The Science of Literature

Helmut Müller-Sievers

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110382198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

One of the most contentious questions in contemporary literary studies is whether there can ever be a science of literature that can lay claim to objectivity and universality, for example by concentrating on philological criticism, by appealing to cognitive science, or by exposing the underlying media of literary communication.

The present collection of essays seeks to open up this discussion by posing the question's historical and systematic double: has there been a science of literature, i.e. a mode of presentation and practice of reference in science that owes its coherence to the discourse of literature? Detailed analyses of scientific, literary and philosophical texts show that from the late 18th to the late 19th century science and literature were bound to one another through an intricate web of mutual dependence and distinct yet incalculable difference. The Science of Literature suggests that this legacy continues to shape the relation between literary and scientific discourses inside and outside of academia.

1) Poetics of the Life Sciences

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Formative Forces: Biological, Philosophical, and Linguistic Generativity

Überzeugen ist unfruchtbar

Walter Benjamin

I

The scholarly production of symbols has pragmatic consequences that can rarely be understood as the univocal dissemination of an originary discovery into other discursive fields. The contemporary boom in auto-poetic explanations did not “begin” with a discovery that was then taken up in neighboring discourses and pursued until the last doubter was convinced of its validity; rather, it originated in a reinterpretation of known phenomena – in a textual event in the widest sense – and then, drawing on developments in adjacent disciplines, occupied more and more areas of scientific language. Cybernetics, computer science, meteorology, and linguistics have all contributed to the strengthening of this new explanatory model and have at the same time benefited from its success. This auto-poetic amalgam of action and reaction to advance the success of self-organizing structures did not escape the notice of its chief advocates, and was invoked as further proof of its fundamental significance, since form and content, as Schelling (the philosophical patron saint of auto-poesis) had already claimed, must coincide in any truly fundamental theory.

As inconceivable as the origin or substance of the autopoetic model may be, its effects are visible everywhere. Its implantation in the most varied regions of social administration testify to this, as does the model’s unabated popularity with a public that can consider itself au courant with the most recent scientific vocabulary. The ultimate peak of this development was the auto-poetic turn of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, which allows societies to conceive of themselves as inevitably evolving and thus no longer as collectives based on the force of law.

Much would have to be said about this. Perhaps one could, for the time being, resurrect the distinction between necessary and sufficient reason that auto-poetics has blurred and state: without cybernetics, without the theory of recursive functions, without extensive computer simulations, etc., the triumph of self-organization would not have been possible. Without the diminishing of social distinctions and their historical and political articulations, there would be no general endorsement of auto-poetic theories of society. This is not meant to question the truth-content or plausibility of these theories, but rather to mark the historical constellation in which a scientific discourse can gain acceptance. From this perspective, the possibility remains conceivable that the transformation of an interpretive event into social reality may be related to what was at times called ideology, even if this implementation may no longer be identified with any recognizable interest group, let alone class, in the traditional sense.

Such musings impose themselves when one studies a phenomenon that must be seen in relation to these debates: the transition from preformationist to epigenetic theories of organic generation at the end of the eighteenth century. Particularly in its speculative idealization in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, epigenesis played the role of torchbearer for contemporary environmentalism.²² I cannot discuss here the dubious nature of this forerunnership as it is intertwined with the problematic of freedom that becomes increasingly important for Schelling. Yet the genealogy of debates over natural generation together with the demonstration of the interdependence of “biological,” philosophical, linguistic, and literary concept-formation give us a view on a peculiar hybrid discourse that in pedagogy, marriage practices, and literary interpretation, among others, has left its mark on the social world.²³

II

We begin with a look at the theories of the origin of organisms that preceded epigenesis. ²⁴ Ovism – in which embryos are lodged in the female ovaries since creation and are shocked to life, so to speak, by male semen – had been dominant since the middle of the eighteenth century; it was in accord with the Enlightenment ideal of full mechanistic explicability, at the metaphysical price, however, of having to delegate the origin of natural forms to the hand of God. In this way, the regularity of the species could be explained without having to invoke qualitates occultae and thus letting theological and secular forces enter into scientific discourse. The emancipatory impetus behind this well-known defensive gesture (which guarantees the regularity of observed phenomena by excluding the problem of origins) should not be forgotten, because the theorists of epigenesis will raise with great fanfare the question of freedom in their biological theories.

The enormous intuitive difficulties of encapsulating all past and future organic life were contained by the aesthetics of the sublime, which preformation’s chief practitioner, Albrecht von Haller, used throughout his poetry. Aesthetic motivations also made Charles Bonnet adhere to preformation despite its admitted difficulties.²⁵

Other aesthetic and social phenomena attach themselves to this physiological position that makes the mother into the non-responsible bearer of generations. It explains the apparent contradiction between arranged marriages – in which the embryonic material is awarded to an unloved husband – and the simultaneous intellectual emancipation of women that was so characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century. Under preformationist (i.e., mechanistic) auspices there is no need for a special anthropology to ground physiological difference in a metaphysical disctinction. The competing hypothesis of the preformation of spermatozoa, for example, is rejected primarily on statistical grounds, and female sexual organs are conceived as an inversion, not as the complement, to the masculine ones.²⁶

In order not to degenerate into matrilinearity, preformationism’s biological indifference to male superiority was kept in check by strict paternal laws. Conversely and at the same time, it was the exteriority and aloofness of the paternal law that secured the remarkable social latitude for women in the eighteenth century. For playwrights, librettists, and novelists, the purely external entanglement of law and love in arranged marriages constituted a time-tested, ludicrous or lachrymose, fabula in which the connection between play, love, and chance – a chance that plays with the indifference of the ovum – becomes intelligible. A further indication for ovism’s literary fertility is the pre-revolutionary polemic against the ius primae noctis, to which absolutely no juridical or social reality in the eighteenth century corresponded.²⁷ It combines, however, precisely the male insignificance in the act procreation – that is why the groom can be supplanted by the sovereign – and the aloofness of the law. Against this backdrop, Voltaire’s Droit du Seigneur and especially Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro stage the irrepressible paradox and comedy of a patriarch who under the auspices of preformation wants to keep all the women for himself and thus loses interest in any one in particular.

In poetic theory (as well as in music) preformationism reigns through the importance it places on rhetorics and on the emulation of examples rather than on originality and creativity. It is no coincidence that the figure that opposes this strict and traditional framework is one in which masculinity and potency literally converge: the genius. It would require extensive remarks to show that the preformed relationship of encapsulation and its irresolvable exteriority corresponds poetically and semiotically to the practice of allegory, which is consequently displaced by the epigenetic figure of the symbol.²⁸

Pre-critical philosophy, if we believe the polemics of Kant and his followers, is trapped by the same logic of prefomationism, because it took the forms of objects as given rather than recognizing them, as Kant will do, as being formed by the subject. It must therefore assume a divinely guanteed preformation between the knower and the known, or, if everything is more or less edowed with perception, among the monads themselves. That is why Leibniz had integrated animalsculism, the version of preformationsim most novel to him, in his monadology. Kant himself, in a prominent place, had called Leibniz’s system of a prestabilized harmony “a kind of performationism of pure reason” [eine Art von Präformationssystem der reinen Vernunft].²⁹

Philosophy of language in the eighteenth century – particularly in the public debates about the origin of language – draws on an additional model of procreation, namely on the ancient theory of generatio aequivoca, according to which lower organisms can arise from inorganic matter. Analogously, the sensualists proposed that language arises, at the apogee of the gradual awakening of the human senses, from unorganized sounds in interplay with ever more clearly structured thoughts. Conventional language, in this view, is logic worn threadbare from constant use. Because it implies a preverbal stage (Buffon’s Adam is perhaps the most charming instance), the sensualist theory of the origin of language is particularly well suited to narrative representation.³⁰ Opposed to it are the preformationist theses of the divine origin of language, which are often accused of logical circularity (by Herder, for example); at least there it is God and not the humans who make the mistake. Though they comport themselves as antipodes, what is common to both conceptions is the indifference of content (thought) to form (sound).

Yet already Albrecht von Haller’s physiology begins to make connections between form and function in order to account for phenomena of vitality, such as voluntary and involuntary movements.³¹ Haller performs large-scale experiments to establish the endowment of organic matter with the forces of sensibility and irritability and their inherence in nerves and muscles; this claim, together with his Newtonian method of cautious speculation, help him avoid the accusation of vitalism. But in his school there is no agreement on the ontological status of these forces, nor is there consensus on their interactions with each other. Do they contribute to the formation and growth of the body? Can they be reduced to a fundamental force?

III

The first theoreticians of epigenesis, Caspar F. Wolff and then Friedrich Blumenbach, posed precisely these questions.³² The ostensible antagonism between sensibility and irritabil...

Table of contents

• Paradigms
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Introduction: A Science of Literature?
• 1) Poetics of the Life Sciences
• 2) The Science of Reading
• 3) The Applied Science of Literature
• Afterword: On Critical Enhancement
• List of First Publications
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index