[In the following essay, Nordmann compares the works of Botho Strauss with Peter Handke, focusing on Handke's play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.]

The performance of a text or the staging of a play is often and easily imagined as the representation, in another medium, of its content or meaning. On stage can be shown what the script merely says; the rehearsal process and the production itself thus appear as means towards the end of communicating to the audience what an author has set down on paper. When this picture of what goes on in performance is extended to dance or the realization of musical scores, the notion of “representation” proves too narrow, and performances are, therefore, often said to “express” a feeling, content, or intention.

While the two notions of “representation” and “expression” are theoretically rich and lend themselves to sophisticated explorations of just what it means to represent or express something, Nelson Goodman proposed that performance might be conceived also in different terms entirely. He suggests that performance can be likened to the exemplification of a pattern or form and that the transition from a dramatic text to its theatrical production involves no ontological leap into a different realm of being: the recorded piano sonata exemplifies the musical score (and vice versa) just as a swatch exemplifies a fabric (and vice versa).² On this account, the term “performance” no longer designates a set of attributes which come into play only once the text ceases merely to be read but is enacted on stage. Instead, the dramatic text is on a par with the staging in that both involve performance, both establish a form, set a pattern, or inscribe a motion: performance is the execution of a work, whether this execution takes the form of writing or reading, (en)acting or staging.³

Rather than discuss the theoretical merits of Goodman's proposal, the following investigation playfully takes it up by treating “mere” texts as performances of sorts. It does not discuss theatrical performances of the plays by Peter Handke and Botho Strauss, but seeks to appreciate how their writing performs very different motions. I wish to clarify these differences between Handke and Strauss by comparing them to two British painters of the eighteenth century, William Hogarth and Alexander Cozens. In doing so, I am following the lead of Handke and Strauss, who themselves suggested that the antagonism of their scientific ways of literary world-making can be mapped on to the antagonism between Hogarth's and Cozens's techniques of artistic invention. This will allow me to return in a brief conclusion to further remarks on the relation between performance and script.

They are reclusive, rarely appear in public, cultivating a proper distance to the culture industry and the quick circulation of ideas and trends. Peter Handke and Botho Strauss serve as high-priests of literature and guardians of the German language, and unabashedly see themselves in the long line of descent from Homer to Hölderlin to Heidegger, from Gottfried Keller to Ernst Jünger to Handke and Strauss. They are prolific and successful playwrights and self-consciously reinvented the novel in its long and short forms; both experimented with the literary essay. Charges of mannerism, arrogance, or elitism are deflected by their earnest persistence. After all, they represent the dying breed of the truly sensitive person who is finely attuned and reacts viscerally to the nuances of speech, who hears the murderous in a wrong turn of phrase. Their plays create artificial and poetic worlds which take up and transcend the cultural sensibilities of a very literate middle class. Even when their plays experiment and expand the language of the theater, they arrive on stage with the assuredness of the modern classic, written for posterity.⁴ In the early 1980s, Handke and Strauss were considered representatives of a New Inwardness (Neue Innerlichkeit), epitomizing a kind of subjectivism which seemingly surrendered political aspirations of the sixties and seventies. For the 1996/97 season, however, the premieres of their new plays are greatly anticipated, since both have recently politicized their own work, creating considerable scandal in the literary world—Strauss claiming his poetic home on a vaguely defined political right, Handke defending Serbia against world opinion and the jargon which produces it.⁵ There is no open rivalry between them, but two recent essays serve as veiled polemics, drawing attention to their radically different Bewegungsarten des Geistes [habits of mental movement].⁶ That exchange began quite innocuously with Peter Handke's reflections on a self-portrait by William Hogarth.

When Hogarth painted himself with his pug in 1745, he included in the lower left-hand corner of the painting a palette. Across the palette arches a curved line, and engraved next to it are the words “The LINE of Beauty.”⁷ As Hogarth confessed later, the enigmatic palette was intended to puzzle his contemporaries, to inaugurate fruitful speculation about its meaning. Peter Handke joined this play of questioning in 1991 with his “Essay on the Successful Day” [Versuch über den geglückten Tag].⁸ In this essay, Handke's earlier enthusiasm for experiencing the world always anew⁹ takes a more modest, more resigned turn. It is devoted to the possibly futile quest for a single accomplished day that is carried forward along the trajectory of Hogarth's serpentine line of beauty and grace.

Less than a year after Handke's essay there appeared Botho Strauss's Beginnlosigkeit: Reflexionen über Fleck und Linie [Beginninglessness: Reflections on Blot and Line]. It seeks to distance Strauss's poetics from “the unreflected art of the present,” and appears to include an implicit critique of Peter Handke: “Many beautiful novels, much that is accomplished … many reveries, in short; but that beauty which is the bounty of botanizing senses pales pretty quickly for the most part.”¹⁰ Handke's botanizing search for beauty “shapes the blot into the figure with the idealized line.” In opposition to this, Strauss defends the blot as “the blossom of explosion [Blüte der Sprengung].”¹¹ With barely a hint of irony he praises its masculinity, which lacks contour and represents all soulful intent, contrasting it with the feminine line whose mystery lies in the unpredictability of its progression:¹²

Pure and strong sensations always lack contour, they are not bounded by countervailing thoughts or experiences. They dissolve into the neutral “color” of time.¹³

Strauss cites the drawings and etchings of Joseph Beuys and John Martin to argue for the blot as a vague center of energy from which thought and feeling emanates. He might have found an ally also in the painter Alexander Cozens, a contemporary of Hogarth's.

Cozens was a mediocre artist enjoying mediocre success when he worried, in 1785, that painters like himself might lack in experience and thus in an “original stock of picturesque ideas.”¹⁴ A sublime spectacle of nature hardly occurs to those who have seen such spectacles only in paintings and who otherwise move only along the well-trod paths of convention. He, therefore, discovered for himself and his less-endowed students the adventure of blotting: “To blot, is to make varied spots and shapes with ink on paper, producing accidental forms without lines, from which ideas are presented to the mind.”¹⁵ Cozens then places a transparent sheet on the blot, beholding it as an unarticulated nature-scene, establishing a foreground, drawing out the contours of a tree here, a glacier there. Without leaving his studio, he is thus able to derive several spectacles of nature from a single blot, thereby venturing boldly beyond the narrow confines of his imagination.

With ingenuous ardor Hogarth and Cozens elaborated in scientific tracts how their principles of artistic creation correspond to the principles of nature. Hogarth delivered, in 1753, his Analysis of Beauty, Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste. According to Hogarth, there are no straight lines in nature. Muscles and drifting clouds, graceful people and racehorses have intricately bent forms; nature draws them in waving serpentines, twists and turns:

Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful.¹⁶

Hogarth thus echoes the mechanistic theories of perception of John Locke and David Hartley: lightwaves take up impulses from objects and impart them as vibrations to the optic nerves, which imprint an undoubtedly wave-shaped impression in the mind.¹⁷ Nature, perception, and mind are fundamentally related, and thus resonate, communicating wave to wave. Whoever is inspired by the serpentine line will take up the impulse of nature and pass it on, and so is a mediator and communicator.

Like Hogarth, Alexander Cozens speaks of experiments and principles of nature when he elaborates, in 1785/86, his New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape. Like Hogarth, he does not conduct a philosophical investigation of aesthetic judgment, and like Hogarth he is not interested in the perception, evaluation, or effect of paintings. As opposed to Hogarth, however, Cozens considers the forms of nature distinguished not by lines, but by shade and color. “To sketch, is to delineate ideas; blotting suggests them.”¹⁸ The eyes should not follow nature nor nature follow ideas. Rather, the blot's suggestion prompts a meeting of mind and nature.

Previous ideas, however acquired (of which every person is possessed more or less) will assist the imagination in the use of blotting; and on the other hand, the exercise of blotting will strengthen and improve the ideas which are impaired for want of application.¹⁹

Two English draftsmen and painters develop, in the eighteenth century, methods of pictorial invention, and by that they mean composition of form. Color, the true domain of the painter, is subordinated to principles of form. The inventive motions of Botho Strauss and Peter Handke are also bound to form and leave their worlds uncolored.²⁰

The blackness of sorrow brightens in Strauss's Beginninglessness to pike- or cave-grey at best: “[a] grey glance cast towards the grey image, from within the dusk of the entire person.” Or, elliptically: “In the black basket we grasp for that spot where that paler darkness, the words. …”²¹ Only once in Beginninglessness does color rise from the dusk, like the sun, but right away it sets again in a horizontal rainy greyness. And, a visionary sunset awakens hope for a colorful night at the very end of the essay: the blushing night-sky is ashamed of that eternal grey in grey and awakens the blot, in all its vagueness, to colorful life.²²

Handke, too, struggles for color, most significantly in his Doctrine of Sainte-Victoire, an essay about Cézanne, the most painterly of painters. “In the colors of daylight, this is when I am,” he notes there, but cannot articulate this being in the colors.²³ Standing in Cézanne's landscape and Cézanne's colors, he confesses: “The distinction and more so the naming of colors has always been difficult for me.”²⁴ As opposed to Strauss, however, Handke seeks an impulse or a beginning that will carry him beyond his debilitating limitation:

I feel my ignorance always as distress; and from this results an aimless urge for knowledge which does not yield an idea because it does not have an “object” with which it could “agree.” But then a particular object might suggest something and thus posit a “spirit of commencement”; now the pursuit can begin in earnest, which otherwise, for all its studiousness, would have remained mere desire.²⁵

At the beginning stands an impulse which puts Handke in a state of grace and carries him forward on its serpentine trajectory. His cursory glance thus rises and sinks, climbs and falls, revolves and circumscribes, winds and curves along the elevations and hollows, heights and depths, lines and arcs of Cézanne's mountain chain Sainte-Victoire. Handke's inwardness proves merely apparent and quite transparent: it serves to impart his motion to the reader immediately, just as the ripples of an impulse are communicated from wave to wave. For decades Handke has already been a prime suspect on the charge of mannerism, and yet he unfailingly succeeds to enchant his readers anew by casting his serpentine line like a magic spell. Even those who follow the cursives of his strokes only reluctantly are set in motion by them.

Peter Handke's plays establish a continuity of motion. While they peak and ebb, accelerate and decelerate, shade from brightness into darkness and vice versa, they provide for no sudden breaks or blackouts between scenes. A “pause” in The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other is a moment of rest in a continuous and serene journey. And indeed, this play, as well as The Play of Questions, suggests (like many of his novels) that pilgrimage may bring about a transformation of sorts which lies outside the narrative bounds of the journey itself.²⁶

The many characters embarked on these journeys (close to three hundred in The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other) are not conceived in terms of inner natures or personalities which are revealed in the course of the play. Instead, they are theatrical icons, emphatically conceived in terms of their visual likeness to what we may have seen or heard or read or remembered. More often than not they lack names, but by their visible likeness they are placed on a trajectory which resonates with our experience:

And again a man and a woman approach each other from afar, he immediately lowering his head while hers is held up high; just before they cross, he suddenly looks up into the other's face, which she, alas, had turned away a moment before.

Two beauties, as speedwalkers, in fitting gear, skitter by in a jiffy.²⁷

Handke remarks in an interview that the theater should almost touch upon real life in order to create resonance in the audience: the director should “barely miss life.” In the same interview, Handke elaborates that in these bare, but unconsummated encounters he sees people as he sees them when he is not unjust towards them, when he has no opinion of them, when he likes them.²⁸ As we pass each other by and do not confront, hold on to, or cling to one another, we remain free to take up an impulse, to find a beginning for a motion of our own. Handke's plays provide the pure pleasure of watching a motion which we can take up, in which we can join.²⁹ This free-flowing motion, barely touching, but not intruding upon characters as it weaves a tapestry of a city, is most familiar to viewers of his 1987 film, co-authored with director Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire. It is also intimated at the conclusion of his play without words The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other:

And now, down below, the First Spectator tears himself from his seat. … Coming and going, coming and going. Then darkness fell on the square.³⁰

Botho Strauss lacks entirely the external impulse sought out by Handke, the spirit of commencement. “It is futile to look for the roots of the fog. Every beginning is an echo.”³¹ He finds that the blot which lacks a beginning is recommended to him by the natural sciences which “impact on the habit of mental movement in all its conceptions.”³² He cites Marvin Minsky and Douglas Hofstadter, steady state and chaos theories, dissipation and autopoeisis, Ilya Prigogine and Stephen Hawking. According to that scientifically suggested cosmic disorder, human relations can no longer be represented in the linear format of the story with its beginning, middle, and end. In Strauss's words they belong much rather in

an illegible order of thresholds, leaps, interdependencies, transitions, dissolutions, riches resulting from the exuberant deterioration of all boundaries, unbounded hues freely spilling into one another, so that nothing can be said anymore about human beings except that they are blots of heat [Wärmefleck]. A fusion. A swarm of doctrinaire desires. A cloud of uncertain resolve …³³

The events are standing still while a glance rises from the dusk of the entire person and longingly sinks into the dusk of the blot, gradually bringing its ambiguities to light. “A permanent readiness for dread [Entsetzen]” accompanies this mode of becoming aware [Gewärtigen].³⁴ Strauss's addiction to experience does not seek knowledge, but hopes for the “real presence” of dread. “The accidental [das Versehen] fights for its preservation with all the means that blind passion has available,” he declares in Beginninglessness. “It fights against the tendencies of enlightenment which inevitably unfold in the love-story.”³⁵ As opposed to Handke, Strauss's inwardness is not merely apparent. He knows of no path which would lead beyond himself, he knows no stories and no History, and casts himself blindly and willingly into the accidents and catastrophes of dread or happenstance, of ambiguous entanglements and dissociations.

One of Strauss's earliest stories and one of his most recent plays exemplify how intensely felt states have to be defended against their dissolution into a linear story or biography. Devotion details the pathetic struggles of a man who has been left by a woman: “I must try with all my strength to touch Hannah's heart. Yet I know that ultimately only he whose all-out effort has failed can move her.”³⁶ His attempts to foster and preserve the despair of the abandoned lover render him a comic figure: “Right, but the comedy is only a protective ether that keeps the pain fresh. If I hadn't grown eccentric, then I'd have become either industrious or apathetic.”³⁷ His abandonment to precious moments of loss render his experience unlike anyone else's, profound and authentic. But, he fails to make permanent the suddenness of such moments and curses himself for his failings: “A nasty night. Sleep has cut me down to size. … I can see how my heroic and festive despair is shriveling into a miserable petty-bourgeois sadness. Perhaps I should admit that I overestimated my capacity for suffering.”³⁸

Most of the protagonists in Strauss's plays lose their balance. A seemingly incidental encounter overwhelms them, a momentary flash illuminates, redefines their lives. Beginninglessness describes a moment very much like the one at the heart of Schlusschor:

Every woman can become a sanctuary of desire once the fleeting glance which has encountered her creates a sharply defined, highly resolved after-image. If only she becomes present to us beyond that one moment, in a sense becomes absolutely present, so that every adventure, every story, every word vanishes in this one instant of time, like matter beyond the horizon of events. This is incidentally the very same force which is active and confuses our senses also in the most banal occurrence, as when the maid in a hotel suddenly, i.e., by ACCIDENT [aus VERSEHEN], tears open the door and sees us in our stillness and inwardness (which in any case is a form of nakedness), apologizes, and turns around. Every desire can be traced back to a quick and violent accident like this.³⁹

The main protagonist of Schlusschor attempts to recover from the moment in which he accidentally encountered a naked woman;⁴⁰ the play also revolves around the quick, violent, and unsettling accident of someone shouting “Deutschland” during the taking of a group photograph.⁴¹ The shutter [Blende] of a camera was used by Strauss also to structure the succession of scenes in Three Acts of Recognition, as indeed most of his plays use suddenness to plunge the audience from one encounter to the next. This is accompanied by an ironic distrust of the rambling speech by which his protagonists attempt to regain control, following their “base inclination” to create more order than there is. These attempts are gently exposed in their frailty and futility.⁴² The drama of Strauss's plays derives from incidental shocks, trivial catastrophes, ruptures, and juxtapositions. None of these blossom into full-fledged stories or characters. Instead, the plays observe how the sense of possibility that is attendant to catastrophe shrivels up. Strauss's male protagonists, especially, generally falter in their efforts to make sense of what is happening and to turn it into a story. What remains is a diffuse and agitated swarm of people and desires, drawn like mosquitoes to the bright lights of the stage. One can upset and disturb that flittering swarm of energy, only to see it reconstituted under the next lamp-post.⁴³ It is in this sense that Strauss's plays provide illuminating snapshots of contemporary society, targeting a self-indulgent middle class, letting the audience glimpse its own startling reflection, hitting the nail pointedly on the head.

Peter Handke and Botho Strauss follow the entanglements of their senses, but Handke keeps finding a trajectory which leads him out into the world, while Strauss remains deeply skeptical, caught up in reflections of the self. Neither one considers language a means to achieve understanding or to communicate semantic content. Handke views communication on the model of resonance: as he sets out to write he provides an impulse, not quite an awakening, inviting his readers to harmonize with the subsequent sojourn of his words and images.⁴⁴ Botho Strauss insists that language should not “serve communication,” but as “a communion,” poetically affirming its origin while it probes the depth and scope of individual sensibility: speaking is a form of listening to the echo of one's own voice. He likens the language of humans to that of whales and dolphins, where each utterance bounces off the walls of an inscrutable space of meaning, a thousand-fold refracted.⁴⁵

For different reasons, therefore, neither Handke nor Strauss is interested in the narrative communication of a particular content, metaphor, effect, topic, or story. In this, too, they agree with Hogarth and Cozens. While they invoke the scientific idiom and wish to mobilize the powers of reason, they do not, therefore, aim for knowledge and do not recommend the arts as a form of knowledge. While Strauss refers and defers to the authority of science in order to justify priority of the blot over the line, he nevertheless insists that art should never be concerned with cognition “but always with the development of mental acuity,” and thus with a method for the cultivation of experience as envisioned also by Handke, Hogarth, and Cozens.⁴⁶ None of them claims the intellectual authority of science for himself. However, their methods of experiencing, their ways of world-making, their habits of mental movement participate in scientific epistemologies: they desire the world in the manner in which science desires it.

Handke and Hogarth savor the “love of pursuit.” “The active mind is ever bent to be employ'd,” declares Hogarth, “this love of pursuit, merely as pursuit, is implanted in our natures.”⁴⁷ This natural inclination corresponds to the scientific virtue of being responsive even to the seemingly inconspicuous. The development of knowledge begins with a first impulse which prompts a felicitous motion leading from one thing to another and perhaps into a successful day.

Otto's protocol at 17 minutes after 3: Otto's thinking-aloud at 16 minutes after 3 was: in the room was at 15 minutes after 3 a table perceived by Otto.⁴⁸

According to philosopher of science Otto Neurath, protocol-sentences like these might mark the beginning of any quest for knowledge. Peter Handke celebrates the element of pleasure in an observational posture as disciplined and artful as Neurath's. The attempt to achieve a successful day, therefore, begins with “the clicking of the buttons, when I stripped my shirt off the chair this morning” with “globules of dew on a raven feather” or with a few lanceshaped pencils lying “on the windowsill along with a handful of oval hazelnuts.”⁴⁹ Handke shares in the joys of science when he finds how careful attention can enlarge what appears incidental, and that a minute triviality can take on a life of its own as its leads the mind to other precious observations of telling detail. He commits himself to this scientific course of progression, trusting that, once excited, the serpentine line may transport him infinitely far afield. Like Neurath, Wittgenstein, and other positivists, Handke thereby rejects the metaphysical notion that the world is somehow deep or profound. He gladly remains on the surface of the appearances, he reads the world and does not attempt to penetrate it or guess its riddle.

In contrast, Alexander Cozens and Botho Strauss ready themselves for profound revelations. They cultivate a sense of anticipation which allows them to suddenly apprehend something where there seems to be nothing. Cozens and Strauss seek the encounter of mind and nature and develop an art of discovery and invention designed to bring forth what is hidden. The imaginative child might see fairy tale creatures in the clouds, and the interplay of hypothesis and observation can lead a theoretically sensitized scientist to anticipate strange particles in a cloud of electrons. Similarly, Cozens and Strauss explore the experience that is only darkly intimated in the vague texture of an ink blot. All these instances lack a beginning. Ideas give contour to the blot, and the blot gives contour to the ideas, without beginning or end: the knowers always encounter themselves. “A universe which didn't evolve the human being couldn't even exist,” Botho Strauss assures himself.⁵⁰

In our sudden confrontation with the vagueness of the accidental blot, we experience a disorienting rupture or shock: having lost our bearing, we find ourselves cast into nature and simultaneously thrown back onto ourselves. In contrast, the willfulness of the line recovers the world and cheerfully runs into eternity. The line weaves people together and carries them forward for the duration of the possibly short-lived harmony of world and perception.

Botho Strauss has claimed the profound poetic blot for the political right, denouncing the line as the signature of an obsolete utopianism. It is not clear, however, whether Cozens's method or Strauss's poetics are affiliated so firmly with a political ideology. Strauss might point to Ernst Jünger's celebration of the sudden, unsettling, illuminating encounter between the artist's or the soldier's mind and the world; and Jünger is certifiably an author on or of the right. And yet, this core experience of shock or “chok” does not reduce Strauss's habit of mental movement to political ideology. The “chok” is also at the heart of Walter Benjamin's aesthetics. Benjamin read and admired Ernst Jünger, but his endeavor to activate in moments of “chok” a history which our conscious intelligence has rendered vague and indistinct, serves the explicitly communist goals of justice and human emancipation. Similarly, Peter Handke's cheerful line cannot be equated with a liberal belief in the perfectibility of the world. Aware of its anachronistic character, Handke defends the serpentine line for its ability to resonate, to touch upon and possibly to amplify values which have become precarious in the age of postmodern science and politics.

Nowadays, the Line of Beauty and Grace might be unlikely to take the same gentle curve as in Hogarth's eighteenth century, which, at least in prosperous, self-sufficient England, conceived of itself as a very earthly epoch. Isn't it typical of people like us that this sort of song keeps breaking off, lapsing into stuttering, babbling, and silence, starting up again, going off on a sidetrack—yet in the end, as throughout, aiming at unity and wholeness?⁵¹

The preceding observations may well be relevant for stagings of Handke's and Strauss's plays.⁵² However, they do not warrant an empirical generalization of the sort that would declare that all stagings of Handke's plays exemplify the line of beauty or that any production of a play by Strauss enacts a moment of slippage and shock. For example, it is easy to imagine a theatrical performance in which Handke's flowing motions are brutally stunted and thwarted; indeed, such a performance would powerfully dramatize the fragility of his utopian conceit.

Since “exemplification” establishes a reciprocal relationship, one might argue to the contrary that every actual staging exemplifies some aspects or properties of the dramatic text. The script has no ontological status of its own to which a performance conforms more or less. Instead, the performance establishes the play to which the author has merely provided the script. The performance reads, interprets, or enacts the script. The form it establishes, the pattern it sets, the motion it follows are inevitably the form, pattern, and motion of the play.

This view opens the door for a multitude of possible readings, interpretations, and stagings, but it does not imply that “anything goes” or that all interpretation is arbitrary. Instead, it proposes enactability as a non-trivial objective criterion which is safeguarded and monitored by the actors during the rehearsal process: whatever “concept” a director or dramaturg comes up with, the actors have to test it for its viability, have to demonstrate its enactability. An actual performance always achieves some agreement between what is happening on stage and what is set down in the text. What this agreement looks like on stage cannot be predicted by considering the text by itself.⁵³ Just like enactability, interpretability is a non-trivial objective criterion, safeguarded and monitored by readers who have to judge an interpretation plausible.⁵⁴

I may hope that my remarks on blotting and the line of beauty are true to Handke's and Strauss's texts: do they really prescribe a flowing motion or the shocking encounter with blots? At the same time, I may worry that my interpretations are merely consistent with the texts: have I reduced the writings of Handke and Strauss to records or notations of my interpretive motion, and can one say only now that, whatever else their texts do, they orchestrate and exemplify flowing motions and sudden ruptures? As old as that dilemma may be, it is resolved by the notion of exemplification which renders my oscillation between hope and worry obsolete. Performance and interpretation exemplify properties which are shared with what they symbolize: the performance on stage and the interpretation on page perform the performance of or by the dramatic text.⁵⁵

Notes

1. I would like to thank Robin Detje and Amittai Aviram for encouragement and criticism.

2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), 65. Goodman speaks more generally of symbolization: in contrast to representation and expression, exemplification symbolizes in such a way that what is symbolized is not outside the symbol. The swatch does not possess certain properties which enable it to symbolize something other than itself: the swatch is a swatch of the fabric and the fabric is the fabric of the swatch. Likewise, a theatrical performance is a performance of the text (exemplifies some of its properties) and the text is a notation of the performance (exemplifying some of its properties). However, there remains a difference between the symbol and what it symbolizes: in its execution and implementation a performance is very different from a dramatic text (and vice versa). Compare also Nelson Goodman, “Implementation of the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (Spring 1982), 281-83.

3. The terms of this equation may seem unusual, but compare the relation of performance to ritual and consider that any performance is (also) the repetition of a previous performance (or rehearsal). Amittai Aviram asks whether the shift from “representation” to “exemplification” corresponds to a shift from metaphor to metonymy. Also, how does the tripartition of exemplification, expression, and representation relate to Peirce's distinction of icon, index, and symbol? I hope to discuss these questions some day.

4. There is nothing vulgar, raw, or compulsive about their plays, which sets them apart from the majority of contemporary German plays (by, for example, Herbert Achternbusch, Rainald Goetz, Elfriede Jelinek, Franz Xaver Kroetz, or the recently deceased Werner Schwab and Heiner Müller). Peter Handke's plays include Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience, 1966), Kaspar (1968), Das Mündel will Vormund sein (My Foot My Tutor, 1969), Der Ritt über den Bodensee (The Ride across Lake Constance, 1971), Das Spiel vom Fragen oder die Reise zum Sonoren Land (Play of Questions, 1990), Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten (The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, 1992), and Zurüstungen für die Unsterblichkeit (opening in the 1996/97 season). Some of Botho Strauss's plays are Hypochonder (1972), Bekannte Gesichter, gemischte Gefühle (1975), Trilogie des Wiedersehens (Three Acts of Recognition, 1977), Gross und klein (Big and Little, 1978), Kalldewey Farce (1982), Der Park (1984), Sieben Türen (1988), Die Zeit und das Zimmer (1989), Schlusschor (1991), Das Gleichgewicht (1993), and Ithaka (1996).

5. For first reactions to Strauss's Ithaka: Schauspiel nach den Heimkehr-Gesängen der Odyssee see Theater heute, 37 (August 1996). Strauss's trouble began with his essay “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” in Spiegel 6 (February 1993), 202-07. It was further aggravated by his refusal to distance himself from right-wing appropriations of this text (cf. Theater heute, 35 [December 1994] and 36 [February 1995]). Handke published a series of articles in the Süddeutsche Zeitung which subsequently appeared as Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (Frankfurt, 1996).

6. For this turn of phrase compare Botho Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit: Reflexionen über Fleck und Linie (Munich, 1992), 75.

7. “Hogarth's Line of Beauty is not actually engraved in the palette; it is stretched over it like a curved rope or a whiplash.” (Peter Handke, The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling trans. Ralph Manheim and Krishna Winston [New York, 1994], 163). See William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, Written with a view of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955), 10: “I drew a serpentine line lying on a painter's pallet, with these words under it, THE LINE OF BEAUTY. The bait soon took; and no Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it did for a time, painters and sculptors came to me to know the meaning of it.”

8. “Successful Day,” in Handke, Jukebox, 119-67 (the essay originally appeared as a separate volume in German). The title might also be translated as “Essay on a Felicitous Day” or “On a Day that Worked Out.”

9. Compare, for example, Handke's 1967 poem on novel experiences in The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld (New York, 1974).

10. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 14. While descriptive of Handke's method, the allusion to “botanizing senses [botanisierende Sinne]” might also be taken as a reference to Ernst Jünger. However, it can be traced back much further to a remark from the year 1768 by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was ready by Jünger, Handke, and Strauss: “There are two ways of prolonging life, the first is to move the two points birth and death further apart and thus to make the road longer. … The other method is to walk more slowly and leave the two points where God put them, and this is the method for philosophers, for they have found that it is best to always go botanizing, zic-zac, try and jump a ditch here and back again, and where it is safe and no one sees it, dare a somersault, etc.” Lichtenberg expressed admiration of Hogarth (most famous are his “Explanations” of Hogarth's plates). Indeed, the quoted remark is almost immediately followed by a declaration of allegiance to Hogarth's serpentine line of beauty and Lawrence Sterne's “Manier en Ziczac,” compare Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher (Munich, 1973), 81f (remarks L 129 and 131).

11. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 101, 14.

12. Ibid., 70: “Der Fleck und die Linie. Er ist alles seelisch Gemeinte, nicht konturierbar, in mehrdeutiger Gestalt sich verlaufend. Sie ist die gebündelte Helle, und ihr Mysterium ist ihr offenes Ende, ihre Unabsehbarkeit.”

13. Ibid., 56.

14. Alexander Cozens, A New Method of Landscape (Wisbech, 1977), 13.

15. Ibid., 8.

16. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 42, compare 34f., 45, 87f., 95ff., and 70 where Hogarth analyzes a goat's horn, observing “first, that the whole horn acquires a beauty by its being thus genteely bent two different ways; secondly, that whatever lines are drawn on its external surface become graceful, as they must all of them, from the twist that is given the horn, partake in some degree or other, of the shape of the serpentine-line: and, lastly, when the horn is split, and the inner, as well as the outward surface of its shell-form is exposed, the eye is peculiarly entertained and relieved in the pursuit of these serpentine-lines, as in their twistings their concavities and convexities are alternately offer'd to its view.”

17. Ibid., 108 on “rays of light which are said to fall upon the eye from every object it sees, and to cause more or less-pleasing vibrations of the optic nerves, which serve to inform the mind concerning every different shape or figure that presents itself.” Compare also 44 and 172.

18. Cozens, A New Method, 9.

19. Ibid., 16.

20. This exploration of two habits of mental movement matches Hogarth to Handke, and Cozens to Strauss by likening for dramatic effect the antagonism between Handke and Strauss to the antagonism between Hogarth and Cozens. All four engage in a similar project by elaborating a scientific way of literary (or painterly) worldmaking; that is, they are concerned with form and method in a colorless world. Reference to this shared empiricist background allows me to highlight further the performative difference between a pursuit of the line and the method of blotting.

21. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 56, 60.

22. Ibid., 113, 133f.

23. Peter Handke, Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (Frankfurt, 1980), 26.

24. Ibid., 10.

25. Ibid., 34.

26. This is characteristic also of his early experimental plays like Offending the Audience or Kaspar, which present a journey of words that precedes the arrival at a here and now.

27. Peter Handke, “The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other,” Theater 24 (1993), 98. For more detail compare Alfred Nordmann and Hartmut Wickert, “The Impossible Representation of Wonder: Space Summons Memory,” forthcoming in Theatre Research International.

28. Theater heute, 35 (January 1994), 14-18, compare 15 and 18.

29. Handke already formulated this aesthetic ideal in his Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms (Frankfurt, 1970), 88-125.

30. “The Hour,” 105. While Handke made some films of his own (Chronik der laufenden Ereignisse [1971], Die linkshändige Frau [The Left-Handed Woman, 1978], and recently Die Abwesenheit [The Absence]), his collaboration with Wenders dates back to Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie's Fear of the Penalty Kick, 1972) and Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement, 1975). If Wenders's films best correspond to Handke's itinerant aesthetics, it is Robert Van Ackeren who is most attuned to Strauss's celebration of trivial catastrophes, compare especially his Reinheit des Herzens [Pure of Heart, 1979], but also Die flambierte Frau [A Woman in Flames, 1982].

31. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 36.

32. Ibid., 75.

33. Ibid., 100.

34. Ibid., 128f. Strauss articulated some of these aesthetic ideas in an earlier essay on George Steiner's Real Presences (Chicago, 1989): “Der Aufstand gegen die sekundäre Welt: Anmerkungen zu einer Ästhetik der Anwesenheit,” Die Zeit 26 (29 June 1990), 15.

35. Ibid., 104.

36. Botho Strauss, Devotion (New York, 1979), 30.

37. Ibid., 62.

38. Ibid., 96f.

39. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 103f.

40. Another variation of that theme occurs in Wohnen Dämmern Lügen (Munich, 1994), 9-11. Here, a man suddenly sees the unfaithfulness of his wife in the incidental nakedness of another woman.

41. “Schlusschor” in Spectaculum 55: Sechs moderne Theaterstücke (Frankfurt, 1993), 187-230, especially 191, 199, 202-216.

42. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 129; compare the scene in which a printer complains of an annoying sound at his workplace while struggling to consume hors d'oeuvres in Three Acts of Recognition, or Lotte-Kotte's monologue with an intercom in the doorway of an apartment house in Big and Little, or the artifully cruel and senseless jargon of Kalldewey Farce.

43. With this metaphor Strauss concludes his essay on the aesthetics of presence. Each of Strauss's plays serves as a lamp-post under which a buzzing, blot-shaped swarm of contemporaries gathers fashionably in vain.

44. Handke himself delights in this quite openly, as evidenced by an interview with André Müller in Die Zeit, 3 March, 1989: “I am intent on a world that is cleansed by language. But that's why you should describe evil, in order to banish it, rather than all the time those hymns to goodness and beauty. You're an idiot. Possibly. It quite pleases me to hear that I write hymns to beauty, because they are concrete and philosophical and the formulations are super-cool [supergeil formuliert]. … I don't know any living author who writes pure literature as I do. Everyone else disseminates opinions. The only accomplishment that I am really proud of is that I avoided an ideology [Weltbild]. My books give me pure reading pleasure. My chest expands when I read them, and I think, how beautifully this is written, he really knows how to write, well-done.”

45. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 32, 108f.

46. Ibid., 15. Compare Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 22: a “kind of doctrine that may teach us to see with our own eyes.”

47. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 41, 42, 45.

48. Otto Neurath, “Protokollsätze,” Erkenntnis 3 (1932/33), 204-214. Neurath was one of the founders of so-called Logical Positivism.

49. Peter Handke, “Successful Day,” 135, 156, 139. “As I listen for a tone, the tonality of the whole day's journey reveals itself to me. The tone does not have to be a full sound, it can be indifferent, as often as not a mere noise; the essential is that I make myself all ears for it” (135).

50. Strauss, Beginnlosigkeit, 10, compare 11: “It is not an object which triggers the pleasant sensation of wishing to contemplate it, but a nameless errant sensation, devoid of images or appearances, seeks a self-satisfaction in which an object appears worthy of contemplation.” Strauss refers to this as a “circulus creativus.”

51. Handke, “Successful Day,” 127. For his precarious optimism compare his postscript to the controversial Winterliche Reise, 130ff., which also alludes to the serpentine line as embodied by the Serbian rivers, the diversions of art, and art as diversion.

52. A performance of one of Handke's plays is analyzed along these lines in Nordmann and Wickert, “The Impossible Representation of Wonder.” For quite another example, namely the performance of the falling motion which characterizes the work of Heinrich von Kleist, see Alfred Nordmann “Political Theater as Experimental Anthropology: On a Production of Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” New German Critique, 66 (1995), 17-34.

53. On the criterion of enactability as a way of testing interpretive claims about texts as well as more general claims about human agency and sociability, compare Alfred Nordmann and Hartmut Wickert, “Ende der Kritik, Beginn der Aufklärung: Aufführungsästhetische Reflektionen am Beispiel des Dokumentartheaters” (typescript).

54. The problem of performing a text or executing a work is thus akin to Wittgenstein's problem of rule-following. On the one hand, it is absurd to assume that the meaning of a rule somehow determines all its applications (or that the meaning of a text dictates our interpretive responses): the rule has to be re-asserted, perhaps re-invented in each application. And yet, there are objective criteria for correct rule-following, namely whether or not our application of the rule agrees with an established practice. In the theater, the rehearsal process seeks out and establishes an objective practice.

55. This reveals what is right and what is wrong with the somewhat casual notion of a performance by a text. That turn of phrase reflects the heuristic and hermeneutically inescapable assumption that one can get nothing out of a text which isn't somehow in it already; and yet, strictly speaking a text does not do or perform anything at all; its performance is attendant on its execution, that is, by way of writing and reading, interpreting or (en)acting.