NEXUS. Postmoderne Mythenbilder. Vexierbilder zwischen Spiel und Erkenntnis. Mit einem Kommentar zu Christoph Ransmayrs

Abstract

Kiel, Martin. NEXUS. Postmoderne Mythenbilder Vexierbilder zwischen Spiel und Erkenntnis. Mit einem Kommentar zu Christoph Ransmayrs Die letzte Welt. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996.252 pp. DM 79.00 paperback. In Nexus, Martin Kiel puts forward an ambitious project. In less than 250 pages, he proposes a theory of the postmodern, an interpretation of myth, a theory of reading, and the analysis of a particular work of literature. The project is held together by the concept of the nexus, a metaphor for the postmodern condition borrowed from biology. While the scope of Mel's study is too broad to deliver all that it promises, the notion of the nexus suggestively bridges the theoretical divide between the humanities and the hard sciences. Nexus consists of 16 chapters that can be combined into four broad sections. Kiel begins with a discussion of the postmodern, which, in his view, has been understood only imperfectly. This situation may be remedied, he suggests in chapters one through three, by a focus on the notion of the nexus. In chapters four through nine, Mel proceeds to discuss the value of myth and of mythical regression. The third section, chapters 10 and 11, portrays Kiel's attempt to establish a conceptual link between myth and postmodern narratives. The fourth and last section looks at the use of myth in Ovid and interrogates the function of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (chapters 12-15). Some brief remarks on method, the nexus, and the nature of the postmodern conclude the volume (chapter 16). The most innovative aspect of Kiel's study is his attempt to map the postmodern onto an explanatory model drawn from biology. In functional cytology, according to Kiel, the concept of nexus (gap junction) denotes a connection between contiguous cells that regulate their metabolism through permeable channels. These channels, however, exchange only elements (Bausteine) and signals, not entire molecules (such as RNA). It is here that Mel perceives an astonishing conceptual similarity (27) to the postmodern condition. Like the nexus, the nature of the postmodern can be described in terms of connection and the exchange of elements and signals. With the help of diagrams, Kiel then theorizes the postmodem moment as nexus, as a state of things indicative of an Epochenschwelle, the onset of a new historical epoch, characterized by self-reflexivity, fragmentation, carnevalization, intertextuality, citation, metastasis, and a cyclical rather than linear order. Among the elements and signals that contribute to the sense of the postmodern, Kiel identifies discourse. Amalgamating theories of myth by Hans Blumenberg, Horkheimer/Adorno, and Rene Girard, the author posits an affinity between myth as healing constructive regression (99) and the postmodern sensibility. In this manner, he grafts onto the formalist model of the postmodern as nexus a mythological critique of Enlightenment modernity and its concomitant belief in rationalism, linearity, and progress. In a similar manner, Kiel employs Umberto Eco's writings on semiotics to delineate a postmodern approach to textuality and signification as rhizomes of meaning. …