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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)."
Underwood argues that literary scholars'
uneasiness about claims of historical continuity is older
than they generally realize and deeply rooted in the social
function of their discipline. For a little over a
century and a half, the discipline of literary study has
been celebrating the specificity of single authors and
periods, while chafing against the constraints of
continuous narrative. Literary historians' enthusiasm for
Michel Foucault's critique of historical continuity is only
the latest instance of this long-standing disciplinary
preference. By describing his genealogical method as a
challenge to the "sovereign subject" and "the immortality
of the soul," Foucault implicitly defined genealogy as an
alternate mode of personal cultivation. Viewed in this
light it has strong affinities to nineteenth-century models
of historical cultivation—for instance, to Walter
Pater's way of finding cultural profit in historical
discontinuity. Underwood ends by focusing on the
institutions that perpetuate this model of culture. He
traces the cultural authority of discontinuity back to the
first "period surveys," and in particular to the pedagogy
of F. D. Maurice at King's College, which sought explicitly
to give the middle classes a stronger sense of their
connection to the national past.
[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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