Understanding Culture: A Handbook for Students in the Humanities 9789048530090

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Understanding Culture

Understanding Culture A Handbook for Students in the Humanities

Babette Hellemans

Amsterdam University Press

Original publication: Babette Hellemans, Denken over cultuur. Amsterdam University Press, 2017 [ISBN 978 90 8964 990 4] © Babette Hellemans, 2017 Translated by: Gioia Marini This text is an adaptation of the book Cultuur from the Dutch ‘Elementary Particles’ series, which was published by AUP at an earlier date.

Cover illustration: Lions painted in the Chauvet Cave; replica of the painting from the Brno museum Anthropos (detail). Wikimedia Commons, HTO Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 991 1 e-isbn 978 90 4853 009 0 (pdf) nur 757 doi 10.5117/9789089649911 © Babette Hellemans / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents Introduction

7

1 The Classics

23

2 Man and Mentality

45

3 Language

65

4 The Silence of the Archives

91

5 Non-Western Cultures

111

6 Image, Memory, and Practice

135

Glossary

165

Acknowledgements

173

Illustrations

175

Index

177

Introduction This textbook is intended as an aid — nothing more, nothing less — to the broad field of research known as culture. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive work on the subject: there are, after all, much better media (including the Internet) available to look up facts and definitions. What, then, is the purpose of this book? The aim is to provide guidance and to outline the different perspectives on culture in the humanities. Long before it became a field of academic research, the concept of culture was surrounded by an aura of ambiguity. If one tried to defend the field of research dealing with culture, such an effort quickly degenerated into a clumsy inability to describe a single well-defined and defining method. And as in any controversy, the conflict revolves primarily around the conceptual framework of culture and therefore is about reputation, academic traditions in different countries, and the use of source material (written sources; visual sources in art and architecture, and landscape architecture; archaeological excavations). Moreover, the debates on culture are so diverse that it is difficult to get a handle on what culture is. Unlike in the field of history in which the concept of ‘truth’ and the ‘reliability’ of one’s sources play a key role, the practice of cultural studies seems to be characterised by something approaching indifference to the quest for the truth. Nevertheless, there is an academic discussion — one could even say a fierce debate — about the essence of culture, a discussion that is focused on our use of language in relation to the interpretation of imagery . The debate is essentially epistemological in nature (from the Greek word episteme (ἐπιστήμη), which means knowledge) and focuses on the nature and possibility of acquiring knowledge about culture. When such important concepts as truth and reliability are called into question in the broader field of the humanities — similar to the concept of gravity or the theory of evolution in science — the temptation is to design a theory in an attempt to manage the total chaos. There is a veritable industry of theory books that focus on the fields of culture, language, religion, memory, and art. This turn to theory can partly be explained by the rise of postmodernism — and literary criticism in its wake — and the different opinions regarding an unbiased interpretation of culture, precisely when such an unbiased interpretation is difficult to establish due to a significant time dimension, the foreignness of the culture, or the existence of power relations and the inability of members of a subculture (such as women, homosexuals or the illiterate) to express themselves.

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This book discusses the development of theories within cultural studies in detail, but I would note here that the tendency to use abstract models sometimes has the same effect as the emperor’s new clothes: no one will dare to come forward and say that the theoretical model is nothing more than common sense. Perhaps to counter this effect, a pragmatic approach is increasingly gaining ground in the field of cultural studies. Increasingly, the attempt to grasp the notion of culture on a conceptual basis is being replaced by the application of culture as an epistemological phenomenon. What is the knowledge value of culture in a society? What are the socioeconomic effects of a cultural sector? Although this practical response to all the theoretical musings is understandable, it would constitute an act of destruction if we no longer made the effort to understand why the thinkers who are central to this book had an important point when they attempted to design an academic approach to culture. As the famous British art critic and essayist John Berger (1926-2017) wrote in his poem Labour Monthly: Men go backwards or forwards. There are two directions But not two sides.1

All the differences between disciplines and geographical traditions aside, what acts as a uniting factor within cultural studies is its exceptional ability to integrate and incorporate, time and again, new influences that define the concept of culture. This academic process is therefore never finished: due to the emergence of new media, it is always future-oriented, and when one looks back on the history of academia, one would notice a significant degree of vitality.

Trajectory or Tradition? More than a hundred years ago, academics at universities began to examine the idea of culture in an analytical, systematic way. Because culture can be said to act as a mirror of our worldview, this image is constantly changing. Culture, therefore, has its own history. In addition, as a result of various events in the twentieth century, radical changes in the way we value culture, including the attachment of moral judgements, (deeply) impacted its study. 1

John Berger, Selected Essays (New York, 2001), p. xi.

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The globalisation of knowledge has also had a major impact on the study of culture. Until the 1960s and 1970s, culture was primarily associated with one specific civilisation, tradition, or linguistic area, and the Anglo-Saxon, French, and German cultural areas in particular were dominant. These worlds were often separated from each other academically, which meant that books written by colleagues were not always read in all languages. To this day, cultural studies remain very much confined to specific geographic areas. However, this segregation of academic traditions is now rapidly subsiding. The emergence of various cultures that do not belong to the traditions of the ‘Old World’ obliges us to revise our view of culture itself. And yet most textbooks on culture still describe the phenomenon from one specific academic tradition. This textbook will deviate slightly from this traditional stance by introducing students to a study of culture as a concept on its own terms with the help of methods from various traditions and by emphasising the historical origins of culture as a discipline. Finally, since this book explicitly aims to describe the concept of culture to students from different countries and backgrounds, it behooves me to clarify its shortcomings. How on earth is it possible for us to break away from academic tradition and theory, which developed its initial discourse on the basis of a Eurocentric or Western perspective, when we are trying to understand the history of the discipline from that very tradition? Is it not the case that all the major thinkers belong precisely to that tradition from which we are trying to break away? This problem cannot be readily solved. But I do think it is possible for us to move one step forward by breaking away from the self-defeating assumption that theory or cultural criticism is an elitist affair per se. In his book The Location of Culture, the Indian-American cultural theorist Homi Bhabha (1949-) questions whether polarisation need be a precondition for a polemic. Given that we would then forever be doomed to binarity and that freedom of knowledge will remain locked in antitheses, we must ask ourselves whether it is possible to approach the concept of culture without a specific political agenda. Wouldn’t it be nice to study culture in and of itself instead of constantly having to stress its applicability or identifiability? This emphasis on aestheticism and idealism can, of course, be labelled as typically bourgeois and self-satisfied. But I would point out that the alternative — militant rhetoric, political engagement, and social criticism — also poses a great danger. Doesn’t the omnipresence of popular media, with its own economic and political agenda, pose at least as great a threat to the survival of a diversity of cultures?

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Material Culture The idea that culture is a matter of taste with degrees of appreciation, that can be structured by aesthetical judgments, has been lost long ago. But what culture does in fact mean is not always clear. We can approach the subject in a roundabout way by using a concept that is often placed alongside culture: nature. This will allow us to see how complex the concept of culture is. An example of this nature-culture dichotomy is the gazebo bird that lives in New Guinea and Australia. For years, the bird will work on building its domed nest on the ground. With great precision, this nest will be decorated with flowers, seeds, leaves, and feathers. Everything that the bird collects is sorted by colour and shape, and none of the nests are similar. Not only does each nest have a recognisable style of decoration and colour — one bird uses blue colours, the other red berries and flowers, and a third makes use of a variety of yellow hues — but we also see how the different shades of colours are coordinated with the finesse of a highly paid interior designer. Those who have seen this bird in a nature documentary or perhaps with their own eyes may ask themselves what is left of that intuitive boundary we believe we can identify between Nature and Culture, let alone the boundaries between Culture, Nature, and Art. If this problem already applies to a tropical bird, then certainly it would apply to humans? One answer may be that humans, unlike animals, make things: pots and teacups, mirrors and combs, Coca-Cola bottles and shoes, paintings and sculptures. On this list are isolated objects that can only be understood through context, so that we can highlight the difference between culture and nature. But these objects, which themselves impart an experience without having any need for language, not only represent what people make, use, and throw away; they allow us to understand that objects are an integral part of the human experience and that therefore understanding these ‘things’ is in itself a complex undertaking. William David Kingery (1926-2000), who first developed a system on the basis of materiality — in his case, ceramics — described the complexity of ‘reading things’ as follows: No one denies the importance of things, but learning from them requires rather more attention than reading texts. The grammar of things is related to, but more complex and difficult to decipher than, the grammar of words. Artifacts are tools as well as signals, signs and symbols. Their use and functions are multiple and intertwined. Much of their meaning

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is subliminal and unconscious. Some authors have talked about reading objects as texts, but objects must also be read as myths and as poetry.2

The quote above illustrates how important it is to have a multifaceted interpretation of culture when it is compressed into an object. Indeed, the boundary between object and culture is blurred, as the interpretation of an object coincides with the culture that produced it. This recognition of complexity has meant that, since 2010, academics also refer to a material turn in the humanities, a movement that is closely related to a broader cultural turn which focused on language as the basis of all human experience. However, for the theme of this book, which examines the concept of culture in a broader sense, we will have to take more than objects into consideration. The exercise becomes more difficult when we want to add to the subjects we are dealing with such abstract concepts as the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or decolonisation. Yet both aspects — subjects and concepts — are interlinked. For example, if we associate the round Coca-Cola bottle as a result of the Industrial Revolution, we see the red and white bottle as an icon of a particular period in history. However, there is also a way to connect subjects and concepts to each other by placing them outside of history. Disciplines such as sociology, archaeology, or anthropology have developed methods by which objects, buildings, and other material objects are studied independently and as stand-alone objects. This quest to immediately understand a cultural object and to develop methods for doing so — referred to as cultural relativism — is perhaps one of the trickiest puzzles in the field. A good example of cultural relativism was in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris at the Fabrique des images exhibition between 2010 and 2011. In the text that accompanied the exhibition, it was explained that The aim of the exhibition is to show what it cannot directly show in a picture: namely, what effect those who have made [the image] wanted to achieve for those whom the images were intended. In some cases, these effects are still visible beyond the centuries and the cultural differences. Provided that the images are recognisable, very old or distant images can evoke longing, fear, revulsion, empathy, amusement, or even quite simply our curiosity. Usually, however, these effects are not noticed because 2 David Kingery, ‘Introduction’, in W. David Kingery, Learning from Things (ed.): Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington and London, 1996), p. 1.

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the conventions that led to the image taking shape remain unclear to visitors of a 21st-century museum who are chiefly used to the tradition of Western art.3

Studying objects of culture directly as they reveal themselves to us in the world today and without any historical context leads to new ways of interpretation and new structures. Examples of such new structures are the naturalistic depiction of objects (e.g. the humanist ideal of the Renaissance) or the animalistic depiction of the cosmos in which humans, animals, and plants belong to a whole (e.g. in African art or in totem poles). When these structures are placed next to each other in the form of objects, we can obtain interesting insights into the underlying culture. By restructuring objects, researchers have the immediate possibility of making contact with other worlds and other eras. We will gradually see these two aspects — the direct presence and the historicising presence of culture — as threads that are intertwined when we study the phenomenon of culture.

Cultural Criticism The question remains why we should concern ourselves with a ‘critique’ of ‘culture’. Is it really worth it? Will all these abstract concepts really add anything to what you already observe around you in a natural way in literature, art, or reality? This underlying doubt also reveals the dual problem behind ‘cultural studies’. First, there is the fact that you initially might not completely understand certain abstract concepts, although with a little perseverance (for example, by looking up specific words or names), that obstacle can be overcome. The second problem is by far the most intractable: the hesitation to study a theory of culture can be based on the fear that you will lose a form of intimacy with your own world whenever you read, observe, or listen. It is as though after reading a book on (or obtaining a degree in) cultural studies or cultural history, you will never again be able to enjoy a book, music, or movies in a relaxing manner but will always hear that voice of cultural criticism. And let’s be honest: this fear is not entirely unfounded. Because cultural criticism is still such a young addition to the family of academia, one that has only recently started growing, ‘culture’ as a subject of study is not yet fully crystallised. 3

La Lettre du Collège de France No. 28, Paris, Collège de France, April 2010, p. 13.

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When the ‘death of the author’ was proclaimed in literature studies in the 1980s, what was meant by this was that there is a significant — even insurmountable — distance between the writer as the author of a story and the text that is to be interpreted. In this view, it is strictly the text itself that should be studied — the contextualisation of the author or the period in which the work was created is not necessary. This view is directly opposed to the way in which literature, painting, and music were considered in the early twentieth century. Back then, the most important goal was to situate the created work in the life of the artist . This would allow us to understand the message of the work or the ‘moral intention’ of the creator, or so it was thought. Incidentally, this traditional approach lives on in the form of a strong interest in the genre of biography. In later years, more and more emphasis came to be placed on the interpreter — the reader, the viewer, the listener — and the author became a side issue. We will explore this in more detail in the final chapter. Today, we are in a phase in which a middle position is sought, with research primarily focused on concepts that are often derived from postcolonial theory formation or gender studies such as hybridity, diversity, and imitation (mimicry). That fact and fiction in history need not be opposites became clear in the most traumatic way in the course of the twentieth century. The Holocaust and the global political upheavals as a result of the traumatic events during the during the colonisation and Western imperialism made more and more scholars realise that sometimes reality can surpass our worst collective nightmares. The unthinkable — genocide — had become reality. The blurring of the divide between fact and fiction also holds true in a positive sense, of course: a trip to the moon is no longer a fairy tale. As a result of these profound experiences, what has emerged is a collective realisation that history is less a linear path of progress and more like a roller coaster; that we can plummet in humanitarian terms to below the level of the ape-man and that, twenty years later, we can make our greatest dreams come true. So once again the question arises: why do humans need a ‘critique’ of culture? Is it because we still believe we can be distinguished from a tropical bird, one that — just like us — likes to keep himself busy decorating his house with knickknacks? Studying culture may be in fashion, but often we don’t know what it is all about. This is partly because culture has become a catch-all term that encompasses all forms of art, music, or literature. But what is also part of cultural studies is the study of certain social groups — high culture versus low culture, for example — or the disadvantaged position

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of women compared to men in history (gender studies) and the LGBT movement (queer studies). Another component of cultural studies is the examination of Western hegemony versus the history of the East (Orientalism). And what about media studies and communication studies? These two disciplines are signif icantly influencing cultural theory and cultural history with their focus on visual culture or the changes in social behaviour in the history of communication — from the quill to the mobile phone. It may seem as though the terms ‘cultural history’, ‘cultural studies’, and cultural theory can be used interchangeably. The various terms that are used say a lot about the dichotomy that has arisen in the history of thought between the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition and the so-called ‘continental tradition’: the United States and the British Empire versus France and Germany — though the latter two countries have developed a very different philosophical approach that has spawned followers in other parts of the world. We shall return to this topic later. For now, suffice it to say that many of the misconceptions about ‘cultural theory’ rest on this dichotomy, because the Anglo-Saxon and the continental tradition differ significantly from each other both in terms of the terminology they use and the way they look at reality. Hopefully this has removed much of the hesitation the reader may have felt towards abstract theory and has aroused their curiosity. After all, some knowledge of theory does lead you to see your world through a new pair of glasses.

Bureaucracy and Civilisation We have already mentioned briefly the significant impact that the Second World War has had in the way the West perceived its own civilisation. In retrospect, there were already several indications before the war that Western civilisation was about to embark on a radically different course. In the early twentieth century, modernism had already led to criticism of the nineteenth-century ideal of Bildung, which posited that people could ‘cultivate’ themselves into a better version of themselves. Modernists challenged the old visual language of art by no longer taking figurative art, which was based on a perception of reality, as a starting point. These two developments — modernism and the legacy of Bildung — occurred synchronously. It therefore seems almost inconceivable that the work of French sculptor August Rodin — thoroughly nineteenth century in form and expression — was made in the same time period as that of the

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radical sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi, who became famous for his ‘eggs’ of marble, had even initially worked in Rodin’s studio in Paris. In the same vein, in modernist literature, the Irish writer James Joyce played around with phrases by putting more emphasis on sounds and word experimentation than on the grammatical and substantive consistency of a sentence. Joyce’s Ulysses even turned the whole structure of the novel on its head so that the fabricated notion of a ‘logical progression’ — a plot — was absent in his work. And in Germany, the avant-garde of the art world during the Weimar Republic was incredibly innovative in their criticism of the manufacturability of man. Because the Second World War was to play such a dominant role in the emergence of cultural pessimism and a deep cynicism about the idea of civilisation, we often underestimate the extent to which the perfectibility of man and culture was challenged in the most phenomenal manner in the Weimar Republic. There are plenty of examples of this: androgynous ideals of beauty with cigar-smoking women à la Marlene Dietrich; Bertolt Brecht’s plays; the opera Lulu by Alban Berg; compositions with atonal music; and, of course, cubism and expressionism in the visual arts, which later came to be referred to by the Nazis as Entartete Kunst — degenerate art. In any event, the Second World War marked a watershed in the way we define culture and civilisation. One of the political and cultural consequences of this post-war period of reflection was the founding of the United Nations, which established a separate organisation for culture and science: the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The establishment of an international cultural institution had far-reaching consequences for the way countries gave shape to their new cultural policy, whose purpose included rebuilding a Europe badly damaged by the war. In this regard, it is interesting to quote the radio speech by the British Minister of Education Ellen Wilkinson on the occasion of the founding of UNESCO in 1945. In her speech, Wilkinson argues how culture can be used as ideological medicine against war and violence. The tone is somewhat grandiloquent by our current standards, but we would do well to remind ourselves that this speech was given at a time when mankind was shrouded in the dark mists of the most terrible events in history: Now we are met together: workers in education, in research and in the varied fields of culture. We represent those who teach, those who discover, those who write, those who express their inspiration in music or in art. We have a high responsibility, for entrusted to us is the task of creating

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some part — and not the least important part — of that structure of the United Nations on which rests our hope for the future of mankind. It is for us to clear the channels through which may flow from nation to nation the streams of knowledge and thought, of truth and beauty which are the foundations of true civilization. We live in a machine age, and the world has worshiped at the shrine of the practical man and of technological achievement. But we know that progress as machine users can lead only to disaster unless we also have progress as human beings. Behind the machine, and vastly more important, is man and the mind of man. It is indeed the mind of man — the right-mindedness of man — which alone can prevent the misuse of the new powers always coming to his hand. Civilization, it has been said, represents the conquest of nature. But surely it must also depend on the development of all that is best in human nature. Lastly, we have the word Culture. Some may argue that the artist, the musician, the writer, all the creative workers in the humanities and the arts, cannot be organized either nationally or internationally. But those of us who remember the struggle in the Far East and in Europe in the days preceding the open war, know how much the fight against fascism depended on the determination of writers and artists to keep their international contacts that they might reach across the rapidly rising frontier barriers. […] Our international organization [UNESCO], intended to be a bridge between nations, must rest firmly on foundations dug deeply into the national life and tradition of the member states. 4

The message is that ‘culture’ can no longer be non-committal but should be part of an offensive to civilise man in order to counterbalance our machineworshipping, warmongering nature. A pedantic ‘finger’ is clearly at work here, and history shows just such a ‘finger’ popping up in the debate on culture. Cultural historians spend much of their time delving into this changeability of moral connotations. Wilkinson’s speech also suggests that the concept of culture is tied to the concept of civilisation. This etymological kinship is clearly reflected in certain languages, notably English and French (civilisation) and German 4 In: 60 Women Contributing to the 60 years of UNESCO — Constructing the Foundations of Peace, under the direction of Ingeborg Breines (Geneva, 2006), pp. 15-19.

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Moai, Rano Raraku, Easter Island

(Zivilisation). In a narrower sense of the word ‘culture’ — as capital of acquired knowledge — the word originated from the Latin colere, which means to ‘grow’ or ‘cultivate’. Just as the farmer cultivates his field, so too the cultivated man works on nurturing and harvesting the mind. Culture, therefore, was initially a word that referred to agriculture. The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) is one of the first who gave this originally

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agricultural word an intellectual meaning. Throughout the history of the West, this Greco-Roman interpretation has been passed down via medieval monasteries, schools, and universities. Cultivating the mind was a private matter, from the humanist ideal of the Renaissance all the way up to and including the nineteenth-century German tradition of Bildung. This brings us back to the speech by the British minister. The ideal of a universal civilisation is a theme that one comes across in many final exams and policy papers, but there are those who contend that the word leaves a bad aftertaste in one’s mouth. This is because civilisation seems to pertain to the elite who know ‘how things should be’ or to those who view the diversity of cultural influences from a certain political correctness — in short, holders of what the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) referred to as symbolic capital. Can we accept the fact that the definition of culture will always have a certain degree of ambiguity, a duality that cannot be resolved, and that the concept will always be contextual? This is what we will gradually discover in this book. The elastic versatility of meanings around the word ‘culture’ do not make it any easier, and yet it is possible to demarcate culture as a subject of academic study. We shall simply have to carry on digging. We use the word culture in the most elastic sense of the term as the sum of the collective representations associated with a particular society. Each of these terms could be the subject of a chapter of its own. The ‘total character’ of culture can be interpreted mathematically as a sum of all the features. However, the definition also shows that culture is about something quite different, namely representation. This emphasis on the whole — we call this the ‘holistic aspect’ — characterises all academic disciplines that deal with culture. If the object of study for the historian, the anthropologist, the sociologist, or the philosopher is culture, they will always strive to examine the complete picture. The creator of the concept of ‘collective representation’ is Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the father of sociology. With this concept, Durkheim tried to emphasise a collectively formulated identity. In his 1912 work, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, collective representations are described by means of rituals and conventions. Durkheim shows that these practices have an autonomous function within a culture and thus transcend the individual. An advantage of Durkheim’s approach is that through representation the researcher can create two mental forms of distance to culture: a spatial distance (geography) and a temporal distance (history). By formulating these two distances a priori, the researcher can place, as it were, the culture s/he is studying back into the created space and time, thereby allowing a culture to be represented in all its facets. Seen

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in this way, collective representation appears to be primarily an intuitive representation of culture and, as a result, the concept is by definition confined — not confined in the sense of limited but rather in the recognition of a degree of demarcation. This demarcation shows nothing more (and nothing less) than the awareness that it is simply never entirely possible to give a purely rational representation — the sum of all factors — of a culture. This reflection is of paramount importance for cultural historians, given that the temporal distance relative to the object being studied is often so considerable that one’s view of the culture is severely obscured. In addition, certain values have become so alien to us that they are difficult to imagine. Even in the case of historians and philosophers specialised in the study of contemporary society, the observer is only able to make reconstructions and analyses after the fact. In other words, the depiction of a culture becomes visible only gradually as one studies and collates accumulated customs into a meaning that steadily grows, allowing even such a thing as ‘the behaviour of institutions’ to be studied via the images, sounds, colours, and concepts that these institutions use. You could argue that an analytical study of today can only be produced tomorrow. That is what Durkheim was driving at with his emphasis on the representation of culture. And yet the question of what precisely distinguishes a researcher of ‘culture’ from the biologist who studies animal behaviour remains. And here we come back to the example of the tropical bird. The term ‘cognition’ is often reserved for neurophysiologists, psychologists, or cognitive scientists, who also commonly use the term representation. From a cultural perspective, representation is not about a hypothetical notion which has to initially be a product of the mind in order to be analysed as an object of society. In other words, for the cultural historian or cultural philosopher, the point is not to describe a cultural object as a product of the mind, as is the case with neuroscience, but as an object (artifact) of a society, whether we are dealing with a song, a Persian carpet, a Rembrandt painting, a philosophical treatise, or a football game... There is, however, a problem. What do you do when you don’t have any form of representation because the object, the recording, or the text reflecting the culture is not available? Perhaps it has gone missing, and you know from other sources that it did exist, or maybe it never saw the light of day because certain groups were simply not given a voice within their society. What do you do when you know you cannot call upon women as a source for your ‘collective representation’? When the illiterate have left no traces? When an iconoclasm has taken place and religious images have been destroyed? This form of ‘non-existence’ is, of course, not a real non-existence

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because we know for certain that women and illiterate people have always existed. Where are they, then, in the sources? This is what cultural philosophers call the ‘paradoxical modality of existence’: there is a form of existence that took place outside of our range of view. We know this by virtue of the silence behind words or the absence of a voice. Imagine a mirror: if you stand before it and close your eyes, your image disappears and yet you know that the image still exists. This same conundrum of ‘non-existence’ shows, as it were, a ‘negative’ of representation: it is not a form of non-existence but at the same time it is not (or no longer) visible. This is the case with women, with the Aborigines and their ritual acts, with singing medieval monks, or the mathematician Poincaré and his formulation of infinity. This is especially true when you think about what fiction means precisely: is it important to also consider non-visible elements in trying to understand a culture, or is it better to subject only the visible, hard measurable facts to scientific analysis? If you take the latter as your starting point under the guise of ‘real science’, then you are in fact saying that Hollywood has nothing to say about current gender relations, that a changing political system in the United States is irrelevant when trying to understand our world, and that the discovery of the Higgs particle does not say anything about the way we see the universe. I would argue that a better understanding of the world we live in is an important objective of the humanities, and a study of the development of the concept of ‘culture’ makes this objective even more relevant. My hope is that the reader will find that this little truth is highly significant and should actually be self-evident.

The Structure of this Book The reader may find it useful to know in advance that the various cultural interpretations examined in this book are categorised thematically, although an attempt has been made to maintain chronological order. I only depart from the chronological order of theoretical ideas when explaining specific concepts or interpretations. Each chapter begins with the basic concepts that are required to contextualise certain developments in ideas, establishing links with previous or later chapters. Bear in mind that for each new chapter, the reader should put on a new type of glasses in order to understand why another perspective on culture became necessary at that particular time in history. In the first chapter I discuss the classics — the first thinkers engaged in studying the concept of culture in a theoretical way. Then in the second

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chapter, the concepts of psychoanalysis and the history of mentalities are reviewed. The third chapter on language represents a kind of fulcrum, both in the literal sense in the book and in mankind’s thinking about culture. Since the linguistic turn, language has been seen as the cement that holds together a porous concept such as culture. Chapter 4 discusses the opposite of language: silence. We examine how Marxism made an essential contribution to cultural theory by focusing our attention beyond just the elite, which had largely determined the canon of cultural history. Marginal and often oppressed groups, including women, are also a part of culture. Related to the problem in chapter 4 is the theme of chapter 5, which deals with non-Western cultures. After a brief historical explanation about the impact of colonisation, we examine such topics as Said’s orientalism and the hybrid state of non-Western cultures that at the same time are under the influence of the West. We will also discuss the Eurocentric view of cultural criticism. The book concludes with a chapter on what culture does to people in practice. What does cultural criticism signify within the hegemony of Western visual culture? What do we mean by the practice of remembering, and how does collective memory work? Before wrapping up this introduction, I would like to clarify two underlying principles supporting the diversity of thought in this book. The tension between Nature and Culture is the central theme in my argument. The view of man as a biomedical creature is so dominant in today’s culture that it is almost as if this tension is a new starting point to highlight the development of the concept of culture. While man, according to this biomedical view, has to deal with neurology, pathology, age, birth, illness, and death and is part of nature, this very same man gives form to life and death through rites of passage, literature, music, and visual arts. The latter is what we call ‘culture’. The second principle has to do with cultural interpretation. Throughout the book we will consider whether there is what you might call a contrarian or an accommodating cultural interpretation. When we interpret a text, an object, or a society in an accommodating way, the subject seems to encourage further reflection. A Marxist cultural interpretation of a soap advertisement from the 1920s may invite us, for example, to think more deeply about the fashion and style of the poster or the position of women and the principles of hygiene at the time. On the other hand, a contrarian cultural interpretation of the same poster can force us to reflect on (implicit) norms and values it expresses. When we interpret the poster in a contrarian manner, we analyse elements that the image itself seems to be unaware of. The image of a housewife busy hanging up her spotless laundry to dry appears to be unaware of

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the patriarchal social image that is evoked. The black man appearing in a chocolate advertisement from the same period unwittingly contributed to a racist message. An accommodating cultural analysis focuses on the message the author or creator wanted to convey, while a contrarian cultural analysis focuses on all sorts of things that are not part of the picture. Sometimes we do not even know what the intentions of the author were, and even if we did know, there may still be any number of unintentional connotations surrounding the message. All the themes in this book relate to these two underlying principles: the issue of Culture versus Nature on the one hand, and on the other hand the question of whether a cultural interpretation is accommodating or contrarian.

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The Classics

Is it still possible to speak of the West as a well-defined culture? If you ask people living in Western countries, which started out as nation-states in the nineteenth century, they themselves appear not to know anymore. The European identity is under considerable pressure. Is a myth being punctured, or does this identity crisis point to a new awareness that old structures in the world can no longer be described using a maritime compass perpetually aligned with the north? Some consider Christianity as the historical-moral glue that kept ‘the West’ together — with the division into an eastern and western part coinciding with the contours of the Roman Empire. But ‘the West’ has for hundreds of years also been the Wild West of the United States. As a result, the ‘Western’ narrative has for a long time had a globalising perspective on the world, with all the ambivalence towards a core identity as a consequence. We will discuss this ambivalence in more detail later in this book because it has given rise to certain analytical approaches to culture. The emergence of modern analytical models goes back to the insights gained in the nineteenth century in the field of human culture, which is governed by natural instincts. It is for this reason that Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is still important — implicitly and explicitly — for the analysis of art, film, music, and literature. The analytical ambivalence that Western scientific culture carries within itself — both suggestive and analytical in nature — was once described by Freud by means of Leonardo da Vinci, the homo universalis: In truth, the greatest possible contrast exists between the suggestive and the analytic techniques, that contrast which the great Leonardo da Vinci has expressed for the arts in the formulae per via di porre and per via di levare. Said Leonardo, ‘the art of painting works per via di porre, that is to say, places little heaps of paint where they have not been before on the uncolored canvas; sculpturing, on the other hand, goes per via di levare, that is to say, it takes away from the stone as much as covers the surface of the statue therein contained’.1

The field of culture is steeped in ‘the human experience’ in which countless expectations or disappointments per individual within that culture lead 1 Sigmund Freud, Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses, lecture for the Wiener Medic. Doktorenkollegium on December 12, 1904.

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to new thought structures. This is why the work of the sculptor, to use Da Vinci’s terms, is so relevant. While the dominance of a scientific vision, a collective mind within a populace, or media suggests ever new cultural patterns, the cultural scientist tries not to add but rather to remove things and thereby to expose the hidden image, just like the stone-cutter. The aim is to give space to the authenticity of a culture within the numerous variations that are possible and to allow this culture to exist on its own terms. In the Introduction, I called this principle the epistemological ability to perceive the autonomy of the cultural object. But the question remains: how can academia develop a toolkit that would do justice to all forms of culture? Can the ambivalence of the cultural scholar be solved? The toolkit of Da Vinci’s stone-cutter has its origins in the Italian marble quarries. But with metal chisels, one cannot sculpt the sandy soils of the desert nor the fragile biotope of the Amazon rainforest. In our efforts to understand the deepening effect of cultural science in history so that the development of the discipline at Western universities becomes more transparent, we will always encounter this ambivalence. The specificity of an analytical tool is to handle the diversity of culture. The founding fathers of the discipline did not have such a complex vision of cultural science: they operated in what was often a regionally functioning academy where everything was still comprehensible and where no further explanation was needed — at least, not for the insiders of the discipline themselves. We cannot elude the fact that the emergence of ‘culture as a science’ has its origins in the universities of Europe. But the dominance of a systematisation of knowledge within the university, as opposed to globalisation in a world where there is a great diversity of knowledge exchange, is no longer self-evident. The thrust of this chapter is to understand how the academic approach to culture has developed over the centuries, in what context we should place these approaches, and how we have broken free of old premises over the centuries. In short, in order to understand why certain thinkers opposed a dominant image of culture within the humanities, we must first describe that original image of culture.

The Foundations of Cultural Criticism Although there are a number of scholars who could qualify as being the ‘inventor of cultural history’, Voltaire (1694-1778) is certainly a strong contender. His Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (‘Essay on the customs

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Voltaire, portrait by Moreau le Jeune (1846)

and spirit of nations’) from 1756 is a first attempt to broadly outline the development of Western civilisation. Voltaire worked on this voluminous work for some sixteen years before it was published, and he continued to work on it until his death. Voltaire wanted this monumental work to be a universal historiography of civilisations, attempting to synthesise the history of mankind in all periods and all circumstances. His underlying ambition was to reject an apocalyptic

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and therefore theological conception of history, which includes the eschaton (ἔσχατον) — the final end within a divine plan in which the Last Judgment of man takes place. Voltaire’s objective was to write a comprehensive cultural history focusing on mankind’s belief in progress, as a result of which we are able to write our own history. As is true of much of the work from the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s interpretation of history is scrupulously teleological. This term, derived from the Greek word telos (τελοζ), means ultimate purpose. We must therefore be careful when using both the concepts of theology and teleology: the two words have virtually opposite meanings! A teleological form of cultural interpretation assumes that human behaviour is always aimed at achieving the good. This rational form of cultural interpretation is forward-looking and refers to the behaviour of both the human race as a whole and the individual. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) is considered to be the one who devised the concept of teleology in the sense that Voltaire used it, i.e., without the presence of a god-like being with a plan for human civilisation. For Aristotle, Nature itself represents the principle of change and thus the beginning and the end of history. Human reason should help civilisation, as in Nature, to ‘do good’ in the (near) future. There is no doubt that a teleological interpretation of human civilisation has left a decisive mark on the way we understand culture. This faith in progress – by which culture increasingly came to be considered more sophisticated, complex, and better – originated in the Enlightenment and definitively took root in the nineteenth century. The scholar Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) was deeply influenced by the radical upheavals in her life, which included the French Revolution and thereafter the turbulent Napoleonic era. She astutely summarised the new cultural Zeitgeist in her 1880 essay La littérature dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (‘Literature in relation to social institutions’): ‘[I]t is the gigantic civilisation that replaces the king’. As the concept of culture gradually became a field of study in the early nineteenth century, there soon arose the need to distinguish between cultural studies within the fields of history and philosophy. We will see in this book that cultural history has often tried to bridge the differences between these two branches of academics, for better or for worse. Unlike an event-oriented historiography in which historical events and politics dominate, a new interest in the development of ideas in history gradually began to emerge. In the preface to his voluminous Histoire de France from 1869, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) advocated a historiography in which laws and political actions were linked to a history of ideas or customs. How did this interest emerge in the nineteenth century? From the above examples, it is clear that the French language and

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culture have played a central role in the development of a scientific method to write about the cultural past. This was a result of the country’s Enlightenment tradition and its dramatic break with the ancien régime, which led not only to the literal beheading (by guillotine) of the ‘cultural’ upper class of society but also to the destruction of monasteries and churches. But the debate on civilisation took place in other countries as well. One example is the work of Edward Gibbon, who wrote his mammoth study, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while traveling through Europe between 1776 and 1789. Gibbon endeavoured to describe the history of thirteen centuries with the underlying ‘philosophical’ goal of uncovering the development of Western civilisation itself. For example, he sets the fall of Rome in 476 against the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The idea behind this comparison was a plea for a ‘rational’ and ‘military’ civilisation in which powerful leaders and generals would drive the nation towards empire. He saw the coming of Christianity with its eschatological focus on a better life in the hereafter as a threat to the practical functioning of Western civilisation. Not without irony, he wrote in his Memoirs that he had described the victory of barbarism and religion. Gibbon’s analytical interpretation has become a classic example of the ‘Anglo-Saxon tradition’ in which history is presented as explanatory and factual, separate from any kind of philosophical interpretation. Interestingly, the strongest counterargument to Gibbon came from another scholar from the same Anglo-Saxon tradition. Irish historian Peter Brown (1935) described how Christianity was not the only ‘culprit’ responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire; indeed, he found that the opposite was true, namely that it was by virtue of the Christianisation of culture that a common civilisation developed. Be that as it may, it is now no longer customary to idealise Roman civilisation à la Gibbon and to see it as the sole basis of Western culture. The examples above — from Gibbon’s military interpretation to Madame de Staël’s view on culture as an alternative to monarchy — give an idea of the split that existed between the so-called continental tradition (represented by Germany and France) and the Anglo-Saxon tradition (represented by the United Kingdom and the United States). This division remains relevant. The Anglo-Saxon tradition is analytical and descriptive in nature and is focused mainly on political history. Academic tradition in the Anglo-Saxon world makes a clearer separation between philosophical approaches and intellectual and cultural history. By the same token, the United States has been the vanguard of innovation in cultural theory and cultural analysis since the Second World War, with European thinkers incidentally often playing a central role in this, as we shall see.

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The trans-Atlantic shift in cultural studies can be explained by history itself. The teleological perspective of civilisation with its faith in progress had been badly damaged in the two world wars. In battered Europe, people had become wary of excessive claims about ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’. And yet before the world wars, it was the German tradition in particular that had contributed to a ‘history of civilisations’ and ‘cultural history’. We mentioned in the introduction the exceptionally creative period of the Weimar Republic between the two world wars. But also before the First World War, German culture and philosophy played a leading role — so much so that we must take a moment here to go into it in more detail.

Herder and Hegel In German-speaking countries stretching from the Baltic Sea and the Rhine up to the Southern Alps, a systematic programme arose that was called Kulturgeschichte. Under the influential scholar Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), the dominant Berlin view of history was empirical, objective, and therefore ‘positivist’. In this view, the past could be described wie es gewesen (‘as it was’), and the question of access to the past — how to get a picture of a time and culture that no longer exists — was essentially a non-issue. The cultural past existed as an objective fact. In contrast to this approach in which man and human behaviour were seen as a constant, a historicist movement developed within German Romanticism that sought more links with philosophy. This movement focused on the diversity of cultures and identities. As a member of the Sturm und Drang movement, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) wrote about the history of civilisation in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (‘Ideas about the philosophy of the history of mankind’). This work has been of immense importance for anyone studying ideas within a culture as an academic problem. Herder showed that knowledge of an idea in culture was not an absolute given but a philosophical and historical question that was preceded by interpretation and methodology. This is why every civilisation, every period, and every culture should be studied within their own parameters — and not by historians looking through their ‘moral glasses’. And one could certainly not assume that access to the past was something self-evident. This kind of cultural interpretation is called historicism; it marked a definitive break with the teleological interpretation of the development of civilisations. From this moment on, culture came to be seen as a subject of study within the field of history. An important concept that Herder introduced to describe the panoramic nature

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Johann Gottfried Herder, painting by Anton Graff (1785), in Gleimhaus Halberstadt

of culture is the word Zeitgeist. This is a concept that is broad and difficult to grasp. It typifies Herder’s philosophy, which is fundamentally unsystematic. Herder had an aversion to any rigid system of thinking and was therefore also critical of philosophers such as Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. For a scientific approach to culture, it is worth dwelling briefly on why Herder loathed the systematic approach so much. After all, shouldn’t the tools of philosophy be systematic in nature? Herder’s answer to this question is twofold. On the one hand, he did not believe that to come up with a

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new idea you needed a systematic approach; instead, he saw the process of systematising as contrary to the creation of a plan or idea. A logical consequence of Herder’s thinking is that building a system shuts off the inquisitive and critical mind and ultimately blocks new insights. This may help us to better understand how someone like Herder could conceive of a concept like Zeitgeist. While Enlightenment philosophers and cultural historians such as Voltaire or the Scottish philosopher David Hume assumed that man was essentially unchanging in time and space, with history teaching us nothing new, Herder argued that man is actually unimaginably variable when dealing with concepts, beliefs, feelings, or interpretation. Not only were people variable in a broad social sense, according to Herder, even within the same period, there could be two people who were very different in the way they dealt with ideas, beliefs, and feelings. The theory of human and cultural variability had a huge impact on hermeneutics (the study of how to interpret texts). Herder was certainly not the only scholar of German Romanticism who dealt with the problem of the (variable) relationship between the past and the present. Any introduction to the concept of culture will inevitably mention the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel distinguished between three types of ‘cultural history’: the original historiography (eyewitnesses and chronicles), reflective historiography (scientific), and philosophical history (teleology). Like Herder, Hegel saw the Renaissance as a significant rupture, with its ‘elevated spirit of humanity’ forming a significant contrast to the previous period, the Middle Ages. Hegel’s interpretation of culture was very much focused on the humanistic ideal of ‘the new man’ born in the Renaissance. The introverted nitpicking of the Middle Ages was replaced by man’s desire to seek out new worlds. According to Hegel, the discovery of America ‘can be compared with the break of dawn, in anticipation of a beautiful new day after the long, dramatic, and dreadful night of the Middle Ages’. As we go along, we will grasp just how much of a mark Hegel has left on the way we look at culture today. Many of the approaches that are considered in this book are, in fact, nothing more than attempts to add nuance to this view of history. This also implies that almost everything in (cultural) philosophy can be traced back to Hegel. Nonetheless, Hegel’s view did need to be refined somewhat, not only because Hegel assumed that man will always improve morally as time progresses and because he espoused almost aggressively anti-religious views, but also because he took the elite as a starting point for ‘culture’. In Hegel’s philosophical-historical system, the ‘dawn’ of America’s discovery heralded the ‘game-changing sunrise’ of the Reformation and thus

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modernity. This interpretation of culture was very closely linked to the idea of ‘the new man’, of which the main features are technological progress and a metropolis where one seeks entertainment and art. In the Hegelian way of thinking, the complete system of art — from massive Egyptian pyramids and Greek sculptures to less recognisable paintings, from nineteenthcentury photos to videos made on a smartphone — takes on the form of a temporal hierarchy. In other words, the teleology of cultural history leads to the increasing sophistication and complexity of artifacts from the same culture. Remarkably, music had no place in this temporal hierarchy of Hegel; it was technology-oriented man, the discoverer, that was the focus, and hence progress in technology was equated with modernity. We see that, in addition to technology, the concept of art played an important role in Hegel’s definition of culture. There could simply be no downfall in this model, only a logical progression of the ‘Zeitgeist’ that precipitates change. In classical cultural history, parallel to the school associated with Ranke that was focused on the objectivity of history, there was an important trend that took variability in culture as a starting point. It was as if there were two ‘camps’: in one camp, the upper layers of culture such as the political actions of leaders and socioeconomic issues were studied, while the other camp looked at the magical, folk history, folklore, and the mundane. It was this latter group that challenged Ranke’s conception of wie es gewesen the most.

The Culture of the Renaissance One scholar who definitely should be mentioned in connection with Ranke is the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). Although the intellectual relationship between Burckhardt and Ranke remains a matter of debate, they will in a certain sense always be linked together. While Ranke saw the state as a centre of political stability, Burckhardt regarded political power as malicious. Similar to Herder, Burckhardt had an aversion to systems. This did not mean that he considered ‘facts’ as completely irrelevant or non-existent. Burckhardt can be considered diametrically opposed to Hegel, who indeed saw a ‘system’ in all cultural manifestations, from pyramids to poetry. In this distaste for systematics, there is also an important Herderian concept hidden in Burckhardt’s thinking: the reconstruction of the Zeitgeist of a particular period. At the same time, Burckhardt’s vision was very much teleological and, like Hegel, he regarded the ‘new man’ of the Renaissance to be superior

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to his predecessor. In Burckhardt’s world, the new man would provide a Zeitgeist in which all aspects of Renaissance culture would be united. His work The Cicerone from 1855 aimed to be a ‘guide to the delights of Italian art’. This description reveals that thorough knowledge of Renaissance art had become part of a broader ideal of civilisation by the middle of the nineteenth century. Burckhardt said the following about this: The generalized facial types are now replaced by individualities, the former system of expressions, gestures and draperies is replaced by an infinitely rich truth to life.2

In the process of coming to a definition of culture, the concept of the Renaissance was used as a lever opposite religious art, which transferred man to a different and more transparent world. In the process of devising a broader discipline such as Kunstgeschichte, an ideal developed that focused on the Renaissance and humanism. This nineteenth-century antithesis between a ‘secular’ Renaissance culture and the ‘primitivity’ of art from the supposed religiosity of the Middle Ages still has a large following in the academic world, where rationality and religion are regarded as each other’s ideological opposites. The Cicerone can be regarded as Burckhardt’s preliminary study to his 1860 masterpiece Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (‘The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy’). Curiously, there is no chapter on art in this book. This was a grave omission, as Burckhardt himself would later admit. He would correct this omission, as we know from diary entries how Burckhardt proceeded with his book during the four years it took for him to complete it. He collected seven hundred fragments from Vite (Lives) by the Florentine painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). This work, in which Vasari discusses the most important artists over a period of 300 years, is still one of the most important biographical sources of Renaissance art. Until the twentieth century, Vasari was considered compulsory reading within the ideal of Bildung, helping to instruct the youth in their self-cultivation by means of education and philosophy. In Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Burckhardt portrayed a vivid panorama of the pomp, pageantry, greed, and desire for fame in the Renaissance — and he described what the many travelers on the streets of Florence, 2 Burckhardt, Cicerone, 2, vi, p. 186; cited by E.H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, ed. 1974), p. 17.

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Siena, and Venice felt about this ostentation. With his work, Burckhardt intended to show that an ‘objective’ and empiricist view of a culture and its past can in fact only be subjective and that the (art) historian in effect operates as a mediator between the past and the present. Burckhardt’s secret lies in the principle that he was one of the first who built his masterpiece around a theory. The huge amount of documentation that Burckhardt used can only be processed when there is a theory behind it that helps in guiding, directing, and selecting. This method consisted of Burckhardt’s assumption that elements should be selected from all manifestations of a culture. Thus Greek architecture, sculpture, and philosophy were starting points that enabled Burckhardt to describe to what extent these elements were an expression of the Zeitgeist. The result of this investigation was a framework that was aimed at an almost mathematical logic in which each detail referred to a general, underlying principle. What was concealed in these early works on cultural history was an exegetical disposition that was mainly about identifying and explaining links and connections. This principle is also clearly visible in Burckhardt’s successors. This gradually put the cultural specialist in a quandary, for creating the kind of coherence that Burckhardt was striving for was not easy. While the philosopher, art historian, film scholar, political historian, or theologian deals with one aspect of society, with the subject matter remaining within a single framework, the cultural scientist attempts to establish logical connections within an entire universe of meanings. This emphasis on broadening the definition of ‘culture’ is precisely Marxism’s claim (we will come back to this point later). What is particularly striking about the designers of ‘classical cultural history’ is how these pioneers were engaged in a quest for a superstructure in which material conditions manifested themselves.

The Warburg Institute One of Burckhardt’s followers was Aby Warburg (1866-1929). It was primarily the breadth of Burckhardt’s interpretation of culture that formed the basis for Warburg’s own ideas. By founding his own institute in London, Warburg gave shape to his ideal. The entirely new foundation offered the public the chance to learn about culture through interaction with all kinds of human cultural artifacts: books, coins, paintings, textile work, and so on. The establishment of a cultural institute would provide an opportunity

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for people to study the symbolic forms of culture such as those seen in ethnology, religious history, language, philology, and astronomy. The synchronous nature of culture, with a focus on parallel developments, thus became a fundamental part of Warburg’s work. His most complex contribution is the article Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1918). The text paints a vivid picture of sixteenth-century Germany as: the age of Faust, in which the modern scientist — caught between magic practice and cosmic mathematics — was trying to insert the conceptual space of rationality between himself and the object

and prepared the way for the future of the Kulturwissenschaftlern [‘cultural scientists’]: May the history of art and the study of religion — between which lies nothing at present but wasteland overgrown with verbiage — meet together one day in learned and lucid minds (minds destined, let us hope, to achieve more than the present writer); and may they share a workbench in the laboratory of the iconological science of civilization.3

The quotation shows how the tension between text and image is evoked through the function of symbolism in culture. Iconology (not to be confused with iconography) is the study of visual imagination and its symbolism, particularly its social and political signif icance. It was to become Warburg’s life project. Although his having been born into a very affluent banking family made it possible for him to realise his dream of establishing a cultural institute, already by the 1920s his Jewish origins put the survival of the library in Hamburg in danger. His health was also worrisome, plagued as he was by severe depression. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer supported Warburg in his laborious writing process in which he gradually developed a method using the above-mentioned cultural symbolism as a point of departure. Cassirer continued to encourage Warburg to complete his book on the ‘philosophical encyclopaedia of man and his symbols’. It gradually became clear that Warburg not only had a historical approach in mind but also aimed to realise an intrinsically interdisciplinary approach that handled art in particular as not simply a discipline concerned with ‘beautiful pictures’. 3

https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about/aby-warburg (01-02-2017).

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Botticelli, La Primavera

When the Warburg Institute moved to London in 1926, it immediately became a monument to the human sciences with an emphasis on the human mind, in particular the influence of ancient history on Western European culture. Above the doors of the institute, the word mnemosyne (‘memory’) was inscribed in Greek letters. The inscription was Warburg’s way of emphasising that the institute was devoted to the cultural studies of antiquity and its Nachleben (‘legacy’) in the Renaissance, true to the tradition of Hegel and Burckhardt. The Nachleben of classical antiquity was certainly not the only research topic that Warburg included in his library. By introducing terms such as ‘exchange’ and ‘immigration’, Warburg stressed the need to study the cultures of Northern and Southern Europe together rather than as separate specialisations. He also believed there was no such thing as a superior culture. By studying the dynamics in the Flemish tapestries of the Middle Ages, Warburg showed that folklore — at the time identified as a form of low culture — likewise consisted of a ‘style’ that was part of the total concept of culture. Style was thus no longer the exclusive domain of an elite but belonged to culture as a whole. Recent research has begun to reassess Warburg’s idiosyncratic beliefs. The ‘Warburg method’ not only shows a deeper psychological understanding of

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culture, it also aims to demonstrate how dangerous it can be to only want to understand Western culture from one type of rationality that is considered superior. Warburg, who died rather young of a heart attack and never experienced the Second World War, was concerned about such a superior attitude, which he feared could lead to superstition, anti-Semitism, or political radicalisation. Research in the spirit of Warburg attempts to go further than simply establishing an objective and empirical inventory; it aims to show the origin of social meanings, images, symbols, and beliefs oriented toward the ‘Second Enlightenment’ that Warburg had envisaged with his institute.

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics In addition to examining the connections between styles in art, thought patterns, and historical events, research on culture in the 1920s increasingly began to incorporate ideas from the new discipline of psychology. This had everything to do with the theories of Freud on the subconscious, which is what the next chapter will be about. It is hardly surprising that psychology was to occupy a central role in the cultural sciences. Didn’t Hegel’s Geist or Herder and Burckhardt’s Zeitgeist already imply that something like a ‘spirit’ existed that held together the cohesion of a culture? When, as a young theology and philosophy student, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) had to write a review of Burckhardt’s work, he was standing at the crossroads of different approaches that would later grow into different academic disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Dilthey wanted to develop a method for the school called Geistesgeschichte in Germany, literally translated as ‘intellectual history’. The natural sciences had developed a strong empirical methodology by the end of the nineteenth century, and Dilthey felt it imperative for the humanities to formulate a counterpart that was at least as solid. The laws of science made a clear distinction between the subject and the object. The observer or machine (the subject) measures a thing, a molecule, a cell, DNA structure — in short, an object. In this process, the subject and the object are strictly separated. Dilthey felt that the humanities had to develop a contrary method by which the identification of a subject and an object would take place in a much less segregated manner or by which subject and object would even flow into one another. Seeing and experiencing a world (he called this Weltanschauung) is essentially connected to a psychic structure and a personal horizon that link man to his past, present, and future. According to Dilthey, understanding a culture from the past required

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an inner articulation of the time structures within our own perception as well as an external objectification by others. In his important essay on the emergence of hermeneutics, Dilthey makes a clear connection between history and philosophy. For him, history is only valid if it is able to transpose the extraordinary within history into its universal nature. He writes: … the inner experience, through which I obtain reflexive awareness of my own condition, can never by itself bring me to a consciousness of my own individuality. I experience the latter only through a comparison of myself with others. 4

While you may believe that your own life with its own past can provide insight into who you are, Dilthey argues that we can only understand ourselves by objectifying ourselves and seeing ourselves from the outside. Understanding ourselves requires that we approach ourselves as others approach us — from the outside in: The process of understanding (Verstehen), in as much as it is determined by common conditions and epistemological means, must demonstrate the same properties everywhere.5

Academic interpretation is shaped by the fact that a systematic approach or regulation precedes the process of objectifying and understanding, says Dilthey. When the inner consciousness is developed in relation to cultural elements within framed norms, values, and ideas about the meaning of life itself, forms can be found in which elements are expressed through poetry, religion, and philosophy. Hermeneutics stands for a theory in which all human objectifications are interpreted. This includes not only the spoken or written word but also visual and artistic expressions, gestures, observations, and actions. This new vision of the concept of culture, in which the inner is connected to the outer, has been invaluable in the development of the humanities and in particular for the influence of an interesting movement in philosophy: phenomenology. In addition to his essay on hermeneutics, Dilthey wrote what is considered his most important work: Der Aufbau der Weltgeschichtlichen in den 4 W. Dilthey, Selected Works. Volume IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History, R. Makkreel and F. Rodi (eds.) (Princeton, 1996), p. 236. 5 Ibid, p. 237.

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Geisteswissenschaften (roughly translated as ‘The structure of the historical world in the humanities’, 1910). The concepts of Verstehen and Weltanschauung also take centre stage in this book, along with a new term that he introduced: Wirkungszusammenhang (‘interdependency’). He wanted to emphasise that the way in which a system functions is important when trying to understand a culture. According to Dilthey, the functioning and efficiency of life and the historical world must be understood by means of productivity before a causal relationship or teleological interpretation can be applied. The bearers of history — individuals, cultures, institutions, or communities — are systems that produce norms and values. Each individual is thus a psychic productive system that is connected to other, more comprehensive systems. These broader systems — culture is one of them — come into being through communication, exchanges, and cooperation between individuals. These broad systems can outlive the individuals that devised them. A good example of Dilthey’s theory of both Verstehen and Wirkungs­ zusammenhang is the research conducted by the Biorobotics Institute of the School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. They are conducting research on both the technical and cultural significance of the interaction between man and machine. The quality of experience in the use of technology is increasingly becoming key. Through the use of technology and robots, a new collective memory comes into existence in which the mythology of antiquity is woven into today’s science fiction. By developing robots that can express human emotions — and that are increasingly able to ‘read’ emotions in other people — we are faced with new ethical questions concerning what Verstehen precisely encompasses. Accordingly, Dilthey has by no means disappeared behind the curtains of history. Because Dilthey also wrote a biography about Hegel, his thinking is often considered to be related to the Hegelian system or to be a response to it. Unlike Hegel, however, with Dilthey it was never about explaining phenomena but about understanding them. Because his work was translated into English at a much later date, Dilthey’s influence in the Anglo-Saxon world has only slowly gained ground. Interestingly, it was none other than the sociologist Max Weber (18641920) who introduced Dilthey’s ideas to the international community of cultural researchers. For Weber, hermeneutics is the web that man has woven around himself. He argues that it is precisely this web that we call ‘culture’. The analysis of culture is a process, according to Weber, in which the subject and the object can no longer be disentangled from each other. This hermeneutical position held by Weber comes directly from Dilthey. However, one question within Dilthey’s hermeneutic model remained

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unanswered: what to do with those factors the historical actors are not aware of? These invisible factors are what the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929) called ‘unconscious motivation’. Habermas maintained that hermeneutics, the discipline within which Dilthey sought intellectual rigour, can be reached through the principles of Freud’s psychoanalysis. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the subconscious is key: much of our conduct in adulthood stems from supressed feelings from our childhood. We will discuss this ‘theory of repression’ in more detail in chapter 2. For now, suffice it to say that Habermas was searching for a combination of ‘scientific’ psychoanalysis and the humanistic hermeneutics of Dilthey in order to bring forth a new kind of research on the study of the human species. Central to Habermas’ theory, which combines these two aspects, is the role that communication plays in what he calls the ‘public sphere’. In his book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (roughly translated as ‘The structural transformation of the public sphere’) from 1962, Habermas describes how eighteenth-century salons and coffeehouses created a new kind of space for debate. These areas were, in fact, a kind of theatre of politics: it was here that people could express themselves politically in a demarcated realm in order to reach a new self-image: this new sphere was not ‘private’ in the traditional sense (i.e., family life), but also was not governed by either the state or the market. Habermas claims that people began to perceive themselves as equal citizens, which in turn enabled the ordinary citizen to undergo a major historical and cultural trend in the direction of democracy. And within family life in early capitalist society as well, a new self-image was able to develop within the confines of a private, trusted environment. Until this period, families were part of the public space and were not familiar with the intimacy of conversation that would characterise family life later. For Habermas, therefore, there was no distinction between the salon and the coffeehouse or the living room and the ‘political space’. This classification of ‘public spaces’ has changed significantly with the emergence of the media, which should actually be reporting on what is being discussed in terms of political self-images in all areas. But journalism has become entertainment, posited Habermas, an aspect of our culture in which commercial interests have become dominant. Gone are the exchanges of views; public opinion is solely a sociological study of groups within society with ever more mixed opinions. Habermas called this non-public opinion, and he saw it as something passive because it numbs the natural instinct of man to act and thus to create culture.

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But now we are getting ahead of ourselves. The influence of the historicist approach to hermeneutics, mapped out by people such as Dilthey and Habermas, is visible in all disciplines of the humanities. These scholars rejected the kind of cultural analysis that only looked at form and wanted to introduce a historical awareness to the study of literature. They argued that the only way to understand a text from the past was to have a unique encounter with that text by virtue of its specific and individual character. The traditional way of reading texts meticulously, through a close reading, was only focused on exceptional and brilliant texts, which thereby ignored the more common forms of culture. Thanks to Burckhardt’s imagination and Dilthey’s Verstehen, it is now possible to outline a historical representation of a culture that is not solely focused on historical events. While Burckhardt sought to capture the collective Zeitgeist, Dilthey focused on the circular relationship between the interpreter and his object. Burckhardt’s emphasis on the collective character of culture was at odds with Dilthey’s focus on the specific and the individual. However different they were from each other, both scholars had in common that they were focused on the political, cultural, or intellectual elite. This was not the view of Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), who is internationally recognised as the founder of cultural history. He was a pioneer who ‘invented’ a discipline by using a method that sought to combine anthropology, philosophy, comparative linguistics, art history, and history. He began his initially difficult career as a Sanskrit student in Groningen. After his plan for his thesis (entitled ‘The Deployment and Setup for the Study of Light and Sound’) was rejected by his supervisor, who felt it was not sufficiently focused on linguistics, Huizinga changed course and received a PhD for his research into the role of the jester in an ancient Indian play. But he continued to meet with resistance within the academic world, and his broadly oriented publications encountered rejection upon rejection. For about ten years, Huizinga earned a living as a history teacher in secondary schools. It was not until 1905 that he finally received a job at the University of Groningen. Ten years later, Huizinga became professor of history at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Unlike Burckhardt and Dilthey, Huizinga believed the common man was also part of culture. He posited that objects of culture in history demonstrated a plurality of form and function in society, allowing us to retrace themes, motifs, patterns, and even emotional life in a culture. Huizinga attached great importance to the study of cultural codes, for example the significance of ‘obedience’ and the concepts of ‘honour’ or ‘resistance’. He also considered objects such as the garden, the landscape, the marketplace,

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The Waning of the Middle Ages. Manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose

or the pub to be part of culture. The ultimate goal of cultural history should be its mutability of form, according to Huizinga, who felt that this quest for the essence of form and thought ideally should take place in different periods and be spread across various countries.

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Johan Huizinga gained international fame with his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919. Almost immediately after publication, the book was translated into English and German. The book’s subtitle is telling: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. For this study, Huizinga made use not only of famous paintings, Flemish tapestries, and sculptures that were created at the court of Burgundy, but also certificates, literature, and eyewitness accounts. While Burckhardt wanted to place his ‘new man’ in the bright Mediterranean light of a new day, Huizinga, who greatly admired Burckhardt, tried to present an image of more or less the same period in northern Europe in the light of the dusk. Both Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien and The Waning of the Middle Ages dealt with the question of continuity and ruptures in man’s views on culture throughout history, but the way in which they elucidated any particular time period was fundamentally different. The biggest difference between them was the interpretation of culture as an elitist affair (Burckhardt) versus the notion of culture as a phenomenon that spreads like wildfire, seeping into every nook and cranny (Huizinga). In The Waning of the Middle Ages, Huizinga described the religious devotion and the artistry of the music and literature in order to portray the mentality of the Middle Ages. He did so using themes such as chivalry, heroism, love, religious sensitivity, and death. By emphasising the expressive power of language and image, including sound and experience, the feeling of uncertainty in the ‘dazzling life of that time’ can be described — and precisely this ‘intensity’ made it clear that the notion of ‘waning’ from the title was not solely intended to be interpreted as decay. The power of this classic book lies in Huizinga’s choice to use metaphors such as ‘life’s intensity’ or ‘waning’ in which complex cultural structures are melded together into a truthful cultural image. Although Huizinga’s description of the Middle Ages was completely unique, we must remind ourselves that there had already been veritable hype in the study of the Middle Ages from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in France and at the European universities of countries such as Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands — the latter two still under strong French cultural influence, similar to the way American culture is currently a defining factor in the scientific world. In terms of their intellectual and methodological significance, both Burckhardt and Huizinga’s approach to culture rejected the ‘positivism’ of Ranke and tried to make space for intuition and imagination. It is important to note that Huizinga did not think history was a purely mental fabrication. He

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did believe that imagination and a sense of aesthetics were preconditions for reaching a solid understanding of history and for paving the way for rational explanation. Though Huizinga focused on the stratification of culture, his approach in The Waning of the Middle Ages has been criticised because for the most part the book describes the elite culture. In another of his famous works, Homo Ludens (Latin for ‘the playing man’) from 1938, he explicitly mentioned the connections between high and low culture. Huizinga described man’s playful character as an essential part of civilisation. Homo ludens expresses himself through language, the law, the art of combat, sport, art, and philosophy. We shall return to this theme of ‘man the player’ as part of culture in the last chapter of this book.

2

Man and Mentality

Having covered the main nineteenth-century reflections on the changeability and immutability of man as a cultural being, we begin this chapter with a discussion of the subconscious and the changeable side of man. Whether we realise it or not, psychoanalytic concepts dealing especially with the subconscious have become a part of our daily lives. When you tell a friend who is angry with you that he ‘shouldn’t take it out on you’, you are making a psychoanalytic remark that demonstrates your awareness that the anger is not directed at you but stems from an unpleasant experience — perhaps one that occurred in the past. In any case, it is something that you yourself are not responsible for. Concepts such as ‘a defense mechanism’ or ‘an inferiority complex’ have become so commonplace that we use them even in our conversations in the pub. The disadvantage of using these terms so loosely is that we do not always know exactly what we are talking about with all our psychoanalysing. Moreover, if ‘psychoanalysis’ leaves too large a footprint in our lives, it gives us the feeling that we are structurally sick or abnormal. All this can culminate in a distrust of psychological babble and lead to the conclusion that psychoanalysis is nothing but mindless babble. Yet it can be useful to examine several concepts from the f ield of psychoanalysis for two reasons. First, psychoanalysis can genuinely help one to analyse a culture more thoroughly, and second, cultural theorists frequently used concepts from psychoanalysis over the course of the twentieth century, which led to decisive steps being taken in the f ield. In this chapter we will f irst explain a number of key concepts stemming from what is now known as ‘classical psychoanalysis’ — that of Sigmund Freud. Our use of these psychoanalytic concepts is obviously very simplif ied, and we do not delve into the development or the complexity of Freud’s way of thinking. We will discuss the way in which psychoanalysis was applied in the social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly by the École des Annales in France, and what the consequences were for research into the history and sociology of culture.

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Photo of Sigmund Freud from the archives of The New York Times (1922)

The Subconscious: A Beginning When we see the world through the eyes of a psychoanalyst, it is populated with individuals who all have a psychological history. All these personal

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histories start with childhood experiences, which are formed by behavioural patterns that are then further developed through adolescence and into adulthood. These patterns are a direct result of that childhood. Psycho­ analysis works on the principle that dysfunctional behaviour or disorders can always be traced back to one’s childhood. The emphasis is placed on the behavioural patterns resulting from experiences from one’s childhood, because a repetition of destructive behaviour, for example, may mask the underlying psychological problems without our being aware of it. In other words, without realising it, our ingrained behaviour can exercise so much control over our lives that it works against us. This is why it is important to consider a key concept: the subconscious. The Rolling Stones had a hit in 1969 with the song ‘You can’t always get what you want’. The crux of the song is clear: after having been rejected in love, we put on the song, pep ourselves up, and move on by singing along to the lyrics ‘you get what you need’. The longing for love, the fear of rejection... these are all human motivations that give insights into the drive behind our conduct. This was Freud’s greatest insight: everything we do is fueled by our drives. If we modify the song by the Rolling Stones to accommodate a psychoanalytic interpretation, the lyrics would go something like this: ‘You don’t always get what you consciously want, but you get what you subconsciously need’. The subconscious is like a huge warehouse where all the painful emotions and feelings are stored safely without the owner having access to them or even a clear overview of them. When the subconscious — our ‘mental warehouse’ — has been excessively suppressed in childhood, an unhealthy kind of frustration can arise, resulting in the obsessive urge to compensate, anxious behaviour, or a narcissistic personality. The suppression of the subconscious is called repression. Literature, music, art, and myths are full of instances of such repression. The best known is the Oedipus complex: the competition between a child and a parent of the same sex for the love of the parent of the opposite sex. What is important is that these are seen as stages in everyone’s individual psychological development and are thus essentially healthy. It only becomes unhealthy when one does not go through these stages smoothly (the aforementioned repression). A example can be found in the principle of the ‘good girl’ versus the ‘naughty girl’ with regard to women. When a son is engaged in a battle with his father for the love of his mother, he will regard women who are like his mother as ‘good’, while women who are not like his mother are ‘naughty’. This results in a permanent tension between attraction and repulsion to women in his life. This attitude towards women in Western culture can be seen in the exaggerated contrast between an idealised mother as the Virgin Mary, or

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the seductive type of women we see in advertisements. But this image of female typologies obviously dates back further. In the case of Oedipus-like power relations, women usually get the raw end of the deal. Women are assigned an often invisible code that in effect means that good girls have no power. As a result, powerful women are labelled as ‘typically male’ in their behaviour and labelled a shrew. This implies that all women are, in fact, flawed versions of men. It is precisely on this point that Freud has been most criticised: his argumentation is based purely on a male perspective. Be that as it may, we can bring about profound changes in culture when both men and women recognise the underlying psychological mechanisms of collective destructive conduct. We only need look at the visual culture on the internet to see just how pervasive the Oedipus complex is in society and how much of an impact this visual culture has on both girls and boys. To sum up, we can say that central psychological points fundamentally affect our entire way of functioning and that we all have defense mechanisms against our fears.

The Significance of Death Studying culture is not restricted to only the ‘visible’. A crisis can reveal deeper wounds, wrong decisions made in the past, and more general dysfunction. We can also remain stuck in the past because we only see which of our decisions were right and which were wrong in hindsight. A trauma can be used to ‘block’, as it were, a painful event from one’s memory. For example, a person can turn a trauma from one’s childhood such as the death of a friend at school or a terminal illness in the family into feelings of guilt or denial. In this way, the trauma is repressed. Death is clearly a difficult but core concept in cultural studies. Interestingly, in studies dealing with death in culture, death itself is often treated as the absence of something. By emphasising absence, we repress the all-encompassing presence of death. When psychologists, lawyers, or historians are directly confronted with death when reading the results of a forensic examination in murder cases or in studies on genocide, they try to embed a certain distance between themselves and death. They do this for the sake of ‘self-preservation’. But what part of yourself has to be saved? Freud looked at the matter differently and turned the problem around. He saw death itself as a biological drive (thanatos), which he used to warn people about their subconscious desire for war. For those involved in cultural studies, Freud’s view of death is important for the realisation that death is a cardinal component of any

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culture because it is part of the human psychological reality. How death is dealt with is a matter of the ‘cultural makeup’. A familiar example of our fear of death (or drive) can be seen everyday in newspaper obituaries, where the bereaved sometimes report that their nearly 100-year-old loved one has ‘unexpectedly’ passed away, despite the normality of someone at such an advanced age dying. The French religious historian Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) depicts in a more subtle way how death is dealt with in the West in his Histoire et psychoanalyse entre science et fiction (published in 1987), which described Christianity as the religion of the ‘empty grave’. After Jesus was crucified and buried, he rose from the dead, as is commemorated annually by Christians during Easter. Christianity had only an ‘empty grave’ as a reminder of the human form of Jesus, who came back to life as a result of this ‘resurrection’. This made the man Jesus into the divine Christ. For Certeau, this feeble evidence of an empty grave was reason to question whether there had perhaps been a collective trauma in Christianity. This is not the place to discuss the pros and cons of Certeau’s thesis, but there is something to be said for studying the church — with its eternally recurring rituals, music, and visual culture (or precisely the absence of such a visual culture) — as a monumental façade in which the absence of death plays a key role. Incidentally, the transcendence of death is a basic tenet of virtually all religions. Sexuality is also a universal phenomenon with religious connotations. Freud also had a thesis for this, namely that our sex drive (eros) should be seen as the counterpart of our death drive (thanatos). But for Freud, this antithesis was not enough to be able to understand human behaviour. For him, sexuality was a key concept of human identity, and this identity did not confine itself to having sex, but encompassed a more profound awareness of the pleasures of life such as good food, nice clothes, or art. We call this hedonism. Freud even wrote that children had a learned awareness of sexual pleasure through the oral, anal, and genital development of the human body. This naturally was not well received in Freud’s era, when sexual repression still reigned supreme. To return to the topic of death, how can death and sex be two sides of the same coin? Let’s turn the problem around: the greater the role of death in our psychological life, the greater our attraction to it, despite our feeling of horror. Docu-dramas about natural disasters are regularly shown on television; we tend to walk towards a car accident when we see one nearby; detective stories are almost always about gruesome murders; the newspapers are full of death threats, extortions, and abuse; and, last but not least, by far the most research money is awarded to medical research

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to counteract unmerited deaths at very young ages. This obsession with death starts early: children like to play computer games in which the main character leaves a trail of death and destruction using machine guns or martial arts.

The Perfect Other Up to this point we have only talked about classical Freudian psycho­ analysis. While it is clear that we cannot discuss the entire history of psychoanalysis here, we would not do justice to the impact of the notion of subconscious processes on Western culture if we neglect to mention an important principle: the mirror stage. This principle is a very important element in literature and the analysis of images in Western culture and is used primarily in film studies. The term was coined by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). To understand what Lacan was referring to with the term ‘mirror stage’, we must go back to the psychological beginning of childhood as the basis for a person’s subsequent behaviour. In the first months of a lifetime, argues Lacan, a child discovers itself and its surroundings in a fragmented and arbitrary way. Everything around the child is a shapeless mass that it cannot make sense of. In fact, a baby does not even know that it has a body, let alone arms and hands that can manipulate objects. Its own toes are just as much toys as a block of wood or a tinkling bell. Lacan suggests that somewhere between the sixth and eighth month, a major change takes place because that is when the mirror stage occurs. From this age, a child will recognise itself when looking in a mirror or a window as someone other than its parent or caregiver. Lacan’s point is that from that moment on, the child sees itself as a whole within a mass that remains rather shapeless. In other words, the child develops the sense of self that manifests in that initial recognition continues beyond the moment of recognising yourself in the mirror. Of course, the child cannot express this budding self-awareness, for it cannot speak yet. This brings us to a second term that was important to Lacan: the imaginary order. The term did not refer to a fantasy world but rather the world of perception. It is the world that the child discovers through images and not through language. This imaginary order is total, complete, and perfect, because the child feels it is the centre of the world during this phase. The child has control over its environment of which it is a part. It also has control over its caregiver: I need only my caregiver, and my caregiver needs only me. For Lacan, this experience is one of the key

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Baby at Play, painting by Thomas Eakins (1876), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

moments in the psychological development of man, because it precedes language and relies on a purely visual environment. After this phase the child will acquire language, and consequently the visual environment becomes increasingly symbolic. This is Lacan’s third stage, which he calls the symbolic order. From the moment a child learns to speak, it becomes aware that this perfect, imaginary world is actually fragmented. It learns that ‘I’ is different from ‘you’ and that ‘dad’ is different from ‘chair’. The child also begins to develop an awareness of sex: it realises that it is a boy and not a girl, for example. In this third phase, the child experiences a great sense of loss, according to Lacan: the loss of control over the world. This sense of loss is beyond repair, even though we are subconsciously conducting ‘repair work’ on a permanent basis. Why don’t I have a bigger house, a prettier nose, a higher position in the company, and all those other things that I should have according to the symbolic order but cannot attain? As a result of language acquisition, we lose our grip on the world. Thanks to Lacan, we realise that psychoanalysis and philosophy are not far apart. Lacan’s theory is used by scholars of film because it provides a convenient model for the analysis of images and, in particular, for the

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Poster for the movie Rear Window

relationship between the image and the suspense of the unspoken. The Slovenian sociologist and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek (1949) has made extensive use of Lacan’s thesis for his study of Hitchcock’s films, such as Rear

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Window and Vertigo. In these movies, everything that is shown seems to have meaning, but the film is in fact about a staggering gap between reality and a woman who cannot be reached, according to Žižek, illustrating how popular culture sees Woman as an art object. In the academic world, popular culture is usually the area of research of cultural sociologists, who focus on the tension between (observable) reality, symbol, and language. We will return to this in the last chapter. For a definition of culture, it is important to remember that Lacan considers language to be a tool to ‘retrieve’ the lost, symbolic object of desire and that this desire extends to the way we perceive ‘the other’. The importance that Lacan attaches to the relationship between language and reality forms a basis for postmodernism (or poststructuralism), which we will discuss in the chapter on language. A quick note about the term postmodernism is appropriate here, because this term often leads to confusion and we will be referring to it repeatedly in this book. After the 1960s (and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, which will be discussed more later), a looser naming of thought currents emerged, which led to postmodernism and poststructuralism being used interchangeably. But poststructuralism is more applicable to the French tradition that focuses on linguistics and symbolism, while postmodernism is used more generally to portray an era in literature or the visual arts. In both cases, however, it is both a response to modernism and an elaboration upon it.

Invented Tradition How does psychoanalysis, with its pretentions of being ‘timeless’, relate to ‘historical’ problems such as tradition and memory? Humanities scholars — historians, art historians, philosophers, literary historians — know better than anyone that even something such as traditions are (re)invented to give shape to culture. Many aspects we now experience as traditional originate from the late nineteenth century or the modern era. In their book The Invention of Tradition, the British historians Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) and Terence Ranger (1929-2015) introduced the principle of invented tradition, that thereby suggests historicity. The Scottish kilt, the Buddhist philosophy surrounding yoga, the celebration of Valentine’s Day: these are all examples of invented traditions. The emerging nationalism of the nineteenth century was key to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s argument. The rise of nation-states was a new phenomenon, and the new states had to distinguish themselves from the age-old tradition of monarchies. To give more flair to the history of

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these new collective identities, traditions were invented so that the people as a whole could identify with their own ‘ancient’ culture. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s book has, of course, received its fair share of criticism, but for now it is important for us to realise that many so-called ‘traditions’ in our modern culture are fairly recent constructions from a historical perspective. The clearest example of this is the culture of folklore. The philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) called this the history’s fear of heights, emphasising that, in history, there can actually be no originating thought. But what about the origin of a culture or the shaping of a collective memory? This cardinal question had become so pressing for many scholars that a new movement was to emerge that would study culture in a completely different way.

The History of Mentalities The French historians Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) joined forces under the name École des Annales, leaving a definitive stamp on historiography and the social sciences by introducing the concept of ‘mentality’. With this approach, they aimed to leave their mark on intellectual history. Many English-language historians use the translation ‘history of mentalities’ but just as many use the French term histoire des mentalités, because the English word mentality refers specifically to an attitude (whether healthy or not), while the French mentalité emphasises how the autonomous process of history unravels new perspectives on the process of civilisation. The history of mentalities gives prominence to ordinary people in ordinary life. The main topics it covers are ideas about childhood, sexuality, family, and death as they have developed in Western civilisation, as well as the dimension of a ‘total history’. Indeed, the history of mentalities is an important starting point for asking historical questions given its emphasis on the everyday lives of ordinary people. This is why the École des Annales is sometimes incorrectly used as a synonym for the history of mentalities. As it so happens, there are two important differences. Historians belonging to the École des Annales mainly address the material reality in which historical man finds himself under the influence of economic processes, social structures, and the development of the environment (the erosion of the mountains, the formation or drying up of rivers, the draining of polders). Historians investigating mentalities, however, are primarily interested in the psychological reality that underlies human interpretations of intimate relationships, hidden under the banality of

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habits and customs. Another area of focus for such historians is man’s attitude toward fundamental changes or passages in life, such as when a person is considered to be an adult. Examples of so-called rites of passages include a girl who has her first menstruation and thus is considered to be sexually mature and thus ready for the marriage market, a boy who celebrates his bar mitzvah and from that time forward can take part in the Jewish community, a student who gets her driver’s license, or an employee who reaches retirement age. The second distinction between historians from the École des Annales and historians in the tradition of the histoire des mentalités is that the latter are more focused on intellectual history. Moreover, this trend predates the École des Annales. The members of the École des Annales incorporate terminology and ‘themes’ that had been developed by classical cultural historians such as Burckhardt and Huizinga. As we mentioned earlier, for these historians cultural issues were focused on matters related to the Zeitgeist and the interpretation of that image. Adherents of the history of mentalities obviously took pains to put these worldviews into social and political frameworks, but the creation or disappearance of ideas was always their starting point. Within this historiographical tradition, culture chiefly meant so-called ‘high culture’ and the changing norms and values of the elite, who usually set the trend for change. To avoid any misunderstanding: the elite involved in this context was not only the financial upper crust of society; the elite of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was made up of both people with a significant amount of material possessions and those who had much less. We could also say that historians in the tradition of the history of mentalities are primarily interested in the avant-garde of society that developed new ideas, ideas that subsequently became important for society as a whole. From the 1920s onwards, the idealistic nineteenth-century view of culture began to lose influence. In a sense, you can also view the history of mentalities as an attempt to bend the idealistic tradition of cultural studies towards the other extreme: the common man. Incidentally, in the last few decades, academics have been gradually returning their attention to elite culture. Key to this attempt to reformulate ‘culture’ with a broader analytical scope is the shift in the concept of a worldview. The new historians investigating mentalities no longer wanted to assume a single idealistic point of view but rather emphasised the structures within which new concepts and ideas developed. By structures, these historians referred to all forms that regulate the mental activities of man: aesthetic images, linguistic codes, gestures, religious rites, and social habits.

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By describing these forms, the new historians attempted to sketch a mental universe that consisted of the specific features that guide and regulate a culture. Of paramount importance for this method was to show how rational and emotional human characteristics could change and to see whether the interaction between rationality and emotion says something about a culture. This change in focus — away from the intellectual elite and towards the ordinary person — caused the traditional distinction between high and low (or popular) culture to disappear. It is crucial to remember that for all these pioneers — both the historians investing mentalities and the first historians of the École des Annales — the theorisation of the concept of ‘civilisation’ was at the top of their agenda. The philosophical theologian Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) can be considered a precursor of the École des Annales, as he was the first to claim that embedded in Western culture is the unfounded preconception that there is such a thing as a dichotomy between a primitive mystical spirit and the Western rational man. In his main work La mentalité primitive (‘The Primitive Mentality’ from 1922), LévyBruhl introduces concepts such as ‘collective representation’ and ‘mystical participation’, explaining how the so-called ‘primitive’ pre-modern spirit in Western culture does in fact make use of an underlying logic. His ideas on the term ‘mentality’ were adopted and further developed by the Annales. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) also adopted certain aspects of Lévy-Bruhl’s discussion of ‘primitiveness’. Because of the similarity in their names, students sometimes mistake the one for the other, but the differences between the two thinkers are significant. Lévy-Bruhl was interested in the logical structure of the mysterious primitive mind, while Lévi-Strauss was mainly concerned with the (linguistic) structural character behind this primitive mind. We will be coming back to Lévi-Strauss repeatedly in this book.

The Mental Toolkit: Lucien Febvre What is actually left of the Annales? Anyone walking on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris will come across a large building, halfway down this broad street, in the architectural style of the 1970s, which is the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, or ehess). This institute has detached itself from the more conventional universities and has become one of the most prestigious French institutes of higher education and research. The education offered by EHESS is only for Master’s and PhD students, and the research is focused on the interaction between social sciences, the humanities, and a theorisation

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of the ‘human sciences’. Along with the more empirically minded Sixième Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (ephe), the institute is a tangible legacy of the Annales. It all started at the University of Strasbourg where, as mentioned above, Bloch and Febvre decided to collaborate on their academic interest in culture and mentality. Febvre’s classic work on mentality is his study of the radical sixteenthcentury French writer Rabelais and the problem of unbelief, entitled Le problème de l’incroyance au XVI siècle. La religion de Rabelais (‘The problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century. The religion of Rabelais’). For now, it is not so important to know the specific works and literary characteristics of Rabelais, the ‘French Shakespeare’. The main thing is to be able to follow Febvre’s argument. Febvre takes a radically modern concept — atheism — as the basis for his analysis of a culture from the sixteenth century. In chapter after chapter, he unfolds the structural limitations of this concept when applied to a time period in which the word was unknown. Lucien Febvre argued that an idea is never an abstract entity with a timeless completeness; on the contrary, an idea always develops within a certain context. The ‘mental toolbox’ (outillage mental) that sixteenth-century man had at his disposal, such as environmental factors or institutional and linguistic forms, places conceptual limitations on the mental universe of man. Febvre suggested that, given these specific mental thought forms, something such as ‘unbelief’ was unthinkable for people living in the sixteenth century, even for an avant-gardist and sceptical humorist as Rabelais. Rabelais’ way of life was, like his way of thinking, imbued with religious imagery. According to Febvre, these limitations within the development of new forms of thinking had both a hermeneutic and a structural dimension. Man needs coherence (vision) and form (structure) to give shape to his idea. In their coherence, the dominant concepts and ideas constitute central points upon which man calibrates his worldview. All ideas, including new ones, should therefore be examined in the light of these fine-tuned landmarks. New ideas are always born from what is already known. Even when a person ‘re-invents’ his or her worldview entirely, the novelty of that image must be given shape within the contours of an existing worldview. No matter how intellectually daring or artistically innovative people were in the sixteenth century, they were never completely devoid of religious dominance, which provided the mindset for interpreting their world. Lucien Febvre concludes that the historical interpretation of Rabelais as the first defender in a long line of freethinkers in the tradition of a timeless concept — namely that of atheism — is untenable. The development of an idea is trapped within the same creative process as other human attempts at innovation. To understand the mental world of

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sixteenth-century man, one needs religious imagery. The idea of a secular world would only have been possible if people in the sixteenth century had an autonomous secular world at their disposal. Febvre’s colleague and friend at Strasbourg, Marc Bloch, was also interested in the antithesis between religion and rationality. There is no doubt that this shared interest can partly be explained by the French tradition of laïcité — the radical separation of church and state — as a result of the French Revolution. Bloch’s contribution to the history of mentalities is of a different order, however. While Febvre focused on hermeneutics and the ‘timelessness’ of concepts, Bloch was chiefly interested in the phenomenon of superstition. He wrote a paper about the magical powers ascribed to French and English medieval kings that allegedly enabled them to heal skin ulcers. In his Les Rois thaumaturges from 1924 (English translation ‘The Royal Touch’), Marc Bloch described how the symbolism and representation of the monarchy could lead to widespread superstition. How on earth was it possible, Bloch asked himself, for so many people to participate in this collective delusion? Bloch was intrigued by the extent of popular belief in magical powers, so he set out to describe the power of such a ‘collective illusion’. He was astonished to discover in medieval sources that even those critics who questioned the healing power of kings never doubted the ‘truth’ of the healing itself, and that statements by witnesses were based on little to no evidence. By emphasising the massive scale of this illusion, Bloch wanted to describe the historical nature of collective psychology. He also wanted to compare this with the collective psychology of the modern mind. The worldview of someone in the Middle Ages was full of wonders, most of which were explained by supernatural causes. The medieval monarchy was literally holy and thus otherworldly, and this notion of holiness clearly manifested a high degree of elasticity, one that could extend to a mass illusion. People in the Middle Ages were evidently not used to subjecting the causes of miracles such as healing to the kind of criticism that modern man applies. This less structured worldview in the Middle Ages gave people the space to speculate freely about cause and effect in the world, like seasons happening, people healing from sickness and the sun rising every morning. A rational critique of miracles, such as that of David Hume in the eighteenth century, would have had no purpose whatsoever in the wider medieval culture, even if an example of this were to be found in Bloch’s archival research. Within the history of Western civilisation, medieval man had a different perspective; the divine served as an emotional refuge where the ability to be critical could function only partially. Only through the civilisation process itself did the human psyche acquire the form that it now has, says Marc Bloch.

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Febvre and Bloch never explicitly formulated a theory of mentalities. They did, however, found the journal Annales de l’histoire économique et sociale together in 1929 with the support of their Belgian colleague Henri Pirenne. Bloch became a professor at the Sorbonne in 1936 but had to leave the university in 1940 under the fascist Vichy regime due to his Jewish origins. He moved to the south of France and was active in the resistance until the Gestapo arrested and executed him in 1944. Despite his early death, the impact of his thinking on historiography has been of immeasurable importance. By focusing on a concept such as the ‘incomprehensible’ in a study of the underlying tendencies within a culture, including the incomprehensible nature of his own time, Bloch ruthlessly exposed the limitations of an approach based purely on political or legal history. Febvre ultimately played the most important role in the anchoring of the methods of the École des Annales. We have already mentioned his notion that outillage mental formed the building blocks of culture. Lucien Febvre was concerned with the question of not only what people think but how it is at all possible that we develop new ideas. For Febvre, therefore, the cultural historian’s main task is to ascertain the mental horizon of a period, not on account of future perspectives but in order to determine the boundaries of a mindset within a particular time and culture. New ideas can be useful, but they are generated within ancient structures and intellectual conventions, so that even something like innovation will always refer back to an older frame of reference. The issue of culture is therefore not directed at a visionary leap into the future, but rather on the everyday tendency of man to revert to his own life, anchored in the past. It was for this reason that Febvre believed the historian should seek the centre of human experience as that which is most resistant to change. It is important to mention that, in Febvre’s view, emotional life also belongs to the cultural specialist’s field of research because emotions help to create new ideas. There is such a thing as a ‘historical curve’ in collective psychology in which emotional life is at the centre of a culture, organised through myths and rituals. This puts Lucien Febvre’s views close to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, though the latter was not primarily interested in the historicity of culture. We will return to this in the next chapter. The later work of historians who aligned themselves with the École des Annales shows less interest in the emotional dimension of cultural processes. With the help of ethnology, linguistics, and demography, the emphasis came to lie on quantitative research and how popular culture functions thanks to the data that was collected. For these historians, Febvre’s original model to develop a general theory of culture was always the guiding

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principle. Extensive studies on topics such as the history of childhood and family life (Philippe Ariès), the Inquisition trials in a Provençal village (Emmanuel Le Roi Ladurie), or the history of the Mediterranean (Ferdinand Braudel) have become textbook examples of the École des Annales. Although important for historiography, these examples have little to do with the theoretical question of culture.

The Civilising Process of Norbert Elias Someone who was associated with the École des Annales but was from a different cultural field was Norbert Elias (1887-1990). Born in Silesia and deceased in Amsterdam, Elias played an important role in the social sciences worldwide. His most important work, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, appeared in 1939 in Germany. Although Elias himself did not claim to have intellectual ties with the École des Annales, there are clear similarities. Using the perspective of structures, Elias outlined a developmental theory that emphasised the slow processes of change when it comes to rules within social life. For example, he studied the reason behind table manners such as the need to use a fork and, as a result, in a broader sense, how the mentality of a society towards the attitude to physicality could change. Most scientists at the time considered this kind of theme to be too insignificant and sometimes downright ridiculous. In short, they felt these were issues that did not merit serious research. Opinions have since changed, and many cultural scientists now take Elias’ theory as their starting point. Almost everyone agrees that there is a direct link between social and psychological processes. Taking the protracted view of history from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, Elias described how man was the architect of (social) etiquette, which enabled him to structure his emotional life. This etiquette acted as a kind of cement around which man, with all his psychological and social relationships, built his worldview. One example is the invention of the fork. Until the late Middle Ages, people used only spoons, and Elias describes how the invention of the fork led to a process of civilisation and the development of table manners. By imposing self-discipline and obliging people to neatly prick their food, the use of the fork meant that it became increasingly important to respect one’s dining companion and that it was considered rude to wolf down one’s food. This example demonstrates a crucial point made by Elias: that social and psychological processes are mirror images of each other. By studying indications of human sensitivity to their social surroundings (such as with

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the fork), the culture specialist can gain insight into changes within the entire civilising process — changes that boil down to the increasing complexity of the rules of social conduct. Forming a culture or civilisation is like taming an animal: man’s relatively instinctive nature (slurping, gobbling, belching, pointing) is gradually replaced by behaviour that is socially and psychologically disciplined. As the Western man binds his behaviour into an increasingly complex and tighter straitjacket, his emotional life becomes ‘domesticated’, as it were. Elias argued that, more generally, the violent mood swings of people in the Middle Ages were gradually replaced by the steady and restrained character of modern man. The sloppy manner in which people dressed was also replaced by a highly sophisticated coding of clothing and style, which became the decorum of modern man. The loose manner of speaking was replaced by more stringent grammatical conventions and the rules of poetry, and the matter-of-fact attitude towards sex was replaced by an almost prudish morality. Elias argued that any change in civilisation occurs via ‘thresholds of shame’; thus, a shame culture changes history. Because emotion and affect are constrained by rules, human feelings become more and more refined. This also makes the civilising process a ‘sensitivity process’. Even a concept such as ‘mental health’ is decisive for our behaviour and has become part of the civilising process. By mapping out changes via the ‘thresholds of shame’, the contours of the Western personality become visible. The underlying structure of changes operates just as a turn signal does for the driver so that he knows that the person ahead of them is turning. For Elias, this ‘drive’ full of surprises and changes represents a socialised form of human creativity into which power is poured, as it were, because the ‘traffic light’ indicates via a code when the driver must turn left or right. Unlike the historians of the École des Annales, this brings Elias close to the intellectual historian who is searching for the cause of cultural change in the power of the idea itself. Elias argued that ideas that guide civilised behaviour are always formed by an elite that sets the standards, which are then more widely adopted by the other layers of a culture. This thesis leans heavily on the Marxist category of social classification, which we will discuss in chapter four. Norbert Elias differs from Marxists in his emphasis on social integration instead of social conflicts, which he formulated in his book Was ist Soziologie?. He saw the history of Western civilisation as an elaborate process of democratisation, one in which ‘civilised’ behaviour is gradually subsumed by society as a whole and not exclusively reserved for the elite. The question is: at what point does this civilising process come to an end? It is also questionable whether Norbert Elias’ thesis remains tenable

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in light of intercultural issues: how can we relate seemingly traditional institutions in South China — such as temples, family ties — to the modern Chinese civilising process of the state with a ‘civil society’? If we were to apply Elias’ theory to this example, we would focus not so much on the competition between local entrepreneurs and the Chinese state or the way this competition is spawning a new system of social values. The question would instead be much more about how this process of social change is facilitating new power structures in which strategies of self-interest and collective morality are being reshaped. It was in the civilising process that Elias saw modern man’s destiny: as the civilising process was increasingly internalised, people would know less and less about their own cultural roots. Elias predicted that a (collective) memory loss of one’s own culture would take place. Because knowledge of the civilising process as a collective pattern would disappear, and thereby also evidence of a cultural past, the daily rituals that man used to rely on fade away. Old habits and rules were no longer discussed because they were tacitly considered to be general knowledge. Whereas the civilising codes do not disappear completely, a social conflict would arise under the surface. This is the price of the civilising process: one’s social room for manoeuvring becomes smaller, not because the codes are becoming more refined, but because the memory of one’s own culture is disappearing and a deeper awareness of the need to regulate no longer exists. As a result, the human psyche experiences an increase in personal stress, and people become increasingly inward-looking. Norbert Elias’ definition of sentimentality as an evasion of lost opportunities for cultural expression came close to Bloch’s notion of the ‘sacred’ as a form of collective illusion. In short, the definition of culture used by social scientists and historians in the tradition of the history of mentalities includes not only an immutable long-term history of the human mind but also the increasing curtailment of spontaneous behaviour.

A History of Ideas Of the numerous attempts to grasp culture, people, and mentality, there emerged in 1950s Germany a movement that dealt with Begriffsgeschichte (a history of ideas). Like the École des Annales and Norbert Elias, the followers of this school wanted to formulate an alternative to the historiographical approach focused on events. Without the use of words and concepts, no history could be written. Through language, people can understand the world around them. This occurs in humans as early as their infancy, as we

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saw with Jacques Lacan. Without language, man would not be able to orient himself in life. The history of ideas is concerned with concepts from the past that have played a leading role in the establishment of institutions, cultures, or systems. This may sound abstract, but in fact this happens around us on a daily basis; through (mass) communication and conversations with each other, we create our world. The history of ideas, however, is concerned with a more fundamental problem: how does an idea that dominates politics or culture arise through dialogue? A more complicated question to ask is how it can be that guiding ideas change over time and (geographical) space. Ideas are, after all, never exactly the same everywhere, and their meaning can change over time. And two different cultures can give the same idea two very different meanings. Because of this variability, ideas develop a history. This makes language a historical source, allowing us to study history not only from the outside — through events — but also through its mentality. A key figure within Begriffsgeschichte is Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006). By reflecting on the ideas of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ in history, he made a link between the history of language and political change. His best-known hypothesis was about Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (basic concepts in history). He described how the German language developed from an old language into a modern language between 1750 and 1850. According to Koselleck, this period may also be considered a ‘transitional period’ in which concepts discarded their old guise and acquired a new meaning. Koselleck also wrote numerous essays on the changing significance of ideas such as ‘Bildung’, ‘progress’, ‘decline’, ‘patriotism’, and ‘revolution’. Koselleck’s influence within European universities was significant; many studies dealing with ‘heritage’ or ‘culture’ used the history of ideas as their starting point. But there was also criticism of his approach. In the history of ideas, the Enlightenment often symbolised the birth of modernism, and Romanticism was considered the starting point of national unification. This assumption contains two major epistemological problems that we have already encountered with Herder and Hegel. First, it implicitly assumes that a belief in progress exists in which ‘modern culture’ is delineated by the existence of a belief in progress. Second, there is a significant risk that a concept is projected back to the past, even though other words may have been used at the time, so that we can’t use the vocabulary of modern concepts in historic contexts where they may have used different terminology. Consider concepts such as ‘citizen’, ‘heritage’, ‘fatherland’, and ‘culture’, the meanings of which have changed in the course of history. This brings us to our next topic: the problem of language in the study of culture.

3 Language The social sciences have contributed in various ways to the analysis of culture. We already mentioned psychology and anthropology, but the development of new disciplines of economics and sociology in the early twentieth century also left their mark on the concept of cultures. The emergence of the working class and a new social awareness in society in which the establishment no longer reigned supreme made researchers aware of the question of whether culture can be studied from the angle of the position of the (political) elite in relation to a multi-layered society. Workers, artisans, statesmen, and intellectuals, women, and social outcasts: all were part of economic business cycles, political discord, and religious changes. Seen in this way, the position of the individual has always been caught up in some kind of social network. When factory workers did not organise themselves into an active labour movement (something Marx had predicted), there had to be a social explanation for this. Some cultural specialists considered this emphasis on utilitarianism — that is, the focus on the utility and practical materialism of social change — to be limited. Did people seek nothing more in life than wealth, power, and status? It turned out that seemingly fixed social categories — such as artisans, merchants, women, and slaves — varied depending on the place and time period. In short, a purely social explanation for changes in culture, with a strict focus on material evidence, gradually became less accepted. Since the 1980s, the research question has conclusively shifted to culture, and numerous studies have been conducted on symbols, rituals, language, and social practices. This paradigm shift, in which the status of language served as a starting point, made frequent use of anthropology. Because of the emphasis on language, this movement in the 1980s has also been called the linguistic turn, with strong roots in structuralism and post-structuralism (or ‘postmodernism’), for by its very nature, language involves structure.

Structuralism The first thing to mention about the word ‘structure’ is that it does not necessarily indicate an activity. You may not necessarily be engaged in structuralist activity when you study the structure of a building to see if it has been built solidly. However, if you are examining the physical structures of the first skyscrapers in Chicago built between 1884 and 1939, you are trying to discover

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Sunset over Manhattan, New York (1932)

the underlying pattern of the composition of these buildings, such as the technique used, the aesthetic form, or the architecture. You are also engaged in structuralist activity when you establish a relationship between a single skyscraper and the way in which this model was copied in Manhattan, New York. In the first example, you focus on the classification of a system; in the second, you show that a single example can belong to a specific structural type. The same applies, in fact, to culture and language. You are not engaged in structuralist activity when you summarise a story to see whether there is an argument and whether it is well written. But you are engaged in structuralist activity when you analyse the underlying principles that move the entire text in a certain direction, such as the order in which events unfold, the characterisation, or the characters’ roles with respect to the story as a whole. You are also engaged in structuralist activity when you compare a single text to a particular system. In short, structuralists are not interested in individual phenomena except when they reveal something about the underlying structure. This systematic study of human experience pertains to various disciplines, from linguistics to anthropology and from sociology to literature studies. For a structuralist, the world has two levels: a visible and a non-visible level. The visible world is everything we see on the surface, such as objects,

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actions, and behavioural patterns. The invisible world is the structure beneath the surface that organises all the phenomena in a way that we can understand our world. Whether we realise it or not, structuring principles allow us to distinguish, for example, vegetables (which are grown in the ground, reproduce themselves, and are edible) from stones (which do not grow in the soil, do not reproduce themselves, and are not edible). As a culture evolves, the structuring principles becoming increasingly refined. As a result, we are now able to distinguish medicinal plants from nonmedicinal plants, and one DNA structure from another. Without organising structures, the world would be chaos. Structuralists see structure as a conceptual framework that we use to classify our world. For a structuralist, everything that is observable belongs to a system, whether we actively know that system is there or not. A structure may belong to a culture, in the past or the present, and language exhibits an organising capacity in this. The question, however, is whether knowing and studying language on the surface (e.g. the speeches of Cicero, the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, a nineteenth-century novel, the iconography of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, or the artwork of Marcel Duchamp) is sufficient to discover the underlying principles of that culture (e.g. the culture of prominent Roman plebeians, the hybrid Mexican identity that merges local Indian customs and Catholicism, Romanticism, religion in the late Middle Ages, or Dadaism).

Narrativity In his unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, the American writer Henry James (1843-1916) described how the young historian Ralph Pendrel went on a lifelong quest for the accuracy of historical reproduction. At one point the protagonist laments: I’ve been ridden all my life by the desire to cultivate some better sense of the past than has mostly seemed sufficient even for those people who have gone in most for cultivating it, and who with most complacency [...] have put forth their results [...] recovering the past was at all events [...] must like entering the enemy’s lines to get back one’s dead for burial.1 1 H. James, The Sense of the Past (New York, 1923) pp. 32 and 49. This example is cited by S. Schama in the epilogue to his book Dead Certainties (Unwarrented Speculations) (New York, 1991), pp. 319-320.

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The fictional character Pendrel goes looking for ‘unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth’: in short, the kind of evidence for which there are never enough documents. His quest for the past seems to temporarily come to an end when in 1910 a distant cousin leaves behind an eighteenthcentury house in his will. This distant cousin had, as it happens, read with great pleasure Pendrel’s article ‘An Essay in the Aid of Reading History’. The historian Pendrel travels immediately to London to collect his inheritance: the key of the house that was left to him. As soon as he steps across the threshold of the house, he finds himself literally in a room from the 1820s. In a certain sense, from the moment he enters the house, Pendrel ceases his quest for qualitative and quantitative historical evidence. But for a twenty-f irst-century academic, you could say that the problems begin precisely when s/he enters a historical interior. The academic today would not be content, as Pendrel was, with the observation that the interior looks exactly as a house in the 1820s and would ask much more fundamental questions. The American historian Hayden White (1928) examined the reality of the historical experience, just as Henry James’ example does: Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see ‘the end’ in every beginning? And does the world, even the social world, ever really come to us as already narrativized, already speaking itself from beyond the horizon of our capacity to make scientific sense of it?2

According to White, the academic who tries to bring order to the chaos of the cultural past mostly deals with representation and storytelling. We already discussed representation in connection with Durkheim, but for White, the meaning of representation lay in language. The representation of a culture and its history coincides with the way language is cast into a mould; we call this discourse. The concept of discourse comes from Lacan and is related to his interpretation of the subconscious, which we discussed earlier. We will be elaborating on this concept of discourse when we introduce the work of Michel Foucault, because the concept is primarily known to historians as 2 H. White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, in: W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative (Chicago, 1981), p. 23.

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a result of Foucault’s oeuvre. To be fair, however, it was Lacan who came up with the concept in its present form. For Lacan, discourse meant constructing coherent meanings between the subject (man) and the way in which this subject gives meaning to the world. Discourse thus describes more than a fait accompli, a reality that is predetermined. Instead, the situation is the other way around: reality can only be known through discourse. When we refer to a cultural or historical reality, we are talking about a ‘coded’ discourse that gives meaning to that particular reality. The discourse therefore does not remain fixed; it hovers between various semantic fields, both from the past and from the present (i.e., the world of the researcher). White posits that the past is a floating signifier. Nevertheless, he does not go so far as to say that he thinks history is pure fiction with no element of truth in it. He did argue, however, that we must recognise that the status of that truth cannot be compared with the ‘tangible’ truth seen in the hard sciences.

The Revolution of the Invisible A logical follow-up question is: ‘What can we say about the truth within any culture when this very culture is itself in a permanent process of mediation with the truth?’ The meaning of ‘mediation’ derives from media studies and is often used to express the interrelation between the change in the way communication is constructed and sociocultural changes. Both aspects work in tandem, as they constitute our everyday communication practices as well as our communicative construction of reality. This chicken-egg causality in the process of defining culture is what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1940) wanted to rekindle in a much cited (but still unresolved) debate for many cultural theorists: So we have to revise Adorno’s famous phrase, according to which art is impossible after Auschwitz. The reverse is true: after Auschwitz, to show Auschwitz, art is the only thing possible, because art always entails the presence of an absence; because it is the very job of art to reveal something that is invisible, through the controlled power of words and images, connected or unconnected; because art alone thereby makes the human perceptible, felt.3 3 J. Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1994), this is a translation of: Les noms de l’histoire (Paris, 1992), p. 33.

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According to Rancière, this question is particularly relevant when we are dealing with a radical break with the cultural past, such as a revolution or instance of violence. Because violence should be considered unbearable, we cannot speak about it directly. But the very unbearableness of language must be seized upon by the political discourse in order to be able to identify injustice in the world. Thus art must show what cannot be seen and expose that which is invisible. Let us illustrate this issue of politics as a means of channelling unspeakable injustice using the example that Rancière cites in his book Les noms de l’histoire (translated as The Names of History), because it clearly shows the dramatic shift that took place as a result of the linguistic turn. The famous study by Alfred Cobban (1901-1968), The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), does not focus on the question of continuity: it does not refer to the storming of the Bastille in 1789 as a turning point in history. Cobban intended his book to be a reconstruction of events and discourses that ‘made’ the French Revolution. He believed we could only ascertain events by means of everything that happened around such events — the so-called non-events, everyday nothings that are passed on and that by their very absence of urgency give meaning to the acute nature of what gradually has come to be called ‘Revolution’. For Rancière, it was also important for humanities scholars to be conscious of the fact that it is the explicit meaning of interpretation that makes history. A social interpretation of the French Revolution would, in other words, not be about the class system of the ancien régime against a rising bourgeoisie but would instead focus on processes of social relationships and conflicts. The interpretation tries to ‘measure’, as it were, these processes on a scale of importance and effect. This establishes a distance between the discourse (the words by which events are described) on the one hand and the truth on the other. Conversely, one could argue that this truth is non-verbal and does not cling to isolated events. This puts Rancière diametrically opposed to the very first historical theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who argued that a responsible reconstruction of political and cultural history was always based on kings and statesmen and their actions. Like the followers of the École des Annales, Rancière had an aversion to ‘the event’ as an isolated and static fact. But unlike the historians of the Annales, Rancière focuses not on a quantitative and layered history in which different speeds of time come into play, but rather on the quest for ‘truth’ as an absolute fact with respect to language and, related to this, the silence. Language and silence construct this truth. Rancière argues that

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the excessive use of language, silly chatter, and loud screams from and for the public must be avoided so that the silent witnesses of the cultural past can be heard. The poor can ‘speak’ by being explicitly silenced, or one can allow them to speak as a silent population. We will come back to this point in the next two chapters. It is important to remember that, since the linguistic turn, humanities scholars have to some degree become reluctant to claim factuality in history. Although there are scholars who assiduously search for their entire lives for the exact reproduction of a cultural or social history, just like the figure Pendrel in Henry James’ novel, they are no longer necessarily in the majority since the emergence of structuralism and post-structuralism. But how did this dramatic turnaround come about? Who were the original creators of this new way of looking at culture? For this, we must delve into the heart of linguistics.

Linguistic Structuralism Linguistics is the academic discipline that studies the general principles underlying language and the use of language. We already mentioned structuralism at the beginning of this chapter. For structuralists, linguistics is the basis for any analysis. The analysis could be a study of grammatical structures and their development, but linguistics is increasingly being applied in combination with other disciplines such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological and ethnological linguistics, and philosophy of language. The founder of structural linguistics was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). In his posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale (‘Lessons in general linguistics’), Saussure laid the basis for a conceptual approach to language for which he became famous. Before Saussure, language was studied only diachronically, that is, the history of language as it has evolved over time. Until the late nineteenth century, scholars assumed that words somehow imitated the objects they represented. Saussure developed the realisation that language should not be understood as a collection of individual words, each with its own history, but as a structural system of links between words as they were used synchronously in a given context. The latter approach is the hallmark of structuralism. Structuralism does not assume the cause or origin of language, symbols, or culture; rather, it focuses on the systems that regulate language, symbolism, or culture.

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Ferdinand de Saussure, photo taken by F. Jullien in Geneva

To clarify his point, Saussure made a distinction between two aspects in language. He called the underlying structures that control a language langue

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(French for ‘language’) and the individual words as they are spoken parole (French for ‘speech’). Structuralists, of course, study langue. The purpose of parole is only interesting when it has something to say about langue. We already established that the elements of a structure refer not only to a collection of individual things: it is a working system in which individual things relate to one another. Within such an entity, interaction occurs. We can only perceive this collection of elements by virtue of their differences. These differences also mean nothing more than the fact that we as humans are able to make a distinction between these entities (such as an object, a series of sounds, a concept). A simple example: if we thought that all objects had the same colour, we would not need words to distinguish the colours from each other. Red is red and blue is blue because we know it’s not green, yellow, or orange. This ability of language to distinguish is called différance. It is important to have a solid understanding of this principle because in later years it was extensively written about by postmodernists in the deconstruction of language. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), for example, took the concept of différance as the basis for his philosophy of language. Derrida developed the concept further by adding the element of ‘delay’, thereby calling into question the way we accord meaning to language. But let us not forget that Saussure came up with the concept. The structuralist believes the human mind can apply différance most rapidly when there are opposites. These are called binary oppositions (binary literally means twofold, or consisting of two components). A small child learns about the world at a very young age by distinguishing between high and low, big and small, near and far, man and woman. Saussure, however, went much further in his innovative theory. He suggested that words do not simply refer to objects or things in the world but that a word is a linguistic symbol composed of two indivisible elements, like the two sides of a coin. He called the two sides signifiant and signifié. In English, Saussure’s concept is commonly translated as signifier and signified. What did Saussure mean when he said that the word is a symbol with two (indivisible) sides? The signifiant is a sound (a mental impression of a linguistic sound); the signifié is the concept referred to by the signifiant. In short, a word is not just a sound, nor is it merely a concept. A sound can only become a word when it is connected to a concept; otherwise it means nothing. Moreover, the connection between signifiant and signifié is fairly arbitrary: there is not necessarily a direct connection between the sound and the concept to which this sound refers. Why should the concept ‘tree’ in English refer to the sound ‘tree’ and not to ‘arbre’? The same goes for book, home, chair, and table. The relationship between the signifier and the

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signified in language is a matter of social convention: it is what a culture and a community says it should be. The idea that sounds do not refer to objects in the world but to concepts in our minds is crucial for structuralism. We already discussed the importance of structure and framework. For cultural studies, the concept of cultural framework derived from the social sciences is revealing in this respect. A cultural framework refers to the value systems, myths, traditions, and symbols within a culture. The framework is not determined by a particular dominant culture, but a particular country could easily have different cultural frames coexisting alongside each other. An individual can also operate within different frameworks. The United States, for example, has its own cultural framework for its white population and its black population. You can easily imagine a situation in which someone knows both systems well enough to function in both of them. Students sometimes confuse a cultural framework with the concept of ideology. These are two different categories that are closely related. An example: Mussolini’s fascism in Italy was an ideology, while his use of the history of the Roman empire and references to Roman architecture and traditions belonged to the Italian cultural framework. Within a cultural frame, we ‘create’ our structures, based on what is given to us by the culture in which we are born. Because language is one of the basic principles of human perception and interaction with the world, these structures of thought are ingrained in language and are passed on from generation to generation. For this reason, learning a new language or living and working in another culture often gives us a fresh perspective on the world.

Heteroglossia No matter how influential Saussure may have been, there are alternatives to his system available to us. At least one is worth mentioning here: the Russian philosopher, literary critic, and semiotician Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). Bakhtin led a turbulent life, partly because his leg had to be amputated in 1938 due to a bone disease and he therefore had to stop his work as a lecturer. Until then, he had been teaching at the Leningrad Institute of History to which he had been appointed in 1924. Two important essays written by him — ‘On the Question of the Methodology of Aesthetics in Written Works’ and ‘Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art’ — were banned by the government of the Soviet Union immediately upon publication. Bakhtin was also accused of being active in the underground Russian

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Orthodox Church, which was prohibited during communism. Whether this ‘accusation’ was true is something we will never know. The fact is that Mikhail Bakhtin was initially exiled to a Siberian gulag on Stalin’s orders, but because he would never have survived there due to his handicap, he was instead sent to the ‘less harsh’ location of Kazakhstan. As a result, Bakhtin’s work that we have at our disposal stems mainly from his time in Leningrad where he had begun to delve into the work of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, culminating in a book entitled Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. There are four main theses in this work, and it is worth going through them here because it allows us to understand the interaction between language, culture, and reality as an alternative model to structuralism. First, there is the thesis of the ‘unfinished nature of the soul’ by which Bakhtin wanted to emphasise that individuals cannot be labelled because man can never be completely understood. His second point concerns the relationship between the individual and ‘the other,’ or other groups. Everyone is influenced by others, argues Bakhtin, and no voice can be isolated: In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding — in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or pictures can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.4

This quote demonstrates how Mikhail Bakhtin also emphasised the interactive element of language, albeit in a completely different way than Saussure. This interactive aspect is perhaps most evident in the third point that Bakhtin broaches in his book on Dostoyevsky: heteroglossia. He stressed that Dostoyevsky’s novels are constructed on the basis of a polyphony of voices. Every character in Dostoyevsky’s work — and this is perhaps most applicable in The Brothers Karamazov — has a voice that speaks for itself and can be distinguished from other voices. The idea of polyphony has much to do with the first two aspects we noted regarding Bakhtin: the principle of the ‘unfinished nature of the soul’ and the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘others’. Mikhail Bakhtin also felt that there was a certain degree of polyphony in the truth. For example, he was firmly opposed to the idea that, when two people disagree, at least one of them had to be wrong. For him, truth — even 4

Quote taken from New York Review of Books of June 10, 1993.

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (1563)

historical truth — was anything but a philosophical statement, phrase, or preposition. Truth required a plurality of voices, he suggested, and not because every voice carries a fragment of truth which can then be traced to a kind of ‘truth synthesis’. On the contrary, polyphony demonstrated a form of loyalty to reality, where engagement and reciprocity with respect to events in everyday life occur. In this way, fact and fiction can be differentiated from each other, and as a result there is still room for morality. Although Bakhtin analysed truthfulness and language in a completely different way than Saussure, the two scholars do share a desire to challenge any simplistic and one-dimensional approach to language. Saussure and Bakhtin’s influence on culture studies has taken off since the 1990s. For literary scholars, structural analysis has been closely associated with names such as A.J. Greimas, Gérard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov. It is beyond this book’s scope to go into the specific contributions of these three scholars, but what they have all contributed to cultural theory is a deepening of Saussure’s structural linguistics by incorporating structures of narrativity into their analysis.

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An example of the method used by these scholars may help to illustrate why they are so important for the humanities. Todorov (1939) wrote a study on Boccaccio’s Decameron, a frame story from the Middle Ages in which ten Florentines flee the city because of the Great Plague of 1350 and start telling each other stories. Todorov observed that all forms within the medieval Decameron could be reduced to a ‘grammar’ with three attributes: the current situation (unstable attributes such as happiness or unhappiness), qualities (stable attributes such as good or bad), and conditions (stable attributes such as someone’s gender, religion, or social position). In this way, Boccaccio created a kaleidoscopic recurring pattern within the Decameron whereby changes were constantly occurring and sins remained unpunished. How was it possible for sins to remain unpunished within the religious morality of that time? But of course, the Decameron was written during the Great Plague, so the population was literally being decimated. Was there perhaps a connection between the recurring pattern in the Decameron and the horrific experiences of the population? When this story by Boccaccio is placed within its historical culture, Todorov claims that there is a connection between the dynamics of the stories and an emerging capitalist culture of ethics. The structure of the story and the pattern correspond to the kaleidoscopic changes in ethics and culture. In their structural analyses of the ‘building blocks’ or ‘grammar’ of a story, these literary scholars always tried to refer to a broader human subconscious, that which they regarded as ‘culture’. Their point is that all forms of narrativity fall back on structures (often old ones) that determine a culture. In that respect, myths are the oldest forms of storytelling and are thus also the oldest structures.

Claude Lévi-Strauss In his autobiographical Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss describes how he became an ethnographer as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. The book was translated quite literally into English as Sad Tropics, which misses the ambiguity of the French title. In French, tropiques can be read as the area in the Southern Hemisphere or it can refer to tropes in music. The emphasis on the musical metaphor is crucial for Lévi-Strauss, who had developed an aversion to the philosophy education he was receiving at the university, which ‘while training the intellect, shrivels the mind (l’esprit)’. Despite having had to flee to America because of the Second World War, he never lost his wild oats, as evidenced by the preface to his La pensée sauvage (Wild Thinking), a book that Lévi-Strauss dedicated to his friend and philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who unexpectedly passed away:

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Even if he had lived I would have dedicated this book as a continuation of our dialogue that started in 1930 [...] My thinking at the time escaped the suffocating isolation to which it was reduced by the practice of philosophical reflection.5

This does not mean that there was no system in Lévi-Strauss’s thinking. On the contrary, as an admirer of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he had developed a very precise, well-thought-out structure. Yet there is something decidedly ambivalent in his way of thinking, a tension between a considerable degree of wildness and a need for structure. He is like a mythical beast, or to use the words of the director and filmmaker Woody Allen: ‘He has the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but not the same lion’. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s thinking was heavily influenced by Saussure, whose work he encountered during his exile in New York through a mutual friend, the linguist Roman Jakobson. Lévi-Strauss’s work was characterised by the search for common denominators and structures that connect people with each other, despite the differences on the surface. Although a variety of possibilities exist in the way cultures shape social behaviour, all human cultures tend to exhibit a codified process, for example the selection of marriage partners, patterns in family relationships, or initiation rites. It is clear that the ritual of eating a birthday cake in Western Europe is different from the moment a twelve-year-old boy is temporarily sent into the jungle to learn to find food in the Amazon, but for structural anthropologists the difference would only apply to the surface level of Saussure’s parole. As initiation rites, both cultural acts have a common langue. The boy who returns from the jungle is welcomed at a homecoming feast, while the other boy blows out twelve candles on his cake. Both receive festive clothing or paintings on the body, and both birthday boys wear some kind of headgear. Retracing common structures within myths that appear to be completely different was something that Lévi-Strauss devoted special attention to. For example, all over the world, in different cultures, there are myths that describe how man is born of clay. In the myth of Oedipus, which we already encountered in the chapter on Freud, Lévi-Strauss saw a conflict between on the one hand the belief that we are born out of a sexual union, and on the other hand the belief held by the Spartans of ancient Greece that humans sprout from the earth. Another example is the story from Genesis in which Adam is created out of clay by God. 5 C. Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris, ed. 1993), x-xi. For the dialogue between MerleauPonty and Lévi-Strauss, see: F. Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, vol. I: Le champ du signe, 1945-1966 (Paris, 1991), p. 60.

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There is a paradox in culture, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, because although humans are naturally focused on thinking in opposites — with our two eyes and hands, our left and right hemispheres of the brain and the associated motor skills with a sense of ‘right’ and ‘left’ — the most important thing that man has produced, language, takes place in a dynamic area, in which reality is mediatised. Life seems to be the simplest when we halve these halves again, thereby reformulating any underlying question until only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer remains (so-called ‘binary thinking’). The French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss called this work of rearranging the debris arising from myths bricolage (tinkering). A characteristic feature of the way a bricoleur works is that a structure is assembled within the culture by means of a step-by-step restoration after being deconstructed. The process of assembling such a system is defined as ‘structuralism’, which is why Lévi-Strauss is also called the father of structural anthropology. By tracing the ‘building blocks’ with which myths are built, such as the theme of humans being born out of clay, we can see how these myths are in perpetual motion, like all other things in daily life. Myths are destroyed, sometimes even ‘unmasked’, then ‘repaired’ with new components and retold again. Let us take an example from one of the oldest myths of humanity, the widespread Indian myth of Rama. The story, known as the Ramayana (which means Rama’s adventure), was written in Sanskrit around 1500 B.C. in India. There are many versions of this myth known throughout the peninsula. The Ramayana is almost always accompanied by another very popular text, the Mahabharata, one of the bloodiest epic tales of Indian culture. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) referred to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata numerous times during his struggle for an independent India. His struggle was also aimed at uniting multicultural India according to the principle of ahimsa (no violence). Alongside the postcolonial bloodshed between the Indians and the British, the Muslims and the Hindus in the country were also engaged in a fierce battle. Referring to this, Gandhi said: What has been said in the Mahabharata is of universal application… Renouncing ahimsa, they took to violence and fought among themselves… This is exactly what is happening in our country today.6

By using a primeval myth as a basis for the new India, Gandhi was updating old principles such as the ahimsa. 6 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/16/fiction

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Claude Lévi-Strauss called such building blocks of mythological stories mythèmes, a combination of ‘myth’ and ‘themes’. Mythèmes are made in what the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) described in The Circus Animals as ‘the foul rag-and-bones shop of the heart’. Each myth that is told is a form of recycling and harks back to the ‘rag-and-bones shop’, each piece of which has its own history dating back to structures that are deeply rooted and hidden in a culture. There is a fascinating principle in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on the sustainability of folklore and mythology. Forty years before ecology was to be widely accepted as an aspect of cultural studies, Lévi-Strauss emphasised the importance of recycling stories within a culture in his three-part masterpiece Mythologiques (1964-1971). Concerned about the severely impaired relationship between man and nature, Lévi-Strauss believed that a culture could be restored to its equilibrium through the ‘rag-ecology’ of stories. Lévi-Strauss’s influence on the humanities can hardly be exaggerated. His structural analysis of the myth is frequently used across many disciplines, from literature and art history analysis to film theory.

Near and Far Lévi-Strauss is also often misunderstood: some saw in his binary and structural approach a system that was often too rigidly interpreted. This misperception can largely be explained by the above-mentioned antithesis between the continental philosophical tradition of Germany and France and the Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophical tradition. Lévi-Strauss’s intrinsically artistic way of thinking — he claimed that he would have preferred to be a composer —was thus not always given its due in the way his work was received. The metaphor for his masterpiece Mythologiques comes, for example, from the arts: themes, variations, and fugues in music. Lévi-Strauss repeatedly pointed out this misunderstanding in interviews, and it was only in the last decades of his centenary life that more room for recognition of his artistry started to emerge. Claude Lévi-Strauss was always most interested in the juicy details of human life: food, death, and marriage. His premise was that life is about paradoxes that cannot be resolved. For him, it was always about maintaining the detached gaze of the anthropologist, cultural expert, or historian. As heir to the Enlightenment way of thinking, Lévi-Strauss had a great aversion to any kind of analysis that lacked reflection and was opposed to opinions driven by personal emotion, but at the same time

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The house for the council of men. Photo by Claude Lévi-Strauss

he did have a great appreciation for the artistic and irrational side of the human condition. For him, human culture has always been a combination of the cerebral, rational mind and the warm-blooded and irrational body. Regarding his vision of structuralism, he himself said that it is a quest for a stable element between superficial differences. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the myth is a litmus test that is related to the two time dimensions, both

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the diachronic (changing over time) and the synchronous (simultaneity). His ambition was to sketch the historical flesh around the ‘rags’ by tracing cultural developments in ancient tales, thereby giving back man’s lost paradise, his ecological heart. Lévi-Strauss also received his fair share of criticism. The British social anthropologist and cultural historian Jack Goody (1919) challenged both the dichotomy and the synchronous dimension within Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. For Goody, dichotomy cannot exist as an absolute fact. In Representations and Contradictions (1997), he writes that polarity within a culture does not do justice to the ambivalence and contradictions that play a central role in the communicative and cognitive processes. Later poststructuralists also found fault with the overly rigid form and even virtual character of polarity within a culture. Within French intellectual circles, criticism of structuralism increased during the course of the 1960s. A counterargument was formulated by the French avant-garde literary journal Tel Quel. It was from this journal that poststructuralism emerged, with Derrida and Foucault as its two most important thinkers. We already mentioned Derrida briefly in connection with his theory of différance. He is considered the founder of ‘deconstruction’ in the humanities, especially in language. In De la grammatologie (1976), he tried to dismantle, as it were, the underlying signs within language — Saussure’s signifié — in order to prove the fluid and undecidable nature of language and the meaning attached to it. But the thinker with the greatest influence within poststructuralism and on new historicism is undeniably Foucault.

New Historicism We have already seen that an overlap often existed between the different approaches to the concept of culture. Yet most theorists pursued very different goals. Within socioeconomic systems, a Marxist theory often gave the definitive answers to questions, while feminists emphasised the patriarchal division of roles within a culture. Psychoanalysts focused on the subconscious in their attempt to reveal the human experience, whereas structuralists searched for building blocks within language, for example in linguistics or by using myths that make it possible to create some semblance of order and thus to create a cultural identity. In some cases, there was so much overlap between cultural theories that it was almost impossible to determine how exactly they differed

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in opinion. This was certainly the case with ‘new historicism’ as well as ‘cultural criticism’ (a movement that originated in the United States and has influenced primarily literary and film studies). Both movements’ main objective is to question the classical way of studying cultural-historical subjects: the past does not move linearly from A to B, as a result of which C follows. According to these theorists, it is impossible to objectively analyse history. Cultural history is more like an improvised dance that consists of a countless variation of moves rather than the orchestrated parade towards an ever-brighter future that traditional historical disciplines often depict. Conversely, events in the past can have various causes that are often difficult to analyse, as theorists of the new historicism movement will argue. One cannot always provide a single causal explanation with certainty. All events, from the beginning of the world to the creation of a work of art, from a lawsuit in a show or series about lawyers to poverty in the world, are shaped by — and themselves shape — the culture they come from. The conclusion of new historicism is significant: our subjectivity and individuality are formed by the culture we come from. We cannot escape this. But the reverse is also true according to these cultural theorists, because individuality can never be exclusively a product of a culture. It is therefore more accurate to say that individual identity and its cultural environment influence, reflect, and define each other. The relationship between the individual and culture is reciprocal and unstable in a dynamic way. The old dilemma of determinism or free will cannot be answered, claim the new historicists, because the dilemma itself is posed on the wrong grounds. According to new historicists, the classic question ‘Is the human identity socially and culturally determined or are people free beings?’ contains two aspects that are intertwined and that in fact cannot be pulled apart. The correct question about cultural identity would instead be: ‘What are the processes by which individual identity and social forming — such as politics, education, law, religion, ideology — create and influence each other?’ Our life is a process of negotiation — conscious and subconscious — within the social context and freedom that we receive in our respective societies. The new historicists therefore claim that the principle of power comes not only from political or socio-economic structures, it circulates in all the crevices and cracks of society and fans out in all directions, across all social classes and all ages. Power is nestled in ideas and in the language within which these same ideas are cast, making this a rather circular process. This brings us finally to a core concept of cultural history and cultural theory: the notion of discourse introduced

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by the philosopher Foucault (1926-1984), whose ideas have had the greatest impact on new historicism.

Michel Foucault Born into a family of doctors, Foucault developed from a very early age an interest in what society considered ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’. His interest in normative frameworks within the medical world was undoubtedly reinforced by his discovery as a young student that he was gay. Because homosexuality was not widely accepted in the early 1950s in Western culture, this discovery led to a severe psychological crisis for Foucault. His interest then turned to the history of mental illness, and his PhD in 1961 was on the ‘History of madness in the classical period’ (French title: Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique). Two other volumes on this theme followed. He wrote more studies related to power, normativity, and language. Two standard works deserve to be mentioned here: Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), published in 1975, and Histoire de la sexualité (History of sexuality), a three-part study that Foucault wrote between 1976-1984 but never completed due to his untimely death from AIDS. His international breakthrough was Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences), published in 1966. Michel Foucault did not study the mundane in the way the historians in the tradition of the history of mentalities did; instead, he focused precisely on the mirror image of the mundane. One example is the attitude of society with respect to a psychiatric institution where people who do not conform to everyday routines and codes of practice are incarcerated. Foucault’s long-term studies were focused on what he called the ‘big lock-up’ of people in view of a powerful government that monitors codes of conduct and standards. He wanted to show how the principle of segregation in history had led to the increase in the number of institutions and protocols. Western culture has systematically precluded non-conformity, which led to the rise of prisons, hospitals, and institutions. As a result, social outcasts were returned to a system, often in a heavy-handed manner, via carefully constructed protocols. An institution for psychiatric patients thus served as a ritualised code of conduct of society as a whole. Foucault’s focus was on analysing a common coding of knowledge by which the world is formed; he was less interested in outlining a ‘worldview’. He called these codes

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Jheronimus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1494-1510)

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discourse: it is the coded way of speaking about culture within a society. Within this coded way of speaking, power structures are constructed, sometimes without us even realising it. In his 1971 book L’ordre du discours (The order of discourse or The order of speaking), he explained that this encoded knowledge (‘discourses’) was an oral expression of mental structures (‘words and things’). Using words that are assigned to things as signifiers, we structure our activities and sort out our world. At first glance, Foucault’s discourse appears similar to Febvre’s outillage mental. Both scholars investigated fundamental principles within the mental vocabulary of Western man in successive periods in cultural history. Yet there is an important difference between the two men, and this difference shows just how much Foucault’s emphasis was on language. While Febvre wanted to point out the historically intellectual capabilities of a culture by means of his ‘mental toolbox’, Foucault was interested in the countless variations in possibilities that a discourse could develop in the history of a culture. Foucault’s approach thus takes a completely different point of view than the historians investigating mentalities from chapter 2. For Foucault, there was no essential connection between discourse and meaning, which was precisely the case with the Annales historians. In other words, Foucault saw man as the designer of his mental world, which meant that it was better to turn the problem around. The way that something was talked about (the words to describe a phenomenon such as hysteria) was more important than that which is being referred to (the thing: for example a psychiatric clinic). In other words, les mots, structured through a discourse, are more important than les choses. Let us continue with this example. When you research the history of madness, a study of the discourse on the meaning of madness and the way a value system is developed that can lead to the process of confinement is revealed. It therefore has nothing to do with the institution itself, which is simply a building of stone and cement, with doctors, nurses, beds, and isolation rooms. Words and things should therefore not be studied for what they represent but for what they mean in themselves and for themselves. Discourse was thus an irrevocable given for Foucault: instead of studying the meaning, he focused on the different ways in which the discourse itself was used. How do doctors talk about madness? How about newspaper journalists? What does the government do to regulate health care? And what does that say about the culture of a country? This is not a question of verifying claims made in the past, such as a diagnosis of hysteria, but one of explaining how these claims could lead to an objective fact within a particular culture. In fact, Foucault went so far

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as to say that he did not consider discourses as documents from a cultural past but as ‘monuments’ to a specific place within the historical landscape. This is why Foucault called his quest archaeology and not history.

Archeology and épistème Two examples from Michel Foucault’s extensive oeuvre can help us examine in detail what he called ‘archaeology’: the emergence of the psychiatric institution and the prison as a place of segregation in society, and the way we talk about sexuality as a form of a personal confession. According to Foucault, the principle of segregation — actively isolating people in a society — originated with the emergence of certain diseases in the Middle Ages. This is when lepers were isolated in separate homes in order to prevent the spread of this contagious disease. When leprosy disappeared from the whole of the European continent at the end of the Middle Ages, the houses for lepers lost their original purpose and even became redundant. But as a result of the collective fear of the disease and of outsiders within society, the leprosy home continued to be a model of segregation within the culture. In the sixteenth century, the leprosy home was converted into an ‘institution’, albeit with a completely different purpose — for madness is not contagious. As society became more specialised, institutions increasingly became a space where all kinds of deviant behaviour were hidden from the public domain, with shelters being created for the homeless, the mentally disabled, psychiatric patients, criminals, abortion homes for women, and asylum seekers. It was Foucault’s intention to show that shelters took the form of discourses within a culture. This shape is variable and sometimes contradictory, or even without a directly visible connection. But behind the shape is an iron logic. This example shows us that Michel Foucault was interested in reusing certain discourses in history. This was something he had in common with Febvre and Elias, who also studied why certain practices in a culture appeared to be immutable precisely because of their reutilisation, even when viewed from a long-term perspective. What these scholars have in common is an interest in how customs are adopted, adapted, and changed in a culture. For historians in the tradition of the history of mentalities, their interest in this ‘force of habit’ was often associated with a form of nostalgia for the simplicity of days gone by in contrast to the complexity of modern society. The new cultural forms did not simply replace the older; the new and the old existed alongside each other, making the culture and society more complex.

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We use a mobile alongside a landline phone, in much the same way that we walk, cycle, drive, and fly to places. For these historians, the appeal of the past lay mainly in the coherent worldview that our ancestors had in contrast to the current worldview which is fragmented, extremely complex, and therefore incoherent. Foucault, however, saw it differently: he disputed the significance of values in the civilising process by going back to the forms that create a culture. He believed that the static character of the past did not stem from the possibility that certain concepts and principles were outdated and therefore seemed immobile but from the disorderly mess of linguistic and institutional forms of the past from which new forms can emerge. For Foucault, it was a question of rearranging the old clutter of language and things. Words and things are bent and revised in order to comply with new power constellations, just as magnets are subject to the forces of iron. This is a radical position on the question of continuity in Western civilisation, one that called into question the very matter of progress itself. Yet there are, according to Foucault, radical breaks in the conceptual patterns of the cultural past. He called this épistème, from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’ and the question of what knowledge is (epistemology). Every historical period exists in and of itself and has no relation to the past (regression) or the future (progression). Some believe that Foucault’s épistème amounts to pretty much the same thing as the concept of paradigma that the American Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) introduced in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Others believe that épistème shows strong affinity with notions of classical hermeneutics, which we already encountered in chapter 1, such as Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung (‘worldview’). But Foucault’s épistème was not intended to trace a spirit of unity within a period nor to identify a radical break in a particular branch of knowledge, such as a change in a scientific approach or the discovery of a Higgs particle. He was interested in a much broader interpretation of fault lines and connections within a culture, one in which a variety of fields are included and different views can coexist. This is why the long-term perspective on history was so important to Foucault. Although in his studies he showed how the clutter of the past — the ‘words and things’ — are reused and organised, after which they disintegrate and crumble again, he believed the civilising process was aimed at taming human behaviour. The forms of ‘tamed behaviour’ become increasingly varied in the civilising process (similar to what Elias described), but for Foucault there was no rationality behind that increasingly tighter straitjacket. It is therefore only logical that his interest turned to nonconformity and those aspects within a culture that are most resistant to the absorption

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process of civilisation. The contrast between the inner dimension of civilisation and the external culture is one of the most important themes in Foucault’s work. The purpose of his ‘archaeological undertaking’ is to unlock a hidden side of culture and of the past by digging into discourses. And Foucault’s somewhat ironic conclusion is that everything — except human creativity — can be absorbed. The creative person — receptive to madness and to all things marginal and locked up in institutions — is the one that propels humanity in the quest for new forms Scholars of cultural studies who call themselves new historicists and who conduct research into cultural processes of change are often focused on the versatility of historical sources that provide information on the reconstruction of a ‘culture’. One name that should not be overlooked is Stephen Greenblatt (1943). In his study of Shakespearean plays in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt emphasised how the plays’ themes — with their observation of metaphors and customs within a culture — can reveal underlying cultural experiences and cultural fears. Greenblatt’s research (like that of other ‘new historicists’ such as Catherine Gallagher or Thomas Laqueur) is not limited to a formal study of the literary text or a specific corpus but instead pushes the disciplinary boundaries. As a result, conventional classifications within cultural studies — such as the distinction between low and high culture, aesthetic or political culture, sexuality or religion — have been transcended in order to find commonalities between various cultures. It is not easy to determine the method by which the ‘new historicists’ work because the degree of sophistication of the analysis is rather specific to the scholar in question. Greenblatt himself once described this method as ‘cultural poetics’. The risk of such an unrecognisable and eclectic framework to describe culture is ever-present, even if much of the most original research is produced precisely from this angle.

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In the previous chapter, we briefly raised the problem of polyphony in the representation of the cultural past, and we also mentioned Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. He also wrote a dissertation on Rabelais, the Renaissance writer we already encountered in our discussion of Febvre and his take on the problem of unbelief and outillage mental. While Russian and French intellectuals have always heavily inspired each other, Bakhtin approached the French writer Rabelais in a very different way than Febvre. History sometimes progresses in a bitter manner: Bakhtin’s dissertation almost did not see the light of day because the contents were considered controversial and even unscientific at the time, while the book is now considered one of the most important works from his oeuvre. What was so controversial about it? In his dissertation on Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages, renamed in a 1965 translation as Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin stated that Rabelais’ salacious novel The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel had for centuries been misinterpreted. Whole passages from this novel were simply ignored due to their alleged obscenity or blasphemy. Bakhtin began to ponder the status of ‘openness’ within the culture that had produced this novel — and in this, he comes close to Febvre’s attempt to reconstruct the outillage mental of Rabelais’ time; only for Bakhtin, it was not about an intellectual ‘conceptual framework,’ but about two other things. First, he wanted a number of passages to be restored from The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (a collection of comic stories) that had been completely ignored or suppressed. Next, he incorporated the social system of the Renaissance in his analysis, considering what kind of language was allowed and what was not. By pointing out two types of subtexts (‘authorised’ language and ‘forbidden’ language), he arrives at a carnivalesque description of sixteenth-century social reality on the one hand and grotesque realism as a literary style on the other. By emphasising an underlying layer within the text — a second voice, as it were — Bakhtin was able to establish that there was an interaction between social conventions and literary freedom. Bakhtin also stressed the importance of humour as part of cultural studies in locating power within a culture. He posited that laughing was therapeutic and liberating. And by resisting hypocrisy, the smiling truth exposes the gravity of power. Earlier, in the chapter on language, we saw that a plurality of perspectives and conflicting interests can be intertwined in

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the same text. Bakhtin identified culture as the place where the most creative cultural interpretations transpire. The emphasis on the subconscious in a text via the grotesque and carnivalesque provides a kind of footing within the slipperiness of language, like a sigh of relief and a liberating laugh, because language in such moments goes back and forth between the different social strata. It is for this reason that Bakhtin is popular in studies of marginal cultures and postcolonialism. The new historicists mentioned in the previous chapter were also interested in how to represent the cultural or historical canon when a part of the discourse within this culture or period is no longer visible. First, we must clarify what marginality exactly means. The concept is quite paradoxical because although marginality appears to suggest a ‘minority’, we are dealing with very large groups in numerical terms. Marginality includes women, who represent the majority of the world, and labourers, who make up the vast majority of the working class. And non-Western cultures, which encompass most of the world, are included in the term ‘marginal cultures’. Clearly, the question of marginality in cultural studies has to do with power structures. Due to this emphasis on power, the study of marginal cultures is almost always politically motivated. After all, how can you find historical information about large groups of ‘ordinary’ people when the discourse of history is almost always constructed by the elite? There is only one thing to do: come up with a new method. The main source of inspiration behind this new method is Marxism.

Marxist Critique It is logical that students born after 1989, who did not experience the fall of the Berlin Wall, should question why we should even bother with Marxism anymore. History has shown that the Eastern bloc in Europe and Russia has disappeared, thereby proving that Marx’s theory has failed. This issue calls our attention to the fact that two important aspects are being overlooked. First, a real Marxist society has never existed, except for some small-scale and short-term experiments. Although communist regimes claimed that their ideology was founded on the principles of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), they were in reality oligarchies. A small group of leaders had control over the economy and the military; moreover, they exercised their power through intimidation.

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Photo of Karl Marx (1875) by John Jabez Edwin Mayall — International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam

Second, even if Marxist societies had really existed and these had subsequently failed, it is still important to understand what the Marxist theory of society encompasses because it has left such a mark on our contemporary culture. We will now see that there are numerous links between Marxism on the one hand and on the other hand gender studies, postcolonial studies, and queer studies. Marxist theory claims that an exclusive focus on the individual rooted in family structures ignores the real forces that shape the human experience, namely the economic systems on which human society is built. For Marxism, economic power is the motive behind all

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social and political activities, including education, religion, philosophy, art, technology, media, and government. Economics, in other words, is the basis upon which the overall structure of social, political, and ideological realities is built. That is why Marxists are always talking about socio-economic class rather than simply economic class. For a Marxist theoretician, human experiences in the political and social domain as well as human productions (television shows, nuclear energy, eating habits, or a book) are incomprehensible without taking into account the material and historical conditions behind those experiences and productions. By ‘historical’, the Marxist theoretician means the material situation in which mankind finds itself. The aforementioned Hobsbawm postulated in his 1997 book On History that the ‘Marxist’ man was entangled in a kind of mirror landscape in which self-reflection and social circumstances were linked with one another. The central argument of a materialist interpretation of history hits the nerve centre between social welfare and social awareness. It all started out as something quite simple, says Marx in his Communist Manifesto (1848). The fact that humans work and produce things distinguishes us from the animal kingdom. After all, in the days of the primitive caveman, everyone was forced to gather food, just as birds build nests or foxes hunt animals. Over time, this changed because humans began producing more than they needed, which resulted in an economic surplus. This led to rifts in the unity of society, says Marx. Since not everyone was forced to work, classes developed in society, with the ruling class suppressing the other classes. The history of the class system described in this manifesto is not only materialistic but also deterministic. According to this theory, there is an irreversible state of affairs in history. In Marxist theory, change can only take place according to the natural law of history itself because the historiographical process is dialectical in nature, as we have seen with Hegel. And this dialectic is rooted in material-historical conditions, which in turn is characterised by the differentiation between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the bourgeoisie: the factory bosses, merchants, lawyers, engineers, and doctors who are in the driving seat of the economy and thus have power over human labour. The have-nots are the proletariat: the miners, the factory workers, the railway workers. They ensure that the coffers of the haves get filled. He called these two groups the upper class and the underclass. Unfortunately, says Marx, those who belong to the proletariat (the underclass) do not have the ability to understand their own situation precisely because of this difference in power relations.

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Marx predicted that there would come a time in history when the proletariat would rebel against this state of affairs, after which a classless society would emerge. Today, there are virtually no Marxists who still believe this. One of the reasons this prediction by Marx is considered obsolete is that the majority in the West nowadays belong to the middle class. An additional difficulty is that ‘bourgeois’ has acquired a connotation that indicates the normativity of the middle class, which consists of both entrepreneurs and employees. And what if we were to take into consideration the position of ethnic minorities in Western Europe or the differences between Northern and Southern Europe? But Marx naturally could not see so far into the future. His historical view was coloured by the Industrial Revolution, which was dominated by the struggle between the upper and lower classes.

Cultural Hegemony There are a number of snags in classical Marxist theory, due to its strong focus on historical materialism. The Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was able to clearly articulate these problems. As the eleven-year-old son of immigrants from Albania, Gramsci had to help his family, which had settled in Sardinia, earn their livelihood. In his spare time, Gramsci read whatever was made available to him, and it soon became clear that he was a very gifted child. With a scholarship, Gramsci was able to study in Turin, where he became active in the socialist workers’ movement. He eventually became the first leader of the Italian Communist Party, which was established by people connected to the magazine he had founded, L’Ordine Nuovo (‘The New Order’). This situation was short-lived, however, because the fascists led by Mussolini banned all ‘secret organisations’ (including communism). Despite Gramsci’s parliamentary immunity, he was arrested in 1926 and imprisoned for more than fifteen years. During this time, he wrote his most famous book: Quaderni del Carcere (‘Prison Notebooks’). Due to the harsh conditions of the prison, his health deteriorated so much that he died in a hospital in Rome shortly after his release. Antonio Gramsci asked himself the following questions: when our vision of history is so heavily materialistic in nature, with a deterministic outcome, what is then the status of the notion of culture within Marxist structuralism? Can it ever be more than a reflection or expression of the underlying socio-economic structure? And how can we then explain change within a structure that is essentially static? He suggested adapting Marxism to allow for the underclass to reflect on its situation. He felt that the subaltern, which

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falls under the subordinate class, could elude the dominance (i.e. manipulation by the ruling class) through self-knowledge. Culture would then no longer be exclusively a concern of the ruling elite. Self-knowledge helps in the process of emancipation, and knowledge of culture is an important part of this emancipation. In this way Gramsci transferred the nineteenth-century ideals of Bildung, which we encountered in the first chapter, from the bourgeoisie to the underclass, the main difference being that Gramsci considered the Bildung ideal to be merely a mask of culture itself. Culture cannot be imposed on people, he contended, but must be based on reciprocity between the classes. Without romanticising or generalising culture, Gramsci argued that the subaltern was being controlled by a cultural hegemony due to its unstructured interaction with culture, which was visible for example in folklore. By emphasising the reciprocal relationship between hegemony (and thus elite culture) and the subaltern (and thus a disjointed culture), Gramsci made a significant contribution to the Marxist definition of culture, for he had added a component that was not exclusively materialistic in nature. For Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony meant: [...] not only the articulate upper layer of ‘ideology’: nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination’. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values — constitutive and constituting — which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in society… It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which also has to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.1

By emphasising both a broad definition of culture (hegemony) and Socratic self-knowledge, Gramsci developed a form of Marxist reflection that went much further than simply seeing the presence of an upper class as limiting any form of cultural self-exaltation. Gramsci thus removed an important and self-paralysing sting from the Marxist principle of materiality and determinism by establishing culture as commonplace and therefore everywhere. 1 Gramsci translated into English by R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 110.

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Adorno and Benjamin on Mass Culture With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the everyday presence of culture that Gramsci referred to became increasingly visible. The JewishGerman Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) agreed with Gramsci that the deterministic nature of the Marxist historical perspective left little room for change, but he was less optimistic than Gramsci about the ability of the underclass to be self-reflective. In the increasing mass production and anonymity of art, Benjamin discerned the dark side of industry’s display of optimism. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), Benjamin described how the public experienced the mechanised production of the same object over and over again. Art was losing its aura of uniqueness because unique pieces were no longer being made. Many of Benjamin’s ideas have proved to be prophetic, including his prediction that film would be the art medium of the future: The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity. The primary social function of art today is to rehearse this interplay. This applies especially to f ilm. The function of f ilm is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily. Dealing with this apparatus also teaches them that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity’s whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free.2

This quotation shows that Benjamin was not entirely optimistic about film’s ultimate role. Reproduction also removes the uniqueness of the artwork, the ‘aura’ that he referred to. And this was definitely cause for concern for Benjamin. At the same time, he was optimistic about the role of film in providing access to a philosophy of life. Someone who is often associated with Benjamin is Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). Adorno was also worried about the dangers of the manipulative power of culture when an essentially amorphous concept like culture is embraced by the masses as ideology. You could say, in retrospect, that 2 W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, edited by H. Eiland and M. Jennings (Cambridge, MA, 1991-1999), vol. 3, pp. 107-108.

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Adorno saw the dangers of a society that no longer makes a distinction between the concepts of cultural framework and ideology. Both Adorno and Benjamin were members of the Frankfurter Schule, a neo-Marxist movement that was involved in critical theory consisting of a mixture of Marxism and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Adorno and Benjamin are often mentioned together because they have had so much influence on cultural philosophy. Obviously, there are differences between the two in the way they approached culture, but we would be digressing if we were to go into that here. Numerous recent publications on this topic are available for the inquisitive student. Their shared vision of Marxism was that, in spite of Marx’s predictions, labourers were no longer laggards in society. By embracing their own ideology, labourers’ culture had in fact become dominant. Adorno went so far as to consider mass culture to be a form of deception of the common people, given that the only aim in this culture, which nowadays is in the hands of the Internet and Twitter, was economic gain. A pregnant and recent example is the impact of Twitter on the presidential elections in the United States in 2016. In a few sentences, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was able to sabotage current events, as in this tweet about the international summit on global warming organised in Paris. The summit had on its agenda the sustainable use of the environment and the reassessment of international standards as a new cultural framework. This tweet from 2012 shows that Trump’s tweet behaviour has a long history — especially considering the short-lived news character of tweets.

Donald Trump’s tweet (2012)

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But let us return to Adorno. One of Adorno’s most influential works was one he wrote with Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) while in exile between 1944 and 1947. In a collection of essays entitled Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of the Enlightenment), they warned about the dangers of a onesided, purely economic and materialistic-oriented approach to culture. The main theme of this book is the danger of the effected form of rationalisation that has been dominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment, with the unusual question of whether there can still be a thing we call culture after the barbarism of Auschwitz. Adorno, Benjamin, and Gramsci were important figures in the development of a Marxist cultural theory after the Second World War. Concepts that emerged from their work such as hegemony (Gramsci) or aura (Benjamin) inspired many Marxist-oriented intellectuals and cultural critics active in the 1950s. As a result of modernism in the 1950s, the West lost many traditions that had been passed on from generation to generation such as building furniture by hand, storytelling, or interpreting a work of art. Adorno and Benjamin claimed that a work of art could be seen as a microcosm: when new ideas emerge in society, we do not always immediately discern them, but they may already be captured in art. To put such an emphasis on the exclusivity of the work of art may seem elitist, since we all would like to have a Monet decorating the wall, the reason why we buy posters, but an ‘elitist’ point of view is certainly not what they intended. What is Marxist about these thinkers is their interest in the relationship between the elite culture and mass culture. And this is where criticism of capitalism comes into play again: artwork with an ‘aura’ — the Mona Lisa, for example — is elitist because the free market says it is one of the most valuable paintings in the world.

The Working Class The Hungarian uprising in 1956 was a turning point in how communism was received by the Western intelligentsia. Until then, the West had little or no information about the cruelty of the communist regime, and they knew nothing of the existence of gulags. When Stalin died in 1953, a movement within communism slowly took shape that emphasised socialism ‘with a human face’. In June 1956, a demonstration in Poland by workers of the Poznan factory, which was directed against the Soviet regime, was bloodily quashed. When students from the University of Budapest subsequently organised a peaceful march in October 1956 to express their solidarity with

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the Poles, they naturally took to the streets with anti-Russian slogans. The atmosphere in Hungary became increasingly grim and reached a low point on 4 November 1956, when the Soviet army invaded Hungary. The West reacted with utter bewilderment to this brutal repression within a communist regime. The political consequences were that Hungarians received no military aid from the West and it was mainly former sympathisers of the communist ideology within the intelligentsia that decided at that point to leave the communist party. Nevertheless, a substantial amount of academic research between 1960 and 1980 was still heavily inspired by Marxism, with continued emphasis on the emancipating effects of culture. One example of a study that has influenced generations is the 1963 book by the British historian E.P. Thompson (1924-1993), The Making of the English Working Class. This study of the radical socialist movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries problematised the passive nature of the working class. While Gramsci emphasised self-knowledge within the deterministic discourse of the Marxists, Thompson argued that the emergence of class consciousness should be seen as more than just the historical perspective of changing social and material conditions. Within the classical Marxist historiography, the underclass is subjected to oppression by an elite. But where in history, then, is the power of the underclass to take action? Given the amount of labour performed by the underclass — their economic contribution to history — this class should at the very least have its own identity. Thompson therefore saw class consciousness as something that was not passive: everyday life is, after all, also part of history. People are not objects of study but subjects of a culture because they actively participate in history. The emergence of a class consciousness is, according to Thompson, an ‘active process that is equally indebted to agency as to conditioning’. Workers are not prisoners of their situation but operate in an active way within their culture, even if it is oppressive. Culture is therefore not the cumulative result of a way of life but a struggle (a ‘means of survival’). Thompson believed that because class consciousness is not defined by a predetermined structure, changes are also possible. In addition to being praised, Thompson’s book was also criticised at the time of its publication. He ignored the place of women in history, and more importantly, he clung too much to the socioeconomic structure as an independent given. Was class not culturally determined? As culture increasingly came to be seen as a construction of meanings, as discussed in the previous chapter, and no longer as a study of behaviour, cultural products, or economic relations, culture itself came to be regarded as reality.

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Women as a Cultural Category Although Thompson completely disregarded the everyday experiences of women, there were many signs that the women of the Industrial Revolution had been actively involved in defining (or redefining) their identity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this active articulation only became stronger. There was much going on in the 1910s: women began to attend university, became doctors, scientists or lawyers, and started demanding the right to vote. Yet it was a slow and difficult process: women in France, for example, only received full suffrage in 1944, in Australia the law allowing women to vote was not passed until 1962, and in Switzerland women couldn’t vote in federal elections until 1971, while the last canton to allow women’s suffrage in local elections didn’t do so until 1991. In countries such as Kuwait, women had to wait until 2005 to gain full suffrage — and there are still many countries that do not uphold this principle of equal treatment. We mentioned earlier the relative importance of marginality when discussing statistics: for women as well, their presence in the culture

Suffragettes demonstrating outside the Police Court, 1911

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corresponds with the power relations that define this culture. In order to be able to look at this issue from an analytical perspective, we must first clarify the difference between feminism and gender studies. We begin with feminism because this movement is the oldest and stemmed from the political desire to give women the same rights as men. Feminist cultural criticism arose from the unequal power situation that women were in — and still are — in many parts of the world. Stories of contemporary women’s movements fighting for equal rights in education and health care in countries such as India and Pakistan are not unique. Feminists are political defenders of equal rights for men and women, just as other political movements strive for equal treatment regardless of race or sexual orientation. In Western culture, this political ambition goes far beyond constitutional law or equal pay. The position of women is deeply embedded in the way we interpret culture. Many Hollywood films depict a traditional division of gender roles, and most academic studies are about male thinkers, politicians, and writers. Women have only slowly moved up into top positions. The idea that women are inferior to men because they are weaker or less intelligent is called biological essentialism. Linked to this are deterministic views that we find everywhere in childrearing and education; we have already touched on some of these when discussing the subconscious character of a culture. These ideas, whether conscious or subconscious, mean that girls are unlikely to be encouraged to become pilots, construction workers, military generals, or orchestra conductors. Conversely, boys are taught to hide their interest in nursing, cooking, or fashion as much as possible. Our awareness of the cultural determination of gender power relations is not something recent. Already in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft was writing about equal rights for women. And in 1929, Virginia Woolf protested against the prevailing patriarchal ideology in her acclaimed book A Room of One’s Own. The manner in which the claim was made that man is superior to woman based on biological essentialism was for feminists a good opportunity to ask questions about the way we interpret our culture and the cultural past. The first feminists who emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the so-called ‘first wave’ of feminism, claimed that the subordinate position of women in Western history was culturally — and not biologically — determined. Most feminists are women, but men have also developed a deeper understanding of this issue. Foucault, for example, noted in his History of sexuality that female sexual behaviour in the prudish Victorian period was diagnosed as ‘hysterical’, a diagnosis that does not even exist for men. In line with the materialist background of Marxist theory, however, many feminist studies were primarily interested in the economic situation of women.

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The Second Sex As the eldest child of a distinguished but impoverished family from the French province, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) had to earn her own living because her parents could not afford to offer a dowry for all their daughters. She studied philosophy, literature, and mathematics in Paris, after which she decided to take an entrance exam for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. At the time, this was the best way to become a teacher. It was there that she met the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. They began a relationship but did not want to marry, for they both wanted to retain their independence. Although this arrangement between the two lovers was important for De Beauvoir’s intellectual development, it is beyond our remit to discuss the biographical dimensions of this ‘pact’. It is important to note that Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking study from 1949, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), has for decades defined the theory of materialist feminism. In this book, De Beauvoir posited the idea that a girl is not born a woman but is made into a woman (‘on ne naît pas femme, on le devient’).

Photo of Simone de Beauvoir

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The most important concern for De Beauvoir was that, in a patriarchal society where men are essentially subjects (independent subjects with a free will), women are only contingent beings (beings that are dependent on circumstances). Men can shape their surrounding; they can actively react and thereby give meaning to the world. Women, however, can only give meaning to the world through the male practices of speaking and acting. Thus, suggested De Beauvoir, women are not only defined by their difference with men but also by their powerlessness. In short, the word ‘woman’ has the same connotation as the word ‘other’. A woman is not a person in her own right. She is the ‘other’ of the man; she is Adam’s rib; the woman is a stranger in a man’s world. She is not the fully developed subject that the man can become, independent and with a free will. Through her emphasis on culture, De Beauvoir argued that the ‘maternal instinct’ was a cultural construct rather than a biological fact. According to De Beauvoir, the patriarchal society sets the norm that women are not complete when they are not mothers. How can a woman define herself of her own will if she only has patriarchal social conditioning as a model? De Beauvoir did believe, however, that women were principally responsible for this situation: for it was women themselves who had to take personal responsibility for a self-formulated identity, even if there was no guarantee of success. But why did women have so much trouble acknowledging their subordinate position? According to De Beauvoir, this was due to history. Unlike other oppressed ‘groups’, women had no written collective past. Because women had been absorbed into a man’s world and had even merged with it, there was a great variety in women’s history depending on social class, religion, material housekeeping, nationality, or language. As a result of this mix and the lack of a collective memory, women had been removed, as it were, from history. De Beauvoir’s Marxist materialism has inspired many feminists. The emphasis in this type of research was on the economic contribution of women to the phenomenon of culture. Unpaid housekeeping, for example, did not indicate the lack of importance of that work but the fact that the patriarchal cultural model considered women as non-workers. As with slavery, marriage was considered nothing more than an economic agreement in which women provided free work for men. According to De Beauvoir, the physical appropriation of women by men as an axiomatic cultural given applies just as much to prostitution as to the compulsory sex that was implicit in the marriage contract. Other scholars combined De Beauvoir’s insights with linguistic structuralism. Hélène Cixous (1939-) claimed that language is itself patriarchally

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constructed because it presumes antitheses: head/heart, father/mother, culture/nature, reason/feeling, sun/moon, and man/woman. For each antithesis that is generated in our cultural mind, Cixous asks: ‘Where is the woman?’. In doing so, she drew attention to an unsolved problem of structuralism, namely the question of what exactly was so feminine about the second item in each of these pair of opposites. According to patriarchal thinking, any antithesis is preceded by a hierarchical principle. Because female stands for inferior, that means that in the above list the heart, mother, nature, feelings, and the moon are inferior. Cixous claimed that these concepts are made subordinate because structuralism as a whole functions by using the antithesis of passive versus active. Based on the biological determinism into which women are born as ‘passive’ beings, they are then made passive in language and in culture. Men are born leaders, while women are naturally submissive. By linking De Beauvoir’s Marxist materialism to linguistic structuralism, Cixous showed that the role of women is made structurally passive in almost every culture: when a woman is not passive, she is not a real woman.

Julia Kristeva and Gender Studies This ‘skewed’ mirror effect of dichotomy in language — in other words, the antithesis is a construct and not an absolute given — was the starting point for some feminists and psychoanalytically oriented philosophers to examine the extent to which culture is interpreted through male eyes. This is called the male gaze. Because women could only express themselves through ‘women talk’ (écriture féminine, a term coined by the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray), their communication seemed irrational because they could never extract themselves from their position in the patriarchally established structuralism. This feminist argument is rather extreme and leaves little room for the intellectual interaction between men and women that have, in fact, taken place over the course of history, however sporadic this interaction may have been. The philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1943-) agrees that the idea of ‘women talk’, which supposedly occurs in a nondeterminable space, was too one-sided. She argues that this classification does great injustice to the versatility of women and that the predicate ‘feminine’ cannot be used to represent a culture for the simple reason that there are as many ‘femininities’ as there are women walking on the earth. Kristeva deserves to be studied in more detail because she takes a

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position on culture that is now generally accepted, namely that women’s history will always be a history of women and men. This makes Kristeva — along with Judith Butler, who should also be mentioned here — one of the pioneers of so-called gender studies. Although gender studies focuses on the inequality between men and women in history, the emphasis is on the dynamic between men and women that brought about this inequality. While feminist scholars take the biological difference between men and women as their starting point, Kristeva aims to emphasise the social aspect of that difference. For Kristeva, in other words, the physical differences between men and women on the one hand and the social contract on the other hand are each other’s mirror. When someone with female biological characteristics is born, it seems to automatically follow from this that that person will have fewer rights in life, especially the right to bodily integrity. The issue, according to Kristeva, is not how the biological difference should be redefined. She turns the issue around entirely: once a biological difference is ascertained, all the machinery of signification comes into force, as a result of which any attempt at definition is lost, overshadowed, and does not stand a chance. For Julia Kristeva (and most Marxist-oriented feminists), the difference between sex and gender does not exist. The convergence of sex (woman or man) and gender (the ‘feminine’ or the ‘male’) points to the emphasis of semiotics in language. Kristeva suggests that men and women can overcome patriarchal presuppositions by giving some thought to the semiotic dimension of language. But note that she has her own interpretation of the concept of semiotics, which is not to be confused with the classical semiotics we discussed in the chapter on language. For her, ‘semiotics’ signified the symbolic world that children first have at their disposal —sounds and physical movements, or contact with the mother. If we think back to Lacan, it is clear that Kristeva gives a strong psychoanalytic interpretation to the presence of gender in culture. This type of semiotics precedes the learning of a (patriarchal) language, no matter how much that language also tries to suppress the first instinct. She cites academic language as an example: it is unsurprising that this language tries to suppress as much as possible the semiotic component related to these primal experiences. Academic language is thus at odds with poetic language, where semiotics usually prevails. It is therefore of paramount importance to recognise this oppression within the academic discourse and to give more room to creativity, artistry, and poetics. This dominance of the patriarchal element in culture holds true for both men and women, something the recent emancipation of the LGBT movement has made clear.

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The Closet as Cultural Space By way of Marxism and feminism, we can learn how the manner in which we see cultural differences is determined by models. These may be based on biological differences, on language, or on the subconscious. Gender plays a key role in the way we shape our (cultural) identity, both in our self-perception and in the perception others have of us. Once a concept of gender has been established, having a gender is a natural fact of life. Men are by nature ‘masculine’, as women are by nature ‘feminine’. Gender studies have shown that this classification is much less fixed than we believe and in any case is very much culturally determined. The significance of gender studies for women’s history can be compared to queer studies for gays and lesbians. The point of queer studies — the reclamation of the word ‘queer’ as a homophobic slur being part of the adoption process — is not to study homosexuality as a category separate from heterosexuality but to have a discussion about sexuality, such as a debate about transsexuality or the acceptance of a particular sexual orientation as a natural given. In studying the question of the culture of sexual orientation, the issue is not to dispute whether a person is born gay or straight; the issue is the way a culture treats a particular sexual predisposition. The struggle to be accepted in one’s sexual identity is always related to the cultural norms, and for instance the fashion industry knows very well how to play with the aesthetic values attached to these norms. On the other hand, when a bank manager or president of a country behaves as if he is a monkey on the top of the highest rock, there are always those who excuse this kind of behaviour. In short, male and female characteristics are quite separate concepts within a culture, and biological standards are regularly used in court cases to explain ‘deviant’ behaviour. In traditional historiography, there was no interest in studies on homosexuality or gay culture because the archives simply do not mention their presence. This conspicuous absence of homosexuality in the archives stands in sharp contrast to the increasing number of people from the 1920s onwards who have come ‘out of the closet’. The First World War is often seen as a turning point in this suppressed history, when soldiers in the trenches had gay-erotic experiences in the claustrophobic space of the trenches because there were no women nearby. These experiences were documented by the so-called War Poets, who were Englishmen who fought in Europe. Because they wrote openly about gay erotica for the first time, this created room for people to publicly stand up for their sexual orientation. Moreover, those at home showed a greater

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degree of tolerance for these soldiers because of the traumatic experiences they have been gone through. In addition to this influence of the First World War, in those years and later in the Weimar period, attention turned to androgynous forms in culture, as exemplified by the cigar-smoking Marlène Dietrich or the dandy. A milestone in the history of gay culture was the Stonewall riots. For years, visitors to the gay bar Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York had been harassed by the police. In June 1969, the police decided to evacuate the bar, after which riots broke out. For the first time in history, gays, lesbians, and drag queens violently protested against the humiliations they had suffered for years. This moment came to be seen as a turning point in the recognition of gay rights. In his inaugural speech, US President Obama mentioned the Stonewall riots as a major historical milestone in the struggle for equal rights. The global Gay Pride parades are, in a sense, a continuation of this gay revolt in Stonewall. Although historical archives say nothing about the presence of homosexuals in history, this did not mean, of course, that there were no gay people in the past. An alert observer will discern that literature and art are full of gay references. But we have to look elsewhere in the cultural past to find their voice. Cultural specialists therefore have actively sought alternative sources for their research, studying not only written sources but also art, music, and literature. In the 1980s, when AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) claimed many victims in the gay community, homophobia flared up violently. Even within the gay movement, there was a crisis. One result was that the subcultures of gays and lesbians were no longer studied separately, which until then had been the case. Since the 1990s, gay culture within queer studies has been studied from the point of view of its own definition of gay and not in relation to heterosexuality. Indeed, within queer studies, sexuality in culture is studied as a living erotic experience in the past without being pinned down to a certain type of sexuality. There is one influential cultural theorist who should be mentioned in this context. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) wrote in her Epistemology of the Closet (1990) about just how much sexuality in Western culture is based on a priori fixed values. Gay culture is ‘in the closet’, in a non-public area, while public space is in the hands of the heterosexual white man. In this way, she pointed out that homosexuality is a construction (just as heterosexuality is) that falls within a spectrum of sexualities. Homosexuality is, therefore, not a private matter that should remain ‘in the closet’, according to Kosofsky Sedgwick; rather, it is a cultural and social axiom. If faced with so-called gay panic — i.e., aggression against homosexuals and against people who

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do not fall within a particular sexual category — Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that you are legally permitted to defend yourself publicly, as happened during the Stonewall riots. By signifying the ‘closet’ as a social space, she wanted to emphasise that homosexuality is in fact often about gay sociality. At home and with good friends, you are allowed to be gay because you are yourself. At the office or on the football field, however, this is not always socially accepted.

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To understand a non-Western perspective on culture as a research field, we must first take a few steps back in history. Why, after all, should ‘nonWestern’ be a category at all when researching culture? Doesn’t such a question directly assume the superiority of Western culture because of the sharp dichotomy that the word connotes? Yet this dichotomy was exactly what the Western white man wanted to convey at the end of the nineteenth century. An example of this attitude is reflected in the poem written in 1899 by English poet Rudyard Kipling entitled The White Man’s Burden: Take up the White Man’s burden, Send forth the best ye wide Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captive’s need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child.

The poem, written on the occasion of the diamond jubilee year of Queen Victoria of the British Commonwealth, is seen as a typical example of the colonial, racist, and imperialist attitude of the West. The way in which the extreme lack of reflection on the exploitation of the colonies was linked as a matter of course to the racist premise of ‘the White Man’ is also evident in the telling advertisement for Pears’ Soap from the 1890s. Yet even back then, there was signif icant criticism of this work. More generally, it was around this time that a growing public outcry against how the West treated the colonies started to materialise. Although this criticism gradually increased in strength, it was to take almost half a century before the colonial system crumbled worldwide, and some scholars still doubt whether it has completely disappeared. We will return to this point in the next chapter. The intense and often violent processes of decolonisation in India, Asia, and Africa in the decades after the World War II had a far-reaching impact on the way culture is studied, for understandable reasons. Postcolonial studies has left its def initive mark and is still ongoing; it continues to have an impact on cultural studies.

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Cultural Self-Perception Today it would be unthinkable to ignore the influence of non-Western countries in the study of culture. But in a sense, this dichotomy between Western culture and ‘the rest of the world’ remains relevant. A painful example is the numerous oriental collections housed in national libraries or the treasures brought over from Egypt, Mexico, and Iraq that are exhibited in museums such as the British Museum and the Louvre. And even in major European universities, a disproportionate amount of money and teaching hours is spent on Western music, culture, film, and media. How is it possible that the question of the significance of culture is posed so prevailingly from a Western perspective? One answer to this question lies in the ‘blind spot’ of cultural self-perception. In order to be able to see links that we did not know existed, we first have to ‘disarm’ ourselves, as it were, of our own projections onto the world. In chapter 2, we already mentioned projection and culture and the problems we may encounter in this respect in the humanities. When you are confronted with inner conflicts upon hearing a pop song, it’s likely that you are interpreting this musical fragment in a way that is familiar to you

Archaeologists at work in Egypt

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and projecting your own feelings onto it at the same time. The success of the sentimental ballad is an example of this principle. And projection goes beyond individual memory when we see connections between the political climate of a country and its artistic and creative value (i.e. the Weimar republic and dada cabaret we encountered in the previous chapter). Postcolonial cultural criticism is especially valuable in this respect. This form of cultural criticism teaches us to debunk assumptions because it focuses on a wide range of human experiences of a psychological, ideological, social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic nature. Postcolonial criticism is also clearly affiliated with emancipation studies and with Marxism. As a theoretical framework, however, postcolonial criticism cannot be considered separate from the development of research in the humanities in which the social sciences have in short order left their mark on the definition of culture. We have already discussed the history of mentalities in which scholars like Bloch and Febvre were interested in new aspects of history that do not belong directly to the field of ‘high culture,’ such as witchcraft, magic, and folk culture. In these examples, aspects of Western culture were a key topic. With the rise of sociology, ethnology, and anthropology as new disciplines, non-Western culture also became a subject matter for academic research, with knowledge of other cultures helping Western culture to redefine itself. Of course, as with other emancipatory movements, the discourse in which postcolonial cultural criticism evolved was often politically motivated. And there is a clear link between the influence of so-called Afro-American studies on the one hand, which focuses on the issue of discrimination and equal rights for blacks and whites in the United States, and postcolonial studies on the other. For although the US is the colonial country par excellence, there has only recently been renewed attention for the irrevocable fact that the original inhabitants of that country have been almost completely wiped out. The black population, many of them brought to the United States as slaves, are still being discriminated against despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the black population is disadvantaged in cultural terms as well. Black writers and painters were given a different vision of the American Dream, as shown by the Harlem Renaissance, a black literary and artistic movement of the 1920s. A more well-known example is the underground movement of jazz music, which featured singers who often sang more or less explicitly about oppression, freedom from slavery, and racism. In the field of culture, this problem of institutionalised racism is a serious one. Consider, for example, the literary canon. The Western literary canon is dominated by a Eurocentric definition of universalism. The great literary works that are seen as ‘universal’ and are therefore included in the canon

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focus on European (historical) experiences and are written in the style and form of the European tradition. The same principle applies to the visual arts, architecture, law, and all other aspects of society. Within the Eurocentric paradigm, European culture and — closely related — American culture are considered superior, which justifies the reading lists at schools, the research projects at universities, and the film subsidies. Almost all the bodies of work that belong to one or the other ‘canon’ originate from white men. To avoid any misunderstanding, it should be made clear that it is not the aim of postcolonial criticism to argue that Van Gogh, Turner, or Edward Hopper were not good painters. What is important here is the realisation that the concept of the canon upholds a white hegemony of culture.

Colonisation and Postcolonial Studies High school history classes teach you that it is only after World War II that one can speak of decolonisation. But above, we saw that cultural criticism stemming from social relations in colonial territories dates back much further. The phenomenon of colonisation began in the late fifteenth century. At that time, people in the regions that today are the countries of Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands set out to extract valuable products from distant countries, often mobilising the local population in this endeavour. About four centuries later, during the diamond jubilee year of Queen Victoria and the appearance of The White Man’s Burden, the British Empire with its Commonwealth was by far the world’s greatest power. Within a century, however, almost nothing was to be left of this power. The decolonisation of the British Empire began with the independence of India in 1947, and by 1980 there were only a few colonies left. It was not until the 1990s, however, that postcolonial cultural criticism was included at universities. As already noted, the theoretical framework this form of cultural criticism identifies with is related to colonial and anti-colonial relations in all aspects of society: political, social, cultural, and psychological. Naturally, the key themes here are rebellion, oppression, miscommunication, and value systems. However, the impact of postcolonial critique on cultural studies is far more complex than what the opposition between the colonial and the anti-colonial would lead one to initially suspect. After all, virtually all intellectuals coming from the colonies were trained according to the Western tradition and hence were influenced to some extent by the Western canon. People from colonial territories even sporadically occupied positions in the upper levels of public administration, the army, and the government.

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Conversely, not all Westerners felt the same way about how they should manage their tea plantation, coffee factory, or cotton trade. And as always, people fell in love with each other in the most unusual circumstances, resulting in mixed marriages. In short, when the Westerner left, this did not necessarily mean the end of the colonial problem. The once colonised countries were left with the infrastructure, buildings, law, educational system, and language of the oppressor. Sometimes there was very little of the original native traditions and culture left because the population had been forced to keep this hidden for so long. The colonial powers were gone but left a trail of cultural colonisation behind and took a foreign culture back to the West. European families that had sometimes lived and worked overseas for generations had to run back to Europe in a rush. Some decided to emigrate to new nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia in order to avoid confronting the old roots of Europe’s tormented European past. These families sometimes felt shame about their past in colonial territories, which was all of a sudden considered objectionable under the new political world order. In political and military terms, the process of decolonisation is relatively simple and has to do with land ownership and who is entitled to it. Culturally, however, postcolonialism is extremely complex. European families that had lived and worked overseas for generations and native people used to live more or less side by side — businessmen, shopkeepers, engineers, priests, midwives — and they were not always aware of that moral dilemma of colonial versus anti-colonial consciousness. There are countless examples of diaries and letters showing that they struggled with a mixed identity, an identity that suddenly seemed to be suspect. They were forced to leave the land of their ancestors. A dramatic example is the so-called pieds noirs from France. This group included people of Christian or Jewish identity who had been drawn to the French protectorates of Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia from all regions of the Mediterranean world many generations ago. When French rule in the North African Maghreb region came to an end between 1956 and 1962, this group was forced — often against their will — to move to France. Every country in Europe has such examples from the colonies. The United States and Canada thus came to symbolise a new life after an often miserable time in Europe. And in the damaged West following World War II, there was little sympathy for this group of people who had been forced to ‘return’ from the colonies. There was also very little interest in their cultural roots. Before the Second World War, colonial ideology as reflected in various sources appeared to be fairly homogeneous. What is striking is the superiority with which Western culture presented itself with respect

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to the existing native culture. The local population was put down as stupid, uncivilised, and savage. Because the West was more technologically advanced, Westerners believed the entire Western civilisation to be more developed. Local customs, religions, and codes of conduct were deemed inferior. The colonial power saw itself as the embodiment of an ideal, a cultured individual, while the indigenous population was seen as ‘the other’. Because of the emphasis on this otherness, colonial ideology could even go so far as to consider the original population to be non-human. This is where the long tradition of universalism comes into play, namely that Western culture is the normative model for everything. The assumption is that all cultural expressions, including ideals and experiences, are universal. This meant effectively that these expressions were European from a cultural point of view. A concrete example is the classification of the world into First, Second, and Third World countries. Another example of this Eurocentric universalism in which an us-them notion is key is orientalism, a term coined by Edward Said (1935-2003) to indicate the permanent situation of people who are trapped between two cultures and who are thus ‘homeless’, as Homi Bhabha (1949-) put it. Both of these examples will be explained below. But first, it is important to understand how non-Western cultures were able to become a serious area of research in the academic world, despite the Eurocentric perspective. For this, we turn now to anthropology.

Anthropology and Our Cultural Glasses Anthropologists see man as a strange creature in the animal kingdom, one who is capable of the finest and the most despicable. The psalmist David from the Old Testament described this thousands of years ago in the following manner: When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you art mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honour. You made them rulers over the works of your hands;

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you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. (Psalm 8: 3-4)

For the anthropologist, this unique position within nature defines the homo sapiens: he makes culture. No matter how different your perspective on definitions of culture may be, according to anthropology it is always about human cognition and human activity as members of a society. No other biological species has had such a long childhood and so much room for fantasising, learning, and thinking as humans have. No matter how different we are from one another, we all make use of symbols. Miraculously, we can think beyond the primary survival instinct, and in doing so we create culture. Our genetic predisposition for language and symbolic communication ensures that we can transfer knowledge from generation to generation. We already shed some light on the complexity of these human codes in chapter 3. One of the founders of Anglo-Saxon anthropology came from Victorian England, the same time period as Kipling’s White Man’s Burden. It is another example of the paradoxical association of the West with non-Western cultures. The name of this British anthropologist was Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917). He defined culture as follows: Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad [comparative], ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits of man acquired by man as a member of society.3

Tylor’s definition from 1871 has long been the guiding principle for the definition of culture because of his emphasis on the complex whole. Moreover, he emphasised the process of acquired knowledge and belief, that is, that an individual is taught culture by other members of society. The principle of culture as an integrated system is still dominant in the way we deal with the concept today in any academic discipline. At the same time, in 3 This definition is in practically all textbooks about anthropology; see e.g. M. Harris, Cultural Anthropology (New York, ed. 1991), p. 9.

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Victorian England people believed that one could have a greater or lesser degree of ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’. An opera connoisseur and wine lover who reads Proust would be ‘more cultured’ than the football fan who reads his newspaper in the local pub. It may well be that some people deal with the concept of culture in this way, but for the anthropologist, notions such as high culture and low culture do not function as guiding principles of study. Let’s take another example and take it one step further. When the German anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) found that he was increasingly being pushed to the margins of society because he was Jewish, he emigrated to the United States. He became a geographer, and others called him a ‘psycho-physiologist’, someone who studies how physical phenomena are interpreted. Boas became increasingly fascinated by the idea that the environment — both cultural and physical — was crucial for the way man views his world. His study of how the Inuit interpret the colour of seawater became famous: the Inuit described the colour using words, concepts, and ideas that Americans did not know or had never even conceived of. This led to Boas getting a position at Columbia University in New York, where he trained the f irst two generations of American anthropologists. This first generation of anthropologists were, in a sense, ethnologists who did fieldwork and observed tribes on the spot. The ethnologist-observer took his suitcase full of books and a notepad into the wilderness to collect data and make sketches. The legacy that Boas left eventually developed into an American tradition within anthropology in which attempts were made to create a synthesis of fieldwork and a rigorous scientific methodology. This combination of practice (also referred to as empirical research) and theory is evident in the work of Boas’ first pupils who travelled deep into the New World to investigate Indian tribes who lived on the plains. Robert Harry Lowie (1883-1957) wrote a book on the Crow Indians called Indians of the Plains, which was to become a classic. Their way of research forced the new generation of ethnologically oriented anthropologists to accept other insights regarding the significance of culture. While Tylor emphasised the ‘complex whole’, Boas and his followers highlighted the idea that we as people all wear cultural glasses (Kulturbrille) through which we view the world. Grasping this principle is easier said than done. When you are cordially invited in Mexico to eat bee larvae, it is very difficult to take off your cultural glasses; after all, you have been taught that bugs are not edible. Or someone who is not accustomed to eating sushi — by now, something that can be found on menus across the world — may be horrified to find out that the fish is eaten raw...

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Fieldwork The synthesis of fieldwork and a rigorous methodology also had a great influence on Lévi-Strauss. In Tristes Tropiques (Sad Tropics), he writes: I wanted to go to the extreme point of wildness; was I not filled with these gracious natives that no-one saw before me, and perhaps no-one would ever see after? As if I followed a stimulating path, I kept my wild people [...] close to me like an image in the mirror: I could touch them, but not understand them.4

The peoples of the New World that the American social scientists came into contact with had a direct impact on European scholars. In the 1920s, the Institut de l’ethnologie was created in Paris, and masks, totem poles, clothing, musical instruments, recordings, and sometimes entire villages were collected by museums throughout Europe. In the visual arts as well, interest in so-called ‘primitive cultures’ grew. Modernist painters and sculptors such as Pablo Picasso and Ossip Zadkine borrowed so-called ‘primitive’ motifs and themes from these cultures. In the music world, instruments from all over the world came to be used, and architects experimented with new materials and construction works, such as tent canvas and loose foundations. Academically, the two-way interaction between American and European anthropologists was further strengthened when many leading scholars fled to America just before World War II. The ‘reassessment’ of ‘the wild’ left its mark on the definition of culture. In the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Culture is neither natural nor artificial. It stems from neither genetics nor rational thought, for it is made up of rules of conduct, which are not invented and whose function is generally not understood by the people who obey them. Some of these rules are residues of traditions acquired in the different types of social structures through which [...] each human group has passed. Other rules have been consciously accepted or modified for the sake of specific goals. Yet there is no doubt that, between the instincts inherited from our genotype and the rules inspired by reason, the mass of unconscious rules remains more important and more effective; because reason itself [...] is a product rather than a cause of cultural evolution .5 4 C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris, 1955 followed by numerous reprints), here in his Oeuvres from 2010, p. 383. 5 V. Debaene and F. Keck, Claude Lévi-Strauss. L’homme au regard éloigné (Paris, 2009), p. 1.

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

Man’s need to create order and the focus on systematics are typical of the French anthropological tradition, which is in line with Durkheim, whom we mentioned in the introduction. For Lévi-Strauss, like for the psalmist, the creation of this order is the essence of man as part of the universe. In his view, it is not by classifying nature and the world that man brings order to chaos, but by searching for the ‘deeper layer’ that underpins the human ability to structure. The idea that culture is an integrated and integral whole of society is the essence of the modernist insight that, beneath our fragmented perception, there is a fundamental reality. For Marx, this reality was in the form of productivity; for Durkheim, it was society; and for Freud it was the subconscious. For many of the early anthropologists, this fundamental reality was culture. By exposing the arbitrary and acquired criteria of culture, anthropology has made a significant contribution to contemporary cultural criticism. The emergence of anthropology as a discipline has had the effect of eradicating a number of significant biases in the academic study of culture in the nineteenth century, such as ethnocentrism, chauvinism, and ‘scientific’ racism (the tendency to ‘gauge’ other societies against the example of your own culture). Boas’ belief that one’s environment determines one’s character and behaviour once again raised the question of the relationship between nature and culture.

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Material Anthropology While French-American anthropologists were mainly interested in the relationship between fieldwork and the development of a methodology, British anthropologists after World War II focused primarily on the Marxist interpretation of cultural materialism. Key to this tradition was the technological advancement of culture. A groundbreaking article by Jack Goody and Ian Watt on the ‘technology of the intellect’, published in Comparative Studies in History and Culture in 1963, examines how the definition of communication fits precisely with the definition of technological progress. In the article, communication is described as a codified way to consciously manipulate the environment in order to achieve a material objective. For example: as part of a culture, the written word, exemplified by pen and paper, is for Goody a sign of progress in the process of the refinement of human cognition. Through the written word — administrative lists and clay tablets on which imports and exports were recorded, or poetic songs — people are able not only to organise their ideas but also to improve on an earlier version. It is in this process of revision that intellectual progress is observable, says Goody, with technology being a cornerstone of culture. From the 1980s, the focus shifted from the Marxist-inspired cultural materialism of British anthropologists to symbolic anthropology. One can almost discern a return to Durkheim’s theory of representation that we discussed in the first chapter, except that scholars now openly recognised the diffuse nature of the history of (material) culture, as evidenced by the question posed by the British cultural historian Peter Burke in the introduction to his book Varieties of Cultural History (1937): ‘How can anyone write a history of something which lacks a fixed identity? It is rather like trying to catch a cloud in a butterfly net.’ The history of culture — once begun as an attempt to describe more aspects of history than simply military campaigns, political strategies of presidents, or the socioeconomic situation of man — evolved further. The broad spectrum of human expression was the key issue, from representation of the visual arts to popular culture or folk culture. For the cultural specialist, the main issue was symbolism in society, the depiction of things, and how these things are perceived. Instead of only focusing on facts — as an academic, the cultural specialist is, of course, interested in the discourse itself — attention was paid to the non-visible and the complexity of human existence. A good example is the British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921-2007), a scholar in the line of Durkheim’s structuralism. In her 1966 book entitled Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo, she examined the shifting relationships between word use and the concept of ‘dirt’. This

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Peter’s vision of the sheet with unclean animals

interpretation leads to what is considered dirty or filthy in a particular culture being placed outside the centre of that culture. Through a detailed analysis of the concept of ‘dirt’, Douglas shows what shifting interpretations say about the clean and the unclean in different societies and in different periods. Through a sophisticated and complex analysis of such cultural aspects as ritual, religion, and lifestyle, Douglas not only shows that Western notions of pollution are relative but also that seemingly simple notions such as ‘dirt’ and ‘purity’ are assigned varying interpretations and that these concepts are necessary to define the concept of ‘the sacred’. For anthropologists, the creation of a sacred space, such as an altar with its shielded space around it, is man’s attempt to structure the world according to normative principles. The contrast between pure and impure is functional, argues Douglas, and the example that she cites is the concept of kosher from the Jewish culture. This refers to the dietary laws approved for Jewish ritual as well as the ban on eating pork or eel. Incidentally, these prohibitions also apply to Muslims. In a 2002 reprint, Douglas reworked some aspects of her earlier study (which in 1991 made it to the top 100 of the Times Literary Supplement’s most influential books since 1945). To gain insight into how the academic

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debate on culture has developed, it is worth seeing which aspects of the previous edition Douglas herself felt needed revision. In the preface to the 2002 edition, written a few years before her death, Mary Douglas took a closer look at the debunking of myths and put even more emphasis on the mundaneness in which a culture develops. Douglas claims that dietary laws shape the reciprocal relationship between the body and the altar. The Israeli people from the Bible were allowed to eat only meat from animals that were allowed to be sacrif iced, and since they were mainly herdsmen, only animals that were dependent on herdsmen were allowed to be sacrif iced. Thus pigs are not necessarily impure; it was simply considered unacceptable to kill them. It is important to realise that for Douglas this did not entail judging or denouncing a religion but rather pointing out that the way we handle concepts (and words) such as cleanliness and dirtiness is often shaped by customs and conventions. Douglas was a scientist who belonged to the field of ‘symbolic anthropology’, a branch within cultural anthropology. This branch wanted to make its own theoretical contribution to the empirical tradition of cultural materialism within anthropology.

Clifford Geertz and Thick Description This broadening of the discipline was signif icantly influenced by the American Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), also a symbolic anthropologist. Since the 1980s, culture as it has manifested itself in the past and the present has been studied by emphasising the way in which symbols guide people’s actions. It is in this interaction between symbol and action that society is structured. Although Douglas takes issue with material anthropology, she still makes use of Durkheimian structuralism (consider her contrast between the clean and the unclean). Geertz, however, almost completely lets go of this dichotomy. In his 1988 collection of essays entitled Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as an Author, Geertz describes a number of methodological problems that come into play in the anthropological profession. In the chapter ‘Being There’, Geertz analyses the truthfulness and the literary value of the anthropologist’s on-site reporting. How can someone who does not come from a particular culture write a truthful report of that culture? Is there no risk that subtleties or even core concepts will be misunderstood? Geertz describes here a hermeneutic aspect that is crucial for any humanities scholar: the inability to access sources from other cultures and other times.

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Although the contemporary anthropologist, historian, sociologist, cultural philosopher, or media expert is less likely to explicitly experience the empirical question of ‘whether or not he/she is there’ as an eye-witness, it is precisely for these scholars that Geertz identif ies this problem. What did Geertz exactly mean? When an anthropologist — or any practitioner of one of the aforementioned disciplines — is skilled in convincing her colleagues of the truthfulness of what she has seen, this has less to do with the factuality or conceptual elegance of the studied events and more to do with her rhetorical ability to convince us. This ability to persuade has more to do with literary abilities, claims Geertz, than with proof of the ability of the anthropologist to penetrate another culture or of the fact that a foreign culture has penetrated the anthropologist to her very bones. Literary persuasiveness and the development of an argument uphold, as it were, the principle that the anthropologist was actually there. And with this observation, we come to one of the key concepts in Geertz’s working method: a thick description of culture (something like a thick brush that is trying to paint a culture). He describes this method for the first time in his pioneering study The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). In the introduction, Geertz explains that by using the term thick description — the concept is taken from an essay by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) — he wanted to stress the need to paint a broad picture of circumstances and situations out of detailed descriptions. When an anthropologist studies an event such as an initiation rite, the Catholic Mass, or the way the weather is forecast, he can come to a broader interpretation of the respective culture by involving the context in making a meticulous description of what is happening: use of images, gesture, sound, movement, etc. Geertz uses the example of winking: while the act itself is simple, the interpretation of it is anything but straightforward. Is someone winking because something itchy is in her eye or because she is trying to pass on a concealed message? Or perhaps it is a form of greeting, an indication that you recognise the other, like raising a hand. Only by involving the context can one understand what is meant by something as simple as a wink. In a sense, thick description always strives for a generalisation of a culture, as Geertz explains, because it links systems of symbolic language with social behaviour. Geertz’s influence as well as this notion of thick description have been considerable in literary criticism, cultural history, discourse analysis, cultural theory, and new historicism. It has also contributed to the linguistic turn in the humanities in which emphasis is placed on semiotics. As can

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be expected, there has also been a reaction to Geertz’s method that is called thin description (how could it be called anything else?). This way of studying culture strongly resembles close reading, or the practice of meticulously looking at structures in sentences, repetitions, turns and the often multifaceted complexity of words in reading. While Geertz focused on a constructivist approach that assumes that people’s behaviour, knowledge, and skills tend to be context-specific, as a result of which reality becomes a subjective construction, thin description emphasises the existence of a four-part stratification in the methodology of the cultural scientist varying from ‘thick’ to ‘thin’ descriptions. In his article ‘Thin Descriptions: Questions of Methods in Cultural Analysis’, the sociologist Graham Murdock explains this as follows. There are four layers of description, leading to cultural analysis: reportage, explanation, description, and evaluation. When many young people are watching a particular television programme (reportage), as evidenced by tweets and blogs (explanation), the cultural scientist can describe this phenomenon (description) and then analyse whether it has a positive or negative effect on society (evaluation). Empirical research such as fieldwork in anthropology or a quantitative investigation of toll charges in Rhineland cities in 1500-1600 uses two of the four facets (reportage and description), as explanation and evaluation do not strictly belong to the empirical domain. This emphasis on empiricism in describing a culture is also called thin description, following the example of Murdock.

Orientalism The legacy of the nineteenth century was also the starting point taken by a key f igure in postcolonial criticism: Edward W. Said, who was briefly mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. The following passage from Said’s famous book Orientalism will help us to grasp the core of his thinking. A key theme in this passage is the paradox between the real situation of the Orient and the Orient of the imagination. Before reading the quote, it is useful to know two facts. First, Said was born in Jerusalem and Palestine but had to flee to Cairo as a child and eventually became a professor in New York. The second point relates to the two French romantic writers referred to in the passage: François-René de Chateaubriand and Gérard de Nerval. Both writers were famous in the nineteenth century for their travelogues. Said writes in the introduction to Orientalism:

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On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976, a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to [...] the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval’ (Desjardins 1976: 14). He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers. … The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilisation and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic ‘Oriental’ awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.6

By emphasising the power of the representation of the Orient as it is shaped by the European, Said puts the question of the ‘appropriation’ of a culture at the centre of the discussion. He argues that it is not the location or the actual history of the inhabitants that is key to the perception of the Other but rather the way this otherness is received, reshaped, and appropriated. By stressing the balance of power so explicitly in this process of representation and forming of the discourse, Said reveals himself to be a declared 6 E. Said, ‘Orientalism’, in: Bill Ashcroft (ed.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York, 1995), p. 87; this passage from the guidebook comes from Orientalism itself.

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follower of Foucault. In the introduction to Orientalism, Said formulates his indebtedness as follows: I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse [...] to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage — and even produce — the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.7

In adopting Foucault’s principle of discourse, Said clearly anchors his book to the Marxist tradition of power relations. For it is not about how the Orient really did look, but the way that Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century envisaged the Orient in literature, the visual arts, and thereby also in politics. The alienating effect (whether deliberate or not) of the Orient in representation leads to a rearrangement of the balance of power in which the Westerner presents himself as rational and more powerful as opposed to the temperamental and disorganised Arab. This representation is visible across late-nineteenth-century European culture. An egregious example is the phenomenon of Egyptomania, the hype surrounding the Egyptian Antiquities. This hype manifested itself in places such as the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; Napoleonic France, where the main squares of Paris are decorated with obelisks; or Italy in the nineteenth century with its newly established national art collections. In painting, the Orient clearly symbolised desire: consider the hammams with lascivious ladies in the paintings of the French painters Degas and Delacroix or the Anglo-Dutch Alma-Tadema. In these paintings, the Orient is timeless, alien, effeminate, passive, and promiscuous. Another example of Edward Said’s use of discourse analysis by which he demonstrates how marginally functioning literary figures implicitly take centre stage is his analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The novel takes place entirely in England in the nineteenth century on the large estate of the wealthy Sir Thomas Bertram. This landlord symbolises the positive image of the traditional English landowner: he is from a good family, is rational, and has outstanding morals. As the patriarch of the family, he supervises the family’s possessions in the Caribbean part of the British colonies. When problems arise in Antigua, Sir Bertram must go there 7

E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London [1978] 1995), p. 3.

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Adrien-Henri Tanoux, Namouna (1887)

in person. Said explains that Sir Bertram sets things right in his ‘colonial garden’ and then returns home. After the patriarch’s long absence, he comes home to a disorderly situation: his children — now adults — are fighting each other and have hidden relationships, while the housekeeping staff are rebelling against their master. According to Said, the novel draws a clear parallel between ‘household and international authority’. Although Sir Bertram’s business trip to Antigua is only mentioned in passing and not much of the novel takes place there, Said makes clear that this trip is crucial for situating the actions of the main character: Mansfield Park [is] a part of the structure of [Britain’s] expanding imperialist venture... [And] we can sense how ideas about dependent races and territories were held [not only] by foreign-office executives, colonial bureaucrats, and military strategists [but also] by intelligent novel-readers educating themselves in the fine points of moral evaluation, literary balance, and stylistic finish.8

8

E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), p. 97.

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The example shows how subtle the discourse of Orientalism and alienation is. When a cultural critical analysis is used, it is not only key figures of a novel or geographic setting that are important but also the realisation that readers were formed — intentionally or otherwise — by a colonial ideology. Said concludes in his work that orientalism (and colonialism) says more about those who describe these ‘exotic’ areas than the people in those areas themselves. The ‘other’ that is thereby created is a construction, a Western fantasy. This other, moulded by the Orient or other areas, is an institution. It is a system in which assumptions and opinions are presented as hard facts. The post-colonial perspective has also come into a fair share of criticism, as always occurs with a paradigm shift. For example, Said is accused of not taking into account the aspect of change in his analysis and thus of not being historical. Critics claim that he does not look at the resistance offered by the colonised territories nor at the social critique that also existed alongside the imperialist ideal in the West. He also fails to take gender into account. If the Orient was a male fantasy, as the example of the hammam clearly shows, how then did female travelers — because they did exist —write about the Orient? Did they make use of the same stereotype? Another element that Edward Said fails to take into account is the concept of symbolic landscapes. If these exotic landscapes were imaginary, does the exact geographical designation really matter, or is it above all about depicting another world that happens to look ‘oriental’ but could just as well be medieval, which was also a popular theme as a result of the nineteenth-century penchant for faraway places and times? One example illustrates how Said’s concept of the ‘projected other’ is clearly borrowed but in a modified form. The historian of ideas, Larry Wolff (1957-), describes in his book Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994) how the axes of ‘cultural fracture’ shifted from a clear division between north and south in the eighteenth century to one of West and East in the nineteenth century. Wolff analyses how, from Paris, the philosophers of the European continent constructed their ideology with the conscious aim of contrasting the ‘disadvantaged’ culture of Eastern Europe with the high culture of Western Europe.

Cultural Ambivalence Both the ambivalence and the global aspect of post-colonial criticism are central theses in the work of the Indian-American cultural critic Homi K. Bhabha. Although his work clearly reflects the influence of Said, Foucault,

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Photo of Homi Bhabha

Lacan, and Benjamin, he has demonstrated in an extraordinarily sophisticated manner that structuralism and Marxism alone are not sufficient for analysing a complex notion such as ‘colonialism’. In Bhabha’s view, the complexity lies mainly in the global nature of the phenomenon. In his book The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha discusses the intrinsically ambivalent character of the post-colonial experience. He explains how Said’s dichotomy remains stuck within the parameters of the colonial ruler. Was it not primarily the colonisers themselves who aff ixed this dichotomy? By adopting this scheme as the basis of his thesis, Said places himself in the colonial tradition he so adamantly rejects, argues Bhabha. Through the concept of ‘imitation’ (mimicry), Bhabha uses literary texts

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and films to unravel how colonised peoples appear to be incorporating the culture of the ruler but do not do so entirely, demonstrating that there is an element of subversiveness towards the dominant culture. Hybridity provides scope for criticism and also for recreating a whole new culture. Bhabha proposes a global orientation within postcolonial criticism, recommending that we refrain from thinking in national traditions as is still frequently the case in literature analysis, f ilm criticism, and cultural studies. He argues the case for a humanities education classif ied into postcolonial themes that are often literally transnational. World literature, cultural history, or film analysis can be treated by means of examples of how cultures deal differently with such historical traumas as slavery, revolution, civil war, political massacres, and the loss of cultural identity. The humanities could reorientate itself, suggests Bhabha, by putting the emphasis on the way cultures define themselves based on what is often called othering (the process of the other as a counter-image of yourself, a negative projection; see Lacan and Said). For Bhabha, such a study would ideally look like this: The centre of such a study would neither be the ‘sovereignty’ of national cultures, nor the universalism of human culture [my emphasis], but a focus on … the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present.9

Thus the lives of neglected cultural groups with a hybrid identity can to some extent be reclaimed and put into the historical canon. Bhabha describes the ‘frontier life’ of two fictional characters from the work of two Nobel Prize winners, the South African writer Nadine Gordimer (My Son’s Story, 1990) and the African-American novelist Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987). In both examples, the living female protagonists —Aila and Sethe respectively — live in the hinterland of two cultures. Aila was raised with norms that conflict with those of her husband. She is ‘homeless’ because she has allowed her house to be used as a covert shooting position against the racist South African government. Sethe’s culture is hybrid and without a home because she has killed her baby, a girl, whom she wanted to protect against the cruelty and sexual abuse of the slaveholder. These two women are doubly marginalised, says Bhabha: as black women in a racist society and as women whose actions result in them being placed 9 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), p. 12; and the introduction of the example cited.

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outside of their own community. By focusing on the psychological and historical complexity of these key figures, it becomes clear that historical reality does not take place exclusively on the battlefield or in the offices of governments. Although marginalised people endure this reality more intensely than other groups, this issue affects many people; indeed, the case Homi Bhabha makes for hybridity has something in common with queer studies, as mentioned in the previous chapter. By elaborating on symbolic geography, projection, and Said’s principle of discourse in his analysis, space is created within the culture in which the principle of the dichotomy (the self opposite the other) no longer applies. Hybridity often means a cultural disorientation. Another Indian-American scholar who criticises the structuralist analysis of postcolonial studies is the philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942-). Spivak has conducted research primarily on the aftermath of decolonisation and the place of the ‘new migrant’ in the globalised world. Postcolonial criticism, she claims, incorrectly suggests that colonialism is a historical fact. Traditional postcolonial criticism is, moreover, a form of cultural imperialism because the discourse is often shaped by the elite of the former colonial power, something Spivak describes in her article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ from her book Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). The title of the article shows that, theoretically speaking, Spivak has been inspired by Gramsci’s Marxism, whose central concern was that the underclass could not actively represent itself but had to be represented (in a passive sense). Central to Gayatri Spivak’s article is the tradition of sati, a social convention among some Indian groups in which a widow literally sacrifices herself. When the husband dies, the widow is also cremated. By doing so, she obtains status in her next life (incidentally, this ritual should not be confused with bride burning). In her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Spivak discusses the power relations that play a role in the banning of this tradition. British colonisers and Hindu leaders had already banned this practice in 1829, and all kinds of documents related to this practice have been preserved. But nowhere in the archives do we find records in which these women were asked to give their opinion on the matter. According to Spivak, both the lack of reporting and the lack of interest in the opinion of women show that no research has been conducted into the representation (or lack thereof) of the subaltern in the history of former colonies. Analogous to Said’s problem of representation, Gayatri Spivak denounces the way academia has conducted research into the practice of sati under the guise of ‘scientific objectivity’. Given that the posing of the problem is

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Coloured watercolour by cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson from 1815. The Wellcome Institute, London

Eurocentric and universalistic (‘widow burning is a morally reprehensible practice’), Spivak argues that the subaltern is silenced, even by leftist intellectuals such as Foucault. Because Foucault presumes a priori established notions (power relations in the historically preconceived hypotheses that are key to his épistème), this creates the side effect that well-intentioned attempts to represent the marginal population can only be implemented with the use of intellectual violence. In the historical research on this taboo — which is a taboo only by Western standards — even the use of language is a problem. Is English or a local language used in the sources? How do we know what the widows themselves would have thought if their voices have gone up in smoke? Gayatri Spivak concludes that some aspects of the cultural past will continue to be inaccessible and thus truly ‘dead,’ because the life that is represented in the research, no matter how well-intentioned, will always remain anachronistic.

6

Image, Memory, and Practice

In all the examples we have reviewed, from the subconscious in the case of Freud and Lacan, to the problem of language and the question of hybridity in the case of Bhabha and Spivak, the question of what culture does in practice to people remains. After all, the social aspect comes to the fore straightaway from the moment there are people conducting activities — often called agents in the literature — that focus on the representation of culture as a whole. It is a social game with codes that can only be understood when we know the rules, just as with understanding the rules of football, knowing the traffic laws, or being able to read a musical score. It is all about the interpretation of an act (‘agency’ literally means ‘capacity to act’). And because agency is a key concept within cultural studies, it is important to understand exactly what is meant by it. In the previous chapters, we dwelled on the question of how to represent the culture of a group when no clear traces of that group remain. Even if a group is not clearly represented in the cultural past, we can still reflect on its presence. This is what the concept of agency is about. It stems from traditional Marxist theory which focused on the issue of where one could find the working class’ capacity for autonomous action in the sources. Given the amount of labour carried out by the working class, there should be at least something of their own identity visible in history. As for workers, it would appear that almost nothing of their everyday lives has been preserved in museums or archives. Occasionally we know how much wages workers earned in the nineteenth century, giving us some insight into their spending power. With a small and seemingly unimportant document as a paycheck, we can gain some insight into the possibilities this group had and didn’t have. From buying food to visiting the cinema, being able to pay the doctor to check up your sick daughter, or paying for her wedding ‘with all the trimmings’: it’s all culture.

Culture as a Societal Function As we have seen, agency represents the essence of man as a creature of action. People are subjects of history who actively participate in shaping culture itself. Of course, certain groups of people may be (or may have been) invisible in newspapers, art, or music, but this historical fact does not make them an object. What we call ‘cultural society’ is therefore essentially a collection of all activities: the acting persons concerned, the cultural production, and the way in which cultural objects are deployed in society.

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From the moment all these activities are assembled under a ‘socio-cultural’ heading, space must be made for their reception. This is because cultural objects and the actions that take place around these objects — such as the unveiling of a statue in a marketplace — function in a way that can by no means be called passive. To extricate ourselves from this vicious circle, it is important to get a clear idea of the triple functionality of culture: the production, mediation, and reception of culture. We start with the idea that production is synonymous with creation. The first word suggests societal relevance, while the word ‘creation’ is surrounded by an aura of significance and exclusivity. After all, included in cultural production are not only those who make culture (artists, composers, filmmakers, writers, intellectuals) but also those who absorb this culture (the audience). There is also the risk that attached to the idea of the individual creative artist or thinker is a hierarchy that is not very practical for the analysis of culture. We do not necessarily need to know what is ‘better’ theatre — a stand-up comedian or a Shakespeare play — but how it is performed. Finally, there is a risk that if agency is not visible within a cultural layer of society, it will not be clear what the status of a production is. Doesn’t the brilliant invention of the paper clip which keeps a stack of paper held together — an object characteristic of a lettered society — also belong to ‘culture’? Nevertheless, if we study the history of culture over the ages, it becomes clear that we cannot completely sever the close connection between the process of creation and the production. The idea of the creator as artist is an ancient concept that we still implicitly make use of: the artist God (deus artifex) who shaped the world, described in medieval and early modern times, has evolved into the individual artist who paints independently, comes up with a new fashion collection, or designs a building. The idea of artistic independence is a powerful image in our cultural subconscious. The collective nature of the ‘thought of creation’ thus always has a two-sided aspect: the thought of creation is directly related to both the designer and the receiver. Thanks to social sciences, the emergence of this new take on the aesthetic side of culture adds nuance, to say the least. Given recent insights into cultural analysis, we can puncture once and for all the myth of the artist as an autonomous subject in a bubble without any awareness of a social, historical, or aesthetic context.

We Have Never Been Modern The artist or writer who is ‘trapped’, as it were, in a historical context and can never completely escape it plays a key role in the analyses of the French

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sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour (1947-) in his study Nous n’avons jamais été modernes from 1991 (We Have Never Been Modern, translated in 1993). Latour says that modernity wrongly claims that a clear distinction can be made between ‘object and subject’ and between ‘nature and society’. According to Latour, this false claim goes as far back as Plato. He has also voiced criticism of the intellectual integrity of modern academic disciplines, and it is worthwhile for us to dwell here on this point. All forms of knowledge transfer — from museum exhibits to rankings of university research — are directly affected by Latour’s criticism. He points out that an academic discipline that scrutinises culture is also itself a culture. There is therefore no clear distinction to be made between cultural society and cultural receptivity as fields of research. Latour argues that virtually all research conducted within contemporary social and cultural historical criticism consists of two options: facts or stories. The supporters of ‘facts’ are anti-fetishistic because they claim that symbolic objects (e.g. religion or art) are simply concepts upon which power is projected. On the other side are the believers in ‘stories’ who argue that individuals are dominated by external forces without being aware of it (e.g. economics or gender). The so-called ‘critical’ academic spirit thereby ensures that he is always right, regardless of the position he takes. Social and cultural critics use anti-fetishism against ideas that they personally reject so they can apply a ‘shamelessly positivist’ approach to areas that serve them well, believing they are ‘perfectly healthy and sturdy realists with regard to the things you really cherish’. The inconsistency embedded within the arguments or the double ‘agendas’ of such research are usually never acknowledged or recognised because there is never any question of transcending these two positions (i.e. the ‘facts’ versus the ‘stories’). Bruno Latour sees the dangers of this restriction of the critical spirit in a binary academic system. Due to this categorisation into ‘camps’, so-called critical ideas (the ‘facts’) are even used to support conspiracy theories (the ‘stories’). He cites as examples the sceptics of global warming who believe that issues are being used to deflect attention away from political abuses or people who claim that the events surrounding 9/11 have nothing to do with Al Qaeda and instead are the result of an internal behindthe-scenes struggle in American politics. Latour points out the practical consequences of instances in which criticism degenerates into a cultural product on the basis of which social scientists and cultural philosophers can claim objectivity. Latour gives us insight into the cultural critic who analyses himself. By adhering to methods of interpretation and genealogies in knowledge

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transfer using designations and knowledge topographies, institutions aim to cultivate a specific academic spirit. Transmitting a method of interpretation has to do on the one hand with professionalising a ‘culture’ and on the other hand with the degree of freedom in intellectual autonomy. This process of self-cultivation is evident in the way schools, universities, art circles, or courts have organised themselves from antiquity to the present. The topography of knowledge institutions and knowledge cultures is something we have already discussed. Despite globalisation, there are still significant differences in approaches to culture, ranging from the Anglo-Saxon to the continental. It is just a matter of time until Asia leaves its own mark on the cultivation of knowledge. The infrastructure that is exposed by topographies of knowledge cultures is mostly related to Bruno Latour’s critique of ‘facts’ and ‘stories’. It becomes clear that the categories of contemporary cultural life — from a general category such as ‘physics’ to a subcategory such as ‘youth literature’ or ‘mass media’ — are categories that have recently been devised. The implications of Latour’s observations for research into ‘culture’ are significant. A study of Romanesque monasteries, Renaissance painting, or nineteenth-century German philosophy no longer focuses on the impact of a monastery, a painting, or a thinker on the basis of criteria that we make use of a posteriori to assess. The focus would instead be directed at the contextualisation of an institution, a person, or an object, where the main focus is on knowledge networks, solidarity between those concerned, the hegemony of a culture, both explicit and implicit — in short, the relationship between a cultural society, a product and an individual. This kind of research attitude to culture makes it increasingly difficult to hold on to ‘a posteriori evaluations’, such as the exceptional quality of a particular thinker or the somewhat awkward conclusion that someone has lived ‘out of his/her context’. After all, we cannot clearly establish the boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the context. In a September 2013 article in The New Yorker entitled ‘Hitler in Hollywood’, David Denby reviews two academic studies that examine whether or not anti-Semitism was present in Hollywood during the 1930s. When the high-ranking Nazi officer Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary about the film It Happened One Night that ‘the Americans are so natural and more superior than we Germans’, we are dealing here with a notable specimen of bizarre irony. The director of the film was Frank Capra, who emigrated as a boy from Italy because his father wanted to pursue the American Dream. Denby’s book review and this example of Goebbels’ comment highlight the intrinsic ambivalence of the concept of culture as part of

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‘civilisation’. When a particular film like It Happened One Night is set in a historical context, the film culture in its entirety is taken into account (including the French, German, and American traditions). As a result, an ideology is repositioned within the cultural society it originates from, by means of its technical context (the assembling or cutting of fragments, genres such as short film, the competition between various media, and movie reviews). Various kinds of questions could be asked about: the degree of risk assessment (were the Jews really in danger?), the cinema as ideological space (with news reports that were shown before the film), or rituals that people knowingly exposed themselves to (the risk of becoming the scapegoat within a culture, the pursuit of a dream, or the loss of a job for ideological reasons).

Museums and the Mediation of Culture When the production of cultural objects is put into a context in a coherent manner, we must ask ourselves the question of how the process of cultural transmission works. The concept of ‘mediation’ we discussed briefly plays a key role in this. But what is mediation? Usually the term is used in the field of conflict resolution — for example in the case of an argument in the workplace — where a third party tries to bring two people who oppose one another to think along the same lines. In culture, mediation also works through a ‘third variable’. The main purpose of research into mediation in culture is to interpret the relationship between two variables (X and Y). How and why does the independent variable X (a cultural object) influence the dependent variable Y (the recipient of culture)? One response might be that the mediator (Z) makes it clear how the causal process between X and Y takes place. In this way, the cultural mediator (Z) brings different aspects together. As an example, let’s examine how the redesign and expansion of the collection of Islamic art in a major museum such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York corresponds with prevailing views about education and information provision in today’s society. An article from The New York Times (22 September 2011) explains: To ask art and artefacts — even magisterial examples from a sweep of more than a millennium — to make a difference, or even a dent, in American anti-Muslim sentiments might be expecting too much. But the opening of the new galleries, less than two months after the 10th

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anniversary of September 11, comes at a time as propitious as the 2003 closing was unfortunate and holds the possibility at least of reshaping many Americans’ views about the deep affinities between Western and Islamic art.

What is striking is how ‘Islamic art’ from countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria — where the depiction of the Prophet Mohammed is an issue — is literally juxtaposed alongside objects from the same region such as bowls, plates, and tiles. Obviously, these are not any old plates and bowls but precious and rare objects. What matters, as we see in the quote, is not the price tag but the awareness that a museum would like to display a certain cultural ideal. By searching in the depots for utilitarian objects to create a historicising context, with an emphasis on utilitarian objects from countries with which Americans have sometimes had difficulty after the 9/11 attacks, ethical claims are somewhat tempered. The interaction with or between objects reveals the cultural distribution of Islamic art and the presence of this culture on American soil. Nowadays there is a signif icant amount of research being conducted on how collections of libraries and museums came about in modernity. While the structuring of the presentation of objects is subject to change — as shown by the example of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — almost all museums rely on the principle of a ‘history of culture’. This kind of staging is the result of the eighteenth-century salons and nineteenth-century world expositions. The age-old tradition of displaying things as a ‘retrospective’ or a ‘reconstruction’ remains dominant to this day. There have, of course, been attempts to break away from this method of presentation. The British art historian Francis Haskell (1928-2000), for example, traversed art history or a museum collection and described the common thread of a collection on the basis of themes such as ‘What is taste?’ or ‘What is classic?’. Haskell could play a mediating role between ‘consumer’ and ‘art’ — in every imaginable chronological configuration.

The Horizon of Expectation While these examples have clarif ied the mediating role of culture, we have remained so far in a neutral and cultural space, crammed with objects. But where did the audience go? In other words, what is the role or reception of this cultural space received? The German literature scholar Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997) dealt with these questions. He developed

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two concepts that are inextricably linked with each other in the study of cultures: reception aesthetics (Rezeptionsästhetik) and the horizon of expectations (Erwartungshorizont). When the reader or viewer’s horizon of expectations is breached, s/he feels that something ‘new’ has occurred. If a cultural product is displayed within the frameworks and norms, the horizon of expectations is reaffirmed. The recognition provides a feeling of confirmation. Consider the advertisement of a coffee brand that capitalises on the reassuring nature of a cup of coffee after a car breakdown in the pouring rain, with the victim hoping for some sort of consolation and a repaired car. It may also be that the horizon of expectations is pried open and that this leads to a deviation from conventions, resulting in an uncomfortable feeling or a sense of alienation in the reader or spectator. The latter is something that artists eagerly capitalise on. According to Jauss, by drawing an imaginary line on the ‘horizon’ of the culture one is studying, one can find out how that culture is received and grasp what people have experienced in terms of positive and negative aspects of that culture. This allows us to identify what may be anachronistic about our interpretation. Given that Hans Robert Jauss was a literary scholar, it is not surprising that he began by focusing on the reception of the reader. Just as Haskell attached importance to a redesign of art collections by which he sought an alternative to the historicising aesthetics, Jauss was opposed to literary history as a chronological arrangement of literary facts. Jauss’ research question focused on the changing assessments and norms within literature, with a literary text being seen as a cultural product of a society, making his work well suited to the Zeitgeist of the linguistic turn. Nonetheless the question remains — and this was also a critique aimed at Jauss — whether culture can be valued within the principle of renewal and innovation (i.e. the loss of recognition) is prioritised in the aesthetic ideal. And we must also ask ourselves whether Western society today is so focused on the unique and (quasi-) autonomous character of the artist-intellectual that we have developed a blind spot when it comes to evaluation. Is innovative art actually really that nice? If you look at the programming of major concert halls in the world, there is very limited space for modern music. Apparently, most visitors would rather hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony yet again than the less accessible work of contemporary composers such as Philip Glass (1937-), even if the latter is currently making a name for himself. This example shows how dangerous it is — from a cultural critical point of view — to link cultural production to cultural consumption.

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Portrait of Beethoven as he was composing the Missa solemnis, by Joseph Karl Stieler (1820), in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany

Man as Player The warning offered above is particularly relevant when cultural production and the way it is received (the receptivity to certain expressions of culture) is directly linked to the concept of ‘cultural society’. This distinction can, to be sure, be conveniently applied when it comes to modern societies because we have a better understanding of the demand for agency by specific social groups and because we are also aware of the diversity of culture. However, the

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existence of a ‘cultural society’ does become a problem for cultural historians who study periods in the distant past or for anthropologists who conduct research on traditional societies. This is because the connotation of a personal experience that is expressed by the concept of ‘cultural receptivity’ loses all credibility in premodern societies. In a society where individual lives are permanently played out within sight of a public ‘eye’, the private always depends on shared physical practices and customs. This interpretation of privacy, integrity, and physicality as an instrument of a cultural practice shows the limitations of the concepts of ‘individuality’ and ‘self-awareness’. The perspective of the pre-modern individual is always one of theatricality — man operating in a public space. In the field of ancient and medieval culture, numerous attempts have been made to outline the ‘reason of gestures’, to analyse the structures of dream visions, to identify the conceptual frameworks surrounding death and life, or to take the use of colour in clothing as a starting point for a study into the possibilities of individual representation. In his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga wrote about the rich variety in the ways man presents himself in a culture. Chapter 1 explained his invaluable contribution to the development of the field of ‘cultural history’. His notion of man as player shows the versatility of man’s identity as he behaves within a culture. Man has no fixed cultural identity, Huizinga suggested, but has learned from childhood to deal with the different ‘role-playing’ within cultural society. This emphasis on the diversity of identities was further developed in the 1970s, in particular by the previously mentioned French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. In his most influential study La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste), he posits that taste may well be debatable but also that in this debate, we are all snobs. In daily life, people constantly choose between the aesthetically pleasing and that which is thought to be impractical, ugly, or unfashionable. Through a detailed study of the gradations of ‘taste’ among the modern French bourgeoisie, Bourdieu showed that taste is anything but innocent because it always relates to cultural and social stratification. Whether you order the southern French fish soup bouillabaisse in a restaurant or participate in the contemporary cult of thin bodies by jogging or following the latest diets, the social world is a system of power relations and symbolism in which a social judgement is reached within a fraction of a second, according to Bourdieu. This stratification of culture, which ‘man the player’ subsumes via codes, shows how abstract ‘culture’ and seemingly concrete ‘cultural consumption’ overlap. Another example that occupied Bourdieu was our sports culture. The rules of a particular sport are part of a broader culture. While sports was

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originally linked to fighting techniques, in line with Aristotle’s theory of cleansing (catharsis) and the Hellenistic ideology of the body, under the influence of nineteenth-century Great Britain, our sports culture became refined, including elitist sports such as polo and rowing competitions between the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Football has a different cultural coding, as it has traditionally been associated with the working class, and these old stratifications are still visible in the current social perception surrounding a sport. These components of culture have long been ignored in academic research, just like the popular culture of sunbathing or torch songs. And yet it may be worth studying man the player as part of a culture, just as with Bakhtin in his study of the carnivalesque in Rabelais. Such a perspective not only sheds new light on political culture or normativity, it also makes the boundary between ceremony and ritual more visible. However, what remains is the insolubility of everyday reality: the tension between the cultural production of a society on the one hand, and the cultural receptivity of the individual on the other.

Collective Memory The mediation of culture often involves the way we ‘remember’ culture. Our contemporary interpretation of remembering and forgetting is something that was rediscovered by neuropsychologists in the late twentieth century. Much of what appeared in studies in the 1980s was in fact a reinterpretation of key insights from the very beginning of the twentieth century, such as psychoanalysis and the work of experimental psychology by the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945). Known for his ideas relating to the collective nature of memory, Halbwachs’ invention of the term collective memory (mémoire collective) in his study Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (‘the social frameworks of memory’) was of paramount importance for all disciplines of cultural studies. In his approach, which emphasised representation, he was directly indebted to Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Halbwachs was interested in the way people use mental images from the present to ‘reconstruct’ the past. Unfortunately, Halbwachs’ concept of ‘collective memory’ is often misinterpreted because people assume that it refers only to the characteristics of the subject (the person who remembers). However, Halbwachs’ philosophy is about how memory operates within a social arrangement. It is in society, after all, that people build up their memory. And it is in that very society that man puts together his own memory by remembering and recognising events and places.

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Halbwachs accordingly considered it impossible for an individual to build up a consistent and coherent memory without a cultural social context. The fact that an individual is a member of a society gives him material to build up his own memory, to remember certain things, and to forget. It is even possible that certain events can be ‘remembered’ without the subject himself being present at the event. Halbwachs’ emphasis on the impossibility of a strictly individual memory reveals what is also called memory consumers in the literature: the extreme tendency of individuals to become emotionally involved in a collective memory. The upsurge in the so-called ‘silent marches’ is one example of this. James Young calls this the ‘pre-memory’ of individuals. This pre-memory is shaped by a fixed template, which causes individuals to react in a vehemently affected manner to events that they themselves have never experienced: For even though groups share socially constructed assumptions and values that organize memory into roughly similar patterns, individuals cannot share another’s memory any more than they can share another’s cortex [...] By maintaining a sense of collected memories, we remain aware of their disparate sources, of every individual’s unique relation to a lived life, and of the ways our traditions and cultural forms continuously assign common meaning to disparate memories.1

This is exactly what Halbwachs wanted to draw attention to: both history and collective memory are publicly available facts. History is ‘dead’; the collective memory is ‘alive’. Halbwachs divided memory into four categories: autobiographical memory, historical memory, history, and collective memory. Autobiographical memory refers only to personal experiences (though these experiences are shaped by a group), while historical memory is exclusively transmitted to us through documents and images. History is the past to which we no longer have natural access — it is no longer important for our daily lives — while collective memory is the active past that forms our identity. In chapter 1, we noted that the practice of classifying types of memory dates back to Hegel and Nietzsche. The collective ‘consciousness’ of history also played a role in the history of mentalities of the École des Annales. One term deserves to be mentioned here: mnemonic history. This interpretation of culture and memory is concerned with the past as it is remembered, unlike ‘real history’. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann (1938-) played a key role in the development of mnemonic history, emphasising the cultural transmission 1 J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993), p. 9.

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of memory. This means that history is not just an enumeration of objective events arrayed in a particular order but rather an active process of signification over time: ‘the uninterrupted work of the composite imagination’. This brings us close to the discipline of hermeneutics — and to Dilthey from the first chapter — in which the meaning of life is found in our self-consciousness and is wrapped in a permanent process of interpretation and reinterpretation.

Remembering and Forgetting Today’s society is obsessed with memory. There is a genuine memory boom under way in which memory, remembering, nostalgia, and tradition are being studied in all facets of cultural society. This memory boom can be detected in the most diverse areas: from historical interiors and the creation of ‘authentic’ olive oil from Italy to the hype surrounding the so-called re-enactment. The latter is the practice of mimicking history by re-enacting a historic event such as a battle. These days, even academics consider the practical side of the re-enactment of history to be attractive. This can be explained by the fact that cultural historians have for the first time designed a kind of applied research which appears to guarantee the ‘relevance’ of their research. Thus the past has become a great laboratory for us all, adding a societal impact on the way we remember ourselves. Perhaps this impact explains the memory boom currently present in the humanities. Some scholars believe that this obsessive interest in memory can be situated within postmodern society, where language is seen as a medium not only to share thoughts but also to construct them. Within this paradigm, history has also been stripped of its semi-objective character, argued White, whom we already introduced in chapter 3. In his 1973 book Metahistory, White contended that historians construct not only their texts and interpretations but also the past itself. This means that the past itself is no more than a construction. The great nineteenth-century historians did not necessarily write history but rather modelled their historical reports on literary genres that were in vogue at that time. We mentioned earlier that White denounced the false reality of the historical discourse; in Metahistory, he also argued that the contrast between poetry and history is too strictly formulated. The concept of ‘historical objectivity’ is called into question. Many people are disquieted by this: is there no longer anything that ‘really’ happened in history? How can history be an academic discipline if we no longer acknowledge facts? And compared to political or economic history, where there are at least battles and receipts to work with, cultural history suffers from vagueness. So if Hayden White argued

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that history and poetry are more similar than we would like to admit, it would appear there is little left of what we could call a ‘science’. This argument is, however, incorrect. White never wanted to claim that there are no ‘facts’ in history. Take the example of survivors of the gulag or the Holocaust. Clearly factuality does exist — even the most terrible facts imaginable. But it is precisely when there are such monstrous ‘realities’ that human memory works differently. In the accounts of those who survived the camps, very little is written about ‘facts’ that we today presume to see in history. For the survivors, the Allies’ military strategy was not a matter of concern, even if the Allies were to become their liberators. They also had no notion of the price of bread and water because that was not what life in the camps was about. This was also the view of the Jewish-Italian chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987). After having survived Auschwitz, Levi published Se questo è uomo (If This Is a Man), which describes in a detached manner how people behave under the most extreme conditions. The prisoners in the camps realised that the events they were witnessing were literally inconceivable; people were even afraid they would not be believed if they ever lived to tell others about it. This was the biggest nightmare of most survivors of the war: relieved to have survived the war, they would tell their story to their loved ones, but no one would (or could) believe the stories. Sometimes, historical reality and poetry flow into one another. We do the study of history gross injustice when such texts are not included in historical commentaries. Incidentally, Primo Levi died after falling from his apartment on the third floor, and although never proven, the death had all the trappings of a suicide. Ultimately, Levi could not cope with having survived the Shoa. The impossibility to remember could also be one of the explanations for the memory boom. The generation of Second World War victims who can still bear witness is slowly shrinking and soon no longer here, so that the oral tradition of telling ‘how it was’, with the important aspect of having eye-witnesses, has become a matter of ‘now or never’. Yet, the impossibility to remember has also become a neurological question. Nowadays there is an increasing interest in memory and remembering, as part of culture, within the biomedical world. In his book The Uses of Enchantment, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) argued that besides trauma, malnutrition could be a second possible explanation for forgetting atrocities. Because the prisoners in the camps had a serious deficiency of vitamin B, this might have created a lapse in their memory. Moreover, normal traits such as observation and interest in your surroundings were not advantageous in this situation: in order to survive, it was actually best not to look around you too much. Excessive vigilance could be dangerous, while not standing out and not looking around was a survival

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strategy. Together with the point made by Levi, these issues demonstrate that remembering events is not easy and that historians should exercise some caution with regard to a ‘collective memory’. Dealing with the question of the ‘reliability’ or ‘expressiveness’ of war victims is common to all eras. The genocide in Rwanda reveals a different approach to the traumatic past. This Central-African country is concerned not so much with writing eyewitness accounts, recalling, or processing the trauma through psychotherapy as with the search for a solution. For African cultural identity, the oral tradition is the cornerstone of history. From this perspective, it was a very powerful symbol when after the genocide the old colonial language — French — was replaced by English. English now serves as the lingua franca in addition to the numerous languages that are present in the country. Forgetting is also a form of remembering. There are memories that are indelible because they are violently scratched into our mental universe. In general, it is striking that research on remembering is more inclined towards empiricism, the embodiment of remembering itself, and the creative solutions to shape life in the gray area between history and memory. In this way, culture provides historiography with an extra dimension and is critical of creating a canon aimed at making history the same for everyone.

Lieux de mémoire And yet it is precisely the latter — the binding nature of remembering (or forgetting) for nation-building, as in the case of Rwanda — that have occupied many cultural specialists since 1990. The French historian Pierre Nora (1931-) coined the highly influential term lieux de mémoire. He believes that our postmodern society has been so preoccupied with the past because there is virtually nothing left of it. Once we lived in worlds of memory (milieux de mémoire); now we consciously cultivate sites of remembrance (lieux de mémoire). These places of remembrance are crystallised places of collective memory. Nora gives the following definition: If the expression lieu de mémoire must have an official definition, it should be this: a lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.2 2 P. Nora, Realms of Memory (New York, 1993), vol. 1, p. vxii, xv; translated from French: Lieux de mémoire (Paris, ed. 1997).

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This quotation comes from the famous set of books bearing the overarching title Lieux de mémoire (translated into English as Realms of Memory). It is a comprehensive study of French nation-building, written between 1984 and 1992. While there exists an English translation of the technical term – which is ‘site of memory’ – scholars tend to keep the French expression as to anchor the topic they want to discuss in its historiographical context. Many authors have used this work as an example to be applied to other countries. Nora’s work focuses mainly on the development of the French national consciousness. He discusses how the imposing Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris) is a typical example of a lieu de mémoire — a perfect example to underscore his thesis. After the First World War, the culture of national remembrance changed dramatically, in part because the bodies of many soldiers were never recovered. ‘Memorial sites’ are not always massive buildings, and they often have more than one identity. An example are the two women who are emblems of the French Republic: Joan of Arc as a symbol of resistance in the Middle Ages and Marianne from the French Revolution. Joan of Arc denotes the

American cemetery of soldiers from the First World War in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. This cemetery contains 9,387 graves of soldiers; the wall in the adjacent garden lists the names of 1,557 missing soldiers

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Catholic heritage of France, while Marianne symbolises the secular French Republic. Joan and Marianne have become allegories of the French nation, just as Lady Justice with her blindfold and scales is a symbol of justice. Joan and Marianne have become crystallised symbols of a collective memory. For Nora, places of remembrance are therefore almost always sites of memory embedded in a thematically developed history. It is with sadness that Nora concludes that memory (mémoire) is part of a warm traditional society that lives in the past, while history (histoire) is cold and intellectual. Nora believes that history is cutting (or has already cut) off its warm ties with the past. This brings us to the main critique of his thesis, namely that a wistful nostalgia echoes throughout his work. His hypothesis stems from a rigidly composed canon; in other words, no attention is given to the diversity of collective remembering. Nora describes memorial sites as polyreferential, i.e., he uses a multitude of cultural myths that are appropriated for various political purposes. Yet these symbols are, in Nora’s view, always focused on a collective memory of the fatherland. But what would be left of his thesis if he were also to describe ‘memorials’ for the colonial areas? And where are women or minorities in this top-down view of a national history? Nonetheless, the notion of lieux de mémoire remains culturally dominant. First introduced by Halbwachs and almost entirely taken up by Nora — in an edited form (for Halbwachs, it was ultimately not about the idea of a nation-state) — the idea of collective memory with respect to nation-building deserves deeper reflection. How about nation-building from an entirely different perspective? Didn’t the development of the nation in nineteenth-century Latin America look completely different from that of Europe? And what about the way in which African countries became nations in the 1950s and 1960s?

Imagined Communities This Eurocentric view is what the American anthropologist Benedict Anderson (1936) reproaches many cultural scientists and political historians for. As an alternative, he introduced the term imagined communities in his 1983 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. While a nation will depict an imagined political community using parades, f ireworks, allegories, and memorials — as the examples given by Nora show — this ‘imagined community’ is not a crystallised lieux de mémoire. This community is completely imaginary

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because even the members of the smallest nation will never know, meet, or hear from the majority of the rest of their nation. And yet the idea of a community exists. Anderson’s criticism of the unilateral view of nationalism is quite harsh: he regards nationalism as a surrogate religion. This typical modern ideology should be seen in the context of culture, argues Anderson, rather than a political ideology. The process of nation-building is fed not only in a passive way through illusion, it is created by citizens actively taking part in image formation. Benedict Anderson claims that the invention of nineteenth-century book production — he calls it ‘print capitalism’ — is chiefly responsible for the successful spread of the idea of the nation. Books, newspapers, and pamphlets were printed on a large scale in their own national language, as a result of which Latin as a language faded into the background, dialects were absorbed into a national language, and a common discourse could emerge. Anderson’s thesis is bottom-up (in other words, nation-building begins at the bottom, from the larger masses) and is therefore the opposite of Nora’s centralised and top-down thesis.

The Image of Absence Let us reflect a little more on the ‘crystallised’ nature of collective memory. Since 2000, greater attention is being paid to the invisibility of groups, which means there is also more space for ‘doubt’ in history — for example, doubt regarding the Holocaust, as Primo Levi showed. It happened, so it could happen again and therefore should be remembered by, for example, completely filling the space up with stone statues. Until the 1980s, this was the usual way to describe and design places of remembrance. In recent decades, there has been a greater tendency to show the emptiness of memory — not because we have forgotten an event but because we are dealing with (deference for) the unpredictability of certain atrocities. Any attempt at representation would fall short by definition and therefore cannot do justice to it. The idea of ‘representing’ a horrifying event via a cultural object by means of emptiness therefore aims to evoke inconceivability. One example of this tendency towards ‘fewer monuments and more remembrance’ is the 2005 work of the Hungarian film artists Can Togay and Gyula Pauer. During the Second World War, Jews in Budapest were forced to jump into the river Danube. If they did not drown in the swirling waters, they were shot by the so-called Arrow Cross, a movement of Nazi-Germany sympathisers. The bodies flowed down the river towards oblivion.

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Shoes lined up along the Danube

There is nothing to remind us anymore of these people who led their lives laughing, crying, in love, happy, and angry — nothing except the shoes left behind on the shore. The two Hungarian film artists captured this moment as a monument, and the minimalist nature of this memorial lays bare the

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painful emptiness and absence of these people in a manner that is all the more pressing. A more familiar work that similarly attempts to represent absence in a monumental manner is the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin built in 2005 by Peter Eisenman. The monument in New York for the victims of 9/11 is also an example of a great void, the large gap that the Twin Towers left behind, with the names of the fallen written in stone, disappearing behind forever running water.

The Senses One of the questions that comes up when looking into the foundations of memory is to what extent it is made up of our senses. In Western culture, sight and, accordingly, visual culture have gradually become dominant from the Renaissance onwards. Some specialists claim that, as a result, a gap has emerged in the study of culture itself. To understand the significance of that gap, it is important to investigate how senses might affect the status of memory. In his highly influential book Confessions, Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354-430) wrote about the pivot point between remembering, the senses, and the human dimension of time. The soul perceives through the body. The body’s senses convey things from the outside to the inner capacity of the soul and from there to the ability to reason, where it is evaluated.3 Now, some 1,500 years later, numerous studies from the field of neuropsychology are being published, this branch of science having become a real hype. What is the human nature of memory, and to what extent can we say there is an acquired memory, or in other words culture? The history of memory and the role of senses involve more than just a visual character. This branch of history examines the role of the senses in the great cultural developments in antiquity and in pre-modern societies. A history of the senses explores how and why visual culture became dominant in the process of modernisation in Western European culture. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a genuine ‘hierarchy’ emerged in which the senses were categorised, with vision at the top of the pyramid and the senses of smell and touch at the bottom. This categorisation has had an impact on how we study culture. How were different social classes kept informed about events — by hearing the bell toll or by reading the paper? What is the role of urbanisation, imperialism, and nationalism in these 3 Augustine, Confessions, Book VII, xvii, 23. The best translation is that of Henry Chadwick in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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processes of information provision? How could people be kept informed of new facts when they could not read the newspaper or had no money to buy a newspaper? We are so accustomed to the fact that perception is a physical act — i.e., something you do with your eyes, smell, or intuition — that we often forget its cultural character. Let us cite some examples we have discussed in this book. Febvre argued in his book on Rabelais (see chapter 2) that the non-visual senses in premodern societies had a more prominent place in culture than is the case today. How we deal with senses even formed the basis of a history of mentalities in Bloch’s book about the English and French kings’ ability to heal through touch. For Foucault, the whole principle of epistemology, control, and power is based on a visual interpretation: on monitoring something or someone. The enormous impact of his work in the humanities has probably led to other senses remaining underexposed in his theory of the cultural épistème (see chapter 3). The senses are, however, not a universal given; they can only be understood in their cultural and social context.

The Medium is the Message The emphasis on context in which senses are used was also the founding thesis of the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), one of the founders of media studies. He is best known for the much-heard phrase ‘the medium is the message’, which is also the title of his book in which he stressed the expanding and retracting process of a medium. Just as the radio encourages listening and simultaneously reduces our seeing, the television encourages seeing and reduces our capacity to listen or feel. Every new medium attempts to recover what has been lost at an earlier stage. (Is the example of the iPad with its touch screen not revealing?) McLuhan called this the process of retrieval. In this way, media are always linked to a specific context of time and space. McLuhan’s theory on the unbridgeable gap between the senses is the most sophisticated in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. In it he describes his great divide theory. According to McLuhan, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century resulted in the cultures of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment becoming increasingly focused on sight. As a result, the ability to ‘see’ became equated with the ability to know the ‘truth’ and ‘reason’: seeing is believing. Marshall McLuhan therefore calls the Renaissance

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and the Enlightenment eye-centered. Taste, touch, and above all smell were mainly pushed to the margins of culture as a result of the elevation of sight. According to this theory, the basic human senses unfolded in four stages in the history of Western culture: oral-auditory, chirographic (i.e. handwritten), typographic, and electronic. In oral-auditory societies, the ability to speak was the basis of a collective transfer of culture. This was to change def initively in the f inal period of the Renaissance and with the Reformation. The ‘revolution of the printing press’ was decisive for the development of the visual hegemony in Western culture, says McLuhan. He surmised that the electronic phase of Western culture would eventually unite the senses again. This is an interesting idea, especially when we realise that McLuhan (the book dates from 1967) was far removed from the Internet or the touch screen of the electronic tablets that are ubiquitous today. As with any theory, the ‘great divide theory’ came in for its fair share of criticism. Many felt Marshall McLuhan’s categorisation was too binary and general, with so much emphasis placed on the tension between the eyes and the ears that the other senses were overridden in the analysis. Constance Classen argued in 2012 in her book The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch that the history of the senses in a certain sense needs to be rewritten, because the ability to read is taken as a starting point in virtually all analyses. This makes the history of the senses Eurocentric, masculine, and elitist, says Classen. After all, many of the ‘less noble’ tasks in cultural life such as cooking, feeding, and washing have to do with the human capability of smell and touch. These senses are often considered ‘sensual’, which suggests there is a dichotomy with the ‘rational’ character of sight associated with reading, writing, and traveling. Housework such as food preparation, childcare, and nursing has until recently been seen as an exclusively female occupation. But isn’t the ability to taste and smell very important when we talk about food preparation or toxicology? And isn’t an acute sense of touch vital for a good doctor? Nowadays there seem to be two trends in the study of culture. Many will emphasise visual hegemony due to the considerable attention given to media studies, material heritage, and film studies. And from the perspective of the law, much academic attention is being paid to public spaces, which are placed under supervision via cameras and the increasing lighting of squares and streets, referred to by Foucault as ‘the eye of the state’. The other tendency, less explicitly present, shows a process of developing awareness within the cultural sciences that visual hegemony is a modern fact and that an exclusively visually oriented study would thus encounter limitations.

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Some academics are interested in the way knowledge is gathered, structured, and passed on through the interaction of various senses. From a gentle breeze to a hurricane, a fluff of wool to a rough wooden plank full of splinters, the sense of touch is the basis of the way we experience the world around us. Why was there social ambivalence about the use of perfume among men in ancient Greece? This was because body odour determined the social class to which you belonged in the Greek polis, as Aristophanes explains (446-386 B.C.) in his play The Clouds. In the play, Aristophanes portrays the peasant Strepsiades who is debt-ridden and tells of marrying a rich girl he thinks he can woo by using fragrant flowers and fruits. The ‘wrong’ odours are described in detail, such as the air that hangs around animals, especially the stench of goats. Aristophanes’ comedy, whose full title is The Clouds, or the School for Sophists, was directed against Socrates’ educational theories and his intellectualism. Different connotations surrounding body odour could reveal an important ideological distinction between culture and nature, between the ideal of civilisation and the political reality of Athenian citizens after the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, smelly medieval cities or polluted Asian metropolises of modernity — the way humans experience the space around them says much about the culture in which they live. By putting more emphasis on the physical and spatial aspects of learning and knowledge transfer, research into the history of ideas is shifting from a one-sided focus on books and texts towards a broader, historical anthropological study in which all senses are utilised.

Roland Barthes In chapter 2, we mentioned that the linguist Saussure was interested in the playful aspects of language and its conventions. Saussure used the example of chess to illustrate the contextual (‘differential’) meaning of words. For example, if a white bishop is missing from a set of chess pieces and we use a salt shaker instead, the meaning of the salt shaker in the sign system of chess is not ‘salt’ but ‘white bishop’. This brought Saussure to the important conclusion that the signifier (signifiant) was the mental print of a linguistic sound, and that the carrier of meaning (signifié) is that which is referred to by the signifier. Both aspects are like the two sides of a coin. So far we have limited ourselves to language in this verbal chess game. But can’t we interpret an image just as we would a text, that is, as a visual form

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of language? This was a question that occupied sociologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Barthes came to an important insight that was missing from Saussure’s work: what was the role of the observer? Let’s explore this using an example. When Saussure analysed the word ‘dog’, he came to the following conclusion. First, that the description ‘dog’ with the corresponding sound is the signif ier, and that the concept or mental image is a four-legged animal, the canis familiaris, the carrier of the meaning. Together they form the ‘sign’. The relationship between the two is, as we have seen, arbitrary, since the French say chien and the British say dog. But what would an observer do if s/he has no connection to the sound? When we look at a traffic light, we see three colours: red, orange, and green. With every colour, we know what this means. But these colours could just as easily have been blue, green, and pink. Or a different order (green means stop, red means go). This shows, according to Barthes, that words, texts, and cultural practices are often studied as if they were texts. However, the social and cultural reality is much more complex than a text when it comes to ‘giving meaning’. The reader or observer is, after all, part of this complex cultural reality because he interprets the signs and these signs carry in them a potentially ambiguous meaning. If I see a car in the street burning, do I think of a car accident, social unrest, theft, or terrorism? The way I give meaning to this scene with the car is linked to the place where the car and I are (an upscale residential area at the East Coast of the United States or a poor suburb in Paris) and how susceptible I am to the media (the presence of a terrorist threat in a remote location is not exactly realistic). By including the role of the observer in semiotic analysis, Barthes assigned the key concepts of connotation and denotation to these two layers of meaning. By denotation, Barthes is referring to the first layer of meaning, the physical reality of what is meant; a red rose signifies a flower with a red colour. By connotation, Barthes means the second layer of meaning that refers to the observer who sees the sign. When a man gives a woman a red rose, the observer thinks of affection, passion, and love. Here the observer has to rely on his knowledge of the cultural context in which he interprets the red rose, for the fact that this flower stands for love is not a natural given. When the two layers of meaning — denotation and connotation — are used as interchangeable and the red rose incorporates the feeling of love, the cultural convention connected to the symbol is regarded as something natural when in fact it is nothing more than a cultural construct. The conferring of meaning is always subject to changes in status and trends.

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Barthes was irritated by those who misconstrued the distinction between the process of denotation and connotation, because society thereby implicitly transmits a normative cultural code that is considered universal but in fact is historically determined. This disavowal is what Barthes called myth; he expounded this thesis in his 1957 book Mythologies. Why was the structuralist Barthes so attached to this semiotic distinction of images? Aren’t some images so universal and timeless that everyone would always recognise them, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky claimed in Meaning in the Visual Arts? (1970) when he introduced the term ‘denotation’? Isn’t someone with a crown on his head always recognisable as a king — regardless of the culture or time period you are talking about? That remains to be seen: the recognisability of a crown as monarchy for all cultures and all times is in fact quite a claim, argues Barthes, because it assumes a cultural presupposition.

Myth Today Let’s take an example from the second part of Mythologies, in which Roland Barthes explains his theory in an essay that has gained a status of its own, called ‘Myth Today’, in which he used a cover of the French magazine Paris Match from 1955. At the level of interpretation of denotation, we see a black boy with a beret in army-green clothes looking as though he is saluting a flag, his small hand against his temples and his chin up. Everyone — no matter what part of the world they come from — would be able to identify with this description of the photo. But which flag is the boy saluting? Presumably the French tricolore; it is, after all, a French magazine. Now we are already in the twilight zone between denotation and connotation: we are beginning to reflect on the way in which the boy was photographed. In the year this Paris Match was published, colonial France was engaged in a process of decolonisation. The French-controlled areas in Vietnam were close to being taken over (1952-1964), and the war against Algeria was raging in full ferocity. Taking this into account in our analysis, what is the possible connotation of this black boy who appears to be swearing allegiance to the French flag? We see in the following quote how Barthes allows the connotation of an image to merge with the cultural myth of colonisation: I am at the barber’s, and a copy of Paris Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro* in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes

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Cover of Paris Match (1955)

uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro* in serving his so-called oppressors. I am therefore again

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faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a black soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier... In myth (and this is the chief peculiarity of the latter), the signifier is already formed by the signs of the language... Myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us... One must put the biography of the Negro* in parentheses if one wants to free the picture, and prepare it to receive its signified… The form does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a distance… It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth. The form of myth is not a symbol: the Negro* who salutes is not the symbol of the French Empire: he has too much presence, he appears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable image. But at the same time this presence is tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent; it recedes a little, becomes the accomplice of a concept which comes to it fully armed, French imperiality… Myth is… defined by its intention... much more than by its literal sense… In spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense (The French Empire? It’s just a fact: look at this good Negro* who salutes like one of our own boys). This constituent ambiguity… has two consequences for the signif ication, which henceforth appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact… French imperiality condemns the saluting Negro* to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier, the Negro* suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment the Negro’s* salute thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish French imperiality… We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature… In the case of the soldier-Negro*… what is got rid of is certainly not French imperiality (on the contrary, since what must be actualized is its presence); it is the contingent, historical, in one word: fabricated, quality of colonialism. Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. If

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I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions… Things appear to mean something by themselves…4 [* This is the translation of Barthes’ use of nègre by translator Annette Travers in the 1987 edition – it is not the choice of the author of this book]

Using this example, Roland Barthes shows how myth refers to cultural beliefs and norms that are expressed at the level of connotation. They represent a hidden system of rules and conventions that in fact only applies to a small group but are presented as if they were universal. By drawing attention to the effect of myths in the forming of images, the dominant ideology of a particular period can be ascertained — the myths are understood as the embodiment of prevailing ideas and practices. As a result, we experience these myths as something natural, which is often in the interests of the dominant cultures within a society. According to Barthes, by identifying myths, we can identify power structures within a culture. This is all beautifully recounted on a theoretical level, but how can you learn to read an image beyond the level of denotation, i.e., beyond a strictly descriptive level? The way the eye is directed within an image says much about the connotation. In addition to the use of colour, the composition, and the manner in which the foreground and background are displayed, the eye is directed by rhythm, framing, and lines until it finds a resting point. It is at that resting point that connotation often occurs. The hand of the boy, the red piping along the beret, and his raised eyes all send our eye to a point that goes beyond the frame (to, presumably, the French flag). The most important message is outside of the image. Such questions should always be asked when analysing an image. Is there deliberate absence, exaggeration, or tension? Does it involve humour or parody? And what emotions are depicted? Can we take the political and cultural context of the image into consideration in our analysis? Debunking cultural myths is an attempt to take apart and analyse the suggestion of a ‘natural character’. This task of ‘denaturing’ is difficult when the language of the observer, which 4 R. Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in : Mythologies ([Paris, 1957] New York: Hill & Wang 1987), p. 116 in the French edition.

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was key for Barthes, stems from the same culture as the myth that must be debunked. And yet the ability to distinguish between denotation and connotation is the first step in the process of expressing criticism of our own culture. Bourdieu wanted to achieve this by emphasising the social game of cultural codes; for Barthes, language and semiotics formed the basis for cultural criticism. Cultural criticism is often considered elitist and intellectualist, the counterargument of which is the existence of a broad-based ‘popular culture’. This deserves some reflection. For what is the meaning of ‘popular culture’, a term from the period of Romanticism? The cultural historian’s response would be that in every period and every culture there is a literate social stratum engaged in self-criticism and that the contrast between an intellectual culture and a popular culture is artificial. Cultural transmission knows no schisms because the subculture of a literate social layer is often subsumed and absorbed by other social strata. Moreover, the concept of ‘popular culture’ does not do justice to the diversity within that mammoth category. The people cannot be designated a cultural entity. Where is the miller and the farmer, the chaplain and priest, to use the words of cultural historian Carlo Ginzburg (1939-)? Where are the women? Doesn’t cultural appropriation also involve interaction and exchange between native people and immigrants? Popular culture does not deserve to be confused with the mass media, whose own logic moves on a completely different level, namely that of consumption and commerce. Cultural appropriation is not an illusion, nor is it clear-cut. It varies per period, social class, and geographical location.

The Academic Attitude In his 1969 book In Search of Cultural History, art historian Ernst Gombrich laments that the academic world responds slowly when it comes to sensing what is going on in society. Most history courses are still chiefly about economic and political history, and there is hardly any exchange between the social sciences and the humanities. Diversity in research on culture is essential, says Gombrich, even if its reputation, and visual or intellectual recognition may thus be put in danger: I would hate the idea of my criticism of Geistesgeschichte giving aid and comfort to such enemies of cultural history. It cannot be repeated sufficiently often that the so-called ‘disciplines’ on which our academic

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organization is founded are no more than techniques; they are a means to an end but no more than that. Clearly the historian of music must learn to read scores, and the economic historian must be able to handle statistics. But it will be a sad day when we allow the techniques we have learned or which we teach to dictate the questions which can be asked in our universities.5

Last but not least, a few questions. Given the dominance of the visual in cultural studies, with the focus on observing and reading, what can we say about the other senses? Is our ability to listen worse than in the past? Listening carefully was of vital importance in societies until the nineteenth century, because people were able to orient themselves in space and time through semiotic sound codes. Through warning systems such as the sound of trumpets and the tolling of bells, people were informed of new political events or the death of a fellow townsman. The invention of the stethoscope, which amplified the sound of the heartbeat, also meant a greater physical distance between the doctor and the patient. Doctors were no longer allowed to touch women from a lower social class. Is this an example of progressive medical insight or of a heightened taboo towards touching in the culture? In Africa, there are still tribes that communicate with each other across long distances via drums, using subtle changes in rhythm and pitch. What is left of our sense of smell in the deodorised Western culture? The soldiers in the trenches who wrote about homoeroticism — the aforementioned War Poets — literally sat pressed together simply waiting for their hour of death. Is this ‘culture’? What is the impact of globalisation on the way we experience taste in food? If the history of culture has no voice in academic councils and cultural organisations, this is because the concept does not have one single technique or method. Regardless of what the cultural specialist can learn from other disciplines to study the phenomenon of ‘civilisation’, he will always have to keep his focus on the singular and the specific. The House of Science has several rooms, and the concept of culture occupies at least two of them: the room of meditation and the room of mediation.

5

E.H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, ed. 1974), p. 46.

Glossary – agency The ability of an individual or group to think and act autonomously. What is important here is the idea that these actions could affect a (cultural) process. – allegory A form of imagery in which an abstract concept is personified. An example is the abstract concept of ‘pride’, which is depicted as a woman with a peacock. – anthropology The study of societies, cultures, and their development, both in the present and in the past. It is important here that one looks at a society or culture objectively and tries to understand it from its social environment. – atheism A worldview in which it is assumed that there is no such thing as ‘the divine’. – axiom A generally accepted, self-contained principle that needs no further proof. – Bildung Loosely translated: self-development The nineteenth-century ideal in which it was posited that people could develop themselves into a better version of themselves. – binarity (binary thinking) Literally: duality Binary thinking is thinking in opposites. The answer to a question is, for example, either ‘yes’ or ‘no’; there is no middle ground possible. – canon The whole of (written) work that contributes to a frame of reference. – causality Causality; the link between cause and effect.

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– chauvinism An extreme form of patriotism. Chauvinism comprises a biased opinion and blind loyalty to one’s own affairs. – close reading A meticulous, detailed study of a (literary) text. – constructivism (with respect to history) A theory that assumes that you can arrive at a construction of the past using source material. This construction, however, cannot be compared with the past itself, because the past is gone. Different constructions of the past can, however, be compared with one another, allowing us to deepen our understanding of the subject. – determinism The teaching that everything is caused by laws. In other words, each event has a definite cause. – diachrony A development occurring over time. – dichotomy The differentiation of a variable into two categories. An example is the variable ‘sex’, which can be differentiated into the two categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. – discourse The way something is discussed. Discourse is like a linguistic construct, a framework, in which a word gets its meaning. – emancipation Striving for equality and recognition for disadvantaged groups. – epistemology Literally: the theory of knowledge The branch of philosophy in which the nature of knowledge and the origin of that knowledge is examined. – eschatology The doctrine concerning the final or ultimate things, such as the gathering of knowledge about the end of (individual) life or the world.

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– establishment The group (usually coming from the upper layer of society) that lays down the law in society. – aesthetics The branch of philosophy that deals with art and the various forms of beauty and taste. – ethics The branch of philosophy that deals with good and evil and moral conduct. – ethnology The study of different ‘races’, with a focus on cultural and social differences between groups of people. – exegesis English speakers have used the word exegesis (from Greek ἐξήγησις from  ἐξηγεῖσθαι, ‘to lead out’) to refer to explanations of Scripture since the early 17 th century. Nowadays, however, academic writers interpret all sorts of texts, and ‘exegesis’ is no longer associated mainly with the Bible. – feminism The social and political movement that arose from the wish to have women receive the same rights as men. – fetishism Originally (in an anthropological context) the assignment of supernatural, external forces to objects and the idolatry of those objects. – free will The ability of an individual to act independent of anyone or anything. – gender Female or male. – hegemony The dominance of the ruling class, resulting in the manipulation of other social groups.

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– hermeneutics The theory of interpretation. Hermeneutics focuses chiefly on the way texts are interpreted. What is key is empathy: if you want to understand what is happening (in a text), you must be able to imagine yourself in the situation described. – holism (> holistic aspect) Emphasis on the interrelated whole instead of emphasis on the different separate parts. – iconography The scientific discipline dealing with the way people, animals, or objects are depicted in art. Iconography addresses the deeper significance of a work of art. Symbolism in artwork is particularly important within this discipline. – quantitative research Research using numerical data. – linguistic turn An important turning point in the 1960s when language began to take on a prominent role in history. The linguistic turn is the notion that language determines our perspective on reality. Thus, in order to understand how groups of people perceive reality, you should study their language. – linguistics The scientific discipline that gathers insights into language and language use. Research is conducted on how a language has developed, for example, and the structures underpinning it. – mediation The meaning comes from media studies and is often used to express the interrelation between the change of communication and sociocultural changes, both in past and present. – metaphor A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two things that at first glance have nothing to do with each other, such as ‘my love is a rose’. – narrativity The narrative element in texts. Of importance here are the (logical) underlying relationships between the events reproduced in a text.

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– subconscious The collection of intuitive mechanisms and mental processes (such as emotions or feelings) that influence behaviour and of which we are not immediately aware. – patriarchy The term used for a society in which men have a superior position in relation to women. In such societies, men fulfil an active role while women have a passive role. – polis (in ancient Greece) A political form of organisation and unit of society, also called a city-state. – postmodernism A movement in philosophy and the arts that developed in the 1960s. Postmodernists believe that every individual looks at reality from his/her own perspective. Truthful statements or depictions are an illusion according to postmodernism. – psychoanalysis The method of curing someone’s mental problems by interpreting and comprehending his or her experiences (with all the accompanying emotions and feelings). The subconscious plays an important role in psychoanalysis. – queer studies A part of academics that focuses on the discussion about sexuality. Among other things, queer studies looks at the way a culture deals with sexual orientation. – representation The process by which meaning is produced and exchanged by members of a culture by means of language, signs, and images that stand for or represent certain things. – rite/ritual A special kind of act or series of acts to which a symbolic meaning is attached. Rituals create, as it were, a rupture between two situations that would otherwise flow from one to the other without anyone being aware of it.

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– semiotics The study of signs and symbols. Semioticians look at the way non-linguistic matters generate meaning and depict reality. – sociology The study of human life in a group. The mechanisms and elements that ­provide societies with stability — i.e., the rules of society — are explored. – structuralism The view of science that is aimed at regulating systems such as those related to language, symbolism, and culture. Structuralists try to find out the underlying pattern or principle of a composition. – subaltern The group in society belonging to the underclass. – supremacy The situation in which an individual or specific group is superior to all the others in society in terms of authority, power, or status. – synchrony Literally: simultaneity Thus, in the case of a simultaneous analysis, one does not look at developments over time but at local differences or similarities at one point in time. – synthesis The composition of different components into a new whole. One example of this is the development of a new idea from existing ideas. – teleology Literally: concept of progress This is a point of view by which all actions, events, and processes can be explained by the ultimate goal. – trauma A psychological scar that an individual or a group incurs after a serious incident. A trauma can have an enormous impact on the life of a person or groups, and the damage is usually irreparable.

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– universalism The assumption that all cultural expressions, including ideals and ­experiences, are essentially the same for all human beings. Accordingly, human reason is the same in every culture and every time period. – utilitarianism The belief that actions can only be justified if they benefit the happiness of the majority, or the common good. – Zeitgeist The ‘character’, as it were, of a certain period, arising from the social, cultural, and intellectual ideas and beliefs of that time.

Acknowledgements This text is an adaptation of my book previously published at the Dutch ‘Elementary Particles’ series of Amsterdam University Press (AUP). The content is partly derived from the plenary lectures on Cultural History I teach at the University of Groningen. For the present edition I would like to thank especially students Zoya Penwell for proofreading the English version and Juliet Resch for assisting me with finding suitable images. Rixt Runia and Sarah de Waard of Amsterdam University Press helped me navigating through the process of publishing, while the anonymous editor at AUP who provided the first draft with so many useful comments. My deepest gratitude goes to the students who, by asking critical questions, taught me time and again to formulate things more clearly.

Illustrations p. 17 p. 25 p. 29 p. 35 p. 41 p. 46 p. 51 p. 52 p. 66 p. 72 p. 76 p. 81

p. 85 p. 93 p. 98 p. 101 p. 103 p. 112 p. 113

Moai, Rano Raraku, Easter Island. Aurbina, Wikimedia Commons Portrait of Voltaire by Moreau le Jeune (1846) Portrait of Johann Gottfried Herder by Anton Graff (1785), in Gleimhaus Halberstadt Botticelli, La Primavera. Polo Museale Fiorentino, Inventario 1890 Roman de la Rose (1490-1500), The Carolle in the Garden, British Library, f.14v - BL Harley MS 4425 Sigmund Freud, photo from the The New York Times archive (1922) Baby at Play, painting by Thomas Eakins (1876), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Poster for the movie Rear Window, Paramount International, Wikimedia Commons Sunset over New York City. In: Flug und Wolken by Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, München, 1932, Wikimedia Commons Ferdinand de Saussure, photo taken by F. Jullien in Genève. Wikimedia Commons Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (1563). Art History Museum of Vienna House for the council of men. Bulletin; bulletin14311946smit. Photo by Claude Levi-Strauss; Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Wikimedia Commons Jheronimus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1494-1510), Musée du Louvre Karl Marx (1875), photo by John Jabez Edwin Mayall – International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam Tweet by Donald Trump (2012) Mabel Capper and fellow Suffragettes demonstrating outside the Police Court 1911. Photo by: Johnny Cyprus, Wikimedia Commons Photo of Simone de Beauvoir. Cultura Collectiva/Facilisimo Add for Pears’ Soap. Wikimedia Commons Archaeologists at work in Egypt. Photo by James Byrym, Archaeologists; Wikimedia Commons

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Claude Lévi-Strauss. Photo by UNESCO/Michel Ravassard; Wikimedia Commons Peter’s vision of the sheet with unclean animals. Illustration from Treasures of the Bible, Henry Davenport Northrop, 1894. Wikimedia Commons Adrien-Henri Tanoux, Namouna (1887). Wikimedia Commons Homi Bhabha. Photo by jeanbaptisteparis; adapted by Hidro. Wikimedia Commons Coloured watercolour by cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson from 1815. The Wellcome Institute, London Portrait of Beethoven composing the Missa solemnis, by Joseph Karl Stieler (1820), in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany The American military cemetery in Normandy, Colleville-sur-Mer, France. Photo by Bjarki Sigursveinsson; Wikimedia Commons Shoes on the Danube Promenade - Holocaust Memorial. Photo by Nikodem Nijaki, Wikimedia Commons Paris Match cover, N. 326, 25 june - 2 july 1955

Index Adorno, Theodor 69, 97-99 aesthetics 9-10, 43, 55, 66, 74, 89, 107, 114, 136, 141, 143 agency 100, 135-136, 142 anachronistic 134, 141 Anderson, Benedict 150-151 anthropology 11, 40, 65-66, 79, 114, 117-119, 121-122, 124, 126 archaeology, see: Foucault Aristotle 26, 144 Augustine, Aurelius 153 aura, see: Benjamin Bakhtin, Mikhail 74-76, 91-92, 144 Barthes, Roland 156-158, 161-162 Beauvoir, Simone de 103-105 Begriffsgeschichte 62-63 Benjamin, Walter 97-99, 131 Bhabha, Homi 9, 117, 130-133, 135 Bildung (ideal of) 14, 18, 32, 63, 96 Bloch, Marc 54, 57-59, 62, 114, 154 Boas, Franz 119, 121 Bourdieu, Pierre 18, 143, 162 bricolage, see: Lévi-Strauss Brown, Peter 27 Burckhardt, Jacob 31-33, 35-36, 40, 42, 55 canon (creating) 21, 92, 114-115, 132, 148, 150 carnivalesque  91-92, 144 Certeau, Michel de 49 civilisation process 58 class struggle, see: Marx close reading 40, 126 Cobban, Alfred 70 collective memory 21, 38, 54, 62, 104, 144-145, 148, 150-151 connotation, see: Barthes consumption 141, 143, 162 cultural criticism 9, 12, 21, 24, 83, 102, 114-115, 121, 162 cultural theory 14, 21, 27, 76, 83, 99, 125 denotation, see: Barthes Derrida, Jacques 73, 82 diachrony 71, 82 dialectics 94, 99, 161 Dilthey, Wilhelm 36-40, 146 discours, see: Foucault Douglas, Mary 122-124 Durkheim, Émile 18-19, 68, 121-122, 124, 144 École des Annales 45, 54-56, 59-62, 70, 145 Elias, Norbert 60-62, 87-88 Engels, Friedrich 92

Enlightenment 26-27, 30, 36, 63, 78, 80, 99, 154-155 épistème, see: Foucault ethnology 34, 59, 114 Eurocentric 9, 21, 114-115, 117, 134, 150, 155 Febvre, Lucien 54, 56-59, 86-87, 91, 114, 154 feminism 102-103, 107 film culture 139 folklore 31, 35, 54, 80, 96 Foucault, Michel 68-69, 82, 84, 86-89, 102, 128, 130, 134, 154-155 Frankfurter Schule 98 Freud, Sigmund 23, 36, 39, 45-50, 78, 98, 121, 135 Geertz, Clifford 124-126 gender studies 13-14, 93, 102, 105-107 Gibbon, Edward 27 Ginzburg, Carlo 162 Gombrich, Ernst 162 Goody, Jack 82, 122 Gramsci, Antonio 95-97, 99-100, 133 Greenblatt, Stephen 89 Habermas, Jürgen 39-40 Halbwachs, Maurice 144-145, 150 Haskell, Francis 140-141 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 28-31, 35-36, 38, 63, 94, 145 Herder, Johann G. von 28-31, 36, 63 heteroglossia 74-75, 91 historicism 28, 82-84, 125 history of mentalities 21, 54-55, 58, 62, 84, 87, 114, 145, 154 Hobbes, Thomas 70 Hobsbawm, Eric 53-54, 94 holism (holistic aspect) 18 homo ludens, see: Huizinga homosexuality 84, 107-109 horizon of expectation, see: Jauss Horkheimer, Max 99 Huizinga, Johan 40-43, 55, 143 Hume, David 30, 58 hybridity 13, 132-133, 135 intellectual culture 162 Jauss, Hans Robert 140-141 Kant, Immanuel 29 Kipling, Rudyard 111, 118 Koselleck, Reinhart 63 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 108-109 Kristeva, Julia 105-106 Kuhn, Thomas 88

178  Lacan, Jacques 50-53, 63, 68-69, 106, 131-132, 135 laïcité 58 langue, see: Saussure Latour, Bruno 137-138 Levi, Primo 147-148, 151 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 56, 59, 77-82, 120-121 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 56 lieu de mémoire, see: Nora linguistic turn 21, 53, 65, 70-71, 125, 141 linguistics 40, 53, 59, 66, 71, 76, 82 marginal culture 92 Marx, Karl 65, 92-95, 98, 121 marxist theory 82, 93-95, 102, 135 mass media 138, 162 materialism, see: marxist theory McLuhan, Marshall 154-155 mediation 69, 136, 139, 144, 163 memory consumers 145 Middle Ages 30, 32, 35, 42-43, 58, 60-61, 67, 77, 87, 91, 149 modernism 14, 53, 63, 99 Murdock, Graham 126 myth 23, 38, 47, 59, 74, 77-82, 124, 136, 150, 158, 160-162 mythèmes, see: Lévi-Strauss Nachleben 35 new historicism 82-84, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich 54, 145 Nora, Pierre 148-151 orientalism 14, 21, 117, 126-128, 130 outillage mental, see: Febvre parole, see: Saussure patriarchy 22, 82, 102, 104-106 philosophy 26, 28-30, 32-33, 36-37, 40, 43, 51, 53, 71, 73, 77, 94, 97-98, 103, 138, 144 Plato 137 postcolonialism 92, 116, 130-131, 133 postmodernism 7, 53, 65 poststructuralism 53, 65, 71, 82 production 94, 97, 135-136, 139, 141-142, 144, 151 psychoanalysis 21, 39, 45, 47, 50-51, 53, 98, 144

Understanding Culture

re-enactment 146 Renaissance 11-12, 18, 30-32, 35, 42, 89, 91, 114, 138, 153-154, 155 representation 18-20, 40, 56, 58, 68, 91, 122, 127-128, 133, 135, 143-144, 151 repression 39, 47, 49, 100 rites of passage 21, 55 Romanticism 28, 30, 63, 67, 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 78 Said, Edward 21, 117, 126-133 Saussure, Ferdinand de 71-76, 78, 82, 156-157 semiotics 106, 125, 157, 158, 162-163 senses 153-156, 163 signifiant/signifié 73, 82, 156 sites of remembrance, see: Nora sociology 11, 18, 36, 45, 65-66, 114 Spivak, Gayatri 133-135 Staël, Germaine de 26-27 structuralism 65-67, 71, 73-75, 79, 81-82, 95, 104-105, 122, 124, 131, 133, 158 subaltern 95-96, 133-134 synchrony 14, 34, 71, 82 teleology 26, 28, 30-31, 38 thick description, see: Geertz Thompson, E.P. 100-101 Todorov, Tzevtan 76-77 Tylor, Edward 118-119 UNESCO 15-16 universalism 114, 117, 132 utilitarianism 65, 140 Vasari, Giorgio 32 Verstehen, see: Dilthey visual culture 14, 21, 48-49, 153 Voltaire 24-26, 30 Warburg, Aby 33-36 War Poets 107, 163 Weber, Max 38 Weltanschauung 36, 38, 88 White, Hayden 68-69, 146-147 Wirkungzusammenhang, see: Dilthey

queer studies 14, 93, 107-108, 133

Young, James 145

Rancière, Jacques 69-70 Ranke, Leopold von 28, 31, 42

Zeitgeist 26, 29-33, 36, 40, 55, 88, 141 Žižek, Slavoj 52-53