The symposium intends to address the practice of commenting as a cultural technique in its various thematic, medial and historical aspects. This comprises, but is by no means restricted to, the specific text type of the ‘commentary’. Long before manifesting itself in philological and other types of commentary, the practice of commenting can be seen as a basic anthropological activity. Man/woman seems to be the commenting animal. Man/woman’s relation to the world and the self has always been mediated through language, hence has been dependent on language which, in its arbitrariness and openness to misunderstandings, is characterized by negativity and, consequently, has to be continuously supplemented. When Rilke in his first Duinese elegy speaks of us humans as “groping animals” that “realize that we are not all too reliably at home | in the interpreted world”, he focuses the beginning of a practice of commenting, continuously accompanying mankind in a gesture of compensation for the need of having to rely on the arbitrariness of language to make up for the lack of an immediate understanding. Even language accquisition, a child’s successive introduction to the world as mediated through language, can be seen as taking place through a continuous complementation of what is given by the child’s partners in dialogue, with its reference on the one hand being on the facts of the surrounding world but, on the other hand, even more so on language itself. This dialogical commenting of the world in the process of acquiring language unfolds as an activity of contextualizing facts and expressions, and it establishes norms.
Apart from this type of dialogical commenting in the present, commenting also takes place in different media and across historical distances. This doubles the contextual reference. Texts or artefacts from other eras and epochs that are no longer part of their original context become the objects of the practice of commenting. Commenting thus appears as a kind of virtual recontextualizazion. The object of attention, decontextualized through historical change, is endowed with a new context by help of the commentary; this new context is virtual, a back projection, it has an archival character: it represents the original context in a more or less adequate manner, but this is always a partial representation only.
Commentaries do not follow fixed functions and uses. Rather, they perform different functions in different contexts. The increase of practices of commenting in certain historical epochs may serve the function of confirming a general consensus (whether real or only felt to be real), it can try to fix certain readings or interpretations or effectuate an actual or only an imagined consensus. At the same time, the exact opposite is possible: the need for commenting can also reside in the fact that the phenomenon commented upon is no longer self-evident. In this case, the practice of commenting can be seen as a sign of crisis. This certainly applies to the Renaissance and to Humanism. By far surpassing the routines of commenting characteristic of the Middle Ages (such as, e.g., the commenting of ‘truths’ within the faculty of theology), the traditional content is now appropriated afresh and – at least partially – judged controversially from different angles.
Commenting must mainly be seen as a practice; at times, commentaries are endowed with hints as to how they should be used, however, they are only rarely conceptualized as specific text types or theorized with a view to their potential functions. In contrast to this, it lies in the interest of the symposium to reach such a conceptualization by splitting up the phenomena from a historical point of view. The following points are meant to offer first impulses for the finding of possible topics of contribution.
The commentary and its limits
Considering the creation of a connection between an artifact and the world, the activity of commenting is potentially infinite. Considering their economic production and their practical use, however, it seems necessary to cut commentaries down to a more or less practical size. In addition to this, enquiring into the limits of commentaries also entails the question as to what can (still) be seen as a commentary and from when on one would no longer speak of one. This also comprises the question of meaningful metaphorical uses of the term. As a form of recontextualization, any practice of commenting refers to objects with some kind of textual structure. These do not have to be philological objects in the more narrow sense of the term. The process of commenting is selective; it isolates its terms and endows them with explanations. This can be seen as a special form of intertextuality. Metaphorically, however, visual or musical quotations, too, can be seen as terms, and their variations can consequently be understood as commentaries. In addition to this, visual or musical artefacts can in turn be interpreted as comments on real-life events, if this relation is to some extent hermeneutically founded. As is well known, Genette has illustrated these intertextual relations with recourse to the metaphor of the palimpsest. In this sense, commentaries, too, superimpose themselves on an original text, but would it – to take but one example – really and rightfully make sense to treat James Joyce’s Ulysses as if it were a commentary on Homer’s Odyssey? Such practical and conceptual questions concerning the limits of commenting could, e.g., be part of historical case studies.
Commentary and authority
Commentaries are usually dedicated to artefacts or texts with a certain amount of authority. This, however, does not always imply normative validity for the present. The exact opposite can be the case, as has been demonstrated by the recent discussion on the commenting of Adolf Hitler’s authoritarian hate pamphlet Mein Kampf, which included types of textual use and misuse in a broad public debate. Traditionally, commenting has always been a huge practice in theology with regard to the Holy Scripture(s) and in jurisprudence concerning canonical law. In the former, what is at stake is the friction between the revelation of God’s word and the practice of commenting, in the latter, it is the application of fundamental juridical insights to a historically informed practice of jurisdiction. The edition and commenting of classical literary works were at times undertaken with a view to the norms and expectations of the contemporary literary system. This brief sketch is apt to demonstrate that commentaries and the practices of commenting follow a number of quite divergent pragmatic interests based on differing aspects of textual authority. Though there may be a difference between the authority of the source text and the authority claimed by the commentary, commentaries in themselves also assume a certain amount of authority. This expresses itself in various ways. Projecting a gamut of possibilities, one could see, on one side of the spectrum, a strict normative force reducing the plurality of interpretive options, limiting the text’s eventfulness and canalizing its understanding towards one specific goal. Seen this way, commenting would have a disciplining function. On the other side of the spectrum, the practice of commenting might also appear as an act of subversion challenging the established consensus held on the text, creating an alternative view in relation to the received wisdom and relativizing not only a traditional understanding but also at times the authority of the original text itself.
Commentary and repetition
With the practice of translation, the practice of commenting shares the problematic idea of somehow repeating the source text. This can be understood either as a reduplicating transposition of the source text or as a founding act of a tradition, which re-establishes what looked lost or corrupted. Nevertheless, one never bathes twice in the same river. Seen this way, commentaries look like serial chains without a beginning or an end. A radical problematization of this kind of non-identity, however, would lead to the position of principally denying that translation and commenting is possible, which clearly runs counter to its cultural practice and need. Accordingly, the phenomenon of recontextualization addresses questions concerning the identity of the source text, which, from a philological point of view, were specifically reformulated in Humanism.
Commentary and context
With regard to its recontextualizing force, the practice of commenting addresses two different archives: the archive of the epoch from which the text to be commented on is taken and the archive of the present moment of the commenting act. This concerns the explication of its relevant terms from a linguistic or historical or source-based point of view. It implies a challenge that shows the insufficiencies of the human memory; commentaries of necessity have to rely on treasuries of knowledge such as, e.g., historical dictionaries and grammars, encyclopedias and blibliographies. The act of commenting thus becomes a touchstone for probing into, and evaluating, the adequacy of our cultural memory with regard to the case in question, and it draws attention to gaps and things lost. If a lemma triggers the formula “not found”, this must be seen as the indication of a kind of failure in the attempt at recontextualization due to a gap in the cultural memory.
Commentary and failure
Most libraries contain a multitude of impressive commentaries but, at the same time, there are also quite a number of monstrous commentatorial ruins complied by ambitious intellectuals. At times, the attempt at recontextualization fails due to a lack of rules of limitation; the commentaries offered on Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung by the Freiherr von Meusebach or on Gottfried’s Tristan by Lambertus Okken look like huge spilled-out file-card boxes whose references reach out into the last corners of the world. There is no sensible relation any longer between invested life-time and the commentary’s usablity. Each discipline knows prominent examples for this. Case studies would allow specific insights into the principal challenges confronting the human as commenting animal.
Proposals (title, potential section reference, 300-word abstract) from all disciplines with a reference to the early modern epoch should be sent by July 31, 2022 to forschung@hab.de.