INTRODUCTION. LETTERS IN THE WEB OF LIFE: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL PHILOLOGY

The articles collected in this special number set out to explore new understandings of philology in the context of the multiple socio-ecological crises and predicaments of our time. It is with a consciousness of exhaustion, in an affective mode of overwhelm, that we rehearse the by-now familiar, yet ever-expanding list of interlocking, mutually exacerbating factors known under headings such as polycrisis, Global Ecological Change or the Anthropocene: in no particular order, these disorders include climate breakdown, species extinction, habitat destruction (including the destruction of human habitats), extreme weather events, the breaching of planetary boundaries, and the escalation of global social injustice, political polarization, violence, war and genocide. What does it mean to continue with the work of philology in times like these? Why might this work matter, both as it has always mattered and in new ways? How could it help us? Philology, as its etymology suggests, is the discipline of loving words, but the term itself has occupied a shifting position within the changing disciplinary self-understanding of German Studies or ‘Germanistik’ over the course of its recent history. Philology/‘Philologie’ can resonate in a number of ways, depending on linguistic, cultural and institutional context: here the overarching designation of a university faculty in which German Studies might be located, there an exhortation to return to the text, elsewhere a dated curiosity that might repay being dusted off, or a confident proclamation of the inherent value of certain types of specialised expertise, concerning, say, editorial practice.1 In the Anglosphere, self-identification as a philologist or philologian may seem an oddity today, certainly out of step with dominant trends in German Studies of recent decades, in which cultural ‘production’ or ‘products’ have tended to be read within wider webs of medial, socio-historical, and political concern, and refracted through various theoretical and discursive turns. While acknowledging and responding to these disciplinary and wider discursive contexts, this special issue is primarily devoted to the question of how and why we practise philology in an unstable and volatile world. We ask: what is involved in a commitment to the labour of love towards words and ‘letters’ — in the capacious sense of ‘letters’ intended by the title of this journal — within the increasingly ruinous and polarising context of ecocidal late modernity?2 How can philological practice be or become a meaningful response to the precariousness of the world? In its current professionalised forms, German Studies (a.k.a. ‘Germanic philology’, the study of the German language and its ‘letters’ in the wider sense) can be understood as itself a product of the industrial age, enmeshed with fossil-fuel culture across all its modes of production, dissemination and practice, including the production of the subjectivities of its practitioners. We know the type, because we are it: time-poor, word-rich, living a lot in our heads, conscious of the ‘always more’ there is to do and know, ambivalent towards our institutions, uncertain as to our resonance, (mostly) determined in our commitments; readers will complete or adapt this list for their own purposes, and its inflection will depend on the relative precarity or security of their situation. Most will recognise the internal dissonance that comes from being neither fully aligned with the neo-liberal values of productivity, innovation, time-scarcity, hyper-specialisation and place-blind mobility that characterise the contemporary academic enterprise, nor fully detached from their effects. Acknowledging and working through these dissonances and ambivalences as they shape our academic practice, we set out in this issue to explore the spaces that remain within all humanities disciplines, including German Studies, in which the university and its members can glimpse another vision of themselves. In this elusive vision, the university imagines itself as a site of deep-reaching societal and personal transformation towards more liveable relationships with human and non-human others within the damaged, ever more fragile web of life.3 In the contributions gathered here, and in the intensive dialogue and collaboration from which they have emerged, we are concerned with the ways in which philology — within German Studies in the first instance — can help to foster and realise a transformative orientation of academic practice towards this vision. While indebted to the by-now prolific dialogues between ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and various strands of Anthropocene theory — dialogues to which all of us have contributed in our recent work — our contributions seek to move beyond established paradigms of academic productivity to explore more ecologically reflexive, perhaps ‘wilder’, modes of reading, writing, thinking and teaching, with and within German Studies. We ask how philological practice can embody modes of disruption and estrangement in the face of dominant and stubborn cultural and political-economic commitments to ecocidal ‘growth’, runaway consumption and the destruction of liveable places or habitats, including cultural and linguistic ones. Elaborating what we call an eco-philological orientation, we look askance at normalised and normative forms of academic performance, recognising these as anachronistic manifestations of individual or institutional self-assertion and self-preservation and ultimately as symptoms of historically contingent energy regimes and pathologically anthropocentric worldviews. ‘Das Petroleum sträubt sich gegen die fünf Akte’4; while it was the disruptive cultural forces of petromodernity that were most visible to Brecht, it is the petrified habits of a fatally unsustainable energy regime that become increasingly palpable in the twenty-first century, the cultural tendency to cling on to those forms and practices petroleum undergirds: the conventional career path, the international conference, the proliferation of ever-narrower specialisms, the myth of untrammelled freedom of movement and the kind of humanities scholarship that only has eyes for the human (and not even all humans).5 One of the questions we set out to explore in this issue is what German Studies and by extension what philology might begin to look like once it has been acknowledged that the above-named conventions are far from future-proof. Of course, tides of innovation, reflection, exhaustion and renewal have long washed the shores of the wider set of concerns and methods that assemble under the heading German Studies and that have been amply represented in many issues of this journal since its founding in 1936. The contributions gathered here acknowledge and build on decades of debate around, and increasing openness towards questions of gender, migration, minority identities and uneven legacies of historical trauma. And, as noted above, concern with ecological loss and what we can now call Anthropocene consciousness have become prominent within German Studies in recent years.6 While our invocation of philology suggests a renewed focus on the word, on words and our relationships with them, our words are increasingly spoken and heard, written and read within a context of unevenly distributed impacts of socio-ecological crisis. Given this context, one of our aims is to seek in philological practice a possible set of routes towards ecological consciousness. Such consciousness is plural and emergent and may include: the articulation and unleashing of ecological anxiety, grief and rage; new or recovered forms of intimacy between human and non-human worlds; fresh or heightened attentiveness to ecological harms; and a newly empowered resistance to, or dismantling of, ecocidal cultural norms and practices. All contributions to the issue share versions of the hypothesis that the deceleration and cultivation of attentiveness called forth by the eros and ethos of literary texts, as newly instantiated in each act of reading, can help to foster clearer orientation towards the catastrophic predicaments of the Anthropocene. Some of the contributions engage with notions and possibilities of ‘wild pedagogy’ in German Studies7 and offer accounts of new or re-oriented pedagogical approaches. These include post-anthropocentric pedagogies, embodiment-friendly practices, critical perspectives on default digitisation and other ways of supporting students’ orientation towards the biosphere via engagement with space, place, body, community, and the more-than-human.8 What can be termed the eco-pedagogical orientation evident in these contributions embraces porous relationships and feedback loops between reading, teaching, affect, consciousness and praxis, including activism.9 This also involves a keener focus on somatic and place-based aspects of the pedagogical encounter, which help us to re-imagine the German Studies classroom or philology seminar as an ecologically reflexive space. We envision bringing an eco-philological commitment to this space, that is, a commitment to taking seriously the work of words, the act of reading, and the work that can be done with words, within and with respect towards the precarious web of life. One important facet of our pedagogical focus is — perhaps counter-intuitively — an insistence on our philological discipline as discipline. Intrinsic to the understanding of ‘wild pedagogy’ proposed here is the knowledge that the environment in which our students find themselves is hegemonically constructed and relentlessly hostile to the forms of contemplation we seek to promote. Rather than embodied presence and attention, default digitisation is engineered to induce the state Mark Fisher presciently diagnosed as ‘depressive hedonia’: a ‘twitchy, agitated interpassivity’ characterised by ‘a sense that something is missing, but [with] no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle’.10 In order to reach a version of wildness that might consist in ‘letting things be’ (see the contribution by Hanna Bingel and Tina-Karen Pusse in this issue), we conceive of ‘wilding’ or ‘rewilding’ as an active intervention in the first instance, one that interrupts the default conditions that exert an increasingly powerful hold over our students’ — and our own — time, thoughts, and attention. To learn the discipline of loving words in the era of clickbait and large language models (LLMs) requires a degree of asceticism as a first line of defence against depressive hedonia. We hold, with Fisher, that third-level education in the twenty-first century — far from being either a remote ivory tower or an engine of social reproduction serving economic ‘growth’ — is one of the primary sites in which prevailing forms, including virtualised forms, of social reality can be fully apprehended and then contested or subverted. Beyond or prior to the close attention to literary texts (which is the focus of several of the contributions), the transnational discipline of German Studies — like philology more broadly — centres on an act or activity that has great potential to counteract the forces that purvey distraction and manipulate attention, namely language learning. The process of language learning involves the effortful step beyond the pleasure principle, with discipline as a point of departure towards an experience that, we argue, is ecological in structure. Iris Murdoch writes of learning Russian that ‘I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. […] Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.’11 Learning a language thus constitutes what Matthew Crawford terms an ‘ecology of attention’, a process in which the self is formed through interaction with something outside and beyond itself.12 This process requires, initially, a degree of submission (to the rules of an unfamiliar grammar, the shapes of different phonetics, the seeming endlessness of unknown vocabulary), but ultimately results in an increased sense of agency grounded in embodied experience. Such a sense of empowerment is not only an important antidote to the state of ‘interpassivity’, but also, in the specific case of language learning, a small but vital act of resistance to the increasing global hegemony of English. If the classroom is, as Fisher has it, the ‘engine room’ in which the reproduction of social reality takes place, human language learning has the potential to be grit in the machine — a possibility to which recent work in the emerging fields of ecolinguistics and eco-translation also attests.13 While the majority of the contributions draw out the ecological potential of practices of close reading — both in terms of an attunement to otherness and, more simply, as a form of slow and low-consumption activity — it is thus vital that we also the and of its commitment to thinking beyond linguistic The ecological potential of on close reading and engagement with literary texts, the cultivation of constitutes a form of attention to a that is, at initially, beyond the but in which the self can become We that philological practice, in its and and more and towards more including across species this the increasing of a to other forms of that on the and in the for and the of the mode of untrammelled to of labour and but by other and on other and has with to the and its in for instance, that is to as of […] an on and in of of […] of and other such as and read linguistic and its linguistic not in to, but as of and with questions of and language loss and language on this to the wider of that is an of planetary language is itself a of knowledge specific and with ways of the the and the with ‘a and a language to the it both our and us to What we to is something like a language in the In to the of the — which while in in — we conceive of the as a of embodied an in the human not fully the We the of the which not only from its but also from its insistence on of habitat and This focus on somatic and place-based aspects of language and learning leads to a question for the does the work of German Studies The question of our multiple in and seminar and at at in between in like this in and in at and in the of and and but not in the and of — of and other as as of the labour that and and the energy that — that we call the this point we are to the and that are reading these words now on a as most of were written a and with to the of but we will the of this and to which readers with a that energy to these words is not While a of the of the as a of academic beyond the of this we do to on the of many responding to the question is German Studies other with the the of those practise This is, we because we and its to our while in and make the that we have increasingly we are to that our discipline in our even these are within our certainly to the These from the ecological that it we more version of this we are on the and it how we are on All and work takes in a of between the conditions of its — on the and by — and the seeming of their in other words, words, German Studies to through the of precarity and long to the relative of a academic position will the of by in the a words in the course of, say, a is on the readers will have or themselves to a words or we and by an the all of the that issues from our and and its through the and eyes of others were to be be far One of our in this and in the work to it, has been to the across our discipline and others that the work of this of is from and from body, and that its do other of human ultimately to The work collected here is itself in several the issue to take shape at a dialogue German at the in of this is by Hanna Bingel and Tina-Karen Pusse In this as as in several in and we how to disciplinary practice through slow scholarship and how to ecologically norms within We possible to our of these questions our modes of This a of from the question of to the aspects of and each other on and from the the of for the and of a over and by resistance to as the default language of interaction was not only in and between German and but also in the that the be of as a an ‘a or working established to out a […] a of working to complete prior all the dialogue was were or in and — not but ultimately by — out of for the of the and other and were not the practice of a — which is by and that it has its own of — we to a commitment to slow attentiveness with distraction and in the room’ in the or on the The was to to the embodied experience of philological practice while acknowledging its and in the many working in which the freedom to to for a working is not our philological from the dialogue we of to we the to with the more practice of as more in the of it is a of ecological theory that is an with ecological reality. this commitment to us on the as the of and other of it have been not to complete the texts within the of over a all other commitments and it is that the more process of at our various have as it the of The issue with a and on this of dialogue by of the Hanna Bingel and Tina-Karen the as an to in the academic including by the environmental impacts of practice and the it places on our The also of the that both to and from the by the of its ‘rewilding’ as to such as or German Studies. It from the articles the that with is one to of and to from to and from to we in these articles a of in and language that embody and more not through their attention to the stubborn and of and the of the in recent — and — and the potential this as a for eco-philological to reading and in its resistance to the productivity and in its to the they argue, the one possible vision of how we as can to the sense of an for our students while how to default modes of and on is by and in their of and the with a on and literary and and the university classroom as a a possible from the of polycrisis, something to a for Acknowledging the of in and ecological and the and political that have for such as the find an for pedagogical in of and in which is on modes of transformative and than on the of spaces have to be or are also the of and study of and which of close between the of and those of have and written on of and defence of their contribution the of and on the and of the and and of the German and In the their German Studies by between and of and while on and its potential The to for the human species and its relationships with the of the biosphere is to the mode of which and in their reading of and in the of a of the Anthropocene as a yet their reading also more forms of — such as that of — which the to in through its with different kind of close intimacy with the non-human through the of is the of between and the of to a by and at the is in eco-philological by the non-human of this and not as that the of clearer human but as no language is it possible to glimpse another one more towards than and readers another kind of encounter, one they have between texts from either of the of the long and a of the late century known as the texts a is with and other and both in different ways to the and of even in the face of a vision of The to set the texts through each or because of their from each other in and can be an act of as it does not to like an authoritative or on the of reading in a of as for a of between different and The contributions gathered here could not have being the of German and and the of and which we We are also to the and feedback on We like to a by the of this us to more how to acknowledge the labour that philological work to be that labour is and This is a question that has various critical in a from cultural theory to and in its Anthropocene as we the of the twenty-first century, it no of It as ecologically with once more to the and and between and practices of within the web of and the ecocidal of the global does our work What does it To these questions in like and that has it possible for us to these such a for the of all labour the production of the are now a we might our other while we were German To this we our to more words the of This of the contributions is for orientation the is in the of a to at will and through the The and its will be there the reading has but will but all the more determined by of that precarity to hold to the of by