Cultural Techniques

Assembling Spaces, Texts & Collectives

Jörg Dünne, Kathrin Fehringer, Kristina Kuhn, Wolfgang Struck, Jörg Dünne, Kathrin Fehringer, Kristina Kuhn, Wolfgang Struck

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110645347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This volume presents the preliminary results of the work carried out by the interdisciplinary cultural techniques research lab at the University of Erfurt. Taking up an impulse from media studies, its contributions examine —from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—the interplay between the formative processes of knowledge and action outlined within the conceptual framework of cultural techniques. Case studies in the fields of history, literary (and media) studies, and the history of science reconstruct seemingly fundamental demarcations such as nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, and materiality and the symbolical order as the result of concrete practices and operations. These studies reveal that particularly basic operations of spatialization form the very conditions that determine emergence within any cultural order.

Ranging from manual and philological "paper work" to practices of opening up and closing off spaces and collective techniques of assembly, these case studies replace the grand narratives of cultural history focusing on micrological examinations of specific constellations between human and nonhuman actors.

Collectives

Writing Out – Gathered Up at a Venture from All Four Corners of the Earth: Jean Paul’s Techniques and Operations (on Excerpts)

Bettine Menke

Translated by Michael Thomas Taylor

The relationship of poetic works and their hermeneutics to cultural techniques is nothing if not unproblematic, since from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards works are conceived as genuinely existing without any preconditions and thus as self-contained, traceable solely to authorial creation. From the perspective of cultural techniques, by contrast, poetic works are ascribed to their preconditions and marginal conditions. They participate in “the expulsion of spirit from the humanities” (“Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften”), to cite and follow Friedrich Kittler.¹

Of course, philology as such is initially determined by cultural techniques: it emerges in the margins of pages; it is formed in glossaries and commentaries on the text that generate the text to begin with. But this will not be my topic for now. Nor will it be the operations that constitute the text and its always “problematic limit between an inside and an outside”² by acting at and from its margins, by repeatedly creating a distinction between text and nontext that is thus compelled to reappear in the text. But when philology mutated into a hermeneutics of literary works in being regrounded in the individual that is supposed to be the creator of the work, all memory of its own techniques, as well as those of literature, were erased in this mutation. One might speak of a hermeneutic oblivion of cultural techniques (and not least of all those of philology).

Yet literary texts refer to cultural techniques in many ways, and not only in referring to their own historical a priori conditions. Rather, they reflect this ­relationship to their cultural techniques – or, to invoke another powerful metaphor, they fold it into themselves: reading and writing, reading that performs itself in writing (excerpting), writing that is reading (citing), organizing by writing, referring to book pages, handling books, turning their pages. These texts thematize such operations and the media that they handle; they embed scenes devoted to their presentation; and they relate themselves to them in many different ways.³

This is the context in which I will situate the writing of Jean Paul, which intervenes into the discourse network (Aufschreibesystem) 1800 characterized by the linkage of genius and expression, work and authorship, inasmuch as it allows techniques and devices – a “technical system”⁴ – to come between reading and writing and also asserts that technical system in the texts in various ways. And moreover, such that they process the “problematic boundary” between inner and outer, text and nontext.

Johan Paul Friedrich Richter read by excerpting. He began his first volume of excerpts in 1778 when he was still in school, and by 1823, had compiled nearly 110 quarto notebooks comprising around 12,000 pages.⁵ Intending to become an author, he began in 1782 to excerpt “unsorted excerpts of texts that one encounters by chance while shifting quickly between parallel readings” of many books at once (“ungeordnete Textauszüge, wie man ihnen zufällig bei schnell wechselnder Lektüre [von mehreren Büchern parallel] begegnet”).⁶ His practice is reminiscent of early modern forms of miscellanea. As in the tradition of loci communes, material is apparently drawn from sources of all kinds: religion, philosophy, natural history, medicine – neither empirically gleaned knowledge nor knowledge verified by criticism, but a “convolute of observations and opinions since antiquity.”⁷ The “technical system” of writing out passages, of administering (Verwaltung) and “handling” (“Handhabung”)⁸ the excerpts, of writing as operations on them,⁹ forms a “heterogeneous ensemble” of writing. ¹⁰ It requires recursive writing operations: “Excerpts of excerpts” (“Exzerpte aus Exzerpten”) that add to the collections and “registers” (“Register”) providing access to what has been compiled in writing.¹¹ The first diary that records the fruits of these readings without any order is doubled in a second, learned accounting (Buchführung) that sorts things by assigning subject headings.¹² “Tables of contents” and “registers” present points of access (Zugriffe) to what has been stored, they make this access¹³ possible and write themselves down beside it – in a convolute labeled “register” itself comprising 1244 pages and ordered alphabetically by keyword, without any categorizing systemization of what it conveys.¹⁴ And of course, this requires a “register of registers” (“Register der Register.”)¹⁵ The apparatuses duplicate themselves and multiply. Repertoires of self-instructions such as the “register [or list] of what I have to do” (“Register dessen was ich zu thun habe”) are evidence not only of the circularity of the recursions, but also of their tendency toward paradox (at least in a temporal sense).¹⁶ The “register” of that “what I have to do” just in the first place lists: “1 This register to be made now” (“1 Dieses Register ietzt zu machen”)¹⁷ – an instruction that opens up a paradoxical circularity because to follow it “now” defers all other tasks (“what I have to do”) infinitely or results in an irresolvable blockage.

The “register” entries are organized as a list, without any hierarchy, to foster recombination, connections that transpose and transect linear sequentiality, and the potential of contact in transverse (re)reading between heterogeneous entries that are set apart from each other – contact that is capable of bringing forth effects of witty (witzig) invention in the combinations of moveably joined discrete elements – which is how Jean Paul actually used his compilations, wandering through them in reading and digressing, in order to write his texts, mainly his novels.¹⁸

The word “baroque” is used again and again to categorize how Jean Paul processes knowledge.¹⁹ “The excerpting system that Jean Paul develops and that ­fundamentally shapes his reading – by his own admission, he ‘hardly [reads] anything anymore … except what is to be excerpted’ (‘er lese fast nichts mehr … als was zu exzerpieren ist’) – clearly functions according to the model of the baroque collectanea,”²⁰ treasure troves of topoi, a source for inventio.²¹ Jean Paul’s texts are thus characterized by the obsolete (veraltete) form of knowledge of the “polyhistorians” (“Polyhistor’n”), the outmodedness (Veraltetsein) of which is made clear by the opposing postulate of the lyric I that Christian Fürchtegott Gellert posits in his poem “Der Polyhistor,” (1746): “I studied nothing but myself / Nothing but my heart.”²² Jean Paul cites not only polyhistorians²³ but also the outdated (veraltete) ordering and processing of knowledge and its forms.²⁴

If Hegel finds, in Jean Paul, only “baroque combinations of things which are laying incoherently asunder and whose relations into which his humour brings them together are almost indecipherable” (“barocke Zusammenstellungen von Gegenständen, welche zusammenhanglos auseinander liegen, und deren Beziehungen, zu welchen der Humor sie kombiniert, sich kaum entziffern lassen”),²⁵ then baroque – it goes without saying – does not denote an epoch but the quality of being askew and grotesque.²⁶ The outdatedness, the obsoleteness of the form of knowledge and the disfigured, misshapen, coincide. Kant, too, called the “erudition” that wants to know everything “gigantic [“g i g a n t i s c h e” ], which is … often cyclopean, that is to say, missing one eye: namely the eye of true philosophy, by means of which reason purposive uses this mass of historical knowledge, the load [of books] of a hundred camels.”²⁷ As “cyclopean,” this knowledge – which is not grounded in principles of reason – is monstrous measured by the metaphorically invoked anthropomorphism, while conversely its regime (Regierung) would be figured in the human-like two-eyed face.²⁸ In 1798, “baroque” can evidently mean “thrown apart in a tumble” („durcheinander geworfen“), as Bouterwek writes of Jean Paul in 1798: “Querfeldein wird erzählt, phantasiert, philosophiert, sarkastisiert, gerührt und amüsiert” (“All across the country, his work recounts, fantasizes, philosophizes, sarcasticizes, affects, and entertains”).²⁹ At the beginning of Les mots et les choses, Michel Foucault cites the “‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’” feigned by Jorge Luis Borges less as an example of the old order of knowledge but because, in “the amazement at this taxonomy,” “we apprehend in one leap” what “is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought … the stark impossibility of thinking that.”³⁰ Things look very similar in the scholarly meta-list of (lists or registers of) scholarly types that is drawn up in Jean Paul’s novel Quintus Fixlein:

[Daß] Bernhard [ein Register] von Gelehrten [gegeben], deren Fata und Lebenslauf im Mutterleibe erheblich waren – daß Bailet die Gelehrten zusammengezählt, die etwas hatten schreiben wollen – und Ancillon die, die gar nichts geschrieben – und der Lübecksche Superintend Götze die, die Schuster waren, die die ersoffen usw. Das … sollte … uns zu ähnlichen Matrikeln und Musterrollen von andern Gelehrten ermuntert haben … – z.B. von Gelehrten, die ungelehrt waren – von ganz boshaften – von solchen, die ihr eignes Haar getragen – von Zopfpredigern, Zopf-Psalmisten, Zopfannalisten etc. – von Gelehrten, die schwarzlederne Hosen, von andern, die Stoßdegen getragen – von Gelehrten, die im eilften Jahre starben – im zwanzigsten – einundzwanzigste...