I’m going to try to say something here about a very unique book: Steffen Martus and Carlos Spoerhase’s Geistesarbeit. In the way I usually categorize my theory reviews here, this is one of those books that are just eye-opening, if again in a different way than other books I’ve praised here.
Martus, at Humboldt University in Berlin, and Spoerhase, now at LMU Munich, are German Germanists. Geistesarbeit, obviously, is a German book, and indeed its two major “case studies,” the Germanist Friedrich Sengle and the rather better-known comparatist Peter Szondi, are also German, and they are both literary scholars (or shall we say: they’re all four of them literary scholars). The book promises to be, and probably is, more generally about the practices of the humanities: the things we do, why we do them, how we do them, and how to best understand them. “Geistesarbeit” hints at this already. It’s a play on “Geisteswissenschaft,” the German term for the humanities, with its various overtones of Hegelian Geist / spirit, of intellectualism, paired with the all-important question of what our “Arbeit,” our work or labor, really is.
Almost inevitably, Martus and Spoerhase situate this effort in the context of the trope of the crisis of the humanities. The solutions that have been advocated, Martus and Spoerhase suggest, may have a glaring weakness: a lack of clarity about what, in practice (that is to say: in practice theory) the work of the humanities actually is, which is, they suggest, an “intricate and sensitive assemblage of practices” (21). I’ll briefly return to the whole theoretical framework of the book below—I’m not, in fact, terribly interested in it, and I’m not wholly convinced Martus and Spoerhase are. For now, I’d just like to say that what emerges from their work in the archive of the Szondi and Sengle papers is a remarkable view of academic praxis, certainly in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Germany, but by not-too terribly difficult extrapolation generally.
This, then, is also why you should read Geistesarbeit. Perhaps most importantly, I think you should read it to get a better sense of what your work (if, as seems likely, you’re a literary studies or humanities worker) actually is. I say this in part because it was fairly eye-opening to me, and I have been thinking about the problem for a while now. In three dozen short, thematically at least partially progressive chapters, Martus and Spoerhase offer perspectives on collaborative work, publication, theorizing and the impact of theory, the way we understand our objects to work, for instance. But they also address themselves to the way in which teaching, the production of syllabi, the entire praxis context of a department (a Lehrstuhl, admittedly, because of the German context), and spatial locativity commingle in the production of what our “actual” work, the concrete practices of our everydays, is. What emerges from this is a complex web of negotiable but preexisting interferences that should have a serious impact on our self-conception as scholars. However we conceive of our ourselves—as researchers forced into the classroom against our will, as teachers with little interest in advancing the somewhat tenuous bounds of humanities knowledge in research, as administrators with a mission to reform, as theorists with a desire to shape the future methods of the discipline, and so on—Martus and Spoerhase note our bounded-upness in networks of relation expressed in practices that are not always “learned” but often copied, part and parcel of how Geisteswissenschaften operates. And the thing is not so much that we do not, technically, know this. In writing this, I have already made a mental note to distribute this blog post via Twitter to a potential audience, just set aside my copy of “Culture Industry,” marked up in yellow marker pen, for teaching later, and am mentally preparing to hear an intra-departmental lecture in a couple of minutes; meanwhile, I just talked to a colleague about their upcoming administrative meeting involving the hiring of a new assistant to the department. You also know this! But it certainly pays to have it laid out in great detail, to understand how many practices are indeed involved in the production and reproduction of humanities scholarship, if for no other reason than to glean a sense of how difficult change is within such systems.
The point of Geistesarbeit is no, though, to highlight that resistance: rather, it is to highlight the peculiarities of that whole array of practices that they look at, if you can “highlight everything.” There are surprising insights into interpretative practice, for instance, as when Martus and Spoerhase analyze Szondi’s choice of language with regards to how well Szondi appears to believe it captures an interpretative insight, but also how such often elaborate quests for “just the right word” are impacted by the conditions of their use: oral presentations and different forms of written publication. Or later, when they discuss the question of how academic reading functions, and reveal (except it can’t be a revelation) how diffuse and variegated actual academic reading practices are, despite our oft-stated, and strategically overstated, insistence on being always-careful, always thorough (for instance, I did not completely re-read “Culture Industry” just now—I already had a bunch of markings in it that I took as the occasion to re-read certain passages).
Many, many more instances of such insights that might not seem particularly revelatory could be cited, but I would instead like to stress how revelatory these passages are even though they may not seem like much. Martus and Spoerhase genuinely, I would say, manage to produce an account of humanities practice: the sheer fact that you pass out of the book without thinking that this is a doubtful account is worth mentioning. For anyone who, like me, is interested in accounts of what our work is, this is just a must-read.
I’ll note semi-randomly a few things that nonetheless bear mention. The first, to pick up from above, is that while I am convinced practice theory offers a useful vocabulary for talking about the work of the humanities in the way Martus and Spoerhase want to talk about it, it’s not quite as clear to me that it’s wholly…well…necessary? Don’t get me wrong: it’s clearly the case that practice theory is a useful frame, and to highlight, at least occasionally, the way we do things as opposed to how to conceive of them (or in addition to that) is helpful. But all the same, I can’t help but feel like it’s a scaffolding that does not, as such, add persuasiveness to the observations, “only” a theoretical language to do it with. The periodical reminders that Geistesarbeit adds to how practice theory conceives of practices are congruent with the observations; I’m not sure they measurably influence my take, at least, on the observations and conclusions. But I’m also not sure that that’s a criticism.
The second is to note two issues I do have with the book. I’ll try to and make those, at least, make sense.
So, first. This is probably the first Suhrkamp book I have ever read cover to cover. That’s a measure of how well Martus and Spoerhase write: this is an eminently readable book! It’s also a measure of how badly this needed to be not a Suhrkamp book, or at the very least not a Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft edition. There’s a need congruence here between the authors’ observation of publication practices, especially Szondi’s desire to be available cheaply and “usably” for students, and the choice to publish in this series, yes. But on the other hand, if ever a book cried out for an index, it’s this—and it gets not even the Namensregister occasionally afforded Suhrkamp books. That was a terribly choice for usability!
And then, second, tied to this, feel like the obvious complaint is to criticize the choice of material, i.e., the archival picks of Szondi and Sengle. I’ll apologize beforehand because it’s so obvious, and clearly also understandable: I’m not sure how much more recent archival materials there are in the first place, and Szondi and Sengle do function pretty well as quasi-poles of a field of professorial positions. But it does leave the flank open for questions such as: how much of Szondi’s practice is still contemporary practice? How, in particular, have digital means changed this, or the professionalization (if that is the word) and proliferation of funding agencies? Martus and Spoerhase nod towards this, but can’t give the same level of answer that they can give about Szondi’s reading; it maybe that no-one really can, or at any rate, that literary scholars can’t; and Martus and Spoerhase realize the problem and gesture towards it often enough. It still feels like a gap. And related to that gap is the desire to have more reflection on their own practice in writing this book. That seems like a genuine missed opportunity. Co-authored monographs are very rare; this book’s place in the practices of contemporary literary studies, including the ways they wrote it, how they divided the work, what support they used, and so on: that seems like it’s accessible to them, and could have usefully complemented their archival work. There’s a one-and-a-half page acknowledgments that, given everything one’s read by the time one gets to it (it’s at the end!), one would simply have loved to know more about.
But overall, I think, none of these complaints detract from the impressive work of Geistesarbeit, and from how it allows us to take a new view of our humanities work. So, if you read German: go and read it. If you’re an English-language publisher, go and translate it. I’ll return to this book very often in the coming months.
Hand Me the Platonic Monkey-Wrench! 