1-Year Plan
Post 24: 1/26/06
Return to DE:
In and Around Göttingen
On January 19, I returned to Germany for a conference at Universität Göttingen on "Authors." Göttingen, while not one of the oldest university towns in Germany, is historically one of the most important. Virtually every great mathematician and physicist of the 19th and 20th centuries, for one thing, passed through it; the walls of the Altstadt are replete with markers of the presence of Gauss, Bolyai, Riemann, Heisenberg, Born, and Planck. There was a strong humanities presence in the 19th century as well, though the Brothers Grimm and the rest of Göttingen Seven were thrown out in 1837 for challenging limits of political advocacy. It has one of the largest libraries in Germany—five million volumes—and I was fortunate to be taken around the old collection, which from the eighteenth century on bought every book purchased by the British Library in addition to the German collection. (This eighteenth-century British connection—through the House of Hanover—may have been one reason for the Romantics' use of the town on their way to the Harz Mountains; Coleridge's famous walking tour of 1799 began and ended here.) The modern library is no less impressive—a multi-winged and -tiered concrete and glass building packed with hardworking students and vast arrays of media. The conference took place in a room off the main space of the library, and was devoted to the "return to the author," after the recent volume of essays Rückkehr des Autors by Prof. Fotis Jannidis and his colleagues. My part in the discussion was to bring the post-authorial moment of language-centered writing into the discussion, after our recent conference in Tübingen.
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It would take a much larger forum than was possible here to restore the author function to immediate use; that was also the question of our conference at Tübingen in December, though explored from a literary angle. One would also need to consider the increasing debates over authorship in digital media and new technology as they are being extended to literature, particularly for how changes in intellectual property laws (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996) are of particular importance for new forms of online writing, both in the creation of multi-authored works and the use of nonauthorized material on authorial sites (raising the issue of "fair use" in terms of linking and digital reproduction). Did the notion of the "author" change substantially with the development of the Beta version of Google.Print (now Google.Books), which made substantial chunks of The Constructivist Moment available as a searchable text—without the author's (my) explicit permission, thus contracting the scope of copyright protection but also providing an indexing and even marketing function that directs potential readers to the work? One of the most durable points in Foucault's "What Is an Author?" is that the nature of the author depends on the constitution of the work; while in literary criticism this has been extended, in what may amount to a postmodern return to philology, to the horizon of the material text, the digital era has expanded the boundaries of the work itself in multi-authored or collectively authored forms. The return to the author, then, links the constitution of the literary author to changing modes of nonliterary authorship, in the process constructing a hybrid discourse out of restrictive demands for meaning in the era of the author's technological dispersal. At least, that would be one concern from an American perspective; for the Germans, something like a return to authorial intention, set against what have been perceived as the vagaries of postmodern methodology, was obviously also high on the agenda.
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The optimism of the "return of the author" at Göttingen was in the happiest sense both methodological and collegial, the tone set by Profs. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer, the conference organizers. There has been a significant reconstruction of the field of American Studies in Germany over the last several years, both in response to the challenge of American literature departments but also, I think, as a result of changing geopolitical alignments, both internal to Germany and specifically in relation to the U.S. The turn to cultural studies at Göttingen, and to a broadly configured new historicism at Tübingen, are in marked contrast to the national, author-centered, old historical, and philological approaches that still characterize much of the humanities in Germany. While some of the terrain of this reconstruction is familiar, one remarkable aspect of it is the range of new approaches that seem to be going off in all directions. Questions of authorship and jazz improvisation, copyright law, modernist irony, literary marketing, border identities, and American millennialism were all projects in development at the Göttingen conference. Perhaps as as kind of jeremiad to the proliferation of these concerns, Fotis Jannidis, the first of the three featured speakers, presented a condensed and schematic account of the author function in terms of communication theory and literary pragmatics. For him, there must be an inductive account of the author, not an abductive one, if there is to be any guarantee of meaning. For me, Mary Louise Pratt's Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Roman Jakobson's incorporation of Information Theory into his poetics, and Michael Reddy's refutation of the communication model in his essay "The Conduit Metaphor," all came immediately to mind as counter positions already in place, though granted Jannidis is also working at the intersection of analytic accounts of intention, the phenomenology of art after Roman Ingarden, structuralist narratology, and an anti-Foucauldian, pragmatist polemic. The crypto-pragmatist assaults of Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp's Against Theory on what they see as the incoherence of poststructuralism might have been useful (if absurdist) reflection of this position (but it seems not well known in Germany), and there seemed to an oversimplification of Foucault and, behind him, Barthes as merely postmodern relativists here as well.
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In my own responses to questions of authorship throughout the conference, I continually came back to the construction of the work as determining what we mean by the author; the author succeeds the making of the work, rather than authorizes it. This would be true for William Bradford, whose Of Plymouth Plantation did not see publication until 1856 though it had already been absorbed into the canon; of Emily Dickinson, whose publication history at a series of moments (late 19th century; modernist; and postmodern, as they are reflected in succeeding editions) makes what kind of author we believe her to be; Gloria Anzaldúa, whose authorship is split between speech communities even as it intends to reconstruct them; and Bret Easton Ellis, whose novel Lunar Park is distributed between print publication and a (publisher-funded) web site, thus extending authorship from published work to an "authorial spectacle" necessary for fan construction—all authorial topics presented at the conference. Prof. Cheryl Walker of Scripps College, the second of the featured speakers, represented the contemporary skepticism toward author-based scholarship and focused on the current practice of multi-authored scholarship. Her nuanced account that showed how works like Patricia Yeager's Dirt and Desire, a study of Southern women novelists, works to create a new author function, namely that of the critic, after the "death of the author" or, in her parlance, DoA. In my own, concluding, presentation, I wanted to show how the author, placed under erasure in the Language school and its turn to a text "made of nothing but words," in Clark Coolidge's sense, reconstructs the author in two ways: by distributing authorship through collective modes of literary production, as in the case of Larry Eigner, whose work becomes a postmodern cybernetic system in its use of media information, editorial mediation, and publishing networks; and in the turn to poetics by language-centered authors, which relocates authorship outside the work. A wider horizon still would be motivation—Why have these changes of authorship occurred?—and for that we would need a discussion more focused on theory than example, though it is granted that one really cannot be taken up without the other.
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I had delayed my return through Frankfurt to Detroit by one day, in the hope that I would somehow magically be transported to the Harz Mountains and retrace the steps of Coleridge (an author). This is no mean feat, as the roads up to the Harz Mountains were significantly impacted by ice, and the weather had turned decidedly nasty with the onslaught of a Siberian air mass that had just brought Moscow to minus 30 degrees. At the last minute, Barbara Buchenau, of the Göttingen faculty, offered to take me along for an outing with her kids and friends on a "little hike," as is often said in Germany (look out!). I have learned that one does not take little hikes in Germany lightly; in this case I was fortunate to have my Detroit winter jacket, good to about minus 20, and a pair of borrowed gloves and knit cap from Barbara. I was impressed. The hike really was not that long—probably a mile up the back of a picturesque pair of hills known as die Gleichen for their rough similarity, something like "Twin Peaks"—but it was solid ice all the way. The trail was ice; the fallen leaves were coated in ice and crunched loudly as we walked; and whenever the wind came up around the side of the hill, significant wind chill was in evidence. Added to that, my camera had become a solid block of frozen metal, so that every time I took it out to take a picture, and took my gloves off to do it, more heat was lost from my fingers. At one point, I seriously had to wonder whether I was getting frostbite, though none of this is really visible in the pictures. Along the way, the children (aged about 3 and 5) went straight up the hill; my German friends cavorted in the unforgiving wind; and we were rewarded with some crackers and sausage as we neared the top. The pressure of the visible, which I think made for some fairly lucid images of the landscapes of the hike, connected directly the physical challenge of the environment in this sense.
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Along the way, I had an amiable conversation with Barbara's friend, an environmental geographer working in the tourist industry; in Germany, to a significant degree, Green politics are integrated into the economy in ways we have yet to experience. But the revelation of the hike was what awaited at its culmination: the ruin of a ninth-century fortress (this area was contested terrain between three principalities) that gave die Gleichen its cultural pedigree and which marked one of the two hills as "inscribed by culture" versus the unmarked other—a contrast that, as we know, comes down to us through the tradition of the picturesque. Robert Smithson made great use of such contrasts in his late essay on Central Park ("Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape"); the contrast between ruined monument and winter landscape surely achieved a Smithsonian negativity. On the side of the ruins, as well, I noted—as Barbara pointed it out to me—a monumental plaque to fallen sons of the land which read:
Für das Vaterland
Gaben ihr Leben
Die Freiherren
Von Uslar-Gleichen
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followed by three generations of sacrifice—1870, WWI, WWII—in which names of the sons of Uslar-Gleichen are listed. This would be, then, a record of an aristocratic, landed family's contribution to the nation—identifying, in a way that I am beginning to see as a kind of cultural blueprint, the heights of nobility with the verticality of descent. The entire landscape, from this perspective, is thus organized by the patriarchal claims of landed gentry, affirming in turn a continuity and even parallelism between three wars, the first nation-forming but the second and third, as we know, catastrophic. In detail from the picture I took, one can read the successive generations of sons who were lost in these campaigns—Wilhelm and Odo, 1870; Rudolf, Alexander, Odo, Eugen, and Hans Ludolf, 1914–18; Herbert, Horst, Berndt, and Friedrich, 1939–45. The culminating moment of our walk, the vantage point achieved at its height, then, was a claim to a social order which would remain and which could not be questioned—it had become a part of the picturesque landscape itself. Where Smithson saw the picturesque simply as a question of contrast, here it has become a matter of social hierarchy. And from this perspective, I wanted to know more of any such terms of counter history that might be available—and which, as we drove in a circuitous route back to Göttingen through former border areas dividing East and West in the Cold War, immediately rose up on all sides. Barbara's history lesson, our trip up die Gleichen, may be seen as educational in two senses: of the persistence of patriarchy as a mode of social organization, and the co-presence of competing narratives that make up the complex time and space of the world below the heights and their ruined claims to hierarchy.
[Text and photos copyright © Barrett Watten 2005. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]
