Do Objects Party Alone? – Prof. Dr. Dorothee Kimmich

Host:
Welcome to Key To My Research - the science podcast by the Excellence Strategy at the University of Tübingen.
In this podcast, we explain in a simple way how outstanding scientists are researching complex topics that affect our everyday lives.

My name is Jennifer, I’m your host and in today's episode we meet Professor Dorothee Kimmich.

Prof. Kimmich:
People feel more and more invaded by objects and things become more and more dangerous also.

Host:
She is a Professor for Literary cultural studies and cultural theory in the German department of the University of Tübingen. And she focuses on the meaning of things in literature and the concept of similarities.

Stay tuned to learn about the significance of things in modern and postmodern literature and why they are more important than you might think.

Prof. Kimmich:
You have lots of novels or short stories where adults and not children are confronted with objects that talk, that run around, and they want to live with you. There's a very nice short story about an Austrian author, and he tells, "Every time I come home I knock a little bit on my door to tell the objects and the things in the room that they can go back to their places where I put them when I left my home so that I'm not too scared and everything is in order. But I do know that when I'm absent all these kinds of objects have fun, and they play around.” So he's telling about how he's convinced that objects have a certain kind of life.

Host:
According to Professor Kimmich, there can be several reasons for this phenomenon. One of them is the meaning that things take on when we spend time with them or live with them.

Prof. Kimmich:
When I'm talking about conviviality, do I think about only human beings or also animals, plants, things? And how are things part of the little cosmos I'm living in? Do I use them only or do I accept that there is something I have to take care for?

Host:
What Professor Kimmich means is that for us humans, things are special in many ways. This becomes clearer when we look at art and literature. But why is this so? And how did Professor Kimmich come up with these ideas? To understand this, we have to go back to the 80s. Kimmich began her studies in Tübingen and then went to Paris for about a year where she had world-famous teachers like the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Prof. Kimmich:
I came from Tübingen and the first two weeks I had to change my clothes, the whole habit. I started smoking because this was very important. In the 80s there were Foucault still in Paris and giving lectures. And we could attend all kinds of super lectures with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault. And this was kind of a turning point in my study career but also in the style I would say, in the style of thinking. And when I came back to Tübingen, it was quite difficult to re-adapt to not only a small town but also different kinds of discussions and thinking.

Host:
After Professor Kimmich returned from Paris, she also realized that things seem to play a big role in modern literature. And there are several reasons why this surprised her:

Prof. Kimmich:
At the first glance you would say: "That has no room in modern literature!” Because we know that things are material and material is dead. So this is the definition. And if you are a person who believes in living material, maybe you are esoteric or a little bit crazy even a child.

Host:
Professor Kimmich’s research lies inbetween literature and philosophy. She says that her niche of thinking and teaching touches history, philosophy and all kinds of arts. And she finds it all in literature.

Prof. Kimmich:
I think it's the only “zone”, you might call it, where you can recognize or even feel how deep art and literature is, how deep it is part of our everyday life and our narrations, our discourses, our habits and our behavior. Because it's part of our history, our biography and the kind of thinking we would develop. And this is: How do you want to live? Normally you don't think that you need art to do that, and you don't think that you need philosophy. But if you combine it with history and philosophy and art you know this is the ambit you are living in.

Host:
A key factor for Professor Kimmich in this context is the power of imagination. As we have heard, this is something that children are usually good at. They actually believe in the realness of things. But also for adults, the power of imagination is something that may have brought us to where we are today.

Prof. Kimmich:
If you have no imagination, you can't survive. And it's the imaginary you live from, and you live for. And the imaginary is nourished by also memory and what you remember. And it's even in the brain it's quite near. The neurophysiologist that tells us that is kind of a capacity which combines the capacity to remember and memory. And you need to have imagination to have plans, to make plans, to decide. And if you have no imagination, you can't solve any problem.

Host:
In postmodern literature, the meaning of things changes.

Prof. Kimmich:
People feel more and more invaded by objects and things really. And the objects become more and more dangerous also. They are many, and they have become dangerous, and it's more difficult to be a friend of the objects you live with. And in modern literature this is kind of - to make it a little bit more theoretical - more interesting. Maybe it's contesting the divide between nature and culture and between the material and the non-material or the spirit and the material or the living and the dead. So, you would say human beings and even animals are living beings whereas all these kinds of things are dead material. And the divide between the dead and the living and the material and the spirit and nature and culture, these big divides what we invented more or less in the 19th or even starting in the 18th century is now contested. And not only contested by philosophy that comes much later only at the end of the 20th century, but it's contested by literature that you should rethink these kinds of categories and also this kind of ordering the world.

Host:
Let's go back from the theoretical approach to modern and postmodern literature x to the methods that Professor Kimmich and her team use for their research. It's very different from what scientists in biology, medicine, or even archaeology do.

Prof. Kimmich:
People in the humanities, my colleagues and I, we mostly work alone at home.
We have to exchange ideas and perspectives, theories and methods and to discuss the approaches, and we can also give hints but at the end, the reading and writing, we do it very alone.

Host:
There are many things, that Professor Kimmich appreciates about the University of Tübingen. One of them is:

Prof. Kimmich:
First, Tübingen is an interesting university because we have many many many many disciplines. We have specialists for Chinese culture and history, for Japanese history, we have this wonderful anthropologist department, we have a big history department, and we have many many other languages and cultures and many different kinds of historical departments or historical research, not of all parts of the world but all times of the world. And so we are very close to each other because Tübingen is so small, and you have many opportunities to work together and there is something, also what is quite, also I think an exception, that even with departments like the natural sciences or also medicine are also interested in our research, and we can talk to each other and cooperation is possible and this is a big chance here in Tübingen.

Host:
This was: “Key To My Research”, a podcast produced by changing time in cooperation with the University of Tübingen. For more information and links to the sources, see the show notes.

There you can also find a link to the hole interview with Professor Kimmich.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, and recommend it to your friends.

Authors: Chris Veit and Joti Fotiadis.

Special thanks to: Professor Dorothee Kimmich, Heiko Heil, Oliver Häußler, Kurt Schneider and Oliver Lichtwald.

My name is Jennifer, Thanks for listening and see you next time.