Cultural Studies From Intracultural.pdf

CULTURAL STUDIES: FROM INTRACULTURAL TO INTERCULTURAL APPROACHES AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Abstract: The discussion of cultural studies lacks definition. Distinctions must be made between intracultural (often British) and intercultural (often American) approaches, between stratified and holistic models. After the semiotic turn the British Cultural Studies-model is being discarded and the field of investigation is exploding, while all Archimedean points of attack for the Interpreter seem to have been lost sight of. In the face of this general dilemma a turn towards some form of new essentialism, possibly a new humanism (Nussbaum), seems warranted in order to escape expanding semiospheres. Art may also function äs a pivotal point beyond commodification and cultural Containment because of its anachronicity and its playful interdiscursive functions. The current discussion of the function of 'Landeskunde', directed äs it is towards specific forms of intercultural dialogue, sidesteps the central issues and aporias of cultural studies.

Cultural studies are not a unified field of investigation with a generally accepted methodology.1 The label encompasses a varying number of disciplines and a fluctuating set of theories and practices, focussing on the arts and the social sciences. And why should there be stability when rhe very rerm 'culture' is so notoriously fluid and ambiguous? 2 Diffuse terminology can have many advantages, however. It enables an ongoing discussion with a large number of participants from various fields of knowledge, it can help to erase traditional limits of interest and to demarcate new fields of exploration, allowing also for novel self-positionIn order to indicate the current variety of approaches to the field, I shall not write cultural studies in capital letters - except when referring to traditional British Cultural Studies — and generally use the plural number. See, inter alia, Klaus P. Hansen, Kultur und Kulturwissenschaft: Eine Einführung (Tübingen-Basel: Francke, 1995) 9-16.

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ings. Frequently scholarly practices and traditions will gradually limit even the vaguest of terms within a specific historical context and interpretive Community, äs has been the case with such terms äs 'literary studies', 'historiography' or 'culture' itself when used in the traditional humanist sense. This does not seem to be what is currently happening, however. Cultural studies are rather branching out into a number of fields with no apparent common denominator in much the same way äs American Studies have branched out. Recent anthologies include sections on Culturalism, Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, Postmodernism and Postcolonial Studies.3 The explosion of the field is a consequence of the deconstruction of the great enlightenment narratives and of the projects of modernization. Fluctuations between universal or global4 and particular, national and local perspectives, between social categories of class, gender, ethnicity and a world of unlimited significations and simulations, in short, between boundaries and eddying syncretisms and hybridities, between the differential and the homogenized, the successive and the simultaneous, have deconstructed the field of cultural studies. Postmodern society seems to be swamped with cultural productions too prolific to be contained within specific beliefs or Orders of knowledge.5 That postmodern society itself is a local phenomenon, belonging to the metropolis rather than to the provinces, to multicultural, quickly developing areas rather than to relatively slowly developing areas, is often forgotten äs proliferating theories extend their own new homogenizing powers to various cultural spheres, mainly hoping to escape the inevitable dialectics of blindness and insight. The dilemma of cultural srudies can bc gathcred from the number of aims the field is given. In some early versions the intention was to educate or emancipate certain groups or classes by Cf. Cultural Theory and Populär Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (New York: Harvester, 1994). A term which for Stuart Hall is no more than a euphemism for 'Westernized', cf. "The Question of Cultural Identity ", Modernity and its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (Milton Keynes: Polity/OUP, 1992) 273-316. On globalization and its dialectics see Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: Sage, 1995).

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either participation in a cultural ideal or by Subversion of a Hegemonie culture, while today cultural studies aim at a variety of objects, among them: (a) the description of processes of fluctuation and hybridization (e. g. Homi K. Bhabha), (b) the deconstruction of all Hegemonie stabilities and/or the emancipation of subcultures (e. g. Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige), or (c) even such concrete, optimistic aims äs the unification of Europe by means of an understanding and hermeneutic deciphering of national and regional differences, a project which must anachronistically and paradoxically rely on the relative stability and visibility of these differences themselves.6 Depending upon (c) is (d): the description of basic cultural values and ideally of total subcodes of feeling, thinking, behaviour.7 Finally (e) cultural studies have been defined by Fred Inglis äs a variety of ethical teaching. Inglis wants to discover "how Cultural Studies will make you good" by canonizing exemplary biographies.8 I shall attempt to enumerate some of the modellings the field of cultural studies has experienced and to describe the basic shift from the British intracultural and stratified to poststructural intercultural and either holistic or homogenizing models. The ensuing loss of orientation has led to various strategies for the ethical or aesthetic positioning of cultural studies. I shall end with a few 6

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The latter aim has been suggested by Ansgar Nünning in "Literatur, Mentalitäten und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Grundriß, Leitbegriffe und Perspektiven einer anglistischen Kulturwissenschaft", Literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Modelle und Methoden: Eine Einführung, ed. A. Nünning (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995) 173-197. Nünning believes, in spite of all postmodern dislocations of culture and cultural studies, that it may be possible to reconstruct the entire mental Programme of a culture äs manifested in cultural phenomena (cf. p. 180). By a comparatist approach to Auto- and Heterostereotypes (192) he wants to promote the European idea (194) and intercultural tolerance. Differences, nations, even national characters thus appear relatively static, postmodern globalizations; intercultural hybridizations and even intracultural stratifications (subcultures) are not incorporated within the model. Thus Herbert Grabes in "Literatur - Kulturwissenschaft - Anglistik", AngHa 114 (1996): 376-395, at 393. Grabes, much like Nünning (1995), seems to aim at intercultural competence through the analysis of mentalities. Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 229. Inglis is here obviously influenced by the writings of the later Foucault, perhaps also by the ideas of Martha Nussbaum.

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comments on the special German discussion concerning didactic aspects of 'Landeskunde'. l. From Intracultural to Intercultural Models The fluidity of the term "culture" has been investigated notably by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society (1958). The main development Williams analyses is the Isolation and abstraction of culture from general social movements within the 19th Century and the possibility of a reintegration of culture and society in socalled modern mass society. Williams contrasts the humanist concept of culture äs shaped by 'the old leisured classes', which becomes a 'court of appeaP in the age of industrialization, with a more collective and communal culture affecting a whole way of life, not only a body of intellectual and imaginative works.9 Mechanisms for establishing the latter are expounded in The Long Revolution (1961) — mainly by means of state Intervention (e. g. a Books Council, a Press Council).10 Williams aims to transform the humanist-educational model of high culture in the tradition of Schiller, Arnold, Eliot, Leavis, which privileged literature and the arts. He doesn't, however, reject this model äs simply elitist - äs will later proponents of the so-called Birmingham School — but aims to expand and modify it by providing access to all forms of culture by means of a dialogic mediation between a communicative common culture which is processual and the more static humanist inheritance, which will thus be transformed and modified. 11 Williams' complex negotiations between old and new concepts of culture have by some members of the 'Birmingham School' later been rejected äs consensualist and replaced by binary oppositions between elitist high culture and populär culture. While commonly excluding the former, films, television programmes, the advertis9

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1850, 3rd ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), Introduction and 296-391, 319. 10 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 4th ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), esp. 368-372. n Williams 1967, 327 and 334-338. See also the idea of a "selective tradition", 323.

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ing industry or mass media in general and the working class Habitus were investigated in detail.12 For Stuart Hall cultural studies explore populär culture on the one hand and social institutions and practices, especially within subcultures, on the other.13 The main difficulty of the British oppositional approach is that while it likes to ignore the incommensurable innovative elements of high culture in a general rejective gesture, it tends to unrestrictedly celebrate the emancipatory power of populär cultural artefacts and to bracket off the economics of cultural production and commodification which the Frankfurt School has elucidated and criticised. Jim McGuigan has called the latter tendency cultural populism^ which can lead to a conniving "with the intensified commodification of culture by affecting disingenuous solidarity with ordinary people and their preferences."14 The basic Marxism of British Cultural Studies has thus, in spite of a marked refinement of the model after the Gramscian turn,15 often led to a 12

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For a general critique of the Birmingham School see Ulrich Broich, "British Cultural Studies äs a Challenge to Eng. Lit.", Journal for the Study of British Cultures l (1994) 21-34. He thus opposes American and British concepts of cultural studies along the lines of a traditional theory/praxis dichotomy, cf. "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities", October 53 (1990) 11-23. Jim McGuigan, "Trajectories of Cultural Populism", Storey 1994, 547-559, at 552 ff. One of the earliest studies under the influence of Gramsci, though still largely oppositional, was Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). The concept of hegemony has allowed for complex negotiations between dominant culture and subculture, including the dissemination of the very idea of autonomous subcultures, without, however, basically changing the dualistic basis of cultural struggle, cf. Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the Populär", Storey 1994, 455—466. Stuart HalPs recent explorations of the field are surely the most promising äs far äs a mediation of Marxist and poststructural concepts is concerned. Hall acknowledges complex negotiations between the central and the marginalized, while at the same time limiting the slippage of significations by assuming the rearticulation of inequalities and borderlines which allow for a variety of guerilla warfare, cf. Stuart Hall, Rassismus und kulturelle Identität. Ausgewählte Schriften 2, ed. U. Mehlen et al., Argument Sonderband N.F. 226 (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1994). He thus approaches the strategies of Gayatri Spivak (see below). Such new explorations are exempt from the general criticism above.

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dualistic version of high/populär culture, sometimes even to a vulgär Inversion of the Arnoldian model.16 The radical rejection of high culture has, within the field of literary studies, been interpreted äs a reaction to a number of different influences, among them: 1) A reaction to modernism. In Anthony Easthope's reading of literary history, modernism becomes an elitist scapegoat, which allows for and demands the practices of the New Criticism. The literary text becomes a repository of hidden values which are conceived äs essences. By privileging complexity and ambiguity, which are to be explored in a process of textual exegesis, the boundaries between high culture and populär culture are affirmed. 2) A reaction against the institutionalization of close reading approaches for the canonized texts within traditional English departments in Britain in the wake of the New Criticism.17 One of the main shortcomings of such a general rejection of high culture is the tendency to construct simplified versions of the Opponent. Literature conceived of äs a self-enclosed System which contains an essence, and criticism, seen äs largely formalist, theoretically innocent and believing in timeless values, seem to be rather dated concepts, especially when applied to English Studies in Germany, where Marxism, hermeneutics or reader-responsetheory have been around for the last thirty years.18 What is also blotted out — on the aesthetic and productive side — is a long tradition of (canonized) literature äs a form of play on the one hand and äs a means of Subversion and/or extrapolation on the l(

' Storey 1994, viii: "All the basic assumptions of ßritish Cultural Studies are Marxist." As he notes, British Cultural Studies has also been equated with "ideological studies" (ix). 17 The New Criticism is often used äs a foil for a definition of cultural studies, see Isaiah Smithson, "Introduction: Institutionalizing Cultural Studies", English Studiesi'Culture Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent, ed. I. Smithson and N. Ruff (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994) 1: "The phrase 'English studies/culture studies' denotes a shift from the New Critical concept of the text and reader äs separable from each other and their culture to ...". 18 Such scapegoats are constructed, for example, by Wolfgang Riedel, "Cultural Studies: Positions and Oppositions", Journal for the Study of British Cultures 2 (1995) 61-73. See also Broich 1994, 26: "Easthope is definitely kicking dead dogs."

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other, opposed to Hegemonie everyday or scientific discourses, a function prevalent especially in the parodic, satiric or utopian modes and stressed e. g. by Marxists, by the Frankfurt School and by humanists of many kinds.19 The subversive function of literary texts (to which even deconstructionists often refer implicitly, äs they generally prefer canonic texts for the demonstration of ambiguities and the slippage of meaning) is downplayed in the scapegoating of high culture, which presents literature äs a mere vehicle of ideology, not least because of institutional appropriation and of sociological modellings of aesthetic dinstinctions (Bourdieu). Anthony Easthope's Literary into Cultural Studies (1991) offers, instead of a simple rejection, the absorption of high culture into general cultural discourses. Like Stuart Hall before him, Easthope distinguishes populär culture from mass culture and accepts the former äs the object of cultural studies, while identifying modernist aesthetics and criticism äs the main causes for a radical hiatus between high and populär culture. This hiatus can, however, be deconstructed: "Literature exists not äs an essence, an entity, a thing, but äs a process, a function."20 Easthope historicises the concept of the literary äs a product of institutions, practices, readings and sets it alongside other signifying practices. Conrad's Heart of Darkness appears to be äs informative a document for the cultural critic äs Tarzan of the Apes, though the decoding of Tarzan's cultural messages will have to rely more strongly upon iconic rather than literary codes.21 High culture is thus absorbed and de-mystified within the general field of cultural studies. Largely within the British area, we have so far encountered (a) (b) (c) (d)

the humanist educational model (Arnold, Leavis) the consensualist model (Williams, Hoggart) the oppositional model (Thompson, the early Hall) the absorption model (Easthope).

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On the necessity of some kind of humanist base for literary criticism in order to transcend deconstruction see my essay "Literature and Value: Back to a New Humanism?", Anglistentag 1994 Graz: Proceedings, ed. W. Riehle and H. Keiper (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995) 403-414. 20 Anthony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991)53. *i Easthope 1991, 93-97.

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Easthope's 'absorption modeP is exemplary for a general trend in recent British Cultural Studies towards the fusion of literature with cultural practices in general. Paradoxically, this trend leads to the final deconstruction of cultural studies äs a discrete discipline — and especially of British Cultural Studies äs defined by the so-called Birmingham School. This deconstruction has been gradual. The first Step was taken under the influence of Gramsci and Volosinov, by the adoption of the concepts of hegemony, articulation, negotiation and the Separation of populär culture from a definite class basis.22 The poststructuralist semiotic turn, which has influenced both Anthony Easthope and Tony Bennett, has fully disarticulated all key terms upon which traditional sociological and Marxist cultural criticism was based, whether 'subject', 'society', 'history' or 'ideology' (besides the traditional concept of canonized literature, äs shown above). Such deconstructions of traditional Archimedean points of reference for cultural studies have led many theoreticians to a concept of interventionism äs a form of guerilla warfare against the established culture, depending upon the kind of hegemonic structure encountered. This can, äs in the case of Tony Bennett, finally lead to the dissolution of any definable methodology for cultural studies and to the Inflation of the discipline/field to the poststructural semiotic superscience, which will tend to absorb all the arts and social sciences without any clear mission of its own: By confronting ... its own actual situatedness between the academy and everyday life, between critique and experience, but refusing the position of intellectual mastery ... that would ensue from a unified problematic, the pcdagogic subject of cultural studies is uncvcnly inscrtcd into the structurcs by which we are constituted. This may be äs much äs the literary academy can achieve at the present conjuncture. Offering no final guarantee of its effectivity, the new paradigm for cultural studies, not yet reified within the academy, remains a site for struggle.23

What Bennett describes here is simply the deconstruction of a discipline, which has, äs an inflated superscience,24 lost all points 22

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See Hall 1994 and Tony Bennett, "Populär Culture and 'the turn to Gramsci'", Storey 1994, 222-229. Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1991) 10. Hall 1990, 22: "In the United States, for instance, 'cultural studies' has

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of attack, vacillating between guerilla warfare and complete disorientation on the one hand and the practical analysis of populär cultural forms without theoretical guidelines (or following the traditional oppositional approach) on the other.25 Similar absorptions of social practices and of institutions into discursive fields have been undertaken by Laclau and Mouffe. 26

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become an umbrella for just about anything." It seems quaint that in the face of inflated semiospheres some critics should still welcome the advent of semiotics, e. g. Grabes 1996 - albeit with a nostalgic turn towards structuralism. Theoreticians like Stuart Hall or Gayatri Spivak see this dilemma and attempt to escape it by vacillating between practical political positionings and poststructural theory, that is, by retaining a dualist base for political interventions in spite of theoretical paradoxicality. They thus mediate between Marxism and poststructuralist semiotics (in the face of such mediations it seems very doubtful, whether semiotics can be used äs a bulwark against Marxism, äs suggested by Grabes 1996, 394). Such mediation may be the only solution at the present moment; it presupposes that the poststructural play of significations does not encompass all extra- or pre-semiotic phenomena. It does, however, seem unclear, what exactly limits the slippage of meanings. A possible answer could be a turn towards a new humanist essentialism, cf. Martha Nussbaum, "Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism*', Critical Theory: A Reader, ed. Douglas Tallack (New York: Harvester, 1995) 449-472. See also Göbel 1995. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Sodalist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); privileging discourse over practices and institutions, they have difficulty in legitimizing agents of Subversion against the political hegemony. For a critique see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Macmillan, 1991) 192-204. The dilemma of cultural studies has been seen by many critics, not only within the arts. The sociologist David Chaney describes the bloated self-reflexive Systems of signification and Simulation in our post-cultural world, first and foremost referring to Baudrillard, äs a form of cultural triumphalism, which negates personal and collective motivators for social practices. Swamped by representational goods, culture itself is dissolved and a distinct cultural sphere gradually disappears, leaving plastic life-styles, which can be changed and discarded äs cultural residue and art-forms for the masses. These individualized lifestyles are fed by participation in various cultural Systems which form a sea of discourses within which we constitute our lived experiences. Chaney finally comes to doubt the very existence of culture äs it suffuses all of the social sphere. David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1994).

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2. Cultural Studies after the Semiotic Turn and the Absorption of Literary Studies As an extreme example of the semiotic turn in cultural Studies I would like to mention Hillis Miller's Illustration (1992). Formed by the American scene, Miller focuses upon the articulation of minority discourses within a hegemonic culture. For such a concept of cultural studies, which is inspired by Gramsci, Miller sees three aporias: (1) The deconstruction of the hegemonial is, he assumes, accompanied by the construction of new hegemonies within a binary patterning. (2) While conserving ethnic or regional variety, such an approach to cultural studies is generally endangered by nationalist aims. (3) While the project of cultural studies assumes that knowledge and power are interrelated, Miller postulates a necessary fissure between the cognitive and the performative dimensions of articulation. For Miller difference and deferral are at the very centre even of the hegemonic culture and are directed by cognitive and textbased processes of reading and enunciation. A work of art will thus change "the society into which it enters" and make it, "in however minute a way, begin again".27 The cognitive and inaugurative semiotic base is for Miller generally prior to any - finally unpredictable - performative transformation at the level of actual cultural practices, a level which is prey to ideologies and nationalisms. Cultural studies come finally to mean no more than some form of textual cfiticism or deconstruction, s the articulate text always remains primary to the ideological implications upon which the traditional British Cultural Studies model relies. If Tony Bennett has moved Outside Literature towards a world of significations, he can finally join radical poststructuralists like Hillis Miller in the negation of any extralinguistic dimension of experience. All radical poststructuralist semiotic models move towards monologic Systems of Containment and deny the non-linguistic other (e. g. the body, the chora, nature, humanist essentials 27

Joseph Hillis Miller, Illustration (London: Reaktion, 1992) 56.

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etc.), thus banishing conflictual or dialogic models of culture. If cultural studies today aim at absorbing literary studies, this may well prove to be an absorption into an abyss of signification in which all cats are grey. Literary studies appear to have, for example in rhetoric or in genre criticism, a firmer base than the decentred concept of cultural studies can hope for, this in spite of Easthope's premature announcements of the end of literary studies.28 It would rather seem that the poststructural model of cultural studies must aim at reformation itself, in order to escape its impasses, whether by turning towards a triadic concept of signification, by an acknowledgement of extra-linguistic fields of experience, by supplanting the concept of ecriture by a concept of living, polyphonic speech äs a basis for cultural heteroglossia and carnivalesque renewal (Bakhtin) or by the reconstruction of some form of humanist essentialism.29 Literary studies can hope to escape the dilemma of cultural studies because of (1) the specific modes of duration and change which prevail in the arts and which are not coterminous with the temporalities of other cultural discourses (generally being shorter, sometimes belated or in advance), but create anachronous ten28

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As Ulrich Broich has shown, Easthope's critique of literary studies focuses on a model of intrinsic, holistic Interpretation which is today, to say the least, outdated. Easthope opposes an essentialist construction of literary value from a historicist and institutional perspective, rashly concluding that because literary value is not transhistorical but historically determined, valuable and less valuable literature cannot be distinguished in similar ifnot identical ways in different times and societies, thus hoping to collapse the high culture/popular distinction. For a quite different approach to historicized concepts of value see my Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Systemreferenz, Funktion, literarischer Wert in seinem Erzählwerk (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), especially the first methodological part on value. For a return to experience see inter alia Bell Hooks, "Postmodern Blackness" (1991), rpt. in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York—London: Harvester, 1993) 421—427. Bell Hooks attempts to mediate between a critique of essentialism and a return to the "authority of experience" (426). Raymond Williams had already turned to Bakhtin in Marxism and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1977). See also Ken Hirschkop, "Bakhtin and Cultural Theory", Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. K. Hirschkop and D. Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989) 1-38 and Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (Oxford: OUP, 1987) 138-146. As for the reconstruction of humanist essentialism see Nussbaum 1995.

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sions.30 In this context Russian formalist notions of rhythms of Innovation and estrangement within a general theory of genre may be suggestive.31 And because of (2) the interdiscursive function of literature. Literature plays with the other discourses of a specific society, rearranges and recombines them, parodies and tests them by juxtaposition, Variation etc.32 Literature can thus hope to escape the general trend of cultural discourses and remain at a functional remove from them, questioning, negating, probing, playing with them. What we cannot return to, however, are formal concepts of the literary äs such.33

3. Temporal and Spatial, Intracultural and Intercultural Models While the humanist, consensual and oppositional models of cultural studies are mainly temporal models, the absorption model is deconstructed by the paradox between the temporal embedding in a modernist story and a monological synchronic Saussurean System of analysis, in which the temporal is not constitutive but 30

See esp. Claudio Guillen, "Literary Change and Multiple Duration", Comparative Literature Studies 14 (1977): 100-118. The specificity of literary changes and fashions is one reason for many difficulties with traditional base/superstructure models. 3 1 See also Göbel 1993, 17-45. 32 With this idea I follow Jürgen Link, "Literaturanalyse als Diskursanalyse. Am Beispiel des Ursprungs literarischer Symbolik in der Kollektivsymbolik", Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. J. Fohrmann and H. Müller (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988) 284-307. This idea has also been supported by Nünning (1995). 33 The search for such concepts can only lead to paradoxes, thus in a recent article by Christoph Bode on "Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft und/oder Cultural Studies?", Anglia 114 (1996): 396-424. Bode assumes that the literary is extrinsic to literature, while at the same time turning towards specifically Western and modernist/postmodernist formal properties such äs ambiguity, 'Leerstellen', paradox and complexity (412) äs transhistorical criteria for the literary. He also vacillates between an aestheticist freedom from referentiality (412) and the predominance of semiosis, textuality and Interpretation on all levels of culture, thus on the one hand establishing the relative autonomy of art, on the other the absolute hegemony of literary critics over all things cultural, such äs subject constitution or mechanisms of marginalization (414).

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leads to deferral and decentring. I would finally like to mention two primarily spatial models of cultural studies, the ethnological/ anthropological and postcolonial. Both exclude the sociological intracultural dimension and privilege intercultural exchange. In the modern anthropological approach (Geertz, Greenblatt) culture is regarded holistically äs a network of significations and practices, for Geertz modelling a form of cultural Island, which the anthropologist observes from the vantage point of another cultural System. A culture is regarded äs an expressive totality in which specific signifying practices are translatable. The general aim is the exploration of a synchronic System, not the Subversion of cultural Systems (äs in the oppositional and humanist models). The ethnographer is fascinated by the homogeneity of a field in which cultural power circulates, but has no intention of intervening; transformations come from outside the System, mainly through intercultural contact. The predominance of spatial models for cultural studies over temporal ones, especially in the USA, can be seen äs an outcome of experiences of displacement, colonial encounter and multicultural contact, which privilege spatial over historical differentiations, while in the British context spatial models aim at a shift from Eurocentrism to a pluricentric postcolonial world. In the USA the evolution of cultural studies and the rise of myth criticism in the 50s had from the beginning a strong spatial aspect: Europe was opposed to the American Garden, the industrialized East to the Virgin West, American exceptionalism had its foil in spatially remote European Workshops and in the Stereotyping of feudal and class hierarchies in distant Europe, while social stratification in the USA remained exempt from invcstigation - spatial dislocation apparently precluding the transference of historical paradigms and traditions to a sphere of Adamic innocence. Such spatial concepts are rearticulated by postcolonial studies again today, especially by the poststructural varieties which are influenced by an ethnological/anthropological, comparatist approach. From early regional and comparative models postcolonial theory has steadily expanded towards a general theory of cultural formation and cultural exchange, for example in the works of Homi K. Bhabha. Cultural change takes place in areas of intercultural — primarily spatial and horizontal — contact rather than

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along intracultural (i. e. class) demarcations, which would privilege the historical and vertical dimensions. Homi K. Bhabha regards intercultural marginal positionings (a spatial metaphor) s areas of negotiation in which renewal and transformation through translation and enunciation are possible. Gestures of holistic hegemonial sublation are generally subverted by the exploration of interstitial space, by hybridization and syncretist strategies.34 Identity, whether national, ethnic or regional, is generally constituted between cultures by the articulation of differences. In interstitial space the slippage of identity, nation, language allows for cultural mediation and the enunciation of new selves. The Location of Culture must for Bhabha thus always aim at mediation, dislocation, renaissance. In such a predominantly spatial model interstitial space — if taken literally — denotes borderlines, oceans, airport lounges. The model is based upon the transposition of the poststructural model of semantic slippage to a larger geographical pattern, to the slippage of national identities. In such interstitial spaces enunciations and articulations of the new take place in messianic time, that is in (curiously postmodern) Benjaminian leaps beyond historical and temporal sequentiality.35 The direction of renewal and transformation remains vague, deconstruction seems to dominate over construction. Much the same can be said of Gayatri Spivak's syncretist and Interventionist models of guerilla warfare against hegemonic Systems. However, Spivak is well aware of the necessity of a basic human commitment, if mainly in negative terms (e. g. anti-sexist, anti-essentialist, against social oppression) and clearly Privileges a micrological praxis ("situational practice norms my theory"). 36 Her approach is thus admittedly paradoxical, though reaching out for a transnational global commitment and transnational literacy. She thus moves beyond the halfhearted nostalgia for a Eurocentric Marxism exhibited by Easthope or Bennett.37 34 35 36

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Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bhabha 1994, 4 and 8. Gayatri Ch. Spivak, "Criticism, Feminism and the Institution*', The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990) 1-16, at 12. See Gayatri Ch. Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studies", Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York-London: Routledge, 1993) 255-284. As with Bhabha, cultural negotiation and exchange

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sum up: In the field of cultural studies a more markedly British sociological and temporal intracultural approach can be distinguished from a poststructural predominantly anthropological and spatial intercultural one.38 Of course there are many cross fertilizations, mediated by varieties of poststructural semiotics. The deconstruction of the Marxist base of cultural studies (e. g. by Bennett, Easthope and to some extent by Hall), which has led to the death of British Cultural Studies in its traditional form, is a product of negotiations between stratified and holistic/interventionist models. In order to define different versions of cultural studies more clearly, I would like to suggest a number of basic oppositions and triads: temporal

spatial

intracultural

intercultural

sociological

anthropological

STRUCTURE OF MODEL

stratified

holistic

FIELD COVERED

lit./arts

media/lit./arts

all social practices

high culture

populär culture

mass culture

MODEL

AIMS

38

subversive

descriptive

teleological

Interventionist

are stressed, however, with a core of ethical commitment, e. g. to some concept of solidarity or "a moratorium on cultural supremacy" (279) and to "cosmopolitanism" (278) and, äs far äs the classroom is concerned, to a postdisciplinary form of Interventionist teaching (280). See also Herbert Grabes, "The Study of British Civilization on the Continent: Some Introductory Remarks", Anglistentag 1989 Würzburg, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990) 3-9, esp.6, on the exclusion of the diachronic aspect from poststructural semiotic models.

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While the oppositions in the 'Model'-slot roughly characterize (generally British) sociological versus poststructural semiotic approaches, the other criteria can be and have been combined in various ways. Richard Hoggart's approach, for example, is a temporal intracultural one, which would stress stratification and Subversion and be directed towards social practices and the arts, populär and high culture; Bhabha's spatial and intercultural approach is largely Interventionist and subversive and directed towards all social practices. 4. Avenues of Escape from the Poststructural Dilemma of Cultural Studies Literature has always played with general cultural discourses and can offer avenues of escape if it is not totally commodified and allows for aesthetic distancing and interdiscursive play. And this kind of interdiscursive play can be practised in so-called high literature äs well äs in populär forms. More often than not commodification and distancing will be precariously balanced on both levels. To give an example: nineteenth Century melodrama, which on the one hand offered a vent for many post-revolutionary sentiments and possibly reflected social dichotomies within its Manichaean world view, also affirmed the Status quo by means of predetermined harmonic closure, according to the laws of poetic justice and the standardized manufacture of the genre. Johann N. Schmidt speaks of basic functional ambivalences in this populär genre.39 And äs Pierre Bourdieu has taught us, so-called high art can be totally socially functionalized and commodified in spite of hidden subversive messages.40 The possibilities of Subversion in literature - which are usually more pronounced in high art - have, however, not been generally accepted äs avenues of escape from our modern semiospheres, mainly because (1) high culture has become a scapegoat in most versions of cultural studies and (2) it is perhaps no actual escape to explore the possibilities of play, 39

40

Johann N. Schmidt, Ästhetik des Melodramas: Studien zu einem Genre des populären Theaters im England des 19. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986) 232. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge, 1986).

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negation or hybridity within a limited semiosphere without extrasemiotic guidelines. Thus it seems necessary to turn towards some variety of Humanist essentialism in order to find a directive beyond mere Subversion and play, a directive also for the varieties of guerilla warfare proposed by Hall or by Spivak. Such a new/old essentialism has recently been proposed by Martha Nussbaum äs a foundation for ideas of social justice. Nussbaum concentrates on basic bodily and psychic needs (such äs abilities to laugh, play, desire) äs prerequisites for a humane life of compassion and respect and posits these within this world, not in a metaphysicalrealist realm.41 Indeed one of the main difficulties for a general theory of cultural studies is that after what Hillis Miller has called the disappearance of God it is difficult to find an Archimedean point without engaging in metaphysical questions.42 A humanist concept of cultural studies must still be developed. Fred Inglis has taken doubtful Steps in this direction, which may indicate the predicament rather than a possible solution. Inglis also wants to evade "the delirious tale of postmodernism".43 He attempts to contain this tale by mediating between grand theory and local knowledge, following Clifford Geertz' hermeneutic approach.44 The spatialized concept of heterogeneous cultural islands is then, in a first attempt to find a way out of the postmodern dilemma, unified by a method of cultural translation, "äs a contribution to the social history of the moral Imagination. This I take to be the best definition of Cultural Studies."45 In search of guidelines Inglis offers other suggestions besides the possibility of a common moral denominator for disparate cultures. He turns to art and calls upon "the noble vision of the Community of art" which envisages "a shared humänity" and even simply "the truth". It is the "moral responsibility of the artist" to teil the truth, which is cast in the unmediated presence or aura of art (!).46 The 41

Nussbaum 1995, esp. 458, 466. For Hillis Miller this quandary is endemic, äs he is enclosed in self-constructed semiospheres, see Walter Göbel, "Modelling J. Hillis Miller: Slippage of Identity or Continuity in Flux?", Anglistik 6 (1995): 103-114. Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 238. 44 The Book is dedicated to Clifford Geertz. 45 Inglis 1993, 169. 4 * Inglis 1993, 193-195.

42

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most simple tenets of romantic and idealistic aesthetics are thus reproduced in order to escape the 'postmodern delirium'. 47 And Inglis finally offers a third avenue of escape, äs he turns towards what he calls the art form of ordinary life, the exemplary biography. In an attempt to fuse personal and impersonal morality, Inglis, recalling Kant, seeks a moral principle which is to "retain its awful power to compel us into right conduct." He turns towards people "with enough character to acknowledge the claims of both right conduct and human flourishing."48 Cultural studies finally become a means of ethical and moral guidance, äs Inglis ends with the vatic message: "... be careful, bring all your sympathies to bear; hate what is hateful; be good."49 Peculiarly puritanical äs these messages may be, Inglis is typical for the current state of cultural studies. Lacking any basic orientation he seeks (a) a common cultural denominator by means of anthropological research, (b) a revival of idealist aesthetics and (c) a concept of the good life which can address us directly without needing any justification or a theoretical humanist base. The multiplicity of the recipes offered, however, exposes the dilemma of cultural studies and the necessity of finding a viable essentialist base. The same dilemma is faced by literary criticism, äs has been shown in a brilliant essay by Heinz Antor, in which he also demands a new humanism or, alternatively, a focus imaginarius äs a heuristic base which is to allow for at least temporary positionings in cultural exchanges.50 Inglis even recycles and invokes the cliches of an aesthetics of Balance and harmony when he admires a painting by Titian because it "matches manner to subject" and thus speaks to us without mediation, creating its own aura and causing a "respohsively parallel thought and feeling in the person using the object in the right way" (199). Here we have the rebirth not only of modernist elitist art, but of idealist stereotypes, of the gifted artist and the similarly gifted sensitive recipient, who can conceive of the best that has been thought and feit in the world, a truly Arnoldian critic. Inglis 1993, 210 and 211. This sounds a bit like the education of a gentleman: "Yet another way of focussirig Cultural Studies is to say that they discourse on the method by which one may turn disposition and temperament into solid character." Inglis 1993, 240. Heinz Antor, "The Ethics of Criticism in the Age After Value", Why Literature Matters: Theories and Punctions ofLiterature, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996) 65-85.

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5. Some Observations on Cultural Studies, 'Landeskunde', and Teaching I would like to turn briefly to the discussion of cultural studies in German universities and to two aspects, (1) to the vast scope of some theoretical approaches, which is largely due to the intertextual basis of the field, when approached from a poststructural perspective, and (2) to the relationship to Landeskunde. Like poststructuralism and moving in its wake, some versions of cultural studies - the more appropriate term would be post-cultural studies^ because a separate cultural sphere has been dissolved attempt to encompass all the humanities, if not most of the sciences äs well. Dirk Hoerder, for example, quite calmly maintains that "Cultural Studies are defined äs anthropological study of the whole way of life of multicultural, and regionally diverse, hierarchically structured societies."51 The field of the megalomaniac cultural studies expert would thus encompass history, sociology, economics, psychology, law, literature, the arts, religion, philosophy etc. One of the main difficulties - besides the danger of dilettantism - with such a global concept is the incorporation within established disciplines, e. g. within English Studies. Suggestions for such an incorporation have been made by many, for example by Jürgen Kamm.52 What he proposes can be described äs an additive model, in which a Cultural Studies curriculum is added to the traditional parts of English Studies, to Linguistics, Literature, Language Learning and Didactics. It is given a fifth of the cake, in which all the above-mentioned sciences are to be accommodated. In such a model the vastness of the project becomes doubly visible: while the traditional parts of English Studies, that is Language and Literature, remain separate, a host of the so-called extrinsic sciences and humanities are to merge within a small segment of the 51

52

Dirk Hoerder, "Cultural Studies - Problems and Approaches", Journal for the Study ofBritish Cultures 2 (1995): 75-80, at 77. For the poststructural model, at least, he is quite right, but he doesn't seem to realize the difficulties involved in the unlimited eddying of intertextuality. Similarly Isaiah Smithson, who defines 'culture studies' äs the "interdisciplinary study of infinite interlocking relations" (Smithson 1994: 6). Jürgen Kamm, "Cultural Studies und Anglistikstudium: Die curriculare Realisierung kulturwissenschaftlicher Lehre", Anglistik 7 (1996): 45-49.

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discipline in a successful interdisciplinary cooperative effort. We would, according to such a model, have classes on Daniel Defoe on the one hand and on historical, sociological, political, psychological, anthropological aspects of Bourgeois constructions of subjectivity on the other, it seems. Much more convincing are integrative models, for example the suggestions of Wolfgang Riedel.53 I would like finally to make a very few remarks on recent discussions of the function of Landeskunde — though but marginally related to the quandaries of cultural studies. Firstly, it is peculiar that it should be possible to speak of "Landeskunde äs it exists today",54 when there is admittedly no unifying concept at all and a great number of different (integrative and non-integrative, historical and contemporary, Marxist and history of ideas, mentalities etc.) approaches exist side by side in German universities and in the many federal directives for teachers.55 It seems, in the face of this multiformity, little more than the usual scapegoat procedure to confront the supposedly simple accumulation of knowledgeable facts by Landeskunde teachers with a sophisticated hermeneutic, reflexive, theoretical and what not cultural studies approach.56 This is not only polemical, it is also theoretically totally misleading, äs since Habermas' Erkenntnis und Interesse^ if not since Nietzsche, we know that there is no such thing äs a dividing line between the sphere of the factual or cognitive and the affective, ideological, critical. It seems to me that the discussion is held about quite obsolete distinctions. The central question should rather be what the function of Landeskunde can be within the limited amount of time the Student has for the subject — in Baden Württemberg not more than one course officially, though actually most students tend to bc more thorough - and why it is taught mainly by native Speakers. 53

Wolfgang Riedel, "Cultural Studies: Positions and Oppositions", Journal for the Study of British Cultures 2 (1995): 61-73. 54 Hans Kastendiek, "British and American Studies: Proposals for a Comparative Approach", Journal for the Study of Bntish Cultures l (1994): 1-19, at 17. 55 See, inter alia, Reingard M. Nischik, "Fachwissenschaft und Lehrerausbildung: Von Richtlinien/Kursstrukturpläneii/Lchrpläne.n, Studienordnungen und Prüfungsordnungen, Lehrangeboten und guten Vorsätzen", Anglistik 6 (1995): 46-50. 56 Riedel 1995, 64.

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The latter seems to me to be due to the intercultural Situation that automatically evolves when a native Speaker attempts to explain the ways of life, networks of significations and institutions of his home country, usually or at least ideally with a lot of local colour and anecdote. What a medley of sciences in all their abstract interdisciplinary interactions - possibly within some future framework for a discrete discipline of Cultural Studies in capital letters - will perhaps never achieve, may more easily be brought about by the communication of lived experience - at least for contemporary Landeskunde. Enmeshed in the networks of signification that cultural studies may never unravel — and which many a playfully interdiscursive novel will explore with more success - the native Speaker, living in Germany, can ideally approach complex cultural mediations on a comparative basis. It is the untidy and fuzzy aspect of cultural networks which allows for non-theoretical shortcuts in 'Landeskunde' and which also makes periods of study in the target country such a significant experience, in short, which gives intercultural contact so much more vividness than the studying of the most absorbing of disciplines can offer. I am sure many a native Speaker is doing an excellent Job in the field, in spite of the possible theoretical deficiencies and the extreme limitations äs far äs the number of courses is concerned!57 Surely only few will become actual Gradgrinds bent on the transmission of facts, facts, facts only and despairing because of a general lack of theory. As the Situation is at the moment, we do not need a Landeswissenschaft58 - and we should not demand one before we have a theoretical foundation for cultural studies. And, of course, both have distinct, if somewhat complementary functions: the one aims at a specific field of intercultural communication, the other started out from mainly intracultural questions - though both meet within the field of interdisciplinary explorations. However, considering the dissemination of cultural studies we are faced with today, a theoretical foundation for 'Landeskunde' or for cultural studies would have to amount to little less than a new metaphysics. 57

And for Stuttgart I may also confide to Wolfgang Riedel that all the modern subjects he misses - such äs the new pauperism, pollution, Immigration, the decline of the welfare state - have been taught, though I don't quite see the point of confusing a discussion of themes with one on methodology. 58 As demanded by Grabes 1989, 4.

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In order not to be misunderstood I must add: pragmatically speaking, Landeskunde must, within the limited time given in the curriculum, always live with compromises which are often more easily achieved without a massive bürden of theory. Ideally, however, we should in the long run aim at a dialogic, conflictual or heterogloss model, which - leaving Landeskunde aside for the moment - would enrich literary studies with some form of cultufal studies on a humanist base, without, however, making a silent or affirmative subaltern of literature. The conflictual should here be preferred to the integrative. Literature has always, to quote Adorno, been autonomous and fait social, has assimilated - or answered back to - numerous discourses and disciplines. At the moment, however we seem to have more questions than answers. Whether the ideal conflictual model could have a poststructural element and whether some form of Landeskunde will then still be necessary within foreign language/culture-teaching remains, among many other things, to be seen. SAARBRÜCKEN

WALTER GÖBEL

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