Head

Prof. Dr. Joseph Vogl

Research Associates

Mark Potocnik, M.A. / Dr. Dirck Linck

Student Assistant

Marcel Nouvertne

Objective

The project studies the poetics of the improbable, which look at the way manners of representation and knowledge systems are connected to identify potential confusion. Using the works of Alexander Kluge and Hubert Fichte, in which tendencies of a modern, political, documentaristic literature find their own specific manifestations, we examine narrative styles that play off the unbelievable against the familiar, obstinacy against skill, the singular against what-we-always-knew. In so doing they opt for a different course of stories and of history, thus bringing into play—both in the practice of representation and in what is represented—an aesthetic experience that is ignited by the unexpected or unhoped-for, by what is exaggerated or merely contingent. The overlapping of fictional and documentary elements this entails initiates processes of judgment, which refer to the blurred boundaries between aesthetic and non-aesthetic areas of competence and open up two additional perspectives for inquiry. The first addresses complex transfers of poetic and media strategies, which are distinguished by a migration of aesthetic forms of varying provenance and subvert conventions of genres. This leads, secondly, to distortions and ruptures that direct the viewer’s gaze away from objects of representation and toward the representative power of forms of representation. Aesthetic experience is thus bound to a reflexive potential, which suspends any evidence of representation even as it concerns the aesthetics of reception.The project approaches this problem, first, by investigating the interplay of techniques and elements of different media and genres in the work of Alexander Kluge, focusing on the dramatization of contingency along with his associated aesthetic and historical scenes of judgment and decision (SP 1). Second, the ethnopoetic method in the work of Hubert Fichte is to be reconstructed, as its poetic anthropology follows an intermedia approach that interleaves autofiction and documentarism, pursuing a process of constant “transcription” and thus ambiguating its discursive status (SP 2).

Subproject 1: From Case to Case. Alexander Kluge’s Poetics of History

(Professor Dr. Joseph Vogl and Mark Potocnik, M.A.)

The subproject is designed as a historical discourse and media analysis of Alexander Kluge’s works. The questions center around the works in which the “Kluge genre” (Reemtsma) chips at the boundaries between literature, film, television and theory, and by interleaving documentation and fiction, exposes the problems of forming aesthetic judgments. The project attempts to come to terms with the poetics of the improbable by emphasizing four areas. The first concerns all of those correspondences between aesthetics and history, in which, across the various units of work, poetological issues are identified as figures of reflection on historical knowledge; it draws upon historiographical and aesthetic methods and forms to sound out the historical field. Second, it deals with the figures of the improbable, which are constituted through striking overlaps between “historical” and “literary” narration, for instance in the form of the anecdotal. Third, this is to be achieved by investing in not only “paraliterary” methods like the interview, investigation, reporting and inquiry; indeed, the competition, combination or complementation of various media also compel us to examine the means for producing evidence for the logic of representation. To the extent that Kluge’s poetics is ultimately oriented on the motifs of a historical sense of possibility and on a method based on the art of differentiation, the concept of criticism associated with this poetics—which relates to both what is represented and the manner of representation—this raises, fourth, the question of the relationship between practical and theoretical, between pragmatic and aesthetic judgments and/or decisions.

Subproject 2: “Research Report. The Novel.” Hubert Fichte’s Ethnopoetics between Autofiction and Poetic Anthropology

(Dr. Dirck Linck)

Subproject 2 examines a literature which is interested in the improbable as a political option and operates at the interface between documentation and fiction. Its object is the ethnopoetics of Hubert Fichte, which emerges in the interleaving of autofictional narration, the queer counter-narrative of history and ethnography, above all the posthumous cycle "Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit" (“The History of Sensibility”), a complete edition of which has been available only since 2006, and which is understood to be the product of a writing extracted from the attempt to thematize improbabilities and “miracles” without annulling them through the logic of representation. By focusing on the event and its attendant circumstances of improbable cultural practices and political interventions, Fichte’s partisan docu¬mentarism is set in relation both to the method of the sciences to be documented, and to the documentarisms of the other arts. This relation is to be investigated in terms of the aesthetics of production and the aesthetics of reception. In order to outline Fichte’s poetics as a “poetics of the improbable” it is planned to portray the correlation between, first, improbable materials and subjects, second, certain forms, genres and figures (as, for instance, hyperbolic expressions and gossip) and third, the method of procedualizing writing, an aesthetically and politically motivated method of permanent “transcription,” which perpetually destroys effects of coherence and closure.

(Translation: Susan E. Richter)