Walser and the universal
The massive tendency on Robert Walser’s writing today is to see it as writing of the particular and of difference. This is because we no longer view it in ‘itself’, but particularly from a post world war II perspective. Here, the catastrophes of ‘totalitarianism’ are seen as a result of implementing the universal sameness on the difference of a each particulars. For example in Theodor Adorno’s writings on enlightenment, fascism and the ‘administered society’ the problem is how this tendency for sameness eradicates the particular. While not all readers follow Adorno, specifically, is the critique he gives of enlightenment not precisely the one we find in readers of Walser. Walser’s style is ‘resistant’ to this sameness. Take the debut, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (1904), a fictional collection of essays, where a schoolboy writes about given subjects. The very choice of the this narrative voice is precisely why Walser’s work is critical. It shows us how massive ‘enlightenment’ is, that it pervades institutions, that it targets subjects, here the schoolboy precisely not simply by orders as in the old paternal structure, but through the ‘forced choice’ of school essays. The point is that it is precisely from within this forced choice, that a small resistance is heard. Walser precisely does not write of a bourgeois subject resisting (this. would be to fall prey to the microphysics of power).
Instead Walser primarilly through a feigned naivity of the style show that the only resistance is in the style itself. Instead, of writing something like ‘I do not want to write these essays’!, Walser’s narrator undermines them through ruptures in the form itself. There is precisely something off or askew in these ‘essays’ (like in other works of Walser as well). Practically all of the essays, are never really concluded, whether it is because he cracks under the force of the institution. We can see, how such writing would serve, for example Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopias’ well (not a utopia in opposition to power-relations, but the split from within, not projecting a positive outside). For example the way Fritz’ makes for a kind of prose that gets on ‘our nerves’, is by verging off topic, or excessively including a critique of his own style in a naive way.
“Wenn der Herbst kommt, fallen die Blätter von den Bäumen an den Boden. Ich müßte es eigentlich so sagen: Wenn die Blätter fallen, ist es Herbst. ich habe es nötig, mich im Stil zu verbessern. Letztes mal bekam ich die Note: Stil erbärmlich. Ich gräme mich darüber, aber ich kann es nicht ändern.” (10).
Walser’s Fritz does not critize the teachers, or the fact that that he has to write the essays, he does not mention the institution, but only that he himself is the problem, since he failed to live up to his ‘own’ expectations. Is this not a perfect indication of what Freud called the ‘superego’, a constant self-vigilance under the force of ‘microphysics’ of power. Yet, what makes Walser’s prose, something else is precisely that he ruptures this through the irritation on the side of the reader. Why does he include the self-correction in the style, since in a real essay, this point should rather be left out in an essay about the fall?
From the point of view of an emancipatory. politics of the particular, Walser’s style is therefore precisely trough its ‘feigned naivity’, through the voice of the schoolboy, able to make out a minimal space of resistance, against the attempt on ‘sameness’ on the side of institution, of making everyone equal. If there is a particular in Fritz it is precisely through the ruptures, through the way the prose ‘cracks’, or falls short of the expectation of a ‘proper essay on fall’.
yet, if this entire line of reading is interesting because it only sees the problem as one of differences between “universal sameness” and “particular difference”. It begins from the particular, Fritz before the institution, and then shows how institutions do not free us in any way, but only stamp sameness on us. What we should salvage is precisely the particular difference. But this line of reading, from Adorno to Foucault, which in different ways sees the universalising tendencies as the problem might be completely wrong. When we accept the premise of the beginning ‘particulars’, we can only think of any kind of universalism as a problem: Simply the attempt to impose another given particular on to others.
The problem with this is that it can only think the universality as something present. it operates like a ‘stamp’ on particular variety. Instead we should see, how any conception of primary particularity that then faces the universal “mimesis” is precisely conditioned by a prior epistemological choice of taking particulars first. Why do we necessarily take the ‘cracks’ in the prose as a sign of a particular identity that the universal makes cracks. Instead, I would suggest that the “institution” is not a universal at all, but instead a particular power-relation, and that the cracks themselves indicate rather the universal, but in a different sense than given above. The universal is precisely the indication of “inability to master” something. If there is something that shows itself throughout Fritz Kocker’s essays it is precisely the repetition of a failure, a failure to fit. yet, this is different from the claim by many Walser scholars, that what Walser demonstrates is the possibilities of the “impotence”. All of Walser’s figures, even from the prince in his early play Snow-white, are figures not of the ‘hero’, but of impotence or ‘lack-of-potentiality’. What Walser does, so the argument goes, is to explore the possibilities of “im-puissance” (following the theory of Giorgio Agamben), for example, of ‘going on strike’, of making the the power-apparatus run empty.
The problem with this position is that it is all too content with the marginal. It precisely does not go far enough, but celebrates the marginal as marginal (a figure of potency in radical impotence). By this logic the game of left-wing competition is to be the most “marginal”, the “most impotent”. Instead of this, does not Walser’s essays mark a very strong desire, not a desire for this or that, but the constant hysterical desire of breaking the form? This also goes against the common place of “impotence” of power as figure for resistance. If Power is simply smooth and total, how can any position of resistance be formulated? The usual response is that because of the “indeterminacy” of different discourses, that collide with each other. It is unclear how a subject could even assume such indeterminacy. Much more theoretically rigorous is the psychoanalytical claim, that desire is itself a result of repression, and therefore can only show itself in negativity, in failure to comply with the given.
To take this on an stylistic level of the essays themselves. What really links them, apart from the fact that they are so many ways of repeating the failure to write the essay. If we take failure as precisely the ‘universal’, or as a ‘contradiction’ then the perspective changes. Then the universal is not something that presents itself, or imposes itself, but the opposite, it is what fails in any particular’s attempt to impose itself.
There is the sense that in fact the form itself is actually liberating and what combines different particulars. I would say what links them is the shared absence. The setting of each essay is in front of the schoolboy’s table, and then the teacher writes the subject on the blackboard (“Man”, “Nature”, “Fall”), and Fritz then has 62–65 lines to finish his essay. This form actually gives a kind of repetition that enables something in the class. It is this “alienation” of what Fritz really “wants to say” that frees up a certain creative energy. This is what Hegel means by contradiction: the very self-determination of form (only short prose) (from the author’s side) is actually the point that cuts across each particular essay as the ‘particular’s struggle with itself’. The presupposed time of the essay (a lesson given by the teacher), makes the space of each essay identical, although we establish this time retroactively through the ‘space’ on the page (see also Granly, 139). The line that ends many essays is the line of the “bell”.
Going back to the ‘universal versus particular’, what is the universal but the ‘failure’ of each essay to have a proper finish. It is in this way, that a certain “lack” of proper limit is included into the heart of the thing (the essay itself). We are therefore not dealing with the ‘preponderance’ of the object, for example (Adorno), that is of original pristine state, that is eliminated by the imposition of reason’s sameness. While Walser is massively critical of power and imposition of sameness, the problem with Adorno’s approach is that it equates universality with the sameness of an identity, whereas we could say that true universality is the sameness of what fails to ‘identify’ itself.
This is very much in line with Fritz own style that excells in irony, and feigned naivity. Irony is itself nothing but a certain curvature of space, not like an outright rebellion, just rendering the given particular identity through the social order minimally precarious or fake.
Granly makes a precise remark, when he points to the work included in such statements. They do not refer to a meta-fictional one, like when Fritz at the end of the essay “Mensch” says, “dies ist mein Aufsatz”. In Granly’s view this point to a displacement from the representation of an outside world (Mensch, Natur…) to a representation of the producing, writing human being. For Granly this does not mean a mere metafictional element (like pointing to “this is prose”, but at the same time working out the condition (also material) of producing (a kind of aesthetics of homo faber). “while they are rhetorical pearls, they are first and foremost texts about a production of a writing” (Schrift). The problem with this reading is that it too much points back to the theoretical post-war II doxa of the “particularity and difference” versus “universality and sameness”. In Granly’s reading we should see this in terms of Deleuze’s work on “pure potentiality” and the “concept”, and “figures of becoming”. The problem with this is that Deleuze is also a thinker of the particular, first and foremost.
Perhaps we should instead see the “universal” as the stumbling block of each essay. The compulsion to repeat after each necessary failure. We know nothing for sure about Fritz’ essays, except that they will repeat in another mode, and this is also different from Deleuze, that there is a certain mildly irritating satisfaction hereby. This also shows that the ‘spark’ or excitation-raiser cannot be seperated from satisfaction. While Walser is often emphasized as a writer of “small things”; is it not the exact opposite he does: he is a writer of constant excess and very big things. Let us take Freundschaft (friendship): (always seen precisely as a relation of particulars):
“Welch ein kostbare Blume ist die Freundschaft. Ohne sie kan selbst ein starker mann Mann nicht lange leben. Das Herz muß ein verwandtes, vertruates Herz, so ein Waldplätzen, wo sich’s ruhen und liegen und plaudern läßt.” (14).
This can be taken as the particularity of a difference. But it can also be taken as excessiveness, of precisely being way too much, something like the nagging Oedipus at the end of Oedipus in Colonnus, that bothers everybody with his talk and simply presence. It is precisely this excessiveness that points not to the assertion of mastery, but to its impasse, that it continues to fail. The universal is on the opposite side of mastery.
