Friday, October 21, 2011

What Kittler seemed to promise

The death this week of Friedrich Kittler reminded me of just how radical his Aufschreibesysteme seemed when it first appeared.  Discourse Networks, the English translation, continues to reverberate through English departments.  I remember vividly that it was the first book I photocopied in its entirety back in graduate school.  Standing in a copy store in Ithaca, I wondered what mysteries were in the pages that came spewing out the machine, which the intense, high-minded older students, who had driven me to xerox Kittler, already claimed to understand.

The radical potential of Kittler’s Habilitationsschrift was that it seemed to erase literature’s claim to uniqueness.  By setting novels equal to pedagogical manuals, Kittler was extending Foucault’s discourse analysis into art.  Foucault had really written little about literature after all, but Kittler was first and fore mostly, a Germanist—at least back then.

Kittler’s work promised to undo the most sacred tenet of German aesthetics—the autonomy of art.  People had claimed that Derrida and deconstruction would lead in that direction, but Kittler seemed to be one of the very first to thoroughly intermingle literature with other discourses, so that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was comparable to a book on language acquisition or medicine.  The one thing that Kittler left to literature was the claim that its best works contained more insights about the operation of discourse and power than non-literary texts.   Thus, a great novel might contain more social history than historical texts.

Looking back on the arc of Kittler’s influence, it seems clear that at some point this radical potential to knock literature off its pedestal has succeeded.  Literary studies today are hardly as important to students and colleges as they were in the 1980s.  Though, Kittler surely does not get the credit for the demise of literature.  Infact he probably gets the credit for driving literary scholars to reclaim the autonomy of art,  for there developed in the mid 1990s a backlash within literature departments against the pomo tendency to levelize all forms of writing.


The early works of Kittler presented a wonderful interpenetration between close literary analysis and cultural history relying on Foucault.  The subtle back and forth in his reading of Wilhelm Meister in Dichtung als Sozialisationspiel and Aufschreibeysteme's masterful leaps from a few lines in Faust to the entire Enlightenment held many of us in awe.  But eventually this tension tore apart, and Kittler wrote increasingly about social forces as largely determinate of subjective processes such as literature.  His essay "There is no software" had the same paranoid reductionism of bad old nineteenth-century Marxism, whereby individual expression is really already determined behind the scene by the forces of industrialization, or in Kittler's more updated form, machine language.


The alliance of theory interests which Kittler had forged with his first books fell apart with the technologically determinist work, and critics who had once participated int he project of discourse analysis turned increasingly into a close readings which neglected the social context.


One place we can detect this swing away from Kittler’s approach is in David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism.  Wellbery had always been seen as an ally of Kittler; their essays often appeared side-by-side.  Each had students that worked with the other.  Yet in Wellbery’s book on the young Goethe’s poetry, you can sense a decisive move away from the claim that literature is comparable to other discourses.  Wellbery says he's engaged in discourse analysis, but really he performs very little of the broad historical sweep that Kittler displayed.  Instead, Wellbery digs deeply into Goethe’s poems with Lacan-inspired close readings.  Powerful, compelling interpretations of individual poems that run on for dozens of pages—this is what Wellbery produces, so that in the end, he re-establishes once again Goethe’s pivotal place at the origins of modern German literature.  By the end of Wellbery’s book you are presented with overwhelming evidence of Goethe’s singular genius.  The old cult is back—and this is conclusion that Kittler might have held in private, but he would never have written a book establishing this point.

As Kittler’s career moved off into media studies, computer programing languages and the history of technology, Germanistik found new theoretical means to re-establish the primacy of literature, at least for those who understood narratology and Lacan.

In other words, Kittler’s radical potential was broken down into highly specialized disciplines.  If literature lost its claim to autonomy, it was not because of Aufschreibesysteme so much as because of the conservative turn among students, administrators and voters, who increasingly found the esoteric conversations of literary studies impossible to follow.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Metropolitan Modernisms

Here's the new course for the Spring 2012:

                                             

German 592                                                                           TR 2:30 to 3:45
Professor Daniel Purdy                                                        409 Burrowes Building

This course will interpret literature, film, architecture and theory from the last 150 years in order to examine the production of spaces within modern metropoli, concentrating fore mostly on Berlin, with additional texts and films about Paris, New York, Beijing and Shanghai.  We will ask questions such as:  How do places within a city acquire a specific ethnic, sexual, political or economic meaning?  What artistic techniques represent the experience of street life best?  How important are urban spaces for the operation of a political public sphere?  What does it mean to “occupy” a place? 

Our approach will compare modern industrial cities to one another.  We will first trace the formation of Berlin modernist aesthetics and then consider its global legacy in the 21st century.  Paris and Moscow will be important to understanding the modernism of Weimar Germany in the 1920s.  New York, Chicago, Beijing, and Shanghai will mark different stages in the diffusion of this early twentieth-century Modernism.

We will read German texts in relation to foreign cities.  We consider the implications of Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project) and Siegfried Kracauer (Straßen in Berlin) fascination for Paris.  New York and Chicago will be discussed in regards to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Bauhaus architecture of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.  Spaces marked in terms of alternative sexualities will be considered in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Magus Hirschfeld’s Transvestiten and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories.  We will read film theory on montage and the experience of urban streets, drawing connections between Russian revolutionary cinema and modernist experimental prose (Döblin and Musil). 

Our readings will survey theories of urbanity from Georg Simmel to Rem Koolhaas, Marc Augé, and Ackbar Abbas.  Finally we will conclude with contemporary discussions of “the European city” as a reaction against globalization generally and the example of China’s rapid urbanization specifically. We will discuss the places of historical preservation and memorialization in Berlin and Beijing by considering Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin.  By way of contrast we will consider architectural debates about preserving traditional urban spaces in China and contemporary Chinese films such as Ning Ying’s I love Beijing.   

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Hunting and the Revolution

Major upheavals begin with small gestures, as this eighteenth-century text, written by Matthias Claudius and translated here, can attest: 

"A LETTER FROM A STAG RECENTLY HUNTED DOWN 
TO THE LORD WHO HUNTED HIM DOWN, 
WRITTEN FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER 

I had the distinction of being chased down by your serene highness today and request most subservently that your lordship might condescend in future to spare me this ordeal.

If your serene highness should ever once be hunted in this manner, you would find my request not unreasonable in the least. I am lying here and cannot raise my head, blood is flowing  from my mouth and nostrils. How can your highness have the heart to drive an animal to its death, especially one that lives innocently, eating only herbs and grass.  Next time have them come out and just shoot me dead, that way it will be over quickly.  It may be that your serene highness takes pleasure in hunting, but if you knew how my heart beats, you would surely never do it again. . . .”

--This satire on aristocratic hunting, written in the manner of an administrative memo from a dying buck to his feudal lord, goes far beyond criticizing an ancient sport; in the stag's last request we hear bitterness and defiance mixed with helpless begging.  One wonders whether Kafka read this story, for the voice of an animal writing an official letter in bureaucratic German would surely have caught his attention.  The text draws us to identify with the dying animal and to recognize ourselves in him—as just another lowly subject driven to an exhausted death by a self-indulgent elite.  The dying buck stands in for all those (humans as well as animals) beneath the feudal lord, especially when he makes the revolutionary suggestion that the lord should himself be hunted down by dogs until he collapses.  With its last breath, the animal imagines a violent revenge whereby the arrogant abuses of feudalism are turned against its masters, and yet the beast is not strong enough, the lord’s hunting party too well armed, and so all the buck can do in the end is ask for mercy.  Still this satire was written in 1775 and you can sense that the hunt might someday indeed turn against the hunters, just as the dying deer desired.

The original you can find on Gutenberg.de and Zeno.de: 

SCHREIBEN EINES PARFORCEGEJAGTEN HIRSCHEN AN DEN FÜRSTEN DER IHN PARFORCEGEJAGT HATTE, D. H. JENSEIT DES FLUSSES


„Durchlauchtigster Fürst, Gnädigster Fürst und Herr!
Ich habe heute die Gnade gehabt, von Ew. Hochfürstlichen Durchlaucht parforcegejagt zu werden; bitte aber untertänigst, daß Sie gnädigst geruhen, mich künftig damit zu verschonen.
Ew. Hochfürstliche Durchlaucht sollten nur einmal parforcegejagt sein, so würden Sie meine Bitte nicht unbillig finden. Ich liege hier und mag meinen Kopf nicht aufheben, und das Blut läuft mir aus Maul und Nüstern. Wie können Ihre Durchlaucht es doch übers Herz bringen, ein armes unschuldiges Tier, das sich von Gras und Kräutern nährt, zu Tode zu jagen? Lassen Sie mich lieber totschießen, so bin ich kurz und gut davon. Es kann sein, daß Ew. Durchlaucht ein Vergnügen an dem Parforcejagen haben; wenn Sie aber wüßten, wie mir noch das Herz schlägt, Sie täten´s gewiß nicht wieder …….“

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

What ails Comp Lit? Its own cure

Comparative Literature is often described as “in crisis.”  How to define and defend against this threat to the discipline is an open question, a problem whose explanation almost always brings a solution with it.  If you can diagnose what ails comp lit, then you are two steps away from prescribing a cure.

But perhaps Comp Lit is not in crisis, rather it is the university around it that has grown intolerant of interdisciplinarity?  What was once taken to be height of the humanities, a learned ability to move between languages and literatures has of late been misunderstood.

So the worst thing Comp Lit could do is start acting like one of the old-fashioned territorial departments that long ago passed away. The great success of comparative literature in the 1980s—yes, the previous century—has lead to the general acceptance of literature departments to include scholars who work in more than one language, more than one canon.  So now comp lit faces the threat of its own success.  Everyone is doing it, so comp lit departments worry that they need to reinvent themselves.

The worst move would be for comparative literature to start acting territorial, to regulate its graduate students, to force them into a narrowly defined range of courses, to create a curriculum that precludes working with outside departments. 
For if comparative literature departments were to draw borders around itself, it would become the territory of non-territoriality, the discipline of inter-disciplinarity, the dogmatic negation of national identity.  It would set up rules and controls over which scholars and what methods are outside national literary traditions.  This would require, inevitably, that comp lit overstate how narrow, periodical and identity-driven other departments were.  “They are hung up on canons, we are without a canon, that is our canon.”

This kind of dogmatic negativity has been around for ages, longer than Hegel’s dialectic.  In the end it leads to its own internal critique, one which seeks to break out of the rules that proscribe interdisciplinarity in favor of that most dreadful of post-Soviet ghosts, ethnic identity.  The biggest groups usually win in such contests, if not English, for it does have its own department already, then Spanish and Mandarin. Comp Lit would suffer greatly if its literary curriculum were reduced to a question of population sizes--biggest enrollments, largest readerships.

Better to encourage and work with a cosmopolitan model of the university, better to indulge in world literature as a heritage all readers enjoy.  Better not to act as if only one department knew anything about the wonderful interplay of the Liberal Arts.