INTRODUCTION. LETTERS IN THE WEB OF LIFE: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL PHILOLOGY

Abstract

The articles collected in this special number set out to explore new understandings of philology in the context of the multiple socio-ecological crises and predicaments of our time. It is with a consciousness of exhaustion, in an affective mode of overwhelm, that we rehearse the by-now familiar, yet ever-expanding list of interlocking, mutually exacerbating factors known under headings such as polycrisis, Global Ecological Change or the Anthropocene: in no particular order, these disorders include climate breakdown, species extinction, habitat destruction (including the destruction of human habitats), extreme weather events, the breaching of planetary boundaries, and the escalation of global social injustice, political polarization, violence, war and genocide. What does it mean to continue with the work of philology in times like these? Why might this work matter, both as it has always mattered and in new ways? How could it help us?

Philology, as its etymology suggests, is the discipline of loving words, but the term itself has occupied a shifting position within the changing disciplinary self-understanding of German Studies or ‘Germanistik’ over the course of its recent history. Philology/‘Philologie’ can resonate in a number of ways, depending on linguistic, cultural and institutional context: here the overarching designation of a university faculty in which German Studies might be located, there an exhortation to return to the text, elsewhere a dated curiosity that might repay being dusted off, or a confident proclamation of the inherent value of certain types of specialised expertise, concerning, say, editorial practice.1 In the Anglosphere, self-identification as a philologist or philologian may seem an oddity today, certainly out of step with dominant trends in German Studies of recent decades, in which cultural ‘production’ or ‘products’ have tended to be read within wider webs of medial, socio-historical, and political concern, and refracted through various theoretical and discursive turns. While acknowledging and responding to these disciplinary and wider discursive contexts, this special issue is primarily devoted to the question of how and why we practise philology in an unstable and volatile world. We ask: what is involved in a commitment to the labour of love towards words and ‘letters’ — in the capacious sense of ‘letters’ intended by the title of this journal — within the increasingly ruinous and polarising context of ecocidal late modernity?2 How can philological practice be or become a meaningful response to the precariousness of the world?

In its current professionalised forms, German Studies (a.k.a. ‘Germanic philology’, the study of the German language and its ‘letters’ in the wider sense) can be understood as itself a product of the industrial age, enmeshed with fossil-fuel culture across all its modes of production, dissemination and practice, including the production of the subjectivities of its practitioners. We know the type, because we are it: time-poor, word-rich, living a lot in our heads, conscious of the ‘always more’ there is to do and know, ambivalent towards our institutions, uncertain as to our resonance, (mostly) determined in our commitments; readers will complete or adapt this list for their own purposes, and its inflection will depend on the relative precarity or security of their situation. Most will recognise the internal dissonance that comes from being neither fully aligned with the neo-liberal values of productivity, innovation, time-scarcity, hyper-specialisation and place-blind mobility that characterise the contemporary academic enterprise, nor fully detached from their effects. Acknowledging and working through these dissonances and ambivalences as they shape our academic practice, we set out in this issue to explore the spaces that remain within all humanities disciplines, including German Studies, in which the university and its members can glimpse another vision of themselves. In this elusive vision, the university imagines itself as a site of deep-reaching societal and personal transformation towards more liveable relationships with human and non-human others within the damaged, ever more fragile web of life.3 In the contributions gathered here, and in the intensive dialogue and collaboration from which they have emerged, we are concerned with the ways in which philology — within German Studies in the first instance — can help to foster and realise a transformative orientation of academic practice towards this vision.

While indebted to the by-now prolific dialogues between ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and various strands of Anthropocene theory — dialogues to which all of us have contributed in our recent work — our contributions seek to move beyond established paradigms of academic productivity to explore more ecologically reflexive, perhaps ‘wilder’, modes of reading, writing, thinking and teaching, with and within German Studies. We ask how philological practice can embody modes of disruption and estrangement in the face of dominant and stubborn cultural and political-economic commitments to ecocidal ‘growth’, runaway consumption and the destruction of liveable places or habitats, including cultural and linguistic ones. Elaborating what we call an eco-philological orientation, we look askance at normalised and normative forms of academic performance, recognising these as anachronistic manifestations of individual or institutional self-assertion and self-preservation and ultimately as symptoms of historically contingent energy regimes and pathologically anthropocentric worldviews. ‘Das Petroleum sträubt sich gegen die fünf Akte’4; while it was the disruptive cultural forces of petromodernity that were most visible to Brecht, it is the petrified habits of a fatally unsustainable energy regime that become increasingly palpable in the twenty-first century, the cultural tendency to cling on to those forms and practices petroleum undergirds: the conventional career path, the international conference, the proliferation of ever-narrower specialisms, the myth of untrammelled freedom of movement and the kind of humanities scholarship that only has eyes for the human (and not even all humans).5 One of the questions we set out to explore in this issue is what German Studies and by extension what philology might begin to look like once it has been acknowledged that the above-named conventions are far from future-proof.

Of course, tides of innovation, reflection, exhaustion and renewal have long washed the shores of the wider set of concerns and methods that assemble under the heading German Studies and that have been amply represented in many issues of this journal since its founding in 1936. The contributions gathered here acknowledge and build on decades of debate around, and increasing openness towards questions of gender, migration, minority identities and uneven legacies of historical trauma. And, as noted above, concern with ecological loss and what we can now call Anthropocene consciousness have become prominent within German Studies in recent years.6 While our invocation of philology suggests a renewed focus on the word, on words and our relationships with them, our words are increasingly spoken and heard, written and read within a context of unevenly distributed impacts of socio-ecological crisis. Given this context, one of our aims is to seek in philological practice a possible set of routes towards ecological consciousness. Such consciousness is plural and emergent and may include: the articulation and unleashing of ecological anxiety, grief and rage; new or recovered forms of intimacy between human and non-human worlds; fresh or heightened attentiveness to ecological harms; and a newly empowered resistance to, or dismantling of, ecocidal cultural norms and practices. All contributions to the issue share versions of the hypothesis that the deceleration and cultivation of attentiveness called forth by the eros and ethos of literary texts, as newly instantiated in each act of reading, can help to foster clearer orientation towards the catastrophic predicaments of the Anthropocene.

Some of the contributions engage with notions and possibilities of ‘wild pedagogy’ in German Studies7 and offer accounts of new or re-oriented pedagogical approaches. These include post-anthropocentric pedagogies, embodiment-friendly practices, critical perspectives on default digitisation and other ways of supporting students’ orientation towards the biosphere via engagement with space, place, body, community, and the more-than-human.8 What can be termed the eco-pedagogical orientation evident in these contributions embraces porous relationships and feedback loops between reading, teaching, affect, consciousness and praxis, including activism.9 This also involves a keener focus on somatic and place-based aspects of the pedagogical encounter, which help us to re-imagine the German Studies classroom or philology seminar as an ecologically reflexive space. We envision bringing an eco-philological commitment to this space, that is, a commitment to taking seriously the work of words, the act of reading, and the work that can be done with words, within and with respect towards the precarious web of life.

One important facet of our pedagogical focus is — perhaps counter-intuitively — an insistence on our philological discipline as discipline. Intrinsic to the understanding of ‘wild pedagogy’ proposed here is the knowledge that the environment in which our students find themselves is hegemonically constructed and relentlessly hostile to the forms of contemplation we seek to promote. Rather than embodied presence and attention, default digitisation is engineered to induce the state Mark Fisher presciently diagnosed as ‘depressive hedonia’: a ‘twitchy, agitated interpassivity’ characterised by ‘a sense that something is missing, but [with] no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle’.10 In order to reach a version of wildness that might consist in ‘letting things be’ (see the contribution by Hanna Bingel and Tina-Karen Pusse in this issue), we conceive of ‘wilding’ or ‘rewilding’ as an active intervention in the first instance, one that interrupts the default conditions that exert an increasingly powerful hold over our students’ — and our own — time, thoughts, and attention. To learn the discipline of loving words in the era of clickbait and large language models (LLMs) requires a degree of asceticism as a first line of defence against depressive hedonia. We hold, with Fisher, that third-level education in the twenty-first century — far from being either a remote ivory tower or an engine of social reproduction serving economic ‘growth’ — is one of the primary sites in which prevailing forms, including virtualised forms, of social reality can be fully apprehended and then contested or subverted.

Beyond or prior to the close attention to literary texts (which is the focus of several of the contributions), the transnational discipline of German Studies — like philology more broadly — centres on an act or activity that has great potential to counteract the forces that purvey distraction and manipulate attention, namely language learning. The process of language learning involves the effortful step beyond the pleasure principle, with discipline as a point of departure towards an experience that, we argue, is ecological in structure. Iris Murdoch writes of learning Russian that ‘I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. […] Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.’11 Learning a language thus constitutes what Matthew Crawford terms an ‘ecology of attention’, a process in which the self is formed through interaction with something outside and beyond itself.12 This process requires, initially, a degree of submission (to the rules of an unfamiliar grammar, the shapes of different phonetics, the seeming endlessness of unknown vocabulary), but ultimately results in an increased sense of agency grounded in embodied experience. Such a sense of empowerment is not only an important antidote to the state of ‘interpassivity’, but also, in the specific case of language learning, a small but vital act of resistance to the increasing global hegemony of English. If the classroom is, as Fisher has it, the ‘engine room’ in which the reproduction of social reality takes place, human language learning has the potential to be grit in the machine — a possibility to which recent work in the emerging fields of ecolinguistics and eco-translation also attests.13

While the majority of the contributions draw out the ecological potential of practices of close reading — both in terms of an attunement to otherness and, more simply, as a form of slow and low-consumption activity — it is thus vital that we also emphasise the implied multi- and plurilingualism of philology, its commitment to thinking beyond linguistic monocultures. The ecological potential of multilingualism operates on two levels. Like close reading and engagement with literary texts, the cultivation of multilingualism constitutes a form of attention to a complex system that is, at least initially, beyond the self, but in which the self can become transformatively caught up. We contend that philological practice, in its cultivated multi- and plurilingualism, reflects and enables more responsive and responsible attitudes towards alterity more widely, including across species boundaries.14 On this view, the increasing dominance of English bears a metaphorical resemblance to other forms of monoculture that are, on the surface and in the short-term view, efficient for maximising resources and facilitating the exchange of information (on the mode of untrammelled flow, analogous to globalised flows of labour and capital), but by any other measure and viewed on any other timescale, impoverishing and unsustainable. Michael Cronin has argued with reference to the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath in Ireland, for instance, that monoculture is inimical to resilience, as ‘the principle of resilience […] entails an emphasis on creating and preserving diversity in society: diversity of culture, diversity of languages, […] diversity of values.’15 Cronin and other scholars such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Amitav Ghosh read linguistic diversity, and its opposite, linguistic monoculture, not merely in analogy to, but as symptomatic of and interlinked with questions of biodiversity and ecocide; language loss and language extinction belong, on this view, to the wider phenomenon of epistemicide that is an effect-cause of planetary polycrisis.16 Each language is itself a repository of knowledge about specific habitats and species, with unique ways of imbuing ‘the rocks, the rivers, the trees and the streams’ with ‘a name and a personality’.17 Where language points to the more-than-human, it both decentres our anthropocentrism and returns us to place. What we wish to champion, then, is something like a ‘small language model’ (SLM) in the non-technological sense. In opposition to the decontextualised digital space of the LLMs — which appear uncannily disembodied while in fact consuming physical resources in ever-greater quantities18 — we conceive of the SLM as a guerilla unit of embodied cognitive autonomy, an OI (organic intelligence, located in the human mindbody) not fully absorbable into the burgeoning AI. We affirm the culture-jamming capacities of the SLM, which stem not only from its ‘inefficient’ plurilingualism, but also from its insistence on particularities of language, habitat and place.19

This focus on somatic and place-based aspects of language and learning leads to a key question for the present issue: where does the work of German Studies mostly happen now? The question of our location yields multiple answers: in libraries and archives, seminar rooms and lecture halls; at conferences, at desks, in meetings; between pages, in journals like this one, in edited volumes and monographs, in notebooks; at theatres and readings; in the (now mostly virtual) deliberations of editors and publishers; and last but very much not least, in the vast and sprawling infrastructure of networked devices — consisting of rare earth metals and other substances, as well as of the labour that produces and maintains them and the energy that powers them — that we call the internet. At this point we are tempted to break the fourth wall and write, dear reader, that you are probably reading these words now on a screen, just as most of them were written onto a screen-bearing device and with frequent recourse to the affordances of digital filesharing, but we will resist the temptations of this ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ and refer you instead to Fueling Culture, which greets readers with a reminder that ‘[t]he energy requested to write these words is not infinite.’20 While a fuller discussion of the non-place of the internet as a locus of academic intercourse falls beyond the scope of this introduction, we do want to reflect on the unlikelihood of very many people responding to the question ‘where is German Studies (or any other similar discipline) located?’ with the reply ‘In the minds of those who practise it’. This is, we suspect, because we struggle, Cartesianism and its aftermaths notwithstanding, to locate our minds, while advances in neuroscience and so-called AI make the very notion that we have locatable minds feel increasingly obsolete. Yet we are equally unlikely to say that our discipline happens in our bodies, even though these are mostly implied, if usually disavowed, within our scholarly activities. (The latter would certainly struggle to exist without the former.)

These reflections proceed from the ecological tenet that it matters where we are. A more emphatic version of this tenet would be: we are on the earth and it matters how we are on it. All intellectual and scholarly work takes place in a zone of tension between the material-energetic-somatic conditions of its practitioners — bodies on the earth, constrained and sustained by complex metabolic processes — and the seeming disembodiment of their ‘outputs’: papers, talks, articles, volumes; in other words: words, words, words. A German Studies scholar fortunate enough to stay afloat through the early-career storms of precarity and uncertainty long enough to swim ashore onto the relative stability of a tenured academic position will probably, following the average rate of publication expected by modern universities in the West, produce around half a million published words in the course of, say, a thirty-three-year career. (This estimate is on the modest side; readers will often have encountered or themselves achieved publication records closer to a million words or more.) Here we count authored text published and undersigned by an identifiable individual; the actual word count, if all untraced paths of the discourse that issues from our mouths and fingers and finds its way through the ears and eyes of others were to be tallied, would be far higher. One of our priorities in this issue, and in the work leading up to it, has been to trouble the tacit assumption held widely across our discipline and others that the work of producing this stream of discourse is somehow untethered from place and from body, and that its effects do not, unlike other products of human endeavour, ultimately fall back to earth.21

The work collected here is itself anchored in several places; the issue began to take shape at a dialogue day, entitled ‘Rewilding German Studies’, held at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, in January 2024. (A fuller account of this event is provided by Hanna Bingel and Tina-Karen Pusse below.) In this exploratory meeting, as well as in several smaller follow-up meetings in person and online,22 we thought about how to decarbonise disciplinary practice through slow scholarship and how to de-normalise ecologically damaging norms within academia. We sought where possible to integrate our growing awareness of these questions into our modes of working. This entailed a re-thinking of practicalities, from the question of event format to the material aspects of sustenance and travel. Contributors bumped into each other on trains and ferries from the UK, swapping the speed of air travel for the longer conversations and chance encounters of a journey over land and by sea. Our shared resistance to English as the default language of interaction was reflected not only in fluid and spontaneous code-switching between German and English, but also in the organisers’ suggestion that the event be thought of as a ‘meitheal’, an Irish word denoting ‘a team or working group established to carry out a single function, e.g. […] a group of neighbours working together to complete seasonal work’.23 By prior agreement among all participants, the dialogue day was screen-free: networked devices were switched off or in silent mode, and — not uncontroversially, but ultimately by consensus — stowed out of sight for the duration of the day. Overhead projection, PowerPoint and other electronically supported and networked visual aids were not used. By adopting, somewhat self-consciously, the practice of a ‘digital detox’ — which is already so co-opted by wellness and self-optimisation discourse that it has spawned its own genre of ‘how to’ self-help guides24 — we wanted to signal a commitment to slow conversation, decelerated attentiveness with minimised distraction and ‘being in the room’ (or in the park, or on the street). The intention was to facilitate greater sensitivity to the embodied experience of philological practice while acknowledging its pleasures, pathologies and privileges (bearing in mind the many working contexts in which the freedom to decide to go offline for a whole working day is not available).

Spinning our philological conversations forward from the dialogue day, we settled fairly quickly into writing teams of two to three people per contribution; we had decided near the outset to break with the more usual practice of solo authorship, as collaborative authorship seemed more in the spirit of ‘rewilding’. After all, it is a deeply held contention of much ecological theory that emphatic individualism is an illusion incompatible with ecological reality. Ironically, this commitment to co-writing threw us forcefully back on the digital, as without the convenience of Microsoft Word filesharing and other electronic pathways of exchange, it would have been difficult if not impossible to complete the co-authored texts within the relatively short turnaround time of just over a year, given all contributors’ numerous other commitments and geographical dispersal. But it is unlikely that the more disjointed process of co-producing text asynchronously at our various screens would have proceeded as it did without the initial groundwork of in-person dialogue.

The issue begins with a detailed report and reflection on this day of dialogue by two of the organisers, Hanna Bingel and Tina-Karen Pusse. Their report highlights the event's format as an attempt to intervene actively in the academic status quo, including by directly thematising the environmental impacts of participants’ existing practice and the demands it places on our bodies. The report also outlines some of the key discussions that both gave rise to and emerged from the event, particularly by exploring the implications of its central ‘rewilding’ metaphor as opposed to alternative suggestions such as ‘retrofitting’ or ‘composting’ German Studies. It becomes clear from the articles following the report that sitting with exploratory metaphors is one way to dislodge automatisms of thought and practice. From wandering pedagogues to insect protagonists, from plurilingual timescapes to resilient wolves, and from shame-filled confession to ‘delotic logos’, we encounter in these articles a series of figures in thought and language that embody and enable more eco-centric orientations, not least, perhaps, through their attention to the stubborn and untameable liveliness of literature.

Daniela Dora and Mary Cosgrove trace the figure of the wanderer in two recent novels — Wilhelm Genazino's Wenn wir Tiere wären (2011) and Felicitas Hoppe's Pigafetta (1999) — and consider the potential this figure holds as a model for eco-philological approaches to reading and teaching. Both in its resistance to the productivity paradigm and in its capacity to re-mystify the more-than-human world, they argue, the wanderer figure offers one possible vision of how we as pedagogues can contribute to the sense of an ‘open future’ for our students while demonstrating how to resist default modes of overwhelm and paralysis. Another angle on pedagogy is explored by Peter Arnds, Elliot Sturdy and Caitríona Ní Dhúill in their discussion of ‘Refuge and the Wilded Classroom’. Beginning with a reflection on some real and imagined wolves who roam European forests, literary and otherwise, Arnds, Sturdy and Ní Dhúill consider the university classroom as a space apart, a possible refuge from the relentless onslaught of polycrisis, something akin to a wildlife sanctuary for thought. Acknowledging the ambivalence of set-apart reserves in conservation and ecological terms, and the undeniable practical and political difficulties that have attended re-introduction schemes for apex predators such as wolves, the authors find an alternative figure for pedagogical encounter in Baptiste Morizot's discussion of enforestment, tracking and wild diplomacy, in which greater emphasis is placed on modes of transformative encounter and co-existence than on the creation of exceptional spaces whose boundaries would have to be guarded or policed.

Interspecies relations are also the subject of Alice Christensen and Ina Linge's study of ‘Insect Life and Letters’, which details two sets of close encounters between the life-worlds of insects and those of humans who have thought and written about them. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's account of butterfly catching and Gillian Rose's defence of intellectual eros, their contribution traces the influence of insect life and society on the writings and biographies of the naturalists Otto Hecht and Rose Caro Hecht, and of the German actor and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers. In the process, their account ‘undisciplines’ German Studies by drawing together disparate research strands, moving fluidly between micro and macro scales of thought and perception while reflecting on insect-focused ecocentrism and outlining its potential queering function.

The effort to recover alternative pathways for the human species and its relationships with the rest of the biosphere is central to the mode of ‘reparative philology’ which Nicola Thomas and Katie Ritson elaborate in their reading of Ulrike Draesner's long-form poem doggerland (2021). Ritson and Thomas perceive in the striking formal arrhythmia of Draesner's text a marker of the Anthropocene as a temporal rupture, yet their reading also unearths other, more regenerative forms of temporality — such as that of ‘kinship time’ — which the poem seeks to salvage, in part through its experiments with plurilingualism. A different kind of experiment, involving close intimacy with the non-human through the figure of sucking stones, is the subject of discussion between Corinna Sauter, Elliot Sturdy and Thomas Traupmann. Here, the story of Demosthenes, who sought to overcome a speech impediment by sucking stones and roaring at the sea, is rethought in eco-philological terms: by reimagining the non-human agents of this story, i.e. stones and sea, not as instruments that serve the emergence of clearer human speech, but as partners without whom no language is possible, it becomes possible to glimpse another Demosthenes, one oriented more towards encounter than mastery.

Finally, Sarah Bowden, Nora Grundtner, and Caitríona Ní Dhúill invite readers into another kind of encounter, one they have staged between two confessional texts from either end of the second millennium of the common era: Levin Westermann's long poem farbe komma dunkel (2021) and a devotional text of the late eleventh century known as the Bamberger Glaube und Beichte. Both texts feature a speaking subject who is consumed with shame and other strong emotions, and both attest in different ways to the pleasures and powers of language, even in the face of a vision of perdition. The attempt to set the two texts ringing through each other, despite or because of their remoteness from each other in time and mentality, can be considered an act of experimental eco-philology insofar as it does not lay claim to anything like an authoritative genealogy or arguable generic kinship, insisting rather on the mere fact of shared reading in a time of polycrisis as sufficient grounds for a consideration of resonance between very different and distant texts.

The contributions gathered here could not have come into being without the generous support of German Life and Letters and the Universities of Salzburg and Galway, which we gratefully acknowledge. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers who offered helpful suggestions and feedback on earlier drafts. We would particularly like to mention a comment by the second reviewer of this introduction, who prompted us to think more carefully about how to acknowledge the underpinning labour that enables philological work to be undertaken, where that labour is often unseen and undervalued. This is a perennial question that has preoccupied various critical orientations in a longer perspective, from Marxist cultural theory to feminist and decolonial critique; in its Anthropocene guise as we approach the middle of the twenty-first century, it shows no sign of growing less intractable. It tasks us, as ecologically oriented philologists, with returning once more to the root oikos and asking: where and how, between life-sustaining metabolic processes and practices of care within the web of life, and the ecocidal extractivism of the global agri-industrial growth-death complex, a.k.a. algorithmic crisis capitalism, does our work happen? What does it rest on? To answer these questions in anything like full would involve listing every enabling process, past and present, that has made it possible for us to write these words; such a maximalist answer would strive for the unconcealment of all invisibilised labour baked into the production of the artefact you are now beholding. As a shorthand compromise, we might ask, paraphrasing Katrine Marçal: Who cooked our dinner (or performed other care work) while we were rewilding German Studies?25 To this labour, too, we owe our ability to pour more words into the ever-growing river of discourse.

This brief overview of the contributions is meant for orientation only; the reader is invited, in the spirit of a rewilded philology, to roam at will and leisure through the following pages. The burning world and its unravelling orders will still be there when the reading has concluded; but so too will philology, precariously perhaps, but all the more determined by virtue of that precarity to hold to the care of words.