Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 151 Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science André Fischer Washington University in St� Louis Abstract: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? For Kant, these existential concerns ultimately come down to the question: What is the human being? Anthropology as the science of human beings remains hopelessly overburdened by the order to respond meaningfully to these questions. For Hubert Fichte, literary writer and self-taught ethnologist, this burden proved a productive challenge to test the epistemological limits of ethnography� His essay “Heretical Remarks for a New Science of Man” raises broad charges against the academic and literary institutions of knowledge production that will be unfolded in the present article alongside other epistemological remarks of Fichte� Behind his sharp polemics (e�g�, against Claude Lévi-Strauss), his passionate identifications (e.g., with Herodotus), and the fuzzy counter-model of “poetic anthropology” looms a fundamental critique of what humans can and cannot know. Fichte derived this critique from his engagement with Afro-diasporic syncretism� This essay investigates how this engagement generated a form of anthropological knowledge as poetic practice, which, though utopian in essence, has epistemological implications beyond Fichte’s work and the specific cultures he studied. Keywords: knowledge, science, epistemology, poetic anthropology, syncretism, African diaspora Hubert Fichte had been traveling and researching syncretistic rituals in the Americas and Africa for almost a decade when he outlined his epistemological program of a new science at the Frobenius-Institute in 1977� In his “Ketzerische Bemerkungen für eine neue Wissenschaft vom Menschen” (“Heretical Remarks for a New Science of Man”), Fichte problematizes the role of language in the context of ethnographic research and envisions a hybrid form of writing that is both rigorous and poetic� In his speech, he stylizes himself as a heretic against 152 André Fischer the orthodoxies of the academic ethnology that allegedly refuses to scrutinize its own methods� Scholars, he argues, that fail to investigate their own subjective motivations for research are incapable of presenting any objective results� Literary authors on the other hand should ground their fiction in empirical research and logical deductions� In this double claim, Fichte blends the familiar claims of documentarist literature with what in ethnography was soon after established as the term “writing culture” (Clifford, “Impartial Truths”). If researchers want to avoid distorting their objects of interest and debasing the people whose culture they set out to study, they, according to Fichte, have to become the focal point in their own inquiry. The more unorthodox demand, however, is that scholars have to make use of the entire stylistic apparatus of modern and classical literature, rather than hiding behind the deceitful transparency of a rational scientific discourse. Despite Fichte’s scientific impetus, it is the Western literary canon that remains - if only in eclectic selection - the measuring stick for the epistemological form that he wants to prescribe to ethnographers� Behind the twofold polemic against the literary and academic establishment lies a familiar Romantic desire to fuse reason and the imagination in a new form of poetic wisdom� Poetry is to become science in the strictest sense of the word ( logos ), which is at the same time restrictive as it reduces the institution of science to its etymological root. Central to Fichte’s argument is his definition of logos , and thereby language, as human behavior: Anthropologie, Ethnologie, Ethologie und die ihnen verwandten Wissenschaften behandeln, unterschiedlich, Verhaltensweisen des Menschen� Unter “Logos” versteht man vor allem “Das Wort”� Worte sind Verhaltensweisen� Schon hier ergibt sich eine Antinomie: Der Typus der Beschreibung und der Typus des Beschriebenen gehen unkritisch ineinander auf� Antinomien können nur poetisch ausgedrückt werden� Wittgenstein versucht: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen�” Das ist keine mathematische Logik mehr und noch keine Poesie� (Fichte, Petersilie 359) Notoriously difficult to translate - Goethe’s Faust tries “word,” “mind,” “power,” “act” - Fichte chooses logos to mean behavior in order to create his foundational epistemological antinomy� What tries to describe human behavior is itself a form of behavior that needs to be described, if any description is to be accurate� This antinomy between the description and the described is the foundation for Fichte’s apodictic claim that such a structure cannot be logically resolved, but only poetically expressed� As a model for this form of expression Fichte presents the early Wittgenstein in his attempt to translate mathematical logic into propositional statements about the world� The result is a hybrid between philosophy and poetry, while the mystical silence remains as the aesthetic backdrop of what appears as rigorous scientific discourse. Through comparative linguistic analysis, Fichte seeks to combat what he detects as “anthropology’s contempt for language” and the “disenfranchisement through the language of science” (Fichte, Petersilie 360)� 1 What Wittgenstein’s cryptic style models as the limits of scientific rationality is for Fichte already prefigured in the language of Hesiod, Herodotus, and the pre-Socratic philosophers, who formulate with magic, ease, discipline, imagination, concision, liberty, and beauty� It becomes apparent that Fichte’s is to a considerable degree an aesthetic critique of the scientific discourse, even where his charges address ethical issues (Katschthaler 134)� Since language is for Fichte a form of human behavior that is incommensurable with the logic of information, the mode of investigation must rely on those elements that resist clear categorization� Die Grundlagen wissenschaftlicher Ausdrucksweise sind durch die Informationstheorie kodifiziert worden; es geschieht ein Blinde-Kuh-Spielen mit dem Unbewussten, dem Unterbewussten, dem Vorbewussten� Terror und Hass, Heuchelei und Lüge, Übertreibung und Understatement, Andeutung und Ironie, Bildhaftigkeit und Metaphern finden in der Informationstheorie nicht statt - menschliche Information setzt sich allerdings fast nur aus ihnen zusammen� (Fichte, Petersilie 361—62) From a structural confusion of the object and the form of description, an inclusion of all inherent contradictions of scholarship becomes possible, such as the venality of researchers, their sexual desires, and their immoral ways of gaining access to sacred objects and knowledge� Formal innovation as it has shaped modernist aesthetics is the key for Fichte’s new science , to correct the linguistic deformations of the “old science” which he deems “co-responsible for the deformations of our world” (Fichte, Petersilie 361)� Fichte’s poetic anthropology wants to “reveal [and not conceal] poetically” (363), as goes his charge against Claude Lévi-Strauss’s supposedly whiny, paternalizing style in Tristes Tropiques , or Elias Canetti’s poetic description of a donkey in Voices of Marrakesh � Fichte’s critique is as radically subjective as the epistemological model that he suggests in his remarks� The horizon in which he would like to locate his own version of poetic anthropology is encompassed by a Western canon of male white authors (Petronius, Defoe, Casanova, Chamisso, Stendhal, Thackeray, Frazer, Proust, Artaud, Dos Passos, Döblin, Genet, and Burroughs) and not at all marked by the cultural forms of the Afro-diasporic religions that Fichte appears to investigate� This Western highbrow attitude is contrasted with claims of an easily understandable form of ethnography that achieves transparency by means of literary stylization� In an introductory paragraph that is not included in the version contained in the volume Petersilie , but that was part of the original speech printed in a Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 153 154 André Fischer volume of the ethnological journal Ethnomedizin , Fichte legitimizes his attack on science by identifying himself as an outsider and a poet� Ich möchte Ihnen danken, daß ich hier anläßlich der Fotos von LEONORE MAU, einige Worte sagen darf� Sie sehen ein umfassendes Material, eine exakte ästhetische Umsetzung von afro-amerikanischer Kultur, wie sie sonst nicht besteht� Kultur ist im allgemeinen ein imperialistischer Begriff. Kultur haben immer die Sieger� Zum ersten Mal werden die Ausmaße einer Kultur der Unterdrückten deutlich� Sie betrifft drei Kontinente - eine atlantische Kultur; auch deshalb ist es glücklich, daß diese Arbeiten im FROBENIUS-INSTITUT hängen� Sie wurden in acht Jahren, unter politischer, gesundheitlicher, finanzieller Bedrohung realisiert� Unabhängig� Mögliche Gesten menschlicher Existenz sind: Widerspruch, Übertreibung, Karneval, Vaudoo� Wenn ich nun, von diesen Fotos ausgehend, ein poetisches Verfahren in der ethnologischen Forschung verlange - halten Sie mich für einen vaudouesk besessenen Dichter� Indem ich maßlos die Wissenschaft angreife, stelle ich mich auf meine Weise der Forschung und werde damit vielleicht nützlicher, als wenn ich ihnen eine akademische Augenwischerei vorführte, in der ich Dilettant bin� (Fichte, Ethnomedizin IV 171—72) The role of the dilettante gives him the liberty to criticize the academic discipline of ethnology without having to follow its procedures of how to effectively formulate such a critique. As Peter Braun pointed out, Fichte, as a literary author, demands the guiding method of literary analysis, namely hermeneutics, to become the new paradigm of the intercultural analysis of ethnological inquiry, which was still tied to a positivistic model (Braun, “Kraut und Rüben” 224)� The reference to literary authors as a corpus on which to train these interpretative methods is thus justified as a cross-disciplinary intervention. Fichte’s critique of science in a broader sense consists further in the accusation that the sciences project a theoretically conceived rationality onto the world of experience about which they, in denial of this distortion, postulate to gain objective knowledge that is the only acceptable form of truth� What cannot be determined through the scientific method of empirical observation and logical deduction does not exist or exists only as a figment of the imagination. Fichte thus suggests that the sciences assume that the totality of the knowledge they generate, including the entirety of possible knowledge, represents reality as such� The complete observation of all observable facts becomes identical with the totality of the world, while one must - as Fichte implies with his Wittgen- Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 155 stein quotation - remain silent about whatever may exist beyond that scope. In the context of ethnology and the sociology of religion, in which Fichte places his critique, the naturalistic assumptions of the sciences imply that if there is a god - and the observed rituals suggest that divinity exists - then it can only exist as the ultimate justification of an inherently rational world and appear only as such an essentially rational principle� As a projection of rational thought onto the empirical world, this god of the philosophers remains deeply skeptical about the gods of the Ewe, Yoruba, or any other polytheism for that matter, since their existence cannot follow logically from the rational construction of the world� Such gods must be necessarily idols and can only be explained as irrational projections� This naturalist ideology of the sciences in general is at stake in Fichte’s attack on ethnology in particular� Of course, the human sciences have their task in demonstrating what exactly such belief systems are, how they are motivated by social factors, and how they are realized in mythmaking, rituals, and in the ethics of everyday life� Such anthropological knowledge would be based on the repeated and repeatable application of the scientific method onto varying subjects, i.e., cultures. Only if the method remains the same and the subjects of inquiry vary can researchers claim objectivity in their response to the question of what the human being actually is� Fichte, whose polemic suggests such a schematic image of science, proposes a revision of the scientific method according to which the researcher lets him or herself be influenced in his or her basic assumptions by its subject of inquiry. In the field of ethnology in particular, this is not a new or radical demand at all, but an essential and ongoing debate in the discipline at least since Boas� Although Fichte’s critique contains the charge that the ethnological practice does not do justice to its own methodological premises, his central target is something else� It is the question whether ethnologists would not have to develop new forms of perception and representation in order to do justice to the “cultural other” that they are trying to understand as the human condition� And following, whether such forms - a new language that is not poetry anymore and not yet science - would not be necessary in order to overcome the rationalistic fallacy that just because we are only able to understand the world rationally, this world must be necessarily and intrinsically rational� The posited “cultural other” that is the subject of ethnological research thus represents to the researcher the possibility of a fundamentally different experience of the world, whether or not such an experience is possible in the observed culture or not� Ethnology in Fichte’s project is, as Manfred Weinberg put it, “merely the thematic pretense that only serves to fundamentally question of the human condition” (Weinberg 323). As such, Fichte’s idea of research is a form of radical selfand world-experience that is modeled after the observed ritual practices which promise to free the subject 156 André Fischer from the rational confinements of the human consciousness. For example, a key concept within the Brazilian Candomblé that addresses this experience is the obrigaç-o da consciência (obligation, but here: breaking or disruption of consciousness)� Fichte refers back to this concept consistently as a potential model for his method, but also as a threshold he does not want to cross by being initiated himself� The promise, however, is that a world structured in non-rational ways could be mediated culturally where it cannot be determined theoretically� In other words, it is the promise to break Wittgenstein’s silence� The natural sciences can only ever provide theoretical terms in response to the question of how the world is actually structured and those terms are, according to Fichte, articulated in a language that remains unexamined� What the human being and its experience of and position within the world really is can be determined in principle within the humanities, and only if what is observed and the observation become identical in a “fundamentally different language.” Wir sind die Sieger� Wir treten auf mit der Haltung der Siegreichen� Wissen ist Macht� Das Weltbild der Physik ist das Weltbild siegreicher Physiker� Der Ethnologe geht siegreich aus der Strukturenanalyse des Indianerstammes hervor� […] Ich gehe aus Haiti nicht als Sieger hervor� Meine Aufzeichnungen sind die Aufzeichnungen von Irrtümern, Fehlschlüssen, Kurzschlusshandlungen� Gäbe es zwischen dem Wittgenstein’schen Schweigen und der Sprache unserer Siegeranalysen und Siegersynthesen eine Sprache, in der die Bewegung sich abwechselnder und widersprechender Ansichten deutlich werden könnte, das Dilemma von Empfindlichkeit und Anpassung, Verzweifeln und Praxis - ich würde sie benützen. Es wäre eine wesentlich andere Sprache� (Fichte, Xango 119) Fichte grounds his epistemological reflections, here in a corresponding passage from the volume Xango (1976), on the construction of an antinomy because his own theory ultimately results in such an antinomy. The telos of an identification of the description and what is described can necessarily not be scientific anymore while also its status as poetry is in question. Fichte’s idea of a new science of man is thus nothing but a utopia, and more precisely, an aesthetic utopia inasmuch it concerns the conditions of perception and attempts to derive a new form of expression from these revised conditions� It is unclear whether Fichte found that his own ethnographic works ( Xango , Petersilie , Lazarus , Haus der Mina ) or the novels from Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit ever realized or at least approximated this ideal type of research� Karl Katschthaler contends that specifically with regards to the ethical implications of his concept of ethnology, Fichte succeeds in the volumes Xango and Petersilie , thereby validating his critique of other ethnologists, especially Lévi-Strauss (Katschthaler 133—76). Peter Braun argues that only in the novel Explosion , when read along with the Xango volumes that also include Leonore Mau’s photographs, this “utopia of a different kind of knowledge” has been realized (Braun, “Kraut und Rüben” 226). Among Fichte scholars it is widely assumed that the novel Forschungsbericht represents the admission of his failure and marks the realization that his preoccupation with the subjectivity of knowledge has always been at home within a literary tradition for which at that point Henry James begins to stand in for as a poetological model (Simo 76)� It can only be reconstructed in an exemplary way how Fichte attempted to realize his scientific ambition and how he sought to integrate the contradictions that emerged in the process� One of Fichte’s earliest published texts on Brazil was the journalistic piece “Ein Geschwür bedeckt das Land,” a report on poverty, corruption, and social injustice in Brazil under the military dictatorship that appeared in Der Spiegel in 1972� Here, Fichte masters the sound of political commitment and mainstream Marxism that his target audience would expect, but that in his literary works is sparsely used� There, he refrains from the simple nexus that the Candomblé might just be another form of numbing oppression, while he presents this suggestion to the readers of the Spiegel without much hesitation� With a tone of objectivity that is typical for the genre, but uncharacteristic for Fichte the literary author, he cautions against the embrace of the syncretistic religions by bourgeois left-wing intellectuals, while portraying the Candomblé as associated with the oppressive regime and its attempts to manipulate the population by “breaking their consciousness” (Fichte, “Ein Geschwür” 5)� His own embrace of the Afro-diasporic religions as well as his scientific ambition appears among the description of the Brazilian misery in a concise paragraph: Trotz eingehender wissenschaftlicher Beschäftigung steht die entscheidende Erforschung des Candomblé noch aus� Der Clou dieser afroamerikanischen Mischreligion, die Verwandlung der Gläubigen in bestimmte Götter bleibt ungeklärt� Im Candomblé haben sich seit etwa 150 Jahren unter dem Mäntelchen einer wie tief immer gehenden Christianisierung Riten aus Dahome, Nigeria, Angola etc� oft reiner erhalten als in Afrika selbst� Ähnlich in Kuba� In Haiti unter dem Namen Wudu� In Guyana� Es gehört zu den verdeckten Anzeichen des westlichen Hochmuts, daß die afroamerikanische Religionsgruppe nie als das bewußt gemacht wurde, was sie bedeutet: eine der größten religiösen Bewegungen aller Zeiten� (Fichte, “Ein Geschwür” 5) Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 157 158 André Fischer From the perspective of his later developed epistemological program, it is easy to guess what the author imagines to be the “decisive investigation” that is yet to come and what the key to the mystery of the gods might be� So far, Western ethnologists only demonstrated their arrogance and failed to acknowledge the Afro-diasporic religions as the “greatest religious movement of all time�” Fichte’s new science was supposed to fill that gap. Journalism was instrumental for Fichte to finance his trips abroad but not the format in which to realize his ambition for research, whereas his ethnological articles on mushroom poisoning, ritual plants, and medical potions that appeared in the Hamburg based journal Ethnomedizin could not satisfy the desire for a fusion of knowledge and poetry� These latter essays remain instructive, however, since they are his only publications to appear in an academic venue and show that Fichte sought recognition from scholars in this context� In these contributions, he attempts, at least in part, to provide objective, verifiable facts on Afro-diasporic religious rites in a way that is legible to an audience not steeped in Fichte’s epistemological idiosyncrasies� Of the pieces published in Ethnomedizin , the one on Abó - a potion of ritual plants used in Brazilian Candomblé ceremonies - probably resembles most a scholarly article to the extent that Fichte articulates a research question (“Do the priests of the African-American religions succeed in manipulating the human personality by means of chemical substances? ” Fichte, “Abó” 362), introduces and contextualizes his topic, cites pertinent literature, repeats his experiments, and attempts to give a transparent account on his methods, e�g�, what he gives in exchange for relevant information� Other than in his “anthro-poetological” writing style, Fichte summarizes existing knowledge, verifies, comments, and synthesizes in a way that is comprehensible by scholars as well as a generally interested audience alike� It is striking that Fichte’s considerations about gender and sexuality that are so productively intertwined in his other prose are entirely absent when he refers to Leonore Mau with the heteronormative formula “my wife” in the descriptions of the experiments with the plants� Fichte shows the same restraint with his otherwise abundant references to literary writers out of context and only allowed himself to include Selma Lagerlöf in a footnote� The article concludes with a lengthy compilation of ritual plants and their associated deities that resembles again his hermetic vertical writing style, reminiscent of the taxonomy of fish at the end of his novel Die Palette (1968)� Fichte did not seem to pursue his other articles in Ethnomedizin with the same kind of rigor and extensive field work. The one-page treatise on herbal remedy against sinusitis cites two botanists on the effectiveness of the plant “zerbe à clous” before adding notes of successful treatment of his partner Leonore Mau and his friend Peter Michel Ladiges� The tension between the scholarly ambition and the slim anecdotal evidence is - probably unintentionally - comical (Fichte, “Ein Kräutermittel” 193—94)� His essay on mushroom poisoning is similarly based on the experience of Fichte accidentally purchasing “elfin saddle” ( helvella ) mushrooms instead of morels, which triggered a food poisoning and hallucinations for him and Leonore Mau (Fichte, “Anmerkungen” 157—61)� Besides references to Proust and Carlos Castaneda, Fichte mistakes Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s song Ein Männlein steht im Walde for a folk song and follows the common misconception of identifying the “Männlein” with a fly agaric ( Fliegenpilz ) and its hallucinogenic effects, when the song is actually about a rose hip. 2 Fichte’s method by which he connects private drug research and syncretism - here it is the red appearance of the “diabolic” Brazilian deity of Esu - is based on, however faulty, literary analysis� Fichte’s novel Versuch über die Pubertät (1974) - which also features the mushroom episode in a crucial passage - marks a point of transition as the last novel published during his lifetime and the first to contain extensive material from his observations of Afro-diasporic syncretism� Here, the descriptions of the rituals serve the purpose of a projection screen for Fichte’s adolescent relations to his mentor Hans Henny Jahnn (Pozzi)� The clearly articulated goal of the novel is to uncover the layers of the narrator’s self through the post-mortem rituals of the Candomblé, while the ambition of research or a new science is not expressed in this novel� Plötzlich - aber vielleicht vorbereitet durch langsam zur Oberfläche geschwemmtes Material - entdecke ich, daß alle meine Versuche bisher nur eine Bewegung verrieten: zurückzufinden in frühere Schichten. Ich beschloß, von nun an die Handlungen einzuteilen in magische und vom Magischen abgelöste. (Wobei ich den Begriff des Magischen für meinen Gebrauch etwas umwandelte�) Ich überlegte, ob nicht auch meine Vorstellungen in der Pubertät Ritualisierungen wären, wie die Zeichensprache der Aderflügler, Schwurgifte und wie das Schminken von Novizen� (Fichte, Versuch 9) In this text, ritual magic becomes the model for a psychological self-reflection that is typical for the genre of the modern novel, but not necessarily for ethnology. Whereas here, a first-person narrator reflects the traumata of his adolescence in the syncretistic rituals, Fichte’s ethnographic texts try to transform this generic structure into what he emphatically refers to as “research�” The deliberate hybrid between literature and ethnology begins with the publication of Xango (1976), where detailed ethnographic descriptions and eclectic impressions or associations are mixed� Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 159 160 André Fischer Professora Dona Theresa bittet uns einzutreten� - Sie sind gerade richtig gekommen� Heute ist die erste Puxada, die erste Saida, das erste Heraustreten der Novizen aus der Einweihungszelle, Ronko, nach dreiwöchigem Eingeschlossensein� Professora Theresa führt uns in den kleinen Versammlungsraum, wo auch die Waschmaschine steht� Die “Töchter”, die Würdenträgerinnen, die M-es aus der Nachbarschaft sehen aus wie Gräfinnen auf einer Wohlfahrtsveranstaltung. Die drei Trommler, der Spieler des Agogo, wirken wie Ganoven, ein Einäugiger, einer schielt, gläubige Arme, mit den Verzeichnungen des Elends� Die Gräfinnen tanzen. Scheren werden in die Einweihungszelle hineingelangt. Auf die Türen! Drei geschorene Mädchen kommen heraus, über und über mit weissen Kalkpunkten versehen� Sie bewegen sich traumwandlerisch in schwerer Trance� Das eine Mädchen ist etwa acht Jahre alt, das zweite um die fünfzehn, die dritte, die Mutter der Kleinen, ist älter� Sie tragen alle lange, weisse Spitzenhosen, darüber einen Rock� Die Brüste mit Tüchern weggeschnürt� Raffiaschnüre an den nackten, bepunkteten Armen. Auf dem bepunkteten Schädel eine kleine Kalkpyramide� An der Stirn ist mit Bindfaden eine rosa Feder befestigt worden� Jede muss sich zweimal bäuchlings auf eine Matte legen� Professora Theresa schüttelt das Adja, einen rasselnden Silberkonus, über ihnen� Die Novizen tanzen der Gemeinde die Gesten ihres Gottes vor� Es sind Oxum, die Maria des Wassers, Oxossi, der Heilige Sebastian, Obaluae oder Omolu, der Heilige Rochus und der Heilige Lazarus� Die drei werden geschlossenen Auges in ihre Zelle zurückgeführt� Die Gemeinde fällt nun in nicht ganz seriöse Nachmittagstrancen. Ein kindischer, betteliger Zwischenzustand folgt auf das Ergriffensein durch die Götter - es dreht sich vor allem um den Erwerb von Bier, Bonbons und Nadelgeld� Zum Schluss tanzen nur noch die Männer mit den übertrieben effeminierten Sexualgesten der Normalen� Zwei Wohlfahrtsgräfinnen finden sich in einem glühenden Kuss. (Fichte, Xango 20— 21) This passage, which describes an initiation ceremony, gives an account that remains somewhat legible to readers who are interested in Candomblé, yet not familiar with the particularities of Fichte’s poetological universe� It provides an idea of the general procedure, even though the dimensions of the ritual space and duration of the ceremony are not entirely clear. Specific elements are only mentioned, but not explained or interpreted, while impressionistic terms, such as “charity countesses” or “childish, begging” reveal more about the observer than about what is observed� The paradoxical poetological form that Fichte framed as new science is not fully applied in the passage above, since it lacks the stylistic devices that translate the presumed otherness not just of the observed culture but moreover of the ecstatic religious state reached in the ritual� The model for this “fundamentally different language” is not derived from the idea of a radical avant-garde, but from the tradition of the Western literary canon, albeit in Fichte’s above-mentioned eclectic selection, from Petronius to Burroughs� The ethnology of the future should hence continue the literary tradition of the past and in doing so not at all turn towards the “cultural other,” which remains an exoticist fabrication and as such only occasions the exploration of the self� The constructed otherness takes the form of a prism, in which the projections of the self are refracted to display a multitude of fragmented images that, then, are not only derived from the sphere of high culture, but contrasted with fragments of memories� In his novel Explosion , Fichte describes the very same event with a different vocabulary in order to stress the experience of the observer. Die Tür neben der Waschmaschine - da steht eine kleine Lazarusfigur mit zwei Hundchen drauf - die schedderige palmenverzierte Doppeltüre geht auf Und heraus treten drei schwarze Mädchen mit weißen Punkten bemalt Sie zittern leicht Und Irma darf fotografieren. Jäcki reißt automatisch die Arme hoch und die Blitze funktionieren Und niemand verhaftet die beiden� Den Verzauberten fällt auch nicht der Kalk von der Wange Sie zerplatzen nicht unter dem Blitz und lösen sich in Staub auf wie ein Kartoffelbovist. Jäcki ist gar nicht dabei beim Fotografieren und macht wahrscheinlich alles falsch mit dem Blitz� Sie sind schöner als der Erzbischof in Scheyern� Sie ergreifen Jäcki mehr als Meerstern ich dich grüße und Es ist ein Ros entsprungen� Schrecklicher als das Rosa der Bombenteppiche Sie sind die Hofdamen im “Glas Wasser”� Sie sind die dürren Leichen auf den Fotos der Zeitungen der Militärregierung Sie sind das ganz andere� Diese Mädchen, in einer anderen Welt zitternd unter der Schminke Taub und erweckt� Stumm und in Zungen redend� Blinde Seherinnen� Sie schwimmen wie Insekten im Kristall� Die Alte Welt zerfällt für Jäcki Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 161 162 André Fischer Die Neue Welt tritt auf Jäcki zu In Professora Normas Waschküche Lazarus� Proust Adé� Theater Adé� Selbst Alex Adé Pozzi Adé� Gruppe 47 Adé� Dies� Und Jäckis Idee es aufzuschreiben� Genauer� Ja� Wissenschaft� (Fichte, Explosion 148—49) In this description of the Candomblé ceremony - challenging for readers unable to fill the gaps left to the implicit reader here - Fichte provides an example of how he envisions the identity of observation and expression through his alter ego Jäcki. It exemplifies the fundamental contradiction of a description of the “wholly other” that is identical with itself when demanding that ethnologists should articulate their results in the poetic language of Western high culture� He suggests that this literary tradition had always tried to verbalize the radical other in innovative forms and thus provides the model for the poetic revolution of the sciences without abandoning the claim to objectivity� The often laborious and unpredictable fieldwork of the ethnographers provided Fichte with a wealth of impressions, which he tried to capture with a unique poetic form in which seemingly random elements are linked to distant associations, such as the comparison of the two initiated girls in trance with a Catholic bishop Fichte remembers from his childhood in Bavaria� The “old world” of European culture collapses in front of a wholly new and different world, the world of the Candomblé, for which the recent literary tradition, here exemplified by the Group 47 , offers no adequate form. Rather, it was the new science that enabled Fichte to bring the radically different into a precise and rigorous form of expression� Of course, only Fichte would have called this method science, but for the paradoxical concept of sacred knowledge embedded in the ritual, a new form of ethnographic writing had to be found against the resistance of the academic establishment� Thomas Hauschild argues that Fichte’s refusal to engage in scholarly debates and his esoteric tendencies have prohibited his ideas from entering the ethnological discourse (Hauschild, “Kat-holos” 304)� However, his hyperbolic concept of science was itself unscientific and more of a referent to universal knowledge� Wissenschaft� Neue Wissenschaft Alles� Vor allem Wissen� Wissen, was geht da vor� Nicht irgendwelche Bände veröffentlichen und irgendwelche Vorträge halten Sondern wissen Und das wie etwas ganz Kleines, Präzises Was geht im Kopf vor (Fichte, Explosion 162—63) Instead of the dry procedures of academic research, Fichte projects the artistic passion of the literary writer - disillusioned with what postwar literature has become and which Rilke famously captured in the question “Must I write? ” - onto a seemingly bureaucratic succession of irrelevant volumes, talks, and papers� Paradoxically, he focusses on the discipline of ethnology while expressing disdain for positivist specialization and instead emphatically seeks a form of knowledge unconditional of its institutional boundaries� In his contempt for academia, he fails to see what Max Weber has called the “personal experience and strange intoxication of science”: One’s own work must inevitably remain highly imperfect� Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment� And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science� He will never have what one may call the ‘personal experience’ of science� Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider; without this passion, this ‘thousands of years must pass before you enter into life and thousands more wait in silence’ - according to whether or not you succeed in making this conjecture; without this, you have no calling for science and you should do something else� (Weber, “Science as Vocation” 135) Fichte’s specialized focus on Afro-diasporic religions is at odds with the hyperbolic truth-seeking that stands behind his concept of science� If everything is about rigor and precision, then this focus entails specialization and limitation� If a new science of man is at stake, in which universal anthropological structures are to be revealed, then his narrow focus on this particular socioreligious configuration relates disproportionately to Fichte’s large-scale claims� There appear to dwell two souls in Fichte’s breast - that of the advocate of positivist and rigorous science and that of the unorthodox, heretic, poetic dilettante - and each of Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 163 164 André Fischer these souls seems to intervene whenever a consistent position is in reach for the author� From the medieval notion of curiositas , to Baconian experimentalism, or the Cartesian method, to Husserl’s rigorous science, and the Weberian model of science as vocation there is no shortage of emphatic models under which Fichte could have housed his project� In fact, as Peter Braun and Manfred Weinberg discovered, Joachim Sterly wrote (on the basis of Xango ) a preliminary expertise on Fichte’s pursuit of a doctoral degree in which he commends Fichte’s scientific precision, but also pointed out that his language is also always that of a poet (Braun and Weinberg 271—72)� Fichte, the amateur ethnologist, who, in spite of regularly publishing articles in Sterly’s journal Ethnomedizin and lecturing on Afro-diasporic religions at the University of Bremen, always remained a literary author and was never admitted to the academic circles against which he polemicized so much, is the same Fichte that repeatedly insisted on scientific rigor in hyperbolic form� Ich möchte die Härten der frühen griechischen Poetologie auf die Wissenschaft angewendet wissen, und ich möchte die Härten des naturwissenschaftlichen Empirismus auf Poesie angewendet wissen� Und nur in dieser doppelten Rigorosität kann etwas Neues entstehen� Nicht in einem doppelten Zusammenbrechen der Kriterien, sondern in einer doppelten Verantwortlichkeit den Kriterien gegenüber. (qtd. in Wischenbart 80) In apparent contradiction to Fichte’s guiding poetological principles of “Verschwulung” (“gayification” or queering) or “Empfindlichkeit” (sensitivity), hardness and rigor are here presented as the ideal categories for the reciprocal analysis of poetry and science� However, the rhetoric of rigor is not directed at producing mere knowledge, the goal of any scholarly endeavor, but instead is supposed to produce “something new�” The potentiation of rigor is supposed to produce something bigger and better than knowledge; it is supposed to create an image of the world as it really is� Beyond Fichte’s critique of the ethics of ethnology, his heterodox program of a new science attempts to establish a countercurrent of poetic knowledge� From the rigorous categories of classical rhetoric, Fichte provides a whole catalogue of devices that ethnologists already use without being conscious of it: “figures of speech, circumlocutions, forms of play, concetti, condensation, rhythm, timbre, sharpness, fragments, errors, gaps, and collage,” while also pointing out the ethnographic genres of the interview, the essay, the aphorism, and the joke (Fichte, Petersilie 363)� The demand that literary texts be based on hard empirical facts has its mirror image in Fichte’s insistence that ethnological texts must be analyzed using rhetorical categories� Fichte’s epistemological reflections and their poetological implications have been at the center of scholarship, with attempts to frame them as “ethnopoetry” (Heinrichs 49), “poetic anthropology” (Heißenbüttel 140), “poetic knowledge” (Röhr 88), “erotology” (Mattenklott 71), “literarization of science” (Böhme 32), “ethnopoetology” (Weinberg 324), “aesthetic critique of science” (Simo 214), “double documentation” (Braun 110), “verbalization of the world” (Fisch 186), “feedback effects” (Bandel 8), “epistemological dead end” (Gillett 152), “poetological anthropology” (Kammer 129), “transcriptuality” (Strongman 91) or “self-reflexive, investigative, exposing poetics” (Franke 14). Despite the considerable attention paid to this contradictory structure, Fichte’s emphatic concept of research as “hard science” is often readily subsumed under the soft humanistic categories in between ethnology and literature, where it serves to express truth claims that the scientific discourse does not allow for. This soft focus on forms of ethnological knowledge is echoed by the term “writing culture” that emerged simultaneously to Fichte’s considerations. Yet also James Clifford saw that in his field such an “extreme self-consciousness certainly has its dangers - of irony, of elitism, of solipsism, of putting the whole world in quotation marks.” Clifford goes on to justify the use of poetic forms of expression within ethnology and like Fichte asserts that “to recognize the poetic dimensions of ethnography does not require that one give up facts and accurate accounting for the supposed free play of poetry” (Clifford, “Impartial Truths” 25—26). Clifford contends that poetry does not mean subjectivism and that it can be as precise and objective as other forms of knowledge production, when generating hybrid forms that transgress disciplinary boundaries� Although Fichte articulated similar concerns as Clifford, he remained on the other side of the institutional divide between scholarship and literature that persisted despite the interdisciplinary efforts of “writing culture.” Indeed, it is all too obvious that Fichte was a literary writer and not a scholar. The knowledge he produced must always be qualified as “poetic” or “aesthetic,” i.e., not verifiable by the standards he himself, at least rhetorically, embraced� His hyperbole of a new science is a tacit concession that humanistic knowledge remains second rate when compared to that of the natural sciences and that Fichte’s emphatic concept of rigorous research is a rhetorical overcompensation of this fact� His concept of a new science is not ahead of its time, but anachronistic, in the sense that it harks back to early critiques of the Enlightenment� The Romantic critique of Enlightenment rationality with its characteristic blending of epistemology and poetry - thereby unwittingly widening the gap between them - articulated a forceful claim for humanistic knowledge, most notably in Friedrich Schlegel’s universal poetry� In a similar fashion, the young Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 165 166 André Fischer idealists from the Tübinger Stift called in their Systemprogramm for a mythology of reason: “mythology must become philosophical and philosophy must become mythological” (Beiser 5)� With the exception of the poet Hölderlin, Fichte was not interested in this philosophical tradition at all, but behind his desire for a new science lurks what Brecht called romantic gawking. Fichte’s critique of a petty scientific rationalism suggests a universalist telos that seeks truth in the form of knowledge� The reversal of categories, after which literature must become research-based and science ought to pay attention to the ambiguities of poetic expression and style truly echoes early Romanticism and Idealism� In Fichte’s own historical context, it ties in with the German postwar debates about documentary literature, the alleged death of literature, and the rise of the postmodern genre of theory, which also entertains the reconciliation of subjective and objective experience that was so characteristic for the Romantic tradition� Despite occasional references to Chamisso or Novalis, Fichte rejects the conceptual baggage of German Romanticism even where he follows in its footsteps� Notwithstanding his insistence on rigor and logic, the poetic knowledge that he seeks clearly has its roots in the tradition that Isaiah Berlin called the counter-Enlightenment (Vico, Hamann, Herder) which emerged in response to Bacon’s empiricism and the Cartesian method� Not just in literal, but also in genealogical terms, Fichte’s new science of man has one of its closest allies in Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725/ 1744)� Like Fichte, albeit in an entirely different manner, Vico set out to restructure the way epistemology is understood in his time and to establish a poetic corrective to rationalism� What can we know and what is in principle unknowable? For Vico, the answer is surprisingly simple� His verum-factum principle claims that since God created the natural world, humans will never be able to fully understand nature regardless of how much they develop their scientific disciplines. What humans can, however, fully understand is the historical world they have created� Unlike the natural sciences that can never completely grasp the object of their curiosity, the humanities can in principle understand all forms of human expression, since the medium of creation is identical with the medium of analysis, namely language� Since everything humans articulate in language can only be analyzed as language, the new science of man (or “The new science of Giambattista Vico about the common nature of the nations”) must be philological at its foundation� Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes science about the true� Philology observes authority in human choice, whence comes consciousness of the certain� This Axiom, by its second part, defines as philologists all the grammarians, historians, textual critics who are occupied with knowledge of the languages and deeds of peoples, both internally, in their customs and laws, and externally, in their wars, peace treaties, alliances, travels, commerce� This same Axiom demonstrates that just as the philosophers, who did not give certainty to their reasoning with the authority of the philologists, have fallen short by half, so too have the philologists, who did not care to give truth to their authority with the reason of the philosophers� If they had done this, they would have been more advantageous to republics and would have preceded us in meditating upon this science� (Vico 77—78) By philology Vico not only means the study of language as such, but the entirety of intersubjective reason that includes customs, laws, politics, and culture� However, his new science is neither a totalization of the philological method, nor a mere fusion of philosophy and philology, but the epistemological program to define what caused the human world to become what it has. By recognizing that the way to understand the world humans have created for themselves, i�e�, the historical world, is itself an act of creation, Vico suggests that knowledge is inherently poetic (Vico 120)� The intricate problem of meaning to which philology and especially hermeneutics are devoted looms behind Fichte’s new science as a tradition with which he chose not to engage and instead consistently foregrounded the importance of Baroque aesthetics for his theory of knowledge� However, already David Simo pointed to the similarity of Fichte’s and Hamann’s critique of scientific language as impoverished and dry as opposed to the original language of poetry (Simo 87)� Beyond Hamann’s idea of poetry as “foundational language,” Manfred Weinberg cites Herder’s essay on the origin of language as poetic song to stress the formal analogy to Fichte’s concept of a new science (Weinberg 10—12)� Weinberg emphasizes the importance of the concept of mimesis for Fichte’s adaptations of poetological models not only from Baroque and ancient Greek authors, but also for his approach to vodou and other syncretistic forms of religious expression� Foundational is then not the “pure” expression of the colonial other, but the “fundamentally different language” that needs to be found in order to articulate the new science of man � Peter Braun convincingly argued that Fichte’s utopia of an “essentially different language” would ultimately have to be articulated by the observed peoples themselves and that the fragmented nature of Fichte’s texts would only be the adequate form to negatively hint at this utopian language (Braun, Dokumentation 255)� In the context of Greek antiquity, the historian and ethnographer Herodotus represents for Fichte the ideal model for his own concept of research, because he consistently marks his own positionality and the limitations of his perspective, while specifically paying attention to non-Greeks, e.g., Egyptians, Scythes, Libyans (Africans), and Persians� Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 167 168 André Fischer Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus� The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks� (Herodotus 3) Herodotus’s world is already shaped by the spheres of influence of colonial powers, and his ethnographic gaze wanders in between them as he integrates accounts of various kinds into his own narrative� The hybridity of his Histories invites the self-comparison with Fichte’s own History of Sensitivity and his dictum to write in layers rather than in stories (“Schichten statt Geschichten”; Fichte, Versuch 294). For Fichte, Herodotus is a “word-maker” (λογοποίός), whose fabrications and gossip are more truthful than objective accounts of historians such as Thucydides who hide their subjectivity behind mountains of facts� Herodotus’s mode of writing is the narrative account, for which he uses the word logos and which does not discriminate against divergent forms of knowledge� Instead of assessing the veracity of statements or reported events, Herodotus gives a mere account of what he heard and saw� His model of research respects the secret knowledge of sacred rituals and the communities for whom this knowledge is valid� At the same time, he implies analogies among various cultures and generalizes the particular observations he makes� Because I believe that everyone is equal in terms of religious knowledge, I do not see any point in relating anything I was told about the gods, except their names alone� If I do refer to such matters, it will be because my account [ logos ] leaves me no choice� As far as human matters are concerned, the priests all agreed in what they told me� (Herodotus 96) This contradictory structure is the perfect mirror image in which Fichte can reflect his own epistemology. Truth becomes a matter of gossip or hearsay and is praised by Fichte in his essay on Herodotus as the curious apperception of the Greek historian, whereas knowledge that is structured by abstract categories appears as a mere instrument of colonialism� Es bleibt unfaßlich, daß nach einem so neugierigen Beginn ein so unneugieriges Europa entstand, für das Wissen selten etwas anderes war als Macht, die Kolonialgeschichte Europas bleibt die Geschichte der Unempfindlichkeit, die Philosophie Europas unneugieriger Idealismus, Scholastik, Scheuklappen und Gebetsmühlen, schon Thales fiel vor den Augen der Magd in den Brunnen, die Fehler in der praktischen Anschauung füllen Bände, Bände Aristoteles, Sartre und Lévi-Strauss� (Fichte, Homosexualität und Literatur I 396) Fichte’s nemesis, the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, stands in here as a counter-model and is the main target in one of Fichte’s sharpest polemics in his critique of Tristes Tropiques � 3 The abstract systematic thought that only needs empirical research to support its already formed hypotheses is rejected in favor of a gathering of narrative accounts� Herodotus’s central epistemological unit is the narrative account ( logos ), which he uses in the plural, and it is never quite clear in the Histories where one logos ends and the next one begins, except for when it is explicitly stated, e�g�: “That completes my account [ logos ] of the sacred animals of Egypt” (Herodotus 124)� The Greek author repeatedly declares his method of recording truthfully what he witnessed (“My job, throughout this account, is simply to record whatever I am told by each of my sources”; Herodotus 144). At times, he specifies that he does not regard it as his task to verify or falsify the accounts he records and also that he does not need to believe himself the logoi he is being told (“I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them - this remark may be taken to apply to the whole of my account [ logos ]”; Herodotus 457). This also resonates with Fichte’s skeptical distance to the religious belief systems he investigates as well as with his refusal to be initiated like other leading Candomblé scholars such as Pierre Verger� Logos for Fichte is, then, really a form of behavior, namely in the Brechtian sense of an attitude or a posture ( Haltung ) that Fichte adopts when fashioning himself as a scholar� The logos of his accounts is precisely not the rigorous logic of Wittgenstein, but the display of an image of the literary writer as researcher� This detached posture is given up whenever fascination and enthusiasm get a hold of the narrative, for example in the descriptions of the rituals� There, a fundamentally new language seeks expression in modernist poetic forms� Yet another of such attitudes comes into play whenever Fichte muses on the broader ambition of his utopian project and a romantic gaze seeks to synthesize the perceived otherness� Exemplary for this posture is the following passage: Man kann sich leicht zu einer unitarischen Schunkelei einfinden, anbiedernd und ausbeuterisch; man sabbert von gleichen Strukturen, klopft dem afrikanischen Ödipus auf die Schultern und zwickt der haitianischen Aphrodite in die Backen� So meine ich es nicht� Ich möchte an Schilderungen von Herodot im Detail aufweisen, daß einige Riten, die wir heute noch in den afroamerikanischen Religionen beobachten, seit klassischer Zeit einen Platz in europäischer Kultur einnahmen, daß sie weder einen Verfall noch ein atavistisches Relikt bedeuten� Herodot und die Trance� Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 169 170 André Fischer Jedoch nicht um die Überlegenheit abendländischer Tradition vor sogenannten primitiven Völkern einmal mehr zu bestätigen, sondern andersherum: Um den Wechsellauf anzudeuten von nubischen, äthiopischen, libyschen Wellen und ihrem karischen, ionischen, attischen Widerspiel� (Fichte, Homosexualität und Literatur I 408) With the help of the “father of history,” Fichte envisions a transhistorical perspective that seeks to find universal structures that reverberate through different cultures and times in similar ways� No form of rigorous research could ever prove such claims, and it remains the task of speculation and metaphysics to articulate what it is that can be traced in all these different cultures. Peter Braun and Manfred Weinberg argued that Fichte’s new science should be understood in terms of Husserl (“life-world”) and Heidegger (“anxiety”), mainly because one of Fichte’s mentors in the field of ethnology, Joachim Sterly, wrote his dissertation on a phenomenological approach to ethnology� Their suggestion is puzzling not only because they misconstrue Fichte’s notorious name-dropping with a systematic engagement, even though they demonstrate that Fichte’s reading of Sterly’s dissertation was selective at best (Braun and Weinberg 263)� In the novel Explosion , Fichte’s protagonist Jäcki states his disbelief in the supernatural that is addressed in a particular ritual and his decision to “work rigorously [and] scientifically [in the mode of] Descartes and Husserl” (Braun and Weinberg 244)� Similar to Fichte’s mentioning of Wittgenstein’s famous dictum quoted earlier, the names of Husserl and Descartes are merely rhetorical devices to invoke “rigorous science” and the “scientific method,” instead of revealing any deeper conceptual relevance� Even more surprising is the attempt by Braun and Weinberg to connect the philosophy of Martin Heidegger - no doubt an important influence for Sterly - to Fichte’s concept of world experience as passive “waiting in the middle of the world and its happenings until the other approaches and reveals itself ? ” (Fichte, Xango 217)� The notion of truth (ἀλήθεια) preferred by Heidegger would be such an unconcealment of Being, however one that goes beyond the anthropological notion of what is strange, different, or “other.” Instead of trying to understand Fichte’s concept of new science through Sterly and Heidegger in particular, the general framework of hermeneutic understanding that is based in a philological interpretation makes much more sense and is already inherent in Herodotus’s approach that Fichte explicitly engages with� If, as Weinberg and Braun attest, the notion of understanding as opposed to the factual material (“Tatsachenmaterial”) is central for Sterly and important for Fichte, it would make more sense to locate Fichte’s new science in the tradition of Giambattista Vico, a fierce opponent of the Cartesian method� However, since Fichte did not dig deep in historical epistemologies and rather eclectically picked his allies and adversaries, his well-known hostility towards his contemporary Claude Lévi-Strauss deserves some revision� In Wild Thought ( La Pensée Sauvage ), Lévi-Strauss compares the deterministic ritual magic with the differentiation of science and wonders whether to consider the rigor and precision presented by magical thought and ritual practices as translating an unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism as a mode of existence of scientific phenomena, so that determinism would be globally hypothesized and tried out, before being known and respected[�] Rituals and magical beliefs would then appear as so many expressions of an act of faith in a science yet to be born� (Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought 14) Ambiguity as a result of scientific differentiation appears here in contrast with the rigor and precision of magic� Lévi-Strauss’s suggestion that this rigor attests to the apprehension of a truth for which a form of scientific inquiry must yet be found, echoes Fichte’s demand for a new science in a striking way� Striking not only because it comes from Fichte’s declared archenemy and supposed representative of a colonialist, paternalizing tradition of ethnology, but because it reveals that the seemingly controversial approximation of science and magic was long underway before he even made his first trip to Brazil. This shows again the formal quality of the mode of polemic writing - and Fichte made use of this mode not just against Lévi-Strauss, but also against Pierre Verger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Arthur Rimbaud - which is to establish a difference where there actually is a close affinity. Notwithstanding the various entry points for a legitimate critique, had Fichte read beyond Tristes Tropiques and considered La Pensée Sauvage , he could have discovered that he has an interlocutor and not an enemy in Lévi-Strauss� He would have had to revise, at least in part, his main charge that structuralism reduces the poetic ambivalence found in indigenous and syncretistic religions in order to force them into already established rational categories. Instead of engaging with Lévi-Strauss in a scientific way, Fichte chooses to compete by means of polemics of which the French anthropologist surely never took notice. As if operating under the spell of an anxiety of influence, Fichte wants to set his own epistemological ideas apart from the magical thought Lévi-Strauss described in La Pensée Sauvage � Magical thought is not a beginning, a start, a sketch, part of an as yet unrealized whole; it forms a well-articulated system, independent in this regard from that other system which will be constituted by science, except for the formal analogy that brings them together and makes the former a kind of metaphorical expression of the latter� Instead, then, of opposing magic and science, we would do better to view them as Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 171 172 André Fischer parallel, as two modes of knowledge, unequal insofar as their theoretical and practical results are concerned (since, from this point of view, it is true that science succeeds better than magic, even though magic prefigures science in that it, too, sometimes succeeds), but not in the kind of mental operations on which the two draw, and which differ less in nature than as a function of the types of phenomena to which they are applied� In fact, these relations stem from the objective conditions in which magical knowledge and scientific knowledge appeared. (Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought 16) Magical and scientific knowledge as related epistemological forms sounds more reconciliatory than Fichte’s rebellious rhetoric and indeed integrates magic into an existing rational discourse rather than trying to poetically disrupt it� On the contrary, Fichte’s model suggests to also adopt and experiment - with the structures that Lévi-Strauss would call bricolage - on the descriptive level in order to achieve a congruence between the ritual procedures and the literary form� Now, the distinctive characteristic of mythical thought is to express itself with the help of a set of heterogeneous elements, one that, even if extensive, still remains limited; and it must make use of this set, no matter what task it is carrying out, since it has nothing else at hand� It thus appears as a sort of intellectual bricolage, which explains the relationship that can be observed between the two� Like bricolage on the technical plane, mythical reflection may, on the intellectual plane, achieve results that are brilliant and unforeseen� (Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought 20) Providing an apt description of Fichte’s new science , Lévi-Strauss defines mythical thought - which he does not clearly distinguish from magical thought - as the experimental assemblage of heterogeneous materials that produces “brilliant and unforeseen results�” Instead of “turning its back on reality” for the sake of the imagination, the mythmaking of the intellectual bricoleur , though limited in its scope, is described by Lévi-Strauss as a “science of the concrete” that is no less scientific and exact when compared to the natural sciences (Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought 19—20)� Understood this way, the mythical thought of the bricoleur represents a “means of liberation” that protests “meaninglessness, which science had, from the beginning, resigned itself to accept” (Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought 26). Fichte’s protest against the ultimate meaninglessness of scientific inquiry tries to imitate the mythical structures he observes in the syncretistic rituals, which also aligns with Lévi-Strauss’ claim that artistic creation is symmetrical to myth, but inverts the way it connects object and event� The creative act that gives rise to the myth is symmetric with and inverse to that which lies at the origin of the work of art� In the latter case, the starting point is a set consisting of one or several objects and one or several events, on which aesthetic creation confers a character of wholeness by revealing a common structure� Myth follows the same course, but in the other direction: it uses a structure to produce an absolute object that takes the shape of a set of events (since every myth tells a story)� Art thus proceeds from a set (object + event) toward the discovery of its structure; myth starts from a structure, through which it undertakes the construction of a set (object + event)� (Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought 31) This mirror image of syncretism is precisely what Fichte is trying to accomplish in his new science , and his rejection of Lévi-Strauss is all the more puzzling given Fichte’s apparent desire to validate his writing as being scientific. However, it is only puzzling if one takes the literary writer at his word as if he was trying not to contradict himself� Möglicherweise bin ich dem Theoretiker Strauss ungerecht gegenüber, vielleicht sind seine abstrakten Schriften humaner, präziser, fundierter� Ich möchte nicht verhehlen, daß mir nach einer ersten Lektüre auch da manches als geblähter Stuß erschien� Ist es nicht schamlos, wenn ein Schriftsteller einen anderen derart zaust? Sicher� Was hat mir Claude Lévi-Strauss getan? Aber was hat Lévi-Strauss getan, um seine Aussagen über die Indianer Brasiliens zu modifizieren? So wurde das Buch Tristes Tropiques zum Ausgangspunkt für eine neue Geschwollenheit, Wehleidigkeit, Brutalität, die beide kennzeichnen, Dichtung und Wissenschaft der siebziger Jahre� (Fichte, Homosexualität und Literatur I 351) Lévi-Strauss is for Fichte a mere placeholder for what he deems as misguided tendencies in contemporary academic and literary culture� For readers of Fichte the categories of the French anthropologist can help to understand the new science as a method of decoding mythical structures without translating them into rational academic discourse� With his poetology of knowledge - “poetisch freilegen, meine ich - nicht zupoetisieren” - Fichte seeks to uncover, and not to conceal, scientific facts by poetic means: “Redefiguren. / Periphrasen. / Spielformen� / Concetti” (Fichte, Petersilie 363)� He borrows the key term of the concetto from the literary scholar and art historian Gustav René Hocke who describes it as a means of combinatory art of fabulation ( ars combinatoria ) for the interlinking of the most fantastic and abstruse metaphors (Hocke 58)� The disparate and irrational elements are combined in a hidden, yet logical way in order to create a marvelous effect. Fichte not only aims to write in this manner, he also recognizes similar techniques in the Afro-diasporic rituals he observes. His insistence on rigor and precision is based in the assumption that there is the same poetic precision in these rituals as can be found in the early-modern poetics that Hocke analyzed� This ars combinatoria is ultimately the method with which Fichte Anthropology of the Future: Wild Epistemology in Hubert Fichte’s New Science 173 174 André Fischer tries to develop his new science outside the confinements of academic research. In agreement with Lévi-Strauss’s assertion that mythical thought and artistic practice follow the same structure, yet move in opposite directions, Hocke’s description of the ars combinatoria provides an apt description of what Fichte’s new science is trying to accomplish: Was die Manieristen an der Kombinationskunst anzog, war also ihre Labyrinthik, d�h� das berechenbar Unberechenbare� Die kombinatorische Welt wird als ein ‘Labyrinth von abstrakten Gedanken’ empfunden� Auch die logische Ars Combinatoria gilt als ein ‘Alphabet der Gedanken’. ‘Diese Methode verschafft uns einen Ariadne-Faden durch das Weltlabyrinth’� Wer die ‘Ars Magna’, eine ‘Mathesis universalis’ beherrschte, hieß ‘Artista’� Was aber den manieristischen Dichter daran fesselt, ist die Umkehrbarkeit des ‘Suchens’� Man will das Labyrinthische mit diesem System nicht entwirren, sondern bis ins Unendliche hinein tiefer verwirren� (Hocke 60) The poetic form of the concetto - a paralogism expressed in opposing metaphors - is perhaps Fichte’s most deliberate attempt to adapt rhetorical forms for his epistemological project� In the context of his work on Lohenstein, Fichte recognizes the proximity of “regular irregularities” found in syncretistic structures and Baroque aesthetics, which for him is another justification of applying the technique of the concetto to express what Hocke calls the “calculability of the incalculable” (Fichte, Homosexualität und Literatur I 192)� Within the ethnographic context such stylistic deliberations on metaphors and their epistemological extensions only reveal what according to James Clifford is the discipline’s underlying allegorical structure when he asserts that “ethnographic writing is allegorical at the level both of its content (what it says about cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is implied by its mode of textualization)” (Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory” 98). The extended metaphor, or in Fichte’s case, the extended concetto, could be described as the macro form of the History of Sensitivity that tried to emulate what is “predictably unpredictable” in syncretism. Allegory - as letting the other (ἄλλος) speak (ἀγορεύω) - is, according to Clifford, the rhetorical default mode of ethnography (Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory” 99). By identifying all discursive modes as allegorical this approach destabilizes epistemological hierarchies, but also blends the different voices in a way that raises again the question to whom it falls to let others speak� A scientific ethnography normally establishes a privileged allegorical register it identifies as “theory,” “interpretation,” or “explanation.” But once all meaningful levels in a text, including theories and interpretations, are recognized as allegorical, it becomes difficult to view one of them as privileged, accounting for the rest. Once this anchor is dislodged, the staging and valuing of multiple allegorical registers, or “voices,” becomes an important area of concern for ethnographic writers. (Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory” 103) Clifford distinguishes three allegorical registers that can be applied to Fichte’s mode of ethnographic writing: Firstly, the representation of a coherent cultural subject as source of scientific knowledge, i.e., the Afro-diasporic religions and their particular rituals� Secondly, the construction of a gendered subject, i�e�, the discourse on gender and sexuality with the figure of Jäcki at its central subject, at least in the novels of the History of Sensitivity � Finally, the story of a mode of ethnographic production and relationship, which in Fichte would be the consistent effort to manipulate the illusions of authenticity (for example in the way interviews are presented), to center the researcher and not his subjects, and to violate whichever supposed rules there are for ethnographic fieldwork. Knowledge, it seems then, always produces “the other” as the object out of reach to satisfy the subjective desire to reach for it� Notes 1 All translations by the author unless indicated otherwise� 2 Cf� Widmaier, “Ein Männlein steht im Walde�” 3 Cf� Fichte, Homosexualität und Literatur 1 , 319—51� For a detailed analysis of Fichte’s polemic against Lévi-Strauss, see Katschthaler 12—95� Works Cited Bandel, Jan-Frederik� Nachwörter. Zum poetischen Verfahren Hubert Fichtes � Aachen: Rimbaud, 2008� Beiser, Frederick C�, ed� The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics � Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996� Böhme, Hartmut� Hubert Fichte. Riten des Autors und das Leben der Literatur � Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992� Braun, Peter� Die doppelte Dokumentation: Fotografie und Literatur im Werk von Leonore Mau und Hubert Fichte � Stuttgart: M&P, 1997� ---� “Kraut und Rüben oder der Bann des Vegetabilen�” Ethno/ Graphie. 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