Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge's Twenty-First-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form by Leslie A. Adelson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge's Twenty-First-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form by Leslie A. Adelson Nils Plath Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge's Twenty-First-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form. By Leslie A. Adelson. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2018. Pp. 304. Paper $68.99. ISBN 978-3110611083. One element common to all of the works by the multimedia narrator Alexander Kluge is his continual contesting and examination of—and confrontation with—the multiple [End Page 217] determinations and establishments of positions that either allow or obstruct the views of the world, and thus contrive and conceive images of a steadily uncertain, insecure, and yet all too concrete reality. His writings and works in different media confront the frameworks and settings that construct such relations and provide one or many perspectives on what is called reality. The title of one of the many collaborative works by this markedly monolithic author gives away what Kluge's striving is all about: the measuring of what he calls Maßverhältnisse, or dimensional ratios. Over the decades in his prose, films, and works for television he has aspired to realize these ratios in his practice, which involves montage-like showing and telling, creating constellations, and nonsystematic burrowing. A brief passage from his 1981 Geschichte und Eigensinn, cowritten with Oskar Negt (a monumental study that appeared in English in 2014 as History and Obstinacy), illustrates the convergence of theoretical positioning and descriptive practices that characterizes Kluge's montages: "The illusion of leadership. In the perception of those engaged in battle, a collective distraction emerges in favor of a perspective from a strong, super-elevated position, that of the so-called commander [Feldherr]. The distraction draws its energy from the fact that the individual or group directly engaged in the practice of war never perceives the whole war. Nevertheless, a need for orientation brings about the production of a completely arbitrary overview" (309). Kluge closely pays attention to the viewpoints or positions of those who determine so-called realities, which are not merely a given, and the illusion of leadership. Ever since his early days as a writer and filmmaker, he has shown great interest in representations of realities and their effects, and has himself been involved in defining them: as an analyst of the actuality of political and historical connections in which the individual finds herself, as one struggling within group identities, as an assembler of moving images and stills in his films and works for television, and as a narrator and prose author who continues to realize constellations as Denkbilder in Walter Benjamin's sense and with an obligation to his "The Storyteller." Prose is thus the focus of this well-written study by Leslie A. Adelson, the result of decades-long intensive engagement with Kluge's oeuvre in the course of thinking and rethinking narration and its condition in the twentieth and twenty-first century. She presents Kluge as "an inventive and maverick user of utopian, critical, and Marxist traditions alike, and the counterfactual hope that his literary narratives mobilize do make claims to real effect on the experiential status of futurity itself" (28). Her study concentrates solely on the narrator Kluge, not the filmmaker or the television program provider, and this limits the scope of engagement with this one-man "mass-medium" (Georg Stanitzek), yet allows for concentrated close readings with intelligent theoretical accompaniment. In Kluge's mostly short prose pieces—"counter histories" (43) "for our dis- and conjunctive times" (22) that point at ways out of the times marked by oppression and power structures (78)—Adelson strives to make out prospects [End Page 218] for "experiencing the future senses" beyond traditional utopias (57). She considers Kluge's storytelling not a hermeneutic one but "something like a cross between phenomenology, materialism, critique, and puttering as a form of labor" (40). She deems it exemplary for a "'future-making' to the degree that futurity, for Kluge, is a kind of long-distance sense organ that many of narratives work on and operatively cultivate" (40). And yet, the present always remains outspokenly the definite point of relevance in...