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  • "fülle der combination". Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte
  • Heather I. Sullivan
"fülle der combination". Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Herausgegeben von Bernhard J. Dotzler und Sigrid Weigel. München: Fink, 2005. 397 Seiten. €52,00.

Conceived as a project entwining the "two cultures" of the humanities and the natural sciences, "fülle der combination". Literaturforschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte is a collection of resourceful readings assimilating scientific and literary texts and practices. Its goals are to historicize science, evoke the scientific in literature, and find literary influences in the laboratory. It accomplishes these goals with emphases on the pervasive literary tools utilized in all forms of writing, on the "textual" generally, and on the nature of "letters"—the alphabet versus numbers, as Sigrid Weigel discusses in reference to the kabala and genetic code. Such goals are not to be underestimated, and indeed, the fine essays fall into four categories where they succeed in demonstrating 1) the exchanges between the "human" and natural sciences: "Passagen und Interferenzen"; 2) scientific ideas in literature: "Wissen im Prozess der Literatur"; 3) the relationships between "Poetologie und Epistemologie"; and 4) the implications of the writing process inherent even in the most "scientific" of discussions: "Inschriftlichkeit des Wissens." As the editors note in the foreword, they seek systematic cross-referential exchanges among the fields rather than simple linear influences. Hence the book studies "einerseits de[n] impact der Kultur auf die Wissenschaft (die ja keineswegs bloß von der Rationalität ihres eigenen Szientismus angetrieben wird) sowie andererseits das Eindringen von Figuren und Deutungsmustern der Wissenschaften in die verschiedenen Felder der Kultur" (13). The collection is a noteworthy contribution to the paradigm of the "world as text." Yet, it is worth mentioning in contrast the recent appearance of many works in science and literature proposing an interdisciplinary perspective [End Page 556] that describes the world as nonlinear, nondeterministic complexity, as ordered and "creative" chaos, or as fractal patterns.

Still, fülle der combination reveals multiple impulses, even with its overall insistence on "texts," "writing," and the "alphabet." These various directions are represented by two of the major figures in interdisciplinary work on science and literature: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, and N. Katherine Hayles, professor of literature at UCLA. Hayles is discussed below. Rheinberger's focus on the epistemology of experiments is representative of the "cultural approach" in its leaning on Derrida. Other examples include Birgit Griesecke's marvelous essay on the possibly unifying notion of "Versuch" as both essay and experiment. She begins with the query as to whether one can find actual coherence "auf transdisziplinärem Terrain" (267). Griesecke's skepticism about how the two "cultures" "sail right on by each other"—she provocatively refers to "cultures" as an ethnographic issue as well—is well placed; yet her answer is Wittgenstein's grammar. Goethe she rejects (one mustn't always begin with Goethe, after all), yet her reason is because his "Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt" is "fest im Bereich der Naturwissenschaften verankert" (276)—does that mean automatic elimination? Bernhard Dotzler, in turn, dedicates his entire essay "Epik der Wissenschaft: Goethe" to Goethe's Farbenlehre, though with similar results: Goethe is wrong about science, the contents are incorrect, but his treatise does demonstrate a "Literarizität der Wissenschaften" and "Wissenschaftlichkeit im epistemologischen Literaturverständnis" (230). These two essays, along with Karlheinz Barck's "Literatur/Denken: Über einige Relationen zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft," are masterful analyses of the literary aspects of science and the cultural-historical developments of science such that we can see, as Barck puts it, "Literatur als Wissensform," and "Fiktion als Kunstgriff der Erfindung" (297, 298). Similarly, Helmut Müller-Sievers studies strategies of reading as forms of the "Entwicklung des wissenschaftlichen Blicks"; Robert Matthias Erdbeer describes the development of a "Deskriptionspoetik" in Humboldt's Kosmos; and Christoph Hoffmann claims that Gottfried Benn establishes a medical process of writing based not on patients but, of course, on texts. This is Benn's "kompilatorisches Prinzip," or a path towards literature: "In Benns medizinischen Schriften, den mediokren genauso wie den preisbewehrten, nimmt Gedrucktes und Geschriebenes ganz und gar den Platz des Forschungsgegenstands ein" (338...

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