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  • Constellations:A Brief Introduction1
  • Andrea Krauß (bio)

Constellations arise out of the conjunction of certain factors that are significant for a situation, a process, a (textual) structure; they result from the presence and the arrangement or grouping of certain factors or elements. With reference to their astrological/astronomical semantic content, talk of constellations can be rendered more precise both discursively and in terms of a theory of representation (Darstellung). Constellations thus point toward a theory of reading. They designate an interpretive procedure that draws specific attention to the instable conditions of this interpretation: To look from the earth into the sky in order to 'read' the positions of the stars to one another, the constellations, is to become a relative observer in relation to an investigative object that is continually shifting; and it is to observe puzzlingly structured 'surfaces' that only coalesce into recognizable astral images when an 'external' knowledge intrudes into the domain of dispersed points of light, when significant patterns produce something legible among these intrinsically unspecified shapes. Constellations therefore accentuate the constellating practice of reading and its presuppositions, they expose an object-formation, in which reading finds itself referred in a specific way to other possible readings. What supposedly appears as a given object does not in itself offer a foundation to the constellating 'texture' but shows itself in its dynamic withdrawal to be an inaccessible—or one might say: unlimitedly accessible 'existence.' Seen in this way, constellation becomes a paradoxical concept, since it [End Page 439] designates both the instrument and the object of reading, mutually intertwined with each other in a complex interaction—a perpetual interaction between the being of an object legibly constellated in whatever way, and the "being-thus" of an object as determined in a particular way and hence the object of constellating (epistemic) operations.

Where constellations designate a problem of object-formation and do not simply label such supposedly predetermined (historical) relations as connections of literary-historical influence, biographically documented networks, or contexts of transmission available for analysis; where, that is, constellations draw attention to the discursive production of objects of knowledge, work with constellations exposes a self-reflective dimension. They are able to hold in tension the inaccessible order of the object and the ordering principles of reading and to expose this tension, inasmuch as they serve as theoretical figures for the critique of representation and so manifest the determinate mode of object formation and its reflection.

If the limits of reason were brought to consciousness by Kant and if this experience or analytic of finitude (Foucault) establishes consciousness as modern consciousness as such, then every differentiation of modern knowledge is marked by this finitude. Every discursive limit that this thought erects, every genre that is simply an effect of such delimitation, but also every discipline that maintains the institutional framework of such delimitation is founded in this finitude. At the same time as modern knowledge production appears, the limits of its delimitation appear as well: the experience of finitude becomes a constitutive unrest that impels knowledge to continual self-overcoming. Thought must think itself as limited, as knowledge that could potentially be thought quite differently. This is where the epistemology of constellations takes root. The experience of finitude is "what allows the most diverse discourses and genres to come together in a constellation above and beyond the borders of the disciplines"2: The limit of thought that is in itself neither thinkable nor representable becomes indirectly recognizable in the transgression of the 'internal' boundaries that structure the established 'topography' of thought. In this way thought 'reads' itself with reference to a possible alternative. It confronts itself, to the extent that other distributive and combinative possibilities of discourse appear, with the presupposition-laden act of [End Page 440] positing its own delimitations. In the features of constellation, the experience of finitude becomes effective as dynamic opening, that is, it becomes legible in its representation (Darstellung).

Walter Benjamin and under his influence Theodor W. Adorno have sketched out an epistemology of constellations. As distinct from the "nineteenth-century concept of system,"3 constellation names that epistemo-critical figure in which a truth not "direct[ly]"4 knowable is able in...

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