When Schiller’s political intent is lost, criticism degenerates into static typologies.
Evidence
These modes of possibility are far from reducing themselves to mere questions of genre, and indeed Schiller’s model is susceptible of application to any dimension of the work of art, whether it be the stylistic or the psychological, the historical or the ideological. In Hegel’s Aesthetics, with its vision of artistic history as a set of varying relations between the poles of subject and object, as well as in Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, with its subjective/objective classification scheme, the basic model is flattened out into a temporal progression, and becomes the foundation for a theory of history. In the American New Criticism, perhaps unconsciously, the crucial insight of a fall from “naïve” to “sentimental” is reexpressed in terms of the dissociation of poetic sensibility, which then becomes a precise analytical instrument for determining the degree and kind of poetic abstraction in a given text. In Northrop Frye’s works, the classes of the genres are once more called upon to symbolize the more concrete modes of our relationship to Being. But all of these revisions of Schiller, which indicate the richness of his basic model, remain idealistic in character; and the return to Schiller himself serves to remind us of the original political intent behind the system. … When that intent is lost, speculative thinking becomes futile and reaches any one of a number of well-defined dead ends: it ends up in a “theory of history,” or substitutes a religious hermeneutic for the political one, or finally and most characteristically becomes involved in the sterile and circular movement of a typology, of the weighing of phenomena against a static system of classification; and such systems, whether in early Lukács, Frye, or Jung’s Psychological Types, are always the sign of historical thinking arrested halfway, a thought which, on the road to concrete history, takes fright and attempts to convert its insights into eternal essences, into attributes between which the human spirit oscillates. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 193
Categorization
- XREF: Directly traces the Frankfurt-School lineage the reader is pursuing — shows how Lukács’s early typological bent, Frye’s archetypes, and Jung all descend from Schiller while dropping his political intent. Connects to Adorno’s critique of the ‘system’ as reified consciousness. — connects to: Typologies reduce analytic effort and predictive uncertainty about political actors.
- DEEPTHINKING: The insight that every idealistic recasting of Schiller loses the political core, and that static typologies are ‘historical thinking arrested halfway’ that convert insights into eternal essences, is a dense, paradigm-defining statement of dialectical critique’s diagnosis.