Review

Author(s): Todd Herzog

Review by: Todd Herzog
Source: MLN, Vol. 110, No. 4, Comparative Literature Issue (Sep., 1995), pp. 965-968
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251215
Accessed: 04-07-2015 11:26 UTC

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MLN

965

consistently engaging way that sends us back to Sturrock's capital examples

refreshed for a new reading.
Alabama State University

FRANK E. MOORER

Martha Woodmansee, TheAuthor,Art, and the Market:Rereadingthe History of

Aesthetics.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xv + 200 pp.
In 1800, Heinrich von Kleist visited a lending library in Wfirzburg and
issued a report on the state of reading in Germany at the time. Requesting
"a few good books ...

perhaps something

by Wieland

...

or by Schiller,

Goethe," he was told that he would not be likely to find such works on the
shelves. "Are all these books out?" he inquired, pleased at the good taste of
the library's patrons. "Not exactly," replied the librarian, who proceeded to
inform Kleist that his library did not carry such books. "Then what sort of
books have you got here along all these walls?" the author asked quizzically.
"Romances of chivalry, those and nothing else," asserted the librarian, "To
the right those with ghosts, to the left without ghosts, according to taste."
The German reading public, it seems, just wasn't reading works by the
likes of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Kleist, but was much more interested
in sensational ghost stories. What, given these circumstances, was a "high
culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the
press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly
written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, TheAuthor,Art, and theMarket,they set out to exorcise these ghosts from
the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that
underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details this process of theoretical exorcism and, in effect, conjures
up the ghosts that eighteenth-century aestheticians sought to banish, bringing them back to haunt the philosophers and their theories.
The book's first chapter, "The Interests in Disinterestedness," traces the
history of aesthetic theory from Moses Mendelssohn to Karl Philipp Moritz.
Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a
work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be
evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories,
removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis,responsible only for
being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee
explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination
of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).

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966

REVIEWS

As literature entered the marketplace, the public was found to favor ghost
stories over "demanding" writers, and the instrumentalist theory of art
worked to justify the wrong works: there were simply "too many readers . . .
reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with
altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by
"rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales
become the hallmark of "good" art. His "theology of art," which adopted
Pietist tactics to encourage reflective meditation on difficult texts, thus
offered demanding writers "a very powerful set of concepts with which to
address the predicament in which they found themselves" (p. 32), turning a
defeat in the marketplace into a victory in the aesthetic realm-the "fine"
arts were now precisely those that did not have a big impact on the public.
Having traced the impact of the newly developed marketplace on the
definition of art, Woodmansee turns in her second chapter to an examination of its impact on the development of the modern concept of the author.
As writers moved from an aristocratic patronage system to a democratic
market-based system, attempting for the first time to earn a living on their
own as professionals, they found the legal foundation necessary for this
shift not yet in place. Germany had not yet developed a concept of intellectual property and, consequently, book piracy was rampant. In order to put
an end to piracy and claim a portion of the profits from book sales for
themselves, writers had to prove that ownership of a work extends beyond
the mere physical foundation to which pirates had reduced it. Johann
Gottlieb Fichte takes up this challenge, responding to the pirates in his
essay "Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting: A Rationale and a Parable"
(1793) by distinguishing among three aspects of a book: the content and
physical aspects (the ideas in the book and the paper they are printed on,
respectively) pass to the buyer with the sale of the book, but the form in
which the ideas are presented remains the exclusive property of the author.
Fichte thus "solves the philosophical puzzles to which defenders of piracy
had recurred, and establishes the ground upon which the writer could lay
claim to ownership of his work-could lay claim, that is, to authorship"
(p. 52). Succeeding copyright legislation turned Fichte's financially-motivated theory into law, demonstrating how contingent the modern definition of authorship is on the legal debate over intellectual property rights
that surrounded eighteenth-century copyright legislation. Recent theory
has made much of the "death" of the author; Woodmansee completes the
sketch by narrating the story of the author's birth.
At the center of Woodmansee's book is a reading of Friedrich Schiller's
AestheticLettersin the light of Schiller's career that functions as a sort of case
study of her reading of aesthetics and the marketplace. By turning to Schiller's financial and material concerns, Woodmansee is able to explain the
puzzling slippage in his enormously influential essay from the emancipatory and instrumentalist theory of art, presented in the early letters, to the
narrowly entrenched and formalist theory of art presented in the later

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967

letters. In explaining this shift, Woodmansee shows Schiller's "extravagant

claim for the power of art" (p. 57) to be a piece of "occasional" writing
strongly influenced by the author's own struggles to forge a career as a
professional writer. Woodmansee grounds her claim by turning to Schiller's
changing opinion of his much more successful contemporary, the poet
Gottfried August Bfirger, who is best known today for his haunting ballad
Lenore,but who was enormously popular in late eighteenth-century Europe
and was a strong advocate of an instrumentalist theory of art, considering
"broad accessibility essential to poetry" (p. 62). Though an early supporter
of Burger's instrumentality, Schiller later, in a devastating, anonymously
published review, charges the poet with opportunism that panders to "the
childish understanding of the people" and threatens "the dignity of art"
(quoted on p. 75), opposing Burger's "populist program for poetry" with
what he terms an "artof the ideal" (p. 75). By the time he expanded on the
ideas contained in the review in the AestheticLetters,Schiller had achieved a
secure patronage in Weimar and was no longer subject to the laws of the
market, providing him with the opportunity to make "a virtue of necessity"
(p. 86) and celebrate an ideal art free of the constraints of the public and
the need to sell books. Schiller's aesthetic theory is thus shown to be as
appropriate to the trajectory of his career as Bfurger'swas to his own.
If Moritz, Fichte, and Schiller were interested in reforming the "supply
side" of artistic production in response to the crisis of the new reading
market, Johann Adam Bergk sought to work on the "demand side." Woodmansee shows how Bergk's hefty 416-page tome "The Art of Reading Books"
(1799) was a response to Addison's advocacy of widespread leisure reading
in the early years of the century. Addison's reckless call, as it became clear
by the end of the century, had failed to specify the "how"and "what"of the
activity, leading to the problem that Kleist encountered in the lending
library: there were too many people reading too many "bad"books. Bergk
seeks "to carry forward Addison's project under the radically altered conditions of literature in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 93)
by expressly detailing not so much what should be read as howbooks should
be read, advocating an active and creative reader who, he hoped, would
"automatically make the 'right' choices" once he/she learned to read, becoming "too sophisticated to derive much pleasure from the growing literature of sheer diversion" and turning instead to classical authors for leisure
reading (p. 100). It is in this climate of the Lesedebatteand reader-reform
that Kant writes his CritiqueofJudgment(1790), which is traditionally read as
"the fruit of a century of pure philosophical reflection on the arts,"
(pp. 101-2) but is, as Woodmansee shows, grounded in the same culturalhistorical conditions that prompted such "lesser"works as Bergk's reading
manual.
After a brief, but interesting, excursus on the role of gender in
eighteenth-century aesthetic theory that focuses on the career of the first
popular German woman writer, Sophie von La Roche, whose gender de-

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REVIEWS

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nied her (theoretical) ownership of her works, Woodmansee ends her book
with an examination of "The Uses of Kant in England." Her reading of the
trajectory of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's aesthetic theories shows the
same retreat from instrumentality to formalism that she found at work
among the German theorists: like aestheticians from Moritz on, Wordsworth and Coleridge "rescue" art from the public and once again validate
the "classics."Woodmansee ends her book by returning to the legal realm,
detailing Wordsworth's defense of the Copyright Bill of 1842, which in
effect legislated his anti-market aesthetic theory of 1815 and encouraged
the production of "difficult" art for posterity rather than for the contemporary book-buying public. The law had finally intervened and provided support for those who would "rescue" art from the market.
It is hard to overestimate the accomplishment of Woodmansee's book.
The study of aesthetics is, in the theoretical debates of our day, usually
opposed to the study of culture, with critics choosing to focus on either one
side or the other. In The Author,Art, and the Market,Woodmansee provides
an exemplary model for integrating aesthetics and cultural studies, returning to texts that are usually read in the "tradition of great minds speaking
with one another and above the historical process" (p. 7), and placing them
alongside lesser known works and legal writings, in order to re-situate the
bonafide canonical aesthetic treatises in the cultural-historical milieu in
which they originated, and re-connect them to the practical and material
concerns that prompted them. This re-situation not only breaks down the
opposition between aesthetics and cultural studies; it also points toward the
genesis of this very notion of an opposition between the two realms and
shows us that the concept of aesthetic autonomy is, in fact, of very recent
origin, but has "entrenched itself so thoroughly that we imagine it always to
have existed" (p. 8).
Woodmansee's examination of the foundational moment of aesthetic
autonomy in eighteenth-century Germany is a powerful and important step
toward a history of concepts of art that is sensitive to the historicity of such
concepts and is, as she is well aware, just a piece of a much larger and very
ambitious project. Other pivotal moments of "far-reaching changes in the
production, distribution, and consumption" of art (p. 32) would benefit
from a reading along the lines of Woodmansee's model. The various attempts to make a space for film in twentieth-century aesthetics would, for
instance, be ripe for such a reading. And we may, in fact, be at another
pivotal moment right now, in which technology has raced ahead of theory
and the law: I am thinking about the ongoing questions and problems
concerning intellectual property in cyberspace. In her insistence that "art"
is not a stable concept, but rather is contingent upon material concerns,
Woodmansee points a way to treating this larger history, in whose legacy we
live and which we help to fashion.
Universityof Chicago

TODD HERZOG

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