ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations:The

caseof Nietzschein ImperialGermany

(18 70-1919)

by Geoff Waite

To put the point simply, the problem is that the text that critics have
on the desk before them may not be the same as the relations of
popular reading. Accordingly, analysis must start with the deter-
minations that organize the social relations of popular reading, if
we are to understand the nature of the cultural business that is con-
ducted around, through, and by means of popular texts in the real
history of their productive activation. Rather than taking the text as
a given, it is necessary to introduce a radical hesitancy such that the
text is the last thing one speaks of, and even then, only in regard to
the historical reading relations in which the text has been
located analytically.1

Taking these remarks as a general, heuristic point of departure, I

want to introudce what my friend Tony Bennett calls "a radical hesitan-
cy" into the proceedings of our conference, or rather into some of its
methodological, theoretical, and political implications. Whatwe know
now about either Imperial Germany or the theory of mass culture
comes to us in the form of extant cultural artifacts or "texts" that have
to be "read" in the broadest sense of the term (I might have said "lis-
tened to," "looked at," "interpreted," or "explained"). Although I
view as empiriocritical, culturally elitist, and class interested the notion
that "the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but writ-
ten texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or
revolutions,"2 I take as a significant truism the notion that what we
know of history is mediated (at this level of generality the hermeneutic

1. Tony Benett, "Texts, Readers, Reading Formations," TheBulletinof theMidwest

LanguageAssociation,16:1 (Spring 1983), 16.
Modemrn
Criticism
2. Paul de Man, Blindnessand Insight:Essaysin the Rhetoricof Contemporary
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 165; my emphasis.
185
186 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

term is appropriate) by extant written documents. But this knowledge

is thus mediated further by the ideological position of the class that
possesses, controls, and disseminates the power to write and to read.
And certainly we'd commit a fundamental category mistake were an
epistemological insight (what we know about history is mediated by
extant texts) conflated with an ontological fact (biological, historical,
and social being precedes, grounds, and, in the last instance and in
complex, uneven modes of reciprocity, determines consciousness and
all its recorded traces).
"Reading" artifacts constitutes, therefore, a necessary but insuffi-
cient condition for understanding history and acting upon it. But this
does not mean that artifactsare thingsthat havemeanings which can be
elicited from them, to paraphrase one of the more duplicitous
narrators in literary history, like nuts from their shells. Attacks from a
variety of ideological camps have persuasively demonstrated that such
an essentialistic mode of reading must be radically supplemented, if
not abandoned. What is implied in all these powerful explanatory
models is a dramatic shift of the axis of critical concern away from
cultural artifacts and what they might be supposed to "really mean"
toward the ways these artifacts have been received and used, both in
historical sequence and at specific historical conjunctures. I take
seriously Bennett's attackon essentialistic assumptions, and I welcome
his hypothesis that "reading" is to be defined as an exceedingly com-
plex mode of mechanisms whereby artefacts are "productively acti-
vated" (Bennett, p. 3 and p. 12). But I further agree with KarlPopper's
critical definition of another kind of essentialism (although I most
emphatically dissociate myself from the uses to which Popper puts his
critique): namely an attitude of mind that attributes excessive import-
ance to words and their meanings.3 Thus the "essentialistic pro-
blematic" is in fact a double one: to productively activate the extant
artifactswe have, while never taking them to be fully adequate, say, to
understanding the origin of mass culture in Imperial Germany, or to
developing a theory of mass culture for our own time.
What we are discussing at our conference is less "the culture indus-
try," "popular culture," or "Imperial Germany" - not things some-
how "out there," then or now - than specific "reading formations."
Now, a reading formation is defined as "a set of intersecting discourses
that productively activate a given body of texts and the relations be-
tween them in a specific way" (Bennett, p. 5). Reading formations are
not theoretically constrained by some "text itselP' that they read but

(Glasgow:William Collins
3. KarlPopper, UnendedQuest:AnIntellectualAutobiography
Sons, 1976), esp. pp. 17-31.
 Waite 187

they are, I believe, constrained by something ultimately more signifi-

cant. The question of textual indeterminancy must never be confused
with that of ideological and political overdetermination. The illusions
and delusions provided by "treacherous impartiality," to paraphrase
from one of the most succinct activations of reading, writing, and his-
tory that exists, must be aggressively displaced by a "scientific con-
scientiousness" that knows itself to be partisan.4 We simply cannot be
neutral, whether we would ever want to be or not, "towards subjects the
understanding of which is incompatible with neutrality."5 The
oppressed classes - the anonymously laboring, propertyless base of
all hitherto existing society - have had, historically and today, the
least to do with reading and writing in the strict sense, and have had,
therefore, both the least and most to do with what Walter Benjamin
called "the documents of barbarism."'6 Any reading formation, no
matter how hyper-conscious, self-reflective, or obsessively ironic, that
does not align itself somehow with these classes in the end inevitably
remains impacted in a problematic ofself-justification and ruling-class
interest, already always contaminated by repressive ideology.
Now, ifMehring had been right, in 1899, that Nietzsche had already
been given the "coup de grace"7 or Habermas, in 1968, that Nietzsche
"is no longer contagious,"8 then I would not introduce him to you
once again. Horkheimer saw the writing on the wall in 1937: "One can-
not speak of Nietzsche without explicitly bringing him in relation to
one's own activity, as well as to his actual intervention in history."'9And
so I take the proper (or improper) name "Nietzsche" - as I take all the
"key words" employed by us here at our conference - not as a person
or text with determinate meaning but as a discurso-ideologicalsite on
which specific, historically determined ideological struggles have been
and continue to be waged. The locations of this site and its contestants
are quite different. In the period immediately before the first great
world war, it was occupied by names such as Gide and Valdry in France;
Mencken in the United States; Volsky, Luncacharsky, Bogdanov, and

4. Leon Trotsky, TheHistoryofthe RussianRevolution,tranl. Max Eastman (London:

Pluto Press, 1977), p. 21.
5. Leo Strauss, Thought onMachiavelli(Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1958), p. 20.
6. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1950), in Benjamin,
Illuminations,transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 256.
7. Franz Mehring, "[Uber Nietzsche]" (1899), in Mehring, GesammelteWerke,XIII
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), p. 180.
8. Jiirgen Habermas, "Zu Nietzsches Erkenntnistheorie" (1968), in Habermas,
Kulturund Kritik:Verstreute Aufsitze (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 239.
9. Max Horkheimer, "Bemerkungen zu Jaspers' 'Nietzsche,' " Zeitschriftfdr
Sozialforschung[Paris], 6 (1937), 414.
188 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

Plekhanov in Russia; Mehring, Eisner, Wille, as well as many of the

significant Wagnerites, Christian theologians, and political theorists in
Germany. In the 1930s the site was contested anew: by Bataille and the
Surrealists in Paris; by Adorno and Horkheimer, first in Paris and then
in New York City, in Germany byJaspers, Heidegger, Goebbels, and
the Nietzsche archive in Weimar; by L6with inJapan; and by LukLicsin
Moscow. Today, at perhaps no less crucial a historical conjuncture,
there are some new names and places: Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe,
Lyotard, Livi, Deleuze, Glucksmann, Foucault, Habermas, de Man,
Akiyama, Odujev, Kukarkin; Weimar and Moscow, once again, and
now Florence, Zagreb, New Haven, Madison, and Ithaca. I cannot and
shall not pretend neutrality in this struggle.
In spite of or, as I think, precisely because of the apparent differen-
ces of opinion in the West concerning Nietzsche's case, a virtual but
unacknowledged consensus obtains with regard to issues of political
ideology. To take the only example I have space for here, current
French and Anglo-American theory of literature - from Derrida and
de Man to Said and Ryan - understands Nietzsche to represent and
sanction the most radical attack on the essentialist notion of the iden-
tity of the text.'0 But only certain texts of Nietzsche recur in such
analysis and the largely ipse dixit critique of them does not extend to a
criticism of Nietzsche's political ideology or of the ideology he influen-
ced. It is a constitutive feature of the problematic of this sham discus-
sion or debate, for instance, that Walter Kaufmann's reading of
Nietzsche from the 1950s is summarily dismissed by Post-structuralist
critics as pretropic and essentialistic. Kaufmann, of course, locates
Nietzsche in the mainstream ofjust that metaphysical philosophy that
has to be deconstructed. But on the other hand, it is tacitly assumed by
these very critics that Kaufmann somehow disposed "once and for all"
of the "myth" of Nietzsche as proto-fascist (in his "original" intent and
in his "authentic" effect) - a myth that had been propogated by
writers as different as Bertram, Biumler, Brinton, or...Georg Lukics. I
should say openly, in partial answer to comments made after the oral
presentation of this paper, that if my own work on Nietzsche returns to
and expands the tradition of viewing Nietzsche begun by Mehring,
Plekhanov, and Lukacs himself, it does so because I regard that view as
fundamentally correct and vitally relevant. Nietzschean political ideo-
logy was and remains pernicious. It should be the dominant target of
anyone who reads him.

10. See my article, "Nietzsche and Deconstruction: The Politics of'The Question of
Style.' " TheBulletinof theMidwestModernLanguageAssociation,16:1 (Spring 1983), 70-
86.
 Waite 189

Let me briefly outline my argument. In what follows I open up the

problem of thereadingformations oflImperialGermany.I shall direct atten-
tion to a series of what I take to be interrelated questions that precisely
bracket German history from 1870 to 1919. First:How in the 1870s did
thecriticsofmassculturereadmasculture?I propose to take as exemplums
of this reading formation the last work of David Friedrich Strauss, The
Old Beliefand the New, and, then, the reading formation of its most
virulent (or at least best known) critic, Friedrich Nietzsche. I shall
argue that the ostensible debate between Strauss and Nietzsche con-
ceals, as cultural debates always do, a consensus view: in this case one
of the most important and influential reading formations, circa 1870-
1874, antagonistic to the working classes.
But we must be reminded again that "Nietzsche" is significant not
only for pre-war Germany but also for contemporary theory of mass
culture in the West. And the major trend of reading Nietzsche in the
United States, in France, and only to a somewhat lesser extent, in the
German Federal Republic works precisely to obscure the full complex-
ity of Nietzsche's view of mass culture, most notably and perniciously
that view's ideologico-political dimension and impact. Nietzsche's
reading formation, as well as the reading formation that explicitly or
implicitly affirms Nietzsche's patrimony are equally deluded." For it
is not merely "aristocratic radicalism" or "cultural elitism" but an
insistence that some mode of human slavery is the only viable relation
of production that constitutes, in the last instance, the actual con-
dition of intelligibility of Nietzsche's reading formation and its osten-
sibly radical criticism ofWilhelminian hegemony. Nietzsche provides
an exemplary illustration of the proposition that "Democratization
necessarily entails aesthetic loss," wherein each of the three main
terms of the proposition requires diacritical stress. Democratization is
thereforenegative. Aesthetic loss is more to be lamented that any other.
And, finally, for Nietzsche and for any consistent "Nietzschean" posi-
tion, this entailment is not merely a necessary but the sufficientcondi-
tion for posing any really significant question. This historically
important, philosophically totalitarian position, is the strongest poss-
ible formulation of what is meant by the term "aestheticism." What
concrete form aestheticism can take varies, of course. There are
bourgeois, formalist, deconstructionist, national socialist, and Stalinist

11. Current apologists for deconstruction see Nietzsche uncritically and exclu-
sively through an optic provided by de Man and Derrida. Cf. Christopher Norris,
Theoryand Practice(London and New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 58-89;
Deconstruction:
Jonathan Culler, OnDeconstruction: AfterStructuralism
and Criticism
Theory (Ithaca:Cornell
Criticism:
Univ. Press, 1982), p. 88; and Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive An Advanced
Introduction(New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 251-252.
190 ThePoliticsofReading
Formations

aestheticisms. When asked by his earliest readers about the connection

between his philosophy and whatJost Hermand has rightly called his
"paroxyms" against democracy and socialism, Nietzsche evaded the
issue. His interlocutor, the shame-faced George Brandes, dropped the
matter. Thus was initiated the scandal and aporia of Nietzsche recep-
tion in the West.
My own operative assumption is that contemporary Western
readings of Nietzsche - especiallyto the extent that they remain futilely
locked in the doubleessentialisticproblematic that I outlined earlier -
has reached an historical impasse once again. This is exemplified in a
subtle way, I shall attempt to show, by Habermas' recent re-reading of
the seminal theoretical text in Western Marxism on mass culture,
Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialecticof Enlightenment.Habermas ex-
plicitly argues for the centrality of Nietzsche in this text in order to
criticize and move beyond any totalizing concept of socio-cultural for-
mations. But, if I am right, this very argument implies an appeal to
Nietzsche that repeats Nietzsche's own reading formation in its most
essential and dangerous features (thus bringing Habermas, against his
stated intent, into the same approximate camp with just those French
critics like Foucault and Derrida from whom he would like to dis-
tinguish himself). With this move by Habermas, who previously pro-
vided one of the most stable blocks of resistance within Western
Marxism against the Nietzschean problematic, the real aporia of the
"Nietzschean" reading formation in the West is finally reached.
After locating this aporia in late CriticalTheory, I shall offer one way
out of this dead-end by referring us back to Imperial Germany c. 1914-
1917, and hence to a moment at the end of the period we are discuss-
ing. I shall try to reconstruct, with the help of an important document
that has been virtually ignored by that massive culture industry that is
Nietzsche-research,not howNietzscheread mass culture (or how Criti-
cal Theory reads mass culture through Nietzsche) but rather howmass
culturereadNietzscheand therefore, by implication, read the reading for-
mation most antithetical to its interests.
You will have noted already a certain ambivalence in my use of the
term "mass culture." I take the term "culture" in the broad but dif-
ferentiated sense proposed by Raymond Williams, namely as "awhole
way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual."'2 But I want to draw a
distinction. What I am arguing for in this paper is that students of
Imperial Germany expand the term "mass culture" to cover at least

12. Raymond Williams, Cultureand Society,1780-1950 (New York: Columbia Univ.

Press, 1958), p. xiv.
 Waite 191

two senses. Now, the conference at which the papers in this issue of
New German Critiquewere originally delivered tended to follow the lead
of early and latter-day Critical Theory, whereby "mass culture" means
"culture industry." I affirm the relevance of this usage. I, too, wish to
focus part of my attention on a text that Nietzsche, according to Critical
Theory, the most significant early critic of the culture industry, himself
targeted as the culture industry's most exemplary excretion. Perhaps I
should admit the possibility that Nietzsche may even make some tell-
ing points against this aspect of mass culture. It is even possible to ack-
nowledge Nietzsche's relatively positive contribution to a critique of
the culture industry - to the extent that Nietzsche exposes the
inherent contradiction in it between its once progressive pedagogic
intent and the instrumentalization of its later praxis.'3 There can be no
doubt that the bourgeois intelligentsia was an exceedingly complex
phenomenon in 19th-century Germany; we should not conflate, for
instance, its refined-decadent element - like Nietzsche - with its
overtly fascistic type.'4
But rather than simply assume that Nietzsche made a positive con-
tribution to the early theory of the culture industry, the question we
should ask is how did he really read the mass culture of Imperial
Germany?
We need, therefore, to shift the critical axis away from a search for
what Nietzsche "really thought" about the culture industry, to ask:
What is the specific reading formation actually employed and later
influenced by Nietzsche? Mehring provided us in 1897 with the
framework for this question: "Absent from Nietzsche's thinking was
an explicit philosophical confrontation with socialism. To be sure that
was a big mistake for a philosopher at the end of the 19th century,
because a philosopher who doesn't know how to confront the most
powerful movement of his time is anything but a philosopher. But the
real problem was that this gap left open the possibility to whitewash

13. For a lucid discussion of Nietzsche in the context of cultural politics in Prussia
that bears directly on my discussion here, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, "Reform als
Utopie: Die preussische Bildungpolitik 1809-1817," in Utopieforschung: Interdiszipliniire
Studienzur neuzeitlichenUtopie,vol. III, ed. Wilhelm Vosskamp (Stuttgart: Metzler,
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1983), 250-272, esp. 265-267. See further: Charles E.
McClelland, "The Wise Man's Burden: The Role ofAcademicians in Imperial German
Culture," and David L. Gross, "Kulturand Its Discontents: The Origins ofa'Critique of
everyday Life' in Germany, 1880-1925," both in Essayson Cultureand Societyin Modemrn
Germany,ed. GaryD. Starkand Bede KarlLackner(College Station, Texas: Texas A &M
Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 45-69 and 70-97, respectively.
14. For a succinct location of Nietzsche in this problematic, see Sebastiano Tim-
panaro, TheFreudianSlip:Psychanalysis and TextualCriticism,transl. Kate Soper (London:
NLB, 1976), pp. 185-186.
 192 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

Nietzsche's philosophy of monopoly capitalism and to aestheticize

away the fact that he combatted proletarian class struggle from the
same elevated circles of thought as did the next best stockbroker or the
next best reptile."'5Yet in order to understand the precise mechanisms
whereby proletarian consciousness and class struggle are whitewashed
and aestheticized away, we need a more radical shift of critical atten-
tion. We need to define "mass culture" as also "popular" or, better,
"plebeian culture." For we need to know how the working class read
both the culture industry and the critics of that industry who, like most
notably Nietzsche, were also dead set against workingclassculture.What
was the reading formation ofplebeian culture? Did it productively
activate the text "Nietzsche"?
By taking lines of argument and a methodology derived from some
recent students of popular culture,'6 it is possible to begin producing
the reading formation of Brecht's "literate worker" circa 1914-1919.
Toward the end of my paper I shall try to outline the plebeian reading
formation produced by untutored readers circulating outside the dis-
cursive order of the academy, even apparently outside the order of the
scholarly journals and press. Whatever the success of my own efforts
here, I insist that we must attempt to reconstruct ex hypothesithe reading
formation of mass culture, the hermeneutic (or rather anti-her-
meneutic) school of suspicion of the working class. In the case of
Nietzsche in Imperial Germany, there are indeed productive dis-
parities between plebeian readings of Nietzsche and academic dis-
course (then or now). To paraphrase my friend Walter Cohen, there
had better be. The critical vanguard must learn from the few visible
traces of plebeian culture we still have, for its "agressive originality,"'7
and, finally, from its crucial potential for human liberation.
Enough preliminaries. The proof of this "pauper's broth," too, will
have to be in the eating. So let us get on with the taskofasking how mass
culture was read by its opponents, how plebeian culture read them,
and how we should ourselves begin to "read."
David Strauss's book Das LebenJesu (1835) has been termed the

15. Franz Mehring, "Nietzsche gegen den Sozialismus" (1897), in Mehring, Gesam-
melteWerke,XIII (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), p. 169. Compare the following formula-
tion: "Nietzsche, in the last instance, is the philosopher of a monopoly capitalism that
has become strong enough not to need Prussian Bayonets" (p. 168).
16. I'm thinking, for example, fo Genevieve Bollkme, Roger Chartier, Michel de
Certeau, Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Richard Hoggart, Hans Medich, Robert
Muchembled, and E. P. Thompson.
17. See Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheeseand the Worms:The Cosmosof a 16th-Century
Miller(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 33.
 Waite 193

"most important theological milestone of the century"•";be that as it

may, it exerted, by their own admission, a formative, perhaps even
decisive influence on the philosophical and political thinking, and
even on the style, of Marx and especially Engels.'9 By the time they had
"settled accounts" with their "erstwhile philosophical conscience"
(about 1845/1846), they had moved in theorybeyond Strauss, never to
return.20 But at the same period, in matters ofhistoricalanalysis,Engels
noted with great satisfaction in The Conditionof the Working-Class in
England(1845): "...in how great a measure the English working pro-
letariat has succeeded in attaining independent education is shown
especially by the fact that the epoch-making products of modern
philosophical, political, and poetical literature are read by working-
men exclusively.2' According to Engels, Strauss'sLifeofJesus(translated
by the Owenites) was one of the most prominent and positive of such
texts for working-class Manchester.
By the time Strauss's last book, Der alte und der neue Glaube,22had
appeared in 1872, Marx and Engels had more urgent matters to attend
to, even though (or because) it is just in this book that the political
implications of the world view Strauss represented came to full light.
Marx wrote Engels from Manchester to London: "I was yesterday at
Dronke's [a socialist journalist, G.W.] in Southport. He's became
terribly fat and it doesn't suit him. At his place I saw by accident a book
by David Strauss that had been lent to him by a German philistine: The
OldFaithand theNew. I paged around in it and it reallyexposes the great
weakness of the "Volksstaat"that no one has wacked this damned priest
and Bismarckworshipper(who gives himself such gentlemanlyairs
vis socialism) on the head."23This was written at the end of May 1873.vis-.-
At exactly that moment in Switzerland, Friedrich Nietzsche, when he
was not busy savoring Turgenev's complex contribution to nihilism,
Fathersand Sons, and not dictating his own seminal reflections on the
arbitrarystructure of the sign, "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral

18. Horton Harris, David FriedrichStraussand His Theology(Cambridge: Cambridge

Univ. Press, 1973), p. 41.
19. See KarlMarx and FrederickEngels, CollectedWorks,II (New York:International
Publishers, 1975), pp. 293, 472-473, 486, 489-490, and 526-527.
20. Marx and Engels, CollectedWorks,IV, pp. 27-29.
21. Marx and Engels, CollectedWorks,IV, p. 528; also II, p. 447.
22. David Friedrich Strauss,DeralteundderneueGlaube,in Strauss, Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, VI, ed. Eduard Zeller (Bonn: E. Strauss, 1876-1878). Later I cite from the English
translation, TheOld Faithand the New (London: Ascher & Co., 1873).
23. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke,XXXIII (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956-
1969), pp. 84-85.
194 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

Sense," was attempting to "wack Strauss on the head" with his first
UntimelyMeditation. Nietzsche always was to consider his "Straussiad" a
key to his intellectual enterprise; Franz Mehring, who read it as early as
1891 agreed, albeit for radically different reasons.24 The Nietzschean
Girondists reach a different evaluation: Kaufmann didn't bother to re-
translate it; Colli and Montinari depreciate it as "the weakest work
Nietzsche ever published."25 And no one seems to want to follow the
reasonable suggestion that, if one wants to read an author, one must
know how s/he reads others. "David Strauss the Confessor and the
Writer" is the only extended evidence we have of what Nietzsche's
actual reading formation looks like.
First, let us return to the author of TheOld Faith and the New. After an
initial reluctance, Strauss greeted the Franco-Prussian war with
genuine fervor. His publication of his private correspondence with
Ernest Renan cost him the latter's friendship but was the most
enthusiastically received work Strauss ever published. TheOld Faith and
the New, which immediately followed the Letters to Renan, might be
interpreted as Strauss's contribution to the war effort, were it not even
more interesting. It appeared in the Autumn of 1872 and went rapidly
through six printings in six months (20 by 1938 when the Nazis had it
republished by Kriner Verlag). In the words of a rcent, I assume
authoritative, study of the episode, the book achieved the greatest pop-
ular financial success ever attained in Germany by a philosophico-
theological treatise.26 For Nietzsche it was, in effect, the first significant
product of the German culture industry: its system of education, cele-
brations, clubs and organizations, newspapers and press, beer halls,
fine art, literature, and philosophy.27 The Old Faith and the New was,
therefore, symptomatic, on Nietzsche's view, of the entire Ideological
State Apparatus of nascent Imperial Germany. It demands of us a
closer look.

24. Franz Mehring, "Zur Philosophie und Poesie des Kapitalismus" (1891), in
Mehring, GesammelteWerke,XIII (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), p. 160.
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke:Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Biinden, ed.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, I (Munich: DTV and Berlin:Walterde Gruyter,
1980), p. 905. Hereafter cited as KSAwith appropriate volume and page number.
26. Harris, David FriedrichStrauss, p. 239.
27. See Friedrich Nietzsche, UnzeitgemiisseBetrachtungen,ErstesStiick:David Strauss der
Bekennerund Schriftsteller(Leipzig: E. W. Fritsch, 1873), pp. 4, 6, 11,25, and 56-57; KSA,
I, pp. 160-177. An underlying contradiction informnsNietzsche's argument about
mass culture. On the one hand, he attacks the Bildungsphilister as someone who "doesn't
know what culture is, namely unity of style [Einheit des Stils]."On the other, the reason
Nietzsche tackles Strauss at all is because he is, symptomatically, "unified" in his style,
world-view, and aesthetics ["er ist einheitlich"]. Cf. KSA, I, pp. 606 and 586, for
instance.
 Waite 195

The book is divided into six interconnected parts: four main chap-
ters, followed by two extended appendices. Compressed, the argu-
ment of the book serves to answer four main questions, one asked in
each of the four main chapters: "Are We Still Christians?"; "Have We
Still A Religion?"; "What is Our Conception of the Universe?"; and,
finally, "What is Our Rule of Life?" The appendices address literature
and music, respectively.
First, "we" are not still Christians. We no longer accept the historical
Jesus as we once did in Das LebenJesuas a major religious or even ethical
thinker. He was an alienated and fanaticJew. Second, whetherwe have
religion or not depends on what you intend with the question. "No" -
if you mean the old faith in a personal God or in immortality;"yes"or at
least "perhaps" - if you mean some vague "oceanic" dependence on
what Strauss calls das All or das Universum. But this remains nothing
more than an inchoate feeling or mood. This is not to say that moods
cannot be vitally significant, but the point here is that the question of
whether such a mood can entail consequences for pure or practical
reason necessarily spills over into question three. Following an argu-
ment developed by, among others, Schopenhauer (whom Strauss had
begun reading in 1866, about the same time as had Nietzsche), Dar-
win, and Haeckel (neither ofwhom Nietzsche had studied as intensive-
ly), Strauss provides two answers to the question "What is Our
Conception of the Universe?" These, for us unsurprising, answers are
arguably unique in the history of theology, at least up to that time:
Inorganic life is said to have originated out of inorganic matter; and
man was evolved from the apes. The fourth chapter turns to the
explicit social and political consequences of the new faith. For Strauss,
moral standards are to be determined not for individuals, or at least
not primarily for them, but rather in specific communities for the
entire human race. This internally incoherent position (the quint-
essential contradiction of bourgois ethics) accompanies him to
extremely conservative, even immodest proposals. In time of specific
political crisis, as he perceives the surface of the Prussian peace, the
Young Hegelian Idealist shows his true colors. Strauss is for the mon-
archy and Pan-German nationalism. He opposes almost all social
democratic arguments (except one for civil marriage and liberalized
divorce laws, since he had a particularly unhappy personal experience
in this regard). He is for the death penalty, especially in cases of politi-
cal assassination but also, as we shall see, ones involving significant
property loss. Inheritedpropertyis the only secure basis for all social life.
Wholly consistent with, and following necessarily from, this principle,
all strikes are to be condemned as anarchical acts against the state and
public welfare, and are to be punished with the most Draconian
measures possible. The Church is totally meaningless and worthless as
196 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

an institution but is better ignored than combatted. Those of us with

residual traces of oceanic feeling are offered two choices. Either a turn
to some rationalistic service, such as those provided by "The Friends of
Light." Or, Strauss's own choice, the solace and opiate ofliterature and
music (no marks for guessing which nationality). German art is to sub-
stitute for cosmopolitan religion. It constitutes, informs, and justifies
salvation in the New Faith.
Now the earliest reception of his book was not anticipated by
Strauss. First, it was an enormous financial success. What he had
expected was a lively, even heated debate about his new faith. What he
got was a virtual consensus of strong disagreement.28 In a sense TheOld
Faith and the New cost Strauss almost all of his oldest and dearest friends
(Friedrich TheodorVischer, Edward Zeller, and Kuno Fischer, among
others). As he admitted to Vischer, the "we" in the text (the "we"
Nietzsche was to interpret as the "all-too-many") had no material
referent. Wagnerites attacked his musical taste, or lack thereof, for
excluding the Master. Conservatives went after Strauss's polemic
against the historicalJesus and Christianity. (This was, after all, the first
theological attempt in history to champion evolutionary theory and a
materialist conception of life.) Liberals were appalled - this was the
early period of the Kulturkampf-- with the strictures Strauss was trying
to place on the Free Church and with his adamant defense of mon-
archism. When Nietzsche's counter polemic appeared in the Autumn
of 1873, Strauss commented privately to a friend that Nietzsche must
have been trying to perform the remarkable feat of hanging a man who
had just been beheaded. (Nietzsche, for all his self-serving claims that
he never attacked individuals, only victorious causes,29 had hoped that
Strauss would not read his essay.) A few months later, Strauss died,
nearly without friends.
As we saw, Marx and Engels left the book unread. How did
Nietzsche read? Let us look over his shoulder as he reads TheOldFaithand
the New and especially the section from which he gleaned the most tell-
ing stylistic howlers for "The Confessor and the Writer." We have only
space for two examples. Strauss argues passionately near the end of his
chapter for capital punishment and against the "high-sounding
phrases and fashionable prejudices" which would bring such matters
even to debate. To desire its abolition in cases of premeditated
assassination is to commit "a crime against society, and at a time like
the present would be "sheer madness" (Strauss, The Old Faith and the

28. I shall refer later to some of this reaction.

29. See Nietzsche, EcceHomo (Warum ich so weise bin, Section 7); KSA, VI, pp. 274-275.
Also Gitzendimmerung (Was den Deutschen abgeht, Section 2); KSA, VI, pp. 104-105.
 Waite 197

New, p. 112). What times are these? The answer is quick to follow:
"The ideas which have now pervaded a numerous class, which is still
boldly pushing its way forward, are a luxuriant hotbed of robbery and
murder. He who considers the possession of property as a wrong, hat-
ing the possessor of it as one who has wronged and is wronging him,
will, by way of establishing an equilibrium, easily award to himself the
right of taking his property, and should he not willingly yield it, his life
also. We need only glance at a newspaper; every week we may find a
case of this kind," (Strauss,p. 112). He now goes on to give an instance
of such a crime which was motivated by political intent: the assassina-
tion of a wealthy manufacturer in Freiburg, who, against Strauss's
instructions, had ordered lock outs against reform-minded workers in
his plant. But this case interests us less here than Nietzsche's reading of
the above passage. He finds of interest only a single, strained metaphor
("ideas" as "a luxuriant hotbed of robbery and murder"). The
ideological level of the passage, let alone its stated content, does not
interest him in the least. But this blindness is so symptomatic and so
omnipresent in Nietzsche's reading formation, that even when some
glimpse of ideology does flicker through, darkness immediately closes
defensively around it. Straussnears the conclusion of his bookwith this
reflection: "The loss of the belief in providence belongs, indeed, to a
the most sensible deprivations which are connected with a renuncia-
tion of Christianity. In the enormous machine of the universe, amid
the incessant whirl and hiss of itsjagged iron wheels, amid the deafen-
ing crash of its ponderous stamps and hammers, in the midst of this
whole terrific commotion, man, a helpless and defenseless creature,
finds himself placed, not secure for a moment that on an imprudent
motion a wheel may not seize him, or a hammer crush him to powder.
This sense of abandonment is at first something awful. but then what
avails it to have recourse to an illusion? Our wish is impotent to
refashion the world; the understanding clearly shows that it indeed is
such a machine. But it is not merely this. We do not only find the
revolution of pitiless wheels in our world-machine, but also the shed-
ding of soothing oil. Our God does not, indeed, take us into his arms
from the outside, but he unseals the well-springs of consolation within
our own bosoms..."(Strauss, pp. 213-14)...and of course within our
own houses where we read Goethe and listen to Mozart. The dominant
image of the machine, alluding although Straussdoesn't know it, to the
alienation freely provided by surplus value, is targeted by Nietzsche at
an important turn in his own discussion. But note what he does with it.
Strauss, Nietzsche writes, "does not even spare the venerable old
universe in his eulogies - as though it were only now and hencefor-
ward sufficiently sanctified by praise to revolve around the central
monad David Strauss. The universe, he is happy to inform us, is, it is
 198 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

true, a machine with jagged iron wheels, stamping and hammering

ponderously, but: 'We do not only find the revolution ofpitiless wheels
in our world-machines, but also the shedding of soothing oil.' The
universe, provided it submits to Strauss's encomiums, is not likely to
overflow with gratitude towards this master of weird metaphors, who
was unable to discover better similes in its praise. But what is the oil
called which tricklesdown upon the hammers and stampers? And how
would it console a workman who chanced to get one of his limbs
caught in the mechanism to know that this oil was trickling over him.
Passing over this simile as bad, let us turn our attention to another of
Strauss's artifices."30It seems to me that this moment in Nietzsche's
clever text is symptomatic of his entire reading formation. "The Ques-
tion of Style" - here as elsewhere, whether it be grafted with questions
of misogyny or an ahistorical, rhetorical, and epistemological pro-
blematic - violently displaces questions of political ideology as soon
as it catches a glimpse of them. It might be argued that one could pro-
ductively activate even Nietzsche's text, grateful to it for at least letting
us see in his work thepossibilityof producing an ideological reading of a
stylistic rupture. But this potential is overwhelmingly unfulfilled and
more often interdicted both by Nietzsche and by the practice of the
post-structuralist reading formation that is so much in his debt.
Nietzsche, for his part, is not conscious of this moment - at least it is
not necessary for us to suggest that he is. He is, after all, as he claims in
the last sentence of his untimely meditation on Strauss, "speaking
the truth."
But nor is Nietzsche's a unique reading formation. It is impacted in
the contemporary reception of TheOld Faithand the New common to
other bourgeois writers in the 1870s. I have read about ten early, full-
length responses to Strauss's last book, including those written by
Eduard von Hartmann, Jakob Frohschammer, Franz Overbeck, V.
Stutz, W. Hieronymi, and Friedrich Theodor Vischer.3 The underly-
ing concern they share, despite their differences of opinion, is that

30. Nietzsche, UnzeitgemisseBetrachtung, ErstesStiick,(Section 6);KSA,I, pp. 188-189.

I cite here from the English translation by Anthony M. Ludovici in TheComplete Worksof
Friedrich Nietzsche,ed. Oscar Levy, IV (New York:Russell & Russell, 1909-1911), pp. 42-
43.
3 1. See Eduard von Hartmann, Die Selbsterziehung desChristenthums unddieReligionder
Zukunft(Berlin: Carl Duncker's Verlag, 1974);Jakob Frohschammer, Das neue Wissen
undderneueGlaube:Mitbesonderer vonD. A. Strauss'neuesterSchrifi:"Deralte
Beriicksichtigung
undderneueGlaube"(Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1873); Franz Overbeck, Ueberdie Chris-
tlichkeitunsererheutigerTheologie:streitundFriedenschrift(Leipzig: E. W. Fritsch, 1873); V.
Stutz, Der alte und derneueGlaube:OderChristentum und Naturalismus,An Straussundden
ziircherischenReformern gepriift(Zurich: Franz Haube, 1874); W. Hieronymi, Dr. David
Straussunddie religidseBewegungderGegenwart:OdervomrGlaubenzumDenken,vomDenken
 Waite 199

Strauss's text will lead to what one writer calls the "dissolution of civil
order and finally to the anarchistic decay ofsociety."32 However much
they might agree with Strauss's attack on religion, he goes too far; one
needs the "noble lie" to keep the masses in check. Strauss is right to
reject Social Democracy, but his text unintentionally plays into its
hands and, worse still, into the hands of the plebs. Thisis the issue. The
ghost of the Paris Commune haunts all these texts, Nietzsche's no less
than those of his contemporaries. Quite against his will, Strauss has
attacked the last theoretical bulwark available to ruling class hegemony
against the proletarian masses. And all these men, including Nietzsche
(who if anything is more blind to this mechanism than the others) find
more or less irrelevant ways of reading Strauss and entering into a
sham debate with him. Bruno Bauer did get it approximately right:
Strauss's text is informed by its inability to link religion to "historical
powers and social relations."33 But what is really at stake - for
Nietzsche and the middle-class reading formation of which he is a part
- is ultimately the question of repressive political ideology and practi-
cal politics. And here all of them - Strauss, Nietzsche, and the others
- are in agreement.
Kurt Hillebrand, who in 1873 wrote the first positive explication of
Nietzsche's polemic against Strauss - Nietzsche gave him credit in
EcceHomo- suggested that it is "completely missing the point to locate
the essense of culture in style alone."''34But Hillebrand's critique of

zum Handeln;Eine kritischeStudie (Wiesbaden: Chr. Limbarth, 1873); and Friedrich

Theodor Vischer, "Deralte und neueGlaube":Ein BekenntnisvonD. Fr. Strauss(1873), in
Vischer, KritischeGiinge,Neue Folge,II (Stuttgart:J. G. Cotta, 1873).
32. V. Stutz, Deralte undderneueGlaube,p. 290. See also: E. Hartmann, Die Selbster-
ziehung,p. 2 (on the "atrocities" of the Paris Commune and the "naked bestiality of
Social Democracy") and pp. 72-73 (on religion as necessary Volksmetaphysik); J.
Frohschammer, Das neue Wissen,esp. pp. ix-x and 201; F. Overbeck, Ueberdie Chris-
tlichkeit,p. 77; W. Hieronymi, Dr.DavidStrauss,esp. p. 54; and F. T. Vischer, Deralteund
neueGlaube,esp. pp. 223-227. This fear is the underlying politicalobjection to Strauss
shared by all these writers, although none dwells on it. The fear is always displaced by
other kinds of argument.
33. Bruno Bauer, Philo,StraussundRenan:UnddasUrchristentum (Berlin:Gustav Hem-
pel, 1874), pp. 42-43.
34. Kurt Hillebrand, "Eigniges Uber den Verfall der deutschen Sprache und der
deutschen Gesinnung (Bei Gelegenheit einer Schrift von Dr. Friedrich Nietzsche
gegen David Strauss)" (1873), in Hillebrand, Zeiten, Vdlkerund Menschen,II (Berlin:
Verlag von Robert Oppenheimn, 1875), p. 302. Early reaction to Nietzsche's book on
Straussfollowed the general ideological lines oftheKulturkampfFor an annotated over-
view of this reaction see, although it is incomplete, Richard Frank Krummel, Nietzsche
und der deutscheGeist:Ausbreitungund Wirkungder NietzscheschenWerkesim deutschen
Sprachraum biszum TodesjahrdesPhilosophen, derJahre1867-1900
Fin Schrifttumsverzeichnis
(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1974), pp. 17-21.
200 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

Nietzsche lacks any serious engagement with anything but an in-

tracultural problematic. It is possible, therefore, to suggest that there
was a compositebourgeois reading formation of Strauss's The Old Faith
and the New in Imperial Germany. "If," as Gramsci thought, "political
questions are disguised as cultural ones, and as such become in-
soluable,"35 then this reading formation and its progeny move always
to occlude access to such questions, even before they can arise or
develop.
Both David Friedrich Strauss's last text and Nietzsche's deconstruc-
tion of it must be read against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian
War, the foundation of the Second Empire, the Kulturkampf, the
general tendency of anti-liberal ideology in its latter moments of post-
1848 defeatism, and the Paris Commune itself. Lukics' general thesis
in The Destruction of Reason is correct: the reading formation we have
been discussing is essentially reactive. It reacts to the fear generated by
the Commune, their common subtext. It is precisely this reading for-
mation, in the sub-version provided by Nietzsche, not Strauss, thatwill
sally forth into the political arena of late 19th-century Germany and,
then, the world. This reading formation is what I mean by the term
"Nietzsche." I make not only the comparatively weak claim that it is
symptomatic of, say, the way Nietzsche read during his so-called first
period (The Birth of Tragedyand The Untimely Meditations). I make the
stronger claim that it remained determinate in the relatively "en-
lightened period" (begun by "Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense"
somewhat earlier, and continued by Human, All-too-Human, Dawn, and
parts of the The Gay Science)and also in his later published works after
ThusSpakeZarathustra. I direct your attention to the discussion of slave
labor in Dawn (Aphorism 206) or, say, to the sections in BeyondGoodand
Evil on "breeding," the cultivation of "tyrants in every sense," the "ex-
ploitation that belongs to the essense of what lives," and the "socialist
dwarf animal" (see Aphorisms 203, 242, 251, 259). But the strongest
claim of all would be that his reading formation became the dominant
reading formation of the Western reception of Nietzsche, including
that of the Frankfurt School.
In any case, it would be an auspicious thing if Habermas's remark in
1968 were correct and Nietzsche were no longer contagious. A recent
turn in Habermas' own thinking considerably complicates matters,
including, by implication, the most coherent theory or "reading" of
mass culture produced by Western Marxism. In his recent "re-
reading" of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas discusses the issue of

35. Antonio Gramrnsci,

Selectionsfrom the PrisonNotebooks,ed. and transl. Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), p. 149.
 Waite 201

why Adorno and Horkheimer so violently "flattened out" their view of

modernity."6He argues that there is a necessary connection between
the totalizing optic of that text (vis-z-vis the good, the true, and the
beautiful) and various significant turning points and/or aporias
reached by Enlightenment whenever it turns self-reflectively on itself.
Most notably such a moment is said to be reached when "the [Marxist]
critique of ideology itself is suspected of no longer producing truths"
(Habermas, p. 20).
Habermas' discussion is, of course, motivated by his interest in pro-
moting a consciously "impure" or "non-coercively coercive" theory
(developed as much from Popper, Piaget, Peirce, Freud, and
Gadamer, as from Marx) that could recuperate those "elements of
reason which are contained in what Marx and the Marxist tradition call
the bourgeois ideals." By these ideals Habermas means specifically the
following: the inner dynamic of the natural sciences and scientific self-
reflection; the processes of democratic decision making; and "the pro-
ductivity and the liberating force of an aesthetic experience with a
subjectivity set free from the imperatives of purposive activity and
from the conventions of everyday perception," as most notably rep-
resented by avant-garde art (Habermas, p. 18). Such are Habermas'
counter proposals to the "global pessimism" of Adorno and Hork-
heimer's "blackest, most nihilistic book" (Habermas, p. 13). And, not
incidentally, all these proposals, together and individually, are con-
ceived as ways of bullying off the field of current French theory: e.g.,
Foucault's anarchistic theory of power structure that cannot itself be
judged in terms of its validity or value, and Derrida's critique of
metaphysics that can only always "attack the validity of its own pre-
mises" (Habermas, p. 29). For Habermas, "structuralism" repeats
Nietzsche's fundamental aporia. And bothcontinually fall prey to a
kind of impotent unmasking. "This regressive turn," he suggests in a
brilliant turn of phrase, "enlists the powers of emancipation in the ser-
vices of counter-Enlightenment" (Habermas, p. 29).

36. Jtirgen Habermas, "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-

Reading DialecticofEnlightenment," New GermanCritique,26 (Spring-Summer 1982), 13-
30. For an important critical activation of Dialecticof Enlightenment in the service of an
analysis of the current North American culture industry, see Fredric Jameson,
"Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," SocialText,1 (1979), 130-148. On my view,
however, the problem with Dialecticof Enlightenment is less its valorization of different
kinds of art than, first, its essentialistic preoccupation with what a given artifact"really
is" and, second, its tacit assumption that the products of the culture industry are
absorbed passively and uncritically by a working class that has no culture of its own.
Nor is Jameson, in his SocialTextarticle at least, entirely free of such assumptions.
202 The Politics of Reading Formations

All this is promising enough, but Nietzsche seems to perform an

exceedingly complex function for Habermas' text. In part, Nietzsche
is suggested to have inspired Adorno and Horkheimer to derive the
standards of their cultural criticism (including what Habermas
elsewhere in the text calls their "impotent rage") from the radical but
isolated and somehow "totalized experience of aesthetic modernity"
(Habermas, p. 23). In part, this is the case because Nietzsche is at the
root of the current French connection. I think, however, that Haber-
mas' own text insufficiently reflects on what Nietzsche is really doing in
it. In a remarkable and atypically uncritical passage, Nietzsche is
activated by Habermas in the service of "the subversive force of an
aesthetic resistance which will later nourish the reflections of Benjamin
and even Peter Weiss" (Habermas, p. 25), and thus Nietzsche is made
into the first theorist of the avant-garde, avant la lettre.So Nietzsche
opens up for Adorno and Horkheimer, but (in amorepositive way) also
for Habermas, the theoretical possibility of necessarily and rigorously
impure modes of communicative action. This is the case since
Nietzsche "consistently" undercuts the rationality of Yes/No posi-
tions" (Habermas, p. 25).
But it is, I think symptomatic that Habermas can arrive at this
relatively positive valorization of Nietzsche only by acoercivereading of
Nietzsche's "celebration of dynamism" and other "expressions of an
aesthetically motivated sense of time" (Habermas, p. 25). All such
ostensibly aesthetic moments in Nietzsche are always ultimately allied,
as analysis of Nietzsche's own reading formation shows, with in-
voluted, ideological blindness. Make no mistake. Nietzsche's polemic
is directed primarily not a deconstructing, say, what he terms
"egoism," or what now might be called abstractly "the theory of the
subject," but rather at destroying or occluding access to one his-
torically specfic form of"egosm" - namely nascent proletarian class
consciousness circa 1870-1890. And he was to be rather successful in
doing so, at least by 1914, when he had been assimilated nicely into the
very bowels of the culture industry itself. The ultimate thrust of
Nietzsche's seminal attack, both in terms of its intent and over-
whelmingly, its deferred effect, is against what he baldly calls in the
UntimelyMeditations"the introduction of history-qua animal and
human history - to the dangerous, because ignorant masses of people
and the working classes [Volksmassen und Arbeiterschichten].''"7
One of Habermas' rare rhetorical flourishes, borrowed from Ben-
jamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," is supposed to con-

37. Nletzsche, VomNutzen und Nachtheilder Historiesfirdas Leben(Section 9); KSA,

I, p. 322.
 Waite 203

vince us, in spite of its essentialistic presuppositions, that avant-garde

art and its progenitor Nietzsche, "exploded the continuum of his-
tory" (Habermas, p. 25). But this passes over in utter silence what was
politically at stake in such alleged explosions. It is not as if either such
art, let alone Nietzsche, "did" or"does" this - they must be madeto do
it.
In 1912 Plekhanov put the Nietzsche case into context: "There is
not, I think, a single country in the modern civilized world where the
bourgeois youth is not sympathetic to the ideas ofFriedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, perhaps, despised his "sleepy" (schlkifrigen) contem-
poraries of his time. But what, in Nietzsche's eyes, was wrong with his
"sleepy" contemporaries? What was their.principal defect, the source
of all the others? It was that they could not think, feel and - chiefly -
act as befits people who hold the predominant position in society. In
the present historical conditions, this is tantamount to the reproach
that they did not displace sufficient energy and consistency in defend-
ing the bourgeois order against the revolutionary attacks of the pro-
letariat.Witness the anger with which Nietzsche spoke of the socialists.
But, again, see what we get."38And it is in not dissimilar historical con-
ditions that Nietzsche's contagion is alive and well today. The last sys-
tematic attempt in Western Marxism to innoculate us against
Nietzsche has succumbed to its own homopathetic cure. Habermas'
tendency in 1982/83 is to regress, with whatever hesitancy, to the read-
ing formation we encountered in 1872/73. See what we get. The read-
ing formation called "Nietzsche" illuminates one way ideological
replication occurs at moments of greatest intentional and rhetorical
difference and in times of political indecision.
But if this thesis is true, what bearing does"Nietzsche" have for "con-
temporary concepts of'mass society'.""9Are there any productive, or
even progressive alternatives to reading "Nietzsche"? And what does
this question have to do with the German question between 1870 and
1914 or the Western question today? Georg Luktics provides us with
the most succinct formulation of the historical and political problem
of reading Nietzsche. "For if a person educated in philosophy and
literature is able to follow epistemologically the nuances of Nietzsche's
reworking of Schopenhauer, and to appreciate with aesthetic and psy-
chological sensitivity the nuances of his critique of decadence, yet still

38. Georgi Plekhanov, SelectedPhilosophicalWorks,2nd rev. ed., translated ano-

nymously, V (Moscow: Progress, 1974-1980), pp. 664-665.
39. For the current Soviet position on Nietzsche's contribution to the theory of
mass culture, see Alexander Kukarkin,ThePassingAge:TheIdeologyand CultureoftheLate
BourgeoisEpoch,transl. Keith Hammond (Moscow: Progress, 1979), esp. pp. 249-
254.
204 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

believes in the Zarathustramyth, the myth of the Superman and "eter-

nal recurrence," this is at bottom harder to fathom than the despairing
belief of a poorly educated working youth - someone who was never
or only temporarily a member of a party and was left out in the cold
after finishing his apprenticeship - that Hitler would realize'German
socialism'."40 Yet Lukics' formulation at the end of this remark seems
passing non-dialectical(and hence non-Leninist),and it certainlyinter-
dicts important questions about reading formations. How did the
allegedly "passive" mass culture read the texts of its class enemy? How
did "a poorly educated working youth" really read, as somedid, Fried-
rich Nietzsche?
My search for traces of evidence for such a reading formation -
evidence that, by definition, must remain almostunrecorded - has
been guided by Carlo Ginzburg's hypothetical and polemical inter-
vention into debates about 16th century popular culture. Ginzburg
argues for the existence of an almost entirely untutored, actively sup-
pressed, and still "untapped level of popular belieP' that was "grafted
onto an extremely clear and logical complex of ideas, from religious
naturalism tending toward the scientific, to utopian aspirations of
social reform,"41 and by "belly materialism." Not only are such ideas
"clear and logical," and not only are they productively activated by a
unique way of readingtexts, they are necessarily connected to specific
socio-political and emancipatorypractices.Now, both this reading for-
mation and the practices it entails can sometimes be understood as
being, in complex ways, more progressive than "sophisticated"
theories of academic discourse.Ginzburg's Mennochio was finally
burned at the stake in 1599; a year later the erstwhile monk Giordano
Bruno followed him into the flames. But Mennochio, the peasant and
the miller, had attracted the interest of the Roman Inquisition not
merely as a heretic but as aheresiarch.42His powerful reading formation
was hermeneutically "agressive" but it was also potentially revolu-
tionary.
Ginzburg is, of course, less than sanguine about the possibility of
locating any substantial traces of such a liberating popular culture
today. Bennett's ferreting-out of essentialism in Ginzburg's text and
his development of the theory informing it, encourages us, however,
not merely to seek but to actively produce such a culture in the reading
formations of history. Reading formations are after all not somehow
"ready-made" in history.

40. Georg Lukics, TheDestructionof Reason,transl. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin,

1980), pp. 87-88.
41. Ginzburg, p. XXII.
42. Ibid., pp. 89, 91.
 Waite 205

In 1914 and again in 1919 - oncejust before and once right after
World War I - a German sociologist, dramatist, and Social Democrat
of working class origins Adolf Levenstein published a companion text
to this larger "physio-psychological analysis"43of the contemporary
industrial working proletariat, a volume of letters written to him by
workers in response to a questionnaire and follow-up correspond-
ence. The question he had asked was: "What did Nietzsche give you?"
Answers came in from miners, house painters, weavers, locksmiths,
sheet metal workers, bakers' apprentices, and day laborers, among
others. Some of the responses were published in book form under the
title FriedrichNietzsche in the Judgment of the WorkingClass.44 By
most modern standards of sociological research, the anthology lacks
methodological rigor, not to say ideological lucidity. But we cannot
afford to pass by this glimpse of proletarian reading formation on
grounds of methodological squeamishness.
One of the things that is strikingabout the letters is the highly dfferen-
tiatedview of Nietzsche they offer. Some workers are far more suspi-
cious of Nietzsche than others, and suspicious for various reasons.
Some write in the imagined tone or style of Zarathustrawhile others are
more analytic. Virtually none of the workers has attained more than a
few years, at most, of normal Hochschulbildung and only two of them
evidence any explicit knowledge of the enormous secondary literature
that, by 1914, surrounded Nietzsche's name. So it is remarkable how
these texts, taken as a composite reading formation, replicate the full
complexity of positions on Nietzsche available on the academic
market place then, and even now. A reader familiar with at least some
of the seconary literature produced by the Nietzsche Industry will find
here, in adumbrated form to be sure, many of the salient perspectives
attained in the academic press only some time later. And s/he will also
find here a perspective on Nietzsche ignored by bourgeois critics that
was articulated, although these workers did not know this, only by the
Left: most notably by Mehring (in the 1890s) and later Plekhanov
(in 1912).
Now, most of these workers had apparently participated at one time
or another in Socialist or Socialist Christian reading and discussion
groups of one form or another, although Nietzsche was seldom read
on such occasions, if at all. These people had read (or at least knew of)

43. See Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage:Mit besondererBeriicksichtigung der

SeitedesmodernenGrossbetriebes
sozialpsycholgischen undderpsycho-physischen Einwirkungen
auf
die Arbeiter(Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1912), esp. pp. 382-406.
44. FriedrichNietzscheim UrteilderArbeiterklasse,
ed. Adolf Levenstein, 2nd ed. (Leip-
zig: Felix Meiner, 1919). The first edition of 1914 is identical to this one.
206 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

Lassalle, to a lesser extent Marx, the early David Friedrich Strauss, and
the "Red" Wagner.45But, as with the case of Ginzburg's Mennochio,
one cannot account entirely for their reading formation by means of
intertextual reference alone. After a reasonable effort to locate such
references breaks down, a specific residue is left. This leads me to
hypothesize, in Ginzburg's terms, that a "grid" or "filter"of popular,
oral culture determines a reading formation that bears startling
similarities to that popular culture argued by Ginzburg for the 16th
century. The hypothesis, of course, is that lived experience qua indus-
trial working class would provide, in the last instance, the contours of
this grid. This would have to be a classreading formation, at a specific
historical moment, and hence a classreading of Nietzsche, no less than
Nietzsche's way of reading Strauss'sways of reading mass culture had
been a class reading. But of course the class was different and had
diametrically opposed interests. And this hypothesis must be care-
fully tested.
There is a sense in which the productive activation of Nietzsche that
emerges from Levenstein's anthology is more progressive than was
academic discussion on the Right or even the Left, then ornow. This is a
remarkable claim. Mine is, of course, a partisanjudgment, based as it is
on the assumption of the relative priority of political emancipation,
say, over philosophical aesthetics. Viewed from this optic, a virtual
consensus view of Nietzsche does emerge, I think, cutting radically
across lines of less significant differentiation. At the very least, this
plebeian reading formation provides a different view of Nietzsche than
ones otherwise available to us.
Of the nearly two thousand workers contacted by Levenstein and
questioned about their reading, fully 35%had read Nietzsche.46 What
did their hypothetical reading formation look like? It bears certainly
little in common with a hermeneutical fusion of horizons or a positivis-
tic close reading. At first the contact with a text seems almost passive.
One day laborer writes: "I want to make clear exactly how I read
everyday, how I, as a worker, came to busy myself with such things. I
didn't shove, I was shoved. I let myself be led by instinct and ony took
the best from what I read and heard. I didn't study it by letting it make a
hard and fast impression on me. I didn't learn it like some foreign

45. On Wagner's impact on the anarchist working class movement, see Frank
Trommler, "Wagner: Der Mentor der Linken," Titel:Das Magazin der Biicher,2:1
(February-March 1983), 26-29. For succinct remarks on the connection in Wagner
between "failed insurrection and nihilistic metaphysics," see Theodor Adorno, In
Searchof Wagner,transl. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981), p. 14.
pp. 382-383.
46. Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage,
 Waite 207

point of view. Not in the sense that I'd prepare piece by piece for an
entire system that was going to be foreign to me. I simply didn't have
the time for that, for grasping the whole thing, I mean. No, I first let my
reading have an unformed, sort of gradually shaping and filling-in
effect on my views, indirectly without my being conscious of it or doing
justice to it."47
But this "instinct" turns out to be neither subjective, nor certainly
uncritical or passive. It is closer to agressive activation. When it comes
to Nietzsche's contempt for the "weak," it remarks that "the modern
slave holders do that often enough"48 (cited in Levenstein, Nietzsche, p.
84). But Nietzsche is not rejected for this or other contemptible ideas.
Now, virtually all the workers represented in Levenstein's anthology
agressively zero in on Nietzsche's notion of the Superman. This is for
them the jugular of his philosophy: not the Will to Power, not Eternal
Recurrence of the Same, not vitalism, and certainly not cultural
criticism - although each of these themes is explicitly addressed and
suspected of concealing some sort of ulterior motive, resentment, or
class bias. This reading formation suspects this Superman for one
reason. A particularly laconic formulation cannot be much improved
upon: "Nietzsche has only contempt and disgust for the herd [den
Herdenmenschen]. But he forgets something: the herd can exist
without the Superman, but the latter can't exist without the herd.""49
This simple insight is the ultimate point of attack on Nietzsche of,
say, Mehring throughout the pre-war period. It at least aphoristically
alludes to the analysis of Nietzsche as the "philosopher of monopoly
capitalism" and touches what matters to the class Mehring represents.
But this is not the whole of this reading formation.
There is one crucial aspect of this plebeian reading formation in
1914 that is if anything more objective, dialectical, and politically
insightful than even Mehring had been, Plekhanov was, or Luk~ics
would be. These workers are suggesting repeatedly that Nietzsche's
Superman must be abandoned to the class enemy. It is not enough to
simplydismiss him and hope that he'll go away. The Superman is
recognized to be too seductive and pernicious to be handed over
without a fight. He must be taken seriously, more seriously than did
Mehring in 1899, Plekhanov in 1912, Lukics in the 1930s, or Haber-
mas in 1968 (let alone 1982) And to take seriously means to produc-
tively activate, to wrest away from the class Nietzsche represented and

47. Anonymous worker, cited in Levenstein, FriedrichNietzscheim Urteilder Ar-

p. 71.
beiterklasse,
48. Cited in Levenstein, Nietzsche,p. 84.
49. Ibid., p. 48.
 208 ThePoliticsof ReadingFormations

for whose "sleepy" readership he wrote. But this active cooption of

Nietzsche refuses to regress (as it would wth latter-day "gentle
Nietzscheans") into a psychologizing away of the Sueprman or (as it
would with self-proclaimed "advanced" critics) into a passing by him
in ironic silence or cleer ostentation.
Socialism has for these workers around 1914, pace Nietzsche, and
pace Strauss, nothing whatsoever to do with what they themselves call
contemptuously "Gleichmacherei."50 Socialism is however, as one
worker freely acknowledges, no less a form of"egoism," namely the
egoism of proletarian class consciousness"5' According to the pro-
letarian reading formation, the Superman can have"meaning" - that
is, can be productively activated - only on two precise conditions.
First, the Sueprman can be activated on the condition that for the term
"Ubermensch" we can substitute "Proletariat." We need to read
Nietzsche's texts in such a way that every use and mention of"Super-
man" is agressively displaced by the proletariat and tested against the
lived experience of the workers themselves. Second, the Superman can
be activated on the condition that we defereven such reading until such
time as the proletariat has attained political power. "On the basis of
democratic solidarity, on the basis of a socialist mode of production
that would prevent the exploitation of people, on the basis of the
greatest possible freedom of individuals... - That is, seen from my
working class point of view, the natural 'Meaning of the Earth' pro-
claimed by Zarathustra, that will bring happiness to all people. That's
how I'd like to approach Nietzsche."52 Indeed, this is the only way to
read Nietzsche, the only way that he might be somehow recuperated,
much as Gramsci's reading The Prince is the only way to recuperate
Machiavelli at the present time. "For the person who can look further
into the distance, the way goes through socialism to the possibility of
individuality in Nietzsche."53 But no vice versa: the way through
Nietzsche leads nowhere.
The difference between the Nietzschean reading of mass culture
and mass culture's reading of Nietzsche can now be summarized. the
way of reading the culture industry that is exemplified by Nietzsche is
ultimately reactive. It is, in the last instance, dismissive and fearful of
plebeian culture. The plebeian reading formation, on the other hand,
was willing, on clearly demarcated conditions, to productivelyactivate
their class enemy and even his apparently "radical" critique of the cul-
ture industry.

50. Ibid., p. 88 f.
51. Ibid., p. 117.
52. Ibid., 87.
53. Ibid., 12.
 Waite 209

If my reconstruction of two significant components of the reading

formation of Imperial Germany is valid and apposite, then the Ger-
man industrial proletariat had at its disposal in 1914 a relatively
untutored but highly differentiated, class specific, and, I believe, objec-
tive instrument to read one of its most vile and contagious ideological
antagonists. What happened in the subsequent years, however, serves
us as a most serious warning. We are alerted to the fact that the effect of
reading, say, Levenstein's anthology of workers' responses to
Nietzsche in 1914 (while the guns ofAugustwere being mobilized) and
then in 1919 (during the struggle for the Soviet Republic of Bavaria)
would have been different on different readers. And so we are further
warned today, some fifty years later, that texts and reading formations,
however important they may seem to us, are simply not enough.

ENCLITI
Vol. 7 #1
Articles on CriticalTheory, Film, Literature,Politics
and Ideology.

Mary Ann Caws Representation as Recall

Richard Klein In the Body of the
Mother
Marguerite Duras An Interview
David Bordwell Film and Textual Analysis
Revisited
Michel de Certeau The Madness of Vision
Tom Conley The Graphic Unconscious of
the Filmic Text
Robert Stam Reflexivity and
The Critiqueof Voyeurism
$4.00 Published at the University of Minnesota for the
Department of French & Italian and the Program
in Film and Media Studies
Address: 200 Folwell Hall 9 Pleasant St. S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455