KRAUS AS SATIRIST

It is anachronistic to speak of the “press” in the early eighteenth century, for the medley of pamphlets, tracts, poems, broadsides, and periodicals involved in the debates over Dunkirk hardly has the generic and institutional shape and predictability that we understand by the press since the late nineteenth century. The press did not exist as a distinct kind of business organization. It did not report facts but factional opinion regarding events and rumors, and the public's interest in such events often outran the press's capacity to verify them. But the uncertainty and openness of such discourse allowed the range of its satiric attack, as I have suggested, to be directed at all elements of communication and to imply that they had failed to communicate. For the modern press, with its more positive sense of actuality and its tighter organizational definition, the satiric strategy had to be narrower and deeper. Perhaps the most important enemy of the press in the twentieth century and the most important satirist is the Viennese writer Karl Kraus. Among the elements in Roman Jakobson's communications model, Kraus's satire focuses most significantly almost exclusively on code, for his concern throughout his active satiric life was language, its nature, and its abuses.

Attacking the press provides the opportunity of decrying the material it presents as a sign of the sorry state of contemporary life, but, at the same time, it allows comment on the press itself as a creature of bourgeois capitalism that selects, suppresses, arranges, and presents its material in order to make money and to shape (or misshape) the culture of its readers in its own interests.