Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 350-354

Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and poetics in the work of Friedrich Schlegel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002; xvi+290 pp.; ISBN: 080186884X; LC call no.: PT2503.S7 C43; $45.00

Michel Chaouli's The Laboratory of Poetry is an important re-reading, through the work of Friedrich Schlegel, of the place of chemistry in Romantic (inter)disciplinarity, and by extension a re-reading of the Romantic episteme itself. References to chemistry are ubiquitous in Schlegel's work, notably in his description of philosophy as "a sort of [end page 350] transcendental chemistry" (38), or his statement that a "completed critical philosophy would always only be chemically completed, not organically" (87). But Schlegel is an intriguing choice since, on the face of it, he does little more than deploy chemical metaphors that were in the air, and since he did not have the detailed knowledge of the discipline possessed by his contemporaries Friedrich Schelling, Novalis and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yet it may be precisely this amateurism that allowed Schlegel — or allows Chaouli — to go past the technical intricacies of the discipline (for instance, as they have been studied in Trevor Levere's work on Coleridge and chemistry) to a broader sense of the epistemological importance of chemistry as a metaphor for reconfiguring other fields of knowledge.

This is a fascinating and groundbreaking study, whose importance does not simply lie in its reading of Schlegel: after all, the Schlegel of the fragments and notebooks has already been reclaimed for poststructuralism and textuality by others, though not with quite the same rigour. Nor does the contribution of this book lie just in its reading of chemistry, though the third chapter provides a superbly succinct theoretical history of the discipline, which takes up the post-Kantian project of "idealizing the [empirical] sciences," as Schelling put it (that is, theorizing or philosophizing them rather than treating them as positive sciences). These are already considerable achievements. But in Chaouli's reading, Schlegel and chemistry also become sites for larger issues about the organization of knowledge, the methodology of theory, and the place of Romantic in relation to contemporary thought. This is not to minimize the importance of "Schlegel" in The Laboratory of Poetry. For the choice of Schlegel's poetics of the fragment as a means of focalizing larger epistemic issues, rather than of Schelling's search for an electromagnetic current or "vital fluid," does of course result in a particular understanding of chemistry's interdisciplinary impact that can in turn revise our sense of how chemistry actually functions in the interdisciplinary systems of Schelling, Coleridge or Novalis.

Methodologically, Chaouli's book makes the important assumption that the rethinking of a particular area (such as poetics) may occur analogically in and through an apparently quite different area (such as chemistry), and that disciplines and fields need to be studied for what Michel Foucault calls their archeological effects. The most significant innovations in a field may well occur through delayed transferences from other fields. Epistemically, The Laboratory of Poetry argues that chemistry (rather than biology or history) is the "archeological territory" underlying the Romantic (re)organization of knowledge. In relation to alchemy (which it nevertheless does not renounce in all ways), chemistry is an anti-foundationalist practice that deconstructs metaphysical notions of substance. Coming in part out of the [end page 351] mathematical interest in combinatorial systems, it is interested in mixings and recombinations of elements and substances. But if mathematics leads to a finite series of combinations (in the sense that three elements combining with four others can only yield twelve recombinations) chemical combinations are much more unpredictable and multiple. Where mathematics as a way of thinking literature would yield a kind of structuralism, chemistry generates a form of poststructuralism. The archeological effects of this poststructuralism can be seen in Schlegel's political and social theory, which Chaouli discusses in his last chapter, as well as in philosophy. The chemical reconfiguration of philosophy goes to the very heart of Idealism as a philosophy "above all intent on finding the one founding position — the Grundsatz — of all cognition and intuition," since a philosophy conceived as chemistry will "necessarily fail to derive from pure, absolute principles" (213).

Chaouli's theoretical history of chemistry begins at the point of its revisionary swerve away from the more metaphysical discipline of alchemy. His concern is less with chemistry's claims to be more scientific than its precursor, but rather with alchemy as a foundationalist and totalizing theory versus chemistry as a way of refusing "a point of inception and a telic movement" (211). Chemistry, at the beginning of the 19^th century is a discourse inhabited by "chaos and contingency" (3). In chemistry, a language of "hermetic signs" yields to one of lateral displacements that operates experimentally "without a concept given in advance" (211, 217), like the aesthetic practice that unfolds from Schlegel's use of the fragment as experiment. Chemistry is thus, as we have already suggested, a poststructuralism avant la lettre. But the connections, in Chaouli's view, go further than loose homologies. Indeed, in his first chapter, on Schlegel's essay "On Incomprehensibility," Chaouli notes Schlegel's interest in prefixes such as ver- and un-, which are meaningless in themselves but produce unpredictable semantic shifts when they combine with other words. These shifts occur in a way that is analogous to the chemical combination and recombination of elements by a process of "elective affinity" which is almost but not quite random. Here and in his fifth chapter, in other words, Chaouli takes up chemistry as an origin for a linguistics of the materiality of the letter: the uncontrollable positional power of language, as Paul de Man describes it, though Schlegel has a more productive and expansive sense of contingency than de Man. Chemistry is all the more apt as a prototype of the agency of the letter because as Chaouli explains, "Unlike written signs, chemical bonds are regarded by most of us as occurring outside of our consciousness," and can thus figure a grammatology in which writing is a form of exteriority, indebted only to "the logic of its own material" (83). These connections between chemistry and écriture, in turn, fundamentally change [end page 352] the way that what Friedrich Kittler calls the "discourse network" of 1800 (a misnomer, since the word is Aufschreibungssystem or system of notation), relates to the much more postmodern discourse network of 1900 and after. For Romanticism, rather than being simply identifiable with "spirit," origins, and the most naive forms of logocentrism and organicism now becomes a mixture, a hybrid of the two Aufschreibungsystems elaborated in Kittler's starkly monolithic periodization.

Chemistry, as Chaouli sees it, also occupies a border-crossing position in a number of other different ways. Indeed, as the "science of mixing" (98), it would seem to be the mode as well as the subject of this book, which mixes disciplinary, cognitive and historical categories. To begin with, chemistry's unique position, what drew Schelling to the field, lies in its being midway between mechanism and organicism. While it clearly eschews biological models of "growth and development" that imply a Bildung (106), chemistry as a way of thinking the sciences of the inorganic also rejects mechanism, which assumes a simple and homogeneous matter, in favour of an irreducible difference," a "matter [that] is heterogeneous as far down as the eye of the experimenter can see" (103). More precisely, then, chemistry complicates the relation between the inorganic and organic, or matter and spirit, rather than representing a choice in favour of one of them. The irreducibly self-different nature of matter discloses a kind of dynamism or vitality in the inorganic while, on the other hand, it is not really a question of rejecting organic models as naive but rather of recognizing the chemical as a permanent moment within the organic process. Chemistry is equally the vanishing mediator of a complicating relation between arts and sciences. In the Romantic period chemistry was still an art as well as a science. Chaouli cites Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who defines it as "the art of separation, or the science of mixing," and Johann Christoph Adelung (in a formulation similar to Coleridge's definition of imagination), who describes chemistry as "the art or science of dissolving natural bodies... into their components and combining these into new products" (98). The continued link of chemistry, at least German chemistry (if not the French chemistry that Coleridge disliked [99, 227n]), to alchemy means that it was still involved in thinking about matter philosophically (and was thus responsive to the project of "idealizing" the sciences). This connection to what later became two faculties, or two cultures in C.P. Snow's famous phrase, also explains how chemistry can cross a seemingly impermeable border between the arts and sciences to generate a poetics. Indeed it speaks to a wider Romantic interactivity of the arts with the sciences which we have lost sight of. For since the Victorian period and the later 19^th century in Europe, the arts have increasingly been drawn into the ambit of the newly formed "social" [end page 353] sciences and insidiously subordinated to the latter, thus being drawn away from speculation to what Kant calls pragmatic anthropology, and in the process also forfeiting their powers of cultural invention.

If there is any criticism to be made of this book it is that the corpus it discusses is selective, consisting largely of the fragments (those left in notebooks as well as those published) that were Schlegel's preferred mode between 1797 and 1806. Thus Chaouli does not discuss Schlegel's many histories (of literature, philosophy etc.), which, simply by virtue of their form, we might expect to be at odds with a chemistry of the fragment. But is this indeed so? I would suggest, on the contrary, that chemistry may well play an archeological role in these writings as well, inasmuch as the histories, as Gary Handwerk has argued, resist totalizing narratives in favour of contingencies and singularities. The interdisciplinary effects of chemistry in other less well-known, seemingly more conventional areas of Schlegel's corpus, are an intriguing prospect for further study along the lines Chaouli briefly sketches for politics and philosophy. Indeed the question of a chemistry of disciplines, chemistry as a model for interdisciplinarity itself, is a further avenue that opens out from this epistemologically rich book, as is the possibility of a new relationship between the arts and sciences that we can perhaps recover by going back before a later nineteenth-century disaggregation of the disciplines to their symbiosis in Jena Romanticism.

Tilottama Rajan

University of Western Ontario