On Negt and Kluge

Abstract

Nine years separate Offentlichkeit und Erfahrung and Geschichte und Eigensinn, the two collaborative works of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge.' What first strikes the materialist reader (the reader of physical books, rather than of ideas) is the evidence they exhibit of the typographic revolution that-along with the postmodern, the end of the '60s, and the defeat of the Left intervenes between them. The first of the two clearly suffers under the constraints of classical discursive form. Its six official chapters, which set out to establish a theory of the proletarian public sphere, find themselves forced against their will to produce instead the rudiments of a theory of the bourgeois public sphere. Here everything has already begun to flee into the footnotes and appendices: three excurses and some twenty separate commentaries now fill up a third of a five-hundred-page volume, into which already a few illustrations begin to emerge. Elsewhere in the various theoretical zones of the First World, new ideologies of the heterogeneous and of Difference have begun to inspire rhizomatic notions of form: Deleuzian plateaus are being laid out side by side in separate and seemingly unrelated chapters, while the two stark columns of Glas dare you to figure out when to jump from one to the other. But even more definitively the discontinuities of Kluge's stories and films bar any return to the traditional essay or treatise, closing the road with a landslide of rubble (You can imagine the problem of antagonistic realism in terms of the analysis of the site of an explosion. The explosion scattered objects across a wide area. The force of the explosion, in other words, what really moved, is no longer present . [p. 348]). Benjamin's dialectical constellations or montages-like Pound's ideogramsseem genealogically to present a family likeness, although in these predecessors the heap of images still strongly hints at some right way of putting everything together. Yet Kluge's own aesthetic (and that of Geschichte und Eigen-

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