Monika Wulz: Erkenntnisagenten. Gaston Bachelardund die Reorganisation des Wissens

Kadmos, Berlin, 2010, 206 pp

Thomas Ebke

Published online: 21 February 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

The most recent issue of the Cahiers Gaston Bachelard is dedicated to Gaston

Bachelard’s (1884–1962) repercussions in and connections to German thought.1

This volume contains well-informed, innovative papers on the (conceivable) ties

between Bachelard and thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber or Carl

Gustav Jung, to name just a few examples. Divorced from its context, this

publication is likely to create the impression that the nexuses between Bachelard’s

writings and major positions in modern German philosophy have by tradition

attracted a fair degree of attention among researchers on both sides of the Rhine.

Yet, this is not the case. Bachelard is anything but a well-known name in the

German arena. The ‘‘discovery’’ of Bachelard for the German discussion only really

set in by the late 1970s, when his key texts, La formation de l’esprit scientifique(1938) and La philosophie du non (1940), were finally translated into German,

nearly 20 years after their author’s death and easily 40 years after their production.

What is more, the short-lived surge of translations and academic literature invoking

Bachelard’s approach in the 1970s was both influenced by and perpetuated the

simplified reading of Bachelard as one of the two central mentors (the other one

being Georges Canguilhem) of Michel Foucault. Indeed, the regrettable habit of

viewing Bachelard merely as a satellite in the Foucauldian universe rather than as a

writer in his own right persists in the German context with few exceptions to this

day2—much in difference to the situation in his home country, where Bachelard is

and has constantly been appreciated as a highly original and independent figure.

T. Ebke (&)

Philosophische Fakultat, Universitat Potsdam, Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam, Germany

e-mail: thomas.ebke@gmx.net

1 P. Guenancia, M. Perrot, J.-J. Wunenburger, Bachelard et la pensee allemande. Cahiers GastonBachelard, No. 11 (2010).2 A more adequate reception of Bachelard in Germany seems to have been stymied by the hegemony of

neo-Marxism in the 1960s and 70s.

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Stud East Eur Thought (2012) 64:143–148

DOI 10.1007/s11212-012-9164-4

Against the backdrop of the deplorably sparse literature on Bachelard in the

German-speaking world, Monika Wulz’s dissertation ranks as a turning point and

pioneer work for a brighter future. In Erkenntnisagenten. Gaston Bachelard und dieReorganisation des Wissens, Wulz goes back to Bachelard’s epistemological

writings as the crucial source for her own philosophical and conceptual framework,

while at the same time developing stimulating outlooks that point far beyond

Bachelard’s model.3 What is the enterprise that Wulz carries out in her book? If one

were to summarize that endeavour in a single formula, one could claim that Wulz

makes explicit the ethical subtext or secret integral to Bachelard’s conception of

science as a procedural, temporal, dynamic practice. According to Wulz, Bachelard

devised a process-oriented ontology by emphasizing that a scientific practice has a

correlative object only insofar as it generates that object as a function of the specific

techniques, axioms and hypotheses which drive the scientific practice at a particular

moment in history. Science does not gather its objects from an antecedent ontic

order; rather, it constructs an operational sphere in which entities are experimentally

arranged in such a way as to produce answers to the questions which guide the

research. For Bachelard, the paradigmatic example of the new scientific ‘‘spirit’’ he

seeks to describe is represented by the rationality of Einstein’s theory of relativity or

Planck’s position in quantum physics: The ‘‘reality’’ that these physical systems

refer to is not traceable by everyday sensory perception and immediate intuitions.

Instead, it depends entirely on the precisely defined physical axioms and technical

appliances designed to examine that ‘‘reality.’’ The empirical data which are at stake

here are not given, but the result of complex theoretical presuppositions and

practical provisions.

Wulz is interested in the fact that this situation, as Bachelard puts it, is a situation

in the making, an ever-changing affair in which processes of an indeterminate,

unforeseeable becoming may unfold. In her reconstruction of Bachelard’s expressly

procedural notion of scientific truth, Wulz then goes on to perform a decisive turn:

The prerogative of such a conception over epistemologies that assume the

availability of absolute truths consists in an ethical difference. In contrast to the

essentialistic tradition, Bachelard’s procedural model induces any scientific

formation to reveal the constitutive conditions, the sociocultural norms and

the precise stakes on which it implicitly relies. According to Wulz, Bachelard’s

description of the scientific process leaves room for the idea that the production of

knowledge is a deeply social project. It is social to the extent that, as no individual

or party is in possession of a timeless truth, the research practice involves a

‘‘collective constellation in which situationally valid statements can be negotiated’’

(10.).4 This means that the expressions and representations of scientific work should

be answerable to an ‘‘imperative of precision’’ (ibid.): Only if our claims to

knowledge remain specific and regional, we concede to ‘‘the other participants of

3 As the author herself remarks, her choice of Bachelard’s texts upon which she bases her own argument

derives from a ‘‘personal interest’’ (14). It is the point which the author wishes to make in her own train of

thought, not the compliance to a conventional qualification of Bachelard’s oeuvre, which structures the

material she focuses on.4 For the sake of reading fluency, I operate with my own translations of the originally German quotations.

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the knowledge society’’ (ibid.) the margin for ‘‘interventions, contradictions,

reformulations and transformations’’ (ibid.).

One of the intriguing features and key achievements of Wulz’s study is

connected to this focus on the particular sociality of the scientific process as

outlined by Bachelard. Wulz illuminatingly underscores the role of Bachelard’s

motive of a cite scientifique, a term that is in the offing in Bachelard’s 1934 lecture

La valeur de la culture scientifique. Her observations on the ethical (or else

pedagogical) punch line of Bachelard’s epistemology set the stage for her main

thesis which is already reflected in the title of the book: It is not only the reality of

science—the order which is at the same time generated and investigated by

science—that is permanently in flux. Rather, the subjects and objects that are

complicit in the research practice find themselves in an endless diversification, too.

And this is precisely why, as Wulz sees it, the subject/object terminology needs to

be replaced with a different description that encapsulates the mutability which is

integral to any element in the research practice. Instead of referring to the stable

orders of subject and object, one should register that all the parties involved in the

production of scientific reality relate to each other in a structure of mutual

information and adjustment—a structure of ‘‘mimesis,’’ as Wulz puts it in allusion

to Walter Benjamin (see 123f.). Against that background, Wulz proposes to speak of

‘‘agents of knowledge’’ [Erkenntnisagenten] in order to denote ‘‘a functional subject

which practises a dialogical pedagogy and participates in the formation process of a

society of knowledge’’ (12.).

After the presentation of her pivotal term, the ‘‘agent of knowledge,’’ Wulz is

able to explore two trajectories: In one direction, she poses the question of how

social configurations and scientific methodologies influence one another and how

these methodologies, in turn, break up ahistoric epistemologies and ontologies. In

another direction, Wulz is concerned with the specific rationality of philosophy as a

type of reflection that is both distinguished from and closely related to the ‘‘new

scientific spirit’’ that fuels modern physics and chemistry. Thus, what this all

amounts to is that Wulz reads Bachelard’s epistemology as a project with the

following gist: Science does not deal with an immutable order of given things. On

the contrary, science is ‘‘a technique of the generation of reality (…) which is itself

perpetually busy creating its very objects through the process of examination’’ (58).

Yet, the problem (or fact) that objectification in science means incessant creationhas widespread ramifications: It causes every component of the research process to

undergo unceasing change and to face open situations in which a shifting of

positions may occur. To get to the heart of this fluidity and temporality on all sides

of the scientific practice, Wulz prefers to speak of ‘‘agents of knowledge’’ and does

away with the subject/object distinction. In her view, Bachelard’s epistemology

contains an eminently ethical, pedagogical and social dimension that calls on us (the

‘‘agents’’ who constitute the ‘‘society of knowledge’’) to keep on allowing for the

open and unpredictable character that goes with the fabrication of reality.

In order to reconstruct the way that this ethos takes effect in Bachelard’s

approach as a whole, Wulz analyzes five lines that run through his writings. In a first

chapter, she illustrates the concept of description, showing that, for Bachelard, to

describe reality does not mean to portray an already existing order of things, but

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rather to bring about the phenomena which then serve as objects of knowledge.

Wulz devotes a subchapter to Bachelard’s interpretation of modern mathematics as

a ‘‘language of the possible’’ (54) which treats the entities it deals with as

correlatives of an abstract rationality, a rationality that is not static but in a state of

permanent reorganization. In this way, modern mathematics fulfils the task of

keeping alive the fluent character of reality as a structure that needs to be actively

determined instead of being given once and for all.

In the second chapter of her book, a chapter called ‘‘Fiction (mimesis),’’ Wulz

moves on to discuss the relationship between the ‘‘new scientific spirit’’ and the

entire realm of poetic imagination and immediacy that Bachelard famously

valorized in his writings on literature. By taking up this context, Wulz addresses a

point in Bachelard’s thought that has traditionally aroused irritation. Whereas in his

psychoanalysis of objective knowledge Bachelard does everything to cleanse

scientific rationality of intuitions (as constant fonts of imprecision), he recognizes

the enormous forces of the poetic mind in his later works such as La flamme d’unechandelle [The flame of a candle, 1961]. According to Wulz, this duality, too, stands

for the fragility of the process in which reality is construed and conceptualized. She

suggests that the role Bachelard ascribes to philosophy has precisely to do with

counterbalancing the two poles of science and imagination, without allowing one of

them to gain ultimate priority.

The third chapter named ‘‘Complication’’ presents us with Bachelard’s argument

as to how philosophy might be able to set stabilized formations of thought and

patterns of perception into motion again. This capacity of the mind to vitalize

consolidated clusters is exemplified by a discussion of the differential calculus and

Bachelard’s understanding of Paul Renaud’s theory of chemical trajectories. In her

discussion of these problems, Wulz comes to the conclusion that Bachelard manages

to establish a differential philosophy, that is, a rationality that succeeds in

reconstructing the permanent process of differentiation inherent to scientific

thought.

The topic of the fourth chapter called ‘‘Pedagogy (mimesis)’’ is the ‘‘mimetic

capacity’’ which must be at work wherever ‘‘agents’’ collaborate in the production

of a shared reality which they are then capable of appropriating as a sphere in which

knowledge is possible for them. Interestingly, Monika Wulz leans on Walter

Benjamin’s conception of mimesis in this respect to make plausible her claim that

the agents and the objects of scientific knowledge relate to each other in continuous

reconfigurations. By drawing on ‘‘the ability to produce similarities’’ (Benjamin),

Wulz here specifies (a) the changes that affect the objects due to fluctuating

conditions of knowledge, (b) the restructuring of the ‘‘agent of knowledge’’ as a

consequence of what he ‘‘learns’’ of the object, and (c) the mimetic interplay that

takes place amidst the ‘‘agents’’ themselves. In this context, Wulz emphasizes the

particular type of self-reference that is characteristic of an ‘‘agent of knowledge’’:

The crucial feature of such an agent would be his or her ability to control the

spontaneous intuitions and perceptions and to turn them into precise, mediated

expressions that can be publicly shared with the other members of the ‘‘society of

knowledge’’. Wulz here outlines an understanding of subjectivity which insists on

the primacy of the public and the mediated over the private and the immediate.

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These considerations also form the thread that runs through the fifth and last

chapter named ‘‘City: Society of Knowledge.’’ Here, Wulz comes back to

Bachelard’s vision of a society in the making. The core of the scientific practice,

as Wulz describes it, is eminently social: ‘‘Only through the alliance and the

cooperation of a diversity of scientists, an objectivity is possible which is brought

about along the lines of the discursive practice of a research group. But this is not a

matter of a social form whose social rules are already settled at the moment of its

initiation. Rather, Bachelard develops a view of scientific activity as a permanent

process of becoming common, concerning scientific observation and knowledge,

that is to say a socialized form of the appropriation of the world and the production

of reality’’ (178.). As Wulz underlines, one can even find in Bachelard the key to a

normative integration of the diverse, highly specialized practices of modern science:

What Bachelard calls the ‘‘fabrique de phenomenes’’ implies a mutual integration of

the rational, the technical and the social, and this ‘‘integral rationalism’’ (192.)

guarantees the ‘‘cultural space (…) in which the variety of scientific speech and the

possibilities of experience can take place’’ (ibid.).

Overall, Wulz offers an excellent reading of Gaston Bachelard’s epistemology

that has all it takes to unlock the writings of this fascinating author for a wider

audience. In poignant and reader-friendly prose, she creates an innovative picture of

Bachelard’s thought, not least because of the intriguing links to other authors

(Benjamin, Deleuze, Agamben) that Wulz indicates. In particular, the pertinence of

her questions for contemporary debates about the function of science in and for

modern societies is striking: Instead of joining the bandwagon of those who

stigmatize both ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘society’’ as problematic, value-neutral systems that

are disconnected from the reproduction of cultural norms, Wulz insists on the

specific culture of science. In doing so, she avoids the opinionated intellectual

gesture of pitting the practice of operative sciences against philosophy—a gesture

which is not entirely blameless in the traditionally reluctant character of the

reception of Bachelard’s work in Germany.

One line in Wulz’s argument that readers might be curious to learn more about

concerns the parallels between her concept of the ‘‘agents of knowledge’’ and Bruno

Latour’s vision of ‘‘quasi-objects’’ which, even though they have always been

fabricated in the shadows of the modern world, have consistently been denied

ontological recognition as the actual ‘‘actors’’ of modernity. Latour replaces the

epistemological polarity of subjects as opposed to objects with the idea of a hybrid

blending: The boundaries between humans and the technical artefacts they produce

are fluid, transforming both poles into productive ‘‘actors’’ that undermine the

subject/object framework. Although it is instantly plain that Wulz gains crucial

inspiration from Latour’s actor-network-approach, it would be interesting to know

to what extent she would join him in his normative conclusions: Does Wulz, like

Latour, encourage us to envisage a future ‘‘symmetry’’ (Latour) between humans

and technical entities, an ontological transformation that will yield ‘‘actors’’ rather

than figures that are either human or non-human? In a sense, Wulz’s own

considerations leave the question open whether her notion of the ‘‘agents of

knowledge’’ is actually applicable to the objects of the scientific practices. At times,

one may at least arrive at the impression that Wulz ascribes the phenomenon of

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destabilization and temporalization exclusively to the subjects of the research

procedure (i.e. the scientists) whereas the objects do not assume the dynamics of the

‘‘agents of knowledge.’’

This trace that leads to a comparison between Wulz’s position and Bruno

Latour’s anthropological project could culminate in another interesting question. If

being an ‘‘agent of knowledge’’ implies the capacity to situate oneself in a ‘‘shared

world,’’ in a public sphere that requires its participants to privilege mediations and

abstractions over the immediacy of lived experience, then do we not have to

elaborate the structural condition which enables humans to assume the role of an

‘‘agent of knowledge’’? After all, would it not be crucial to clarify the particular

self-referential capacity that allows humans to switch between mediated and

immediate modes of their behaviour, to switch, that is to say, between science and

poetry, between abstraction and intuitive imagination etc.?5 Questions like these

point to just one of the umpteen lines along which Monika Wulz’s brilliant book

may be further discussed.

5 In this respect, it is helpful to register Wulz’s remark that the ‘‘self-control and precision of thought

amid a scientific society’’ (144.) enables science ‘‘to express the I not only by means of immediate

emotions, but to adopt a dually mediated distance towards its proper sentiments and intuitive perceptions’’

(ibid.). This account of (human) subjectivity would in fact open the door to the domain of philosophical

anthropology in the tradition of Max Scheler or Helmuth Plessner or, more generally, to theories of the

subject that deal with the conditions of possibility facilitating a certain self-awareness of specifically

human ‘‘agents’’.

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