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.

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 21^st 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.   

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 …….“

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.

Charlemagne backs the Euro with Frankish troops

The FAZ reports that Jürgen Stark, a German economist on the board of the European Central Bank has resigned.
http://www.faz.net/artikel/S30638/ezb-chefvolkswirt-stark-tritt-zurueck-risiko-zentralbank-30683913.html

The Guardian explains that this sends "shock waves" through the markets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/09/stark-ecb-resignation-sends-markets-reeling

On the face of it, Stark's resignation shows that the ECB is divided on whether it should continue to buy government bonds of European nations that are in burden with debt.  The FAZ article reiterates an ancient North-South comparison, the idea that northern European nations, such as Germany foremostly, are obliged to financially obliged to support southern European nations, if they want the Euro to continue as a successful currency.

This North-South trope, whereby the South needs rescuing by the North, goes back centuries, it permeates European history from at least 800 AD onwards.  In the year 800, as students of German/European history know, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by a grateful Leo III, bishop of Rome and Pope.  Leo had had his eyes and tongue removed by a partisan Roman mob.  The presence of the Frankish army in the Eternal city reinforced, or rather rescued, his life and position.  The northern barbarians had been invited on the basis of a long standing, several generations-old policy, whereby various Popes had worked together with Charlemagne's forebearers for the sake of mutual political and from the Frankish side, military, support.

In today's financial market, there is no need to talk about Charlemagne as the founder of a unified Europe, but the old metaphors pervade.  Everyone in European politics knows them.  Sometimes these old comparisons are deliberately invoked, sometimes they pop up unexpectedly in the minds of journalists and readers, whether they are intended or not.

The markets are anxious presumably because the resignation of an important, conservative banker with long-connections to Germany's conservatives looks like a rehearsal for a larger resignation--a German pull out from continued support for the buying bonds from souther governments.  Like the emperor leaving the warm, lovely climes of Italy to head back north over the Alps to confront his own rebellious Dukes and Saxons.

Decline and Fall

It all started out so harmlessly, peruse an old tome about an ancient empire before falling asleep, edifying and soporific—that’s how Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ended up at the top of the bookpile next to my bed.  A few nights of calm reading followed by lights out.  The editor’s cheerful preface gave no clear warning of what would follow.  When he mentioned finishing Decline and Fall in three months, his pace seemed a bit ambitious, but perhaps it was merely the sign of a bookish bent.

But I am here to tell you folks—it’s a slippery slope.

After a hundred pages, it’s hard to stop.  Before you know it you will go to sleep hoping that you will be awakened again at 3:00AM, so that you read more about what really happened to Commodus—never mind Gladiator.  Insomnia becomes your friend. 

Before you know, you’re reading Gibbons at breakfast, then you start neglecting breakfast.  Instead, you pour another coffee and keeping reading.  A three-day weekend arrives and you’re on the sofa until noon still nestling the book that a week ago you said was just a “night-cap.” 

Eventually you turn on your computer, but not to check your email or go back to that half-baked article you need to revise.  No, you start checking to see what Wikipedia says about Gibbons’ wicked emperors and sacked cities.  Was he making this stuff up?  Is he hopelessly biased and thus unreliable.  That might be a relief, put an end to your mania.  But, alas, no.  A morning of switching back and forth from laptop to tome has Gibbons ahead by miles.  The internet is no match for his synthetic narrative.  Not only does he use all the same sources any modern scholar would deploy, he pulls them all together in a compelling tale told with clubby irony and wit.   No understatement here, just a catalogue of immorality and power-grabbing that keeps you reading for more.

You sense that Gibbons has a political ax to grind.  Sure he was a loyal subject of the English empire, but he’s clearly also an Enlightened thinker.  Very open minded about Zoroasterians.  He thinks mob rule is insane, distrusts democratic institutions, while deriding tyranny and absolute power.  He keeps a running tab of all the abuses that absolute monarchs impose about their subjects, like Amnesty International.  Let’s you feel the full disaster of military dictatorship.  In the end, you’re not really sure where he stands, a monarchist perhaps and no fan of the French Revolution, presumably, but a very reasonable fellow.  More progressive than half the Whigs on Masterpiece Theater.

Before you know it, you are checking out colleagues’ books on the gothic wars in third-century Thrace.  But still Gibbons keeps ahead of the pack.  The internet just confirms what Gibbons wrote 240 years ago.  Modern scholars provide commentaries that after 35 pages agree with his zippy paragraphs.  In the end, you're grateful he's not all wrong, because that means you can keep going.

Soon you have lost all track of time, you’re online searching out English translations of Gibbons’ late Roman sources.  Before you know it, you’ll be learning Latin.

German History of Chinese Globalization

Jürgen Osterhammel is one of those scholars whose writing seems to gain momentum the longer he works on a subject.  This summer, his latest tome, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, was omnipresent in book stores around Germany.  It looked like a promising read especially ebcause Osterhammel is described as an historian who writes within the context of globalization, that is to say that his 19^th century would be a global one, not just a cross Rhine struggle between Germany and France.

But I was already schlepping one of Osterhammel’s earlier books in my suitcase, and some sense of middle aged decorum pressed upon me that I ought to finish this book before buying the next—blame it on the financial crisis.

Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (1998) is a superb book, a wonder and a joy to read. When I first came across it, I was delighted that someone had written vast scholarly work on how Europeans described China.  Osterhammel works through all the major sources, French and English to be sure, the Spanish and Portuguese accounts are integrated through translations, and the whole thing from a German perspective, just to give you a sense of how all these travel writings and anthropological theories were integrated into German thought.  A masterful work, to reviewed and mined for footnotes. 

But that was just the start, Osterhammel has an earlier work on China that covers a much wider sweep: China und die Weltgesellschaft (1989).  This earlier book tries to accomplish many things: it is in part a history of China, an account of modernization theory and a history of European engagement. It tries to write Chinese history as well as the historiography of European accounts of China.  The two levels get a little tangled up, so that Osterhammel takes seriously the many accounts of China as a tyrannical Empire.  Old tropes such as “Asiatic despoticism” appear along side more modern statistical accounts of rural development.  In other words, Osterhammel treats all writing on China as source material.  The second book, Die Entzauberung Asiens, corrects this tendency by providing an intellectual history of how Europeans envisioned China.  Die Entzauberung is more conscious of how metaphors and discourses shape knowledge-claims, and in that sense it is a much more valuable to book for literary scholars.  But read them all, because Osterhammel has a lot to teach about globalization and Chinese history in the first book.  For those of you not well-versed in the layers of China Studies, the first book will be a continued source of information, even as the second book examines how its tropological genealogy.  Someday it may seem self-evident, selbstverständlich, that histories be written with an understanding of the international networks that connect eventhe most isolated nations, and when that point is reached, Osterhammel’s work will have brought us there.