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WOLFGANG BRAUNGART
Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie with its Rede über die Mythologie).
Whether this is successful is another matter. In any case, this is the aspiration.
In turn, this aspiration goes hand-in-hand with the recognition of a problem.
FURTHER DETERMINATIONS AND DIFFERENCES
This demonstrates that a ritual is not pure performance for its own sake, de¬
void of meaning," even if the concrete attribution of sense takes a back seat
for individual participants in the ritual. Ever since the performative turn in
cultural studies over the last third of the twentieth century, cultural per¬
formance can no longer be sensibly discussed as performance that is free of
meaning. If the ritual were to be understood as such, it would be easier to
construct a bridge between this and literature and art. However, something
cannot truly be autotelic: everything that we do as humans happens within a
socio-cultural context, and every human expression or action draws meaning
from the culture in which it occurs. It is arguably the case that the cultural
participants in an action or form can assign autotelism in an ethical/aesthetic
sense, or intentionally make use of it themselves: this is how it should be; there
should be discourse that is good for “nothing,” and not justified by its practical
functionality.
Precisely this was suggested in the eighteenth century, when the idea of au¬
tonomous art was developed and came into being. However, this establishment
of the aesthetics of autonomy must, in turn, be viewed within the context of
history and culture: it is the discourse that symbolises the autonomous value
of humankind (Moritz, Kant, Schiller). Depending on one’s theological stand¬
point, it is even possible to claim that a religious performance is an end in it¬
self. This applies, for example, to doctrines on grace and justification: how can
the weak man use his religious actions to demand something from almighty
God via an autotelic strategy? From this angle, the liturgy can be viewed as a
large-scale sacred “game” for theology in the twentieth century, according to
Romani Guardini. The liturgy can be seen as the greatest Western work of art;
a work of art that can only be autotelic when before God, and is only worthy of
His grace precisely because it does not intend to achieve anything. Alongside
other representatives of a more conservative aesthetic, Guardini attempted to
view art as an autonomous, ceremonial game. However, this conservative solu¬
tion to the problem, merely indicated here, is not at all sufficient to describe
the relationship between ritual and literature/art in an appropriate way. This is
particularly the case for literature, which contains closer social, structural, and
semantic links to the ritual. Art is not just a celebration; art is not just a game.
1 Frits Staal: The Meaninglessness of Ritual, Numen 26 (1979), 2-22; Axel Michaels: ‘Le rituel
pour le rituel’ oder wie sinnlos sind Rituale, in C. Caduff - J. Pfaff-Czarnecka (eds.): Rituale
heute: Theorien, Kontroversen, Entwürfe, Berlin, Reimer, 1999, 23-48.
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