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Rei Terada, "Introduction."
Though the concept of "culture" seems to have fallen recently
into some disfavor, the essays in this volume argue for the rich and
generative meanings of culture as well as for the necessity of reading
philosophy and culture together. The contemporary sense of culture, which
developed slowly from the intentionality and learnedness of earlier notions
of disciplinary improvement, alludes to something like an enigmatic harmony
amongst disciplinary practices. The introduction traces a brief genealogy
of the concept of culture, focusing on its vacillation between learned
deliberation and a looser, uncoerced affiliation. This looser sense of
culture begins with Schiller's description of the Greeks' own vacillation
between ideas of culture. The late emergence of the contemporary notion
of culture suggests that culture and race are not the same, but compete
for similar territory: culture came into the discussion after earlier,
ontological notions of race became separated into notions of race, class,
nation, society, and culture. Rather than facing culture and philosophy
head on, the contributors to this volume develop ways of thinking about
the dynamics of autonomy and collectivity on which culture depends. Their
interest is in work that pulls philosophy and cultural studies together
and necessitates a philosophy of culture and a culturally historical
philosophy. These papers gain perspective from Romantic (and sometimes
pre- and post-Romantic) elaborations of the ways in which manifestations
of individuality, interiority, particularity, and privacy may coalesce
quite tenuously to express aspects of collectivity. Culture emerges as
a network of habits, ideas, and affinities. Daniel Tiffany's description
of "correspondence" without common source, in particular, serves as a
model for the "unaccountability of affinities," a notion of culture that
challenges any presumed ontological link between culture and identity.
[go to introduction]
Manu Chander, "Contention
and Contestation: Aesthetic Culture in Kant and Bourdieu."
This essay examines the relationship between philosophical
aesthetics and cultural sociology, focusing on a perhaps unlikely pair
of thinkers, Immanuel Kant and Pierre Bourdieu. Placing into dialogue
with one another Bourdieu's materialist analyses of cultural production
and consumption (in The Field of Cultural Production, Distinction,
and elsewhere) and Kant's Critique of Judgment, I suggest that
the two demonstrate a structural homology, one which opens up a point
of contact between their otherwise disparate approaches to the problem
of culture. More
specifically, I argue that each system, in developing an alternative
to dominant strains of subjectivism and objectivism, offers a theory
of perpetual antagonism, whereby subjects are bound together by the fact
of contention. That is, both Kant and Bourdieu suggest that
the culture arises out of dissenting claims to universality, which might
be characterized alternately as "absolute judgement"—Bourdieu's
phrase for the promise of having the final say in contestable matters
of cultural relevance—or, as Kant puts it in the Dialectic
of Aesthetic Judgment ('56), "a hope of coming to terms." Taken
together, these two models of "aesthetic culture" describe a single process,
a process by which culture continually emerges anew: in the competition among
cultural producers and consumers for a position of relative privilege, or "cultural
capital," the collective belief, the "hope" in universal assent is reinforced;
in the persistent failure of universal assent to be realized, dissent among aesthetic
subjects is fueled, perpetuated, as it were, in the form of cultural competition.
Far from being incompatible, I thus conclude, aesthetics and the sociology
of culture seem inextricably bound, each discovering at its own limits
the necessity of the other.
[go to essay]
Ted Underwood, "Culture
and Discontinuity (in the 1840s and in Foucault)."
Long abstract text here for Contributor5
[go to essay]
Thomas Pfau, "The
Melancholic Gift: Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Fiction."
This essay explores the antagonism between nineteenth-century
European liberalism (in its broadest sense as a self-regulating narrative
of economic and civic progress) and the simultaneously spreading idioms
of cultural pessimism, anti-rationalism, and decadence. What joins
these two ideological strata, albeit in an antagonistic sense, is an
underlying, fundamental tension between the modern conception of political
liberty with its supplemental language of rights, on the one hand, and
an alternately mystical or mournful reflection on modern freedom and
the metaphysical costs of modernity, on the other. The essay sketches
how a conception of freedom as a virtually unlimited array of developmental
and intellectual possibilities entangles the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie
in contradictions from which it could only escape through the virtual
(and pernicious) solutions of utopian and/or totalitarian ideological
fantasy.
[go to essay]
J. Hillis Miller, "Crossroads
of Philosophy and Cultural Studies: Body, Context, Performativity, Community."
Current cultural studies make certain assumptions about
body, context, performativity, and community. These are also topics in
philosophy from Aristotle and Plato down to Judith Butler and Jean-Luc
Nancy. Both philosophers and those in cultural studies would do well
to pay more attention to each other's work than they often do. This missed
encounter might be thought of as a failure of Oedipus to meet up with
Laius at the place where three roads meet, since the relation between
cultural studies and philosophy is sometimes patricidal. Yeats's "Crazy
Jane on God" is a poem that invites reading by both philosophical theorists
and by those in cultural studies. Jean-Luc Nancy's Corpus and Derrida's
extended commentary on Nancy's work in On Touching are good
examples of philosophical works that are an implicit challenge to cultural
studies' assumptions, while Judith Butler's work is an exemplary combination
of both philosophy and cultural studies, an encounter between the two.
[go to essay]
Daniel Tiffany, "Club
Monad."
In this brief essay, I examine whether Leibniz's monadology—a
theory of metaphysical substance appropriated by Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel,
and others—may help to explain a phenomenon that appears to be
remote—almost inconceivably remote—from philosophical metaphysics:
the genealogy of modern nightlife. Although I understand nightlife
quite literally as a mode of experience which has evolved historically
in the anomalous space of the nightclub, I also understand nightlife
as a phenomenon determined in part by the history of certain kinds of
vernacular poetry and therefore sharing with poetry a kind of lyric substance. More
precisely, in relation to Leibniz's theory of substance, I focus on the
labyrinthine topology of nightlife, especially the nightclub's ambiguous
relations to what lies outside its windowless space; its sociological,
topographical, and verbal obscurities; and its open secrecy, which amounts
to a spectacle of obscurity.
[go to essay]
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