ELEVEN

On Experience and Illumination:

Werner Herzog's Dialectical
Relationship with Society
Stefanie Baumann

On April 30, 1999, at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota,

Werner Herzog asserted, "There is something ultimately and deeply
wrong about the concept of what constitutes fact and what constitutes
truth in documentaries in particular."1 Even if he is usually much more
interested in images and sounds than in concepts, this one, or more pre­
cisely the constellation of the notions of fact, truthfulness, and the artistic
agency of expressing the real is for Herzog of such importance that it
would drive him to write his well-known "Minnesota Declaration." 2 De­
spite the apparent disjointedness of the text and the opaque character of
some of the aphorisms, this manifesto draws a clear dividing line be­
tween contrasting ideas of truth: on the one hand, Herzog's own concep­
tion of "poetic" or "ecstatic" truth that "can be discovered only by not
being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically correct"3; and on
the other hand, the notion of factual accuracy, the "truth of accountants"
as defended by the representatives of what Herzog calls "Cinema Vérité."4
According to Herzog, those advocates of factuality ground their concep­
tion of veracity in general (and of documentary filmmaking in particular)
in a unidimensional, flat idea of truth resulting from an allegedly unme­
diated, objective representation of reality. This approach prevents them
from perceiving the very complexity of truth: they are unable to acknowl­
edge and unfold its "deeper strata." These strata are not a matter of right
or wrong, but of particular configurations that stimulate a genuine spiri­
tual experience. While I lerzog conceives authentic truthfulness as a sub-
187
188 Chapter 11
jective encounter with something unique, factual truth is for him the
mere result of a tedious registering of superficial information. "If facts
had any value," Herzog stated in an interview with Paul Cronin, "if they
truly illuminated us, if they unquestionably stood for truth, the Manhat­
tan phone directory would be the book of books. Millions of established
and verifiable facts, but senseless and uninspiring. The important truths
remain unknown."5
Yet for Herzog, the problem of relying mainly on factual truth does
not only lie in the flatness and dullness of the result. More importantly,
the problem is that it pervades society as a whole by generating a unilat­
eral and inflexible perception of reality. This is because "[f]acts create
norms," as Herzog states in the fourth point of the "Minnesota Declara­
tion." Rather than transcending the appearance of the world in its imme­
diacy, the conventional documentaries advocated by the "accountants"
block the process of imagination by always (re)producing the same
benchmarks and fixed values. In doing so they not only shape a stan­
dardized perception of reality, but also subtly endorse a common-sensi-
cal worldview, which implicitly exhorts spectators to believe in its un­
questionable validity and behave in conformity with the norms of the
existing society. In this way, such documentary films confirm the world,
as it is, as ineluctably given. Herzog's challenging statement can thus be
understood as more than yet another pretentious self-staging by an ec­
centric artist. The problem he evokes does not concern only what is to be
considered as true and the way truth-content is to be deciphered from the
reality in question and presented on screen; rather, he also shows how
this underlying idea of truth and its application through documentary
formats is entangled with the political element of perception and its ef­
fects on society.
THE IDEOLOGICAL IMPRINT OF HEGEMONIC FACTUALITY:
HORKHEIMER AND ADORNO
Even if Herzog does not refer to any particular intellectual tradition, his
critique of the notion of factual truth and its societal impact resonates in
several ways with the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer. The two philosophers also deplore the authoritarian, nor­
mative agency of facticity, and consider the hegemonic claim for veracity
attributed to modem science by positivistic currents to be highly proble­
matic. But their critique goes much further than Herzog's affirmative
statement: they not only criticize the limitations of such truth claims, but
also thoroughly problematize the very notion of the factual. Hence, a fact
is for them not simply objective information to be registered, categorized,
or processed through scientific methods; it is neither as neutral as it
seems, nor immediately given. Quite to the contrary, the very idea of
On 1'vperience and lllnnibmllon IN*)
factual data as independent, isolated tokens, dissociated from their hl»
torical development and their actual function in society is itself an out
come of the instrumental rationality characterizing the disenchanted
world. "Modern science, as positivists understand it, refers essentially to
statements about facts, and therefore presupposes the reification of life in
general and of perception in particular," writes Horkheimer in Eclipse of
Reason. "It looks upon the world as a world of facts and things, and fails
to connect the transformation of the world into facts and things with the
social process. The concept of 'fact' is a product—a product of social
alienation; in it, the abstract object of exchange is conceived as a model
for all objects of experience in the given category."6 Just as the idea of a
detached, neutral science, working independently from the society in
which it is embedded, conceals its active role in the conservation of the
status quo, the very concept of fact reflects the principle of the division of
labor that pervades every layer of society. This is not to say that the
objective world does not exist, that factual knowledge has no value at all,
or that all knowledge is necessarily subjective and relative. Quite the
contrary. But the objective realm is neither ahistorical nor untouched by
actually existing socioeconomic relations, and becomes an ideological
presumption if it is not understood dialectically in relation to the histori­
cal developments of the very society in question.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the separation between the
objective and the subjective as two independent, autonomous spheres —
the objective being the neutral, actual real, and the subjective, the realm
of intuition, humor, opinions and individual biases —is thus to be ap­
proached critically as a reflection and continuous reproduction of the
generalized process of reification, rather than a simply accepted presup­
position of the production of knowledge. What comes to the fore is that
this division not only affects the organization of society in its totality, but
also shapes the self-understanding of its members: it relegates the subject
to the position of a passive receiver of information, a mere consumer of
knowledge. For the recognition of something as a fact presupposes an
underlying classificatory scheme through which it can be grasped and
categorized as such. Instead of actually experiencing a particular object or
situation, one is to identify it as a specific case within pre-given catego­
ries. Thus, in this logic, only what fits into the grid can be acknowledged.
Subjective experience is replaced by the operation of detecting character­
istics and classifying them into a prearranged order. "In positivism, a
historical condition of the mind is documented which no longer knows
experience and, consequently, both eradicates the indictments of experi­
ence and presents itself as its substitute—as the only legitimate form of
experience," writes Adorno. "The immanency of the system, which virtu­
ally isolates itself, neither tolerates anything qualitatively different that
might be experienced, nor does it enable the human subjects adapted to it
to gain unregimented experience. | . . . | The regimented experience pre­
190 Chapter 11
scribed by positivism nullifies experience itself and, in its intention, elim­
inates the experiencing subject.''7 This loss of the capacity to experience
exacerbated by the development of a modern, rationalized, capitalist so­
ciety, leads to what Horkheimer and Adorno call the "administered
world"8—a world, Herzog would say, of accountants. It generates indi­
viduals that subject themselves to the prevailing value-structure of soci­
ety. Leaving no space for subjective experiences of the objective world,
the idea of a detached sphere of facts appears as indubitable truth and
therefore acquires an authority that apparently can no longer be chal­
lenged.
THE ADMINISTERED SOCIETY AND ITS AGENTS: THE CULTURE
INDUSTRY
The uncritical belief in what is presented as objectively real—the neglect­
ing of the mediatedness of all things through society and its historical
becoming—is thus fully in the service of the conservation of the existing
societal order. Rather than generating awareness or appealing to critical
thinking, this type of factual, detached knowledge functions like any oth­
er commodity and thus obliterates the complexion of the object as such.
For "[t]he curiosity which transforms the world into objects is not objec­
tive," Adorno writes, "it is not concerned with what is known but with
the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as possession. This is
precisely how the objects of information are organized today. Their indif­
ferent character predestines their being and they are incapable of
transcending the abstract fact of possession through any immanent qual­
ity of their own. [... ] They may never be broadened out in any way but
like favorite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to
be rejected as false or alien. They must always be accurate but never
true."9
Furthermore, the unflinching argument of factuality comes with a
claim "to be realistic" —the "overvalued realism" (überwertiger Realis-
mus)w omnipresent in the mass media and ruling over political and posi­
tivist discourses—which tends to suppress independent, non-conformist
ideas and utopian thinking. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the idea of
factual truth indeed creates norms, and these norms pervade the whole of
society through the omnipresence of the products of the culture industry.
Whether it is in the dissemination of information in the news, the vulgar­
ization of scientific knowledge, or the normalized way through which
reality appears in feature films, television series, novels, and other prod­
ucts aimed to entertain, the "cult of fact"11 infiltrates the consciousness of
people and sustains the reigning reality principle. Instead of subverting
the status quo in the very element of perception and problematizing its
intrinsic ideological purposes, the products of the culture industry pro­
( >11 I qu'Ocihr mill lIluiHtHiillnii |W1
mote a unilateral, conventional, "culinary,"12 and uncritical re» eption
that leaves Its underlying premises untouched. By adhering to the same
logic of reification, the same principle of separating the objective from the
subjective realm, and the same conformist ethos, the different formats <>l
the culture industry converge i n a unified image of reality which stl< lei to
established forms. In sum, they constitute a harmonized representational
system of societal standards that leaves no space for singular experiences
or dissident thoughts. As Horkheimer and Adorno write in Dialectic of
Enlightenment:
Through its inherent tendency to adopt the tone of the factual report,
the culture industry makes itself the irrefutable prophet of the existing
order. With consummate skill it maneuvers between the crags of de­
monstrable misinformation and obvious truth by faithfully duplicating
appearances, the density of which blocks insight. Thus the omnipresent
and impenetrable world of appearances is set up as the ideal. Ideology
is split between the photographing of brute existence and the blatant lie
about its meaning, a lie which is not articulated directly but drummed
in by suggestion.13
The problem with the products of the culture industry, especially with
those that are based on indexical images, is that their clichéd imagery
worms its way into reality through their very appearance as immediate
Hence, these stereotyped images not only override the unicity of things
by transforming them into clichés,14 but also turn into models to follow in
a world which appears as an impenetrable, opaque, and hermetic system
Rather than inciting the individuals to rely on their own capacities, the
normalized culture industry imposes an authoritarian scheme of identifi­
cation and signification that provides patterns for every situation. Ihe
persisting antagonisms, frictions, and conflicts of reality are thereby con
cealed under an ideological veil of coherence. In this system, truth takes
on the form of neutral, apolitical facts (though easily instrumentalized for
political purposes), while everything that is connected to the subject and
its experiences is relegated to the private sphere.
This is why the dialectical philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno,
through an immanent critique of society, aims first and foremost to pene­
trate the appearance of unity in order to unfold its inner conflicts and
disclose the irrational tendencies inherent in the fully rationalized appa­
ratus. And this is also why the utmost condition of a genuine artwork is
for them its double constitution as social fact and autonomous creation:
its subversive force lies precisely in its resistance to the dominant social
order by not fitting into its systematic structure, while still being part of
it. Contrary to the products of the culture industry, which are closely tied
to the logic of capitalism and its ideology, genuine artworks only follow
the injunctions of their material, and thus constitute the outside of so» i
ety.
192 Chapter 11 On Experience and Illumination 193

It is this outside that the thinkers of the early Frankfurt School tried to most of them, he is himself the narrator, never trying to hide his strong
rescue, this other of society that does not fit into its overarching reality German accent or his characteristic voice, thus providing an explicitly
principle and its reliance on facts and identities. subjective access to the objective world. Rather than giving a neutral
account of the respective situation through an impersonal voiceover, as is
often the case in more classical documentary formats, he combines differ­
HERZOG AND THE ADMINISTERED SOCIETY
ent sorts of narrations, including factual elements, poetical meditations,
apparently anodyne details and personal impressions. In La Souffrière
Herzog's hostility toward the "accountants," his assault on the restrictive
(1977) for instance, Herzog's documentary on the "unavoidable catas­
norms and values of society and the standardization of perception
trophe" (the eruption of the eponymous volcano in Guadeloupe) forecast
through commercial formats is, as with Horkheimer and Adorno's criti­
by scientific experts and which finally did not occur, it is precisely that
cal philosophy, closely linked to the idea of recovering the possibility of
which is usually not taken into account in the report or transmitted
uniqueness and genuine experience. By emphasizing the complexity of
through the media that interests him: the calm fatalism of those who
the idea of truth—a singular, irreducible truth which is to be unfolded in
stayed despite everything, the silence reigning in a city abandoned by its
its disparate, sensuous, and intelligible dimensions rather than being
inhabitants, the beauty of the landscape and its apocalyptic, melancholic
simply registered and classified—Herzog intends to break through the
feel. And his "scientific" documentaries, such as Encounters at the End of
ideological straitjacket of conventional forms and their ascribed mean­
the World (2007) on the different research communities in Antarctica or
ings. For him too, it is precisely the other of actual society, its uncatego-
Into the Inferno (2016), which follows the volcanologist Clive Oppenheim­
rizable outside, that provides access to this truthfulness which does not
er to the volcanoes in Indonesia, Iceland, Ethiopia, and North Korea, are
fit into an objectifying schema.
more about Herzog's personal encounters with the people involved and
However, as already mentioned, Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration,"
his impressions about the cultural, social and political environment in
as with his other writings and statements, is certainly not an attempt to
which the research is set than about scientific knowledge and approved
take part in an intellectual debate. Contrary to other filmmakers of his
facts. The scientists themselves are not only shown as obsessive research­
generation, such as Alexander Kluge, who worked closely with Adorno
ers, but also as curious dreamers, admirers of science-fiction stories, or
and Horkheimer and refers explicitly to their critical theory in his theoret­
private rock stars. Instead of determining and isolating a particular phe­
ical views, Herzog neither makes recourse to theories in order to corrobo­
nomenon of research, Herzog's films mingle together a wide range of
rate his intention nor aims to seriously conceptualize his perspective.
interrelated occurrences and objects, and emphasize the imaginary di­
Rather than formulating a thorough critique, he insolently declares a
mensions they reveal. Hence, multiple dimensions are interwoven to af­
"holy war" against the standardized formats of the culture industry.15 In
fect, contradict, or divert one another and thus complexify the topics
terms of articulation, Herzog could not be further away from Horkheim­
instead of didactically explaining them. Through eclectic forms and con­
er and Adorno's subtle dialectical thinking. His choice of words often
stant deflections of the focus, Herzog subverts the hegemonic claims for
seems to confirm the impression that he would be more interested in the
truthfulness which are predominant in conventional documentary for­
self-mythologizing of his own personae as nonconformist artist and free
mats not by ignoring the factual or opposing to it a purely fantastic
spirit than in serious, critical reflection. Also, his Wagnerian idea of an
world, but by entrenching objects in the multiple constructions through
artwork, shown by his grandiose use of music and the solemn comments
which they acquire a meaning. Suspending the question of their factual
which sometimes appear in his films seem to be far from Adorno's pref­
accuracy, Herzog emphasizes instead their thought-provoking potential
erence for Schonberg's conceptual compositions, Picasso's abstract paint­
and the peculiar experiences with which they are associated. Concomi­
ings, or Beckett's minimalist theatre.
tantly, the ideas that come up reflect back on the society in which they
Nevertheless, something in Herzog's position touches upon the con­
appear. For what comes to the fore through aesthetic means is that the
cerns of the thinkers of the early Frankfurt School, and it does so much
perception of an object as factually given —as indubitable fact—is not an
more delicately through his cinema than in his public appearances or his
evident, automatic operation, but itself formed by the social, geographi­
writing. In order to challenge the "cult of facts" inherent to many main­
cal and political surrounding. What constitutes an object depends on the
stream documentary formats, he purposely amalgamates conventionally
way its perception is shaped in a particular societal context, just as this
separated realms. This is not only the case in Herzog's refusal to accept
perception depends on the historically developed constitution of the ob­
the notorious division between fiction and documentary,16 but also in the
ject. To say it with Horkheimer's words: "The facts which our senses
way he approaches factual realities in his own 'documentary' films. In
present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical
194 Chapter 11
character of the object perceived and through the historical character of
the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by
human activity."17
Herzog's films unfold, through his own subjective perspective, a
panoply of different mediations through which objects are approached
and experienced. One of these mediations is the actual process of filming,
through which those factual objects appear in their dramatic, anodyne,
strange or familiar dimensions. Rather than explaining them, this reveals
their enigmatic resistance to assimilation. Herein lies their political poten­
tial, not in their manifest content revealing a hitherto unknown truth, but
in the way they formally and topically enlace divergent sensuous and
intelligible facets and thus challenge established ways of seeing. Bringing
together aesthetic, political and social aspects of objects and situations-
dimensions that are usually kept separate in the products of the culture
industry—Herzog reconfigures the habits for viewing reality. Therefore,
he does not ignore the more conventional forms he wants to challenge
with his filmic production, but makes perceptual standards appear in
another light.
For example, his "apocryphal documentary"18 Lessons of Darkness
(1992) inherently refers to the media coverage of the First Gulf War. Her­
zog's seemingly otherworldly and completely decontextualized images,
which are embedded in a kind of mystical, dystopian narration, contrast
starkly with the indifference of the neutral reports about the mere factual
in the news, even if those are also flavored with spectacular images.
While the latter have become stereotypical representations of military
devices and distant suffering, Herzog's provocative, apocalyptic vision of
the calamity pushes his spectators to find a different approach.
Without a doubt, the images of slowly burning oil fields in Kuwait,
devastated landscapes, and strange machines and vehicles produce a cer­
tain unease when they are combined with pompous music. Their over­
bearing aesthetic quality seems to deflect attention from the political,
human and ecological catastrophe to which they bear witness.19 Yet in
Herzog's montage they are juxtaposed with other images: highly pixel­
ized media footage, disturbingly unspectacular sequences showing a col­
lection of torture instruments and short interviews with victims—again,
not sensation-seeking accounts, but dialogues through which the impos­
sibility to assimilate what happened comes to the fore. Even if those
rather discreet scenes are clearly overshadowed by the infernal views of
black smoke, huge fires and massive machinery, they are not suppressed.
Instead of explaining the incommensurable muteness of those who were
traumatized by the war, Herzog makes their voicelessness contrast stark­
ly with the overwhelming aesthetic dimension of the images in this lofty,
apocalyptic spectacle of manmade destruction. It is a spectacle so impres­
sive that some of the firefighters seem unwilling to end it as they enthu­
siastically spark the flames anew after having extinguished them.
On Experience and Illumination 195
Rather than being socio-critical in the sense of the artworks that Ador­
no calls (and condemns as) realistic or committed, that is, by transmit­
ting, explicitly or not, a particular political message,20 Herzog's films,
especially his earlier productions, express the dialectical relation between
societal norms and their inherent politics of perception on the one hand
and the subject's particular way of experiencing the surrounding world
on the other. The subversive forms he uses for that purpose are, as Eric
Ames puts it, "neither politically oriented nor politically inert."21 For
even if they do not address social and political issues frontally by directly
criticizing specific situations or taking on an activist stance, neither do
they avoid contemporary society and its inherent violence. Indeed, not­
withstanding Herzog7s extraordinary penchant for sublime landscapes,
intense soundtracks, original storylines and unique characters, the "ec­
static truth" he seeks is not the archaic variety found beyond contempo­
rary society, in a kind of authentic natural state, but a singular, illuminat­
ing moment occurring in, through, and in spite of it.22 The world he
evokes is always in one way or another marked by the historical develop­
ment of society and its numerous material and immaterial traces; it is
never an ideal, untouched, authentically natural place. Even the remote
desert in an experimental film like Fata Morgana (1971) is riddled by
strange objects and outdated machines; just as the isolated world of the
nomadic Woodabee {Herdsman of the Sun, 1989) is not devoid of the traces
of their precarious and impoverished social condition, which forces them
to find food on an enormous waste dump. Similarly, the deep Amazo­
nian jungle in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) not only bears witness to
the "overwhelming indifference of nature"23 which humans try to chal­
lenge, but also to the colonial exploitation of the forest and the indige­
nous population.
A pure, natural state devoid of societal contamination cannot be
found in any of Herzog's films. The mediatedness of nature and culture,
of human civilization and the environment in which it is settled, as well
as that between individual life and societal domination, is always
present. At the same time, characters do not lose their singularity, nor is
the beauty of the landscapes diminished. They are both unique and prod­
ucts of a historically developed society.
OBSTINATE OTHERNESS: HERZOG'S CHARACTERS
Rather than homogenizing the storyline, the setting, the characters, and
the editing according to a logic which subordinates the details to a pre-
established idea, Herzog's films keep the antagonisms and frictions of
reality alive. Hence, Fitzcarraldo's charming but quixotic vision of carry­
ing a steamboat over a mountain in order to build an opera house in the
middle of the Amazonian jungle relates both to his personal failure in the
196 Chapter 11
capitalist world and his refusal of its values on the one hand, and his own
exploitation of the indigenous population for the sake of his vision on the
other (Fitzcarraldo, 1982). The same is true for Reinhold Messner's risky
ascent of two summits in the Gasherbrum massif without returning to the
base camp (The Dark Glow of the Mountain, 1984). Herzog shows him as a
fascinating, determined, and at the same time humble and very human
mountain climber; he appears as both a hero who does not surrender in
the face of danger and as an obsessive outsider constantly in a "conquest
of the useless" who describes himself as probably mentally disturbed.
Herzog's film provides stunning, contemplative images of the mountain
landscape, while not concealing Messner's dependence on the numerous
porters carrying his heavy equipment and supplies. The film shows them
both as a nameless, hard-working crowd and as a community with par­
ticular rituals and beliefs that remain hermetic to Messner and his part­
ner, even if the two mountain climbers treat them respectfully. Their
presence in the film suggests that the condition of possibility of Messner's
particular adventure, of his own escape from the utilitarian values of
society, is precisely the generalized context of exploitation of late capital­
ism. This connection between the singular way of being of his protago­
nists and the socio-political context transpires in many of Herzog's films
in one way or the other. The exceptional individual is always mediated
by the historically developed society, just as the latter is challenged by
the personal experiences of the unique characters. Rather than providing
escapist visions of authenticity, they are constellations of the complex
nexus of society.
The uniqueness and complexity of many of Herzog's characters and
settings is indubitably one of the most distinctive marks of his films.
Because they are excessively stubborn, audacious, unworldly, or eccen­
tric, or because they are handicapped, nonconformists or "beings inca­
pable of being used,"24 as Deleuze puts it, or simply because they take
their dreams more seriously than the reality principle would allow, the
protagonists in Herzog's films are all, in one way or another, outsiders
who reflect on society from its margins. Nevertheless, it is not the proble­
matic situation of exclusion as such that is at the center of the films.
Instead of considering his characters through the lens of society, its con­
ventions and virtues, he shifts the focus to their own singular way of
being and experiencing. For Herzog avoids presenting his characters as
nasty criminals, eternal victims, or as symptoms of decadence. He does
not idealize or romanticize them either. Rather, far from appearing as
innocent, pure, or heroic protagonists, they bear a peculiar awkwardness,
vehemence and unwieldiness, all of which makes it difficult to identify
with them. They simply do not signify anything other than themselves,
while their singularity remains all the same closely related to the society
from which they emerge. Irreducible to types, they elude categorization,
thwart identitarian attributions and thus frustrate conventional expecta­
On Experience and Illumination 197
tions. As Thomas Elsaesser puts it: "Subjectivity in Herzog is in fact noth­
ing other than the effect of a resistance to signification."25 Or, to say it
with Timothy Corrigan's words, "[i]n a world where vision and sensibil­
ity have been corrupted by status-quo notions of truth, Herzog's outcasts
are entirely inaccessible to the prejudices of society."26
This is particularly visible in his version of the Kaspar Hauser story
(The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974). Brought up in a kind of cellar without
any direct contact with society, Kaspar Hauser is unable even to walk
when he is finally taken to the village. None of the cultural codes are
familiar to him: he is the outsider par excellence, and will always remain a
stranger to society despite the numerous efforts to integrate him. This is
palpable in the reactions of others: his thinking appears naïve and incor­
rect to the "cultivated community," as most prominently shown in the
scene in which a logician tests his i ntellectual capacities. The cl erics inter­
pret his lack of faith in God as an immature affront against authority, and
his dreams and stories remain mysterious to those he tells them to. But it
is also manifest in his own physical and mental state. Until the end of the
film, Kaspar Hauser talks in a very peculiar and broken way, using his
own idiosyncratic grammar and odd way of articulating perceptions and
ideas.27 When he addresses his fellow humans, he does so in a particular­
ly blunt but inoffensive manner and rarely looks them in the eye. Howev­
er, while to a certain extent he resists assimilation, he does not rebel
against the conventions he is forced into: he neither protests when con­
fined to the local prison, nor when exhibited as an exotic object of curios­
ity among other "abnormal" people, nor when introduced into the aristo­
cratic high society which wants to adorn itself with his celebrity as poor
child of nature. However, he never fully satisfies the expectations of
those who induct him into social life, where he continues to express a
certain uneasiness. Hence, his singularity resists not only assimilation,
but also his subjection to the projections of others. He neither fits into the
scheme of the savage good-for-nothing—he is too harmless and too curi­
ous an object of humanistic ambitions—nor into that of the "greatest
mystery" of all as he is presented at the fair. His aspect and attitude are
not really spectacular enough. As for the idea of him incorporating a sort
of untouched purity, this also seems inappropriate, as his behavior is too
rough to conform to the bourgeois idea of innocence. What comes to the
fore through Kaspar Hauser's irreducible, obstinate otherness are the
multiple forms of social violence inherent in the futile attempts to trans­
form him according to a predetermined idea of what he should be and
should represent. Ironically, it is after his death that society triumphs
after all: his autopsy actually reveals certain anatomical anomalies, which
allegedly allow for the assessment of his unique condition according to
scientific knowledge and the subsumption of his case under its catego­
ries. It is this constellation of enlightened society in the nineteenth centu­
ry, itselt divided into different social classes and representatives of the
198 Chapter 11
diverse fields of competence, and the exotic outsider who remains enig­
matic despite the good (or bad) will of those who try to facilitate his
integration, that expresses a certain truth content of the film. It is a truth
that cannot be grasped through rational categories alone, but one that
manifests itself through the subversive aesthetic experience of the film.
For this truth does not reveal itself in terms of the language of society: it
transcends the latter's hegemony by alluding to a potential other and
hinting at a different perceptible register of meaning. Through this truth
transpires the fact that the exoticism of the one is dialectically related to
the normality of the others, or, as Alan Singer puts it, "however exotic the
look of the films, they always return us to the knowledge that such other­
worldly exoticism is no less a product of culture than the cultural norms
it belies."28
Rather than promoting imaginary and fantastic worlds in which genu­
ine authenticity would be possible, Herzog's films unfold the challenging
potential of singularity in the very core of society. The "new images" he
provides reconfigure the factual and social world without reconciling its
inherent antagonisms or obstructing the heterogeneous mediations
through which meaning is distilled. Herein is revealed the images' uto­
pian potential, which does not lie in a polit ical message, nor in t he collec­
tion of data contradicting established facts, nor in escapist visions of un­
touched nature, but in the subversive force of Herzog's constellations.
ENDNOTES
1. Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (Minneapo­
lis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1.
2. Accessible on Werner Herzog's website (https://www.wemerherzog.com/
complete-works-text.html), accessed on November 9,2018.
3. Paul Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul
Cronin ((New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 288-289.
4. As Eric Ames notes, Herzog is referring to American observational cinema rath­
er than to Jean Rouch's experimental approach to documentary film which he highly
appreciates (see Ames, Ferocious Reality, p. 9). See also Paul Cronin's discussion of
Herzog's use of the term in Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, XXXI-
XXXIII.
5. Cronin, Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed, 288.
6. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 2004), 56.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, "Introduction" in T. W. Adorno, et al.. The Positivist Dis­
pute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 57-
58.
8. Horkheimer and Adorno introduced the term "administered world" in a radio
debate with Eugen Kogon under the title "Die verwaltete Welt oder: Die Krise des
Individuums." published in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 13: Nachgelas-
sene Schriften 1949-1972, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer
Verlag, 1989), 122-42.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture" in ed. J. M. Bernstein, The
Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 61-
98,85-86.
On Experience and Illumination 199
10. See Theodor W. Adorno, "Erziehung-Wozu?," Theodor W. Adorno. Erziehung zur
Milndigkeit, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 105-19 (trans­
lation by the author)
11. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophi­
cal Fragments (1947), ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002), 119.
12. The expression stems from Bertolt Brecht.
13. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of enlightenment, 118.
14. As Adorno writes in "Culture Industry Reconsidered": "The colour film demol­
ishes the genial old tavern to a greater extent than bombs ever could: the film extermi­
nates its imago. No homeland can survive being processed by the films which cele­
brate it, and which thereby turn the unique character on which it thrives into an
interchangeable sameness." The Culture I ndustry. Selected essays on mass culture, ed. J.
M. Bernstein, 98-106,103.
15. In Les Blank's short documentary film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), Her­
zog states: "If you switch on television, it's just ridiculous and it's distractive. It kills
us, and talk shows will kill us. They'll kill our language. So we have to declare holy
war against what we see every single day on television, commercials. I think there
should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against
Bonanza and Rawhide."
16. Herzog explicitly declares: "The line between fiction and documentary doesn't
exist for me. All my films, every one of them, take facts, characters and stories and
play with them in the same way. I consider Fitzcarraldo to be my best documentary
and Little Dieter Needs to Fly my best feature. They are both highly stylized and full of
imagination" (in Cronin: Werner Herzog. A Guide for the Perplexed, 289).
17. Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," in Critical Theory: Selected
Essays, trans. Matthew O'Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 188-251,200.
18. Ames, Ferocious Reality, 66.
19. Regarding Herzog's connection of pompous music with sublime images in Les­
sons of Darkness, see Matthew Gandy, "The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo­
Romanticism and the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking," in Brad Prager ed., A
Companion to Werner Herzog (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 528-546.
20. Committed art, as Adorno understands it, aims to denounce political issues
through artistic means, and thus uses the artwork for transmitting a political or ideo­
logical message. By committing to a specific cause, those artworks adopt the very logic
of the society they aim to criticize rather than resisting to it through their own consti­
tution. For instrumentality is that which vitiates the reality that die artwork seeks to
resist. For Adorno, a genuine artwork acquires its importance as such when it is not
reduceable to a manifest meaning, because the way in which its form and content
interrelate is necessarily fundamentally different from discursive logic. See Theodor
W. Adorno, "Commitment" in New Left Review 87-88 (September/December 1974): 75-
89.
21. Ames, Ferocious Reality, 151.
22. Contrary to interpretations that view Herzog's films as an expression of the
Heideggerian concept of authenticity (see for instance Brigitte Peuckert, "Herzog and
Auteurism: Performing Authenticity," in Brad Prager ed., A C ompanion to Werner Her­
zog (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 35-57), I consider his films to constantly mediate
singularity through the historically developed society and vice versa.
23. Herzog repeatedly uses this expression, e.g. in Les Blank's documentary "The
Burden of Dreams" (1982) about the filming of Fitzcarraldo and in his own film Grizzly
Man (2005).
24. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 184.
25. Thomas Elsaesser, "An Anthropologist's Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream," in
Timothy Corrigan ed., The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (London:
Routledge, 2014), 133-56, 144.
200 Chapter 1 1 On Experience and Illumination 201

26. Timothy Corrigan, New German Film:. The Displaced Image, Revised and extended Singer, Alan. 2014. "Comprehending Appearances: Wemer Herzog's Ironic Sublime
edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 131. The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed)
27. According to Timothy Corrigan, Kaspar Hauser's idiosyncratic way of speaking London: Routledge.
reflects his particular way of experiencing his environment. While societal language
restricts his sensuous access to the world by subjecting it to established codes, his
peculiar expressions open up a possibility for recovering his experience: "Trans­
formed into a kind of poetry to match his perception, language can act as a liaison
between Kaspar and the natural world and hence a means of reestablishing the con­
nection that language originally deprived him of." In New German Film: The Displaced
Image, Revised and extended edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994),
136.
28. Alan Singer, "Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog's Ironic Sublime,"
in Timothy Corrigan ed.. The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (Lon­
don: Routledge, 2014), 183-205,197.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. 1974. "Commitment." New Left Review 87-88 (September/Decem-

ber 1974): 75-89.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2001. "Culture Industry Reconsidered." In The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture. J. M. Bernstein (ed). London: Routledge Classics.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1971. "Erziehung-Wozu?" Theodor W. Adorno: Erziehung zur
Miindigkeit. Gerd Kadelbach (ed). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1976. "Introduction." The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology,
trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2001b. "The Schema of Mass Culture." In The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge Clas­
sics.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophi­
cal Fragments. G. S. Noerr (ed). E. Jephcott (trans). Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Ames, Eric. 2012. Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapo­
lis: University of Minnesota Press.
Corrigan, Timothy. 1994. New German Film: The Displaced Image. Revised and extended
edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cronin, Paul. 2014. Werner Herzog A Guide for the Perplexed: Conv ersations with Paul
Cronin. New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Hab-
berjam (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2014. "An Anthropologist's Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream." The
Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. Timothy Corrigan (ed). London:
Routledge.
Gandy, Matthew. 2012. "The Melancholy Observer: Landscape, Neo-Romanticism and
the Politics of Documentary Filmmaking." A Companion to Werner Herzog. Brad
Prager (ed). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Horkheimer, Max. 2004. Eclipse of Reason. London: Continuum.
Horkheimer, Max. 2002. "Traditional and Critical Theory." Critical Theory: Selected
Essays, Matthew O'Connell (trans). New York: Continuum.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1989. "Die verwaltete Welt oder: Die Krise
des Individuums." Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 13: Nachgelassene Schriften 1949-1972.
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.
Peucker, Brigitte. 2012. "Herzog and Auteurism: Performing Authenticity." In A Com­
panion to Werner Herzog. Brad Prager (ed). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.