360 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2­3)
profane that spell out the rhythms of culture,
always a step ahead of its definitions and descrip-
tions.
The word `culture' belongs to the histories of
Western European languages. If we want to move
into the elusive phenomenon in other places,
below the shifting internal line of cultural difference,
we will not look for translations and approximations
of the word. Such synonyms carry on
their back the impulse to translate from the
European, which is a characteristic of the colonized
intelligentsia under imperialism, and thus is
the condition as well as the effect of that differentiating
internal line. They will not let us go
below it. We must rather learn a non-European
language well enough to be able to enter it without
ready reference to a European one. We may
discover Creole versions of the word `culture'
which will complicate our argument. But they are
neither the same word nor its translation.
Anthropologists and comparative historians
learn field languages but customarily do not enter
them so that they become languages of reference.
Cultural Studies investigators typically do not
relate to their native languages or the languages of
their immediate or remote places of origin as
languages of reference. The only route to learning
languages in this way is through instruction in
reading the verbal art in these languages and
instruction in philosophizing through ethical
systems in them. However, this would require
educational reform.
Such efforts might make us realize that every
Culture and Cultural Analysis
Michael M.J. Fischer
W
ithout a differentiated and relational
notion of the cultural (the arts, media,
styles, religions, value-orientations,
ideologies, imaginaries, world-views, soul, and the
like), the social sciences would be crippled,
reducing social action to notions of pure instrumentality.
When singularized, frozen, or nominalized,
`culture' can be a dangerous concept, subject
to fallacies of pejorative and discriminatory hypostatizations
(we have reason, they have culture) or
immobilized variables (their culture is composed
of x features). The modern social science use of
the term `culture' is rooted in the historical milieus
that arose with the dismantling of the religious and
aristocratic legitimations of feudal and patrimonial
regimes, and the agons of Third World particularistic
`cultures' against First World claims of
universal `civilization'. As a counterpoint to definitions
of culture as the `besť productions in
aesthetics, knowledge, and morals, the anthropological
understanding removes the hegemony of
cultural valuation from elites with its erasure of
attention to demotic and subaltern forms, and
instead asserts the importance of understanding
the relations between all cultural forms at play and
in contestation within social formations.
Keywords cultural critique, global restratification,
(post)structuralism, reconstruction after
trauma, religious returns
cultural process, even in the belief system and
ritual sector, moves because human beings imagine
and create fictions of all kinds, including the
rational fictions that extend philosophy; and that
it is not possible for one of us to have access to an
exhaustive sense of all the cultures of the world.
Study of diversity in metropolitan space should
make us aware of the limits to the production of
cultural information outside the metropolis.
Let me qualify everything I have said by
suggesting that in the field of culture alive there
are no mistakes. Cultural continuity, made possible
by cultural change, is assured by cultural explanations,
coming from all sides, insiders and
outsiders, rulers and ruled. The study of cultures
is part of culture ­ the anthropologisťs picture of
elders initiating young men and women, as well as
these very words you read. Culture is a place
where different explanations always collide, not
just by races and classes, but by genders and generations.
Culture is its own explanations. It is
possible that the assumption of a collectivity
sharing a culture is not an essential truth, but a
millennial increment of the need to explain.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation
Professor in the Humanities and the
Director of the Center for Comparative Literature
and Society at Columbia University, New York.
Her recent books include Death of a Discipline
(Columbia University Press, 2003) and Other
Asias (forthcoming, Blackwell Publishers, 2006).
The 1970s
Cultural studies, (post)structuralism, and symbolic
or interpretive anthropology transformed cultural
analysis in the 1970s, along with feminism, media
and performance studies, new historicism, and
early studies of decolonization and new nations.
Symbolic anthropology drew upon the quasicybernetic
paradigm of Harvarďs Social Relations
Department under Talcott Parsons, the semiotics
of C.S. Peirce, R. Birdwhistle, and T. Sebeok,
structural linguistics (field linguistics classes
taught systematic methods of elicitation and
analysis of cultural units), Thomas Kuhn's notion
of paradigms and Noam Chomsky's generative
grammar. The core course in the Anthropology
graduate program at the University of Chicago was
organized into Cultural Systems, Social Systems,
and Psychological Systems. David Schneider
(founder of the Society for Cultural Anthropology)
argued that the cultural system provided the
principles of organization for the social system;
Clifford Geertz (1973) argued that the cultural
system was logico-meaningfully integrated, the
social system functionally integrated, and the
psychological system psycho-dynamically integrated.
Geertz thus wrote essays on religion,
ideology, common sense, art, and moral thinking as
`cultural systems'. Schneider argued that the
distinction between etic and emic could not be
sustained, thereby making all systems of thought,
native and scientific, merely variant modes of
cultural accounting. Victor Turner analyzed the
Ndembu `forest of symbols' with a widely imitated
combination of structural-functional (Durkheim,
van Gennep) analysis of mythic charters and ritual
process, Freudian fusions of corporeal-emotive and
cognitive-symbolic poles in symbol formation, and
Kenneth Burke's performative notions of the
rhetorics and grammars of motives.
The turn towards interpretive anthropology led
by Geertz and Turner followed from the instability
of the etic/emic and the cultural/social system
distinctions, and drew upon the hermeneutic and
phenomenological traditions of Dilthey, Weber,
Freud, Schutz, Ricoeur (who also taught at
Chicago), and Mircea Eliade (also at Chicago).
Meanwhile in fall 1966, structuralism and
poststructuralism arrived simultaneously in the
United States via The Structuralism Controversy:
The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man
conference at the Johns Hopkins University with
Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, and others,
an event that would lead to a dominant strand of
cultural work of the next generation [Macksey and
Donato, 1972]. In France, structuralism and poststructuralism
were modalities of French response
to the traumas of World War II, Americanization,
and the influx of North Africans after the Algerian
War of Independence. Lévi-Strauss brought
together the enthusiasm of post-war thinking
about set theory, linguistics, and cybernetics with
an elegy and reconstructive method for aboriginal
cultures destroyed by colonialism in Australia and
in the Americas. He and his fellow structuralists
(Georges Dumézil, Jean-Paul Vernant, Michel
Détienne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet) transformed the
study of Greek mythology and myth studies in
general. No longer could anyone identify deities
with single virtues (god of wisdom) without
considering that deity's structural position vis--vis
others; no longer could one version of a myth be
privileged without considering the entire set of
transformations that a mythic structure makes
possible. Lévi-Strauss seemed at the time to
vanquish (in favor of deep, pervasive, regenerative
mythic and social structures) the attempt by JeanPaul
Sartre to fuse voluntaristic, politically engagé,
existentialism with the inertial forces of history
understood through Marxist lenses. Lacan, the
early Foucault, and Bourdieu were received in the
United States as elaborations of this culturalist
structuralism.
Foucaulťs insights into disciplinary power and
the birth of the clinic may have had something to
do with a kind of Freudian nachträglich or post
facto recognition of his experiences as an
adolescent: the reformatory to instill heterosexual
codes, and watching compliance to the Nazis in his
native Poitiers (`we all have a fascism in our heads';
Raber, in Herman, 2004). Derrida and Lyotard
were more explicit about the legacies of World
War II. Lyotarďs Postmodern Condition, Evan
Carton points out:
turns ­ between chapter 9 `Narratives of the
Legitimation of Knowledge', and chapter 10,
`Delegitimation' ­ on a paragraph devoted to
Heidegger's notorious 1933 Rector's Address,
. . . and the new chapter begins, `In contemporary
society . . . [where] the grand narrative
has lost its credibility'. (Carton, in Herman,
2004: 24)
The essay is about the coming of the computer and
information age in which local language games and
performativities will have more force than past
universalist ideologies for mass mobilization (in
the name of History, Reason, or Progress), and
where incommensurabilities among language
games and value systems will challenge two
centuries of standardized linguistic, religious,
educational nation-building (as France copes with
Muslim North African immigrants). Similarly,
Derrida in his first major work (Of Grammatology)
takes on the `ethnocentrism which everywhere
and always, had controlled the concept of
writing . . . from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger'
Problematizing Global Knowledge ­ Culture 361
and introduces the image of ashes that would grow
as a motif in his corpus, quoting Edmund Jabes,
`O est le centre? Sous la cendre' (`Where is the
center? Under ashes') (Derrida, 1967: 24).
The stress in interpretive anthropology and
poststructuralism on culture as contested
meanings created, negotiated, and performed in
locally polyvocal contexts dovetailed also with the
rise of Cultural Studies. In Britain, Cultural Studies
arose at Birmingham University from literary
studies, branching out under the leadership of
Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall into youth and
popular culture, ethnicity, hybridity, race, and class
cultures. In the USA, Cultural Studies grew out
of American Studies redirected by anthropologists
and folklorists (initially at the University of Pennsylvania),
and from labor and social history as in
the work of George Lipsitz (1990, 2001). For a
time, centers for Cultural Studies sprang up to
create interdisciplinary work between the humanities
and social sciences, until the field was eventually
reimperialized by English and Literature
Departments, losing not only its ethnographic and
social science edge, but its fledgling efforts to work
in languages other than English (ironically the
language of most writing about postcolonialism)
except in Comparative Literature Departments.
The 1980s
The 1980s produced revised modes of cultural
analysis, followed in the 1990s by changing infrastructures
(media, environment, biotechnology,
and violence) that took on new cultural salience.
The 1980s' revisions included new approaches to
using ethnography to investigate and map the
changing nature of cultural and social forms at the
end of the 20th century (Marcus and Fischer,
1986); inquiries into the multiple disciplinary
tools that could be employed in making cultural
analysis more trenchant and revealing (Clifford
and Marcus, 1986); the incorporation of transdisciplinary
approaches (feminism, deconstruction,
film and media studies, new historicism, science
and technology studies, cyborg anthropology); the
efforts to revive area and global studies with
fresher ideas about how to do multi-sited ethnographies
of mutually dependent activities in
dispersed parts of larger systems or networks; and
inquiries into second-order modernization and the
risk society (Beck, 1986; Fortun, 2001; Petryna,
2002). New journals propelled these initiatives,
including: Cultural Anthropology (vol. 1, no. 1.,
1986), Public Culture (vol. 1, no. 1, 1988), Positions
(vol. 1, 1992), Visual Anthropology (1987),
Subaltern Studies (vol. 1, 1982), Representations
(1983), and the eight-volume annual Late Editions
(1993­2000).
The 1990s
In the 1990s, a new experimental, recombinant,
mode of cultural thought, writing and visualization
took material shape, through the combination of
commercial biotechnologies (shaped by post-1980
legal, financial, and technological infrastructures)
and information technologies (particularly after
the World Wide Web in 1994 and linked databases
made the Internet an everyday medium).
Lyotarďs 1979 speculations on the postmodern
condition of knowledge and the role of the
computer in making information available
suddenly seemed both quaint and prescient:
quaint in failing to foresee the many-to-many
communication uses, the way just-in-time
accounting could reorganize the business world,
and the way email would speed up the pace of
work and introduce new stratifications; yet
prescient in the apperception of new local
language games and formats, including increased
communicative reach through flows, codes, and
performativity rather than single propositions or
arguments. Compare also: Gregory Ulmer's
efforts to think Derrida through electronic media
[1985, 1989, 1994], Avital Ronelľs re-readings of
telephony in Alexander Graham Belľs America
versus the place of technology in Heidegger's
Germany [1989], Friedrich Kittler's contrast
between the cultural formations carried by standardized
German in 1800 and the gramophone,
film, and typewriter in 1900 [1985, 1986], and
the efforts by Mark Poster, Jacques Derrida, and
Michael Fischer to rethink the oral versus literate
cultures debate (Goody, 1977; Ong, 1982) for
new electronic modes of communication [Poster,
1990, 2001; Derrida, 1996, 2001; Fischer, 2001,
2003).
As restratification processes proceeded in the
aftermath of the implosion of the Soviet Union
and the decline of the bipolar world, violence and
religious legitimations repackaged themselves.
Derrida suggested that globalatinazation through
the capital concentration and mergers of transnational
media conglomerates would make Islamic
and other `fundamentalisť resistance movements
appropriate and be undone by the new media, like
a kind of auto-immune disease, intense, virulent
and violent, very much like AIDS, the plague of
these years whose dynamics also gave rise to new
modes of cultural work, with activists pushing for
changes in drug approval processes, using the
Internet to challenge the hierarchical relations
between doctors and patients, insurance
companies and beneficiaries, and the entire healthcare
system. Globalatinazation, AIDS (and SARS,
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, mad cow disease,
and other viruses), 1990s' financial crises moving
rapidly across the globe from East Asia to South
362 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2­3)
America, and worries about climate warming, all
made the 1980s cultural notions of alternative
modernities seem, if not quaint, more relational
than ever, differentially connected to the global
patchwork of political and cultural economies.
Ethnic and religious warfare intensified and led to
renewed analyses of the limits and weaknesses of
constitutional forms of governance and the lack of
local rootedness of human rights and global
humanitarian industries.
Circa 2005
We live today under the sign of the film Safar-e
Qandahar by the Iranian director Mohsen
Makhmalbaf, and its image of prostheses being
parachuted from Red Cross helicopters to Afghan
men running on crutches to catch them. Under
this sign, at least three sites intersect of deep play
(overinvestments of money, power, fantasy, hope
and fear, putting our existential, ethical, and social
stakes at risk): (1) the reconstruction of society
in the wake of social trauma and structural
violence; (2) immersion in telemedia that affect
access to information, formation of public sentiments,
and manipulation of the public sphere,
governance, and personal subjectivities; and (3)
changes in life science institutions involving
both profound commercialization of biological
research, and efforts of patient groups using the
Internet and other new information technology
tools to force accountability on the institutions of
science and what is made to live and who is let
die.
Just as, Lyotard might say, there is no Jew and
we are all jews (female, queer, normalized,
neurotic, vulnerable, struggling for recognition,
autonomy, rights, community, place, citizenship),
so there is no culture, and all we do is cultural.
Culture is not a variable; culture is relational, it is
elsewhere or in passage, it is where meaning is
woven and renewed, often through gaps and
silences, and forces beyond the conscious control
of individuals, and yet the space where individual
and institutional social responsibility and ethical
struggle take place. Cultural anthropology
operates in a set of third spaces: where new multicultural
ethics are evolving out of demands that
cultures attend to one another, and within technoscientific
networks where the demands of the face
of the other, history, and autobiographical figurations
counter the reduction of all to the same. The
challenge of cultural analysis is to develop translation
and mediation tools for helping make visible
the differences of interests, access, power, needs,
desires, and philosophical perspective. Above all,
as we begin to face new kinds of ethical dilemmas
stemming from developments in biotechnologies,
expansive information and image databases, and
ecological interactions, we are challenged to
develop differentiated cultural analyses that can
help articulate new social institutions for an
evolving public sphere and civil society.
References
Beck, Ulrich (1986) Risk Society: Towards a New
Modernity. London: Sage.
Clifford, James and George Marcus (1986)
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Writing Ethnography. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Derrida, Jacques ([1967] 1974) Of
Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, Jacques ([1996] 1998) `Faith and
Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion" at
the Limits of Reason Alone', in J. Derrida and
Gianni Vattimo (eds) Religion. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (2001) `Above All, No
Journalists!', in Hent de Vries and Samuel
Weber (eds) Religion and Media. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Fischer, Michael M.J. (2001) `Filmic Judgment
and Cultural Critique: The Work of Art,
Ethics, and Religion in Iranian Cinema', in
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds)
Religion and Media. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Fischer, Michael M.J. (2003) Emergent Forms of
Life and the Anthropological Voice. Raleigh,
NC: Duke University Press.
Fortun, Kim (2001) Advocacy after Bhopal:
Environmentalism, Disaster and New Global
Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of
Culture. New York: Basic Books.
Goody, Jack (1977) The Domestication of the
Savage Mind. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Herman, Peter E. (2004) Historicizing Theory.
Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press.
Kittler, Friedrich ([1985] 1990) Discourse
Networks 1800/1900. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Kittler, Friedrich ([1986] 1999) Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude ([1962] 1966) La Pensée
sauvage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lipsitz, George (1990) Time Passages: Collective
Memory and American Popular Culture.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Lipsitz, George (2001) American Studies in a
Problematizing Global Knowledge ­ Culture 363
364 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2­3)
Moment of Danger. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François ([1979] 1984) The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato (eds)
(1972) The Structuralist Controversy: The
Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Marcus, George and M.M.J. Fischer ([1986]
1999) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences,
2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ong, Walter (1982) Orality and Literacy: The
Technologization of the Word. New York:
Methuen.
Petryna, Adriana (2002) Life Exposed: Biological
Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Poster, Mark (1990) The Mode of Information.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Poster, Mark (2001) Whaťs the Matter with the
Bildung
Josef Bleicher
T
he concept of Bildung (educative selfformation)
may well be the most grandiose
thought to emerge in the 18th century,
according to Gadamer (1975), who considers it
the guiding concept underlying the rise of the
humanities. In tandem with them, it engendered
the movement that evolved new aesthetic and
moral standards and ideals and also challenged the
orientation towards a narrow Enlightenment
rationalism in the name of the rounded Bildung of
the individual. This notion of Bildung later
informed the education system in Germany with
its emphasis on integrating a wide range of subjects
and competences within a framework established
with reference to the Vorbild (model) of the
classic languages and authors. Here it followed the
precepts of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
succinctly stated that `The true purpose of the
human being is the Bildung of all his strengths into
one integrated whole.'
In the 19th century, while accompanying the
transformations related to the industrialization of
Germany with critical commentary, the meaning
of Bildung itself was transformed. At the cultural
level, it found itself trying to maintain the inheritance
of humanist ideals in face of the dehumanizing
effects of rapid industrialization, and the
transition of Germany from a Kulturstaat (state
identity based on culture) to a modern, economically
driven nation-state belatedly clamouring for
a place on the world stage. Bildung thus became
streamlined into Ausbildung (training, expertise)
to answer the need for skilled manpower, and
thus increasingly approximated the notion of
`education' prevalent in other European countries.
Concomitantly, at the socio-political level,
sharpening social differentiation accompanying the
modernization of Germany saw its remaining
humanistic essence become the canonized, elitist
preserve of the Bildungsbürgertum (that segment
of the bourgeoisie defined by the accumulation
and use of cultural capital).
The conceptual history of Bildung parallels that
of Kultur, as the micro- and macro-levels of
cultural self-formation. Interestingly, both these
emblematic concepts arise out of a naturalistic
Keywords aesthetics, Bildung, education,
Kultur, morality, self-formation, Weimar
Klassik
Internet? Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Ronell, Avital (1989) The Telephone Book. Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Ulmer, Gregory (1985) Applied Grammatology.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Ulmer, Gregory (1989) Teletheory:
Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York:
Routledge.
Ulmer, Gregory (1994) Heuretics: The Logic of
Invention. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Michael M.J. Fischer was educated at Johns
Hopkins University, the LSE, and the University of
Chicago. He now teaches at MIT, where he
directed the Program in Science, Technology and
Society from 1996­2000. Previously he taught at
Rice, where he directed the Center for Cultural
Studies from 1986­1993, as well as at Harvard and
Chicago. These proved fortuitous times and sites
of key moments for methods in cultural analysis.