Evening reading at the end of the semester

Found a wonderful web site put out by the Morgan Library of its holdings, a nice digital resource.  They give ordinary websters the opportunity to leaf through rare Flemish art works.  Tonight I am perusing a Book of Hours by Simon Bening, an early sixteenth century miniaturist from Ghent-Brugges.

http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com/links.html

For those of us unschooled in Flemish art history, it is easy to spot the connection to Vermeer through the way in which domestic spaces are depicted.  One main room is shown with people engaged in ordinary household activities and in the background there is a doorway opening into another lighted room in the back.  The eyes movement from this room to the one in the back uses perspective without relying on a natural landscape.

Then another page shows the connection between Flemish painting and Albrecht Dürer.  Bening’s sad-faced Salvator Mundi reminds me of Dürer’s intense self portrait.  From one face to another the internet lets you slide, and as more archival and rare book material becomes available on the web, the easier it becomes to more from one visual memory to the other.  The connection between Dürer and Salvator Mundi is of course a familiar one, but how easily we can confirm it now.

In the midst of this late night contemplation comes an email announcing the death of Richard Sheirich, a German professor at Pomona, 84 years old, did not know him but he looks a bit like Ben Kingsley in Hugo.

http://www.pomona.edu/news/2011/12/13-richard-sheirich.aspx

All this hangs together as the internet brings us the private views from devotional pages to the news of a colleague's death, someone we have never met before tonight.

Waking up from the Dream

Rude awakenings, when sleepers awake from a long dream they are often angry,

This happened to the PSU students who rioted after Paterno was fired.  They were distressed that his exit was swift and disgraceful, but they were also more broadly angry that the football myth had been betrayed from within.  They attacked the messenger, a media truck, --the medium that had fed them the illusion was now blamed for its demise.  They were not initially angry about Sandusky’s crimes, rather they were upset that their “college experience” had been spoiled.

“Awakening as a graduated process that goes on in the life of the individual as in that of a generation.  Sleep is its initial stage.  A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams.” 

 --Walter Benjamin, note on the Arcades Project

By no means is this desire to keep dreaming confined to students or the young.  This week’s Time magazine cover shows directly how American readers generally are encouraged to worry about staying in their dreamy beds rather than listening to the rumbling outside.

Pederasty and Football

Just because you don’t follow football much and have been to only one game since you got here, doesn’t get you off the hook.  There is the horror at reading the wrenching details of crimes committed where you work.  Sorrow for the children put through awful misery.  That’s enough to send you into despair, without the mythic grandstanding that sports fandom creates.  You work at a place, you have to take responsibility for the bad things that happen there, even if you had nothing to do with them.  Yet that does not mean you have to accept collective guilt either.  One way to negotiate the distance between individual and group guilt is through critique.  So here goes.

Too much about the response to the pederasty reported at Penn State has revolved around the collective “we.”  Even the remorseful public gestures for the victims have the feel of one giant narcissistic ego convulsively seeking redemption.  When the real problem is the collective “we” in the first place.  We should not be such a “we.”   We should be individuals pursuing an education, not some vast horde chanting in unison.

The big hype surrounding the football program is what got those boys into the locker room with an old pervert in the first place.  They were in awe of the players and coach, so much so that they could be lured into awful situations. 

It is belief in the goodness and power of football that now leaves fans and players unable to fathom what happened.  Just look at the stammering of ex-football players, incapable of explaining how Sandusky could do such terrible things.  Blind faith is what leads to such speechless incoherence and rage.

The collective shock that Penn State has gone through this last week must lead to more critical thinking, to a complete re-evaluation of the college sports machine.  We cannot cure or undo the crimes by coming up with one giant collective act of atonement.  The crimes were a result of the disjuncture between our collective image and the terrible interests of one person.  The Sandusky case shows how the myth can be used for sick personal interests regardless whether they contradict the public image.  The collective “we” cannot solve the crime, nor prevent some future crime.  Individuals need to act on their own in defiance of what is good for the program.  They have to stop thinking for the team and instead think for themselves.  For as everyone who has seen the time line published in the papers, everyone who has read the one mother’s anguish that no one stepped into stop the rapes, it is perfectly clear that it was the breakdown of such personal moral decision making that caused the crimes to go on unabated.

Instead of acting as a group, we have to think for ourselves and abandon the Dionysian frenzy that sweeps across every weekend.   We have to dismantle the collective myth of football, understand that the game is an entertainment, rather than a higher calling.  Otherwise, more rot and corruption, more provincial self-congratulation at our own awesomeness will lead to some further yet unimagined abuse.  A university is a collection of individuals thinking rationally and critically for themselves—that is the definition of Enlightenment which, in the end, is not a team sport.

Goethe in Love

The cinematic event of the decade approaches.  Who can fathom the mixed emotions, the excitement, the worry--all evoked by this new film, a new sexy cinematic adaptation of Die Leiden des jungen Goethes.  Run to the movie theater now!  You will be showing this film to your students for years to come.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/younggoetheinlove/

Germany 1772 - the young and tumultuous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) aspires to be a poet; but after failing his law exams, he is sent by his father (Henry Huebchen) to a sleepy provincial court to mend his ways. Unsure of his talent and eager to prove himself, Goethe soon wins the praise and friendship of his superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). But then Lotte (Miriam Stein) enters his life and nothing is the same as before. However, the young lovers are unaware that her father has already promised Lotte's hand to another man. Director Phillip Stoelzl returns to the very wellspring of Romanticism - Goethe's loosely autobiographical masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther - and conjures up a beguiling and refreshingly innocent period romance.

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 …….“