Writing Out â Gathered Up at a Venture from All Four Corners of the Earth: Jean Paulâs Techniques and Operations (on Excerpts)
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 âthe expulsion of spirit from the humanitiesâ (âAustreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaftenâ), 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 âproblematic limit between an inside and an outsideâ2 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 Ârelationship to their cultural techniques â 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 â a âtechnical systemâ4 â 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 âproblematic boundaryâ 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 âunsorted excerpts of texts that one encounters by chance while shifting quickly between parallel readingsâ of many books at once (âungeordnete TextauszĂŒge, wie man ihnen zufĂ€llig bei schnell wechselnder LektĂŒre [von mehreren BĂŒchern parallel] begegnetâ).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 â neither empirically gleaned knowledge nor knowledge verified by criticism, but a âconvolute of observations and opinions since antiquity.â7 The âtechnical systemâ of writing out passages, of administering (Verwaltung) and âhandlingâ (âHandhabungâ)8 the excerpts, of writing as operations on them,9 forms a âheterogeneous ensembleâ of writing. 10 It requires recursive writing operations: âExcerpts of excerptsâ (âExzerpte aus Exzerptenâ) that add to the collections and âregistersâ (âRegisterâ) 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 (BuchfĂŒhrung) that sorts things by assigning subject headings.12 âTables of contentsâ and âregistersâ present points of access (Zugriffe) to what has been stored, they make this access13 possible and write themselves down beside it â in a convolute labeled âregisterâ itself comprising 1244 pages and ordered alphabetically by keyword, without any categorizing systemization of what it conveys.14 And of course, this requires a âregister of registersâ (âRegister der Register.â)15 The apparatuses duplicate themselves and multiply. Repertoires of self-instructions such as the âregister [or list] of what I have to doâ (âRegister dessen was ich zu thun habeâ) 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 âregisterâ of that âwhat I have to doâ just in the first place lists: â1 This register to be made nowâ (â1 Dieses Register ietzt zu machenâ)17 â an instruction that opens up a paradoxical circularity because to follow it ânowâ defers all other tasks (âwhat I have to doâ) infinitely or results in an irresolvable blockage.
The âregisterâ 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 â contact that is capable of bringing forth effects of witty (witzig) invention in the combinations of moveably joined discrete elements â 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 âbaroqueâ is used again and again to categorize how Jean Paul processes knowledge.19 âThe excerpting system that Jean Paul develops and that Âfundamentally shapes his reading â by his own admission, he âhardly [reads] anything anymore ⊠except what is to be excerptedâ (âer lese fast nichts mehr ⊠als was zu exzerpieren istâ) â clearly functions according to the model of the baroque collectanea,â20 treasure troves of topoi, a source for inventio.21 Jean Paulâs texts are thus characterized by the obsolete (veraltete) form of knowledge of the âpolyhistoriansâ (âPolyhistorânâ), the outmodedness (Veraltetsein) of which is made clear by the opposing postulate of the lyric I that Christian FĂŒrchtegott Gellert posits in his poem âDer Polyhistor,â (1746): âI studied nothing but myself / Nothing but my heart.â22 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 âbaroque combinations of things which are laying incoherently asunder and whose relations into which his humour brings them together are almost indecipherableâ (âbarocke Zusammenstellungen von GegenstĂ€nden, welche zusammenhanglos auseinander liegen, und deren Beziehungen, zu welchen der Humor sie kombiniert, sich kaum entziffern lassenâ),25 then baroque â it goes without saying â 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 âeruditionâ that wants to know everything âgigantic [âg i g a n t i s c h eâ ], 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.â27 As âcyclopean,â this knowledge â which is not grounded in principles of reason â 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, âbaroqueâ can evidently mean âthrown apart in a tumbleâ (âdurcheinander geworfenâ), as Bouterwek writes of Jean Paul in 1798: âQuerfeldein wird erzĂ€hlt, phantasiert, philosophiert, sarkastisiert, gerĂŒhrt und amĂŒsiertâ (âAll across the country, his work recounts, fantasizes, philosophizes, sarcasticizes, affects, and entertainsâ).29 At the beginning of Les mots et les choses, Michel Foucault cites the ââcertain Chinese encyclopediaââ feigned by Jorge Luis Borges less as an example of the old order of knowledge but because, in âthe amazement at this taxonomy,â âwe apprehend in one leapâ what âis demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought ⊠the stark impossibility of thinking that.â30 Things look very similar in the scholarly meta-list of (lists or registers of) scholarly types that is drawn up in Jean Paulâs novel Quintus Fixlein:
[DaĂ] Bernhard [ein Register] von Gelehrten [gegeben], deren Fata und Lebenslauf im Mutterleibe erheblich waren â daĂ Bailet die Gelehrten zusammengezĂ€hlt, die etwas hatten schreiben wollen â und Ancillon die, die gar nichts geschrieben â und der LĂŒbecksche Superintend Götze die, die Schuster waren, die die ersoffen usw. Das ⊠sollte ⊠uns zu Ă€hnlichen Matrikeln und Musterrollen von andern Gelehrten ermuntert haben ⊠â z.B. von Gelehrten, die ungelehrt waren â von ganz boshaften â von solchen, die ihr eignes Haar getragen â von Zopfpredigern, Zopf-Psalmisten, Zopfannalisten etc. â von Gelehrten, die schwarzlederne Hosen, von andern, die StoĂdegen getragen â von Gelehrten, die im eilften Jahre starben â im zwanzigsten â einundzwanzigste...