Practices of Comparing
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Angelika Epple, Walter Erhart, Johannes Grave (eds.) Practices of Comparing BiUP General Angelika Epple, born 1966, is vice-rector for International Affairs and Diversity at Universität Bielefeld and teaches history with a focus on the history of the 19th and 20th century. Since January 2017, she has been the spokesperson of the Col- laborative Research Center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing”. She has broadly published on the history of globalization/s, theory of history, and historiography. Walter Erhart, born 1959, teaches German literature at Universität Bielefeld. Since 2017, he has been vice-speaker of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing”. His research focuses on German literature from the 18th to the 20th century and practices of comparing in world travel literature and in autobiographical writing. Johannes Grave, born 1976, teaches art history at the Friedrich-Schiller-Univer- sität Jena. Since 2017, he has been principal investigator in the Collaborative Re- search Center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing”. His research focuses on theo- ries of the image, the temporality of pictures and of their perception, practices of comparing, art around 1800, as well as Italian paintings of the early Renaissance. Angelika Epple, Walter Erhart, Johannes Grave (eds.) Practices of Comparing Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice This Volume has been prepared within the framework of the Collaborative Research Cen- ter SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing. Ordering and changing the world”, Bielefeld Uni- versity, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogra- fie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 (BY-NC) license, which means that the text may be may be remixed, build upon and be distributed, provided credit is given to the author, but may not be used for commercial purposes. For details go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Permission to use the text for commercial purposes can be obtained by contacting rights@ transcript-verlag.de Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. © 2020 Bielefeld University Press. An Imprint of transcript Verlag http://www.bielefeld-university-press.de All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Proofread by Dipl. Psych. Jonathan Harrow Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5166-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5166-3 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839451663 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper. Contents Acknowledgements.......................................................................................... 7 Typologies and Forms Practices of Comparing A New Research Agenda Between Typological and Historical Approaches Angelika Epple/Walter Erhart ....................................................................................11 Preliminary Typology of Comparative Utterances A Tree and Some Binaries Kirill Postoutenko ................................................................................................. 39 Incomparability A Tentative Guide for the Perplexed Hartmut von Sass ..................................................................................................87 Odysseus, Blackbirds, and Rain Barrels Literature as a Comparative Practice Walter Erhart ........................................................................................................111 Where Do Rankings Come From? A Historical-Sociological Perspective on the History of Modern Rankings Leopold Ringel/Tobias Werron .................................................................................137 Histories The Weight of Comparing in Medieval England David Gary Shaw ..................................................................................................173 The Shifting Grounds of Comparison in the French Renaissance The Case of Louis Le Roy Andrea Frisch ......................................................................................................199 Comparison and East-West Encounter The Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Centuries Zhang Longxi .......................................................................................................213 Japan as the Absolute ‘Other’ Genealogy and Variations of a Topos Emmanuel Lozerand............................................................................................. 229 “Goût de Comparaison” Practices of Comparative Viewing in Eighteenth-Century Connoisseurship Joris Corin Heyder ............................................................................................... 257 Inventing White Beauty and Fighting Black Slavery How Blumenbach, Humboldt, and Arango y Parreño Contributed to Cuban Race Comparisons in the Long Nineteenth Century Angelika Epple ....................................................................................................295 The Politicisation of Comparisons The East-West Dispute over Military Force Comparisons in the Cold War Thomas Müller ....................................................................................................329 Genealogies of Modernism Curatorial Practices of Comparing in the Exhibitions Cubism and Abstract Art and documenta I Britta Hochkirchen...............................................................................................349 Comparing in the Digital Age The Transformation of Practices Anna Neubert/Silke Schwandt ................................................................................ 377 Authors and Editors.......................................................................................401 Acknowledgements The publication of this book has been made possible through the help ofmany people. It all started at a conference in October 2017 at Bielefeld University where we met up with numerous colleagues to discuss the basic idea that we should try to understand comparing as a central human practice. We owe our thanks to Vera Breitner, Rebecca Moltmann, and Sabrina Timmer for preparing and organizing the conference; Vera Breitner, Sandra Sensmeyer, Clara Bernhard, Sabrina Timmer, and her team for their help in the various stages of preparing the book; Jonathan Harrow for reviewing and revising the English translations; and Gero Wierichs and Kai Reinhardt for their support from the publishing house transcript. Our thanks also go out to the conference’s keynote speakers for their inspir- ing and thought-provoking perspectives on our topic. These were Ann Laura Stoler (whose contribution is not part of this volume) and Haun Saussy (who agreed to ex- pand his talk to a book-length essay published by Bielefeld University Press: Are We Comparing Yet? On Standards, Justice, and Incomparability, 2019). We also thank Em- manuel Lozerand (who did not attend the conference) for contributing an exciting talk to this volume that he delivered in Bielefeld in 2019. We owe our particular thanks to all the contributors who made this book happen, and, last not least, to the numerous scholars and colleagues who—with great commitment—were and are involved in the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 Practices of Comparing. Ordering and Changing the World. It is thanks to the generous support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) that we have the opportunity to explore the questions set out here in much more detail and greater depth. Bielefeld and Jena, April 2020 Angelika Epple, Walter Erhart, Johannes Grave Typologies and Forms Practices of Comparing A New Research Agenda Between Typological and Historical Approaches Angelika Epple/Walter Erhart Comparisons—a ubiquitous tool of powerful thinking? Introduction to a multidisciplinary field of manifold controversies1 “It’s like comparing apples and oranges”—this is what one might well say when a comparison is deemed to be impossible. This fruit-based example for not being able to compare holds at least in the Anglo-American world; Germans prefer to state the same impossibility by comparing apples and pears (likewise supposed to be in vain). Speaking of comparison in general, the opposite also holds true: You can compare everything with everything—as another quite common saying goes. You definitely can compare apples with oranges. Being fruit, they sharea commonality while differing in many other respects. They are truly comparable in terms of their size or shape; their weight, color, taste, health index, origin, and history, the ease of peeling them; their local and global distribution; their economic positions on markets; and their appearances in seventeenth-century paintings or world literature. The comparisons are endless, and the fate of apples, oranges, and pears—being both comparable and incomparable at the same time—might befall human beings