The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference by Helmut Müller-Sievers (review)

In the current wave of interest in what is called the “history of science” in literature departments in the United States, the question of the specific interaction of science and literature is constantly raised, usually to remain tantalizingly unanswered. To be sure, so brute a formulation of the question can probably not result in a satisfactory solution. In The Science of Literature, Helmut Müller-Sievers turns the question on its head. Or to be more fair, he lets us view the question from a number of different fruitful angles in what amounts to a major suggestion about how to conduct scientifically informed and humanistically meaningful inquiry. This collection of essays, spanning the thematics that Müller-Sievers has treated over the course of his career, proposes both a large-scale historical thesis and an implicit methodological update to literary reading. The book will likely be a citational backbone to many studies to come, as it adapts the insights of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Hans Blumenberg to investigate a kind of alternate modernity grounded in the history of motion as both scientific object and material practice. Some of the easy prestige of what has been called the “production aesthetic” of modernism is forced backward in time by Müller-Sievers, who attracts our view to a history of aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that looks every bit as fundamental to our aesthetic sensibilities as the work of a Moholy-Nagy or a Döblin.

The book falls into three parts, which deal with the “discursive assistance literature provides to the life sciences” (2), biological thinking as an underpinning of the rise of philology, and the rise of the new motion mentioned above, respectively. The essays track with Müller-Sievers’ career, from his early books on epigenesis (Epigenesis (1993) and Self-Generation (1997)) and Büchner (Desorientierung (2003)) to his recent work, The Cylinder (2012), which argues monographically for the third thesis. Some of the essays are republished here, often in expanded or revised form. Readers familiar with the author’s work will find it expressed cleanly and concisely, but the collection has another effect as well. It presents Müller-Sievers’ views not only as isolated theses but also as a unified project, an attempt to revise cultural-historical narratives that also offers new tools for producing those narratives.

The first part of the book weaves together chapters about German Naturphilosophie and the literature it produced and influenced. The general models of embryogenesis that emerged in eighteenth-century debate, preformationism and epigenesis, here play an outsize role at the basis of not only biology but also philosophy and linguistics. Self-Generation played a role in making these theories central to understanding the period, alongside works by Timothy Lenoir and others. Here, we find this concern expanded (the difference between the two models accounts for two modes of deconstructive thought, for example) and refocused around issues of understanding and orientation. Indeed, finding orientation in a graphic context is one of the main themes of the earlier essays, which explore Romantic Erdkunde and depictions of family, as well as the problematic of the “metaphoricity of nature itself” (82). It is Büchner who breaks out of the pattern, according to Müller-Sievers, realizing a kind of writing that “plays out the consequences of a radical break between nature and language, on the one hand, and between the rhetorical levels internal to language, on the other. Büchner asks how a language would have to proceed in which the hierarchy—indeed even the possibility of differentiation—between literalness and poeticity is abolished” (88).

If the first part of the book deals with the problem of nature’s inscription—is it an auto-inscription or not?—the second takes up the same problem viewed from the science of human...