Responding to these recent interventions, our theme of “fluid media” seeks to open new theoretical possibilities of its own by building on a discourse of primordial fluidity in matter that emerged around 1800 in the aesthetic and natural philosophies of Herder, Goethe, and Schelling. While much research has been devoted to conceptualizing dynamic, fluid form, especially in the Goethean project of morphology (Wellbery 2010; Geulen 2016), the notion of a fluid medium as material basis and even origin for dynamic form has remained an under-theorized substratum in these debates (only recently addressed by e.g. Deniz 2023).

Our panels bring together a diverse, international group of primarily early-career scholars to conceptualize the role of fluid media as agents of form, formlessness, and transmedial interaction across the visual, verbal, and musical arts, as well as the natural sciences. With four presenters each (limited to 15 minutes per presentation), our sessions leave ample time for discussion among participants.

Sponsored by the Lessing Society, our first panel, “Surface, Matter, and Form(lessness),” begins by situating fluid media as an alternative to the canonical separation between the visual and verbal arts initiated by G.E. Lessing’s seminal Laocoön essay. The presenters in this panel examine the role of fluid as medium and metaphor in aesthetics, natural science and philosophy, painting, sculpture, and literature.

Associate Professor Tove Holmes (McGill), a specialist in literary visuality across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opens this panel with a paper highlighting a fluid conception of interart relations in Goethe’s works and thought. Starting with Goethe’s intervention in the Laocoön debate, Holmes explores how Goethe produces the illusion of oceanic fluidity in marble through a range of transmedial strategies staged in the flowing literary medium of description. Tracing the conceptual origins of these strategies through Goethe’s scientific (Farbenlehre, cloud studies) and literary writings (Wahlverwandtschaften), she demonstrates the theoretical importance of material conceptions of fluidity to the aesthetic project of “dynamic presentation” (Darstellung) in which Goethe’s description of sculpture participates.

Providing further natural-philosophical context to our discussion of fluid media, Assistant Professor Matteo Zupancic (University of Pisa) argues in his paper that the “amorphous” and “fluid” aesthetics that define Schelling’s nature philosophy and Goethe’s morphology represent a primordial state of matter modeled on Spinozan substance. In both Goethe’s morphology and Schelling’s nature philosophy, fluid is not form-less, but represents an infinite potential for both form and transformation. Zupancic’s paper concludes with a case study demonstrating the connection between the fluid form of Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams collection and his scientific studies of invertebrates (molluscs and polyps).

In our panel’s third paper, Assistant Professor Alexander Sorenson (Binghamton University), author of The Waiting Water (Cornell, 2024) turns to literature, considering the role of water as a shifting metaphor for an early nineteenth-century literary and sculptural hermeneutics of surface and depth. Sorenson contrasts Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, where watery surfaces act as a medium for the material and poetic submergence of meaning, with Adalbert Stifter’s early realism, which invests the surface with an opposite function, threatening an overflow rather than disappearance of meaning. In each case, Sorenson demonstrates how the watery medium itself “becomes the message” (McLuhan), challenging the very hermeneutic paradigm that it symbolizes.

In our fourth and final paper, Sandro Heidelbach (Yale) turns our discussion to fluidity as a strategy of dynamization in the visual arts. As Heidelbach argues, Goethe’s fluidization of the visual in his Laocoön essay gives way in the mid-nineteenth century to a more strictly materialist treatment of fluid dynamism in the maritime painting of Courbet and Delacroix. Connecting these experiments to Bernhardt Siegert’s theorization of the “autography of the sea,” Heidelbach’s paper provides a fruitful impetus for discussing the relationship between the ephemeral interarts conception of fluid media characteristic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the increasingly technological conceptualization of media post-1850.