Introduction to Special Section "Movement": Movement and the Modern

The essays in this section explore the dialectic of movement and stasis that plays out in the literature and thought of the Goethezeit. These contributions stem from a series of panels on the topic organized by the MLA Forum on Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century German Literature for the 2021 MLA convention. They open up a dialogue about how movement functions to reflect and shape emerging social, aesthetic, affective, temporal, and political concepts in the period.

Movement and stillness stand at the center of Lessing's argument about the superior flexibility of poetry over the plastic arts in his Laocoon (1766); his interpretation of the Laocoon statue rests upon the "pregnant moment" in which movement is frozen.¹ Poetry and drama, in contrast, are liberated from the more rigid representational strictures applied to the visual arts because of the arbitrary and transitory nature of words. It is the movement of words that continually feeds our imagination. As Susan Gustafson reminds us in her essay in this section on the Wilhelm Meister novels, Lessing connects movement to aesthetic pleasure: "Reiz ist Schönheit in Bewegung" (Charm is beauty in motion).² In this sense, Lessing's aesthetic program deviates from Winckelmann's neoclassical fetishization of Greek statuary and is predicated on aesthetic effect. Lessing's embrace of movement drives the privileging of poetry and drama over sculpture and painting in his semiotic treatise. A few decades later, Hegel reprises this aesthetic value system in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics, 1835–38), situating the static art of statuary at the beginning of a genealogy of aesthetics that culminates in poetry, drama and, eventually, the end of art. The movement and evolution so central to his aesthetic and ethical project delineate a development from the motionless "schwere Materie" (heavy matter)³ of statues to the lightness and transitoriness ("die innere Lebendigkeit") (inner life)⁴ of poetry. Dialectical thought is, to be sure, predicated on constant movement, and movement is thereby perceived as a product of the present and the future. The concepts of Bildung and Steigerung (progression), so important for Goethe and his contemporaries, likewise point forward to Hegel's notion of movement that drives modern dialectical thought.

In this way, movement is often coded as modern, while stasis is relegated to a premodern past. As Gilles Deleuze reminds us in his analysis of the moving pictures of film, movement is anathema to wholeness: "movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable."⁵ He understands premodern time as marked by a series of privileged, discrete "forms or poses" that give way to one another, whereas modern time is marked by "any-instantwhatevers" that are equally important or unimportant.⁶ Aesthetic movement is modern precisely because it continually destabilizes any sense of wholeness, a concept at odds with a postsacral worldview. György Lukács similarly connects aesthetic movement with modernity when he distinguishes the hero of the premodern epic from the hero of the modern novel in terms of movement in his Theorie des Romans (Theory of the Novel, 1920). For Lukács, the epic hero resides at the center of the adventures he experiences, embodying "der innerlich unbeweglichste Punkt der rhythmischen Bewegung der Welt" (the inwardly most immobile point of the world's rhythmic movement).⁷ The epic hero does not move at all; he is a flat center around whom the world of the epic moves. In contrast, the novel represents "ein Werdendes" (something in the process of becoming)⁸ an encounter between a fragile hero and the "Brüchigkeit der Welt" (the fragility of the world).⁹ As a "Werdendes" the novel, along with its hero, is constantly in dialectical motion within a precarious modern world.

Lukács famously discusses Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795–96) in this context, celebrating the modern hero Wilhelm while simultaneously expressing his discomfort with what he sees as the inorganic, flat quality of the Turmgesellschaft (Tower Society) portions of the narrative. Dialectical movement is, of course, intimately connected to a concept of organicism, and Goethe's own...