.17 If the assertionof absolute beginnings in history lives off of such a mythical force, then the need to experience the meaningfulness of one's own life as well as history in terms of the prevailing period has outlived its demythologization. Even when one grants the insight of historicalcriticism that "man does indeed make history, but he does not make the epoch" (p. 31), the metaphor still retains a hermeneutic privilege. This shows that, at least with respect to the experience of historical change, the transition from old to new occurs gradually, piece by piece. And those involved in the development of a new age are the first to carry old baggage over the threshold. It also reveals that contemporariescannot all govern the same threshold in the same way. Some shy away from it at first; some cross over while casting a look backwards;some never cross it at all. Even when there is a significant beginning event the transition is incremental. Take for instance the birthof Christ:considered in terms of its consequences, it placed Westen history in an irreversible process and at the same time divided it radically into a before and after. According to Blumenberg,
Christianitylaid claim only very late to having initiated a new phase of history. Initially this claim was totally out of question for it because of Christianity's eschatological opposition to history and the unhistorical quality that was (at least) implied by it. (p. 468)

We will leave it to the theologians to evaluate this assertion. But we do need to consider whether the set of Christian images involving the old and the new nonetheless persisted during the experience of period shifts, especially during the "renaissances" such as the Carolingian,the twelfth century's, or thatof the early Modem Age: humanism. An instance of this continuity is seen in the imminent

380 eschatological expectation of Christ's coming evidenced in John's apocalypse: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earthhad passed away, and the sea was no more" (Rev. 21:1). Of course in answerto gnosticism's tendency to turn the new into the 'strange', the church fathers soon asserted the identity of the Deus creator et salvator as well as the one creationof the world. They "domesticated the new with the help of the category 're' and hope with the help of the anamnesis of holy origins."'18And yet their theological neuteringof the new concerned only the period of final judgment and salvation. It must have scarcely affected the inner-historicalcaesure of Christ's birth. That prototypical, revolutionary division of world time into a before and an after must have remained unscathed. After all the paradigmof Christian chronology could legitimately arise from the rational belief that the succeeding periods stood at the beginning of a new era that broke away decisively from the exhausted old one. Moreover, it could find grounds in a second Christianparadigmthat was unaffected by the suspension of eschatology-the Pauline concept of the Christianas a "new creature": "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17). This is the Christianconcept of the qualitativelynew, the newness which breaks out of the crisis of the past and rejects forever what has become old. Was it not this concept that informed the epochal consciousness at the beginning of the Modem Age? Do we not see it there expressed in Christian terms such as "renovatio" or in profane terms like "rinascita"? Is it not true that in orderto legitimize the expectationof the new against the normative horizon of the old, the Modem Age still had to rely on the category "re" to show that the new was a reappropriation of an original, outdated, or forgotten truth?Hans Blumenbergargues that prior to its self interpretation,the self-conception of the modem age with its claim of inauguerating history ab ovo did not exist, and that it in fact made "the concept of an epoch itself a significant element of the epoch" (p. 19). If Blumenberg is correct, does it not stand to reason that the Christian paradigm of the conversio (of the new in eschatological form)

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also determinedthis shift in which the meaning of epoche in antiquityis practicallyreversed?In other words, does it not stand to reason that the or "provocativesecularization" reinterpretation of that paradigmproducedthe shift? In orderto answerthis question we need to look at the way the field of images concerningthe advent of the new shifted in the early Modem Age. We should turn first to Petrarch, an almost proverbialwitness to the period shift from the Middle Ages to the Modem Age. Of course, like other transitionalfigures, he was unaware that his own writing as a militanthumanistwas contributingto epoch-makingchanges and that he would one day be considered the initiating force behind the Renaissance. Still his letters reveal that he was thoroughly conscious of standing at the beginning of a new age, with which the DarkAges met theirend. In the letter he wrote Giovanni Colonna remembering his stay in Rome in 1341, he suggests using the victory of Christianity over Rome as a historical line of demarcationto divide history into two greatperiods-the classical and the modern. As a result the decline of the Roman Empire and cultureaquireda significance analagousto that held by the birthof Christ in the conception of of the Middle Ages. Thus history characteristic the paradigm of Christian chronology legitimized not only a new conception of history but also the repudiationof the recent "dark ages" as something that now had to be left behind. According to Petrarch, just as Christ once broughtthe light of belief into the darkness in which the heathen lived, now the light of classical culture would cast its rays on the Middle Ages' barbaricdarkness.'9 It was only because the Modem Age rigorously renounced the recent past that it could describe it as dark and barbaric.But legitimizing this rejectionand with it the self-conception of modernity (which at this point still claimed no autonomy) required a return to a more remote past, an ideal past, an antiquitybrought back from the depths of time. This necessity then accounts for the emergence of the cyclical view of rebirth (rinascita) among the early Modems. But from the beginning that image had to compete with other metaphors such as "return from exile" or "resurrection." (The latter especially makes the paradigm of the Pauline conversio comprehensible by portray-

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience ing the advent of the new as an irreversible process.) This lies behind Ulrich von Hutten's joyous exclamation at living here and now in a newly created world. That familiar quotation, "O saeculum! 0 litterae! iuvat vivere, etsi quiescere nondum iuvat"20 has become a prototype of the emphatic conception of epochs in the Modem Age. It presupposes not only the to new life but also the death of the resurrection old (Romans 6:4)-a rejection of the past that outdoes the classical gesture of triumph:"Heus tu, accipe laquium, exilium prospice."21 Thus the Reformation began with an ostentatious destructionof the old that sanctioned the new message: On the morning of December 10th, 1520 Luther burned along with the bill of excommunication the Decretum Gratiani and the papal decretals-the books of canon law among Catholic Christianity; "Tradition had been executed."22 As I previously suggested, we can distinguish antiquity and modernity according to the epistemological precedence of the old over the new and the new over the old respectively. This holds at least if we count the Modem Age as beginning with Descartes, who by providingthe categories of methodical doubt and necessary existence (the concept of an absolute beginning whose origins lie in its own nature)helped the .23 If Modem Age achieve self-understanding my suggestion holds, then the Christianparadigm of the new, which changes everything both in the world-through Christ's incarnation-as well as in the individual-through his the epconversion-would have predetermined ochal shift to the Modem Age. Moreover, as a latent pattern,it even anticipatedthe priorityof the new in the subsequentpolitical and aesthetic revolutions which rejected all tradition, especially the Christian. In this process involving a continuing and accelerating development of ever shorter periods, aesthetic expectation has repeatedly gone ahead of the historical experience of the new. ReinhartKoselleck has shown this to be the case with the greatperiodconcepts of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation;Poetik und HermeneutikXII has period done the same for the nineteenth-century concepts which, as it turns out, were also derived from the history of literature, art, and style. In what was often a long process of acceptance, these period concepts were at first

381 more or less literarily or aesthetically conceived, then accepted historically, and finally pragmaticallyapplied. One might want to speak here of a historical avant-gardism in aesthetic experience, a point that is underlined by the very history of avant-garde: This military metaphor, which became very fashionable around the middle of the nineteenth century,24 itself had literary and aesthetic origins. Etienne Pasquier used it first to describe the development of Frenchpoetry in the Renaissance: "Ce fut une belle guerre que l'on entreprit alors contre l'ignorance, dont j'attribue l'avantgarde a Sceve, Beze et Pelletier; ou si vous voulez autrement, ce furent les avant-coureurs des autres Poetes."25 Even when one looks at how the definition of epoch has changed from the old chronological concept to the modem historical one, one sees that the shift in meaning, which occured during the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century (Koselleck: "Sattelzeit"), was actually anticipatedin literarydocumentsof the Enlightenment. Since the sixteenth century, epoch has become an increasingly significant concept for reckoning time, because it allows one to structure the series temporum around importantdates. In Bossuet's universal history, announcedwith the new subtitleLes epoques ou la suite des temps, epoch acquires the significance of a great event: "ainsi, dans l'ordre des siecles, il faut avoir certains temps marquespar quelque grand evenement auquel on rapporte tout le reste." Yet having noted how great events mark off the new, Bossuet immediately ties this into the classical meaning of epoch as a stopping or resting point. He claims that from the vantage point of a great event, the historian can survey both what comes before and after without being misled by anachronisms:
c'est ce qui s'appelle 6poque, d'un mot grec qui signifie s'arrqter, parce qu'on s'arrqte la pour considerer comme d'un lieu de repos tout ce qui est arrive devant ou apres, et eviter par ce moyen les anachronismes,c'est-a- dir, cette sorte d'erreurqui fait confondre les temps.26

The article in D'Alembert's encyclopedia adopts this definition almost verbatim, and mentions the rule, so useful for the historical chronology, of using the concept of epoch properly-neither too much nor too little. Moreover, noting that the division of epochs is

382 and that there is no astronomipurely arbitrary cal reason for choosing one epoch over another, the article expresses little surprise that nations disagree about how to distinguish the different epochs. However, this understanding of "epoch" is not the end of the story. We need to look at how two other writers use the word in order to grasp something of its still hidden character:Thus far "epoch" has been defined by the point in time that allows one to demarcate periods, but from now on it will be fixed by the initialevent which ushersin the new through an irreversible"revolution"! "Epoch" is first used this way not in Kant(in the "conflict of [academic] faculties" over the "epoch-makinginfluence" of the revolutionof 1789) but in Diderot ("Sur la princesse d'Ashkow"): "ce projet fera 6poque."27 It includes the meaning of "epoch" as an event that produces something new: something that cannot be derived from the old and tracedback to what "has always been there." Likewise Rousseau, in his "Discours sur l'inegalite parmi les hommes" (1755), called the crisis that broughtthe state of natureto an end, and thus had a decisive influence on the course of all future events, an epoch-making event par excellence: "Ce fut 'a l'epoque d'une premiere revolution qui forma l'etablissement et la distinctiondes familles, et qui introduisitune sorte de propriete;d'ou peut-9trenaquirentdeja bien des querelles et des combats."28 Epoch and revolution enter here into a new relationship: of "epthe cyclical-astronomicalunderstanding och" as a point of rest and reversiblemovement is itself reversedso thatan epoch begins with an initial and unique revolution which irreversibly decides the further fate of mankind.29 This historicized conception informs the specifically modem consciousness of time and epochs that we find at the beginningof the transitionperiod. Later, there is a further shift in meaning: the German idealists, in their philosophies of history, expand the new consciousness of epochs through the transcendentalconstruction of the "Epochs of Consciousness." Accordingto this conception, epochs no longer succeed one another but diverge. The historical school subsequently conceived of them as self-contained periods; since then they have formed the foundation for the periodization of history.30 By extending the mere point in time to an initiating

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event, the modem concept of epoch allows one to conceive the split between the new and the old in dialectical terms. This can be seen in Hegel's concept of "objective spirit," which explains the history of mankindin terms of one unifying principle expressing itself in manifold political and culturalmanifestations. In the wake of the increasingly rapid developmentof industrialand democraticsociety that came with the nineteenthcentury, this idealistic concept of objective spirit lost its persuasive power. The concept proved to be retrospective, and as such well suited for understandingthe past as successive phases in the developmentof consciousness towardemancipation,but not for the rapidly changing present. At understanding the end of the Romanticperiod, historicismwas joined by an aesthetic consciousness that could deal freely with the whole of the past (Benjamin'smus e imaginaire). The succession of self-contained periods devolves into the coexistence of competingmovementsthatrise and fall in rapidsuccession. The primacyof the new is posited as absolute; the modernity of the period since Baudelaire is conceived of as an experience in which the new sets itself off not from the old but only from itself, in which every modernitybrings forth its own antiquit,. III. In the period of modernitysince Baudelaire, no critic of culturehas questioned the aesthetic (and epistemological) preference for the new more decisively than Walter Benjamin.3' The new and the never-changing are for Benjamin disguised categories of historical illusion and the task of a marxistphilosophy of history is to uncover their unrecognized correlation: "The destructionof historical illusion must result in the same process as the construction of the dialectical picture" (WA V. 2, 1251). Here, in this early note, Benjamin expressed an idea he hoped to develop in the Passagenwerk: he would use Nietzsche's idea of an eternal repetition of the same (in which the historicism of the nineteenthcentury overturnsitself [8a, 3]), to oppose both the moral Amor fati and the modern aesthetics of the Nouveaute. Understood in this way, Baudelairewould have all at once revealed the false consciousness of a modernityenamoredof progress, as Benjamin's

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience materialist reading of Fleurs du Mal would prove:
Modernity, the period of hell. The punishmentsof hell are in each case the newest thing that exists in this sphere. The concern is not with the fact that 'again and again the same' occurs (a fortiori the eternal returnis not what is meant here). It is ratherthat the face of the earth, precisely in what is new, never changes, that what is newest always remains the same in all of its parts. Thatconstitutesthe eternityof hell. To determine the totality of the traces by which modernity reveals itself would mean representinghell (p. 1.5; PP I, G 17).

383 that makes the old quotable again for Baudelaire. The new revives a dead past. This is what his fashion paradigm shows (Ed. PI. 837ff.) and it is this basic impulse that Benjamin failed to see. The hermeneuticfunction of the aesthetics of Nouveaute allows Baudelaire to complete the shift from historicism to aestheticism. It thus contradicts Benjamin's concept of the regression of modernity back to its "pre-history," but by the same token it corresponds to his theory of the present momentof recognizability. But to his own loss, Benjaminfailed to use it to buttresshis position. Benjamin's approachto a "pre-historyof the nineteenth century" provoked a serious objection from Adorno: "The phrase that 'the new immerses itself in the old' is to me highly suspect from the point of view of my critiqueof the dialectical image as a regression. In this phrase one does not reach back for the old; instead, the new is, as illusion and phantasmagoria, itself the old" (WA V. 2, 1132). This criticism has a kernel of truth. After all, at one point, Benjamin himself offers a reformulation of his main thesis in which he rejects the idea of an archeology of the nineteenth century. He repudiatesthe search for prime historicalforms, the archetypes of collective unconscious, as methodologically inappropriate for producing a pre-history. Instead he suggests that "the concept of a pre-historyof the nineteenth century has meaning only where it is to be presentedas an original form of that pre-history, that is a form in which all of pre-history groups itself anew in images peculiarto the last century" (N 3a, 2). His point-at least on my reading-is that our modern age has its specific pre-history in the preceding century. In other words, the nineteenth century, with its initial appearance of uncontrollabletechnology, is the pre-history of what is to come; it is the "clasical antiquity" of modernity! On this reading then, the naive belief in progress, the new as mere sensation, would be nothing more than the dream form of the event found in the collective consciousness: "The dreaming collective knows no history. The course of events, always the same and always the newest, flows by it. The newest, the most modernas mere sensation, is just as much a mode of dreaming the event as the eternal returnof the same" (S 2, 1; PP I, M14). The moment when one awakens from the collective

Now, of course, the contemporary reception already demonstratedthat Baudelaire's friends took measures to oppose the charge of immorality by trying to vindicate the writerof Fleurs du Mal as the "Dante of the decadent era": "c'est du Dante athee et moderne, du Dante venu apresVoltaire" (J 3a, 1). And in his newly seen "landscape of ennui" there definitely appears a "death-like Idylle" of the city in many facets" (WA V. 2, 55). Yet the aspect of hell by no means does justice to all of the traces of modernism in Baudelaire's major work. Fleurs du Mal also leads the reader-if I may retain the Dantesque frame of referenceand opens up for througha modernpurgatory32 him in the contrasting "landscape of ecstasy,"33 unhopedfor resting places of remembrance and artistic paradise. The experience of the new and the newest (which is by no means permanent and necessary) thereby suddenly changes again into the same and never-changing or into the oldest (the "pre-history" Benjamin sought for). Baudelaire's aesthetics of Nouveaute maintains its moral claim with the attitude of an exploratory curiositas, which although sometimes disappointedis nevertheless indomitable. For Benjaminthe closing verse of the poem in Fleurs du Mal, "Au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver de nouveau," reveals the new as the "origin of illusion" and the "quintessence of false consciousness" (V 1, 55). But against this, one can argue that Baudelaire renewed here a famous Dantesque paradigm:the last journey that leads Odysseus, unconcernedwith heaven and hell, beyond the limits imposed on man, the antipodes of the ancient world. Thus Baudelaire provocatively quotes: "Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous bruile le cerveau, / Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?" It is precisely the new

384 dream and the historical illusion dissolves would then be characterized as Baudelaire's "moment of waking." This is identical to Benjamin's "presentmoment" of recognizability (N 18, 3) "in which things put on their true-surrealistic-mask" (N 3a, 3). From this it follows thatin the dialecticalimages of Fleurs du Mal "the past unites with the present to become immediatelya constellation" (N 2a, 3), and moreover, thatFleurs du Mal allows one to see the present alreadyas an anticipationof the future-the present Paris already as the ruin of middle-class society and capitalist culture. If one accepts this reading, then the forced attempts to show that Fleurs du Mal portrays modernityas permeatedby (classical) antiquity become superfluous, and the charge that the absence of a conflict with classical antiquity weakened Baudelaire's theory of modernity falls by the wayside.34 If only Benjamin had graspedthis, his Passagenwerkcould have then embodied Maxime Du Camp's overwhelming idea: "d'ecrire sur Paris ce livre que les historiens de l'antiquiten'ont pas ecrit sur leur villes." But although the Passagenwerk, with its "mythological topography" postulating Paris' decline, did not do justice to Du Camp's greatinsight, Benjaminnonethelessplaced great emphasis on it. In the chapter "Antikisches Paris, Katakomben, demolitions, Untergang von Paris," Benjamin recounts how Du Camp was thus inspired to write his great factual account Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIXe si'cle (1st ed. 1868). While waiting for his glasses to be repaired, Du Camp suddenly realized he had grown old. It was then, while meditatingon the Pont Neuf about "cette loi de l'inevitable destruction qui gouverne toute chose humaine," that he had a sudden inspiration.As the crowning achievement of his mature years he would write the book about Paris that could have been written about the fallen cities of antiquity:the book that during the age of Pericles could have been written about Athens or during Ceasar's lifetime could have been writtenabout Rome.35 This is not simply "the highly characteristic classical inspiration," because, more than that, it anticipatesthe decline of the modern international city. Benjamin returns to this in a later entry: "The fantasies about the decline of Paris are an indicationthat technology was not being

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responded to. Through these fantasies blind consciousness exclaims that with the development of large cities, the means increased of razing them to the ground" (C7a, 4). The modem reader would have been better served, if Benjamin, with his gift for diagnosing the preconscious, repressed, or forgotten knowledge buried in the mythic realm of tradition, had takenthis insight into the underlyingpathos and made it the main focus of his pre-historyof coming modernity! This insight, fully developed, could have been the test of his theory of the dialectical image. He could have demonstrated- or rathertried to demonstrate-how a historianpracticingthe new dialectical method is able to "go throughthe past with the intensity of a dream in order to reach the present as the waking world the dreamrefers to" (PP I; F, 7). This dialectical method of history Benjamin proposes is supposed to be the "Copernican revolution" thatputs "contemplationon trial." The theory behind it presupposes that in the "present moment of recognizability" we conceive the past in terms of what it determinesin the present. However-and here is the dialectical move-the moment of waking dispells the illusion of epic continuity (the traditionof the victor [PP I, 081]), thus enabling us to recognize the constellation of present time and history (N 18, 4). It is this that makes possible the dialectical shift to political action (PP I, 056). Benjamin's understanding of the presentmoment of recognizabilityanticipates the aesthetics of reception by thirty years. According to Benjamin a dialectical image "is that in which the past suddenly unites with the present moment to become a constellation" (N 2a, 3). He subsequently explains this definition in this way: "The historical index of images, namely, says not only that they belong to a particular period, more than anythingelse it says that they only become readable in a particularperiod." (N 3, 1). He does not just incidentally understand "recognizability" as "readability" here; he goes on to say, "Every historical moment conceived of as possibility frees possibilities in history. Every possibility of history that is freed comes to the aid of possibilities in the present."36 This expectation is realized most clearly in literarytexts; every extensive history of receptionreveals that not every question can be put to every text at all times: These questions

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience can only be determined progressively. The wealth of significance a text has can only be recognized over time. After all, with the passage of time, the horizon of experience shiftsoften against tradition. And that shift in turn changes the way the text's possible meanings are read and understood. What Benjamin says here is clearly analogous to the subsequent aesthetics of reception. In fact in his essay on Fuchs, Benjamin writes:
a posthistory, by means of which its (art's) prehistory as if in constant change is also recognizable. They teach him how art's function of outliving its creator enables it to leave his intentions behind; how the response from his contemporariesis part of the effect that the work of arthas on us today, and how this effect rests on the encounternot only with him, but also with history which has allowed it to progress up to the present day (WA 11.2, 467).

385 reception theory. In the productiveresponse to art works the dialectic does not come to rest: the present moment of readability implies other future moments of readability. Why should history be any different? Apparently because here, where the shift occurs from the aesthetic to the political, a theological paradigm was called on for assistance: the messianic freezing of the event (WA 1.2, 703). But why should history be frozen, with what hope, to what ends? Perhapsthe answer to this puzzle lies in the fact that the "present moment of recognizability" has aesthetic origins, and the "moment of waking" theological ones. In both concepts the opposition between trace and aurareturnswithout finding a final dialectical solution: "The trace is the appearanceof proximity, as distant as what it left behind may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, as near as what produces it may be. In the trace we are in control of the matter;in the aurait takes control over us" (M 36,4). For this reason Gerhard Kaiser has correctly remarkedwith respect to the GeschichtsphilosophischenThesen and the essay on Fuchs that Benjamin's "conception of heliotropism was taken from art and cultural history, namely the response to works and texts. "37 In fact the expectation latent in the past correspondsto the meaning hidden in the work, which waits to become evident in the light of later works; or as Benjamin put it: "As flowers turntheir head to follow the sun, so the past by means of a secret type of heliotropism turnsto face the sun that is rising in the heavens of history" (1.2, 694). Thus Benjamin could also say that "The response to great and much admired art works is an ad plures ire"' (N 7a, 4), equating aesthetic experience with a religious conception (in Rome the phrasemeant the dead!) that speaks for itself. Moreover, Benjamin's previously mentioned demand on the historical dialectician also has aesthetic origins. Benjamin makes the demand in the Fuchs essay after discussing works of art as examples that integratetheir prehistorywith the history of their reception. Now as for the moment of waking, the "GeschichtsphilosophischenThesen" make the reliance on messianic theology quite visible: "The past carries a temporal index with it that refers to it to redemption. . . . We were

As a result of this, Benjamin demands that the historical dialectician "be aware of the critical constellationin which precisely this fragmentof the past occurs at precisely this presentmoment in time." This demand, understood in terms of the dialectic of aura and trace, could be articulated in such a way that it would indeed be a "Copernican shift"-and would be fully consonant with receptiontheory:contemplatingthe past gives way to reappropriatingit in the present. The contemplativeattitudewould thus be understood as directed towards the appearance of something distant, in which the aura gains control over us. The dialectical attitude, on the other hand, would be understood as directedtowardsthe productivereappropriation in the present of the distant in which "rememberance" (Eingedenken) attempts to gain control of an object (in the critical constellation that a conscious appropriation of the past requires, but where it is not enough that "the present casts its light on the past" [N 2a, 3]). Benjamin nevertheless did not draw this conclusion. Instead, he apparently attempted to preserve an auratic moment in the "present moment of recognizability". The definition"image is thatin which the past suddenlyunites with the present moment to become a constellation"-is explained abruptly and at first unclearly: "Image is dialectic at rest" (Bild ist Dialektik im Stillstand: N 2a, 3). But this is puzzling-especially given his anticipation of

386 expected on earth. With every race that preceded us we were given a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim" (II). Here Benjamin short-circuited the paradigm of an aestheticsof receptionwith thatof theology: the redemption of the past takes the place of the work from which the interpreterderives its hithertounnoticed significance for the present. The messianic power nevertheless provides It should not stop more thanjust the interpreter. with freeing a work from the work of a lifetime or its era, or with liberating a particularepoch from the homogeneous course of history; it should continue "until the whole past in an historical apokatastasis is brought into the present" (N la, 3). This hope, however, has a stipulation:"Admittedly, redeemedmankindat first receives the bruntof his past. That means that it is only for redeemed mankind that the past becomes quotablein each of its moments" (III). In the end, however, this stipulation is withdrawnagain in a heightened determination of the coincidence between presentmoment and history. Not just a final state in the future,every lived and frozen moment can already be the final judgement for the salvation of mankind (III) or-as in the case of the Jews to whom it is forbiddento peer into the future- "the small gate through which the messiah can enter" (XVIII B). If here-as Gerhard Kaiser remarked-the resurrectionof history should fulfill a hope that Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Bloch set in a resurrection of fallen nature, then Benjamin's solution is purchased with a final contradiction:the "present moment of recognizability" and the "moment of waking" can no longer be mediateddialectically. The present moment of recognizability presupposes conscious access, even the seizure of the trace, in order to gain control of the object-the lost, repressed experience. The present moment of waking, on the other hand, is not accessible to the historical subject. It presupposesa decisive moment (Kairos), the intangible opening up of the gate through which the messiah can enter, thus "the appearance of a distance, so near what causes it may be." This contradictionruns throughthe whole Passagenwerk as well as the "Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen." Benjamin cannot decide whether to use active or passive images to explicate "the present mo-

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ment of recognizability": "Blasting out a piece of the past" (XVII) is opposed to "receiving the past as a gift" (III), the violent "tiger's leap into the past" (XIV) to the nonviolent "remembrance" (XVIII B), the critically destructive quoting (N 11, 3) to the redeeming quotability (III), the freed fragment to the monadological structureof the historical object (N1O,3), and this in its singularityin turnto the apokatastasis of the whole past (N1A,3), finally the messianic, though weak, power given to us (II) is opposed to waiting for the coming of a greater force. But when all the historian(or any agent) can do is kindle the sparksof hope in the past, not in the future (VI), what can waiting achieve? We cannot expect a solution to this contradiction either in the incomplete Passagenwerk or in the extensive essays. Perhapsthis is one of the reasons why the text-and along with it the plan WalterBenjaminspent his life pursuingnever achieved the auratic form of a 'work' and-in accordance with his insight into the dialectic between trace and aura-could never have achieved it. Nevertheless, it is a unique commentaryon a period of calamity which may well be the prehistoryof the presentfin de siecle. It is a document of a "search for time past," that was a search for the lost future.,"38 Moreover, it gives a clear-sighted prognosis: "The concept of progress is to be groundedin the idea of catastrophe.That it continues 'in this way,' is the catastrophe"(N 9a, 1). As such, it leaves behind a large trace that we should respond to when it is once again necessary for us to determine the relationshipbetween tradition and innovation in the "present moment of recognizability." IV. "Ii faut commencerpar le commencement!" I have shown elsewhere what hopes and disappointments, what happy expectations and painful experiences this motto has produced in recent history.39Todaythe privilege of the new is questioned more decisively than ever before. It is burdened with the unrealizable duty of justifying not the preservationof tradition but its change. "Saving the past" now counts as the ultimatein wisdom. Nonetheless, the indispensable role of aesthetic experience has always

Tradition, Innovation, and Aesthetic Experience been, and should continue to be, creating expectations-creating them in orderto reveal and test what is thinkableor desirable, if not quite recognizable or readily justifiable. The literary historianshould rememberthis. Creatingexpectations is, in my opinion, the obligation of the arts. Only those who confuse this contemporary obligation's necessarily provisionalmoral character with aesthetic indifference can contest it. To put faith in this privilege of aesthetic experience, precisely under the fatal conditions of a new Fin de Siecle at the end of the second millenniumpost Christumnatum, seems to me more promising than a return to the old, ante Christum natum concept of epoche. Indeed, such countermovementsinvolve us in aporias. Both Heidegger's history of being and Benjamin's theology of history make this clear. According to Heidegger one should consider thatevery epoch in history "is one thatinvolves the 'Ansichhalten'(withholding/ epoche) of the truthof being." 40 According to Benjamin, on the otherhand, every epoch needs a "messianic stopping of the event." Only then can it overcome progress or the period of decline, which are two sides of the same coin-or in his words, "the past completely devolves upon the redeemed mankind."41 Prophets on the right, prophetson the left-who will blame the child of the world who, findinghimself in the middle, mistrusts the pausing of truth as well as the stopping of history and instead sets his hope in the quiet power of what are, if no longer absolute, then perhaps modest beginnings?
'O. Marquard,SkeptischeMethode im Blick auf Kant, 3rd ed. (Freiburg:1982), p. 47. 2Cf. "Ursprungund Bedeutungder Fortschrittsideein der 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes"' in Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt, VIII Deutscher Kongre fur Philosophie (Munchen 1962), ed. H. Kuhn and F. Wiedmann (Munich: 1964), pp. 51-72; "LiterarischeTraditionund gegenwartiges Bewultsein der Modernitat," in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Prozel des 1970), pp. 11-66; "Der literarischer (Frankfurt: Modernismus von Rousseau bis Adorno," in AdornoKonferenz 1983, ed. K. v. Friedburg and J. Habermas (Frankfurt:1983 [stw 460]), pp. 95-130. 3 This quote is from the second of his essays on Leonardoda Vinci. See Paul Valery, edition de la Pleiade, vol. I (Paris 1957), p. 1210. 4 According to Th. W. Adorno, "U ber Tradition," in Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. (Frankfurt: 1967), pp. 29-41. 5 In Plato's "Symposium" (207a-208b) Diotima's comparison between the reproduction of animal and of

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spirituallife demonstratesthis. Thus Hans- Georg Gadamer comments: "Just as there it is always a new creature that continues the preservation of the species, so it is also apparently with human knowledge that it must always acquire new relevance if it should exist at all." H.-G. Gadamer, "Unterwegs zur Schrift?" in Schrift und Gedachtnis, ed. Aleida Assman, Jan Assmann and Chr. Hardmeier(Munich: 1983), p. 16. 6 See in this context my interpretation of Apollinaire's programmatic poem "Zone" in "Die Epochenschwelle von 1912" in Sitzungsberichteder Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,Phil.-hist. Klasse, vol I, 1986. 7 Op. cit. (fn. 4), I, 1172. 8 See Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World,trans. RalphMannheim(Chicago: 196 1)-Dante als Dichterder irdischen Welt, (Berlin/Leipzig: 1929)-as well as the passages on Dante in my A sthetische Erfahrungund literarische Hermeneutik,(Frankfurt:1982). 9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol I: Inferno, trans. with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton:1970), p. 279. The Italianoriginal is as follows: "'0 frati,'dissi, 'che per cento milia / pergli siete giunte a l'occidente, / a questa tanto picciola vigilia / di nostri sensi ch'e del rimanente/ non vogliate negar l'esperienza, / di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente. / Consideratela vostra semenza:/ fatti non foste a viver come bruti,/ ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza."' '0 Oeuvres, ed. de la Pleiade (Paris: 1951), pp. 680ff. " Das Passagenwerk (see fn. 33), vol. 1, pp. 1135, 271, 273. 12 With reference to his critique on the abstractionof aesthetic consciousness in Wahrheit und Methode (libingen: 1980), p. 81. 13 The text of the following section was originally writtenfor the colloquium 'Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewultsein". For further treatmentof this topic see vol. XII of Poetik und Hermeneutik, ed. R. Herzog and R. Koselleck (Munchen: 1987), esp. pp. 563ff. The text of the subsequent section III has been taken from a work "Spur und aura-Bemerkungen zu Walter Benjamins Passagenwerk" in Art social undArt industriel,ed. H. Pfeiffer et. al. (Munchen: 1987). 14 H. Blumenberg,The Legitimacyof the ModernAge, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: 1983), p. 469. Aspekte der Epochenschwelle-Cusanerund Nolaner (Frankfurt:1976), p. 20. References to page numbers will be made in the text. I have made slight changes in some of the English quotations (STG). See also "Epochenschwelle und Rezeption," in Philosophische Rundschau 6 (1958), pp. 94-120. 15 In English, p. 148. For the quotationin German see SakularisierungundSelbstbehauptung (Frankfurt: 1974), p. 170. 16 Vergangne Zukunft-Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, (Frankfurt:1979), pp. 355ff. 17 F. Noack, Triumph und Triumphbogen, Vortrage der Bibliothek WarburgV (Leipzig: 1928), pp. 150ff. 18 J. Moltman, Artikel, "Neu, das Neue" in Historical Worterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6, ed. J. Ritterand K. Grunder(BasellStuttgart:1984). 19 For a more extensive discussion with references see als Provokation, pp. 23-29, here JauI, Literaturgeschichte p. 25.

388
20 Oh, this century!Oh, the cultivationof literature.It is a pleasure to live and no longer to rest. 21 Harkthou, accept the yoke and look forwardto your exile. 22 According to M. Fuhrmann, "Die Falschung im Mittelalter," in Historische Zeitschrift 197 no. 3 (1963): 549. 23 See H. Blumenberg (fn. 15), p. 145 (Engl.) and p. 164 (Germ.). 24 Especially through the followers of Saint-Simon. See H. B6hringer, "Avantgarde-Geschichte einer Metapher" in ArchivfiurBegriffsgeschichte22 (1978): 90-114. 25 Tresor de la langue francaise, vol. 3, ed. P. Imbs (Paris: 1974), p. 1057. 26 "Discours sur l'histoire universelle" in Oeuvres completes de Bossuet, vol. 24 (Paris: 1875), p. 262. 27 See the P. Robert's Dicionaire alphabetique et analogique de la langue francaise (Paris: 1963), epoque (no. 6). 28 OeuvresCompletes, vol. 3, ed. B. Gagnebinand M. Raymond (Paris: 1964), 167. 29 Blumenberg(see fn. 1, p. 165, fn. 6) comments on an analagous passage in Voltaire: "I' s'est fait depuis environ quinze ans une revolution dans les esprits qui sera une grande6poque." 30 See M. Riedel's article "Epoche, Epochender Philosophie, bewuptsein" in Historisches Worterbuch vol. 3, ed. J. Ritter, p. 598. 31 Quoted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte = 3) in vol. V. 1-2: Das PassagenSchriften(Werkausgabe werk (Frankfurt:1982), (from the "Aufzeichnungen und Materialien" with abbreviation and page number, from "Ersten Entwurfe" with the abbreviationPP I and page number);Baudelaire,Oeuvre, ed. de la Pleiade, Paris 1951. 32 Baudelaire himself defended his book with the argumentthat in its "terrible moralite" it would be misjudged if one did not take his principleof composition into account:"A un blaspheme,j'opposerai des elancementvers le ciel; a une obscenite, des fleur platoniques . . . Livre destine a representerl'agitation de l'esprit dans le mal." See my A sthetische Erfahrung, p. 848. 33 See G. Hess, Die Landschaftin Baudelaires Fleurs du Mal, (Heidelberg: 1953).

JAUSS
I A glance at the themes in Fleurs du Mal contradicts Benjamin'sassertionthat "Classical antiquityin Baudelaire is Roman. Only at one point does classical Greece standout in his world" (WA I. 2, 593). The poem "Le Cygne," for Benjamin a prototype for the merging of modernity with classical antiquity, quotes Andromache, Lesbos, and the Femmes damnees Sappho, Delphine and Hippolyte. Whatever else may seem to belong to classical antiquityrefers to a mythical preworld: "j'aime le souvenir de ces 6poques nues, La vie anterieure, La Geante." With this the catalogue is alreadyat an end. The dandy as "last gleam of the heroic in times of decadence" (WA 1.2, 599) may only compensate for this with difficulty. This negative conclusion could not have been expected any differently if one takes the provocative phrase from the Salut publique more seriously than Benjamindid, althoughhe places him at the end of Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire: "No more tragedies!Enoughof the old history of ancientRome! Do we not stand larger today than Brutus did?" (Ibid., p. 604). 35 The inspiration of the anticipated decline of the world city does not yet occur in the preface, but only much later at the end of the Du Camp's work. See Karlheinz Stierle's revealing comments in his latest book Die Lesbarkeitder Stadt, (Munich: 1988). 36 G. Kaiser, "Benjamin's 'Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen".' inAntithesen-Zwischenbilanz einesGermanisten (Frankfurt: 1973), pp. 241-42. See also Peter Szondi, "Hoffnung im Vergangenen. Uber Walter Benjamin" (1961), in Satz und Gegensatz (Frankfurt:1964). 37 Kaiser noted this in the context of some remarkson the GeschichtsphilosophischenThesen and the essay on Fuchs. See G. Kaiser, ibid. 217/8. 38 Szondi, "Hoffnung im Vergangenen" (see fn. 36), p. 40. 39 In Der literarische Prozed der Modernismus (see fn. 1). 4 See M. Riedel (fn. 30), p. 599. 41 "Geschichtphilosophische Thesen," II/III. See also Das Passagenwerk(fn. 33), V. 1, p. 575: "Overcomingthe concept of 'progress' and the concept of 'decadent age' (Verfallszeit)areonly two sides of one and the same matter" (N2,5).