Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics
This chapter looks at Hans Blumenberg's “Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics” (1966), which focuses on poetic language. The three basic ideas of the relationship between language and thought should help one gain a certain orientation to determine the function of poetic language. After all, an immanent poetics will by necessity depend on examining the function of a work's language. The explication of the immanent poetics of a work will therefore depend on asking the “right” questions with regard to this work's language. Of course, hints can be derived from the author's exogenous poetics, from his self-testimony and self-observation, if this is indeed what they are and not simply the “offshoot” of a normative theory of art. This methodical preliminary question deserves not to be passed over. Already the classification of a text by its author as “self-observation” during the process of aesthetic production expresses a certain aesthetic position. This position permits experience to provide relevant information about the process of a work's emergence.