Andrew Blough is a PhD student in the German department at UC Berkeley. They joined the department in 2019 after receiving an M.A. in Philosophy from Duquesne University the same year. They are interested in the interrelation of technique/technics and knowledge construction, particularly as pertains to poetics from Romanticism to concrete poetry. Their aims of investigation are twofold 1) the historical constellation of philosophical aesthetics with practical and moral concerns in the German tradition from Baumgarten through Heidegger 2) literary and scientific strategies invoking or troubling these relations. They are currently writing a dissertation on the poetics of experiment in modern German literature.
Research Areas
Modern German Literature and Philosophical Aesthetics
Science and Literature
Romanticism, Symbolism, Concrete Poetry
Critical Theory
Research Project
Lust am Versuchen: On the Epistemology and Poetics of Experiment in Modern German Literature
Natur- and Lebensphilosophen from Novalis to Helmuth Plessner have asserted the Unbegrifflichkeit or Unergründlichkeit of life. As the philosopher of technics Bernard Stiegler has more recently argued, however, technics constitutes “a continuation of life through other means,” one that can be directed through cultural techniques and technological systems. How, then, do we reconcile the ungraspability of Life in ethical terms with the potential for its cybernetic direction? This paper adopts the notion of life as a field of experimentation in order to approach this problem. The guiding question of the broader project is: How do literary technique and poetics more broadly foster new forms of sociability through experimental procedures of sensibility? In order to provide answers, both the discursive and praxiological relation between literature and experiment will be investigated, that is, how literature adopts scientific notions by analogy and operationalizes them in aesthetic practices. Literature might be considered experimental when it, along with experimental physics, for example, seeks to discover speculated states and processes. In the same way, poetry and related fictional scenaria can test the possibility of alternative social and political worlds. Literature can also draw on existing discourses of experiment to establish its own tradition of literary experiment. The project will attend to exchange between forms of knowledge beyond established disciplines and discourses along with the resulting experimental interstices of knowledge. To this end, it will treat works in which the vocabulary of experiment is connected to specific techniques and practices.
Publications
Blough, A., & Teupert, J. (2021). Introduction: Traveling Forms (Global German Studies). TRANSIT, 13(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/T713153435 Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9940d362362.
