The Social and Political Context

Unlike his teacher Theodor W. Adorno, Alexander Kluge, an artist working in the field of the aesthetics of reception, is optimistic about the possibility of socially transformative practice and places his hopes in societal participation in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. But Kluge, in contrast to many ‘68ers, never subscribed to the illusion that lasting changes in societal structures can be brought about abruptly or in the short term.

Alexander Kluge was born on February 14, 1932 in Halberstadt and studied law, history and church music at the University of Marburg, where he took his doctorate. He then joined the law firm of Helmut Becker, a politician with a special interest in cultural and educational policy. He was the legal advisor of the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, and advised Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in legal matters.

He made his film debut in 1960 with his short film Brutality in Stone (Brutalität in Stein) after an internship with Fritz Lang; as a writer with his prose volume Lebensläufe (i.e. Résumés); and as a media-conscious politician with the Oberhausen Manifesto, in which 26 young film directors declared war on the fossilized structures of West German cultural policy with respect to film. Since that time, Kluge has been regarded as a pioneer of German auteur cinema, as a legally trained lobbyist who championed a different form of film promotion and training opportunities for filmmakers. His book, The Public Sphere and Experience (Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung), a foundational text of the New Left in which Kluge, together with the social philosopher Oskar Negt, propounded the concept of a critical counter-public, appeared in 1972. After the introduction of the dual broadcasting system, Kluge succeeded in taking over independent programs with the private broadcasters RTL(plus) and SAT.1 in the mid - Eighties and has broadcast his own cultural magazine 10 vor 11 (i.e. ten minutes before eleven), News and Stories and Primetime/Spätausgabe (i.e. late edition) with them since that time.

The Counter-Public

Kluge’s constantly growing multimedial work must be seen as „work in progress,“ as a broadly-based experimental set-up completely in the tradition of skeptical critique as it was propounded by the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. But unlike his teacher Adorno, who regarded any possibility of a socially transformative practice as „disingenuous,“ Kluge continues to place his faith in participation in social life – as did Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht before him. The starting-point of his critique is the compartmentalization of society into sectors that seal themselves off against individual human experience. As Kluge writes: „Federal elections, Olympic celebrations, the actions of a sniper troop, a premiere in the Große Schauspielhaus (a traditional Berlin theater that was torn down in 1988) are all considered „public.“ Events of enormous public significance such as child-rearing, working at one’s job, or watching TV at home are thought of as “private.” The collective social and societal experiences that people in fact generate in the contexts of living and the production process cut across these compartmentalizations.” Negt’s and Kluge’s concept of a counter-public conjectures a free association of subjective human qualities whose organization takes the form of protest and that take their stand against the separation of the public and private spheres: “The core theme of realism is never validation of reality, but protest against it,” write the two authors in The Public Sphere and Experience (Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung). “This protest derives its energy from an expanded imaginative faculty that trusts the normative power of the factual as little as it does the rational logic of discourse. In this context, Kluge speaks of an „anti-realism of feeling.”

Self-Regulation and Imagination

Kluge’s narratives, films and the associative approach of his television interviews can be conceived of as models of self-regulated imaginative activity. They never follow a recurrent theme that would merely simulate an aparent order with no existence in reality. Instead, they rely on dialog with the experiences of the viewers and readers, because films and texts can strengthen or weaken people, they can generate an increase in self-confidence or diminish it, as the case may be. Kluge’s option leaves no room for doubt: his works aim at building up a reservoir of strength in their recipients that contributes to generating an awareness and a feeling for their own possibilities of expression and action. To be able to accomplish this, they must not close themselves off hermetically from the viewer’s experiences, and they may neither evade the hard facts of reality nor treat them as though they were our inescapable destiny. For this reason, Kluge narrates his stories in a fragmentary form. Readers and viewers must contribute their own meaning (a play on the German word „Eigensinn”: “eigen –Sinn”, “one’s own meaning” – i.e. „obstinacy,“ stubbornness“ or „proprietary meaning“) so that a context can emerge. Kluge is convinced: Only through cooperation can that type of self-awareness arise that human beings require if they wish to be the authors of their own lives.

Waiting for Utopia, today as in 1968

Protest, self-determination and emancipation are central themes in Kluge’s work, in which the potential for hope embodied by „1968,“ the fragmentation of the student movement that began soon thereafter, and the emergence of the RAF are reworked anew, over and over again. But Kluge never subscribed to the illusion that lasting changes in societal structures can be brought about in the short term. 1989 demonstrated that a system can implode abruptly and unexpectedly, but it also showed with equal clarity that human beings’ inner economy, their creation and accumulation of experience, requires longer temporal yardsticks to adapt to such changes. Thus the motto of Kluge’s very first feature-length film from 1966, Abschied von gestern (i.e. farewell to yesterday), that investigates the relationship between continuity and rupture following 1945: „No abyss separates us from yesterday, just changed circumstances.“ and two years later, his film Artists under the Big Top: Disorientated (Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos), makes the statement: “Utopia keeps on improving the longer we wait for it.” This sober estimation of the actual relationship of forces has proven itself accurate in a way, although Utopia did not improve even once, but instead vanished entirely. A comfortless realism that makes itself perceptible in Kluge’s work as a working through of grief and mourning.

Related literature:

• Negt, Oskar / Kluge, Alexander: Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-518-00639-8 (out of print). English-language translation: Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. P. Labanyi, J.O. daniel and A. Oksiloff, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• Negt, Oskar / Kluge, Alexander: Geschichte und Eigensinn (i.e. history and obstinacy), Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-518-11700-9. English translation. History and Obstinacy
• Kluge, Alexander: Lebensläufe (i.e. résumés), Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-518-01911-2.
• Kluge, Alexander: Lernprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-00665-7. English translation: Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome, translated by Christopher Pavsek, Duke Univ. Press, 1996.
• Schulte, Christian (ed.) / Stollmann, Rainer: Der Maulwurf kennt kein System: Beiträge zur gemeinsamen Philosophie von Oskar Negt und Alexander Kluge, (i.e. the mole knows no system: contributions to a joint philosophy of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge) Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-273-2.
• Schulte (ed.), Christian / Siebers, Winfried: Kluges Fernsehen: Alexander Kluges Kulturmagazine (i.e. Kluge’s television: Alexander Kluge’s cultural magazine), Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-12244-4.
• Schulte (ed.), Christian: Die Schrift an der Wand: Alexander Kluge: Rohstoffe und Materialien (i.e. the writing on the wall: raw materials and materials), Osnabrück 2000, ISBN 3-932147-57-X.
• Dr. Christian Schulte (ed.), Christian: In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod: Texte zu Kino, Film, Politik / Alexander Kluge (i.e. in danger and greatest need the middle way results in death: Texts on cinema, film and politics), Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-930916-28-2.