4 The Dissection of the State: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the Politics of Aesthetics

Abstract

One frequently encounters the claim that aesthetics is an essentially, and disingenuously, political discourse. The project of cultural critique, versions of which figure so visibly in the landscape of contemporary crit­ icism, might be summed up as the attempt to demonstrate that aesthetics not only fails to transcend the purposeful machinations of power but also reinforces these machinations through its very pretense to transcend them. This demystification of aesthetics has enjoyed considerable success at least in part because aesthetics, as we have seen, is so clearly a historical phe­ nomenon that can be incorporated into political narrative. The vehemence with which conservative journalists and critics parody and decry the "polit­ icization" of aesthetics pays tribute to the force of the demystifying narra­ tive: as soon as one considers with any care the historical emergence of the aesthetic sphere during the eighteenth century, it rapidly becomes obvious-particularly in the German contexts in which aesthetics was first and most elaborately theorized-that the idea, the funding, and the upkeep of a "cultural sphere" serves recognizable, and quite pressing, political and class interests. The disinterestedness of aesthetics thus provides as it were a detour or disguise for various and not necessarily complementary projects: the consolation and bureaucratization of a middle class within an absolutist state; the construction of an ideological base for an eventual middle-class hegemony; the diversion of revolutionary energies; and so on.1