JOURNALS: New German Critique No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring – Summer, 1995), pp. 3-17

From JSTOR

Introduction: Cultural History and Cultural Studies: Reflections on a Symposium

John Czaplicka, Andreas Huyssen and Anson Rabinbach

New German Critique
No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring – Summer, 1995), pp. 3-17

Published by: Duke University Press

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488529

This edition of New German Critique on Cultural History and Cultural Studies developed from an interdisciplinary conference that took place  at Harvard in 1994.

p.3

[...] this event was characterized by sharply focused statements punctuated by intense and often passionately enga- ged debate. At a time when the term “cultural” has established itself as something like a master-trope in the humanities, preying on and displac- ing the notion of the “textual” as used in literary criticism and the “social” as in social history, a conference on cultural history, its past and present practices, and its relationship to the emerging field of cultural studies was certainly timely.

p. 4-5

[...] lack of clearly defined disciplinary boundaries in cultural studies also carries its own risks. Interdisciplinary confer- ences in particular are often afflicted by what we might call a premature anti-disciplinarity. In the enthusiasm about crossing disciplinary thresh- olds, participants frequently forget to fully account for the position from which those crossings began. Thus for an undertaking like cultural his- tory it matters much if the point de ddpart is history, sociology, anthropo- logy, literary criticism or art history. If common goals can be articulated around issues of cultural representation, disciplinary practices will vary widely from the archival research of the historian to the participant obser- vation of the anthropologist; from the modelling of the sociologist to the textual or iconological criticism of the literary critic and the art historian. The less such differences in practice are articulated, the more they assert themselves in debate in the form of rancor, irritation, and frustration. In fact, the central controversy of the symposium was precisely over the claims of “disciplinarity” as opposed to the perceived amoand irreverent “boundary-crossing” practices of cultural studies.

p. 6

Pre- mature anti-disciplinarity is a major problem when it leads to the aban- donment of the archive and the object, to ignoring traditional cultural forms, to the shunning of close reading, and to the forgetting of any- thing but the currently or formerly popular. We perceive this as a more important problem in cultural studies than the often heard accusation of hyper-politicization which simply resurrects the old chestnut of the man- datory separation of politics and culture. The reservations expressed (and often heard at the conference) by historians and literary critics who insist on some grounding in “disciplinarity” are not entirely inappropri- ate. Rather than problematizing and working through traditional dichoto- mies such as text/context, high culture/low culture, fact/fiction, or modernity/postmodernity, cultural studies all too often simply reverses the plus and minus signs in the name of transgression and subversion. Radical constructivists will ridicule the historian’s concern with factic- ity and will in turn be accused of relativism and nihilism. The focus on context will dissolve the text which no longer even has to be read care- fully.2 The triumphalism of the popular and mass cultural replaces the celebration of canonical high culture, but risks becoming equally canoni- cal and exclusionary. Postmodernity and its concerns with the important issues of gender, class, race, and sexuality is seen as a panacea while all the ills of the world are blamed on modernity and Eurocentrism.

p. 7-8

The canon which helped stabilize cultural identity across generations by providing what Assmann refers to as a “concretization of identity” in “figures of memory” such as texts, monuments, and insti- tutional practices is now questioned by other cultural constructs focus- ing on gender, multiculturalism, race, and, in a cultural anthropological perspective that recurs to popular culture and the everyday, on once invisible aspects of everyday behavior and habitus.

p. 10

[...] historicism: the search for quasi-biological organic unities linking philosophical doctrines, artistic styles, poetic expression, and quotidian artifacts. The historicist impulse was evident in the nineteenth-century obsession with musealization, monumentalization, with the “invention of tradition,” and with the quest for the sources of an active principle in the history of states. Cultural history, as Lamprecht defined it in 1896, was histoire totale: the epochal and morphologically constitutive elements of a nation’s collective biography.

In contrast to an older tradition of cultural history that exhausted itself in the task of framing the motifs of nationalist discourse, the current revival of interest in cultural history is clearly conceived as a mode of resistance to universalizing, monumentalizing history.

p. 11

macrohistory, close-ups Thus in the practices of cultural history, one can distinguish between the practitioners of everyday history, who often fall prey to a fetishization or poetization of their discrete multifarious objects, and the historical theorists whose overdetermining use of structural, teleological, or even apocalyptic perspectives on development and transformation loses sight of the fragments and obscured places in history [...]

p.  13-14

[A]rchive [...] links the practice of cultural history to memory in a concrete way. [...]

[C]onceived as compilations of suppressed emotions and behaviors – iconographic repositories of psychological tropes “stored” in collections.

Memory, as Benjamin understood it, was an eminently “practical” affair, combining a passion for collection with a sense of history as retrieval.

p. 15

Christian Boltanski‘s “Missing House,” the Plotzensee Memorial, and “The Topograph of Terror” demonstrates how each of these commemorative sites demands the “empathetic engagement of an informed beholder in the contemplation of material, formal, and documentary configurations.” Particularly evident in the Boltanski work, the artist uses historical research and reconstruction in order to endow a concrete physical environment with the status of a site for memory, “a work of history as well as a work of art.”

p. 15

[...] Huyssen introduced another complex of issues centered on the cultural contingencies of lived temporality and public memory. He described the inherent instability of all memory and the hybrid temporality emerging from the jumble of a non-synchronous condition of consciousness that is induced electronically by the flicker- ing images of popular culture in the new media. The obsession with memory as well as cultural amnesia, the waning of history in its teleo- logical incarnation and its simultaneous resurrections in the real and in multiple representations are some of the contradictory results of this manner of mediation, which is accompanied by the decline in the public impact of intellectuals and of traditional producers of cultural representations in literature and the arts. The public need for history and cultural memory seems to be real.

p. 16

Huyssen’s recurrence to classic modernist formulations of memory eventually leads him to a positive formulation of public and pri- vate memory as a strategy to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the on-line archive, and to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simula- tion. His conceptualization of memory tends toward what Warburg termed “retrospective contemplativeness” (retrospektive Besonnenheit: see Assmann, Diers, Weigel, Czaplicka) and what Benjamin meant by Eingedenken [remembrance], but the context of memory in the late twen- tieth century is a fundamentally different one. Thus the politics of mem- ory suggested by Huyssen abandons the emphatically contemplative and redemptive mode of memory that saves the import (not just the image or reconstruction) of the past itself by actualizing it in an active form of remembering and interpretation, in a kind of Vergegenwdrrtigung. That active remembering, as Czaplicka proposes, often involves figures of memory characterized by an openness or allusiveness that involves the contemplative subject in a concrete relation to history through documentation, site, and specificity.

p. 16

Searching for possibilities of escaping our postmodern amnesia in the mediations of museal culture, Huyssen noted how museum objects may escape or even transcend the fetishization of commodities in the econom- ics of symbolic exchange. As Gottfried Korff suggested in his paper, especially common objects of everyday use, the residues of a former present, saved from history in museums and other collections provide a key to the historicity of everyday life, the sphere of culture which has most often been left in the dark by the grand narratives of cultural history.