6 - Pathologies: Elfriede Jelinek's Die Klavierspielerin and Rainald Goetz's Irre

Summary

ELFRIEDE JELINEK'S DIE KLAVIERSPIELERIN (The Piano Teacher) and Rainald Goetz's Irre (Crazy) were both published in 1983. As literary products of the early 1980s, they are exemplary of an intensified phase in the questioning of the Enlightenment conceptualization of selfhood and social order in the aftermath of the 1968 movement and the rise of the new feminism in the 1970s. The decade and a half before their publication was characterized by an extraordinary wave of critical-theoretical activity in Western Europe and the United States, corresponding in the intellectual arena to what Peter Wagner terms the “de-conventionalization” of social practices. Two features of the very diverse theoretical work of the late 1960s and the 1970s are important to note. One is the rebellious turn among a broadly defined intellectual left in the West against the perceived totalitarian character of international capitalism and its ideological control of the masses, both via the false promises of consumerism and through its institutionalized regulation of social power and knowledge. The second is the key aspect of the critique of language — both as the sum of social signifying practices and as institutionalized discourse — as that by which social reality is produced and organized. On the one hand, this emphasis on language acts finally to unseat the Enlightenment subject from its central position as the agent of history, at any rate theoretically. Individual subjectivity and agency become a chimera, since the “individual” must be acknowledged, too, as the product of signifying practices and as always already determined by pre-existing orders of discourse.