Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

DIFFERENCE AND ORIENTATION

An Alexander Kluge Reader

BY ALEXANDER KLUGE

EDITED BY RICHARD LANGSTON

A Signale Book

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

ITHACA AND LONDON

CONTENTS

Translator Information

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part I Introduction

The Guardian of Difference: The Essayist Alexander Kluge by Richard Langston

Part II Literature

1. The Difference: Heinrich von Kleist (1985)

2. Storytelling Is the Representation of Differences (2001)

3. The Peacemaker (2003)

4. Companions in Now-Time (2007)

5. Storytelling Means Dissolving Relations (2008)

6. Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One (2013)

7. What Is a Metaphor? (2016)

Part III Film

8. Word and Film (1965) by Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke

9. Bits of Conversation (1966)

10. The Realistic Method and the Filmic (1975)

11. Film: A Utopia (1983)

12. A Plan with the Force of a Battleship (2008)

13. No Farewell to Yesterday: New German Cinema from 1962 to 1981 as Seen from 2011 (2012)

Part IV From Classical to New Media: Opera, Television, Internet

14. An Answer to Two Opera Quotations (1983/84)

15. On the Expressions Media and New Media: A Selection of Keywords (1984)

16. Medialization—Musealization (1990)

17. The Opera Machine (2001)

18. Primitive Diversity (2002)

19. Planting Gardens in the Data Tsunami (2010)

Part V Theory

20. The Role of Fantasy (1974)

21. The Function of the Distorted Angle in the Destructive Intention (1989)

22. The Political without Its Despair: On the Concept of Populism (1992)

23. War (2001)

24. The Art of Drawing Distinctions (2003)

25. Critique, Up Close and Personal (2007)

26. The Actuality of Adorno (2009)

27. Inventory of a Century: On Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (2013)

28. An Instance of Internet Telephony over the Himalayas (2016)

Index

Translator Information

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part I Introduction

The Guardian of Difference: The Essayist Alexander Kluge

Part II Literature

1. The Difference: Heinrich von Kleist (1985)

2. Storytelling Is the Representation of Differences (2001)

3. The Peacemaker (2003)

4. Companions in Now-Time (2007)

5. Storytelling Means Dissolving Relations (2008)

6. Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One (2013)

7. What Is a Metaphor? (2016)

Part III Film

8. Word and Film (1965)

9. Bits of Conversation (1966)

10. The Realistic Method and the Filmic (1975)

11. Film: A Utopia (1983)

12. A Plan with the Force of a Battleship (2008)

13. No Farewell to Yesterday: New German Cinema from 1962 to 1981 as Seen from 2011 (2012)

Part IV From Classical to New Media: Opera, Television, Internet

14. An Answer to Two Opera Quotations (1983/84)

15. On the Expressions Media and New Media: A Selection of Keywords (1984)

16. Medialization—Musealization (1990)

17. The Opera Machine (2001)

18. Primitive Diversity (2002)

19. Planting Gardens in the Data Tsunami (2010)

Part V Theory

20. The Role of Fantasy (1974)

21. The Function of the Distorted Angle in the Destructive Intention (1989)

22. The Political without Its Despair: On the Concept of Populism (1992)

23. War (2001)

24. The Art of Drawing Distinctions (2003)

25. Critique, Up Close and Personal (2007)

26. The Actuality of Adorno (2009)

27. Inventory of a Century: On Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (2013)

28. An Instance of Internet Telephony over the Himalayas (2016)

Index

TRANSLATOR INFORMATION

The essays and dialogues comprising this book were translated by a team of international scholars under the coordination of Richard Langston. Their contributions are greatly appreciated. They are

Rory Bradley

Martin Brady

Andreas Freytag Hill

Miriam Hansen

Helen Hughes

Steffen Kaupp

Taylor Kent

Richard Lambert

Richard Langston

Samantha Lankford

Sandra Niethardt

Sara S. Poor

Nathan Wagner

Emma Woelk

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The battle over film

2. Locomotion

3. A film like an earthquake, a man like a volcano

4. Writing conventions for the orders of magnitude

5. People

6. Easy

7. The Paramount-Palace on Broadway

8. A media corporation

9. The Etruscan shrew

10. The bumblebee bat

11. Instructions for the transferral of a dead person

12. The pale man

13. Senta

14. Volksempfänger on Christmas Eve in 1942

15. The ENIAC computer in 1946

16. A microcomputer in 1980

17. The human nervous system

18. Paranthropus boisei and Paranthropus robustus

19. Electronics function directly

20. A powerful servant, formerly a slave

21. Old territory

22. The trust that binds them can be called love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I traveled to Munich in the summer of 2010 with the intention of paying Alexander Kluge a visit and floating the idea of an English-language reader of newly translated essays. Difference and Orientation is just one of many collaborations and projects that resulted from that initial conversation. Foremost among these were my involvement as principal translator of Kluge and his longtime collaborator Oskar Negt’s magnum opus, History and Obstinacy (Zone Books, 2014); my editorial oversight of the second volume of the Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch entitled Glass Shards (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); and my forthcoming monograph, Dark Matter: A Guide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Verso, 2020). The last of these projects to come to fruition, Difference and Orientation profited from a wealth of experience and acquired knowledge initially made possible by a research leave supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Like everything before it, this anthology would have been impossible without Kluge’s long-standing support, for which I am endlessly grateful. Beate Wiggen and Gülsen Döhr at Kluge’s DCTP offices in Düsseldorf have also been invaluable interlocutors. Initial work on the translations contained in these pages began in the fall of 2011 and concluded in the fall of 2017. Of the many translators involved in rendering Kluge’s thought into English, the esteemed British team Martin Brady and Helen Hughes as well as Samantha Lankford deserve special recognition for joining the original team after the project set sail and making their work available. Responsible for the lion’s share of these translations, Emma Woelk was a key collaborator who constantly went beyond the call of duty. Bethany Wasik of Cornell University Press was instrumental, especially in securing rights to reproduce the only two previously published translations included in Difference and Orientation. I am indebted to Miriam Hansen’s estate for allowing me and Cornell University Press to include her and Sally Poor’s seminal translations. Kizer Walker of Cornell University Library and the Signale series was a crucial advocate early on; without his enthusiasm and support, this anthology would have never gotten off the ground. Similarly, the editor in chief at Cornell University Press, Mahinder Kingra, championed the idea for this anthology and generously accommodated its considerable scope. Marian Rogers’s meticulous editorial work conferred on the manuscript spit and polish, for which I am most appreciative. Above all, Difference and Orientation would have simply never materialized without Leslie Adelson’s support. Her advocacy, expertise, advice, and feedback have been the linchpin that ensured that the many essays and dialogues assembled here reach the wide English-language readership they rightfully deserve.

Richard Langston

Durham, North Carolina

PART I

INTRODUCTION

THE GUARDIAN OF DIFFERENCE

The Essayist Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston

Born in 1932 in the central German city of Halberstadt, the German polymath Alexander Kluge is certainly known both at home and abroad for wearing many hats. Above all, his career as one of New German Cinema’s most cerebral filmmakers still commands international acclaim, even though he officially bid adieu to celluloid with his last feature, Miscellaneous News (1986). First and foremost a writer of stories before he ever shot Brutality in Stone, his first short made together with Peter Schamoni in 1960, Kluge returned to writing in earnest in 2000 with his massive Chronik der Gefühle [Chronicle of Feelings] and has generated since then an astonishing complex corpus of storybooks that has grown more than twice the size of what he published during his first robust literary phase, which was framed by his literary debut, Attendance List for a Funeral (first published in German in 1962 and later republished as Case Studies), and the extensively revised fifth German edition (1978) of his second book, The Battle (the first edition of which was published in 1964). Far less accessible to English-language audiences when inaugurated in the second half of the 1980s, three cultural windows were broadcast weekly on late-night German cable television by Kluge’s television production company, Development Company for Television Program, at its peak, and have continued uninterrupted into the present, making him a singular phenomenon in the history of the medium. Few if any can lay equal claim to his long-standing status as television auteur with unobstructed authority as both executive producer and director. A wave of recent translations in English (not to mention Chinese and most European languages) and affordable reproduction technologies have increased the worldwide accessibility to not only Kluge’s television programs but also his films and literature. A filmmaker, author, and television producer, Kluge is, however, more than just the sum of this triumvirate. He is also recognized as a trained musician and lawyer, an accomplished theorist with roots in the Frankfurt School, a savvy media activist and entrepreneur, and a celebrated public intellectual of the highest stature. The translated texts assembled in Difference and Orientation bear witness to yet another long-standing preoccupation, one enmeshed in virtually all of his other spheres of activity. Kluge is also arguably one of Germany’s great essayists of the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Collected in the present volume are twenty-eight examples of Kluge’s essayistic thinking that attest to his long-standing commitment to what his friend and mentor Theodor W. Adorno once called the essay’s affinity to intellectual freedom.¹

Calling Kluge an essayist may initially strike readers of this anthology as a strange proposition, especially given how a quick scan confirms that roughly half of the texts contained in the following pages look less like what we formally expect of essays and more like run-of-the-mill dialogues. Sorting Kluge’s massive canon according to medium and then genre would appear to substantiate such doubts. Even though occasional essays by Kluge have appeared in German literary and theory journals (like Merkur, Kursbuch, and Ästhetik und Kommunikation) as well as in miscellaneous anthologies since the sixties, he has published so few stand-alone volumes of collected essays throughout his sixty-year career that they can be counted on just a few fingers. When thought of in these terms, Kluge the essayist appears to pale in comparison to other more prolific German essayists like his contemporaries Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Karl Heinz Bohrer, or Michael Rutschky and Botho Strauß from the next younger generation, or even elders, mentors, and idols like Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Kracauer, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. What counts as the first formal anthology of Kluge’s essays—Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Zur realistischen Methode [Part-Time Work of a Female Slave: On the Realistic Method, 1975]—was written in response to Helke Sander’s scathing feminist critique of his film of the same name released in 1973.² Other volumes, like his Theodor Fontane, Heinrich von Kleist und Anna Wilde: Zur Grammatik der Zeit [Theodor Fontane, Heinrich von Kleist, and Anna Wilde: On the Grammar of Time, 1987] and Personen und Reden [People and Speeches, 2012], complicate matters further given the fact that most of what looks like essays therein were originally speeches. Apart from these exceptional instances curated by Kluge himself, the few remaining compendia of Kluge’s essays have been compiled by others and usually limit their scope to cinema.³ How then is it possible to call Kluge an essayist when so much of what we might designate as his own bona fide essayistic output is the result of a defensive strategy or a concession to institutional rituals? Does the essay really belong to Kluge’s core register of expression? What, for that matter, is to be gained by calling Kluge’s speeches and dialogues essays? Are his essays limited to just his printed work, or does the term also apply to his films and videos? In other words, where exactly does the essay reside in Kluge’s oeuvre, and what relationship does it assume to the rest of his work?

What may look dubious from one perspective appears quite obvious from another. Overlooking the status of these aforementioned essay collections entirely, film scholars have had few if any qualms calling Kluge the filmmaker an essayist, especially given how both his celluloid films (1960–86) and his recent video films, like the nearly ten-hour News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital (2008), all conveniently fall under the aegis of the essay film.⁴ Indeed, Kluge once availed himself of this designation when reflecting on the seemingly ambitious objectives for his penultimate 1985 film, The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (also known as The Blind Director). In an essay on his film’s ambitions, he writes: In cases where experience, or, rather, its translation is blocked, we need to resort to the format of the essay film. I know of no other possibility for conveying such an abundance of material so quickly.⁵ Yet this admission is actually one exceptional instance of Kluge making explicit mention of this subgenre; more often than not, he writes and speaks of just films, stories, or broadcasts without any further qualification. Certainly not limited to just film studies, scholarly appeals to genre employed in an effort to pin down Kluge’s idiosyncratic works invariably give rise to narrow classifications and artificial hierarchies that reflect little on just how the essayistic infiltrates all of Kluge’s works regardless of medium. Some of his greatest films (like The Patriot [1979] and The Power of Emotion [1983]) accompanied film books that contain not just screenplays, but also essays and stories that together must be recognized as robust instantiations of a sustained indexical practice crisscrossing, to and fro, different mediums without concern for adhering to the rules of genre. Regardless of whether one is dealing with a documentary or a feature film, Kluge writes in the essay The Realistic Method and the ‘Filmic’ included here, the most intensive observation or most probable plot is predicated on the schema of its genre that excludes real contexts.⁶ The logic of genre with its categories, rules, and divisions is, in other words, an anathema to Kluge’s longstanding, core interest in forging otherwise indiscernible connections by transcending the artificial opposition[s] that such conventions generate.⁷ The key to Kluge’s realistic method, and by extension his essayism, has always been the principle of montage he robustly theorized in the context of his filmmaking as both a theory of and attendant praxis for forging cognitive relationships that no camera can record and no films can ever show.⁸ Hardly limited to just his films, the contrasts and gaps typical of montage are also present, albeit in transposed form, in Kluge’s literature, television programs, streaming video, and video films. With the explicit inclusion of indexes in his recent books, films on DVD, and online streaming videos, Kluge has in fact upped the ante, insofar as readers and viewers are encouraged now more than ever before to think about relationships that exceed the boundaries of genre and flow across his multiple media.

Difference and Orientation

To call Kluge an essayist is therefore not to speak of a distinct subgenre in his multimedia oeuvre, but rather of a peculiar way his work thinks critically about the real contexts of contemporary life. In his seminal essay The Essay as Form, published three years after he serendipitously met the twenty-four-year old Kluge at a classics lecture held at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Adorno extolled the essay as a hybrid form when most post-war West German academics frowned upon it as something trivial and relativistic. For Adorno, the essay’s reliance on play and luck, its aversion to methods and systems, as well as its open, fragmentary character, are just some of the many features that made it for him the critical form par excellence.⁹ The essay’s unique claim to truth—or more accurately its repudiation of culture’s untruths by penetrating what hides behind the façade under the name of objectivity—is also a function of its ability to stand in relation to other spheres of experience and knowledge without ever replicating them; neither a pure and tidy philosophy nor an aconceptual intuitive art, the essay nevertheless "has something like aesthetic autonomy, Adorno insists, and aspires to its own conceptual thought while behaving cautiously toward theory.¹⁰ In this respect, the aforementioned abundance of material typical of many of Kluge’s essays is not merely a function of their formal features; the essay’s aloof propinquity to the concerns of theory and art is also what facilitates Kluge’s wild mixture of narration, illustration, commentary, and abstraction without ever fully occupying or conflating them. What I do, Kluge explains in an interview with literary critics Ulrich Greiner and Iris Radisch included in the following pages, is below the threshold of literature.¹¹ And in his first 2012 lecture on poetics held at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he had met Adorno nearly sixty years earlier, he confessed from the outset, I am . . . the court poet of the great philosophers. I myself am no philosopher."¹² There is indeed much more in Adorno’s essay on the essay (like, for example, the role of the object, interpretation, its incorporation of truths and untruths, and happiness in the essay) that resonates with Kluge’s own hybrid, fragmentary forms, regardless of whether they are cinematic (film, video, streaming video) or literary (stories, speeches, dialogues, essays) in nature. Arguably, the most important point is, however, Adorno’s elucidation of how the essay thinks.

It is not the essayist who thinks but rather the essay itself—Adorno calls it an arena for intellectual experience—and it does so idiosyncratically and in opposition to dominant modes of thought predicated on scientific and philosophical notions of truth.¹³ To this end, the essay negates, says Adorno, the compulsion of identity and instead allows for the consciousness of nonidentity.¹⁴ In other words, it traffics in difference, the very ingredient that Adorno and Max Horkheimer said instrumental reason was dead set on expelling from the world.¹⁵ Differentiatedness, he goes on to underscore, is the essay’s medium.¹⁶ It is, in other words, the hallmark of dialectics. If there is one recurrent theme throughout all of Kluge’s thought collected in these pages, then it is that of difference. We writers, he proclaims in his acceptance speech for the Kleist Prize that begins this volume, are the guardians of the last leftover bits from the grammar of time, a difference between present time, the future, and the past.¹⁷ To the rhetorical question Can film attain the same expressive effects as highly differentiated language? Kluge and his coauthors, Edgar Reitz and Wilfried Reinke, provide a resounding yes.¹⁸ In order to grasp the productive possibilities of television, it is not enough, he says, to comprehend how film and new media "are aligned under different stars; one must also acknowledge how television stands as a hybrid between them.¹⁹ To understand the full potential of critique, what Kluge identifies as an elusive human capacity to differentiate practically at the crucial moment," we must recognize res extensa’s ability to interrupt res cogitans.²⁰ In spite of the considerable weight Kluge’s thought consistently places on the production of difference, be it temporal, expressive, medial, or critical, it would surely be an oversight to equate his sense of difference with that of Adorno’s. Whereas the latter operates exclusively according to the principle of contradiction, the former identifies dialectics as just one of several possibilities.²¹ "Dialectics is a category of relationality [Zusammenhangs], Kluge recently explained, but multidimensionality is also a category of relationality. It can be dialectical, but it does not have to be so."²²

Both of these manifestations of relationality—dialectical and multidimensional difference—are equally important for Kluge’s essayistic thinking. The first evokes Adorno’s account of the essay as a critique of system, but in Kluge’s hands the locus of this critique shifts in part from the thinking mind to the sensing body.²³ Suspicious of the eye’s (and, by extension, the mind’s) weakness for immanence (like Adorno before him), Kluge writes of an embodied critique in the form of the allergic reactions of the skin, the keen and especially trustworthy ear, the hardened soles of the feet, the unruly diaphragm, just to name a few.²⁴ As he first articulated it in his aforementioned 1975 essay collection, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, Kluge groups these decentered protests under a dialectical theory of realism not in terms of any aesthetic method, but rather as the human capacity he calls the antirealism of feeling.²⁵ In his Frankfurt lectures on poetics held in June 2012, he uses broad anthropological strokes to sketch the origins of this feeling in the art of survival: In the course of the evolutionary process, only those humans survived who were capable of repudiating those conditions of reality that did not mean them well. They did this not only on a large scale through uprisings and revolts, but also imperceptibly by taking everything they perceived in reality and deflecting it slightly through illusion.²⁶ What both social revolt and storytelling’s illusions have in common is a shared antipathy to what Sigmund Freud once called the reality principle, yet this negative reaction is only a first step. The critical, says Kluge, must also eventually turn positive and practical, and to this end his essayistic thinking seeks out reality’s multidimensionality.²⁷ The prison of reality resides on the surface of present experience, yet reality also burrows into catacombs, wells, and abysses, a polyphony of underestimated temporalities that can be articulated using grammatical moods like the subjunctive and optative, tenses like the present perfect and futur antérieur, and time spans evolutionary and planetary, if not cosmic, in dimension.²⁸ Asked in the same interview with Greiner and Radisch whether his rummaging through time serves a utopian-like principle of hope, Kluge replied: No, I am looking for the principle of ways out.²⁹

Looking for ways out of the prison house of reality requires guarding temporal differences that industrialized consciousness, manifest for Kluge in commercial cinema and television, otherwise threatens to demolish. It involves distinguishing not just past, present, and future, but also fortuitous kairos (the time of good fortune), from the forward march of chronos (mechanical time) toward future disaster. Seeking out such opportunities entails employing facts and fiction in equal measure just as it avails itself of ambiguity and metaphor, narrative and image, and solitary monologue as well as collaborative dialogue. It means delineating a provisional space akin to a garden where more time and experience can be cultivated beyond the mayhem brought on by the Internet’s flood of information and data. All of this counterproduction, Kluge underscores in his poetics lecture, ultimately boils down to a matter of orientation. Taking Immanuel Kant’s reflections on orientation as his model, Kluge points out in his poetics lecture two basic forms of orientation available to experience:

When I talk about orienting oneself, I mean it in the sense of lighthouses, of which there are two kinds. Using lanterns, wreckers based on the shores of the North Sea would lure ships into running aground so that they could be looted. All of Sylt is comprised of such loot assembled there in the island’s church. The second sort of orientation is the orientation toward objects we humans can neither reach nor touch, objects that cannot be displaced. One example of such objects is stars in the firmament. Stars are a means of navigation for ships at sea and wanderers in the desert alike.³⁰

Orientation is, in other words, achieved through either direct or indirect experience; in each instance, the conditions conducive to differentiation are what matters. Yet as Kluge’s illustrations of wreckers and wanderers suggest, neither immediate nor mediated experience is inherently more advantageous for a successful outcome, even though we humans tend to orient ourselves "according to the criteria of direct life experience."³¹ Unable to discern a wrecker’s lanterns from legitimate lighthouses, seafarers directly learn only too late that the light source informing their plotted course was motivated by deception and doom. Conversely, wanderers lost in a desert can never judge firsthand the source of light radiating down from the starry firmament, but their safe passage is all but guaranteed, assuming they weather their journey back home. Essential is not only maintaining a balance between these two very different types of experience but also ensuring their relevance for orienting oneself. Yet this capacity also entails an additional faculty, one responsible for assigning trust to orientation that differentiation can provide. As the range of Kluge’s engagements with the history of media included in this anthology shows, the historical vicissitudes of trust are closely tied to the increasingly mediated nature of social experience—the rapidly metamorphosing postclassical public spheres of today—and their attendant challenges to our powers of differentiation. This critical negotiation of difference, orientation, and, by extension, trust comprises the core of all of Kluge’s essayistic thinking. While some readers may care to enlist the texts assembled in this volume as hermetically privileged entry points into the elusive meanings of Kluge’s notoriously perplexing books, films, and broadcasts, others may care to recognize in concentrated form an opportunity for studying this very search for difference and orientation operative in all of Kluge’s essayistic thinking.³²

Notes on Text Selection

At first glance, the divisions in Difference and Orientation may give readers the impression that Kluge is quite simply a multimedia artist at home in not just one or two but four, if not five, métiers. With its four ensuing sections on literature, film, media, and social theory, it would appear that the doctrine of medium specificity, along with its attendant essentialisms, is also operative in Kluge’s shifts from one medium to another.³³ Yet the very word media fails to capture the core of Kluge’s project. In a brief position statement on media published in 1979, he opined, "People talk of ‘film producers’ and ‘screenwriters.’ Accordingly, television, video companies, radio, and film all regard themselves individually as mediums when, in fact, they are actually forms, conditions under which a medium emerges. It is never specialists but rather real people who are the real medium of experience [Erfahrung], wishes, fantasies, and even an appreciation of art.³⁴ While Kluge does write of individual media—in his essay Film: A Utopia, he offers, for example, a typology of the happy endings organized according to media"—readers will surely notice that in every section of this anthology focused on one medium Kluge invariably addresses others and therewith implies a larger medial array at work in his aesthetic politics, one in which all his many forms are connected and communicate with one another.³⁵ This does not, however, imply that Kluge’s literature, for example, is film by another means. What Kluge achieves in one form is indeed predicated on a difference with respect to others, but this difference is never ontologically fixed.

Difference and Orientation provides English-speaking readers with a broad, exemplary spectrum of Kluge’s essayistic thinking spanning the entirety of his career. While some texts included are essential (like Film: A Utopia, of which there exist three different versions), others were chosen for their ability to either represent Kluge’s thinking at crucial historical junctures or address his engagement with particular themes and problems. Given the sheer enormity and sprawl of Kluge’s writings and dialogues, a certain degree of arbitrariness was unavoidable, and yet the regularity with which Kluge recycles and revises his ideas ensures that practically every niche of his thought, including many of the topics from his theoretical collaborations penned together with social philosopher Oskar Negt, can be found here. As the overwhelming majority of texts appear here in English translation for the first time, the objective for this volume has also been to ensure complementarity with the readily available translations published largely in academic journals. In only two cases have previously published translations of essential works been reproduced in the present volume: Miriam Hansen’s Word and Film, originally published in October in 1988; and excerpts from Sara Poor and Hansen’s co-translation of Kluge’s seminal thinking on opera, originally published in New German Critique in 1990. The remaining selection of texts took cues from Christian Schulte’s exhaustive, German-language collection of Kluge’s cinematic writings In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod, originally published in 1999. The four essays in Schulte’s reader included here in translation compliment the eleven Kluge texts included in Tara Forrest’s English-language anthology, Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination (2012).

Difference and Orientation begins with that aesthetic form—namely, literature—with which Kluge embarked on his career. It was 1958 when Kluge, disenchanted with the legal profession, left his legal mentor Hellmut Becker for West Berlin and, at Adorno’s recommendation, worked as luminary filmmaker Fritz Lang’s intern on the set of The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), a studio production that stripped Lang of his authority.³⁶ When not mediating Lang’s opposition to the film’s meddling producer, Kluge spent his time in the canteen writing stories he had already started as a lawyer.³⁷ Both of Kluge’s breakthroughs, his storybook Attendance List for a Funeral (1962) and his feature Yesterday Girl (1966) based on the story Anita G. included in his literary debut, can be traced back to these early days of writing. Whereas neither writing nor filmmaking took precedence in the sixties and seventies, both would eventually take a backseat over the course of the eighties as a result of the grueling demands of producing television. In the nearly two decades since 2000 when Kluge suddenly returned to literature like never before, the number of English translations of his storybooks has increased by 80 percent (there are thirteen discrete titles available to date), yet English readers have at their disposal virtually none of Kluge’s many recent reflections on storytelling. Instead of reaching back to his literary beginnings around 1958, the first chapter in part 2 of Difference and Orientation begins with Kluge’s 1985 acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Kleist Prize, which had been revived after a half-century hiatus. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 then jump to three subsequent dialogues that capture Kluge’s thinking at the time of his first three book publications in the new millennium: Chronik der Gefühle (2000), Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt [The Devil’s Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century, 2004], and Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben [Next Door to Another Life, 2006]. An oblique meditation on books and collecting, chapter 4 echoes Benjamin’s reflections on the topic in his 1931 essay Unpacking My Library. Chapter 6 includes the first of four lectures Kluge gave in 2012 in conjunction with the acclaimed series Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics. Chapter 7, the final chapter in part 2, finds Kluge joining the fray that has engaged a great many intellectuals who have deliberated on the power and importance of metaphor.

Well aware of the wealth of Kluge’s cinematic essays already available in translation, Difference and Orientation includes in part 3 texts intended to round out these existent resources. It begins, in chapter 8, with the aforementioned reprint of the coauthored 1965 essay Word and Film by Kluge, Reitz, and Reinke, originally published when all three taught at the Ulm School of Design’s trailblazing film department.³⁸ An interview between Kluge and Enno Patalas and his wife, Frieda Grafe, published in the film journal Filmkritik shortly after Kluge received the Special Jury Prize at the 1966 Venice Film Festival then follows in chapter 9 and provides insights into the making of his first feature, Yesterday Girl (1966). Chapter 10 provides readers access to one of the last remaining, untranslated portions from Kluge’s aforementioned essay collection of 1975 on antagonistic realism, Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin. The crux of part 3, the seminal essay Film: A Utopia that constitutes chapter 11, finds Kluge reflecting on the radical potential of auteur cinema at precisely that moment at the dawn of commercial television when cinema’s livelihood was in the balance. The final two chapters, 12 and 13, document Kluge’s far more recent retrospective evaluations of Soviet avant-garde cinema practices (which inspired his own News from Ideological Antiquity [2008]) and the organizational politics that gave rise to New German Cinema as seen through the uncertainty of cinema’s future in the new millennium.

Part 4 zooms out from Kluge’s engagement with cinema to what might be best called his long-standing genealogical interest in pre-cinematic forms of the classical public sphere. Before cinema emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, public life in Europe was captivated by the emotional economy of opera and, before it, the dramaturgy of the circus. To each of these forms, Kluge has dedicated a feature film: Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed (1968) is his circus film; Power of Emotion (1983) is the culmination of his interest in opera; and his penultimate film, The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985), like the aforementioned essay Film: A Utopia, tarries on cinema itself on the eve before turning his energies full-time to smuggling the principle of auteurism into television, beginning a year later. Much more than an academic interest in cinema’s precursors, Kluge’s films and the attendant essays included in this section ultimately grow out of his and Negt’s conviction that a transformation in the public sphere never obliterates its previous instantiations. What Negt and Kluge call the pseudo-public spheres orchestrated by today’s consciousness and programming industry merely sit on top of classical forms of the public sphere, of which the circus and the opera are but two among many examples.³⁹ The viability of authentic social experience in the post-classical age of public spheres of production thus boils down to the possibility of counterpublics emerging at the seams and fractures between all the many coexistent spheres of publicity.⁴⁰ Seen from this vantage point, the essays included in part 4 of Difference and Orientation testify to Kluge’s expansive engagement with the public sphere. Whereas the essay in chapter 14 engages with opera on its own terms, the dialogue in chapter 17 queries opera’s historical relationship to film. The dialogue in chapter 18 ruminates on Kluge’s indebtedness to the cinema of attraction. Chapter 15 finds Kluge reckoning with the distinctions between classical media and new media, the advent of which Kluge ties to the advance of digital technologies, attendant reductive forms of programming, the acceleration of experience, and the acquisition of new forms of private property located in viewers’ heads. In chapters 16 and 19, he turns to old and new forums (the museum and the Internet) that have become especially important in his most recent collaborations.

Keeping in mind Adorno’s caveat that essays do not rigorously deduce themselves from theory, readers should recognize that the contributions in the fifth and final part of Difference and Orientation, entitled Theory, constitute neither in part nor in whole a discrete theoretical corpus either detached from the rest of Kluge’s aesthetic work or the exclusive property of his collaborations with social philosopher Oskar Negt. On the contrary, these nine works attest to both the indebtedness to and distance from theory Kluge’s essayistic thinking maintains. Chapter 20 on fantasy reaches back to Kluge’s days as an honorary professor lecturing on film and television at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1973, a year after his first collaboration with Negt, Public Sphere and Experience, appeared. Chapters 21, 26, and 27 demonstrate not only Adorno’s and Benjamin’s strong influence on Kluge’s theoretical orientation, but also Kluge’s points of departure from his mentors’ work. Chapter 22 on populism and passivity makes available for the first time in English one of four essays Kluge penned alone for his third collaboration with Negt, Maßverhältnisse des Politischen [Measured Relations of the Political, 1992]. As Kluge was a student of the history of war like his father, his encyclopedia entry on war in chapter 23 harks back to both his controversial book on the Battle of Stalingrad, The Battle (1964), and those portions of the third book of History and Obstinacy (1981) coauthored with Negt on war as a special case of the public sphere of production. Kluge’s dialogue in chapter 24 and his thought-images in chapter 25 illustrate the origins and consequences of his theory of feeling for critique. Closing the anthology is Kluge’s Skype conversation with renowned Chinese literary scholar Wang Hui, recorded in the spring of 2012. A testimony to Kluge’s desire to think beyond Europe’s geographic and intellectual boundaries, the interview, which was held following a public screening of News from Ideological Antiquity subtitled in Chinese, engages the viability of Marxist thinking in the age of globalization and testifies to the centrality of cooperation and collaboration in the form of dialogue for Kluge’s essayism.

On Reading and Translating Kluge: Word, Text, Image

Kluge’s essayistic thinking assumes myriad guises. How he writes a formal essay is vastly different from how he delivers a prepared speech to an audience, and this, in turn, is quite different from how he dialogues with another person face-to-face. Unlike his speeches and dialogues, Kluge’s essays written for readers are especially vexing. When reading such essays, readers piece together parts of a puzzle, get their bearings, and then cautiously move forward, only to encounter another roadblock not far down the road. This is at least what Kluge’s translators encounter when rendering his essays into another language. In its most condensed form, Kluge’s essayistic thought is always jumping, shifting, jerking, and spinning. He regularly traffics in repetition and rephrasing as well as commentary and digression such that distinctions between parataxis and hypotaxis make readers pause. Frequently, long strings of concatenated clauses bury subjects at the end of sentences. His word choices are occasionally antiquated or highly technical, but never arbitrary. His punctuation is unorthodox; readers regularly encounter, for example, extensive semicolon-laced lists, colons and equal signs that stand in for copular verbs, and singular em dashes that substitute for adverbs. Italics, capitalization, and bold type-face are frequently used for emphasis. Sentence fragments, digressions, commentaries, and excurses frequently interrupt the flow of thought. Seemingly unnatural tenses (like his guru Walter Benjamin, Kluge often writes in the present tense about past events), the incorporation of unattributed quotations, and the unexpected shift in voice are equally disorientating. Similarly, Kluge occasionally slips in and out of first-person singular voices that are often not his own. All of these features make for a sometimes dense and difficult read. For the translator of Kluge, all of these idiosyncrasies boil down to the fundamental question as to whether to preserve the German original’s character at the expense of immediate intelligibility or to mold the originals in an effort to maximize the reader’s access to Kluge’s thought. As was the case with the translation of History and Obstinacy, the translations included in Difference and Orientation have sought out a middle ground that preserves as much of Kluge’s form as possible while nevertheless ensuring that English-language readers hear both his voices and their messages. This means that the translators made difficult decisions regarding such matters as punctuation, sentence fragments, long concatenated clauses, the passive voice, the frequent inversion of subject and object, and the frequent use of the impersonal one (man in German) modeled after Robert Musil’s writing, just to name a few.

Customary in many translators’ introductions to theoretical texts are glossaries that identify and define concepts from the original language especially difficult to render into English, concepts that merit qualification for newcomers unfamiliar with the semantics of the original in order for the fullness of their meaning and significance to fully resonate. No such glossary is included in Difference and Orientation and with good reason. Readers will certainly notice throughout the entirety of Difference and Orientation that Kluge’s essayistic thinking does avail itself of a recurring set of concepts, the meanings of which are not always self-evident. Concepts like the cumbersome relationality (derived from Zusammenhang, which is also sometimes rendered as context) or the deceptively simple yet remarkably complex reality (which Kluge captures as Wirklichkeit and Realität) are just two among many that he has glossed in the appendix to the second volume of social philosophy that he coauthored with Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy.⁴¹ Readers should at the very least keep in mind this extensive glossary penned especially for foreigners when working through Kluge’s many ideas contained in the following pages. Another layer of concepts operative throughout Difference and Orientation are those that Kluge has acquired from his Frankfurt School mentors. Arguably the two most important for Kluge’s (and Negt’s) thinking about the public sphere are Erfahrung and Erlebnis, both of which mean experience in English but have radically different meanings in German according to the philosophical writings of Adorno and Benjamin. Novices unfamiliar with these distinctions, not to mention the many other conceptual trappings of the German tradition of Critical Theory woven into Kluge’s essays, would profit enormously from the insightful introductions to Kluge and Negt’s translated collaborations.⁴² What readers will not find in these indispensable resources is an annotated catalogue of concepts exclusive to Kluge’s aesthetic theory and its attendant practices that are scattered throughout the essays and dialogues contained in Difference and Orientation. Quite often such concepts not sufficiently explicated in one essay resurface in a later work in this volume with ample clarity. Accordingly, the volume’s index should prove especially helpful for readers unclear about Kluge’s language. In exceptional instances, the editor and translators provide in the endnotes brief glosses of peculiar concepts, unfamiliar historical events, and forgotten people. Also included in the endnotes are not only Kluge’s many commentaries and citations, which appeared in the original more often than not in the form of footnotes, but also many of those citations omitted in the original that the editor and translators successfully identified in the course of the translation process.

Kluge has avidly incorporated images since the seventies into not only his stories but also his essays and dialogues. One third of the works included in Difference and Orientation included images in the German original. Given structural limitations for the following volume, only four of these ten texts are reproduced with some, if not all, of their accompanying illustrations. In these cases, the substantive intratextual dialogue between word and image required their inclusion. Often designated as figures in the German originals, Kluge’s images do not conform to readerly expectations of illustrations. Rarely do his images just illustrate an essay’s content in subordinate fashion. What they show is rarely what is seen. The relation to and significance of images for the content of Kluge’s illustrated essays are anything but self-evident. Kluge’s images operate within a web of intertextual references, some of them linguistic and others visual. Captions seldom explain what is shown, but rather index thought beyond the frame. Often organized in clusters, Kluge’s images are themselves dialogical and thus require viewers to read them against one another for the differences and the orientation they provide.

Notes

1. Theodor W. Adorno, The Essay as Form, in Notes on Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:3.

2. See, for example, Helke Sander, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’: The Films of Alexander Kluge, trans. Regina Cornwell, New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 59–68. See also Heide Schlüpmann’s essay Femininity as Productive Force: Kluge and Critical Theory in the same volume; and Jan Dawson, ed., Alexander Kluge and The Occasional Work of a Female Slave (New York: Zoetrope, 1977).

3. The best example is Alexander Kluge, In Gefahr und grösster Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod: Texte zu Kino, Film, Politik, ed. Christian Schulte (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1999). For English readers, Tara Forrest’s anthology casts a wider thematic net with its selection of scholarly essays and eleven Kluge texts, including television conversations, interviews, excerpted literary texts, and essays. See Tara Forrest, ed., Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

4. For example, Timothy Corrigan writes: For me and others, Kluge is one of the most important theoreticians and filmmakers associated with the essay film. See Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 207n15. Similarly, Christian Schulte designates the essay film as the supraordinate concept that guided his first coproduced short from 1960, Brutality in Stone, from which all of Kluge’s other subordinate working concepts (e.g., image, archive, critique, the temporality of kairos) follow. See Christian Schulte, Kritik und Kairos: Essayismus zwischen den Medien bei Alexander Kluge, in Inszenierung und Gedächtnis: Soziokulturelle und ästhetische Praxis, ed. Hermann Blume et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), 243–60.

5. Alexander Kluge, The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, trans. Tamara Evans and Stuart Liebman, New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 13. Translation slightly modified to accord with the original: Alexander Kluge, Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit: Das Drehbuch zum Film (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1985), 12.

6. Alexander Kluge, The Realistic Method and the ‘Filmic,’ 156 in this volume.

7. Alexander Kluge, On Film and the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Y. Levin and Miriam B. Hansen, in Forrest, Alexander Kluge, 33.

8. Kluge, On Film and the Public Sphere, 46.

9. Adorno, The Essay as Form, 18.

10. Adorno, The Essay as Form, 4, 7, 8, 5, 18 (emphasis mine).

11. Alexander Kluge, The Peacemaker, 73 in this volume.

12. Alexander Kluge, Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One, 100–101 in this volume.

13. Adorno, The Essay as Form, 13, 11.

14. Adorno, 17, 9.

15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5.

16. Adorno, The Essay as Form, 15.

17. Alexander Kluge, The Difference, 41 in this volume.

18. Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke, Word and Film, 125–26 in this volume.

19. Alexander Kluge, On the Expressions ‘Media’ and ‘New Media,’ 256 in this volume.

20. Alexander Kluge, Critique, Up Close and Personal, 434 in this volume.

21. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 5.

22. Richard Langston, ‘Das ist die umgekehrte Flaschenpost’: Ein montiertes Interview mit Oskar Negt und Alexander Kluge, Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch 2 (2015): 64.

23. Adorno, The Essay as Form, 9.

24. On Adorno’s distrust of images, see Alexander Kluge, The Function of the Distorted Angle in the Destructive Intention, 360–62; on the skin and ear, Kluge, Critique, Up Close and Personal, 446–47; on the passion of the feet and the resistance of the diaphragm, Kluge, The Art of Drawing Distinctions, 412–13—all in this volume.

25. Kluge, Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One, 103 in this volume. The original essay in which this theory of antirealism first emerges is Alexander Kluge, The Sharpest Ideology: That Reality Appeals to Its Realistic Character, trans. David Roberts, in Forrest, Alexander Kluge, 191–96.

26. Kluge, Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One, 103 in this volume.

27. Kluge, Critique, Up Close and Personal, 441 in this volume.

28. Kluge, Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One, 103 in this volume.

29. Kluge, The Peacemaker, 76 in this volume.

30. Kluge, Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One, 101 in this volume.

31. Kluge, On the Expressions ‘Media’ and ‘New Media,’ 266 in this volume.

32. Georg Stanitzek, Essay—BRD (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2011), 14.

33. Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2.

34. Alexander Kluge, Die Medien stehen auf dem Kopf, in Die Patriotin: Texte/Bilder 1–6 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1979), 294.

35. Alexander Kluge, Film: A Utopia, 182–83 in this volume.

36. Alexander Kluge, Bits of Conversation, 151 in this volume.

37. Thomas Combrink, Die Stunde Null als ‘Zeitmaß der sich überstürzenden Ereignisse,’ in Doppelleben: Literarische Szenen aus Nachkriegsdeutschland; Materialien zur Ausstellung, ed. Bernd Busch and Thomas Combrink (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), 300. See also in this volume Alexander Kluge, Companions in Now Time, 85.

38. In addition to Forrest’s aforementioned anthology, which reprints English-language translations of a few of Kluge’s seminal film essays, there are also special issues of October (Fall 1988) and New German Critique (Winter 1990) that are dedicated to Kluge and include important writings on film. Additionally, Eric Rentschler’s West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988) contains six shorter essays spanning Kluge’s engagement with film and new media.

39. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xlvi.

40. On the contemporary conditions for counterpublics, see Miriam Hansen, foreword to Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, xxxix–xli.

41. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy, ed. Devin Fore, trans. Richard Langston et al. (New York: Zone Book, 2014), 389–440.

42. See both Hansen’s aforementioned foreword (ix–xli) and Devin Fore’s introduction to Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy (15–67). On the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis as it relates to Negt and Kluge’s social philosophy, see Hansen, xvi–xx. See also Richard Langston, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge: From the Underestimated Subject to the Political Constitution of Commonwealth, in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Werner Bonefeld et al. (London: Sage Publications, 2018), 1:317–34.

PART II

LITERATURE

1

THE DIFFERENCE

Heinrich von Kleist

The inquest and autopsy take place on the afternoon of November 22, 1811. In the evening hours, the two coffins for Frau Vogel and Heinrich von Kleist are laid to rest. Their deaths have a hermetic effect. Something closes itself off. It was once written, A man who dies at the age of thirty-five . . . is at every point in his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.¹ So much for literary quotes. Kleist was thirty-four when