Radical romanticism. Art in the Age of the Technological Sublime
Jos de Mul. Radical romanticism. Art in the Age of the Technological Sublime. In C. Vesters (Ed.), Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2009, 167-175.
According to the German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, who lived in the Netherlands for several decades, our country is the only one in Europe that has never known a Romantic movement. Perhaps this is an overstatement, but I think we may justifiably claim that the basic attitude towards Romanticism in the Netherlands is rather hostile. Thirteen years ago, when the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam organized the exhibition entitled The Passage of Time. Philipp Otto Runge. Casper David Friedrich, many reviewers were extremely critical. In his review of the exhibition, published in De Volkskrant, Michaël Zeeman quotes from a letter, which Runge wrote to his sister on October 26, 1798: “Being an artist is so incomprehensibly beautiful. No other human being experiences life as powerfully as I do, and I have only just started. What heavenly joys are still in store for me?” According to Michaël Zeeman this statement is a manifest example of the revolting arrogance of the romantic artist, and he continues: “These are horrifying utterances these are, although they explain a lot. Alongside his works, they reveal the state of mind, or perhaps we should say the emotional disposition, which gave birth to this abundance of confused brooding and jaunty ostentation in black and white and full color. It is a world characterized by an excessive belief in analogous reasoning and a disproportionate use of words like ‘insight’ and ‘essence’. In short: this is the world of German Romanticism in optima forma. And all this would perhaps just be bearable if the result would not be such an endless series of affected clichés” (Zeeman 1996). The Dutch author Oek de Jong, who was invited to give a speech at the opening of the exhibition, expressed his aversion to German Romanticism in no less explicit terms. Referring to the landscapes of Friedrich, he stated: “Especially Friedrich’s landscapes, full of battered oaks, megalithic tombs, snowy graveyards, moonlit coasts, and figures staring at the moon, immersed in pantheistic feelings, made me aware of my reserve towards and aversion against ‘the romantic’ in art and literature” (Jong 1996).
Michaël Zeeman and Oek de Jong are no exceptions. In many, the word ‘romantic’ effortlessly evokes the cliché image of romantic lovers in moonlit forests and on tropical beaches. A cliché image that one might call sentimental or even pathetic, yet one that is, at a superficial glance, rather innocent. However, Rüdiger Safranski leads us to believe that romanticism is significantly less innocent than this cliché image seems to suggest, and according to him we may be grateful for the fact that this movement has hardly taken root in the Dutch polder. In his book Romantik: eine Deutsche Affäre, Safranski presents this movement, which emerged around 1800, with a generous touch of German self-hatred, as an explosive mixture of art, religion and politics, which brought European culture to the rim of a bottomless abyss (Safranski 2007). While the romantic desire for a better, congenial world of poets such as Novalis, Hölderlin and Schlegel can still be easily cast aside as rather innocent Schwärmerei, things went seriously awry, says Safranski, when later romanticists such as Marx, Wagner and Nietzsche primed themselves to truly realize this desire. From there, according to Safranski, it is only a small step towards Joseph Goebbels’ stählerne Romantik (stealed romanticism, quoted in Herf 1995, 87). The catastrophe that sprang from National Socialism appears to have brusquely awoken the Germans from their romantic glow. According to Safranski, the counterculture of the 1960s, so critical of the existing social structure, and ending in the terrorist violence of the Rote Armee Fraktion, teaches us that romantic desire is a lasting threat for the democratic culture that finds its roots in Enlightenment.
Romanticism, viewed as a form of counter-Enlightenment, indulging in irrationalism and nationalism, and ending in an orgy of violence. It is a popular narrative. Twenty years ago Alain Finkielkraut told a similar story in his La défaite de la pensée (Finkielkraut 1987). Repetition, however, is not a guarantee for truth. To my mind, this reading of Romanticism is at best a distinctly one-sided perspective, and at worst a considerably twisted interpretation.
In the following I will defend an opposing interpretation. The calamities that Safranski mentions, which have tormented Europe over the last two centuries, to my mind should be ascribed to a lack of romanticism rather than to a surplus thereof. In an age and a country in which opinion-makers gladly refer back to the heritage of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ (Israel 2001) it is, therefore, worthwhile to shed light once more on the heritage of Radical Romanticism. In the first part of this lecture I will broadly present my position. In the second part I will explain the actuality of the heritage of Radical Romanticism in more detail by interpreting one of her most salient appearances: the technological sublime. I will end by briefly discussing the Romantic oscillation between enthusiasm and irony.
A famous koan—a paradoxical saying or anecdote to meditate on—from the Zen Buddhist tradition reads: ‘If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha’ (Aitken, 1990, 8). At first sight this is a rather shocking pronouncement, which seems to clash with the nonviolence that is arguably a characteristic of Buddhism. If one looks at the history of Zen in twentieth-century Japan one will however need to recognize that Zen’s violent nature not only expresses itself in meditative koans but also in the practice of Zen.
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