C ARSTEN S CHINKO America as Medium, or: Culture and its Others I Europe vs. America? Let us begin with some banalities: to ask for European perspectives on American Studies - as discussions about the discipline’s aims and futures frequently do these days - necessarily relies on the assumption that there are transatlantic differences to begin with. While few will doubt the existence of such differences as a general finding, a good part of the challenge lies in attributing and evaluating the differences in questions - especially when it’s not so much society at large that is dealt with, but rather the interrogation of a distinct academic form of practice, in short: the self-reflection of American Studies, its past, present, and potential future(s) in different contexts, and, since we are talking about national organizations mainly, in different countries. 1 Any claim for European peculiarities should keep in mind that it is first and foremost the critical means - the theories and methods - that are put into focus worldwide. 2 The ‘America’ we are talking about is the medium of American Studies (which in turn is part of the humanities) more than anything else, and as such can, must, and will be deand reconstructed professionally. Heinz Ickstadt seems to agree: “For better or for worse, American Studies not only studies America but creates and reconstructs ‘America’ in its own discourse.” (2002: 546) A certain self-organization of scholarly knowledge production and dissemination is evoked by his use of the possessive pronoun, a moment that allows setting apart a specifically academic observation of ‘America’ from other forms of communication - less reflexive ones for example, or more popular ones, or more overtly political ones. 3 Yet at the same time Ickstadt, professor for American literature at 1 A number of associations have recently attempted to meet the call for a transnational perspective. Associations such as the CAAR, MESEA, EAAS or IASA try to transcend nation-state borders, thematically as well as institutionally. 2 Including the question asked by Henry Nash Smith in 1957: “Can American Studies Develop a Method? ” 3 Evidently, this self-organization does not deny the possibility of politically engaged positioning by scholars of any camp. In fact, the ideological base of most articulations can quite effortlessly be revealed. Yet, without any reflexive surplus, those articulations would not be circulating as scholarly communication too smoothly - a fact that might explain why we, at times, can appreciate the style, expertise or erudition of colleagues even if we tend to disagree with their ideological assumptions and political positions. 134 C ARSTEN S CHINKO the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute in Berlin, accepts self-descriptions put forward by the majority of his colleagues who frequently highlight the heteronomous design of this field of expertise. Approvingly, Alice Kessler-Harris is quoted, stating: “The heart of American Studies is the pursuit of what constitutes democratic culture.” This, according to Ickstadt, is “the most precise definition of the radical heritage of an American studies movement that had always aimed at having more than a purely academic agenda.” (548) To fulfill those extra-academic functions, however, an acceptance of academic self-reference will have to shun the hermeticism of ivory tower-erudition, a knowledge sealed off from the outside world. Rather, the scholar has - as minimal requirement - to be able to lead a steady “dialogue” with surrounding disciplines, to keep in touch with non-academic institutions, and the general public to get beyond the incessant presentation of clever interpretations for the professional in-group. This democratic ethos has been an important element of the self-understanding of most Americanists, indeed. 4 It is a pursuit that exceeds the thematic reference to a “democratic culture” and thus triggers off far more than another object of study: American Studies in its very practice has to transport egalitarian values and directives. To do so, the role of the scholar as a mere disinterested onlooker on culture and society has to be renounced. Far from exclusively relying on his or her reflexive competency, the task, according to another eminent German Americanist, is “to reunite the ‘scholar’ and the ‘citizen’ in a truly democratic society.” 5 What is at stake here is the balancing of the conflicting gravitational pull between the self-organization of an at least semi-autonomous academic discipline (and the institutional conditions it necessitates) on the one hand, and the quest for relevance ‘outside’ the university campuses on the other. Predictably, this balancing act has been performed differently in the respective American Studies organizations worldwide. What I try to do in the following, is first to give a brief outline of one way to conceive of transatlantic differences on an institutional level, focusing on Germany, more precisely on the intellectual climate of the FDR that has been decisive for the work of Americanist scholars, too. 6 In this setting, the 4 It is an ethos encompassing both, the left-liberal consensus of an older generation of Americanists and the New Americanists with their variants of a ‘radical democracy’ as outlined by Mouffe/ Laclau (1985). 5 An end to this “division of labor” has been envisioned by Günter Lenz and quoted in Ickstadt (2002: 548). 6 I am aware that a more elaborate version of such differences would have to be comparative, including at least American Studies in the Eastern German setting and its way into the present. Yet, my interest is systematic rather than historical and thus I consider the short sketch of the milieu I have been educated in appropriate. While Sabine Sielke (2006) in a current delineation and evaluation of American Studies prac- America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 135 core conflict separating older representatives of American Studies from the now dominating, highly politicized New Americanists has taken a slightly different route which can best be understood by contextualizing American Studies in the larger frame of the humanities and social sciences. The following part will then take its lead from a specific dispute within American Studies which carries an echo of these differences. I am referring to an opposition suggested by Winfried Fluck between his own more liberal approach to American Studies and what he calls the “cultural radicalism” of the now dominant New Americanists, represented most prominently in the U.S. by scholars like Donald Pease, Robyn Wiegman, or Amy Kaplan. Despite the fact that there is a well-established institutional exchange between Fluck’s Berlin and Pease’s Dartmouth, this academic conflict and especially the German side of it (along with the underlying theoretical presuppositions and value-structures) has not received the attention it deserves. 7 To enable a discussion, their role is taken over by yet another European observer Paul Gilroy, himself an influential British critic who has worked in Black Diaspora Studies, a field that, while following different routes at times, shares the post-national thrust of current U.S. Americanist studies as well as its politicization of academia. 8 These filiations notwithstanding, Gilroy, in contrast to his U.S.-colleagues, refrains from giving up the belief in the reforming capacities of modern societies altogether, refuses to cancel aesthetic considerations from his unique brand of Cultural Studies and Social Theory, and could thus be an appropriate partner for discussion. 9 tices in Germany focuses on the FDR as well, her approach is far more encompassing, though admitting that “even a sketch of this development could easily develop into a three-volume book project.” Less interested in such a genealogy, my essay strives for an understanding of general moods with much slower and far more indirect impact. 7 At a conference in Berlin, Pease had a short discussion with Fluck about his notion of the individual that might have shed some light on the issues. Still, the discussion did as yet not make it into print and the sheer disregard is symptomatic of the current selfcenteredness of U.S.-based American Studies, its almost fetishistic call for resistance in the face of an admittedly harsh political climate within the U.S. While the necessity of an engaged form of criticism will be attributed to these realities, and derives a good share of its legitimacy from the latter, the paradoxical outcome of the engagement are increasingly hermetic texts hardly received (and receivable) beyond academia - despite the self-confident posture as ‘public interventions’ or even ‘genuine dialogues.’ 8 Donald Pease was the most prominent guest of the New Americanists camp in Berlin. The prominence is due to two seminal publications in which Pease was involved, The Futures of American Studies, co-edited with Robyn Wiegman and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (1994), co-edited with Amy Kaplan. 9 Having chaired the African American Studies Department at Yale, Gilroy in 2005 returned to London as the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics. 136 C ARSTEN S CHINKO What interests me most in my sketch (and, adding Gilroy, slight reconfiguration) of said dispute will be the conceptualization of media and society and the implications both of these terms carry when it comes to a delineation of modernity, and to “culture” as the most notorious key term of recent Americanist scholarship. Thus, I am less providing any clear-cut European perspective myself, but - if you like - work parasitically on an established distinction between ways of modeling American Studies supplemented by a nod from Britain. Such an approach is (or rather: can be observed as) located itself: my comparative observation of Gilroy and Fluck culminates in a “systems theory” perspective as elaborated by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Having reached a level of considerable critical acclaim in (unified) Germany, the reception of system theory’s remarkably interdisciplinary body of work within the U.S. has been less than significant so far. While academic twists and turns and fashions are always a result of multiple and often quite contingent reasons, part of the explanation for the disinterest can be found in the tackling of culture. Neither an integrative force (as in consensus theories) nor as a more antagonistic model of dissent, culture, for Luhmann (2000: 247), is “one of the most detrimental concepts ever to be invented.” Whether this alone provides a view from outside notoriously called for today, will have to be seen. In any case, it seems to me a perfectly paradoxical end-point when transatlantic (cultural) differences are at stake, and “culture” - reference point in most American Studies - has to meet its conceptual others. II Institutions as Atmo/ Spheres It is on the institutional level that transatlantic differences must first be outlined if we are talking about American Studies and its surrounding disciplines in terms of an organizational structure. The fact that, for better or worse, American Studies in Germany can hardly be said to be on the center of attention (as compared to German Studies within the humanities in Germany or the sciences in the larger university system) is of relevance here. 10 As with American Studies in the U.S., the most heated debates were led within the respective ‘national’ disciplines, if certainly not restricted to these. One might readily grant American Studies its uniqueness as a field of study and still heuristically conceive of the academic scene as a cluster, 10 Disregarding the asymmetries within academia that result from this marginality for a moment, one might well find positive side-effects of this situtatedness: greater tolerance for experimentalism, openness to the new. Needless to say, quite a few would happily trade the thrill of open scholarship for a better standing within the university and on the job market. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 137 crystallizing around the respective (national) disciplines, or around formative disciplines such as sociology in the 1970s and - always trying to claim the king’s throne - philosophy. 11 What, then, are the decisive steps in the emergence of a German academic culture, who are the leading theorists influencing the debates, its Diskussionskultur? American Studies in Germany became institutionalized at a time in which “a characteristic historical compromise between the Nazi past and the democratic present continued to fuel a German skepticism toward any emphatic idea of democracy and freedom in the restorative climate of the postwar era.” 12 In such a climate, the formation of the DGfA in 1953 itself, an association whose official purpose according to its articles was and still is “to support American Studies in Germany on an academic basis and to help deepen the scholarly and cultural relations between Germany and the United States” has been a politically symbolic and highly charged act and as such one instance of the “cultural countertendencies” that “did emerge in conjunction with a more open attitude toward the West and the stabilization of a democratically constituted state in the 1950s.” 13 Here, a new voice emerged promising to counter the anti-Enlightenment sentiments, a vigorous factor in German culture at that time (and, if to lesser degree, even today). Twelve years later, a heated discussion aired on Sender Freies Berlin captured the dualistic zeitgeist by laying bare the intellectual lines of conflict. In this broadcast, Theodor W. Adorno, “the emigrant who had returned to Germany after the war and had already become the representative figure of left intellectualism” confronted Arnold Gehlen, “the intellectual on the right” who “had certainly not withheld his services from Hitler” and had in fact profited from the forced retreat of Jewish scholars like Adorno from the university system in Nazi Germany. 14 Soon, the discussion centered on the moral dilemma of reflexivity, and the problem of ‘political maturity’ so essential in postwar Germany. Asked by his interlocutor whether all people should be burdened with fundamental problems of modernity, Adorno spoke out 11 These days, media studies have become a candidate for such an academic pole position. See the discussions under headings such as “Medienkulturwissenschaften” introduced by S.J. Schmidt (1998), Jörg Schönert (1996) and others initiating the debate about chances and pitfalls involved in restructuring literature departments and even the humanities as such. Again, it is not a national culture that is most decisive but organizational necessities (state funding, orientation for students) that explains the nation-state orientation of these arguments. 12 Hauke Brunkhorst, “Tenacity of Utopia”, 128. 13 In the German original the goals are specified as such: “die Amerika-Studien in Deutschland auf wissenschaftlicher Basis zu fördern und zu einer Vertiefung der wissenschaftlichen und kulturellen Beziehung zwischen Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten beizutragen.” (Satzung, §2, Absatz 1) 14 Brunkhorst (1992: 128). 138 C ARSTEN S CHINKO against the exoneration favored by the anthropologist Gehlen and affirmed the need for a “complete responsibility and self-determination” instead. Hauke Brunkhorst, who brings to mind this seminal dispute, is convinced that “(h)ere we have all the essential components of an intellectual discourse that emerged first in favor of Adorno in the 60s, and then by Gehlen in the 70s.” (129) He then elucidates the underpinnings of the dialogue: “the thematic difference between them is between a premodern Aristotelian concept of reason, and one that is modern and, as it were, out-and-out Cartesian.” These characterizations should not be misunderstood as total affiliation, however. Neither does Gehlen deny the “contingency, alterability, and variability of modern institutions”, nor is Adorno interested in resurrecting the subject as autonomous entity outside the social. Yet, Gehlen relies on elites that successfully absorb the risks and challenges of a modernity in crisis, thus providing the exoneration needed without giving in to what he sees as “the anarchically dysfunctional solvent power” of an excessively reflexive culture, while Adorno insists on “the potential for reflection and freedom” as “present in equal measure in all human beings without restriction” (130). What makes their positions ideological is less a matter of intellectual respectability than a matter of immersion in the German postwar context. Brunkhorst writers: “Accordingly, Gehlen is interested in a therapeutic treatment of cultural crisis that draws narrow institutional parameters for transformation through freedom and reflection, while what Adorno would like to transcend is precisely institutional overdetermination, the restriction of reflection by the forces of ideology, economics, and bureaucracy” (130). Unfortunately, for Adorno the only existing ‘institution’ regarded capable of transcending those restrictions was art, more specifically, the modernist work of art which, given its complexity, was not necessarily accessible for nor appealing to the masses. In contrast, Gehlen’s anthropological model of exoneration through continuous institutionalization inevitably turns out problematic in a society that produced the Third Reich, and that just undertook its first steps towards egalitarian democracy. Unquestionably, it could not be of much help in denazifying the institutions. What has outlasted the narrower postwar context, though, is a fundamental dualism between functionalist and cultural approaches to society - an opposition soon evoked in the polemical title Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie published in 1971. 15 In this volume its editors, Jürgen 15 Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie - Was leistet die Systemsoziologie? (1971). According to Baecker (2003: 10), both Habermas and Luhmann share a fascination for the key term ‘communication,’ and while Habermas derives his emphatical notion of discursive rationality from that concept whereas Luhmann stresses the complexity buried therein, both their contributions can be seen “as strategies of denazification.” America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 139 Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, initiated what became a long-standing rivalry between two remarkable thinkers and more importantly still, one of the most influential controversies during the 80s and 90s. If the engaged left-liberal repositioning of the Frankfurt School in the work of Habermas dominated the earlier decade, Luhmann’s cool idiom became the “winner theory” (J. Hörisch) in a unified Germany. It has turned out an intellectual antagonism that is of concern for (German) Americanist interested in the larger institutional background for the unlike couple has been influenced by American scholarship - an influence that especially Habermas profited from, for it helped to break loose from the grip of the old polarity between Adorno and Gehlen who - despite their antagonism - share a rather negative attitude towards the United States. According to Brunkhorst, for Gehlen “the egalitarian concept of freedom in the Western democracies was in essence little more than a mixture of Bolshevism and Americanism - well intentioned at best, but certainly not something good.” (128) For the “acculturated bourgeoisie,” Culture with capital C was under attack by the anarchic forces of modernization and the supposedly ‘degenerating’ thrust of ‘Americanization.’ Evidently, Adorno’s perspective was more ambivalent in this regard; still, the Frankfurt scholar suffered in his Californian refuge, and while his most claustrophobic narrative of modernity, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, was an account of modernity at large, the book’s general argument about the dark underbelly of instrumental reason was hardly put in doubt by his experiences abroad. 16 A quite different perspective emerges in Habermas’ reflections. In a 2004 interview he talks about his “America” and the promise it has, until recently, lived up to: “For a European observer and a twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of permitted opinion in the months of October and November of 2002 […] were unnerving. This was not ‘my’ America. From 16 Adorno’s speculations “On the Question: What is German? ”, a 1965-radio feature, reprinted later, reveal a rather ambivalent transatlantic perspective. Pointing out to the “fatal antithesis of Kultur and Culture” Adorno explains: “Following a tradition of hostility toward civilization which is older than Spengler, one feels superior to the other continent because it has produced only refrigerators and automobiles while Germany produced the culture of spirit. However, to the extent that the latter becomes established and an end in itself, it also has the tendency to detach itself from real humanity and become self-satisfied. In America, however, sympathy, compassion and concern for the lot of the weaker still flourish even in the omnipresent exchange economy (…).” (Adorno 1985: 126) To Adorno, this proto-capitalist society even displays “an energetic will to establish a free society” which “does not lose its goodness because the social system imposes limits upon its realization.” Thus, he concludes: “In Germany, arrogance towards America is out of place.” (127) 140 C ARSTEN S CHINKO my 16th year onward, my political thinking, thanks to the sensible re-education policy of the Occupation, has been nourished by the American ideals of the late 18th century.” 17 While those ideals feature a more abstract form of greatness, retrospectively given credit by Habermas, part of the abiding allure of “America” for him lies in a kind of democratic vernacular that goes along with the heterogeneous philosophical body of work known as pragmatism, and commonly referred to as quintessential American contribution to philosophy. In the 1980s, when Habermas succeeded in becoming (one of) the leading intellectual(s) of West Germany - the magisterial Theory of Communicative Action was published in 1981 - a part of his appeal was due to the reception of this democratic American thought, most notably that of C.S. Peirce and G.H. Mead. 18 In his quest to reformulate Critical Theory, pragmatism (and the affiliated symbolic interactionism) was of help by its open, processual philosophical mode, its focus on (collective) human agency and on communication as basic property of reality, and social experimentalism, and its democratic egalitarianism. 19 Here, one might surmise, was a theoretical account that provided the level of hope necessary to accompany the 68-movement’s long way through the institutions, a hope that neither Gehlen’s account nor Adorno’s pessimistic vision could engender. To Habermas, the democratic energy of pragmatism confirmed his belief in the United States as a country well-equipped with intact institutional structures - a core that not even the Vietnam War and other imperialist involvements were able to shatter. Translated into the political realm, pragmatism’s experimentalism opts for the rejection of any kind of symbolic politics that tries to bring social processes to a halt by (re-)establishing authoritarian representations, as these would interrupt the fundamental symbolic interaction between citizens along with its dialogic principles. Consensus, then, cannot be founded in an assumed stability of top-down representations but has to be the contingent and temporary end-result of an ongoing public debate. Based on tolerance and recognition this political procedure aspires to include all citizens. The emphasis on mutual processes of understanding has found its way into 17 “America and the World. A Conversation with Jürgen Habermas” Logos 3.3. (Summer 2004). 18 In Freedom and Culture, John Dewey, a key figure in pragmatism and another source of inspiration for Habermas, argues that “freedom of inquiry, toleration of diverse views, freedom of communication, the distribution of what is found out to every individual as the ultimate intellectual consumer, are involved in the democratic as well as in the scientific method.” (Dewey 1939: 102) 19 In his introduction to Habermas and Pragmatism, editor Mitchell Aboulafia quotes an interview in which Habermas talks about his introduction to Peirce, Dewey, and Mead by his friend Karl-Otto Apel in the early 60s. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 141 Habermas’s concept of the “ideal speech situation,” in which “all participants pursue illocutionary aims without reservation in order to arrive at an agreement that will provide the basis for a consensual coordination of individually pursued plans of action.” (Habermas 1984: 295f.) The refusal of any kind of Staatsästhetik in favor of a routine of rational understanding, a Verfahrenstechnik, evidently has a specific urgency for a left-liberal intellectual in the German context, and the low-key, decidedly anti-aristocratic attitude of a communal ethos as evinced by John Dewey and others must have been a further confirmation for Habermas. 20 Within the academic realm, pragmatism’s egalitarian design, its optimistic outlook was the addition needed within the reformulation of Critical Theory. The appropriation was a move of undeniable political relevance, yet, to some, it stopped short off some of the key issues that move pragmatism closer to postmodern epistemologies and poststructuralist notions, close enough to endanger the project of modernity as envisioned by the Frankfurt scholar. 21 Maybe the label “Kantian pragmatism” (Th. McCarthy) best captures this sort of theorizing, relying as it does on some critical elements and a prioris that came close to turning some of the core assumptions on their head. For one, Habermas saved (moral, rational) universalism from the claim of a radical situatedness of communal understanding - communitarian rhetoric have to be a nuisance to someone as averse to a German Sonderweg and interested in a potentially global community of rational citizens in an ever-expanding world-society. Norms, mere contingent by-product of situated communal sense-making in stricter versions of (neo-)pragmatism, are elevated into a position of authority again. Remarkably distanced from his friend’s credo of “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” (Rorty 1991) Habermas would never abandon a critical vantage point enabling to provide the criteria necessary for appropriately describing and evaluating the conflicting self-descriptions of social actors. In short, his conception was far more normative than that of his American colleagues. Renouncing irrational aspects of human life such as emotions - admitted as simply another part of experience in much pragmatist studies - in almost exclusive favor of rational behavior, Habermas put a harsh limit on what a legitimate form of intersubjective understanding and social transaction might 20 Others, most prominently Karl Heinz Bohrer (1984; 1990), have called for a renewal of aesthetic representation to counter the ‘provincialism’ of the Bonn Republic and its main representatives, especially Chancellor Kohl. It is illuminating to contrast Bohrer’s view with Habermas’ surprisingly mild recognition of Kohl in his “almost bodily denial of any form of Staatsästhetik” as a figure of his generation (1998). 21 See Winfried Fluck’s “Introduction” (1999), in which he sees “striking similarities” between pragmatism and poststructuralism, while affirming that pragmatism - by revitalizing concepts such as agency and subjectivity “escapes the recent radical critique of essentialism in Western thought.” (ix) 142 C ARSTEN S CHINKO entail. 22 What this specific German re-interpretation of pragmatism amounts to is an open procedural experimentalism that nevertheless relies on stability and control functions best fulfilled by institutions (and commented on by an intellectual elite). The difference is not to be missed: Habermas hardly denies the lasting effects of functional differentiation - in fact, he is well aware of the dynamics of modern societies, most notoriously the centrifugal drift that separates spheres and their distinct kinds of rationality. Still, while these energies have been outlined most explicitely in the sociological classics of Europe, and tend to be downplayed in American pragmatism’s optimistic search for democratic citizenry, the German scholar absorbs the danger of disintegration by re-conceptualizing communication as having an in-built drive toward mutual understanding with universal aspirations. Nowhere is the quest for rationality within the second generation of Critical Theory more evident than in the rejection of poststructuralism as a danger to public discourses. According to Habermas, Derrida and Foucault have to be subsumed under the label “neo-conservatives” for they would not allow for a continuation of the emancipatory project of modernity. Yet, the rejection encompasses the level of form as well. French theory, with its predilection for paradoxes and ambivalences and its openly literary style is said to cancel the chance of mutual knowledge. Unable or unwilling to trace what people share, difference becomes the key word in this kind of scholarship - to Habermasians a fetishized formulation of otherness at best, and as such disallowing for any institutionalized negotiating. Now, it should be clear that my sketch comprises but the dominants of scholarly discourses. No one would seriously claim that the work of Adorno or Habermas (or other Critical Theorist) does not find support in today’s academic and intellectual world. Still, the integrative force of the moral position taken by the Frankfurt scholars soon had to face the postmodern skepticism - a skepticism that resulted in a further differentiation of academic discourses. Put differently, if for Habermas the political effects of poststructuralism were overshadowing its potential intellectual allure, the later reception for better or worse has been based on ideological grounds less and less. Soon to be received as neither a threat to democracy, nor a proto-fascist agenda, Derridean deconstruction and similar intellectual agendas became but one academic resource among others, the political ideological register less and less brought into play. 23 22 Recently, Habermas seemed more open to these irrational element, e.g. even accepting religion as possible resource for a modern identity. See his Glauben und Wissen (2001). 23 To some, this decrease of attention to ideological preconditions is a form of active forgetting - French theory has been influenced by thinkers under taboo in German intellectual life - Heidegger, Nietzsche, and more recently, the interest in Carl Schmitt. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 143 If the notion of academia as controlled by leftist critics has been a delusion from the start, there nevertheless was and, to a limited extend, still is a cautionary tone when it comes to ‘irrational’ phenomena such as collective identity - a tone, I suggest, that can be attributed to the left-liberal consensus about the modes of inquiry more than to any actual contents. Reason and rationality in judgment and style, a distanced attitude toward the object of study, the avoidance of any overt political agenda were the main ingredients of this cooled-off posture. 24 The leading academic figures of today still adhere to this consensus, not the least as it seems to offer a form of intersubjective comparability hard to be found in more idiosyncratic readings. Aleida Assmann, Chair of the English department at the University of Constance, explicitly sets her own influential work on cultural memory apart from the more politically inclined Cultural Studies project. It was the smooth co-optation and co-operation of science and the humanities in the Third Reich, as Assmann recently explained, that was the main reason for the need for a more disengaged form of criticism: “While American and British cultural studies redefine culture in such a way as ‘to provide ways for thinking, strategies for survival, and resources for resistance’ for the marginalized,” Assmann observes, “German Kulturwissenschaften seem to do the very opposite; they cool rather than ignite, they ward off rather than encourage political action.” As one of the protagonists of a loose assemblage of interdisciplinary scholarship referred to as “Kulturwissenschaften” - notice the component “Wissenschaft” with its promise of positive knowledge - she accordingly focuses not so much on the political struggles of the excluded (and their perspective, or the identity politics these engender) but concentrates on the general medial means of sense-making (and the uses they enable) instead. This skepticism and disengagement, however, should not be conflated with an apolitical perspective, but can alternatively be read “as a barrier against fatal politicization,” in short, as a call for a different kind of politics. 25 The long-term research project she helped to initiate in the 1980s was aptly titled “Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation” (J. and A. Assmann 1983), an archeology of literary communication. Following the foundational research of Eric Havelock and Walter Ong on orality and print technologies - decidedly in contrast to the more openly metaphorical Derridean notion of writing - they stress the shaping powers of media evolution when it comes to the structure of society as such, its organization of com- Others regard this as a moral overreaction that misses the fact that the institutions are well established and working, that in fact, one possible way of re-conceptualizing the humanities is as a form of ‘riskful thinking’ (H.U. Gumbrecht). 24 The avoidance of explicit politicization does, of course, not mean that the protagonists refrain from participation in debates outside academia. 25 Aleida Assmann, “Cultural Studies and Historical Memories” (1999: 91). 144 C ARSTEN S CHINKO munication, knowledge and cultural memory. The difference to Habermas’ rejection is significant: neither Derridean deconstruction nor Foucauldian genealogies of modernity are regarded morally corrupt. In fact, references to both authors can frequently be found in Aleida Assmann’s work. The reasons for privileging the Toronto School are quite profane, based on an academic decision: the decidedly non-systematic mode of French thought does interfere with her interest in giving theoretical contours to an archeology of modern communication. Well aware that language about media and communication will always be metaphorical, the scholarly control of the performative element becomes a matter of decision - should we allow or even highlight the excess, or is it better to present a coherent narrative of modernity despite the acknowledgement that it will turn out a contingent one? Assmann opts for the latter, believing the power of institutions to be a much more decisive factor than disseminatory forces of signifying practices. While according to the cultural memory paradigm the materiality of communication does not determine possible uses in advance, the correlation of cultural developments and self-descriptions with media evolution allows the Constance scholars to theoretically assemble potential subgroups (and their cultured self-description) within only one overarching cultural formation - in short: no irreconcilable differences here. Even if these formations do not have to end at nation-state borders, much of the work followed the reconstruction of national memories and one will justly argue that the ‘nation,’ far from being an nostalgic or overtly ideological category in their work, becomes operative for its promises of coherence, too. Indeed, this variant of cultural theory is rather interested in the systematic elaboration of its premises and in the careful reconstruction of its key terms. The lack thereof has been both, part of the appeal as well as the reason for the slow advent and at times even dismissal of Cultural Studies with its notorious indeterminate core vocabulary. III The Mediality of (Counter-)Modernity Without a doubt, scholarly knowledge is part of the global flow of information and thus the increased attractiveness of the Cultural Studies paradigm in Germany in the last years should not come as a surprise. Especially a younger generation of scholars endorses this decidedly post-disciplinary field of scholarship and among these its support might well be said to rival the status it gained within U.S. institutions. American Studies certainly has played a key role in popularizing poststructuralist thought (often filtered through U.S. Cultural Studies practices) in Germany. Indeed, one could argue that even those German Americanist scholars skeptical of French America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 145 theory and more at ease with pragmatist thought have taken up the very elements of pragmatism closer to postmodern theory and put them up against the prevailing universalist Habermasian version. 26 Thus, roughly speaking a ‘postmodern’ reading of pragmatism came into ‘dialogue’ with a ‘modern’ one within the work of an older generation of Americanists now approaching the end of their career. With a new generation the postmodern variant has then ruled the scene over the last decades, and it took a while until poststructuralist agendas had become canonical, and a return of pragmatism/ turn to neo-pragmatism could become an alternative. But where is the difference within the global academic enterprise if work done by German Americanists increasingly comes to resemble that of their U.S.-American colleagues? If the (re)turns resemble intellectual fashions, following transnational phenomena of institutional exhaustion, the need to ‘make it new’ is typical of Western modernity. To claim that the local has lost its impact would be premature. To look for intrinsic differences alone will not suffice, for it is the impact on local contexts, the way in which renewed academic practices feed into the local self-understanding that becomes decisive. Surely, the new generation of scholars will have another relation to the Third Reich - the single most important factor when it comes to a self-understanding of German society at large - as well as the narrower academic context, and to rapidly changing national semantics and imaginaries (most recently: “Wir sind Papst,” “Du bist Deutschland,” Klinsmann, Günther Grass). Finally, new and urgent social problems such as migration and diaspora issues were gaining attention and these realities were most explicitly taken issue with in Cultural Studies and related academic research agendas. As several scholars working in American Studies - among them Berndt Ostendorf, another scholar of Fluck’s generation - have already pointed out, however, there is quite a potential for projection going on in these often affective modes of research. 27 American Studies is most assuredly no exception to this. 26 Despite the closeness to postmodern theorems, pragmatism, as Winfried Fluck (1999) argues, tries to preserve some of the concepts that poststructuralist attacked: agency, subject, rational planning. 27 At a conference, Robyn Wiegman has problematized the “refused identification” in the work of the New Americanists who set out to re-describe the discipline by confronting the older practitioners head on. Yet, while the critique of exceptionalism has without a doubt contributed to a better understanding of the myth-and-symbolschool and earlier forms of knowledge production, the new generation of Americanists repeated some of the mistakes, as Wiegman self-critically argues. Any call for a disengaged model of scholarship however will hardly provide the solution to the problem of affective structures. Even the cold idiom of systems theory and its cult of disengagement is not beyond interest and desire. Its detached prose is a rather explicit form of engagement - a reaction to both the Third Reich and the 68-movements politicization. 146 C ARSTEN S CHINKO Wouldn’t it be possible that the fascination with minorities - think of the boom of African American Studies among German Americanists - has its sources less in the emancipatory potential of a politically motivated criticism but rather in the familiarity with which a multicultural foil prevents us from seeing another form of America, that of radical individualism? Would the embrace of minority cultures in German American Studies - seen from the angle of an Americanized Cultural Studies practice - in the end be highly dubious since it allows us to maintain some pre-modern nostalgia of true Gemeinschaft against the cold rule of modern Gesellschaft? 28 Furthermore, isn’t ‘culture’ as a key term of political debates completely taken over by the Right in Germany by now, which has learned their lessons reading Gramsci and Foucault all too well. 29 Of course, multiculturalist scholarship in its elaborate form is far from the dangerous naïveté of a Herderian völkish outlook, yet one still wonders about the ease with which the production of subjectivities along the lines of race or gender is frequently turned into an apriori of community in quite a few analyses. 30 All these speculations about and interpretations of latent motifs obviously should not be understood as a plea to drop Cultural Studies from the syllabis and research agendas along with its focus on the production of cultural identities and the formation of subjectivities - a move which in the face of global migration and pretty robust structures of stratification and social injustice would be quite cynical anyway. Critical tools can hardly be accounted for if put to inadequate use by some of its practitioners. What, then, could a less problematic use look like? One could follow Paul Gilroy who is skeptical not only about essentialist positions (most prominently Afrocentrism) but also about the abstract anti-essentialisms confronting the former (most notoriously the textualism of Homi Bhabha or Henry Louis Gates). Consequently, in his seminal contribution, The Black Atlantic (1993), the British scholar sets out to give contours to an “anti-anti-essentialist” black diasporic tradition. In many respects Gilroy would fall under the rubric of cultural radicalism in Fluck’s suggestive inventory, a mode of criticism the latter understands as being reliant on “the assumption of an all-pervasive, underlying systemic 28 Needless to say that the right has been far more successful in employing this corrupted distinction. To put it bluntly: the gut-level appeal to a primordial identity works better than a call for solidarity. 29 See Mark Terkessidis’s argument in Kulturkampf (1995). 30 Think of the notorious calls to ‘storytelling’ in Black Studies with its nostalgic and even primordialist connotations. While there certainly is a possibility of delineating a different mode of narration in the texts of African American writers, one should remain skeptical of the impact these are said to have on the psyche of its readers and on the organization of the so-called communities. See my Die Literatur der Kultur (2006). America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 147 element that constitutes the system’s power in an invisible but highly effective way.” 31 (Fluck 2002: 216) Indeed, Gilroy is utterly convinced of the structural pervasiveness of racism (and sexism) in Western societies and thus not restricted to the random symbolic and/ or physical violence of a handful intentional actors (even if that would make for a rather big hand). 32 Despite this crucial conviction, however, Gilroy clings to the belief in a reformist potential of modern culture. In the preface to his influential study, he tries to convince his readers “that the history and theory of the Enlightenment were worth understanding and arguing about.” (ix) One can be a relentless critic of the failings of individual thinkers, and the intellectual discourses they helped to establish and still “acknowledge the difficulties in making Kant stand in for the Enlightenment as a whole. It should be stressed that he does not himself conceive of genocide or endorse its practice against Negroes, Jews, or any other variety of people.” (2001: 60) In order to come to terms with the problematic, Gilroy uses Berel Lang’s notion of affiliation, “stronger than analogy or likeness although more oblique than that of direct physical causality.” 33 Such a qualification still enables Gilroy to put forward a radical critique of existing theories of modernity and modernization in order to “write the history of the black diaspora” as “something more than the corrective inclusion of those black commentaries” (1993: 45) overlooked so far. Consequently, that “something more” causes serious modifications when it comes to the temporality of the existing narrations of the modern - among them the idea of an American Exceptionalism - and thus both theorists under discussion, Fluck and Gilroy share an interest in the future (as temporality) and, moreover, find its traces in the expressive forms under scrutiny, i.e. in the black vernacular and the aesthetic production. As the respective formulations of this unusual correspondence will soon make clear, however, neither the formulation of futurity itself, nor the implications the theorists draw from them are identical. Traces of a black futurology buried within black music and literature can globally be found, and while he frequently refers to examples of black culture in the U.S., Gilroy - unlike Fluck - definitely would deny the USA 31 Fluck specifies: “The names for this systemic effect vary, including the prison-house of language, ideology redefined as semiotic system, the reality effect, the ideological state apparatus, the cinematic apparatus, the symbolic order, episteme, discursive regime, logocentrism, patriarchy, whiteness, or Western thought.” (216) 32 There is no way, then, to see racism’s lasting effects as the exception to a generally moderate, rational state and its public order - an marginalization of a troublesome phenomenon frequently played out by politicians. 33 Gilroy quotes Lang’s Act and Idea of the Nazi Genocide (Chicago UP, 1995: 189) in Against Race (2001: 60). 148 C ARSTEN S CHINKO and its brand of future-centeredness a particularly positive role in that play. Quoting Hegel’s famous remark, in which the philosopher of the Weltgeist consigned Africa to a condition of permanent historylessness while identifying America as the land of the future, “the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” Gilroy even discredits any positive connotation when it comes to U.S.-American culture: “Remembering that provocative teleological sequence should compound our caution. It prompts us to ask how much contemporary reflection on the problems created by concern about the boundaries of self and community is really a consequence of the globalization of the American popular cultures that currently define so much of our anxious postcatastrophic modernity.” (2001: 338) Yet, not only white performances are to blame; a good share of current African American popular modes of expression (e.g. Gangster rap) falls under his sharp verdict, too. What Gilroy sees as (meager) cure against this most claustrophobic scenario is “the development of vernacular futurology” (347) beyond a modernist New, a semantics and imaginary (in both verbal and sonic form) that did not come naturally. Here, the cultural productivity of the black diaspora emerges as main source of inspiration. “The usurpation of the future by blacks involved them in struggles to throw off the shackles of the primitive and to win the right to address the future. This idiom did not come easily to political cultures dominated by the hermeneutics of memory.” It is a counter-culture of modernity (within modernity) from the angle of Du Boisean “double consciousness” that can best be found in a “grounded aesthetics” carrying the “congregational logic of antiphony.” (1993: 38) Such an aesthetic of the collective “is never separated off into an autonomous sphere,” Gilroy reasons, but will always entail a “grounded ethics” remindful of “the relations of domination that supply its conditions of existence.” (1993: 38) Thus, no differentiation of spheres takes hold in this narration of modernity with its focus on a (rather wholistic) black diasporic culture. 34 It is a ritualistic use of forms more than a process of institutionalization (and/ or abstraction, bureaucratization etc.) one encounters in Gilroy’s work, then, since the latter would imply the emergence of what has, according to some critics, become the Western version of aesthetics. Polemically condensing current critical positions on the latter, the result would read like this: a high-cultural elitism implying a cognitivist bias of a caste of supposedly disinterested, and most assuredly unfunky connoisseurs using the cultural capital of the canon to further confirm themselves 34 The postnational agenda supports the fluidity of sense-making, the transfer to other settings, the connectedness to different lifeworlds. Any restriction of national memory will almost necessarily be more concerned with the formation of a canon, the development of high culture, the emergence of elites who lay claim to the heritage. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 149 and others of the superiority of their form of life while treating aesthetic productions according to the rules of commodity fetishism as works of art - something to put on the wall (or shelf) in order to impress their red-winedrinking friends of similar dispositions. Fortunately, Gilroy’s text is free of such tedious invectives, yet what he highlights marks the core difference: where there is no separation of spheres, where no functional differentiation nor Arbeitsteilung provide foundational structures, an alternative tradition can find its way into modernity, promising an alternative lived and shared form of aesthetic life. It is another modernity, “otherwise not outside” the Western episteme and as such in conflict with the institutionalized and bureaucratized official traditions it sets out to dismantle. 35 Black music offers a particularly rich body of examples for what Gilroy calls “the politics of transfiguration” - implying a fundamental change with the way we think, feel, talk - supplementing a mere reformist ‘politics of fulfillment’ that relies on the existing “structures of feeling,” propelled by the legitimate forms of institutionalized communication. Drawing on Ralph Ellison’s suggestive metaphor of the “lower frequencies,” Gilroy sees a sly activity of secret coding at work in black cultural expression, an activity once triggered off by the harsh realities of the policed slave camps. 36 He is convinced that the memory of this sly coding - the dangerous double talk, the roots of signifying as a less-than-playful necessity in the face of death - and the futurology buried therein can still be heard by acute recipients of black cultural productions. 37 That music should play the privileged role as the ‘hermeneutic key’ to black experience in a diaspora tradition should come as no surprise. Not only has music always been a decisive part of black articulation but its very rhythms allow Gilroy to put forward the notion of a ‘hidden public sphere’ in which the slave memory can be conserved and passed on. Easier than in the case of the written word, the suggestion of a medial transferal, bodily received in antiphonic rhythms works far more 35 It is not that politics and aesthetics come together again in this form of life, they are - according to Gilroy - inseparable to begin with and, as such, could hardly end up in an aesthetization of politics. 36 Ellison’s Invisible Man (1990: 581) is addressing the readers from within a hole in the ground. At the end of his picaresque narration, he ponders: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? ” The addresse, arguably, is the liberal reader whose abstract inclusionary protocols are simultaneously being put to test by the neo-picaresque novel as they are confirmed. 37 That Gilroy here departs from deconstructive as well as constructivist assumptions that both work against the ‘container metaphor’ of communication by highlighting the “exteriority of writing” (Wellbery 1992) and the system-relative and immanent production of past (and future) in the present respectively, should be evident. My interest, however, is slightly different, yet related, focusing on Gilroy’s use of music as core site of articulation. 150 C ARSTEN S CHINKO smoothly than in the visuality of print, so important in the advent of Western modernity and individualism, and so intricately linked to discursive regimes supporting the terror of slavery. However, the metaphorical vantage point of ‘double consciousness’ that sets off this diasporic tradition, is founded in the register of the visual: a double vision, simultaneously a ‘burden’ and a ‘gift.’ As with all concepts of alienation, the defamiliarizing thrust is born out of a print culture - not only does racism happen in fleeting moments of hate, it is fixed in a whole body of texts, high and low, official documents or materials of entertainment that open up multiple observations of the same representations and thus enable counter-representations. Print technology, in all its ambivalence, can be said to be the medial mode most strongly associated with the genuinely modern awareness of contingency. 38 This awareness encompasses both, the general experience and knowledge that things could be differently and are both neither impossible nor necessary as they are on the one hand, and the more culturally distinct form of black experience born out of violence on the other. The cure to the latter, specific form of awareness to the contingency of ascriptions in Gilroy’s work is a sonic community capable of producing alternative descriptions of the souls of black folks. Judged from the medial assumptions, the mode of integration of these remains a completely different one, though. There is nothing wrong with focusing on a singular mode of expression but Gilroy includes all different sorts including literary texts who hardly can be said to be non-semantic or transitory; when the “oral structures” are highlighted that will “definitely shape the aesthetic forms” and do so by the very antiphonal qualities disabling the advent of Western individualism one understands that the fluid and acoustic medium of sound is combined with an strictly interactional setting which forms the “core event of realtime, face-to-face performance.” 39 Literature, too, is approached from that angle. It is a strange modernity then, strangely devoid of material effects or signifying necessities, and most of all against the spatio-temporal dislocation known from print communication: the promise of distance, the reflexivity involved in the potential to read the same text twice, and other key factors in the making of Western print culture. Gilroy knows all this, of course, and groups the “various technologies - print, radio, audio, video” that happen to appear “in a wide range of settings at various distances” from the interactionbased core event. The “democratic, communitarian moment” rooted in those vernacular practices “which symbolize and anticipate new non-dominating relationships,” then, is based on a mode of communication that of course does exist, yet will have a hard time convincing the reader of its centrality in 38 See Luhmann (1992) for a elaboration on the notion of “Kontingenzbewußtsein.” 39 This, and the following quotation: Gilroy (2001: 190f.) America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 151 light of modern communication technologies. Put differently: that traces of said oral logic of antiphony and communal aesthetics will find its way into other medial forms is an assumption similarly shared by the Assmann camp. If - following McLuhan - every new media contains the older ones and can only be understood in a relation of difference to another medium, print communication can only be defined in its distance to sound. The Assmanns would grant that this relation might vary considerably, so one might well - if heuristically - set out to distinguish a specific black tradition by comparing alternative self-descriptions. 40 Yet, their media theoretical approach would also insist that the change of the dominant media of a society will inevitably restructure the ‘culture’ at large and therefore cannot be demographically demarcated to a special in-group and their collective experiences all that easily. By invisibilizing the materiality of the black codes and communications Gilroy himself seems to come dangerously close to what he earlier, and correctly so, chastised as ‘overintegrated concept of culture’ - correctly, since he has to suggest that black experience will by definition be linked to an exposure to specific sorts of communication while evading others, most evidently print communication which has been so central in the formulation of the modern episteme (e.g. the Foucauldian archive, the Weberian bureaucracy, Luhmann’s “cultivated semantics” of discrete social systems, etc.). 41 In counter-narratives focussing on black culture print technologies are frequently listed merely as part of a regime of oppression, suggesting one could get rid of it, invisibilizing the paradox of criticizing the regime by the use of its core medium. Along with his remaining emancipatory rhetoric grants print modernity a progressive potential; still his separation of fulfillment vs. transfiguration has a strong medial drift. (In another essay he even explicitly characterizes film and sculpture as non-vernacular modes of expression - leaving one to wonder why literature should be counted in? ) 42 Gilroy’s futurology, 40 To be observed by the observation of a cluster of ‘texts,’ not by unmediated bodily or psychic experiences. 41 When first delivering my talk, Donald Pease uttered his conviction that Gilroy’s goal was to poietically call into life the counter-imaginary of a black futurology, much less to suggest that these already exist. Leaving aside the argument that such a sort of political wish-fulfillment would again be produced by the right more successfully - and who would prevent right-leaning critics from doing so? - I am doubtful that there is a chance to simply feed this sort of noise into the system, once it is established as such, for the simple reason that culture is not a system. Again, how does transfiguration relate to fulfillment? Furthermore, such an argument carries us back to the question of political scholarship and its legitimacy. To invite such poietic models can hardly be restrictable to the scholars you like. Just to claim moral integrity will not prevent those you despise to do just the same - from ideologically different sites, with different goals altogether 42 Gilroy, “It’s a Family Affair: Black Culture and the Trope of Kinship” (1993). 152 C ARSTEN S CHINKO therefore, is an archive (sometimes semantic, at other times sonic) or a social imaginary based on the scholarly observation of a repertoire of fixed forms more than the communicative operations themselves which carry these representations as the ‘non-traditional tradition’ that Gilroy describes. In other words, the repercussions of orality in print epistemes might well result in a black counter-tradition within the West. Yet, the problem starts at a decisive point in Gilroy’s argument when he shifts from giving contours to a specific form of contingency, double consciousness, diasporically delineated to the quite normative elaboration of a specific form of mediality capable to capture the essence of black resistance and transferring it from time to time, from place to place. The ship, his main metaphor for the articulation and relation of a fragmented community and its fractured memory, is the vessel containing the secret (codes) - whatever the contingent content at different times and places will be. 43 Double consciousness, evidently, is still an apt concept to characterize the specific form of seeing the world in conflicting registers, yet it can fruitfully to be related to another, more fundamental form of contingency that is at the heart of modern society. To put it differently: that the experience of marginality and oppression has produced hurtful experiences as well as “the gift of second sight” (Du Bois), that it still does so, can hardly be denied - although it would be open to debate whether this still can be used as a description of a changing black culture in a post-soul era (Neal 2002; George 2004). Whether such experiences culminate in more than a semantic and when they do so, is quite another question. Furthermore, as Kenneth Warren has already pointed out in 1998, Gilroy runs dangerously close to a “reification of slave memory” and, doing so, suggests “that the emancipated and their descendants come fully equipped with a set of responses to their plight in modernity.” 44 No matter, one could add, what these plight will turn out to be: the next step in the career of a middle-class urbanite, the bare struggle for existence of a ghetto dweller, the complex strategies of an African American politician who has to level his interest in black politics with 43 It is here, in the highlighting of a cultural form of oppositionality that a more materialist criticism sets in. For a critique of Gilroy’s eclectic mix of materialist arguments with more culturalist ones see Kenneth Mostern, “Social Marginality/ Blackness: Subjects of Postmodernity” (1998). 44 Kenneth Warren, “Ralph Ellison and the Reconfiguration of Black Cultural Politics” (145f.) This hits a neuralgic point in the debates about a marginal vantage point. When Rorty argued that such a standpoint at the margins alone does not guarantee a position beyond the contingency of any type of world-making, Diedrich Diederichsen (1996: 62) rejected this rather bloodless credo by asserting that the oppressed do know one thing better for sure: what to get rid off. There is, to paraphrase Diederichsen, a significant difference between (an often diffuse) bourgeois alienation in a mass society and a situation of lived inequality and/ or racism. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 153 the general party line. Commenting on Gilroy’s twofold politics, Warren stresses those intellectual and artistic contributions that are taking the inclusionary semantics of liberalism at their word but have been marginalized in The Black Atlantic. There is no doubt that being (or becoming) part of a ‘sonic community’ as envisioned by Gilroy can have therapeutic and compensatory effects on the marginalized, and, moreover, that this kind of membership without fees plays into postmodern identity politics, the politics of cultural recognition. Besides being a detestable and highly exclusive collective, however, the question remains how to relate that sonic counter-modernity to other accounts, especially more “acultural theories” (Ch. Taylor) of modernity that (either explicitly or implicitly) reflect the impact of print technologies on. As culture or sediment of tradition, finally, double consciousness is - once articulated and thus open to re-interpretation and signification - to be found in a ‘repertoire of forms’ that does not, in itself, carry the codes determining the uses or inviting the appropriate receptions. Again: is the alternative future a mere semantic occurrence in a modernity ‘traditionally’ allied with Western notions of futurity, i.e. progress, linear development, and the irreversibility of time within general structures? IV Smallest Units of Society Chair of the culture department at the JFK-institute in Berlin, Winfried Fluck belongs to a breed of Americanist scholars who still believe in the reformist potentials within modernity, who remember the promise of American democracy in postwar Germany, and who share the academic quest for intersubjective knowledge (as against a more idiosyncratic display of intellectual skills). 45 At the heart of Fluck’s account of American modernity one will encounter a Tocquevillean notion of the individual: conceived as smallest social unit, the individual is the motor of modernity which can best be characterized by “a way of life in which the elimination of the social hierarchies of aristocratic societies” leads to “the typically modern drama of an unstable identity no longer grounded in clear-cut immovable hierarchies.” 46 Democracy, then, is stripped off its emphatic undertones, and regarded as a dynamic process of de-hierarchization. Even communitarian semantics fail to live up to the promise of stability in a society that is endlessly becoming without knowing where it will end up. In fact, these depic- 45 In other words: who - while admitting that every form of knowledge production is situated as well as motivated - is unwilling to reduce the will to knowledge to a will to power. 46 Fluck (2003: 75). 154 C ARSTEN S CHINKO tions of collective life are a reaction to this radically open-endedness and, as such, especially prone to fall prey to the future, which in Fluck’s account is the key temporality in a modernity in which the old solutions and semantics fail to convince, in which traditions are fundamentally destabilized. 47 According to the Berlin scholar it is a “restless individualism” - not to be confused with semantic derivates such as individualist in the sense of an autonomous subjectivity - generating the driving force behind the U.S., “the unlimited dynamic of self-development unleashed by modernity.” 48 Needless to say, the individual has been a highly charged concept in current debates, and the struggle over Tocqueville is far from being settled; systems theory might be of help in clarifying some aspects of Fluck’s approach. 49 Coming from different theoretical backgrounds both, Luhmann and Fluck are interested in a comprehensive theory of modern society that is aware of existing phenomena of stratification and social injustice - as well as the resulting forms of protest and disaffiliation - but cannot be sufficiently described by these. As abundant as they might turn out to be, such phenomena of social asymmetry have to be explained as effects of the primary structures: functional differentiation in Luhmann’s sociological account, the modernity that engenders “expressive individualism” in Fluck’s. Regardless in how far the respective contributions reflect on their own contingency of observation, the structures these accounts delineate are irreducible part of a ‘reality’ beyond the contingent self-description of agents and other semantics. Again, not an overt political engagement but the longing for a consistent theoretical program - precision in the critical vocabulary, a reflexive use of a Leitdifferenz, which enables the larger argument in the first place, etc. - comes to the fore. 50 The question, then, is not so much whether Fluck (or Luhmann) would want to change the inequality in a given society or whether he is happy with the status quo; to change anything at all, a better understanding of the general workings of society, culture, and not the least, academic discourse, is the place to start. 51 While certainly well-read in Cultural Studies, Fluck would alienate a good share of its protagonists by claim- 47 Future, however, not as something teleologically to be approached but as unknown and unknowable horizon in a society in which risk calculation has taken the place of prognosis. 48 Fluck (2003: 76) borrows the term from Marshall Berman (1983). 49 For a critical assessment of Tocqueville, see Pease (1999). 50 Using Gilroy’s distinction, Fluck would argue in favor of a politics of fulfillment, a choice that in its more ‘liberal’ trust in the existing structures of communication and its value-structures carries a political element. 51 Ironically, Luhmann evaluates the use-value of his own theorizing. On the backjacket of his chef d’oeuvre Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, arguing in favor of a systematic understanding of modernity he reasons with mock modesty about future uses: “dann kann man besser sehen, was man machen kann.” America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 155 ing that “American Studies is a joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain systematic knowledge about American society and culture in order to understand the historical and present-day meaning and significance of the United States.” 52 Most assuredly, such an agenda strives for a comprehending of the dual workings of society and the individual. Consequently, its unease will result in tackling the now dominant theories of subjection and appellation. As the secret (or not so secret) motor of modernity, the individual is not located outside the social in Fluck’s account. However, as he insists in a critical assessment: “Individualization can only be thought of as subjection if, at least theoretically, a non-subjected individual is set as reference and norm for otherwise subjection could not be conceptualized as such.” This notion of a ‘non-subjected’ element within the social is certainly not an easy thought, and as his cautious ‘at least theoretically’ suggests, at first nothing more as a figure of non-identity. Yet, Fluck wants the individual as being more than just a figure: the smallest unit of the social that - as social agent - can feed back his experiences (of contingency, of being recognized, of not being recognized, of being recognized for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong registers) somehow into the social operations. 53 Thus the social realm is reconstructed from the perspective of the individual. That theoretical move in itself certainly does not stop the violence of representations, the ceaseless ascription of identities - yet it brings attention to the fact that both, the operationality of the individual psyche and the social attribution cannot be described simultaneously even though operating at the same time. Here, theorists of subjection would claim that Fluck by necessity falls back into reinstating some apriori identity, at least some phenomenological center of perception existing independently, and, in a strict sense, a-socially. Taking the individual as a starting point to assess the simultaneity, Fluck in contrast would argue in turn that the reliance on one modality/ temporality, i.e. the social, will turn out to produce reductive accounts. 54 Since they approach the problem from opposite sites, there cannot be a real understanding of the 52 Fluck and Claviez (2003: ix). 53 By dismissing any positive notion of this figure of non-identity, theories of subjection have to proceed without being able to talk about the role of and the potential for reflection as starting point of social change. 54 Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (2000) might well be the most refined attempt to come to terms with the operationality of society’s other, yet, even here, in her impressive study of subjection, she cannot successfully give evidence how the temporal openness of the iterative moment is processualized by the psyche and how this operationality can be fed back into the social - this is why more ambiguity, hybridity, and other terms of in-betweenness are what is finally offered, all terms well-known from text-based literary studies. 156 C ARSTEN S CHINKO irreconcilable model. Niklas Luhmann tries to solve this theoretical problem by excluding the ‘smallest unit’ from society: society, according to his brand of systems theory, consists of communication, not of people. In this account, psychic processes are not part of the operations of the social, while definitely not independent of those. 55 Psychic processes, most notably thoughts and emotions, are said to co-evolve with the whole of communications, find themselves in ecological niches opened up by communication at all times, but have an operational reality and temporality on their own: thoughts connect to other thoughts within closed psychic systems, whereas communications are conceived of as emergent reality. I will refrain from reproducing the complex redefinition of the structural coupling of these closed systems, each internally reconstructing its environment by differentiating between itself and its other (communication, bodies, other psyches). Instead, I want to highlight the related notion of “exclusion individuality” a notion that bears a striking resemblance to Fluck’s approach - yet, as sociological theory has the advantage of not being refuted as yet another permutation of American Exceptionalism. This detour allows an evaluation of Fluck’s reading of American culture through the lense of a general theory of modernity. In concurrence with Fluck, systems theorists argue that in modern society inclusion cannot be conceptualized as integration any longer, it rather “stands for communicative strategies of considering human beings as relevant. Inclusion is the social mechanism that constitutes human beings as accountable actors.” Conceived this way, the interplay between social and psychic systems can be described other than “as kind of containment or membership” that were convincing in older forms of society. What is called individuality or individualization then is the way in which people cope with social expectations.” These expectations change with the advent of modernity and its differentiation scheme. Here, “society is decomposed into perspectives of function systems which cannot become organized as a whole.” 56 Individuals (or, more precisely, their psyches, their bodies, etc.) are addressed differently by science, economy, politics, art, religion, educational institutions. All of these do not refer to individual wholeness but have specific expectations towards individuals: for economy and its media money, the only thing interesting is the difference of possessing/ not possessing. Accordingly, the individual person is treated rather as a dividual, but this 55 Post-humanist, often applied to systems theory seems a problematic label: for if the ur-difference disallows for any intentional control of the social by the individual actors, psychic systems are in a strictly operational sense inaccessible for the social. And vice versa. 56 Nassehi (2002: 127). America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 157 form of inclusion into the subsystem is total: even those unable to pay are thus very much included into this functional system. At the same time, modern society “depends on semantics of individuality that make it possible to relieve the function systems of any strict determination of individuality” in the first place. It is the singular human being who has to “handle this difference between individuality and dividuality, and that is what sociology usually calls individualization” (128). “Finally, the individual can only represent herself,” Fluck (2003: 74) writes, regarding American society as an especially radical variant of the modern episteme. Luhmann would probably accept and refuse this reading at the same time: the individual for him is outside the social and has to come to terms with his ‘identity’ ever anew, outside the partial grasp of functional systems. The term “exclusion individuality” refers to this specific ‘homelessness’, and highlights the modern self-reference of human beings as well as “the structural background of the semantics of individualization.” The randomness in modern representations of selfhood might thus be related to “the central paradox of modern individuality: a pattern that demands that no pattern at all should be followed.” Yet, while systems theory has its strong points in describing the ecological conditions for this social patterning of individuality, it shows a strong tendency to take a liberal account at face value, focusing on a “technique of distanciation” as well as “bourgeois exaction of a stable and continuous identity.” 57 Here, Fluck promises a far better grasp on the discontinuous and fragmentary affiliations, regarding the collectivist credo of group identifications and individualist self-fashioning as two tokens of the same coin, in short: as coping strategies in an era of expressive individualism. Doing so, he makes a sound distinction between the structural conditions and possible semantics of self-description. An elaboration on the social beyond Tocqueville, however, could provoke an even more systematic account, one that could help in understanding how the at times transitory affiliations and identifications relate to the “cultivated semantics” within social systems. For, as Armin Nassehi rightly points out, individualization happens within the functional subsystems as well, as a form of “inclusion individuality” emerging around symbolically generalized communication media such as truth, money, power (politics), law, belief, or art: “The function of these media is to increase the chance of connectivity of communication in a world in which precisely this is improbable.” (2002: 130) Here, as Nassehi points out, in these communicative forms of individuality, a link between systems theory and Foucauldian discourse analysis comes into view: “The economic system does not only anticipate individual decision-makers but also compels individuals to act as 57 Nassehi (2002: 129) 158 C ARSTEN S CHINKO utilitaristic subjects. The legal and the political system do not only attribute individualistically, but they also demand self-control and loyality.” (133) Put differently: the individual is not simply there, but always already generated. Yet, while a reflection on these subject formations urges us to abstain from any phenomenological center of attention, the forms of attentiveness, of processualizing meaning, of arousing the play of the imaginary will vary from one subsystem to another. This is less a matter of culture than of social structure and its forms of inclusion. V Medial Hybridity What about art and the aesthetic element of communication, we might then finally ask? Having taken its “cultural turn” American Studies as a discipline still is surprisingly cohesive in its focus on artistic productions, especially on literary texts as privileged sites of study. The fashion in which these texts are academically approached is highly variable, however. Fluck’s less drastic account of American modernity (if compared with the New Americanists dark vision) and culture is reflected in his reluctance to give up the aesthetic as a category which, as he correctly observes, has been supplanted by “the most neutral, the most dehierarchized concept” of “representation” in Cultural Studies. 58 In Das kulturelle Imaginäre Fluck delineates the modern American novel as a main factor in the “fascinating story of individualization.” Leaving aside that Luhmann would dismiss the anthropological model favored by Iser and culturally reformulated by Fluck, he nevertheless agrees in that art is regarded as that social system in which psychic processes are thematized as such. 59 Here, the contingency at heart of modern polycontextural society is finding an apt channel, promising increased individualization through intensified perception, enhanced complexity of second-order observation, or allowing for imaginary selfempowerment. While I cannot think of any meaningful concept of literature that does not take notice on these factors, I am less convinced that this must necessary lead to the (over-)emphasis on contingency. The notion of an “oral literature” might be a problematic one when applied to modern texts, downplaying the materiality of the printed word, the physical quality of a book (as well as the social conventions of silent reading) - still, one might get the impression that Fluck’s consistent history of de-hierarchization as well as Luhmann’s empty figure of systemic inclusion are based upon a 58 Fluck (2002: 84) 59 While the renunciation of anthropology in systems theory can be justified, Luhmann and his disciples would do well to re-integrate the imaginary into their approaches to art as a social system. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 159 conception of contingency presupposing a very distinct sort of print culture, a culture that among other things favors individual (when compared to relatively weak communal) practices of sense making. It is here, that the question of modernity and mediality, as well as that of a counter-tradition might be successfully reformulated. In Gilroy’s account the experience of racism produced not only an alertness to contingency of modern ascriptions by and large affirming the asymmetrical status quo and perpetuating inequality. Furthermore, it has given birth to a culture of collective care that is at odds with what has been at the core of quite a few acultural theories of modernity: the structures of functional differentiation. The latter cannot be conceived without recourse to print technologies, to consecutive phenomena such as archivation, to the potential of re-reading and second-order observation, etc. There is no doubt that this danger to the coherence of cultural self-descriptions - for now we can not only observe how things are, but can observe others and their distinctions, their ways of world-making - can be downplayed even if differentiation is conceptualized as key element. Gilroy culturalist strategy is to highlight non-semantic rhythmical patterns even in written texts. For only then it makes sense to conceive of literary communication in analogy to call-and-response rituals in black church ceremonies. Fluck, I argue, presents a more phenomenological fundament of literary reading - that only in a second step is structured according to cultural diversity - by relying on a print-paradigm and its traditionally Western technique of reading. It is a paradigm that in its mediality urgently suggests a split between a perceptual psychic center and the object to perceive - much more than the fleeting sounds of (paradigmatically unrecorded/ live) music. This predilections structure the further assessment of the literary text. Two contradictory temperaments can help to grasp the medial differences: when Toni Morrison, key figure in black diaspora discourses, characterizes her own literary work, she refers to the aural (not oral) quality, the sound of the otherwise silent pages. Describing the way she achieves that special kind of sonic reality effect, that “language that does not sweat,” Morrison paradoxically points to the endless revisions, the comparison of one written version to another - a comparison that would neither be possible, nor a problem without print technologies. 60 It is the conservation of the printed page that makes possible the repeated readings in the first place. Will the (black) reader be able to read the text in the fashion intended? Possibly. Such a reader would look through the text, grasp its rhythmic patterns not so much cognitively, but perceive them almost bodily. Then, the meaning would not be the most decisive part of fiction. Rather, a mode of culturally 60 Morrison (1981). 160 C ARSTEN S CHINKO uplifting experience of belonging would be the main interest of Morrison’s production of presence though clever manipulation of symbols. The same reader could, however, give in to more hermeneutical urges and thus follow a more classic Western predilection for sense-making. 61 In fact, Morrison’s writing itself contains both, invitations for the more musical minded as well as more ‘meaningful’ writing. That her most prominent piece of work, Beloved, thematizing the drastic effects of Western regimes of writing, itself contains elements that are cryptic to a degree as to disallow for the first form of reception. As with all such operations, meaning is but the contingent product of this form of reading, re-reading, and interpretation. This brings us to the second example. In an occasional remark about his daily work, Niklas Luhmann recounts with astonishment: “it frequently happens, that - when looking for the right phrase, I see the pictures of the printed letters as mental images.” 62 This might well be an extreme form of processualizing printed words, more likely to occur in hyper-professional readers and writers than in the average consumer, and, more idiosyncratically explained with reference to Luhmann’s lifelong loyalty to his type-writer, his excessive archivation of the Zettelkasten, his life of reading - but maybe specialization is the whole point: if the marginalized finally find entry into the institutions, will the result be explicable with reference to a bourgeoisificational drift and, more tragically still, as a loss of culture, a loss of soul? 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