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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 aesthetic impression and aesthetic presentivity of cultural expression. Its “significance” 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 connected 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 “articulation”, 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 “objectifiable 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 continues 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, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2012.
