Contemporary debates about the politics of migration, asylum, and exile witness a wide range of conspiracy theories, evidence-free arguments, and post-truth distortions. Social media are quick to present refugees as agents of sexual assault, even serious media outlets can’t help to wonder whether migrants are terrorists in disguise, and massproduced television shows cast immigrant communities in Germany and elsewhere as hotbeds of international drug trafficking and crime. The reasons for installing the immigrant’s body as a screen of often paranoid and unfounded projections are manifold; the rise of populist agitation is as much at its roots as the withering of nuanced perspectives—right and often left—amid the bubbles of post-neoliberal, internet-based communication. What might matter more, however, is that in the end free-floating claims about the figure of the migrant tend to untether the very possibility of public discourse and political debate in general: if evidence- free conjecture and blatant lies reign triumphant, then we lose— as Hannah Arendt already argued in the postwar period—the very base of political dialogue and of pluralistic conceptions of democratic life. In representing a feared loss or lack of spatial groundedness, of moored identity, the figure of the migrant thus increasingly turns into what the champions of populist and mostly right-wing identity politics demonize so as to pursue their anti-pluralistic attack on the foundations of democratic institutions altogether.

The same period that has produced the figure of the migrant as a screen of free-floating anxieties and post-truth speculation has also unmoored contemporary art from whatever it still could take for granted after the demise of dominant traditions and normative concepts of art in the twentieth century. As evidenced in recent art events such as Kassel’s Documenta 15 (2022), in its timely embrace of discourses of inclusivity, diversity, and decolonization, contemporary art has shed whatever previously remained of the normative frameworks of autonomous art: it prioritizes collaborative practices over the myth of the individual artist, open-ended process over self-contained work, social engagement over aesthetic self-referentiality, gestures of sharing over the reifying power of the market. Amid this, as critics such as Wolfgang Ulrich and Hanno Rauterberg argue, efforts to delimit the concept, domains, and borders of art no longer prove adequate.

I. Introduction

The Work Of nineteenth-century physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) continues to tower over contemporary understandings of sound and acoustical perception. In its effort to uncouple the investigation of auditory phenomena from traditional strategies of visualization, from subjecting acoustics to the paradigm of the visual, Helmholtz's research played a key role in defining sound and its sensation on its own terms. Rather than wanting to observe objects meant to visualize acoustical vibrations, like Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni during the late eighteenth century, Helmholtz's aim was to investigate the ear and its operations as an independent medium of aural experience and the acoustical as an autonomous field of knowledge. He thus advanced the differentiation of both scientific inquiry and human registers of sensory perception that are often seen as decisive hallmarks of what we have come to call the modern age. As importantly, Helmholtz's writing on the physics of sound waves, of reverberation and resonance, set up a new framework in which sound could be rethought as inherently relational: as something that belonged exclusively to neither a vibrating object nor a perceiving listener, but materialized and unfolded in the space in between them. Sound needed pulsating matter and receptive subjects to come into being, yet in doing so it also defined and shaped both as interdependent elements of the acoustical field in the first place.

Though champions of musical modernism or experimental sound art will unlikely follow this path of thought, Helmholtz also remains influential as a scientist eager to ground musical aesthetics—judgments about the quality, beauty, and pleasure of musical material—in empirical and hence measurable, perhaps even computational, observations and arguments. He not only explained dissonance as a result of acoustic “beats” caused by the interference of adjacent frequencies and consonance as the absence of such beats, but in his assessment of “good” music he sought to reconcile the tensions in classical aesthetic discourses between choice and necessity, freedom and causation. According to Helmholtz, the modern major scale sounded pleasurable to the (Western) ear because listeners had learned to embrace (Western) tonality as “the necessary consequence, conditioned by the nature of things, of the chosen stylistic principle.” To put it crudely: good style and music, in Helmholtz's view, required composers and listeners willing to accept and put to work what nature prescribed and scientists could objectively describe.

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.

To offer possible answers to the question—“Can Computers Read?”—is to ask for trouble. Most of us have strong feelings about acceptable responses, less for philosophical reasons than because possible answers might deeply affect the future of our institutional existence as scholars and critics. Similar to the binary logic of computing at its most basic level, either a categorical “no” or a triumphant “yes” will be expected as the only viable answer, and whatever positions one develops will be applauded or rebuffed because they will challenge fundamental beliefs about what we do as academics and how we envision our role in years to come. Traditional humanists will shake their heads about the question's inherent blasphemy. They will claim that computers only know of 0s and 1s. Semantic complexity, symbolic ambiguity, and creative meaning making are essentially foreign to them. They will claim that computers calculate and follow commands, whereas true reading is a feature of the life of the mind, of our uniquely human ability to think, perceive, and feel what exceeds mere calculation. Posthumanist technophiles, on the other hand, will not hesitate to see the question as an opportunity to dismiss the dreams and delusions of Western humanism. They will respond: because matter itself is organized according to discrete or even digital principles, because mental processes function like software within the brain's hardware, because culture is much more tied to nature than constructionism has led us to believe, a computer's engagement with code and language not only is comparable to human reading but in fact tells us the very truth about human reading.

One of the most popular genres within nonfiction cinema today is the so-called “essay film.” These audiovisual productions are literary or philosophical meditations on a variety of topics, including self-reflective explorations on the nature of image- and sound-making, social critiques and histories, and introspective investigations plumbing the depths of human nature. As varied as the form and topics of these films are, there is common agreement on their definition. The essay film has generally been characterized as an in-between genre that moves freely from fiction to nonfiction, part documentary, part fantasy, made for television viewing and for gallery or museum exhibition. One of the characteristics of the essay film is that it is not predictable, since it does not follow the conventional rules. Moreover, essay films are both informed by and produce theory. To that extent, they constitute part of a body of experimental films, which Edward S. Small identifies as a genre and refers to as “direct theory.”

The contemporary essay film is international, and many of its producers have a transnational or diasporic identity. At the same time, however, there are national variations of the essay film. When one traces a history of the genre, it is evident that several national cinemas have a clearly developed brand of this hybrid form that identifies them as being part of a larger national cinematic tradition. Thus there are the French, British, Italian, North American, Latin American, and German essay films.

When taking stock of German film culture since the demise of its famous Autorenkino, which attracted international attention in the 1970s and reestablished West German cinema as “legitimate,” one could do worse than consider the singular case of Dominik Graf. For over the last thirty years Graf—who is almost completely unknown outside Germany and whose status at home does not nearly approach the level of recognition enjoyed by post-Autorenkino filmmakers such as Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich, and Doris Dörrie, nor that of the better-known post- Wende directors such as Sönke Wortmann, Tom Tykwer, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck—has been one of German film's most productive filmmakers.