Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century

TLDR: The authors traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.

Abstract: The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung ). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.

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Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century
Pieter Vermeulen
Ortwin de Graef
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume
10, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 241-250 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/pan.2012.0026
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by K.U. Leuven at 07/09/12 1:46PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pan/summary/v010/10.2.vermeulen.html

Forum: Bildung and the State
Guest Editors: Pieter Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef
Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century
Pieter Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef
Stockholm University and University of Leuven
1. Nation and Narration Once More
In the last few decades, the study of the relations between literary forms and
political formations has gured prominently on research agendas in the humani-
ties. These investigations focus almost exclusively on the quintessentially mod-
ern form of community: the nation. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, the nation conjures up the simultaneously rousing and soothing image
of a human collective connected by common descent, language, and history. The
nation claims to ground the contingency of contiguity in the biological fact of
commonality, and to contain the experience of historical change in the observa-
tion of natural continuity. The key insight propelling research into the relation
between the nation and literature is that literature not merely celebrates this con-
tinuity but actively constructs, invents, and imagines it.
The titles of two agenda-setting books published in 1983, both of which have
survived as powerful intellectual idioms, capture the extent of this construction
work. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, his study of the emergence
and consolidation of the nation as the dominant modern form of community,
underlines that emerging technologies such as the newspaper and the novel pro-
vided the means “for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the
nation” (25). They make it possible for their audiences to apprehend their si-
multaneity with people whom they will never meet face-to-face, and to think of
that simultaneity as a condition for co-belonging to the same nation, “conceived
as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (26). The title of
the second book fullls the need to add an imagining of historical continuity to
this apprehension of co-belonging and simultaneity: in their introduction to The
Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger note that practices
that seem historically established and self-evident in fact use “ancient materials
Partial answers 10/2: 241–250 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes,” one
of those purposes being the consolidation of a sense of shared nationality (6).
Invented traditions, they write, “seek to inculcate certain values and norms of
behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past,”
and more specically with “a suitable historical past” (1).
There are at least two reasons why literature has historically played a privi-
leged role in the imagining of community and historical continuity: rst, and triv-
ially, its ability to target the affects, anxieties, and desires of its readership, which
is a vital asset in the project of inculcating values and norms and in transcribing
readers into citizens; second, and almost equally trivially, literature almost al-
ways takes a narrative form, and the narrative concatenation of multiple events
is an obvious way of forging a connection between the present and a suitable
historical past, and of convincingly conveying the natural necessity — rather
than the historical contingency — of that connection. Narrative, that is, helps the
citizens of the nation to recognize the past events to which it connects them as
the historical roots that bind them together. The nation relies on a narrative that
aims to dissemble its reliance on the human, and always to some extent arbitrary,
performance of narration and to pass itself off as a natural growth to which nar-
rative deferentially refers. This is how Etienne Balibar, in his seminal analysis of
the nation form, renders the nation’s reliance on ctions of continuity:
The history of nations . . . is always already presented to us in the form
of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject.
The formation of the nation thus appears as the fullment of a “project”
stretching over centuries, in which there are different stages and moments
of coming to self-awareness [which] all t into an identical pattern: that of
the self-manifestation of the national personality. (86)
Balibar makes clear that the imagining of the nation requires a particular ction
of continuity, in two respects. First, the nation posits itself as the fulllment of a
project, and as such it functions as the last stage of a purposive scheme, even if
this sense of direction is merely “a retrospective illusion” (86). And second, what
the nation realizes is nothing but itself: it is a process of “self-manifestation,”
in which what is retrospectively revealed to have been a potential community
actualizes itself as a historical formation. Thus the well-known story: through
narratives that naturalize patterns of self-regulation and purposive development,
the nation legitimizes itself as a natural fact rather than an unnatural imposition.
It has been the job of much literary criticism in the last few decades to worry
about this displacement.
2. Bildung and the State: The Interface
In the eld of literary studies, this unavoidable moment of disavowal — vari-
ously named “aestheticization,” “aesthetic ideology,” or simply “ideology” —

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has become an important target of critique. The present forum contributes to this
research program by exploring the interface of two notions deeply implicated
in the articulation of nation and narration in the long nineteenth century; yet
because they do not exactly correspond to the two terms of that fateful meeting
— terms that, in their turn, as we saw, never perfectly map onto one another — a
critical investigation of this imperfect overlap turns these notions into powerful
tools for a novel interrogation of the interface of modern political and literary
history.
The rst of these terms is the notoriously untranslatable notion of Bildung (in
English, “formation” and “cultivation” probably come closest, though it is worth
recalling that Matthew Arnold transcribed it as “culture”). Around the turn of
the eighteenth century, discourses of Bildung, which had been circulating in the
life sciences since the middle of the century when the term had begun to com-
plicate (without fully abandoning) its religious provenance (Kontje 7–9), began
to migrate between the domains of, most notably, the life sciences, aesthetics,
pedagogy, and cultural philosophy. The notion of Bildung conjures tropes of or-
ganic ourishing — patterns of development that actualize their own potential
in a self-regulating process. Such movements of ontogenetic and phylogenetic
self-actualization only depend on foreign input to the extent that this input fur-
nishes opportunities for recognizing and appropriating previously unrecognized
dimensions of reality as, in the last analysis, one’s own. Apart from presenting a
denite sense of direction and an assured sense of self-regulation, the main sell-
ing point of Bildung is that it offers a developmental pattern in which increased
self-reexivity does not come at the expense of self-identity; instead of leading
to abysmal alienation, moments of reexivity are continuously naturalized as part
of a plan of self-actualization. In an authoritative exposition of the concept, Hans-
Georg Gadamer notes that “[i]n Bildung . . . that by which and through which one
is formed becomes completely one’s own . . . in acquired Bildung nothing disap-
pears, but everything is preserved” (qt. Redeld 1996: 47). The appeal of Bildung
is that it provides the outlines of a process — that is, a narrative pattern — that
consists in the “fusion of process, telos, and self-presentation” (48).
The combination of orientation and self-manifestation explains the ourish-
ing of the narrative schema of Bildung at a historical threshold where order and
direction were no longer self-evidently provided by a divine transcendence — a
threshold that also saw the rise of the nation form as a compensatory frame
of reference (Anderson 9–12). The idea of Bildung makes it possible to derive
norm and necessity from developmental processes themselves, without recourse
to a divine instigator of such processes. It furnishes a systemic rather than an
intentional model of rationality; it conveys “a type of purposive causality that
outstrips mere artice” (Cheah 48). The magic of Bildung is that it transforms
the “inventory of discrete, dissimilar, and ephemeral objects and interests” that
we call the world into a totality reecting “an order and goal-directedness that
positively transcends human intelligence” (Pfau 2010: 581). By providing a pat-

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tern to present the development of the modern subject or the modern nation as a
continuous campaign, it couches the foundational (symbolic as well as histori-
cal) violence of the modern nation-state in patterns of organic growth, and thus
allows it to misrecognize its own contingency.
We propose that one name for the limit of this naturalization of the political
ction of the nation-state is, surprisingly perhaps, “the state.” Even if Romantic
nationalists like Fichte, Herder, and Humboldt worked hard to theorize the state
as just one more stage in a process of Bildung to which it naturally belonged,
and to embed it “within the warm embrace of vernacular language and litera-
ture” (Hart and Hansen 505), the intellectual afterlife of this project has failed
to cement the wishful linkage of nation and state. While this afterlife has quite
consistently reserved the name of the nation for the ction of a people unied
by birth, customs, or language, it has used the name of the state to acknowledge
the reality of less comforting aspects of social and politica life: in Nietzsche’s
(Zarathustra’s) unforgettable phrase, the modern state is “the coldest of cold
monsters” — cold enough, at the very least, to withstand the warmth of national
custom and habit; for Nietzsche, the state signals “the death of peoples” (34).
The state in nation-state, that is, serves as a reminder of the difference between
“‘spontaneous’ and ‘concrete’ bonds” on the one hand (the things we normally
attribute to the nation or to civil society), and the reality of “an outside coercion”
on the other (Moretti 53). More often than not, the state represents “a ‘mechani-
cal’ and ‘abstract’ form of social cohesion, intrinsically remote and foreign to
the countless articulations of everyday life” (53). The dysphoric affect that the
signier “state” tends to evoke pries open the things that discourses of Bildung
so self-evidently seem to link.
As is well known, antistatism has become a widespread critical disposition
across the political spectrum in the last two centuries. Yet even in the early nine-
teenth century, the state gured only as a necessary evil in theories of Bildung:
“[i]n the ideology of Bildung descended from Humboldt, the state fundamen-
tally remains a necessary transitional arrangement dedicated to its own dissolu-
tion once the universal Bildung of all is achieved in a second innocence saving
humankind from the alienations of artice” (de Graef and Gilleir 7). The state is
always only a means to an end, a dispensation that is difcult enough to accom-
modate for an ideology that thrives on the ultimate indistinguishability of means
and ends in a continuous process of auto-generation. The state does not readily
lend itself to the patterns and the rhythms of Bildung. Indeed, as Ian Baucom has
remarked, it seems to resist narrativization altogether: while “we are accustomed
to thinking of the nation, and to posing questions regarding the relation between
literature and nation, in temporal terms,” the state “has yielded a thinner gram-
mar of time, in signicant part because it has seemed to succeed in putting the
question of time outside itself or, at most, in producing a simple binary code of
before and after” (713).

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What is the main selling point of Bildung?

Apart from presenting a definite sense of direction and an assured sense of self-regulation, the main selling point of Bildung is that it offers a developmental pattern in which increased self-reflexivity does not come at the expense of self-identity; instead of leading to abysmal alienation, moments of reflexivity are continuously naturalized as part of a plan of self-actualization. 

Q2. What is the main point of the book?

Ahl’s own attention to minor rhetorical shifts and linguistic displacements advertises his own practice of associative reading — which does not restrict itself to the links that are visible on the surface of the text — as one vital critical strategy for insisting on the tension between literature and the state. 

Q3. What is the paradox of the Romantic organicism?

In continually devising objective vehicles or, really, institutions that are to mediate the psyche’s development . . . cultivation necessarily draws on and gradually succumbs to a lifeless, extraneous and artificial dimension . . . the processes theorized by Romantic organicism necessarily give rise to the vast and variegated objective domain of mediating institutions that gradually usurp the meaning of “culture”: books, theories, education systems and norms, social and moral norms, technologies of memory (the archive, the museum, the idea of a curriculum, etc.). 

Q4. What is the meaning of the phrase Bildung?

The combination of orientation and self-manifestation explains the flourishing of the narrative schema of Bildung at a historical threshold where order and direction were no longer self-evidently provided by a divine transcendence — a threshold that also saw the rise of the nation form as a compensatory frame of reference (Anderson 9–12). 

Q5. What is the purpose of the analysis?

Their analyses tie in with recent developments in critical theory, codified in special issues of the journals Occasion and Contemporary Literature, that aim to move beyond the fashionable antistatism that can, as the authors have seen, be traced back to the nineteenth century. 

Q6. What is the key insight propelling research into the relation between the nation and literature?

The key insight propelling research into the relation between the nation and literature is that literature not merely celebrates this continuity but actively constructs, invents, and imagines it. 

Q7. What is the role of the state in the history of German culture?

In much intellectual work in a Foucaultian, Marxist, poststructuralist, or postcolonial vein, the state has routinely been viewed as “an almost intrinsically totalitarian institution” (Goodlad and Rothberg 3). 

Q8. What is the role of the state in the theory of Bildung?

Among many other things, the state functions as a placeholder for all that interrupts the continuity that patterns of Bildung plot for the nation. 

Q9. What is the main point of the article?

Ahl’s article traces the confrontation between literature and the state in one of the main institutions through which nineteenth-century Bildung sedimented itself: education. 

Q10. What does the tendency to portray the state as a totalitarian regime do?

As Matthew Hart and Jim Hansen have noted, the tendency to “represent the state as a merely totalitarian regime blind to the slaughter of innocents and contemptuous of civil liberties” works to occludes the state’s “long (if ambivalent) history as an agent of liberty, equality, and fraternity” (493). 

Q11. What is the key insight in the study of the relation between literature and the state?

There are at least two reasons why literature has historically played a privileged role in the imagining of community and historical continuity: first, and trivially, its ability to target the affects, anxieties, and desires of its readership, which is a vital asset in the project of inculcating values and norms and in transcribing readers into citizens; second, and almost equally trivially, literature almost always takes a narrative form, and the narrative concatenation of multiple events is an obvious way of forging a connection between the present and a suitable historical past, and of convincingly conveying the natural necessity — rather than the historical contingency — of that connection. 

Q12. What is the purpose of the book?

that is, helps the citizens of the nation to recognize the past events to which it connects them as the historical roots that bind them together.