Joachim Küpper The Cultural Net: Early Modern Drama as a Paradigm Joachim Küpper The Cultural Net: Early Modern Drama as a Paradigm This book is published in cooperation with the DramaNet project, funded by the European Research Council ISBN 978-3-11-053638-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-053663-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-060173-2 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934498 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Joachim Küpper, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: photodeedooo/iStock/Thinkstock Typesetting: Meta Sytems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the generous support of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in Brussels. Over a period of five years, the grant enables the project’s principal investigator to hire a team of junior researchers with whom he works on the topic for whose investi- gation the funding was granted. These younger scholars are obliged to inde- pendently publish the results of their investigation. The grant-holder is expect- ed to submit a publication that systematizes the findings of the entire team, including his own ideas concerning the research question which is at the cen- ter of the team’s scholarly work. The grants are meant to encourage “frontier research”—thus the term coined by the ERC—, in the sense of concepts that are novel and may or may not turn out to be convincing. I developed the basic theoretical approach here outlined, which consists in a network theory of cultural (specifically literary) production. The main area of exemplification for the theoretical assumptions, early modern European dra- ma, was chosen to accord with one of my primary fields of expertise. Over the years during which I was able to devote myself to this project—for which we created the name “DramaNet”—I profited enormously from working with the members of my team, who introduced me to ramifications of the questions per- taining to the field of exemplification previously unknown to me. The present book will refer to their publications wherever this is indicated according to stan- dards of scholarly ethics; in order to provide some orientation, I will briefly char- acterize the thematic and methodological frames of the various more specialized studies resulting from the research team’s endeavors in the last section of the chapter “Outline of the Argument”.—In addition, I drew much invaluable inspi- ration from the papers read at the five conferences we were able to organize; the proceedings of these conferences have been published or will be published in the near future. Whenever this or that idea of “mine” might have been inspired by one of these papers, I have made this explicit.—During the tenure of the project, I was invited by prestigious universities from all over the world to present my hypotheses and provisional results. I am grateful in particular for the intense discussions I had with friends and colleagues at Princeton University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Columbia University, the National Research University − HSE, Moscow, and, finally, UCLA. Samuel Walker took up the task of correcting my English, and de Gruyter Publishing was ready to print the manuscript. I should like to conclude this preface with an attempt at briefly contextual- izing my approach within a broader framework reaching beyond the limits of cultural studies in the strict sense. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110536638-202 vi Acknowledgements I need not give expression to the generally accepted view (which I share) that the concept of the nation-state—as it emerged embryonically after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and unfolded in the course of, and after, the Napo- leonic Wars—was the basis of certain major achievements, such as the equality of all citizens with respect to political and juridical rights. It would not have been possible for humankind to immediately “leap” from the level of absolutist monarchies to a global state, in which every member of the species would be guaranteed equal rights.1 This said, the modern national wars, starting with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/1, and continued by the massacres of World War I and World War II, show that the concept of the nation-state is no longer viable in our times. Weapons technology has reached a level that will cause future wars in technologically advanced parts of the globe to result in collec- tive extermination. The United Nations, the European Union, and the Transat- lantic Alliance were answers to the questions put on the agenda by the two world wars of the twentieth century. In present-day Europe and beyond, indus- trial production, finance, and, in part, politics are no longer taking place with- in national circuits, but rather in decentralized network structures more or less analogous to those described in this book. Cultural consciousness seems to somewhat lag behind these “real-world” trends. My polemics against a concept of culture that originated in Romanticism are also meant as a contribution to a larger reconsideration of basic configurations which extends beyond the con- fines of literary and artistic production. Berlin, November 2016 Joachim Küpper 1 The economic problems and the refugee crisis the European Union is facing at this point in time (2016) demonstrate that egalitarian politics that go further, culminating in the idea of a welfare state, are bound to the separation of a more or less homogeneous community from the rest of the species. It is a prerequisite of the much-acclaimed virtue of solidarity that all members of the community in question share certain general attitudes of behavior, including work ethics. Contents Acknowledgements v 0. Outline of the Argument, Basic Hypotheses, and Remarks on Methodology 1 I. The Cultural Net 34 The Basic Metaphor 34 Nodes and Contact Zones 45 Processes and Rationales of Assembly 53 Formal Organization and Mediatedness 75 Temporal Incongruences 84 Accessibility 92 Borderlines 99 Transnational Cultural Agencies 115 Control and Demand 134 Basic Prerequisites 150 The Economy of Cultural Transfer 153 II. Mass Media, Early Modern 157 The Masses 157 Mediality 164 The “Orientation Toward The Message” 174 The Predilection for Tragedy 190 Devices of Enticement: Love, Horror, and Marvel 202 Mass Media, Early Modern and Present 209 III. Historical Issues, Theoretical Perspectives 212 Some Case Studies 212 “Rootedness”: Johann Gottfried Herder 232 “National Literatures”: Topoi and Languages 250 “National” Styles? “Hybridity”? “Third Spaces”? 274 IV. Concluding Remarks 292 Culture as Network: Subversive and Innovative Potentialities 292 Limits of the Basic Metaphor 303 References 313 0. Outline of the Argument, Basic Hypotheses, and Remarks on Methodology “Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.” (Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur” [1952/1969]) 0.—This book has two main objectives, one theoretical, the other historical. In terms of theory, it tries to explore the metaphor of culture as originating from processes of transfer and extraction evolving within a virtual network. In this respect, it is inspired by technological developments that were and go on taking place in the period of its conception. But the theoretical concept here submitted is not systematically linked to such recent trends of technological evolution. This feature shall become evident in a second part which will investigate the productivity of this new approach to conceptualizing culture by targeting a specific field of cultural production from the pre-technological era: literary texts, specifically dramatic texts, mainly “Western”, from the early modern age. The choice of the period was, at least in part, driven by the intention to keep the present-day context of inspiration to which the general theoretical concept is linked strictly separate from the theoretical claims that may be de- rived from the investigation of a specific section of the literary field. By way of discussing a range of concrete examples of processes of cultural transfer and exchange, the second section of this book shall also help elucidate facets and implications of the theoretical approach presented in the first section that may otherwise remain all too abstract. In addition, this part on early modern drama as mass media has the ambition to provide a portrait of the literary text corpus in question that might yield new historical insights for scholars working in that specific field. It is thus intended to demonstrate that the new approach submit- ted here may be valid and valuable beyond the limits of theoretical speculation. In a third part, I will present succinct case studies which are apt to cast a light on specific problems of a network theory of cultural production and reception that require a more detailed reflection. As the claim linked to the theoretical approach suggested in this book is a more general one, there will be passages in which I shall deal with texts from other genres and periods (e.g. the nine- teenth-century realist novel) in order to further develop the implications of the main theoretical ideas.—In this last major section, I will also address at some length the approach to conceptualizing cultural production and reception which is opposite to mine, namely the assumption of the existence of “national https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110536638-001 2 Joachim Küpper literatures”, including the derivatives of this latter concept, up to postcolonial theory.—A brief concluding part will attempt to highlight some problems in- volved in my theorizing that might lead to further scholarly discussions.