Die vergangene Zukunft der Literaturtheorie. Zur temporalen Dimension disziplinärer Arbeitsteilungen

Abstract The essay departs from the so-called »end of theory« and relates it to transformations of temporal horizons: the loss of an emphatic conception of the future, ecological crises, and artificial intelligence. It engages in conversation with two developments, each starting from the past of (literary) theory: first, the demand for a return to the object of study; second, the historicization of formerly emphatic theory, which is now regarded as a cultural event of former generations. The essay proposes to connect these various directions in a productive way: the literary studies division of labor between theory, method, and object is interpreted temporally with reference to proposals by, among others, the theoreticians of science Mary Hesse and Niklas Luhmann. The role of the object is to represent the constructed past of scientific arguments. Method secures the future in an operative sense: it generates probable possibilities for continuation. Theory, then, is the mediation of reconstructed past and operative continuation. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of future anteriority, the third section of the essay develops an understanding of literary theory in the mode of the future perfect. Theory as textual practice keeps the future open. It makes its own historicity visible, thereby keeping contingent paths open. This meaningful textuality of theory is indispensable especially against algorithmic constructions of reality. The essay advocates, in both research and teaching, an understanding of literary theory that relates it to media-ecological infrastructures and practices of reading and writing. The proposed conceptual differentiation between theory, method and object has concrete implications for research and teaching: in teaching ›methods and theories of literature‹, these could be reflected in relation to concrete architectures of writing and reading instead of ordering them according to big names. In research, concrete projects can use the reflection on the relationship between object, method, and theory to keep the spatio-temporal location of speaking and writing recognizable.