Simulating Simulation: Art and Modernity in Faust II

Abstract

Challenging what they considered the predicaments of modern bureaucratic reason, early German Romantics such as Novalis, Schelling, and Fried rich Schlegel argued for a rebirth of mythology in order to imbue modern secularized history with transcendental meaning and secure the construction of traditional cultural identities. German Romantics around 1800 envisioned in the hermetic realm of poetry the power to reduce the institutional complexity of their society, hoping to establish links to timeless resources of orientation, judgement, and interpretation. Seen from today's historical distance, however, it seems legitimate to maintain that it was not Romantic poetry and aesthetic speculation proper, but rather the poetic imagery of industrial life itself and the phantasmagorical tendencies of commodity culture that were able to generate the desired mythic powers of the past. Nineteenth-century capitalism introduced numerous new technological achievements and market products in the form of historical restitutions, citing old and well-known forms and appearances out of context. In the urban metropoles of the mid-nineteenth century, one encountered endless iconographic references to a mythical world that had seemingly survived the often iconoclastic thrust of eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Just as fashions during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era mimicked Greek customs and styles, so the inchoate consumer culture of the nineteenth century donned the cloak of imitation and cross-cultural masquerade. As a result of curious processes of citation, inversion, and displacement, the outward appearances of technologically assembled goods often reproduced the visual surfaces of those old premodern products they were to overcome: