Oldal 27 [27]
RITUAL AND AESTHETIC PRESENTIVITY
Trakl’s tone, even though it is so difficult to describe how this tone is created.
The situation is no different with Thomas Mann, with Ingeborg Bachmann, or
Martin Walser. “Tone” also constitutes a work, even in prose. “Significance”
is a fundamental dimension of aesthetic experience and arises from the aes¬
thetic impression and aesthetic presentivity of cultural expression. Its “signifi¬
cance” becomes greater the more regulated and processed it is. In literature,
“tone” can be understood as literature’s specific, non-discursive “presentative
symbolism.””
Everything that people do or create as a cultural act or expression is con¬
nected to cultural semantics. This means that this act or expression is symbolic
by its very nature and can therefore be interpreted, whether this is intentional
or not. Creatio ex nihilo does not exist. Everything, even an individual “articu¬
lation”, is always collective, too.’? One must always relate oneself to culture
in one way or another, and draw the material used for the articulation from a
cultural context. This is also valid for the applied and liberal arts. There are no
pure colors, free of cultural meanings; there are no chords that are empty of
meaning; in a social and cultural context, stone and wood cannot be released
from meaning as construction materials. However, it has to be stated that it
can be very difficult to offer an appropriately precise, verifiable description of
these dimensions of meaning. Every cultural “articulation” contains an “objec¬
tifiable component” which can be clearly explained with reference to cultural
contexts.'® No experience can be completely direct and “un-derivative”; neither
the experience of the producer nor that of the recipient of cultural expression.
This potentially aggrieves the modern subject’s need to be unique. It is happy
to be skeptical of rituals, and is yet so in need of them. The modern subject
yearns for nothing more than directness and authentic validity: precisely that
which the ritual is not. And the modern subject wants nothing more than a
sense of belonging: precisely that which the ritual makes possible.”
The ritual is a type of action, and the meaning of this action is substantially
drawn from its aesthetic presentivity. This does not apply any less to literature:
and this is the key aesthetic bridge between the two. Literature makes use of
the entire spectrum of expression that the ritual has at its disposal, and con¬
tinues to do so through to the present day.
6 Susanne K. Langer: Philosophie auf neuem Wege: Das Symbol im Denken, im Ritus und in der
Kunst, Frankfurt a. M., S. Fischer, 1965. [Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism
of Reason, Rite, and Art, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1942.]
17 Matthias Jung: Der bewusste Ausdruck: Anthropologie der Artikulation, Berlin/Boston, De
Gruyter, 2009.
Jung: Ausdruck.
Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka: Zugehörigkeit in der mobilen Welt: Politiken der Verortung, Göt¬
tingen, Wallstein, 2012.