Paperback Theory

The ways in which works of theory came to stock the shelves of your local bookstore is a story yet to be written. It is one that is sure to be of great interest to scholars of book culture and publishing history. But as Philipp Felsch’s The Summer of Theory shows, it is also important to understanding how theory travels from the seminar room and the lecture hall to the pub and the club—particularly with respect to works of theory that cross from one language and country to others.

While bits and pieces of this dimension of the socio-cultural life of theory can be found in occasional anecdotes by theorists, editors, and publishers, by and large they represent but a small number of pieces of a very large puzzle. And though the life and thought of major theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault have been the subjects of biography, the inside story of how their works came to be published, distributed, and translated—not to mention how they found their way into the hands of readers—is mostly treated as a footnote compared to the details of their personal and intellectual life.

Telling the story of the publication of theory and its reception will appear to some to be an empty form of scholarship. Why should anyone care, for example, about the Italian publisher of Antonio Negri—let alone his English translator and publisher? What matters to these folks are the grey contents of Negri’s writing, not the story of how his work came to be published in English—including what his foreign publishers read and discussed. Moreover, why should anyone be concerned with the French publisher of Gilles Deleuze or even care that a pair of his German publishers met once a week with a reading group for five years to struggle through a bootleg edition of Anti-Oedipus? (Felsch 101).

The Summer of Theory, however, makes the case why we should care. It is a page-turning and highly-entertaining account centered on the life and times of the West German publisher Peter Gente, who, along with his wife, Merve Lowien—from whom the publishing house took its name—and some of their friends and colleagues co-founded Merve Verlag in 1970. Their publishing house would come to shape the theory scene in the 1970s and 1980s in West Berlin and West Germany by publishing “dangerous thinking” (6). This work ranged from the Italian Marxism of Negri and the French post-structuralism of Louis Althusser, Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, and François Lyotard to the political theory of Carl Schmitt and systems theory of Niklas Luhmann.

Felsch’s account of the life and times of the publisher begins in 1956, with a list of the films Gente viewed that year and the grade he gave them in his cultural diary. Through this year, Gente had not yet fallen in love with theory. But everything would change in 1957 when he experienced his theoretical “awakening” (13) reading Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951) for the first time. Adorno’s book unsettled him and “although he understood hardly any of its impenetrable aphorisms,” he could not put the book down (14). It became his “vade mecum” (19) which he carried around in his pocket as he walked around Berlin in the late 1950s. Adorno was regarded in Germany at the time as “the ‘trustee’ of a German tradition, that of Beethoven and Höderlin,” writes Felsch, “which had been compromised and had to wait for [Adorno’s] work to make it listenable and readable again” (20).

Among the early articles that Gente clipped and saved from the period was a commentary by Adorno on the 1959 Frankfurt Book Fair. Here, reports Felsch,

Adorno expressed a vague “anxiety” that had oppressed him for some time at the sight of each season’s new publications: it seemed to him that the books no longer looked like books. The covers had become “advertising,” degrading the reader to a consumer as they made their advances. They heralded the “liquidation of the book” in “all too intense and conspicuous colors.” (22)

Here, Adorno bemoans the industrialization and deterioration of the book market in Germany. In the same year, the German translator, editor, author, and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger came to similar conclusions as Adorno about the German book market. Namely, that it was deteriorating into a commodity that demoted the reader to a consumer.

Felsch however finds it ironic that the very aspect of the book market that Adorno bemoans, that is, the publication of paperbacks, is one that contributed to his success. “Once Minima Moralia appeared in soft cover in the early 1960s,” observes Felsch, “no one carried it around in hardcover any more” (23). In addition, Adorno would go on to achieve high sales figures not through the publication of hardbacks, but rather through several paperback series published by the German publishing house, Suhrkamp Verlag. These changes in the book market in Germany, that is, the transition from expensive hardback editions to cheaper paperback editions, leads Felsch to conclude that the “history of theory is not conceivable without these upheavals in the book market” (23).

To translate this observation into U.S. terms, try to imagine, if you will, the history of theory without, for example, the paperback editions published by the University of Minnesota Press in their Theory and History of Literature series. Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, the series was launched in 1981 with a translation from French by Richard Howard of the revised edition of Tzvetan Todorov’s Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?: 2. Poétique (1968). The later edition, simply entitled Poétique (1973), which was published in the Minnesota series as Introduction to Poetics, appeared in a “conspicuously colored” solid lime green cover (Figure 2) that surely would have turned Adorno’s critical stomach. For that matter, so too would the publication of both the 1972 English translation his own Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) and the 1976 English translation of Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962) with solid, hot-orange covers by The Seabury Press of New York City (Figure 1).1 And though he died in 1969 and did not live to see the publication of these English translations of his work into books that would not have looked to him like books, as Felsch makes clear, German editions of his work in this format had long preceded these wonderfully colorful American editions.

Though Godzich and Schulte-Sasse share with Gente the introduction of translated theory from abroad in colorful paperback editions, it remains to be determined whether the process which brought them to bring these authors to an English-reading audience was as colorful and progressive as Gente’s journey. But even if so, the back stories of series editors who work for scholarly and academic publishing houses such as Suhrkamp and University of Minnesota Press quickly separate from the work of those like Gente who literally become publishers to serve an audience that is primarily non-academic and non-scholarly. The closer U.S. analogy here would be the Foreign Agents Series published by the semiotics journal, Semiotext(e).

Founded in 1974 by Sylvére Lotringer, a literature professor at Columbia University, Semiotext(e) began as a journal of semiotics. Lotringer, who studied in Paris with Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and completed his doctoral thesis in 1967 on Virginia Woolf under the direction of Goldmann, decided when he moved to New York to “make himself ‘available’ to the American artists, because he found their work more concrete than the texts of the Parisian Left-Nietzscheans” (155). And it was Lotringer who brought together Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Felix Guattari, John Cage, William Burroughs, and others at the 1975 “Schizo-Culture” symposium—one where Foucault was “accused by the audience of working for the CIA,” and who concluded that the event “marked the end of the sixties” (155).

The series editors for Semiotext(e)’s Foreign Agents Series were Lotringer and Jim Fleming, and it was independently published from 522 Philosophy Hall on the campus of Columbia University. Authors translated in the series included Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari—ones also translated by Merve. And like Merve, the translations were inexpensive, small-trim size, paperback editions targeted to a non-academic and non-scholarly audience.

To get a sense of how the Foreign Agents Series worked, one way to order books in the series was to tear out the last page of a book in the series, and mail it back to 522 Philosophy Hall. On one side, you could circle the series titles that you wanted to order, and on the other you could subscribe to the journal (Figure 4). In the late ’80s, a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations would run you $4.95 with a $1 for postage. If you ordered more titles, the postage was still the same. The translation of Simulations that you would receive would contain the majority of a chapter from L’échange symbolique et la mort,2 which was first published by Éditions Gallimard in 1976, and the entirety a chapter from Simulacres et simulation,3 which was first published in French by Éditions Galilée in 1981. These shorter editions were targeted at a much different audience than the longer editions published scholarly and academic presses. As a comparison, consider that the complete translation of L’échange symbolique et la mort into English was published in 1993 by Sage Publications, and that the complete translation of Simulacres et simulation into English was published in 1994 by the University of Michigan Press, whereas the shorter version released by Semiotext(e) was published in 1983, preceding the complete English translations by a decade. So who was the audience for these 45rpm editions of theory?

As Felsch points out, Semiotext(e) became a “continuous forum for communication between New York art and Parisian theory” (155). In a similar way, Merve would come to be a continuous forum of communication between the Berlin art scene and Parisian theory. The latter was the largely the result of Heidi Paris, who from 1975 was both in a personal relationship with Gente, and was his partner in the operation of Merve. Whereas Gent saw his mission as a publisher of theory in the 1970s to sell the greatest number of cheap paperback copies of difficult texts, Paris redirected it in the 1980s to include the production of “limited editions of objects situated between theory and art” (154). Together, Gente and Paris “composed Merve’s legendary long-sellers, established authors such as Deleuze and Baudrillard in Germany, and steered their publishing house into the art world,” writes Felsch, “where it has its habitat today” (6).

Sometimes called the “Reclam of postmodernism,” Merve “was the German home of postmodernism,” says Felsch. “Reclam,” he comments, “are the publishers of the ‘Universal Library,’ the yellow, pocket-sized standard texts that no German student can do without” (3). Merve, by contrast, established its reputation in the 1980s mainly through paperback translations of French poststructuralism. Though “cheaply glued,” these books were to their German audience “a guarantee of advanced ideas, and the pop-art look of the un-academic styling was ahead of its time” (3). To be sure, Merve’s reputation in Germany parallels that of Semiotext(e) in the United States.

Merve Verlag began as a socialist collective. One of the main theses of Felsch’s book is that while “[p]eople in Germany tend to equate the heyday of theory with what was known as ‘Suhrkamp culture’” (7)—a phrase coined in 1973 by George Steiner referring to the catalogue of this Frankfurt publishing house as the canon of theory in West Germany—they also need to include Merve in this equation. The difference being that whereas Suhrkamp books approached theory from a scholarly perspective, Merve books approached it as a “fan club” (7).

According to Felsch, Jacob Taubes was one of the important architects of Suhrkamp culture in West Germany. In the mid-1960s, Taubes established the Department of Hermeneutics at Freie Universität Berlin. According to Henning Ritter, who was a tutor under Taubes, it was a “centre of often wildly interdisciplinary studies, highly controversial, and a sanctuary for many who did not want to tread any predefined path” (40). In 1965, when Gente entered the department as a student, explains Felsch,

Taubes was in the middle of planning a new paperback series for the head of Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld. Three years before, Unseld had inaugurated the edition suhrkamp, a rainbow-colored shelf of paperbacks that became the emblem of an intellectual era. The concept of supplying literary and philosophical titles in a pocket format had become feasible only after the death of Unseld’s predecessor Peter Suhrkamp, who had staunchly refused to deal in paperbacks. (41)

The edition suhrkamp sold well and was targeted by Unseld to students and younger readers. The new format increased sales of authors such as Adorno, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein not only in the bookstores around university campuses, but also the ones located in train-stations.

It was in this environment, that Gente arrived at the idea of publishing theory in booklet format, and began his journey as one of the main architects of Merve culture in West Germany. Originally, he was mainly thinking of publishing articles from foreign journals “whose prior distribution allows us to assume that the reader interest has not yet been exhausted” (48), but as theory in West Germany at the time was being consumed like novels, he decided to go in a slightly different direction.

One of the aims of the collective was to replace “books as things” with “functional books” (60). The first title that they published was a thin, anonymous translation, of a booklet by Althusser entitled How to Read Marx’s Capital (1970). They did so in a 1970s environment where new theory journals, theory publishers, and theory series “sprang up like mushrooms” (53). “Doing publishing,” said Lowien, “is an experiment, which the participants should be able to abort at any time if they should find another activity more meaningful” (52). And indeed, many students, tradesmen, actors, and booksellers participated in the Merve collective and then left it between 1970 and 1976. Their mission “was to supply German derivative Marxism with theory imported from abroad” (53), which Felsch further characterizes as an effort “to jump-start German Marxism out of its dogmatic standstill with boosts from Italy and France” (57).

Felsch speculates that Gent perhaps “secretly dreamed” of becoming “the intellectual conscience” of a new movement in German Marxism (53). By the time he started to work with the Merve collective, Gent’s idolization of Adorno was well behind him. As a member of the ’68 generation, Gente saw the publication of theory in paperback not as the downfall of the book, but rather as its revolution. For Gente, the paperback destroys the aura of the book, and invites the reader to subvert its obsolete functions (60).

Merve Verlag practiced a philosophy of “ill-made books.” And, to the extent that they strayed from this philosophy in the mid-1980s with the publication of bibliophile editions with lead-type printing and stitched bindings, the Merve publishers felt the need to explain this to their audience. They did so as follows:

Just as there is salmon in every supermarket today, the beautiful, bibliophile book has become the common, customary book, and the bad book is that of the connoisseurs, the collectors and insiders. If necessary, you can buy two copies straight away, underline in it, take it with you to the loo or on the road, give it away, forget it somewhere, toss it out, use it for all kinds of things. (60–61)

In short, the Merve collective placed their revolutionary hopes for theory in ill-made books, which in the 1970s became increasing smaller and more colorful. And in the 1980s, they openly proclaimed, “We happily confess to making bad and cheap books.” “We’re not pros, we’re bookworms” (90). Felsch says that in the ’70s and ’80s that these cheap, ill-made books sold “like phonograph records” (95). Perhaps though he should have said “like cheap phonograph records,” the kind you would find in the cut out and bargain bins. Then again, a new 45rpm Merve volume from a theorist was always less expensive than its 33 1/3 LP version sold by Suhrkamp Verlag.

Merve worked particularly hard to distinguish its audience from that of Suhrkamp, which published some of the same French theorists. They encouraged their readers to use their ill-made books “in the toilet, on the train, and ‘for all kinds of things’—for everything but culture in the classical sense” (110). In time, one of those uses was literally as art.

In 2010, in celebration of forty years of publication, all 336 titles of the Internationaler Merve Diskurs series were displayed as a frieze in the former Phoenix factory in Hamburg. Appropriately, writes Felsch, the “most extensive Merve assortments have long since been found not in Red bookshops, but in museum shops and art bookshops” (146). “And while the art world cloaks itself in a cloud of theory,” he continues, “theory continues to become more and more like art” (146). For Felsch, this transition began in the 1980s, when “theory migrated into the white cubes of the art galleries, where it is still most comfortable today” (170)—a transition that was aided by the theory work that took place in discos and bars.

“I tend to go to discos and bars where musicians and painters are, people doing art,” said Gente about his post-’79 publishing practice. And here, one West Berlin bar stood out, the Paris Bar, where Gente and Heidi Paris would even hold their editorial meetings. “The so-called editors’ meetings take place in bars,” said Paris (187). Lest one believe this is an inappropriate place for intellectual activity, Felsch reminds us that Jürgen Habermas said that the Enlightenment had its beginnings in the London coffee-houses; that E. P. Thompson said that the revolutionary working class were born on the banks of the Thames in a pub; and that the Existentialists drank petit crème at the Deux Magots and the Flore. In this context, the germination of dangerous thinking in the bars and discos of West Berlin is but another chapter in the history of the drinking spots of intellectual activity. Nevertheless, the transition of Merve editorial activities to bars and discos “seemed like selling out the ideas of ’68” (191)—ideas which were very important to the collective in the early ’70s.

According to Felsch, the ’68 generation had “an ambivalent attitude towards public houses in general” (188). In fact, in 1977, Lowein wrote almost prescriptively about their leftist publishing collective that “[d]iscussions and editorial work take place in homes” (188). Though she does not say “must” take place in homes, it is all but implied here. But a year after Lowein left the collective, Heidi Paris was showing Foucault around the night spots of Berlin, that is, Merve’s de facto new editorial offices. And it just so happened that David Bowie lived around the corner from those night spots at the time—and would also frequent them. As luck would have it, the evening in January of 1978 that Lowein was showing Foucault around the clubs, Bowie bumped into them (197). For Felsch, this meeting encapsulates the “disco dispositive” of the post ’68 world of Merve—a context where “the disco was . . . relevant to their work as theory publishers” (198). As Bernd Cailloux, who moved in the same circles as Gente and Paris put it, “a group discussing Hegel or Heidegger in the less plot-driven corners of the disco” was “[a]lways at hand” at the time (199).

It is difficult to not regard the transition of Merve publishers as a collective who read and discussed a bootleg edition of Anti-Oedipus over the course of five years in their homes and who proudly produced ill-made books in the ’70s to editors who huddled in the corner of a disco to discuss Hegel in the ’80s and who since 1991 now produce hardcover books as the story of publishers selling out both theory and the ideals of the ’68 generation. Felsch provides enough material here to make the case, and for the key protagonist in this sell-out story to be not Gente, but rather Paris.

The story of the birth and growth of this West German publishing house makes for wonderful reading. It shows the important role of material culture in not only the publication and dissemination of theory, but also in its production and reception. And various anecdotes and asides about the interactions of theorists published by Merve Verlag such as Althusser, Baudrillard, and Lyotard make for even more engaging reading for students of the history of theory.

However, it is not surprising that the “disco dispositive” of post ’68 theory in West Germany leaves Felsch predicting in his “Epilogue: After Theory?” that “the future of theory is uncertain” (208). For Felsch, “it is hard to avoid the impression that the present-day theory discourse is in the as-if mode” (206). “Have difficult ideas returned,” he asks, albeit only “as a retro fashion?” (206). These conclusions regarding the future of theory are then juxtaposed against the future of Merve, which he says “seems to be secure for the time being” (208).

Felsch’s “Epilogue” makes clear that much more changed for theory in the 1990s than just the publication of hardbacks by Merve. Theory itself radically changed. “The 1990s,” writes Felsch, “were the decade of Cultural Studies and the breakthrough of pop theory” (2006). The advent of cultural studies during this period provides a new perspective on post ’68 theory in West Germany—one that dates much of the work in the Merve catalogue. Moreover, as the low theory of the ’90s with its emphasis on race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality gave way to the globalization of theory in the new millenium, the Eurocentrism and white-male focus of the Merve paperback theory catalogue becomes increasingly apparent. Not only are no women theorists discussed in any detail in Felsch’s study, the theory world outside of the US and Europe is virtually non-existent from the perspective of the Merve catalogue—two points that significantly lower Merve’s historical stock value. But none of this is taken up by Felsch in his “Epilogue,” where he is content to leave Merve in the white cube in perpetuity.

One of the other serious omissions of the volume is the failure of Felsch to note the reputation of Taubes. According to the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, it was through Taubes that he had come to know the reality of moral evil in the world. Scholem, who invited Taubes in 1949 to study with him at Hebrew University, came to regard him nothing short of a monster. And, as Jerry Z. Muller describes in his recent biography of Taubes, he was not the only one of this opinion. How Felsch manages to omit this point regarding a person he regards as one of the important architects of Suhrkamp culture in West Germany is not a minor one.

Given then what we know about Taubes that was omitted from Felsch’s study, the question of what is known about Gente that was also omitted from it might be raised. After all, Gente’s editorial mentor was Taubes. Suspicion here is also raised because Felsch says that many of those who worked with Gente, who he calls “the minds of old West Berlin,” “mistrusted” the inquiries he made about Merve Verlag (207). But regardless of the pieces of the intellectual and moral portrait of Merve Verlag that might be missing from the three decades covered in the book, the bigger story that is alluded to in the epilogue is how much the character and dissemination of theory changed after the 1980s.

If the period from the 1960s through 1980s is termed the era of “paperback theory” based on its primary mode of dissemination, then theory today might arguably be termed “digital theory” in recognition of the dominant material mode of its production and dissemination. While one can still purchase paperback and hardback books in a bricks and mortar bookstore, not only are most of these works digitally produced and available as POD for purchase online, many of them are also available for little or no cost through websites that make pirated copies available for download. Moreover, open access publishers such as Open Humanities Press and Lever Press offer digital editions of new theoretical work at no cost for download along with modestly priced POD editions.

Moreover, if a major apparatus of theory in the late twentieth-century was the disco and the pub, then the new millenium has added another: the virtual apparatus. From chatrooms, blogs, and podcasts to discussion lists, social media venues, and other online platforms, there are many new and emerging virtual venues for theory work. Moreover, these virtual venues include both theory work aimed at academic and scholarly as well as non-academic and non-scholarly audiences. In other words, venues are available for theory work in the virtual world for both theory pros and fans. Thus, if it is important to understanding how theory travels from the seminar room and the lecture hall to the pub and the club, then it is just as important today to understand how it travels in virtual environments and digital space which now even include some seminar rooms and lecture halls.

Additionally, if the revolutionary politics of paperback theory are fair game, then so too are the revolutionary politics of virtual theory. Furthermore, if the revolutionary reach of a paperback book is necessarily limited by its print run, then by comparison the reach of virtual theory is limited only by our access to it on digital platforms. Consider, for example, that a short talk by Slavoj Žižek on happiness that was posted ten years ago has now been viewed nearly 2.5 million times. While many of his works are available in inexpensive paperback editions including through pirated editions, it is safe to say that none has come close to either 2.5 million in sales or downloads.4 If theory still provides revolutionary hope as it did in the ill-made books of Merve, then that hope has been transferred today from the products of the printing press to those of the digital processor.

While I do not doubt the accuracy of Felsch’s prognostication of the state of theory in West Germany circa 2015, it is not one that I share with Felsch regarding the future of theory in the U.S. circa 2023. While theoretical discourse in West Germany may have recently been in the “as-if mode” and existed only “as a retro fashion,” this is definitely not the case in the U.S. today, nor do I believe that it is characteristic of theory on a more global scale. There is nothing “as-if,” for example, about either recent work on the worlding of theory or the major work by women theorists from across the globe. Moreover, if by “retro” one means theoretical work that excludes women and non-European / non-U.S. perspectives, then this term does not describe the future of theory in the U.S. at the present moment.5

Nevertheless, if we view theory in the U.S. from the perspective of those who have recently chosen to sell it out for object-oriented ontologies, new aestheticisms, and postcritique, then there is a ring of truth to Felsch’s prognostications regarding theory today.6 But these are all directions that seem more fitting for the museum bookstore rather than the one on university campuses—let alone the thriving new media environments of theory. The white cubes of art galleries may provide a comfortable home for the legacies of the Merve catalogue, but this is not contemporary theory charged with revolutionary hope. Rather, the latter is most comfortable in the dynamic world of social and new media—a world where Žižek has become a “multi-Platinum” theorist.7