o o CM In most other European countries (one would want here to say "cultures") culture carries a similar meaning, with a more distant one being the French, wherein the notion is probably less frequently used than elsewhere. Hence, according to Larousse, the term "culture" relates to (1) the action of cultivat- ing: "the culture of flowers," for example; (2) the unity or the whole "of ac- quired knowledge;" (3) the unity or the whole social, religious and other structures characterizing a certain society; (4) "mass culture;" (5) "physical culture;" and (6) a culture in a biological sense, such as that of microbes. Another usage, similarly distant from the usual sense of culture, but with a difference arising from an even more different historical background, is a Russian interpretation of culture, wherein culture is, as the Russian philoso- pher Mikhail Epstein stated some years ago, designed "to liberate a person from the very society in which he is doomed to live. Culture is not a product of society, but a challenge and alternative to society.""' Culture is a parallel world, in which art is "more true," in the words of the contemporary Russian 14 An outstanding example of symbolic commodification carried out by postmodernism is first the work and then the views of Jean Baudrillard, which started as an all-pervading critique of postmodern culture and in a single decade ended by being one of its main theoretical supports with him becoming one of its proponents . 15 Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 112. 111 Mikhail Epstein, After the Future (Amherst: University of Mass. Press, 1995), p. 6. 1 4 AESTHETICS: PHILOSOPHY OF A R T OR PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE? painter Erik Bulatov, than real life. Culture thus offers a spiritual shelter from the mindless pursuits of everyday life and its chaos. These different meanings of the term culture offer various inroads into the issue of a possible philosophy of culture. It is mostly the tradition of the Frankfurt School, combined with contemporary discussions of new technolo- gies, alternative culture, postmodernism, postmodernity and, especially, con- temporary visual culture, which are among the second group of reasons for present attempts to bring together philosophical aesthetics and the notion of culture. There is a certain antinomy in such an attempt, for culture was in the past either a normatively neutral term or, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, often a negative one, for it was conceived as an opposite to the uncommodified avant-garde art. The views and theories of Walter Benjamin were in this regard exceptions which gained authority only when the tenets of Adorno or Marcuse became increasingly obsolete in relation to the recent developments in art and culture. The notion of culture appears to respond well to its recent neutral or at least non-normative notion, to "the dethrone- ment of high culture," to use Péter Gyôrgy's phrasing, and to the implemen- tation of the institutional or, to use Stephen Davies's terminology,17 the "pro- cedural" definition and theory of art as theoretically and practically the rul- ing definition, offering a philosophical framework in aesthetic discourse on art. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that no other definitions and understandings, for example, following Davies again, the "functional defini- tions of art," exist any longer. The difficulty with the institutional or proce- dural definitions (and interpretations) of art today is that they disregard the historical changes that have occurred with the passage from modernism into postmodernism and treat art as if it was still functioning as it had in the time when modernism was vibrant and exclusive while, in fact, they mostly use as their examples conceptual art which often functions as Wittgenstein's lan- guage games. If, on the other hand, the social and existential functions of art have apparently substantially diminished due to a series of reasons (these being analyzed in the last few decades by Henri Lefebvre, Lyotard, Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, David Harvey, Zygmunt Bauman, and Gianni Vattimo, among others), then we may possess a good reason to ask whether in the present time the very object of such theories and of the ensuing definitions is not flawed at its very outset and does not - and cannot - authentically repre- sent their pertinent reference point and the subject of its definition. More- over, even if such attempts remain legitimate, meaning that art still basically functions as it did in the past (although perhaps not to the same extent, or 17 Cf. Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 1 5 A L E Š ERJAVKC with the same intensity, or equally frequently) the problem still remains how to establish the relation of such art to culture in the sense of mass and con- sumer culture - which today applies predominantly to the visual culture and its hybrid forms, these r ang ing f r o m dress codes , des ign , a n d the aestheticization of everyday life to the ensuing anaestheticization and its ret- roactive consequences. Contemporary art in most cases obviously no longer strives to be partisan, subversive and radical. Even if authors such as Terry Eagleton (in his Ideology of the Aesthetic, 1990) claim that postmodern art is both radical and conservative, most frequently its radical features are imme- diately commodified or carry and, especially, retain little weight if measured by their social consequences. Commodification is one of the essential com- mon features of contemporary and past culture and of contemporary art and is the third cause for the question of how to relate the philosophy of art to a philosophy of culture so as to avoid separating these two realms of inquiry whose subjects increasingly appear to be merging or are revealing numerous similarities - for hasn't art, by losing or diminishing its truth-disclosing func- tion, landed in the broad and normatively neutral realm of culture? Modernist art tended to distance itself from culture: culture was ethnic, local, traditional or mass and consumer culture, while art was predominantly elitist (and a part of "high" culture), be it in the traditional modernist sense or the avant-garde one. One of its distinguishing characteristics was its sub- versive nature, be it in relation to previous art or to society, as well as its truth- disclosing role, defended by philosophers f rom Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and Althusser. It fur thermore required an effort on the part of the audience to achieve aesthetic and artistic appre- ciation. Such modernist art is today often assimilated and integrated into the repository of cultural heritage and is modern in the Lyotard sense (as is the theory which supported it). One of the features of postmodern art and cul- ture, related of course to their commodified nature, is their accessibility, their "user-friendly" nature which, on the one hand, allows both to be global and, on the other, to raise the question whether this is still art and not simply culture in its traditional commodified form. Such works are hence often hy- brids between modernist art (from which they retain the notion of art) and culture under modernism (from which they have gained their accessibility and, therefore, what was then perceived as its commodified features). A para- mount example of such art or culture is contemporary architecture, which is simultaneously artistic, aestheticized, market-oriented and represents a pub- lic space. It is therefore not surprising that the issue of postmodernism was first raised in architecture, in which the demarcation line between art and 1 6 AESTHETICS: PHILOSOPHY OF A R T OR PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE? culture is often extremely difficult to draw. In modern exhibition spaces the architectural environment often carries equal or similar importance to the works exhibited in it. The reason why an attempt to designate aesthetics as philosophy of cul- ture seems at first sight doomed to failure is that aesthetics, not only in its functionalist form, but also in its proceduralist or institutionalist variants, in spite of innumerable attempts to disrupt the institution or the realm of art, nonetheless contains an intrinsic normative feature. While contemporary art may be losing its real or imagined existential or truth disclosing function and value which it presumably possessed under modernism, the designation of "art" nonetheless at least potentially retains artifacts and other phenomena existing under such a designation within the unavoidably, i.e. by definition, normative realm of "art." To be an artist today often designates primarily one's self-designation and only secondly that of the audience. I may be an artist in my own eyes and for this I don' t require confirmation from others - a feature which radically distinguishes a contemporary artist from a modern- ist one, who required at least the appreciation of a narrow circle of similarly inclined individuals. But, on the other hand, such a designation does not eliminate, negate or replace its normative implications. So, how would aesthetics, in spite of the aforementioned possible reser- vation, be possible as a philosophy of culture? I shall conclude my paper by discussing two such attempts. The first is that of Heinz Paetzold who has developed his views in a series of articles and books published since 1990. (I am thinking particularly of his Ästhetik der neueren Moderne from 1990 and his more recent book The Symbolic Language of Culture, Fine Arts and Architecture, from 1997.) The essential argu- ments from these two books have been presented and updated in a recent article entitled "Aesthetics And/As Philosophy of Culture" and published in the 1999 volume of the IAA Yearbook. I shall thus limit my discussion of Paetzold's views to this essay. Paetzold's intention is to develop a critical philosophy of culture. In his words, "This undertaking finds a historical backing in the stance of the ear- lier critical theory, on the one hand, and in the project of the philosophy of symbolic forms, on the other. I am arguing - continues Paetzold - in favor of a synthesis between these two strands which moved historically along sepa- rate routes.'"8 What makes Paetzold's project of a philosophy of culture inter- 18 Heinz Paetzold, "Aesthetics And/As Philosophy of Culture," The IAA Yearbook, vol. 3 (1999); , p. 1. 1 7 A L E Š ERJAVKC esting is the requirement for such a philosophy to be critical, for without this critical element it is difficult if not outright impossible to propose a persua- sive philosophical project. What Paetzold then appropriates f rom Cassirer is his understanding of culture as a "process of man's progressive self-libera- tion." But, for this to be possible, in culture two sides have to be recognized: "All this leads me to the conclusion," states Paetzold, "that philosophy of hu- man culture becomes a critical endeavor only to that extent that we grasp culture's two sides: Its hope giving promises and its thorough failures." ly Sec- ondly, argues Paetzold, "the philosophy of human culture has to deal with the plurality of symbolic forms in a nonhierarchical, pluralistic way. ... De- throning scientific and technological rationality from being the foundational paradigm of culture does not mean to enthrone the arts and poetry in place of science as romanticism wanted to do."2" Thirdly, the philosophy of human culture contains an answer to the question of what makes a cultured subjec- tivity. This includes bodily and somatic components which cannot be sublated into pure rationality.21 Among the early philosophers of culture Paetzold finds not only Herder and Georg Simmel, but also Vico, Rousseau, Croce and Collingwood, and places aesthetics within a critical philosophy of culture as a component of it,22 wherein works of art exist as "symbolically significant expressions of cul- ture."21 He ends his essay by explicitly embracing a functional understanding of symbolic forms, art included. While Paetzold's project of a critical philosophy of culture, a segment of which is also aesthetics as a philosophy of art, appears very promising, it lacks, for the time being at least, an analysis of the negative side, i.e. culture's fail- ures. Without explaining this side, his project seems to fall under a similar category as the neopragmatist theories of Shusterman and Rorty that Paetzold criticizes for highlighting only the aesthetic dimension of contemporary cul- ture, i.e. only one of its sides. Hence the project of a critical philosophy of culture remains for the time being incomplete. Another, much better known recent project of a philosophy of culture, is that of Fredric Jameson , many of whose writ ings a f te r the essay on postmodernism published in the New Left Review in 1984 were devoted to vari- ous aspects of not only postmodernism as the cultural dominant of the cur- rent late capitalism, i.e. its multinational form, but also to broader cultural Ibid., p. 2. 20 Ibid., p. 3. 21 Cf. ibid., pp. 3-4. 22 Cf. ibid., p. 8. 23 Ibid., p. 9. 1 8 AESTHETICS: PHILOSOPHY OF A R T OR PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE? issues, these being devoted to and supported by a variety of works ranging from films by David Lynch, contemporary poetry and postmodern architec- ture, to paintings by Andy Warhol and Hedeigger's analysis of a painting by van Gogh. In certain respects Jameson's analysis and critique of contempo- rary culture is similar to that discussed in Paetzold's project, although it rests not only upon the tradition of the Frankfurt School but especially that of Georg Lukacs and partly on Lyotard and Baudrillard. In fact, most ofjameson's theory is surprisingly traditionalist, finding, with its totalizing tendencies, its proper historical place perhaps more in the first half or the middle of the previous century than at the outset of postmodernism. By stating this I in no way wish to diminish its importance and influence or insightfulness. On the contrary, I instead want to point out that such a totalizing stance obviously reveals, firstly, the contemporary need for such a viewpoint and the privileges it offers and, secondly, it avoids the shortcomings of regarding postmodernism as a complete break with the past which then prevents a serious historical comparative analysis. On the other hand, Jameson's frequent almost inter- changeable use of the terms art and culture and his treatment of the former as an implicit extension and perhaps a relatively special case of the latter, avoids some of the pitfalls of the desire to establish a clear division between the two, implying a desire to collapse them into a single entity. The reason that Jameson's approach appears successful, be it in relation to realist, mod- ernist or postmodernist art and culture, is in his implicit interpretation of art and culture as a vehicle for creating meaning, for creating a representation and self-representation of ourselves as social beings. Hence his requests ad- dressed to authentic art and culture are requests for political and partisan views and articulations, for subversion of established norms and views - an interpretation that is highly successful when aimed at politically oriented works or an Adorno-type interpretation of art and its place in society, but which falls short when applied to acclaimed works of art which nonetheless show no covert or overt political intentions. This question is frequently raised by Jameson himself, as in the case of Warhol's works: "The question [is] why Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans - so obviously representations of commodity or consumer fetishism - do not seem to func- tion as critical or political statements?"24 It is exactly this question that sets the limits to Jameson's endeavor to determine the function or functions of art in a uniform way. Yet, an apparent way out of this impasse is offered by the notion of "cognitive mapping," which is in fact, as Jameson himself admits, a 24 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 158. 1 9 ALF.Š ERIAVEC paraphrase of Lukacs's class consciousness. Put differently, the basic purpose or function of art - any art of any epoch - is to offer a cognitive mapping of oneself and of the society to which we belong, to disclose the truth of oneself within one's place and to offer coordinates which help us establish our here and now within a given social, historical and mental space. In 1984 and also in 1991 (when the essay was published in a book bearing the same title) he expressed his view that postmodernism hasn' t developed sufficiently yet to allow for a cognitive mapping which would be not only the opposite of i t se l f - schizophrenia, chaos, temporal displacement, etc. To our surprise this topic is later dropped - something that makes us wonder whether this happened because it was irrelevant or because in no instance an answer for it has yet been found. In other words, postmodernist art and culture seem to offer no clue as how to establish a cognitive mapping similar to that offered in mod- ernism by modernist works as described and explained by Lukacs, Adorno and others. It thus appears as if Jameson accepts Lyotard's views from The Postmodern Condition, in the English Introduction to which Jameson offers no way out of what, for him, should be a failure, but which is, for Lyotard, exactly the central feature of postmodern art.25 The notion of cognitive mapping somewhat corresponds to ideas pro- moted by Heinz Paetzold, for cognitive mapping doesn' t necessarily mean only a rational endeavor, but is, judging also from Jameson's Hegelian back- ground, equally sensuous, representing in this way a case of symbolic forms. If this is true, a link between these various attempts to forge a philosophy of culture may be established, but we seem to be still a long way f rom a relatively consistent and theoretically persuasive philosophy of culture, although some- thing of the kind appears, after half a century, to be again a necessity which will help us productively relate art and culture, but in a contemporary histori- cal setting. 25 Cf. Fredric Jameson, "Introduction" inJean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. xxiii-xxv. 2 0 Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXII • Številka/Number 2 • 2001 • 21-42 AESTHETICS, PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND "THE AESTHETIC TURN" LARS-OLOF ÄHLBERG Zweifellos erleben wir gegenwärtig einen Ästhetik-Boom. Er reicht von der individuellen Stilisierung über die Stadt- gesta l tung und die Ökonomie bis zur Theor ie . . . zu- nehmend gilt uns die Wirklichkeit im ganzen als ästhetisches Konstrukt. -Wolfgang Welsch Aesthetics should be . . . rethought in such a way that it becomes embedded in a broader context within philosophy of human culture. -Heinz Paetzold A book advocating philosophy as the reasoned pursuit of aesthetic living cannot harbor an essential dualism between reason and aesthetics, reflected in an unbridgeable divide between the modern and postmodern. -Richard Shusterman I "Aesthetics is a chaotic field of inquiry which has had unusual difficulty defining and organizing itself. It is also one of the most fascinating and challenging branches of philosophy", says Kendall Walton in his review of Michael Kelly's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.^ Walton evidently thinks of aesthetics as philosophical aesthetics, or, as philosophy of art, but aesthetics can be understood in a much wider context - as it often is nowadays- as a general theory of art and aesthetic experience, as the theory of specific art forms, and ' Kendall Walton, Review of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 2000, p. 8. L A R S - O L O F ÄI-ILBERC. as an integral part of the philosophy of culture. If philosophical aesthetics is a chaotic business, what then about aesthetics broadly conceived? In this paper I propose to discuss some of the issues raised by Richard Shusterman and Wolfgang Welsch in their recent writings on the aims and purposes of aesthetics. Both philosophers advocate, with different emphasis and purpose, a reformation and transformation of aesthetics as an intellectual discipline, and they are both involved in the "aesthetic turn" in philosophy. I shall begin by sketching the background against which the current revival of interest in aesthetics occurs before discussing "the aesthetic turn" and in particular Shusterman's and Welsch's views. II Aesthetics as the systematic philosophy of art owes its existence, historically speaking, to the distinction between aisthesis sensory pe rcep t ion and experience) and noesis (reason and knowledge) in the classical philosophy of antiquity, the dichotomy between aisthesis and noesis dominat ing much subsequent Western philosophy and thought. Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, inaugura ted by Alexander Baumgarten in the mid- 1750s but foreshadowed by Leibniz's reflections on the difference between clear and unclear ideas and sensations and their relationship to distinct (theoretical) ideas,2 is paradoxically both a child of rationalism and the Enlightenment and at the same time a critique - albeit an implicit one - of an absolute, logistic rationalism, which does not grant cognitive value to aisthesis. Wolfgang Welsch rightly observes that Baumgarten conceived of aesthetics (i.e. philosophical aesthetics) as complementing and correcting a one-sided and arid rationalism.3 Since the palmy days of the philosophy of art in the 19th century, when the philosophy of art was at the centre of the philosophical discussion and occupied such an important place in the philosophical systems of Hegel, Schelling and Schopenhauer,4 aesthetics 2 Se Jeffrey Barnouw, "The Beginnings of 'Aesthetics' and the Leibnizian Conception of Sensation", Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Matt ickjr . (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52-95. 3 "Baumgarten hat die Ästhetik als Korrekturdisziplin des einseitigen Rationalismus konzipiert und begründet" (Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, 4e Aufl., Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), p. 88. 4 When aesthetics as the philosophy of art fell into disrepute during the last decades of the 19th century this was in large measure due to the overly speculative and "universalistic" character of Hegel's, Schelling's and Schopenhauer 's metaphysics of art, which elicited 2 2 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " as the philosophy of art has been relegated to the outskirts of the philosophical landscape both in the phenomenological and the analytic traditions in philosophy during the first half of the 20th century."' During the 50s and the 60s, however, there is a renewed interest in the philosophy of art both in Continental philosophy ("continental" being an infelicitous geographical me taphor ) and in analytic philosophy ("analytic" being an infelicitous chemical metaphor). Although ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, ph i lo sophy of l anguage and moral phi losophy have domina t ed the philosophical scene, philosophical aesthetics conceived as the philosophy of art has gained a respected but subordinated position in general philosophy. This renewed interest in aesthetics is at least in part due to the "linguistic turn" in philosophy, which can be discerned both in phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions as well as in analytic ways of doing philosophy. During the 1990s, however, aesthetics as the philosophy of art and as the reflection on aesthetic phenomena in general has become a major concern in many academic disciplines and interdisciplinary projects. A plethora of works in and on philosophical aesthetics published in recent years is a sign of the times, but also in several other disciplines such as cognitive science, the psychology of perception as well as in cultural studies the renewed interest in aesthetic questions is visible. In addition to Michael Kelly's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998), the first modern encyclopedia of its kind, six introductory books by Anglo-American philosophers on aesthetics have been published within no less than three years: Gordon Graham's Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics ( 1997), Dabney Townsend's An Introduction to Aesthetics (1997), George Dickie's Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach (1997), Colin Lyas's Aesthetics (1997), James W. Mann's Aesthetics (1998), and Noël Carrolls Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (1999). All these works are more or less firmly situated within the analytic tradition, and display both the characteristic virtues and vices of analytic aesthetics, the exception being Colin Lyas's book, which is by far the most original and engaging. The works an anti-philosophical bias in the emerging empirical discipmes of art history and the history of literature. 5 Important and influential works in the philosophy of art have been written during this period as well, in particular by idealistically inclined philosophers such as Benedetto Croce (Estética come scienza dell' espressione e lingüistica generate, 1902) and R. G. Collingwood (The Principles of Art, 1938) and by philosophers transforming and transcending the idealistic tradition, Ernst Cassirer's PhilosophiedersymbolischenFormen (1923-9),John Dewey's Art as Experience (1925), Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy in aNetu Key: A Study of Symbolism in Reason, Rite, and Art (1942) and Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from "Philosophy in a New Key"( 1953) should be mentioned as well as Roman Ingarden's Das literarische Kunstiuerk (1931) and Untersuchungen zur Ontologie derKunst (1965). 2 3 L A R S - O L O F Â I II.BERG by these Anglo-Saxon writers represent a more or less analytic and ahistorical approach to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, whereas Brigitte Scheer's introductory work, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik (1997),° is more a work in conceptual history ("Begriffsgeschichte") or the history of philosophy than a systematic introduction to the philosophy of art. Scheer claims that aesthetics has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in the past fifteen years or so, not only in an institutional, academic context, but rather as a potent ferment, affecting many philosophical disciplines. In her view, philosophical aesthetics today has primarily a critical function, relativizing the claims of ahistorical reason, attacking the central paradigm of Western philosophy, the traditional, logocentric conception of reason. Philosophical aesthetics, in her view, is an inter- and transdisciplinary endeavour, and is together with epistemology one of the fundamental philosophical disciplines.7 There are, to be sure, aestheticians and philosophers of art, seeking to avoid the two extremes of a determined anti-historical approach and a resolutely historicist approach - both of which seem to me to occlude important aspects of art and aesthetics. Theoreticians such as Luc Ferry, Gérard Genette and Jean-Marie Schaeffer in France, Oto Marquard, Wolfgang Welsch, Heinz Paetzold and Martin Seel in Germany exemplify the attempt to combine an historical approach to the problems of art and aesthetics with a more or less systematic and constructive perspective." How the historical and the systematic/analytic should be related to one another is a moot question; and we may well ask whether historical considerations are always relevant to " Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols., ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Colin Lyas, Aesthetics (London: UCL Press, 1997), George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Dabney Townsend, An Introduction to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 1997), James W. Manns, Aesthetics (Armonk, USA, 1998), Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), Brigitte Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997). 7 Brigitte Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik, p. 1-5. 8 See Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Udo Marquard, Aesthetica und Anaesthetica: Philosophische Überlegungen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1989), Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990) and Grenzgänge der Ästhetik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), Jörg Zimmermann, Hrsg., Ästhetik und Naturerfarhrung (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1996), Heinz Paetzold, Die Realität der symbolischen Formen: Die Kulturphilosophie Ernst Cassirers im Kontext (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (München: Hanser, 2000). 2 4 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " philosophical analysis. In any case, there seems to be a growing awareness of the importance of historical and contextual approaches to philosophical problems, in particular to problems in the philosophy of culture and in aesthetics. When dealing with problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of culture a downright historicist approach dispensing with arguments, reducing philosophical questions to purely historical questions should be avoided, as should the other extreme, treating aesthetic and cultural concepts as if they possessed some internal ahistorical necessity thereby reducing philosophical questions to purely logical ones. Historical concepts have a logic and are amenable to conceptual analysis, logical concepts have a history and can be analysed from a historical perspective. Andrew Bowie's aspiration to avoid "the tendency towards merely 'monumental ' history of ideas characteristic of some work in hermeneutics and the unconscious philosophical amnesia of much analytic philosophy" is certainly commendable.'1 The revitalization and renewal of aesthetics is, however, not a purely academic matter, many theorists are convinced that contemporary aesthetics has, or, rather should, have a critical function in the larger culture as well; aesthetics is often conceived of as philosophy of culture and criticism of culture. As Michael Kelly says in the introduction to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics: "[A]esthetics is uniquely situated to serve as a meeting place for numerous academic disciplines and cultural traditions [my italics]", aesthetics is "the critical reflection on art, culture and nature",10 and Brigitte Scheer claims that "philosophical aesthetics has experienced an extraordinary renaissance during the past fifteen years, not primarily as an institution, which keeps itself within its own disciplinary boundaries, but as a ferment penetrating and transforming almost all philosophical areas".11 Philosophical aesthetics has above all a critical potential because philosophical aesthetics in her opinion "repudiates the centra l pa rad igm of Western philosophy, the traditional logocentric conception of rationality and the absolutification of that conception".12 Whereas "the linguistic turn" carried with it a heightened consciousness of the linguistic character and language-dependent character of our world views,13 it is today appropriate to speak of an "aesthetic turn", she claims, " Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), viii. 10 Kelly, "Introduction", Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, xi. 11 Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik, p. 1, my trans. 12 Ibid. 13 Scheer 's characterization of the linguistic turn is somewhat inaccurate, for the linguistic turn involved above all a preoccupation with the structure of language, the relationship between word and world, and more generally the analysis of linguistic 2 5 LARS-OI .OF Ä I II.BF.KG because aesthetics takes the interpretative and constructive character of our sensations and perceptions of the world seriously.14 In short, the aesthetic character of knowledge and experience in general is acknowledged in many quarters today, Scheer believes. Similar views are held by Wolfgang Welsch, who in his essay "Ästhetische Grundzüge im gegenwärtigen Denken" (1991), speaks of cognitive and epistemological aestheticization, the aestheticizing of knowledge and reality; in today's (post) modern world there is, he claims, a strong tendency, a tendency he apparently endorses, to view truth and reality as aesthetic phenomena - aesthetic in a wide sense of the term. In Welsch's view, constructivism is the dominant philosophy today, in stressing the constructedness of personal identity, of reality and of the world constructivism implies an aestheticization of truth, knowledge and reality.15 Welsch argues in his essay "Ästhetik außerhalb der Ästhetik - Für eine neue Form der Disziplin" (1995) in favour of an "aesthetics outside of aesthetics", aesthetics as a multi-disciplinary "trans-aesthetics", which transcends the boundaries of traditional art centred philosophical aesthetics and occupies itself with the analysis and criticism of contemporary culture and theory. Since the aesthetic has invaded most, if not all, areas of life and culture in "our postmodern modern world", philosophy, and in particular philosophical aesthetics must follow suit, Welsch believes. meaning. See The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1967). The term "linguistic turn" was, contrary to a widespeard opinion, not invented by Rorty, the logical positivist Gustav Bergmann seems to be the inventor of the expression "linguistic turn", by which he meant something else than Rorty, who adopted the term for the collection of essays The Linguistic Turn (See R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, xxi). The different "turns" in philosophy and cultural theory seem to have replaced the adaption of Kuhnian "paradigms" to the humanities; after "the epistemological turn" we have "the linguistic turn", "the interpretive turn" (Cf. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, eds. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, Richard Shusterman, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), and "the cultural turn" (Cf. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, eds. Victoria E. Bonnell & Lynn Hunt , University of California Press, 1999). 14 Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik, p. 3., my trans. 15 Wolfgang Welsch, "Ästhetische Grundzüge im gegenwärtigen Denken", 1991, in W. Welsch, Grenzgänge der Ästhetik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 62-105, trans, as Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997). An important discussion of constructivism is found in John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1995). Ian Hacking offers an interesting analysis of various forms of constructivism in his The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2 6 AESTHETICS, PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " III What then does "aestheticization" mean, what are the implications of the "the aesthetic turn" for research in the cultural sciences, and what is the status of philosophical aesthetics after "the aesthetic turn"? Several answers suggest themselves, bu t before considering Richard Shusterman's and Wolfgang Welsch's views a few comments on the answers proposed by the Faculties of the Humanit ies and Social Sciences at Uppsala University in the "Joint Programme of Renewal for the Humanities". "The Aesthetic Turn", which f o r m s p a r t of the p r o p o s e d p r o g r a m m e in "Cul tural Analysis and Contemporary Criticism", is described as follows: Within philosophical aesthetics today, a frequently used term is "the aesthetic turm", or in other words there is an increasing tendency to view the aesthetic dimension as primary and fundamental to the composition of our perceptions and experience of reality, a tendency that is for instance an outcome of the cultural upheaval in which we are living and which requires cultural analysis with a more aesthetically conditioned reflectiveness. This deepening and extension of the aesthetic dimension outside the traditional delimitations of art faces the aesthetic disciplines with new and vital research tasks."' The main points can be summarized as follows: (1) the aesthetic d imens ion is o f t en taken as primary as regards o u r percept ion and apprehension of reality, (2) this alleged tendency in contemporary thought is the result of recent cultural changes (the transition form modernity to postmoderni ty?) , (3) the aesthetic disciplines including philosophical aesthetics should broaden their horizons so as to include aesthetic phenomena outside the arts in their purview. The first claim is certainly true, the aesthetic dimension is taken as primary by many leading philosophers and cultural analysts today, but whether they are justified in doing so is a moot question, therefore the second claim that "cultural analysis with a more aesthetically conditioned reflectiveness" is required in order to understand contemporary culture (and art?) seems to me more doubtful. The third claim is unexceptional if it is interpreted as an exhortation to analyse the diversity of aesthetic p h e n o m e n a (and aesthetic aspects of diverse cultural phenomena) in contemporary society, which to my mind also includes a sharpened awareness of the complexity of the notion of the aesthetic, or, rather, of the different and heterogeneous notions of the aesthetic at play in the discourse of "the aesthetic turn". 10 Uppsala University, "Humanities and Social Sciences", Proposal 2000-12-15, p. 23. 2 7 LARS-OI .OF ÂI ILBERG The background of "the aesthetic turn" and the tasks lying ahead for aesthetics (broadly conceived) are clarified in the following passage: There has been a renewed interest in aesthetics during the past few decades, both philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic analysis in the wider sense, largely due to the critical discussions surrounding postmodern theory (philosophy, aesthetics, cultural analysis) and postmodern art, literature, and architecture. The aestheticization of morality and lifestyle is often said to be a characteristic feature of contemporary culture. While traditional aesthetic theory often displayed litde or no interest in cultural spheres outside of high culture, and therewith limited its purview to fine art and belles lettre, contemporary aesthetics has broadened its scope to encompass everyday life and popular culture as well. This means that the very notion of the "aesthetic" is undergoing a transformation: from having been a relatively well-defined concept, it has become a more variegated and chaotic notion, reflecting the complex reality which is its object of study.17 Here "the aesthetic turn" is explicitly associated with postmodernism and postmodern theory. Whereas the observation that traditional aesthetic theory (probably philosophical aesthetics is meant) has paid little or no interest to aesthetic phenomena outside of high art and culture is certainly correct the claim that "contemporary aesthetics" nowadays includes into its purview "everyday life and popular cul ture as well" is a lmost as certainly an exaggeration. In the first place this characterization applies to some, perhaps many, contemporary aestheticians, (notably Shusterman and Welsch), but — for better or worse- not to all or even most philosophical aestheticians. In the second place we should note that "everyday life and popular culture" has for a long time caught the interest of researchers in various disciplines dealing with aesthetic phenomena (sociology of cul ture , sociology of ar t and literature). Therefore it is a moot question whether the not ion of "the aesthetic" has undergone, or, is undergoing a transformation. In fact, one issue of fundamental importance is what is meant by "the aesthetic" and "aesthetics" by the champions of "the aesthetic turn", and last but not least , what could and what should be meant by these notions. Nor am I so sure that "the aesthetic", has been "a relatively well-defined concept" in the traditional discourse of philosophical aesthetics and the aesthetic disciplines; it seems to me that "the aesthetic turn" trades partly on the etymologically speaking original meaning of "the aesthetic" as "what pertains to sensations and perceptions and the sensuous enjoyment of sensuous and perceptual qualities". 17 Ibid., pp. 24-5. 2 8 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " I am inclined to think that much of the impetus of "the aesthetic turn" derives from privileging one aspect of the traditional meaning of "the aesthetic", or, one use of the notion of "the aesthetic" at the expense of others, and granting "the aesthetic" in the sense of "sensuous qualities", "what pertains to (pleasurable) sensations and perceptions", pride of place. One aspect of "the aesthetic" has become dominant in "the aesthetic turn" at the expense of others, and in particular, at the expense of "the artistic". The claim that "the aesthetic turn" owes much to postmodern theory and postmodernism (as well as postmodernity) is, I believe correct, therefore many interesting and exciting tasks await the philosophical aesthetician and cultural analyst, for, postmodern theory and postmodernism in the arts and in the culture at large is a very mixed bag.18 We need to ask ourselves which postmodern theories and ideas have influenced and determined the nature and shape of "the aesthetic turn". Needless to say, our attitude towards "the aesthetic turn" is conditioned by our views on postmodern theory and postmodernism in general.1''1 Lest my remarks concern ing the proposal for the renewal of the humanities at Uppsala University be misunderstood, I hasten to add that the proposal to explore "the aesthetic turn" is, in my view, very timely and amply justified, but "the aesthetic turn" should not simply be taken for granted, nor, s h o u l d t he n a t u r e a n d e x t e n t of " the aes thet ic t u r n " be taken as unproblematically given; in short "the aesthetic turn" should be subjected to a critical analysis from various points of views (philosophical, art historical, sociological), something that is certainly not excluded by the wording of the document. My own view is that there is indeed - for better or worse - a widespread aestheticization of many aspects of contemporary everyday life and mass culture (as well as of theory), but "hedonistic consumerism" is in many contexts p e r h a p s a more appropr ia te label for what is called "aestheticization". I also believe that it is important for the cultural sciences including philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy and sociology of culture to c o n f r o n t " the s ta te of cu l tu re" critically. When it comes to the 18 We shou ld also no te that , accord ing to some analysts, pos tmodern i ty and postmodernism are already passé. The architectural historian and critic Philip Jodidio, for example, asserts that "it is clear that the time of the Post-Modern is gone" (Philip Jodidio, Contemporary European Architecture, vol. IV, Köln: Taschen, 1996, p. 6). Who is the paradigmatic postmodern theorist? Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard, or Rorty? Although only Lyotard and Rorty (at a time) accepted the label "postmodernist", all thinkers mentioned are habitually regarded as crown witnesses for postmodernism. But there are fundamental and irreducible differences between the "postmodernism" of a Foucault and a Derrida and a Baudrillard, consequently the implications for "the aesthetic turn" differ widely depending on which theorist we regard as typical of "the postmodern turn". 2 9 LAR.S-Ol.OF Am.»ERG aestheticization of theory, and the claims that knowledge and reality have been "aestheticized" I am not so sure that this is what actually has happened across the board, moreover I part company with those who applaud the aestheticization of morals, theory, reality and what not. I shall offer some arguments for my position in the sequel, but now that the cat is out of the bag, I turn to the views of Richard Shusterman and Wolfgang Welsch, perhaps the most influential proponents of "the aesthetic turn". IV "The project of modernity (with its Enlightenment roots and rationalizing differentiation of cultural spheres) has been identified with reason", says Richard Shusterman in his recent work, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (1997).2H The postmodern, he continues, is "contrastingly characterized as dominantly aesthetic".21 Now, both Shusterman and Welsch are prone to contrasting the modern and the postmodern in this rather cavalier way, but although there clearly is something in this contrasting characterization of the modern and the postmodern, I think we should be wary of such snappy and fo rmula ic descr ipt ions of s o m e t h i n g as vast, p o l y m o r p h i c a n d heterogeneous as modernity and postmodernity. In spite of the fact that Shusterman warns us against taking these terms ("the modern" and "the postmodern") "as denot ing dichotomous, inimical essences",22 he cha- racterizes Habermas as "championing the claims of reason and modernity", and Rorty as "representing the aesthetic and postmodern".23 Although I think Shusterman has the aesthedcization of morals and life-styles in mind (perhaps world views and reality as well) when he speaks of the postmodern as largely aesthetic, he apparently also believes that postmodern theory is in some sense "aesthetic", or, more aesthetic than traditional, modern theory, since aesthetic aspects enter into all or most kinds of theor iz ing accord ing to h im. Postmodernism has taken an aesthetic turn, says Shusterman, thinking of the (aesthetically inspired?) critique of reason, and above all, of the "the postmodern implosion of aesthetics into ethics and politics".24 What does the "implosion of aesthetics into ethics and politics" actually mean? One thing it 20 Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), 113. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 114. 24 Ibid., p. 127. 3 0 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " doesn' t mean, I suggest, is that "ethics and aesthetics are one", as Shusterman implies in quoting Wittgenstein.2r' Wittgenstein's "parenthetical phrase", he claims, is "today so meaningful", because it "gives pointed expression to important insights and problems of both aesthetic and ethical theorizing in our pos tmodern age".20 According to Shusterman, Wittgenstein "denies modernism's aesthetic ideology of artistic purism" and "implies that such isolationist ideology is no longer viable now that the traditional compart- mentalization of knowledge and culture threatens to disintegrate into manifold forms of interdisciplinary activity".27 Shusterman is, of course, aware of the context in which Wittgenstein's remark (proposition 6.421 in Tractatus) occurs, a r emark expressed "in that austere economy of p regnan t minimalist expression so characteristic of the modernist style",28 as he puts it. Shusterman knows that for the early Wittgenstein ethics as well as aesthetics (as expressions of value) involve seeing things sub specie aeternitatis, that ethics and aesthetics are transcendental and concern the realm of the mystical, a conviction that is - mildly pu t - uncongenial to a postmodernist.2'1 Therefore Shusterman's claim that "Wittgenstein's ambiguous dictum that ethics and aesthetics are one by erecting the aesthetic as the proper ethical ideal"30 supports the postmodern "aestheticization of the ethical" is surprising. It may be the case that the postmodern conviction "that aesthetic considerations are or should be crucial and ultimately perhaps paramount in determining how we choose to lead or shape our lives" is widespread,31 but it is certainly not Wittgenstein's idea nor is it an idea we should accept lightheartedly.32 25 Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 236-7. 2" Ibid., p. 237. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 236. Wittgenstein's proposition 6.421 reads: "It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same)" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Pliilosophicus, 1921, trans. D.F. Pears & B. F. McGuiness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), the original German parenthetical sentence being: "(Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins)". 2" According to Hans-Johann Glock Wittgenstein's "sibylline pronouncement" involves the following points: (1) ethics and aesthetics are concerned with necessities, which by their very nature cannot be expressed in meaningful propositions, but only shown, (2) ethics and aesthetics constitute a higher, transcendetal realm of value, and (3) ethics and aesthetics are based on a mystical experience (Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 31). 311 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 237. 31 Ibid. 32 Cf. Joseph Margolis' remarks about Shusterman's use of Wittgenstein's dictum (J. Margolis, "All the Turns in 'Aestheticizing' Life", Filozofski Vestnik 1999:2, "Aesthetics as 3 1 LARS-OLOF A I ILBERG But what exactly is involved in "the aestheticization of the ethical", and what does "aesthetic" mean here? Shusterman offers the following clues. The aestheticization of the ethical, he says, is "perhaps more evident in our everyday lives and the popula r imaginat ion of ou r cu l tu re than in academic philosophy",3 3 this aestheticization being manifested "by our cul ture 's preoccupation with glamour and gratification, with personal appearance and enrichment".34 This, Shusterman says, is "the postmodernist ethics of taste", whose most influential philosophical advocate is Richard Rorty. Rorty favours "the aesthetic life", which among other things implies the ideal of private perfection, self creation and a life motivated by "the desire to embrace more and more possibilities",35 and the "aesthetic search for novel experiences and for novel language" [novel languages being ways of defining oneself in novel ways].31' The "ethics of taste", Shusterman argues, is a consequence (though not a logical consequence) of anti-essentialism regarding human nature. If the absence of a human essence, Shusterman says, implies no determinate ethic, it cannot imply an aestheticized ethic either, but "it still can lead to an ethics of taste, since in the absence of any intrinsic foundation to justify an ethic," Shusterman continues, "we may reasonably be encouraged to choose the one that most appeals to us".37 The appeal of an ethic, he believes, is ultimately an aesthetic matter, "a question of what strikes us as most attractive or most perfect".38 It is important to note that Shusterman, following Bernard Williams, makes a distinction between ethics and morality, ethics being mainly concerned with values and the good life and morality with obligation.311 Bearing this distinction in mind Shusterman's view that the aestheticization of ethics is a good thing becomes perhaps less objectionable, but what about moral obligations? Can moral obligations also be "aestheticized" and conceived of in terms of taste, choice and appeal? Shusterman seems to think so, for, he Philosophy", Proceedings of the XlVth International Congress of Aesthetics 1998, Part I, Ljubljana 1999, p. 199). 33 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 238. 34 Ibid. 35 Richard Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection", in Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis, eds.J. H. Smith &W. Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) p. 11. 3li Ibid., p. 15. 37 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 243. 38 Ibid. m "Ethics, as distinguished from morality, recognizes that there is more to the good life than the fulfilment of obligations", says Shusterman (ibid., p. 245). According to Williams "morality [is] a special system, a particular variety of ethical thought" (Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London: Fontana/Collins, 1985, p. 174). 3 2 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " argues that "[f]inding what is right becomes a matter of finding the most fitting and appealing gestalt, of perceiving the most attractive and harmonious constellation of various and weighted features in a given situation or life".40 Finding what is right is, Shusterman claims, "no longer the deduction of one obligation from another more general obligation [.. .], nor is it the outcome of a logical calculation based on a clear hierarchical order of obligations".41 Therefore, Shusterman concludes, "ethical justification comes to resemble aesthetic explanation in appealing not to syllogism or algorithm but to perceptually persuasive argument [. . .] in its attempt to convince".42 Two comments are in order: first, Shusterman almost imperceptibly switches from "moral" (in moral obligation) to "ethical" (in ethical justification), but he presumably means that moral deliberation, finding out what our obligations are in a certain situation, is rather like aesthetic explanation andjustification; second, he speaks of ethicaljustification, as resembling aesthetic explanation "in its attempt to convince". This seems to be a rather strange "disembodied" view of moral obligation, for even if it is the case that we sometimes are called upon to justify our actions from a moral point of view and although it is also true that we sometimes feel the need to justify our actions and the actions of others and that therefore the purpose of offeringjustifications is to convince (ourselves or others), this is by no means always the case when trying to find out what course of action to take and when asking ourselves (or others) what our moral obligations are. Moral obligations are invoked not only in order to justify a certain course of action, or to convince somebody of the right course of act ion. F inding ou t (by whatever means - del iberat ion, intuit ion, spontaneous feeling) what our moral obligations are in a given situation leads normally to action; moral obligations are action-guiding. The main purpose of finding out what our moral obligations are is not to justify an action or to attempt to convince somebody of the Tightness of the action in question, but simply to do the right thing. Shusterman's view of moral obligations seems to me to be strangely contemplative and "intellectualised". When Shusterman says tha t" [f] inding what is right becomes a matter of finding the most fitting and appealing gestalt" he has, I think, either pronounced a tautology or actually left the universe of discourse of ethics and morality behind. For we may well ask about the most fitting and appealing gestalt, "fitting and appealing from what point of view"? Fitting or appealing from a moral point of view or from an aesthetic point of view? If the answer is "from a moral point of view" 411 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 245. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 3 3 LARS-OI .OF ÂI ILBERG we are dealing with a tautology, if the answer is "from an aesthetic point of view" we have, I suggest, not so much aestheticized ethics and morality, but abandoned ethics and morality altogether. Applying aesthetic considerations and standards of the kind envisaged by Shusterman (and Rorty) to ethics and morality means that questions of right and wrong, of justice and equality, should be answered by invoking "taste", "appeal" and "liking" instead of by appealing to norms and standards (however changeable, heterogeneous and flexible). Shusterman's view implies to my mind the denial of the rationality of ethics and morality and moral deliberation, and the dissolution of ethics and morality as guides to action. The aestheticization of ethics and morals is, in my view, not a new ethics or morality, but a new a-morality (I am not saying immorality). In spite of this, and somewhat paradoxically, Shusterman can be seen to advocate a new ethics and a new morality. For all his anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism Shusterman seems to think that his anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism provides some kind ofjustification for a new ethics and morality, for an aestheticized ethics and morality. Shusterman's views are therefore reminiscent of earlier endeavours to find a "justification" for ethics and morality. But "to propose a new justification [for morality] would be to inaugurate a new practice",43 as Paul Johnston has argued convincingly to my mind. If the proposed practice ("the aestheticization of ethics") differs in fundamental respects from what has hitherto been considered to be ethics and morality we are justified in regarding the new practice as a new a-morality. Shusterman may be right in maintaining that in these postmodern times aesthetic consideration play a fundamental role in "choosing" life-styles and values and in deciding what the p rope r and r ight act ion is in given circumstances. But if we applaud this state of affairs, as Shusterman does, have we not discarded ethics and morality altogether, or, rather, accepted a playful hedonism - some would say nihilism - as the guiding principle of life and action?44 I have said that Shusterman's idea of the aestheticization of ethics is less objectionable than his analysis of morality, because it is obvious that there are many conflicting versions and visions of the good life in contemporary society, and it seems that we have no "neutral" criteria by which different versions of the good life could be judged. Nevertheless, something more can be said about the supposedly arbitrary and "aesthetic" choices people make regarding 4:1 Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 69. 44 Paul Johnston's remarks about Bernard William's "justification" of morality apply in this case too: "Central moral concepts such asjustice, integrity, and guilt are marginalized or rendered opaque, while the very notion of obligation comes to seem highly problematic" (Johnston, Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy, p. 73). 3 4 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " the good life in these postmodern times. In the first place, Shusterman like Rorty and Welsch exaggerates the extent to which we are able to choose a life- style and an ethic. Economic, social, cultural and psychological realities impose, I suggest, robust limitations to what life-styles, and which ethics are open to us. Nor should it be forgotten that the choices open to us and the choices we actually make may be - to a larger extent than we realize - conditioned by factors beyond our control. The aestheticization of ethics seems to appeal mainly to liberally minded postmodern philosophers and intellectuals and reflects perhaps also the predicament of many "ordinary" middle-class persons in affluent societies, but large sections of the population in affluent societies, not to mention poor societies, have a much more restricted range of "choices" of life-style and ethics.4r' I also believe that something more than just aesthetic appeal enters, and should enter our ethical deliberations, our thinking about the good life. Consider the following example. I suppose racist and sexist values and attitudes can be part of an ethic, i.e. of a conception of the good life. If we accept the aestheticization of ethics, it seems that the only thing that can be said about this ethic is that we dislike it, that it does not appeal to us. But racist and sexist values are not free-floating phenomena, they have a history and they fit into certain social, economic, cultural and psychological patterns. These values are, for those, who embrace them and live by them not something theyjust find appealing, many racists, perhaps most actually believe that it is a scientific truth that non-whites are mentally and morally inferior to whites. Since this view is a delusion, a racist ethic can be rejected, not jus t on aesthetic grounds, no t ju s t because we dislike it, but on rational grounds.41' Even if aesthetic considerations may enter our deliberations about the good life, I think, Shusterman and company play down the role of reason and argument in ethics. V In the wake of "the aesthetic turn", Wolfgang Welsch envisages aesthetics as a new "prima philosophia". Modern epistemology, Welsch claims, has been continuously "aestheticized" since Kant. There is, he says, "a fundamental aestheticization of knowledge, truth and reality".47 Aesthetic categories such 45 See, fo r example , Zygmunt Bauman 's Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). 4 Ibid., p. 342. '"' Bohdan Dziemidok, "Aesthetics", The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, eds. William Outhwaite & T o m Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 4. 4 0 AESTHETICS, PIIII .OSOPIIY OF CULTURE AND " T H E AESTHETIC T U R N " Aesthetics is thus basically a philosophical discipline concerned with aesthetic phenomena in general and with works of art in particular as well as the philosophical analysis of art criticism (metacriticism). Although the philosophical study of aesthetic phenomena in general are said to form part of aesthetics, Dziemidok's definition is clearly art centred in a way that Shusterman's and Welsch's conceptions of aesthetics aren't.'17 The British philosopher and aesthetician Malcolm Budd presents a similar definition in another recent publication, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998), when he describes aesthetics as "consist[ing] of two parts: the philosophy of art, and the philosophy of aesthetic experience and character of objects or phenomena that are not art".llfi Whereas the problems of the philosophy of art are relatively well defined, "the philosophy of aesthetic experience" concerns a variety of heterogeneous phenomena, including not only aesthetic experiences of nature (environmental aesthetics), but it hardly includes "the aestheticization of ethics and everyday life".1'11 There is nothing wrong in studying the aestheticization of ethics and everyday life, on the contrary, it is impor tan t to study the manifold aestheticization processes at work in contemporary culture, but I doubt whether these concerns should be at centre of philosophical aesthetics. The arts and the experience of art raise many important and intriguing problems that should not be put into the mixed and rather ill-defined bag of "trans- aesthetics", nor should they be swallowed by a new "soma-aesthetics". Ales Erjavec is right in saying that there is a "broadening of the notion of the aesthetic" at work here and that Welsch's trans-aesthetic implies a "collapsing of the aesthetic and of aesthetics".7H I entirely agree with him that art should be 1,7 Cf. Susan Feagins definition of "aesthetics" in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995), where aesthetics is defined as " the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of experience of art and the natural environment" (Susan Feagin, "Aesthetics", The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 10). Aesthetics is thus not identical with the philosophy of art, it includes environmental aesthetics, but hardly "the aestheticization of ethics and everyday life". "8 Malcolm Budd, "Aesthetics", The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 59. 08 The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is intended to replace Paul Edwards large Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967. The definition of "aesthetics" offered by John Hospers in that work reads: " [T] he philosophy of art covers a somewhat more narrow area than does aesthetics, since it is concerned with the concepts and problems that arise in connection with works of art and excludes, for example, the aesthetic experience of nature" (John Hospers, "Aesthetics, Problems of ' , The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 1-2, ed. Paul Edwards, New York: Macmillan, 1967, p. 36). 70 Ales Erjavec, "Aesthetics as Philosophy", Filozofski Vestnik 1999:2, "Aesthetics as 4 1 LAKS-OLOF A I ILBERG viewed as "a relatively distinct phenomenon requiring its relatively distinct theoretical reflection".71 The problems of representation in art, the value of art, the rationality of critical judgement etc., will not go away by simply ignoring them.72 If we are not interested in such questions, we are not, I suggest, doing philosophical aesthetics (but, rather, undoing aesthetics). The questions concerning the aestheticization of theory, ethics and everyday life are best viewed as problems for the philosophy and sociology of culture and the criticism of culture. Art and aesthetics are too important to merge into an undifferentiated new discipline studying "the aestheticization of everything".73 Philosophy", Proceedings of the XlVth International Congress of Aesthetics 1998, Part I, Ljubljana 1999, p. 18. 71 Ibid. 12 See, for example, the excellent collection of essays Art and Representation which discusses the problem of representation in general and the problems of representation invarious art forms (Art and Representation: Contributions to Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Ananta Ch. Sukla, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001). ™ This article is partly based on a paper presented at the International Colloquium "Aesthetics as Philosophy of Culture", organized by the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics in Ljubljana, 29 June-lJuly 2000. A few passages in sections II and IV have appeared in my article, "Aesthetics between Philosophy and Art: Four Variations", in Swedish in Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 2000:20-1, pp. 55-77. 4 2 Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXII • Številka/Number 2 • 2001 • 43-58 THE DANGERS OF POSTMODERNITY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE PAUL CROWTHER Introduction In this paper, I shall identify some key dangers presented by patterns of existence in the postmodern life-world. I will also indicate the basis of an adequate - that is to say, refoundational philosophical response to them. (A response of this kind is one which links cognition to constants bound up with the nature of human embodiment, but which allows that these constants are activated in contrasting ways under different historical conditions.) Part One. David Harvey has noted that in the postmodern era economic modes of production have shifted away from the rigidly determined practices of the post-war period. Of the postmodern economy, Harvey notes 'It rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products and patterns of consumption. It is characterised by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organisational innovations'.1 These radical innovations likewise engender a more globally integrated market. The ambiguities of this have been usefully summarised by Philip Cooke as follows: 'One of the most important changes in setting has been the emergence in the late modern period of an increasingly integrated global economy, ' David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity: An Enquiry into the origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 147. PAUI. CROWTIIKR dominated by the most advanced forms of capitalist production and exchange. This development could be thought to run counter to the ... trend towards decentralisation. Yet it is not, because the global system has no centre. It is a decentred space of flows rather than a clearly hierarchical structured space of production'.2 This global but de-centred integration opens up a fascinating possibility - namely for the macro-social dimension of the civilizing process to facilitate greater integration without the use of coercive force. And again, this potential is also complemented by the globalizing effects of innovation in the field of medical and information technologies. The existence of satellite television and the Internet, for example, enable social developments and interactions to be communicated to even the most remote parts of the world. The 'global village' metaphor is in this respect an apt one. We now live in an epoch where consciousness of humanity and its vicissitudes as a species, is an idea which can be presented with sensory vividness rather than in merely abstract ideal terms. The self-regulation intrinsic to the civilizing process can accordingly be informed by a more intense universal orientation than has been possible before. There is, of course, no guarantee that this universalised self-consciousness will be able to consolidate itself. On the one hand the possibility of developing the appropriate kinds of correlated international institutions and admini- strative structures is a formidably difficult one; and, on the other hand, any globalizing dynamic will tend to occur alongside vehement - even violent - assertions of local identity (as is the case, for example, in the tragic late twentieth century conflicts in the Balkans). This being said, however, there is no intrinsic reason why these difficulties should not find some cumulatively satisfactory resolution. It is, as the popular idiom has it, 'all to play for' . Given these possibilities, and other undoubted advances made in relation to the other positive criteria of the civilizing process, it may seem that we are on the threshold of some golden age. However, if taken to an extreme, this can result in a negative factor vis a vis the civilizing process, namely symbolic arrest wherein communities and individuals are locked into transactions with symbols at the expense of and as a substitute for more basic life processes. Indeed, in the contemporary world there are of poststructuralist persuasion those who would deny that we can meaningfully talk of such processes independently of their symbolic modes of articulation. 2 Philip Cooke, Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 141. 4 4 T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE Before considering this let us look at the broad form of specifically postmodern symbolic arrest in more detail. In its widest manifestations this takes the form of consumerism. Such a phenomenon has been a strong feature in the world socio-economic structure since the 1950's (and, indeed before that in the USA). It is a form of social mentality which seeks gratification through the purchase of items and where this gratification derives as much if not more from the packaging and 'lifestyle' connotations of an item, than its practical utility. Consumerism - as opposed to the production and exchange of goods per se- is driven by the advertising industry and concomitant productive patterns of in-built obsolescence i.e. artefacts made in such a way as to be used and disposed of quickly, so that the consumer is driven towards the purchase of new ones. In this form of society social kudos purtains primarily not towards achievement in the specialised symbolic practices, but rather to the variety of brand labelled goods which the individual has the financial resources to buy. Consumerism is intricately bonded to a second factor in postmodern symbolic arrest, namely the global expansion of mass-media and information technology. Whatever universalising potential this may have, it comes at a great cultural price. In this respect, Neil Postman has observed that: 'We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not the printed word. To be sure there are still readers and there are many books published, but the uses of print and reading are not the same as they once were; not even in schools, the last institutions where print was thought to be invincible ... Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like televisions screens'.3 Postman makes an extremely damning analysis of the effects of television th roughou t all aspects of contemporary social existence, By its nature, television is a medium where compositional and editorial factors are to the fore. No matter how documentary its intent, the television programme is primarily constructed from different camera shots, and edited tape sequences. This in itself makes the medium unsuited to the presentation of temporally sustained rational exposition and argument. Material of this kind has to be compressed into more editorially amenable units. Television's internal destructiveness vis a vis the foregoing has been 3 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 28. 4 5 PAUI. CROWTHER dramatically compounded by the colonising power of one of its particular usages - in commercial advertising. Postman observes that: 'The move away from the use of propositions in commercial advertising began at the end of the nineteenth century. But it was not until the 1950's that the television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete as the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeals, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them'.4 Indeed Postman continues: 'the television commercial is not all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of scenic lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners ... - these tell us nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer'.5 Now these observations, of course, illuminate the link between television and the symbolically arrested consumer sensibility noted earlier, However, Postman also emphasises a much more far-reaching point namely that the television commercial and related entertainment idioms have colonised the presentation of news, current affairs, and politics. Not what is reported but how it is reported becomes the focus of meaning - its style, its 'cleverness' of presentation, and, in the case of politics and politicians, ' image' and 'sound bite'. Additionally (although Postman does not dwell on it much) more trivial pursuits such as sport are presented as if they were of the greatest existential import. The means to this are a sustained build-up to the sporting event through frenzied advertising in the weeks preceding it and then endless interviews and expert opinions etc. etc. just before, and during the actual occurrence of the event. In the world of postmodern symbolic arrest, life and death, world events, and the world of sport assume equal entertainment value. "Ibid, p. 131. 5 Ibid, p. 131. 4 6 TIIE DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE Part Two It is also notable how symbolic arrest has permeated the world of public services and utilities and even educational institutions. Within them develop what might be called a 'management culture' wherein services and processes are 'repackaged' and 'products' are promoted as if the relationships involved were purely commercial ones. The dimension of symbolic arrest here focuses on the way in which management culture seeks to promote 'efficiency' but does so only by interpreting it on the basis of models of social interaction and outcomes derived from cybernetics and the advertising industry. What results is not a more functionally efficient institution or service but rather one which is seen to display a well organised management structure. In effect, the symbolic relations and internal dynamics of bureaucracy become ends in themselves. Another zone of postmodern symbolic arrest which is worth considering is in the visual arts. Here there is some affinity with the management culture just discussed. In 1964, for example, Tom Wolfe's book The Painted Word6 put a light-hearted case for interpreting much twentieth-century modernist art as dependent for its intelligibility upon accompanying bodies of theoretical discourse. Wolfe's reading is, in fact, not true of this art perse, but it is true of much conceptually-based 'art ' practice since the 1960's. Elsewhere7 I have argued that 'meaning' in such works is largely determined by contemporary curatorial interests - the art object exists only as a vehicle for talk about art and its modes of social significance or otherwise. It's raison d'être is as a symbolic display not of art, but of those conditions and institutions under which it is constituted by persons whose proper business is its management, criticism, or historical interpretation. The phenomenon of symbolic arrest has also characterised dominant contemporary strategies in the other specialised symbolic practices, most notably philosophy, literary theory and the social sciences. At the heart of this is a group of theoretical approaches known collectively as poststructualism. Figures such as Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and (to some extent) Baudrillard,8 emphasise that knowledge only occurs as an articulation within a field of signifying relations, and that this renders meaning, truth, and subjectivity, much more unstable and fluid notions than has hitherto been ® Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 7 In my 'Against Curatorial Imperialism: Merleau-Ponty and the Fundamental Historicity of Art', in the Blackwell Companion to Art Theory ed. P. Smith and C. Wilde, Blackwells (forthcoming). * For a critique of Baudrillard's position see Chapter 9 of my The Language of Twentieth Century Art: A Conceptual History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 4 7 PAUI. CROWTIIKR supposed. This att i tude has become a general characterist ic of much contemporary thought. In fact, Hans Bertens has suggested that something like it informs most recent attempts to comprehend the general nature of postmodernity. In his words: 'If there is a common denominator to all ... postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis of representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, oral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted'.9 The most radical form of this scepticism is found in Derrida's philosophy. Derrida's basic position has been excellently summarised by Wolfgang Welsch as follows: 'Derrida proved that meaning is always due to the inscription in media, and that mediality does not first ensue subsequently and externally but is constitutive for meaning at the outset, that it has productive significance for processes of meaning. Meaning is not, as the metaphysical tradition had thought, 'tarnished' or faked through the materiality of the medium; rather without this connection there would be no meaning at all. The pure sign-free meaning which the tradition had dreamt of was a phantom. Today this is - thanks to media experience - the state of reflection in philosophy'.10 Welsch's point in the last sentence here is an important one. The diverse modes of representation made possible by recent innovations in media and information technology are themselves an exemplification of Derrida's sign- based epistemology. They reveal the ways in which di f ferent media are constitutive of our ways of experiencing the world. Hence Welsch's general conclusion that: 'today's philosophy considers complete worlds - be it the everyday world, the physical world, or a literary world - to be constructions and, to this extent, at least in part to be artefacts. Artistic or fictional feats, inhere in all worlds, starting with the fundamental schemata of perception, via modes of symbolisation, through to the forms of evaluation of objects. And it cannot be said that any of these procedures and criteria could be straightforwardly derived from a reality-in-itself. - All worlds are basically artificial worlds.'" 0 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 11. 10 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997), p. 177. " I b i d , p. 171. 4 8 T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE Welsch's leap from the fact that signs necessarily mediate our experience of reality, to the conclusion that they are constitutive of it in a radical sense, is what I shall call epistemological nihilism. Such a viewpoint does not deny that there is a realm of being beyond signification, but it does deny that this realm can provide the conceptual foundations for distinguishing between forms of knowledge, or for the objective superiority of one conceptual frame over another. Epistemological nihilism is, I would suggest, the inevitable outcome of all the varieties of poststructualism. Indeed, the familiar idea of reality as a 'social construct' propagated in much social science and 'discourse theory' is itself a crude form of epistemological nihilism. I would argue further that such nihilisms exemplify postmodern symbolic arrest in its most dense and strangulating form. Reality is seen in the most basic terms, as an effect of varieties of symbolic artifice. Rather than achieving self-regulation through adapting to, and articulating reality, self-consciousness is locked into the fantasy that symbolic display of one sort or another is a sufficient characterisation of the real. In a sense this involves an unrecognised regression to a mythical mode of thought, insofar as symbol and reality are taken to be fused with one another. Now it might be argued that the problem, of symbolic arrest has been overstated here. Whatever else is the case about postmodern society, it represents a real diversification of life-choices which are open to the individual, and, in particular, it has allowed the voices of marginalised or repressed communi t ies to not only obtain a hearing, but to become a part of a mainstream eclectic culture. But again, whilst these are indeed positive factors, the dimension of symbolic arrest presents, nevertheless, the direst problems. The irony is that whilst the potential for great advance exists, this potential is being squandered and much worse. The squandering consists in the way that symbolic arrest actually works counter to its intended effects. In the health services, for example, the nursing profession still caters for patients, but the energies of experienced s taf f -which could be of most benefit to those who are in need of care - is diverted into useless administrative duties. These duties engender plans, flow charts, and other signifiers of efficiency, but this is efficiency only in a rhetorical sense. The figures 'cash out' . Budgets are balanced but responsibility for patient care is devolved on to the young and inexperienced. In practice, the patient loses out. The very functions which define the nursing profession are contradicted by the means of their, supposedly, more efficient realisation. This embod ie s a k ind of law of symbolic arrest which pervades 4 9 PAUI. CROWTIIKR contemporary society. Broadly speaking, the more the term 'quality' is used as a rhetorical goal in relation to operational strategies in the public services, utilities, and education, the more the image of efficient operation is conveyed, and the less, correspondingly, are the actual benefits which accrue to the recipients. Admittedly, the systems still work but how they work is a pale shadow of the ways in which they could and should work. The danger is amplified in the context of information technology. In his book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality Michael Heim judiciously observes that 'Business in America embraced computers under the magic rubric of productivity. Yet company reports do not seem to get better after thirty drafts. Real economic productivity in the United States actually declined over the last decade, and so has the competitiveness of the US economy. Feel productive; push more paper.'12 Of course information technology is an enormous boon in relation to all aspects of contemporary productive processes, but Heim's point is that it also engenders a futile tendency to produce information for its own sake, even in contexts where it is actually meant to promote efficiency. More generally he notes that: 'Infomania erodes our capacity for significance. With a mind-set fixed on information, our attention span shortens. We collect fragments. We become mentally poorer in overall meaning. We get into the habit of clinging to knowledge bits and loose our feel for the wisdom behind the knowledge.'1'1 On these terms, the new technology tends to engender an aimless and fragmented pursuit of information for its own sake. The computer-user 'surfs the Internet' in the apotheosis of what Heidegger once characterised as empty 'curiosity'. This - like the wanderings of the 'f laneur' - has its attractions, but not if carried to a point of obsessive ness. Such a point, if culturally generalised, takes us to the zone of absolute danger. Heim's book is actually illustrative of this in several respects. For example, whilst identifying the dangers of information technology obsession his response to this is to advocate a quasi- mystical oriental counter-philosophy which, in effect, amounts to a kind of exotic Californian holiday which occasionally keeps one away f rom the computer. In terms of reality, however, Californian holidays are, at best, of 12 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 5. 13 Ibid, p. 10. 5 0 T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE limited duration. They do not amount to taking control of a situation - which is surely the response demanded here. The real problem is that information technology (and variants - such as virtual reality) have, like the media and advertising industries, an intoxicating glamour whereby the individual focuses on and consumes the symbolic means rather than the functional ends which are involved. And like the televisual image, information technology has its own adverse epistemological effect over and above the mere diminution of attention span. Heim describes it as follows: 'The computer absorbs our language so we can squirt symbols at lightening speeds or scan the whole range of human thought with Boolean searches. Because the computer, not the student does the translating, [a] shift takes place subtly. The computer system slides us from a fierce awareness of things to the detached world of logical distance. By encoding language as data the computer already modifies the language we use into mathematized ASCII (American Standard Code of Information Interchange). We can then operate with the certitude of Boolean formulas. The logical distance we gain offers all the allure of control and power without the pain of having to translate back and forth from our everyday approach to the things we experience."4 On these terms, thought processes which follow the prompting of information technology have a reductive effect. The sensible particularity and complexity of the real is expressed abstractly as a logic of inclusion and exclusion vis a vis class membership. Reality does, of course, have this aspect, but symbolic expressions of it do no justice to such things as, for example, concrete patterns of human interaction. Applied beyond the appropriate context, the idioms of information technology function as symbolic displays which distort and conceal the realities which they are meant to articulate. Part Three All the factors which I have described so far enmesh with one another. Postmodern existence both operates and is definable within a world wide web of symbolic arrest. And in every web there is something nasty. In this case the something nasty is uniquely, a product of the factors which constitute the web. It is a 'creature' of two converging aspects - one being an artificially induced mutation of self-consciousness, and the other being a something 'other ' than human being. 14 Ibid, p. 21. 5 1 PAUI. CROWTIIKR The former I shall call the qualitative cyborg. To work towards its understanding let us first define the cyborg as a human who has been implanted with genetically-engineered tissue or micro-chip technology. In a quantitative sense this is not problematic. Interventions of this sort can enhance the body's capacity to resist illness, disease, and can compensate for congenital deficiencies. However, let us suppose that these interventions are directed not towards resisting or preventing adverse factors in bodily existence but towards the transformation of cognitive structures. There is a massive amount of contemporary writing which wriggles and writhes in ecstasy at this very prospect.15 The idea is that if one can 'interface' with a virtual-reality cyberspace whenever one desires then this will engender a liberation from the body and a projection into a realm of f reedom and realisable fantasy. William Gibson's novel Neuromanceris frequently cited as a exemplar of what this might be like. It is, however, important to distinguish between this essentially fantasy notion of the cyborg and the qualitative variety. All fantasy derives its potency and desirability from the matrix of physical embodiment. There can only be adventures in virtual cyberspace because of the patterns of loss and gain - the 'economy of desire' referred to in the last Chapter - which characterises the being of embodied subjectivity. No matter how immersed in virtual cyberspace one might become, what is experienced there only has meaning by virtue of its reference back to the body and its mundane interactions. Remove that, and the conditions which render fantasy meaningful are removed. The significance of desire realised in a cyber-world may appear to be other than that of normal embodied existence, but it merely extends the customary economy of desire in an unrecognised form. And the real always returns. At some point the cybernaut is reluctantly summoned back to the domain of everydayness. He or she thus becomes something of a divided 'unhappy consciousness' in the Hegelian sense. Now it might be that the cybernaut may be able to strike some modus vivendi between the real and the virtual. But unless the nature of this relation and it components are subjected to searching critical scrutiny on the basis of an adequate epistemology, all thatwe have are fantasies of harmony. And one particularly foolish fantasy of this kind beckons to the cyber-addict. It is that of the total immersion scenario, where the addict chooses to be placed in a virtual-system which brings about the delusion that what they are experiencing 15 See, for example, some of the essays in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology, and Post- Human Pragmatism, ed. Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy (London: Routledge, 1998). 5 2 T I I E DANGERS OF P O S T M O D E R N I IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE is real. The addict is able to exist continuously in this cyber-world though also being placed in a biomechanical support system which provides for nutrition, the discharge of waste, and regular toning up of muscles and tissue. The film The Matrix is loosely prophetic of this. Such a context radicalises the dimension of unhappy consciousness noted earlier. For the cybernaut's existence is now absolutely dependent on a reality which - as a deluded subject - he or she has no volitional relation to. No matter what interactive cyber relations evolve within the total immersion system, and no matter how reliable in principle the biomechanical support system is, they are absolutely dependent on contingencies. A super-virus, environmental disaster, or even the malignant flick of a switch outside the system, could destroy this cyber-world in toto. The individuals within the system would have no opportunity to prepare for such happenstances, neither would they be able to formulate responses to them. The burgeoning literature of cyber-babble rarely reaches as far as these insights. Indeed, its preoccupation with cybernaut fantasies has meant that the real issue has scarcely been addressed. For the cyborgs just described do not embody a radical transformation of humanity, but rather a particularly stupid mode of self-indulgence. The cyber-augmentation of cognitive capacities involved here amounts to little more than a quantitative intensification of those patterns of desire and gratification which are defined by the condition of embodied subjectivity. The qualitative cyborg is very different. This can be shown by developing a contrast . The embod ied subject 's remembrance of the past and its imaginative projection of experiential possibility involve the generation of imagery to satisfy linguistic descriptions. This generation is, however, at best piecemeal, fragmentary, and highly creative. Indeed, it is precisely the incompleteness of such generation which necessitates narrative as the basis of the cohesion of die self. We know that the body exists continuously through space and time, but we can only comprehend this existence as a unity (i.e. become self-conscious) insofar as the continuum is marked out in terms of mutually significant episodes and events. This narrative structure depends as much upon what we are unable to remember or project, as it does upon what we can actually realise. Let us suppose, however, that through biomechanical implants or genetically engineered tissues, some humans are able to massively augment their powers of recall and imaginative projection. Their mental engrams now admit of virtually full rather than schematic embodiment. A being of this kind can choose to, as it were, switch-off its present input of stimuli, so as to replay past experiences or project possible ones with a sensory vividness that 5 3 PAUI. CROWTIIKR approximates immediate perception. For such an agent it would seem as if these experiences were actually occurring in the present. In order for such a cyborg to function it would need some kind of cognitive bracketing out mechanism whereby its virtual experiences were recognised as projections and not real stimuli from the present, This is necessary because if an agent could not distinguish between present, past, and mere possibility, its sense of self would be collapsed. This being said, it may be that bracketing devices of the most enormous complexity could be developed. These would enable a controlled interface between both the present and past and possible experience, which could draw simultaneously on all the senses and the subject's general experiential viewpoint. Hence, in recalling a past event, we would not only project what we perceived but also something of those affective states and broader attitudes which informed that particular perceptual engagement. Similarly, in projecting future or counterfactual possibilities, we would not only 'see' and ' hear' etc. a state of affairs but would also extrapolate and project an image of how we might feel in that context and how our personal worldview might differ from its present incarnation. A biotechnical project of this kind would probably, at the outset, have a purely quantitative orientation. It would seek to merely improve or augment human cognitive mechanisms. In the long term, however, it could easily produce a qualitative transformation. This is because the specifically human form of finitude is here radically changed. To be able both to recreate the past and project alternative experiences with virtual exactness, is to eliminate that dimension of incompleteness and lack which necessitate narrative as the basis of unity of the self. For the qualitative cyborg, nothing is lost and nothing much is gained in the passage of life. On the one hand, its past moments can live again in the present and on the other hand, the attractions of the future are vitiated through the power to project alternative experiential possibilities at will and at any time. The emphasis in experience is, thereby, shifted away from narrative meaning towards mere continuity. Different things happen to the qualitative cyborg, but none of these things existentially outweigh any other. The past does not fade, and any future or counterfactual possibility that one cares to project can live, as it were, in advance of the future. Every experience has equality of intensity and value. On these terms, then, mere augmentation of cognitive capacities can lead to a being whose finitude is qualitatively different from that of a human. Such a being has an immediate present, but to the degree that it can recall or project its experience is not closely bound to that immediate present. In the case of the human being, in contrast, the immediate present forms the focal point of its sense of self. As it cannot recall the past or project alternative 5 4 T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI I Y - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE exper iences with any completeness, it must link these selectively and evaluatively in a cumulative narrative which contextualises and makes its immediate present meaningful. The qualitative cyborg has no need of such a narrative. Such self- consciousness as it starts with is compressed into a one dimensional vector of activity - namely a means /end rationality directed towards maximising the possibilities of its own survival. The only avenues of intrinsic value which would be relevant to it are those symbolic specialised practices which have technological or practical use. Given the appropriate interface stations one such cyborg would be able to communicate its own history in toto to another. There would be no problem of interpersonal communication since the very narrative factors which are the basis of personality are what the qualitative cyborg's cognitive augmentations serve to diminish. Language, empathic identification, and imagination would be mechanised in the direction of informational interface alone. The aesthetic dimension of experience would disappear entirely. Such a being would only be self-conscious in a formal sense i.e. it could identify itself as having occupied and being able to occupy spatio- temporal co-ordinates other than its immediate one, but these would not matter to it except in a quantitative sense. They would simply be units accumulated alongside others in the continuous flow of its existence. Now a cyborg of this kind begins - in my scenario - as an implanted h u m a n whose cognitive augmentat ions push it unintentionally in this dehumanised direction. It is driven by animal instincts for survival and reproduction, and, given the elimination of narrative meaning, these are all that its cognitive powers can be directed towards. There would be nothing else for it. It follows, therefore, that such a being would gradually seek out and bond with others of the same kind for survival and reproductive purposes. Given the appropriate in vitro fertilisation and nurturing technology it is quite possible that these purposes could be realised. Humanity would have accidentally created a mutant species which would find its own creators at best incomprehensible and, at worst, of significance only insofar as they inhibited or could be put to use in the facilitation of cyborg survival. Not only would these beings be alien to the civilizing process, they could threaten its very existence. The technological innovations which make the qualitative cyborg feasible are also of considerable concern in themselves, especially in relation to the massively accelerat ing growth of artificial neural networks and nano- technology. It is possible, for example, that artificial intelligence will be created with a capacity to evolve autonomously towards levels of biological complexity. If such 'artilects' were able to engage with one another and engender their 5 5 PAUI. CROWTHKR own 'forms of life' (in the Wittgensteinian sense) then the human species would find that it had, inadvertently, created a much more powerful rival to its own dominion of the earth. The potential for violence here would almost be beyond comprehension. Qualitative cyborgs and artilects are not just science-fiction, they are already visible on the technological horizon. We are making them emerge from the world wide web of symbolic arrest. Unfortunately it is the cosy science- fiction mentality of cyber-babble which inhibits an adequate awareness of the dangers which the qualitative cyborg and the artilect present. Science fiction - however horrible the possibilities it projects - is a human endeavour with outcomes controlled by its creators. The possibilities which I am describing are not. In the unpleasant unglamorous real world our capacity for controlled endings has been diminished. Things much-worse than the possibilities which I have described may happen. Unfortunately, because contemporary symbolic arrest is unable to distinguish between scientific fact and the comforts of science fiction, it regresses to a level of mythic understanding which is of a particularly childish kind. Everything has to work out for the best, in the end, so all that we need do in the meantime is to float through delicious cyber- space fantasies. We are left then, with the following position. If the postmodern world continues on its present symbolically arrested course it is quite conceivable that civilization will come to an end through the advent of an era of cyber- modernity, where mechanised processes define the terms of existence, or where biomachines extinguish or enslave the human species. The alternative is for philosophy to intervene. This does not entail a rejection of technological innovation. Rather it involves a critical thinking through of historical change in relation to these enduring epistemological and aesthetic factors which are the basis of self-consciousness and the civilizing process. In this way one might hope to establish a critical philosophical standpoint which could help regulate - however minimally - the transition to what comes after postmodernism. Conclusion I shall now consider where such a philosophy should be sought, and what its relation to postmodernity might be. In terms of the first question, we must recall the central tenet of the refoundational strategy, namely that constant elements in experience are always articulated under historically specific circumstances. This means that their philosophical comprehension will take different forms at different times. In some epochs, such and such a constant 5 6 T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE will figure more centrally in experience than others, and philosophical discourse will reflect this accordingly. At other times, constants which hitherto only seemed of marginal importance will come to the fore in unexpected ways a n d b e c o m e the r eby m u c h more accessible to ph i losophica l understanding. One of the most striking examples of this is the contemporary primacy of signification. Signification is a necessary condition of any possible experience over and above mere animal consciousness, and the ubiquity of signs in contemporary consumer culture is a heightened expression of this necessity. Indeed, the current prevalence of epistemological nihilism has a similar disclosive significance vis-a-vis both the structure of signification itself, and its more general ramifications. It serves, in particular, (whatever its faults) to affirm the fact that meaning is not some simple correspondence between sign and referent, but gravitates around the sign's relation to other signs in a developing field of signifying relations. This insight is of vital importance in comprehending the dynamic complexity of the se l f - but only if it is correlated with an understanding of those constant reciprocal relations which stabilise the cognitive field, and, thereby, give holistic cohesion to the self. (It is these stabilising factors, of course, which epistemological nihilism fails to negotiate.) Given this decisive philosophical clue from postmodern culture, and the need to overcome its limitations, the question arises as to which philosophical positions should be drawn from in this task. On the basis of a refoundational approach, one need not be tied to any single thinker or philosophical school. This is because any significant philosophical work will offer some way or other of identifying constants in experience. The thing is to select sources which also i l luminate one 's present situation through their particular way of articulating the more enduring factors. In the present case, this means a philosophy which can locate us in relation to the clues noted above and which can develop them on the basis of a systematic notion of reciprocal relations thus enabling the articulation of self-consciousness as a process of realisation. This project could usefully draw on the Hegelian tradition, or a totally re- thought historical materialism. There is, however, an even more directly relevant method which itself cuts across some customary methodological boundaries. It can be called transcendental hermeneutics. The first term in this title signifies an intention to clarify those constants which are logically necessary conditions for objective knowledge and self-consciousness. The second term indicates that this will not issue in some exhaustive and fixed philosophical system, but is, rather, an on-going process of clarification, critique, and reformulation - all in all a sustained interpretative task. What makes transcendental hermeneutics more than the sum of its two 5 7 PAUI. CROWTIIKR parts, however, is the possibility of progressive articulation. This means that through its dialogue with tradition and its own historically specific context of experience, transcendental hermeneutics seeks to establish the truth of self- consciousness on the same basis as the civilizing process itself i.e. as a cumulative process advancing - however, erratically - to higher stages. Our criterion of 'higher' in this context, is the ability to identify constants and their reciprocal relations with one another, to continuously differendate them internally and reassess the nature of the whole in the light of this. Just as importantly it involves a tracing of the implications of this process in relation to the problems of the present and in relation to the present's implications for it. If such an analytic momentum can be historically sustained each distinct phase of development can be, in logical terms, more consistent and more comprehensive in explanatory and methodological power than the preceding phases. Since, however one of the main effects of historical existence is the forgetting of the past, the emphasis of philosophical analysis in any one period may - for contemporary cultural reasons - focus on one group of constants and forget or neglect others which have been previously illuminated. This is why a transcendental hermeneutical approach does not seek a definitive resolution to philosophical problems. Changing historical circumstances disclose new aspects to familiar categories, as well as concealing others. Transcendental hermeneutics, accordingly, involves a constant reinterpreta- tion of the past in relation to the present, and the acknowledgement that the only complete framework of philosophical truth is that of progressive articulation as the possibility of a continuous open-ended process of gradual cumulative advance. 5 8 Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXII • Številka/Number 2 • 2001 • 59-86 TRANSCULTURALITY: THE CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY WOLFGANG WELSCH "When we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1929 A simple question was occasion for me a decade ago to develop the concept of transculturality. I had the impression that our present concepts of culture were no longer suited to their object, today's cultures. Put the other way round: Contemporary cultures seemed to be exhibiting a constitution different to that asserted, or suggested by our concepts of culture. So we'd better develop a new conceptualization of culture. This I attempt to do under the heading 'transculturality'.1 The following account comprises four sections: firstly a critique of the traditional concept of single cultures, secondly a critique of the more recent concepts of multiculturality and interculturality, thirdly a detailed discussion of the concept of transculturality, and fourthly some further perspectives. The concept of transculturality, it seems to me, is for both descriptive and normative reasons the most appropriate to today's cultures. ' The first version of this conception was published as "Transkulturalität - Lebens- fo rmen nach der Auflösung der Kulturen" (in: Information Philosophie, 2, 1992, pp. 5-20). It was developed fu r the r in "Auf dem Weg zu transkulturellen Gesellschaften", in: Die Zukunft des Menschen - Philosophische Ausblicke, ed. Günter Seubold (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999), pp. 119-144. WOLFGANG WELSCI I One thing beforehand: I will certainly, in some respects, schematize, extrapolate and exaggerate the development which I believe can be witnessed. There will be several things in this to criticize. However, firstly, if one wants to say anything at all, then one must exaggerate. And secondly, exaggeration is a principle of reality itself; tomorrow's reality will be the exaggeration of today's; it is this which we call development. I. The traditional concept of single cultures Why do I think that the conventional concepts of culture are no longer suited to the constitution of today's cultures? How was the traditional conceptuality of culture comprised, and what are the new realities which no longer submit to the old precepts? 1. 'Culture' in the tradition a. From a special to a general concept of culture 'Culture' first developed into a general concept, spanning not only single, but all the reifications of human life, in the late 17th century. As a general concept of this type, 'culture' appeared for the First time in 1684 with the natural rights scholar Samuel von Pufendorf.2 He denoted as 'culture' the sum of those activities through which humans shape their life as being specifically human - in contrast to a merely animal one.8 Prior to this the noun 'culture' had not had an absolute usage such as this. Culture had been a relative expression, bearing only on specific realms or activities. Accordingly, in antiquity, Cicero had spoken of the "cultura animi" ("care of the spirit"),4 patristics propagandized the "cultura Christianae religionis"/' and in the Renaissance, Erasmus or Thomas More pleaded for 2 In the second edition of his script De jure naturae et gentium libri octo (Frankfurt, 2nd ed. 1684) Pufendorf effected, in several places, the transition f rom the traditional concept of a specific 'cultura animi' to the new talk of a general 'cultura ' (Book II, Ch. 4, § 1). Prior to this, he had already spoken of "vera cultura" in a letter to Christian Thomasius of 19th January 1663, that is, strictly speaking, made absolute use of the expression 'cultura' for the very first time (the letter is printed in: Christian Thomasius, Historiajuris naturalis, Halle 1719, Appendix II, Epistola I, pp. 156-166, here p. 162). s Cf. Samuel von Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo, II, 4. 4 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, II, 13. 5 Cf. Wilhelm Perpeet, "Zur Wortbedeutung von 'Kultur'", in: Naturplan und Verfallskritik. 6 0 TRANSCUI.TURAI.I IY: T H E CHANCING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY the "cultura ingenii" - the culture of the inventive spirit.1' For centuries, the expression 'culture' appeared only in such compounds and related to specific realms of activity. With Pufendorf 'cul ture ' became a collective singular and an autonomous concept which now - in a presumptuous unification - claimed to encompass the whole of a people's, a society's or a nation's activities. A hundred years later this global concept of culture obtained through Herder - especially in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man which appeared from 1784 to 1791 - a form which was to remain exemplary for the time to follow.7'8 Many among us still believe this Herderian concept of culture to be valid. It's not only traditionalist minds that do this, rather we are presently also witnessing various revivals of this conception: they stretch from ethnic fundamentalism through to Huntington's talk of "civilizations". b. Herder 's concept of culture In terms of its basic structure, Herder's concept is characterized by three d e t e r m i n a n t s : by social homogen iza t i on , e thnic consol ida t ion and intercultural delimitation.'•' Firstly, every culture is supposed to mould the whole life of the people concerned and of its individuals, making every act and every object an unmistakable instance of precisely this culture. The concept is unificatory. Secondly, cul ture is always to be the "culture of a folk", representing, as Herder said, "the flower" of a folk's existence.10 So the concept is folk-bound. Thirdly, a decided delimitation towards the outside ensues: Every culture is, as the culture of one folk, to be distinguished and to remain separated from other folks' cultures. The concept is separatory. Zu Begriff und Geschichte der Kultur, eds Helmut Brackert and Fritz Wefelmeyer (Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 21-28, here p. 22. " Ibid. 7 J o h a n n Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966). The work First appeared in four separate parts, each of five books, in the years 1784, 1785, 1787 and 1791, published by the Hartknoch press in Riga and Leipzig. 8 Cf. for the history of the concept of 'culture': Joseph Niedermann, Kultur. Werden und Wandlungen des Begriffs und seiner Ersatzbegriffe von Cicero bis Herder (Florence: Bibliopolis, 1941); Perpeet, "Zur Wortbedeutung von 'Kultur'", I.e.; Jörg Fisch, "Zivilisation, Kultur", in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), vol. 7, pp. 679-774; Gyorgy Markus, "Culture: the making and the make-up of a concept (an essay in historical semantics)", in: Dialectical Anthropology 18 (1993), pp. 3-29. !) I shall not take account of Herder 's particularities here, but rather concentrate on the typology of his concept of culture. 10 Herder , op. cit. 6 1 WOLFGANG WF.I.SCI I 2. Obsolete features All three elements of this traditional concept have become untenable today. First: Modern societies are differentiated within themselves to such a high degree that uniformity is no longer constitutive to, or achievable for them (and there are reasonable doubts as to whether it ever has been historically). T. S. Eliot's Neo-Herderian statement from 1948, that culture is "the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep",11 has today become an obviously ideological decree.12 Modern societies are multicultural in themselves, encompassing a multitude of varying ways of life and lifestyles. There are- f i rs t ly-ver t ica l differences in society: the culture of a working-quarter, a well-to-do residential district, and that of the alternative scene, for example, hardly exhibit any common denominator. And there are - secondly - horizontal divisions: gender divisions, differences between male and female, or between straight, lesbian and gay can constitute quite different cultural patterns and forms of life. - So already with respect to this first point, homogeneity, the traditional concept of culture proves to be factually inadequate: it cannot cope with the inner complexity of modern cultures. Secondly, the ethnic consolidation is dubious: Herder sought to envisage cultures as closed spheres or autonomous islands, each corresponding to a folk's territorial area and linguistic extent. Cultures were to reside strictly within themselves and be closed to their environment. - But as we know, such folk-bound definitions are highly imaginary and fictional; they must laboriously be brought to prevail against historical evidence of intermingling. Nations are not something given but are invented and often forcibly established.13 And the political dangers of folk-based and ethnic fantasies can today be experienced almost worldwide. 11 T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 31. 12 The ethnology of the 20th century also worked for a long time with the notion that culture is a structured and integrated organic whole in itself. Ruth Benedict 's book The Patterns of Culture (Boston and New York: H o u g h t o n Miffin Company , 1934) is representative of this. From the sixties and seventies onwards doubts about this premiss were increasingly expressed (see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973). Margaret Archer called the "myth of cultural integration" the dubious "legacy of ethnology" (Margaret Archer, Culture and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 2 ff.). 19 This was effectively noted by Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm: "The central mistake committed both by the friends and the enemies of nationalism is the supposition that it is somehow natural [...] The truth is, on the contrary, that there is nothing natural or universal about possessing a 'nationality'" (Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld 6 2 TRANSCUI.TURAI.I'IY: T H E CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY Finally, the concept demands outer delimitation. Having noted that "every nation has its centre of happiness within itself just as each sphere its centre of gravity",14 Herder typically enough continues: "Everything which is still the same as my nature, which can be assimilated therein, I envy, strive towards, make my own; beyond this, kind nature has armed me with insensibility, coldness and blindness-, it can even become contempt and dis gust.— As you see: Herder defends the double of emphasis on the own and exclusion of the foreign, the traditional concept of culture being a concept of inner homogenization and outer separation at the same time. Put harshly: It tends — as a consequence of its very conception - to a sort of cultural racism.1(1 The sphere premiss and the purity precept not only render impossible a mutual understanding between cultures, but the appeal to cultural identity of this kind finally leads to separatism and paves the way for political conflicts and wars.17 and Nicholson, 1964, p. 150 f.). "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self- consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist" (ibid., p. 168). "[...] the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the 'invention of tradition'" (Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions", in: The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983, p. 14). 14 J o h a n n Gottfried Herder, Audi einePhilosophie der GeschichtezurBildungderMenschheit [1774] (Frankfurt /Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 44 f. 15 Ibid., p. 45. Herder continues: "[...] see how the Egyptian hates the shepherd, the vagabond! how he despises the frivolous Greek! So it is for each two nations whose inclinations and circles of happiness clash - one calls it prejudice! vulgarity\ insular nationalism!" (ibid., p. 45 f.) Against this Enlightening objection, Herder explains: "Prejudice is good [...] for it makes for happiness. It forces peoples together to their centre, makes them firmer at their stem, more flourishing in their kind, more fervent and then happier too in their inclinations and aims" (ibid., p. 46). He further says: "The least knowing, most prejudiced nation is, so considered, often the first: the age of wandering desires and hopeful voyages abroad is already illness, flatulence, unhealthy corpulence, death's apprehension.1" (ibid.). "' A type of racism is - with the island, or sphere axiom - built in, one which is even retained wherever biologically ethnic racism is discarded, that is, where the respective culture is no longer defined with recourse to a folk's nature, but with resort instead to definitional substitutes such as nation, state, or even - circularly - to a "cultural nation". For, in changelessly clinging to the autonomous form of culture, one continues to advocate structurally a kind of cultural racism. - In a highly regarded speech to the Unesco in 1971, Lévi-Strauss pointed out the relevance of specifically cultural racism. 'Race' is, according to him, to be understood not so much as the basis, but as a function of culture. Every culture, to the extent that it autonomously develops itself and delimits itself f rom other cultures, tends to cultural racism (Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Race et Culture", in: Lévi-Strauss, Le regard éloigné (Paris: Pion, 1983), pp. 21-48, in particular here p. 36). - For the strategic function of racism in the modern state, cf.: Michel Foucault, "Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme", in: Les Temps Modernes, 46, 1991, no. 535, pp. 37-61. 17 This separatist complex can be formulated harmoniously. You then say: Every culture is immediate to God. (With this, I am varying Leopold von Ranke's formula "every epoch 6 3 WOLFGANG WELSCI I To sum this up: The classical model of culture is not only descriptively unserviceable, but also normatively dangerous and untenable. What is called for today is a departure from this concept and to think of cultures beyond the contraposition of ownness and foreignness - "beyond both the heterogeneous and the own", as Adorno once put it.18 II. The concepts of multiculturality and interculturality I now want to discuss the more recent concepts of multiculturality and interculturality. I will point to the disadvantageous manner in which - in spite of all apparent progressiveness - they still remain bound to the traditional concept. 1. Multiculturality In contemplating the very multitude of different forms of life within one and the same society, the multiculturality concept seems to escape the dilemmas of the conventional concept of culture. But in cont inuing to unde r s t and the d i f fe ren t cul tures as be ing things i n d e p e n d e n t a n d h o m o g e n e o u s in themselves, it still conceptua l ly compl ies with the conventional understanding of culture. Therein lies its principal deficiency. The concept tries to face up to the problems which different cultures have living together within one society. And this certainly does represent a progression compared with the old demands for societal homogenization. But for its part the concept is incapable of contributing to the solution of the problems resulting from plurality for the very reason that it still sticks to the old idea of culture's design. This it does, to be sure, not with regard to the erstwhile large cultures, but with respect to the many cultures within society upon which it focuses. It still conceives of these single cultures as being homogeneous and well delineated - that is, in precisely the old-fashioned Herderian style. On the basis of this conception, a temporary respite in issues of tolerance, acceptance and avoidance of conflict between the different cultural groups might be attained, but never a real understanding or even a transgression of is immediate to God".) It can also be formulated realistically, then you must say: in this way, culture becomes a ghetto. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektili, in: Adorno, Gesarnmelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 3rd ed. 1984), p. 192. 6 4 TRANSCUI.TURAI.I'IY: T H E CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY the separating barriers. Rather the multiculturality concept has the supposition and acceptance of these barriers as its basis. Hence it can - conditions in the US have demonstrated this for years - even be used to justify and reinforce appeals for demarcation.1 '1 The concept thereby threatens to favor regressive tendencies which, in appealing to cultural identity (a construction which is most o f ten gained f rom the imagination of some yesteryear), lead to ghettoization and cultural fundamentalism.20 In this way the burden inherited from its antiquated understanding of culture comes to the fore. Cultures which are apprehended in principle as being autonomous and like spheres cannot ultimately understand one another, but must rather - according with the logic of this apprehension - set themselves apart from one another; they must ignore, fail to recognize, defame and combat one another. This was, by the way, shrewdly expressed by Herder when he said that spheres of this type can only "clash with one another" and that their rebuttal of other cultures is a condit ion for their happiness.21 In the context of multiculturalism, the « 10 Cf. Diane Ravitch, "Multiculturalism. E Pluribus Plures", in: American Scholar (1990), pp. 337-354; Hilton Kramer, "The prospect before us", in: The New Criterion, 9 / 1 (Sept. 1990), pp. 6-9; J o h n Searle, "The Storm Over the University", in: The New York Review of Books, 6 Dec. 1990, pp. 34-42; Multi Kulti: Spielregeln für die Vielvolkerrepublik, ed. Claus Leggewie (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990); Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York - London: Norton, 1991); Daniel Cohn- Bendit and Thomas Schmid, Heimat Babylon: Das Wagnis der multikulturellen Demokratie (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1992); Pluralisrne culturel en Europe: Culture(s) européenne(s) etculture(s) des diasporas, ed. René Gallissot (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1993); From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, ed. Ronald Takaki (New York - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1994); Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Multikulturelle Gesellschaft: Modell Amerika, ed . Bernd t Ostendorf (Munich: Fink, 1994); Wolfgang Kaschuba, "Kulturalismus: Kultur statt Gesellschaft?", in: GeschichteundGesellschaft2\ (1995), pp. 80- 95; Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle Over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives (New York: Knopf, 1995); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 20 One complies with the maxim that cultures are to be their own - and they are exactly this, above all, when contrasted with other cultures and contrasted with a common culture. "Back to the roots" reads the magic formula, or "only tribes will survive". Salmon Rushdie once articulated a similar danger when talking to his fellow Indian writers: "[...] of all the many elephant traps lying ahead of us, the largest and most dangerous pitfall would be the adoption of a ghetto mentality. To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers, would be, I believe, to go voluntarily into that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the 'homeland" ' (Salmon Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands" [1982], in: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta Books, 1991, pp. 9-21, here p. 19). 21 Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, p. 46. 6 5 WOLFGANG WF.I.SCI I continued influence of the old cultural notion of inner homogeneity and outer delimitation more or less logically induces chauvinism and cultural separatism.22-And it seems to me that several adherents of the concept don ' t even want to solve but rather to reinforce the resulting problems. 2. Interculturality A similar reservation seems to apply towards the concept of intercul- turality.2S For all its good intentions it too continues conceptually to drag along with it the premisses of the traditional concept of culture: the insinuation of an island- or sphere-like constitution of cultures. It does recognize that this constitution necessarily leads to intercultural conflicts, and attempts to counter these with intercultural dialogue. It's just that as long as one goes along with the primary thesis of an island- or sphere-like cultural constitution these problems will not be soluble, because they spring from the primary thesis named. The classical concept of culture with its primary trait - the separatist character of cultures — creates the secondary problem of the difficult coexistence and structural inability to communicate between these cultures. Hence the resulting problems cannot be solved on the basis of this concept.24 So, in just the same way as the multiculturality thesis, the interculturality thesis doesn't get to the actual roots of the problem, but operates on a subsequent level, so to speak cosmetically. - Both the multicultural and intercultural issues ought to be addressed in a different manner from the outset: in view of today's permeation of cultures. 22 It is not enough here to point out cultures' factual endeavours towards delimitation. These would be less cogent if they were not backed up by the multiculturality concept and driven into the dead end of ghettoization. Cultural terms influence cultural self- understanding. 23 Cf. for this concept Franz Wimmer, Interkulturelle Philosophie (Vienna: Passagen 1989), vol. 1; Philosophische Grundlagen derInterkulturalitat, ed. Ram Adhar Mall and Dieter Lohmar (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); Archie J. Bahm, Comparative Philosophy: Western, Indian and Chinese Philosophies Compared (Albuquerque, N.M: World Books revised edition 1995). 24 This becomes very clear in Wang Bin's article "Relativismo culturale e meta- metodologia" (in: Sgiiardi venuti da lontano. Un'indagine di Transcultura, eds Alain Le Pichon and Letizia Caronia, Milan: Bompiani, 1991, pp. 221-241): if cultures are autonomous islands to begin with (ibid., 222), then a real understanding between them will first come about precisely when this premiss is done away with, when that is, the cultural differences de facto no longer exist (cf. p. 236). The island-basis creates the problem, which it can' t solve - but from which one can appreciate that a solution can only be brought closer by overcoming the island-thesis. 6 6 TRANSCUI.TURAI.I IY: T H E CHANCING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY * My criticism of the traditional conception of single cultures, as well as of the more recent concepts of multiculturality and interculturality can be summarized as follows: If cultures were in fact still - as these concepts suggest - constituted in the form of islands or spheres, then one could neither rid oneself of, nor solve the problem of their coexistence and cooperation. However, the description of today's cultures as islands or spheres is factually incorrect and normatively deceptive. Our cultures de facto no longer have the insinuated form of homogeneity and separateness, but are characterized through to the core by mixing and permeations.2ii I call this new form of cultures transcultural, since it goes beyond the traditional concept of culture and passes through traditional cultural boundaries as a matter of course. The concept of transculturality - which I now want to set out - seeks to articulate this altered cultural constitution.2,i'27 25 We are mistaken when we continue to speak of German, French, Japanese, Indian, etc. cultures as if these were clearly defmied and closed entities; what we really have in mind when speaking this way are political or linguistic communities, not actual cultural formations. 20 The prefix ' trans' in 'transculturality' has a double meaning. First it denotes the fact that the determinants of culture are becoming more and more cross-cultural. In this sense ' trans' has the meaning 'transversal'. In the long run, however, this development will increasingly engende r a cultural constitution which is beyond the traditional, supposedly monocultural design of cultures. So, whilst having the meaning 'transversal' with respect to the mixed design of cultural determinants, 'trans' has the sense of 'beyond ' with respect to the future and compared to the earlier form of cultures. 27 I must admit that I held the term 'transculturality' for a new one when I began working on this topic in 1991. Transversality - which I'd spoken of previously only with an eye to questions of reason (for the first time in my Unsere postmoderne Moderne^einheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1987, Chap. XI; most recently in: Welsch, Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vemunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995, stw 1996) - now in cultural theory too - this was my idea. In the meantime I have learned that 'transculturality' - or at least the adjective 'transcultural' - isn't quite so rare after all. But my usage of the term does not, as is usual in an older tradition, target transcultural invariances. With this term I seek far more to account for the historically modified structure of today's cultures. 6 7 WOI.FGANG WELSCH III. Transculturality 1. Macrolevel: the altered cut of today's cultures a. Networking Firstly the old homogenizing and separatist idea of cultures has been surpassed through cultures' external networking. Cultures today are extremely interconnected and entangled with each other. Lifestyles no longer end at the borders of national cultures, but go beyond these, are found in the same way in other cultures. The way of life for an economist, an academic or a journalist is no longer German or French, but rather European or global in tone. The new forms of entanglement are a consequence of migratory processes, as well as of worldwide material and immaterial communications systems and economic interdependencies and dependencies. It is here, of course, that questions of power come in. A consequence and sign of such permeations is the fact that the same basic problems and states of consciousness today appear in cultures once considered to be fundamentally different - think, for example, of human rights debates, feminist movements or of ecological awareness which are powerful active factors across the board culturally.28 According to the old model of culture and its fiction of difference things such as these would have been quite impossible —which in turn is evidence of the obsolescence of this model. b. Hybridization Secondly, cultures today are in general characterized by hybridization. For every culture, all other cultures have tendencially come to be inner-content or satellites. This applies on the levels of popula t ion , merchand i se a n d information. Worldwide, in most countries, live members of all other countries of this planet; and more and more the same articles - as exotic as they may once have been - are becoming available the world over; finally the global networking of communications technology makes all kinds of information identically available from every point in space.29 28 This is not a straightforward matter of exporting Western ideas, rather retroactive modifications also come about: The affirmation of property, for example, which Indian women's rights campaigners said represented an indispensable prerequisite for their emancipation, has caused some Western critics of private property to think again. - 1 owe this observation to Martha C. Nussbaum. 2" Places like Mammoth - a Californian ski station, where you find numerous names such as St. Moritz Road, Chamonix Place, Cortina Circuit, or Megeve Way (in the surroundings you also have a Matterhorn Peak) are curious examples of the t rend to 6 8 TRANSCULTURALIIY: T I I E CIIANGINC. FORM OF CULTURES TODAY c. Comprehensiveness of the cultural changes Cultural mixing occurs not only - as is often too one-sidely stated - on the low level of Coke, McDonalds, MTV or CNN, but in high culture as well, and this has been the case for a long time - think, for example, of Puccini and Chinese music; of Gauguin and Tahiti; of Picasso and African sculpture; or of Messiaen and India. Moreover, culture in the sense of forms of life, of daily routine is more and more becoming cross-cultural too. Germans, for example, today have implemented more elements of French and Italian lifestyle than ever before - even Germans today know how to enjoy life. d. Dissolution of the foreign-own distinction Stricdy speaking there is no longer anything absolutely foreign. Everything is within reach. Accordingly, there is no longer anything exclusively 'own' either. Authenticity has become folklore, it is ownness simulated for others - to whom the indigene himself belongs.30 I want to provide two examples. These days it is supermarket products, telecommunications articles and T-shirts from famous universities above all that belong to potlatch - the ritual of exchange and waste among today's successors of native North Americans. Representatives of Indian culture themselves consider it highly questionable that their ancestors would still recognize today's customs as a continuation of the old rituals. But this doesn't worry them. They seize the foreign as their own. As can be seen, transculturality can reach all the way down to the most emphatic rituals of identity. But while these First Nation People are still aware of the orginally heterogenous source of the articles named, this often no longer seems to be the case in Japan. There the foreign is considered the own as a matter of course. In Kyoto, accompanied by Japanese friends, I entered a restaurant in which everything appeared genuinely Japanese and asked my companions hybridization. One has the whole world (insofar as it counts for a specific purpose) in one place. 30 The rhetoric of regional cultures is largely simulatory and aesthetic; in substance most things are transculturally determined. What's regionally specific has become décor, superficies, aesthetic enactment. This is, of course, one of the reasons for the eminent spread of the aesthetic noticable today (cf. Die Aktualität des Ästhetischen, ed. Wolfgang Welsch, Munich: Fink, 1993). - One might, just once, seek out a Tirolean ski resort: Tirolean merely exists still as atmospheric enactment, as ornamentation. On the other hand, the basic structures - f rom the ski lifts through to the toilets - are exactly similar to those in French ski regions or at international airports. Significantly, the cuisine too has changed. What is put before one, looks like and calls itself Tirolean Gröstl, Kasnocken or Schupfnudeln, but it is - corresponding with international standards - drastically calorie- reduced. In short: The appearance is still Tirolean, but in substance everything has changed. Originality exists only as an aesthetic production. 6 9 WOLFGANG WELSCI I whether everything here really was completely Japanese, including the chairs which we had just sat down on. They seemed astonished by the question, almost annoyed, and hastily assured me that everything there - including the chairs - was completely Japanese. But I knew the chairs: they were a model "Cab", designed by Mario Bellini and produced by Cassina in Milan. I d idn ' t then ask the next question - whether the crockery was completely Japanese (we were eating from Suomi series plates produced by Rosenthal). - It's not that European furniture should be found here that's astonishing, but that the Japanese held them to be products of their own culture. That the foreign and own has become indistiguishable for them serves witness to the degree of factual transculturality. Expressed as a principle this means: The selectivity between own-culture and foreign culture is gone.31 Today in a culture's internal relations - among its different ways of life - there exists as much foreignness as in its external relations with other cultures.32 31 Incidentally, this is also reflected in a famous theorem within analytic philosophy. According to Quine and Davidson, the problem of translation between different societies and languages is structurally no different and in no way greater or more dramatic than within oneand thesame society and language. Rorty comments: "Part o f t h e f o r c e o fQu ine ' s and Davidson's attack on the distinction between the conceptual and the empirical is that the distinction between different cultures does not differ in kind f rom the distinction between different theories held by members of a single culture. The Tasmanian aborigines and the British colonists had trouble communicating, but this trouble was different only in extent f rom the difficulties in communication experienced by Gladstone and Disraeli. [...] The same Quinean arguments which dispose of the positivists' distinction between analytic and synthetic truth dispose of the anthropologists ' distinction between the intercultural and the intracultural" (Richard Rorty, "Solidarity or Objectivity", in: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 21-34, here p. 26). 32 Sociologically viewed, this is a familiar fact today: "[...] people belong to many different cultures and the cultural differences are as likely to be within states (i.e. between regions, classes, ethnic groups, the urban and rural) as between states" (Anthony King, "Architecture, Capital and the Globalization of Culture", in: Global Culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity, A Theory, Culture & Society special issue, ed. Mike Featherstone, London: Sage, 1990, pp. 397-411, here p. 409). "[...] cultural diversity tends now to be as great within nations as it is between them" (Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 231). "It is natural that in the contemporary world many local settings are increasingly characterized by cultural diversity. [...] and one may in the end ask whether it is now even possible to become a cosmopolitan without going away at all" (Ulf Hannerz, "Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture", in: Global Culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity, pp. 237-251, here p. 249). 7 0 T R A N S c u i . r u R M . r i Y : T H E CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY 2. Microlevel: transcultural formation of individuals a. Several cultural origins Transculturality is gaining ground moreover not only on the macro- cultural level, but also on the individual's microlevel. For most of us, multiple cultural connexions are decisive in terms of our cultural formation. We are cultural hybrids. Today's writers, for example, emphasize that they're shaped not by a single homeland, but by differing reference countries, by Russian, German, South and North American or Japanese literature. Today this applies not only for advocates of high-culture, but increasingly for everyone. Since the Germans have been travelling en masse to hot countries, as studies show, their attitude to summer days earlier considered unbearably hot has changed significantly; all of a sudden people enjoy these days. Or if you speak to the chefs of a completely normal restaurant: they can explain to you how our taste has changed within the last twenty years, how much of what was once exotic is considered normal as a matter of course. Or think of young people and how they are shaped by pop and music culture: role-models can no longer be sorted nationally at all. In this way transculturality is today advancing in the most natural manner and is determining the formation of individuals' cultural identity. The cultural formation of subsequent generations will presumably be even more strongly transculturally shaped.33 b. Sociological diagnoses Sociologists have been telling us since the seventies that modern lives are to be understood "as a migration through different social worlds and as the successive realization of a number of possible identities",34 and that we all possess "multiple attachments and identities" - "cross-cutting identities", as Bell put it.35 Even in the thirties Paul Valéry had already pointed out that external social pluralization also brings about an internal pluralization of the individual;31' and the Chicago sociologists praised then the advantages of a 3:1 Amy Gutmann states that today "most people's identities, notjust Western intellectuals or elites, are shaped by more than a single culture. Not only societies, but people are multicultural" (Amy Gutmann, "The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics", in: Philosophy & Public Affairs, 22, no. 3 [1993], pp. 171-206, here p. 183). 34 Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind. Modernization and Consciousness, New York: Random House, 1973, p. 77. 35 Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage. Essays and Sociologicalfoumeys 1960-1980, Cambridge, Mass.: Abt Books, 1980, p. 243. 30 According to him the present-day means a state in which "a series of doctrines, schools of thought and ' truths ' , which vary greatly amongst themselves, or are even 7 1 WOLFGANG WKLSCI I multiple or fragmented self for urban life, as Richard Sennett has recently pointed out.37 "By virtue of his different interests arising out of different aspects of social life, the individual acquires membership in widely divergent groups", said Louis Wirth.38 "A fragmented self is more responsive".3'-1 c. Historical precursors Such internal multiplicity which is rapidly increasing in modernity and postmodernity, is of course not totally new. Montaigne had already confessed: "I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word."411 "We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment , plays its own game."4' Novalis declared that one person is "several people at once" since "pluralism" is "our innermost essence".42 Nietzsche said of himself that he was "glad to harbour [...] not ,one immortal soul', but many mortal souls within",43 and he coined the formula of the "subject as a multitude" in general.44 Or remember Walt Whitman's "I am large ... I contain multitudes"45 or completely contradictory, are acknowledged in equal measure" and even - this is decisive - "exist alongside one another and act within the same individuals" (Paul Valéry, "Triomphe de Manet", Œuvres, II, Paris: Gallimard, 1960, pp. 1326-1333, here p. 1327). Today "in all cultivated minds" there exist "the most varying of ideas and opposing principles of life and cognition freely alongside one another [...]." "The majority of us will have several views about the same object, which easily alternate with one another in judgments" (Paul Valéry, "La crise de l'esprit", Œuvres, I, Paris: Gallimard, 1957, pp. 988- 1014, here p. 992; Valéry, "La politique de l'esprit", pp. 1014-1040, here p. 1017). Already in 1890 Valéry had written to his friend Pierre Louis "je crois plus que jamais que j e suis plusieurs!" (Paul Valéry, Letter of 30 August 1890, in: Lettres à quelques-uns, Paris: Gallimard, 1952, p. 17 f., here p. 18). 37 Cf. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 127. 38 Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life" [1938], in: Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Prentice Hall, 1969), p. 156. 3!l Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, p. 127. 4(1 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 242 [II 1]. 41 Ibid., p. 244. 42 Novalis, Schriften, eds Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, vol. 3: Das philosophische Werk II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983), p. 571 [107] and p. 250 [63] resp. 43 Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister. Zweiter Band, in: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, eds Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), vol. 2, p. 386 [II 17]. 44 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, fuli 1882 bis Herbst 1885, in: Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11, p. 650 [August - September 1885]. 45 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass ["Song of Myself'], 1855 (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 84 [1314-1316], 7 2 TRANSCULTURALIIY: TIIF. CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY Rimbaud's "JE est un autre".41' Today what once applied to outstanding persons only seems to be becoming the structure of almost everybody.47 d. Cultural identity in contrast to national identity A cultural identity of this type is, of course, not to be equated with national identity. The distinction between cultural and national identity is of elementary importance. It belongs among the mustiest assumptions that an individual's cultural formation must be determined by his nationality or national status. The insinuation that someone who possesses a Japanese, an Indian or a German passport must also culturally unequivocally be Japanese, an Indian or a German and that otherwise he's some guy without a fatherland, or a traitor to his fatherland, is as foolish as it is dangerous.48 The detachment of civic from personal or cultural identity is to be insisted upon - all the more so in states, such as ours, in which freedom in cultural formation belongs among one's basic rights.4'' Wherever an individual is cast by differing cultural references, the linking of its transcultural components with one another becomes a specific task in identity-forming. Work on one's identity is increasingly becoming work on the integration of components of differing cultural origin.50 And only the ability to transculturally cross over will guarantee us identity and competence in the long run.51 411 Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny [May 15, 1871], in: Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 249-254, here p. 250). 47 Vgl. zum Thema des pluralen Subjekts Verf., "Subjektsein heute - Überlegungen zur Transformation des Subjekts", Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 39. Jg. (1991), Heft 4, 347-365; ferner: Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft (Frankfurt /Main: Suhrkamp 1995), Zweiter Teil, Kap. XIV: "Transversalität und Subjektivität", 829-852. 4S This insinuation stems f rom the classical concept of culture in so far as this is folk- based and commands homogeneity. 4''' Of course, civic and cultural identity can overlap. In many cases they will. The point is that they are not to be equated. 5(1 Zehra Çirak, a Turkish born writer who has lived in Germany since the age of two, says on this: "I prefer neither my Turkish nor my German culture. I live and long for a mixed culture" (Zehra Çirak, Vogel auf dem Rücken eines Elefanten, Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1991, p. 94). 51 Cf. my Vernunft: Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft, especially pp. 829-852. 7 3 WOLFGANG WELSCI I 3. Intermediate summary To sum this up: Cultural determinants today - from society's macrolevel through to individuals' microlevel - have become transcultural. The old concept of culture has become completely inappropriate. It misrepresents cultures' actual form, the type of their relations and the structure of individuals' identities and lifestyles/'2 Every concept of culture intended to pertain to today's reality must face up to the transcultural constitution.53'54 The gesture made by some cultural theorists, who prefer to cling to their customary 52 Wherever this concept continues to be represented, it acts as a normative corset, as a coercive homogenization precept. 53 Ulf Hannerz ' concept (or "root metaphor") of "creole cultures" and "creolization" is quite close to my perspective of transculturali ty. "Creole cul tures come out of multidimensional cultural encounters and can put things together in new ways" (Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, p. 265). "Something like creole cultures", Hannerz suggests, "may have a larger part in our future than cultures designed, each by itself, to be pieces of a mosaic" (ibid., p. 267). In 1991 Michel Serres held an impressive plea in the spirit of transculturality (Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, Paris: Editions François Bourin, 1991). His thesis is that what matters for present-day culture and education is to transcend the traditional alternatives of own and foreign and to think in terms of intersection, mixing and penetration. Whoever wants to move in the present-day world must be able to deal with a medley of cultural patterns. r'4 A fur ther conceptual clarification may be helpful. The diagnosis of transculturality refers to a transition, or to a phase in a process of transition. It's a temporary diagnosis. It takes the old conception of single cultures as its point of departure, and it argues that this conception - although still seeming self-evident to many people - is no longer descriptively adequate for most cultures today. Instead, the diagnosis of transculturality views a present and future state of cultures which is no longer monocultural but cross-cultural. The concept seeks to conceptually grasp this transition. One point, however, might seem confusing in this talk of transculturality. It may appear contradictory that the concept of transculturality which points to a disappearance of the traditional single cultures nonetheless inherently continues to refer to 'cultures', and to a certain extent even seems to presuppose the ongoing existence of such cultures - for if there were no longer such cultures, where should the transcultural mixers take their components from? The point can easily be clarified. The process of transition obviously implies too moments: the ongoing existence of single cultures (or of an old understanding of culture's form) and the shift to a new, transcultural form of cultures. With respect to this double character of the transition, it is conceptually sound and even necessary to refer to single cultures of the old type as well as to point the way to transculturality. But what will be the case after the transition has been made? Won' t it, at least then, be contradictory to continue speaking of 'cultures' on the one hand and of'transculturality' on the other? Not at all. Because the activity of weaving new webs will, of course, continue to take existing cultures as its starting-point or reservoir for the development of further webs - but now these reference cultures themselves will already have a transcultural cut. The duo of reference cultures on the one hand and new cultural webs on the other remains, the difference however is that the reference cultures will now already be 'cultural' in the sense of 'transcultural' . 7 4 TRANSC.ui . ruRAi .nY: T I I E CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY concepts and, wherever reality doesn't yield to these, retreat to a "well so much the worse for reality", is ridiculous. IV. Supplements and outlooks Having so far developed the general features of transculturality, I would now like to append some supplemental viewpoints and prospects. 1. Transculturality - already in history First: Transculturality is in no way completely new historically. It has, to be sure, been the case to a larger extent than the adherents of the traditional concept of culture want to admit. They blindly deny the factual historic transculturality of long periods in order to establish the nineteenth century's imaginary notion of homogeneous national cultures. - Take whatever culture you want as example. Take your own or, for instance, Japanese culture: It obviously cannot be reconstructed without taking Chinese and Korean, Indian, Hellenistic or modern European culture into account. Carl Zuckmayer once wonderfully described historical transculturality in The Devil's General. "[...] just imagine your line of ancestry, from the birth of Christ on. There was a Roman commander, a dark type, brown like a ripe olive, he had taught a blond girl Latin. And then a Jewish spice dealer came into the family, he was a serious person, who became a Christian before his marriage and founded the house's Catholic tradition. - And then came a Greek doctor, or a Celtic legionary, a Grisonian landsknecht, a Swedish horseman, a Napoleonic soldier, a deserted Cossack, a Black Forest miner, a wandering miller's boy from the Alsace, a fat mariner from Holland, a Magyar, a pandour, a Viennese officer, a French actor, a Bohemian musician - all lived on the Rhine, brawled, boozed, and sang and begot children there - and - Goethe, he was from the same pot, and Beethoven, and Gutenberg, and Mathias Griinewald, and — oh, whatever - j u s t look in the encyclopaedia. They were the best, my dear! The world's best! And why? Because that's where the peoples intermixed. Intermixed - like the waters from sources, streams and rivers, so, that they run together to a great, living torrent".55 - This is a realistic description of a 'folk's' historical genesis and constitution. It breaks 55 Carl Zuckmayer, The Devil's General, in: Masters of Modem Drama (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 911-958, here p. 930 [translation modified]. 7 5 WOLFGANG WELSCI I through the fiction of homogeneity and the separatist idea of culture as decreed by the traditional concept. For everyone who knows their European history — and art history in particular - this historical transculturality is evident. Styles developed across the countries and nations, and many artists created their best works far from home. Albrecht Durer, who is considered an exemplary German artist, first found himself in Italy, and he had to seek out Venice a second time in order to become himself completely. The cultural trends were largely European and shaped a network linking the states.58 In genera l , Edward Said's observation holds: "All cultures are hybrid; none of them is pure; none of them is identical to a 'pure' folk; none of them consists of a homogenous fabric."57 50 Recently the exhibition "Il Rinascimento a Venezia e la pittura del Nord ai tempi di Beilini, Dürer, Tiziano" (Venice, Palazzo Grassi, 1999) caused a stir by getting by completely without "national identity determinations and dues" (Matin Warnke) - it was guided by the way things were, by the many influences and mixtures. 57 Edward W. Said: "Kultur und Identität - Europas Selbstfindung aus der Einverleibung der Welt", Lettre International 34 (1996), pp. 21-25, here p. 24. In the same spirit Wolf Lepenies has said: "There are now only hybrid cultures" (Wolf Lepenies, "Das Ende der Überheblichkeit", in: Die ZEIT, no. 48, 24 Nov. 1995, p. 62). Similarly, f rom a philosophical point of view, J . N. Mohanty stated, "that talk of a culture which evokes the idea of a homogeneous form is completely misleading. Indian culture, or Hindu culture consists of completely different cultures. [...] A completely homogeneous subculture is not to be found" (Jitendra N. Mohanty, "Den anderen verstehen", in: Philosophische Grundlagen der Interkulturalität, pp. 115-122, here p. 118). Mohanty also notes generally: "The idea of cultural purity is a myth" (ibid., p. 117). Jacques Derrida notes: "/i is peculiar to a culture, that it is never identical with itself. There is no culture and no cultural identity without this difference toiuards itself (Jacques Derrida, "Das andere Kap", in: Das andere Kap. Die vertagte Demokratie - Zwei Essays zu Europa, Frankfurt /Main: Suhrkamp 1992, pp. 9-80, here p. 12 f.) Rémi Brague has pointed out how European identity is characterized by the sense of its distance from a double origin: "What's specific to European identity lies in its 'cultural secondariness': in the knowledge of its not being original, but having before it something else, something prior - culturally Greek antiquity, religiously Judaism" (Rémi Brague, Europa-Eine exzentrische Identität, Frankfurt-Main/New York: Campus 1993). - As soon as one observes the cultural fictions of purity more closely and realistically, they rapidly break up into a series of transcultural entanglements. Traditionally, and at least in the occident, mixtures of peoples came about particularly through conquest. In this, aspects of a conquered culture were integrated in the new, hegemonic culture. "Santa Maria sopra Minerva" is the formula for such processes. The difference to today lies in that the present-day blending has little to do with territorial, political expansions or conquests: It is far more a matter of transversal cultural interchange processes. 7 6 TRANSCUI.TURAI.nY: T H E CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY 2. Cultural conceptions as active factors in respect of their object Conceptions of culture are not just descriptive concepts, but operative concepts.r,H Our understanding of culture is an important active factor in our cultural life. If one tells us (as the old concept of culture did) that culture is to be a homogeneity event, then we practice the required coercions and exclusions. We seek to satisfy the task we are set - and will be successful in so doing. Whereas, if one tells us or subsequent generations that culture ought to incorporate the foreign and do justice to transcultural components, then we will set about this task, and then corresponding feats of integration will belong to the real structure of our culture. The 'reality' of culture is, in this sense, always a consequence too of our conceptions of culture. One must therefore be aware of the responsibility which one takes on in propagandizing concepts of this type. We should be suggesting concepts which are descriptively adequate and normatively accountable, and which - above all - pragmatically lead further.59 Propagandizing the old concept of culture and its subsequent forms has today become irresponsible; better chances are found on the side of the concept of transculturality. 3. Annexability and transmutability The concept of transculturality aims for a multi-meshed and inclusive, not separatist and exclusive understanding of culture. It intends a culture and society whose pragmatic feats exist not in delimitation, but in the ability to link and undergo transition. In meeting with other forms of life there are r'8 Generally, concepts are schemata, with which we make our world understandable for ourselves and organize our actions. They preset grids and ways of viewing things which entail behavioral patterns and disturb facts. In this light, Deleuze determined the task of philosophy as being the creation of concepts: "La philosophic [...] est la discipline qui consisted creer des concepts" (Gilles Deleuze andFelix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophic?, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991, p. 10). r'!' Hence critical reflections on cultural concepts, such as I undertake here, are - from time to time at least - necessary. No one would claim that an alteration of the concept eo ipso already alters reality. That would be overly simplistic idealism. But, conversely, the way in which the conscious and subconscious effectuality of cultural terms codetermines cultural reality should not be overlooked. The subcutaneous and officious effectuality of the old concept of culture - one thinks automatically, or even states explicitly that culture is to be homogeneous, national etc. - contributes to separatisms and particularisms of the obsolete sort. Work on conceptual enlightenment is called for to counter this. 7 7 WOLFGANG WELSCI I always not only divergences but opportunities to link up, and these can be developed and extended so that a common form of life is fashioned which includes even reserves which hadn ' t earlier seemed capable of being linked in. Extensions of this type represent a pressing task today. It is a matter of readjusting our inner compass: away from the concen- tration on the polarity of the own and the foreign to an attentiveness for what might be common and connective wherever we encounter things foreign. Transculturality sometimes demands things that may seem unreasonable for our esteemed habits - as does today's reality everywhere. But transculturality also contains the potential to t ranscend our received and supposedly determining monocultural standpoints, and we should make increasing use of these potentials. Diane Ravitch - an American critic of separatistic multiculturalism - reports an interesting example: In an interview a black runner said "that her model is Mikhail Baryshnikov. She admires him because he is a magnificent athlete". Diane Ravitch comments: "He is not black; he is not female; he is not American-born; he is not even a runner. But he inspires her because of the way he trained and used his body. When I read this, I thought how narrow-minded it is to believe that people can be inspired only by those who are exactly like them in race and ethnicity".00 - Once again: We can and should transcend the narrowness of traditional, monocultural ideas and constraints, we can develop an increasingly transcultural understanding of ourselves. I am confident that future generations will more and more develop such transcultural forms of communication and comprehension.111 00 Diane Ravitch, "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures", p. 354. (il Incidentally, it is not only recent developments in the constitution of cultures, but in the same way in science and with day-to-day problems which make an analogous transition to thought forms of mixing necessary for us. They call for a shift away f rom the old preference for clean separation, division of the world and unilinear analysis and for a transition to web-like, entangled, networked thought forms (I have set this out in more detail in my Vernunft). Thus in reality too we are finding ourselves confronted more and more with issues which result from networking effects. Even when problems arise locally their effects transcend borders, become global. Our old separatist thought forms however are unsuited to react to this. For them such transcending of borders is merely an "undesired side effect" - which you accept with a shrug of the shoulders and which you are helplessly confronted with. But of course it appears only to be a "side effect" because one has thought separatistically in the outset. The causal chains of reality however do not stop at this small-minded desire for division. Hence we must shift away f rom separative thinking and make the transition to thought forms of entanglement in economic, ecological, and all questions of planning. 7 8 TRANSCUI.TURAI.ITY: T I I E C H A N C I N G F O R M OF CULTURES T O D A Y 4. Internal and external transculturality F u r t h e r m o r e , the individuals ' discovery and acceptance of their transcultural constitution is a condition for coming to terms with societal transculturality. Hatred directed towards foreigners is (as has been shown particularly from die psychoanalytic side) basically projected hatred of oneself. One takes exception vicariously to something in a stranger, which one carries within oneself, but does not like to admit, preferring rather to repress it internally and to battle with it externally.02 Julia Kristeva writes: "In a strange way, the stranger exists within ourselves: he is the hidden face of our identity [...] If we recognize him within ourselves, we prevent ourselves from abhoring him as such."03 Indeed she also states a precondition for this recognition of the stranger within oneself: "Those who've never lost any of their roots, seem incapable of apprehending any word which could relativize their position. [...] The ear opens itself to objections only when the body loses the ground beneath its feet. To hear a dissonnance, one must have experienced a sort of imbalance, a tottering upon an abyss."04 Perhaps that sounds more dramatic than it is. For who today could be so conceited as to consider their roots to be the only ones possible? Not even to value his own roots does he have to do this. It is quite the reverse: insight into the specificity of these roots makes it possible to justify their particular estimation. But one cannot then simultaneously present them as being the best roots of all humankind altogether (with most others simply not having had the luck to receive these roots in the cradle). One's own roots are roots for oneself-not for everyone. Others can and may well value their own roots in the same way. The preference of one's own origin at the same time logically demands recognition, although not necessarily the adoption of other possible M Freud had already pointed to an analogy between the inner topology of repression and the outer topology of the relation to strangers: "[...] the repressed is foreign territory to the ego - internal foreign territory - just as reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external foreign territory" (Sigmund Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis", in: Freud, The Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey, vol. XXII, London: Hogarth, 1973, pp. 5-184, here p. 57 (31st Lecture). Musil has clearly recognized the mechanism of projection of disinclinations: "Now, ethnic prejudice is usually nothing more than self-hatred, dredged up from the murky depths of one's own conflicts and projected onto some convenient victim, a traditional practice from time immemorial" (Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins, New York: Knopf, 1995, vol. I, p. 461). "[...] the good Christian projects his own faults onto the good Jew, whom he accuses of seduc ing him into commit t ing advertisements, high interest rates, newspapers, and all that sort of thing" (ibid., p. 559). 113 Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p. 9. "4 Ibid., p. 29 f. 7 9 WOLFGANG WEI.SCI I origins. One should remind oneself of this precisely in one's weak moments, those in which one might be in danger of drifting into the trap of making claims to exclusivity. Against such temptations I would like to remind you of an inheritance of our tradition: in Greek ¡jemg meant both the stranger and guest. In other words, strangers were welcome as a matter of course. - If one is to appeal to European tradition at all, then please to this one too. It is precisely when we no longer deny, but rather perceive, our inner transculturali ty, that we will b e c o m e capab le of dea l ing with o u t e r transculturality. 5. Transculturality = uniformization ? Let me turn to a penultimate point. It's a crucial one. I want to respond to a potential misunderstanding. One might think that the concept of transculturality simply means and recommends the acceptance of an increasing homogenization of cultures and the coming of a uniform world-civilization, whereas it does not care about cultural diversity and its disappearance. But this is not die case at all. Transculturality does not mean simple uniformization. It is even intrinsically linked with the production of new diversity. For two aspects need to be distinguished. First of all, it is indeed the case that cultural diversity in the old sense is diminishing. Today's and tomorrow's cultures will no longer be homogeneous, mono l i t h i c , clearly de l imi ted ( n e i t h e r factual ly , n o r in t he i r own understanding of themselves). It is just this which comprises the content of the transculturality diagnosis. But even with regard to this uniformization one should not only see gray. Whereas uniformization brings with it cultural losses on the one hand, greater communicability between people of different origins - as is seen particularly in the younger generation - ensues in its wake. Understanding each other is becoming more a matter of course and it is becoming easier to get on with each other in everyday life than was the case in any earlier generation. These could be signs of the formation of a world-internal society. The uniformization processes might perhaps lead us close to the old dream of a Family of Man and of a peaceful global society. For this one might very well accept some losses at other levels. As transculturality pushes forward, diversity does not simply vanish, but its mode is altered. Diversity, as traditionally provided in the form of single cultures, does indeed disappear increasingly. Instead, however, a new type of 8 0 TRANSCUI.TURAI.NY: T i l l ! CHANGING FORM OF CULTURES TODAY diversity takes shape: the diversity of different cultures and forms of life, each arising from transcultural permeations and exhibiting a transcultural cut. Consider just how these transcultural formations come about. Different groups or individuals which give shape to new transcultural patterns draw upon different sources for this purpose. Hence the transcultural networks they are shaping will vary already in their inventory; and they will do so even more in their structure, because even the same elements, when put together differently, result in different structures. The transcultural webs are woven with different threads, and in different manner. Therefore, on the level of transculturality, a high degree of cultural manifoldness arises once again - certainly no less than that which was found between traditional single cultures.® It's just that now the differences no longer exist between clearly delineated cultures, but result between transcultural networks of identity which are no longer bound to geographical or national stipulations. The new situation can be described as follows: the same or similar identity networks can turn up at different places in this world; at the same time quite different forms of identity can exist in the same place. Neither would be possible according to the old, monocultural model. This shows once again the extent of the changes that are linked with transculturality. All of this applies not only on the level of groups, but already on that of individuals. The global spread of the same content and signs in no way means the inception of a uniform human. Instead selective screening is often carried out quite differently, as is additionally the attribution of meaning. Even someone who makes the same selections as another person can give the chosen elements a quite different meaning in his cultural cosmos from those of the other.1'1' Hence instead of a purported uniformity there exists from now on a diverse network of common features and differences between individuals.07 li5 Similar views to mine are forwarded by Ulf Hannerz who says "that the flow of culture between countries and continents may result in another diversity of culture, based more on interconnections than on autonomy" (Hannerz, Cultural Complexity, p. 266) and by Mike Featherstone, who argues "against those who would wish to present the tendency on the global level to be one of cultural integration and homogenizat ion" (Mike Featherstone, Consumer culture & postmodernism, London: Sage, 1991, p. 146). "Even if the possibility of global communication has come about among young people and changed societies throughout the world, this doesn't mean that the uniform young person has now made its entry on the world stage. A global semiotic community has arisen, but the signs have manifold meaning" (Reinhold Gorling, Heterotopia. Lektiiren einer interkulturellen Literaturuiissenschaft, Munich: Fink, 1997, p. 37). Ii7 Max Scheler had already pointed out the simultaneity of the adjustment between cultures and the increase in individual differentiation. He did this in a 1927 lecture entitled "Man in the Era of Adjustment" (in: Max Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives, Boston: Beacon, 8 1 WOLFGANG WELSCI I This new type of cultural diversity exhibits a great advantage over the old one. Transcultural networks always have some elements in common while differing in others, meaning that there exist between them not only differences, but at the same time overlaps. Since they include parts which also occur in other networks, they are altogether more capable of affiliation amongst one another than the old cultural identities ever were. So in terms of its structure the new type of difference favors coexistence rather than conflict. Forms differing transculturally are free f rom the old problems of separatistic difference. 6. Comparing the concept of transculturality to the gloabalization and particularization diagnoses To conclude, Fd like to compare the concept of transculturality with two o the r concepts which are much talked abou t today: the c o n c e p t of globalization and that of particularization. My thesis is that these concepts are too one-sided, and that particularization is a wrong, yet understandable reaction to the likewise insufficient globalization diagnosis. The transculturality concept however, it seems to me, is able to fulfill the legitimate demands of both competing concepts, because it explains uniformitarian processes on the one side and the emergence of new diversity on the other side within a single framework. The concept of globalization assumes that cultures are becoming the same the world over.1'8 Globalization is obviously a concept of uniformization (preferably following the Western model) - and of uniformization alone. But this view can, at best, represent half the picture, and the champions of globalization must be having a hard time ignoring the complementary resurgence of particularisms worldwide.0'-' Their concept, however, is by its 1958, pp. 94-126). Scheler denoted the "adjustment" as the "inclusive trend of this era" (p. 102). 1,8 Cf. Global Culture: Nationalism, globalization and modernity.