Introduction: Wolfgang Iser's Aesthetic Politics: Reading as Fieldwork

Author(s): John Paul Riquelme

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,
2000), pp. 7-12
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 Introduction:

Wolfgang Iser's Aesthetic Politics:

Reading as Fieldwork

John Paul Riquelme

The wet center is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney, "Bogland"1

The engaging complexity of Iser's work arises from

Wolfgang
many
converging elements
but primarily from his continuing
attempts to identify and explore terra incognita that turns out
always to be the terra infirma on which we tread. Like Seamus Heaney,
when Iser digs with his pen he excavates territory that has no bottom.
His writings consistently and insistently expose and describe doubled,
antithetical of cultural as contribute to a
aspects production they process
of continual emergence. in culture, Iser
By evoking creativity's place
provides compelling evidence concerning the role of the aesthetic in
human Several crucial issues arise from Iser's commitment
experience.
to our creative involvement with literature and with other elements of
culture. They include especially the question of the political views that
stand behind and within his theorizing and the question of his theory's
relation to literary modernism as both a source and an
shaping object of
The two are not
commentary. questions entirely separable, considering
the frequent charge that the politics of literary modernism is reaction
ary. The and of Iser's
democratizing aspects implications writings
suggest that his aesthetic politics cannot easily be dismissed along with
the modernist texts to which it
responds.
Nowhere is Iser's on continual clearer than in
emphasis emergence
his attitude toward literary texts as cultural artifacts in which we
what we are not and what we be. For Iser the act of
recognize might
reading involves our that we are not what we mistakenly think
realizing
ourselves to be and that, as a we become
consequence, may something
we never Iser gradually develops this attitude in his
imagined possible.
essays and books in English concerned with reading: "Indeterminacy
and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," The Implied Reader, and The
Act of Reading.2 The process of continual emergence is equally clear in

Neto Literary History, 2000, 31: 7-12

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8 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Iser's latest book, The Range of Interpretation (forthcoming 2000). WTiile

he provides a of virtually a table of
typology interpretation, periodic
kinds of interpretation, Iser describes the interpretive act as a form of
translation in which what is basic and unavailable to us becomes "a
productive mapping of ever new territories." The interpretive mapping
is related to literature because it is a form of "figuration" that "equally
assembles and dismantles territories." These territories are not firm
Like is to be understood as
ground. reading, interpretation perform
ance rather than explication; instead of the unearthing of some buried
object, interpretation is the process of digging itself. Both reading and
involve the of a liminal, or in-between,
interpretation negotiating space

by means of activities that avoid "colonization," the ideological superim

of meanings on human experience. Emergence is the "hallmark"
posing
of which Iser as acts of
interpretation, presents world-making.3
In his move from and criticism to the
reader-response theory charting
of a literary anthropology, Iser has maintained his focus on creative
production, which he eventually presents as an imperative within
culture. To an alternative to the historical materialist's
provide emphasis
on labor and struggle in human history, Iser explores the concepts of
and as defining elements in human experience that enable
play staging
the writing of the history of the future as something new. In sketching
the ways in which the unexpected and unprecedented can emerge, Iser
from literature as a base. His phenomenological writings about
begins
the mental processing of literary texts, which had a strong influence on
Anglo-American literary theory and criticism in the 1970s and 1980s,
established an affective model of aesthetic response that stressed the
reader's For Iser, the act of is not an act of understand
activity. reading

ing something contained and given in advance by the text; instead, it

a new and mental out of textual elements.
generates perspective object
But his description of reading left room for being misunderstood as
to individual readers and to literature in a narrow
pertaining primarily
Iser's interest was instead the of in culture.
way. larger place creativity
This interest, which was implicit in Iser's writings concerned with
became in some of the essays collected in Prospecting:
reading, explicit
From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology and, most emphatically, in
The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology.4 Iser attempts
to construct a bridge from literature to culture as the context of the
whole that includes literature when he articulates the concept of staging
to evoke the recursive embodiments that literature enables. As Eric Gans
points out, with its link to ritual, staging is an anthropological category.
By means of it Iser is able to present literature as part of the fieldwork we
are able to carry out on ourselves. This fieldwork can proceed when we
discover ourselves in the position of being in-between. We can explore

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 INTRODUCTION 9

this liminal space in our encounters with art when our role approaches
that of the actor as an element in an aesthetic in
activating experience
which we become what we are not. As Oscar Wilde
says in one of the
epigrams from the opening of The Picture ofDorian Gray, "From thepoint of
view offeeling, the actors craft is the type" of all the arts.
Iser's development of the in-between as a central concept, which
Winfried Fluck mentions prominently in "The Search for Distance,"
creates a resemblance to other theorists, some of
post-structuralist
a
whom give the concept sharply political coloration.5 On the surface,
however, Iser seems not to be readily comparable to theorists and critics
who aims. He does not invite the
overtly express political comparison.
The degree to which Iser's aesthetics is an aesthetic politics that is
anticolonial in character or else an aesthetics distanced
intentionally
from politics has yet to be settled. Paul Armstrong's "The Politics of Play"
outlines an implicit political vision in Iser's aesthetics, one reminiscent
of Karl Mannheim's description of democratization in "The Democrati
zation of Culture."6 Although Iser does not write directly about social
relations, he uses a vocabulary that Mannheim would accept to describe
his on the character of as a "'democ
position processual representation

ratizing'" (FI 289) of the concept of mimesis. In Mannheim's essay,

written in 1933 just after Hitler came to power, he argues for the
character of understood as a
permanently revolutionary democracy,
system whose defining and sustaining element is the democratizing
process. That is a process in which horizontal and vertical elements have
become mutually implicating and mutually defining. In Mannheim's
of democratization, so
post-Enlightenment, postromantic conception
cial machinery that is maximally emancipatory, both over time and at
any given historical moment, comes into being in a sustainable way only
in a permanently revolutionary situation. That situation is one in which
a manner
groups negotiate for power in that continuously brings new
leadership into positions for influencing or making choices for the
community. The political process that Mannheim advocates in response
to fascism admits and institutionalizes the need for perpetual instability
in order to make freedom possible. Without uncertainty, or what Iser
calls indeterminacy, is no freedom. Mannheim's political process is a
democratized version of idea of revolution," which
Trotsky's "permanent
mentions in his essay when he that
Murray Krieger suggests "permanent
carnival" is in art. Carnival, Mannheim's democratization, and
possible
of Iser's all involve a continual,
Armstrong's conception politics unpre
dictable shifting of positions within the structure of power relations.
Iser's anti-hierarchical views are evident when he describes the liminal
space in chapter 6 of The Range of Interpretation as a vortex (a term with a
in modernist that names the into
history aesthetics) coming being of

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10 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

tangled hierarchies, a phrase Iser takes from Douglas Hofstadter.7 One of

the passages that Iser quotes from Hofstadter can be read as an
allegory
of the possibility of achieving democratization when Hofstadter presents
emergent phenomena in relation to "an interaction between levels in
which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and
influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the
bottom level" (709).
Our sense of the political and ethical dimension of Iser's aesthetics
can vary on whether we situate his in the
depending writings primarily
context of the English-speaking audience for his work or in the
historical context from which it emerged, a context that includes the
rise of fascism in Europe and the Nazi genocide. Gabriele Schwab argues
in her essay that Iser's work responds to the Holocaust in striking ways
while Winfried Fluck in his essay historicizes Iser's overt separating of
the aesthetic from the political by explaining the situation of intellectu
als in Germany immediately after World War II. These contributions
respond to the question of Iser's politics by bringing to the fore how
deeply his are motivated by political and ethical considerations,
writings
ones that take a stand totalitarianism and
against against prejudicial
thinking In these essays, it begins to become
and behavior. clear just how
strongly Iser's intellectual orientation was affected by growing up and
living in a divided and divisive society, first in Nazi Germany and then in
a Germany that had been partitioned. His writings can be read in one
as to a destructive and self-destructive cultural situation. It
way responses
isworth remarking that in The Range of Interpretation the placement and
the vigor of Iser's commentary on Franz Rosenzweig gives this important
Jewish thinker's work a crucial role in the book's history of interpreta
tion. Rosenzweig's The Star ofRedemption is the climax of that history. The
choice of a whose works are
Rosenzweig, philosopher largely neglected

by comparison those of Heidegger,

with is an antifascist act, though Iser
does not characterize it in that way. Iser provided in his work on reading
an alternative to formalist and to Marxist to literature. In his
approaches
later about and he an alterna
writing creativity interpretation, provides
tive to humanistic thinking influenced by Heidegger.
The writings of a European intellectual shaped by the historical
circumstances surrounding World War II, writings that also draw heavily
on a wide range of continental philosophical sources, will likely be read
in unexpected, sometimes wrongheaded ways and used for unintended
purposes by readers educated and formed by other social and intellec
tual circumstances. Part of the difficulty that remains for English
speaking readers of Iser is to understand the intellectual context in
which the work originated by contrast with the context into which it has
been translated. There is a obstacle for some readers to overcome,
large
for example, in Iser's phenomenological attitude toward mind, which is

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 INTRODUCTION 11

not compatible with ego-psychology. In "Restaging the Reception of

Iser's Early Work," Brook Thomas sketches some of the misreadings of
Iser's first influential writings in English by British and American
theorists. In the process, he clarifies Iser's commitment to the aesthetic,
as does Murray Krieger in "The 'Imaginary' and Its Enemies." Krieger
brings to the fore more recent intellectual politics on this side of the
Atlantic, in relation to which he sees Iser as a persuasive defender of the
aesthetic. Like Gabriel Motzkin's "Iser and the Philosophers," Krieger's
essay also contributes to our understanding of the philosophical tradi
tions to which Iser's work needs to be compared.
But Iser's speculations about the role of imagination in humankind's
continual self-fashioning derive not only or from
primarily philosophi
cal thinking. His sources are also the literature to which he responds.
Although Iser's range of literary reference is extensive, central to it are
writings by literary modernists. In "The Four Sides of Reading," besides
distinguishing Iser from other theorists of reading, Bianca Theisen
out the resonance between elements of recursive observation in
brings
Iser's theory and Rilke 's The Notebooks ofMalte Laurids Brigge.
When Iser himself writes about modernist literature, however, he
writes not about German texts but primarily about Irish works, those of
Joyce and Beckett. Several of the essays, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's,
Gabriele Schwab's, and my own, begin exploring how important Beckett's
writings are not just as the object of Iser's analysis but as a motivating
force in his theorizing. Itmay be the case that all humanistic theory that
has cogent implications for understanding art shares a figurative and
conceptual territory with some of the seminal literature of its time. In
the writings of Iser on Beckett, we have a theorist shaped by an internally
divided society producing works in one language that he participates in
translating into another; in producing those works, he responds to the
writings of an Irish author shaped by an internally divided society, an
author who wrote in one language and then translated himself into
another. Although this convergence of internal division, repetition, and
translation as a of remains to be its outline
process emergence mapped,
suggests that Wolfgang Iser and Samuel Beckett dug in the same
bogland, a special field that is not solid In the future, Iser may
ground.
well be recognized as the Beckett of contemporary humanistic theory.

Boston University

NOTES

1 Seamus Heaney, "Bogland," Door into theDark (1969; London, 1990), p. 56.
2 Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" (1971),
repr. in Prospecting: From Reader Response toLiterary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 3-30;
The Implied Reader: Patterns Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore,

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 12 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

1974); The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978). All of these texts
were written in German and then translated into English with Iser's active
originally
They as: Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als
participation. appeared originally
Wirkungsbedingung literarisher Prosa (Constance, 1970); Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen
des Romans von bis Beckett (Munich, 1972); Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ?esthetischer
Bunyan
Wirkung (Munich, 1976). Increasingly, the English versions differed from their German

counterparts. Iser added as the final item in the English version of Der implizite Leser an

essay that appeared in English in New Literary History 3 (1972) before its publication in
German, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological an of The
Approach," anticipation
Act of Reading. While preparing his texts for an English audience, Iser provided equivalents
in the receiving language that amount at times to reformulations for a different audience
of aspects of the German texts, in comparison to which the English texts cannot be said to
be the same. The process bears comparison to Beckett's participation in the translation of
his own works from French into English. A bibliography by Eddie Yeghiayan of writings by
and about Iser is available online at <http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/iser/index
.htmlx
3 from The Range of Interpretation come from chapter of
My citations 6, "Configurations
Interpretation: An Epilogue," and from the overview of that chapter contained in the
"Preface." Page references are not possible, since, as Iwrite this, the book has not yet been
published by the publisher, Columbia University Press.
4 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,
1989), and The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1993);
hereafter cited in text as FI.
5 The of the in-between in their writings raises the possibility of linking
centrality
elements of Iser's and the work of Homi Bhabha, whose commentaries on
theorizing
It may, in fact, be that
postcolonial matters differ in obvious regards from Iser's writings.
Bhabha's and Iser's understanding and description of modernity's character overlap in

ways. Distinctions do need to be drawn, but considering the similarities in their

significant
at times, the shared concept of the in-between, and a shared antimimetic
terminology
attitude, the distinctions may not be absolute and may not provide the whole story, which
remains to be told convincingly. If there is a clear similarity between theories that appear
to stand in such opposition, their difference becomes more difficult to parse and the

project of formulating itmore urgent. In "Location and Home in Beckett, Bhabha, Fanon,
and Heidegger" {Centennial Review 42 [Fall 1998], 541-68), I explore briefly the shared
antimimetic attitude of Bhabha and Iser and their common use of terms,
including hybrid,
mimicry, and bridging, to evoke the in-between. I suggest there that both take positions that
are in character"
"largely modernist (546-47).
6 "The Democratization of Culture," in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New
York, 1971 ), pp. 271-346; in Essays on the Sociology of Culture (New York,
originally published
1956), pp. 171-246. In his editor's introduction (p. lxxxviii), Kurt Wolff claims that the
of "Die Demokratisierung des Geistes" has never been made
original German manuscript
translated it and other for
available by the scholars who previously unpublished essays
on the Sociology of Culture.
Essays
7 Douglas R. Hofstadter, G?del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1980; New York,
1983), p. 684; hereafter cited in text.

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