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.
Our second panel is co-sponsored by the Lessing Society and the Goethe Society of North America, attesting to its broad interest for German Studies around 1800. Bringing together specialists in music, visual arts, and performance theory, this panel explores fluid relationships between media, and different strategies for rendering fluid media visible in performance.
Professor Catriona MacLeod (Chicago) opens the panel with a consideration of medical doctor and poet Justinus Kerner's ink blot poems (Klecksographien), which were created by pouring and dripping ink on to a folded sheet of paper and then inscribing words on the resulting blot. Putting Kerner's experimental method into conversation with E.T.A. Hoffman's exploration of spilled ink and the arabesque in The Golden Pot, MacLeod elucidates the significance of the liquid medium of ink, which for Kerner serves to productively blur the edges between word and image.
In our second paper, Benjamin Schluter (Visiting Lecturer, NYU) takes a similarly intermedial approach to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s musical poetics in the score for his opera Undine. Analyzing a central appearance of water spirits in the opera, Schluter contends that Hoffmann’s musical score represents a vertiginous encounter between his ideal of musical “fluidity” and the imperative to fix information in signs. Schluter argues that the encounter materializes as a “glitch” in Rosa Menkman’s sense, where the inscriptive medium “fails to disappear as techné,” producing a residue of unwritable fluidity.
Outlining an important intellectual and musical-poetic precursor to Hoffmann’s romantic opera, Ph.D. candidate and composer Glen Gray (Johns Hopkins) analyzes Pietro Metastasio’s late eighteenth century drammi per musica, and their uptake in Johann Gottfried Herder’s poetics of fluid “Empfindung” (sentiment or affect). As Gray observes, oceanic metaphors dominate both Metastasio’s and Herder’s discussion of the passions as fluid media that are expressed in musical form. Gray argues that Metastasio’s arias act not only to unbind the passions in momentary outbursts but also engage listeners in concentrated acts of reflection.
Dr. Julia Ostwald (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Arts Linz) brings the topic of passion and performance into conversation with the history of science by examining popular performances of mesmerist animal magnetism in the late eighteenth century. Positioned on the threshold between aesthetic and scientific entertainment, mesmerism was based on the assumption of an ether-like ‘magnetic fluidum’ (also discussed in our first panel), which was understood to materialize in bodily performance. Drawing on John Durham Peters’ elemental media theory, Ostwald’s paper argues that mesmeric performances sought to manifest ether as a profoundly fluid concept capable of crossing distinctions between the material and the immaterial, between the individual senses, and even between distinct social spheres.