The 2nd of December is another day that is crowded with incident. One incident in particular fits in with my current research into performance writing.
The University of Leipzig was founded six hundred and two years ago on the 2nd December 1409. Frederick I, Elector of Saxony and his brother William II, Margrave of Meissen, founded the institution, which originally comprised only four faculties and now has fourteen. Not a huge expansion over 602 years of uninterrupted research and teaching, but pretty selective. There are a number of noted alumni, including the current Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel. Of particular interest to my research are, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002).
Goethe was the complete polymath straddling the 18th and 19th centuries. He was writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, etc. etc. As a writer his work spans all modes, poetry, theatre, prose, philosophy and science. At Leipzig he studied Law for three years from 1765 to 1768. At the end of August 1771, Goethe was certified as a licensee in Frankfurt. He wanted to make the jurisdiction progressively more humane. In his first cases, he proceeded too vigorously, was reprimanded and lost the position. His legal career did not last long, although he did continue to practice law to earn a bit of a crust at the time. But I digress.
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| Goethe |
Goethe remarked, ‘Thinking...is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.’
In a letter to his friend and art collector Sulpiz Boisserée on the 22 March 1831, one year to the day before he died, he wrote:
‘…I have found no confession of faith to which I could ally myself without reservation. Now in my old age, however, I have learned of a sect, the Hypsistarians, who, hemmed in between heathens, Jews and Christians, declared that they would treasure, admire, and honour the best, the most perfect that might come to their knowledge, and in as much as it must have a close connection to the Godhead, pay it reverence. A joyous light thus beamed at me suddenly out of a dark age, for I had the feeling that all my life I had been aspiring to qualify as a Hypsistarian. That, however, is no small task, for how does one, in the limitations of one's individuality, come to know what is most excellent?’
(The Hypsistarians, were an ancient Jewish-pagan sect of the Black Sea region.)
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| Nietzche |
As to Fred and Ferd, they were both strutting their stuff in the latter half of the 19th century and have had a profound influence on the whole concept of performance theory. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) explored the origins of contemporary moral categories of good, bad, and evil, He argued that these categories are not essential or universal categories but are culturally constructed through operation of social power through history. He was very big on the concept of power. Goodness is simply that which is valued by those in power, and badness is its opposite, either as a threat to power or the antithesis of it. What is of importance is not the use of words like ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘evil’, but the genealogical approach. Instead of considering ideas and moral values like good and evil as universal truths or the word of God, he sees them as the contrivance of history that take form over time through on-going social struggle. They are the performance of power. This genealogical approach to ‘thinking’ had a profound influence particularly on 20th century thinkers including the likes of Michel Foucault, George Bataille, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Jean Lyotard.
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| Saussure |
As to Saussure, his Course in General Linguistics (1916), published posthumously by his students, became the inspiration for the development of ‘structuralism’. He emphasised firstly that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary, and that these meanings are maintained only by convention; secondly, the meanings of words are relational, no word can be defined in isolation from other words; thirdly (there is always a trinity) language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language. We come back to Goethe’s ‘thinking’ as ‘an organ of perception’.
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| Gadamer |
But what of Hans-Georg? His contribution is expressed in his work Truth and Method (1960 in German, translated to English 1975). In it he develops his theory of understanding as linguistic and historical. Gadamer argued that people have a 'historically effected consciousness' (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. Thus interpreting a text involves a fusion of horizons where the scholar finds the ways that the text's history articulates with their own background. Gadamer was a scholar of hermeneutics, the science and art of interpretation.; however, Truth and Method is not meant to be a programmatic statement about a new 'hermeneutic' method of interpreting texts. Gadamer intended Truth and Method to be a description of what we always do when we interpret things (even if we do not know it): "My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing"
So as you can interpret, the University of Leipzig has produced quite an effect, which is still very much performing in the 21st Century.
As to another event of the 2nd December, The Monroe Doctrine was introduced on 2nd December 1823. It is a policy of the United States and stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention. The Doctrine noted that the United States would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries. The Doctrine was issued at a time when nearly all Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal had achieved independence from the Spanish Empire (except Peru and Bolivia, which became independent in 1825, and Cuba and Puerto Rico). The United States, working in agreement with Britain, wanted to guarantee no European power would move in. The doctrine was announced by President James Monroe, but the author was the then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.
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| Monroe |
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| Adams |
“The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers….
We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States…”
So stay out of our back yard! Another example of power and forceful performance writing which fits right in with Nietzschean observations.
It is understandable that so many other American countries, particularly South American, have some issues with the Monroe Doctrine.
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