Birgit Neumann - Travelling Concepts For The Study of Culture-De Gruyter (2012)

Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture
Concepts for the Study of Culture

Edited by
Doris Bachmann-Medick · Horst Carl · Wolfgang Hallet
Ansgar Nünning
Editorial Board
Mieke Bal · Hartmut Böhme · Sebastian Conrad · Vita Fortunati · Isabel Gil
Lawrence Grossberg · Richard Grusin · Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Ursula Heise · Claus Leggewie · Helmut Lethen · Christina Lutter
Andreas Reckwitz · Frederik Tygstrup · Barbie Zelizer
De Gruyter
Travelling Concepts
for the Study of Culture
Edited by
Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning
in collaboration with
Mirjam Horn
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-022761-1
e-ISBN 978-3-11-022762-8
ISSN 2190-3433
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Preface and Acknowledgments
The study of culture has become an interdisciplinary and international

venture which has propelled the development of knowledge beyond
traditional boundaries. Yet despite this trend towards border-crossing
there are still remarkable differences between various disciplinary and
national research cultures. The project “travelling concepts for the study
of culture” proceeds from the assumption that, more often than not, the
meaning of concepts differs between diverse disciplines, academic cultures
and historical periods. Concepts such as ‘performance,’ ‘memory’ or
‘space’ are not univocal or firmly established terms. Rather, they are
dynamic and changeable as they travel back and forth between different
disciplines and various research cultures. The numerous changes incurred
by concepts should, however, not be regarded as an impediment but as a
driving force enabling interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue.
The aim of the volume, therefore, is to trace the travelling of a
number of concepts for the study of culture across various disciplinary,
historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means
to map both their transfer from one discipline or research culture to
another, as well as to chart the transformations which emerge through
these transfer processes. The engagement with travelling concepts can
help to reveal similarities, differences and tensions between different
conceptual usages and, in doing so, establish links within the increasingly
diversified field of the study of culture. Such an endeavour can also
introduce a self-reflexive dimension to the field, for it points to the extent
to which disciplinary premises and culture-specific research traditions—
and, frequently, epistemological ‘blind spots’—affect our own theorising.
This book is based on several conferences, workshops and seminars
which took place at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of
Culture (GCSC). Our sincere thanks go to all who made this project
possible and have given their expertise and energy in turning it into a
book. First of all we would like to thank the contributors to the volume
for the wonderful cooperation, their inspiring chapters and their great
patience during the production process of this book. We have benefitted
greatly from many conversations and discussions with Doris Bachmann-
Medick, Vita Fortunati, Michael C. Frank, Wolfgang Hallet, Vera
Nünning, Manfred Pfister, Frederik Tygstrup, Ute Berns, Roger Lüdeke
and Martin Zierold. Moreover, we would like to thank Manuela Gerlof
and her colleagues at de Gruyter for their support, patience, and
encouragement in publishing this volume. We are also very grateful to
Mirjam Horn, Simon Cooke and Anna Beck who helped to prepare the
VI Preface and Acknowledgments
manuscript for publication: Thank you for your patience, sharp minds and
eyes. Simon Cooke did an excellent job in proofreading the articles. We
would also like to take this opportunity to thank the German Research
Foundation and the International Graduate Centre for the Study of
Culture for making this, as well as many other projects, possible.
Passau and Giessen, June 2012 Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning
Table of Contents
I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS:
MODELS FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE
BIRGIT NEUMANN and ANSGAR NÜNNING
Travelling Concepts as a Model for the Study of Culture..............................1
DORIS BACHMANN-MEDICK
Translation – A Concept and Model for the Study of Culture...................23
ANNA VERONIKA WENDLAND
Cultural Transfer.................................................................................................45
ANITA TRANINGER
Emergence as a Model for the Study of Culture...........................................67
II. KEY CONCEPTS FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE

UWE WIRTH
The Underlying Logic of the Study of Culture..............................................85
Culture as Text: Reading and Interpreting Cultures......................................99
ALEXANDER FRIEDRICH
Metaphorical Anastomoses: The Concept of ‘Network’ and its
Origins in the Nineteenth Century................................................................119
ANSGAR NÜNNING
Narrativist Approaches and
Narratological Concepts for the Study of Culture......................................145
WOLFGANG MÜLLER-FUNK
Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative:
A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report..........................................................185
VIII Table of Contents
GRETA OLSON
Gender as a Travelling Concept: A Feminist Perspective..........................205
BIRGIT NEUMANN and MARTIN ZIEROLD
Cultural Memory and Memory Cultures.......................................................225
HANS RUDOLF VELTEN
Performativity and Performance....................................................................249
CAROLINE WELSH
‘Stimmung’: The Emergence of a Concept and Its
Modifications in Psychology and Physiology...............................................267
SILKE HORSTKOTTE
Visuality and Visual Culture............................................................................291
STEPHAN GÜNZEL
Space and Cultural Geography.......................................................................307
INGO BERENSMEYER
From Media Anthropology to Media Ecology.............................................321
MARTIN ZIEROLD
Mass Media, Media Culture and Mediatisation............................................337
LEORA AUSLANDER
Material Culture and Materiality.....................................................................353
FRANK BÖSCH and HUBERTUS BÜSCHEL
Transnational and Global Perspectives as
Travelling Concepts in the Study of Culture................................................371
WOLFGANG HALLET
Conceptual Transfer: A Cognitive Approach to the Construction,
Re-Interpretation and Re-Contextualisation of Academic Concepts.......389
Notes on Contributors....................................................................................411
I. Theoretical Frameworks:
Models for the Study of Culture
Travelling Concepts as a Model for the
Study of Culture
BIRGIT NEUMANN and ANSGAR NÜNNING
1. The Study of Culture:

An Interdisciplinary and International Field of Research
No observer of the trajectory of the study of culture over the last decades
can help noticing the ongoing trend towards interdisciplinarity and inter-
nationalisation. Terms such as inter- and transdisciplinarity, transculturali-
ty, transnationality and globalisation now have firm places as buzzwords
in academic discourse. Tilottama Rajan is indeed right to stress that the
increasingly interdisciplinary and transnational make-up of cultural stud-
ies—and one can add Kulturwissenschaften—has been “responsible for a de-
centring innovation” as it propels the “emergence of knowledge outside
traditional boundaries” (Rajan 68). The idea of locating the study of cul-
ture exclusively in the context of national and disciplinary constellations is
surely losing plausibility in a world which is itself increasingly character-
ised by cultural exchange, globalisation, transnationalisation and interde-
pendence (see Schulze-Engler x).1
Yet, despite this trend towards border-crossing there are still marked
differences between various disciplinary and national research cultures
(see Appadurai 52). These differences can hardly be overlooked when
comparing, for instance, the ways in which Cultural Studies as practised in
Great Britain or North America differs from the German tradition of Kul-
turwissenschaften, all of which are characterised by numerous cultural and
local specificities. What is at stake here is not merely a question of termi-
nology but an epistemological rupture between, for example, the German
and British cultural contexts that concern the constitution and traditions
of the respective research cultures as a whole, including the ways in which
they construct their objects, define their objectives and practise the study
1 For this introduction we have drawn on ideas that were also published in Birgit Neumann
and Frederik Tygstrup’s introductory essay “Travelling Concepts in English Studies” and
Ansgar Nünning’s chapter “Transnational Approaches to the Study of Culture.”
2 Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning
of culture (see Nünning, “Transnational Approaches”; Rajan). As any

comparison of a random selection of introductory text books will con-
firm, approaches to the study of culture differ considerably from one na-
tional or local tradition to the other as well as from one disciplinary
tradition to the other (see e.g. Assmann; Böhme, Matussek, and Müller;
Campbell and Kean; During; Jaeger and Liebsch; Nünning and Nünning;
Oswell; Sommer; Storey; Tönnies and Viol).
The plurality of approaches to the study of culture, including the dif-
ferences between them, testifies to the fact that the study of culture is it-
self very much a cultural practice. Cultural studies, Kulturwissenschaften, the
study of culture, sciences humaines are epistemological configurations con-
structed on disciplinary and local specialisation, and it is within regionally
circumscribed epistemic communities that many of the key concepts for
the study of culture have been developed. Approaches to the study of cul-
ture are themselves culturally and historically conditioned and thus subject
to change and cultural variation. Though this is seldom acknowledged, let
alone subjected to self-reflexive research, disciplinary and local specialisa-
tion frequently pose obstacles to both the transfer of approaches and con-
cepts from one research culture to the other, and the development of
genuinely transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of
culture. These challenges become particularly evident when we conceive
of Kulturwissenschaft(en) as an interdisciplinary frame of reference, which is
supposed to integrate the whole spectrum of the traditional disciplines in
the humanities (see Nünning, “Transnational Approaches”).
Approaches, theories and concepts in the study of culture are not only
heavily imbued with, and shaped by, particular historical, intellectual and
local traditions, they also come with ideological freight and often uncon-
scious biases, as postcolonial theory and globalisation studies have amply
demonstrated. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown in his ground-breaking
book Provincializing Europe (2008), every case of transferring a cultural,
economic or political model or theory from one context to another always
involves “a problem of translation” (Chakrabarty 17)—a translation of
existing worlds, their “conceptual horizons” and their thought-categories
into the context, concepts and horizons of another life-world (see ibid.
71). He draws attention to the fact that any seemingly “abstract and uni-
versal idea” can “look utterly different in different historical contexts,”
that no country is “a model to another country,” that “historical differ-
ences actually make a difference” and that “no human society is a tabula
rasa” (ibid. xii).
What Chakrabarty observes about the “universal concepts of political
modernity” (ibid.) is also true of every approach and concept for the study
of culture that is transferred from one academic context to another: such
Travelling Concepts as a Model for the Study of Culture 3
transfer processes “encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institu-

tions, and practices through which they get translated and configured dif-
ferently” (ibid.). All of this should be kept in mind when trying to gauge
the challenges and possibilities offered by cultural studies under condi-
tions of globalisation and interdisciplinarity. The engagement with the
theory and practice of cultural studies inevitably calls for self-reflexive re-
search agendas, which can draw attention to the epistemological, cultural
and political implications of the theories and concepts we endorse. One
aim of the present volume is to put forward and probe a metatheoretical
framework for developing such a self-reflexive approach to the study of
culture.
One—we think promising—way of developing an approach which
can foster interdisciplinary and transnational dialogues was suggested by
the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal in her book Travelling Concepts in the
Humanities: A Rough Guide (2002). Her project proceeds from the assump-
tion that concepts are indispensable for the study of culture because they
are “the tools of intersubjectivity” in that “they facilitate discussion on the
basis of a common language” and “offer miniature theories” (Bal 22).
Concepts are first and foremost intellectual tools, which determine how
members of the academic community conceive of themes, approach ob-
jects and define the relevant questions to be addressed. They are best un-
derstood as ‘operative terms’ (Welsch), i.e. as terms that are never merely
descriptive but also performative, “programmatic and normative” (Bal
28). They construct and change the very objects they analyse, “entailing
new emphases and a new ordering of the phenomena within the complex
objects constituting the cultural field” (ibid. 33).
To the extent that concepts cross, transcend and sometimes transform
the boundaries between different academic contexts, they enable discus-
sion and exchange on the basis of a common meta-language—or so it
seems. Yet, more often than not, the meaning and operational value of
concepts for the study of culture differ between diverse disciplines, na-
tional cultures and historical periods. Concepts such as ‘memory,’ ‘gender,’
‘visuality,’ ‘materiality,’ ‘performativity’ or ‘space,’ which are at the core of
the study of culture, are not univocal or firmly established terms. Rather,
they are dynamic and changeable as they travel back and forth between
diverse academic contexts. Hence, they constitute what Mieke Bal has
called ‘travelling concepts.’
It is in the ongoing process of travel, exchange and transfer that con-
cepts become invested with new meanings and gain a new lease of life.
But they may also be upstaged by alternative concepts and become effec-
tively obsolete. The meaning of concepts, one might say, is never fixed
once and for all, but is something that emerges from the way concepts are
used, appropriated, translated and kept up to date—over and over again

and always with a difference. Indeed, the performative perspective of
‘travelling’ suggests that concepts only stay alive as long as scholars con-
sider it worthwhile to argue about their meaning and to apply them in
their analysis of cultural phenomena (see Rigney 348). Hence, the cultural
power of a concept resides in the scholarly activities it propels, i.e. in trav-
elling processes, rather than in what it is ‘in itself.’
According to Bal, the changes that concepts undergo when crossing
disciplinary and/or cultural boundaries should not be regarded as an im-
pediment but rather as a driving factor enabling and indeed spurring in-
terdisciplinary dialogue, a dialogue which places concepts and cultural
formations within their pertinent contexts. Present in a given moment and
a specific epistemological context, concepts also link that moment and
that context to earlier moments, to earlier epistemological contexts.
Broadly speaking, one could therefore say that concepts establish a “con-
tact zone,” i.e. they open up a field of research in which different disci-
plines “meet, clash and grapple with each other” (Pratt 6). Potentially,
individual disciplines in this contact zone make themselves as susceptible
as possible to negotiations and connections with other disciplines, thus
affording a sense of how deeply disciplinary and local contexts affect the
very conceptualisation of concepts. Travelling elsewhere, placing different
approaches to the study of culture in confrontation with each other and
exploring differences between them lays bare the often hidden and natu-
ralised presuppositions, discursive practices and structural features of re-
search traditions (see Gupta and Ferguson 87). Arguably, working with
travelling concepts can add a self-reflexive dimension to the study of cul-
ture.2
2. The Travels of Travelling Concepts
In exploring the potential of travelling concepts for organising the study

of culture, it is certainly worth recalling that the concept of ‘travelling con-
cepts’ is itself a travelling concept par excellence. Twenty years before
Mieke Bal argued that concepts move “between disciplines, between indi-
vidual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically
dispersed academic communities” (Bal 24), Edward Said introduced the
metaphor of the voyage to draw attention to the constant transfer of theo-
2 See Hutcheon, who stresses that interdiscplinarity essentially relies on the “effort (of) learn-
ing the discourse of another discipline, learning how to formulate and articulate the issues”
(Hutcheon 19).
ries within the humanities and the social sciences (see Said, “Traveling
Theory”). Stressing that theories are always “a response to a specific social
and historical situation of which an intellectual occasion is part” (ibid.
237), Said challenges the conventional notion of theory as stable, located
as it were in a fixed place or even original context (see Frank 61). By con-
trast, he maintains that theories always travel both in space and in time,
continually altering their shape as they traverse distances from one aca-
demic context to another. What are assumed to be bounded and bordered
theories are understood as transculturally constituted, embedded and in-
fluenced fields of knowledge that constantly interact with one another.
The journeys of theories are characterised by selective appropriations,
productive misunderstandings and discontinuous translations according to
historical and local circumstances. Perpetually being moved in and out of
discrepant contexts, theories acquire new meanings, ultimately yielding
transformed ideas which occupy “a new position in a new time and place”
(Said, “Traveling Theory” 227). On this account, theories not only emerge
from specific historical situations but carry that ideology in themselves “as
a ghostly aftereffect” (Baucom 163), even when the circumstances have
altered. Each theory, we may conclude, involuntarily reveals the historical
and local traces of the contexts in which it has emerged. Accordingly, the-
ory is best understood as a historically and culturally coded practice, which
is bound to contain traces of the respective historical situation within
which it was produced. Just as cultures themselves, the study of cultures
can therefore be understood in terms of the productive tensions between
routes and roots (see Gilroy 133). Precisely because concepts carry the traces
of their various journeys, profound knowledge of their history is crucial to
the study of culture (see Caroline Welsh’s contribution in this volume).
Ironically, or maybe fittingly, the reception of Said’s essay itself amply
testifies to the transformative process that the concept of ‘travelling theo-
ry’ attempts to describe (see Frank 62). The concept was, for example,
taken up by James Clifford in his contribution to the Inscriptions volume on
Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists in 1989. One year later, Clifford further
elaborated the travel metaphor in his essay on “Traveling Cultures.” At a
time in which our understanding of the world is pervasively shaped by the
topoi of global mobility and the continuous transfer of information, goods
and people, it is not difficult to see why the travel metaphor should prove
so attractive to members of Western academia, who are frequently “privi-
leged travellers themselves” (Frank 62). “[T]heory nowadays takes the
plane,” Clifford notes, “sometimes with round-trip tickets” (Clifford,
“Notes” n.pag.). However, just as ‘travelling theorists’ move within a lim-
ited space and transgress some but not other boundaries, so do ‘travelling
theories’ (see Frank 62). Clifford criticises the way that all too often their
journeys are confined to those parts of the academic world that take part
in English-language research: stressing that theory is no longer at home
only in the West, Clifford takes issue with the fact that travelling theories
should spread hegemonically from the USA across the whole world.
Clifford therefore also warns against the pitfalls of the metaphor of
travelling: drawing attention to its connotations of “middle class ‘literary,’
or recreational, journeying, spatial practices long associated with male ex-
periences and virtues” (ibid.), he draws attention to the fact that no meta-
phor comes without ideological freight. Variations in scale and scope, the
multidirectionality of travels, flows and exchange processes as well as the
exercise of power are often overlooked. All the more disturbing is the fact
that Edward Said—after all one of the masterminds of postcolonial theo-
ry—employs the travel metaphor in a somewhat uncritical manner (see
Frank 62). If Clifford nonetheless decides to retain the term, it is precisely
because of its association with class privilege, gender and beaten tracks,
which might function as powerful reminders of the fact that concepts are
never neutral or uncontaminated. According to Clifford, the term is im-
bued with a “sense of worldly, ‘mapped’ movement” (Clifford, “Notes”
n.pag.) that alternative terms lack. “Travelling is a matter of
recognizing the ambivalent, increasingly contested appropriations and re-
sistances that characterize the circulation of theories” (ibid.). The meta-
phor of travelling, then, does not describe a linear path between two
unrelated poles; instead it involves complex, uneven and contradictory
relations of mutual transformation. These discontinuous transformations
are not only part of theories, rather might prove critical for the very for-
mation of specific theories.
Mieke Bal’s 2002 study Travelling Concepts may also be read as a contri-
bution to the ongoing project of mapping the travelling of theories and
exploring how these journeys affect the organisation of disciplinary
knowledge (although she refers neither to Said’s nor Clifford’s essays).
Yet, it is important to note the conceptual shifts that Bal introduces in her
book—shifts, which, again, illustrate Said’s claim that theories are always
appropriated in highly selective ways. Firstly, Bal is no longer interested in
the travel of full-blown theories, but shifts the focus to concepts, which
she defines as “shorthand theories” (Bal 23). What she implies by this
shift is that single concepts are more flexible than whole theories and can
therefore transcend boundaries between various disciplines more conve-
niently: To the extent that single concepts can be isolated from their origi-
nal theoretical contexts and be accommodated to various disciplinary
traditions and methodologies, they are “naturally prone” (ibid. 15) to trav-
el, i.e. they “travel[…] better than whole bodies of interconnected” theo-
ries (Frank 62).
Secondly, in contrast to Said, Bal is not so much interested in the ways

in which theories or concepts are transformed as they shift between places
and historical moments, as she is in the way they travel between the more
institutionally delineated areas of disciplines. According to Bal, the mean-
ing, reach and operational values of concepts differ between disciplines.
The ambivalent appropriations and varying conditions for acceptance and
rejection that characterise the journeys of concepts trigger constant con-
ceptual transformations. The concept of performativity, for example,
which has emerged in linguistics and the philosophy of language, has un-
dergone major changes since it has been appropriated by deconstructive
approaches, gender studies and narratology (see Hans Rudolf Velten’s
contribution in this volume). Yet, according to Bal, and here she follows
Said and Clifford, the changes that concepts undergo should be explored
and developed—rather than passed over hastily. Because the meanings of
concepts must constantly be renegotiated by different disciplines, the
travelling of concepts opens up an exciting field for interdisciplinary de-
bate. A sustained enquiry into the dynamics of such travelling and the pol-
itics involved, and into the genealogies of the concepts in question is
conducive to the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the study
of culture and to a higher degree of self-reflexivity in any approach to this
increasingly diverse field.
3. Working with Travelling Concepts in the Study of Culture
Bal’s ideas, to which the title of the present volume pays homage, are
highly appealing not only for the organisation of research in the humani-
ties, but also for scrutinising the interfaces between the diverse disciplines
and academic cultures engaged in the study of culture. Mapping the travels
of concepts and examining the specific uses of concepts in diverse disci-
plinary and national contexts can establish structured relationships be-
tween different academic communities and help bridge the obvious gaps
between various traditions. The term ‘travelling’ does not merely refer to
cultural movement but to creative take-up, change, blending and redefini-
tion. The travelling category explicitly addresses the differences, tensions
and antagonisms between disciplines and local traditions of the study of
culture (see Doris Bachmann-Medick’s contribution on translation in this
volume). Travelling is thus conceived as a multilayered, complex and con-
flictual process which generates difference and defies tendencies towards
homogenisation and universalisation.
To trace the travel of concepts, then, means to map both their trans-
fer from one disciplinary and/or regional context to another, as well as to
identify the complex transformations which emerge through these pro-

cesses of transfer (see Frank 62). Sifting through the variegated strata of a
concept potentially reveals the extent to which the concept is differenti-
ated internally (see Hampsher-Monk, Thomas, and van Vree, “Introduc-
tion”). These differences testify to a history of uneven development and
affirm the coexistence of the contemporaneous and the non-
contemporary, of the local and the global, of disciplinary and non-
disciplinary knowledge in a genuinely hybrid zone (see Baucom 163).
Moreover, working with travelling concepts allows us to examine how
concepts circulate—or fail to do so—, and how they change as they circu-
late. We are interested in the question of why certain concepts travel wide-
ly while others never cross borders. Tracing the travels of concepts can
bring to light specific structures of difference: Disciplines, the humanities
and the sciences, cultural studies, theories, methods and conceptual sys-
tems are not unified givens but constituted only through multifarious
overlaps and transferences. Rather than searching for a solid ground and a
fixed point of reference from which to proceed, cultural studies should try
to ‘think and work at transitions’ (see Weigel 125), transitions which are
marked by the specific, yet interrelated concepts and methods of a range
of disciplines involved in the study of culture (see Uwe Wirth’s contribu-
tion in this volume).
Travel processes are implicated in the interaction between knowledge
and power. The question of whether or how concepts travel is therefore
not only an “academic issue” (Cooke 27); rather, their mobility is bound
up with social and political concerns. In his essay on “Traveling Theory,”
Said maintains that the transfer of ideas in the humanities is influenced by
both “conditions for acceptance” and “resistances” (Said 226–27). Con-
cepts rarely travel by themselves; rather, travel processes are multidimen-
sional, social processes, encompassing interactions of various forms, such
as institutions, organisations, agents, their epistemological norms, and so
on. The interaction between travelling processes, institutions, knowledge
and power is epitomised in the European context in the form of the Bo-
logna Process, initiated in 1999. Its primary goal was to make higher edu-
cation systems across Europe “more compatible and more comparable,
more competitive and more attractive for our own citizens and scholars
from other continents” (European Commission 2). Travelling thus be-
came increasingly desirable and possible (see Cooke). Institutional adapta-
tion to this international research environment is evidenced by the
founding of several specifically international graduate schools, conference
networks, and collaborative research centres, in which the international
dimension of approaches and topics is central to the projects—and, ulti-
mately, to their funding: “The implications for the way in which scholars
in this increasingly international academic arena conduct their study, re-

search, teaching, and collaborative ventures are therefore not only theoret-
ical, but concrete” (Cooke 27).
Concrete travelling activities are frequently performed by agents, who
negotiate between different academic cultures and disciplines. Agents or
so called ‘cultural brokers,’ ‘gatekeepers’ or ‘bridgers’ (see Khagram and
Levitt 10) foster the transfer of certain concepts and intellectual prac-
tices—and inhibit the travels of others (see Doris Bachmann-Medick’s
contribution on translation in this volume). To the extent that mediators
always act according to existing interests and always operate within certain
power relations, such as the hierarchies between disciplines or between
regional cultures of knowledge, they are likely to transform concepts ac-
cording to very particular intellectual, epistemological, political and histor-
ical requirements. The social situatedness of agents is therefore just as
important as the more general academic contexts in which concepts are
developed and disseminated. Further exploration of the cultural agents
and social institutions may provide interesting hints as to the reasons for
and the functions of conceptual transfer processes in diverse academic
contexts.
Moreover, conceptual transfer is unthinkable without the circulation
of media. For it is only through mediation that concepts can acquire a
high profile within the academic community. In a metaphorical as well as
in a concrete sense, media can be understood as means of transportation
that take concepts to different places and contexts, frequently prompting
new and unexpected epistemological constellations. In our increasingly
technologised academic world, a globalised media culture on its own, con-
cepts are distributed by a variety of media: by journals, books, the Inter-
net, talks delivered at conferences, etc. These forms of medialisation
inevitably affect how concepts are distributed and perceived in the aca-
demic world. Media technologies of publication, including the status or
‘symbolic capital’ (sensu Bourdieu) of publishing houses, journals and con-
ferences, citation indexes, the choice of language, the politics of transla-
tion—these are just some of the factors which shape the discontinuous
travels of concepts. And although concepts travel further and more swiftly
than ever before, their accessibility is often “restricted to those social ac-
tors who have the economic means or the cultural capital to make use of
them” (Welz 37).
Given the importance of media and medialisation to the making and
travelling of concepts, we should pay increased attention to the material
and medial foundations of our activities and routines, our practices and
premises, and to reconsider academic practice and the study of culture
from a media perspective (see Ingo Berensmeyer’s and Martin Zierold’s
contributions in this volume). Human (and scholarly) knowledge-

making—including the creation of concepts—is founded on media, on
the materialities that underlie processes of communication and interpreta-
tion. These ‘materialities’ do not carry any definite meaning, yet they inevi-
tably bear on the production of meaning and influence the reception
processes (see Pfeiffer 40). New technologies and media formations affect
cultural expectations about perception, presentation and circulation of
knowledge. More research needs to be done on the “feedback loops” be-
tween media, media technologies and changing forms of epistemologies
(see ibid. 42), and it would certainly be a worthwhile endeavour to explore
the study of culture against the changing background of technological
media. As Ingo Berensmeyer argues in his contribution, Matthew Fuller’s
term “life among media” (5) could indeed prove a good starting point to
gauge the multi-level interconnectedness of technological agency, scholar-
ly practices, actors, and the production of knowledge in diverse media en-
vironments.
The interests, situatedness and ‘symbolic capital’ of agents and institu-
tions as well media systems, materialities and language are crucial to the
ways in which concepts are created, disseminated and perceived, unequally
exchanged, distributed and transformed (see Bhabha 20).3 Stuart Hall is
therefore right to point out that “[c]ultural studies today is not only about
globalization: it is being ‘globalized,’ a very uneven and contradictory pro-
cess, which is not just a question of substituting one problematic for an-
other and is one which we are only just beginning to understand” (Hall
393). Admittedly, the theory and practice of German Kulturwissenschaften
relies first and foremost on concepts produced within the circuits of
communication established by Western political and cultural dominance
(see Frank Bösch and Hubertus Büschel’s contribution in this volume).
The prevailing approach to culture is dominated by Western perspectives
and modern Western notions, such as the very concept of culture, which
only dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century. At least norma-
tive concepts of culture (see Reckwitz 64) are still frequently associated
“with an older discourse of racial and ethnic difference” (Gilroy 7). The
increasing globalisation of cultural studies as an academic project can
therefore “not obscure its conspicuous problems with ethnocentrism”
(ibid. 5).
3 The privileging of certain travel routes and the ignorance of others has much to do with
the role of English as an agent of globalisation and global dissemination. It seems that
English is the “devouring ‘lingua franca’” (Hui-Sok 133) of the study of culture in our
globalised world.
To a large extent, concepts for the study of culture have been system-
atically spread from north to south and from west to east. Yet, innovation
does not necessarily mean westernisation and travel processes are by no
means one way. Not everything originates and flows to the rest of the
world from the west and the north and yet, all too often, scholars in the
west refrain from a dialogue with ongoing scholarly debates in, say, South
Asia or North Africa. Paul Gilroy rightly points out that the question of
where the concepts and methods which make the study of culture possible
come from is a highly political one (see Gilroy 5). Our understanding of
culture as well as of the study of culture needs to be decentred and
stripped of proprietary notions that consider theory, knowledge, innova-
tion and modernity as essentially ‘Western’ (see Schulze-Engler xii). In a
world of “multiple modernities” (Welz), the transnational dimensions of
culture can no longer be understood as being extrinsic to the study of cul-
ture.
4. Travelling Concepts:
Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Culture
The concept of ‘travelling concepts’ as put forward by Said, Clifford and

Bal provides a promising model for framing and fostering the develop-
ment of transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of cul-
ture. To do justice to the complexity of travelling processes and their
entanglement with cultural power relations it seems, however, warranted
expanding the scope of the axes along which concepts can travel. Travel
processes are complex and multilayered, involving direct and indirect rela-
tions and dynamics. In order to provide conceptual and methodological
backbones to any project concerned with the travelling of concepts, as
well as the development of transnational and interdisciplinary approaches
to the study of culture, four axes should be distinguished:
1. travelling between academic disciplines: crossing disciplinary
boundaries,
2. travelling between academic and national cultures and cultures of
research: crossing national borders,
3. travelling diachronically across time: crossing the boundaries be-
tween historical periods,
4. travelling synchronically between functionally defined subsystems:
travelling between academia and society, its cultural practices,
norms and power relations.
Working with travelling concepts involves multiple and different forms of

analysis that allow us to focus on the production of difference and differ-
entiation. The goal is not to arrive at a single paradigm or master narrative
but to find ways of holding these different dimensions in productive con-
versation with one another. Of course, the distinction between the four
axes presupposes the very existence of bounded or bordered cultural
units—particularly of disciplines but also of national academic cultures—
and the structures associated with them. It might, however, well be that
neither disciplines nor national or regional academic cultures are cohesive,
distinct and ultimately separate entities. National academic cultures as well
as disciplines are defined and constituted by mutability, porosity, hybridity
and inconclusive processuality. Increasingly mobilised forms of social life,
global exchange processes as well as transdisciplinary exchange make it
less and less persuasive to conceive of the production of knowledge in
terms of fixed territories or clearly delineated disciplines (see Hannerz).
Ongoing appropriations, applications, translation and transfer processes
of available epistemological and cultural resources clearly have the poten-
tial to reconfigure and transform existing boundaries. The emergence of
new, genuinely interdisciplinary areas of research such as cultural memory
studies (see Birgit Neumann and Martin Zierold’s contribution in this vol-
ume) or visual studies (see Silke Horstkotte’s contribution in this volume)
testifies to this trend.
On the other hand, the extent to which regional, historical and disci-
plinary cultures of knowledge and concomitant culturally local conceptual
and methodological contexts shape the study of culture cannot be ig-
nored. As explicated above, the trend towards interdisciplinarity and
transnationalisation has not led to the disappearance of differences—quite
to the contrary. Rather than glossing over these differences it is important
to mediate between them, emphasising interference and translation be-
tween the disciplinary and interdisciplinary as well as the local and global.
A focus on travelling may allow insights into the complex interweaving of
disciplinary and interdisciplinary as well as national, regional and transna-
tional constellations. Disciplines and diverse national cultures are thus not
regarded as given or necessary academic arenas but as categories to be in-
vestigated as contested social constructs, which are always in a state of
flux.
Existing research has largely focused on the transfer processes be-
tween disciplines, between historical periods, and between geographically
dispersed academic communities, i.e. on the first three self-evident axes.
The role that society, including its cultural practices, histories and values,
plays in the construction and dissemination of concepts has often re-
mained unacknowledged. Contrary to this trend, Michel Foucault (as one
among others) has emphatically stressed the broader cultural impact of

epistemological innovation. In his analysis of epistemological breaks in The
Order of Things, which is both a “history of the structure of systems of
knowledge and a decentring of disciplines” (Rajan 81), Foucault time and
again interrupts his argument to draw attention to “the fact that within the
space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been
thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way” (Fou-
cault 50, 217ff.). For Foucault, epistemological breaks not only affect nu-
merous and apparently very different disciplines at the same time, but also
the culture at large (see Frank 67–68; see Alexander Friedrich’s contribu-
tion in this volume).
Although one does not have to embrace Foucault’s somewhat sweep-
ing assessment of the force of epistemological innovations, what should
be taken into account when working with travelling concepts are the con-
stant exchange processes between theory and cultural practice. Concepts
of, for instance, cultural memory are not only explicitly formulated in the
ever proliferating field of cultural memory studies. Rather, concepts of
memory are also shaped in and through the cultural practices and perfor-
mances of memory cultures—be it in literature, painting, photography, in
rituals, monuments, museums, in historical documents, newspaper re-
ports, political debates or sociological surveys. Literature, along with the
other arts, arguably plays a crucial role in probing new epistemological
constellations. Due to their ‘de-pragmatisation,’ the arts can bring into
interaction what is otherwise separated by cultural and academic conven-
tion, meaning that the heterogeneity of culturally prevalent concepts gains
expression more radically than in other discourses. Far from merely evok-
ing culturally pre-existing concepts, it seems that literature and other arts
can function as ‘epistemic things’ (see Rheinberger), i.e. as a testing
ground for new epistemological configurations and as the basis from
which ‘new’ concepts are extrapolated (see Uwe Wirth’s and Caroline
Welsh’s contributions in this volume). Arguably, the arts and their imagi-
nary recodification of scientific, social and cultural norms have a consider-
able share in revitalising existing epistemological orders and in reinforcing
new notions of, for example, memory, gender, space, mediality or visuali-
ty. These can then be taken up by the study of culture to be further ex-
plored and elaborated into full-blown concepts. Concepts are thus not to
be understood as static abstractions, but also as dynamic re-arrangements
of symbolic forms—a dynamics that travels in the space between cultural
practices and academic theory. The study of concepts for cultural studies
may thus turn out to be both a study of theoretical frameworks and a
study of the symbolic forms which shape our concepts of culture.
More research needs to be done on the relation between academic

discourse and cultural practices. It would be a rewarding endeavour to
write a history of concepts which precedes the history of science and the
formulation of theory and to show how these different epistemological
constellations interact in the constant making and re-making of concepts.
A key aim should be to illustrate how and to what extent the degree of
self-reflexivity and explicitness of concepts is itself subject to historical
and cultural changes.
5. Pitfalls and Potentials of Travelling Concepts as a

Model for the Study of Culture
The complexity of theoretical and conceptual transfers also resides in the

fact that concepts are always embedded in their respective theoretical con-
texts. The latter include the theories, frameworks or paradigms in which a
given concept was developed, the discipline from which it originates as
well as the respective disciplinary discourses associated with it, and the
academic research culture with its concomitant institutional practices, na-
tional traditions and intellectual styles. Therefore concepts always have a
number of disciplinary, formal and functional features that can be derived
either from their position and role in a particular theory, conceptual sys-
tem or discipline, or from the traditions from which they originate and
their respective intellectual styles. Whenever a concept is transferred from
its original context(s), it always comes with theoretical and ideological
baggage, both of which may, however, be lost in transit (see Wolfgang
Hallet’s contribution in this volume). The incorporation of concepts
adapted from other disciplines or research cultures therefore always entails
acts of recontextualisation, i.e. relating the adapted concepts to established
frameworks and theories in the new disciplinary and institutional context.
The interdisciplinary transfer and recontextualisation of concepts is clearly
a selective and transformative process influenced not only by conscious
and strategic resistances but also by various, cultural and epistemological,
‘blind spots’ (see Frank 63). To the extent that the receiving discipline’s
paradigms direct attention to those aspects of the received concept that
are most relevant to the discipline, the transfer inevitably remains selec-
tive: Only certain aspects of a specific concept are adopted, while many
others are reinterpreted or simply overlooked (see ibid.). “Whenever the
emphasis shifts from one dominant paradigm to another,” Michael C.
Frank rightly stresses, the perspective on the received concept changes:
“Concepts that were previously unnoticed or marginalized move to the
centre of attention and the transfer begins anew, producing a different

result” (Frank 63).
Although such conceptual transfers across any of the axes identified
above constitute a promising way for the development of interdisciplinary
and transnational approaches to the study of culture to proceed, they are
inevitably fraught with challenges and risks. Important challenges include
the tasks of paying critical attention to the processes of translation and of
successfully mediating between different cultural traditions as well as be-
tween academic and theoretical differences. In doing so, one has to avoid
the danger that the travelling of concepts brings together two incommen-
surable cultural or theoretical frameworks. The most obvious risks include
the danger of oversimplification and of the loss of terminological preci-
sion, theoretical consistency, analytical insight, and epistemological and
heuristic power. When concepts travel they may also become mere com-
monplaces or metaphors, which can result in the dissolution of a concept
as a whole. While recursivity, i.e. the relaying of concepts across scholarly
practices, ensures that concepts are disseminated and become influential,
it also means that they can end up exhausted and ultimately meaningless
from having been repeated in increasingly reduced form.
Concepts, as Mieke Bal has pointed out, look like words but work as
“shorthand theories” (23). In fact, it might well be that many travelling
concepts look like words but work as metaphors. Just think, for instance,
of the concept of collective memory. Originally, the concept of memory,
as it was developed in philosophy and psychology, emphasised processes
which occur in the individual mind. The transfer of the concept to the
social world and the level of culture, hence the travelling of the concept
‘memory’ to a range of neighbouring disciplines, required a profoundly
metaphorical use of the term. Cultures, nations or groups do not possess a
unitary faculty for remembering; but much of what they do to create a
shared past resembles processes of individual remembering (such as the
selectivity and perspectivity that are characteristic for the construction of a
‘usable past’). It appears that frequently the travelling of concepts is bound
to their capacity to be deployed as operative metaphors, thus ensuring
their almost infinite adaptability to various academic discourses and exist-
ing paradigms. Due to their enormous wealth of interdiscursive connota-
tions, “concept-metaphors” (Spivak 329) seem to be particularly able to
travel between, and remain apt in, diverse disciplines and to establish links
between heterogeneous domains of knowledge (see Neumann and Tyg-
strup, “Travelling Concepts”). Because conceptual metaphors constitute
discursive interfaces between the disciplines, they are of critical im-
portance for any form of synthesis of knowledge and for fostering re-
integrative communication in academe. Yet, while metaphors are certainly
conducive to the production of new knowledge, they may just as well fos-
ter oversimplification: Concepts lose much of their analytical potential
once they are made to function as metaphors. When ‘space,’ for instance,
is little more than a metaphor for the material dimension of human expe-
rience and cultural practice, we are no longer dealing with a concept that
has the analytical precision to translate the experience of culture into cog-
nition (see Stephan Günzel’s contribution in this volume).
On the other hand, the import of concepts from other fields can be
an important heuristic move and very productive, yielding new combina-
tions of insights and leading to the revision of established disciplinary the-
ories or the discovery of unknown phenomena. Moreover, it can “trigger
and facilitate reflection and debate on all levels of methodology” (Bal 29)
and redefine a discipline and its boundaries, generating new theoretical
frameworks, disciplinary research domains or new fields of interdiscipli-
nary research. The fields of cultural memory studies, visual studies, media
anthropology, cross-disciplinary narrative research as well as performance
studies provide cases in point of such emergent transnational and trans-
disciplinary approaches to the study of culture.
As stated above, the most important surplus value of travelling con-
cepts for the study of culture is probably their potential to introduce a
self-reflexive dimension to interdisciplinary and transnational research,
thus affording a recognition of how deeply disciplinary, national and his-
torical contexts affect the very conceptualisation of concepts. The study
of culture in our globalised world could surely profit from a greater degree
of self-reflection about, and much more detailed investigations of, the dif-
ferent local traditions and styles of ‘doing’ cultural studies, the promotion
of greater “transnational literacy” (Bal 291), and a willingness to question
one’s own academic routines and to negotiate between different national
research traditions including their intellectual styles (see Galtung). If Homi
Bhabha is right in his claim that translation is the “performative nature of
cultural communication” (228), then this calls indeed for the critical com-
parison not just of different cultures but also of the various national and
disciplinary traditions of studying culture.
6. The Design of This Book
The essays collected in this volume can be seen as contributions to the

development of an understanding and use of travelling concepts for the
study of culture, theoretically, methodologically, and in the basic practice
of analysing cultural phenomena. The first section seeks to examine dif-
ferent models for the study of culture which allow researchers to explore
and coordinate avenues for interdisciplinary and transnational exchange.

‘Travelling concepts,’ ‘translation,’ ‘cultural exchange’ and ‘emergence’
provide different models for conceptualising the interfaces between dif-
ferent approaches to the study of culture, hinting at how structured rela-
tionships can be established between them.
Though all of these approaches are concerned with the dynamic pro-
cesses involved in the traffic between academic cultures, and are thus in-
tertwined in a number of ways, they focus on different aspects. The
approaches concerned with translation and cultural transfer look closely at
the historical and social contexts, the actual people and institutions who
adapt concepts, goods or practices from another country or another disci-
pline, the multilayered processes involved in the acts of translation, or ap-
propriation, and the transformations that theories, concepts and other
cultural phenomena undergo as they are transferred from one context into
another. The concept of cultural transfer builds on concepts of agency,
thus conceiving of conceptual transfer as a rather intentional and directed
strategy (see Anna Veronika Wendland’s contribution). In a similar vein,
translation studies stresses that translational activities are performed by
agents who negotiate between different academic cultures and disciplines
(see Doris Bachmann-Medick’s contribution on translation in this vol-
ume). Hence, in contrast to the category of ‘travelling,’ both the categories
of translation and cultural transfer explicitly address the agents that are
involved in the exchange of concepts. Yet, where cultural transfer studies
focus on intentional agency, translation studies are more interested in the
dynamics of mutual transformation and the translational reconceptualisa-
tion of the notion of culture itself. The concept of emergence, on the oth-
er hand, is intricately linked to notions of epistemological discontinuity
and to the precarious status of agency and the diminishing of the power of
the subject (see Anita Traninger’s contribution in this volume). According
to this concept, conceptual transfer processes yield something new with-
out one single will or intelligence being able to determine the outcome of
this process. As a concept for the study of culture, emergence can serve as
a conceptual anchor in an epistemological configuration that challenges
monocausal interpretation and totalisation, as well as the search for origins
and teleology.
The second section introduces different concepts of culture and ad-
dresses key concepts for the study of culture, tracing their travelling across
various disciplinary, national and historical contexts. The contributions by
Uwe Wirth, Doris Bachmann-Medick and Alexander Friedrich discuss
different models for conceptualising culture and for doing cultural studies.
Simply put, the volume is based on a broad understanding of ‘culture,’
encompassing material, performative, social and mental dimensions. Mov-
ing beyond normative concepts of culture, the study of culture is con-

cerned with both cultural expressions, discourses, cultural heritage and
artistic objects, and a wider anthropological notion of culture, conceived
as the broad realm of whole ways of life, or human life forms, including
material manifestations, collective habits and mentalities, social institu-
tions, practices, and rituals, as well as shared values and social norms (see
Nünning, “Transnational Approaches”). This understanding allows us to
cover a broad spectrum of concepts, each of which offers a different per-
spective on the elusive field called ‘culture’—ranging from cultural
memory to performance, space, materiality, identity and alterity, gender,
narration, visuality, ‘Stimmung’ and mediality. Jointly, they should bring to
the fore the multifaceted and heterogeneous dimensions of cultures.
Taken together, the contributions document the thriving research dis-
cussions that take place under the heading of ‘travelling concepts.’ To be
sure, they do not represent the entire array of theoretical, methodological
and practical questions that animate the contemporary development of
transnational and interdisciplinary practices in the study of culture, but it is
the contention of the authors and editors that they will prove to be useful
in the ongoing debate on the future research agendas of the study of cul-
ture in an increasingly globalised and interdisciplinary research communi-
ty. Most importantly, we hope that this volume can stimulate debate about
the study of culture and prompt our readers to think about projects which
take that debate one step further.
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Translation – A Concept and Model for
the Study of Culture1
1. Introduction
It is no longer possible to ignore how crucial processes of cultural transla-

tion and their analysis have become, whether for cultural contact or inter-
religious relations and conflicts, for integration strategies in multicultural
societies or for the exploration of productive interfaces between the hu-
manities and the natural sciences. The globalisation of world society, in
particular, demands increased attention to mediation processes and prob-
lems of transfer, in terms of both the circulation of global representations
and ‘travelling concepts’ and of the interactions that make up cultural en-
counters. Here, translation becomes, on the one hand, a condition for
global relations of exchange (‘global translatability’) and, on the other, a
medium especially liable to reveal cultural differences, power imbalances
and the scope for action. An explicit focus on translation processes—
something increasingly prevalent across the humanities—may thus enable
us to scrutinise more closely current and historical situations of cultural
encounter as complex processes of cultural translation. Translation is
opened up to a transnational cultural practice that in no way remains re-
stricted to binary relationships between national languages, national litera-
tures or national cultures.
This broadening of the horizon of translation currently poses chal-
lenges to most of the disciplines in the humanities and specifically to the
study of culture, by referring to translation as a category of practice in the
social field and by developing translation as an analytical category and
even as a model for conducting cultural research. Admittedly, this com-
plex process risks diluting the concept of translation, and it seems im-
portant to delineate the concept more precisely. We might begin this
1 I am grateful to Kate Sturge for the translation of an earlier version of this essay, which
appeared as the introduction to “The Translational Turn,” a special issue of the journal
Translation Studies. Ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick 2–16.
24 Doris Bachmann-Medick
specification by dissecting what has become a rather vague term into its
most important facets (transfer, mediation, transmission, metaphor, the
linguistic dimension, transformation, and so on) and the most significant
areas of enquiry to which it can contribute.
One of these areas would be the reinterpretation of situations of glob-
al cultural encounter. Another would be a reworked view of the academic
landscape and research practices—it might, for example, be constructive
to consider interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as a translation prob-
lem, potentially enhancing our understanding of the contact zones arising
in the transitions between disciplines. In all these cases, it would be a mis-
take to pass hastily over the tensions inherent in translation’s relationships
to appropriation, transformation and conflict. These can usefully be ex-
plored and developed: frictions arising from translational relations
(whether they be metaphor transfers, conceptual bridges or mutual repu-
diations) between the humanities and neurobiology offer a taste of what
this might involve. It is beginning to emerge in the challenges that a ‘trans-
lational turn’ poses for the studies of culture and for the humanities, in-
cluding translation studies itself.
2. The Turn to ‘Translation’ – A ‘Translational Turn’?
If the horizon of translation is expanding and differentiating, does this

alone imply a ‘translational turn’ in studies of culture? Certainly it is not
enough to disengage the category of translation from a linguistic and tex-
tual paradigm and locate it, as a cultural practice, in the sphere of social
action where it plays an ever more vital role for a world of mutual de-
pendences and networks. In this respect, important studies within transla-
tion studies have long been moving the category far beyond its traditional
contexts (see, among many others, Cronin, Translation and Globalization;
Hermans; Tymoczko and Gentzler; Venuti; on the ‘turns’ within transla-
tion studies see Snell-Hornby, Turns of Translation Studies). But the turn to
translation goes further, since it is born specifically out of the category’s
migration from translation studies into other discursive disciplinary fields
in the humanities: translation has not only become a precondition for
‘travelling concepts’ in the humanities and the social sciences, but is a
‘travelling concept’ itself. In a very wide range of disciplines we find the
attempt to develop the translation category into a more general transla-
tional model for investigation and to apply it concretely in more compre-
hensive cultural analyses. However, the success of a broader translational
approach depends on the category of translation undergoing methodolog-
ical specification as it moves through the disciplines. Only then will trans-
Translation 25
lation fully develop the potential for the study of culture that Lawrence
Venuti already noted in the late 1990s (see Venuti 9), and only then will
we be justified in calling translation a new key term for the humanities,
including the social sciences and the study of culture (see Bachmann-
Medick, Cultural Turns).
In recent years, numerous ambitious investigations have been made by
scholars concerned with cultural analysis and the social sciences to fore-
ground the translation perspective and give it practical and analytical ap-
plication. Jürgen Habermas, for example, calls on religious communities in
post-secular societies to ‘translate’ their religious language into a publicly
accessible secular language (see Habermas), while Joachim Renn grounds a
whole sociology on “relations of translation” (Übersetzungsverhältnisse; see
Renn). Nikos Papastergiadis reinterprets migration in terms of translation-
al action (see Papastergiadis) and Veena Das discusses “violence and
translation” (see Das); in more explicitly textual terms, Susan Bassnett ex-
amines “translating terror” (see Bassnett, “Translating Terror”) and Mona
Baker foregrounds “translation and conflict” (see Baker). Countless other
examples demonstrate the huge range of areas of enquiry within the hu-
manities that are currently making use of the category of translation both
as a new analytical category and as a category of action in itself. Perhaps,
then, the ‘translational turn’ has already arrived?
It is certainly clear that, compared to just a decade ago, today’s situa-
tion is much more complex, since the boundaries between disciplines have
become blurred to a far greater extent. Back then, some voices within
translation studies, interested in a ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies, were
already naming a “translation turn in cultural studies” (see Bassnett,
“Translation Turn”; more recently see Snell-Hornby, Turns in Translation
Studies 164–69; Snell-Hornby, “What’s in a Turn?”), then a “translative
turn” (see West 162). But these early hints have not yet been systematical-
ly pursued by translation studies, despite increasingly ‘translational’ ap-
proaches in research across the humanities and social sciences. Only now,
as voices from outside the discipline join the debate, does there seem to
be a drive to sharpen the translational perspective theoretically and sys-
tematically in order to justify describing it as a ‘turn’ in its own right (see
Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns 238–83; “Übersetzung in der Weltge-
sellschaft”). Yet, we still need contributions to the project of furthering,
while also critically rethinking, this heightened theoretical attention to
translation processes in various fields. We need responses to a fork in the
road: will the translation category, as it moves as a ‘travelling concept’ be-
yond the textual and linguistic level, stubbornly stick to the path of purely
metaphorical uses of the translation concept? Or will new research ap-
proaches begin to elaborate a more sophisticated and detailed translation

perspective in methodological and analytical terms?
At this decisive moment, the underexplored interfaces between trans-
lation studies and other disciplines within the humanities may become
newly productive—as translation processes of their own, so to speak.
Hereby, translation studies’ special disciplinary competences would open
up even further to expansion and, inevitably, transformation—especially
in the disciplinary border and transition zones where the translation per-
spective contributes to a translational thinking intended more than just
metaphorically—translation stances that are more fundamental and more
capable of wider application, ‘border thinking’ and ‘in-between thinking,’
and an increase in the value attached to mediation processes. And the
humanities could make new ‘re-turns’ to translation studies as they try to
sharpen the contours of this broad understanding of translation.
However, mutual incursions, conceptual migrations or hybrid overlaps
between the disciplines do not alone effect a ‘translational turn.’ We must
ask a more general question: how do ‘turns’ in the humanities come
about? In disciplines concerned with culture, theory does not advance via
the massive ruptures of ‘paradigms.’ Theoretical attention shifts less com-
prehensively, in a delicate feedback loop with the problems and processes
of the surrounding society, via ‘turns.’ Different ‘turns’ can coexist, in a
kind of eclectic theoretical constellation (see Bachmann-Medick, Cultural
Turns; on the problem of the figurative language of ‘turns,’ see Snell-
Hornby, “What’s in a Turn?”). Given this academic landscape, an expand-
ed translation concept (whether metaphorical or analytical) will not neces-
sarily result in a ‘translational turn’—unless it moves through three stages
that characterise ‘turns’ in general: (1) expansion of the object or thematic
field; (2) metaphorisation; (3) methodological refinement, provoking a
conceptual leap and transdisciplinary applicability (for more details on the
question of when a turn becomes a ‘turn,’ see Bachmann-Medick, Cultural
Turns 25–27).
Thus, only when the conceptual leap has been made and ‘translation’
is no longer restricted to a particular object of investigation, but moves
across disciplines as a new form of knowledge—a kind of ‘travelling con-
cept’ and a methodologically reflected analytical category—can we really
speak of a ‘translational turn.’ At that point, translation also turns into a
model for the study of culture as it transforms cultural concepts by mak-
ing them translatable and translating them consciously into different
fields. Beyond this, scholarly thinking and perceptions themselves become
translational as a movement in research gathers pace, moving towards
border thinking, taking greater interest in interstices, and focusing increas-
ingly on mediation. In this framework, translation becomes an analytical
Translation 27
concept for social theory, action theory, cultural theory, microsociology,

migration studies, history, the theory of interculturality, and so on. As ana-
lytical concept, translation no longer remains on the merely metaphorical
level but is worked out on the basis of empirical social processes (see
Fuchs, “Reaching Out”).
A further interdisciplinary translation step could enable these incur-
sions of the translation category to benefit, in turn, from the disciplinary
skills of translation studies. Translation studies’ “fine-tuning of meanings”
(see Fuchs, “Reaching Out” 27) and its work on translation in a strict
sense, on “translation proper” (see Dizdar), offer a way to steer the trans-
lation concept, currently somewhat distracted, back into more specific
channels. The aim should be to encourage the pursuit of a ‘translational
turn’ on three levels, each of which should be critically examined in the
light of the expertise of translation studies: (1) on the level of an expanded
horizon from textual to cultural translation, or from the translation of lan-
guage to the translation of action—including pragmatic, existential trans-
fer situations; (2) on the level of epistemological impulses—without
cordoning off the power relations and asymmetries of global relations; (3)
on the level of the appropriation and transformative development of
translation-oriented approaches in what is now almost all the humanities
and social sciences—including the critical notion of the study of culture as
translation studies.
3. Expanding the Horizons of the Translation Category
3.1 Translation as Contextualisation

A ‘translational turn’ in those disciplines concerned with the study of cul-
ture presupposes the cultural turn in translation studies since the 1980s, a
move that extended translation’s purview beyond the transfer of languages
or texts, opening it to questions of cultural translation and of the frictions
and complexities of cultural lifeworlds themselves (see Snell-Hornby,
Turns of Translation Studies 164–69). In the process, the familiar categories
of text-related translation, such as ‘original,’ ‘equivalence’ or ‘faithfulness,’
were increasingly supplemented by new key categories of cultural transla-
tion such as ‘cultural representation and transformation,’ ‘alterity,’ ‘dis-
placement,’ ‘discontinuity,’ ‘cultural difference’ and ‘power.’
For a long time, reflection on cultural translation in translation studies
drew its impulses chiefly from ethnographic research and its critique of
representation (see Carbonell i Cortés; Simon and St. Pierre; Sturge; Wolf,
“Culture as Translation”; Yamanaka and Nishio). These offered methods
of cultural contextualisation which helped a ‘translational turn’ take root

within translation studies itself. Cultural contextualisation fostered the
linking of smaller units in texts (symbols, forms of address, narrative pat-
terns, communicative situations, etc.) to larger, culturally specific and his-
torical patterns of thinking and signification. But, conversely, these efforts
of cultural contextualisation still need the procedures and positions of tex-
tual translation in order to gain important correctives to a critique of rep-
resentation that risks sweeping generalisations: it is never whole
‘cultures’—and never general and holistic cultural concepts—that are
translated. In contrast, a more concrete than metaphorical translation per-
spective makes the wider spheres of culture and practice accessible in
smaller units of communication and interaction. It allows larger complex-
es of communication like cultural transfer, the transmission of concepts,
cultural dialogue or cultural comparison to be almost microscopically dis-
sected—not least in terms of concrete translational activities by agents
acting as cultural brokers. There is still untapped potential in ideas such as
Susan Bassnett’s early call for translation theory as a general theory of
transactions, dependent on the specific translational actions and negotia-
tions of cultural brokers:
Today the movement of peoples around the globe can be seen to mirror the very
process of translation itself, for translation is not just the transfer of texts from
one language into another, it is now rightly seen as a process of negotiation be-
tween texts and between cultures, a process during which all kinds of transactions
take place mediated by the figure of the translator. (Bassnett, Translation Studies
5–6)
The expansion of the translation category as a model for the study of cul-
ture reaches far beyond a mere ‘travelling concept.’ This expansion is per-
haps all the more groundbreaking in that the translator and, especially, the
translation scholar always set the micro and macro levels in a necessary
interrelation: the smaller formats, textual and interactional analyses, are
related to wider translational frameworks and vice versa. Translations are
thus inserted into broad views of the relations of power and dependency
and into a discursive environment such as Orientalism or colonialism (see
Asad and Dixon 177; Venuti 158). Translation history is made part of the
history of colonialism, part of a “global regime of translation” (see Sakai,
“How Do we Count a Language?” 75) or of a “biopolitics of translation”
(see Sakai and Solomon; Solomon 53).
In these moves outward to wider horizons, clearly the role of lan-
guage, and with it “translation proper,” cannot be ignored. However, in
the disciplinary framework of translation studies, “translation proper” it-
self suggests a concept of translation that undermines representation-
alism: a multilayered, complex concept that is constantly generating differ-
Translation 29
ence and hybridity and confounding tendencies towards homogenisation

through what translation studies scholar Dilek Dizdar refers to as its
“third-party position” (Dizdar 96). Dizdar shows how “translation prop-
er,” as a language-oriented procedure, can offer valuable insights for the
investigation of in-between positions and ethical implications as opposed
to mere transcodings, thus making more visible the translation process
and the actions of translators themselves.
3.2 Translation as Self-Translation and Transformation

The tension between “translation proper” and an expanded understanding
of translation in the humanities and social sciences absolutely needs to be
retained and constructively explored—not least in order to demonstrate
how strongly even individual translation practices are conditioned by more
comprehensive hegemonic relationships, the asymmetries of the global
“regime of translation.” Connections like this are especially significant at
the level of language policy. The struggle of regional, indigenous languages
like Gĩkũyũ or Yoruba against the overbearing power of world languages
makes the translation issue a particularly explosive one. This becomes
clear in an impressive autobiographical essay by Kenyan writer and scholar
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (see Wa Thiong’o). He describes from his own experi-
ence how the asymmetries of languages are also relations of violence.
These asymmetrical relations subject speakers, including authors, to de-
mands for a specific kind of translation—and political enforcements of
translation—that affect their very existence. The power relations between
European and African languages in these situations are experienced bodi-
ly, as linguistic repression or terror. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s encounters with
translation from the Kenyan Gĩkũyũ into the global lingua franca of Eng-
lish result in self-translation in a double sense: the translations of his own
books by himself, but also translations of his own self—a life lived in and
as translation. At stake here are translation challenges which, as Jon Solo-
mon argues, always already imply the “myth of global English” (Solomon
66). But even this now mythologised global language leaves gaps for inter-
vention, oscillating as it does between the conflicted poles of “complete
translatability”—attended by translation as a medium for the configura-
tion of the “flexible personality”—and a contrary national linguistic self-
assertion and articulation of difference (see ibid. 67).
At this stage a translational perspective within cultural research opens
the door for further study of the politics of translation. This will involve
discussing, on the one hand, global linguistic asymmetries in the frame-
work of what Solomon calls a “biopolitics of translation” (ibid. 53) and,
on the other, the levels of the experiences, actions and constraints that
impose translation and self-translation on subjects and agents in the

framework of “translation as a social action.” The latter aspect is exam-
ined in particular depth by Martin Fuchs in his sociological perspective on
translation as a social practice (see Fuchs). Fuchs shows how the Indian
‘Untouchables’ or Dalits try to translate their existential and political con-
cerns into a universalist Buddhist frame of reference, so as to find a point
of contact with other social contexts and thus gain recognition. Transla-
tion appears here as an intentional, active “reaching out to others.” We see
how far-reaching a translational perspective can be, not least for the analy-
sis of practices by social groups which, through their pragmatic negotia-
tions, use translation “as a mode of agency” (Fuchs 32). Analysing social
action in this way indicates how little, in translation circumstances like
these, the bipolarity so often—and problematically—associated with the
translation process really holds. When translational actions need to cap-
ture universalist ‘third terms’ (such as Buddhism) as reference points, the
situation is evidently multipolar. Translation here is more than just a
bridge between two unrelated poles, more than a one-way transfer pro-
cess; instead, the concept is a complex sociological, relational one that
opens up translation to reciprocity and mutual transformation.
The ground for this far-reaching notion of translation as transfor-
mation was prepared by the postcolonial debate. Certainly, postcolonial
studies have largely focused on transforming Europe’s understanding of
itself as an ‘original,’ critically re-mapping and reorienting previously dom-
inant notions of centre and periphery, breaking open fixed identities and
attacking the principle of binarism in favour of hybrid mixing. Yet post-
colonialism’s attention to the patterns of power in all kinds of translation
relations (see Niranjana; Spivak; Tymoczko and Gentzler) has importantly
set out the terms for considering mutual translation and transformation as
a conflictual process. It is a viewpoint that oversteps traditional under-
standings of translation relations as relations of equivalence, breaking
apart the assumption of firmly drawn positions or spheres, let alone of
faithfulness to the ‘originals’ of tradition, ‘roots’ or identity. Instead, it is
the transgressive and transformative aspects of translation that, as Zyg-
munt Bauman argues, are the precondition for “reciprocal change”:
Cross-cultural translation is a continuous process which serves as much as consti-
tutes the cohabitation of people who can afford neither occupying the same space
nor mapping that common space in their own, separate ways. No act of transla-
tion leaves either of the partners intact. Both emerge from their encounter
changed, different at the end of the act from what they were at its beginning.
(Bauman xlviii)
Translation 31
3.3 Culture as Translation – Cross-Cultural Translation

The far-reaching approaches to translation as transformation incorporate
a dynamic that will ultimately trigger a translational reconceptualisation of
the notion of culture itself: “culture as translation” (see Bhabha). Cultures
are not unified givens that, like objects, could be transferred and translat-
ed; they are constituted only through multifarious overlaps and transfer-
ences, by histories of entanglement under the unequal power conditions
of world society. Countering tendencies to standardise, to affirm identities
and to essentialise, a translation perspective can bring to light specific
structures of difference: heterogeneous discursive spaces within a society,
internal counter-discourses, right up to the discursive forms of acts of re-
sistance. Drawing on this concept of a ‘translational’ culture, Judith Butler
makes the category of translation a transnational key category of cosmo-
politanism, in which the constitution of a world culture is an unending
process of cross-cultural translation (see Butler 49–50).
However, perhaps the formula of a “translational transnationalism”
(Apter, “On Translation” 5) should not be too hastily adopted as a way of
making global language and translation policy and practices the gateway to
enlightened cosmopolitanism. A ‘translational turn’ might, rather, start
from the confrontation with concrete issues and work towards a consider-
ation of the historical, social and political conditions that could allow
cross-cultural translation even to take place. Several pointers in this direc-
tion should be mentioned. Firstly, Bhabha’s links between the transna-
tional and the translational can be taken quite literally in this case. They go
beyond mere wordplay to indicate a task for transnational cultural studies
awaiting further elaboration: “Any transnational cultural study must ‘trans-
late,’ each time locally and specifically, what decentres and subverts this
transnational globality, so that it does not become enthralled by the new
global technologies of ideological transmission and cultural consumption”
(Bhabha 241).
Secondly, the translation category can encourage us to spell out not
only ‘culture’ and ‘cultural studies,’ but also ‘globalisation,’ in a translation-
al sense. Thus, Michael Cronin’s “globalization as translation” (Cronin,
Translation and Globalization 34) refers to the decentring of global processes
as well as an agent-oriented view of globalisation (see also Papastergiadis,
“Cultural Translation”). Translation allows the citizens of a global civil
society to achieve a “bottom-up localization” (Cronin, Translation and Iden-
tity 28) and thus advance the active formation of relationships and net-
works. But thirdly, the study of global translation processes also requires
careful reflection on the historical dimension. Such work calls for a rein-
terpretation of the transition of non-European nations (such as India) to
capitalism and distinctive forms of multiple modernities: no longer as the

result of linear processes of universalisation, but as the result of historical
differences and translational ruptures.
4. Epistemological Dimensions of a ‘Translational Turn’

and Their Global Implications
4.1 Displacement
“Translation is the agency of difference” (Haverkamp 7)—but a statement
like this requires specification. Nor can that specification remain only epis-
temological, countering holistic approaches and the supposed purity of
the concepts of culture, identity, tradition, religion and so on. It is impera-
tive to provide historical detail when analysing processes of cultural trans-
lation; Walter Mignolo and Freya Schiwy call this the necessity of
“theorizing translation across the colonial difference” (Mignolo and
Schiwy 4). Crucial in a historical approach is the attempt to rethink the
new epistemological and methodological orientation with a fresh emphasis
on global relations and the global regime of translation.
Global relations, with their displacements and multiple cultural affilia-
tions, insist on a new view of the translation concept that is political and
sensitive to power—and thus enhances the study of culture with a political
dimension. In place of the popular notion of translating as bridge-
building, it might therefore be more stimulating and realistic to focus on
the fractures and disparities in the translation dynamic. After all, the in-
between situations within translation relations are closely linked to the
interstitial existences arising from global migration, exile and diaspora. As
early as 1923, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” dis-
placed the original by relocating its historical survival to the transforma-
tive work of the translation. Benjamin’s emphasis on the productive force
of translational discontinuity—as opposed to translation as the reproduc-
tion of meaning and the representation of the original—finds special
relevance today in its encouragement to retranslate in the wake of post-
colonial rewritings of history. Recently, initial attempts have been made to
consider the process of migration, too, in the light of translation (see Pa-
pastergiadis, Turbulence of Migration; Wolf and Vorderobermeier).
A translational view of migration is still at a very early stage, but it
promises to benefit from the analytical capacities attributed to translation.
They shed new light on the translational character of cultural phenomena
in general: their non-holistic structure, their hybridity and multiplicity. In
this regard, our understanding of translation has now developed to include
Translation 33
important processes of displacement and alienation, of distinction and

mediation. The path has, at least, been cleared for new methodological
approaches to the ‘interstitial spaces’ so celebrated by the humanities, by
examining them as translational spaces: as spaces where relationships, sit-
uations, identities and interactions are shaped through concrete processes
of cultural translation. Geographically relevant relationships between
translation studies and urban studies emerge from this, as can be seen in,
for example, translation scholar Sherry Simon’s investigation of the con-
tact zones, language communities and many-language migrants of the di-
vided city of Montreal (see Simon).
But beyond this, ‘in-between spaces’ unfold their greatest potential in
an epistemological and analytical respect: translation-oriented lines of ap-
proach encourage the search for concepts that cut across binary pairs and
break open formulaic clusters. For example, a translational view of ‘inter-
culturality’ makes plausible the concept’s constitution out of individual
translation steps, thus giving new visibility to easily forgotten elements like
understanding, mediating, misunderstanding, resistances and so on. This
kind of translational approach makes complexity more transparent and
easier to handle—useful not least in dissecting master narratives and syn-
thesising terms, like modernisation, identity, society or culture, that can be
disassembled when examined in terms of translation processes (even at
the risk that a translational fragmentation and blurring like this might yet
again be a European or Western strategy).
4.2 From Universalisation to Cross-Categorical Translation

Will the concept of translation, then, succeed in transforming universalis-
ing European theories, concepts and categories themselves? Or are these
still necessary in order, as Boris Buden argues, to open up a “new univer-
salist perspective” in the face of the “particularisms” (Buden 17) prolifer-
ating worldwide? To be sure, alongside the search for a “universal basis
for communication,” the search “for the specific cultural origin of the
self” (Shimada 260) remains very much present. It is this dilemma which
opens up a promising if contested field for translation issues. One-sided
claims to universalisation premised on Eurocentric categories are certainly
being called more and more vehemently into question, especially from
outside Europe. Under particular fire is the European translation privilege
and its long tradition of translating other cultures and languages exclusive-
ly into the European context. In the future, current trends to reverse that
line of vision are likely to become increasingly important in critical reflec-
tions on translation. This will mean that the west will be increasingly sub-
jected to—and will increasingly subject itself to—translation processes
from other directions and with a view to other (Asian and African) locali-
sations and translation traditions (see the articles in Hermans; Hung and
Wakabayashi). This turnaround of the translation perspective will show
how “translation processes genuinely play a fundamental role in the ways
all non-European cultures see themselves” (Shimada 261).
It is becoming ever more dubious to assert global communication and
to only ground this communication in universalisations that remain all too
firmly in Western hands. The assumption of global distribution on the
basis of universalising transfers is, at least, no longer uncontested. It is
beginning to be filtered through a close scrutiny of global, reciprocal
translation processes. This move is supported above all by studies that try
to identify points of articulation for the mutuality of translation, like the
shared effort to find ‘third idioms’ (with reference points like religion, as
discussed by Fuchs, or human rights as in Tsing). Such approaches cannot
survive without the impetus for a reconceptualisation of translation com-
ing from outside Europe—at present, especially strongly from Asia. Non-
Western conceptions of translation are being formulated with a critique of
Eurocentrism informing the emphasis on reciprocal translation and theo-
retical exchange (see Hung and Wakabayashi; Ning; Ning and Yifeng).
In this respect, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work aims at ‘displacing’ the
question of translation. It shows just how closely epistemological and
global problematics interlock with issues of cultural and translation policy,
demonstrating how the translation perspective has to be developed from
the divergent cultural categorisations in different life-worlds. His influen-
tial book Provincializing Europe proposed that we consider translation not
only “cross-culturally” but also “cross-categorically” (Chakrabarty, Provin-
cializing Europe 83), thereby explicitly challenging Eurocentric, universal
points of comparative reference and in turn opening the door to non-
European categories of investigation. For example, it must be possible to
translate the Hindi term pani into the English term ‘water’ without having
to pass through the pre-given category in the Western knowledge system,
H2O (see ibid.). For Chakrabarty, only a comparison that neither resorts
over-hastily to general terms of mediation nor leaves the tertium compara-
tionis unreflected can help create a shared plane of mutual cultural transla-
tion.
Chakrabarty shows how “cross-categorial translation” demands a his-
toricised and contextualised approach to universalising investigative cate-
gories such as democracy, human dignity or equality. He argues that a
political historiography in non-European countries like India and under
postcolonial conditions is possible only through a process of translating
European key categories of modernity—translating here in the sense of
‘translation-as-displacement.’ Chakrabarty presents the example of the
Translation 35
whole “series of displacements of the original European term ‘the prole-

tariat’” in India—towards “subalterns,” “masses,” “peasants,” even Hardt
and Negri’s concept of “multitude” (Chakrabarty, “Subaltern History”
101). J. Devika’s study of “translating feminist concepts largely produced
in first-world contexts into the local language” (Devika 183) in 1980s Ker-
ala State, India, is another innovative investigation of this kind. Her work
underlines the “instability of translation” in the process of a “specific
shaping of modernities in colonies and postcolonies” (ibid. 185), especially
through a “state of being ‘in translation’ […] beyond the mere logic of the
text” (ibid. 193). Both examples show that translation as a differential
concept must be thoroughly historicised.
The importance of this kind of approach for the development of
translation as a key category or even model for the study of culture be-
comes clear especially when we undertake cultural comparison. In a wider
context, we can use the perspective of concrete translation processes to
examine issues like a global, transnational historiography that takes into
account “entangled histories” (see Randeria). Its relevance is most striking,
however, in terms of its re-evaluation of universal concepts in transcultur-
al traffic. Because there are no homogeneous spaces of reference in the
global sphere, it is essential to attend carefully to the culturally specific
settings, conditions, deep structures and translational perspectives at work
in the study of culture, including those of our own research. Which con-
cepts are we working from? How far can we still consider research catego-
ries like modernisation, development, capitalism, labour, feminism and so
on to be universally valid? What kinds of translation processes are neces-
sary to both open up such analytical terms transculturally and find func-
tional equivalents for them in the spheres of action and conceptual
systems of non-European societies?
5. Humanities and Studies of Culture as “Translation Studies”
5.1 Translation Within Disciplines

Before the term “cross-cultural translation” can justifiably be used, then,
new reflection on the problem of “cross-categorical translation” is neces-
sary—and this seems to be one of the greatest challenges for the trans-
lational reorientation currently permeating the various disciplines. Its ur-
gency would be increased if the humanities as a whole were to become a
globally open translation studies. One example is the energetic debate
within comparative literature on restructuring the entire subject. There,
the model of translation expands the object of comparative literature’s
attention into political contexts and examines it from the vantage point of
“translation zones” (Apter, Translation Zone 5), showing how “philology is
linked to globalization, to Guantánamo Bay, to war and peace, to the In-
ternet” (ibid. 11). Comparatist analyses of cross-cultural texts, language
wars, linguistic creolisation and multilingual situations are already making
significant contributions of this kind (see ibid.).
In the case of an emerging translational migration studies, in contrast,
more detailed work is needed to identify what it might mean to redefine
migration using the concept of translation and self-translation as a contin-
uing process of transformation: “In an age of global migration we also
need new social theories of flow and resistance and cultural theories of
difference and translation” (Papastergiadis, Turbulence of Migration 20). On
the level of sociological translational analysis of intracultural social prob-
lems, too, initial foundations have been laid that stake a claim to cultural
theories of translation for the analysis of the integrational tasks of modern
societies. Indeed, those tasks might well be characterised as relations of
translation; at any rate, they could make good use of translation processes
in the search for strategies to regulate conflict or further integration (see
Renn; Renn, Straub, and Shimada).
Finally, the discipline of history, increasingly transnational in its orien-
tation, has recently begun to rediscover translation. Translation is under-
stood here as a specific historical process, associated with colonialism and
decolonisation, missionary history and concept transfer (see Howland;
Rafael; Richter 13). Historians are increasingly looking for creative rein-
terpretations of basic political concepts like liberty, democracy and human
rights, for challenges to develop new historical and political terms in place
of those proposed by the West (see Liu, Translingual Practice; Sakai, Transla-
tion and Subjectivity), and finally for practices of explicit non-equivalence. A
few attempts have been made—for example in religious studies—to use
the concept of cultural translation as an “analytical tool for image trans-
missions and religious conversions in general” (Bräunlein 29), necessitat-
ing increased attention to translations of images. Interpreting religious
transfers from this translation perspective reveals that transformation, re-
interpretation and active appropriation are mediated across long distances
by means of a visual and performative practice of ‘image acts.’ This is a
standpoint particularly suited to driving the model of translation in a di-
rection that has so far been largely ignored, one importantly addressed by
Birgit Mersmann in terms of a “cultural visual studies as translation re-
search” (Mersmann, “Bildkulturwissenschaft” 107). As Mersmann com-
plains, “visual cultural translation is still under-represented” in translation
theory and the study of culture (Mersmann, “(Fern-)Verkehr der Bilder”
158). Visual translation has a particular explosive force arising from the
Translation 37
all-encompassing transcultural worlds of media and images in which we

come face to face with cultural differences and opposing visual cultures,
even visual taboos (an example being the scandalous photographs from
Abu Ghraib).
5.2 Translation Between Disciplines

I have touched on just a few examples to indicate the large scale on which
the concept of translation is currently pervading the various disciplines
involved in the study of culture. A translational approach can be used to
mine disciplinary links and overlaps themselves for possible transfor-
mations of subjects and their conceptual systems, since “when concepts
enter different genres they do not remain intact” (Beer 186). In the emerg-
ing knowledge society, translation is more than just a medium of cultural
contact or a procedure for intercultural encounter. It can also become a
model for disciplinary linking where the individual disciplines make them-
selves as susceptible as possible to connections to other areas of knowl-
edge and explore their ‘contact zones’ (see also Bachmann-Medick,
“Übersetzung im Spannungsfeld” 286–90). In contrast to the ‘smoother’
category of interdisciplinarity, the translation category has the advantage
of explicitly addressing the differences, tensions and antagonisms between
disciplines or schools of thought. Increased attention to such conflicted
contact zones could be particularly rewarding for a translation and thus
transformation of scientific concepts through their reformulation in other
contexts, conceptual systems and genres. A fascinating example of this is
the current debate between neuroscience and the humanities over free
will.
Another surplus of the translation category might be to harness its
characteristic self-reflexivity to help consider our own research in the
analysis of culture as itself a task of translation: humanities as a kind of
‘translation studies.’ On the one hand, this draws attention to the internal
structure of knowledge acquisition in research on culture: pluralised rela-
tions and phenomena arise precisely through the disruption of concepts of
wholeness and unity, by indicating the multiple strata—and contradic-
tions—that each translation process inevitably accretes. It is important
here that the work of cultural research should not be centralist but should
begin with the investigation of margins and interstices (between disci-
plines or between cultural phenomena). Contact zones between the self
and the other, and therefore border spaces and overlaps, must be explored
as spaces of translation. In terms of the theoretical landscape, this is an
appeal to translation epitomised in what we have called ‘turns’ (see Bach-
mann-Medick, Cultural Turns 384–89).
5.3 Translation as a Model for the Transnational Study of Culture

From this vantage point, a further dimension of translation for the hu-
manities and the study of culture becomes visible: the possibility or neces-
sity of translating not only between culturally different concepts, but
between different, locally specific knowledge and research cultures within
the study of culture itself. Even within Europe, tunnel vision still all too
often restricts the view to Anglo-American approaches alone. What other
research approaches are being ‘lost in translation’? This translation task
becomes even more relevant beyond Europe—an example would be Latin
American cultural studies, only very recently coming to international at-
tention after its previous marginalisation. Here, “cross-categorical transla-
tion” can help to broaden awareness in a way that will draw stronger
contours for a critical globalisation of the humanities in the future.
If the study of culture is to be not only globalised but transformed,
starting from what are from the European viewpoint its ‘margins,’ it will,
in Stuart Hall’s view, have to make use of translation processes: “Cultural
studies today is not only about globalization: it is being ‘globalized’—a
very uneven and contradictory process […]. What interests me about this
is that, everywhere, cultural studies is going through this process of re-
translation” (Hall and Chen 393). A full decade ago, then, Stuart Hall was
already insisting on the need for European cultural studies not only to
translate itself into the processes of internationalisation and modernisa-
tion, but also to make itself translatable for Asian and African cultural
studies. Importantly, Hall decouples translation once and for all from a
European ‘original’:
[T]ranslation [is] a continuous process of re-articulation and re-contextualization,
without any notion of a primary origin. So I am not using it in the sense that cul-
tural studies was ‘really’ a fully-formed western project and is now taken up else-
where. I mean that whenever it enters a new cultural space, the terms change.
(Ibid. 393)
For this as-yet unfulfilled project for the humanities in translation and as
translation studies, we must intensify the search for methods and research
concepts that do not remain restricted to Western knowledge traditions,
but that arise in the course of a “global conversation” (Jacob 112). In this
context, ‘translation’ could become a stimulating model for a transnational
study of culture, reaching beyond ‘travelling concepts.’ Such a model of
translation would postulate not only a global frame of ‘travelling’ that con-
siders the applicability or transformation of concepts, but also a frame of
‘displacement,’ of ruptures, frictions, power asymmetries, and even un-
translatabilities (see Bachmann-Medick, “Transnationale Kulturwissen-
schaften”). The critical points that Naoki Sakai sets up in his work go
Translation 39
straight to the core of this set of issues. Sakai’s main object of criticism is
an overly harmonious notion of global conversation, and of translation as
communication between national languages, against which he sets the dis-
continuity of translation processes. He elaborates the epistemological and
political conditions under which the humanities and the study of culture
might operate as critical translation studies: namely, by trying to compre-
hend and overcome the global system of translation as a regime of “na-
tional monolingualism,” as a modern schema of “co-figuration” of
national languages (in the sense of countable units) by means of which
boundaries—and with them, exclusions—are brought about (see Sakai,
“How Do We Count?”).
In this system, translation as a critical conceptual perspective has an
absolutely strategic function. Sakai and Solomon have elsewhere shown by
example what humanities as ‘translation studies’ can also mean: “compara-
tive cultural theory that is attentive to global traces in the theoretical
knowledge produced in specific locations” (Sakai and Solomon v). Their
point is far from being that cultural studies, like ‘travelling theories,’
should spread hegemonically from the USA across the whole world. Ra-
ther, the study of culture needs to face up to the simultaneous production
of knowledge and theory “in disparate sites”—and undertake to publish it
multilingually: perhaps in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean simulta-
neously, as the multilingual series Traces does (see Sakai and Solomon).
Theory is, of course, no longer at home only in the West. A project like
Traces, with its “dislocation of the West” (ibid. 18), could be seen as a fit-
ting complement to Chakrabarty’s historical project of “provincializing
Europe.” The convergence suggests that the ‘translational turn’ in the
study of culture finds its greatest scope at those points where disciplines
make themselves pluralised and translatable within an emerging global
knowledge society—against the grain of a “unilateral regime of transla-
tion.”
However, in individual cases we must ask very carefully what insights
are really gained, what empirical research is furthered by working with the
category of translation, and whether we might not merely be witnessing
the start of a new metaphor’s triumphal march. One thing, though, is al-
ready clear: the (transnational) study of culture can profit a lot from a
concrete and critical sensitivity to cultural translation processes in their
political dimensions and underlying structures: their implicit strategies,
their claims to power and hegemony, their manipulations and acts of vio-
lence, as well as the opportunities for intervention that they offer. ‘Trans-
lation’ is emerging more and more as “a matter of war and peace” (Apter,
Translation Zone 3). Ultimately, the move from what is still an ivory tower
of theory and research to the hard ground of social and political relation-
ships in “global communication across cultures” would, in Mary Snell-

Hornby’s words, be “a truly revolutionary ‘translation turn’” (Snell-
Hornby, “What’s in a Turn?” 50).
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Cultural Transfer
ANNA VERONIKA WENDLAND
I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities,

allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up
against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much
an identity as the normal condition of life.
(Judt n.pag.)
1. Introduction
Travelling concepts as a model for the study of culture have been envi-
sioned first and foremost as concepts travelling between disciplines. How-
ever, before knowledge or concepts are transferred between disciplines,
they have often been travelling through space, time and between lan-
guages. A highly influential modern concept in Cultural Studies, hybridity,
travelled not only between disciplines and epochs (from nineteenth-
century biology and genetics to twentieth- and twenty-first-century hu-
manities), but moved back and forth cross-continentally and between dif-
ferent languages: from British evolutionary theory and German genetics to
the Russian philosopher and literary theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin, whose
writings were re-discovered in the 1970s in France and then in North
American postcolonial studies. Often such concepts undergo major trans-
formations when travelling, and scholars from different backgrounds use
them in transdisciplinary dialogue, but not necessarily to designate the
same thing (see Bal 22–34).
Other travelling concepts are of relevance not only to the humanities,
but have profoundly shaped human history, as shown by an Eurasian ex-
ample, namely the emergence and spread of Christianity from a marginal
middle-Eastern Judaic sect into a world religion after numerous changes in
tradition, bearer groups and sacral languages.
These are the very points that cultural transfer theory and study is in-
terested in. It focuses on the transformation of culture through travelling
ideas, travelling objects and—as ideas and objects need bodies, bearers
46 Anna Veronika Wendland
and incentives to carry them, or to make them move—on travelling hu-

man beings, media and politico-economic structures which provide the
framework for these transfers. Moreover, cultural transfer study addresses
the contingencies and the discontinuous modes of transfer. It takes into
consideration ‘failed’ transfers as well as disregarded ones. Research into
cultural transfer tries to uncover tracks and avoids a linear understanding
of movement in time, space and minds. Finally, researchers of cultural
transfer analyse success-failure continua and examine typologies of trans-
fers in their respective historical contexts.
All these forms of travel can be envisioned as unfolding between cul-
tures, i.e. between different systems of meaning-making, which are de-
fined by specific semiotic sets, values and rules, and—of increasing
importance since the eighteenth century—by political borderlines. Yuri
Lotman has described this interaction of ‘semiospheres’ as driven by hu-
man individuals, the bearers of intellect, who need encounters in order to
process information, generate new information, store it in their memories,
and communicate it to other individuals (see Lotman 150–55). Thus, at
the core of cultural transfer is the meeting of semiospheres, seen as inter-
acting ‘reasoning systems,’ powered by human encounter, and this is why
travel, translation, and accumulation of external knowledge (e.g. the com-
mand of the other’s language) is central to cultural transfer.
The concept of culture underlying cultural transfer models is rather
pragmatic: it concedes that cultural differences exist, but places emphasis
on the fact that differences and borderlines are the result of human con-
structional work and are thus subject to constant change (see Osterham-
mel, “Kulturelle Grenzen” 115). Moreover, it assumes a basic capability to
interact as the constitutive element of every culture. Similar to theorists of
‘transculturality,’ it argues against the Herderian ‘spherical’ concept of cul-
ture, since this would imply cultural systems that are arranged around a
‘core’ (of semiotic sets, values and interpretations of the world outside),
and which are unable to interact and consequently ‘clash’ when confront-
ed with other civilisations (see Welsch).
On the contrary, cultural transfer theory presumes that civilisational
clash is actually the exception in human history, whereas exchange is the
norm. Even in the classical cases where extremely different civilisations
are entangled with each other—during the age of ‘discoveries’ and coloni-
al imperialism—there is an enormous continuum between the total annihi-
lation of cultures caused by the expansion of other cultures on the one
hand, and cultural adaptation and interference on the other. Already the
early ‘explorers’ were struck by the similarities between their own and for-
eign cultures, developing “transcultural hermeneutics” (Osterhammel,
“Kulturelle Grenzen” 102) and learning indigenous languages in order to
Cultural Transfer 47
describe the ‘Other,’ to rule over it or to convert it to Christianity (see

ibid. 101–02). It was precisely this experience of cultural interaction in the
colonial and postcolonial world—so to say, the early discussion on ‘glob-
alisation’ (see Engel and Middell)—that formed the groundwork for dis-
cussions on the historical role of cultural transfers avant la lettre since the
1970s. In the context of de-colonisation, of the emergence of new social
movements, of the communication revolution and increasing global chal-
lenges such as the energy question, the role of power and the media econ-
omy in transfer processes came to the fore. Was the global spread of
Western food and drink, or of North American TV and pop culture a
quasi-osmotic process, or was it to be declared a new form of imperialist
expansion? Critical theorists stressed the role of Western global military
presence, corporate agency, and the US mass media in this process (see
Boyd-Barrett; Said; Schiller; for a concise overview on the discussion on
US cultural imperialism see Gienow-Hecht). On the other hand, the ‘cul-
tural imperialist’ approach could neither explain why Western cultural ex-
ports proved, paradoxically, to be successful in many countries in spite of
unpopular Western policies, nor why cultural ‘imports’ were interpreted
and used in new ways by active local audiences and communities (see
White).
Cultural transfer theory aims to explain these ambivalences of cultural
confrontation and transfer. It emphasises that objects, ideas, forms of be-
lief, works of art and people travelling between cultures are able to trans-
gress or undermine or ignore political, cultural and epochal boundaries.
Moreover, cultural transfer theory assumes that once transferred, cultural
practices and objects—such as fast food or music culture—must not nec-
essarily become indicators of the direct exertion of power or imperialist
domination. Finally, it holds that transferred objects or practices become
part of their new contexts and are often used in different ways than in the
former context.
However, transfers as such should not be seen as necessarily contra-
dictory to boundaries. They may lead to the redefinition of boundaries or
the construction of new ones. Anti-Semitism, for example, was and is a
tremendously successful instance of ideological transfer in the modernis-
ing world, which spread from Western to Eastern Europe and subse-
quently to the Islamic world, being endowed with local moments at every
stage of its travel (see Benz; Ley; Tibi).
2. Precursor Concepts and Concept History
‘Transfer’ is a travelling concept in itself, which emerged in the specific

historical, political and economic framework of the post-Cold War global
system. ‘Transfer’ is a term which originally migrated from the economic
sphere, especially from international trade and more recently from in-
vestment and funds banking, to the humanities, where it replaced older
terminology such as ‘cultural exchange’/Kulturaustausch. Another meaning
of transfer is knowledge transfer from the theoretical to the applied sci-
ences, and further into the corporate economy and related production
chains, where knowledge transforms into patents and, subsequently, into
new products. Here the term already points to a central prerequisite in
cultural transfer research: the assumption that the transferred object is not
left untouched but undergoes transformation during the transfer process.
Moreover, ‘transfer’ has recently made a career in European integration
policies, referring to the transfer of legislative and executive power from
national to transnational bodies (such as the EU Parliament and Commis-
sion) and thus taking the place of precursor terms such as translatio. This
latter notion denoted the transfer of power and political legitimacy, the
most famous example being the translatio imperii, a medieval eschatological
theory on the succession of global empires and the role of the Roman-
German Empire in salvation history. Other historical meanings refer to
the transfer of bishoprics and of saints’ relics bearing symbolic and sacral
capital, which could easily be transformed into economic capital when
cities or monasteries developed into pilgrimage centres. Translatio, which
was closely connected to a specific text genre containing the narrations of
wonders occurring while the saints’ bodies were transferred, was of central
significance for colonising and baptising formerly pagan regions (see
Heinzelmann).
The early examples mentioned here—pilgrimage, colonisation and the
transfer of sacred objects—hint at the fact that cultural transfer is a histor-
ical, not a recent ‘modern’ or globalisation phenomenon. However, it is
no pure coincidence that in the first decade of the new millennium, an
increasing interest in research into transnational history (or histoire croisée or
entangled histories, see Werner and Zimmermann, “Vergleich,” De la com-
paraison) and cultural transfers went hand in hand with the increasing sig-
nificance of transnational institutions (such as the European Union) and
the development of a global trade and finance system that operates almost
entirely beyond national legislative control. Some cultural transfer phe-
nomena even refer directly to economic transfers in their terminology, e.g.
the Melanesian ‘cargo cults,’ a form of adaptation and integration of for-
eign objects into indigenous religious practice. These objects were goods
which had been shipped to Melanesia by European and American cargo

ships (see Jebens; Kaplan; Lindstrom; Steinbauer).
Consequently, cultural transfer is not an entirely new concept, but ra-
ther an integrative development of several precursor concepts which have
been discussed in different disciplinary contexts since the ‘first wave of
globalisation’ in the nineteenth century. As they are primarily interested in
the diachronic transformation of societies and the role of knowledge
transfer in this process, historians played an eminent role in the creation
of the concept. Thus the history of ideas (Ideengeschichte), which is often
identical to the history of the dissemination of ideas, and the history of
notions/concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), which is traditionally prominent in
Germany (see Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck), can be considered as pre-
cursor disciplines, although they are still active disciplines in the study of
cultural transfer. Furthermore, the history of international and intellectual
relationships ((Kultur-)Beziehungsgeschichte), which developed initially as the
history of bilateral relationships between nation states such as Germany
and France, can also be addressed as a precursor of transfer theories.
Comparative approaches in historiography and sociology play a major
role as the precursor or incentive concepts of transfer theories. The roots
of the discussions on comparison and the role of transfers date back to
the controversies of the late nineteenth century on the epistemic value of
cultural studies in history and on concepts of universal history, which
were fuelled by the writings of the Leipzig historian Karl Lamprecht
(1856–1915). His theories were heavily criticised in Germany but actively
received in France, where they later contributed to the formation of the
Annales school. Generally, the early discussions resulted in the beginning
of institutionalised exchanges of historians between French and German
universities and research groups, a development which was interrupted by
the Great War. Afterwards, debates on cultural transfer were led by
French historians and German sociologists and cultural historians on a
highly sophisticated methodological level. German interwar research on
cultural formations, however, increasingly tended towards ethnocentric
and eventually overtly racist conceptions of Volksgeschichte, which de-
scribed transfers as unidirectional relationships between hierarchical sets
of ethno-cultural entities. After World War II, historical comparison was
transferred into the new frameworks of social history which were predom-
inantly interested in contrastive comparison and less in inter-cultural
transfers (for a detailed description of European continental disciplinary
discourses since 1880, see Middell, “Kulturtransfer,” Das Leipziger Institut).
Since the 1980s, a debate has emerged between comparatists on
whether classical comparative and international relations methods centred
around—comparable—institutions and state structures would be able to
explain other fields that were of greatest relevance for the development of
nations (see Kaelble, Vergleich, “Debatte”). The critics argued that there
are plenty of similarities between states and societies which were suppos-
edly based upon the interaction of the entities being compared, and that
specific groups of people in intermediary roles (translators, scholars and
scientists, travelling specialists, labour migrants, editors, industrialists)
played a key role in this communication. This interaction was often
framed by common membership in scientific academies, institutionalised
communication (e.g. at international academic congresses) and common
religious or spiritual interests (e.g. freemasonry), or even marital relations.
Beyond intermediary groups, a second factor came to the fore in cul-
tural transfer studies. Instead of focusing upon central governments or the
big cities (often capitals) of the respective countries, polyglot borderland
regions became central to transfer research, since they are intermediary
zones which catalyse trans-border communication. These problems were
mainly discussed using examples from Western European or Atlantic his-
tory, e.g. French-German cultural contacts, the history of the humanities
and of university systems in France, Germany and the US.
In this context, Michel Espagne and Michael Werner coined the no-
tion of cultural transfer first in its French version (transferts culturels) and
appealed for simultaneous research into neighbouring societies and their
peripheral zones (métissage) (see Espagne). Zones of métissage can be de-
fined either as virtual spaces of intellectual encounter or as the above
mentioned borderland regions connected to specific border-transcending
practices such as trading or smuggling, or forms of bilateral borderland
administration and control. Methodologically, the transferists argued for a
comparative perspective on cultures and social entities enriched by a
component focusing on interaction (see Osterhammel, “Geschichtswis-
senschaft” 301). In doing so, researchers could avoid misinterpretations of
a given tradition or development as ‘autochthonous.’ Not temporal con-
tacts of “parallel” cultures, but “the entanglement of interacting histories”
should be at the centre of consideration and research (see Middell, “Kul-
turtransfer” 18–19). Related terms in different languages have since been
proposed, such as Verflechtungsgeschichte, histoire croisée or ‘shared history’ (see
Werner and Zimmermann, De la comparaison). Apart from the Franco-
German research initiative, there was an inspiring tradition of comparative
studies in the humanities of the Warsaw Pact countries, especially in GDR
Slavic studies, which developed concepts of transnational Slavic cultural
relations. One of the most influential comparative models on socio-
political developments in Eastern Central Europe was presented by the
Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, who researched the national movements
of ‘small’ nations, their social elites and the shift to mass politics in the
nineteenth century from a trans-European perspective. Such research was

the incentive for later considerations on the relations between the activists
of different national movements and the forums for communication (lit-
erary and scientific societies in big cities, imperial societies, parliamentary
bodies, imperial universities) (see Hroch; Wendland, “Randgeschichten”).
Thus, Eastern Central and Eastern Europe and their trans- and pre-
national imperial experience have ultimately become a prominent area of
research into European cultural transfers. However, though historians are
very prominent in the study of cultural transfer, the concept is likewise
valuable for sociology and cultural anthropology; conversely, historians
interested in cultural transfers take inspiration from ethnological and soci-
ological material.
3. Definition and Typology of Cultural Transfer
As has been highlighted already, the study of cultural transfer means stud-
ying not only concepts and objects on their journey through real and se-
miotic space, but also addressing migrating people who take their skills
and values from one cultural system to another. But it is not necessarily
migration which brings about cultural transfer—another, no less efficient
way to spread knowledge, concepts or values is printing, distributing and
reading books. Thus, one of the most general definitions of cultural trans-
fer defines it as a movement of people, objects and semiotic (textual or
visual) systems in space through migration, encounter and text reception
(see Middell, “Kulturtransfer” 20–21). The first notion focuses on the
‘sending’ culture and the intermediaries, whereas the latter refer to the
moment of contact and transfer media (as printed books, works of art or
digitised information in the Web 2.0 era) and to adaptation through the
‘receiving’ part. However, a simplistic ‘sender-receiver’ model, or naïve
producer-trader-consumer concepts (object or idea A goes from B to C
and is ‘consumed’ there) has been already modified by differentiated trans-
fer models which avoid a linear understanding of transfer from an active
to a passive participant. Such models consider the readiness to adapt on
the ‘receiver’s’ side as the controlling moment in transfer processes,
whereas the initiative to ‘send’ on the part of the ‘sender’ is less decisive.
Hence, it is the inversion of perspective (from sending to receiving cul-
ture) that makes cultural transfer a new approach in the comparative study
of culture.
Since the 1970s, there have been many attempts to classify modes and
ranges of cultural transfer or, as some authors still do not use the vocabu-
lary of transfer, cultural encounter (Kulturbegegnung) and exchange. Typolo-
gies are based on parameters such as the sustainability of transfers, the

degree of constraint or violence in the transfer processes, the level of re-
flection on transfers within the societies involved and evidence of trans-
formational events. Urs Bitterli developed a typology which is based on a
rather static concept of culture and refers mainly to the encounter of Eu-
ropeans with non-Europeans. Nevertheless it is helpful to systemise trans-
fer processes on a wide scale between conflict and peaceful acculturation
(see Bitterli). Bitterli distinguishes four basic types of encounter on the
basis of two binary criteria, i.e. violence/non-violence and temporal con-
tact/enduring or regular contact:
1. Kulturberührung (non-violent, temporal and punctual contacts),
2. Kulturzusammenstoß (conflict and use of violence, often following
stage 1, including genocidal violence carried out by European in-
vaders),
3. Kulturbeziehung (mutual, regular and institutionalised relations on
the basis of a balance of military power),
4. Kulturverflechtung (entanglement/acculturation).
Jürgen Osterhammel has proposed modifying Bitterli’s taxonomy on the
grounds of a more recent understanding of cultural boundaries as con-
structed and flexible. Moreover, he argues that considerations of cultural
encounters should include cultural boundaries which are closer to or part
of Europe, i.e. internal peripheries (e.g. the Celtic lands in Britain and
France) or the Eastern European frontier where agrarian societies were
confronting nomadic cultures (see Osterhammel, “Kulturelle Grenzen”
101–38).
In early and medieval history, where evidence from written sources is
scarce and research on culture largely has to rely on material culture, i.e.
archaeological findings, cultural transfer is defined pragmatically on the
basis of these findings, that is on travelling objects or stylistic and tech-
nical influences that are mirrored in objects or building techniques. Ar-
chaeologists and medieval historians describe such early forms of cultural
transfer on the basis of impact and sustainability criteria, referring to con-
cepts which are adaptable to early and modern transfers alike, like Peter
Burke’s triad of ‘reception,’ ‘appropriation’ and ‘accommodation.’ ‘Recep-
tion’ means adaptation without transformation. ‘Appropriation’ describes
the active transformation of style or technique by the receiving culture,
e.g. in art or building styles. ‘Accommodation’ refers to transformation
processes in ‘sending’ communities following contact with ‘receiving’ cul-
tures, which can be exemplified in modifications of attitude, e.g. in
German chronicles about Slavs (see Burke, Kultureller Austausch; for cen-
tral concepts in cultural exchange see also Burke, History 70–73, 82–88,
104–08; Klammt and Rossignol). Other authors identify ‘primary’ and

‘secondary’ forms of adaptation (see Kleingärtner 11–25; Muhs, Paul-
mann, and Steinmetz 18ff.), the former meaning the use of objects re-
ceived from trans-European traders, e.g. as objects of prestige, or for
exchange in the function as means of payment. Evidence for this comes
from the ancient Scandinavian trade routes between the Baltic region and
the Black Sea via western Russia and the Ukrainian Dnieper basin, or
from Arab trade on the Hispanic peninsula and in Eastern Europe. ‘Sec-
ondary adaptation’ means the integration of style, knowledge, or technique
into homemade production or cultural practices. People could learn from
imported objects, trying to copy them with their own tools; but even more
influential was the knowledge transferred through direct contacts between
elite representatives, craftsmen, artists, administrative and legal specialists,
clerics (who often served as judicial specialists) or municipal bodies. Such
exchange was especially intensive in borderland situations or along trade
routes and river systems or within ecclesiastical networks. Such transfers
included the gradual transformation of the imported knowledge. An ex-
ample is the adaptation of Carolingian building techniques in the Slavic
regions of present northern Germany or the transfer of municipal law
from different German regions throughout Eastern Central and Eastern
Europe, the ‘Magdeburg’ law being the most prominent one.
A more recent example for knowledge transfer through encounter is
the early modern media revolution (book-printing technique and reforma-
tory mass publishing) since the end of the fifteenth century, which was
closely connected to the transfer lines of the Rhine and Elbe valleys, the
imperial viae regiae, and the Hanseatic cities on the Baltic shore (see maps
in Klammt and Rossignol 5–10; Kleingärtner 11–26; Magocsi). Trade
routes and markets as catalysts of object transfers—and object transfor-
mations—of course play a decisive role in later epochs as well, as shown
by the example of colonial trade in the nineteenth century, which pro-
duced entirely new trends in food and dress and transformed foreign
goods into domestic goods. Thus, ‘Russian’ or ‘English’ tea referred to a
product which was of course neither Russian nor English, but a result of
new mass consumption practices following the opening of East Asian
markets and resources to imperial traders (see Vries).
Other expanded models mainly refer to modern cultural transfers
since the eighteenth century and have been developed in the context of
German studies in France and French studies in Germany. They try to go
beyond the description of transfer lines of knowledge, style, technique,
law or ideology. They explain cultural transfer as a dynamic and complex
communication process, in which the receiving social entity decides when
and whether it is ready to receive a transfer, and what to do with it after-
wards, i.e. how to adapt it to its own sets of ideas, values or political or-
ders, or even how to disguise that there has been any transfer at all and
how to display what has been transferred as an indigenous ‘own’ entity
(see Middell, “Kulturtransfer” 25). Such a successful act of disguising of-
ten stands at the beginning of great ‘national’ traditions, as shown by the
systems of national Academies of Sciences throughout Europe, which
made use of French models, or the French university system after 1871
and the US Ivy League universities, which although modelled on leading
German institutions in the nineteenth century, were nevertheless displayed
and perceived as genuinely ‘French’ or ‘American’ solutions (see Digeon;
Espagne and Middell).
Another transfer story connected with disguised traditions is the tri-
umph of national ‘master’ narratives throughout Europe and subsequently
throughout the world. They all were conceived and perceived as original
and primordial narratives in their respective societies, but can be traced
back to “masters” (in the sense of ‘models’ rather than ‘maestros’) (see
Thijs) that were initially forged in France and Germany since the eigh-
teenth century and enriched by religious emplotments. They functioned in
roughly the same way, having in common a three-stage teleological narra-
tion (beginnings-decline-birth of nation/genesis-crucifixion-resurrection),
the antagonism between heroes and villains and the successful integration
(or neutralisation) of other factors such as class, religious confession and
gender (see Janowski; Lorenz; Wendland, “Russian Empire”). Moreover,
cultural transfers or—to use the contemporary term—‘influences’ became
an important argument in inventing or disguising the historical origins of
the native community, as shown by the controversies about the ‘Slavic’ or
‘Nordic/Viking/Scandinavian’ features of archeological findings in north-
eastern Germany, Poland, Russia and Ukraine in the age of nation-
building (see Emeliantseva, Malz and Ursprung; Rohrer).
The genesis of such narratives, however, was very transnational, or in-
ternational, because French concepts of the modern nation or German
Romantic concepts of linguistically defined ethno-cultural entities merged
with local traditional narratives following translation and text reception.
The nation’s conceptual antagonist, the Marxist concept of class and in-
ternationalism, migrated throughout the world in the wake of the national
concepts. Likewise, it was transformed within imperial frameworks, as
shown by the history of Austromarxism or Soviet socialism. Its xenopho-
bic Stalinist version was later declared to represent “Socialism in one
country,” which constitutes a classical example of a ‘disguised’ transfer
(see Deneckere and Welskopp 155–58).
Nevertheless, the advanced definition of cultural transfer would ex-
clude the above mentioned epochs and societies which diverge from the
Habermasian model of civil societies and enlightened public discourse.

This model applies almost exclusively to modern European societies (or
para-European societies in former settler colonies in the Americas or Aus-
tralia) since the Enlightenment, whereas other epochs or areas are in need
of other concepts. Here, the aforementioned typologies of cultural appro-
priation and accommodation may be more relevant, or concepts elaborat-
ed in the framework of postcolonial studies. Homi Bhabha’s notion of
‘hybridity’ plays an eminent role here, a concept which subsumes adapta-
tional processes in both postcolonial and metropolitan settings, colonised
and colonising societies. The concept helps us to understand why allegedly
‘sending’ communities are not left untouched by their interaction with
‘receiving’ ones. Subsequently, we can analyse local forms of Islam or
Christianity in African or Asian societies as well as the postmodern ac-
commodation of Western spirituality (e.g. the appropriation of Asian reli-
gious influences) as hybrid cultural forms. ‘Hybridity’ also describes the
emergence of postcolonial intellectuals and their texts, which use and
transform the linguistic and semiotic systems of the former ‘masters,’
shaping fictional worlds in a ‘Third Space’ (see Bhabha; Burke, History
104–10; do Mar Castro Varela and Dhawan; Huddart).
4. ‘Misunderstandings’ and ‘Failures’ in Cultural Transfer
Whereas the Saussurean model of linguistic communication shows that

language tends to redundant codes in order to avoid mistakes of transmis-
sion during the coding/transfer/decoding process, models of cultural
transfer function with a structural integration of ‘mistake-making.’ Cultur-
al ‘misunderstanding,’ ‘false reading,’ ‘mistaken reception’ are not relevant
to theories of cultural transfer, since adaptation processes and transfor-
mations of the concept itself, or inhibited transfers are legitimate elements
of the very transfer process itself, giving us valuable information about the
societies entangled with each other. Though difference between cultural
systems is crucial to cultural transfer—otherwise there would be neither
the need for transfers nor the instruments to discern them—there is no
such thing as a ‘failed’ cultural transfer. This would imply a hierarchy of
cultures, where the inferior part is not sufficiently developed to ‘success-
fully’ adapt foreign cultural elements, as was the explanation for ‘failed
transfers’ in earlier times. Serious cultural transfer research, however, asks
for the specific reasons for non-adaptation of a transfer in a specific his-
torical moment, or tries to discover hidden and discontinuous traditions
which were influential in former epochs but are presently declared as ‘not
ours.’
The notion of cultural ‘misunderstandings’ again leads from the

concept of dynamic mutual communication processes to the second core
concept of modern cultural transfer theories—the above mentioned ap-
propriation and therefore transformation of transferred objects as a cen-
tral characteristic of cultural transfer processes. Often, a transfer comes
into a given system as a foreign element, initiating an irritation or pertur-
bation, which is subsequently processed within the very system. Thus, the
appropriation of Western administrative techniques or educational con-
cepts in Russia has often been declared a false understanding of these
concepts by the autocratic and Orthodox Russians; an adequate considera-
tion leads to the conclusion that the Russian-style transformation of, e.g.,
the Prussian humanistic Gymnasium, and the subsequent display of it as
being genuinely Russian was the only way to introduce a new form of ed-
ucational organisation into the existing system (see Sinel).
Another aspect related to ‘failed’ transfers is the contingency of
transfer histories. Concepts may fail within one cultural context but are
transferred successfully into another—another epoch, or another com-
munication structure. This is the case when ideas wander between cultures
very slowly; some transfers being rejected or set back in one epoch, but
proving successful in a later one, e.g. Protestantism (or, more precisely,
Baptist and Pentecostal churches) in Latin America or in Eastern Europe
(see Stoll). Failure and success depend very closely on the cultural context
in which an idea is promoted. The reception of Lamprecht’s cultural and
global history has already been discussed in the paragraph on disciplinary
history. Another example of failed-at-home-but-successful-abroad is the
history of Krausismo in the Hispanic world, which transformed a philo-
sophical system entirely ignored in Germany into the leading liberal re-
form philosophy in Spanish-speaking countries (see Mateo; Ureña).
Apparently, it was the religious aspect in the works of Karl Christian
Friedrich Krause (1781–1832)—derogated as out of date in Germany—
which catalysed their transfer into the Catholic world.
In the light of these considerations, ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of transfers
are a matter of cultural and epochal perspective. Additionally, the transfer
model explains the transformation processes, which occur when ideas
wander between epochs or cultures, as preconditions for success. Krause
and Lamprecht proved to be unsuccessful in one cultural system and one
historical moment, but highly influential in another. The non-proliferation
of reformatory concepts in Poland was no failure, but a process ending up
at a dead end, because early modern Polish social structures differed from
north-western European ones, which boasted reformatory movements.
However, the existing influential players in Poland, predominantly the
Catholic Church, the landed gentry, and even Orthodox anti-Catholic
movements in the eastern borderlands, made successful use of reformato-

ry concepts in general education, native language preaching and printed
propaganda (see Schmidt).
5. Boundaries, Borderlands and Cultural Transfers
Cultural boundaries (Kulturgrenzen) and political boundaries are constitutive

for the analysis of transfer forms, since interaction (violent or non-violent)
between cultures is mainly evident and virulent in their contact zones, i.e.
on the boundaries, borderlands or frontiers. Based on a thorough review
of recent theory on boundary-making, forms of territorialisation and bor-
derland regimes, Jürgen Osterhammel introduces three types of such
boundaries. The first is the imperial ‘Barbarian’ frontier, which secures
imperial lands but has a broad external glacis with settlements of pacified
or acculturated Barbarian populations. The second is the linear territorial
border of modern nation states, which divides entities of similar structure
and which is defined by political agreements. At the same time, border-
lands and multi-ethnic peripheries are of significance for the interaction of
nation states or are envisioned as a threat to national integration. The
third type is the colonial frontier (Erschließungsgrenze), a constantly moving
zone where one civilisation (often agrarian) expands and colonises lands
that are perceived as ‘empty’ (see Osterhammel, “Kulturelle Grenzen”).
All these formations of borders, or boundaries, or “edges,” as Tony
Judt would have put it, catalysed specific cultural transfer processes that
shaped the specific cultural landscapes of Europe. Since the mid-
nineteenth century, these heterogeneous landscapes have experienced in-
creasing pressure from both the top-down and the bottom-up perspective,
exerted by standardising central authorities on the one hand, and mobilis-
ing national movements on the other. The Rhine valley, for example,
transformed from a ‘Barbarian’ frontier and a space of early Romanic-
Germanic encounter to one of the most intensively frequented zones of
trade, art style and knowledge transfer in Europe, whereas in the age of
nationalism, perceptions of the Rhine in Germany and France perceived it
as an endangered peripheral border zone and natural bulwark against for-
eign influences (see Febvre). From the mid-nineteenth century, the histor-
ical eastern borderlands of Poland—today’s western Ukraine, Belarus, and
parts of Lithuania—which constituted an ancient transitory zone between
Eastern and Western Christianity, eastern and western Slavic languages,
and different script systems (Latin and Cyrillic), were increasingly seen as a
threat to political integrity by the central authorities of Russia and Austria,
and subsequently of independent Poland (see Schenke; Wendland,
“Randgeschichten” 108–12). However, borderlands can generate not only

suspicion, but new cultural and even national identities, as examples from
Western and Eastern Europe prove. In Belgium, a west central European
borderland on the Roman-Germanic linguistic boundary, the historian
Henri Pirenne shaped the central narrative of his country as the market-
place and “crossroads of Europe” (Beyen and Majerus 296–98). In
Ukraine, which is situated on the ancient eastern European steppe frontier
zone ‘at the boundary of’ Christian civilisation, Orthodox agrarian and
Animist or Muslim nomad populations came into close contact. The fron-
tier experience later became a central component in concepts of Ukrainian
cultural identity “between East and West.”1
6. Migrants and Diasporas
Apart from the spatial factor, the borderland, another central factor in
cultural transfer is individual and collective agency, often resulting in the
transfer of objects, texts or institutions. This becomes evident from many
of the examples cited above. This human factor can be described through
a typology as well. Individuals as agents in cultural transfer processes often
are representatives of elites, e.g. the aristocratic elites intermarrying all
over Europe since the Middle Ages, clerics or specialists in the state ser-
vice of early modern states, especially in the fields of military engineering,
the navy and diplomacy. Scholars and scientists from Asia and Europe in
the US academy are modern examples of elite migration as triggers of
knowledge transfer or the creation of new knowledge. Below the elite stra-
tum, we find agrarian and urban settlers, e.g. peasants and townspeople
from different German lands in Poland and Russia. Confessional refugees
or deportees played an eminent role in early modern population and colo-
nisation politics, for example the Huguenots and Salzburg Protestants in
Prussia.
Another interesting collective agency is the mobile diaspora. A promi-
nent example is the history of European Jews and Armenians, who were
driven out from many parts of the continent but were attracted to other
regions due to royal privileges, as was the case in medieval Poland. Mobi-
lised diasporas specialised in professions which fulfilled complementary
functions within the surrounding societies, e.g. in international trade, fi-
nancing and administration. The Baltic Germans in Russia executed a sim-
1 The direct translation of ukraïna is ‘borderland.’ The word was initially used to denote the
frontier landscapes of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy (see Wendland, “Grenzgänge und
Grenzgänger”).
ilar role for Imperial Russia, dominating its diplomatic corps until the
post-1870 confrontation with unified Germany. Outside Europe, Hindus
and Chinese in the European colonies and their successor states in South
East Asia are prominent mobilised diasporas (see Armstrong). Many of
these intermediary groups have been thoroughly examined from the per-
spective of intrinsically ethnocentric narratives. Cultural transfer studies
are less interested in their history as part of a larger ethnic or cultural
group (see Conze and Boockmann) than in their ability to generate new
(often multiple) cultural identities, new information, social and economic
capital, and new cultural texts within their respective environments. Simi-
lar arguments could be made with regard to smaller wandering ‘expert’
groups such as Bohemian administrators in Austrian Galicia, or French
officers, lawyers, and officials all over Europe at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, especially in the German lands. Napoleonic France as
a model for institutional and legislative change for its neighbours in West-
ern and Central Europe has long been attracting the interest of cultural
transfer studies (see Burg). Often the middlemen and -women brought
not only toolboxes, institutions or new legislative concepts, but also dress
styles, language standards, or new religious practices which were partly
assimilated by the receiving communities, or at least by the respective
elites.
7. Cultural Transfer as a Meta-Concept in the Study of Culture
Above I have presented a rough overview of a constantly growing field of

theory and research, one which is gradually becoming institutionalised2
and is increasingly gaining interest and funding in the age of European
integration. Transcending the history and application of the concept itself,
it is primarily interesting whether cultural transfer can serve as a model for
transdisciplinary dialogue, i.e. “for conceptualizing the interfaces between
different approaches to the study of culture and allow for establishing
structured relationships between these,” as the editors asked in the con-
ceptual outline to this volume. Two aspects come to mind in this respect.
First, cultural transfer (rather than cultural exchange, which is a precursor
term based on trade-related metaphors which imply that the ‘traded’ ob-
ject remains unaffected) may be useful as a conceptual meta-structure with
regard to self-reflection and self-observation of the study of culture as an
2 A German example is the recently founded Global and European Studies Institute (GESI)
at Leipzig University and the ENIUGH, the European Network in Universal and Global
History.
emerging or already established discipline. Second, cultural transfer can be

defined as an over-arching methodological concept which operationalises
other guiding concepts in the study of culture under a specific perspective,
regardless of which discipline is embarking upon this project.
Beginning with the latter, cultural transfer analysis shows what makes
concepts travel (or inhibits them from travelling) between disciplines and
cultures of knowledge at a specific moment in time. It can help to define
space, transfer vectors and agencies entangled in this process. Thus, cen-
tral concepts in the study of culture such as ‘travelling concepts,’ ‘transla-
tion,’ and ‘travelling narratives’ can be conceptualised as elements of, or
the result of, cultural transfer processes which unfold in space and time.
The analysis of cultural transfer therefore safeguards a specific sense of
historicity—and a critical reasoning on the role of political, economic or
academic power structures which enable or inhibit concept transfer. Orig-
inally a historical concept, cultural transfer becomes an instrument of
analysis for all scholarly research questioning primordialist, ethnocentric,
ahistorical and internalist explanations of the transformation of (knowl-
edge) cultures. This constitutes the pragmatic value of the concept to
many disciplines.
This leads to the former aspect, the value of cultural transfer study as
an instrument in disciplinary self-observation. Since cultural transfer theo-
ry is sensible to the alleged ‘failures’ in transfer processes, it can give an-
swers to the question of why certain concepts travel easily and others
slowly, or do not travel at all. Furthermore, it offers insights into the rea-
sons behind terminological ‘misunderstandings’ or ‘mistranslations.’ Final-
ly, since it stands for the principal significance of transformation through
transfer, it may serve as a model for the transformation of scholarly con-
cepts caused by travel and translation (between spatial entities, languages
and disciplines). The concept offers great potential to encourage transna-
tional disciplinary dialogue between Cultural Studies, Sciences de l’homme, Kul-
turwissenschaften and Kulturologija, and helps us to understand why different
cultures of knowledge produce different notions of ‘culture’ and ‘studies
of culture.’
The self-reflection aspect may lead to further considerations on the
study of culture as a transdisciplinary, subject-oriented, concept-guided
approach. In the guise of a meta-(often mega-)discipline, it has already
been established in US and Western European, but not in Eastern Euro-
pean or non-European knowledge cultures, notwithstanding the promi-
nent role of scholars with non-Western roots in the field. Cultural transfer
analysis, serving as an instrument of self-observation, would ask whether
the transnational potential of this disciplinary endeavour will develop into
global potential, or whether it is, rather, a specific Western system of rea-
soning that conceptualises and organises research in the humanities. As

cultural transfer theory sees the ‘receiving’ part as the controlling factor in
transfer processes, it could ask for the reasons for the non-proliferation of
key scholarly concepts in cultural studies to non-Western cultures. Fields
to be discussed are the supremacy of English as an academic language of
communication and the lack of translational endeavours, which exclude
whole communities, or at the least some generations, in non-English-
speaking countries from the discourse. Furthermore, it is worth mention-
ing the dominance of certain disciplines (e.g. literary studies) in cultural
studies quite apart from the theoretical jargon which seems hermetical and
untranslatable to representatives of other scholarly cultures or which is
even rejected as cultural imperialist newspeak. Last but not least, we should
assess the political and ideological moments which inhibit transnational
knowledge transfer, e.g. tenure politics and ‘synergetic’ university reforms
in Western academia, or the shift from emancipatory civil rights activism
towards minority nativism in metropolitan societies. Both result in the
emergence of neophyte macaronic disciplines (at the cost of ‘traditional’
ones) or identity-ridden “para-academic programs” (Judt, n.pag.), which
frustrate transcultural dialogue since their “shortcoming is not that they
concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they en-
courage members of that minority to study themselves” (ibid.).3 To sum up,
the disciplinary self-observation function of cultural transfer analysis takes
up the practice of mainstream critique, which once stood at the very be-
ginnings of the study of culture, and is now to be applied to the academic
study of culture itself.
Having discussed the advantages of the cultural transfer concept as a
critical meta-concept for the study of culture, we have to turn to its epis-
temic limits. As has already been pointed out, cultural transfer is a genu-
inely historical concept which emerged within European historiographic
discourses. The Eurocentric focus of this chapter is not only due to the
author’s specialisation in European and East European history, but can be
put down to the history of the concept itself. I have argued that advanced
theories of cultural transfer were originally derived from research into the
historical and discursive experience of Western European civil societies
and nation states, and that the study of non-Western and pre-modern so-
cieties requires certain accommodations of the concept. However, all cul-
tural transfer concepts tend to structuralist argumentation because they
arrange ideas, objects and people in chronological and spatial settings,
3 The quotation at the beginning of the chapter is from this text. See also Terry Eagleton’s
polemic “In the Gaudy Supermarket” and related controversy in letters to the editor.
pointing out a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ and unearthing the motives of trans-
fer-promoting or -inhibiting agents.
Thus, the strength of the concept that gives much to the study of cul-
ture—its sense for diachronicity, space, agency and power—also consti-
tutes its weakness with regard to other levels of cultural analysis. Cultural
transfer as a historical concept operates with origins/causes, results/
consequences, contexts, explanations, evolutionary developments and
more or less rational and autonomous agency. However, there are plenty
of cultural and social phenomena which remain beyond this scope because
they emerge above reason, cause or individual will, as something new and
entirely unpredictable. Any communication which constitutes societies
and drives cultural transfers is not equivalent to the sum of individual ut-
terances, but produces a new ‘emergent reality.’4 A striking example are
the above-mentioned discontinuous or non-linear communication pro-
cesses producing specific forms of cultural transfers (e.g. the unpredicta-
ble dissemination and transformation of knowledge, art styles, or
literature). They are discussed in advanced models of cultural transfer, but
require additional concepts to be adequately described. Consequently, his-
torians have to borrow concepts from other disciplines that were devel-
oped in order to explain the missing links between individual and society,
between meanings, behaviours, events and objects—or more precisely,
phenomena which appear as missing links from a narrow historiographical
perspective. Beyond these limits, ‘emergence,’ especially the term as used
in communication and systems theory, or some aspects of ‘translation’
may become inspiring complementary models for any scholarly explora-
tion of the unexpected ‘Other’ in cultural transfer processes.
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Emergence as a Model for the Study of Culture1
ANITA TRANINGER
“It is beyond the wit of man to number the instances of emergence”
(Morgan 1), wrote C. Lloyd Morgan, a member of the British Emergentist
movement, when challenging Charles Darwin’s theory of a steady and
continuous evolution. And indeed, not only are the phenomena that can
be characterised as emergent numerous, the use of the term has become
even more widespread in recent years.
1. Semantics, Etymology, Use
With regard to its semantics, ‘emergence’ presents itself in a dual nature

that becomes particularly visible if we compare its uses in English and
German contexts. In English language contexts, ‘emergence’ is a rather
common expression in scholarly discourse not necessarily linked to any
disciplinary lineage. In German academic discourse, however, Emergenz at
the very least connotes a scientific aspect that goes beyond autochthonous
synonyms like Entstehung or Entwicklung. The term’s use, however, often
points towards an understanding that is broadly equivalent with the terms
quoted, with the added benefit that symbolic capital in terms of ‘theory’ is
accumulated.
With regard to its connotations, the term ‘emergence’ has been criti-
cised as a misnomer in that its etymology points towards the emerging,
literally the getting out of water (emergere) of something which had already
been looming under the surface. For this reason, Konrad Lorenz famously
suggested replacing the term with ‘fulguration,’ invoking the raw forces of
a thunderstorm to denote the appearance of a new quality unseen and un-
heard of. Lorenz himself acknowledges that he is borrowing the term
from late-medieval theistic philosophers and mystics who coined the term
1 This article was conceived and researched during my time as a fellow at the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in spring 2009, and I gratefully acknowledge the gen-
erous support provided.
68 Anita Traninger
fulguratio (‘lightning’) for the overwhelming witnessing of new creation,

striving to express God’s powerful intervention (see Lorenz 47–48).
Lorenz’ alternative coinage continues to be quoted in accounts of the-
ories of emergence, but it has not changed the terminological preference
for ‘emergence.’ Also, the latter term’s essentialist connotation, which mo-
tivated Lorenz’ critical intervention, has not figured in the controversial
debates that have surrounded the concept. The shock of newness, howev-
er, which Lorenz overstates in a rather poetical manner, has informed the
term’s connotation, even though two senses of novelty are confused here.
While Lorenz enlivens the conceptual core of the notion of emergence by
likening it to a thunderbolt and thus stressing the very moment in which
something unforeseen enters the picture, the instance of occurrence is
typically not at the centre of interest in the study of emergence. Lorenz’
account draws on a psychological sense of the unexpected rather than a
theoretical sense that something remains unexplainable or unpredictable
despite a full and complete knowledge of the lower-level elements and
their relation (see Hempel and Oppenheim 62). While the concept of
emergence exclusively depends on the latter, the rhetoric of emergence
frequently promotes the further notion by referring to the shock of novel-
ty. As a matter of fact, however, emergence, despite its etymological root
and semantic connotation of instantaneity, can only be asserted retrospec-
tively (see Wägenbaur, “Einleitung” 31).
Today, the concept of emergence is used in a variety of scientific
fields and academic disciplines to denote an even wider variety of phe-
nomena. The common denominator in all its applications appears to be
“that some property or phenomenon is observed that somehow trans-
cends the level of the objects that nevertheless produce it. The properties
or phenomena referred to as emerging can be as diverse as qualities, pat-
terns or behaviour” (Haan 1).
I will now take a closer look at where the notion of emergence stems
from, briefly review the disciplines where it figures prominently, and try to
pin down some general features of this omnipresent and elusive notion.
As there are excellent overviews of the systematic and historical dimen-
sions of emergence (see e.g. Stephan), I will concentrate on the uses of the
term in the various disciplines and point towards the different functions it
is assigned within them.
2. Origins in Literary Criticism
The term ‘emergence’ was first introduced into scientific discourse by

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), the common-law husband of George
Emergence 69
Eliot. Lewes, the dedicatee of Middlemarch, was an actor, theatre critic, phi-
losopher of science and novelist. Before turning to scientific studies, he
published Life and Works of Goethe in two volumes (1855), which is still
considered a valuable introduction to the poet. In his most ambitious
work, Problems of Life and Mind (1873–79), a critique of David Hume’s the-
ory of causation, Lewes distinguished two types of effects: ‘resultants’ and
‘emergents.’ The terms refer to phenomena that are predictable from their
constituent parts—‘resultants’—and those that are not—‘emergents.’
Lewes builds on concepts first introduced by his venerated correspondent
and supporter John Stuart Mill who, in his System of Logic, had introduced a
difference between homopathic and heteropathic effects (see McLaughlin
26–30; Mill ch. VI, § 1).
Lewes’ contribution to emergentist theory, it has been noted, amounts
to little more than his felicitous phrasing, which was not a coinage in the
strict sense. His introduction of ‘emergence’ into scientific discourse is to
be qualified as the metaphorical extension of earlier unscientific uses (see
Bedau and Humphreys 18), and his term has since become catachrestic in
the sense that something that was unnamed before is named by a meta-
phorical borrowing that permanently stands in for a non-existing original
term. Just as there is no one way of explaining and theorising emergence,
there is no ‘actual’ expression. Lewes’ legacy is a term that “captures the
imagination in ways that ‘heteropathic law’ and ‘heteropathic effect’ do
not. There is something in a name” (McLaughlin 31).
Lewes termed a type of effect emergent, doubtlessly adopting an al-
ready current expression and narrowing its meaning down to a specific
technical sense. That the term was indeed common is demonstrated by
Lewes himself. He applied it not only to problems of causation, but em-
ployed it fruitfully and in a non-technical way in his work on literature and
the arts as well. There, emergence mostly refers to something that takes
on meaning or relevance during a non-linear and unpredictable process of
recognition. More specifically, ‘emergence’ relates to mechanisms of dis-
semination, attention and acknowledgement that are beyond the control
of any single agent but are, rather, collective processes with uncertain out-
comes. In this sense, Lewes discusses literary success as an emergent phe-
nomenon: “The prosperity of a book lies in the minds of readers. Public
knowledge and public taste fluctuate; and there come times when works
which were once capable of instructing and delighting thousands lose their
power, and works, before neglected, emerge into renown” (Lewes, Success
6–7; see also 21 on Shakespeare’s emergence into renown).
But it was not through its use in literary criticism that the term emer-
gence ‘emerged into renown,’ to take up Lewes’ phrasing. Rather, it was
70 Anita Traninger
the metaphorical use of the term in the context of nineteenth-century

chemistry and biology that gained momentum.
3. Emergentist Thinking in the Sciences
The history of the notion of emergence is commonly divided into four

phases (see Stephan 25–26). It was a group of scientists, later termed the
British Emergentists, who made seminal contributions to the shaping of
the notion and whose work informs and defines the first two phases of
the term’s history. The tradition began in the nineteenth century with
John Stuart Mill, which would be phase one, and faded before the middle
of the twentieth century, which marks the end of phase two. The move-
ment peaked in the 1920s with thinkers such as the philosopher Samuel
Alexander who presented a complex metaphysical system in Space, Time
and Deity (1922) in which emergence plays an important role. C. Lloyd
Morgan, a zoologist and psychologist who is held to be the founder of
comparative or animal psychology, contradicted, as mentioned above,
Charles Darwin in his Emergent Evolution (1923). Morgan’s view of evolu-
tion was that it does not move forward in an orderly sequence, but that at
certain critical points genuinely new properties emerge suddenly and un-
expectedly, usually due to an unpredictable rearrangement of the already
existing entities. C. D. Broad, whose philosophical interests were enor-
mously wide-ranging, took up Morgan’s concept of emergence in particu-
lar in his monumental work The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925) which at
the same time marks the end of the tradition of British Emergentism.
British Emergentism is based on the assumption that everything is
made of matter which is granular rather than continuous. These particles
are ordered according to a hierarchy of levels of organisational complexity,
ascending from the physical to the chemical, the biological, and eventually
the psychological level (see McLaughlin 20). To this layered view of nature
corresponds a hierarchy of disciplines:
The world is divided into discrete strata, with fundamental physics as the base
level, followed by chemistry, biology, psychology, and possibly sociology. To
each level corresponds a special science, and the levels are arranged in terms of
increasing organisational complexity of matter, the bottom level being the limit-
ing case investigated by the fundamental science of physics (O’Connor and Wong
1.4).
From the beginning, the notion of emergence was sufficiently abstract
that it required no intense translational efforts, but was effortlessly taken
up in various scientific disciplines at crucial points in their history.
Emergence 71
The ideas of the emergentists were widely discussed and heavily criti-
cised in the 1920s, but it was not a type of philosophical or methodologi-
cal criticism that brought an end to the movement. Brian McLaughlin has
argued that it was rather the discovery of quantum mechanics and the de-
velopment of molecular biology that put pressure on the theory and trig-
gered its demise. And as chemistry and biology were the main fields of
interest for the emergentists, they were superseded by new directions of
research (see McLaughlin 24). A phase of critical review of the notion in
the 1960s constitutes the third phase of emergentism which was followed
by another move into new territory in the 1970s: the philosophy of mind.
In the wake of the cognitivist rejection of behaviourism, philosophers of
mind turned to emergence, shifting the focus from observable external
behaviour to the thought processes underlying that behaviour (see Sawyer,
“Emergence” 554). The engagement with the topic in the philosophy of
mind has not decreased since; on the contrary, it has been discussed ex-
tensively by philosophers of mind, psychological theorists, and cognitive
scientists to counter attempts to reduce said disciplines “to explanations
and analyses of neurons and their interactions” (Sawyer, “Durkheim”
228).
Eventually in the 1990s, and beyond the four-phase-model, emergence
became one of the core concepts in the (computational) modelling of
complex dynamical systems. These are termed ‘emergent systems’ and are
characterised by their display of behaviour that cannot be predicted from
a full and complete description of the system’s parts. Particularly oft-
quoted examples are traffic jams, schools of fish, or flocks of birds (see
Sawyer, “Emergence” 555).
Thus, to sum up and to try to pin down the conceptual cornerstones
of emergence: Emergence refers to a shift in evolutionary processes, when
new qualities cannot be explained by the laws that govern the set of ele-
ments from which they arose. Emergence thus necessarily refers to rela-
tions between a whole and its parts. It also implies complexity as the novel
systems have properties that their constituent elements do not have in
isolation. In general, it can be said that emergence is characterised by non-
linearity, unpredictability, irreducibility, autonomy, and complexity.
Emerging phenomena are autonomous because they can only be de-
scribed on their own terms and not on those of their constituent parts.
That is, the properties or phenomena that emerge do not need reference
to the underlying interactions for a proper description (see Haan 3).
Still, the concept has been said to have triggered “almost a century of
confusion” (Sawyer, “Emergence” 553), and it has even been the bone of
contention within and between many of the disciplines that had appropri-
ated it and had deemed it useful. The lines of battle are diverse, and I am
72 Anita Traninger
not in a position to recapitulate them here, but many of them seem to re-
volve around the question of whether emergence is to be conceived of as
an ontological or an epistemological phenomenon—the question whether
a phenomenon is emergent or is described as emergent.
4. ‘Emergence’ in the Humanities and the Social Sciences
No such deep fault lines are apparent in the humanities, which some may
dismiss as a pointer towards a less rigid use of the notion or even its (re-
newed, or rather: reversed) exploitation as a metaphor. Essentialism is
hardly an issue in the humanities where the notion of emergence has been
adopted and the term is widely accepted as descriptive. Emergence, Niklas
Luhmann writes, is rather an element of a narrative than a notion that
would explain the phenomenon of emergence (see Luhmann, Gesellschaft
134–35). In general, the humanities and the social sciences privilege dif-
ferent aspects of the notion than the natural sciences. For them, the term’s
potential lies elsewhere.
Early on, the concept of emergence figured in the social sciences, even
if it might have appeared in disguise, as it were, hiding behind other terms.
As Keith Sawyer has shown in various publications, the sociology of
Émile Durkheim is to be understood as emergentist avant la lettre. In his
Règles de la méthode sociologique (1895), Durkheim stated an apparent paradox:
whereas society is not the sum of individuals, social facts arise out of the
joint activity of individuals. And while society emerges from the interac-
tion between individuals, social structure is external to individuals and ex-
erts causal power over those individuals. In order to resolve these
apparent contradictions, which have been criticised as unfortunate ambi-
guities by Durkheim’s interpreters such as Anthony Giddens, Sawyer sug-
gests we should read Durkheim as an emergentist, for even though
Durkheim never used the term ‘emergence,’ his phrase sui generis was used
in a sense synonymous with contemporary uses of the term ‘emergent’
(see Sawyer, “Durkheim” 231–32).
Durkheim’s use of the concept, if not the term ‘emergence,’ points
towards fundamental shifts with regard to the question of agency which
would inform the social sciences and the humanities in the late twentieth
century. These shifts lead away from the classical subject-object paradigm
which has prevailed in Western thought since the Renaissance. The con-
cept of emergence undermines the subject’s agency by rendering it prelim-
inary to and, at the same time, disconnected from the emerging social
system.
Emergence 73
In Luhmann’s ground-breaking theory of society, the individual is not

even part of the societal system anymore, but figures only in its environ-
ment: “The only possibility is to view man well and truly, with body and
soul, as a part of the environment of the social system” (Luhmann, Gesell-
schaft 30; my translation). According to Luhmann, it is communication that
produces society; and communication is an emergent reality sui generis (see
Lee 330). Society thus reproduces itself on the level of communication,
which is conceived as improbable and thus does not proceed continuous-
ly, but unforeseeably and erratically.
Emergence thus has a place at the conceptual core of system theory,
even though Luhmann redefines central notions associated with the con-
cept of emergence with regard to his theory of social systems and, ulti-
mately, society as a whole. He does not place the elements from which
something emerges first, but has them depend on their status as elements
of the system observed. They are elements only for a particular system and
thus only thanks to this system. This is, for Luhmann, the root of auto-
poiesis. Furthermore, Luhmann asserts that higher (emerging) systems can
be of a lower complexity than systems of a lower order just because they
themselves determine the unity and the number of their elements. Emer-
gence is to be understood as the reconfiguration of complexity (see Luh-
mann, Soziale Systeme 43–44).
While the emergentists in the realm of natural science seem to have
privileged the genesis of new systemic wholes from a set of parts and tend
to focus on the relation between the two, being sure to be moving from
lower to higher complexity, recent sociological and, in its wake, cultural
theory has focused on the independence of the new whole from its con-
stituent parts and its autopoietic reproduction of itself. The term ‘emer-
gence,’ as Niklas Luhmann projected it, highlights the independence of
society as a system from the psychological features of the individuals for-
merly held to be constituting it.
While system theory does rely on a notion of emergence that cannot
be associated with a specific discipline, it seems that the taking up of its
methodology, and more often just its terminology, in the fields of literary
and cultural studies is governed both by the theory’s explanatory power
and by the connotative prestige of this import. While ‘emergence’ does
enjoy currency in common English discourse, Emergenz in German clearly
connotes an association with the technocratic jargon of Luhmannian sys-
tem theory. In the German context, the notion of emergence appears to
have mostly travelled from system theory into various disciplines in the
humanities. The coinage Emergenz, unusual in everyday German, is fre-
quently a distinct pointer towards the discourse of system theory in the
vein of Niklas Luhmann. Scholars who work with the notion not only
74 Anita Traninger
employ a term that may seem useful with regard to their topic, but they
can also expect to reap the benefits of engaging with a larger academic
trend and, by engaging with the distinct technical jargon of this theoretical
framework, distance themselves from traditional approaches. This is not
to say that the reception of system theory has not yielded fruitful results,
but that the use of the terminology and its impact on ways of thinking and
writing is wider than the actual precise transfer and application of the con-
cepts.
Examples of works that draw specifically on emergence (and not on
system theory as a whole) include a volume on love as an emerging phe-
nomenon in seventeenth-century France, where emergence is used to con-
test intertextuality (see Dickhaut 21), and a rather brief but ambitious text
by Bianca Theisen on the emergence of literary genres, which relies on
Luhmann’s notion of emergence as the surprising genesis of meaning (see
Theisen 216) and which aptly demonstrates some implications of this
transfer.
For the transfer of the notion of emergence to the arts and literature,
Luhmann’s privileging of the emerging system over its parts appears to be
of crucial importance. Scientific discussions of emergence have insisted
that in order to determine whether a ‘whole’ could be characterised as
emergent, it first had to be established what was to be understood as the
parts or the constituents of that whole (see Hempel and Oppenheim 62).
In a reversal of perspective, Luhmann privileges the system that is selec-
tive towards its constitutive parts. Even if this theoretical reconfiguration
does not figure prominently in accounts of emergence, it is nevertheless
the lynchpin of Bianca Theisen’s model of the emergence of genres. Had
she relied on one of the notions of emergence developed in the natural
sciences, she could not have avoided the question of what the set of ele-
ments was from which a genre can be said to have emerged. Are these
texts of the same genre, of the same and neighbouring genres, all literary
texts, all texts? The notion of emergence, if taken in the sense customary
in the natural sciences, does not account for hybridisation, for example, or
transformations of genres brought about by factors external to a specific
genre or even to literature as such. Only if the emerging system is con-
ceived as being itself selective towards its constituent elements, can emer-
gence be fruitfully applied to the description of the evolution of genres
(and other cultural phenomena).
Genres can thus be construed as emergent in the sense that literary
history is indeed digital, not analogous, i.e. we are dealing with individual
instances and distinct literary works. While each text partakes of a certain
genre (or operates in friction with one), the genre itself is not to be found
in its realisations. In that sense, genre is at the structural basis of any text,
Emergence 75
but at the same time emerges from texts as a separate entity with funda-
mentally different properties: Genres, contrary to literary texts, are types
of abstract entities which cannot be exhibited by deictic acts of pointing
(see Hempfer 221). The problem, of course, which cannot be traced fur-
ther in this context, is that it is difficult to ascertain when exactly a genre
emerges in the sense that a new system with distinctive properties be-
comes observable. Luhmann noticeably only describes works of art as
emerging in that he stresses the improbability of their very emergence (see
Luhmann, Kunst 204).
By utilising the notion of emergence for an account of the evolution
of genre, Theisen implicitly vouches for a literary history that conceives of
its object as a self-governed, autopoietic system in which authors, the tra-
ditional anchors of literary history, do not figure as the generators of
meaning. The introduction of emergence into the study of literature and
culture is clearly due to a tendency towards delimiting human or, more
specifically with regard to literary history, authorial agency. This is in tune
with developments in theory-building in the humanities that have been
informed by other lines of thinking, most notably by post-structuralism. It
is primarily the name of Michel Foucault that has been associated with
this change of perspective.
In proposing ‘genealogy’ as a concept that opposes the search for ‘ori-
gins,’ Foucault discusses Nietzsche’s notions of Herkunft (‘stock’ or ‘de-
scent’) and Entstehung.
Entstehung designates emergence, the moment of arising. It stands as the principle
and the singular law of an apparition. […] [E]mergence designates a place of con-
frontation, but not as a closed field offering the spectacle of a struggle among
equals. Rather, as Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil, it is a
“non-place”, a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong
to a common space. Consequently, no one is responsible for an emergence; no
one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice. (Foucault, “Nietzsche”
83–85)
Again, emergence is linked to discontinuity, but, and more importantly,
the notion is also directly linked to a precarious status of agency and the
diminishing of the power of the subject, an idea that has gained wide cur-
rency in philosophy and cultural and literary theory. While this passage is
not commonly quoted as a reference for emergence, it enunciates an im-
portant aspect central to late twentieth century concerns: the questioning
of one view of agency, according to which
a subject is endowed with a will, a freedom, an intentionality which is then subse-
quently “expressed” in language, in action, in the public domain. Here “freedom”
and “the will” are treated as universal resources to which all humans qua humans
have access. The self who is composed of such faculties or capacities is thus
76 Anita Traninger
thwarted by relations of power which are considered external to the subject itself.
And those who break through such external barriers of power are considered he-
roic or bearers of a universal capacity which has been subdued by oppressive cir-
cumstances. (Butler, “Reading” 136)
In her summary of Foucault’s argument on sovereignty and power (see
Foucault, “Two Lectures”), Judith Butler emphasises the “shift from the
subject of power to a set of practices in which power is actualised in its
effects” (Butler, Excitable Speech 79). Subjugation thus constitutes the sub-
ject, which is only paradoxical if one maintains the autonomy of this sub-
ject.
Thus, and literally conceptualising the paronomasia of ‘subject’ as in
subjection and ‘subject’ as in autonomous agent, Foucault dissolves the
traditional, unquestioned constituent, the human subject, from which so-
ciety at large has been held to emerge. Rather, the individual is in turn
conceived as one prime effect of power (see Foucault, “Two Lectures” 98).
Only at first glance does this echo the emergentist concept of downward
causation “in which a higher-level property or pattern begins to cause ef-
fects in the lower level, either in the component entities or in their pat-
terns of interaction” (Sawyer, “Durkheim” 231). As a matter of fact,
Foucault’s conception is nothing less than an inversion of former certain-
ties. And above all in our context, it is indicative of the dominant concep-
tual framework informing the proliferation of ‘emergence’ in the
humanities: the challenging of agency.
5. Emergence and Performativity
It is in this vein that emergence has been taken up in connection with in-
vestigations into the concept of performativity. While still often linked
exclusively to instances of performance or staging, it actually takes its cue
from three distinct, yet converging theoretical models which are related by
a family resemblance, to use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s term. Wittgenstein’s
point was that things which may be thought to be connected by one es-
sential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlap-
ping similarities, where no one feature is common to all. These theoretical
models are, firstly, the dichotomy of competence and performance, of an
abstract system of language and its realisations, as it has been formulated
in generative grammar (see Bohle and König); secondly, Austin’s notion
of performative speech acts, which refers to utterances that accomplish
the act that they designate (see Austin), in its application to wider linguistic
and cultural contexts; and, thirdly, the notion of performance, stemming
indeed from theatre studies and focusing on the physical co-presence of
Emergence 77
actors and audience on the one hand and the simultaneity of words and
actions on the other.2
It is through the model of performance art that emergence enters the
picture (see Fischer-Lichte 284–85). In opposing performance to mise-en-
scène, the concept of theatre as a representational art is called into question.
Rather, emergence as a concept is applied to instances where something
new arises without one single will or intelligence being able to determine
the course of events. In this line of thinking in performance studies, the
focus is on those events and processes where overall intentions (authorial,
directorial) are indeed crucial and play an important part, but where the
outcome is nevertheless unpredictable and might even run counter to
what was originally planned. Again, this unpredictability stems from the
involvement of more than one participant or agent, such as is typically the
case in a theatre performance. But contrary to a flock of birds or a school
of fish, a theatre production is designed as the performance of a previous-
ly agreed and rehearsed dramatic text or script, the representation of a
previously thought-out, memorised and rehearsed course of events on the
stage. In this situation, preparation down to the last minute detail never-
theless results in a singular, ephemeral performance that is unpredictable
in the theoretical sense. Collaborative endeavours implicitly negate the
concept of an autonomous subject who would be in a position to control
the emerging processes (see Fischer-Lichte 287). It is the tension, if not
incongruence, between planning and outcome, which can be observed in
many fields from management to academic research, that is encapsulated
by the performative notion of emergence.
Against this backdrop, it is quite remarkable that in recent science
studies emergence has been coupled with a strong notion of agency, but
not in the traditional sense of autonomous and intentional human action.
Andy Pickering, in his The Mangle of Practice, attributes agency not only to
humans, but also to the objects of their research, thus making outcomes
unpredictable and thus emergent because of the necessary frictions be-
tween these competing agents (see Pickering 1995). Thus, ‘science in the
performative idiom’, as Pickering designated his field of inquiry, is actually
another current undermining the human subject’s autonomous agency.
It is with regard to research organisation and planning that emergence
has recently entered public debate. In the spring of 2003, an interdiscipli-
nary workshop on emergence was convened by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
in Stanford, California. It involved discussants from a host of disciplines
from engineering to musicology. The conference report, published in a
German daily newspaper, did not detail the agreement or disagreement
2 See Hans Rudolf Velten’s contribution to this volume.

78 Anita Traninger
concerning the notion of emergence or even how the scholars from such
a diverse palette of disciplines could have agreed on a common horizon in
using the term, but it hints at one link between all of them which is at
quite a different level: one result of the conference was that ‘emergence’
became a relevant concept with regard to the “auto-reflexive organisation
of science and research.” “Instead of relying on exactly defined comple-
mentarities and compartmentalisations of knowledge in interdisciplinary
collaboration,” Gumbrecht writes,
instead of detailing the answers to the most minute detail (which one is—
paradoxically—supposed to already have at one’s fingertips at the stage of writing
the research proposal), the value of interdisciplinary collaboration lies in the op-
portunity to let new questions, new strategies for answering them, and even new
organisational forms of joint research emerge and present themselves. Emer-
gence thus should and could be an organisational principle of academic research.
The emergence of this principle appears to be more plausible now than it ever
was before. (Gumbrecht 38, my translation)
The notion of performativity might help to shed more light on how exact-
ly emergence could contribute to understanding and developing scholarly
practice and funding procedures beyond the exhausted laissez-faire attitude
that underlies the appeal just quoted.
Scholarly work is often characterised by significant differences be-
tween plan and outcomes, projected milestones and actual results, funding
proposals and the eventual course of events within a research project. The
idea of the foreseeability of research leads to project reports that construct
a smoothness of the investigative process which superimposes a narrative
on the course of events which is, like any narrative discourse, selective
towards the actual histoire of the project (or, to put it in emergentist terms:
project reports tend to project steady evolution where emergence pre-
vails). For strategic reasons, shifts, ruptures, or stagnancy must not regis-
ter.
On a more abstract level, it has to be asked which idea of the future
academic work plans (mostly in connection with applications for funding)
typically presuppose. Just like the performative speech act of promising,
the research proposal determines a future in the present. It obliges its
authors and “puts on record [their] spiritual assumption of a spiritual
shackle” (Austin 10). Yet, for the funding authorities, the paper is the fu-
ture, a future which has already been brought about by the performative
utterance of the research proposal.
When a project is given the green light, the funding institution expects
(and justifiably so) that the tasks mapped out in the proposal are being
performed. In accordance with the funding agreement, the research to be
carried out is supposed to be a staging, a mise-en-scène of the proposal text.
Emergence 79
But if we accept a performative notion of performance, a performance

can never be just the faithful rendering of a predetermined script. Even
though the project is rooted in a promise which has gained its binding
force long before research even started, the actual investigative work can-
not but add to or deviate from the script, as it involves a host of factors
impossible to pre-determine. It is prone to be changed over time, and it is
always at risk of being overthrown by emerging constellations and unfore-
seeable events. Just as in the theatre, where a dramatic text only gives the
cue for a plurimedial performance, research proposals and project
roadmaps serve in a paradoxical manner as a grid which guides the inves-
tigative steps to be taken on the one hand, but on the other provides the
yellow brick road which seems to be there only to be left. It is the grid
that induces not only what it maps out, but also what it does not project.
Working plans—and not their abandonment—are indeed productive in-
struments of research management, but in fundamentally different ways
than intended and commonly assumed. In being analogous to a dramatic
script, they serve as the leitmotif for a performance which eludes the con-
trol of any one participant. Emergence thus serves as a hinge concept. If
the arts and sciences do not simply represent the given, but produce and
perform meaning, then the notion of emergence mediates between plan
and performance and is indeed an organising principle of academic prac-
tice in general, and the study of culture in particular.
6. Summary
Emergence, to take this further with regard to the topic of this volume, is
indeed a concept for the study of culture, both on the conceptual and the
methodological level, i.e. both for the study of culture and for the study of
culture.
Apart from all semantic and conceptual differences between the natu-
ral sciences and the humanities, what distinguishes them most with regard
to emergence is where they see the long-term perspective for the concept:
In the natural sciences, a certain optimism prevails that the notion of
emergence will be superseded by a predictability of the occurrence of any
phenomenon if only the adequate theoretical knowledge becomes avail-
able (see Hempel and Oppenheim 64) and that phenomena now charac-
terised as emergent could be subjected to theoretical explanation. The no-
tion is thus a kind of a stand-in in cases awaiting solution. In the
humanities and social sciences—in disciplines as diverse as history, sociol-
ogy, political theory, literary and cultural studies—which are not con-
cerned with orders of matter but with human agents, the situation is
80 Anita Traninger
different. There, emergence serves as a conceptual anchor in an epistemo-

logical configuration that problematises mono-causal interpretation, the
search for origins, agency and teleology.
Emergence has to be understood at least in a fourfold sense: First, it is
a concept championed by the sciences. Second, it is a concept that has
travelled both within and beyond the sciences. Third, it has been devel-
oped independently as a concept in the humanities and the social sciences
which shares some traits with its counterpart in the sciences but is accen-
tuated and functionalised in quite different ways. Fourth, and this applies
only to English-language contexts, emergence was current as an expres-
sion before it was given its specific meaning and has continued to be so.
But whether or not emergence is used with reference to a specific
theoretical formulation: the notion has accumulated meaning and has tak-
en on a semantic richness that informs even the most pedestrian uses. In
the history of its discussion in the various scientific fields, aspects and
characteristics have been highlighted that are now part and parcel of an
everyday understanding: unforeseeability, discontinuity, novelty, shifts, etc.
The notion of emergence has accumulated symbolic capital during its
travels through the disciplines, and when it eventually surfaced in literary
and cultural studies in the last third of the twentieth century, it had, at the
same time, the same simple semantics of gradual and unpredictable suc-
cess that George Henry Lewes had built his argument on literature on, but
had also accumulated the iridescent richness and the seductive sound of a
well-travelled concept.
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II. KEY CONCEPTS FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE
The Underlying Logic of the Study of Culture
UWE WIRTH
“We must return to logic and investigate the logical character of culture con-
cepts,” states Ernst Cassirer in his essay “Nature Concepts and Culture
Concepts” (Cassirer 118; original emphasis) that is part of the collection
of essays Logic of the Humanities. Logic is understood here as an ‘inner logic’
which depends significantly on the underlying ‘culture concept.’ Nothing
has changed ever since: What constitutes the study of culture is ‘somehow’
determined by the chosen concept of culture and at the same time by the
approach towards its object. The philosophy of science calls this approach
‘method,’ assuming that ‘method’ is a kind of map which helps to ap-
proach the object step by step. In order to discuss the underlying logic of
the study of culture, we need to investigate two interconnected aspects:
First, what kind of ‘inner logic’ is involved in cultural analysis? And se-
cond: How do scholars begin to undertake their journey towards the ob-
ject—culture(s)—and how does their travel itinerary shape their concept
of culture? To follow Mieke Bal, these journeys are the “unstable ground
of cultural analysis,” because “[c]ultural analysis, like anthropology, does
construct an object, albeit with a slightly different sense of what that ob-
ject is […] after returning from your travels” (Bal 4). In the following, I
will closely examine this ‘unstable ground of cultural analysis’ and com-
bine it with the question of the underlying logic of cultural analysis.
In his essay “Thick Description,” Clifford Geertz recounts an “Indian
story” (Geertz 28)—at least, he is careful to add, he heard it was of Indian
origin. It is the story of an Englishman who learns from his Indian inter-
locutor that “the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of
an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle” (ibid. 28–29).
The Englishman (an ethnographer Geertz suggests) asks in return on what
this turtle would rest. “Another turtle,” is the prompt reply. “And that
turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down’” (ibid. 29).
Geertz reads this tale as an epistemological metaphor for the notion that
every analysis of culture “is intrinsically incomplete,” what is more, in par-
ticular the “most telling assertions are its most tremulously based” (ibid.).
The essence of this metaphor is a suspicion: the suspicion that the study
86 Uwe Wirth
of culture does not have the set security of a coherent, basic working
method (see Weber 590) due to its “strong interconnection with methods
and their ‘hybridization’” (Benthien and Velten 7; my translation). Hence
it seems to be nothing more than a demanding adventure without a secure
solid ground (see Böhme et al. 7). To put it more positively: Instead of
looking for a solid ground from which to proceed, cultural studies try to
pave the way for a “thinking and working at transitions” (Weigel 125)
which is characterised by the specific methods of a variety of disciplines.
At the same time, Geertz’ story about the turtles raises the question of
why even influential explanations seem to be based on uncertain premises.
This implies a reflection of the logic of cultural analysis, for the relation of
premise and explanation is basically a logical one.
The central question is: What concept of logic is needed in this con-
text? Most scholars consent that it is not a ‘logic of scientific discovery’ in
Popper’s sense. Therefore it is not a prescriptive, deductive logic which is
based on the principle of falsification, but rather one in the sense of Cassi-
rer’s use of the term: a material-based logic which accounts for the gov-
erning principles of its object in a specific way and does justice to the logic
innate to the object itself. According to Cassirer, the object of cultural
analysis is the “basic function” of symbolism (Cassirer, “Subject Matter” 76;
original emphasis), which manifests itself in language, myth, art and reli-
gion as various symbolic forms. In reference to Vico, Cassirer uses the
term ‘logic’ in a way which suggests an influence of the material on the
method. As it says at the beginning of Vico’s chapter “Method,” his pro-
posed “new” science “must begin at the point when its subject matter be-
gan” (Vico 124), so at bygone mythical times characterised by a ‘poetic
logic,’ times when the term ‘logos’ did not refer to inferences but the in-
vention of words, figures and fables. For Vico, consequently, ‘logos’ was
originally adjacent to the concept of ‘myth.’ Mythical thinking generates
connections by the help of a ‘logic of fantasy.’ With “conjectures and pro-
jections” (Blumenberg 6) it creates images and metaphors. As Cassirer
puts it in reference to Vico: By inquiring into the genesis of images and
metaphors, logic ventures “to break through the circle of objective
knowledge, the circle of mathematics and natural science, and dared in-
stead to constitute itself as the logic of the humanities—as the logic of
language, poetry, and history” (Cassirer, “Subject Matter” 54).
The basal premise of a logic of this kind is that “every creature truly
understands only what it produces” (ibid.). Thus, the subject matter of
cultural science includes every artifact mankind ever created. However,
Cassirer not only sees the logic of the study of culture as an extension of
its subject matter. He describes, moreover, what this logic as a logic of
procedure ‘does’: It is not only concerned with artefacts. Above all, it is
The Underlying Logic of the Study of Culture 87
primarily the approach which produces the subject matter. Thus the study
of culture is at the same time a “Poetics of Culture” (see Greenblatt). In
other words, the method is shaped by the matter, but simultaneously con-
stitutes the subject matter. It is this seemingly paradoxical dual process
which will be traced in the following.
According to Hayden White, a scholar “performs an essentially poetic
act in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain
upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain
‘what was really happening’ in it” (White x; original emphasis). Three strat-
egies, White continues, would be employed in this: explanation by “formal
argument,” “by emplotment” and “by ideological implication” (ibid.).
Hence there is an inferential, a poetic or a political kind of logic involved.
The logic of the study of culture, as I would like to argue, is located at the
transitions of these three strategies. This way, it not only creates an “as-
pect of an ‘explanation,’” but also its subject matter. However, the notion
of an interaction of object and epistemological act is not exactly new. It is
discussed by Rickert and Dilthey in reference to Kant—as is the question
of the interrelation of matter and method.
The neo-Kantian Rickert sees the specific method of cultural science
in an a priori “principle of selection,” which forms the basis for a distinc-
tion between the “essential” and the “unessential” (Rickert 30; my transla-
tion). For Rickert, the central task of the logic of cultural sciences is to
reflect on the evaluative dimension of this implicit principle of relevance 1
which governs all processes of the scientific development of concepts (see
ibid. 49). He rejects, however, the notion of a method which is derived
from matter (see ibid. 17). According to him, the decision about what is
relevant—and hence what constitutes the “scientific character” of an in-
sight—cannot be extrapolated from the concrete object (see ibid. 44).
Dilthey, on the contrary, argues that the subject matter of natural sciences
as well as of human sciences is created by the law of facts and the only
difference between these two fields lies in a “tendency that is grounded in
the subject matter itself” (Dilthey 103). ‘Tendency’ here refers to a specific
method of subject constitution, namely either by the understanding of
human and historical life or by the comprehension of physical laws. In
contrast to Rickert, he correlates the interconnection of matter and meth-
od with a law inherent to the subject matter.
Along the same line of argument, Cassirer understands logic firstly as
a practice of subsuming manifold intuitions (Anschauungen) under one con-
ception (Begriff). Arguing beyond the Kantian notion, Cassirer’s concepts
1 See the sociological and linguistic notions of the term ‘relevance’ in Schütz; Sperber and
Wilson.
88 Uwe Wirth
are no pure conceptions of reason but culturally coined conceptions—

hence in this sense ‘culture concepts.’ Cassirer makes a subtle yet momen-
tous shift of emphasis in reaction to the problem Kant dealt with in his
chapter on schematism. The problematic aspect lies in the subsumption of
“an object under a conception” because the “conception must contain
that which is represented in the object to be subsumed under it” (Kant
107). Hence, although the objects of intuition and the conceptions of the
understanding are located on different epistemological levels, both need to
be in a particular way ‘homogeneous.’ This homogeneity is not given a
priori, but is produced a posteriori. It takes a “mediating representation”
(ibid. 107), which is “intellectual” and “sensuous”—and this is what Kant
calls a “transcendental schema” (ibid. 108; original emphases).
Cassirer re-evaluates Kant’s transcendental conception of schematism
with reference to Vico’s mythological concept of historiography. Cassirer
argues, still along the lines of Kant’s argument, that the subordination of
objects under species and genera, “which in themselves constitute a tight-
ly unified system in which each single phenomenon and each particular
law is assigned to its place,” always “in this logical order must be tied
throughout to a perceptual order” (Cassirer, “Subject Matter” 64–65).
This ‘perceptual order’ is functionally analogous to Kant’s ‘mediating rep-
resentation’ in that it is placed in an epistemological space in-between in-
tuition and conception. As Cassirer puts it in his essay on the “Subject
Matter of the Humanities”:
It is by no means the case that “logic” or conceptual and scientific knowledge
perfects itself in a vacuum. It encounters no absolutely amorphous stuff on
which to exercise its formative power. Even the “matter” of logic, those particu-
lars which it presupposes in order to raise them to universality, is not absolutely
structureless. The structureless could not only not be thought, it could not even
become objectively seen, or an object of awareness.
The world of language and the world of art immediately afford us evidence of
this pre-logical structuring of this “stamped form,” which antecedent lies at the
basis of logical concepts. They show us ways of ordering which move along other
paths and obey other laws than logical subordination of concepts. (Ibid. 65)
The ‘ways of ordering’ are—apart from language—especially the “organic
nature of the arts” (ibid.) and Cassirer mentions in this context sculpture,
painting and architecture, apparently because these are ‘spatial’ art forms.
For Cassirer, the way space is shaped by these different articulations
of artistic creation becomes a model for understanding Kantian space
within the context of the study of culture. Thus, the formerly transcen-
dental exposition of pure intuitions a priori is now understood as a histori-
cally and culturally “stamped”—mythic, aesthetic and theoretical—space.
Hence, it is a space which can never be “‘the same’” (Cassirer, “Mythic” 9)
due to its cultural and historical determinants. It is also a space defined by

an inherent logic which is characterised by a (re-)arranging of elements;
and thirdly, it is a space in which certain power stratagems are able to im-
press something on “this partly insensate, partly idiotic ephemeral under-
standing, this incarnated forgetfulness, so that it remains present to mind”
(Nietzsche 42). In every one of these aspects, the assumption of a tran-
scendental homogeneity of intuitions is substituted by the premise of the
diversity of culturally coined symbolic forms. Instead of an ahistorical
schematism as a ‘mediating representation,’ the concept of ‘stamped
forms’ emerges. These forms in their manifold manifestations are subject
to a constant historical transformation. At the same time, they are a “his-
torical a priori” (Foucault 143).
In this way, Cassirer converts Kant’s transcendental into an historical
thought space, which—as the result of cultural and historical processes—
creates a posteriori what Kant assumed to be the transcendental condition
of its possibility a priori as a symbolic form. Hence, the logic of the study
of culture is no longer submitted to an ahistoric schematism. Rather, it
yields to a ‘stamp’ that at different times indents different matter with dif-
ferent forms, leaving sensually perceivable traces which can be recon-
structed and interpreted. In this sense, the method of the study of culture
proves to be analogous to that of a historian-detective (see Warburg 111):
the symbolic forms as traceable evidence become the subject matter of the
study of culture. Accordingly, symbolic forms cannot be considered with-
out their material base and thus the study of culture needs to rest on a
‘material logic,’ since—considering the concept of symbolic forms—the
method is epistemologically dependent on the matter. Consequently, there
can be “no pure, but only a material-based theory” (Böhme et al. 73; my
translation) in cultural studies.
Let us return to the passage by Cassirer cited above. Right at the be-
ginning we notice something remarkable: in the first sentence the word
‘logic’ appears in inverted commas, only to be repeated in the third sen-
tence without any marker. However, the punctuation marks did not dis-
appear altogether, but apparently changed places. Now, Cassirer speaks of
the “matter” of logic. Later, the inverted commas return, framing the
phrase “stamped form,” which is introduced to explain the ‘pre-logical
structuring.’ Hence we encounter three variants of shifting emphasis
which provoke one question: Is the logic of the study of culture in need of
quotation marks? Furthermore: Which is the underlying epistemological
interrelation between ‘logic,’ ‘matter’ and ‘stamped form’?
To answer these questions we need to consider how to define the
symbolic form as a ‘pre-logical structuring.’ It not only functions as a
schematising, ‘mediating representation,’ but also as a signpost for ‘ways
90 Uwe Wirth
of ordering’ to move along ‘other paths.’ Matter becomes the traces, the
symbolically impregnated forms, which the method detects and interprets.
The core problem is a double-bind: on the one hand, relevant traces only
become meaningful clues in the context of the ever-changing ‘culture con-
cept.’ On the other hand, these changing concepts can only be recon-
structed on the basis of relevant traces. In both cases, the cognitive
interest of the study of culture is directed at “fundamental structures”
(Derrida 281) which are not just ‘there’ but need to be developed in the
context of an interpretation. Thus, the static, quasi a priori model of a code
is replaced by a dynamic a posteriori model of inference. The consolidated,
associative connection of signifier and signified (as conceptualised in se-
miology based on de Saussure) gives way to an understanding of significa-
tion which is based on historically contingent “loose interconnection”
(Luhmann 355; my translation). In this way, contemporary approaches to
the study of culture discuss alternatives to the logic of subsumption and
“show us ways of ordering which move along other paths and obey other
laws than logical subordination of concepts” (Cassirer, “Subject Matter”
65). These ‘other paths’ stand for a searching logic of re-arrangement
which finds its laws as it goes along—by the wayside. The metaphor of
the ‘other paths’ is also significant because it belongs to the same semantic
field as ‘approach,’ implying a movement geared towards an object. ‘Ap-
proach’ denotes an epistemic logic that substitutes the primacy of subor-
dination with the primacy of re-arrangement to reconstruct how cultures
arrive at conceptions. ‘Logic’ now designates processual operations which,
in the context of re-arrangements, create transitions (see Gennep). This
implies a logic of transition, one which operates in the in-between space
of ‘sensuous’ phenomena and ‘intellectual’ conceptions to produce ‘medi-
ated representations.’
An illustration of how such a logic of transition works is given by
Charles Sanders Peirce who writes on the pragmatic function of infer-
ences: “The purpose of logic is attained by any single passage from a
premiss [sic] to a conclusion, as long as it does not at once happen that
the premiss is true while the conclusion is false” (CP IV.477)2. According
to Peirce, there are different approaches to pass from premise to conclu-
sion. Deduction follows the principle of the subordination of cases (‘mi-
nor premiss’) under rules (‘major premiss’). It works ‘top-down’ and is
applied ‘all the way down’ to arrive at an analytical conclusion (see ibid.
II.623). Induction, on the contrary, develops an abstraction on the basis of
2 The source refers to Peirce’s Collected Papers edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiß,
vol. I-VI (1931-1935) and by Arthur W. Burks, vol. VII-VIII (1958). Citation follows vol-
ume and paragraph.
a number of cases. It works its way ‘bottom-up’ to draw a generalising

conclusion (see ibid. II.364). In addition to these, Peirce thought to have
discerned a third, unformalised kind of inference which he calls abduction.
Abduction is an operation to come up with plausible hypotheses (see ibid.
V.189), by which Pierce means: finding premises. Accordingly, abduction
is the “first step” (ibid. VII.218) to take on the path of scientific discovery,
more so even: “It is the only logical operation which introduces any new
idea […]” (ibid. V.171). The conclusion of an abductive inference is the
result of a “backward” process, “reasoning from consequent to antece-
dent” (ibid. VI.469). Peirce describes these ‘abductive transitions’ as fol-
lows: “The surprising fact, C, is observed; [b]ut if A were true, C would be
a matter of course, [h]ence, there is reason to suspect that A is true” (ibid.
V.189). The assumption that the premise A (A stands for ‘antecedant’ and
thus for the class of premises as such) could possibly lead to the conclu-
sion C rests only on a suspicion, on a pre-logically structured, associative
and supposed connection. This notional connection is formulated as a
hypothesis within the framework of a quasi detective-like inferential pro-
cess. The hypothesis functions as the ‘mediating representation’ which, on
the basis of perceptual data, makes preliminary conceptual and proposi-
tional classifications.
Let us imagine we are standing on a beach in Northern Greece—let us
say in Chalkidiki—and are about to take our morning walk. We encounter
strange traces in the sand indicating that something—or someone—was
dragged along the beach. We ask ourselves who could have made these:
Are those the traces left by fishermen pushing their boats into the water?
Or has an animal, maybe a sea turtle, left its mark, moving ashore to lay its
eggs? As soon as we asked ourselves these questions, we have already
made two hypotheses—two ‘mediating representations’—about the origin
of these marks. Both hypotheses, both alike in plausibility, need to be re-
assessed now, e.g. by asking someone about the occurrence of fishermen
and/or sea turtles in this area. We take the trace as a surprising fact, which
is ‘abducted’ from the sensual realm of phenomena into the intellectual
‘thought space.’ On the way from one realm to the other, i.e. in transition,
we allot a functional space to the surprising fact: In the larger context of
argument, the surprising fact becomes C quasi in passing through the in-
between space between the sensual level of observation and the intellectu-
al level of hypotheses. We observe the perceivable effect of an unknown
cause as a result of an invisible process which leaves its mark. The un-
known cause which we cannot perceive hypothetically becomes the ante-
cedence A, which implies the rule ‘if A, then C.’
The point of abduction is hence to invert deductive reasoning—it is a
“retroduction” (CP I.63). The abductive operations to arrive at hypotheses
92 Uwe Wirth
are not characterised by the principle of subordination, but of rearrange-

ment. The conclusion C is not the end, it is the starting point for the path
the scholar needs to take to arrive at a plausible explanation. With this, the
transition from premise to conclusion has changed fundamentally, be-
cause the in-between space is re-defined: This transitional space is no
longer a purely ‘logical space’ which is determined exclusively by deduc-
tive rules of inference. It is a ‘conjectural space’ of association in which
perceptual data is linked to elements of “personal knowledge” (Polanyi,
Personal Knowledge 60) by “tacit inferences” (Polanyi, “Tacit Inference”
144–45). These associative-conjectural connections—and this is where the
study of culture comes into play—are characterised by specific (and im-
plicit) cultural, mythological, ideological or epistemological basic assump-
tions. Thus, these underlying assumptions inform the formation and
selection of hypotheses.
How did we get the idea that those traces on the beach stem from a
sea turtle? Why did we not pursue the other hypothesis any further? Ap-
parently, at this stage pre-logical structured associative and selective mech-
anisms enfold their suggestive force in the transitional space between C
and A. It is a space which is not only configured by formal reasoning, but
also by narrative structures and ideological implications of all kinds. These
associative connections, on the basis of which hypotheses are formulated
to create the ‘aspect of an explanation,’ could thus only be fiction—or
thoughts based on a particular ideologically or mythologically ‘stamped’
world view, respectively. Or to stick to our example: Let us pretend we go
to the nearest village to reassess our sea-turtle hypothesis. We meet a very
old local who tells us that neither one of our hypotheses is verifiable: the
traces stem from a huge sea monster sent by Poseidon to scare an unfaith-
ful lover (dwelling in the neighbouring village, of course!).
The Peircean concept of abduction was treated with sceptical distance
by the philosophy of science (see Hacking 102). For a history of science,
however, it might be vital to know how and with which methods scientists
at different times, in different cultures, in different “cultures of knowl-
edge” (Knorr Cetina 11) have made use of conjectures or abductions, re-
spectively. This is also an object of the study of culture, if understood as a
history of knowledge, not only because the perception of the world and
the processing of knowledge is thought to be ‘man-made,’ but because,
above all, it is in the different ways of perception and processing “thought
collectives” (see Fleck 38–51) that “thought styles” (ibid. 125–42) and
“paradigms” (Kuhn 123) are established. These make use of disciplinary
mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. And by means of formation and
selection of hypotheses, these mechanisms might not seem acceptable any
longer. In these cases, an abductive reasoning ‘in passing’ becomes a rite de

passage.
The cultural, ideological or epistemological forms shaping the for-
mation and selection of hypotheses can be conceptualised as momentary
connections in the sense of a style-intrinsic “thought constraint” (Fleck
133) which can be construed as an “epistemic event” in the context of
historically definable “thought collectives” (ibid. 39). Thought collectives
are defined as “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas” (ibid.; original
emphasis). Furthermore, inherent to it is a “special kind of “carrier” for the
historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge
[…]. This we have designated thought style” (ibid.; original emphasis). With their
intrinsic constraints, thought styles are defined “as a readiness for directed
perception and appropriate assimilation of what has been perceived” (ibid.
142). This is how facts are produced: “At first there is a signal of resistance in
the chaotic initial thinking, then a definite thought constraint, and finally a form to be
directly perceived” (ibid. 95; original emphasis). This directedness of percep-
tion is an epistemological specification of what Cassirer termed the ‘basic
function of symbolism’—the pre-logical structuring of perception and
thought through symbolic forms. This concept of style presupposes a dif-
ferentiated artistic, mythical, religious or scientific way of perceiving the
world and processing knowledge, which establishes in turn a system of
ideological implications: a symbolic system which displays historically con-
tingent political (in the broadest sense of the term) decisions of theoretical
choices as incidents in a ‘historical development.’
This also applies to Geertz’ ‘Indian story.’ Possibly, its punch line is
not directed at what is implied about cause and explanation, but at how
the story is used politically by Geertz. One could get the impression that
this story is used to exemplify an ethnological premise which, in the mean-
time, has found its way into almost every theory of culture: the equiva-
lence of fundamentally differing thought styles. In fact, the Indian story
represents a cultural difference which implies a logical one. While the logic
of an Englishman looks for the final cause—an inferential final explana-
tion—the Indian is satisfied with a ‘thin description’ of an interference
which is interlaced with mythical narrative, a narrative which leads into an
infinite regress as soon as one considers it under the premise of an infer-
ential logic and which, thus, differs the claim of a final explanation in the
sense of the Derridean différance.
Différance, understood as a double gesture of differentiating and defer-
ral, is a provocative concept in its denial of a transcendental entity (for
example a ‘transcendental signified’) against which semantic, but also logi-
cal differences could be ascertained. Due to its implicit inherence, ethno-
logists make use of the concept différance to describe cultural differences as
94 Uwe Wirth
well as to problematise cultural processes of translation. As one could

gather at first glance from the Indian story, what is at stake is realising the
logic of the Other as an/other logic—without claiming prima facie the he-
gemony of interpretation for one’s own. If Homi Bhabha is right in his
claim that translation is the “performative nature of cultural communica-
tion” (Bhabha 228), then this calls for a ‘logic of translation’ (see Bach-
mann-Medick 238–39 and her contribution on translation in this volume)
which takes new paths—a logic of transition which does not subordinate
the observations of alien phenomena under one’s own conceptual schema.
In the in-between space of phenomenon and conception, abduction
operates as a kind of “borderland-style” (see Fleck 161–63) of thought
that explores and tries out new transitions, new passages—a process
which often bears the characteristics of guessing. In fact, Peirce admits:
“abduction is, after all, nothing but guessing” (CP VII.219). The hypothe-
ses derived from these transitions mark out a not yet clearly defined
thought space and thus move through a more or less “open realm of re-
search” (Rheinberger, “Zelle” 272; my translation). At the same time,
guessing opens up new approaches to the matter of epistemological pro-
cesses, namely the perception of phenomena and their conceptual inter-
pretation. In connection with epistemic bricolage (see Lévi-Strauss 21),
newly guessed ‘mediated representations’ emerge which are both ‘intellec-
tual’ and ‘sensual.’ It is a search for new ways of transition which describe
new paths and follow other laws than those of logical subordination under
already existing schemata.
Travel already starts at concept formation, as Rheinberger argues in
the introduction to Experiment Differenz Schrift (1992) with regard to a pas-
sage from Freud’s “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” Freud writes that
science could not be based on “sharply defined basic concepts”: The “true
beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena
and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them” (Freud 117).
On this basis, an analogy can be drawn to Cassirer’s concept of a ‘material
logic’ and to the Peircean concept of abduction as the ‘guessing link’
between sensual perception of the world and intellectual processing
of knowledge. According to Freud, everything depends upon the ideas
“which will later become the basic concepts of the science” and “their not
being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant rela-
tions to the empirical material, relations that we seem to sense before we
can clearly recognize and demonstrate them” (ibid.).
With his description of the undefined beginning of scientific process-
es, Freud sketches a transition zone at the “threshold of scientificity”
(Foucault 210) in which an “epistemic thing” (Rheinberger, Experiment 15)
can develop from the application of abstract ideas to empirical matter, or
from an acknowledgement of the material basis from which these ideas

were extrapolated. The pressing question is now, on the one hand, what
the ‘significant relations to the empirical material’ could be, and on the
other, which epistemological force is attributed to the guessing of these
significant relations.
In answer to the last question, Peirce states in his essay “Guessing”
that all of our knowledge is based on “collecting observations and forming
some half-conscious expectations” (Peirce 267)—until we are finally faced
with an experience which contradicts these expectations. Consequently,
we re-evaluate our memories of the observed facts, “we endeavour so to
rearrange them, to view them in such new perspective that the unexpected
experience shall no longer appear surprising” (ibid.). This explanation
consists of the assumption “that the surprising facts that we have ob-
served are only one part of a larger system of facts of which the other part
has not come within the field of our experience” (ibid.). The re-arranging
of memories and observations is apparently the equivalent to Freud’s
‘grouping,’ ‘classifying’ and ‘correlating.’ It resembles in many ways the
process which Polanyi describes as an “act of integration” which is per-
formed on the basis of “tacit inferences” (Polanyi, “Tacit” 139–40). Peirce
gives the example of a person who enters a room in which three quarters
of a painting by Raffael are projected onto a wall. The observer “guesses
that that quarter is there […]; and six months later he will, maybe, be
ready to swear that he saw the whole” (Peirce, “Guessing” 267). Peirce
calls these acts of integrative interpretation “surmise, conjecture, or guess”
(ibid. 268). Reading Freud with Peirce, the ‘significant relations’ become
evident: they are the conjectural connections between a vague idea and
empirical matter which is given as a perceptual impression.
However, abduction does not subordinate the perception under an
existing concept—only by arranging, grouping and re-arranging the ma-
terial are the conceptual connections made. The main point of this notion
is that concepts emerge from processes of epistemic practices (hence: a
posteriori). At the same time, they are influenced by a historical a priori
which implies a permanent inconsistency of the order of concepts and
knowledge. With regard to Rheinberger one could conceive the scientific
process as a “process of creation, deferral and interference of traces”
(Rheinberger, “Zelle” 266; my translation). ‘Transcendental schematism’ is
replaced by the process of guessing significant relations in the context of
an epistemic bricolage.
Accordingly, defining a ‘logic of research’ is, as I would like to argue,
the basis on which a logic of the study of culture operates. A clear distinc-
tion between the level of observation and the level of theory formation is
not possible—neither for cultural nor natural science. The reason for this
96 Uwe Wirth
lies in the configuration of cultural things: Geertz understands culture in

reference to Weber as a “web of significance [man] himself has spun”
(Geertz 5). The study of culture in the context of thick descriptions is
aimed at conceptual structures “superimposed upon or knotted into one
another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit” (ibid. 10) and
at interpreting them as “stratified hierarchies of meaningful structures”
(ibid. 7). To interpret culture we need not only to conceive those struc-
tures as “systems of construable signs” (ibid. 14), i.e. as traces. We also
need the skill to guess the significant relation between signs as traces. As
Geertz writes about the task of cultural analysis, it is “guessing at mean-
ings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the
better guesses” (ibid. 20). In reference to culture as guessable ‘systems of
construable signs,’ an analogy between knowledge formations and symbol-
ic forms becomes evident. In both cases, ‘form’ is conceptualised not as a
static schema, but as a dynamic re-arrangement of concepts—a dynamic
that can be described as a travelling in the space between phenomenon
and conception, as well as a travelling in the web of culture concepts.
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Culture as Text: Reading and Interpreting Cultures
1. From the ‘Anthropological Turn’ to ‘Cultural Turns’
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, important approaches to

cultural analysis from ethnology/cultural anthropology have been adopted
by a number of disciplines involved in the study of culture. An ethnologi-
cal revaluation of culture as a system of signs and meanings has led to the
development of new analytical categories. This was especially the case
with the interpretation of symbols and rituals, but also in descriptions of
culture and experiences of difference, whether in the field of literature or
in social practice. These kinds of broad ethnological impulses have led to
an ‘anthropological turn’ (see Bachmann-Medick, Kultur als Text)1 in stud-
ies of culture, literature and in the social sciences. But ethnological re-
search itself has also long since gone through its ‘cultural turn’ as a result
of its focus on “collective systems of meaning.”2 Groundbreaking in this
respect was the metaphor of ‘culture as text,’ which has been developed as
a ‘travelling concept’ (see Bal) right across the humanities up to the pre-
sent. ‘Culture as text’ became a chiffre for the insight that social life itself
is organised through signs and symbols, as well as through representations
and their interpretation. As a ‘travelling concept,’ this notion propagated
the far-reaching understanding of culture as both a constellation of texts,
and a semiotic fabric of symbols that becomes ‘readable’ in forms of cul-
tural expression and representation. Significant here is the considerable
expansion of what is understood by text to include social practice, as well
as the recognition of the dependence of culture on representations in gen-
eral. This comprehensive textual perspective created a significant new in-
tersection between the social sciences and literary and textual studies. It
1 The current article is based in parts on the afterword “Bilanz und Perspektive” in my vol-
ume Kultur als Text. I am grateful to Joanna White for the translation of this article and to
Robert Ryder for his helpful suggestions.
2 On the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences see Reckwitz (22); on ‘culture as text’ see ibid.
(445–77); see also Helduser and Schwietring.
led to the inclusion of literary texts within the ensemble of ‘cultural texts’
and pointed towards reading them within a framework of a “poetics of
culture” (Stephen Greenblatt) for their exchanges and ‘negotiations’ with
other discourses.
In this role, ‘culture as text’ initially proved to be a pivotal bridging
metaphor between cultural anthropology and literary studies. Following an
admittedly ambivalent career path, the concept of ‘culture as text’ has nev-
ertheless continued to rise and has become an over-determined general
principle, an emphatic key metaphor, even an overall “programmatic mot-
to for the study of culture” (Böhme, Matussek and Müller 134). At first,
this concept was still closely connected to ethnographic research and to
the semiotic framework of interpretive cultural anthropology.3 However,
since the end of the 1990s it has been utilised to encompass a much
broader interdisciplinary horizon for the study of culture. ‘Culture as text’
advanced from being a conceptual metaphor for the condensation of cul-
tural meanings to a rather free-floating formula frequently referred to in
analyses within disciplines involved in the study of culture. Surprisingly,
‘culture as text’ has remained a consistent key phrase throughout the dis-
courses concerned with the study of culture—even after the culture de-
bate had long since turned away from the holistic understanding of culture
implied by the formula.
The frame of discussion has certainly altered significantly in recent
years. On the one hand, the anthropological turn led to a more compre-
hensive debate about the new focus on the study of culture in the various
disciplines, for example about literary studies as ‘cultural studies.’4 On the
other hand, in the field of the study of culture itself, the ‘anthropological
turn’ gave rise to further ‘cultural turns’ across several disciplines, whose
ever new perspectives continue to shape research practice to the present
(performative turn, spatial turn, postcolonial turn, iconic turn, etc.) (see
Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns). Furthermore, the internationalisation
of literary and cultural research beyond the borders of national cultures
and national literatures has been gaining strength for some time. In this
context, critical revisions of the concept of culture within cultural anthro-
pology have highlighted symbolic knowledge in its mediations by relations
of cultural globalisation beyond fixed cultural or textual borders. Here, the
interface between a globalised anthropology and a new reflection on
3 See Geertz: “culture as an assemblage of texts” (“Deep Play” 448); “cultural forms can be
treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials” (ibid. 449).
4 From the many works on literary studies as a study of culture, I note here Bachmann-
Medick, “Literatur – ein Vernetzungswerk ”; Benthien and Velten, Germanistik als Kulturwis-
senschaft; Nünning and Nünning, Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften; Schößler, Literaturwis-
senschaft als Kulturwissenschaft.
Culture as Text 101
‘world literature’ in comparative literature must be examined more closely.

Is the ‘travelling concept’ of textuality or even the well-worn ‘culture as
text’ still able to provide any sort of direction?
2. ‘Culture as Text’ Revisited:

‘Readings’ of a Key Metaphor in Cultural Analysis
The concept of ‘culture as text’ arose out of the criticism of mentalism, i.e.
of overemphasising mental processes and intentions. Very quickly, the
concept rose to become a conviction at the core of a more comprehen-
sive, textually oriented cultural theory. As an indistinct, metaphorical, al-
most inflated ‘travelling concept,’ it made its way through the most diverse
disciplines—even mutating into “technology as text” in the philosophy of
technology and the social sciences (see Beck 238–48), ‘sport as text’ in
sports studies (see Hildenbrandt), and ‘genetics as text’ in the latest re-
search in the so-called life sciences (see Weigel, “Text der Genetik,” which
builds on Hans Blumenberg’s position “Die Lesbarkeit der Welt”). In his-
toriography, the ethnological idea of ‘culture as text’ has been used to go
beyond a mere history of mentalities and direct attention to the symbolic
dimension of historically ‘foreign’ systems of meaning. These are captured
through “thick description”—whether in a social history broadened by
cultural history, in micro-histories or histories of everyday life, or in an
ethnologically-inspired historical anthropology (see, among others, Med-
ick). In this context, a specific ‘textuality of gender’ has become visible by
linguistic and discursive constructions of gender roles (e.g. through ser-
mons, treatises, mirrors for princes) (see Schnell). In literary studies, the
idea of ‘culture as text’ has stimulated the formation of a productive new
perspective on literature as a “text of culture” (see Csáky and Reichen-
sperger). It triggered the opening up of the traditional understanding of a
closed text and fixed textual borders more than ever before, up to and
including “unstable texts” (see Sabel and Bucher). As the study of texts,
literary studies has displayed a tendency to take this key idea literally, and
has thus adopted it comparatively uncritically. However, the metaphor of
text and reading continued and, following the completion of the full de-
coding of the human genotype and the listing of its final sequence of let-
ters, went even as far as gene technology (see Weigel, “Text der Genetik”).
‘Reading from the book of life’ is thus spoken of as if it were a neutral or
even harmless matter, when in fact it is a serious intervention into the
make-up of human life: the claim that a gene structure is a text ultimately
amounts to a perversion of the idea of culture as text. For through this
claim, a text’s ability to open up spaces of interpretation is being sup-
pressed in favour of computer simulation, information and data network

storage, which pave the way for all kinds of manipulation.
One possible starting point for a critical revision of the concept of
‘culture as text’ is the observation that it has, nevertheless, opened up a
systematic axis of comparison and connectivity between disciplines. In the
future this needs to be developed beyond a restricted model of the text. In
doing so, there is above all potential for an understanding of culture that is
not limited to singular cultural spaces, but is able to use overarching cul-
tural semiotic relations as an axis of comparison. These kinds of border-
crossing connectivities have led, for example, to the opening up of area
studies in ethnology, which was previously limited to particular spaces and
regions, to a systematic, methodologically and theoretically reflexive cul-
tural anthropology (see Lackner and Werner). The same goes for the ad-
vancement of regional studies to a more comprehensive Cultural Studies
in foreign language philologies. Not least, systematic axes have become
available for an expansion of national philologies into an intercultural
comparative literary studies, which exposes itself to world literatures.
Precisely because of its generality, disposition to travel, and broad in-
terpretability, ‘culture as text’ has become the foundation for such trans-
formations. While this means it has helped to set an overarching
“refiguration of social thought” (see Geertz, “Blurred Genres”) in motion,
the price has been its own inflation and autonomisation as a suggestive
“metaphorical refocusing” (Geertz, “Deep Play” 448). Evidently, it never
mattered whether talk of ‘culture as text’ referred to a key idea, a concept,
metaphor, analytical model or even paradigm. On the contrary, the con-
cept’s potential to stimulate seemed to arise from this very vagueness. For
some time now, however, loud cries for its concretisation have resounded
within the cultural disciplines. The formulaic ossification found in such
metaphors, but also in other terms that have turned into jargon or fash-
ionable ‘turns,’ needs to be broken apart analytically in order to garner
differentiated approaches. In this sense, the all-too graspable ‘culture as
text’ needs to be made provocative again so that we gain a renewed impe-
tus for understanding culture that thrives on ‘cultural text’ without equat-
ing ‘culture’ with ‘text.’
Making something provocative would mean finding a method for ex-
plicating a blurry metaphor to the point where it yields an analytical cate-
gory. ‘Contextualisation’5 might be one method for revealing the interplay
between (literary) texts, forms of expression and cultural connections
(such as colonialism or Orientalism) at the junctions where they meet.
Furthermore, this would open up the ways in which literary texts are in-
5 On contextualisation/contextualism see Grossberg.

Culture as Text 103
volved in wider forms of cultural representation and staging (rituals, festi-

vals, media performances, etc.) beyond their textual borders. New Histori-
cism, for instance, demonstrated how literary texts are located in a web of
connections and relations of exchange and negotiation with other texts,
institutions, practices and instances of coding, and how literature as a ‘cul-
tural text’ of its own interprets and alters a given society’s dominant sym-
bolic repertoire or system of signs. Derived from ‘culture as text,’ this
concept of a ‘cultural text’ was made productive for a broadening of the
philologies towards the study of culture—in order to grasp both the pos-
sibilities for linking literature to other types of texts and discourses, as well
as its interventions into the culturally specific shaping of feeling and be-
haviour.
As is well known, ‘culture as text’ is based on an understanding of cul-
ture as a structure of meanings in which actions are continually being
translated into signs. However, what seems to me to be worth keeping as
a shared basis of all disciplines in the study of culture is not the exaggerat-
ed objectifying assumption that culture consists of texts in a narrow or
broad sense (i.e. that practices, art, string quartets, festivals, etc. can all be
conceived of as texts in the same way so that their structure of meaning can
be revealed). Rather, it is the challenge of developing a ‘reading’ of per-
ceived reality whereby interpretation remains coupled to the concrete so-
cial relations of events and actions: conceiving of culture as text means
“constructing a reading of what happens” (Geertz, “Thick Description”
18).
Is this really only to be understood in a strictly textual way? Conceiv-
ing of ‘culture as text’ does not mean taking ‘culture’ as a metaphor of
reading removed from actual practice. Is such a “generalisation of the un-
derstanding of culture as text over and above the philologies” (Lindner 79)
really just the tendency “to see the world merely as a text” (ibid.)?6 The
questioning of cultural analysis as a (supposed) mere reading of a text
should not be overstated. Instead, Geertz’ own coupling of culture to “en-
acted statements of […] particular ways of being in the world” (Geertz,
Available Light 17) should be taken more seriously, since according to
Geertz, these enacted statements refer to “transient examples of shaped
behavior,”7 i.e. cultural practices and their contexts and not, for example,
to written or even canonical texts.
6 On the criticism of the reading metaphor as a hermeneutic abbreviation under the erasure
of social forms of reading and, above all, usage, see also Algazi (109–10).
7 Geertz: “Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a
manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and
tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in
transient examples of shaped behavior” (“Thick Description” 10).
Such a reading, which uses a broader understanding of textualism to

gain distinctly praxeological spaces for manoeuvre, can be found in An-
dreas Reckwitz’ model of cultural sociology. Reckwitz’ argument aims at a
“praxeological understanding of texts” (Reckwitz 606) by interpreting ‘cul-
ture as text’ not under the sign of a mere reservoir of meanings, but rather
under the sign of patterns of meaning as “‘models’ for guiding practice”
(ibid. 457), or as a “set of practice dispositions” (ibid. 458). Instead of pre-
supposing an immanent textual meaning, he conceives of a text rather as
the result of an attribution of meaning by its recipients. There is a signifi-
cant point of contact with literary studies here. For in literary studies it is
also questionable to assume an autonomous textual meaning, one which
“can be determined in the text independently of the attribution of mean-
ing by its participants” (ibid. 587). Are not the “text users,”8 the readers,
crucially involved in the constitution of the meanings and, beyond this,
the social use of a text?
While the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ is used to claim a fixed textual
meaning all too quickly, a theory of practice that takes into consideration
the meanings created on the part of the reader could also be productive
for literary studies. This might even lead to a praxeological revival of
reception-based theories of text from the 1970s (e.g. Stanley Fish) (see
Reckwitz 606ff.). Here, according to Reckwitz, one might find starting
points for a ‘literary turn’ in those theories of practice in the social scienc-
es that are not looking for a way out of the homogeneity model of culture
along a unilaterally mentalistic or textual path. The richest perspectives—
also for literary studies—are offered by those theories of practice con-
cerned with multiplying “practices of reception” (ibid. 623) and freeing
them from being assigned to a single, homogenous system of meaning.
This gives actors the freedom to participate in different systems of mean-
ing, thereby making varying “meaning options” (ibid.) available to them.
Actors, according to Gadi Algazi, in no way reproduce the meanings of
their own ‘culture,’ which are hardly transparent even to themselves. In-
stead they follow social codes of behaviour and pragmatic requirements to
carry out certain actions and ‘social customs.’ These do not have inherent
meaning, rather “they represent potential, structured options, which take on
specific meanings and, more importantly, generate effects only when
used” (Algazi 111).
What emerges here is a different understanding of culture, one which
“does not reduce [culture] to texts or ‘symbols,’ but understands it as a
heterogeneous and open system of practical options” (Algazi 113). In con-
trast to the still prevailing culturalistic and textualistic fixing of the ‘culture
8 On a corresponding criticism see Nünning and Nünning, “Kulturwissenschaften” 7.

Culture as Text 105
as text’ metaphor, this kind of unconventional, praxeological reading of it

opens up new directions and allows challenging conjunctures with con-
temporary debates on cultural dynamics and cultural hybridity.
3. A Performative Reading of ‘Culture as Text’
Up until now, the limits of the concept of ‘culture as text’ have been dis-
cussed in anthropology, history and the social sciences with increasing
vehemence (see Lindner 79). Here, the dominant criticism was of the
over-proportional fixation on “culture as product” instead of “culture as
production,” i.e. as an act of creation (see ibid.): the world was only being
perceived in textual structures and distorted through a culturalistic lens.
Important elements such as cultural dynamics, power relations, situational
constraints, intentions, orality, dialogic processes of exchange, and the
exact course taken by conflicts remained as much hidden from view as any
ineluctable material givens. Opposing this culturalism is
a pressing desideratum in the study of culture, namely the search for ‘cultural
translations’ of the material, which bestows on a society its order of power-
(lessness), and not just the analysis of the realm of the symbolic in its admittedly
complex self-referentiality. (Gerbel and Musner 13)
In light of this problematic failure to take the material into consideration,
literary studies too is directing new attention to corporeality and to other
forms of materiality such as reading and writing—not least through its
openness towards recent media theory (see Benthien and Velten, “Einlei-
tung” 13) and performative approaches (see, among others, Fischer-Lichte
et al.; Kertscher and Mersch; Martschukat and Patzold; Wirth). The con-
cept of textuality has served its time, as Moritz Baßler et al. write, because
“now it is more often a question of media, rituals, communication or
memory than of textuality” (Baßler et al. 103; my translation).9 Texts
should be read as “cultural performances” (Benthien and Velten, “Einlei-
tung” 22) that not only represent reality but also constitute it. This heralds
a shift in focus from text to practice, eventually resulting in the ‘performa-
tive turn.’ The use and effect of language, the intentions of the speaker
and, above all, non-verbal forms of communication are thus expressly in-
cluded in cultural analysis. This “going beyond words” (see Wikan 186)
aims at capturing fields of cultural relations “that reside neither in words,
‘facts,’ nor text, but are evoked in the meeting of one experiencing subject
with another” (ibid. 190). Thus there is a shift from networks of meaning
9 In addition, see the somewhat abstract statements on the question of the textuality of cul-
ture in Baßler et al.
to relational structures. In literary studies this shift not only concerns the
relationship between reader and text but also material and social factors
such as corporeality, the shift from orality to written texts (in literatures of
the Middle Ages and the early modern period), and ritual, theatricality and
literary performance (see Velten 221–22, 228; see also Neumann 25: liter-
ary texts “refer in an intricate way to the non-textual substrate of a cul-
ture,” e.g. to the corporeal, to patterns of movement and to rituals).
Increasingly, the aspect of performativity currently seems to be eclips-
ing the aspect of representation. Greater attention is being paid to meth-
ods of production, patterns of perception and practices of textualisation.
Gadi Algazi calls these aspects “productive repertoires” (Algazi 116) and,
along these lines, he proposes “understanding literarity as a contested so-
cial convention, analysing texts as the exemplification of practical options,
and directing attention away from the interpretation of texts to their pro-
duction […]” (ibid. 114). On the part of literary studies, this would mark
an intentional, pragmatic step for overcoming the limitations of ‘culture as
text.’ This step leads in a surprisingly similar direction to other praxeolo-
gical overcomings of ‘culture as text’: Susanne Feldmann’s “pragma-
semiotic analysis” (see Feldmann), for example, which is based on ethno-
logical theories of metaphor and trope, enables a praxis-oriented interpre-
tation of symbols and exposes the role of metaphors and tropes in the
formation of practice. In a similar vein, Horst Turk’s suggestion of an
“operative semantics” (see Turk, “Schlüsselszenarien”) brings forms of
“self-staging, self-narration, self-description, self-observation and self-
reflection” (see Turk, Grenzgänge 10) into play under the auspices of per-
formance.
Although literary studies is principally and literally concerned with
texts and not primarily with practices, it is precisely the “practices carried
out in the texts” (Turk, Grenzgänge 282) that could be examined in much
greater depth. Since in the end, “it is precisely in literary texts that we find
the representation and thematisation of the discursive and pragmatic rou-
tines, with whose help both the differences and the similarities in and be-
tween cultures are borne out” (ibid.). Literary texts are not just to be read
for content and meaning, or for assumed universal structures (such as
death, jealousy, love, dreams, etc.). The attempt to shed more light on
“the level of the constitution of practices” in literary texts, rather than just
on “the constitution of meaning” (ibid. 8) might constitute a concrete step
towards a more comprehensive cultural analysis in literary studies. Here
too ‘culture as text’ turns out to be a travelling concept, one that does not
travel in a straight line but that switches levels and thus makes processes
of translation necessary.
Culture as Text 107
One starting point for this kind of fundamental change in direction

would be overcoming the current overemphasis on thematically centred
approaches in the interpretation of literature. Literary texts in particular
can direct attention away from the construction of meaning and towards
the models and repertoires of practice and attitudes of perception that
shape culture—and do so through their aesthetic “invention of scenarios,
their provision of paradigms” (Turk, Grenzgänge 8). What a corresponding
reconnection of reading and interpretation back to this kind of ‘scenic
happening’ and to ‘medial perspectives’ might actually look like has been
shown by Klaus Scherpe in his analyses of speech acts and mimetic be-
haviour in “first-contact-scenes.” These occur as the initial moments of
intercultural encounter not only in scenes of discovery, conquest and in
situations of ethnographic fieldwork, but also in literary narratives of trav-
el, adventure and colonialism (see Scherpe, “First-Contact-Szene”; on the
cultural-theoretical reflection of this kind of a cultural gaze in literary stud-
ies see Scherpe, “Kanon – Text – Medium” 21). It is not the meaning of
the text which is foregrounded here, but “the phenomenon of medial self-
observation” (see Scherpe, “First-Contact-Szene” 157). One might take
this kind of shift as a suggestion to investigate literary representations not
so much for new themes that are interesting from the point of view of the
study of culture, but rather for the way they configure significant forms of
practice and communication. From here it is just a short step to an explo-
ration of the forms and means of literary communication and representa-
tion itself—the perceptual terms, the contextual relations and (aesthetic)
modes of staging, but also the methods and terms which make cultural
techniques and culture-specific forms of perception accessible: mimetic
practices, fictionalisations, visualisations, narrative structures and attitudes,
rituals, metaphors, etc.
The prerequisite for such a critical working out and translation of text-
ualism would be, surely, to mark the differences between textual and
pragmatic dimensions more clearly. These differences have become all too
blurred through Geertz’ “explicitly metaphorical use of textual analysis”
(Turk, Grenzgänge 137). But culture is not at all the equivalent of text. Ra-
ther—as Horst Turk notes in his derivation of Geertz’ ‘culture-as-text’
metaphor using Yuri M. Lotman’s cultural theory—we need to hold on to
the fact that “alongside the textual ‘realisation,’ the pragmatic also [re-
mains] valid” (ibid. 133). It is precisely because of the foregrounding of
their own constructedness that literary texts should not be interpreted as
mere realisations of culture, but as offering a “scope for potentialisation”
(ibid. 154).
Yet in the face of such surpluses, even literary studies involved in and
reflecting upon the study of culture must pose the question of “readabil-
ity” (see Neumann and Weigel 10): do literary texts really become more
‘readable’ “through the inclusion of questions of mediality, cultural an-
thropology, of the discourses running through them, of interculturality,
ethnicity” (Barner 81)?10 “The readability of literary texts is no longer fos-
tered, but rather the readability of cultures (for which, it is true, literature
is only partially necessary)” (ibid.). Should not, as Wilfried Barner writes,
the readability of literary texts in their distinctive aesthetic quality and fic-
tionality be encouraged instead? He states that the strength of an ‘open’
cultural research lies precisely in its “‘making readable’ of that which is
distinguished by its aesthetics, individuality and distinctiveness” (ibid. 87).
But one can hardly read in a comprehensive manner when, at the same
time, the object of that reading is reduced to a single, namely literary,
manner of reading. A multiplication of readings or an “expanded under-
standing of reading” (ibid. 75) are aimed at making aesthetic differences
visible in connection with ‘formed behaviour.’ Literary texts offer fruitful
openings for this: through the development of their own cultural codes,
practices, cultural techniques, forms of symbolisation and patterns of per-
ception.
4. The Limits of Interpretive Categories:

Patterns of Perception Instead of Thematic References
The long dominance of the text- and meaning-heavy understanding of

culture has led to an exaggerated focus on thematic approaches in literary
studies. The range of new themes and research ‘objects’ such as dreams,
violence, disgust, hysteria, friendship and honour in literature is virtually
endless. This trend has resulted in a rather reductionist frame of cultural
analysis. It was this narrowing that motivated, amongst other things, a
long-running debate in the Schiller-Jahrbuch on the issue of whether literary
studies, by putting on such cultural, interdisciplinary spectacles, was per-
haps losing sight of its actual object.11 Whatever the case, an orientation
towards new research topics can only ever be a first step towards a cultur-
ally oriented literary studies, since it tends to reduce literature to the status
of a historical/cultural source or even a social report.
Literary studies might also do more to remind itself that its object not
only represents a text of culture, but also has an intrinsic aesthetic value.
10 On the question of ‘readability’ see also Scheffer; on the ‘limits of readability’ see Weigel,
“Phantasma der Lesbarkeit” 246.
11 See the debate, initiated by Wilfried Barner, which continued over three volumes of the
yearbook of the German Schiller Society: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 42 (1998), 43
(1999), 44 (2000); see also Bachmann-Medick, “Weltsprache der Literatur.”
Culture as Text 109
Despite all efforts in cultural contextualisation, there are demands that

justice be done to the aesthetic distinctiveness of the individual literary
text. For not only are cultural contents, reflected through literature, the
object of a culturally informed interpretation, but also the structures and
patterns of aesthetic representation as such. Namely, if something has in-
deed been lost through the culturally oriented literary reflection of recent
years, then this is perhaps less the literary ‘object.’ Rather, it is the re-
course to the aesthetic potential of the literary ‘material’ and its indispen-
sable analysis of form. The logical consequence would then be to realise
more fully the maxim that “[e]very theory must be developed from the
material” (Böhme, Matussek and Müller 73) by releasing the ethnographic
competence of literature itself. Not literature and ethnography, but litera-
ture as ethnography remains a desideratum. But what is to be understood
by this?
One possibility would be to reflect on the “emphatic conception of
the textuality of culture itself” (Neumann and Warning 8) and consider
the implications of the concept of ‘transgression’ for ‘literature as ethno-
graphy.’ Transgression means a subversion of cultural relations of mean-
ing and representation. As a new concept in the study of culture, it could
work against an all too smooth readability of one’s own culture. Trans-
gression is located expressly at the level of “a pattern of perception,
description and comprehension” (ibid. 11). Associated practices of
boundary-crossing, dissolution of limits, carnivalisation, code-smashing,
etc. therefore pertain not only to a mere symbolic creative “crossing-over,
for example between the arts, media, discourses, cultural territories or lan-
guages and sexes” (ibid. 10). Rather, they pertain to a performative “trans-
gression of […] ritualised incidents” (ibid.) within a culture itself. From
the perspective of the study of culture, what seems crucial here is the per-
formative surplus, which is taken up by the term ‘transgression.’ It is used
to point to what might emerge beyond a textualised cultural knowledge
and used to stage itself as a counter term to ‘ritual.’ For where rituals are
cultural disciplinary strategies for managing processes of transition, trans-
gressions tend more fundamentally towards a subversive ‘restyling’ of
dominant codes. Through acts of mimesis, through metaphoricity, but
also through translation, these kinds of transgressions could assist in the
breakthrough of a cultural theory of border-crossing. This could be di-
rected against traditional, dichotomous orders of knowledge and against a
knowledge of culture that is only made available through textualisation:
“If we want to ‘read’ a culture, if we want to decode the ensemble of ‘cul-
tural texts’ it produces, then there is the possibility that we will ‘overlook’
a residuum that, whilst constitutive of culture, cannot be ‘read’ because it
is not codified, and instead breaks the code: its transgressions” (Teuber
244). Reading literary texts for these not yet textualised cultural “processes
of transgression” (Neumann and Warning 11) into the unexplored, and
even recognising these as a central border-crossing operation within the
process of civilisation—this is what emerges from an understanding of
literature as ethnography.
Further notable case studies that examine literature as ethnography
can be found in the area of medieval studies, which “has always started
with a very much wider definition of literature and culture” (Peters,
“Neidharts Dörperwelt” 446; see also Müller, “Der Widerspenstigen
Zähmung”, Text und Kontext; Peters, Text und Kultur) and which, in dia-
logue with interpretive approaches from cultural anthropology, has em-
phasised the alterity of its object. But here, too, the focus of analysis has
shifted away from being primarily on literary processes of Othering and
on the reflection of the experience of otherness and alterity. Instead—and
not just in research on the Middle Ages—the otherness of signs and of
the different systems of representation themselves has come to the fore.
Literary texts—as has been shown by Gabriele Brandstetter, for example,
using Gottfried Keller’s novella Die Berlocken—can be “ethnographies of
one’s own culture” (Brandstetter 311). For they can reflect cultural codes
and symbolisations as well as a transgressive use of signs. In Keller’s case,
this is “the becoming other of seemingly familiar signs in cultural ex-
change” (ibid), namely in a colonial situation, in which these (European)
signs are resignified by the colonised.
Thus literary texts can also be analysed within a wider ‘anthropological
turn’ which brings precisely their own patterns of representation and per-
ception to the fore: as possible vehicles for a transgression of their loca-
tion within the close weave of their own culture. Here, too, of course, the
success of such an approach depends on starting literary analysis from
junctures rich in potential connections, for example from “key conceptual
figures” (Karlheinz Stierle). The ‘gift’ would be one such defining figure.
This is shown by Pamela Moucha’s interpretation of Kleist’s Erdbeben in
Chili with her explicit reference to Marcel Mauss’ ethnological theory of
cultural exchange (see Moucha). These kinds of more structural categories
of textual interpretation, taken from ethnological cultural analysis, could
also incorporate so-called ‘poetogenetic structures.’ These are based on
antecedent, anthropologically founded modes of behaviour that either
form the foundations of literature, are taken up by it or transform it: mi-
mesis, fiction, rhythm, catharsis, narrating, observing, etc. (see Zymner
and Engel). However, from here one can all too easily end up with a quite
different anthropological framework of a biological, evolutionary anthro-
pology, which tends to stand in opposition to a perspective informed by
the study of culture (see, for example, Eibl). Here one is tempted to
Culture as Text 111
search, not unproblematically, for universal anthropological categories via

‘poetogenetic structures,’ treating ‘reading’ as just such a category (see
Barner 75). Nevertheless, this search throws light on interpretive catego-
ries of literature and culture that are not caught up with traditions of cul-
tural meaning: schemata, cultural models, reproductive repertoires,
cultural forms of perception and cultural techniques. Using such catego-
ries, cultural comparison might be carried out in a less Eurocentric way in
the future.
5. Widening the Concepts of Culture and Text:

Intercultural and Global Challenges
Discussions in recent years have shown that the critique of a holistic un-
derstanding of culture has remarkably far-reaching effects on the politics
of culture. It questions a “clash of civilisations” claimed by the American
political scientist Samuel Huntington with regard to international rela-
tions—above all its problematic presupposition of static cultural blocks
that inevitably lead to a politics of confrontation. Conceptual alternatives
to such positions are only thinkable alongside a dynamic and open under-
standing of culture, above all with an understanding of culture as transla-
tion and negotiation, as posited by Homi Bhabha and postcolonial theory
(see Bhabha). This definition of culture emphasises the fruitfulness of cul-
tural “contact zones” (as investigated by anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt
in her analysis of travel reports). It also propagates new “ways of looking
at culture (along with tradition and identity) in terms of travel relations”
(Clifford, Routes 25).12 The emphasis here clearly lies on the fundamental
necessity of dealing with cultural differences, recognising their existence,
while at the same time not fixing them as ontological properties. Hybridi-
sation, creolisation, etc. are key categories here, ones that have no place in
a concept of culture as text or as a closed system of meaning. An increas-
ingly fragmented “world in pieces”—as even Clifford Geertz has in the
meantime made clear—can no longer be held together by any sort of ho-
lism: “The vocabulary of cultural description and analysis needs also to be
opened up to divergence and multiplicity, to the noncoincidence of kinds
and categories” (Geertz, “World in Pieces” 246). This also applies to a
global figuration of literatures that can no longer be unified through ca-
nonical Western texts and their universalisation of aesthetic standards,
12 See also Clifford: “Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to
contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless
movements of people and things” (Routes 3).
even if more recent studies in neurobiological research consider “carrying

out transcultural comparison and searching for aesthetic universals” (Sing-
er 227) in the field of art and literature to be a particularly fertile research
area.
In the disciplines involved in the study of culture, however, the issue
of transcultural comparison is derived from and modified by the inter-
weaving of societal processes themselves, from the contact between cul-
tures and the ‘hybrid’ overlappings of very diverse layers of experience
and affiliations caused by migration and diaspora. Especially since the col-
lapse of colonial dichotomies and a fixed constellation of nation states,
cultural systems can hardly be viewed as standing vis-à-vis one another
anymore. Rather, cultures and literatures take shape in contact zones with
their mix of cultures and pragmatic demands for border-crossings on both
sides, with their conflicts and attempts at reconciliation. Thus the idea of
‘culture as text’ is on its way to being transformed or even replaced by an
explicitly non-holistic and dynamic concept of culture: by the idea of cul-
ture as a process of translation and negotiation (that acknowledges differ-
ences and power asymmetries and therefore perhaps cannot be easily
adopted as a travelling concept). One of the results of this concept trans-
formation is the current emergence of translation as a powerful analytical
category in the humanities and social sciences (see Bachmann-Medick,
“Translational Turn”).
In this context, the relationships between text and meaning also have
to be rethought in more complex ways: as being implicated in power rela-
tions, in processes of a negotiation of meaning in intercultural contact
scenarios, and in processes of hybridisation through transnationality and
globalisation. The increasing scope of textual reflection in literary studies
points in this direction, promoting a “theory of texts that brings the en-
actment of dispositions, positions and constraints of order both in as well
as between cultures into view” (Turk, Grenzgänge 156), meaning that literary
texts cannot be ascribed to the texts of one culture, and certainly not in the
sense of canonical texts. Such models of texts between cultures will only
really come into their own when, starting from the specific textual horizon
of these texts, there is an attempt to widen the analysis to the global circu-
lation of texts in general. Just as cultural anthropology did not stop at the
analysis of foreign (tribal) cultures but has transnationalised itself to be-
come a macro-ethnology of the global age (see Marcus), so literary studies
faces the challenge of locating itself within the emerging world society.
This means dealing to a greater extent with non-European literatures, with
Culture as Text 113
texts between cultures, and with literatures of the world in a new way.13 Yet
literary studies could also bring its own ‘philological competence’ to bear
on the global stage of world politics. Indeed, in recent times, ‘philological
competence’ is again being hailed as a foundation stone of critical humani-
ties, even by postcolonial cultural theory. It can be applied to counter-
abbreviated and pre-fabricated societal slogans through philologically
trained research competence that does justice to the details of real situa-
tions and exposes rhetorical decorations in the fields of politics and media
(see Said).
Literature, literary studies and studies of culture generally have under-
gone a shift into new fields of research through these kinds of transna-
tional awakenings. This shift is a result of the hybridisations which
become tangible as cultural overlappings, incontemporaneities, hierarchies
of power, as third spaces of homelessness and in-between existences (see
Bhabha), as well as conflictual, charged spaces of intercultural debate.
These hybrid spaces emerge especially in the field of postcolonial lit-
erature and cultural theory, as well as in the literature of migration (see
Chiellino; Gögtürk, Gramling, and Kaes). In general, they give shape to a
“new comparative literature” as an issue of global translational relations
(see Apter). Can concrete approaches to intercultural literary comparison
be drawn from such a frame of reflection? One might think here, for ex-
ample, of Vibha Surana’s culturally contrastive comparison of a European
novel (Goethe’s Werther of 1774) and a Hindi novel (Agyeya’s Shekhar: ek
Jivani of 1941–44) focussing on significant cultural differences in the dis-
course of love—which, in addition, also makes use of the “microscopic”
procedure of “thick description” (Surana, Text und Kultur 233). It is the
literary texts themselves that interculturally expand and rupture the ethno-
graphic process of representing cultures. This also applies to Thomas
Mann’s adaptation of a mythical Indian story in his novella Die vertauschten
Köpfe. Eine indische Legende (1940) [‘The Transposed Heads. A Legend of
India’] and its later reworking in the Indian drama with the same motif,
Hayavadana (1969), by Girish Karnad (see Surana, “Kulturdynamik”). Giv-
en these kinds of complex trans- and intercultural interrelations and en-
tanglements, a major question arises: To what extent are yet more marked
transgressions necessary that not only performatively ‘loosen’ the ‘travel-
ling concept’ of the text from its European robe, but develop explicitly
comparative categories of analysis with a cross-cultural texture?
13 For approaches to this see Schmeling, Schmitz-Emans and Walstra; on the current discus-
sion on world literature see, amongst others, Meyer-Kalkus; Prendergast; Simonsen and
Stougaard-Nielsen.
A broadening of the horizon towards globalisation is more than just a

performative shift of emphasis in the understanding of culture and text to
include corporeality, theatricality, ritual, representation and practice. It
demands the inclusion of media and the mediated sphere of ‘imagination,’
as conceptualised by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as the scene of the
global, transnational production of culture (see Appadurai). It also calls
for assessing world communication from the perspective of media theory
(see Bolz, Kittler, and Zons). Recently, the emerging categories in the the-
ory of culture of space and mapping that have fostered a ‘spatial turn’ are
being taken up at variance to the focus on national cultures—not only in
history and the social sciences (see, for example, Schlögel), but especially
in literary studies, and even within literature itself (see Weigel, “Topo-
graphical Turn”).
For literary studies, the broadening of the horizon towards a transla-
tional and spatial “poetics of displacement” (Clifford, Predicament 10)
sketched here represents a massive challenge to every form of national
philology. Disciplinary key terms or ‘travelling concepts’ such as ‘text,’
‘author,’ ‘work,’ ‘influence’ and ‘tradition’ are also affected by this and
complemented by categories such as ‘discontinuity,’ ‘break,’ ‘difference,’
‘translation’ and ‘border.’ The long journey of the concept of culture
and/as text is thus far from being over. Travelling beyond its semiotic sta-
tions, it opens up ever more explicit political perspectives for the study of
literature and culture: cultural comparison, research into text- and lan-
guage-mediated transcultural relations and translations and, not least, a
critique of the canon aimed at putting an end to the centuries-long univer-
salisation of Western aesthetic norms.
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Metaphorical Anastomoses:
The Concept of ‘Network’ and its Origins in the
Nineteenth Century
ALEXANDER FRIEDRICH
1. Introduction
The term ‘network’ has become an almost ubiquitous concept in the

second half of the twentieth century. Network theories increasingly suc-
ceed in their attempt to develop terms describing the laws of our “inter-
connected world” (Barabási 7). By the same token we use the term
‘network’ colloquially to refer to new technologies, infrastructures, pres-
sure groups, economic and natural phenomena.
Thus, the German cultural theorist Hartmut Böhme calls the ‘net-
work’ a ‘cultural key metaphor’ (kulturelle Leitmetapher) dominating modern
society and sciences today (see Böhme 26). The German media theorist
Erhard Schüttpelz, however, calls it an ‘absolute concept’ (absoluter Begriff)
claiming universal validity since everything is to be considered as a net-
work (see Schüttpelz 25). Obviously both conceptions do not agree on the
quality but on the pretension of the term: no matter whether it is con-
ceived as a metaphor or as a concept, it is claimed that ‘networks’ have a
great impact on our life—at least the ‘Network Fever’ which has been
studied by the architectural theorist Mark Wigley, who notes that “[w]e are
constantly surrounded by talk of networks” (83).
Reconstructing the history of the ‘network’ discourse, Wigley argues
that the modern concept of ‘networks’ echoes ideas developed in the ar-
chitecture theory of the 1960s. Schüttpelz, however, states that the ubiqui-
ty of ‘networks’ emerged from different but intersecting scientific
accounts of networks within media theory in the middle of the twentieth
century, developing into an all-encompassing thought pattern of scientific
and cultural elites in the early 1990s: a macro-technological (makrotechnolo-
gische) ‘top-down’ perspective on infrastructures as networks, and a micro-
sociological (mikrosoziologische) ‘bottom-up’ perspective on human relations
as networks. Promoted by ideological elites and new technologies, espe-
120 Alexander Friedrich
cially the Internet, the concept of networks has henceforth spread into
colloquial language (see Schüttpelz 32).
Schüttpelz’ proposition in respect to the decisive role of the Internet
could be confirmed by the study of the German cultural scholar and com-
puter scientist Jochen Koubek, who analysed the headlines of the German
newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung between 1993 and 2001 and found
a significant positive correlation between the increasing frequency of the
words Netz (‘net’ or ‘web’), Vernetzung (‘networking’) and Internet (see
Koubek 45–48). In his study, Koubek argues that the success of the In-
ternet had catalysed the emergence of a cultural pattern of thought and
perception of networks which he called a ‘cultural paradigm’ (kulturelles
Paradigma) (see ibid. 53). However, what does the paradigm of networks
mean?
2. Relevance of ‘Networks’ for the Study of Culture
The wide scope of designations reaching from ‘concept’ to ‘fever’ indi-

cates that in the study of culture, the conception of networks oscillates
between formalism and fascination. On the one hand, it is deployed as a
term explicitly defining objects of investigation as networks by scrutinising
the properties and conditions of interrelated structures based on ‘vertices’
or ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’ or ‘links.’ On the other hand, it guides the study of
culture as an implicit concept, a kind of tacit thought pattern related to a
heterogeneous set of ideas referring to social or natural structures, tech-
nical innovations or political concepts.
Thereby, transcending its mere descriptive function, the concept
gained a prescriptive dimension (see Kaufmann 182). Thus, ‘networking’
has become an important element of research policy, too. Popularised
since the 1980s—as an alternative to the reductionist and hierarchical
organisation of knowledge and research (see Capra; Hayles, Cosmic Web;
Vester, Unsere Welt, Interconnected Thinking)—networking became a general
guideline for interdisciplinarisation (see Pellert). Moreover, since technical
and social networking has become essential for everyday life purposes as
well, it is regarded as a basic cultural skill or technique (Kulturtechnik) in-
cluding communication, engineering and organisation (see Böhme 26;
Gießmann 9–11). Therefore, the imperative of contemporary life is said to
be read: “I am connected, therefore I exist” (Rifkin 571; see Gleich 19).
Respecting these wide-ranging implications of networks, at least three
main aspects of the concept for the study of culture can be distinguished:
First, ‘network’ as a concept; second, ‘network’ as a vision; and third,
‘networking’ as a code of practice.
Metaphorical Anastomoses 121
As a concept, networks are considered as a “transdisciplinary”

(Fangerau and Halling 8) model to describe multitudes of phenomena as
structured ensembles to be researched. There are, however, quite different
concepts of networks converging on an axis between two theoretical an-
tipodes: At the ‘formalistic’ pole, an emerging “network science” (Nation-
al Research Council 1) treats natural and cultural relations as computable
structures. Based on mathematical methods, this scientific approach
claims “to grasp the properties of our weblike universe” (Barabási 178). At
the opposite pole, scholars often refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
of ‘rhizome’ (see Deleuze and Guattari 3–25). This tradition of conceptu-
alising networks, most notably the actor-network theory, does not rely on
networks as computable structures, but as multiple modes of interaction,
transformation and narration (see Latour, Never Been Modern 6, “Recalling”
15, Reassembling 129). Likewise, Foucault described structures of power
and control (dispositif) as a network (réseau) between heterogeneous ele-
ments connected for strategical purposes (see Foucault, “Le jeu” 299).1 In
the study of culture, all these approaches were taken into account more or
less explicitly for constituting ‘network’ as a basic term to describe and
investigate the complex interrelationships of actors, artefacts and dis-
courses which produce and maintain a flow of signs, materials, ideas and
power.
Since the 1980s, the concept has come to be strongly related to both
cultural criticism and social hopes (see Keupp 11–53). Since then, ‘net-
works’ has become a popular metaphor for collective visions reaching
from grassroots democracy to cyber utopias. Until now, the expansion of
digital networks and the requirements of the “network society” (Castells)
fostered utopianism as well as scepticism regarding the consequences of
networking advanced by information technologies (see Lovink). For ex-
ample, in prevailing public debates on networks the desire for free access
to information is contested by the anxiety about privacy and national se-
curity interests.
Another dominant part of the public controversy is concerned with an
economically driven enforcement of networking. In this context, ‘net-
working’ is a code of practice rather than a firm concept or vision, pro-
moting and stipulating cooperations and interdependencies between social
groups, information technologies, infrastructures, industrial relations,
working conditions, economic integrations and political alliances in the
course of globalisation.
1 The edition of Foucault’s works by Colin Gordon, however, translates dispositif with ‘appa-
ratus’ and réseau with ‘system of relations’ (see Foucault, “Confession” 194).
Still, the question remains why social groups, organisations, organ-

isms, infrastructures, and information technologies have been named
‘networks’ at all.
3. Question and Aim for this Case Study on

‘Network’ as a Travelling Concept
Before the use of the term ‘network’ led to an all-encompassing thought

pattern which has been labelled as ‘absolute concept,’ ‘cultural key meta-
phor,’ ‘cultural paradigm’ or somewhat ironically as ‘fever,’ it was used as a
word denoting netlike physical objects. Webs and nets even have a long
tradition as metaphors of hunting, trapping, veiling and saving deriving
from ancient times (see Emden, “Netz” 248–60). However, since when
and for what reason have technical, organic and social structures come to
be called ‘networks,’ too?
As the biochemist and literary scholar Laura Otis has shown, the
modern concept of ‘networks’ actually rests upon an intricate history be-
ginning in the nineteenth century: studying telegraphs and nerves, physi-
ologists and physicists in the nineteenth century drew upon each other’s
models of communication networks, stimulating one another in a meta-
phorical “feedback loop” (Otis 13), which means that the metaphorical
process runs not only in one direction, but is circular.
Proceeding from Otis’ intriguing historical studies, I will ask how pre-
cisely the metaphorical interaction took place in particular cases. For this
purpose, I will contextualise some significant texts in order to retrace
some transition points, interfaces and shifts of meaning of the term ‘net-
work.’ Finally, I will suggest a model or diagram mapping the complex
dynamic of the metaphorical ‘feedback loop’ which had established itself
by the beginning of the twentieth century, giving rise to the emergence of
the ‘travelling concept’ of networks.
As Mieke Bal states, going into the matter of ‘travelling concepts’
means exploring the considered objects in close reading (see Bal 10). Ana-
lysing concepts travelling from one discipline to another should be a re-
warding task due to the traceability of references supplied by the objects
themselves, in the form of quotations, for instance. However, tracing con-
cepts travelling between the natural sciences, different disciplines involved
in the study of culture and colloquial language might be much more diffi-
cult. Thus, reference books seem to be a good starting point for studying
emerging and travelling terms over a long period. Therefore, I will begin
my case study with a brief analysis of some historical dictionaries and en-
cyclopaedias.
4. The Lexical Field of Networks in German Reference Works

(1740–1911)
Whereas Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language defines the

term ‘network’ in 1755 as “[a]ny thing reticulated or decussated, at equal
distances, with interstices between the intersections” (Johnson 39), the
German compound Netzwerk (‘network’) was not lexicalised in the highly
influential German dictionary published by Johann Christoph Adelung in
1766. Adelung regarded reticulated phenomena as Netz (‘net’ or ‘web’). In
1740, however, Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaf-
ten und Künste, the eighteenth century’s largest encyclopaedic work, already
distinguished between ‘net’ and ‘network’ by recording the entry “Netz-
Werck” (Zedler 2022; vol. 23). This entry mainly deals with tissue discov-
ered by the Italian physiologist Marcello Malpighi (1628–94), who is re-
garded as the founder of microscopic anatomy. Several of the structural
units still bear his name, e.g., the Rete Malpighi, and the anastomosis2 of arter-
ies and veins he discovered is also known as the ‘miraculous network’ or
Wundernetz in German (see Reiche 1588). Adelung classified this anatomi-
cal meaning of Netz as ‘figurative’—“[f]igürlich, wegen einiger Ähnlichkeit
in der Gestalt” (Adelung 473; vol. 3)—that is to say, metaphorical. During
the nineteenth century, however, this classification disappeared and a mul-
titude of new compounds emerged in German dictionaries adopting the
lexeme ‘Netz.’
I have tried to quantify this linguistic innovation in some respects by
analysing the corpora of several popular nineteenth century German ency-
clopaedias. Since the degree of accessibility of the digital sources varies,
the statistical results are only approximate; nevertheless a clear tendency
has become obvious.3 The following diagram shows the developing fre-
2 The term anastomosis comes from Greek αναστόμωσις (anastomōsis) deriving from the verb
ana-stomoō, which means “to furnish with a mouth or outlet” (OED 439; 2nd ed.; vol. 1):
“Applied originally to the cross communications between the arteries and veins, or other
channels in the animal body; whence to similar cross connections in the sap-vessels of
plants, and between rivers or their branches; and now to cross connections between the
separate lines of any branching system, as the branches of trees, the veins of leaves, or the
wings of insects” (ibid.). As a medical term, anastomōsis is defined as (1) a natural communi-
cation or juncture between similar structures, such as blood vessels, (2) an operative union
of two hollow or tubular structures, (3) an opening created by surgery, trauma or disease
between two or more normally separate spaces or organs (see Dirckx and Stedman 39-40;
Landau and Becker 112; vol. 1).
3 The corpus of the frequency analysis comprises: Adelung, Brockhaus (Conversations-Lexicon),
Herloßsohn, Brockhaus (Bilder-Conversations-Lexikons), Herder, Pierer, Bibliographisches In-
stitut (Meyers Konversationslexikon), Brockhaus (Konversationslexikon), Bibliographisches Insti-
tut (Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon), Brockhaus (Kleines Konversations-Lexikon). As digital
sources I used zeno.org (online and DVD) and retrobibliothek.de. Zeno’s search engine
quency of the word Netz and its compounds in different editions of Ger-
man dictionaries between 1793 and 1911.
Fig. 1: Absolute frequency.

The absolute frequency of the word Netz (‘net’ or ‘web’) is represented by
the first bars and the darker bars next to it display the matches of com-
pounds consisting of the lexeme Netz. The smaller bars represent a selec-
tion of special compounds, namely Eisenbahnnetz (‘railway network’),
Netzwerk (‘network’) and Telegraphennetz (‘telegraph network’).
Obviously, the lexical field of networks expanded in the middle of the
nineteenth century and the frequency of the compounds even overtakes
the frequency of the primary word. As the second diagram shows, this
result can be affirmed by the values of the relative frequency which is the
absolute number of the respective words divided by the approximate
word count of the corpus in question: to assure a certain comparability of
the results I only included different editions of the two encyclopaedia
publishers Brockhaus and Meyers.
functions are restricted and the digitalisation of the sources at retrobibliothek.de is not yet
complete. However, the amount of text handled already provides significant statistical re-
sults.
Fig. 2: Relative frequency.

As the railway and telegraph networks grew exponentially from the middle
of the nineteenth century, there is preliminary evidence to suggest that the
increasing usage of compounds adopting the element Netz is related to
this socio-economic development. At least it is noticeable that both tech-
nical net-works and net-words rapidly increased at the same time. That
does not mean that the new cultural vocabulary merely reflects the tech-
nical progress. But as Christian Emden notes, the simultaneity of the
boom both of the lexical field and the artefacts suggests that the impact of
‘networks’ on the cultural imagination seems to depend on material mani-
festations, practices and techniques of networking (Emden, “Epistemische
Konstellationen” 153–54).
However, the question still remains why infrastructures have been
called ‘networks’ at all. With this question I would like to enter the meta-
phorical ‘feedback loop.’
5. Railway Networks
In 1835, the leading nineteenth-century German economist Georg

Friedrich List published an article concerning railway systems in the Pfen-
nig-Magazin, which was the first German illustrated magazine—published
since 1833 with a circulation of up to 100,000 copies weekly. List’s article
“Über Eisenbahnen und das deutsche Eisenbahnsystem” contains me-
thodical meditations on the development of a German railway system. In
this article he did not yet use the term Eisenbahnnetz (‘railway network’). In
1838, however, List published a new treatise on the German national
transport system predicting that “the railway systems of all big continental
nations will develop by way of a web so that they radiate from the capitals
to the main border crossings” (List, National-Transport-System 13, my trans-

lation).4 In this treatise, which was a reprint of his article concerning rail-
ways in the German encyclopaedia of political economics (see List,
“Eisenbahnen” 650–778), List considered the military advantages of the
railway system, assuming that the weblike structure of the concentric net-
work would benefit the nation under attack rather than the aggressor be-
cause the defender could move troops forward using all connections in
the network, whereas the invader could use only a few of them (see List,
National-Transport-System 13). Hence, List raised the hope that the devel-
opment of the railways would avoid future wars of conquest.
His hope was not to come true, though. Just 20 or so years later, the
author of the revised encyclopaedia article had to concede that List was
mistaken in this point, since in the Second Italian War of Independence
(1859) railways were used systematically for military purposes for the first
time—without serving solely as a means of defensive war (see Rotteck and
Welcker 23; vol. 5). As the twentieth century eventually taught us, List was
completely wrong to expect the railway to have civilising effects. Howev-
er, his reasoning on the expediency of national railway networks has been
convenient for political economics. Moreover, he established the term
Eisenbahnnetz signifying the future railway system of the Unites States of
America (see List, National-Transport-System 93). Thereafter, the term
spread out rapidly in habitual language use.
Obviously, the adoption of the network metaphor is based on the car-
tographic representation of the railway system. In his paper from 1833,
List published a map which adorned the cover of the aforementioned
Pfennig Magazin two years later, showing his draft of a future German
railway system (List, “Über Eisenbahnen” 79; see also Beyrer 77). As the
similarity between railway systems and cobwebs could not be seen directly
from a mere individual point of view, mappings decisively catalysed, if not
caused, the usage of the network metaphor. Based on a spatial abstraction,
the metaphor visualised the invisible architecture of the entire system.
Depending on the pattern of the infrastructure, the metaphor varie-
gated its connotations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the
German geographer and writer Oskar Ferdinand Peschel (1826–75)
coined a frequently quoted phrase concerning the different structures of
the French and German railway networks: “‘The French railway system,’
says Peschel aptly, ‘is a spider’s web, the German one is a fishing net’”
(Geistbeck 238; my translation). Even in 1931 this quotation appears in
4 I translated this as ‘web’ instead of ‘net’ to highlight that the comparison is based on a
spider’s web.
German textbooks on transport geography (see Hassert 254). Obviously,

the metaphor is based on the degree of centralisation of the infrastructure.
6. Telegraphs Are Nerves Are Telegraphs…
The term Telegraphennetz or ‘telegraph network’ established itself for the

same reason. In 1829, Abraham und René Chappe, the brothers of the
inventor of the optical semaphore telegraph Claude Chappe, suggested
cross connecting the isolated lines radiating from Paris: since then, the
formerly starlike shape of the telegraph system has taken the form of a
spider’s web (see Chappe and Chappe 10; Flichy 56; Gießmann 57; Haase
36). Due to the rise of electrical telegraphy, however, the network meta-
phor took another turn in the metaphorical ‘feedback loop.’
As the philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer noted in 1860, in
the second half of the nineteenth century “the comparison of telegraph-
wires to nerves is familiar to all” (Spencer 306). Spencer compared the
structure of societies to organisms, stating that the function of infrastruc-
tures complies with organic structures:
Into each great bundle of nerves […] enters a branch of the sympathetic nerve;
which branch, accompanying the artery throughout its ramifications, has the
function of regulating its diameter and otherwise controlling the flow of blood
through it according to local requirements. Analogously, in the group of tele-
graph-wires running alongside each railway, there is a wire for the purpose of
regulating the traffic—for retarding or expediting the flow of passengers and
commodities, as the local conditions demand. Probably, when our now rudimen-
tary telegraph-system is fully developed, other analogies will be traceable. (Ibid.)
Comparing technology to biology, the direction of Spencer’s analogy goes
from nature to culture: the better infrastructures will be developed, the
more societies will resemble living organisms. In this analogy, thus, organ-
isms are the archetypes or role models for societies and societies are built
like organisms.
A decade earlier, however, the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-
Reymond employed the telegraph metaphor to describe the function of
the nervous system. In his popular lecture Über thierische Bewegung (‘On An-
imal Locomotion’), given in 1851, he presented this analogy to a public
audience:
Now, do you see the soul in the brain as the only sensitive, conscious region of
the body, and the whole rest of the body as an inanimate machine in its hand?
Just so the life of the great nation of France, otherwise centralized to the point of
desolation, pulses only in Paris. But France is not the right analog[y]; France is
still waiting for a Werner Siemens to cover it with a telegraph net. For just as the
central station of the electric telegraph in the Post Office in Königsstrasse is in

communication with the outermost borders of the monarchy through its gigantic
web of copper wire, just so the soul in its office, the brain, endlessly receives dis-
patches from the outermost limits of its empire through its telegraph wires, the
nerves, and sends out its orders in all directions to its civil servants, the muscles.
(Du Bois-Reymond, Thierische Bewegung 29; qtd. in and trans. by Otis 11)
As can be seen, Du Bois-Reymond’s imagery is very complex, since it is
based on a simile (‘just as,’ ‘just so’), mounting a series of metaphors (the
brain is an ‘office,’ the soul is a ‘sovereign,’ muscles are ‘servants,’ the
body is an ‘empire’ or a ‘machine,’ nerves are ‘wires’). In the view of cog-
nitive linguistics, metaphor is defined as understanding one conceptual
domain, the target domain, in terms of another conceptual domain, the
source domain (see Kövecses and Csábi 4). In this case, however, more
than two domains are involved: the first domain is the physiological basis
of body control or more specifically the ‘nervous system.’ The second
domain is the structure of hierarchical command and control in a monar-
chy or more generally the domain of ‘social organisation.’ The third do-
main is the telegraph as a ‘means of communication.’ The fourth is the
domain of ‘machinery’ and, finally, the fifth domain is the domain of ‘ma-
terial webs’: the wording used by Du Bois-Reymond evokes the image of a
spider’s web which has been ‘woven’ or ‘spun’ by the engineer Werner
Siemens ‘covering’ (überspinnen) the whole country like a ‘gigantic cobweb’
(riesenhafte[s] Spinngewebe) of telegraph wires (see Du Bois-Reymond, Thier-
ische Bewegung 29).
Nevertheless, in regard to this quote of Du Bois-Reymond we can
say—in terms of the theory of ‘conceptual metaphors’5—that the ‘tele-
graph system’ is the ‘source domain’ and the ‘nervous system’ is the ‘target
domain’ of the metaphorical transfer: the biological activity of nerves shall
be understood in terms of electrical signal transmission. Therefore, the
metaphorical transfer goes from culture to nature. Hence, its direction is
directly opposed to Spencer’s analogy. Some sentences later, however, Du
Bois-Reymond reverses this relation through the proposition that the
“wonder of our time, electrical telegraphy, was long ago modelled in the
animal machine. […] It is more than similarity”; he argues “it is a kinship
between the two” (Du Bois-Reymond, Thierische Bewegung 29, qtd. in and
trans. by Otis 11).
Therefore, Du Bois-Reymond’s metaphor has changed its direction:
having been the ‘source domain’ before, the process of technical signal
transmission shall now be understood in terms of organic stimulus con-
5 The theory of conceptual metaphors was introduced by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
in their seminal study Metaphors We Live By. Zoltán Kövecses and Szilvia Csábi wrote an in-
structive introduction to the cognitive linguistic study of metaphor.
duction. Regarding the theory of ‘conceptual metaphors,’ this is quite unu-

sual if not paradoxical because “[t]he target domain is the domain that we
try to understand through the use of the source domain” (Kövecses and
Csábi 4). Since ‘conceptual metaphors’ are used to interpret unknown or
unfamiliar matters through better known or familiar ones, “the source and
target domains are not reversible,” and for this reason “the metaphorical
process typically goes from the more concrete to the more abstract but
not the other way round” (ibid. 6).
In this case, though, the metaphorical process reverses, or more pre-
cisely—runs circular. This metaphorical ‘feedback loop’ between tele-
graphs and nerves could emerge because the telegraph metaphor is based
on an equation with two unknowns: on the one hand, electricity and its
technical use were still regarded as a ‘wonder,’ since electricity as well as
nerve conduction had not yet been understood sufficiently. In 1864,
James Clerk Maxwell presented his Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic
Field to the Royal Society which explained previously unrelated observa-
tions, experiments and equations of electromagnetic phenomena by
providing a consistent theory of electricity (see Maxwell 459–512). On the
other hand, the phenomenon of synaptic transmission kept neurophysio-
logy busy for more than a century (see Clarke and O’Malley 238).6
Yet, the proposed kinship between the nervous system and the elec-
tric telegraph inspired the German physiologist to invent a remarkable
apparatus in 1885, which he called the “Zuckungstelegraph” (Du Bois-
Reymond, “Vorrichtungen” 398), that is, ‘Contraction’ or ‘Twitching
Telegraph.’ Tellingly, this apparatus not only bears the telegraph metaphor
in its name. Apart from being a demonstration model visualising the ‘kin-
ship’ between electricity and muscle activity, it is the embodiment of the
metaphor itself. The following image shows Du Bois-Reymond’s con-
struction plan of the ‘Twitching Telegraph’ (see De Cyon 43, XLIII; Du
Bois-Reymond, “Vorrichtungen” 398; fig. 9).7
6 For the discovery of the synapse see the study of Richard Rapport.
7 The following image is taken from The Virtual Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, Berlin (http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/technology/data?id=tec 611).
The Max Planck Institute translated “Zuckungstelegraph” with “Contraction Telegraph.”
‘Twitching,’ however, applies better to Zuckung in my opinion.
Fig. 3: ‘Twitching Telegraph’.

Between the two stands on the left and the right there is a frog’s calf fixed
in a clamp. The muscle is connected with wires and an indicator, which
moves upwards on the right when the calf contracts. In this way, by turn-
ing on and interrupting the power supply one can simulate the rhythmic
transmission of data by Morse code, which had become the world wide
language of telegraphy. Composed of electrical, mechanical and biological
components, Du Bois-Reymond’s ‘Twitching Telegraph’ from 1885 pro-
vides physical and metaphorical evidence of his proposition from 1851,
stating that electrical telegraphy was ‘long ago modelled in the animal ma-
chine.’ For this reason, the ‘Twitching Telegraph’ fulfils a double function:
firstly, as a ‘biomechanical model’ it exemplifies the proposed ‘kinship’
between electricity and nervous activity; secondly, as an ‘embodied’ or
‘material metaphor,’ it implies that the electrical activity of the nervous
system operates with a sort of language using data and codes transmitted
by currents and fibres.
Du Bois-Reymond was considered to be the first scientist to use the
telegraph metaphor for teaching purposes (see Dierig 112). In 1851, his
friend and colleague Hermann von Helmholtz, professor of physiology at
Königsberg, granted his prior claim to the electrical telegraph simile (see
ibid. 112–13; Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond, Dokumente 111)—where
Helmholtz’s own investigations into the sensory processes relied on the
telegraph metaphor as well. As a heuristic model for the operations of the
eyes and ears, the metaphor led Helmholtz to an epistemological theory

proposing that perception of reality is an interpretation of neural signs
signifying certain external objects—similar to Morse code.
In 1863, in Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage
für die Theorie der Musik Helmholtz explained: “Nerves have been often and
not unsuitably compared to telegraph wires. Such a wire conducts one
kind of electric current and no other. […] So with the nerves” (von
Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone 35–36).8 Five years later, in his essay on “The
Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision” (1868), Helmholtz confirmed
and emphasised the relevance of the analogy by arguing that the
nerve-fibres have been often compared with telegraph wires traversing a country,
and the comparison is well fitted to illustrate this striking and important peculiari-
ty of their mode of action. In the net-work of telegraphs we find everywhere the
same copper or iron wires carrying the same kind of movement, a stream of elec-
tricity, but producing the most different results in the various stations according
to the auxiliary apparatus with which they are connected. […] Nerve-fibres and
telegraphic wires are equally striking examples to illustrate the doctrine that the
same causes may, under different conditions, produce different results. (Von
Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress” 150)
Regarding sensory processes, this doctrine had already been stated by the
German physiologist Johannes Peter Müller, who was the teacher of both
Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz. In his Handbuch der
Physiologie des Menschen (1844) he asserted the ‘law of specific energies,’ stat-
ing that
all sensory nerves are sensitive to the same cause but react to the same cause in
different ways. […] Therefore, sensation is not the conduction of a quality or
state of external bodies to consciousness, but the conduction of a quality or state
of our nerves to consciousness, excited by an external cause. (Müller 668; qtd. in
and trans. by Clarke and O’Malley 206; original emphasis)
Like his mentor Müller, Helmholtz argues that the sensations of nerves
are “mere symbols indicating certain external objects” (Helmholtz, “Theo-
ry of Vision” 66); and like Müller, Helmholtz calls the sensations of nerv-
ous activity a Zeichen (‘sign’ or ‘symbol’) of its exciting cause. But unlike
Müller, who argues that one could merely interpret the nerves’ signs but
could never recognise the world itself, Helmholtz believed “that one could
use the relationships among signs to experiment on the world and gain
meaningful knowledge of it” (Otis 45).
For Helmholtz, then, the telegraph model is not merely the ‘represen-
tation’ of an idea of nervous activity. Rather, the telegraph metaphor im-
8 Concerning the concepts of nerves not as ‘conductors’ but as ‘resonators’ see Caroline
Welsh’s contribution in this volume.
plies the idea that body control can be defined in terms of ‘communica-
tion.’ In this way, Helmholtz considered Zeichen as arbitrary signs of “the
external world, the interpretation of which must be learned by experience”
(Helmholtz, “Theory of Vision” 390). In Helmholtz’ view, cognition of
the world is not impossible but mediated. Just as individuals can associate
with each other and come to agreements, through interacting with each
other via telegraphs, individuals can associate signs with objects and inter-
pret their relationship based on their experience: Zeichen are means of in-
teraction and ‘networks’ are means to communicate them.
Obviously, the telegraph metaphor had a decisive impact on the
emerging network metaphor, emphasising the ‘function’ of networks by
comparing nerves with telegraphs. However, a decade before Du Bois-
Reymond introduced the telegraph metaphor in his lecture, Samuel Morse
and other engineers and designers of telegraph networks had already re-
garded their wires as nerves. In 1838, when Morse developed the tele-
graph code, he wrote a letter to his collaborator F. O. J. Smith, describing
telegraph lines as “nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a
knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land” (Morse 85; origi-
nal emphasis). Hence, Du Bois-Reymond did not invent the telegraph
metaphor but introduced it into physiology as a ‘heuristic model’ by in-
versing the direction of the metaphorical transfer. But by involving addi-
tional domains, for example the ‘spider’s web,’ ‘social organisation’ and
‘machinery,’ he reversed the metaphorical transfer again.
As a result, it seems quite impossible to determine “whether the
models of telegraphy as metaphors influenced the models of neurophysi-
ology in the nineteenth century or vice versa,” as Christian Emden states.
“Both of them proceed simultaneously and cannot be deduced from each
other” (Emden, “Epistemische Konstellationen” 143; original emphasis;
my translation). Laura Otis, on the other hand, draws upon N. Katherine
Hayles’ metaphor of the ‘feedback loop’ to describe the interaction of
simultaneously emerging concepts in science, literature and culture as a
kind of ‘multidirectional’ exchange of images and ideas (see Hayles Chaos
and Order 7; Otis 4). Thereby, the theory of conceptual metaphors is appli-
cable merely to a limited extent to explain the cultural dynamic of the
metaphorical circuit since it has been based on “the principle of unidirec-
tionality” (Kövecses and Csábi 6; original emphasis).9
9 The theory of ‘blended spaces’ seems to be more applicable in this case. This approach
proposes two or more given ‘input domains’ which are related by a ‘generic space’ defining
their similarity in order to project a common ‘blended space’ (see Fauconnier and Turner
133–87). However, this case raises the question how the ‘generic space’ (containing what
the inputs have in common) could be defined with regard to an ‘equation with two un-
knowns’ (this is how I would characterise the relationship between the given domains).
Once established, the metaphorical ‘feedback loop’ between telegra-

phy and neurophysiology provided a new meaning of networks referring
to their ‘functionality.’ Thereupon, the network metaphor took another
turn in the ‘feedback loop,’ as we can see in the next case.
7. Neuron Versus Nerve Net
While Du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz referred to tele-

graph networks in order to visualise the ‘function’ of nerves, anatomists
applied the network metaphor to nerves with regard to their ‘structure.’
Since the Italian physician Camillo Golgi discovered a new staining meth-
od in 1888, which was very effective in making nerve cells visible, two op-
posing groups of neurohistologists arose: on the one hand, there were the
‘neuronists.’ They believed
that the nerve cells and their processes, like trees of a forest, constituted inde-
pendent units in contiguity with other units but not in continuity. They devel-
oped the concept of what was later known as the neuron and the neuron theory.
Their opponents, on the other hand, considered the cells and fibres to be in
direct continuity with one another by way of a network to which the fibres con-
tributed; these were the reticularists. (Clarke and O’Malley 87–88; original empha-
sis)
The German anatomist Joseph von Gerlach is regarded as the originator
of the network theory of nervous tissue. Relying on his observations be-
tween 1870 and 1872, Gerlach states that different parts of the nerve cells,
axons and dendrites, are physically joined, fusing within a plexus to form a
vast nerve net (see Clarke and O’Malley 88–90; von Gerlach 684). About
ten years later, in 1883, Camillo Golgi, probably the best known reticular-
ist of his day, proposed the existence of an anastomotic10 network formed
only by certain nerve fibres (axons).
In examining the preparations obtained by his new method, Golgi dis-
tinguished two types of nerve cells and correspondingly two categories of
nerve fibers: Firstly, nerve fibres “which preserve their own identity” and
proceed in direct connection with cells; and secondly, nerve fibers which
subdivide in a complicated manner, “lose their identity and participate in
toto in the formation of the diffuse network” (Golgi 298, qtd. in and trans.
by Clarke and O’Malley 91; original emphasis).
Therefore, the emerging concept of ‘networks’ would be an interesting ‘test case’ for the
theory of ‘blended spaces’—not least because the theory itself is based on the concept of
‘networks,’ as the very title of the above-mentioned article already evinces: Conceptual Inte-
gration Networks (see ibid.).
10 For the definition of the term see note 2.
When Golgi’s work became known to German histologists, his argu-

ment dominated this field of study for the rest of the nineteenth century,
and well into the twentieth century the neuron versus net controversy
continued (see Clarke and O’Malley 87–91). His new staining method and
his ideas were acknowledged by the Nobel Committee, who awarded him
the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1906, which he shared
with his contemporary and adversary Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Using Gol-
gi’s staining method, the Spanish neuronist proposed that nervous tissue
was composed of individual, autonomous cells, instead of a continuous
web. On the basis of his investigations, he asserted in 1888 that he had
“made careful investigations of the course and connections of nerve fibres
in the cerebral and cerebellar convolutions of man, monkey, dog, etc.”
and in so doing he had “never seen an anastomosis” between nerve fibres:
the fibres were interwoven “in a very complex manner, producing an in-
tricate and densely woven plexus, but never a net” (Ramón y Cajal,
“Estructura” 456–57; qtd. in and trans. by Clarke and O’Malley 112).
In his “Croonian Lecture”, given to the Royal Society in 1894, Ramón
y Cajal argued that the phenomenon of anastomosis was “so much against
our […] theories” concerning the nervous system, that the free branching
of cellular expansions “appears not only more probable, but also more
encouraging”; for the Spanish anatomist a continuous network was
“something rigid, immutable, incapable of being changed,” just like a “grid
of telegraph wires in which one can create neither new stations nor new
lines” (Ramón y Cajal, “Croonian Lecture” 467–68; qtd. in and trans. by
Otis 234). By associating the imagery of an anastomotic network with a
‘grid’ of wires, Ramón y Cajal rejected the telegraph metaphor by com-
plaining that the reticular theory hurt one’s feelings concerning the abili-
ties of the human brain.
Even in 1933, when the neuron theory had been widely accepted,
Ramón y Cajal felt impelled to re-evaluate the evidence of the neuron the-
ory encouraging its advocates to overcome the temptation of reticular
theory. By admitting that “for certain minds the reticular theory offers an
extraordinarily seductive and convenient explanation” (Ramón y Cajal,
“Neuronismo” 217; qtd. in and trans. by Clarke and O’Malley 136), he
accused the advocates of reticular theory of being prejudiced. However,
his arguments seem to be prejudiced as well, since the asserted ‘probabil-
ity’ (of independent cells) presupposes the ‘state of knowledge’ of a scien-
tific community and the offered ‘encouragement’ (of the scientific
community) presupposes the ‘feelings’ of decision-making individuals.
Accordingly, Ramón y Cajal preferred metaphors evoking ‘autonomy’ ra-
ther than entanglement. For this purpose he referred to the source do-
main of social systems. Whereas in 1888 he proposed “that each element
is an absolutely autonomous physiological canton” (Ramón y Cajal,

“Estructura” 457; qtd. in and trans. by Clarke and O’Malley 112), in 1933
he employed the imagery of a populous city to defend the autonomy of
the nerve cells against the claim of the net theory:
Let us not fear, then, that by the impetuous attacks of the reticularists, the old
and genial cellular theory of Virchow will suffer grave damage. The normal or-
ganism, so much an association of relatively autonomous cells, always contains, in
the manner of a populous city, defective, deformed, monstrous, and even gravely
sick, as well as healthy elements. For this reason, which we have moreover indi-
cated previously and now insist upon, when dealing with the morphology and
neural connections, we should rely on the law of large numbers, that is to say, on
a rigorously statistical criterion. (Ramón y Cajal, “Neuronismo” 646; qtd. in and
trans. by Clarke and O’Malley 138)
Referring to the ‘law of large numbers,’ Ramón y Cajal argues that even if
some anastomoses in neural tissue might be found, neuronal discontinuity,
hence, autonomy, has to be accepted as the primary principle. Actually,
this is a circular argument because it draws a conclusion which has already
been assumed in the premise: the autonomy of nerve cells as a matter of
principle. The circular argument could be paraphrased as follows: ‘Organ-
isms are associations of autonomous elements. Organisms are like cities.
Cities contain normal and abnormal elements. Normal elements are
autonomous. Hence, elements in organisms are autonomous.’ Thus, that
which can be defined logically as a petitio principii based on an analogy, ap-
pears on the metaphorical layer of meaning as a ‘feedback loop.’ Since the
relationship between individuals and society as a whole still is a fundamen-
tal question of modern politics and sociology, and since the exact relation
between nerve cells was not to be proven until the invention of electron
microscopy, Ramón y Cajal’s analogy can be seen—like Du Bois-
Reymond’s analogy—as an equation with two unknowns.
Finally, concerning the discontinuity of nerve cells, Ramón y Cajal was
not mistaken. Electron microscopy and biochemistry confirmed that
nerve cells are not directly connected but make contact with each other
via a narrow gap of separation called ‘synaptic cleft’ (2-3 nanometres)
where chemicals called ‘neurotransmitter’ relay, amplify and modulate sig-
nals between discrete cells.
However, there are synapses called gap junctions where the cell membranes are
so close to each other that electrical signals are transmitted directly without any
chemical involvement. Furthermore, some molecules travel from one cell to an-
other through gap junctions without entering into extracellular space. So, it turns
out that Golgi was also right. (Lichterman 308)
Significantly, the term ‘neural network’ became accepted in neuroscience
to describe a population of physically interconnected nerve cells. The term
‘neural network,’ thereby, verbally represents that both Ramón y Cajal and
Golgi were, in a way, right. However, “such marked dissent among nine-
teenth-century neuroanatomists using similar techniques suggests that
their perceptions were determined by more than their lenses and stains”
(Otis 56). Obviously, their differing notions of ‘networks’ have been deci-
sive in this case. Whereas Golgi embraced networks as an organic whole,
Ramón y Cajal repelled them as something rigid conflicting with human
nature.
8. Conclusion
The meaning and scope of the network metaphor changed in the course
of the nineteenth century. Formerly used in science as a term describing
biological structures, it became a metaphor for the morphology of infra-
structures, namely the railway and telegraph network. In the course of in-
vestigating the ‘kinship’ between electrical telegraphy and nervous
conduction, the network metaphor changed its function. Having first been
a metaphor describing the ‘shape’ of structures, it has come to be em-
ployed for understanding the ‘function’ of such structures.
Once established at this epistemic level, the metaphor stimulated a
complex interaction between the domains involved. This interaction can-
not be explained by the principle of ‘unidirectionality’ as it is proposed by
the theory of conceptual metaphors—which indeed makes an exception:
“In some cases […] the source and target can be reversed” (Kövecses and
Csábi 25). But still, a mere reversal cannot sufficiently describe the interac-
tion in the present cases. Rather, a principle of ‘bidirectionality’ seems to
cause a metaphorical ‘feedback loop’: the target domain ‘telegraphy’ be-
came the source domain for ‘neurophysiology,’ whereas ‘neurophysiology’
served as source domain for ‘telegraphy.’
The precondition of this metaphoric circuit could be regarded as an
equation with two unknowns: despite being scientifically unexplained,
both electricity and nervous conduction were considered as kindred phe-
nomena. In the course of solving this ‘equation,’ both electric telegraphy
and nervous conduction together established a ‘second order target do-
main’: ‘communications systems.’
As the ‘structure’ of ‘communication systems,’ the networks metaphor
henceforth entailed even more source domains, such as material webs,
social organisation, biological organisms and machinery. Regarding them
as devices of communication and control, the metaphor of networks was
about to become a concept. Networks thereby achieved a new scope of
meaning, finally raising ontological questions of identity and interaction:
Are the elements of a network autonomous or not? And what does it

mean ‘to be connected’?
These questions were not only discussed in the sciences but also in lit-
erature. Most notably, the novels of George Eliot abound with images of
networks and webs. While she was writing the novel Middlemarch (1871–
72), her partner, the philosopher and physiologist George Henry Lewes,
studied the brain and she took an active part in his investigations.11 As edi-
tor of The Westminster Review she was also familiar with the works of Her-
bert Spencer, who published the above cited essay on “The Social
Organism” (1860) in this very journal. However, “[i]t would be a great
mistake to conceive of the scientific ‘influence’ on Eliot as a unilateral
flow or to ask where she ‘got’ a particular metaphor,” Otis argues. “With
her writing, her editing, and her inspired conservation, Eliot gave to scien-
tific discourse as much as she got. Her web images, like those of the scien-
tists, emerged from exchanges with other minds” (Otis 84).
Fig: 4: Complex feedback loop.
11 Thereby, G. H. Lewes coined the term “emergent” (412; vol. 2). See Anita Traninger’s
article in this volume.
Involving sciences as well as literature and everyday life, the metaphorical

‘feedback loop’ is very complex. Due to its complexity, the expression
‘feedback loop’ might not be appropriate in every sense. Above all, the
implication of a cybernetic model might be misleading. Nevertheless, the
model of a ‘complex feedback loop’ could help to describe the relation-
ship of emerging meanings of ‘network’ as a ‘multidirectional’ interaction
of different domains. The following diagram attempts to map the complex
dynamics of the metaphorical transfers regarding the cases focused on in
this contribution.
To sum up, the metaphorical ‘feedback loop’ between telegraph net-
works and nerve nets constituting the concept ‘communications systems’
was already based on network metaphors. The different overlapping met-
aphorical layers of meaning enable complex interactions of images and
associations. For explaining the metaphorical transfer in this case, thus, a
multilevel-model of ‘conceptual metaphors’ is required. By the same to-
ken, such a model could provide an approach to the concept of ‘travelling
concepts’ itself: the anastomoses or circulation (as a special instance of
‘travelling’) of metaphors between different domains may establish a
common domain of ‘second order,’ providing the basis of an emerging
concept.
Revisiting the three main perspectives on networks outlined at the be-
ginning of this article—‘networks’ as a concept, as vision and as a code—
the history of the concept not only gives reasons to consider varying in-
teractions between them. Moreover, it encourages us to revisit the concept
of ‘travelling concepts’ itself.
The analysis of the emerging concept of ‘network’ showed an increas-
ing complexity of meanings and references during the nineteenth century.
This complexity even increased dramatically throughout the twentieth
century and the notion of networks turned out to be highly productive
and influential for almost all disciplines involved in the study of culture—
be it as a decided concept or be it as a tentative term for exploring new
objects or contexts of investigation. Thus, what travels is actually a term
connecting a heterogeneous constellation of ideas, concepts and imagina-
tions rather than a particular, identical concept. Nevertheless, the travel-
ling of the word leaves its marks in different concepts, and different
concepts of ‘networks’ increase the implications of the term. For this rea-
son, the travelling fosters not only a significant productivity but an over-
determination of an ambiguous term, which runs the risk of transcending
the claims of scholarly language. Hence, a study of culture dealing with
‘networks’ needs to reflect this ambiguity.
Generally, there are two major ways to deal with this challenge: For
the sake of clarity the meaning of the term should be defined as concisely
as possible. With regard to its cultural impact, however, the complexity of

its implications is a phenomenon which cannot be eliminated—but ana-
lysed and interpreted. As a transdisciplinary concept, the study of networks
suggests a highly promising approach for analysing multiple cultural pro-
cesses. Respecting its metaphorical origins, the travelling concept of networks
will be a rewarding object of cultural analysis.
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Narrativist Approaches and Narratological Concepts
for the Study of Culture1
ANSGAR NÜNNING
1. Introduction: Narrative Worldmaking as an Interface Between

Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research and the Study of Culture
Although there is widespread agreement among many scholars working in

a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that cul-
tures and narratives are closely interlinked, the complex connections be-
tween the interdisciplinary fields known as narratology and the study of
culture have not yet been gauged, let alone systematically explored. On the
one hand, many anthropologists, historians, sociologists, cultural and nar-
rative psychologists, as well as researchers in literary studies and cultural
memory studies would tend to agree that storytelling or narrative
worldmaking (see Herman 2009) plays an important role for the creation
of cultural communities, and that collectively shared narratives serve to
shape cultural identities. On the other hand, neither narratologists nor re-
searchers in cultural studies, or its German variant of Kulturwissenschaften,
have made any sustained attempts to develop a narrative, or narrativist,
theory of culture, or a cultural theory of narrative. Although the develop-
ments of “narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research”
(Heinen and Sommer) include debates about the uses and abuses of con-
textualist approaches like “postcolonial and intercultural narratologies”
(see Sommer, “Contextualism Revisited”) and programmatic outlines of
“cultural narratologies” (Nünning, “Surveying”), such approaches have
neither been fully developed nor have they had much impact in the field
of the study of culture. This seems to confirm an observation made by
Wolfgang Müller-Funk, an Austrian researcher in literary and cultural
studies:
1 In this article I have drawn on and elaborated some ideas and formulations that I also used
in earlier essays, viz. Nünning (“Towards,” “Surveying,” “Making Events”); see also
Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann.
146 Ansgar Nünning
That which seems to be obvious often runs the risk of being overlooked. It
would be obvious to consider the constitutive relevance of narratives for
cultures and to possibly understand cultures as more or less (hierarchically)
organized clusters of explicit and also implicit, of expressed, but also of
concealed narratives. For it is undoubtedly narratives that are central for the
representation of identity, for individual remembering, for the collective mental
state of groups, regions, nations, for ethnic and gendered identity. (Müller-Funk
17; my translation)
The main project of this chapter is to explore such intersections between
narrative(s) and culture(s), and between the interdisciplinary fields known
as narratology and the study of culture. Proceeding from the assumption
that narratives or stories are not only one of the most important “cultural
ways of worldmaking” (see Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann), but also
provide an important interface between cross-disciplinary narrative re-
search and the study of culture, the chapter will make a modest attempt to
synthesise concepts and ideas from a variety of fields that have displayed
keen interest in the forms and functions of narrative worldmaking in this
age of cross-disciplinary narrative research. More specifically, fully sub-
scribing to David Herman’s view that “no one area of study can come to
terms with the multidimensional complexity of narrative worldmaking”
(Herman, “Editor’s Column” ix), it tries to assess the usefulness of narra-
tive and of a number of other concepts developed by both classical narra-
tology and more recent approaches in cross-disciplinary narrative research
as key concepts for the study of culture.
Using the insight into the performative, reality-constituting, or
worldmaking function of narration as the most important point of depar-
ture, the chapter will outline some of the most important concepts and
building blocks that narratology and inter- or multidisciplinary narrative
research can contribute to the development of the study of culture. In-
stead of giving a wide overview of the historical development of narrative
theory or of the main differences between classical narratology and the
new post-classical narratologies (see Herman, Narratologies; Nünning,
“Narratology or Narratologies?”), an attempt is made to clarify which
concepts and perspectives developed by narratology and transdisciplinary
narrative research could benefit the study of culture.
As anyone familiar with recent developments in the fields of cross-
disciplinary narrative research (see Heinen and Sommer; Olson) and/or
the sudy of culture, or its German variant of Kulturwissenschaften, will know,
it would be the task of several monographs to provide comprehensive
overviews of the state of the art of any of the disciplines or fields that
have recently displayed great interest in narratives. The same holds true
for any attempt to sketch comprehensive maps of recent developments in
the two interdisciplinary fields in question, i.e. the interdisciplinary study
Narrativist Approaches and Narratological Concepts 147
of culture and narrative research. It is no longer only narratology, be it in

its classical or postclassical variants (see Herman, Narratologies), that sys-
tematically explores the forms and functions of narratives, but rather a
broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, ranging
from anthropology and history over literary, cultural and media studies to
psychology, sociology, political science and economics (see Heinen and
Sommer; Klein and Martinez) as well as such recently emerging interdisci-
plinary research fields as cultural memory studies, to name but a few.
Moreover, not only do the trajectories of these disciplines and their vari-
ous traditions in narrative research differ in many respects, but the devel-
opments and currents trends of narratology alone are also far too complex
for any attempt to map them in one essay (see Fludernik and Olson). The
objectives of the present chapter will thus have to be much more modest,
as the following brief overview of the content and focus of the six sec-
tions will serve to outline.
Challenging the view that narrative, or other narratological concepts,
should be conceived of as a paradigm example of Mieke Bal’s notion of
‘travelling concepts’ (see Bal, Travelling Concepts) that have been transferred
from one discipline to another or to several other fields, the second sec-
tion provides a rough map of the co-emergence of interest in narrative(s)
in a broad range of disciplines. Outlining where narratology and the study
of culture could, but have so far largely failed to meet, section three pro-
vides a brief survey of recent attempts to develop narrativistic approaches
in the study of culture and approaches in narrative research that are geared
towards cultural and contextual issues. Exploring the most important con-
ceptual intersections between cultures and narratives, sections four and
five focus on key concepts for a cultural narratology and a narrativist
study of culture. While section four discusses some premises and concepts
of a cultural and historical narratology, which is based on the notion of a
cultural semanticisation of narrative forms and which focusses on the
forms, or “principles and practices of narrative worldmaking” (see Her-
man, “Principles”), section five explores the functions that narrative can
fulfil as a cultural way of self-, community, and worldmaking, respectively.
By way of conclusion, section six outlines some new horizons and re-
search openings for a narratologically oriented theory and study of culture,
arguing that narratology, as well as traditions of narrative research across
various disciplines in the humanities, and the study of culture could mutu-
ally profit from each other in a number of significant ways.
148 Ansgar Nünning
2. Narrative and Narratological Tools as ‘Travelling Concepts’?

The Co-Emergence of Multidisciplinary Narrative Research
In the context of a volume on ‘Travelling Concepts for the Study of Cul-

ture’, the question of whether narrative and other key concepts developed
in and by narratology are indeed ‘travelling concepts’ seems as good a
place to begin as any. Anyone reading such excellent collections of essays
as Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity (Meister), Nar-
ratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research (Heinen and Som-
mer), or Current Trends in Narratology (Olson), will probably be inclined to
deduce from the very titles that narratology has indeed travelled far be-
yond literary studies and that it has become a truly inter- or even transdis-
ciplinary endeavour in this ‘age of cross-disciplinary research.’ Whether
this is really so, however, is arguably an open question.
On the one hand, there are a number of reasons why one could in-
deed argue that narratology and some of its key concepts have become, or
are in the process of becoming, travellers, i.e. a travelling theory and trav-
elling concepts. Three of these reasons deserve to be singled out. First of
all, there has arguably been a “Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences”
(Kreiswirth, “Tell Me a Story”) and a “Narrative Turn in the Humanities”
(Kreiswirth, “Narrative Turn”), testified to not only by such volumes as
Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Litera-
ture (see Nash), the seminal and truly interdisciplinary Routledge Encyclopedia
of Narrative Theory (see Herman, Jahn, and Ryan), and the collections of
essays delineating recent trends in narratology quoted above, but also by
the wide-ranging interest in narrative in many disciplines in the humanities
and the social sciences. Second, as Heinen, Meister, Olson and other nar-
ratologists have recently shown, narratology has assumed an ever more
important role in narrative research across the disciplines. What Heinen
observes about narrative research has also become, at least partly, true of
narratology:
narrative research is no longer confined to literary studies but has gained great
currency in many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences,
ranging from cultural and media studies to linguistics, to historical theory and
historiography, to anthropology, philosophy, theology, psychology, pedagogy,
political science, medicine, law and economics. (Heinen 193)
Third, what Werner Wolf has called “The Transmedial Expansion of a
Literary Discipline” is especially obvious and pertinent in transgeneric,
intermedial and interdisciplinary applications of narratology (see Heinen
196; Nünning and Nünning, “Von der strukturalistischen Narratologie”
11;). Narratology is indeed no longer merely a theory of verbal narrative
(see Wolf 146), but has become equally interested in issues of media and
mediality (see Wolf), and in the forms and functions of narratives in other
media (see Ryan) and discourses (see Klein and Martínez).
On the other hand, there are also a number of good reasons why one
might want to challenge the claim that narratology and its key concepts
are indeed paradigm examples of travelling theories and travelling con-
cepts. Although the developments oulined in the preceding paragraph do
indeed seem to support the view that “narratology is increasingly appealed
to as a master discipline” (Fludernik, “Histories” 47), a closer look at the
history and state-of-the-art of ‘narrative research across the disciplines’
(see Heinen) suggests that what we are actually faced with are, more often
than not, various more or less independent trajectories of scholarship in
different disciplines that have displayed sustained interest in narrative. All
of the disciplines within the humanities and social sciences that are usually
mentioned in recent overviews and histories of narrative theory, for ex-
ample linguistics, media studies, historiography, anthropology, philosophy,
psychology and psychoanalysis, medicine, political science, economics, as
well as law and legal discourse (see Fludernik, “Histories” 47–48; Heinen
193; Klein and Martínez), have their own and very rich disciplinary tradi-
tions of narrative research. Moreover, though there are many different
theoretical frameworks and context- or culture-sensitive interpretations of
individual narratives in all of these disciplines, the great interest that has
existed in the study of narratives across the humanities and social sciences
has arguably been multidisciplinary rather than inter- or transdisciplinary
in nature.
So what we are actually, or arguably, faced with is not so much a case
of narrative and narratogical tools as ‘travelling concepts,’ but rather a
complex co-emergence of interest in the forms, role and functions of nar-
rative and storytelling in a wide array of disciplines across the humanities,
social sciences and even disciplines in other faculties like medicine. Each
of these disciplines and fields has developed its own research traditions,
paradigms and concepts, not all, or even many, of which are narratological
in either nature or origin. Since any attempt at mapping the development
of narrative research in even one of these disciplines would require a full-
length article of its own, suffice it to say that all any story about either nar-
ratology or narrative research across the disciplines can ever hope to offer
is just one “of the countless possible plots” in a field that has recently
turned not only into “a garden of forking paths” (Onega and García Lan-
da 36), but also into a highly complex landscape that is characterised by
divergent tendencies and numerous trajectories:
The actual evolution and development of narrative theory cannot begin to be
grafted onto the master narrative of critical theory as told by the post-
structuralists. Indeed, the story of modern narrative theory does not fit well into
150 Ansgar Nünning
the frame of any narrative history. There are far too many story strands, loose
ends, abrupt turns, and unmotivated reappearances of forgotten figures and
theoretical approaches to fit easily within any one narrative structure. The
history of modern narrative theory is more accurately depicted as a cluster of
contiguous histories rather than a single, comprehensive narrative. (Richardson
172)
One might even go so far as to argue that the metaphor of ‘travelling’ may
actually be misleading rather than helpful or illuminating for any attempt
at coming to grips with the complex and historically variable relations be-
tween narratology and other disciplinary traditions of narrative research.
To take but two examples: The rich tradition of narrative research devel-
oped in historiography and the theory of history that has been dubbed the
‘narrativist school of historiography’ and that includes such luminaries as
David Carr, Arthur Danto, Jörn Rüsen and Hayden White was developed
largely independently from narratology (see Jaeger). Another case in point
of such fruitful coexistence, or co-emergence, of interest in narrative in
two largely unrelated fields is the equally rich tradition of narrative psy-
chology that is associated with the work of Jerome Bruner, Jens Brock-
meier, Michele Crossley, Donald Polkinghorne, Theodore Sarbin, Jürgen
Straub and many other researchers (for overviews, see Crossley; Echter-
hoff), and that has also displayed little if any interest in narratology. The
same holds true for narrative research in other disciplines in the humani-
ties and social sciences, including, for example, medicine, political science,
economics and law or legal discourse (for very good overviews, see the
articles in Klein and Martínez).
What needs to be added, however, is that there are, of course, quite a
number of “local histories of narratological development” (Fludernik and
Olson 3), as well as applications and extensions of narratology, in other
fields and disciplines (e.g. in theology). Three of the most prominent of
these recent developments can be dubbed transgeneric, transmedial and
interdisciplinary expansions of narratology. They include the increasing
narratological attention paid to literary genres formerly excluded from nar-
ratological inquiry, especially drama and poetry, narratological work on
other media like cartoons, films, pictorial narrative, music, and the new
media (see Meister; Nünning and Nünning, Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, in-
termedial, interdisziplinär; Ryan), and narratological analyses of real-world
narratives in non-fictional discourses (see Klein and Martínez). In most of
these transgeneric, transmedial and interdisciplinary approaches, “tradi-
tional narratological concepts and methods are applied to new objects of
analysis” (Fludernik and Olson 3). Some of the most sophisticated work
in these areas has also demonstrated the need to develop new theoretical
frameworks and analytical tools for such objects as cartoons (see
Schüwer), films (see M. Kuhn) and computer games (see Zierold). Though
some of these developments have been delineated and mapped by a num-
ber of recent overviews (see e.g. Fludernik, “Histories”; Fludernik and
Olson; Heinen; Meister; Nünning and Nünning, “Produktive Grenzüber-
schreitungen”), the potential that either these transgeneric, transmedial
and interdisciplinary narratological approaches or narrative research in
other disciplines (e.g. in history or narrative psychology) may have for the
study of culture has not yet been considered in any depth.
In sum, neither narrative nor many of the analytical concepts and
tools developed by narratology have thus actually travelled from narrato-
logy as point of departure to other disciplines; nor have concepts travelled
in the opposite direction, for that matter. Though one can certainly argue
that narrative “travels easily across media, from discipline to discipline,
within disciplines, from theory to professional practices, from narrative to
non-narrative” (Hyvärinen 4), there is not much evidence for the claim
that this also holds true for narratological concepts. A stimulating collec-
tion of essays on “The Travelling Concept of Narrative” (see Hyvärinnen,
Korhonen, and Mykkänen) notwithstanding, most of the key concepts
from narratology have up to now not really been ‘travelling concepts’ in
the sense outlined by Mieke Bal. Although there are a number of examples
that seem to suggest otherwise, for example the travelling of the narrato-
logical concept of framing to other media and fields of inquiry being a
case in point (see Bal 133–73; Wolf and Bernhart), these are arguably ex-
ceptions to the rule.
On the whole, the notion of a co-emergence of interest in narratives
in many disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences seems a
more appropriate way of conceptualising the manifold developments in
both cross-disciplinary narrative research and the study of culture than the
metaphor of ‘travelling.’ This multidisciplinary co-emergence of interest in
the role and functions of narratives in culture raises the question of how a
fruitful exchange of concepts and ideas between narratology and the study
of culture could be fostered. As the next section will show, some narrativ-
istic approaches in the study of culture and cultural approaches in narra-
tive theory provide a good starting point for any attempt to forge
productive links between the two fields of research which have much
more in common than its practitioners who largely ignore each others’
work seem to suggest. Let us now therefore turn our attention to the two
main research areas that this chapter is mainly concerned with, narratolo-
gy, or cross-disciplinary narrative research, and the study of culture, two
fields that have a number of parallels of concern, but have so far largely
failed to meet or cooperate fruitfully by exchanging concepts.
152 Ansgar Nünning
3. Where Narratology and the Study of Culture (have so far failed to)
Meet: Narrativistic Approaches in the Study of Culture and
Cultural Approaches in Narrative Research
To present the outlines of the interfaces and links between narrative re-
search or narratology and the study of culture, or of what I have elsewhere
(see Nünning, “Towards”; “Surveying”) dubbed ‘cultural narratology,’ we
need to historicise and contextualise the debates in which this chapter
makes a modest attempt to intervene. When narratology, i.e. the ‘science
of narrative’ (Todorov), was invented in the late 1960s, three of the things
that were ignored or lost were cultural contexts, semantic implications and
ideological functions of narratives, and the history or historical variation
of narrative forms. Although we have recently witnessed both a number
of cultural turns in the humanities (see Bachmann-Medick) and a great
revival of interest in the study of narratives across various disciplines, nar-
ratology and the interdisciplinary study of culture still seem to be oceans
apart. This holds especially true for classical narratology, whereas some of
the more well-developed recent approaches in narrative theory, for exam-
ple feminist narratology, postcolonial approaches to narratives and inter-
cultural narratology, are much more interested in cultural contexts and
interpretative concerns.
Nonetheless, as even excellent recent volumes that chart current
trends in narratology serve to show (see e.g. Heinen and Sommer; Olson),
cultural contexts and cultural concerns are not among the most important
areas or directions into which cross-disciplinary narrative research has
been developing in the last decade or so. As Monika Fludernik and Greta
Olson have shown in their illuminating assessment of current trends in
narratology, the emphasis rather lies on cognitive approaches, transgener-
ic, transmedial and interdisciplinary narrative study, and in attempts at re-
constructing local and national research tradition in narratology itself (see
the essays in the volumes edited by Olson; see also Heinen and Sommer;
Meister; Ryan). While there have been sophisticated attempts at mediating
cognitivist and culturalist approaches in other interdisciplinary fields like
metaphor theory (see e.g. Kövecses), classical narratology has to date
largely continued to shy away from the study of cultural, historical or ideo-
logical concerns, dismissing the notion of, for example, contextualist or
intercultural narratology outright (see e.g. Kindt; Kindt and Müller,
“Brauchen wir”).
The great majority of researchers working in the wide field encom-
passed by the study of culture have displayed almost as little interest in
narratology and in the role of narratives as cultural ways of worldmaking
(see Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann) as practitioners of narratology
have mustered for cultural contexts and historical concerns. As Doris

Bachmann-Medick has shown in her wide-ranging monograph, there have
been a number of ‘cultural turns’ in the study of culture, including for ex-
ample the iconic turn, the performative turn, the postcolonial turn and the
translational turn. While all of the cultural turns discussed by Bachmann-
Medick cut across disciplinary and national boundaries and have signifi-
cantly changed the ways in which research agendas have developed in the
study of culture, they have not done much to increase interest in what the
philosopher Nelson Goodman christened “ways of worldmaking” or in
what Jerome Bruner felicitously called the “narrative construction of reali-
ty.” The fact that cultural theorists have not only identified, but also care-
fully reconstructed a wide array of cultural turns, while a narrative, or
narrativist, turn in the humanities has merely been postulated (see
Kreiswirth, “Tell Me a Story”; “Narrative Turn”), but not delineated in
any detail, testifies to the relative paucity of interest that the study of cul-
ture has bestowed on the forms and functions of narratives, let alone on
narratology as a discipline.
Mutually ignoring each other’s research traditions, both narratologists
and scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of the study of culture
have thus far overlooked or deliberately ignored something very obvious:
Though there has been a great and sustained boom in narrative research in
various disciplines over the past two or three decades, and a renaissance
of narratology, the considerable significance of narratives for cultures as
“narrating communities which differ especially in their narrative reper-
toire” (see Müller-Funk 14; my translation), has not been accorded much
attention in either narratology or the study of culture (see Nünning, “Kul-
turen”). Although postclassical narratologies have developed in a number
of interesting directions, ranging from cognitive narratology to feminist
narratology (see Lanser, “Toward”) to psycho- and socionarratology (see
Bortolussi and Dixon; Herman, “Towards”), contextual and cultural di-
mensions of narratives have only recently become the focus of attention.
As I have elsewhere tried to show (see Nünning, “Surveying”), the rise of
contextualist and cultural narratologies has opened up a number of inter-
esting new horizons which the study of culture has so far failed to follow.
While contextualist approaches in narratology have so far been mainly
concerned with contextualising the (mostly fictional) narratives under
scrutiny rather than pursuing broader cultural concerns or building bridges
towards the study of culture, cultural theory has mainly focused on the
work of particular scholars (e.g. Lotman) or explored the uses of narra-
tives in particular disciplines (e.g. historiography).
This deficit is surprising as it might actually be useful for the study of
culture to benefit more comprehensively from the outlined renaissance of
154 Ansgar Nünning
narratology, just as the latter could in turn benefit from paying more at-
tention to the cultural contexts and historical variation of narratives. First-
ly narrative theory has benefited from a great interdisciplinary interest in
narration but also from other ‘cultural turns’ (see Bachmann-Medick) like
the anthropological turn, the postcolonial turn, the historical turn, the eth-
ical turn and especially the cognitive turn, but the cultural, or culturalist,
turns have not yet received as much attention as they deserve. Secondly,
the renaissance of narrative theory may be attributed to the realisation that
narratives and the act of narration are not specifically literary phenomena
that are restricted to fictional texts but which also appear in non-literary
contexts as well as in many other media and disciplines (see section two
above). If telling stories is really a basic anthropological need felt by hu-
man beings and a central medium of creating identity, then the theory of
narration could not only occupy centre stage in literary and cultural theory
but also become a starting point of interdisciplinary research. A third rea-
son for narratology’s increasing importance and its great potential rele-
vance for the study of culture is the insight that narrative forms are
neither constant features beyond historical variation, nor are they neutral
or insignificant media of representation.
Narratives and narratology are of special interest for the study of cul-
ture as cultures are narratively constituted to a remarkable degree and be-
cause narration or storytelling itself is one of the most important cultural
ways of worldmaking (see Goodman; Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann).
Narratives and narrative forms are not only related to culture and subject
to historical variation, but are also bearers of meaning in their own right,
cognitive tools and cultural ways of worldmaking that bestow sense and
identity. The insight into the performative power of narration, i.e. its ca-
pacity to make selves, sense and reality, (see Eakin; Nünning and Som-
mer), shows how great the interdisciplinary value of narratology for the
study of culture could actually be (see section four and five).
In view of the most important publications in the fields of the study
of culture and narratology during the past few years, one is astonished to
see that in spite of the border-crossing and interdisciplinary character of
the study of culture and narrative research, there is relatively little com-
mon ground in these two research traditions. Whereas the study of culture
has hardly taken notice of either postclassical narratology or cross-
disciplinary narrative research (see Heinen and Sommer), the new orienta-
tions in Kulturwissenschaften that Doris Bachmann-Medick has systematically
presented in her volume Cultural Turns have contributed to some of the
approaches subsumed under the wide umbrella of the term ‘postclassical
narratologies’ (see Herman, Narratologies), especially to postcolonial narra-
tive theory. Nonetheless, the theoretical frameworks and key concepts of
Kulturwissenschaften (see Jaeger and Liebsch) have only played a marginal

role thus far in recent narrative research, let alone in narratology proper.
Most of the handbooks, introductions and overview articles on the
two research areas contain indications for the thesis that the study of cul-
ture and narratology have largely developed independently of each other
in the recent past. For example in Bachmann-Medick’s volume Cultural
Turns there are chapters on the interpretive turn, performative turn, reflex-
ive turn/literary turn, postcolonial turn, translational turn, spatial turn and
iconic turn, but none on a narrative turn or narrativist turn. In other con-
texts however, there are some mentions of a “narrative turn” (Isernhagen
176–77, 180) or a “narrativist turn in the human sciences” (Kreiswirth,
“Tell Me a Story”) without, however, any similarly wide empirical evi-
dence in the study of culture, as in the turns treated by Bachmann-Medick.
Insights and developments in narratology have played hardly any part in
most of the handbooks and introductions to the study of culture (see e.g.
Appelsmeyer and Billmann-Mahecha; Assmann; Böhme et al.; Nünning
and Nünning, Einführung). The monumental three-volume handbook to
German Kulturwissenschaften (see Jaeger et al.) may serve as an example for
many other publications, offering an impressively wide and well-founded
overview of the profile, tasks and functions of the interdisciplinary study
of culture, as well as its foundation, methodical concepts and key ideas
(see Jaeger and Liebsch). It contains, however, not a single contribution
on either narratology or cross-disciplinary narrative research, although at
least two of the more than one hundred essays in these volumes are de-
voted to narration (see Fulda; Meuter). Conversely, the study of culture
research and text books are conspicuous by their absence in most of the
more recent publications on narratology—even in those on inter- and
transdisciplinary narrative research (see e.g. Alber and Fludernik; Heinen
and Sommer; Olson; Phelan and Rabinowitz).
Even if one or two exceptions like Fauser’s short chapter on ‘cultural
narratives’ in his introduction to Kulturwissenschaften (see Fauser 87–93), or
Sommer’s and my overviews of contextualist narratology (see Nünning,
“Surveying”; Sommer) confirm the rule, it does seem remarkable to what
degree the developments in the study of culture and narratology are not
given mutual attention in these two interdisciplinary research fields. Such
generalisations need, of course, to be relativised for at least two reasons:
on the one hand there is great interest in narrative across the media (see
Ryan) and narration in many of the disciplines that are involved in the
study of culture (see section two above). Examples of this include, besides
literary and media studies, history, sociology and narrative psychology,
each of which have created a very productive narrativistic research tradi-
tion. Also in some areas of narratology the idea has gained currency that
156 Ansgar Nünning
narrative forms are by no means universal or ahistorical, but rather subject

to historical change and contextual as well as cultural variation. The narra-
tological approaches that bear up these ideas include feminist or gender-
orientiented narratology (see Nünning and Nünning, Erzähltextanalyse),
postcolonial narratology (see Birk and Neumann) and contextualist narra-
tology (see Nünning, “Surveying”; Sommer). These and other approaches
devoted to the intersections between cultures and narratives will be out-
lined in the following as they provide productive starting points and im-
pulses for the ongoing development of contextualist and cultural
narratologies and for a narrativistic (or even narratological) study of cul-
ture.
Despite its impressive productivity, the study of culture has not dis-
played much interest in narratology or even in cross-disciplinary narrative
research and its recent developments. Although for decades many disci-
plines associated with the study of culture, ranging from anthropology to
history to psychology and sociology, have explored forms and functions
of narratives and narration, there is not much evidence for the claim that
narrativity has become one of the foundational terms for the study of cul-
ture (see Meuter 140: “Narrativität als Grundbegriff der Kulturwissen-
schaften”). While many disciplines involved in the study of culture have
been concerned with narratives as an object of study, narrative, narrativity
and other key terms developed by narratology have not received much
attention as distinct theoretical concepts outside of narratological circles.
Both narratology and other disciplinary traditions of narrative research
(e.g. in history and psychology) have much to offer for anyone interested
in developing a narrativistic (or narratological) study of culture, as the fol-
lowing sections will try to show.
As Jerome Bruner and other cultural and narrative psychologists, rep-
resentatives of the ‘narrativist’ school of historians and historical theorists
(e.g. Arthur Danto, Lionel Gossman, Louis Mink, Hayden White), and,
more recently, leading narratologists like David Herman have emphasised
time and again, narratives are not just a literary form or means of linguistic
expression, but in fact a cognitive mode of self-recognition and a cultural
way of worldmaking. This basic insight may go some way to explaining
the widespread interest that narratives have had for some time in different
areas of the humanities. It is not just narrative theory in a narrow sense or
literary studies that concern themselves with the elements, structures and
functions of narratives, but also anthropology, history, philosophy, narra-
tive psychology and psychotherapy, and economics, to name but a few.
This broad transdisciplinary interest in narrativity, which has now caught
on in medicine, law and the natural sciences as well (see Klein and Mar-
tinez; Nash), is accompanied by a considerable extension of research in-
terest in other objects that no longer restricts itself to literary narrative

texts but includes non-fictional or real-world narratives (i.e. Wirklich-
keitserzählungen, the title of a volume edited by Klein and Martinez), as well
as the forms and functions of narratives in old and new media.
In light of this widespread multidisciplinary interest in narrative(s),
one can sum up that though the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘narrativity’ have
gained currency as key concepts in the study of culture (see Meuter 144), it
is not necessarily legitimate to claim that there is something like a ‘narra-
tivist paradigm’ in the study of culture, or in Kulturwissenschaften, for that
matter (see Meuter 140, who makes this claim). Although there has been
some sustained interest in narratives in different discourses in the men-
tioned disciplines, it is not really a question of a paradigm in Kulturwissen-
schaften in the theoretical sense (see T. Kuhn), as there is no scientific
theory or coherent framework held by people working in the study of cul-
ture, which has arguably so far failed to develop any paradigm (see Porn-
schlegel, “Das Paradigma”). Neither is there much exchange or consensus
about narrative concepts among the theorists in the disciplines mentioned.
What has happened is that each discipline has developed its own narrativ-
istic approach and established its own research fields and traditions (e.g.
narrative psychology) without initiating either a paradigm change in the
discipline at large, or a transdisciplinary turn in the study of culture (see
Bachmann-Medick).
Nor has narratology developed a fully-fledged theoretical approach
oriented towards the study of culture, even though there are some contri-
butions to contextual and cultural narratologies that hint at this kind of
new orientation (for an overview, see Nünning, “Surveying”). When con-
sidering the many developments and approaches in postclassical narratol-
ogies, it becomes clear that most narratologists have displayed only limited
interest in the study of culture and that the great majority of new
approaches are heading in different directions. This holds true for cogni-
tive narratology, for linguistic, pragmatic and rhetoric approaches as well
as for transgeneric and transmedial narratology (see Meister; Nünning and
Nünning, Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär; Ryan). The
transgeneric and inter- or transmedial approaches which explore narratives
in other genres and media than literary fictions serve to show that trans-
ferring narratological models to other genres and media requires some
modification, revision and extension of the analytical tools. These devel-
opments and insights are of interest for cultural narratologies as the latter
also do not focus primarily on literary texts but tend to look at non-
fictional forms of narrative in other discourses, genres and media.
Furthermore, narratology is undergoing some other developments
that could give valuable impulses and ideas to narrativist approaches to
158 Ansgar Nünning
the study of culture. Interest in contextual questions as well as in concepts

of cultural studies is especially obvious in the case of approaches that are
oriented to contexts, ideological issues, and norms and values like feminist
narratology, gender oriented narratological theory, and intercultural and
postcolonial narratology. These new narratological approaches relating to
context and theme, which are of particular interest for the study of cul-
ture, are not, however, really ‘new narratologies’ but rather offer applica-
tions and extensions of narratological categories, models and methods.
These approaches focus their interest on the content and theme of narra-
tive texts as well as on their relation to cultural and historical contexts, two
areas which were not considered by structuralist narratology. As the term
‘contextualist narratology’ indicates, they go beyond the sphere of the
primarily text-centred narratology of structuralist origin. The mentioned
approaches are most clearly applicable to the study of culture in that they
pay attention to aspects like race (postcolonial narratology, ethnic narra-
tology), class (marxist narratology, socio-narratology) and gender (feminist
or gender-oriented narratology, queer narratology, corporeal narratology),
i.e. to categories and issues which are key concepts in cultural studies and
which serve to shift interest to historical, cultural, ethnic and ideological
questions that were completely and deliberately ignored by classical narra-
tology.
Contextualist approaches like feminist and postcolonial narratology
have already brought forth an impressive array of exemplary studies, apart
from innovative ideas on the creation of theoretical frameworks, concepts
and models (see e.g. Basseler; Birk; Birk and Neumann; Orosz). Also in
the area of narratological research focusing on cultural history there are
several substantial studies that testify to the great potential held by this
field of research (for an overview, see Erll and Roggendorf). The rele-
vance of these and similar approaches for the study of culture can be
found to a large extent in the contextual and cultural narratologies which
shift the emphasis from formal and structural aspects to those concerning
content, context and functions of narratives, thus pushing the semantic
dimension of narrative texts into the foreground.
Among the researchers and studies that have been especially im-
portant for the development of narratological approaches to the study of
culture, the works of Mieke Bal, a literary and cultural theorist from the
Netherlands, deserve special mention, since she was among the first to
make a name for herself as a narratologist, before starting to use the tools
of narratology for what she called ‘cultural analysis.’ Bal was also one of
the first to question the sense and point of narratological text analysis,
asking a question which sounds very simple, but which is actually as
important as it is invaluable for anyone interested in gauging the uses and
usefulness of narratology for the study of culture: “what’s the point?” (Bal,
“The Point” 729). Bal later went on to answer the question herself by de-
veloping her own approach of cultural analysis and by showing how
the notion of travelling concepts provides a methodological blueprint for
the application of narratological tools in other disciplines. Accordingly,
narratology and the study of culture are not mutually exclusive, but the
categories of analysis which were developed out of narratology can be
beneficially used to examine cultural phenomena, as Bal demonstrated by
using narratological concepts of focalisation and of framing for cultural
analysis and by reconstructing the ways in which these concepts have
travelled (see Bal, Travelling Concepts 35–49, 133–73). More recently, practi-
tioners of such new approaches as feminist narratology, postcolonial nar-
ratology, or intercultural narratology have begun putting the analytic
toolkits of narratology “to the service of other concerns considered more
vital for cultural studies,” as Bal put it in an article tellingly entitled “The
Point of Narratology” (729). Though working in the research traditions of
both British Cultural Studies and German Kulturwissenschaften, and, unlike
Bal, not being especially interested in narratology, the Austrian theorist
Wolfgang Müller-Funk in his monograph Die Kultur und ihre Narrative. Eine
Einführung (2002/2008) has outlined a theory of culture based on narra-
tive, making the study of narratives into an analytical tool to grasp cul-
tures. While Bal’s work has served to develop narratology in the direction
of cultural analysis, Müller-Funk uses a double perspective of narrativity as
a cultural phenomenon and a methodical view of cultures. Like Bal and
Müller-Funk, Astrid Erll’s work in cultural memory studies, and, more
specifically, her model of a rhetoric and “narratology of cultural memory”
(Erll 157–60), has served to give a wide range of stimulating impulses for
the development of narrativistic approaches in the study of culture and
cultural approaches in narrative research. On the whole, however, Mieke
Bal, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Astrid Erll, Roy Sommer and some other
scholars are laudable exceptions to the rule, since not very many narrato-
logists have so far followed their context-sensitive work on the relation
between culture and narratives, or heeded Mieke Bal’s clarion call to move
“from narratology to cultural analysis” (Bal, “Close Reading”). The next
two sections will therefore outline some of the premises and concepts of a
cultural and historical narratology, an approach which may serve to bridge
the gap between narrative research and the study of culture.
160 Ansgar Nünning
4. Cultures and Narratives: Premises and Concepts for a

Cultural Narratology and a Narrativist Study of Culture
The recent diversification of approaches in narratology has resulted in an

increasing interest in the forms and functions of narratives within culture
and a shift of attention towards the question of how narrative forms con-
tribute to our understanding of such phenomena as gender, history and
subjectivity. While the mere systematic and formalist analysis of narrative,
once the central point of narratology, has largely gone out of fashion, nar-
rative theorists have begun to turn their attention to what Mieke Bal has
called ‘cultural analysis.’ Many practitioners of such new contextualist ap-
proaches as feminist narratology, intercultural narratology or postcolonial
narratology have begun to apply the analytic tools of narratology to a
broad range of narrative texts and media beyond literature in a narrow
sense and to research questions associated with the domain of the study of
culture.
Shifting its attention to the ways in which narrative forms function as
a way of worldmaking, i.e. a cognitive force in its own right which is in-
volved in the actual generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, hierar-
chies of norms and values, and structures of feeling and thinking, cultural
narratology, like other narrativist approaches to the study of culture (e.g.
those developed in historiography and psychology) focuses on what struc-
turalist narratology ignored and left unanswered: viz. the crucial question
of how narratives, both literary and non-literary, are “engaged in the ongo-
ing process of cultural construction” (Bender, Imagining xv). For want of a
better term, I have elsewhere suggested that one might call such an ap-
proach “cultural and historical narratology” (see Nünning, “Towards”;
“Surveying”). The following suggestions are offered as a means to sketch
some conceptual, terminological and methodological premises for a con-
text-sensitive and cultural approach to narratives that is still rooted in nar-
ratology but that geared towards the study of culture.
By ‘cultural and historical narratology’ I mean a kind of integrated in-
terdisciplinary approach that puts the analytical tools provided by both
narratology and other narrativist approaches to the service of the study of
culture and that goes far beyond the analysis of narrative fictions. Focus-
ing on “the study of narrative forms in their relationship to the culture
which generates them” (Onega and García Landa 12), cultural narratology
explores “cultural experiences translated into, and meanings produced by,
particular formal narrative practices” (Helms 14). Interest in cultural nar-
ratology thus centres around the interfaces and mutual relations between
the respective objects of study in both narrative theory and the study of
culture, i.e. the types, structures and functions of narrative phenomena on

the one hand and culture(s) and cultural issues on the other hand.
Linking questions pertaining to narratology and the study of culture,
cultural and historical narratology explores both the narrativity of cultures
and the culturality of narratives. Focussing on the narrativity of cultures
and on cultures as narrative communities, such an approach is mainly
concerned with theoretically conceptualising and empirically studying the
functions that narratives can fulfil as a cultural way of worldmaking. It
explores the roles that narratives play in the construction of cultural phe-
nomena like ideologies, hierarchies of norms and values, structures of feel-
ing and thinking, collective memory, cultural identity, and rituals. The
premise of the culturality of narratives, however, also turns the attention
of cultural narratologists to a question which structuralist narratology sys-
tematically ignored, viz. the question of how far narratives and the ele-
ments that constitute them (e.g. certain plot patterns, preferred narrative
forms, linear or cyclic time structures) themselves depend on culture and
may be variable, i.e. phenomena that are specific to culture.
Cultural and historical narratology can therefore be defined as a con-
text-sensitive and diachronic theory of narrative that does justice to the
cultural dependency and historical variability of narrative forms as well as
to the significance of narratives for cultures. What is needed for the de-
velopment of a fully-fledged cultural narratology is both a narrative, or
narrativist, theory of culture, for which Müller-Funk has already prepared
the way, and a culture-oriented theory of narrative that considers the di-
mensions of cultural contexts, diachronic changes and social differences
which structuralist narratology ignored. Not only is the category of ‘gen-
der’ relevant for an analysis of all the elements that constitute narratives,
but also other difference categories like ‘race,’ ‘class,’ ‘generation,’ ‘reli-
gion’ and ‘nationality.’ Such a cultural and historical theory of narratives is
not restricted to literary narrative texts but also includes all types of cul-
tural narratives or non-literary forms of narration in daily life, in institu-
tions and in a wide range of different discourses (see Klein and Martínez).
which form the central focus of the study of culture oriented theory of
narration.
Unlike classical structuralist narratology, which was mainly concerned
with the systematic formalist description of narrative techniques, the focus
of cultural narratology is not only placed on using narratological categories
of analysis to examine historically and culturally variable forms and func-
tions of narrative, but also on the expansion of the theoretical framework,
range of methods and analytical tools to link up narrative theory to the
study of culture and its main research questions and concepts.
162 Ansgar Nünning
In order to explore the interfaces between narratives and cultures, and

between narratology and the study of culture, cultural narratology inte-
grates anthropological and semiotic theories and definitions of culture as
developed by, for example, Clifford Geertz and the German semiotician
Roland Posner. The latter conceives of cultures as systems of signs which
have three dynamically interrelated dimensions, viz. a material dimension,
a social dimension and a mental dimension. Such an anthropological, ho-
listic and semiotic theory of culture provides a suitable theoretical basis
for a narrativist and narratological approach geared towards the study of
culture. Acknowledging that cultures not only have a material side (e.g.
narrative texts) but also a social and mental dimension, allows cultural nar-
ratologists to extend their research interest beyond the domain of material
textuality and to also include both the social practices of real-world story-
telling in different discourses and institutions, and the mental dimension
of cultures that narratives provide access to, including shared attitudes,
ideas, concepts, schemata, cultural models, ways of feeling and hierachies
of values, which manifests itself in narratives and other symbol systems.
From this perspective narrative texts appear as a part of the material di-
mension of culture that is indissolubly linked with both the social practic-
es of storytelling in institutions and the collective mental codes, models
and cognitive patterns of a culture. In narrative texts and everyday stories
mental dispositions are manifested, i.e. collectively prevailing ways of feel-
ing and thinking, convictions, norms and values, and other mental disposi-
tions that inform our narrative ways of worldmaking.
Such a semiotic concept of culture and the outlined interdependence
between its mental, material and social dimensions provide useful starting
points for any attempt to define the relation between culture(s) and narra-
tive(s), and to clarify methodical questions of a narratological approach
interested in the study of culture: If culture(s) are defined as a dynamic
interaction between the material, social and mental dimension, then the
analysis of thematic selections and narrative forms that are characteristic
of a certain culture or period provides important information on the
mental disposition of the respective culture or period. Studying the men-
tal dimension of a culture or a society with narratological methods thus
means that an analysis of the forms and functions of narratives can help
to reconstruct culturally formed values, norms, attitudes and collective
mentalities that are manifested in compact form in narrative texts, i.e. in
the material culture. Though the ubiquity of narratives makes it difficult to
establish the boundaries of such a culture-oriented narratological project,
it is possible to outline some of the conceptual and methodological con-
sequences that it entails.
Linking up this semiotic concept of culture with a cultural narratologi-

cal framework, one can conceptualise cultures from a narrativist or narra-
tological viewpoint not as ‘text,’ but as an ensemble of narratives. From
this point of view, cultures are not so much ‘imagined communities’ (sensu
Anderson) but ‘narrative communities,’ i.e. communities forged and held
together by the stories the members tell about themselves and their cul-
ture as well as by conventionalised forms of storytelling and cultural plots.
Wolfgang Müller-Funk was one of the first cultural theorists to make a
connection between central categories of the study of culture and such a
narrativistic concept of culture. In what is arguably the best narrative or
narrativist theory of culture to date, Müller-Funk argues that cultures dif-
fer not only with regard to the subjects and themes they are particularly
interested in, but also with regard to their favoured modes of storytelling,
their forms of constructing narratives (see Müller-Funk 53). Müller-Funk
has therefore made the valuable suggestion to conceptualise cultures as
‘narrative and memorial communities’ (“Erzählgemeinschaften,” see Mül-
ler-Funk 14), i.e. as collectives that share a certain repertoire of cultural
narratives and narrative patterns (see Fauser 87): “Without any doubt it is
narratives that form the basis of collective, national memories and that
constitute politics of identity and difference. Cultures should always also
be conceived of as narrative communities which are distinguished from
each other by their reservoir of narratives” (Müller-Funk 14; my transla-
tion).2 Bruner talks of the same phenomenon as “a community’s stored
narrative resources and its equally precious toolkit of interpretive tech-
niques: its myths, its typology of human plights, but also its traditions for
locating and resolving divergent narratives” (Bruner, Acts 67–68), also
adding “its folktales, its old-hat stories, its evolving literature, even its
modes of gossip” (Bruner, Making Stories 93).
Cultural narratives are conventionalised on the basis of these narrative
repertoires that cultures consist of, even though this may occur to differ-
ent degrees. This conventionalisation that testifies to the culturality of nar-
ratives can clearly be seen in the selection structure of many genres and
text types, especially in what Bruner has called ‘narrative acts of self-
making’: “Besides, narrative acts of self-making are usually guided by un-
spoken, implicit cultural models of what selfhood should be, might be—
and, of course, shouldn’t be” (ibid. 65). It is by resorting to conventional-
ised patterns of narration and genres that social communication of indi-
vidual experiences is made possible by telling stories. “For it is the
2 “Zweifelsohne sind es Erzählungen, die kollektiven, nationalen Gedächtnissen zugrunde

liegen und Politiken der Identität bzw. Differenz konstituieren. Kulturen sind immer auch
als Erzählgemeinschaften anzusehen, die sich gerade im Hinblick auf ihr narratives Reser-
voir unterscheiden.”
164 Ansgar Nünning
conventionalization of narrative that converts individual experience into

collective coin which can be circulated” (ibid. 16). Narrative patterns can
be understood as “templates for experience,” that may be specific to cul-
ture but have a broad reach: “What is astonishing about these narrative
templates is that they are so particular, so local, so unique—yet they have
such reach” (ibid. 34–35). Even everyday stories that create identity often
refer back to genre patterns: “Our self-making stories accumulate over
time, even pattern themselves on conventional genres” (ibid. 65). In the
case of narratives and their patterning themselves on genres, it becomes
clear which communicative function genres fulfil as cultural knowledge
(mostly implicit): “Generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of
shared knowledge which have been inferred from perceived regularities in
individual literary texts. As sets of norms of which both readers and writ-
ers are aware, genres fulfil an important role in the process of literary
communication” (Wesseling 18).
Apart from realising the significance held by such generic repertoires
and other cultural models that serve to shape narratives, it is the concept
of culturally determined and available plots (see Polkinghorne, “Narrative
Psychologie” 26) that is especially useful for a cultural narratology inter-
ested in the ways in which cultures shape narratives and narratives shape
cultures. Such culturally available plots can have a wide-ranging effect on
the configuration of stories and cultural narratives as they do not only
serve to turn experiences into meaningful narratives, but also conversely
serve to select only or mainly those events that are compatible with the
master narrative of the plot in question. Typical examples of culturally
available plots include master- or mini-narratives like progress, crisis or
catastrophes. As I have tried to elucidate elsewhere by outlining a me-
taphorology and narratology of crisis (see Nünning, “Steps Towards”),
such metaphors and plots can offer great insights into the complex of ide-
as, thoughts, ways of feeling, values and norms that can be understood as
the mental dimension or mentality of a culture in accordance with the se-
miotic concept of culture outlined above.
Cultural narratology is particularly interested in such generic reper-
toires and culturally available plots, not just in literary texts, but also in
non-literary narratives in other discourses because the latter also provide
valuable insights into the social and mental dimensions of culture when
they become the object of the kind of close reading and systematic analy-
sis championed by narratology. Though it leaves the narrow confines of
structuralist taxonomy, a contextual, cultural and historical narratological
framework is informed by a critical practice that the toolbox of classical
narratology and the training in the precise semiotic analysis of narratives
can provide. Denying or ignoring the many achievements of structuralist
narratology would thus arguably be foolish, a way of throwing the concep-

tual babies out with the formalist bathwater. As the controversy between
Dorrit Cohn and John Bender in New Literary History (1995) has shown, it
does make a difference whether we can establish a consensus about textu-
al features or not, and it is the descriptive toolkit of narratology that pro-
vides us with the terminological categories needed as the basis for rational
argument.
Moreover, questioning the traditional notion that the relationship be-
tween narratives and reality is based on mimesis, cultural narratology pro-
ceeds from the assumption that it is more rewarding to conceptualise
narrative as an active force in its own right which is involved in the actual
generation of ways of thinking and of attitudes and, thus, of something
that stands behind historical developments. In his seminal work Imagining
the Penitentiary, in which he argued that widespread attitudes toward prison
were formulated in English fiction which facilitated the conception of the
eighteenth-century penitentiary, Bender sums up this new understanding
of the active and constitutive role that fictions can play in the process of
forming institutions and shaping mentalities: “I consider literature and the
visual arts as advanced forms of knowledge, as cognitive instruments that
anticipate and contribute to institutional formation. Novels as I describe
them are primary historical and ideological documents; the vehicles, not
the reflections, of social change” (Bender, Imagining 1).
Conceptualising narratives as cognitive cultural forces, cultural narra-
tology explores the ways in which the formal properties of narratives re-
flect, and influence, the unspoken mental assumptions and cultural issues
of a given period. It focuses on the power of narrative fictions “to repre-
sent a medley of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for
cultural space” (Scholes 134). Such problems as the relationship between
the polyphonic structure of novels, as well as complex narratives in other
genres and media, and their challenge to dominant cultural discourses re-
quire narratological tools for their description and analysis.
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and polyphony, which has only recently
been incorporated into feminist and cultural narratology (see e.g. Helms),
provides useful conceptual and methodological tools for coming to terms
with such issues of cultural conflicts. To study the way in which narratives
represent or orchestrate the cultural themes of each time, one could refer
to Bakhtin’s notions of the novel “as a diversity of social speech types”
and “a diversity of individual voices” (Bakhtin 262), to his remarks on dis-
course in the novel (see ibid. 259–422), and especially to his felicitous
concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia and polyphony. Of particular rele-
vance in the present context is Bakhtin’s understanding of the ways in
which novels orchestrate their themes:
166 Ansgar Nünning
The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and
ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech
types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.
Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of
characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help
heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social
voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationsships (always more or
less dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationsships between
utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different
languages and speech types, its dispersions and droplets of social heteroglossia,
its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the novel. (Bakhtin
263)
Such a cultural and social understanding of novelistic discourse provides a
very fruitful framework for coming to terms with the interconnections
between narratives and cultural contexts, and for gaining insights into the
complex ways in which narratives function as a cultural way of worldmak-
ing. Such a framework could also be applied to narratives in other con-
texts and discourses, even though it would then need to be modified and
extended so as to be able to grasp the forms and functions of narrative
worldmaking in, for example, economics, law, medicine and politics.
From a narratological point of view, however, Bakhtin’s inspiring and
suggestive, but also notoriously vague musical metaphors are in need of
translation in order to gain the precision needed for textual analysis. As
pertinent narratological work on the subject has shown, Bakhtin’s meta-
phors can be translated into the terminology that narratology has devel-
oped for a study of the discourse level of narratives, viz. the various
categories to analyse narration and focalisation as well as the forms and
functions of multi-perspective narration (see Helms; Nünning and Nün-
ning, Multiperspektivisches Erzählen).
As Gabriele Helms has convincingly demonstrated in her brilliant
monograph on dialogism and narrative technique in Canadian novels, the
framework of a cultural narratology is arguably germane to both Bakhtin’s
intense concern with social norms and values and to his perceptive at-
tempts to relate the dialogic structure of novels to the world views and
ideologies of the societies from which they originated. Helms argues that
the “term ‘cultural narratology’ describes the place where dialogism and
narrative theory meet, allowing the analysis of formal structures to be
combined with a consideration of their ideological implications” (Helms
10). In contrast to other narrative theorists who use the term ‘cultural nar-
ratology’ without developing or explaining it, Helms is one of the first
narratologists to provide a conceptual and methodological outline of a
cultural narratology and to actually test its usefulness (for an earlier at-
tempt, see Nünning, “Towards”).
Such an approach implies, of course, that formal techniques are not

just analysed as structural features of a text, but as narrative modes which
are highly semanticised and engaged in the process of cultural construc-
tion. As Helms emphasises, “a cultural narratology would enable us to
recognize that narrative techniques are not neutral and transparent forms
to be filled with content, and that dialogic relations in narrative structures
are ideologically informed” (7). In this respect the project of a cultural
narratology can draw on Fredric Jameson’s fruitful concept of the “ideol-
ogy of the form” (Jameson 141), which implies that “form is immanently
and intrinsically an ideology in its own right”:
What must now be stressed is that at this level ‘form’ is apprehended as content.
The study of the ideology of form is no doubt grounded on a technical and
formalistic analysis in the narrower sense, even though, unlike much traditional
formal analysis, it seeks to reveal the active presence within the text of a number
of discontinuous and heterogeneous formal processes. But at the level of
analysis in question here, a dialectical reversal has taken place in which it has
become possible to grasp such formal processes as sedimented content in their
own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own, distinct from the
ostensible or manifest content of the works. (Jameson 99)
If one accepts the idea of a semanticisation of narrative forms, any literary
and cultural historian who wants to address ethical, ideological or political
issues raised in or by narratives can profit from the application of the
toolbox that narratology provides. Context and form, content and narra-
tive technique, are, after all, more closely intertwined than structuralist
narratologists have tried to make us believe. It is not only the problem of
the reception of literary character that inevitably draws critics’ attention to
the interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also key questions
that postcolonial, feminist and Afro-American studies are concerned with.
Moreover, cultural and historical analyses of narratives require thicker
descriptions than those offered by structuralist narratology, descriptions
which take into account both thematic and formal features of texts and
the ways in which epistemological, ethical and social problems are articu-
lated in the forms of narrative representations: “The political enters the
study of English primarily through questions of representation: who is
represented, who does the representing, who is object, who is subject—
and how do these representations connect to the values of groups, com-
munities, classes, tribes, sects, and nations?” (Scholes 153). Such questions
as who the subjects or objects of narrative representations are have always
been genuine concerns of narratology, whose categories and models for
the analysis of narratives provide useful tools for getting to grips with
such issues. Key narratological concepts like focalisation, unreliable narra-
tion and narrative perspective have proved very fine descriptive tools, but
168 Ansgar Nünning
they need to be applied before they can yield insights considered vital for
literary and cultural history. As Monika Fludernik, Vera Nünning, Bruno
Zerweck and other proponents of a cultural, diachronic or historical nar-
ratology have convincingly shown, the development of narrative forms
(e.g. unreliable narration) can fruitfully be interpreted as a reflection of
changing cultural discourses.
Narrative forms do not merely reflect cultural, ideological and social
concerns, they are also active cultural forces in their own right in that they
serve to articulate, and negotiate between, conflicting positions and voices.
As Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck have demonstrated, ideology mani-
fests itself not only on the level of the story (e.g. in the constellation of the
characters or the actantial network, and in the semanticisation of space
and movement within the narrated world; see Hallet and Neumann), but
also on the level of discourse, for example in the structure of narrative
transmission, the choice of point of view or perspectives, the temporal
organisation of narratives, and the ways in which events, characters and
the setting are presented. All of these as well as other narrative forms are
more than just techniques in that they are explicit or implicit carriers of
cultural meaning and ideology.
The application of narratological concepts can also serve to shed new
light on other central concerns of the study of culture like the representa-
tion, or rather construction, of identity and alterity in and by narratives.
The narrative construction of social and cultural differences and of “imag-
ined communities” (sensu Anderson) is not just one of the central issues in
feminist and postcolonial studies, but also one of the key concerns and
research fields of the study of culture. Narratives are a powerful cultural
way of worldmaking in that they serve to construct images of selves and
others. Cultural narratology thus provides important analytical tools for
coming to terms with key cultural issues like the ways in which prevailing
notions of identity and alterity, or otherness, are created in and through
narratives (see Fludernik, “Identity/Alterity”).
Another question which was largely ignored by structuralist narratolo-
gy but which occupies centre stage in both cultural narratology and other
narrativist approaches to the study of culture concerns the functions that
narratives can fulfil in various contexts, discourses and institutions (see
section five). A central point of convergence shared by the different narra-
tivist approaches which have been developed in many disciplines across
the humanities and social sciences is the insight that narratives are one of
the most important cultural ways of meaning-making (see Bruner, Acts)
and worldmaking (see Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann). This basic in-
sight, which goes some way to explain the broad interest that narratives
and storytelling have had for some time in many different disciplines, em-
phasises the performative quality or power of narration (see Nünning and

Sommer), bringing the reality-constituting power of narratives and story-
telling into focus. Elaborating on the title of his book, Jerome Bruner ex-
plains what is at issue: “I have called it Acts of Meaning in order to
emphasize its major theme: the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-
making, and the central place it plays in human action” (Bruner, Acts xii).
If one understands narratives as a way of meaning- and indeed worldmak-
ing, then a question also has to be asked about the elements and processes
which are involved in narrative worldmaking, i.e. the “processes by which
meanings are created and negotiated within a community” (ibid. 11). Since
I have elsewehere provided a detailed account of how narratives serve to
make events, stories and worlds (see Nünning, “Making”), it may be in
order to refer the reader to this essay and to other recent accounts of nar-
rative worldmaking (see Herman, “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking”;
“Time”; “Principles”) and the making of fictional worlds (see V. Nünning,
“The Making”). The next section will focus instead on elaborating on the
functions that narratives can fulfil as cultural ways of self-, community,
and worldmaking as well as on some of the concepts developed by multi-
or transdisciplinary narrative research for exploring the functional links
between narratives and cultures.
5. Narrative as a Cultural Way of Self-, Community-, and Worldmaking:

Functions of Narratives and Categories of
Transdisciplinary Narrative Research
As an open-ended conclusion, the final section will sketch out some hy-
potheses about the cultural functions of narratives and some more con-
cepts to analyse such functions. The notion of narratives as cultural ways
of self-, community-, and worldmaking that provides the starting point
and central hypothesis of the following observations rests on the assump-
tion that narratives are never merely mimetic reflections of the real world,
but rather actively create models of the world or storyworlds (see Herman,
Story Logic) that refer to the real world. Narratives can thus not only the-
matise and represent events, stories and cultural issues, but they can also
actively construct identities, communities and hierarchies of values and
norms.
Paul Ricœur’s dynamic and three-dimensional model of mimesis pro-
vides a helpful framework that can serve to illuminate the complex pro-
cesses involved in narrative worldmaking. Ricœur’s model makes clear
that the creation of world-models or versions of reality through narratives
or literary works rests on dynamic transformation processes—on an inter-
170 Ansgar Nünning
action among the “prefiguration” of the text, that is, its reference to the
preexistent extra-textual world (mimesis I), the textual “configuration” that
creates a fictional object (mimesis II) and the “refiguration” by the reader
(mimesis III). Narrative worldmaking thus appears as an active constructive
process, in which cultural systems of meaning, narrative forms and pro-
cesses, and practices of reception are equally involved and in which reality
is not merely reflected, but instead first poetically created (see Ricœur 107)
and then “iconically enriched” (see ibid. 127). The symbolic order of the
extra-literary reality and the worlds created through narratives (e.g. within
the medium of fiction) enter into a relationship of mutual influence and
change. Ricœur’s ‘circle of mimesis’ can also contribute to a differentiation
among different levels of the relationship between narratives and cultural
contexts: first, narratives are related to the extra-textual worlds; second,
they represent their content and functioning in the medium of narrative;
and third, they can help to form new world-models and cultures.
The performative power of narration, i.e. its worldmaking and reality
constituting function, is based on the fact that narrative is not just a medi-
um of representing cultural phenomena but also able to construct histo-
ries, identities, alterity, and also communities, cultures and worlds.
Narratives can fulfil a function of structuring reality as emphasised by Je-
rome Bruner: “a narrative may structure (or distort) our view of how
things really are” (Bruner, Making Stories 9). They can also create worlds
and models of reality that are so coherent, expressive and suggestive that
they can even influence or characterise people’s actual experience of reali-
ty: “fiction creates realities so compelling that they shape our experience
not only of the worlds the fiction portrays but of the real world” (ibid. 9).
Furthermore, a number of functional hypotheses can be formulated
that differentiate and pin down the relatively general thesis of a reality-
structuring and worldmaking function of narratives. Some impulses in this
direction are provided by the studies in the field of literary theory that as-
cribe literary narratives some functions that other types of narrative, how-
ever, could also fulfil. Hubert Zapf, for instance, has developed a triadic
model whereby literature can fulfil important cultural functions as a revi-
sionist counter-discourse, culture-critical metadiscourse and reintegrating
interdiscourse (see Zapf). Following on from Zapf and other literary theo-
rists and philosophers, Stella Butter has shown how far literary narrative
can function as a medium for cultural self-reflection as well as a medium
for critique of culture and reason. Even though individual cases would
need to be studied to determine which of these functions are specifically
applicable to literary fiction and which are transferable to other types of
narratives, such models can nevertheless give impulses for narrativist ap-
proaches to the study of culture.
Narratives in non-literary contexts and discourses arguably also fulfil a

number of other functions that can shed additional light on what is in-
volved in the creation of models and images of the world, and of cultural
knowledge. The most important real-world function ascribed to narrative
include the forging of coherence (see Fulda 256), the integration of dis-
parate events (ibid.), and the creation of meaning and sense, which pri-
marily consists in endowing actions and events with meaning (see
Polkingshorne, “Narrative Psychologie” 31). Narratives furthermore serve
to structure experience and knowledge in that they forge causal and logical
connections between events and experiences on the syntagmatic axis. Fur-
thermore it is the narrativist study of history that has shown that narrative
is simultaneously an essential means or specific form of explanation. The-
se general functions do not restrict themselves to autobiographical acts of
self-narrations but they also apply to cultural narratives.
One of the most important insights of narrative psychology resides in
the fact that narratives function as a central medium for creating coher-
ence and sense, and therefore also for individual and collective identity
formation (see e.g. Echterhoff; Polkinghorne). Narratives therefore do not
merely serve to organise or structure experiences and events but plot pat-
terns and other narrative schemata can also be seen as a prefiguring and
reality-structuring means of identity construction. The functions of narrat-
ing thus extend much further than just creating connections and coher-
ence (see Fulda 257), residing in the creative and constructive character of
narrative knowledge (see Polkingshorne, “Narrative Psychologie” 26). As
the title of his seminal book How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves al-
ready serves to highlight, Paul John Eakin emphasises the constitutive role
that narratives and storytelling have for the construction of identity: “nar-
rative plays a central, structuring role in the formation and maintenance of
our sense of identity” (Eakin 123). The construct of a stable self and the
notion stable identity, Eakin argues, are the result of narrative construc-
tions and thus ultimately nothing but a verbal fiction: “our sense of con-
tinuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration“ (93):
When it comes to autobiography, narrative and identity are so intimately linked
that each constantly and properly gravitates into the conceptual field of the
other. Thus, narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenol-
menological and cognitive self-experience, while self—the self of autobio-
graphical discourse—does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative.
(Ibid. 100)
Whereas the mutual connection between narratives and individual identity
creation has recently been well conceptualised and empirically examined
(see Neumann et al.; Straub), the functions of narration for the creation of
collective identities have not been nearly as well researched, including the
172 Ansgar Nünning
question of how cultures can be constituted as narrative communities. In a

pioneering essay on the importance of narrative coherence for cultures,
Daniel Fulda delineated the ways in which the meaning- and sense-making
function of narratives depends on, and results from, forging coherence
(see Fulda 251). We know remarkably little, however, about the role that
narratives play for forging cultural coherence and communities. In the
context of narrativist approaches to the study of culture, which conceptu-
alise cultures as narrative communities (see Müller-Funk 14), one of the
most important functions of narratives reside in their serving as a medium
of creating cultural coherence, of enhancing community feeling, and of
forging collective identities. The function of storytelling as a medium of
creating narrative coherence is not restricted to bringing together hetero-
geneous actions, events and experiences, but, according to Fulda (see
Fulda 260) the coherence- and sense-making function of narrative also has
an important social dimension. On account of the fact that narratives are
always addressed to someone (see ibid.), their function to generate social
and cultural coherence consists in giving the audience an opportunity to
share the narrator’s experiences and evaluations, and in offering the narra-
tor a chance to join a social or ideological group through storytelling (see
ibid.).
This creation of social and cultural coherence is not at all limited to
everyday storytelling but is also found in narratives in journalism, in the
media and in narratives in historiographic, economic, political and moral
discourses, each of which seeks to gain collective approval. Even narra-
tives that are not directed at a particular audience generally aim at generat-
ing consensus, agreement and integration. This is the foundation of their
cultural and social function as a medium of enhancing community feeling,
something which the notion of cultures as narrative communities serves to
highlight.
As cultures consist of, and at the same time enhance, a communal
repertoire of stories and narrative patterns which, following the notion of
the ideology of form, always entail hierarchies of evaluations, norms and
values, they are not only narrative communities but also communities of
evaluation, interpretation and understanding. Collectively shared narra-
tives are not only a means of making sense, of understanding events and
experiences, but also a medium of constructing cultural patterns of order
and interpretation: “In time, the sharing of common stories creates an in-
terpretive community, a matter of great moment not only for promoting
cultural cohesion but for developing a body of law, the corpus iuris” (Bru-
ner, Making Stories 25). As interpretive communities cultures communicate
and use their stories in order to reach a consensus about what can be con-
sidered as normal within a given cultural framework. Furthermore stories
also provide opportunities to cross borders and domesticate infringements

of behavioural patterns which are considered normal, as well as to assimi-
late new experiences. Narratives and storytelling play a significant part in
this, as the coherence created by them can help to get the members of
narrative communities used to new experiences or familiarise them: “Do-
mestication is a major means for maintaining a culture’s coherence. Cul-
ture, after all, prescribes our notions of ordinariness. [...] Breaches of the
ordinary, once domesticated in narrative, bear the stamp of the culture”
(ibid. 90).
Moreover, not only can narratives be viewed as an expression of what
Bruner calls “culture’s narrative dialectic” (ibid. 62), they also fulfil an im-
portant function as links, going between the established, ordinary routines
and standards of a culture on the one hand and the extraordinary but pos-
sible deviations from these standards on the other: “we are the beneficiar-
ies of the culture’s ongoing dialectic. For we have a stock of stories, old
stories, to draw on for representing our imbalances to ourselves” (ibid.
100). Bruner describes “the medium of narrative” as one “form that keeps
perpetually in play the uneasy alliance between the historically established
and the imaginatively possible” (ibid. 62). The collectively shared narra-
tives of a community are an inherent component of their daily philosophy,
i.e. what Bruner calls “folk psychology as an instrument of culture” (Acts
33), or, in other words, what is considered as common sense within the
framework of a given culture. According to Bruner, this folk psychology
does not consist in abstractions, terms or concepts, but is organised narra-
tively: “Since its [folk psychology’s] organising principle is narrative rather
than conceptual, I shall have to consider the nature of narrative and how
it is built around established or canonical expectations and the mental
management of deviations from such expectations” (ibid. 35). Above all,
narratives function as a medium to call into question and explain cultural
actions or phenomena that contravene currently valid folk psychology:
“Note that it is only when constituent beliefs in a folk psychology are vio-
lated that narratives are constructed” (ibid. 39). Narratives thus have a
considerable social impact in their capacity as cultural models:
Narrative is one of the more complex and important kinds of cultural model.
[...]. The role of narrative in meaning construction becomes especially clear
following anomalous or otherwise disturbing events. [...]. Following such
disturbing events, people generally become talkative. They tell and retell the
story until the events are gradually domesticated into one or more coherent or
shared narratives that circulate among the community of sufferers. The mean-
ings are emergent in the narrative process. Through narrative, the strange and
the familiar achieve a working relationship. (Shore 58)
174 Ansgar Nünning
For the reasons outlined above narratives are thus an important medium
of resolving social conflicts in that they are able to balance out conflicting
interests and defuse cultural tension, something which Bruner was one of
the first scholars to point out: “Whatever else it may do, culture must de-
vise means for maintaining incompatible interests and aspirations. A cul-
ture’s narrative resources—its folktales, its old-hat stories, its evolving
literature, even its modes of gossip—conventionalize the inequities it gen-
erates and thereby contain its imbalances and incompatabilities” (Bruner,
Making Stories 93). Based on the repertoires of narrative forms outlined in
the fourth section, especially the selection of a variety of perspectives and
voices, narratives allow a broad range of cultural topics, social interests
and contrasting points of view and voices to be heard within one story.
They prove to be a particularly appropriate medium to analyse meaning
and solve conflicts:
the viability of a culture inheres in its capacity for resolving conflicts, for
explicating differences and renegotiating communal meanings. The ‚negotiated
meanings’ discussed by social anthropologists or culture critics as essential to the
conduct of a culture are made possible by narrative’s apparatus for dealing
simultaneously with canonicality and exceptionality. Thus, while a culture must
contain a set of norms, it must also contain a set of interpretive procedures for
rendering departures from those norms meaningful in terms of established
patterns of belief. It is narrative and narrative interpretation upon which folk
psychology depends for achieving this kind of meaning. (Bruner, Acts 47)
Closely related to their capacity for resolving conflicts is another im-
portant function that narrative fulfils as a medium of popularisation and
disseminating prevailing norms and values, which narratives can also, of
course, subject to satire and critique (see Erll, Grabes, and Nünning;
Grabes, Nünning, and Baumbach). By means of its shared narratives, cul-
tures also become communities of values in which narratives, as outlined
above, allow infringements and transgressions of prevailing norms and
values to be thematised and domesticised: “Culture is not simply about
the canon but about the dialectic between its norms and what is humanly
possible, and that is what narrative, too, is about” (Bruner, Making Stories
16). Narratives thus do not only serve social communication about values
and norms, but also ensure that cultural models are archived and remem-
bered in the cultural memory: “Its [a culture’s] myths and its folktales, its
dramas and its pageants memorialize both its norms and notable viola-
tions of them” (ibid. 15).
From a functional point of view it becomes clear once again that nar-
ratives and cultures mutually constitute each other. On the one hand, nar-
ratives can be seen as a cultural way of worldmaking or a performative
medium of constructing cultural phenomena like identities, communities,
and norms and values. Narratives are not only regurgitated stories or mi-
metic representations of real events, but as cognitive modes of sense-,
meaning- and worldmaking they also create alternative or possible worlds,
which can call hegemonic world-models into being, while also serving to
constitute what is regarded as real: “Narrative, including fictional narra-
tive, gives shape to things in the real world and often bestows on them a
title to reality” (ibid. 8). On the other hand, it also proves heuristically
productive to conceptualise cultures as narrative communities as it is es-
sentially the collectively shared stories that contribute to forging social
coherence, generating communities of interpretation, and offering frame-
works for negotiating and understanding cultural values and norms.
If we want to know more about the interrelations between narrative(s)
and culture(s) as well as about other uncharted research areas, we would
be well advised to make use of and further develop narrativist approaches
and concepts for the study of culture, picking up the threads of other con-
textualist approaches like feminist and gender-oriented narratology (see
Mezei; Nünning and Nünning, Erzähltextanalyse), post-colonial narratology
(see Birk and Neumann; Fludernik, “Identity/Alterity”), and intercultural
narratology (see Orosz and Schönert; Sommer). Müller-Funk’s proposals
for a narrative analysis of cultural phenomena, Mieke Bal‘s approach of
culture analysis and her notion of ‘travelling concepts,’ Astrid Erll’s narra-
tological work on the dynamics of cultural memory, and Roy Sommer’s
outline of a contextualist narratology are other approaches offering im-
pulses for a cultural narratology germane to the study of culture. These
and other narrativist approaches described above provide theoretical
frameworks and methodologies that make it possible to consider the sig-
nificance of narratives and narratology for other core areas of the study of
culture, apart from the connection between narratives and identity. This
could include systematically looking at ritual studies (see Dücker), includ-
ing gauging the narrativity of rituals and the rituality of narratives, the im-
portance of storytelling and factual narratives in non-literary, real-world
contexts (see Klein and Martínez), and cultures of empathy (see Breit-
haupt), to name but a few of the emerging topics and research areas where
narrativist approaches and narratological concepts and the study of culture
could fruitfully collaborate.
As I hope to have shown, transdisciplinary narrative research can of-
fer not only a coherent theoretical framework for a detailed analysis of a
wide range of cultural objects, but also a number of useful concepts,
methodological impulses and innovative perspectives for the study of cul-
ture. Narrativist approaches and narratological concepts and the study of
culture can mutually enrich, and benefit from each other in several im-
portant ways. First, and most obviously, they can mutually apply, test and
176 Ansgar Nünning
extend concepts, methods and approaches developed for their own ob-
jects of research. Narrative theory can also contribute to, and even alter,
research agendas in the study of culture, just as the latter can serve to re-
frame concepts and research questions, for example by mediating struc-
turalist, cognitivist and culturalist approaches or by raising issues about the
cultural roles and functions of narratives that are not raised by narratolo-
gy. Coming to terms with the performative power of narrative, and under-
standing the complex forms and functions that narratives fulfil as a
cultural way of worldmaking, could be an important contribution to the
ongoing attempt to develop comprehensive paradigms and well-defined
key concepts for the study of culture.
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Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative:
A Transdisciplinary Discourse Report
WOLFGANG MÜLLER-FUNK
1.
In Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal

develops the idea that terminologies and concepts are not stable and fixed
within a certain academic discipline, but are transferred from one academ-
ic field to another—within but also beyond the humanities (see Bal, Travel-
ling Concepts; Müller-Funk, Kulturtheorie 332–49; Neumann and Tygstrup).
This suggests a dialogical relationship between various fields of research.
Moreover, it becomes striking that the ‘same’ terminology has different
meanings in different disciplines. This is true for key concepts and terms
in cultural analysis such as discourse, space and narrative, but also for
identity. There are two reasons for these different meanings. Firstly, liter-
ary studies or art history have different references to and understandings
of cultural and social reality than, for example, history or sociology, which
concentrate on practice and actions. Secondly, they have a different focal
point, or—to make use of a key point from the terminology of literary
narratology—another perspective, another focalisation. In other words,
one can argue that the transdisciplinary field of cultural studies and cultur-
al analysis is also a territory in which productive dispute and discussion
can take place.
This is extremely important with regard to our topic. Identity is a typi-
cal travelling concept; one can find discourse on identity in different
schools of philosophy, in sociology and political science, in psychoanaly-
sis, in British Cultural Studies and German Kulturwissenschaften (see Straub
277–303), and in modern literature. For example, whereas phenomenolo-
gy has discussed the problem of identity from an inside perspective, Brit-
ish empiric philosophy in the tradition of John Locke and David Hume
has analysed it from an outside focus. In the case of identity, this is deci-
sive. From an inside perspective, Lucius, the hero of a novel by the Latin
writer Apuleius who is transformed into a donkey, remains the same per-
186 Wolfgang Müller-Funk
son whether he is a human being or a donkey (see Bakhtin 38–39). In con-

trast to this inside perspective, the donkey and the human being called
Lucius are not identical for his social surroundings, because a donkey and
a human being cannot be identical.
Sociological functionalism and cultural constructivism also choose
perspectives from outside, describing identity as an artificial and illusion-
ary procedure that is constitutive and necessary for social action and for
one’s place in a given symbolic space. In contrast to our internal experi-
ence of the uniqueness and authenticity of our identity, the social sciences
and cultural studies make clear that this kind of self-experience is illusion-
ary and imaginary. Here identity is either the result of a social procedure
(identification) or the result of a symbolic process.
Psychoanalysis as modern fiction offers an interesting in-between ap-
proach, since in this symbolic field the focus is itself the wandering be-
tween the inside of a patient and the outside of an emphatic person, the
therapist (see Erikson 17–18). And in literature, especially in modern nov-
els, there is always the possibility of changing perspectives and therefore
of the confrontation between inside and outside. Already on a structural
level, identity can be seen here as a dynamic phenomenon that is based on
the presence of an Other, the ‘reality’ of an unavoidable Other, a difference,
which is a structure at the same time. In contrast to Erikson, this has been
interpreted in French structuralist and poststructuralist theory as the end
of classical identity (see Descombes 93).
Widening Bal’s concept, one can say that there are at least three levels
of travelling concepts with regard to ‘identity’:
1. Travelling within the humanities and social sciences;
2. Travelling between different national cultures, which have different
traditions of science and culture;
3. Travelling between the social sciences and humanities and literature
and the arts.
As Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle have pointed out, an essential
part of the vocabulary on identity (as person, role, mask) comes from the-
atre and/or literature (see 11).
As we will see, the concepts are changing during their travels and what
distinguishes one discipline from another is the different use they make of
seemingly identical terms. With regard to identity, one can differentiate at
least three ‘journeys’ and shifts of concepts in general:
1. A journey from social science to philosophy, as Odo Marquard has
pointed out in his article “Identität: Schwundtelos und Mini-
Essenz—Bemerkungen zu einer Genealogie einer aktuellen Diskus-
sion” (‘Identity: Disappearing Telos and Mini-Essence—Remarks
Identity, Alterity and the Work of the Narrative 187
on the Genealogy of a Contemporary Discussion’; my translation)

in the volume Identität (‘Identity’) in the series Poetik und Hermeneutik
(‘Poetics and Hermeneutics’). Referring to G. H. Mead and symbol-
ic interactionism, Marquard alludes to the multiple importation of a
sociology of identity from Anglo-Saxon into German-speaking aca-
demic spaces (see Marquard 349), but he also adds later that the
term had previously migrated from philosophy (see ibid. 353).
2. A theoretical import from French postwar philosophy into Anglo-
Saxon cultural studies and to contemporary cultural analysis and
Kulturwissenschaften. At the centre of this transfer is the interest in the
figure of the Other and its function for identity.
3. A shift from modern psychology and sociology to literature (and
from literature to psychology and sociology). This refers to a type
of literature and artistic production that is used as the ‘media’ of an
experimental form of knowledge as it is the case in Robert Musil,
Hermann Broch, Paul Valéry, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Roth,
Marcel Proust, Max Frisch, Milan Kundera, Javier Marías and many
others. Here literature is understood as a specific episteme or, to
speak with Schelling, as an intellectual view (intellektuelle Anschau-
ung).
In the following sections I will discuss these different approaches in the
field of German philosophy, Anglo-Saxon social science, French philoso-
phy, in cultural studies and Kulturwissenschaften, and in classical modern and
postmodern literature. I will look for the interdependences and breaks
which have taken place in the in-between of these different forms of
epistemai.
The title of this essay implies the simple question of whether there is
any identity beyond culture. And how can one describe the relationship
between identity and alterity? What is the function of the narrative aspect?
I will start with the German philosopher Odo Marquard and later discuss
Paul Ricœur’s concept of two different forms of identity and his analysis
of narrative identity. In a further step, I will read two European novels,
one from a modernist author, Joseph Roth, the other from a postmodern
writer, Javier Marías. Both novels have a programmatic reference to the
topic itself. At the end of the essay I will try to perform the art of differen-
tiation with regard to our topic: culture, identity and alterity.
2.
Marquard states that the master-word identity is a topic that has a problem
with identity. It was never a central concern of traditional philosophy. It
was Schopenhauer who distinguished between personal identity, owner-

ship and property, and representative identity (see Marquard 348–49).
From the perspective of (German) philosophy, identity comes from the
outside or at least from its margins. Identity always produces problems
and splits. There is, for example, an official and an unofficial identity. Es-
pecially in contemporary social science and its focus on role distance, the
accent is no longer on the true and hidden but on the hiding Self (see ibid.
350). The philosopher Marquard agrees with the sociologist Niklas Luh-
mann that identity is an essential issue of cultural modernity: It is abso-
lutely necessary, Luhmann argues, for self-referential complex systems to
find identity in their ‘environment,’ “Umwelt” (Luhmann qtd. in Marquard
318). Identity is seen as an operation and as a functional element in mod-
ern societies. Identity always comes into play when it is threatened by
change. It is interpreted as a substitute for traditional metaphysics, a ves-
tige of such emotive terms as essence (essentia) or telos. The question of
absolute beginning or origin is replaced by the problem of identity.
There are two interesting distinctions in Marquard. Firstly, he speaks
about the old facets of identity as being religions, states, nations and clas-
ses, and the new issues of identity as being reflexive, communicative and
to do with a universal identity that undergoes permanent change (see
Marquard 352). I dare say that there is a mix of ‘old’ and ‘new’ identity in
the contemporary discussion and discourse on culture. There is, on the
one hand, a suspicion against a universalistic concept of identity and a re-
turn to particularistic identity, yet on the other hand, there is an insistence
on the fact that this particularity is constructed, meaning that it is part of a
dynamic process, i.e. culture. Thus, identity is the result of the breakdown
of traditional terms such as ‘essence’ and ‘teleology’ (see Marquard 358–
59).
Secondly, the German philosopher also contrasts an identity of gener-
ality with an identity of particularity. The first version has its roots in an-
cient Greek philosophy. It states that every being is identical with itself.
Here, identity negates difference. In contrast, the Jewish idea of Jahwe (‘I
am, who I am’ or ‘I am, who I will be’) lives from the indefinite qualitative
difference, as Marquard points out by quoting from Kamlah’s theological
work (see Marquard 354). The first version of identity is beyond time (and
space), the second has a strong historical aspect; it is in time and space. Or
in other words, it is a constructed narrative identity. Or to put it in yet an-
other way, ‘cultural’ identity in particular is always an inscribed narrative
matrix.
3.
According to postmodern philosophy or poststructuralism, identity no

longer can be seen as an authentic kernel. This idea was central e.g. to the
classical autobiography and the Bildungsroman, especially in German litera-
ture, for example in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1808–38) or Wilhelm
Meister (1795/96), or in a romantic and ironic version in Eichendorff’s Aus
dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826). The corresponding narrative is based on
the ‘chronotopos’ (Bakhtin) that after a long period of wandering and
straying, the homodiegetic narrator and protagonist finds his/her true call-
ing. Elias Canetti’s autobiography in three volumes is also based on the
idea of an identity that is found at the end, a typical adaptation of the Aris-
totelian idea of entelechia. It is a fixed kernel within yourself (see Currie
2 ff.) that becomes visible at the end of the story. There is a strong deter-
ministic aspect to this concept of identity. In the first chapter of his life
story, Elias Canetti writes that all his later experiences had already hap-
pened earlier in Rustchuk (see Canetti 9). Compared with the ‘classical’
Bildungsroman or autobiography, a new moment comes into play that has
similarities with the idea of psychoanalysis (although Canetti, like Musil,
was a harsh critic of Freud). Namely, the idea that it is the experiences in
early childhood that are formative for later life. Canetti’s autobiography
also includes the classical telos that he was predestined to become a writer.
In all these literary examples, identity is understood more or less as a
fixed and durable element, a reliable factor in one’s life, which is beyond
time and space, constant and immobile as Aristotle’s unmoved mover.
From a narrativistic perspective, this is itself a narrative construction of
identity, a story about how a specific human being searched and found
his/her true ‘self’ at the end.
There is another concept of identity in modernity, namely a social and
sociological one, which describes how a person, a collective or a commu-
nity finds his, her or its place in the world of modern society. Here, man
or woman is not seen as a fixed being but is formed through the process
of socialisation in institutions such as the family or school. Identity is seen
as the result of identification. His/her identity, personality and language
are the result of that process, which is seen as integration into society
and/or culture (see Lohauß 129–61; Ruegg 229).
Erikson’s theory of identity may be seen as a concept that bridges the
gap between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Here, identity is un-
derstood as the result of the drama of childhood but also as a complicated
balancing of three key elements of personality: the Es, the Ich and the
Über-Ich, or id, ego and super-ego. Identity is seen as a creative synthesis
between our desires and the demands of a culture. The interesting point is
that it is the figure of the father (and to some extent of the mother) who
represents the dimension of the Other on two levels, on a personal and a
collective one. Through a complex process of identification, identity is
generated on a personal and a collective level because the father represents
the super-ego (see Erikson 11–54; Luhauß 30–31), the Lacanian symbolic
order. In the theoretical framework of Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis,
personal identity is also illusionary and imaginary. However, I would add
that this does not mean that it does not represent a cultural ‘reality.’
It is the oedipal triangle that proves to be the symbolic space where
the process of identity building takes place. It entails a difficult process,
which is seen as positive integration into society and its specific symbolic
order (culture). Identity is the cornerstone of what is called socialisation:
finding a place in society and culture. In contrast to Straub’s view, there is
no real difference between personal and collective identity, for example an
imagined community (see Anderson). Identity is seen as the result of posi-
tive development. Moreover, identity is the precondition of psychological
health. Similar to the concept of humanistic Bildung, identity has an ex-
tremely positive denotation and connotation. This affirmative moment is
distinguished in poststructuralism but also in British Cultural Studies.
Here, identity takes on a widely negative meaning. Identity is seen as an
illusionary idea and—hand in hand with the double meaning of subject—a
symptom of oppression by society (see Straub 277–78). In the eighth
chapter of Robert Musil’s unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The
Man Without Qualities), the essayistic voice speaks about the strange, unreal
and uncanny configuration of Kakanien, a country in which everybody
distrusts each other. The author uses the German word Charakter in this
context in an unspecific sense that is quite similar to identity. It is men-
tioned that every inhabitant of this multicultural empire has at least nine
identities (or characters): profession, nationality, state, class, geography,
gender, consciousness, unconsciousness and privacy. The last Charakter is
the most interesting one. On the one hand, it bands together all the other
identities within itself; on the other, it is dispersed by all those others. This
private identity or character is compared to a small and eroded hollow,
into which all the other characters drain and then come out again to fill,
together with other small streamlets, another hollow, which is defined as
the passive fantasy of unfilled spaces (see Musil 34).
Thus, identity disappears in Musil’s novel into the imaginary. Ulrich,
the protagonist, is not so much a man without qualities, as the English
translation suggests, but a man who lives in these unfilled spaces as a man
without identity. There is no longer a strict relation to the sample of
identities, rather there is a radical vacuum behind all the qualities and
characters. In the interior of modern identity is: nothing. The plurality of
identities undermines identity itself, it becomes an empty phenomenon, a

‘fader’ (see Weber 85–97).
To a certain extent, the diagnosis in Musil’s novel can be understood
as a parallel analysis of society and culture in the decades between 1870
and 1930 with regard to disciplines such as sociology and psychology (see
Lepenies 239–401). But Musil also has something in common with post-
structuralism, namely the idea that identity is a complex, fragmented and
doubled phenomenon.
As far as I can see, there is in Musil neither a focus on the symbolic
aspect of the process of identity production, nor a specific interest in the
dynamic between self and Other, which goes hand in hand with this pro-
cess. This is also true of modern sociology. Yet these two aspects of iden-
tity—alterity and the role of narrating—have become central to the
humanities and social sciences in the wake of what have been called the
new cultural turns in Kulturwissenschaften (see Bachmann-Medick).
4.
In my view, Paul Ricœur’s contribution to this topic is remarkable, be-

cause he has presented a new perspective in his three volume monograph
Temps et récit (1983–85) and a book about the relationship between selfness
and otherness—Soi-même comme un autre (1990). The connection between
both topics is striking, although the French philosopher works out this
relation in an explicit form in only one chapter of his later book, where he
differentiates between personal and narrative identity (see Ricœur, Soi-
même 144–206).
In this book, the author discusses not only the complicated relations
between the self and the Other but also differentiates between two aspects
of identity: Whereas identity in the sense of the Latin word idem (‘same-
ness’) is connected with constancy in time (and space), identity in the
sense of the Latin ipse (‘selfhood’) does not imply the idea of an un-
changeable kernel of a personality (see Ricœur, Soi-même 11). With regard
to alterity, it follows that there are also two aspects to alterity: otherness
and (cultural) alterity, which correspond to sameness and selfhood respec-
tively. As in other concepts (for example the Lacanian dyad je and moi),
there is a double fragmentation: on the one hand, identity has two sides
that are connected and divided at the same time; on the other hand, the
self is always split because of the priority of the Other that is written into
the self. It is quite clear that the idem-identity is very abstract and symboli-
cally empty; in contrast, the ipse-identity contains positive predicates. The
two elements work as in mathematical logics: x(a), there is an x that is a.
Or A=A (see Marquard 360). The first identity is absolute, but like Musil’s
it is hollow, tautological and deictic. In Pierce’s terminology it is indexical
(see Peirce 350). As the word ‘I’ (Ich), it refers to a person but has no (ex-
plicit cultural) meaning itself. It becomes meaningful only by the addition
of the predicate (woman, worker, Austrian, etc.). Only the second,
changeable aspect of identity refers to our topic: cultural identity, although
one might argue that the other aspect of identity, the self-reference that is
perceived by an internal focalisation, also affected cultural change. It be-
comes important in post-traditional, modern, Western or non-Western
cultures, in which every human being is required to work out this relation-
ship to self (see Straub 280).
Narrative is not only a manner of speaking, a speech act or a
Sprachspiel (Wittgenstein), but is a central element with regard to identity. It
is the narrative that integrates the two aspects of identity, the idem and the
ipse, or in Marquard’s terminology, a general with a particular identity.
Narrative generates a configuration of events. It suggests continuity and
produces sense by transforming contingency into narrative necessity (see
Ricœur, Soi-même 173–86). Narrative identity makes it possible to combine
constancy with change. Through narrative, one can invent or imagine pos-
sible (ipse-)identities and play with them, as it is the case in the famous
Bob Seger song “If I were a carpenter and you were a lady.” Or one can
tell the story about the young and enthusiastic communist one was in
one’s youth. Narratives of emigration also have a similar structure. Here,
in contrast to the main person, the narrated I, providing the stable ele-
ment in the narrative, is represented by the voice of the storyteller, since
the narrated I is potentially undergoing permanent change. It is the narra-
tive process itself that creates identity through a complex dialectic be-
tween sameness and selfhood, otherness and alterity. It represents
continuity and therefore the aspect of the idem, the idea of the uniqueness
of a certain person, and it contains all the metamorphoses, transfor-
mations and conversions of a person who is telling his or her life story.
The frog and the prince, the ardent communist and the harsh conserva-
tive, Saulus and Paulus are connected in a paradoxical way, so that one is
the other and at the same time is not. The narrative guarantees duration in
change.
5.
As I have shown in an earlier essay (see Müller-Funk, Komplex 365–82;

“Dummheiten” 241–61), narrating not only means telling a story, but tell-
ing a story to someone. Sometimes this can be very abstract and not rep-
resented by the manner of speaking (as it is the case in many classical

modernist novels, which often avoid the gesture of having an empirical
person narrate the story). Nevertheless, the Other is written into the con-
figuration of the narrative matrix. There is always a hidden I who speaks
to an Other. There is always, as Mieke Bal has shown, a dialogical element,
which has the structure of an abstract letter (see Bal, Kulturanalyse 7–43;
Müller-Funk, Kulturtheorie 332–49). Therefore, it also entails an ethical as-
pect (see Ricœur, Soi-même 207–46). Narrating means an invitation to iden-
tification, a plea for recognition and especially the idea that my story is
‘true’ or, in case of literary fictions, plausible or reliable. Identity needs
confirmation by the Other who is—from a cultural perspective—part of
the symbolic field that is established not least by narratives. The narrative
is the unavoidable medium of this cultural procedure. Therefore, only nar-
ratives are able to create collective identities, which are based on narrating
communities, on groups of readers, who become storytellers at the same
time. This kind of narrative always tells a story about who we are und who
we are not. On an individual level, it creates a narrative unity of life. On a
collective level, it suggests—in an act of abstraction and imagination—the
‘life’ of a nation, the history of a movement, a group, etc. Identity estab-
lishes a clear order with a very often unconscious negative identity that is
similar to the image of an other we fear to be or to become. It is the image
of a misused castrated body, an ethnic group or an exploited social minor-
ity (see Erikson 28).
Coming back to Musil’s novel, what does loss of identity mean? What
kind of identity is it? These confusing and irritating cases of narrativity can
be, as Ricœur argues, formulated anew in his terminology as the revelation
of the ipse-identity by the loss of the idem-identity that is supporting it (see
Ricœur, Soi-même 184). Following this argument, the hero is someone who
can be characterised by interference between the two levels. In the case of
anti-heroes such as Musil’s Ulrich or Max Frisch’s Stiller, this relation is
broken. Nevertheless, those works contain a narrative that is the loss of
identity and character, a master narrative of classical modernism, one the
philosopher Günter Anders has given the title Man without world. It is the
story of alienation (see Anders xi). It is part of the modern cultural labora-
tory in which new forms of narrating are experienced.
6.
The idea that identity depends on the figure of the Other is, in many as-
pects, an astonishingly late one. It was to be picked out as a central theme
in at least three symbolic fields; in French philosophy, in contemporary
cultural analysis and in modern and postmodern literature. It is literature

that is best able to present the paradoxes of identity under the circum-
stances of global modernity.
Joseph Roth’s text Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht is a literary
masterpiece and an object lesson for every narrative theory because it
demonstrates several important aspects of narrative configuration, of the
performance of narrating, the Sprechweise (‘manner of speech’), but also of
the function of narrative in creating and sustaining communities. This, in
particular, points to the phenomenon that identity is always based on its
opposite, alterity. The short novel (which is more of a novella) is set in the
late 1930s in Paris and also presents the (fictional) audience, the narrative
community (Erzählgemeinschaft). This is a very specific narrative communi-
ty, namely a diasporic one; here, Russian anti-communist exiles meet each
other night after night in a particular restaurant. Diasporas, which have
moved to the centre of interest in contemporary cultural studies (see Ap-
padurai), are highly interesting narrative communities with regard to their
(fragile) identity. Emigrants live in between the old and the new identity,
between the symbolic space of their old national culture and of the culture
of the immigration country. Thus there is a strong and permanent need
for storytelling.
In contrast to many other ‘classical’ modernist writers, Roth plays with
the act of narrating itself by using a form of storytelling which seems to be
very traditional in the sense of Benjamin’s famous essay (see Benjamin
385–410), but proves to be post-traditional at the same time. Using Ge-
nette’s terminology, the novel is intradiegetic, i.e. it includes a narrative
frame with two storytellers, the embedded narrator named Golubtschik,
who, night after night, tells the visitors of Tari-Bari his fantastic life story,
and a non-identifiable frame narrator, who represents the visitors in the
restaurant, but is displaced for two reasons. He presents himself to the
audience and to the embedded narrator as a German writer, a person who
speaks many European languages, including Russian. Like the guests in
the Russian restaurant, he is an emigrant, but he is not part of the diaspor-
ic, anti-communist Russian community. His identity is mysterious. The
inside and outside perspectives do not fit together. Like many other pro-
tagonists in Roth’s œuvre, the frame narrator is the author’s double and
also has a double in the text itself. He has something in common with the
author (his Central European origins, his knowledge of foreign languages,
his European attitudes, that he is a German native speaker, that he was in
Russia during World War I and that he lives as a writer in exile in Paris).
At the same time, he is also the mediator to the real audience outside the
world of the text, which is important, because this small novel also refers
to the problem of reliability. Through its protagonists the novel presents
three cultural spaces: Russia, France and Central Europe, which includes
Germany, Austria and Hungary.
It is also important to mention that time stands still in this exile res-
taurant, firstly, because there is not a specific time to order as usually the
case in French restaurants, and, secondly, because the clock has stopped.
Everyone (incidentally, there are no women in the Russian restaurant) is
looking clandestinely at the wall clock, although they know that it no
longer works (see Roth 79). This is a rhetorical reference to a specific
moment of storytelling: Narrating is an act in which the past is preserved
and suddenly becomes contemporary. During Golubtschik’s narration,
present time disappears. Everyone feels as if he had experienced
Golubtschik’s life (see ibid. 47). During this night, Old Russia arises again.
But there is also another interesting aspect of cultural alterity. As an
expert of another culture, the frame narrator explains to the reader why
Russian émigrés are so careless about time: it is because they have lost
their cultural orientation in exile. They are out of time because they have
lost their former identity. But they also neglect time because they want to
demonstrate their cultural difference to French culture. They play “echte
Russen” (‘authentic Russians’, Roth 111), those people who do not have
the same kind of calculating mentality as those in the West.
This is a story about the insecurity of identity that is itself the result of
wrong or false stories. Entering the world of the text, we get to know the
private space of identity, a hollow filled with vacuum and fantasy, as it is
described in Musil’s novel. This post-Romantic prose combines the topic
of wrong or false stories with the motif of the double. There are a lot of
mirroring effects: between Golubtschik and the frame narrator, between
the frame narrator and the author, between Golubtschik and his ‘false’
brother Krapotkin, who proves to be a rival in love, and between
Golubtschik and the demonic Hungarian devil Jenö Lakatos.
But there is also a break in identity with regard to time. Golubtschik
and his mistress Lutetia have lost their former selfhood. This becomes
evident at the end when Golubtschik’s narration is caught up by time. The
ugly woman who comes for Golubtschik is none other than the former
beauty, the model Lutetia. Names and life stories are permanently chang-
ing in the novel (see Roth 123). This creates an atmosphere of uncanni-
ness, which Freud described in his interpretation of Hoffmann’s piece Der
Sandmann (The Sandman), which in turn played a key role in Julia Kristeva’s
definition of the strange that irritates every form of identity (see Kristeva
199–202). Speaking critically, Kristeva identifies the strange of the uncon-
scious with the cultural strange in an undifferentiated way.
In contrast to Hoffmann, the darkness of the narrative space in Roth
is increased in as much as the embedded narrator, but also all embedded
narrators within his own narration, are unreliable storytellers (see Nünning
3–39). According to the narration of old Golubtschik, the embedded nar-
rator, the young Golubtschik is driven by an oedipal fantasy that ‘in reali-
ty’ he is not the son of a forest official, but—this is an oedipal narrative—
is the illegitimate offspring of a mighty, fantastically rich prince. Influ-
enced by the devil, the obscure Hungarian businessman and spy Jenö
Lakatos, he tries to gain recognition as the son of this prince, called
Krapotkin. He wants the name of ‘his’ father. He spends half his life on
the obsession to become a Krapotkin instead of a Golubtschik. The Slavic
name has a connotation with ‘dove.’ So Golubtschik means he is a cock
pigeon, a male dove. But this possibility of a metamorphosis from a small
peaceful being into a powerful person is thwarted by the official son of
prince Krapotkin. Golubtschik’s insidious adviser Lakatos makes him be-
lieve that his rival is not the real son of the Russian aristocrat. In his view,
he, and not Krapotkin junior, is the real son of the superior ‘father.’
Golubtschik, the male dove, becomes a spy and a member of the tsarist
secret service, the Okhrana. This murky field is ideal for the disappearance
of all fixed identities. He evolves to become a master at blackmail, control
and betrayal. After a failed attack against his rival he has to leave the coun-
try and continue his job in Paris. Ironically, he now adopts the pseudonym
Krapotkin.
There is also an interesting female protagonist in the novel, called Lu-
tetia—this is the Latin name for Paris. The misogynistic gender construc-
tion in the text is instructive. Lutetia, the model, the allegory of Paris, is an
artificial creature, a mask, pure performance, the broad kat´exochen. Wom-
an, especially a French one, has no identity (see Riviere 40), only false
names and stories, changing clothes, lingerie, gestures and perfumes. Lute-
tia is the mere ipse without any idem. Her restless lover, however, is also a
man who failed to find an identity in another way. This is the kernel of the
narration, of his life story, of his confession. The reliability of his story
remains ambivalent. For example, he did not murder his rival and his
faithless lover, although he tried to do so. At the end, he finds his rival
again in Paris as part of the Russian community that has been expelled by
the Communist regime after the civil war. The heinous Lutetia is also still
alive. She has lost all her beauty. This is a form of revenge and, at the
same time, it is a melancholic plot of perishability. But when she enters
the restaurant on that very morning, she has a scar, a trace of the attack of
her lover years ago. So this part of Golubtschik’s story might be true.
She is the same and, at the same time, she is another. The abyss of
time ruins identities that were connected by the chain of events in
Golubtschik’s confession. This is an indication that Golubtschik’s story
cannot be totally false. There is another uncanny effect in the text when,
at the end of the story, Lakatos reappears as the frame narrator’s neigh-
bour in the hotel. This ending signals the return of the same disaster for
the narrator that was so characteristic for Golubtschik. The frame narrator
has never seen Golubtschik and his narrative community again, but Laka-
tos remains in this demonic world.
The story is perhaps also characteristic of the situation of a very spe-
cific cultural minority and its fragile identity. One could relate this private
story to history, to the breakdown of patriarchal pre-modern tsarist Russia
in 1917. In this reading, the novel could be understood as a noteworthy
piece of literature with a psychoanalytic background. It is located on the
margins of space and time and describes the transformation of a peripher-
al cultural region under the conditions of a modern, nontransparent
world. In this interpretation, Golubtschik’s confession is an integrative
part of the symbolic reservoir of a narrative community.
But it is also quite evident that Roth’s novel is part of the narrative
complex of alienation or, to refer to Ricœur, a narrative version of the
revelation of the ipse-identity through the loss of the idem-identity. This
could be seen as the deep structure of so-called globalisation. In different
ways, the protagonists in the novel are people without identity:
Golubtschik, Lutetia and, especially—Lakatos. They still have a certain
identity, as men or women, as French, Hungarian or Russian, but this
identity is mere appearance and no longer has any supportive power.
The opaque demimondes of the secret service, of fashion, but also of
the diaspora (which in Roth’s novel is a bleak and comfortless symbolic
space) are presented as a metaphor for the modern world. The covert rul-
er of this modern uncanny dystopia is, as in other texts by Joseph Roth,
the globalised Hungarian, the entrepreneur Jenö Lakatos, who, like Lute-
tia, is only a surface, a squire and enchanter, a phenomenon of perfor-
mance without any story—with the exception that he is marked as a
Hungarian and that he jumps on one leg like the devil (see Roth 31).
Roth’s narrative version of modernity is extremely pessimistic, conserva-
tive and demonic and one could reduce the emplotment of Roth’s text to
the statement that the symbolic overkill of narrative acts neutralises all
serious forms of narration. Therefore, all forms of identity have become
weak and eroded; firstly because all narrations prove to be lies, secondly
because it seems that there is no longer any need for storytelling. When
Golubtschik meets his rival again in Paris and tries to apologise for the
attack years ago, Krapotik jun. answers that he should not speak about the
past, but only about the present and future (see ibid. 127).
7.
There is a strong dialogical moment in Roth’s story about storytelling. The

majority of the visitors in the restaurant already know the confession of
the ‘murderer.’ Confession itself has a dialogical structure: It needs an alter
ego who is the addressee of the mysteries and shares one’s life.
The Other is the instance which takes the position of a moral or juristic
instance. S/he is the one who exculpates, acquits, pardons or forgives the
person who confesses a chain of events from his or her life to another
person, either someone directly involved in the narrative or an outsider,
who is seen as neutral. The confession is a radical form of narration, but
this aspect is hidden in all sorts of narrative processes. It marks the ethical
dimension of storytelling.
Again and again, the embedded narrator pauses in his story and there
is time for the audience’s reflection, especially the frame narrator’s media-
tions on whether his story can be true (see Roth 47, 123). A narrative
always has an addressee who is—under modern circumstances—not a
direct and explicit one, as it is the case in Roth’s novel. Narrating means to
narrate something to someone. This dialogical element, this presence of
the Other in the narrative matrix is also the precondition for what one may
call cultural identity. Cultural identity presupposes that a group of people,
a community, believes that a certain story or a narrative complex is true,
realistic and reliable. The goal of all storytelling is that my counterpart be-
lieves in ‘my’ story. In contrast perhaps to the contemporary readers, the
visitors of the Tari-Bari in Roth’s text have decided to believe in
Golubtschik’s story in a weak sense, because even invented stories are true
in at least one sense: They reveal the character of the narrator and are
symptomatic for the situation of a cultural group. They want to believe the
‘murderer’s’ story. Up to a certain point, all cultural identity is based on
the will to believe a story. Quite evidently, the criteria are not rational but
entail psychological aspects. In Golubtschik’s case it is his body language
which makes the audience believe him (see ibid. 123).
The topic of credibility is prominent in Javier Marías’ novel Maňana en
la batalla piensa en mí (1994) too. Here, the addressee of the narration is not
a cultural minority as in Roth, but a single person, Luisa. She is the sister
of a dead woman, Marta, who died half-naked immediately before the first
sexual encounter with her new lover during her husband’s absence—he
was abroad. The frustrated lover, Victor, is the homodiegetic narrator of
the story, who reflects on the necessity of persuading his dead lover’s sis-
ter of the painful and implausible events of some weeks ago. As a poten-
tial narrator he comes under pressure. Whereas he has no identity within
the surroundings of the dead woman (because he is unknown, has no
name, no face, no story), he himself has a precarious identity. It becomes

central to reveal (t)his ‘true’ identity.
As in Roth, there is an aspect of confession in the story. Victor has to
tell Marta’s sister that he was with her before she died and left her young
son alone with the dead woman. There is no doubt that he, as the posses-
sor of a mystery, has power (see Marías 270–71), but only narrating it ena-
bles him to reveal and neutralise the symbolic power of his narrative. It is a
painful situation in which the listener, Luisa, the double of the dead sister,
is assigned the role of moral instance or judge. So it becomes decisive to
tell the painful story about the events of that night in such a way that his
attractive vis-à-vis—the gender relations play an important role in the
process of narrating—does not find him guilty. By true storytelling he is
able to establish a common narrative community à deux, which is based on
the idea that only these two persons know the real story about what hap-
pened. They have a secret in common (see ibid. 278–95). His confessions
evoke further confessions from other people, firstly Luisa’s, and secondly
the confession of the dead wife’s husband.
Like Roth’s text, Javier Marías’ novel is self-referential. It is a literary
piece on the complex logic of narrating, otherness and a common symbol-
ic space that is established by a type of narrative which has a mystery at its
centre. Sameness and otherness, selfhood and alterity are intermingled in
this story. As the representative of Victor’s conscience, Luisa functions as
an abstract Other, but she has her own story and her own personal and
collective identity as a heterosexual woman—that is, her symbolic alterity
to the man. The abstract process on the level of idem is overlapped by the
reciprocal erotic attraction to each other. There is an interesting detail in
the novel. Luisa refuses to allow Victor to tell his version of her sister’s
last night in life in his own flat (see Marías 278). The spaces of man and
woman are separated in this case, because they have different positions
within the symbolic field. So a neutral third space has to be found. This is
the restaurant. After they have told each other their version of what hap-
pened, Luisa accepts Victor’s invitation to continue the talk at his flat.
And at the end, she also accepts his offer to have a drink with him.
Although there is some sort of cultural difference in this embedded
process of narrating, I doubt that one can say that Victor and Luisa live in
separate cultures. They may have different positions in one and the same
cultural space, yet they share not only a common language (also metaphor-
ically), but also an middle-upper-class background and the values, attitudes
and habitus of a Spanish postmodern individualistic culture.
British Cultural Studies has taught us to understand culture with re-
gard to the trinity of race, class and gender. Each of these three symbolic
margins can be part of a specific national culture with all its subcultures. I
would like to propose using the term cultural alterity only for those phe-
nomena in which differences of language, religion, tradition and history,
manners or mentalities play a central role. In all other cases (gender, sexual
orientation, lifestyle, profession, milieu, generation), I would prefer the
term symbolic alterity, because all these differences refer to implicit but
varying and changing positions within one society. The person from an-
other national culture, however, traditionally only has one possible posi-
tion: the position as a figure at the edge, at the margin. It is true that
globalisation suggests that this difference between inside and outside has
been cancelled. Yet I am not sure if this is true.
If Luisa and Marta were young women from the Middle East or from
West Africa with a Muslim background, or if Victor were not a writer but
a carpenter from South America, it would be a totally different novel. It is
not certain whether, in these hypothetical cases, Victor’s confession could
take place and, moreover, would lead to such a peaceful end as in Marías’
text. The narratives of new intimacy Luisa and Victor have in common are
part of the same symbolic household of an enlightened, Western Europe-
an, postmodern, national culture. They share these values, although they
might have different opinions about the details because of symbolic alteri-
ty (gender, age or lifestyle).
8.
On our journey with the travelling concept of identity, we started with the
philosophical suspicion that identity is a symptom of that kind of crisis
that we call modernity. In different philosophies, identity exists twice; ab-
stract and non-narrative, and particular and narrative. The discourse on
identity in sociology and psychology tends to the statement that identity
goes hand in hand with a process of integration. Modern cultural analysis,
postmodern philosophy and (post-)modern literature offer two different
figures of alterity—as the Other and as the stranger—,figures that do not
have a visible place in disciplines such as sociology, psychoanalysis and
traditional philosophy. Thus, the constitutive aspect of the Other for creat-
ing identity is a basic and important contribution of contemporary narra-
tive cultural analysis.
I accept that all these differentiations I have proposed along my pro-
grammatic literary reading are not binary and exclusive oppositions, but
overlapping phenomena, as it is the case with Ricœur’s distinction be-
tween sameness and selfhood. It is the work of analysis that makes a dif-
ference between otherness, symbolic and cultural alterity. It is the work of
the narrative to mingle and connect them in the chains of events, in the
emplotment, in the characters of the protagonists, which constructs iden-

tities. Narrating is the art of the impossible through connecting substance
and process, timelessness and time, constancy and change, and transform-
ing them into a new artificial unit. It is literature that makes it possible to
overcome binary oppositions and that shows how they are fitted together
or broken in the narrative process itself. With regard to cultural alterity,
one might argue that the narrative is the symbolic process in which a hu-
man being or a group finds his/her/its symbolic place by displacing Oth-
ers.
Identity is a space that is empty and crammed at the same time, and
the narrative is not only linked with all forms of identities but also links
the tautological, non-narrative and empty aspect of identity with the sym-
bolically filled one. The figure of the Other is inscribed at the empty and
abstract level of identity, whereas heterogeneity (“hybridity”), the mixture
of identities (e.g. in language, race or gender) takes place in the “location
of culture” (Bhabha 225–26, 251). Identity is the result of an all-embracing
and regulating system in which the identity of a subject is produced
through the act of narrating, as Warning writes in his essay “Forms of
Narrative Construction of Identity in the Courtly Novel” (see Marquard
553). Identity is always a double.
If narrating is also a form of creating personal and collective identity,
of building symbolic spaces, then the development of post-traditional
models of identity and alterity depends on innovative forms of narrative in
which the Other in a double sense (the principal Other as the counterpart of
the idem, and the cultural Other as the antipode of the ipse) is not automati-
cally displaced, but gains a positive function in an open narrative structure.
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Gender as a Travelling Concept:
A Feminist Perspective1
GRETA OLSON
Here is an abstract of a happier version of the essay I have been asked to
write on gender as a travelling concept:
“Gender’s Grand Tour”

Once upon a time, nasty ol’ binary sex was challenged by the introduction of a lit-
tle upstart named gender. Bouncey young gender soon dashed notions of natural-
ly based biological differences between women and men to the ground. Gender
went on to grow and grow and grow. It travelled from the lands of grammar and
sexology into that of social theory, and soon thereafter traces of gender could be
found in all of the disciplines. Before anyone knew it, gender had toppled over
ideas such as normative sexuality as well: Who could still say that anyone needs to
wear a corset or shave in order to be attractive or to identify herself through her
attraction to and attractiveness for the other gender? Thus a plethora of genders
and sexualities came into being. And in the utopian garden of ungendered and
happily queered sensibilities, everyone found a subversive, fluid, yet comfortable
home. Yipee!
And here is a précis of the unhappier version of an essay on gender as a

travelling concept which the following essay will actually take:
“Gender Does Not Travel Well”

Gender is a historically problematic and controversial concept that has been
treated variously in women’s studies, masculinity, gender, and queer studies as
well as in the variety of political movements associated with these disciplines.
Moreover, the concept of gender in its current and most pervasive usage has
done a disservice to the political agendas associated with the women’s and the
gay rights movements. Gender—happily elastic and without teeth—has thus be-
come an institutionally acceptable and pallid stand-in for a variety of social and
disciplinary problems. Gender represents the successful effacement of the dis-
comforts associated with feminist critique. It is an outgrowth of a neo-liberal
1 My great thanks go to Birte Christ for her critical comments on an earlier version of this
essay.
206 Greta Olson
post-feminist era, in which younger women (and men) feel no attachment to

what are viewed as defunct feminist struggles.
The remainder of this essay follows the narrative path described in the
second abstract. On the one hand, it wishes to look at gender, within the
framework of this volume, as one of those ‘travelling concepts’ that Mieke
Bal might adjudge as having moved most successfully between the disci-
plines and thus having furthered the project of interdisciplinarity (see Bal).
On the other hand, this essay has a political aim which is to say why the
large-scale adoption of the concept of gender has been disadvantageous
for the politics of feminism. Defining the travels of ‘gender’ is important,
firstly, due to the ubiquity with which the term is mentioned—if only
through lip service—in many fields of research. Secondly, defining gender
and tracing its disciplinary travels also has the potential to enact change.
Definition and re-definition can alter habits of thought that have become
conventionalised and uncritical. This is Monique Wittig’s challenge in her
still pertinent The Straight Mind: “We must produce a political transfor-
mation of the key concepts, that is of the concepts which are strategic for
us. For there is another order of materiality, that of language, and language
is worked upon from within by these strategic concepts” (Wittig 30).
This essay attempts to do three things. The first is to give you, its
reader, a mini history of the concept called gender and its travels from
grammar and biology to cultural theory. This will comprise the more con-
ventionally academic, historicising first part of the essay. A second section
offers a more situated approach to gender from the author’s own view-
point as an advocate of difference feminism. The third part of this essay
will ask, briefly, how appropriate it is to deal with gender as a travelling
concept at all.
1. Little Gender’s Big Journey: A Mini History
In its current usage ‘gender’ is most prominently characterised by its ca-

pacity for expansion. Based on its capacity for word building, ‘gender’ ap-
pears to be highly productive. Constructions such as ‘gender-bender,’
‘ungendering’ and ‘gender-bashing’ have now become common place.
‘Gender’ derivations such as ‘gender-blender,’ ‘gender dysphoria,’ and
‘gender neutral’ have been officially recognised as new lexemes in the
most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2009 Draft Ad-
ditions). Yet other derivations such as ‘gender fluid,’ ‘gender Fuck,’ ‘gen-
Gender as a Travelling Concept 207
derzon,’ ‘gendersaurus’ and ‘genderfied’ also appear to be becoming estab-

lished.2
Yet what precisely ‘gender’ means is contested. Most presently and
pressingly, gender is used synonymously with ‘sex’ to denote the first cate-
gory of identity: the big birthday, or, now, prenatal (and performative)
pronouncement of the words ‘It’s a girl!’ or ‘It’s a boy!’ based on a mid-
wife’s, obstetrician’s, or pre-natal physician’s appraisal of a fetus’ or new-
born’s external genitalia. These words send young humans scrambling out
into the world with a host of associations surrounding their assigned sta-
tus; they instantly place the individual within a symbolic order that has the
signifiers ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ so pinned down that there is little possibility for
the movement to the left or right of the normative.
The synonymous usage of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ is still, uncannily due to
its blatant outdatedness, present in the OED’s 1989 definition of gender
as an “In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human
being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to
the biological, distinctions between the sexes” (definition 3.b.). Thinking
of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ as equivalents has been described by sociologists as
the so-called natural attitude towards gender: This attitude assumes that
there are two and only two genders, that they are based on natural ana-
tomical differences, and that everyone can be classified on the basis of
them (adopted from Kessler and McKenna, Gender 113–14; qtd. in Kessler
and McKenna, “Transgendering” 343). Despite critiques of sexual bi-
narism by biologists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Joan Roughgarden,
this ‘natural’ attitude towards gender continues to prevail in neo-
Darwinian evolutionary psychology. It assumes that adaptive strategies for
mating are ‘hard-wired’ and are based on the struggle for sexual reproduc-
tion that our foremothers and forefathers undertook in the Pleistocene
age.3
In terms of its deployment as a differential category, ‘gender’ is gener-
ally defined in contradistinction to ‘sex,’ the box we mark on government
forms along with those for age and nationality. It is used to mean learned
feminine and masculine norms of behaviour. Thus it is now considered to
be self-evident to state, as my Dictionary of the Social Sciences neutrally does,
that gender is the “culturally constructed forms of behavior that roughly
correlate with social difference” and that the social sciences are now
“careful to distinguish between gender and sex” and to look to the former
to explain “behavior, practices, roles, and social organization” (Calhoun
2 I leave the curious reader to look these lexemes up herself in the Urban Dictionary
(http://www.urbandictionary.com).
3 See, for instance, the work of David Buss, Devendra Singh, and Randy Thornhill and Craig
T. Palmer.
208 Greta Olson
187; original emphasis). This notion of gender as culturally constructed

behaviour has led to an explosion of research on various aspects of gender
in the social sciences as well as in the humanities.
Patently, this has not always been the case. Historically, ‘gender’ has
been in use in English from the late thirteenth century onwards. In its ear-
liest usages, ‘gender’ denoted the grammatical classification of various
types of substantives or the feminine or masculine sex as in “no mo gen-
ders ben there but masculyn and femenyne, al the remenaunt ben no gen-
dres but of grace, in facultie of grammer” (Usk’s Testament of Love, 1385:
13; qtd. in the OED 1989).4 Since at least Shakespeare’s time, ‘gender’
could also denote copulation or breeding (see Glover and Kaplan xi).
Since the late eighteenth century, ‘gender’ could also refer to same-sex
sexual acts. A newspaper report from a 1784 issue of the Morning Herald,
refers to “[t]he rumour concerning a Grammatical mistake of Mr. B.---- and
the Hon. Mr. C-----, in regard to the genders, we hope for the honour of
Nature originates in Calumny!” (Chapman 185; qtd. in Glover and Kaplan
x; original emphasis). Note that the use of “mistake… in regard to the gen-
ders” as a negative euphemism for sodomy rests on the assumption that
sexual acts not occurring between the ‘opposite’ genders violate natural
law. The capacity for ‘gender’ to mean both classificatory difference, as in
its grammatical sense, learned masculine and feminine behaviours, copula-
tion and non-heteronormative sexual acts is retained in the conflicting and
overlapping uses of ‘gender’ today. Thus if we have difficulty offering an
easy definition of gender, this is in fact because it continues to be used
confusedly and synonymously with both ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ (see Jackson).
The grammatical usage of gender strikes me as still important because
it implicitly refers to the sense with which we now use gender, as my Dic-
tionary does, to mean the constructed and acculturated manner in which
those classified as men and women behave differently. This usage evokes
Ferdinand de Saussure’s recognition of the arbitrary nature of the relation-
ship between signified and signifier in his synchronic analysis of language
as a system. The two parts of the sign only make sense within the system
to which they belong. Thus in deconstructive accounts of gender, to
which I would assign both Michel Foucault’s (The History of Sexuality vol. I
1976, vol. III 1984) and Judith Butler’s (Gender Trouble 1990, Bodies That
Matter 1993) work, gender is a polarity that operates only if the two poles
are kept apart. Foucault’s work in his The History of Sexuality (I, II) and in
Herculine Barbin (1978) functions to destabilise notions of stable and natu-
ral sexual difference.
4 For a helpful German-language history of usage in English, see Kornexl.

Investigating new nineteenth-century sciences of sexuality including

psychoanalysis, Foucault shows that dimorphic sex is a construction that
went hand in hand with the establishment of normative forms of sexual
practice and desire. Sexuality is regarded by Foucault then as a regulatory
practice, a discipline and a form of knowledge that intersects with forms
of power. Similarly, Thomas Lacquer offers a cultural history of sexual
binarism that likewise demonstrates that the notion of two opposed sexes
is recent and tenuous. Using analyses of anatomical illustrations and other
treatises on reproduction, he shows that up until the eighteenth century
physiological sexual characteristics were, like the humours, thought to be
subject to diet as well as other factors. The normative body was envi-
sioned as a masculine one to which the feminine body failed to cohere.
Masculine genitalia were thought to be inverted in women’s bodies. Ra-
ther than two sexes there was only one. Thus the assumption of the natu-
ralness and immutability of the two-sex model is rendered highly
problematic: “The record on which I have relied bears witness to a fun-
damental incoherence of stable, fixed categories of sexual dimorphism, of
male and/or female” (Lacquer 22).
Before these interventions into the stability of notions of biological
sex and sexuality, ‘gender’ was used to denote social and cultural aspects
of femininity and masculinity. The sexologist Alex Comfort stated in his
1963 Sex and Society that “[t]he gender role learned by the age of two years
is for most individuals almost irreversible, even if it runs counter to the
physical sex of the subject” (Comfort ii, 42; qtd. in OED 1999). Similarly
Robert Stoller (1968) began to theorise the learned quality of behaviours
that had heretofore been ascribed to anatomical difference because these
behaviours simply did not always correspond to individuals’ anatomy. As
he states, “[…] one may sense himself as not only a male but a masculine
man or an effeminate man or even a man who fantasizes being a woman”
(Stoller vol. I, 10). Thus by the late sixties a possible disconnection be-
tween anatomy and gender-related behaviour had been diagnosed. This
led to an awareness and simultaneous pathologisation of non-normative
gender behaviours. The diagnosis of gender-related behaviours that do not
conform to a model of oppositeness as illnesses remains in descriptors
such as ‘gender dysphoria,’ which means “the condition of feeling that
one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female is the oppo-
site of one’s biological sex” (OED 2009 Draft Additions). Biological sex is
assumed to be the given upon which gender identity should be based.
Feminists had been theorising gender long before the 1960s boom in
sexology. Virginia Woolf in her Three Guineas (1938) had shown how prac-
tices of gender construction contributed to violence and warfare. Similarly,
Simone de Beauvoir had shown that femininity is based on far more than
210 Greta Olson
the differentiation of visible genitalia. She writes in words that bear quot-
ing in greater length than in the sound-bite fashion with which one most
frequently encounters them in overviews of the history of feminism and
gender studies:
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or
economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents to society; it
is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male
and eunuch, which is described as feminine. […] Up to the age of twelve the little
girl is as strong as her brothers, and she shows the same mental powers; there is
no field where she is debarred from engaging in rivalry with them. If, well before
puberty and sometimes even from early infancy, she seems to us to be already
sexually determined, this is not mysterious instincts directly doom her to passivi-
ty, coquetry, maternity; it is because the influence of others upon the child is a
factor almost from the start, and thus she is indoctrinated with her vocation from
her earliest years. (Beauvoir 297–98)
De Beauvoir emphasises the constructed, learned and acculturated nature
of femininity, which positions women as subordinate to and dependent
upon men. Her analysis suggests that femininity constitutes a social and
subjective position that can only exist in contradistinction to man as the
essential self. Femininity is, then, for de Beauvoir a relational category.
Independent of physiology and historically dependent, it is based on
women’s subordination. For de Beauvoir, man is the self, woman is the
other, and lesser. Similarly, the historian Joan Scott has suggested that
gender primarily works as a way of constituting and signifying social rela-
tionships between the sexes (see Scott 66). This insight has led to advanc-
es not only in women’s but also in men’s as well as queer studies.
Second-wave feminism—roughly feminist work that began during the
1960s—can be said to have denaturalised relations of sex-based inequality
by showing how women are acculturated to behave as subalterns to men.
This work relied on a critique of processes by which gendered behaviour
is learnt. Thus in her seminal The Feminine Mystique (1963) Betty Friedan
analysed a July 1960 issue of woman’s magazine McCall’s and compared it
to features in women’s magazines from the 1930s. By virtue of articles
about women becoming pilots, the earlier magazine issues suggested that
women’s experience was not constricted to the private sphere. By con-
trast, the sample 1960s McCall’s issue offers articles on women’s baldness,
a fight between a honeymooning couple, a mother who learns to dance
Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s lifestyle, and how to
find a second husband; it also contains features on maternity clothes, how
to diet to look like a photo model, and patterns for home sewing projects
and making folding screens. Friedan argues that contemporary popular
culture shapes women into helpless dependents and contributes to the
‘problem that has no name’—that is, women’s feeling like concentration

camp victims due to their enforced powerlessness in their limited roles as
suburban mothers (adapted from Friedan 81–82).
Friedan’s critique of the prevailing feminine ideal was taken up again
and intensified in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), which trac-
es how women are separated from their bodies, sexuality, and agency
through processes of feminisation. Resting on this critique of women’s
assigned roles, second-wave feminism, put simply, combated specific legal
issues of inequality against women. In the United States, this contributed
to the end of legal wage disparity (Equal Pay Act, 1963), the criminalisa-
tion of discrimination based on sex (Civil Rights Act, 1964), and the legali-
sation of abortion in the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Feminist agency functioned by naming and combating the sources of dis-
crimination against women, including women’s willing participation in an
ideology of subordination, and by celebrating commonality and connec-
tion between individual women. On this score one remembers the slogan
and second-wave publication by the name of Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970).
Yet within the feminist movement, there was an awareness of the
problems involved in generalising women’s experience so as to name and
resist aspects of gendered inequality which were endemic to patriarchy and
paternalism. Works such as The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch
could be readily criticised for analysing middle-class, primarily white het-
erosexual women’s experience as though it were representative of all
women. Moreover, whereas gender and gender categories were questioned
and contested by second-wave critics, the assumption of sexual difference
as the basis for a newly celebrated commonality among women remained
firmly in place.
It is in this space that Judith Butler steps in. Butler begins her work on
gender by rendering problematic the concept of woman that implicitly
underwrites most feminist projects:
The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one
which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often ac-
companies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form dis-
cernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine
domination. (Butler, Gender Trouble 5)
She takes up Monique Wittig’s critique of universal understandings of
women, ones that are negated by lesbian experience:
[…] most of the feminists and lesbian-feminists in America and elsewhere still
believe that the basis of women’s oppression is biological as well as historical. […]
The belief in mother right and in a “prehistory” when women create civilization
(because of a biological predisposition) while the coarse and brutal men hunted
(because of a biological predisposition) is symmetrical with the biologizing inter-
212 Greta Olson
pretation of history produced up to now by the class of men. It is still the same
method of finding in women and men a biological explanation of their division,
outside of social facts. (Wittig 32; original emphasis)
Reading de Beauvoir, Foucault and Monique Wittig, Butler works in her
still enormously influential Gender Trouble (1990) not only to denaturalise
the concept of woman but also the assumption of biological sex upon
which it rests. She does so by demonstrating how gender categories are
always already inscribed within a system of enforced sexual difference.
Whereas for many readers de Beauvoir’s central project was to trace a
metaphysics of difference that had constructed man as self, presence and
essence, and woman as Other and the negation of man, Butler performs a
re-reading of de Beauvoir via Wittig. She finds in The Second Sex the possi-
bility of a positive becoming: “By scrutinizing the mechanism of agency
and appropriation, Beauvoir is attempting, in my mind, to infuse the anal-
ysis of women’s oppression with emancipatory potential” (Butler, “Varia-
tions” 26). For if one becomes a woman and made into a representation
of one’s gender, one is involved in a process by which identity is con-
structed that has no end. Potentially, this process can be interrupted, de-
constructed and at least in part subverted (Butler, Gender Trouble 45).
Butler outlines a blueprint for subversion by showing how Wittig’s re-
working of de Beauvoir uncovers the relatively arbitrary nature of that
which is considered to be the incontrovertible insignia of sexual differ-
ence: Why should earlobes not be viewed as the signifiers of sexual identi-
ty, for instance, rather than the labia, clitoris and vagina or the scrotum
and penis? She shows that the ascription of gender difference is always
already located within a differentiation of sex. She thus denaturalises the
sex binary by showing that it is historically and socially contingent. If gen-
der difference simply mimes a historical perception of a biological divi-
sion, then it has led to constructions of the body as gendered and as
sexed.
Butler is renowned for her deconstruction of gender as based on sex-
ual difference and her attendant critique of heteronormativity, which is
also based on the assumption of ‘natural’ sexual dimorphism. Yet the as-
pect of her work that is most often quoted concerns her analysis of gender
as a form of performance: “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable
identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender
is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space
through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, Gender Trouble 191; original em-
phasis). Gender is an instable site of cultural inscriptions that is deter-
mined by and perpetuated in language and linguistically derived practice.
Facile readings of Butler understand gender, as the product of repeat-
ed performance, to be simply a matter of choice: today I shall perform
femininity, tomorrow something else (see, for instance, Nussbaum). Yet in

efforts to clarify her early work Butler has pointed out that gender per-
formance constantly occurs within a field of available scripts concerning
acceptable gendered practices. To break away from these scripts is to in-
voke censure and pain (Butler, “Preface” xxi). Drag performances do in-
deed show that the production of femininity is not based on visible
genitalia but rest on the quotation, repetition, highlighting and exaggera-
tion of tropes that are culturally inscribed as feminine.
For Butler, one must ‘trouble’ the concept of gender because it is a
regulatory system that leads to exclusions. Invoking Foucault’s vocabulary
about the incarcerating quality of epistemes of knowledge and their ac-
companying institutions, Butler writes of gender as a policing of behaviour
that is inherently violent. By deconstructing gender and sexual difference,
she hopes to make room for all of those individuals who are punished by
the prescriptive, normative and punitive divisions of gender. Butler ulti-
mately envisions a proliferation of possible gendered identities: “[…] we
may seem justified in concluding that the history of gender may well re-
veal the gradual release of gender from its binary restrictions” (Butler,
“Variations” 37).
The affirmative strategy beyond iteration of the binary is ‘queering’ as
a form of social and linguistic resistance (see Butler, Bodies That Matter
223). Beyond an emancipation from heteronormativity, Butler in her later
work has striven for a politics of inclusion of the previously excluded, one
that would embrace those labelled for whatever reasons as ‘queer’ as well
as those who are de-voiced in the public sphere for reasons such as eth-
nicity or poverty (see Butler, Frames of War).
Arguably, at least here in Germany, the locus from which this author
writes, gender performativity has remained the preferred theoretical model
to describe sex-related behavioural and identity differences. By de-
essentialising gender and, accordingly, the unproblematic concepts of
woman and sex, however, Butler’s theory of performative gender has ren-
dered mute some of the political claims of feminism.5
2. But What If Gender Was a Bad Idea?
I now wish to ‘trouble’ the concept of gender by addressing it from a

more specifically feminist vantage point. In the following, I wish to ask
5 One might argue, however, that Donna Haraway went even further than Butler in decon-
structing gender difference by demonstrating that a reliance on the old gender binary con-
tinues to see and represent woman simplistically as the equivalent of nature (see Haraway,
Simians).
214 Greta Olson
what it has meant for the category of woman to have been displaced by
that of gender and the supposedly more inclusive theory of gender. I want
to argue that gender’s ascendency as a critical concept, a theory of identity
difference, and as an object of study has not been without negative conse-
quences, particularly for feminism and for women’s studies. Gender’s
post-1990s travels have in fact created points of dissonance and dissatis-
faction in terms of the politics, the path of intellectual inquiry, and the
institutional acceptance of feminism.
Angela McRobbie dates 1990 as the end of second-wave feminism
and the advent of gender (McRobbie 13–14). More radically, Tania
Modleski states that this was the period in which feminism was essentially
hijacked from women, and “every use of the term ‘woman,’ however
‘provisionally’ it [was] adopted, is disallowed” (Modleski 15). By arguing in
post-structuralist terms that the conceptualisation of ‘woman’ itself was
intellectually corrupt—an attachment of essentialised notions of identity
which ignored logocentric thought structures and textual inscription—the
idea of feminism as being by, about, and for women became problematic.
Part of feminism’s demise also came from within, from a recognition
of the charge that it was no longer easily possible to describe the experi-
ence or needs of women with one unified voice, even if to do so was a
form of strategic essentialism that was necessary to furthering the struggle
for social justice.6 To deploy the category of ‘woman’ was to become im-
plicated in a process of universalisation and a blatant disregard for those
who do not feel comfortable, for reasons of sexual practice, ambiguous
anatomy, ethnicity, or other reasons from being included within the gen-
der/sex binary. Feminism could also be accused of suggesting that gender
was the most important identity category, something that women of col-
our had been disagreeing with since at least Soujourner Truth’s speech
from 1851 in which she asked, “Ain’t I a woman?”
In the advent of Butler’s and others’ work, gender became widely
adopted as a critical category. In standard historical overviews, US-
American second-wave feminism is dated as extending from the sixties to
the end of the eighties and is portrayed as having been primarily political,
whereas French feminism is described as having been based on psychoan-
alytical and deconstructive analysis.7 For instance, Toril Moi’s influential
Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) describes Anglo-American feminist work as
6 Yet as Robyn Wiegman argues, second-wave feminism was always conscious of the effects
of race and sexuality on forms of discrimination. It is false, she attests, to “cast[…] women
of color and lesbians as belated arrivals to feminist critical practice and movement”
(134–35).
7 Occasionally, Marxist, primarily British feminism is posited as a third category of feminist
thought.
under-theorised and French feminism theory as its opposite. From the

1990s onward, feminism is then described as having moved into a period
of post-structuralism or backlash. ‘Women’s studies’ programs, based on a
platform of feminist politics, were replaced by ‘women’s and gender stud-
ies’ or by ‘gender studies’ (see Wiegman) or by ‘men’s, lesbian and gay,
and queer studies’ (see Auslander).
During this period in which feminist theory and women’s studies ap-
peared increasingly unsatisfactory, Butler’s ‘gender’ came into critical as-
cendency. This was problematic for three reasons: One, ‘gender’ made and
makes little sense in French or Italian (see Braidotti and Butler 37) or in
German, for that matter (see Metzler Lexikon, “Gender/Geschlecht” 141–
42). Responding to these translational difficulties, an attempt was made
during the 1990s to introduce Genus into German research as an equiva-
lent term.8 Thus new categories had to be found for the concept, or the
Anglophone term ‘gender’ had to be adopted, leading to further forms of
confusion and overlappings of ideas about differences in behaviour, anat-
omy and sexual practice. Second, the rise and further rise of Butlerian
gender theory can be seen as another instance of the hegemonic domina-
tion of American scholarly norms and narratives of scholarship (see
Braidotti, “Comment” 25). This has arguably been to the demise of other
forms of European feminist thought that have had greater difficulty in
finding institutional acceptance. Indeed, as Braidotti contests, women’s
studies, if taught at all, have often been subsumed in European universi-
ties under the field of American Studies, thus giving them an inappropri-
ate national inflection and emphasis on a single localised history (see
ibid.). Third, gender has been used to further reactionary political ends,
and may also be as every bit an exclusionary concept as ‘woman’ and
‘women’ have been claimed to be.
Regarding the first problem, ‘gender’ may not be a readily translatable
term. If, as Braidotti charges, ‘gender’ can be used in French to describe
humans in general and has no relevance in Romance language theorisa-
tions of sexual difference and feminism (see Braidotti and Butler 37), it is
highly questionable if the term should be generalised at all. This adoption
of an English term into a variety of non-Anglophone areas of scholarship
is related to the second problematic aspect of adopting Butlerian gender
theory as a useful tool in analysing differences in sex-related forms of be-
8 My thanks go to Ina Schabert for pointing this out to me (personal correspondence). For
further information, see Bußmann and Hof. They argue that genus remains preferable be-
cause ‘gender’ (Geschlecht) does not have a socio-cultural denotation in German and because
‘gender’ originally was a grammatical term before it was re-invented to indicate the differ-
ence between biological sex and learnt gender-related behaviour (see Bußmann and Hof,
Genus viii).
216 Greta Olson
haviour. On an institutional level this may mean that publishers and uni-
versity administrations are more comfortable with supporting publications
and programs with an emphasis on gender rather than those that focus on
forms of inequality that are regularly experienced by women; the former
are regarded as more pertinent and more likely to attract male students
and scholars and hence more funding (see Braidotti and Butler 43–44; for
a similar argument about the American context, see Wiegman).
On a political level, the promotion of gender has likewise been used as
a reason for advocating the policy known as gender mainstreaming rather
than taking issue with specific forms of discrimination against women.
The wide-scale acceptance of gender theory has often represented a de-
politicisation of feminist issues, which also left the politically adversarial
claims of lesbian, gay and LGBTG activists wholly untouched:
The state of gender theory did not rest. In mainstream American feminist dis-
course, the sex/gender dichotomy swung with a vengeance towards the pole of
gender, embracing it under the joint cover of liberal individual ‘rights’ and social
constructivist ‘change’. Neither sex nor sexuality was high on the list. It was left
to the gay, lesbian and queer campaigners to try to rewrite sexuality into the fem-
inist agenda. (Braidotti, Metamorphoses 32)
What is potentially harmful about the theory of gender is that it takes po-
litical issues of discrimination and violence into the anti-material ether of
inscription. The advocacy of a neo-Butlerian theorisation of gender—and
this is hardly the historical individual Butler’s fault—has been to institu-
tionalise gender studies and to deconstruct some of the tenants of femi-
nism and thus the basis for sustained women’s and feminist studies.
Whereas feminist and women’s studies arose out of political concerns,
and queer studies works for the freedom of those who practice or embody
non-normative forms of sexuality, gender studies has no clear political
goals. Moreover, ‘gender’ in itself is by no means less potentially exclu-
sionary than the concept of woman. As Robyn Wiegman attests, the move
to programs for gender and queer studies demonstrates that ‘gender’ in
itself does not function readily as a term that includes political activism
with regard to sexuality. Like ‘woman,’ the deployment of the concept of
gender can, furthermore, be criticised for suggesting that it represents the
most important form of identity:
The notion, then that gender is more critically mobile than women and that it will
withstand what women could not—the interrogation into its historical, cultural,
and contextual deployments—begins by “fixing” women as the price of its own
utopian gesture. But more crucial than this is the implicit priority that gender
gives to thinking about sexuality, masculinity, and men over and against other ax-
es of analysis—namely race, class, and nationality. (Wiegman 131; original em-
phasis)
A further negative consequence of the ascendance of gender theory has

been its deployment to conservative ends. In an albeit now-dated 1994
critique of the wholesale adoption of the conceptualisation of gender in
German academic circles, Braidotti suggests that this theory proved palat-
able because it was far less radical than other forms of feminist critique
(see Braidotti and Butler 38). Her assertion is supported by Ina Schabert’s
account of the very problematic, still retarded and incomplete acceptance
of women’s studies as a legitimate subject of scholarship in Germany. In
this vein Schabert describes what I would call the ‘double consciousness’
or, in words she quotes from Sigrid Weigel, “der schielende Blick” (Schabert
74) that afflicts women studies scholars in Germany: Individuals write
with a constant eye on what the traditional, anti-feminist male colleague
might object to about their work. To resist such objections, Schabert as-
serts, Butler’s difficult syntax and penchant for philosophical abstraction
has been widely adopted as a strategy for forestalling critique:
So we partly write like men, making gestures of objectivity, parading abstractions
and complicated sentence structures, fitting our findings in prestigious theories,
denying them their proper value by offering them as evidence of the need for
theoretical or methodological revision. This probably explains the extraordinary
popularity of Judith Butler, whose books function for German feminist studies as
both a philosophical buttress and a formal model. (Ibid.)
Schabert’s analysis suggests that the flight from materiality and, necessari-
ly, also from women’s embodied lives that is inherent in deconstructive
accounts of gender such as Butler’s has a peculiar attraction within the
German context. It allows one to remain in the comfortable realm of de-
constructive debate rather than departing from women’s actual experience
as a basis for creating new models of analysis and structures of knowledge.
As an alternative to gender theory, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti
emphasises a form of feminist difference which cannot be seen as analo-
gous to the essentialism with which US-American second-wave feminism
is so frequently charged. Let me now posit this affirmative form of femi-
nism as a way of thinking forward from the status quo myriad usages of
‘gender.’ In a conversation that has extended over at least the last fifteen
years in the form of lectures and publications, Braidotti and Butler have
traded back and forth about the idea that difference feminism and gender
performativity are both viable emancipatory strategies. As Braidotti puts it,
there has to be more than “one point of exit from the kingdom of the
phallus” (Braidotti and Butler 53). Ultimately, a variety of strategies should
be encouraged.
Summarising this conversation, Butler writes in her monograph Undo-
ing Gender that gender has come to be used in conservative discourse, for
instance by the Catholic church as a synonym for lesbianism and homo-
218 Greta Olson
sexuality; it has also been used to dislocate feminist claims (see “Varia-
tions” 184). While Butler may contest these deformations of her theory,
she also continues to support an anti-materialist and constructivist under-
standing of gender as a form of social (and political) positioning and in-
scription: “Gender is thus opposed in the name of sexual difference
precisely because gender endorses a socially constructivist view of mascu-
linity and femininity, displacing or devaluing the symbolic status of sexual
difference and the political specificity of the feminine” (Butler, “Varia-
tions” 185).
By contrast, Braidotti advocates materiality and lived embodiment as
the affirmative basis for a re-envisioned theory of sexual difference. Iden-
tifying with the “fixed location” of that which makes women be perceived
as different from the norm is a necessary step towards political agency (see
Braidotti, “Becoming” 53). Braidotti thus critiques Butler’s denial of the
body, sexual pleasure and emphasis on the linguistic rather than the mate-
rial. Instead, she insists that the margin of non-belonging which has been
assigned to women must be the basis for activism. Sexual difference can-
not, she argues, be disembodied. This critique of the anti-feminist poten-
tial of Butler’s deconstruction of ‘woman’ is not unique: In a reflection on
developments in feminist theory since 1985, Toril Moi states that Butler’s
gender analysis has led to a disassociation of women from their bodies
which has created only confusion and not in any way aided the feminist
cause (see Moi 178).
The affirmative form of ‘becoming woman,’ for Braidotti, involves an
intellectual strategy that first destabilises the traditional concept of wom-
an. It thus allows individual feminist subjects to speak as women, but not
in any one single, monolithic voice:
Crucial to this political process [feminism] is the fact that the quest for alternative
forms of social representation of women requires the mimetic revisitation and
reabsorptions of the established forms of representation of the post-Woman fe-
male feminist subjects (for whom the term woman no longer need apply. Femi-
nism is the strategy that consists in redefining a social imaginary related to
women […]. The politics of sexual difference is a praxis that consists in activating
real-life women’s difference from the way difference has been institutionalized in
the phallogocentric system as a site of devalued otherness. (Braidotti, “Com-
ment” 36)
It would be simplistic to fault the rise of gender theory with the demise of
feminist analysis and the emergence of a conceptual disregard for the re-
alities of women’s embodied lives. Yet gender theory’s ascendency did
roughly coincide with the backlash, post-feminism and anti-feminism that
mark our current cultural moment. As McRobbie describes the present, it
is not just that younger women (and men) now feel a lack of identification
with their older feminist sisters and the social-political arguments with
which they identified themselves. It is rather that they hate them. The new
ethos of popular culture is to parody feminist theory by ironically com-
menting on the regular reduction of individual women to their body parts.
This is to suggest: ‘Yes, it is the desirable woman’s wish to objectify her-
self playfully and knowingly.’ This is the age of Sex and the City, of lipstick
lesbians, and of middle-class women embracing pole dancing as a sport.
The author of this essay certainly agrees that ‘woman’ is a problematic
and contested category and likewise supports the argument that it is vital
not to generalise women’s experience. Yet I also believe that a return to a
women-centred model of cultural analysis and political practice is neces-
sary to address persistent social disparities and forms of discrimination
that affect those people who are identified as women. Moreover, the theo-
risation of women’s experience in women’s and feminist studies has not
been pursued long enough for it either to be abandoned or deemed re-
dundant. Furthermore, gender now functions as a vague apolitical stand-in
for a politics that addresses sexual inequality, as in gender mainstreaming.
It is also used to conservative ends as a synonym for sexual behaviour and
a replacement for the denominators ‘woman’ and ‘man.’ Again, to quote
Braidotti on these issues:
In such a political context, gender politics is dislocated. In institutional settings
feminist activism is replaced by the less confrontational policy of gender main-
streaming. In society at large, the ‘post-feminist’ wave gives way to neo-
conservatism in gender relations. The new generations of corporate-minded
businesswomen and show-business icons disavow any debt or allegiance to the
collective struggles of the rest of their gender while the differences in status, ac-
cess and entitlement among women are increasing proportionally. Even in the so-
called advanced world, women are the losers of the current technological revolu-
tions. (Braidotti, “Critical Cartography” 3–4)
With Braidotti I advocate a return to women’s studies and feminist phi-
losophy as a basis of knowledge and to an explicitly feminist political
agenda that would of necessity also include men. Feminist thought must
continue to critically investigate the concept of woman, while nonetheless
attending to forms of discrimination that affect actual women’s lives.
The debate that I have rehearsed here, albeit in a simplified and trun-
cated form, may appear to some gender-savvy readers to be simply old
hat. For them, this will look like a tired rehash of discussions between
gender constructivists and revisionary difference feminists that character-
ised the nineties. Gender, for many, has simply become passé (see Angerer
7–8). For the more theoretically up to date, gender studies have now mor-
phed into studies that consider questions of posthumanism and intersec-
tionality. The former attempts to move away from the anthroprocentrism
220 Greta Olson
endemic to the humanities towards alternative notions of materiality and

subjective becoming.9 The latter investigates how intersections of identity
categories such as race, gender, and class contribute to shaping particular
groups’ experiences of oppression. Intersectionality may provide a solu-
tion to feminism’s historical failure to account for other forms of social
domination while—unlike gender studies—still addressing specific issues
of inequality that affect women.10
3. But What If Gender Is Not a Travelling Concept?
In their introduction to a special issue of the European Journal of European

Studies on travelling concepts, Birgit Neumann and Frederik Tygstrup of-
fer a helpful overview and contextualisation of Bal’s travelling concepts
theory. Their caveats include that the theory is not new but stems from
Edward Said’s and James Clifford’s work (see Neumann and Tygstrup 1–
2) and that Bal’s ‘concepts’ may in fact be dressed-up metaphors (see ibid.
5–7).
I am not convinced that travelling concepts provide the best form of
cultural analysis, though this is a topic which exceeds the scope of this
essay. The theory of travelling concepts appears to compete with two oth-
er grand narratives regarding the most convincing basis for cultural analy-
sis. One of these concerns the idea that identity and reality are constituted
by the creation and participation in stories: qualities of narratives, includ-
ing agents, changes of status, causality, and experientiality can be found in
all representations of experience, whether these be graphic, multimedial or
digital. Another grand récit of analysis suggests that experience is shaped
and interpreted through reference to pre-linguistic conceptual metaphors.
The work of science studies scholars demonstrates how metaphors func-
tion as points of re-instantiation and exchange when they are adopted in
new contexts.11
Gender is a contested theory about differences between humans that,
I have argued here, has not travelled all that well. This essay has pointed
to only a very few areas in which permutations of the concept of gender
have created points of resistance; it has not been able to describe the
9 For work on posthumanism, see Halberstam and Livingston; Haraway, Simians; for work
on nomadology and becoming animal, see Braidotti, Metamorphoses, Transpositions, “Ani-
mals”.
10 The work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins has been seminal to
intersectional studies but was preceded by the work of black feminists including Sojourner
Truth. For an overview of intersectional work in Germany, see Haschemi Yekani et al.
11 See the work of Sabine Maasen and James Bono for examples.
adoption of gender into a variety of disciplines and national arenas of

scholarship.12 Rather, this essay has claimed that gender has been de-
ployed by some to neutralise the claims of feminism; this has been to the
detriment not only of women’s studies but also to the theory of gender
and the politically inchoate institutionalisation of gender studies that has
arisen out of this theory.
If we do continue to use ‘gender’ let us re-politicise the term and con-
nect it to activism and affirmative change. Only then, I maintain, will this
concept prove to be viable and productive in various political and intellec-
tual geographies.
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Cultural Memory and Memory Cultures
BIRGIT NEUMANN and MARTIN ZIEROLD
1. Mapping the Field of Cultural Memory Studies
Memory matters. The idea of memory pervades contemporary public life,

spurring heated debate in the media, in the political sphere and in academ-
ic discourses (see Radstone and Schwarz 2). Over the last two decades or
so, memory has emerged in various parts of the world as a key concept for
the interdisciplinary study of culture, involving disciplines as diverse as
psychology, history, sociology, art history, literary and media studies, phi-
losophy, theology and the neurosciences. As a travelling concept par ex-
cellence, memory has contributed to forging new interdisciplinary
endeavours not only in the field of culture but also between the humani-
ties, social studies and the sciences (see Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies”
1). What these investigations of the relation between culture and memory
are primarily interested in is, broadly speaking, “the importance of acts of
memory for the present” (Bal, “Introduction” xv), i.e. the cultural func-
tions that ‘memories in the making’ fulfil in specific socio-cultural con-
texts. At stake is the ever-shifting interplay between present and past, “the
workings of the past-in-the-present” (Radstone and Schwarz 2), and the
manifold and frequently contradictory bearing these workings have on
collective identity, politics and social recognition. “Memory is crucial to
the understanding of a culture,” Marita Sturken notes, “precisely because
it indicates collective desires, needs, and self-definitions” (Sturken 2).
Yet while the “contemporary ‘presentness’ of memory is evident”
(ibid. 1), exactly how memory is to be understood remains an open mat-
ter. The omnipresence of the term cultural memory in the study of culture
cannot hide the fact that the concept denotes quite different things in dif-
ferent disciplines, national contexts and historical epochs. Indeed, the ar-
ray of terminologies coined to capture the relationship between memory
and culture testifies to this diversity: mémoire collective/collective memory,
cadres sociaux/social frameworks of memory, social memory, ars memoriae,
lieux de mémoire/sites of memory, invented traditions, myth, memoria, heri-
226 Birgit Neumann and Martin Zierold
tage, commemoration, kulturelles Gedächtnis, kommunikatives Gedächtnis, gen-

erationality, cultural trauma, digital memories, and so forth. The relations
between memory and culture, which the concepts of cultural memory and
memory cultures explore and respond to, are certainly complex, being
open to many different terminological interpretations, methodological
takes and theoretical perspectives (see Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies”
2–3). The various travels of the concept of memory “between disciplines,
between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geo-
graphically dispersed academic communities” (Bal, Travelling Concepts 24)
certainly yielded a distinct “terminological richness” (Erll, “Cultural
Memory Studies” 3), but also a peculiar “disjointedness”, sometimes even
confusing heterogeneity in the field of cultural memory studies (see ibid.).
What is at stake here is not merely a question of different terminologies
but of epistemological differences, in some cases incompatibilities, which
concern the constitution of the respective research cultures as a whole,
including the ways in which they construct and approach their objects.
At the same time, however, cooperation among the disciplines and re-
gional research cultures seems vital for the success of cultural memory
studies. The study of cultural memory, Nicolas Pethes and Jens Ruchatz
have pointed out, is not only a multidisciplinary field of research, but es-
sentially an interdisciplinary endeavour (see Pethes and Ruchatz 9): To
come to grips with the complex interfaces between culture and memory
co-operation between disciplines is crucial. Elaborating key concepts, re-
vealing their specific structures of differences and overlaps, is a precondi-
tion for enabling interdisciplinary dialogues.
The present contribution seeks to capture some of the travels of the
concept ‘cultural memory’ in an exemplary rather than exhaustive manner.
What we want to illustrate is the extent to which the journeys of the
concept cultural memory are characterised by selective appropriations,
productive misunderstandings and discontinuous translations. These dis-
continuities are largely due to local epistemologies, historically variable
norms and the dominant paradigms of a discipline, which direct the re-
searchers’ attention to those aspects of the concept that can best be
adapted to their present purpose (see the introduction to this volume). Of
course, our own tracing of the concept’s travels is also influenced by our
cultural location, in terms of both our North European provenance and
our disciplinary training in the humanities and social sciences, respectively.
Cultural Memory 227
2. The ‘Invention’ of Collective Memory
The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who published his landmark Social

Frameworks of Memory (Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire) in 1925, is commonly
credited with the ‘invention’ of the concept of collective memory (see
Harth). Halbwachs’s work on memory was inspired by insights from two
major thinkers in the late nineteenth century, namely the philosopher
Henri Bergson and the sociologist Émile Durkheim (see Apfelbaum 79–
81). True, memory has been a key topic for social thinkers since Greek
Antiquity. Yet it was only in the early twentieth century that memory was
conceived of as a distinctively social and cultural phenomenon, a mémoire
collective, as Halbwachs put it (see Echterhoff and Saar, “Einleitung” 15–
17). In Social Frameworks of Memory, Halbwachs took up Bergson’s concep-
tion of memory as a fluid and changing entity, which is fundamentally re-
sponsible for our experience of time, but addressed the issue from
Durkheim’s sociological perspective (see Olick, “From Collective
Memory” 155). Interdisciplinarity thus characterised the study of memory
from its very beginnings.
Broadly speaking, Halbwachs’s studies follow four main lines of
thought, which have to a considerable extent shaped the field of cultural
memory studies: first, the creativity of memory; second, the social con-
struction of individual memory; third, the development of collective
memory in groups such as the family and generation; fourth, the extension
of collective memory to the level of entire societies, including culturally
available commemorative symbols and technologies. By thus establishing
a link between individual and collective memory Halbwachs provided a
sociological framework for the study of memory (see Apfelbaum 77).
Memory, for Halbwachs, is first and foremost socially constructed and
constructive. In his 1925 publication, On Collective Memory (orig. Les cadres
sociaux de la mémoire), Halbwachs argued that each individual memory is
also a collective memory in so far as memory is not only mediated but also
structured and shaped by social arrangements. Due to the intimate inter-
play between social frameworks and individual memory, the distinction
between the individual and the social components of remembering ulti-
mately becomes blurred: Memories, according to Halbwachs, “are recalled
to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me
the means to reconstruct them” (38). Social contexts, social materials and
social cues are thus intrinsically part of what we usually consider to be ‘in-
dividual’ memories (see Olick, “From Collective Memory” 156).
According to this view, individual and collective memory are closely,
even dialectally related. The mémoire collective is not to be understood as a
group mind, it is not an anti-individualist memory (see Echterhoff and
Saar, “Einleitung”). Rather, it is the sum of experiences and knowledge

relevant to the self-understanding of a particular group. Collective
memory, in this scheme of things, provides the frame within which indi-
viduals make sense of their experiences: “We can remember only on con-
dition of retrieving the position of past events that interest us from the
frameworks of collective memory” (Halbwachs 172). Collective memory
emerges through constant social interaction, i.e. through shared experi-
ences and actions, as well as through ongoing communication about the
group’s past. Memory, according to Halbwachs, is therefore closely tied to
the formation of collective identities (see Echterhoff and Saar, “Einlei-
tung” 18). What makes recollections important to social groups, then, is
not the past as such, but its creative mnemonic appropriations in the light
of the group’s present needs and imagined futures (see Apfelbaum 85).
Halbwachs’s emphasis on the relation between memory, identity and
storytelling has considerably influenced subsequent investigations of
memory (see Apfelbaum 87; Olick, “From Collective Memory” 156). The
importance of memory and narrative to the formation of identities, indi-
vidual and collective, is extremely well documented (see Brockmeier and
Carbaugh; Eakin; Hinchman and Hinchman; Straub; Welzer). This em-
phasis, however, has frequently led to a disregard of unintentional, implicit
and non-narrative forms of cultural remembering (see Öhlschläger and
Wiens). Moreover, it is questionable whether in complex modern socie-
ties, in which collective memories are typically communicated through
media, processes of remembering necessarily go hand in hand with the
formation of collective identity (see Zierold).
Halbwachs’s studies of collective memory put emphasis on the multi-
ple social frameworks of individual memory, arguing that memory is al-
ways shaped by collective contexts. According to this view, collective
memory is inherently plural, because each individual is always part of
several groups, each of which has its own memories (see Neumann,
Erinnerung, Identität, Narration 79). Yet Halbwachs also lay the ground for
a collective conceptualisation of memory (see Olick, “From Collective
Memory” 157), thus shifting attention from the social constructedness of
subjective categories of meaning to a radically different concept of culture,
namely as “patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society”
(Olick, “Collective Memory” 336). In addition to a “socially framed indi-
vidualist approach to memory” (Olick, “From Collective Memory” 157),
Halbwachs drew attention to the importance of culturally circulating sym-
bols, rituals, customs and media to the construction of collective memory.
In La topographie légendaire (1941) he focuses on religious communities
whose collective memory is structured around topographical aspects and
Cultural Memory 229
reaches back thousands of years, thus illustrating how the past is brought
into the present (see Apfelbaum 91).
Halbwachs’s contention that there is a dimension of collective re-
membering that does not rely on individual acts of memory provoked
controversy almost immediately. The historian Marc Bloch (1925), who
was Halbwachs’s colleague in Strasbourg, accused Halbwachs of falsely
transferring concepts from individual memory to the level of the collec-
tive, thus falling prey to a typical Durkheimian strategy (see Echterhoff
and Saar, “Einleitung” 24). Even though scholars today continue to ques-
tion the validity of the concept of collective or cultural memory, arguing
that it is a metaphor at best, Halbwachs’s contention that collective
memory relies on the transmission of mnemonic symbols is the starting
point for many fruitful investigations of the relation between memory and
culture, most notably of Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural
memory.
In contrast to Halbwachs, who might currently be “the best remem-
bered founding father of memory studies” (Erll, “Cultural Memory Stud-
ies” 8), the contributions of German Jewish art historian Aby Warburg to
the study of memory have, at least in some disciplines, been somewhat
marginalised. Warburg can indeed be considered as an early proponent of
an interdisciplinary study of culture. He emphatically argued that scholars
should cross disciplinary boundaries to gain deeper insight into the com-
plex workings of cultural memory (see ibid.). Rather than putting forward
a full-blown and coherent theory of memory, Warburg initiated several
memory projects which illustrate the complex and contradictory workings
of memory. His unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29), fundamentally an
attempt to combine philosophical with image-historical approaches to
memory cultures, documents the history of pictorial memory from an-
tiquity up to the twentieth century, including such various visual materials
as postal stamps, photographs and illustrated newspapers. The atlas is
structured around so-called ‘pathos formulae’ (Pathosformeln), which travel
through various historical periods, art works and regions. ‘Pathos formu-
lae’ are best understood as visual, highly mythic symbols, which encode
emotionally intense experiences (see Weinberg 235) and serve mnemonic
functions. Due to their enormous affective potential they allow for varia-
ble, culturally-specific decodings and structure cultural memories in an
implicit, often hidden manner.
Hence, whereas the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is often credited
with laying the theoretical foundations for the study of the social and cul-
tural dimensions of individual memories (see Erll, “Cultural Memory
Studies” 9), Warburg’s most important legacy to today’s memory studies is
his empirical insistence on the relevance of pictures—and thus media in a
broader sense—to the construction and continuation of collective

memory (some scholars therefore even consider Warburg as a founding
father of visual studies; see Horstkotte in this volume).
Of course, Halbwachs and Warburg were far from being the only
scholars interested in the interplay between memory and culture in the
early twentieth century (see Olick, “From Collective Memory” 155). One
might just as well start the history of cultural memory studies with quite
different thinkers: French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, British
psychologist Frederik Bartlett, cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the
philosophers Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, the psychoanalyst Sig-
mund Freud, to name but a few, made important contributions to the
field of cultural memory studies at the beginning of the twentieth century
(see Leslie; Terdiman). For although most of these thinkers were interest-
ed in the workings of individual memory they also showed how culture,
social constellations and the materiality of things, respectively, often un-
consciously, mould acts of remembering. Occasionally these scholars took
notice of another’s work; more often, however, their research into the
field remained largely unconnected (see Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies”
8). The concepts that were shaped for the study of memory in this early
phase did not travel well. Memory studies around 1900 are an example of
“an emergent phenomenon, cropping up at different places at roughly the
same time” (ibid.), i.e. a transdisciplinary shift of critical perspective with
only few intentional acts of conceptual translation and interdisciplinary
exchange.
3. The Rediscovery of Memory in the 1980s:

The Second Phase of Cultural Memory Studies
After promising beginnings in the 1920s, memory studies were marginal-

ised and eventually disrupted with the beginning of the Second World
War. It seems that after the Second World War the works of Halbwachs
and Warburg, but also of Bartlett and Vygotsky, were largely forgotten
and that interest in memory had ceased (see Apfelbaum 78). It was only at
the beginning of the 1980s that the concept of collective memory came
back on the scene again, quickly moving centre stage not only in the aca-
demic world, but also in political discourse, the mass media, the arts and
popular culture. In this context, the seminal works of Halbwachs and,
eventually, Warburg were rediscovered, so that they are currently consid-
ered as major inspirations in the field of cultural memory studies. Yet even
in the 1970s, when Pierre Nora spelled out the premises of the history of
mentalities, he was convinced that this historical orientation was largely
Cultural Memory 231
inspired by contemporary intellectual preoccupations. It is only recently

that he has come to acknowledge the theoretical debts his approach owes
to Halbwachs’s conceptions of history and memory (see ibid.).
Various reasons may have contributed, in one way or another, to the
‘memory hype’ that set in over the course of the 1980s. Historical and po-
litical developments were certainly conducive to the rekindled interest in
memory and its interdisciplinary study. The 1980s saw the gradual extinc-
tion of the generation that had witnessed the Shoah and the Second
World War (see Echterhoff and Saar, “Einleitung” 13). This development
caused major mnemonic disruptions. Gradually, these horrifying events
ceased to be part of any lived, autobiographical memory and, consequent-
ly, their remembrance came to rely on memory media, on monuments,
museums, films, books, and so on (see Radstone and Schwarz 3). Forty
years after the Holocaust, the question of how this traumatic event could
and should be publicly remembered pervaded political debates (see Erll,
“Cultural Memory Studies” 9). Moreover, major transformations in inter-
national politics and the increased forging of international bonds, for in-
stance through the perspective of a European union, put the focus on
national but also international sites of memory. Pierre Nora’s project of
inventorying the French lieux de mémoire is clearly marked by the concern
for the disappearance of national memory through the increasing interna-
tionalisation of political discourses: “The rapid disappearance of our na-
tional memory cries out for an inventory of the sites where it [national
memory] was selectively incarnated” (“Présentation” vii, our translation).
Last but not least, crucial developments in global history and politics,
such as the breakdown of authoritarian regimes, forced migration, geno-
cides and ecological catastrophes, contributed to an increasing “politiciza-
tion of memory” (Radstone and Schwarz, “Introduction” 2), so that
public debates about memory were taking on more complex, often inter-
culturally inflected forms (see Klein et al.). Memory is frequently invoked
in the public sphere to acknowledge various acts of violence and injustice,
present and past (see ibid. 3), thus adding an ethical dimension to the con-
cept of memory (see Margalit). In these contexts, issues of trauma and
witnessing have played an increasingly large role, pointing to the culturally
disruptive effects of memories and calling into question conventional, nar-
rative forms of remembering. This development was clearly spurred by
9/11 and ensuing debates about appropriate ways of remembering: Whose
version of the past should we remember and to what political ends? Is
memory aimed at educating the next generation, at expiating guilt or at
enabling self-aggrandisement? Under what memorial aegis and according
to whose rules do communities remember their misdeeds and barbarities?
What the debates around these questions have shown is that memories are
never shaped in a political vacuum (see Langenohl; Young). They always

reflect both the past experience and current needs of communities. It
seems that ongoing public debates about appropriate forms of remem-
brance have added a self-reflexive dimension to cultural memory, driven
by the awareness that power dynamics as well as questions of responsibil-
ity and justice are inevitably implicated in memory processes.
Furthermore, new theoretical developments served as a catalyst for
memory studies in the 1980s. Theoretical approaches such as deconstruc-
tion, social constructivism, gender theory and postcolonialism, the history
of mentalities and nouvelle histoire, deeply affected conventional notions of
history as a ‘master narrative’ and brought new memory phenomena to
the fore (see Echterhoff and Saar, “Einleitung” 13–14). The ‘narrative
turn’ in numerous disciplines concerned with the study of culture revealed
the constructive and necessarily selective dimension of historiographic
discourse, ultimately calling the clear-cut boundary between history and
memory into question. In psychology, too, emphasis was put on the social
contexts of memory processes and the influence that communication and
storytelling had on individual memories (see ibid. 27–28). Against the
background of these historical, political and theoretical developments, in
the 1980s a second phase of memory studies began with the publication
of several innovative contributions to the field of cultural memory studies,
among which Nora’s concept of national lieux de mémoire as well as Jan and
Aleida Assmann’s concept of cultural memory probably proved to be the
most influential.
The lieux de mémoire project, started by the French historian Nora in
1977, builds on the importance of localisation and space for memory pro-
cesses, taking up an idea which goes back to the ancient concept of loci
memoriae. Yet whereas the loci memoriae was, by and large, a necessary and
value-free mnemotechnics in a society without modern media, Nora’s lieux
de mémoire are invested with extremely ideological and nationalist meaning
(see den Boer 21). The larger part of the French lieux de mémoire, such as
“Le Roi,” “Vichy” or “Le Louvre,” are closely tied to the identity politics
of the French nation and are designed to serve the remembrance of na-
tional history. Nora defines lieux de mémoire as any significant entity,
whether material or non-material in nature, that serves as a symbolic ele-
ment of the memorial heritage of specific communities (see Nora, Realms
xvii). Hence, such lieux include not only material spaces (such as Paris or
Versailles) but also historical persons (e.g. Jeanne d’Arc), theoretical texts
(e.g. Descartes’ Discours de la méthode), symbolic objects (e.g. the French
flag) as well as ritual actions and public holidays.
The conceptual framework of Nora’s project derives from what he
identifies as an overarching paradox (see Schwarz 51). According to Nora,
Cultural Memory 233
the lieux de mémoire no longer constitute a coherent collective memory; on

the contrary, they testify to the fragmentation and even dissolution of
memory. “Memory is constantly on our lips,” Nora argues, “because it no
longer exists” (Nora, Realms 1). Contemporary (French) society faces a
moment of transition in which it experiences the inevitable replacement of
memory as embodied in living communities by an anonymous history.
Due to the effects of globalisation, democratisation and the disintegration
of traditional communities, we are about to enter a period that will be
marked by the “reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of
what is no longer” (ibid. 3). According to Nora, it is because of the disap-
pearance of memory that we are presently witnessing such a boom in lieux
de mémoire. As indicated by Nora’s selective inventory of memory sites, the
lieux de mémoire are extremely pluralised, even atomised, and therefore no
longer possess the capacity to forge a shared national memory and to give
life and meaning to the national past (see Carrier 141): Where once there
had been “order and hierarchy,” now there was mainly chaos and a clear
lack of any “central organizing principle” (Nora, Realms 3: 614). Lieux de
mémoire are artificial placeholders for a vanishing collective memory, ves-
tiges of ‘real’ memory and simulacra that merely refer to themselves (see
Carrier 141.).
Nora’s lieux de mémoire project is probably the most prominent exam-
ple of a cultural history, which links theoretical reflections on collective
memory to the research of historical memory cultures, a project, which is
extremely ideological and sometimes even considered as nationalist (see
Carrier 158). Cleary, the memory that pervades Les lieux de mémoire is that
of old, centralised and culturally peculiarly homogenous France (see Saar
274; Schwarz 54). Indeed, as Nora himself points out, his project proceeds
from the special position of France, “a kind of French Sonderweg compared
to the English monarchy and the German Empire” (den Boer 31). Ac-
cording to Nora, French national memory is distinct from, for instance,
German or English memory, for it is simultaneously authoritarian, unified,
exclusive and universal. To the extent that the very concept of lieux de mé-
moire bears the traces of French cultural politics, it reveals that—and
how—specific historical contexts and political interests shape the concep-
tualisation of concepts for the study of culture.
The national specificities of the concept of lieux de mémoire become
particularly evident when comparing it to similar concepts developed in
other countries, such as the concepts of ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm
and Ranger), ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson) or ‘theatres of memory’
(Samuel). The concept of ‘theatres of memory,’ for instance, which was
coined by the English historian Raphael Samuel, also combines theoretical
approaches to cultural memory with historical analyses of memory cul-
tures, in this case, British memory culture. The concept, which is rooted in
left-wing, Marxist politics, aims to rediscover everyday experiences of or-
dinary people. According to Samuel, we live in a vibrant historical culture
and the rise of heritage and living history testifies to an expanding and
intrinsically democratic sense of history. The project of inventorying ‘thea-
tres of memory’ pays tribute to popular heritage culture, thus writing a
mnemo-history from below, which both reflects and propels the demo-
cratisation of history. Hence, whereas Nora’s concept is concerned with
the nationalisation of the past, considering heterogeneity as a threat rather
than positive thrust, ‘theatres of memory’ are interested in propelling the
pluralisation of memory.
Even though Nora’s programmatic concept of lieux de mémoire is deep-
ly implicated in French identity politics, it did indeed travel far. Nora’s
project spurred many comparable projects and studies on national lieux de
memoire, be it in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy or Spain. The fact that
many publishers, impressed by the success of an easily accessible mnemo-
history, commissioned volumes on the lieux de mémoire of their respective
nations (see den Boer 22), illustrates the extent to which collective re-
membering and media of memory are tied to commercial considerations.
Yet the travels of the concept of lieux de mémoire to different national con-
texts were far from being smooth. Rather, its travelling posed various
problems related to conceptual history, ultimately yielding transformed
concepts which, in the words of Edward Said, occupy “a new position in a
new time and place” (Said 227). Jay Winter’s concept of ‘sites of memory,’
for instance, takes its point of departure from Nora’s lieux de mémoire, but
refers more narrowly to physical sites where commemorative acts take
place. Winter’s concept bears the traces of twentieth-century concerns
with memory: The concept ‘sites of memory’ builds on the premise that,
in the twentieth century, most sites signal the loss of life in war. Sites of
memory are thus inextricably linked to processes of mourning: hence the
title of his volume Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995).
The German series, to give another example, is called Erinnerungsorte;
however, the concept is largely stripped of the nationalist nostalgia that
lies at the heart of the corresponding French concept lieux de mémoire.
Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, the editors of the successful series,
point out that the concept of ‘Erinnerungsorte’ is first and foremost a
metaphor to describe a shared knowledge of the past that possesses a
normative and formative potential for the present (see François and
Schulze 18). ‘Erinnerungsorte’ refer to collective memories which acquire
their meaning through ever-changing relations to the present. Other than
Nora, François and Schulze aim to present an open, pluralistic history,
which can testify to the conflicts, heterogeneity and even ruptures within
Cultural Memory 235
German memory culture. The conceptual differences between the concept

of ‘Erinnerungsorte’ and lieux de mémoire already become evident on the
level of translation (see den Boer 22). François and Schulze as well as
Nora (see “Nachwort” 685), in his contribution to the German series,
highlight the difficulties in finding an adequate translation of lieux, sug-
gesting such different terms as Mythen (‘myths’), Topoi (‘topoi’), Knoten
(‘knots’), Herde (‘centres’), Kreuzungen (‘crossings’) and Erinnerungsboyen
(‘buoys of memory’). It is clear that all of these terms have different con-
ceptual connotations to the more concrete expression of Ort and thus en-
tail new emphases and a new ordering of the phenomena within the
complex field of collective remembering.
In Germany, the second phase of cultural memory studies is probably
shaped most pervasively by the concept of cultural memory. The concept
was developed and elaborated in various publications by Jan and Aleida
Assmann (partly in collaboration with researchers elsewhere at the univer-
sity of Heidelberg; see Harth). To date, the concept of cultural memory
has been the most influential attempt to theorise the complex relations
between culture and memory. Because the concept of cultural memory is
intimately tied to issues of identity politics, power structures, value sys-
tems and political legitimation it has proved particularly fruitful for the
interdisciplinary study of culture (see Erll, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und
Erinnerungskulturen” 171).
Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory, which is inspired by Maurice
Halbwachs’s ideas and concepts of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school
(Lotman and Uspenskij), breaks up the concept of collective memory to
introduce a basic distinction between two different modes of remember-
ing, two modi morandi, namely communicative and cultural memory (see
J. Assmann, Das kulturelles Gedächtnis 56). This way it becomes possible to
distinguish between a collective memory that is based on everyday com-
munication and a collective memory that relies on institutionalised sym-
bolic forms and media of memory, a distinction entailed, indeed, by
Halbwachs’s broader concept. These modes of remembering clearly differ
in terms of their contents, forms, transmission, time frames and carriers
(for a summary see Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis 27–33).
Communicative memory, to some extent equivalent to Halbwachs’s
concept of collective memory, lives in everyday interaction and communi-
cation and therefore only has a limited time-depth, typically encompassing
three interacting generations and thus reaching no further back than ap-
proximately 80 to 100 years. Communicative memory is implicated in eve-
ryday life. Its contents are variable and each member of the community is
free to pass on his or her interpretation of past experiences to other
members. Traditions of communication, memory talk, and the affective
ties of families, groups and generations guarantee the durability of the col-
lective memory.
Cultural memory, by contrast, is highly institutionalised and relies on
exteriorised, objectified symbolic forms, i.e. on both media and perfor-
mances of memory, which, according to Jan Assmann (see Das kulturelles
Gedächtnis 56), can be transferred into changing contexts and be transmit-
ted from generation to generation. Because of the ethical importance that
groups attach to cultural memory, and because it is based on fixed points
in an ‘absolute past’ (rather than on the moving horizon of communica-
tive memory), its contents are fixed in external objects which can stand
the test of time, such as books, monuments and paintings. Specific institu-
tions, such as museums, archives and libraries, i.e. institutions of preserva-
tion, are established to grant the continuation of cultural memory.
Moreover, cultural memory, in contrast to communicative memory, relies
on highly specialised carriers of memory, who frequently act as guardians
of memory. These specialists, such as shamans, priests or poets, interpret
the messages specific media of memory convey and impart them to the
community. Memory and power are thus intimately related: Cultural
memory gives meaning to a shared past, shaping collective self-images as
well as the values and norms of a community (see J. Assmann, “Kollek-
tives Gedächtnis” 13–15).
Despite the differences between communicative and cultural memory,
there are also many dynamic overlaps between them. Both communicative
and cultural memory are essentially tied to the making of identities:
“Memory,” Jan Assmann points out, “is knowledge with an identity-index,
it is knowledge about oneself, that is, one’s own diachronic identity, be it
as an individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community, a
nation, or a cultural and religious tradition” (“Communicative and Cultur-
al Memory” 114). The relationship between memory and identity is reci-
procal: On the one hand, remembering is crucial to the formation and co-
hesion of groups; on the other, groups are defined and held together by a
shared past. Remembering, Assmann concludes, is therefore always “a
realization of belonging, even a social obligation” (ibid.). Accordingly,
memory never preserves the past as such; rather, much of what we re-
member is an actively designed construct fulfilling current needs for
meaning (see Neumann, Erinnerung, Identität, Narration 86). Collective
memories are highly selective and constructive; they are “permeated and
shot through with forgetting” (A. Assmann, “Canon” 103–04). This is
why acts of forgetting, whether purposeful or involuntary, inevitably in-
form and structure the field of politics.
It has frequently been pointed out that Jan Assmann’s concept of cul-
tural memory bears the marks of its disciplinary origin, namely Egyptolo-
Cultural Memory 237
gy, and can therefore not easily be applied to the study of contemporary
cultures. Having originally been designed to capture the specificities of
relatively homogenous high civilisations of the ancient world, the concept
of cultural memory presumes the existence of a rather unified memory,
which is controlled by only a few, very powerful elites. The notion of a
single, homogenous collective memory has only limited validity in con-
temporary, inherently pluralised and multicultural cultures (see Saar 273).
Numerous researchers have therefore suggested replacing the notion
of one cultural memory with the idea of numerous cultural memories vy-
ing for cultural recognition (see, e.g. Saar 275). The Collaborative Re-
search Centre “Memory Cultures” (Erinnerungskulturen), which was
founded at the University of Giessen in 1997, for example, proposes to
replace the relatively static and homogenous concept of cultural memory
with a concept that puts emphasis on the dynamics, creativity and plurality
of cultural remembering. The concept of cultures of memory stresses the
heterogeneity of cultural memories and the variability of mnemonic prac-
tices that coexist within a conflicted culture and that frequently vie for
political hegemony (for a summary see Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis 34–37;
Sandl). Memory cultures, from this perspective, are sites of conflicts, in
which the mnemonic interests of different cultural groups and their inter-
pretations of the past are publicly negotiated and discussed in regard to
their legitimate validity. Hence, memory does not refer to a simple, reified
and knowable past but is best understood as an open process, in which
many contrary forces and social demands converge and vie for recognition
(see Sturken 1).
The concept of cultural memory entered the circulation process of in-
terdisciplinary constellations in an amazingly short time, persistently shap-
ing the research agenda of numerous disciplines concerned with the study
of culture (see Harth 88). The numerous travels of the concept did, once
again, yield manifold shifts—in both the receiving disciplines and in the
conceptualisation of cultural memory itself.
In line with a pervasive cultural turn, literary studies was particularly
eager to adopt the concept of cultural memory. True, memory always was
a key topic in literary studies, as, for example, Frances Yates’s The Art of
Memory (1966) and Renate Lachmann’s Gedächtnis und Literatur (1990;
Memory and Literature, 1997) amply illustrate. Lachmann understands inter-
textuality, i.e. references to other texts, as the memory of literature. Ac-
cording to this view, the memory of a text is constituted by the
intertextuality of its references. In contrast to these studies, which are
primarily concerned with the poetics of literary memory, the eventual im-
port of the concept of cultural memory shifted the focus to the politics of
literary memory; furthermore, it expanded the scope of literary analysis
beyond its traditional focus on representations of individual memory to

collective forms of memory. In her study Erinnerungsräume (1999), Aleida
Assmann drew attention to the extent to which literary texts, particularly
canonical texts, store and reproduce the cultural capital of a society and
can thus function as powerful media of collective memory. Subsequent
studies concerned with the interfaces between literature, memory and cul-
ture showed that it is not only canonical masterpieces but literary works in
general, and not least popular literature, that take an active part in the con-
struction of collective memory (see Erll, “Kollektives Gedächtnis” 170),
often giving voice to hitherto forgotten or marginalised memories (see e.g.
Birke; Eckstein; Erll, Gedächtnisromane; Neumann, Erinnerung, Identität, Nar-
ration; Rupp): Thanks to their narrativising and aesthetising power, literary
texts generate images of the past that resonate with cultural memory, thus
providing powerful frames for collective interpretations of the past (see
Nünning).
Literary studies has not only imported the concept of cultural
memory; it also has some relevant exports to offer to the larger field of
cultural memory studies (see Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis 167). Perhaps most
importantly, literary studies has drawn attention to the importance of
form, showing the extent to which the ‘how’ bears on the ‘what’ of re-
membrance. Because cultural memory, particularly in its belatedness, is
always based on representation (see Huyssen 2–3), the form of memories
has an effect on the kind of memory that is produced. In this context, lit-
erary studies has stressed the manifold interfaces between narrativity and
memory, demonstrating that most collective memories possess a narrative
structure. It seems that media of memory—be it films, monuments or
museums—derive much of their meaning from some narrative kernel:
Narrative structures make events memorable by compellingly organising
the past around the specific experiences of human figures, which can en-
gage the sympathies of the reader or viewer (see Rigney 347).
While literary studies often analyses fictional texts in order to generate
knowledge about formal and conceptual aspects of the relationship of
memory, culture and society, other disciplines like history and social sci-
ences have also made use of the concept of cultural memory in their spe-
cific ways. As the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the historian Pierre
Nora are two of the founding fathers of cultural memory studies, both of
their disciplines have a firmly rooted investment in the field and are now
among the key contributors to memory studies as an interdisciplinary en-
deavour.
For many historians the term ‘memory’ has initially been conceived of
as a challenge to the concept of ‘history.’ The rediscovery of the concept
‘memory’ in the 1970s and 80s has led to a number of debates about the
Cultural Memory 239
relations between memory and history, sometimes defining them in strict

opposition to one another. While traditional concepts of history stress the
need for an objective search for historical truth in an almost scientific way,
the notion of ‘memory’ highlights the constructive, subjective and ambig-
uous character of every attempt to reconstruct the past in the present.
Even though this perceived fundamental threat to the historical tradition
led to heated debates at first, nowadays the concept of memory is firmly
embedded in the study of history and has opened up many innovative av-
enues to the study of the past (see Burke; Fried; Niethammer). Combining
empirical with theoretical approaches, the concept of memory also al-
lowed for the integration of cultural theory into the study of history.
Thus, ‘history’ and ‘memory’ are no longer seen as oppositions on the
same level of abstraction, but rather as productively related. The historian
Peter Burke (1989) has stressed in his seminal “History as Social
Memory,” that the academic act of writing history in itself is part of social
memory, with all its political and cultural implications. However, this does
not mean that the specific activities of historians lose their academic
standards: Today, following the tradition of historians like Jacques
LeGoff, many scholars insist on the relevance of a professional historical
discipline striving for objectivity (without ever being able to fully achieve
it), which is seen as a specific part of the broader processes of cultural
memory, on which history draws for its academic research and to which it
at the same time contributes with the knowledge and the stories it gener-
ates.
The concept of memory has not only proven to be fruitful in the field
of history in terms of theoretical and epistemological reflections, as well as
analyses of social memory of historical events, such as the Holocaust. In
addition, the advancement of the methodology of Oral History is closely
related to the concept of memory. As Astrid Erll points out, early research
in the field of Oral History merely accumulated recollections of witnesses
to history, but lacked a deeper understanding of processes of memory (see
Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis 51). It was especially in dialogue with concepts of
memory that Oral History developed a more sophisticated methodology.
The concept of memory has also proven very productive in the social
sciences. At the same time, however, the social sciences are an example of
the way that while the term ‘memory’ has travelled widely, specific con-
cepts of ‘memory’ have travelled a lot less, especially internationally. Many
scholars contributing to ‘social memory studies’ (see Olick and Robbins)
still take Maurice Halbwachs as their primary theoretical foundation, with
the more recent contributions, for example by Nora and Jan and Aleida
Assmann, taking much longer to gain wide recognition in the Anglo-
American discussion, not least because many texts, especially from the
German context, have still not been made available in English transla-
tions.
At the same time, scholars in German sociology have developed a
very specific concept of memory following the tradition of Niklas Luh-
mann’s systems theory, which has hardly been followed up on interna-
tionally (see Esposito). Thinking about social aspects of ‘memory’ from a
perspective of systems theory, the focus of research shifts fundamentally.
According to systems theory, the most basic operation for each system is
to constantly draw a distinction between the system itself and its ‘outside.’
Historic events (in a very abstract sense) obviously are a fundamental fac-
tor in this process: communication that has been considered as part of the
system in the past is likely to be accepted again, whereas communication
which has been dismissed will likely be dismissed again in the future.
Thus, ‘memory’ is seen as a fundamental feature of productive social sys-
tems. At the same time, if everything were remembered by a system, the
load of information would inhibit any processing of present information,
let alone of innovation. Thus, successful systems establish a ‘memory’
which is just as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. It is
particularly this stress on the productive dimension of social forgetting
which a systems theory perspective has contributed to the broader social
memory discourse.
While this tradition is shaped by a primarily theoretical and conceptual
interest in the concepts of ‘memory’ (and forgetting), the Anglo-American
social sciences have put a much stronger emphasis on empirical research
in the context of social and cultural memory and its political implications.
Scholars like Michael Schudson and Barbie Zelizer have contributed sem-
inal empirical analyses of mass media memory of the Holocaust (see
Zelizer, Remembering to Forget), the Kennedy assassination (see Zelizer, Cov-
ering the Body) or the Watergate scandal (see Schudson), to name only three
examples.
An increased focus on traumatic memory has also lead to the devel-
opment of a discourse about the ethical implications of remembering. An
ethics of memory, as formulated by Avishai Margalit and Paul Ricœur,
suggests that we have a moral obligation to remember events of radical
evil to ensure that they will never happen again. To the extent that ethics
names the obligation to remember the hitherto silenced and de-privileged
memory can form an arena of resistance to dominant forms of culture.
Remembering in this sense is closely intertwined with questions of re-
sponsibility: Memory entails caring, a regard for the well-being of others in
the present. Memories cause us to reflect upon the past, present and fu-
ture. They enable us to lead more reflexive and therefore more human
lives.
Cultural Memory 241
4. A Third Phase of Memory Studies? The Dynamics of Transcultural

Memories in Contemporary Digital Media Cultures
In the last decade or so, cultural memory studies has seen a “dynamic
turn,” which shifted the focus from individual products or ‘sites’ of
memory to processes in which these products are caught up and in which
they gain their cultural significance (see Jäger; Rigney). According to Ann
Rigney, “this shift from ‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’ within memory studies runs
parallel to a larger shift of attention within cultural studies from products
to processes, from a focus on cultural artefacts to an interest in the way
those artefacts circulate and influence their environment” (Rigney 346).
The dynamic shift is largely based on the premise that individual products
or media are part of the cultural circulation of meanings and that meaning
is never fixed once and for all, but is something that is generated, time and
again, in the way that texts and other cultural media are appropriated and
reinterpreted, always with a difference (see ibid.). Accordingly, the cultural
significance of a specific memory does not so much reside in itself; rather
it is the result of its creative reception, i.e. its continuous adaptation, re-
ception, appropriation and reinterpretation in a whole range of different
media and across various cultures (see ibid.; Jäger). Or, to put it differently:
The cultural significance of memory is the result of its ongoing transmedi-
al, but also transcultural adaptations or travels (see Crownshaw).
One reason for the increasing interest in new perspectives and con-
cepts that can more profoundly embrace the dynamics of memory, is evi-
dent in the dynamics of contemporary (digital) media cultures. While on
an abstract level, the close relation between media and memory have very
often been stressed (see Borsò, Krumeich, and Witte), few scholars in the
first two phases of memory studies put media technologies at the very
centre of their theoretical and empirical research interests. However, the
notion that our modes of memory are being transformed by changing
media (and, although probably less obviously, vice versa), can be found in
many concepts of memory, starting from Plato’s famous Phaidros dialogue
on the relation of writing and memory.
Thus, it is not surprising that the rise of digital media technologies has
led to fundamental debates about the future of memory, with both utopi-
an and dystopian scenarios being debated (for a more detailed overview
and critique, see Zierold 59ff.). For example, Aleida Assmann has pub-
lished widely her fears that “the [...] systems of the mass media culture [...]
shut out the past and create an absolute present. [...] In the world of mass
media, the consciousness of a past silently evaporates in the cycles of
continuous production and consumption” (“Texts” 132). On the other
hand, some scholars have claimed that digital media will allow for a ‘total
recall,’ a complete memory of everything, as Microsoft’s Gordon Bell and

Jim Gemmell have labelled their book claiming to explain “How the
E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything” (see Bell and Gemmell).
Today, the once seemingly utopian hope for a complete digital memory
has itself turned into a dystopia, with scholars concerned about data priva-
cy and security, such as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, striving to re-
introduce the ‘virtue of forgetting’ into digital culture (see Mayer-
Schönberger).
Even though it might be too early to judge just how exactly digital me-
dia will transform cultural and social memory, it seems to be an undenia-
ble fact that it will change the ways in which we remember our past.
Memory studies increasingly try to come to terms with these recent, ongo-
ing and rather ambiguous developments, which increasingly call for an
even stronger focus on trans-medial, trans-national and processual per-
spectives and concepts. Currently, there seem to be at least two different
approaches trying to conduct empirical research on the relation of digital
media and memory.
A growing body of work, predominantly in the German language,
takes ‘classical’ topics of memory studies, i.e. memory of the Holocaust,
the role of museums, etc., and analyses the impact of digital media in this
context. It is not only the research questions that stress continuities. The
results also suggest that, while digital media play an important role, they
do not replace ‘old’ media in many contexts. For example, Dörte Hein has
demonstrated in her research about the memory of the Holocaust on the
World Wide Web that relevant Internet formats are usually closely con-
nected to traditional forms of remembering, like archives and museums
(see Hein 254). A recent edited collection on ‘memory cultures 2.0’ also
connects rather traditional fields of memory studies with aspects of new
media, for example analysing representations of the Second World War in
digital games or digital forms of remembering destroyed synagogues in
Germany (see Meyer).
While this line of research focuses on continuities, another approach
stresses fundamental transformations, trying to map a new research field
that might be called ‘digital memory studies,’ together with new theories
and methodologies of memory research. In an edited collection on ‘digital
memories,’ the editors stress this perceived need for innovation in
memory studies in relation to digital media:
[T]he existing paradigm of the study of broadcast media and their associated tra-
ditions, theories and methods, is quickly becoming inadequate for understanding
the profound impact of the supreme accessibility, transferability and circulation
of digital content on how individuals, groups and societies come to remember
and forget. (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, and Reading 3)
Cultural Memory 243
Research in this context addresses questions like the individualisation of

group memory (see Neumann, “Digital Memories”), i.e. through media
formats like Facebook or the ubiquitous text messages and photo ar-
chives, which mobile phones provide today. With this shift towards an
increasing plurality and individuality of social forms of memory, memory
studies seem to be moving in a new direction in terms of media technolo-
gies. At the same time, this line of research also takes up questions that
were raised by Maurice Halbwachs’s early research on the relation of so-
cial and individual memory.
More recently, the concept of memory has also travelled into the wide
field of popular culture studies. It was commonly assumed that popular
culture is mainly characterised by its interest in the present moment and
thus prone to amnesia. Yet empirical phenomena like ‘retro’-trends, ‘sam-
pling,’ ‘cover versions,’ etc. bring this conception into question. Recent
years have seen a growing number of studies introducing the concept of
memory into research on popular culture (see Jacke, Schwarzenegger, and
Zierold), with Simon Reynold’s widely discussed monograph on Retroma-
nia being a culmination of this trend (see Reynolds).
Combining research on popular culture with memory studies has
proven to be productive for both research traditions. Research on popular
culture has gained a much stronger awareness of the multiple temporalities
of popular culture and the high relevance of various forms of remember-
ing ranging from practices of collecting to processes of re-production
based on older material, e.g. in samplings and cover versions. But memory
studies also have a lot to gain in dealing with popular culture: As described
above, traditional theories of memory tend to be rather static, focussed on
national (high) cultures and insensitive to the specificities of modern/ dig-
ital media cultures. Against this backdrop, dynamic, processual, often
global and always mediated popular culture is a true challenge to estab-
lished concepts of memory. While memory studies has often been criti-
cised as being too focussed on the national and on high cultures from a
purely theoretical standpoint, any initiative to do research on memory and
popular culture makes it an empirical necessity to further develop concepts
of memory to be able to better grasp dynamic and paradoxical structures,
and global as well as purely local phenomena.
The challenges of digital media, the intercultural and international dy-
namics of memory, and the relation of global popular culture and
memory, will likely remain some of the pressing and complex issues for
memory studies for the foreseeable future. Although some scholars, like
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, have predicted a declining interest in memory stud-
ies, the concept of memory still seems to be at the centre of many lines of
research, and is not likely to stop its productive travels into various disci-
plines and cultural contexts in the near future.
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Performativity and Performance
HANS RUDOLF VELTEN
1. Introduction
In the past two decades, performance and performativity have come to be

acknowledged as major categories through which a wide range of social
and cultural activity can be described, analysed and theorised. Together
they have emerged as leading concepts in such diverse areas of academic
inquiry as linguistics, ritual and theatre studies, literary, media, gender and
social studies, aside from their use in contemporary art, theatre, and
dance. As theoretical concepts they are engaged in a peculiar relationship
with each other: they are not the same, they have different disciplinary
roots, but they frequently overlap or are seen as neighbouring concepts—
depending on the theoretical framework being used and on the object to
which reference is being made. In consequence, they are often understood
as synonyms (which they are not), leading to both a certain methodologi-
cal haziness and a conceptual overextension.
Both notions have developed simultaneously from different discipli-
nary sources since the mid-twentieth century, becoming attractive to
postmodern theory and theatre studies in the 1960s, before being dissemi-
nated in a myriad of variants and combinations in several disciplines
and—most importantly—interdisciplinary fields. Accordingly, from the
end of the 1990s many scholars have identified a ‘performative turn.’ The
attractiveness and the spreading of the performative as a clue to the intrin-
sic processuality of cultural phenomena show that it touched a nerve in
cultural theory. Yet this dissemination has a dark side: today there is no
integrative, consistent theory of performance/performativity, but instead a
pluralistic field of eclectic and sometimes contradictory theoretical con-
cepts, a “rhizomatic proliferation” (Hempfer 13) which inconsistently re-
fers to the different conceptual roots of both terms as well as to the
discursive framework of poststructuralist reference. This development can
be considered as an effect of the ‘travelling’ of concepts as intellectual
tools of academic discourse. While travelling through the discourses, dis-
250 Hans Rudolf Velten
ciplines and linguistic/cultural spaces, the concepts’ shapes, goals and

even contents change, because they mingle with new and different mental
and methodological traditions.
The following contribution tries to provide some orientation within
this bewildering complexity and to emphatically cut into the branched
root system of performance and performativity; first separating and defin-
ing them in their fields of origin, and subsequently analysing their further
development as they travel through history, discourses, research methods
and theories in a continuing dialogue.
The nouns ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ derive from the English
verb ‘to perform,’ which has two semantic variants: one means to execute
an action, a task or function, to carry out or accomplish something defi-
nitely: the other relates to presenting something to an audience, or to en-
tertaining an audience by making an (artistic) appearance. Performativity is
the noun which is usually considered to represent the first variant, per-
formance the second. But the pragmatic scholarly use of both terms is not
as clear-cut as it may seem from a mere lexicographical point of view.
Both terms have a wide range of meanings depending on their use in dif-
ferent cultural and academic contexts. ‘Performativity’ may be used to de-
scribe a specific aesthetic quality of a performance (see Fischer-Lichte,
Ästhetik) and performance may be used in a linguistic sense to denote the
production of actual utterances (see Chomsky; Searle). The adjective ‘per-
formative,’ which in this context is of supreme importance, is a neologism
coined by John L. Austin defining performative utterances as “the doing
of a certain kind of action” (Austin 5).
Broadly speaking, a dominant and a subdominant understanding of
both ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ can be distinguished. In ‘perfor-
mance’, the theatrical notion has become dominant, the linguistic sub-
dominant, in ‘performativity’ the linguistic notion is dominant and the
theatrical subdominant. For example, philosopher John Searle sees per-
formance as the utterance of a speech act with which accomplishment,
execution or implementation of something is reached, whereas for linguist
Noam Chomsky performance is the use of language in general (when
competence is the knowledge of language). But the dominant understand-
ing of ‘performance’ is that during the last thirty years it came to designate
a multiplicity of practices and genres within the performing and visual arts
which exceed traditional concepts by incorporating elements such as live
presence, embodiment and real time. In trying to give a pertinent defini-
tion of what performance is, Henry Bial speaks of a “tangible, bounded
event that involves the presentation of rehearsed artistic actions” (Bial 59;
see also Carlson). Its conditions can be summarised as follows: that it re-
quires (1) people (or animals or even things) who perform, and (2) people
Performativity 251
who witness the performance. Hence, performance is always for someone

even if the roles shift and the audience becomes performer or vice versa.
Everything else is contested: for example, whether performance has to be
necessarily live (which in film and multimedia events is not the case) or
whether it has to include consciousness of the ‘double,’ or whether it in-
volves the presentation of rehearsed or pre-established sequences of
words or actions (“restored behavior,” Schechner, Between 35ff.).
Since the 1980s, performance has become the object of institutional-
ised research: the establishment of performance studies as an interdiscipli-
nary domain—often developed out of drama departments, and including
ritual and play theories, performativity, performing as a practice, perform-
ing processes and intercultural performance—has seen an ever larger ex-
pansion whose academic limits are difficult to overview.1 As Richard
Schechner, the godfather of the field, explained: “Performance studies
resists or rejects definition. As a discipline, [it] cannot be mapped effec-
tively because it transgresses boundaries, it goes where it is not expected
to be. It is inherently ‘in between’ and therefore cannot be pinned down
or located exactly” (Schechner, Performance Theory 360).
Even if ‘performativity’ has been institutionally assimilated in perfor-
mance studies, as a concept it has travelled its own ways and has been me-
andering even more in cultural theory and transdisciplinary research than
‘performance’ has done. Terminologically, as stated above, performativity
stresses the notion of executing, accomplishing an action. This under-
standing goes back to Austin’s use of performative verbs for his theory of
speech acts. In this linguistic or analytical conception performativity is
strictly related to language ‘acts’ investigated in the pragmatics of language.
Yet the formulas ‘words do something in the world’ (Austin) and ‘saying
makes it so’ (Searle) are being described as “carry-home-concepts”, that is,
they appear to express a valuable yet not too difficult idea, “detachable
from the circumstances of its formulation without significant loss and use-
fully applicable to a wide range of different intellectual challenges or prob-
lems” (Loxley 2). Indeed, ‘performativity’ has been subject to extensive
discussion in postmodern theory, literature, gender and media theory, the
humanities in general including anthropology, economics, sociology, and
the history of science. It has played and still plays an important role in dif-
ferent issues such as gender and political identity and change, theories of
narration, and/or the understanding of transformative processes in aes-
thetics or social analysis.
1 A proof for this extension is Philip Auslander’s attempt to map this field in four substantial
volumes (see Auslander).
2. History and Development of the Two Concepts
It has almost become a commonplace to lament the complexity and con-

fusion of the wide-scale diffusion and different uses of ‘performance’ and
‘performativity.’ Therefore, I will try to clarify things—an attempt which
necessarily involves simplification. Generally speaking, there are three ac-
ademic sources or models of understanding for all the following theories
and terminological usages: (1) the analytic philosophy model, represented
by Austin’s lectures “How To Do Things With Words” (1962); (2) the
theatre model, which was used by sociologist Erving Goffman in his anal-
ysis of role playing in everyday life (1959), by anthropologists Isaac Singer
in his analysis of ‘cultural performance’ in India (1959) and Victor Turner
in his observation of ritual as ‘social drama’ (1969); and (3) the gender
model used by Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990), maybe today the most
influential, which can be described as an original combination of the for-
mer models. I will now briefly outline the most important features of each
model and connect them by means of a chronological narrative.
In his Harvard lectures (1955), Austin distinguished between certain
utterances which in specific conventions constitute and accomplish a so-
cially effective (speech) act, and others which had not this power. The
former he called ‘performative,’ differentiating them from the latter, which
he named ‘constative utterances,’ and which refer to something else and
therefore can be classified as true or false. Austin claimed that words do
something in the world, something that is not just a matter of generating
consequence: promises, assertions, bets, threats and thanks that we offer
one another are not simply linguistic descriptions of non-linguistic actions
going on elsewhere: they are actions in themselves, actions of a distinctive-
ly linguistic kind (see Austin 7–12). Austin then broadened this basic out-
line into a theory of speech acts in which the performativity of requests,
orders, declarations and so on was seen as characterising all the utterances
we issue as speakers (illocutionary acts).
One of the ‘conventions’ of performativity was that speech acts must
be uttered seriously in an everyday language. Therefore, Austin portrayed
fictional or literary utterances as fundamentally derivative, ‘parasitic’ on
the serious or substantial speech acts he was theorising. John Searle sub-
sequently elaborated Austin’s outline, transforming it into a more general
‘speech act theory,’ but maintaining his account of fictional or ‘non-
serious’ utterances. This detail was certainly most important for ‘per-
formativity’ to travel from the philosophy of language (which did not en-
hance Searle’s theory any further) into the field of postmodern (literary)
theory. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish and Sho-
shana Felman adapted speech act theory and dispelled or deconstructed
Performativity 253
the attempt to draw a precise boundary between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ utter-
ances. As a literary theorist, Fish turned Austin’s and Searle’s arguments
upside down, viewing in fictional or literary discourse the actual performa-
tive utterances. According to Fish, literary discourse relates to serious ut-
terances precisely as the performative relates to the constative in Austin’s
lectures (see Fish). Felman argued—following Paul de Man—that the
terms ‘constative‘ and ‘performative‘ more closely represent entire func-
tions of language than different types of linguistic utterances: Constative
language works as a medium for the communication of truth and
knowledge, whereas performative language refers to the deconstruction
and self-reflection of language and a register of desire.2
Central to this conceptual/theoretical reframing was Derrida’s 1972
essay “Signature Event Context,” in which he questions not only Austin’s
definition of fiction but also the felicity conditions of speech acts: “Could
a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a coded
or ‘iterable’ utterance?” (Derrida 18). Derrida draws on the iterability of
the linguistic elements necessary for the communication of meaning
which is valid also for literary language. The performative speech act can
only succeed because it is citational, i.e. it repeats known codes embedded
in specific ritualised acts. With his reception and criticism of Austin, Der-
rida tried to foster his theory of linguistic signs based on iterability and
quotability. In his terms, ‘performativity’ is the effect of altered meaning
through the repetition of signs in shifted contexts in time and space.
An often cited ‘story’ of performativity maintains that in the 1990s the
concept travelled again: from deconstruction into gender theory. Judith
Butler took hold of Derrida’s modified concept of Austin’s ‘performative’
and applied it to dominant or ‘common sense’ claims about the identity
categories of sex and gender. But this is only half-true. In her first essay
on the topic, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988), Butler
develops her concept of the ‘performative act’ neither from speech act
theory nor from postmodern theory, but from performance theory, espe-
cially Turner and Clifford Geertz. Only later, in Bodies That Matter (1993),
does she refer back to Austin’s and Derrida’s writings, when she defines
performativity “as the reiterative and citational practice by which dis-
course produces the effects that it names” (Butler, Bodies 2).
In the first instance, Butler construes her gender model with reference
to the theatre model of ‘performance,’ especially Turner’s concept of repe-
2 In the words of Jonathan Culler: “For Austin, literature had to be excluded in order to get
at the fundamental nature of the performative; for literary theorists, literature is a primary
example of the performative functioning of language. This is no small mutation” (Culler
508).
tition, where social acts require a performance which is repeated. Consid-

ering gender as an act, she draws on the theatrical sense of ‘act,’ under-
standing the ‘doing’ of gender as the dramatisation of the body, “a matter
of ritualized, public performance” (Butler, Gender Trouble 272). Gender
identity is hence not a result of essentialist orientation and role playing
expressing a biologically fixed sex, but instituted through a stylised repeti-
tion of acts which bring about gender transformation. Performativity—in
Butler’s sense—means the repetition of social acts accomplishing non-
essentialist (gender) identity.
Judith Butler’s gender theory is therefore pivotal in bringing together
elements of ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ theory. Her writings not
only establish a unique understanding of performativity, which has seem-
ingly been most influential (see ch. 3.4), but are also the starting point for
the “asymptotic” relation between performance and performativity in cul-
tural theory, i.e., “an ever-closer proximity without a final, closing conver-
gence” (Loxley 140).
The history of the second above-mentioned model, the theatre model,
is less clear and more intricate, because it cannot be traced back to one
source as is the case with Austin. When Erving Goffman wrote his wide-
ly-acclaimed The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life he used the term ‘per-
formance’ to refer to the sum of an individual’s activity occurring during a
period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of ob-
servers and which has some influence on the observers (see Goffman).
Goffman draws on theatrical language to analyse the pre-established pat-
terns of social behavior and thereby focuses on an important function of
performance: self-fashioning. Still broader was the meaning of ‘perfor-
mance’ that anthropologist Singer invested the term with, defining it as
the most important field of cultural analysis. For Singer, cultures are not
just abstract categories, but particular manifestations and events. In those
“cultural performances,” traditions are “organized and transmitted on par-
ticular occasions through specific media” (Singer 12). To observe such
performances, Singer demanded the active involvement of the analyst in
field behavior, instead of trying to reach objectivity from a distance. Later,
Victor Turner called for the “performance of the ethnographer” (Turner,
From Ritual to Theatre 89–90) an enhanced participation which allows full
attention to the corporeal and sensual aspects of the ritual rather than its
meaning. So the social and perceptual dimensions of ritual and culture in
general became more accessible through performance theory.
The interdisciplinary cooperation between Victor Turner and the later
founder of performance studies, Richard Schechner is central to ‘perfor-
mance’ as a theory. It was Turner who argued repeatedly that performance
analysis helped both the very different dramaturgical and structural ap-
Performativity 255
proaches to better describe ritual and culture. As early as 1957, Turner had
coined the concept of ‘social drama’ as a key instrument for anthropologi-
cal work in his book Schism and Continuity in an African Society. He focused
on organisation, dynamics and the dramatic structure of ritual perfor-
mances. He characterised their status as transitory, as a liminal form be-
tween two solidified fields of cultural activity. This ‘in-between-ness’ of
performance, with which Turner was not only able to delineate its liminal
status, but also its contingency and fluidity, eventually became an indis-
pensable tool for the analysis of any performative process in ritual and
theatre (see Turner, Ritual Process). He found that the ritual process shaped
and controlled social reality, and at the same time was an instant of pure
potentiality.
In the 1970s Turner and Schechner realised several research projects
on the relation between social drama and aesthetic drama. From this col-
laboration, ‘performance’ developed into a category of analysis. It was
thus no longer an umbrella term for ritual and play, theatre and drama,
recitation and address, dance, music, and art performances of past and
present both in European and non-European cultures. Schechner opened
up Turner’s four-phase model of ritual process to dramatic forms, creating
a methodological key for new intermedial phenomena like performance
theatre or art performances which increased from the 1970s. Furthermore,
he claimed and developed the institutional implementation of perfor-
mance studies departments at US universities (beginning at New York
University in 1980), which were dedicated to broadening the range of clas-
sical drama departments into events of all sorts characterised by a perfor-
mance dimension.
The double history and the travelling of the two concepts ‘perfor-
mance’ and ‘performativity’ is in many ways a source of problems, “since
neither of the two usages has yet managed to displace or entirely accom-
modate itself to the other” (Loxley 140). However, it seems not at all
wrong that the attractiveness and creative power of the field is to be
found precisely in its asymptotic relation and its aptness for theoretical
combination: “The fortunes of the performative are striking in the dispari-
ties among the various conceptions and assumptions […]” (Culler 506–
07). At the time literary critic Jonathan Culler wrote that, some scholars
had already proclaimed a ‘performative turn.’ Even if the turn talk is obvi-
ously an outcome of research politics and therefore strategic, it neverthe-
less shows that the popularity of performance/performativity across all
disciplinary borders must have reasons. Now, what is the magic of the
performative? Take for example:
1) It questions the formula that culture is made of texts and monu-

ments, counterbalancing it with: culture is made of performances,
hence it is processual and transformative. Behind the slogans the
performative calls into question hides an unspoken uneasiness
about the idea that culture is made up of semiotic references and
‘represented’ by its texts.
2) It is largely animated by an anti-hermeneutic impetus which is
suspicious of the assumption that meaning, authorial intention,
identity, substance, or essence could be pre-existing in aesthetic
productions such as art, literature, music, and theatre.
3) It favours (corporeal) presence and effects of presence over rep-
resentation and representing. Sense and symbolic meaning are not
only a result of semiotic relations, but also an effect of material
performance and re-performance.
4) It is (therefore, but not only) an antagonist of ontological and es-
sentialist definitions and conceptions.
5) It does not focus only on the discursive features of an art work,
but on the processual features of an event or a manifestation.
6) It is able to analyse the hybridity of cultural phenomena and of in-
termedial constellations, both in contemporary Western and non-
Western culture and ritual, and to give instruments of interdisci-
plinary comparison.
7) It expresses a growing uneasiness about authorial intention, re-
suming discourses of effect aesthetics, focusing on the reception
and audience of a performance.
8) It is able to link the material, bodily aspects of culture with its
symbolic meaning in the theory of performative embodiment.
9) It questions and sometimes polemicises its own categorisation.
3. Interdisciplinary Dimensions of the Field
Contemporary research is marked by an increasing use of the terms ‘per-

formance’ and ‘performativity,’ some of it on theoretical grounds, some
just as metaphors. Such usage shows that both terms have travelled into
academic fields where they were scarcely at home, as for example in his-
torical disciplines like literary, popular and art history, media history and
the history of science. It has gained popularity in sociology, pedagogy,
theology, political sciences, human and social geography, and even theolo-
gy. Besides, it is and will remain preeminent in interdisciplinary research
like performance studies, cultural studies, gender and queer studies as well
Performativity 257
as in its field of origin, namely anthropology, theatre and literary theory

including narratology. Today there is research not only in the Anglophone
world, but also in other languages, such as German and French: perfor-
mance and performativity have also travelled across national and geo-
graphical boundaries. The following nine research areas show this
extensive travelling.
(1) Performance Studies and Analysis. In quantity and diversity, perfor-
mance studies, including theatre studies, is the main area for the theoreti-
cal development of performance and performativity. Institutionally, there
has been a strong growth in academic performance studies departments
since the 1990s. Their focus can be very different in terms of how ‘per-
formance’ is defined. For example, the Performance Studies Department
of NYU pursues a broad concept where performance includes a wide va-
riety of aesthetic genres as well as ritual, popular entertainment and social
behaviour. Others conserve a strong focus on traditional theatre practice,
by changing theoretical perspectives; still others concentrate on the wider
range of postmodern and contemporary performance practice, maintain-
ing their interest in ‘aesthetic performance.’
As to the objects of research, there are at least five main fields of in-
terest: performance analysis, spectator studies, rehearsal studies, event
theory and theatre history (see McAuley). Research in these fields also co-
vers the inter-medial, inter-generic and inter-cultural relations of perfor-
mance, and is thus able to grasp the interplay between different
elements in many contemporary cultural performances. These studies con-
tribute vigorously to a better terminological definition and description of
performance and performativity themselves, and they have successfully
historicised terms which in the first place were made for contemporary
cultural events.
In recent years, Erika Fischer-Lichte has theorised ‘performance’ as an
aesthetic process, in which meaning is produced through the simultaneity
of different elements: the bodily co-presence of actors and audience in the
event, their mutual perception, the materiality of space, time, voice and
rhythm (see Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik). In her most recent book, she has
marked four properties of ‘performance’: (a) ambivalence (it is active and
pathic, creative and destructive at the same time); (b) no performance is
predictable, so it is emergent in character; (c) perception (of audience and
performers) as a process; (d) the transformative power of performance
(see Fischer-Lichte, Performativität). Although Fischer-Lichte has developed
these principles for performance analysis with regard to contemporary
theatre, they can also be applied to other media such as images and texts.
In Europe, Fischer-Lichte’s influence in theatre and literary studies can
hardly be overestimated.
(2) Ritual Studies. Performance and performativity theories contributed

considerably to the emergence of ritual studies as an interdisciplinary field.
Scholars in this field were dissatisfied with traditional categories brought
to the understanding of ritual. It was Turner who argued that a “living
quality frequently fails to emerge from our pedagogics,” performance the-
ory enhanced dramaturgical approaches (‘social drama,’ ‘liminality’) to the
analysis of ritual, overcoming the conventional hierarchy of ‘thought’ and
‘action.’ Before this, activity and dramatising in ritual had always been
considered as functions or enactments of conceptual and symbolic enti-
ties. Performance theory, simply put, has shifted the focus on thought
embodied in action, and has, by the way, altered the relation between
‘thinking theorist’ and ‘acting object.’ And, most importantly, ‘performa-
tivity’ as an analytic tool became a criterion for what is or is not ritual—a
development which was often criticised.
Moreover, in ritual theory, performance and performativity concepts
have been combined. Consequently, more attention has been paid to the
simple set of actions performed according to a rule-bound sequence. In
Stanley Tambiah’s performative theory of ritual, for example, which draws
on Austin’s performatives, dramatic performances and rituals are both
performing effective action, which is reached by the specific use of media
embodying intense experience: songs, dances, music, spoken formulas,
formalised gifts. Emphasising the formalism of ritual as having a distanc-
ing effect that serves to articulate and communicate institutionalised atti-
tudes, he sees ritual as a “mode of social action” which enhances social
communication (Tambiah 119–20). This was a decisive shift from semiot-
ic approaches which saw ritual as meaningful text (see Geertz).
In ritual theory, ‘liminality’ and embodied transgression are among the
most frequently cited attributes of performative efficacy. The concept of
‘liminality’ or ‘in-between-ness’ is deployed in many intercultural contexts
in order to grasp the interplay of different elements in ritual. It involves
forms of transgression such as border-crossing, parody, subversiveness,
which so far have been mostly neglected in ritual analysis.
(3) From Speech Act Theory to a Philosophy of Mediality. It is interesting that
contemporary Media Studies frequently draw on concepts of performativi-
ty and performance, in order to analyse constellations of repetition, varia-
tion, liveness, etc. in technically reproduced media. Even more important
is the shift that research in analytic philosophy has made towards mediali-
ty. Sibylle Krämer holds that the postmodern elaboration of Austin’s con-
cept of the performative can only be fully understood in relation to
mediality. If Derrida is right in stating that the rules of language are due to
the iterability of language signs, and that therefore any sign must be itera-
ble and employable in every context, then—according to Krämer—the
Performativity 259
target of performativity must be the analysis of the iteration and variation

of signs in writing and other media of technical reproduction, which are
distanced by space and time. Krämer argues that performativity becomes a
dimension of cultural practice in general, insofar as all signs that are pro-
duced by a performer are accomplished by the audience (aesthesis) in a way
which transgresses the pure semiotic qualities of this perception and can
no longer be considered as representation. Hence, media make their ob-
jects and themselves perceptible not only by techniques of symbolisation,
but by “somatization” (Krämer 21).
(4) Gender and Performativity. Following Judith Butler’s theory of gender
(see Butler, Gender Trouble), there has been much discussion about her
dismissal of the separation of sex and gender. ‘Doing gender’ and the
question of agency have hence become hallmarks in gender and queer
theory. Especially the latter has embraced Butler’s theses and has trans-
formed them into socially relevant claims regarding the recognition of in-
dividuals differing in their gender orientation from heterosexuality.
Through Butler, but also thanks to the works of Eve K. Sedgwick (see
Parker and Sedgwick), performativity has thus become a most prominent
term of gender politics.
Obviously, much research has also been done regarding the construc-
tion of gender in social and aesthetic performance. These studies ask, for
example, how the reception of music, theatre and film performances
changes when gender as a category is considered as central. The central
issue here refers to the differences of performativity as an everyday social
practice of citation and doing gender, compared to the fashioning of gen-
der in performance. Butler had already recognised the significance of this
difference, when she made clear that the sight of a transvestite on stage
and the same transvestite in ordinary life bring about contrasting effects
(Butler, Gender Trouble 278). It remains intriguing to work with Butler’s
theses in the framework of performance, but at the same time her under-
standing of performativity continues to travel into a great number of dis-
ciplines outside gender and queer studies. One of them is geography. In
their essay “Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and
Subjectivities,” Nicki Gregson and Gillian Rose, for example, explore the
potential of performance and performativity as conceptual tools for a crit-
ical human geography. They trace two contrasting discussions of perfor-
mance currently prevalent in geographical literature, namely those of
Goffman and of Butler. While Goffman’s concept seems to prevail, they
argue that performance should be connected to performativity—that is, to
the citational practices which produce and subvert discourse and
knowledge, and which at the same time enable and discipline subjects and
their performances. Here, the ‘citational practice’ is a clear reference to
Butler’s work, not to Derrida’s. Gregson and Rose argue that spaces, too,
need to be thought of as performative, and that more needs to be made of
the complexity and instability of performances and performed spaces (see
Gregson and Rose). This example underlines again how the different no-
tions being considered are combined eclectically to match the needs of
disciplinary research.
(5) Text and Performance: Categories of the Historical Analysis of Poetry. It was
the Swiss medievalist Paul Zumthor who introduced the term ‘perfor-
mance’ into literary history (see Zumthor). Based on anthropological and
communication studies (Dell Hymes) and oral poetry research, he intro-
duced some important concepts into the analysis of medieval literary texts:
théatralité vocalité (the role of the voice), and mouvance (regarding the manu-
script). They characterise ‘performance’ as a multisensorial, processual
event (the recitation or singing of poetry) on which written manuscripts
are based.3 Hence, the interest in the performance of poetry came through
anthropological and linguistic crossroads, for Hymes drew on Austin and
Searle when he worked out his Ethnography of Speaking (see Hymes).
When Zumthor asked questions which aimed at a reconstruction of
the performance by finding ‘traces’ of pragmatic context and social inter-
action in the manuscript, he used performativity as a relational category,
conceivable only in the interactions and references to textuality. But the
text itself remained a feeble document of the loss of performance.
Since then there has been a shift in research in order to better define
what the potentials of performativity as an analytic tool in literary history
actually are. Finding it insufficient to simply reconstruct the conditions
of performance, scholars have focused on the performativity of the writ-
ten text. But there are different approaches: one employs performativity
to explore a double strategy of the text, i.e. (1) to feign orality and liveness
by means of “effects of presence”—structural performativity, and (2)
to shape affective and cognitive effects in the act of reception—functional
performativity (see Velten). While this approach relies on the theatre
model combined with theories of reader-response, another draws more on
the linguistic model and locates performativity in the repetition and itera-
bility of rhetorical devices, self-reference showing its mediality, and fram-
ing (see Herberichs and Kiening). In both directions, the mimetic
potential of the text to bring about receptive imaginations stands at the
centre. A third approach can be seen in the analysis of performative prac-
tice within medieval culture, when ritual texts, such as prayers, magic for-
mulae and sacred or worldly rituals of remembrance “bring something to
3 Zumthor’s work not only inaugurated the dimension of performance in medieval literature,
but also influenced the research on manuscript philology, the so-called New Philology.
Performativity 261
completion”, as Turner had formulated (see Grignolati and Suerbaum, 1–

12). In conclusion, ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ have been most
fruitful terms for the discussion of several questions around the medieval
manuscript and early print; they have reloaded the debates on pragmatic
context, orality, authorship, strategies of effect, presence and representa-
tion, and self-referentiality.
(6) Literary Narratology. As early as the first references to ‘performativi-
ty’ by Fish and Felman in the 1980s, the interest was in Austin’s theory of
the performative and Derrida’s deconstructionist reception of it (see
above). In 2000, Culler provided an answer to the question of why the
performative was so appealing to literary studies: “Since literary criticism
involves attending to what literary language does as much as to what it
says, the concept of the performative seems to provide a linguistic and
philosophical justification for this idea” (Culler 506). Proceeding from this
premise, narratives were also treated as metaphorical ‘utterances’ or ‘com-
plex speech acts’ (see Pratt), which ‘accomplished’ literary speech. In writ-
ten narratives, performativity has become the dimension which refers to
the act of narration or the level of the narrator’s agency. Other than the
narrator of a story, who addresses an audience mediating the story in a
plurimedial manner, performativity in reading a narrative “refers to the
narrator’s self-thematisations, to his or her explicit comments on the sto-
ry, the act of narration and to addresses to the reader” (Berns 94). It there-
fore appears to be modelled on scenic performance, and this is the point
where ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ concur in contemporary narra-
tology. But the concurrence is treacherous: while in a performance of reci-
tation the narrator has other media at his service (body movements,
gestures, mime, modulation of voice, stage, etc.), the narrator of a read
story has still other possibilities, such as self-contradictions, reflexiveness,
metanarrative and metafictional means. However, both narrators can be
investigated historically, and the background of the oral performance has
enhanced the quest as to what performativity of written texts may be.
Most important have been the narrator’s agency, the pragmatic context of
the narrative act, the materiality of scripture, the ‘modulation’ of the narra-
tor’s voice as an act of the speaking body which generates a surplus of the
enunciated (see Felman), and the staging of the act of writing as a poetics
of infection (see Strowick).
There is a certain danger that ‘performativity’ becomes simply a sub-
stitute for other terms used in narratology such as ‘mimesis,’ ‘aesthetic
illusion’ and ‘metanarrativity.’ But there is huge potential for further inves-
tigations, if one considers the relation between visual and verbal forms of
narrative performativity, or the implications of imagination in the two
modes of performance.
(7) Iconography/Art History. Just as performativity can be a quality of

texts, so it can also be one of images. Indeed there is some research which
explores the opportunities of the performative in art history, sometimes in
combination with other contemporary approaches to the image. The basic
idea is that the image has agency, that it acts and induces action, before it
represents and signifies (see Dierkens, Bartholeyns, and Golsenne). This
idea opens up the traditional iconography to pragmatic contexts and social
efficacy. If images as well as texts can take roles as media in a performance
(a procession, liturgy, ceremonies, etc.), then they shape this performance
since they are a part of it. But they are at the same time the only witness of
this performance, encompassing all of its dead materiality and liveness (see
Gvozdeva and Velten 7–8).
With reference to agency, performativity also puts emphasis on the
social and religious power of images, i.e. their sacred or magic power, their
ascribed authority in the framework of power relations. And with respect
to theatricality, performativity can be considered as specific staging strate-
gies of the image, as von Rosen has shown in Caravaggio: liveness, atti-
tude, role plays and the postures of figures (see von Rosen). All these
recent approaches promise a still more intense and yet diversified debate
on the possibilities of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in image studies.
(8) Sociology. Beginning with Goffman’s theory of performative role
playing in social communication, performativity has also been theorised in
the social sciences, including political science and the pedagogical disci-
plines. Here performativity has been considered less a linguistic and more
a social phenomenon, even if Austin’s concept of the social effects of
speech were taken up early on—as in Bourdieu’s essay on the performa-
tive magic in rituals of institutional initiation. Bourdieu shows the symbol-
ic and social efficacy of the institutional rite, that is, “the power which it
contains to act in reality when acting in a representation of reality” (Bour-
dieu 123). This is why he calls the sanctioning of social differences in the
ritual “magic“ and its ritual effect “social” or “performative magic.” Inter-
estingly, Bourdieu’s example has to do with speech, gestures, insignia and
clothing in a ritual context, and in its entirety brings about a social trans-
formation. We clearly can see how elements of ritual and performance
theory (ritual/theatrical setting, public) are combined with elements of
speech act theory (speech, accomplishment, constitution of reality). When
Judith Butler developed her theory of performativity she did not know
Bourdieu’s essay. But she also interweaves linguistic and corporeal ele-
ments in order to describe social processes where the symbolic is em-
braced and embodied by the performative act. The difference to Bourdieu
lies in another element Butler adds—the repetition of the performative
Performativity 263
act, a constant inscription of a cultural code instead of a single event

(which takes effect).
Today there are many different ways of using and implementing per-
formativity and performance in social science, some of them hardly ex-
plored. The education researchers Christoph Wulf and Jörg Zirfas focus
on the body as a main bearer of educational processes, both as an analytic
object and as the target of formation of social and aesthetic identity (see
Wulf and Zirfas). The French sociologist Jérôme Denis instead views per-
formativity more politically, as a form of agency of the individual which
can guarantee pluralism (see Denis 20–21). Recently, political scientist Jef-
frey Alexander adopted the anthropological and theatre model of perfor-
mance in order to demonstrate how performance can define the study of
society, developing an outline of cultural pragmatics shifting from texts to
gestural meanings. Gestures, views and clue phrases as social performanc-
es between ritual and strategy, enhanced by mass media, have a strong
impact on attitudes and power relations in society (see Alexander).
(9) Performativity and Science. The concept of performativity has also
been used in science and technology studies. In the study of the history of
science, there was the proposition to shift from a ‘representational idiom’
to a ‘performative idiom,’ intending to put the focus on the processuality
of knowledge (‘knowing how’) instead of the results of knowledge (‘know-
ing that’). Pickering and others developed a performance analysis of his-
torical knowledge in order to get a useful instrument for the interplay of
human and material actants. Thus it is possible to describe more accurate-
ly the impact of objects, instruments and the material environments of
scientific investigation (see Tkaczyk 119).
Another area of research refers to the immaterial elements in the
communication of knowledge in lectures, discourses, presentations, and
public experiments: types and styles of speech, habits of scholars and ex-
perts, ways of talking, gestures, and media use; these factors have shown
themselves to be important in public scientific lectures and experiments in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, in these meticulously
planned performances, sometimes contingent outcomes emerged. In these
cases, ‘performativity’ can stand for the accomplishment of the event, but
also to describe a dynamic process which extends beyond human agency
and the possibilities of human intention and planning (see Tkaczyk 132–
35).
The travelling of performance and performativity as terms of cultural
inquiry between a great number of academic disciplines and interdiscipli-
nary fields shows—apart from their continuous dissemination and rhi-
zomatic proliferation mentioned at the beginning of this essay—an
amazing transformative power. They have become tools enabling meth-
odological shift and new theoretical criticism in various traditional aca-

demic departments, while contributing to the formation of a number of
interdisciplinary research areas by travelling. As migrating concepts of cul-
tural theory, they must also be esteemed for their activity as translators
between the academic cultures and their stimulus for terminological reflec-
tion.
At the same time, they have become—as terms—subject to processu-
ality and change, so that they have lost a definite meaning valid for every
context in which they appear. Travelling carries the risk that theoretical
concepts may erode, create misunderstandings and eventually lose innova-
tive and transformative power. Therefore, they have to be carefully de-
fined for every subject area in which they are used or implemented, which
means continuous terminological work and reflection. At the same time,
they have to maintain their core issue of underlining the significance of
the performative disposition of culture. Only then will they testify—
beyond the breaking of disciplinary boundaries and the shift to cultural
analysis—to the significance of pluralism, processuality and focalisation
inherent to this analysis.
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‘Stimmung’: The Emergence of a Concept and Its
Modifications in Psychology and Physiology
CAROLINE WELSH
1. Introduction
Over the last two decades the emergence of ‘literature and science’ as a
new field in literary studies and a reorientation within the historiography
of science itself have lead to an increasing interest in concepts and their
‘migrations’ between disciplines. The importance of language not only in
scientific texts but, more importantly, in the experimental practices of the
laboratory itself has become evident. Concepts and metaphors in the sci-
ences are now understood to play an important role not only on the level
of the presentation of scientific results but also on an epistemological lev-
el, where the representation and production of scientific facts is con-
cerned (see Rheinberger; Rheinberger, Wahrig-Schmidt, and Hagner;
Schmidgen). Thus the study of concept formation and of the productive
role of vague metaphors has become an integral part of recent publica-
tions on the history and epistemology of science (see Bono; Brandt; Lö-
wy). Recent literary and cultural studies have focussed on the circulation
of concepts and ‘figures of thought’ between the sciences, literature and
the humanities, and on the resulting interfaces and interactions between
the various fields of knowledge (see Parnes, Vedder, and Willer; Vogl;
Welsh and Willer). In consequence, the conception of the relationship
between science, literature and culture has changed. The debate on the
‘two cultures’ initiated by Charles P. Snow in the late 1950s has been re-
placed by a more interactive view emphasising processes of exchange and
interaction between multiple areas of knowledge.1
Among the concepts travelling not only between various disciplines
within the humanities but also between science and the humanities,
1 In 2009, NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin published a se-
lection of essays by Brandt, Kronfelder, Wegener and Welsh, reevaluating the two culture
debate.
268 Caroline Welsh
concepts originating from the field of music have recently gained increas-
ing attention. Here, in connection with a more general shift in cultural
studies from the visual to the aural, the concepts of ‘rhythm,’ ‘resonance’
and ‘tuning’ (Stimmung) have emerged as key concepts (see von Arburg;
von Arburg and Rickenbacher; Erlmann; Gisbertz; Lichau, Wolf, and
Tkaczyk; Wellmann; Welsh, “‘Stimmung’ im Spannungsfeld,” “Stimmung
in den Wissenschaften,” “Nerven-Saiten-Stimmung,” “Resonanz-Mitleid-
Stimmung”).2 By focussing on these aural concepts and on their journeys
between the humanities and the sciences, Mieke Bal’s pioneering work on
travelling concepts is supplemented in two directions. Whereas Bal em-
phasised the importance of concepts as a new methodological basis for
interdisciplinarity within the humanities (see Bal 5), this paper argues for
the importance of including the concepts’ use in the sciences; whereas Bal
explains her choice of visual concepts with “the immense interest in visu-
ality in the humanities today” (ibid. 20), this paper illustrates the im-
portance of aural concepts for cultural studies. It presents part of a larger
project, which analyses the emergence of ‘Stimmung’ (tuning/mood/
tonus) in psychology, aesthetic theory and physiology around 1800 and
the further development of this concept and ‘figure of thought’ in both
the sciences and the humanities during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. By focussing on the usage of ‘Stimmung’ in various discourses,
my aim was to emphasise the continuous exchange between the various
fields of knowledge, the permeability between science, literature and the
humanities as opposed to the deep divide postulated by C. P. Snow and
others (see Welsh, “‘Stimmung’ im Spannungsfeld”). Here, I will provide a
historical case study of ‘Stimmung’ (and in part of the related concept of
‘resonance’) as a travelling concept crossing the boundaries between mu-
sic, psychology and physiology in the context of the larger transformation
or semantic shift the concept undergoes between the eighteenth and the
end of the nineteenth centuries. The underlying thesis is that the semantic
shift is a result of the ‘migrations’ of a concept from the original domain
of musical practice and theory into various other areas of knowledge in
the last decades of the eighteenth century. ‘Stimmung,’ I would like to ar-
gue, first became a travelling concept used widely in psychological, physio-
logical, aesthetic and musical contexts before it became a predominantly
psychological concept at the end of the nineteenth century.3 As a case
2 For studies on resonance and ‘Stimmung’ concentrating on the fields of aesthetic theory
and literature, see also Jacobs; Toop; Wellbery.
3 This paper cannot document all the ‘journeys’ and transformations of the concept. Its
importance in aesthetic theory is documented in Welsh (Hirnhöhlenpoetiken) and Wellbery.
In his article Wellbery presents a precise overview of the use of ‘Stimmung’ in German aes-
thetic theory from Kant to Heidegger and beyond. The use of ‘Stimmung’ as a common
‘Stimmung’ 269
study of a travelling concept, the paper intends to illustrate the productivi-

ty of travelling concepts as a model for cultural analysis. It does not ex-
plore the possibility of using ‘Stimmung’ or resonance as key concepts on
the level of cultural theory. As a historical study it provides an overview of
different usages, meanings and functions of ‘Stimmung’ in different areas
of knowledge. Since concepts which have travelled widely may carry with
them traces of former stations of their journey, the knowledge of the his-
tory of a concept is essential for its further use. This is especially true
where travelling concepts are intended to facilitate interdisciplinary dia-
logue.
After a short introduction into the concept’s origin and its general
transformation from a term mainly used in musical contexts to one pre-
dominantly associated with a specific state of the mind, the main part of
the paper is divided into four parts. The first part looks at the precondi-
tions for a successful adaptation of ‘Stimmung’ in psychology, physiology
and aesthetics around 1800. The second and third parts concentrate on
the emergence and ‘travelling’ of the concept of ‘Stimmung’ in psychology
and physiology and on the various modifications the concept underwent
on entering these new domains of knowledge. In the final part I will look
at different forms of contact zones between psychological and physiologi-
cal discourses occasioned by the common use of ‘Stimmung’ before and
after the institutionalisation of the disciplines. The paper concludes with
some comments on the general theoretical implications of the case study
presented here for the conceptualisation of travelling concepts.
The German word Stimmung originated in the field of music where it
had three slightly different meanings. It was used firstly to designate the
musical practice of tuning instruments. One can either tune an individual
instrument by establishing the typical intervals between the tones, or one
can tune all instruments of an orchestra to the same pitch. In both cases
all the strings/chords of the instrument (or all the instruments of the or-
chestra) are tuned in harmony to each other. Stimmung referred secondly to
the system of musical tuning in which the frequency relationships of the
intervals are determined—in this context it was used parallel to the official
term ‘musical temperament’ (musikalische Temperatur). And, most important
for the various travels of the concept, Stimmung also described the state of
the instrument after it had been tuned.
All these meanings of ‘Stimmung’ in music are still in use today. Nev-
ertheless, a major semantic shift has occurred with regard to the main
concept and methodological basis to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue between art his-
tory, literary studies and music theory is best represented in the publications based on
Hans-Georg von Arburg’s research project on Stimmung in the Arts (see von Arburg; von
Arburg and Rickenbacher).
270 Caroline Welsh
meaning of ‘Stimmung’: Today the word Stimmung is most frequently ap-

plied to describe a general emotional state or disposition of the mind
which can best be translated by the English word ‘mood.’ It is still em-
ployed in the musical contexts mentioned above, but the word is now
firmly integrated into the languages of emotion, which today form the
dominant context of its use. Further usages of the term are now derived
mostly from the psychological meaning of the term, no longer from the
metaphorical use of musical ‘Stimmung.’ Mainly on the basis of its estab-
lishment as a psychological concept, ‘Stimmung’ is becoming popular
again in both literary studies, where it signifies pre-reflexive aspects of po-
etic language (see Gumbrecht; Wellbery), in interdisciplinary studies con-
cerned with the relationships between the arts (see von Arburg and
Rickenbacher), in cultural theory (cultural moods) and in studies on litera-
ture and science (see Gisbertz; Welsh, “‘Stimmung’ im Spannungsfeld,”
“Resonanz”). A clear indication for the influence of this originally specifi-
cally German concept on contemporary usages of ‘mood’ in English can
be found in Hadley Cantril’s The Invasion from Mars (1940), one of the first
studies on mass psychology. Here, the German term Stimmung is used to
explain the psychological impact Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H. G.
Wells’ The War of the Worlds had in 1938 (see Cantril 74; Lichau et al. 12).
2. Preconditions for the Emergence of

‘Stimmung’ as a Travelling Concept
What has ‘Stimmung,’ meaning the tuning of musical chords, to do with

aesthetic perception, the nerves, the language of emotions and theories of
association? In order to appreciate the impact the concept of ‘Stimmung’
had in various areas of knowledge around 1800 it is necessary to have a
look at the preconditions for its success. I would, in fact, like to argue that
the precondition for the successful adaptation of the concept of ‘Stim-
mung’ in psychology, physiology and aesthetics around 1800 lies in the
existence of a cluster of neighbouring concepts that had been in use since
the middle of the eighteenth century. ‘Sympathetic resonance,’ a concept
closely related but not identical to that of musical ‘Stimmung’ (tuning), is
the most important of these neighbouring concepts. Such resonance oc-
curs when different musical strings are tuned either to the same tone or to
one of their overtones. In this case the harmonic chords resonate togeth-
er: if only one of them is struck, the other will also sound. In connection
with the increasing importance of nerve physiology in the eighteenth cen-
tury, this type of resonance (also called sympathy) between musical strings
was transferred to physiology. By the middle of the eighteenth century,
‘Stimmung’ 271
musical string instruments had become a privileged metaphor within the

newly developing speculative theories on nerve and brain physiology.
With regard to physiological processes, man was conceived of as a musical
string instrument, whose nerves resonate/vibrate in response to sensual
stimuli.
In Germany Johann Gottlieb Krüger envisioned the human body in
analogy to a musical instrument “because the fibres of the nerves are flex-
ible” and “completely resemble the taut string of a musical instrument”
(Krüger 645; my translation). According to Krüger, the nature of the
movement which occurred in the outer substance of the nerve when we
have a sensation could be deduced from the knowledge of the movements
of musical strings. Krüger proceeded not only to calculate the strength of
sensations according to the same rules which apply to the quality of musi-
cal strings. He also transferred these findings to redefine the old doctrine
of the four humours as a basis for the temperament of a person. Up to
this point, personal ‘temperament,’ a basic physiologically grounded aspect
of ‘character,’ had been related to the mixture (temperamentum, temperatura)
of the body-fluids and vapours (‘humours’) with their various primary
qualities (cold, warm, dry, damp). The four temperaments, the choleric,
phlegmatic, sanguine and melancholic, differed with regard to the mixture
of the humours, which affected both the blood and the spiritus animalis in
the brain. The melancholic, for example, was seen to have a dry and cold
constitution. His/her corresponding frame of mind was described with
metaphors of darkness, opacity and cloudiness which referred to second-
ary qualities of the black bile. In contrast, the choleric had a warm and
damp constitution. His/her quick-tempered and versatile mind was de-
scribed with metaphors of fire and heat corresponding to the inflammato-
ry qualities of yellow bile (see Kutzer 113–19). With Krüger the
physiological explanation shifted from the doctrine of the humours to that
of the nerves. The various temperaments were now explained according
to the degree of tension and thickness of the nerve fibres. The choleric
was described as a person with delicate, highly sensitive and tense nerves,
which were easily set into motion. The melancholic, on the other hand,
was envisioned to have tense but thick nerves, which were not easily set
into motion but once moving continued to vibrate for a considerable
time. According to Krüger, this explained why the melancholic had diffi-
culty in dissociating himself from a particular idea.
In Britain, only one year later, David Hartley built his theory of asso-
ciations around the concept of clusters of vibrations. Vibrations, accord-
ing to Hartley, were transmitted from the sense organs to the nerve fibres
and from there to the brain where they created specific patterns of vibra-
tions. These patterns were the basis of conscious perception, memory and
272 Caroline Welsh
thought. Complex concepts, intellectual ideas, emotions and moral senti-

ments were therefore a result of repeated combinations of simple patterns
of vibration, so that in the end the brain was envisaged as a network of
individual clusters which vibrated as a whole if any part of them was set in
motion by an external stimulus. The advantage of this new physiological
foundation of the theory of associations lay in the possibility of an unlim-
ited differentiation, individualisation and combination of ideas and emo-
tions. Hartley did not speak directly of resonance or of tuning. On the
contrary, referring to the nerve as such he emphasised: “For that the nerve
itself should vibrate like musical strings, is highly absurd” (Hartley 12).
Nevertheless, the terminology he used in connection with the individual
fibres of the nerve belongs to the same semantic field (vibrating musical
strings) and the logic is the same: We have a vibrating fibre, a medium (a
fluid) which transfers the vibrations and other fibres which co-vibrate
(resonate) within a cluster although they have not been stimulated directly.
It is therefore not surprising that in Germany the popularisation of Hart-
ley’s theory of association by Adam Melchior Weickard in 1790 included
the concepts of resonance and of ‘Stimmung.’ Clusters of vibration were
envisioned here as a group of fibres which had acquired the same ‘Stim-
mung,’ i.e. they were tuned in harmony with each other so that all fibres
belonging to one cluster resonated as soon as one of them was set in mo-
tion (see Weickard 44–45). The difference between Hartley’s clusters of
vibration and Weickard’s ‘Stimmung’ of the brain is that the concept of
‘tuning’ allowed for the idea of ‘retuning’ (Umstimmung). This in turn led to
the conception that different tunings (for instance of the brain) produced
different harmonic clusters which corresponded to different chains of ide-
as. Like different musical keys, a specific ‘Stimmung’ of the brain would
automatically enhance particular chains of association not common in an-
other ‘Stimmung.’
Interestingly, these analogies between musical strings and nerve fibres
then travelled ‘back’ to the domain of music, where they contributed to
the conception of music as a language of the emotions. In the following
years, Daniel Webb (1761) explained the “influence of music over our
passions” (Webb 134) by emphasising the analogy between the effect of
music and the effect of the passions on the nerves. Because both music
and the passions were seen to cause certain vibrations in the nerves, music
could also evoke the passions by producing the corresponding vibrations:
We are then to take it for granted that the mind under particular affections, ex-
cites certain vibrations in the nerves, and impresses certain movements on the
animal spirits. I shall suppose that it is the nature of music to communicate simi-
lar movements to the nerves and spirits. (Ibid.)
‘Stimmung’ 273
In Germany, Johann Jacob Engel’s (1780) theory on the musical represen-

tation of the passions was closely linked to his physiological explanation
of the effect of music: only because “all passionate feelings (‘Vorstellung-
en’) of the soul are inseparable from the corresponding movements of the
nervous system” is it possible to “activate the passions of the soul by cre-
ating the corresponding vibrations in the body” (Engel 312–13; my trans-
lation). Both Engel and Webb link the effect of music to the idea of a
correspondence between the effect of the passions and of music on the
nerves. It is important to note here that we are talking about passions.
Passions are movements of the soul. The concept of ‘Stimmung’ differs
from that of ‘resonance’ in this respect: ‘Stimmung’ is not a movement of
the soul/mind or body. It is instead the precondition for such movement
and, in psychology and physiology but not in music, it can also be the re-
sult of such movement.
To summarise the main aspects to this point: the analogies between
musical strings and nerve fibres, musical resonance and clusters of vibra-
tion, and the resulting impact of such a conception on theories of associa-
tion and on theories of the effect of music on the passions were the
necessary preconditions for an epistemologically productive use of ‘Stim-
mung’ in psychological contexts. So far, the development in Britain and
Germany ran more or less parallel. The situation changed the moment the
focus shifted from the concept of ‘resonance,’ where the tuning/‘Stim-
mung’ is merely the precondition for the possibility of resonance, to the
concept of ‘Stimmung’ itself.
This shift from resonance with its emphasis on movement to ‘Stim-
mung,’ focussing on the disposition of a system, occurred when the musi-
cal concept of ‘tuning’ ‘travelled’ from musical practice to the newly
emerging fields of psychology and aesthetics. This is where the develop-
ment in Germany and Britain went off in two different directions. And
this is where I would like to begin my analysis of the concept’s ‘travel’ be-
tween various disciplines or fields of knowledge around 1800.
3. ‘Stimmung’ Enters Psychology:

The Formation of a New Category
In the last decades of the eighteenth century ‘Stimmung’ was introduced

as a metaphor in the relatively new fields of aesthetic theory and psycho-
logy. Here, ‘Stimmung’ defined a new category within the languages of
emotions still important in psychology today. This psychological ‘Stim-
mung’ was (and still is) distinct from passions and specific feelings in as
far as it described a relatively long-lasting emotional state which was less
274 Caroline Welsh
specific, less intense and less likely to be triggered by any particular stimu-
lus or event. As German equivalent of the English ‘mood,’ it is more like
an underlying emotional disposition. As such it refers to the third aspect
of ‘Stimmung’ in music: the state of the musical instrument after tuning—
and the possibility of retuning (Umstimmen) the instrument.
This concept of ‘psychological Stimmung’ was introduced by Johann
Georg Sulzer, one of the most influential psychologists of the second half
of the eighteenth century, not in his psychological works but in his Allge-
meine Theorie der Schönen Künste (‘General Theory of the Fine Arts’).
In the article concerned with the appropriate “tone of poetry,” that is
the element of poetry used to convey the emotive aspects of language,
Sulzer reflected on the fact that one thinks differently when one is happy
and when one is sad (see Sulzer, “Ton” 1159). According to Sulzer, this
was a problem for a successful communication between the literary text
and the reader because “one and the same thing can have a very different
impact on us, depending on our general emotional state [Gemütslage]” (ibid.
1160; my translation). In this context Sulzer explicitly introduced the term
Gemütsstimmung to describe such general emotional moods.4 In order to
keep the concept present, I will use the formulation ‘psychological Stim-
mung’ here instead of the English word ‘mood.’ He argued that every
‘psychological Stimmung’ had its own expression in poetry and that this
expression of mood manifested itself in the sensual aspects of language: in
its rhythm, its prosodic structure and in the metaphors and the visual im-
ages these evoked. To fully appreciate poetry, the reader had to actively
identify the ‘tone’ of the work and put himself into the appropriate psy-
chological ‘Stimmung’ (‘mood’ or ‘state of mind’).
Sulzer introduced Stimmung after considering various other possible
terms: Gemütsfassung (‘frame of mind’), Lage des Gemüts (‘situation of the
soul’). But only the metaphoric use of ‘Stimmung’ provided him with a
concept which belonged to the same field as the ‘tone’ of voice (Stimme)
and its metaphoric counterpart the ‘tone of poetry.’ And only the term
Stimmung related the new concept back to resonance and clusters of vibra-
tion as the basis of perception and association. This is important because
Sulzer’s ‘psychological Stimmung’ integrated these concepts and subordi-
nated them to that of ‘Stimmung.’ According to Sulzer, different psycho-
logical ‘Stimmungen’ (‘moods’) not only have an effect on the way we
perceive the world, but they also lead to different chains of association.
4 “Diese Lage, die man auch die Stimmung des Gemüts nennen könnte […]” (Sulzer, “Ton”
1160)—“This condition which one could also call the Stimmung of the soul […]” (Sulzer,
“Ton” 1160; my translation).
‘Stimmung’ 275
‘Stimmung,’ I would emphasise, was obviously highly successful due

to its integration into an existing cluster of concepts. The possibility of
combining ‘Stimmung’ with patterns of resonance, chains of associations,
nerve vibrations and different musical keys turned ‘Stimmung’ into a po-
lyvalent, flexible and suggestive concept. It was introduced as a psycholog-
ical disposition in an article on poetry by the editor of an interdisciplinary
encyclopaedia on the Fine Arts (including an article on musical ‘Stim-
mung’) who had already widely published on psychology. That is, ‘Stim-
mung’ as a psychological concept emerged as the result of interdisciplinary
encounters between poetry, psychology, and music.
In the following decades this new emotional category describing basic
emotional dispositions restructured the field of emotions and enabled
a clear distinction between passions/affects, feelings, and moods. One
could say with Mieke Bal that the concept of ‘psychological Stimmung’
offered a “miniature theory” (Bal 22), which structured ideas about a gen-
eral psychological disposition of the subject and its interactions with the
environment as a result of this disposition.
In psychology, psychiatry, and the arts the concept was extended and
gained importance when ‘psychological Stimmung’ was combined with
Sulzer’s earlier psychological theory of the existence of dark, not con-
scious areas within the soul and their influence on our conscious ideas,
judgements, emotions, and actions (see Sulzer, “Erklärung”). Here, the
focus lay on the interaction between conscious and unconscious areas
within the soul. In order to explain the tyrannical power of prejudice, of
passion and of preconceived ideas, Sulzer extended Leibniz’s theory of
‘tiny perceptions’ to include other unconscious mental activities. Leibniz
had focussed on unconscious perceptions, which had an impact on his
conscious perceptions and ideas. Sulzer included not only perceptions but
also dark or confused ideas, judgements, thoughts, and feelings. In short,
all activities of the mind could now either take place within consciousness
or in the dark, ‘unconscious’ areas of the soul (see ibid. 107). This meant
that those activities of the mind which remained unconscious were not
accessible to reason and, as a consequence, had a more direct and uncon-
trollable impact on conscious judgements, ideas, and behaviour.
It is important for the further development of the concept of ‘psycho-
logical Stimmung’ that these subjective moods were the only consciously
perceivable indicator of unconscious processes in the dark areas of the
soul (see ibid. 108). As a consequence, dark, gloomy black moods (‘Stim-
mung’) became popular in psychology and in Romantic literature. In both
cases they indicated that the subject was about to lose control over its
thoughts or actions. In the Magazin der Erfahrungsseelenkunde, a popular psy-
chological journal published between 1783 and 1793, the editor Karl
276 Caroline Welsh
Philipp Moritz included an article describing the case of a young man

whose bad mood (“üble Stimmung”) leads to a complete moral numbness
in which he can prevent himself from murdering his brother only with
great determination (see Moritz 240). In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novel Die
Elixiere des Teufels (1814), uncontrollable unconscious processes within the
subject cause bad, dark (“böse,” “düstere”) ‘Stimmungen.’ Although the
protagonist himself experiences these ‘Stimmungen’ as something foreign,
indicating that a dark power is trying to gain control over him (see Hoff-
mann 33, 156–57), the novel itself implies that Sulzer’s dark moods
provide the psychological background for these psychopathological expe-
riences.
Just as ‘resonance’ and ‘clusters of vibration’ contributed to theories
on the effect of music on the passions, Sulzer’s ‘psychological Stimmung’
likewise ‘travelled’ back to the field of music, where it revolutionised theo-
ries on the emotional effect of music. Two years after publishing the re-
port of an intended fratricide in his journal, Karl Philipp Moritz lets the
protagonist of his novel Andreas Hartknopf combine Sulzer’s ‘psychological
Stimmung’ with his theory of dark and confused ideas, feelings, and emo-
tions in a completely different way. Reflecting the impact of music on the
soul, Hartknopf states that “in a certain mood, an otherwise quite insignif-
icant musical tone […] can have a miraculous effect on the soul” and
bring forth “a thousand memories, a thousand confused ideas” (Moritz
132–33; my translation).
As shown above, the effect of music had been explained by Daniel
Webb and others as a sympathetic resonance between body and soul.
Moritz modified this view by subordinating resonance to ‘Stimmung.’ The
effect was now understood to be dependent on the ‘psychological Stim-
mung’ of the individual listener, since the chain of associations resonating
with the music is specific to a certain individual in a specific mood. This
meant that even an otherwise quite insignificant tone could unfold its ef-
fect in a particular mood. As a consequence, music now no longer led to
general passions; it instead became the language of the individual soul’s
unconscious because it was able to lift dark and confused (that is not dis-
tinct, not conscious) ideas and memories into consciousness. This adop-
tion of the psychological concept of ‘Stimmung’ to the aesthetics of music
marks the shift from the aesthetics of sentimentalism based on sympathet-
ic resonance to the aesthetics of German Romanticism.5
What are the modifications the concept underwent on entering the
field of psychological theory? One main modification of the concept has
to do with the cluster of the neighbouring concepts, i.e. of resonance and
5 For the larger context of this transition see Dahlhaus (65–66).

‘Stimmung’ 277
theories of association. ‘Stimmung’ (mood) became epistemologically pro-

ductive because of the possibility of different moods leading to different
patterns of resonance and because of the emphasis on the possibilities of
tuning and retuning. The other modification is linked to the differences
concerning the subject and object of tuning. In music ‘Stimmung’ is an
objective state. The agent is clear: the instrument is tuned by the musician
before it is played. In psychology ‘Stimmung’ is a subjective state: the sub-
ject is tuned and its tuning in turn affects the perception of the self and of
the world. The agent is rather vague: the subject either tunes or retunes
itself (consciously or unconsciously) or it is retuned from the outside in
interaction with the environment. In both cases the borderline between
the subject and the object of tuning becomes permeable.
4. ‘Stimmung’ Enters Physiology:

The Function of a Polyvalent and Vague Concept
‘Stimmung’ entered the life sciences approximately two decades after Sul-
zer first used it as a psychological concept. It first appeared in 1795 in Jo-
hann Christian Reil’s introductory article of the first issue of his journal
Archiv für Physiologie, which has the programmatic title “Von der Le-
benskraft” (‘On Vital Forces’). As a physicist interested in mental illness,
Reil was well-acquainted with the psychological theories of his time. With
this article, the concept of ‘Stimmung’ became central to the idea of life as
a natural, vital force.
The introduction of ‘Stimmung’ into physiology must be seen in con-
text with the more general transition around 1800 from a mechanistic the-
ory, which considered the body as a machine, to a theory of the body as a
living organism. Reil defined ‘Stimmung’ as the degree of Lebenskraft (‘vital
force’) and believed it to be dependent on the specific mixture of organic
matter. In emphasising the organic nature of Lebenskraft, he argued against
standard opinions characterising the vital force as something spiritual, as
opposed to organic matter (see Reil 23–29, par. 7 and 8). Relating the
word Stimmung back to the Latin term temperies (‘to temper,’ ‘to regulate,’
‘to mix properly’), Reil distinguished between ‘Stimmung’ as the natural
degree of the vital force (Lebenskraft), and Miß-Stimmung (in-temperies as an
abnormal degree of the same force. The right ‘Stimmung’ (tonus) of the or-
ganism as a whole and of specific organs was thus seen as necessary for
the health of the organism, whereas Mißstimmung (‘mistuning’) was under-
stood as a sign of illness, inflammation, and high temperature (see Reil 20,
72).
278 Caroline Welsh
Reil used the terms Stimmung and ‘musical temperature/temperament’

as synonyms in order to illustrate his main thesis that the basis of life was
to be found in the mixture of organic matter and not in a metaphysical
conception of a life force. According to him, a change within this mixture
automatically led not only to a different quality but also to a different de-
gree of ‘Stimmung’ (see Reil 66–81, par. 19 and 20). In connection with
the specific modifications of ‘Stimmung’ in its entry into physiology, it is
noteworthy that this quantitative aspect gained importance when Johann
Wilhelm Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt introduced Reil’s ‘vital
Stimmung’ into the theory of Galvanism. Here, too, ‘Stimmung’ was un-
derstood to be the result of an active but purely organic force within the
organism. In the context of nerve physiology it explained the varying de-
grees of excitability of the nerve, i.e. its ability to respond to the stimuli of
the outside world. ‘Stimmung’ now played a role not only as a theoretical
concept but also on the level of scientific practice. In their experiments on
perception and on nerve physiology, both Humboldt (1797) and Ritter
(1798) had observed that the nerve and the sense organs reacted different-
ly to the same stimuli from the outside world. They explained these sub-
jective reactions by postulating a change in the degree of ‘Stimmung.’
I will concentrate on Humboldt here, because he is important for the
further ‘migrations’ of the concept from physiology to the physiognomy
of nature and the art of landscape painting. In his Versuche über die gereizte
Muskel- und Nervenfaser (1797), Humboldt claimed that the different levels
of irritability of the nerve not only depended on the number of previous
stimuli but also on the general condition of the organism. He had discov-
ered that the ‘Stimmung of excitability’ could be purposefully influenced
(tuned and retuned) by the experimenter by subjecting the nerve to a
treatment either with an alkaline or sodium chloride solution (see Hum-
boldt 1: 7 and 169–75; 2: 471–72). Together with Reil’s theory of an or-
ganically based ‘vital Stimmung,’ these experiments led to a re-evaluation
of John Brown’s theory of excitability (see Humboldt 2: 75–80). Whereas
Brown postulated a direct correlation between the degree of nerve excita-
bility and the amount of stimuli the nerve had previously been exposed to
(a lack of stimuli caused an increase of excitability and vice versa), Hum-
boldt argued that the degree of excitability (the ‘Stimmung’ of the organ-
ism or of part of the organism) also depended on the specific mixture of
organic substances responsible for the general condition of the organism.
Contrary to the Brunonian theory of excitability, life was now no longer
seen simply as an echo, as a reaction of the excitable matter to external
stimuli. Instead, this new aspect of excitability emphasised the vibrant ac-
tivity within the living organism itself, where organic substances were con-
tinuously changing. The living organism was now seen as a complex
‘Stimmung’ 279
system, able to tune and retune itself. In ‘Stimmung,’ this autonomy of life
as a vibrant energetic system in interaction with its environment was con-
densed into a central concept.
A decade later, in connection with his botanical studies in South
America, Alexander von Humboldt introduced ‘Stimmung’ into landscape
painting and thus contributed to another migration of the concept, con-
tinued in the work of Carl Gustav Carus and others (see Böhme 142–51).
‘Stimmung’ here was used as a psychological category to describe the ef-
fect of a specific landscape on the viewer (see Humboldt 247). According
to Humboldt, this ‘Stimmung’ is a result of the typical physiognomic as-
pects of the landscape, especially its geological structure and its character-
istic vegetation. Here, nature is itself responsible for tuning and retuning
the psyche.
What were the main modifications of the concept on its entrance into
physiology and the life sciences? As already indicated, a new element en-
tered the concept with Reil’s introduction of ‘Stimmung’ into the physio-
logy of life. In psychology, ‘Stimmung’ was a qualitative category: one was
in a happy, sad, productive, melancholic or dark mood, and the mood in
turn influenced perception of the world and was responsible for different
chains of association. When used in a physiological context, the concept
acquired a qualitative aspect: the ‘Stimmung’ of an organ or the nerves,
etc. was in harmony (or disharmony) with that of other organs and it
could be tuned and retuned. But ‘Stimmung’ was now also used in a quan-
titative sense: the degree (Grad) of ‘Stimmung’ (it could be high or low)
became a central part of the concept. This modification of the concept on
its entrance into the life sciences, its transformation as a result of its adap-
tation into a new discursive context, is directly linked to the integration of
‘Stimmung’ into a different cluster of concepts. The new cluster includes every-
thing related in one way or another to temperies (‘mixture,’ ‘temperature’).
In other words, both clusters of concepts—the cluster around the ‘psy-
chological Stimmung’ including resonance, patterns of vibration and dif-
ferent musical keys as a basis for theories of association, and the cluster
around the ‘physiological Stimmung’ including both qualitative (harmony/
disharmony) and quantitative (degree of temperature/temperies/mixture)
aspects originally derived from the various musical meanings of ‘Stim-
mung.’ But they activate different aspects of the original musical concepts
of ‘tuning,’ ‘tone,’ ‘harmony,’ and ‘(musical) temperament.’
The introduction of this quantitative aspect into the concept was the
main modification of ‘Stimmung’ on its entry into the domain of physiol-
ogy. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the psychological and the
physiological ‘Stimmung’ have the same underlying thought pattern, that
is the same mini-theory or nucleus of a narrative: in both cases, ‘Stim-
280 Caroline Welsh
mung’ referred to a general disposition of a dynamic system—the psyche,

the living organism, later the brain and the nerve. In both cases, this dis-
position determined the specific response to internal and external stimuli
and, last but not least, in both cases the ability of the dynamic system itself
to tune and re-tune (Stimmen and Umstimmen) was central. Since in both
cases, therefore, the concept of ‘Stimmung’ can be seen as an answer to
the question of interaction between an internally organised living system
and the environment, it seems safe to conclude that this time the concept
‘travelled’ directly from psychology to physiology.
The concept of ‘physiological Stimmung’ of the nerves, the brain and
the sense organs did not disappear with the emergence of the experi-
mental sciences in the nineteenth century. But although it can be found in
physiological theories and textbooks throughout the nineteenth century, it
did not develop into a firmly established, clearly defined scientific term.
Instead, the importance of the concept of ‘Stimmung’ in the physiology of
the nineteenth century lay precisely in its ability to adapt itself to new the-
ories (for instance mechanic, galvanic, molecular theories on the transmis-
sion of information through the nerves) and to new objects (nerve fibres,
brain cells, retinal processes). In all these cases, the vagueness of the con-
cept is central to its continued use (see Welsh “Nerven-Saiten-
Stimmung”). The situation is very different for the further development of
‘psychological Stimmung’ in the nineteenth century. Here, the concept
emerged as a clearly defined term within psychological and psychiatric lit-
erature.
In the concluding part, I would like to look at possible consequences
of the journeys of ‘Stimmung’ for the interaction between discourses and
disciplines. In what way does the fact that ‘Stimmung’ has migrated into
various other fields of discourse by the beginning of the nineteenth centu-
ry contribute to its further career as a psychological concept and category?
Does the common concept, once it has ‘travelled’ and established itself in
the discursive fields of psychology and physiology, facilitate the interac-
tion between these two areas of knowledge? Does ‘Stimmung,’ in other
words, function as a medium of exchange between physiological and psy-
chological discourses?
5. Interfaces and Other Contact Zones

Between Physiology and Psychology
A historical analysis of the specific character and function of interaction

among different discursive fields occasioned by travelling concepts like
‘Stimmung’ 281
‘Stimmung’ has to take into account the possible differences of such

zones of contact
a) between areas of knowledge, before the differentiation and institu-
tionalisation of the disciplines,
b) between emerging disciplines, still fighting for their independence
during the phase of their institutionalisation in the nineteenth cen-
tury in the context of an increasing divide between the sciences and
the humanities, and
c) between established disciplines with extensive subcultures faced
with the problem of ‘intradisciplinary’ and ‘extradisciplinary’ inter-
action and with the resulting necessity of common concepts.
It therefore seems reasonable to suspect that contact zones between phys-
iological and psychological discursive fields occasioned by their common
use of ‘Stimmung’ should likewise change with the emergence of the ex-
perimental sciences and the increasing institutionalisation of the disci-
plines of psychiatry, psychology, and physiology in the nineteenth century
(see Eulner). The two following examples, showing the use of ‘Stimmung’
before and during the establishment of psychiatry as a scientific discipline,
investigate this difference.
If one defines ‘interface’ as a common boundary between independent
disciplines, one should reserve the term for the period during and after the
establishment of psychology/psychiatry and physiology as independent
disciplines, which occurred in the second half of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth centuries. The contact zone created by the use
of ‘Stimmung’ to describe both physiological and psychological disposi-
tions around 1800 is of a very different nature. Its main function is to es-
tablish a link not between independent disciplines but between
anthropological entities. In the wake of Ernst Platner’s insistence on a
commercium mentis et corporis in his Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise
(1772), German anthropology around 1800 subverted Cartesian dualism
by emphasising the interactions (Wechselwirkung) between body and soul
(see Schings) and the necessity to investigate human nature as a whole. In
this context, as the following example illustrates, the use of physiological
‘vital Stimmung’ and ‘psychological Stimmung’ played a significant role in
the conceptualisation of the interactions between body and soul as two sep-
arate anthropological entities.
In his textbook on mental illness, Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens,
published in 1818, Johan Christian Heinroth, Romantic anthropologist
and the first Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leipzig, argued
that all mental illnesses had their origin not in the brain but in the
soul/mind (see Heinroth, Lehrbuch 181–86). On the basis of Romantic
282 Caroline Welsh
anthropology’s emphasis on a close interrelation between body and soul,

he postulated an immediate interaction between both entities (see ibid.
198–211). Describing the nature of this interaction, Heinroth took ad-
vantage of the existence of ‘Stimmung’ as a concept used for the general
state or disposition of a dynamic system both in psychological and in
physiological discourse. In arguing that the Seelenstimmung (the ‘Stimmung’
or disposition of the soul) was responsible for the Lebensstimmung (the ‘vi-
tal Stimmung’ of the organs and in particular of the brain as described by
Reil) and, vice versa, that the ‘vital Stimmung’ of the body also influenced
the ‘Stimmung’ of the soul, the reciprocal influence between body and
soul was established through the concept of ‘Stimmung’ as a result of tun-
ing and re-tuning in both directions.6 However, Heinroth’s conviction that
all mental illness originated in the mind (soul) made it necessary for him to
establish a hierarchy between both forms of ‘Stimmung.’ Although the
soul and the organs were tuned in harmony, Heinroth emphasised that the
soul (mind and reason) alone was responsible for the organism’s health
(the right ‘Stimmung,’ according to Reil). A specific ‘vital Stimmung’ was
therefore excluded as the origin of mental illness. The illness was instead
seen as the result of the combination of two factors: a specific disposition
of the soul (‘Seelenstimmung’), for which the individual itself was made
responsible, and a stimulus from outside which merely triggered the out-
break of the illness (see Heinroth, Lehrbuch 195, 222–35; Roelcke 61). All
subsequent changes of the ‘vital Stimmung’ of the organism were seen as a
result of the mistuning (Verstimmung) of the soul.
Wilhelm Griesinger, Professor for Clinical Medicine and Psychiatry
and from 1865 Director of the mental hospital (Charité) in Berlin, was one
of the founding fathers of psychiatry as a scientific discipline, based on
physiological medicine. He became famous for his insistence that psychi-
atric disorders are a direct result of brain disorders (see Wahrig-Schmidt).
His use of ‘psychological Stimmung’ in this context is an early example for
an interface between two disciplines (physiology and psychiatry) during
the phase of their institutionalisation. In the second extended edition of
his principal work Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten für
Ärzte und Studierende (1861), Griesinger argued that the psychopathological
manic and depressive Verstimmungen (‘mistunings’) correlated directly with
the underlying organic condition of the brain (see Griesinger, Die Pathologie
[1861] 33). The idea of a direct correlation between brain and psyche re-
fers to the concept of ‘psychophysical parallelism,’ which replaced the
6 For Heinroth’s reliance on Reil’s ‘vital Stimmung’ in his Anthropologie (1822), especially with
regard to his explanation of the four temperaments, see Welsh, “Stimmung in den Wissen-
schaften” 58–63.
‘Stimmung’ 283
theory of an interaction between two separate entities in the second half

of the nineteenth century. Body and mind were now understood as a
function of each other—and in extreme versions of parallelism as two
different perspectives on the same entity (see Wegener). In other words,
the concept of ‘Stimmung’ was central to Griesinger’s main thesis that all
forms of mental illness were a result of brain damage. It enabled him to
connect the psychological effect to its postulated physiological origin
without having to be too precise about the exact physiological processes
responsible for creating the pathological ‘Stimmung’ (see Welsh, “‘Stim-
mung’ im Spannungsfeld”). In consequence, manic and melancholic ‘Ver-
stimmungen’ could be defined as the primary psychological symptoms of
organically induced mental illness. Thought disorders, paranoia and a gen-
eral pathological relationship to the outside world were understood to be
merely a result of these pathological moods, not their cause. ‘Stimmungen’
therefore formed the basis for Griesinger’s classification of psychiatric
disorders as either melancholic or manic.
What conclusions can be drawn from these two examples for the con-
ceptualisation of different types of contact zones? The comparison be-
tween the use of ‘Stimmung’ within Heinroth’s and Griesinger’s general
arguments highlights a main difference in the nature of the contact zones
provided by ‘Stimmung’ before and during the differentiation and institu-
tionalisation of the disciplines. Both Heinroth and Griesinger distin-
guished between the physiological and the psychological aspects of mental
illness and used ‘Stimmung’ as a mediator between them. I am not con-
cerned here with their different opinions as to the origin of mental illness.
Instead I want to emphasise that the function of ‘Stimmung’ changed within
their general argument. Heinroth’s parallel use of ‘vital Stimmung’ and
‘psychological Stimmung’ in the context of Romantic anthropology pro-
vided a bridge between body and psyche/soul, conceived of as two differ-
ent anthropological entities in interaction with each other. This enabled him
to argue that every individual was himself or herself responsible for creat-
ing the psychological disposition for mental illness, which in turn disrupts
the health of the body. Griesinger’s use of ‘Stimmung,’ on the other hand,
is central to his intention of establishing psychiatry as an independent sci-
entific discipline based on physiological medicine. ‘Psychopathological
Stimmung’ enabled him to create a link, an interface, between the disciplines
and discourses of psychiatry and physiology on the basis of their independ-
ence as disciplines. Insofar as both disciplines were familiar with the
common thought pattern structuring the concept, but applied it to differ-
ent objects of investigation, ‘Stimmung’ here could function as a ‘bounda-
ry concept’ (see Löwy): it is both general and specific enough to facilitate
the co-operation between diverse disciplines (psychology and physiology)
284 Caroline Welsh
with different interests. However, ‘boundary objects’ (see Star and

Griesemer) and ‘boundary concepts’ (see Löwy) are specific variants of
interfaces describing means of communication between heterogeneous
groups or different disciplines. Initially developed to conceptualise inter-
faces between already established disciplines and highly specialised sub-
disciplines, they represent an answer to a problem characteristic for the
twentieth century: the necessity of innovative input from outside the
boundaries of the existing conceptual network of overspecialised sub-
disciplines. Peter Galison’s ‘trading zones’ and Susan Lay Star’s ‘boundary
objects’ have in common that they were created to facilitate the exchange
between heterogeneous groups, disciplines, or sub-disciplines. Löwy’s
‘boundary concepts’ can be seen as specific kinds of travelling concepts,
where the degree of epistemological productivity in a highly specialised
area would form the main criterion for a successful journey and further
migrations of an essentially vague and polyvalent concept. The interface
Löwy described as a result of the ‘immunological concept of the self’ and
the possibilities to differentiate between self and non-self provides a
common pattern of thought or mini-theory, one which restructured the
field of immunology in the 1950s and brought together people from vari-
ous subdisciplines within biology and clinical medicine. Like Galison’s
trading zones and Star’s boundary objects, Löwy’s examples of boundary
concepts belong to the third category of interfaces mentioned above, the
interface between established disciplines with extensive subcultures faced
with the problem of lacking ‘intradisciplinary’ and ‘extradisciplinary’ inter-
action. Griesinger’s ‘psychological Stimmung,’ on the other hand, created
an interface which belonged to the second category of interfaces created
between emerging disciplines still fighting for their independence during
the phase of their institutionalisation in the nineteenth century. His con-
tact zone is just as much a zone of delimitation and differentiation as it is
a zone of contact. After establishing mental illness as organically based
and psychiatry as a medical science, Griesinger concentrated on the psy-
chological phenomena.
6. Conclusion
What general implications can be drawn from this historical case study of
‘Stimmung’ for the conceptualisation of travelling concepts, interfaces,
and other contact zones between the sciences, literature, and the humani-
ties?
The analysis of ‘Stimmung’ as a travelling concept provides a particu-
larly instructive example of the variety of ways in which a concept may
‘Stimmung’ 285
travel back and forth between different areas of knowledge and may be
applied to a range of different phenomena. In doing so, it illustrates the
productivity of looking at travelling concepts as an important tool of cul-
tural analysis. While previous case studies of the journeys of key concepts
for the study of culture were often restricted to their journeys within the
humanities, the concepts themselves do not necessarily stop at such artifi-
cially constructed borders and may travel freely between all areas of cul-
tural knowledge. Thus this case study also emphasises the importance of
broadening the perspective to include possible journeys of concepts be-
tween the humanities and the sciences.
The two most significant journeys of ‘Stimmung’ into psychological
and physiological discourses at the end of the eighteenth century highlight
certain aspects generally helpful for the successful ‘travelling’ of a concept
or a metaphor:
a) the existence of different clusters of neighbouring concepts (reso-
nance/clusters of vibration/musical keys or temperature/tempera-
ment mixture). In this specific case, the neighbouring concepts
were a precondition for the successful ‘migrations’ of ‘Stimmung’
because they had themselves already been involved in journeys of
their own. Since the modifications the concept undergoes on its en-
try into a new field of knowledge may integrate new clusters of
concepts, the network of concepts and metaphors potentially avail-
able to modify ‘Stimmung’ in all areas increases with each success-
ful journey;
b) an essential vagueness of the concept, for example with regard to
the question what is tuned and by whom; and
c) a common, more abstract thought pattern or mini-theory that re-
mains constant, in this case the focus on the general disposition of
a dynamic (re-tuneable) system (psyche, organism, brain or nerve)
which determines the specific response to internal and external
stimuli. Whereas the first two aspects enable productive modifica-
tions of the concept on its ‘journey’ between various disciplines, the
third aspect stabilises the concept.
The perspective on ‘Stimmung’ as a travelling concept and its journeys
between music, psychology, physiology, and literature illustrates that such
concepts play an important role in the formation of knowledge. They
may—as in the case with ‘psychological Stimmung’—establish themselves
as new, more or less clearly defined categories, successfully restructuring
the discursive field they have entered. On the other hand, the analysis of
the function of ‘physiological Stimmung’ revealed that the long-lasting
assumption that the sciences profit from clear-cut concepts and models,
286 Caroline Welsh
whereas the humanities, and especially literature, prefer vague, polyvalent

concepts and metaphors, is itself a prejudice. One function of ‘physiologi-
cal Stimmung,’ namely to suggest continuity where in fact fundamental
changes in theory have taken place, confirms the emphasis placed in re-
cent research on the importance of vague, polyvalent, not clear-cut and
well-defined concepts not only for epistemological productivity within the
humanities (see Bal), but also in the sciences (see Bono, “Science”; Brandt,
Metapher 37–55; Löwy; Welsh, “Nerven-Saiten-Stimmung”). Literary texts
nevertheless may be said to have a specific place within the general order
of knowledge insofar as they not only disseminate knowledge and con-
cepts produced in other areas of knowledge, but also engage knowledge in
a process of self-reflection. In Moritz’s novel, the combination of Sulzer’s
‘psychological Stimmung’ with his earlier theory on dark and confused
ideas provides the basis for a completely new interpretation of the effect
of music on the soul. The idea that music may evoke unconscious associa-
tions connected to a specific mood is a good example of such self-
reflexive processes of knowledge in literature. In this case it also initiates
the ‘return journey’ of the strongly modified concept of ‘Stimmung’ into
musicological discourse.
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Visuality and Visual Culture
SILKE HORSTKOTTE
1. What Is Visuality?
Among the buzzwords circulating in the academe today, ‘visuality’ and

‘visual culture’ are without a doubt prime candidates for inclusion in the
category of ‘travelling concepts.’ Not only has the visual culture paradigm
(developed by such scholars as Mieke Bal, Lisa Cartwright, Michael Ann
Holly, Nicholas Mirzoeff and W. J. T. Mitchell) revolutionised the ways in
which we think about those Western high-art images that were already
being studied by art historians; it has also directed our critical attention
towards images that are not Western in origin, or that are not art; it has
pointed up the predominantly visual nature of contemporary culture and
suggested ways of analysing the new digital images that surround us. The
concepts of visuality and visual culture have, moreover, travelled from the
US universities in which they were first developed to university depart-
ments and interdisciplinary research centres around the world; and they
have filtered down from degree programs devoted explicitly to ‘visual
studies’ to other disciplines such as literature, history, anthropology, phi-
losophy, religious studies, the social sciences and even science and medi-
cine. Last but not least, the visual images themselves with which this
research is concerned are increasingly on the go, travelling from one social
sphere to another, from high art to popular culture, between places and
virtually across the globe.
Research into visuality and visual culture originates with the observa-
tion that we live today in an image culture in which visual representations
are not only more ubiquitous than in any preceding period of history, but
in which images also take over many of the functions formerly associated
with textual media and practices—ranging from information through ab-
stract reasoning to the encoding of scientific data. In the course of the
past two decades, digital images and imaging technologies have rapidly
conquered a central place in our everyday lives. Screens saturated with
multiple images as well as text regulate our access to and interaction with
292 Silke Horstkotte
the world. In our workplaces, we routinely use visual and communication

technologies that allow for a global circulation of ideas and information,
and these are increasingly encoded in visual modes which require new
forms of visual literacy and competence. The once largely text-based In-
ternet has morphed into a new ‘Web 2.0’ with millions of clips being host-
ed on YouTube and billions of images uploaded to Flickr and Facebook.
Due to their ephemeral and digital nature, the images that surround us are
not confined to one place, but are shown in many places at once. Images
are also increasingly not linked to any one medium but are constantly be-
ing remediated: we are all familiar with Van Gogh’s sunflowers even if we
have never seen any of the paintings because we have seen reproductions
in art books, on postcards, t-shirts and even coffee mugs, as well as in TV
shows and on billboard advertisements. An older ‘new’ visual medium like
cinematography is now available not only in movie theatres but in a varie-
ty of formats, including the cinema but more importantly television
screens, DVD players attached to either TVs or computers, iPods and
other handheld devices. These devices have hugely different sizes, are
used in different sorts of settings, and make for wildly different viewing
experiences.
What, precisely, is meant by ‘visuality’ and ‘the visual’ in this context?
The term ‘visuality” was first coined by the historian Thomas Carlyle. In
his lecture On Heroes (1841), the deeply anti-democratic and anti-Semitic
Carlyle argued that only the hero had the ability to visualise history as it
happened, a vision that was hidden from the eyes of ordinary men. Visual-
ity, for Carlyle, was the clear image of history, as opposed to the mere ac-
cumulation of facts by lesser historians. One of the first edited collections
in the newly emerging field of visual culture, Hal Foster’s Vision and Visu-
ality (1988), adopted the term to refer to the social fact of visuality, as op-
posed to the physical processes of sight, which Foster called “vision.”
However, as Foster and others have stressed, the two terms stand in a dia-
lectical rather than a strictly oppositional relationship to each other: vision
is never mere physiological sight since it always occurs in a social and per-
ceptual context. Indeed, many studies have argued that physiological pro-
cesses of seeing are always culturally mediated—examples include the
medieval and early modern images of exotic animals that confirmed textu-
ally disseminated prejudices about these animals even when they were
drawn from nature.
Visual culture is therefore concerned with invisibility, blindness and all
forms of synaesthesia as well as the visual itself, and it does not exist in
isolation from text-based and other media practices. The inclusive catego-
ry of ‘the visual,’ as opposed to ‘visual art,’ implies a wider range of ob-
jects, as well as a different sort of experience, a different set of skills and a
Visuality and Visual Culture 293
different methodology. ‘The visual’ is often invoked in opposition to ‘the

textual,’ and the term implies a critique of the routine slighting of visual
experience throughout academia (why, for instance, do history degree
courses expend so little energy on teaching students how to read visual
images, when photographic images are a major historical source for, say,
WWII?). The double goal of visual culture studies, then, is to understand
the social and cultural construction of visuality, as well as the visual con-
struction of the social and the cultural. Originally an interdisciplinary field
of study in which scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds engaged
in a search for new understandings of images, including those images that
are not Western and/or that are not art, and of the visual domain as a
whole, visual studies (as the field is also often called) emerged in the 1990s
as a new disciplinary paradigm in competition with art history. Like many
areas of research, visual studies soon became a field around which hopes
and fears congregated: while some art historians saw the new field as an
imminent danger to jobs and funding in their own departments, as well as
a threat to established methodologies and taught competencies, others
attributed to visual culture “the potential to contribute a voice significantly
different from the text-based practices that are preeminent in the humani-
ties and […] the capacity to uncover connections between parts of the
university that are now largely disjointed” (Elkins, Visual Studies vii). The
following section traces some of these developments.
2. History and Development of the Concept(s)
The term ‘visual culture’ (visuelle Kultur) first appears in Béla Balázs’
groundbreaking work of film theory Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man) of
1924, where it is employed to foreground the independent aesthetic con-
tribution of the new cinematic medium. In 1972, Michael Baxandall be-
came the first author to reference ‘visual culture’ in an art historical
context by discussing the role that contextual visual experience played in
the contemporary reception and, indeed, also production of fifteenth-
century Italian art. Eleven years later, Svetlana Alpers—another art histo-
rian—used the term in a very different way, namely to distinguish between
a visual culture (which she argues was dominant in seventeenth-century
Holland) and a textual one (see Dikovitskaya).
Besides these scattered and varied etymological origins, a second
source for the visual culture paradigm lies in the establishment of the new
academic discipline ‘cultural studies’ from the 1960s onward. Originally a
1950s British movement, cultural studies concerns itself with the cultural
practices of social groups that do not necessarily belong to the cultural
elite, for instance the British working class or minority subcultures. Cul-
tural studies in the US, which emerged in the 1970s, was and remains less
openly Marxist than its older British cousin, and is mainly concerned with
the study of popular culture. In both schools of thought, culture is under-
stood as a fluid process of engaged and embodied social practices, not a
fixed canon of ‘high culture.’ As such, cultural studies offer many insights
into how images and visual media shape our daily lives and contribute to
semanticising social and political interaction.
Visual culture first became institutionalised in US universities as a re-
sult of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s, when universities recognised that
many of their students were highly visually literate but that this literacy did
not necessarily revolve around the kind of high-art images that were being
studied in art history departments. In a time of decreasing public funding
for higher learning institutions, students were being treated as paying cus-
tomers whose needs and demands had to be met by new degree programs.
Three universities in particular were forerunners in this development: the
University of Rochester (NY), which started offering an interdisciplinary
graduate programme in Visual and Cultural Studies taught by faculty from
several humanities departments in 1989; the University of Chicago, where
W. J. T. Mitchell began teaching a course on visual culture in the art histo-
ry department in the early 1990s; and the University of California at Ir-
vine, whose graduate programme in visual studies was approved in 1998
(see Dikovitskaya for a detailed account).
Although two of the first programmes thus originated in art history,
this discipline has, from the start, felt more threatened by the new field
than any other competing discipline (film studies, media and communica-
tion, comparative literature, etc.). These early anxieties and rivalries came
to a head in the notorious October questionnaire (see Alpers et al.). The
questionnaire, drawn up by October editors Rosalind Krauss and Hal Fos-
ter, consists of four statements that all start with the unsubstantiated
words “it has been suggested,” leaving it open as to whether these are
meant to represent the views of the editors or something that they dis-
agree with. The statements themselves are very polemical, especially the
third one, which asserts that visual studies conceptualises the visual exclu-
sively as “disembodied image, re-created in the virtual spaces of sign-
exchange and phantasmatic projection” and that the new disciplinary par-
adigm “is helping […] to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized
capital” (Alpers et al. 25; original emphasis).
Although the recipients of the questionnaire represented the more
progressive strands of art history, many of their replies were written in the
same hostile tone as the questionnaire itself. They set up an unnecessary
competition between visual studies and art history, and they reasserted the
competence of art history in all matters visual while simultaneously argu-

ing that visual studies did not have a proper object, let alone a set of com-
petencies. They also appeared anxious about the disciplinary future of art
history and, indeed, of art itself. Thus, Susan Buck-Morss started her re-
sponse with the emphatic accusation, “The production of a discourse of
visual culture entails the liquidation of art as we have known it” (Buck-
Morss qtd. in Alpers et al. 29). With few exceptions, then, the October
questionnaire illustrates nothing so much as how resistant established dis-
ciplines, especially art history, were to the new visual culture paradigm.
Because of the variety of definitions of visual culture, the lack of unity
of the field and the multiple ways in which the field has been integrated
into the academe, it remains difficult to say whether visual studies is an
emerging discipline, an interdisciplinary field, or a “quasi-field,” “pseudo-
discipline” or “dangerous supplement” (all pace Mitchell, “Showing See-
ing” 167). A quick Google survey illustrates the widely divergent ways in
which visual culture has been institutionalised, while simultaneously doc-
umenting the global spread of visual studies: the terms ‘visual culture’ and
‘visual studies’ most commonly pop up as names of degree programmes,
either within traditional art history departments, or else drawing on faculty
from a number of departments (including art history, film, literature, me-
dia studies and so on). Relatively few universities have institutionalised
visual studies in separate departments, and among those, there is a lot of
difference as to what is taught in these departments: SUNY Buffalo has a
Visual Studies Department that combines fine art and art history; Har-
vard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, on the other
hand, teaches studio art and film. The University of Karachi in Pakistan
has one of the oldest visual studies departments (dating from 1999), but it
is devoted exclusively to studio art, as is the department at Lingnan Uni-
versity (Hongkong), while the Film and Visual Culture Department at the
University of Aberdeen (Scotland) is simply a film department. Duke has
expanded its art history curriculum to include “Art, Art History and Visual
Studies,” and a number of liberal arts colleges in the US have similar art
and visual culture departments. Goldsmiths’ Department of Visual Cul-
tures (within the University of London) is unique in that it is devoted ex-
clusively to “new forms of contemporary art-theoretical practice.”1
In 2002, when James Elkins was writing Visual Studies: A Skeptical In-
troduction, he outlined the history of visual culture studies to date as fol-
lows:
first there seemed to be a new discipline called visual studies or visual culture, and
it grew to the point of threatening some existing disciplines […]. By […] 2001,
1 See department website: http://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/.

visual culture seemed to have partly collapsed and been reabsorbed into the vari-
ous disciplines and individual practices from which it came. […] As I write this,
[…] visual culture is thriving and at the same time provoking resistance and also
sighs of boredom from people who think it is an evanescent collage of existing
practices. (Elkins, Visual Studies 20)
At the time that I am writing this—spring 2010—the visual culture para-
digm is still very much alive and thriving. Indeed, it is spreading in all sorts
of directions that were unforeseen by Elkins in 2002. Maybe one of the
most exciting developments is the one towards defining the visual cultures
of specific countries, regions and historical periods, which I will briefly
outline in the concluding section of this article. While there were only a
handful of visual studies programmes in the US and the UK ten years ago,
visual culture is now being taught at universities across the globe, be it
within visual studies departments, as part of art history degree courses, or
in interdisciplinary programmes. Visual culture has changed the object
domain and the methods by which visual objects and practices are studied
within many existing disciplines, including not only art history but also
film and television studies, cultural studies, sociology, media and commu-
nication studies, anthropology, literary theory, philosophy and aesthetics.
The following sections will outline some of the methodological assump-
tions that inform visual studies.
3. The Visual Turn
The new omnipresence of images has been linked to a ‘visual,’ ‘pictorial’

or ‘iconic turn’ in the humanities (see esp. Mitchell, Picture Theory). These
terms refer both to the increasing dominance of images in contemporary
culture and to the need for new investigative methods to analyse images.
They imply that the traditional hierarchies of words and images have been
reversed: while Western culture has been dominated by the textual for the
past 2,500 years, the image has now become the dominant means of or-
dering the world and spreading information, pushing words to the mar-
gins of TV and information screens. This means that the new key
discipline for contemporary cultural studies is visual studies, rather than
linguistics or textual studies.
What, then, does it mean to study the image after the visual turn? One
thing that has to be noted right at the beginning is that even though
the term is one of the most widely used in visual studies, nobody really
knows what an image is. As far back as 1986, W. J. T. Mitchell, a pioneer
of visual culture, drew attention to the huge variety of objects and con-
cepts that can be—have been—included under the ‘image’ label, including
(but not limited to) paintings, statues, photographs, maps, diagrams, digi-
tal images, projections, metaphors, memories, hallucinations and even ide-
as (see Mitchell, Iconology). It is therefore crucial to draw a sharp line
between ideas about ‘the’ image with its particular sign system and phe-
nomenology on the one hand, and the many kinds of images we are con-
fronted with on the other. Mitchell has suggested a terminological
distinction between the ‘image,’ which is internal, mental or metaphorical,
and the ‘picture,’ which is external and visual. However, this distinction
still leaves open questions of mediality and materiality since digital images,
for instance, are external and visual, but not material, and they are open to
remediation. While these concerns play a central role in German Bildwissen-
schaft (‘image studies’), the more encompassing term ‘visual culture’ which
emerged in English-speaking countries has pushed the necessity of defin-
ing the image a little to the side. However, although visual culture turns
attention away from the exclusive focus on images and towards a study of
visuality in its entirety, the question of what an image is, how the domain
of images relates to the verbal, or the word, and how people look at imag-
es, does keep turning up in visual studies.
The basic object domain of visual studies overlaps in many ways with
the more established discipline of art history, which has led, as we have
seen, to visual studies often becoming either a part of art history depart-
ments or their new name. However, the way in which images are studied
in visual culture differs crucially from established art historical meth-
odologies. One important difference is that visual culture tends to de-
historicise images: it attempts to escape from the chronological model of-
fered by art history by replacing the study of the history of the object, at
least to some extent, with that of its spectator(s). Moreover, the category
of objects studied in visual culture is more inclusive than that of art histor-
ical research and includes advertising images, news photography, scientific
imaging practices, fashion, skin decoration and amateur videos, to name
but a few examples. The October survey amply illustrates how threatened
some art historians have felt by this. What is often forgotten, however, is
that the opposition between art history and visual culture is a false one, as
many of the ideas developed in visual studies actually originated within art
history. Thus, the method of studying high art in conjunction with other
kinds of images was first developed by the art historian Aby Warburg
(who is specifically mentioned in the October questionnaire as a founding
figure of visual studies). Warburg’s unfinished picture atlas Mnemosyne, on
which Warburg worked from 1924 until his death in 1929, was meant to
document the history of a pictorial memory from antiquity up to the
present day and was to include mass media such as postal stamps, photo-
graphs and illustrated newspaper articles. Another member of the War-
burg circle, Erwin Panofsky, wrote on film from an art historical perspec-
tive. However, these auspicious beginnings became marginalised and dis-
rupted after 1933. In some ways, then, visual studies is taking up and
developing older cues from within art history, and it is also helping to re-
integrate these ideas within art historical practice (see Davis).
4. Looking and Spectatorship
Besides including a wide variety of images in his work, Aby Warburg’s

second great intellectual contribution to visual culture studies became his
concept of the ‘pathos formula.’ The pathos formula of an image, around
which Warburg centred his idea of an iconographic cultural historiog-
raphy, is its depiction of psychological states of agitation. More recent
contributions have focused on the affective reactions of beholders in re-
sponse to such a perceived vitality, agency or aura of images. In his land-
mark book The Power of Images, art historian David Freedberg studied the
concrete ways in which images are used as well as the active responses of
beholders of images which, together with held beliefs, motivate specific
actions and behaviours. Freedberg concluded that images are often under-
stood not only as a representation of something else, but as a presence in
their own right, and that this understanding applies across cultures: beliefs
in the supernatural effectiveness of images are not the prerogative of
primitive peoples; they are also held within Western Catholicism, where
statues of the Virgin or of a saint may be washed, anointed and dressed on
certain holidays (see Freedberg 89–91). Moreover, belief in and prayer to
the Virgin are often directed not toward the Virgin as such, but towards a
specific image of the Virgin. The image, in this case, is not understood as
a sign or representation because sign and signified collapse into a single
object.
This means that the visibility of an object needs to be referenced to its
readability, as well as to the pragmatics of its use. Of course, it is well-
known that images cannot only be looked at or perceived, but also
touched, used, painted over or destroyed. This line of research has re-
ceived increasing attention through the study of new media and media art,
of computer games and every kind of interactive image use. Such a prag-
matics of the image is concerned with images as objects, as well as with
images as action, event or experience, as creation, configuration or as a
deconstruction of identity (and of alterity). At the same time, this ap-
proach stresses that logical differentiations between image and medium
rely on a concept of perception that recognises the role played by imagina-
tion and memory, and that makes reference to a wide range of practices of
image production. Such an approach insists that all meaning-making pro-

cesses relating to images must take account of these dimensions.
Visual culture, then, is concerned with visual practices, not still imag-
es, and the exchanges between images and their viewers are understood as
interactive and dynamic. In order to describe different ways of responding
to images, visual studies has adapted a number of terms from other disci-
plines. From reception theory, it has borrowed the distinction between the
ideal viewer of an image imagined by its creator, and the ways in which
actual viewers respond to an image (which may include reading the im-
age’s title and other written information provided by a museum, listening
to an audio-tour, but also briefly glancing at an image while hurrying to
see something else or even turning away, as well as more drastic responses
such as damaging, attacking or destroying images). Another central con-
cept for studying practices of looking is that of the spectator, which
comes from psychoanalytic film theory. The spectator is neither an ideal
viewer nor an actual one, but an embodied viewing position that circum-
scribes specific aspects of identity as well as ideological constraints, for
instance the male spectator of an action film. The actual viewer of a film
can then take up this spectatorship position irrespective of whether s/he
is a man or a woman. The concept of spectatorship stresses that what is
purportedly seen is actually dictated by an entire set of beliefs and ideolo-
gies.
One such ideology from within Western art that has been critiqued
extensively in visual culture is that of central perspective. Contributions
have highlighted that far from being a ‘natural’ or ‘objective’ way of seeing
things, central perspective is actually a highly artificial system of represen-
tation which maps three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional pa-
per or canvas according to a set of calculations based on the assumption
of a ‘visual pyramid.’ Although the basis for perspectival construction is
partly scientific, that science is itself predicated on a specific, culturally and
historically contingent understanding of space (as rationally ordered), of
the perceiving subject (as monocular, static, and in mastery of that which
it sees), and also of the physiology of vision (as a rational faculty dissociat-
ed from the other senses). In his treatise Della pittura (1435), the earliest
text on perspective in painting, Leon Battista Alberti combined the theory
of the visual pyramid, which had been developed by Arabic mathemati-
cians, with the Platonic notion of similitude. In practice, moreover, artists
blended theoretical assumptions about the nature of seeing with existing
practices. Especially when depicting the human figure, perspectival con-
struction was rarely rigorously applied (see Mirzoeff 26 ff.).
Seeing under the regime of what Martin Jay has called “Cartesian per-
spectivalism” came to be identified with the power structures of an ocu-
larcentric society where visual techniques of observation take precedence

over methods of determent and ubiquitous surveillance inscribes itself
into the individual’s methods of self-control (Jay 5–7). An important
model for the visual controlling and disciplining of modern subjects which
is drawn on extensively in visual studies is Michel Foucault’s concept of
panopticism. First proposed as a means of prison reform by Jeremy Ben-
tham in 1791, the panopticon is a blueprint for modern prison architec-
ture in which a circular arrangement of prisoners’ cells faces a central
observation tower. The prisoners are perfectly visible to the observer(s) in
the tower—Bentham suggested glass walls to achieve this purpose, but it
was quickly pointed out that these would provide an ideal escape route.
Thus no panopticon in the strict sense was ever built, although many
nineteenth-century institutions followed the model to some extent. The
prisoners, however, cannot see who is watching them, or even whether
there is actually a guard in the panopticon or not. In the absence of an
actual exchange of glances, it becomes the architectural structure itself
which serves to police prisoners and which induces them to self-police.
The concept of panopticism therefore stresses the central role of vision in
creating, controlling and disciplining modern subjects. Another example
for this would be the use of photography (in passports and government
records) to catalogue, survey and control entire populations. But it is not
only the explicit use of photographic images for government purposes
that has been studied within the model of panopticism. Many visual cul-
ture scholars also emphasise that every kind of looking at any kind of im-
age always takes place within a power dynamic between the image and its
spectators, between different images and between different spectators.
The study of practices of looking thus reaches out from analysing images
to include the practical, contextual and intersubjective dimension of visual
culture as well as the constructive nature of looking.
Seeing always takes place within a context of other people and other
objects. In the museum example alluded to above, the visitor is surround-
ed not only by a plenitude of artwork all scurrying for his attention, but
there may be other visitors in the room, some looking at artwork, while
some are also stealing glances at each other. Moreover, there is the guard
who is looking at the visitors to ascertain that they are not coming too
close to the exhibits. In some museums, the guard may have been re-
placed with a surveillance camera. Furthermore, looking is not the only
sensual activity each of these people is involved in, as some visitors are
also talking to each other, while others will be overhearing these conversa-
tions and the guard (if it is a human one) may be talking into a radio or
chatting with his colleague in the next room across the doorway. There
will be smells, and some objects—while visitors are not actually supposed
to come near them—may be tempting one to imagine what touching them

would feel like. Vision and sight, then, are sensorially integrated and em-
bodied. The specific forms of sensory integration have been shown to
vary from culture to culture, and the Western five-sense model is neither
natural nor a norm.
Thus, the assumptions of ‘ocularcentrism’ are false because vision
never occurs in isolation from the other senses. Moreover, vision is not
necessarily more closely connected to the rational mind than the other
senses, as has been assumed in the Western model: it can also be linked to
sexuality, to witchcraft and to the ‘evil eye.’ The idea of vision as integrat-
ed with other senses, which was first expressed by the French philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has led to a ‘phenomenological’ or ‘sensory turn’
within visual studies. This is in tune with developments in the sciences,
since studies in neurophysiology, specifically in situated cognition theory,
have also been working towards a redrawing of the boundaries between
people and things, vision and other senses. Once more, these findings
hark back to positions first articulated in the 1920s and 1930s, when Wal-
ter Benjamin wrote about the Zerstreuung or ‘dispersion’ experienced by
early visitors to the cinema as a ‘haptic’ dimension of film perception.
One of the central tenets of visual studies, then, is that the act of look-
ing is profoundly impure. ‘Seeing’ very much entails other modes of
sense-based perception such as listening, touching, feeling, tasting or
smelling. Various modes of seeing can, moreover, be observed within lit-
erary texts or in music, dreams, memory or all kinds of bodily experiences
like dance, pain, sexuality, etc., so that there cannot be any such thing as a
clearly defined realm called ‘visuality.’ Furthermore, seeing is nothing nat-
ural: it is rooted in cultural practices and codes as well as in sexuality, de-
sire and the unconscious (see Elkins, The Object Stares Back); it is closely
bound up with blindness and the invisible; it is predicated on culturally
and historically specific technologies (see Crary); and it does not take place
in isolation, either from other subjects or from other (non-visual) senses.
In this model, the spectator is no longer supreme subject and master of
that which s/he sees, nor is the object a passive recipient of that gaze. Be-
sides receiving crucial input from the object side, the spectator is also al-
ways already influenced by the vision of other subjects: we are ourselves
situated in the field of vision.
5. Word and Image
One of the most-repeated dogmas of visual culture is the credo that there
is no ‘pure’ visuality because images are always already invaded by lan-
guage, and “all media are mixed media” (Mitchell, Picture Theory 5 et pas-
sim). However, visual culture theorists hold widely divergent opinions on
what consequences this has for the study of images. Does it simply mean
that images are always accompanied by writing of some sort, or does the
image itself have a discursive as well as a phenomenal side? The latter
would entail the possibility of reading the image as text with the help of
methodologies originally developed within literary theory such as semiot-
ics and narratology. Many innovative impulses in this area have come
from scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell or Mieke Bal who originally
trained as literary scholars and subsequently turned their attention to the
ways in which words and images interact in intermedial artworks, but also
to how literary methodologies, for instance semiotics, poetics and narra-
tology, can contribute to understanding images. In his second book Picture
Theory, Mitchell came up with a system of terminology to describe three
basic possibilities for word and image relations. According to Mitchell’s
innovative usage, the “imagetext” is any kind of composite or synthetic
work that combines image and text; the hyphenated form “image-text”
refers to the relations of the visual and the verbal more generally; and the
slashed “image/text” describes a “problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in
representation” (Picture Theory 89). In keeping with his “mixed media” the-
ory, Mitchell then goes on to argue that any kind of text is always already
an imagetext since writing in its graphic form is itself an inseparable sutur-
ing of the visual and the verbal, and thus “‘pure’ texts incorporate visuality
quite literally the moment they are written or printed in visual form” (ibid.
95).
Likewise, Mieke Bal stresses that visual and verbal forms of represen-
tation always invade and inform each other (see Bal 19). However, while
Mitchell insists that there are nonetheless crucial differences at the level of
sign-types, forms, materials of representation, and institutional traditions
(see Mitchell, Picture Theory 161), Bal draws the opposite conclusion and
studies images as texts with the help of narratology and semiotics. Indeed,
semiotics as it was first conceived by the American philosopher Charles
Sanders Peirce had been intended as a medium-neutral methodology and
it remains more suitable to the study of images than the linguistic sign
theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Moreover, Peirce had included many
examples that were not originally intended as signs (such as a footprint or
the hole left by a gun bullet). Nonetheless, the possibility of studying visu-
al images with the help of semiotics remains deeply contested within visu-
al culture studies. A major problem with semiotic readings of images is
that it is difficult if not impossible to state with any degree of certainty
what in an image counts as a sign. Is it the entire image? The individual
objects depicted in it? Its constituent parts such as brushstrokes or pixels?
While the semiotic study of natural languages is based on the assumption

that one word equals one sign, no such easy sectioning of the image is
possible. Even the idea that a picture could be divided into a number of
signs has been called reductive of the complexity, strangeness and mute-
ness of the image (see Elkins, On Pictures).
While the possibility of reading images as texts thus remains contest-
ed, the last twenty years have seen the emergence of a good deal of im-
portant work on bi- and multi-medial artifacts. This ranges from the work
centred around the International Association for Word and Image Studies
(IAWIS) to the publication of edited collections and special issues of
journals devoted to the role of textual illustrations, to multi-media and
installation art or to photography in fiction, to name but a few examples.
6. Visuality as a Travelling Concept: Current Problems and Debates
In her response to the October survey, Susan Buck-Morss identified a lim-

ited number of standard themes on visual studies syllabi: “the reproduc-
tion of the image, the society of the spectacle, envisioning the Other,
scopic regimes, the simulacrum, the fetish, the (male) gaze, the machine
eye” (Buck-Morss, in Alpers et al. 29). These concepts stand in for the
work of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, Martin Jay, Jean
Baudrillard, Sigmund Freud, Laura Mulvey and Donna Haraway, respec-
tively. In 2002, six years after Buck-Morss, James Elkins named Barthes,
Benjamin, Foucault and Lacan as the core canon of visual studies and crit-
icised the current practice of visual culture as boring and predictable. In-
stead, Elkins proposed a more ‘skeptical’ practice of visual culture that
shies away from too easy, pat analyses, that questions its underlying as-
sumptions, that draws on a wider range of theories and that refers to a
larger variety of images, including scientific and non-Western ones (see
Elkins, Visual Studies). Looking at the body of visual studies work pub-
lished in the last couple of years, it would appear that Elkins’ criticism has
been heeded: the landscape of visual culture studies has diversified con-
siderably. Anthropological and historical studies have argued that many
assumptions about vision and the five senses are culturally and historically
specific to Western modernity and have developed alternative models for
studying perception in earlier periods and faraway cultures (see Edwards
and Bhaumik). This does not mean that the basic assumptions of visual
studies are mistaken or that vision is not a social construction, but that the
rules for that construction are culturally and historically contingent, as had
always been claimed by visual studies. Moreover, the study of visual cul-
ture in anthropology has shown that concepts of the museum, for in-
stance, derive exclusively from Western museums and may not work in a
South Asian setting.
Much recent work in visual studies has focused not on visual culture
per se but on the specificity and historicity of national and regional visual
cultures, for instance American (see Holloway and Beck), Spanish (see
Smith) or Russian visual culture (see Kivelson and Neuberger), but also
the visual culture of specific historical periods, for example the nineteenth
century (see Schwartz and Przyblyski). This means not only that the object
domain of visual culture has widened considerably, turning away from a
primary concern with postmodern and technical images which character-
ised early work in the field, but it also points towards a growing re-
integration of visual studies within art historical practice. The basic ques-
tion underlying this period of the field’s development, then, is no longer
‘is culture visual?’ but ‘how visual is a given culture?’ or ‘what is the visual
culture of a certain region/country/period like?’.
Besides the study of the cultural and historical conditions under which
vision takes place, a second major strand of visual culture studies is con-
cerned with the political dimensions of contemporary visuality and the
moral and ethical dimensions of spectatorship. In a more broadly political
discussion, the question arises as to whether and in what way it is possible
to look in ways that cannot be co-opted by the media and by forces of
global consumer culture. Other visual culture scholars with an interest in
media—as well as media scholars with an interest in visual culture—are
studying the changes that images have undergone in what has been called
a post-photographic era (although it has been pointed out that the advent
of digital photography, far from being the death of photography, has
meant that more photographs are being taken today than ever before). In
postcolonial studies, another interdisciplinary field that has been fruitfully
combined with visual culture, scholars are studying how contemporary
African artists are reclaiming pre-colonial visual traditions in their work in
order to criticise Western hegemony. At the end of this list, which is far
from exhaustive, let me briefly mention the exciting work on scientific and
medical imaging practices, both contemporary as well as in older historical
periods—an area with the potential to bridge the growing gap between the
sciences and humanities.
Some of the changes that have taken place within visual culture, as
well as the concentric travel of that concept, can be gleaned from the ways
in which the two dominant textbooks in the field have been changed from
their first editions ten years ago to the second editions which came out in
2009 (Mirzoeff; Sturken and Cartwright). Both books have become thick-
er (Mirzoeff) or larger in format (Sturken and Cartwright), glossier, and
now include a greater number of more colourful illustrations. Clearly, pub-
lishers are recognising that there is now a huge market for introductions
to visual culture. Another interesting change in Mirzoeff’s introduction is
that the book has been rearranged according to a historical timeline (al-
though the topics addressed are still, by and large, the same as in the first
edition). This, as well as the addition of a number of close readings of im-
ages that play an important role in art history as well as in visual studies
(e.g. Holbein’s The Ambassadors or Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a
Drowned Man), further serves to illustrate the rapprochement between vis-
ual studies and art history and the reintegration of the two fields. The
concept of the visual or pictorial turn has similarly been historicised when
W. J. T. Mitchell, in a seminal article published in 2002, argued that there
existed not one but many iconic turns: “The visual or pictorial turn is a
recurrent trope that displaces moral and political panic onto images and
so-called visual media” (“Showing Seeing” 170).
While visual culture has been an interdisciplinary project from the
start, the new developments in the field are thus causing it to travel in
even more directions than ever before. As is often the case with new fields
of research, we are at present seeing a considerable diversification of the
field, which may or may not be followed by a period of greater disciplinary
consolidation.
References
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Chicago P, 1983.
Alpers, Svetlana, et al. “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77 (1996): 25–70.
Bal, Mieke. Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 1991.
Balázs, Béla. Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films. 1924. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-
kamp, 2001.
Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Histo-
ry of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936.
Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken,
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Carlyle, Thomas. The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle:
On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. 1841. Ed. Michael K. Goldberg.
Berkeley/Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Centu-
ry. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1990.
Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton UP,
2011.
Dikovitskaya, Margaret. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn.
Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2005.
Edwards, Elizabeth, and Kaushik Bhaumik, eds. Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader. Ox-
ford: Berg, 2008.
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego: Harcourt Brace,
1996.
—. On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
—. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York/London: Routledge, 2003.
Foster, Hal, ed. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane, 1977.
Freedberg, David. The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chica-
go: U of Chicago P, 1989.
Holloway, David, and John Beck, eds. American Visual Cultures. London/New York:
Continuum, 2005.
Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster. Seat-
tle: Bay Press, 1988. 3–23.
Kivelson, Valerie A., and John Neuberger, eds. Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual
Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP, 2008.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London:
Routledge, 1958.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. 1999. London/New York:
Routledge, 2009.
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—. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 1.2 (2002):
165–81.
Schwartz, Vanessa R., and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds. The Nineteenth-Century Visual
Culture Reader. New York/London: Routledge, 2004.
Smith, Paul Julian. Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet. Manchester: Man-
chester UP, 2006.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Cul-
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Warnke. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000.
Space and Cultural Geography
STEPHAN GÜNZEL
Space, originally a physical concept, has been undergoing variations since
the beginnings of science. However, even in its earliest stages the concept
was already travelling across disciplines since it was understood not only
physically, but also metaphysically, even mythologically, and mathematical-
ly, in particular geometrically. This understanding of space finally gave rise
to a non-materialistic and even non-extensional conception of space as the
structure of relations (of spatial objects), known as topology. It was espe-
cially this abstraction that allowed for a multiplication of spatial concepts,
and that gave rise to a further travelling of the concept through the fields
of physiology and aesthetics. This development, which took about 2,500
years, in nuce was repeated by cultural geography, which moved from a
materialistic and deterministic view of (physical) space to an immaterial
and possibilistic view of (cultural) space from the late nineteenth to the
early twenty-first century. The pivot for this move was Henri Lefebvre’s
trialectic of space as it was developed in his 1974 book Le production de
l’espace. Yet it was not until the year of his death in 1991, when the book
was translated into English, that it was received as a contribution to cul-
tural geography.
1. History and Development of the Concept of Space
The general history of the physical and likewise mathematical concept of

space can be divided into two epochs: the Aristotelian period and the
Newtonian period. A third epoch, which is a consequence of Einstein’s
critical rethinking of Newton’s spatiality, can be located at the early twen-
tieth century and relativistic spacetime theory. The dominant spatial con-
cept in antiquity was that of ‘place’ (Greek topos). Within his epistemology,
the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) classified ‘place’ first of all
as a linguistic category by which anything can be described according to
where it is. In his Physics, he subsequently defined place as the border sur-
rounding any material object; in itself, a ‘place’ has no extension and is
308 Stephan Günzel
invariable. According to Aristotle, it is the pure modality of a thing’s be-

ing, therefore it is not the place that can be moved, but only things that
can change their place. Aristotle tried to use this concept to solve a prob-
lem that had been posed by Zeno of Elea (c. 495–445 BC), who argued
that trying to describe the physical traversal of a given distance (which is
the literal meaning of the later Latin expression spatium) leads to certain
paradoxes, in particular that the infinite number of points to which any
distance can be reduced in geometrical respect makes it logically impossi-
ble to traverse all single ‘points’ (for their number is infinite). In turn,
Aristotle tried to emphasise the physical concept of ‘becoming’ as a
change (of place) and to separate the concept of ‘place’ from its pure
geometrical definition.
Nevertheless, Aristotle’s concept also raised theoretical problems: if
place was the location of things, where then is a certain place itself locat-
ed? This problem had already been discussed before Aristotle, namely by
his teacher Plato (427–347 BC), who argued that there has to be some-
thing which ‘gives place’ to any possible being (including locations). Plato
called this the chora. He defined it as an instance that is in-between the
realm of eternal ideas and the world of becoming. The concept of chora
can be interpreted as a forerunner of the Newtonian concept of ‘absolute
space’ insofar as it is conceived as the horizon or context of any possible
existence in the physical world. Nonetheless, Plato’s concept had less im-
pact on ancient physics or medieval ontology where the Aristotelian view
prevailed. The reason for this was Aristotle’s cosmology that, as the back-
ground to his physics, called for a ‘first mover’ located at the edge of the
outermost sphere—which in the Christian interpretation was identified
with God—who was the cause of any physical process in the world. Aris-
totelian physics and its cosmological framework are nevertheless typical of
ancient Greek philosophy insofar as scientific reflection always began with
the question of an origin (arche) or what being is in total.
In trying to answer the general questions of philosophy, pre-Socratic
philosophers evoked a certain concept of space or spatiality. The first one
to do so was Hesiod (c. 700 BC), who defined the origin as an opening or
abyss (chaos), thereby anticipating Plato’s concept of chora. Anaximander
(c. 610–c. 546 BC) defined the totality of being as something that is with-
out a border (a-peiron) in the temporal as well as the spatial sense. In the
same respect, Parmenides (early to mid-fifth century BC) conceived of
totality as a spherical entity outside of which nothing exists. Like Aristotle,
many ancient theorists of space agreed on the idea that within the (finite)
world everything is of matter or substance and that nothing like a void
exists. Exceptions can be found in the Atomistic concepts of theorists
such as Leucippus (late fifth century BC) and Democritus (c. 460–c. 370
Space and Cultural Geography 309
BC), who argued that there is a void in between atoms in order for them
to be moveable.
The fundamental change within the conceptualisation of space pre-
supposed a turning away from the cosmology of a finite universe, especial-
ly as it was promoted by Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), who adopted the
Aristotelian worldview. Against this view, theologians such as Giordano
Bruno (1548–1600) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) proposed the idea of
the cosmos as something infinite, or of the universe as an infinite number
of universes respectively. The perspective on the cosmos that put the
Earth at its very centre became only one possibility amongst others. Espe-
cially in early Italian Renaissance philosophy, this ‘cosmological turn’ was
of great impact: it corresponded to a new and even modern ontology of
the world as something that can only be perceived or described from a
certain ‘standpoint.’ Likewise, the technique of linear perspective painting
became established as an appropriate form of pictorial representation in
which a certain point of view on the world was accepted as sufficient.
The decentralisation of the Earth as it was implied by Nicolaus Co-
pernicus (1473–1543) can thus be considered to be a consequence of this
new perspectival and optical theory of representation. Although Coperni-
cus still denied the existence of empty space, he nevertheless envisaged
the possibility of a viewpoint from which the planets’ movements could
be described. However, the final impulses for a new concept of physical
space came from a theological as well as an experimental side. Already
before Copernicus, the Jewish Philosopher Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410)
had argued that the Aristotelian concept of ‘space as place’ is inconsistent
because a reduction of ‘space,’ which is seen to be quantitatively identical
to the surface of an object, could lead to an increase of the object’s place
(e.g. taking away a piece from a spherical object increases the outline of
that body). With this, Crescas did not in fact so much prove Aristotle’s
concept of space as the sum of places to be wrong, but rather his critique
showed that the epistemological basis for ancient physics had begun to
vanish: The new understanding of space to come about was that of vol-
ume as the (geometrical) product of a three dimensional extension.
In order for volume as the definition of space to be accepted, first of
all the existence of empty space had to be proven. This was done by Otto
von Guericke (1602–86) who, in the seventeenth century, developed an air
pump and demonstrated the power of a vacuum in his hemispherical ex-
periments. Guericke’s demonstration enabled the advancement of the
Newtonian worldview, which rested primarily on the acceptance of space
as void and stood in strong opposition to the dominant theory of matter
in the baroque, which was still committed to Aristotelian ontology. In par-
ticular, René Descartes’s (1569–1650) theory of physical space as plenum
310 Stephan Günzel
gave strong backing to this substantialism since he defined the external

world as continuous and of a material character (res extensa).
Against the Aristotelian-Cartesian heritage, Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
finally established a new understanding of physical space. Newton was
trained in the neo-Platonic tradition of Cambridge where his teacher,
Henry More (1614–1687), introduced him to the Cabbalistic concept of
space as makom. This expression can stand for the divine being, but as a
concept it first of all means ‘indivisibility,’ which became the core concept
for the notion of absolute space. According to Newton, space in total
cannot be divided; it is not the sum of all (relative) spaces but is spatiality
as such. This new concept finally overthrew the whole Aristotelian physics
in which the universe was finite and spatiality was bound to both the lo-
cality of an object as well as to its substance. From here, the Platonic con-
cept of chora can be interpreted as a forerunner of Newton’s concept of
absolute space, which now included Cusanus’ and Bruno’s idea of the in-
finity of the universe, as well as the Copernican worldview. But in contrast
to, or in consequence of, Copernicus, the Earth’s movement for Newton
was not only relative to the sun, but any position of any planet was relative
to any other.
For Newton, the universe had no centre, and it also had no end. What
Newton called absolute space has to be considered as a matrix: it is the
totality of all measurable relations between objects. This meant there was
no ‘place’ in this universe any more for a divine creator as the cause of all
movement within it. Instead, Newton supposed matter (as mass) itself to
be the cause of movement by means of attraction. Newton’s concept was
heavily discussed and in particular he was accused of promoting an atheis-
tic philosophy, i.e. physics. Anticipating that charge, Newton wrote in
some of the printed copies of his Opticks that space is the organ with
which God ‘perceives’ the world (sensorium dei), stating that he nevertheless
believed God existed.
It was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) who, in a dispute with
the Newtonian Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), argued that such a concept is
not only atheistic, but is first and foremost false. In contrast to Aristotle,
who implied location was the definition of space, Leibniz argued that it is
not the topos in itself, but the relations between topoi that define space.
In doing so, Leibniz became a forerunner of a topological concept of spa-
tiality which was further developed by Leonhard Euler (1707–83) in the
eighteenth, Johann Benedict Listing (1808–82) in the nineteenth and Jules
Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) in the twentieth century, respectively. A
topological description of space (Leibniz called it analysis situs) is less inter-
ested in physics or in the motion of matter, but rather in a transformation
of Euclidian geometry into non-graphic algebra and the processing of ge-
ometry purely by calculation. This was the main reason why the dispute
between Leibniz and Clarke could not be solved in either of the two fields
(geometry or physics), but only on a different stage of reflection.
A solution to the dispute between physics and mathematics was de-
veloped by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who stated that the definition of
space as an extension measurable in three dimensions is the very—and
only—condition of any perception by the external senses. In contrast to
time, which rests upon the inner condition of (memorable) succession,
space (extension) is something that underlies any possible appearance (‘in
space’). However, the Kantian concept of space did not (yet) imply the
understanding of space as dependent on individual perception; rather, he
talks about an imaginable space, a space that can be (geometrically) con-
structed independently from any given situation. Therefore, Kant does not
talk about the construction of space by individual cognition, but about the
general constructibility of objects and the relations between them. In con-
trast to Leibniz’s approach, which considered the construction as prior to
its spatial appearance, Kant conceived of spatiality as something prior to
even the topological (re)construction of it.
It was not until the nineteenth century that Kant’s concept of space
was transformed into the concept of subjectivity as it is widely understood
today. Subjectivity in the post-Kantian sense rests upon a physiological
understanding of perception that implies spatiality is subject to the condi-
tion of each species or even of each individual. Especially in the psycho-
physics and physiology of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) and
Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94), space was qualified as variable according
to different impressions and, therefore, became a question of experience
in the strong sense. It was at that time that non-Euclidian geometers tried
to find an alternative basis for geometry that avoided the parallel-axiom.
In psychophysics, the new geometrical approach created a stronghold for
the idea that space does not necessarily have to be defined as an extensive
realm in which each place can be located sufficiently by three coordinates.
For what is missing is a parameter for describing space as something that
can also appear as curved, as is the case in individual perception. Even if
the Cartesian system of coordinates enables a description of all locations
in respect to a ‘point zero,’ none of the three values depicts the qualitative
form of space, either in perception (where the field of vision is curved in
relation to the viewer) or in geodetics (where the surface of the Earth is
measured as curved).
Non-Euclidian geometry and modern topological approaches began
to cause a rethinking of physical space, which until then had been bound
to Newton’s concept of space as homogeneous and as an entity separated
from time. Arguing against the latter, Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909)
312 Stephan Günzel
contended that time and space cannot be seen as different entities but are
two aspects of the same physical ‘event.’ Just as time has extension, space
is of a certain age. Minkowski’s student Albert Einstein (1879–1955) then
went on to develop a relativistic theory of space in which he claimed that
Newton’s difference of absolute and relative space fostered an image of
space as a ‘container.’ Einstein’s argument was that the movement of a
physical body described on the level of absolute space does imply a
movement of the relative spaces themselves. Thus, Einstein wanted to
look on (absolute) space as being relative not to ‘another space,’ but to
matter, whose property of spacetime is determined by the electromagnetic
field. In consequence, on the one hand, Einstein transforms the Newtoni-
an notion of space by claiming absolute space itself to be relative. On the
other, earlier concepts that have been overtaken by physics are re-
established: for example, as Einstein himself pointed out, Descartes’s idea
of space as a continuous plenum returns in the concept of a field. By look-
ing upon space as being of a certain age, it can therefore no longer be in-
finite because it has been expanding since the big bang and has been
transformed during its temporal development. In recent cosmology, espe-
cially in string theory, space is not only conceived of as interwoven with
time, but spacetime possesses at least ten different spatial dimensions.
Arguing against physical notions, as well as in consequence to the dis-
putes between physical and mathematical concepts, phenomenologists
such as Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his successor Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976) in Germany and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and his col-
league Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) in France emphasised the
grounding of spatiality in the bodily experience. On the one hand, this
type of ‘subjectivism’ was a result of the psychophysiological concept of
space but, on the other hand, it was also a counterproposal: a description
of spatial structures should not be given according to a mechanical expla-
nation of the body’s function, but from within the lived experience itself.
In any case, the phenomenological notion of space still rested upon the
idea of a ‘point zero’ inherent to the subject from which the dimensions
arose. Like Euclidian geometry, their number is seen as given, as can be
seen in the work of the mathematician Oskar Becker (1889–1964), a pupil
of Husserl, who, in his doctoral thesis Beiträge zur phänomenologischen Begrün-
dung der Geometrie und ihrer physikalischen Anwendungen (Contributions Toward a
Phenomenological Foundation of Geometry and Its Physical Applications) of 1923,
tried to deduce the three-dimensionality of space from the field of percep-
tion.
In contrast to scientific and also philosophical concepts of space, the
notion of cultural or anthropological space as it can be found throughout
the twentieth century does not seek a definition of the origin, the essence
or the true concept of space, and instead inquires into spatial practices as
well as into the production of spatiality. An important figure in the mod-
ern cultural discourse on space is Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) who claimed
that in an anthropological sense, it is less useful to think about space as
such than to look upon different structures that constitute cultural and
aesthetic spaces throughout history. His claim directly influenced the art
historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), who analysed the system of central
perspective in pictorial presentation as a symbolic form that constituted
the idea of a homogenous space the first place in both painting as well as
architecture. Furthermore, Cassirer influenced the anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who analysed archaic cultures by looking at the
way they structured their material world, for example settlements, housing
and craftwork, with respect to the structure of the intelligible world, i.e. a
specific myth or the given rules for marriage. The cultural approach to
space in cultural theory was renewed by Michel Foucault (1926–84), who
not only applied the structuralist description of spatiality to different his-
torical forms of space, but also to scientific concepts of space, stating that
they belong to the same discourse or paradigm.
2. Space in Cultural Geography
At first, space was only an implicit concept in cultural geography, i.e. it

appeared under a different focus, which was that of climate. One of the
first geographers to deal with space was in fact a medic: Hippocrates of
Cos (c. 460–c. 370 BC). In his writing On Airs, Waters and Places, he de-
scribed the best places for healthy living in accordance with climatic fac-
tors. In general, this led to the notion of the centre as the best place with
respect to health. Even though this notion could be applied to any geog-
raphy, Hippocrates related it to the situation of Greece. He identified Eu-
rope in the north and west as a cold, wet and thus unhealthy place to live,
just as parts of Asia and Africa in the south and east were too hot and dry.
Greece, on the other hand, was considered to be the best place to live as it
offered a mild climate. After Hippocrates, Aristotle not only took up this
geographical model, but also transferred it to the field of ethics, where the
mean point between two extremes (for example, courageous action as the
midpoint between fear and overconfidence) was now considered the true
way of acting. Thus, already in antiquity, the geographical concept of
space (or place) travelled from medicine (and cosmology) via ethics into
politics, as Aristotle began to evaluate types of governance according to
the theory of the middle (to him, democracy was an extreme, just as tyr-
anny was, so that aristocracy was considered the best course).
314 Stephan Günzel
In the seventeenth century, Hippocrates’s climate model or geograph-

ical template of ‘good space’ was well received in theories of natural law.
Montesquieu (1689–1755), in his 1748 The Spirit of the Laws, used climatic
extremes as an argument for explaining differences not only in moral but
also in legal systems. The death penalty in a ‘hot country’ seemed to him
to be justified since natural drives cannot be controlled by the mind due to
the temperature, and also because of the temperament of the respective
peoples. From here the spatial concept of climate-bound cultures con-
joined with the discourse of race and travelled again—this time from the
legal sphere into that of race theory. Due to the dialectic of the enlight-
enment, this was not initially ‘racist,’ but was used by Immanuel Kant, for
example, in his writings on the differences between races to argue that the
genetic differences (which match the climatic differences) mean all people
are humans. In his volumes on Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity,
published between 1784 and 1791, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)
also argued, with explicit reference to Hippocrates and Montesquieu, that
each culture has its own position in the ‘middle’ because it has an original
culture bound to the place where that culture happens to be located.
Nevertheless, it was precisely the enmeshment of culture and climate,
or race and space, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that
dialectically turned into an argument for the superiority of certain races.
A precursor to this thinking as regards spatiality was the geographer
Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). In his Anthropogeography of 1882 he estab-
lished a new discipline that, whilst distancing itself from physical geogra-
phy, at the same time adopted its very concept of space, namely of place
determining culture. In the 1901 essay “Lebensraum,” Ratzel then used
Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) biological concept of ‘living space’ to natu-
ralise the human sphere for the sake of a ‘scientific’ geography. Finally, in
his Political Geography of 1897, Ratzel introduced his deterministic concept
to the new branch of geopolitics in which borders between territories
were justified (and likewise questioned) according to climatic differences.
The title of Hans Grimm’s (1875–1959) novel A People without Space (Volk
ohne Raum) became the buzzword for a German politics of expansion and
annexation.
A related concept to that of living space as human habitat is that
of the ‘culture circle’ (Kulturkreis)—also known today as ‘culture areas’—
introduced by the anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938) as the main
concept of cultural morphology, an approach he adopted from Oswald
Spengler (1880–1936), who, in further reference to Georg Wilhelm Frie-
drich Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophy of history and Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s (1749–1832) morphology of plants, looked at cultures as
organisms that dwell in a certain place at a certain time and might appear
or vanish. This concept of space echoes the evolutionary approach to

space whilst also varying it: According to Charles Darwin (1809–1882),
evolution takes place when due to spatial separation, variations of existing
forms can survive. Morphologists, however, remain in line with Jean-
Baptiste Lamarck’s (1744–1829) idea of an inheritance of acquired charac-
teristics, as they believe in a teleological principle inherent to an organism,
regardless of its location.
Ratzel’s deterministic view of (geographical) space was already cri-
ticised early on. The main critique came from the French historian and
geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), who espoused a possibil-
istic view of space, for example in his last work, the Principles of Human
Geography of 1918, in which peoples or cultures are seen as agents that
transform space according to their needs. Just as the aggressive realisation
of Ratzel’s concept of space was coming to an end, the French historian
Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) wrote his three-volume masterpiece on The
Mediterranean, which was published in 1949, while he was a prisoner of war
in a German camp. In the epilogue he explained his position as that of a
‘moderate determinist.’ As a historian, he tried to account for the influ-
ence of geographical factors on history. In his 1958 article on History and
Social Science in the journal Annales, in which he tried to explain the ap-
proach of the new group of historians using this method, he then differ-
entiated two main types of history (longue durée). However, the problematic
aspect of his conception is that whilst Braudel sees the level of events as
being the realm of (political) possibility, the level of social history is just as
determined as the level of nature. This becomes even more obvious when
comparing the two texts: Whilst the three volumes focus on the three lev-
els of the natural, social and political history of the region in question, the
article mixes natural and social history.
Yet even pure possibilism can give rise to an extreme political concept
of space, as can be found, for example, in Carl Schmitt’s (1888–1985)
concept of law as nomos. He translated this from the Greek with the ho-
mophonic neologism Nahme, whose pronunciation is close to that of the
German Name (‘name’), but implies a taking, particularly a taking of land,
as in Landnahme. Schmitt’s concept even goes beyond geopolitical claims
when he states that all land first of all has to be ‘taken’ by culture or that
culture per se is the occupation of space. Indeed, Immanuel Kant had al-
ready used this figure in his 1797 Metaphysics of Morals, where he writes that
the concept of ‘free land’ logically implies occupation or possession, since
only that which belongs to someone can be offered or given away.
The most important step in cultural geography, one which shaped its
actual appearance, was taken when the heretofore implicit notion of space
was made explicit. This happened in postmodernism as it was understood
316 Stephan Günzel
by Anglo-Saxon neo-Marxists. David Harvey (*1935), in The Condition of

Postmodernity of 1989, used the category or frame of space (as well as that
of time) to rethink culture from a critical and non-deterministic point of
view. He was able to draw on a tradition of geographers such as Yi-Fu
Tuan (*1930), Anne Buttimer (*1938), Edward Relph (*1944) and David
Seamon (*1948), who were influenced by the concept of space as a matter
of lived experience as it was put forward by phenomenology. But Harvey
mainly drew on the modern concept of space as ‘spacetime’ as it was de-
veloped by Minkowski and Einstein. This notion not only included the
coupling of time and space, but it also implied that space can be trans-
formed in time and that space is dependent on time. Harvey—in a possi-
bilistic manner—now described how, on the one hand, space was
shrinking in respect to the time that it takes to cover a certain distance,
whilst on the other hand, the space of possible experience was widening.
This analysis was used by the Swiss human geographer Benno Werlen
(*1952) to argue that the concept of a substantial, invariant and determin-
ing space belongs to a certain historical ‘lifeworld’ (the premodern), just as
the functional, variant and possibilistic concept of space does (to the
modern). From here, the postmodern condition, as Harvey describes it,
can be addressed as the age in which one has the option to live in either
the premodern or the modern. Furthermore, the critique of culture has to
focus on spatial issues and should thus be the task of cultural geography.
3. Lefebvre and the Spatial Turn
The ‘godfather’ of Marxist cultural geography is Frederic Jameson. In his

1984 article Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he not
only used the term ‘postmodern’ in a very critical manner, but he also
provided an important analysis of (architectural) space. To him, the Bona-
venture Hotel in Los Angeles, owned by the Westin Group and built by
the architect John Portman between 1974 and 1976, is the spatial form of
postmodernity par excellence. It offers traditional space (an atrium in the
lobby) as well as modern space (glass covered elevators and escalators of-
fering a wide vista) and was used as the setting for various science fiction
movies and television series. But to Jameson, the visitors in the building
cannot be sure of ‘where’ they are, and this spatial situation becomes the
symbol of the present time. Later on, Jameson used the term ‘cultural
turn’ to describe his approach. Yet his critical approach already seems to
be forgotten today, as this turn did not mean that every faculty or disci-
pline from then on had to deal with cultural issues, but rather that (late)
capitalism was using the label ‘culture’ to sell its goods and accumulate
money. The Westin Bonaventure is a space in which the high prices are
legitimated by a cultural experience (in a city that seems to lack any tradi-
tional culture).
It is important to keep this aspect in mind in order to understand
what is meant by the claim of a ‘spatial turn.’ This term has been used in
the subtitle of a book that was published in the same year as David Har-
vey’s volume on postmodernity. It is called Postmodern Geographies and its
author is Edward Soja (*1940). Just like Harvey, Soja called for a new ap-
proach in geography that (re)considered space. In doing so, Soja spoke of
the ‘spatial turn’ that new Marxism had taken with Jameson, but also with
Perry Anderson (*1938) and others. Even though the phrase was used—
almost accidently—only at that one point, it was very successful. In Soja’s
follow-up book, Thirdspace from 1996, the spatial turn was considered to
be an ongoing and crucial debate. Along similar lines to Jameson, the
book particularly focussed on the city where the Bonaventure Hotel is
located. Furthermore, as the subtitle Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-
and-Imagined Places points out, cities are ‘read’ on two levels: one is that of
the real or architectonic space, the other is that of the imaginations at-
tributed to those places, especially in various kinds of media.
In Postmodern Geographies, Soja characterised these places that have to
undergo a double reading as heterotopic, following Michel Foucault, but
they are like this not only because they can bring together different func-
tions or give place to practices not allowed outside. Rather, they are het-
erogeneous because every place is physically and, at the same time, also
already mentally constructed or mediated through narratives, images, etc.
Soja characterises Los Angeles and other places as ‘thirdspace.’ This
phrase does not originally stem from Soja. In fact, the postcolonial scholar
Homi Bhabha (*1949) had used the term before him in an interview as
part of a statement on the rising up of Muslims against Salman Rushdie’s
(*1947) Satanic Verses of 1988. Bhabha tried to point out that Muslim
(sub)culture as it can be found today especially in western cities cannot be
derived from either the western or the eastern culture, or from both of
them as origins, but has to been seen as a new origin—as a third space.
However, the main point of reference for Soja is the French sociolo-
gist and Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) and his book
The Production of Space. That Lefebvre was not mentioned in Soja’s first
book is not a surprise as the original French publication from 1974 not
only got lost in the mass of Lefebvre’s writings, but ‘space’ was not yet
conceived as a category for social critique in this period.
When the book was translated into English in 1991, the situation and
the audience were different ones. Critiques of postmodernism had opened
scholars’ eyes to the productive and encompassing potential of space.
318 Stephan Günzel
Soja, in the introductory chapter of Thirdspace, gave a summary of

Lefebvre’s ‘Trialectic of Space.’ In order to open up Marx’s dialectic of the
interplay between nature and culture (whereby the latter works on the
former), Lefebvre introduced a third term of an already transformed
space. (At which point Bhabha’s and Soja’s understandings of thirdspace
are therefore similar.) Lefebvre called this (third) space a ‘representational
space.’ This formulation still causes some misunderstandings as Lefebvre
talks of the second space as a representation of space at the same time. In
fact, this is the aspect of the (cultural) imagination of a certain place or
‘firstspace.’ To understand the difference between the second and the
third term, one can draw on another triad Lefebvre uses to draw distinc-
tions. Whereas the first (real) space is perceived individually, the second
(imagined) space is constructed or conceptualised—foremost by urban
planning or science in general—, and the third space, or rather the third
view of space (or architecture), is that of living or lived space. Just as in
the sense of the phenomenological ‘lifeworld,’ this aspect implies a collec-
tive subject.
This can be applied to the Bonaventure Hotel: the first space is that of
a visitor who enters the building and is overwhelmed or confused by the
architecture. The second space is that which was constructed by means of
architectural knowledge. The third space is that which is addressed by
Jameson when he speaks of this particular hotel as a symbol for late capi-
talism. It is constructed by architects and experienced by consumers, but
at the same time, to cultural analysis it is, pars pro toto, the meaning of the
system. To finally provide a symbol of the trialectic of space or how rep-
resentational spaces are constituted, Soja refers to Jorge Luis Borges’s
(1899–1986) short story Aleph from 1949, in which an aleph (without say-
ing what it is) is kept in a small place, but everybody who looks at it sees
the whole world in it (the aleph-symbol in topology is used to indicate the
potential of a set).
4. Outlook
Since the spatial turn has affected many other disciplines, cultural geogra-
phy has become a, if not the, central agent in the discussion on space and
the spatiality of culture today. Nevertheless, ambivalence remains as
different disciplines draw on different aspects. The tendency here is that
the more historically orientated a discipline is, the more it tends to a de-
terministic or material view of space; an orientation towards present
phenomena is more likely to have a possibilistic and furthermore a con-
structivistic understanding of space. As such, historians rediscover theo-
ries like Braudel’s longue durée, whereas human geographers focus on the
images of places that are distributed by media as particular constructions
of cultural space. Whereas the latter assume the former are using a deter-
ministic concept of space, the former sometimes accuse the latter of being
too simplistic or even reactionary.
If thought of in terms of the double-sidedness of space as ‘real-and-
imagined,’ the two approaches might be reconciled in the future. Research
which steers a middle path can already be found in epistemological ap-
proaches, for example those carried out by geographers such as Peter
Meusburger (*1942) at the University of Heidelberg, where a large-scale
research project on “Knowledge and Space” is being conducted, or David
Livingstone (*1953) at Queen’s University in Belfast, who does research
on the history of geographical knowledge. This includes firstly the recon-
structions of scientists’ journeys in order to show how, at a certain histori-
cal moment, knowledge was distributed. Secondly, it demonstrates a
turning away of geographers from large-scale and outdoor regions or cities
to small-scale and indoor spaces such as laboratories and other institu-
tions.
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Crang, Mike, and Nigel Thrift, eds. Thinking Space: Critical Geographies. London/New
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Grant, Edward. Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle
Ages to the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge/London: Cambridge UP, 1981.
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From Media Anthropology to Media Ecology
INGO BERENSMEYER
1. Media Anthropology: The ‘Materialities of Communication’
The concept of ‘media anthropology’ does not delineate a well-defined,

monolithic paradigm for the study of literature, culture and media. Rather
than offering a cut-and-dried methodology, media anthropology can be
conceived as a transdisciplinary cluster of research interests and problems
connected with a broad range of anthropological questions of human
sense-making and cultural creativity in relation to (various forms of) me-
dia, including but not limited to so-called mass media. The scope of this
term quickly transcends the boundaries of more traditional ethnographic
studies of mass media in Western and non-Western cultures. (For an un-
derstanding of media anthropology from the disciplinary perspectives of
ethnography, comparative sociology and cultural studies, see Askew and
Wilk; Rothenbuhler and Coman.)
In its current forms, this cluster of interests has its origins in the 1970s
and 1980s, when it developed out of what was then perceived as a large-
scale crisis in the humanities. This crisis was diagnosed especially in mod-
ern languages departments whose fields of study were still predominantly
defined by the European tradition of national philologies (Germanic, Ro-
mance and Slavic languages). The philologies, as nationally oriented
modes of editing and interpreting texts, increasingly came under pressure
from new technological, philosophical and political developments that
challenged scholars to reflect on the material and medial foundations of
their activities and routines, their practices and premises, and to rethink
the study of culture from a media perspective. These developments
ranged from the rise of modern audiovisual media in Western (and in-
creasingly also non-Western) cultures after World War II (film, TV, com-
puters, now also the Internet) to the challenges posed by French and
American versions of poststructuralism to traditional humanistic ideals
and assumptions. In the process, hermeneutics—the (philosophically em-
bedded and supported) art of interpreting texts, which had been particu-
322 Ingo Berensmeyer
larly successful in Germany after World War II—lost its universal appeal
as a guiding transdisciplinary methodology and philosophical ideal of
scholarship. While not entirely abolishing their interest in hermeneutics as
a method for interpreting texts and other artefacts, scholars paid increas-
ing attention to the media foundations of human sense-making and expe-
rience, the ‘materialities’ undergirding processes of communication and
interpretation (see Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer).
As a travelling concept that crosses several disciplinary boundaries,
media anthropology in this sense combines hermeneutic and ‘materialist’
elements, bringing the study of sense-making into contact with the study
of communications media. It has proved fruitful as a fusion of horizons
between predominantly French, German and American traditions in the
study of culture. The heterogeneity of these traditions, however, also
makes it difficult to give a clear definition of the emerging field. Since me-
dia anthropology is a fairly recent endeavour, its intellectual and material
emphasis can be placed on a number of elements ranging from cultural
anthropology, psychology, the social sciences and communication studies
to comparative literature and more traditional versions of aesthetics. This
is partly due to the fact that the terms ‘media’ and ‘mass media’ have dif-
ferent connotations in different disciplines. Their boom in the modern
humanities only began about 25 years ago. Older dictionaries primarily
defined the term ‘medium’ as a grammatical form of Greek verbs, as a
person with para-psychological abilities, or as a part of wave theory in
physics (see Helmes and Köster 15). The need for a bolder and more
comprehensive theorising of ‘media’ in the humanities—as a replacement
for the waning relevance of hermeneutics and the national philologies—
has only gradually become manifest from the 1980s onwards.
Its genealogy, however, in various forms of media awareness, is much
older. For instance, the Greek philosopher Plato, in the Laws (817b), de-
scribes the ideal state as an ideal tragedy. He repeatedly concerns himself
with the medium of writing as both a necessity and a problem. Many texts
from the classical philosophical and literary tradition refer to the com-
monplace notion of the world as a kind of stage, noting the fusion of
media and reality. In different languages, the word for ‘art’ emphasises
aspects of craft, technology and media in contrast to purely cognitive and
perceptual aspects. There appear to be continuities between media theory
and aesthetics, even though it has to be left undecided for the moment
whether traditional aesthetics can be or should be reformulated wholesale
in terms of media theory. Further manifold connections can be drawn be-
tween the history of media and the social processes of modernisation in
Europe, especially in the ‘great transformation’ of the long nineteenth cen-
tury. In these transformative processes, literature—especially the novel—
From Media Anthropology to Media Ecology 323
could take on the increasingly difficult task of human self-interpretation,

as interactions between persons, institutions and systems became more
complex and less stable. The novels of Charles Dickens (1812–70), for
example, not only document industrial modernisation in nineteenth-
century England, they also offer vivid images of the conflict between inse-
cure persons, outmoded institutions and aggressive modern systems. They
attest to the power of the imagination, but they also point out the increas-
ing lack of objective correlatives for patterns of human inwardness in ac-
celerating processes of modernisation. In the twentieth century, the wide
appeal of the novel as a genre and the book as its most prevalent medium
were challenged first by film, which is apparently more powerful in creat-
ing a convincing fusion between technology and the
imaginary, and then by TV and other forms of electronic media, which are
said to create or at least encourage alternative habits of allocating one’s
spare time to entertainment and/or information. Ever since the early
twentieth century, debates about culture (also) have to be conducted in
the form of media debates, including debates about how one medium (or
set of media) is replaced or superseded by others. Towards the close of
this article, I will return to the paradigmatic role of the novel as an exam-
ple of ‘anthropological’ continuity in the context of massive technological
and social changes.
In Germany, one culmination point of these debates was the publica-
tion, in 1988, of the proceedings of a conference on ‘Materialities of
Communication’ that took place at the Inter-University Centre in Du-
brovnik (then Yugoslavia). This conference brought together humanities
scholars from West and East Germany, but also from France and from
North and South America, including Jan and Aleida Assmann, Karlheinz
Barck, Friedrich Kittler, Jean-François Lyotard, Humberto Maturana, Paul
Watzlawick and Niklas Luhmann. Among the questions discussed, two are
worthy of particular notice:
1. What else, apart from the traditional dimension of meaning, could
one observe about the phenomena of human communication?
2. In what other terms, outside of the traditional boundaries of aes-
thetics and semantics, could these phenomena be studied?
In order to elucidate these related questions, the conference participants
tested established conceptual tools for the study of culture on new histori-
cal and systematic objects of study (see Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer). ‘Stop
making sense,’ the title of an influential 1984 concert film with the Talking
Heads (the first, by the way, to use digital audio techniques) thus became a
slogan for a new materialist trend of studying the prerequisites of mean-
ing: the sites, carriers and modes of sense-making that are not in them-
selves meaningful. Towards the end of the 1980s, scholars trained in the
national philologies therefore began to use theories of media to expand
the purview of traditional hermeneutics, for instance to begin to under-
stand writing as a technology and print culture as a vulnerable historical
constellation about to become superseded or at least supplemented by
‘digital’ alternatives. From the study of materialities of communication,
some of these scholars began to embark on a route towards an anthropo-
logically grounded understanding of media: of media-based cultural con-
figurations and human experiences.
2. Key Concepts and Their Transformations
In Canada and the US, investigations into the cultural and social role of
media and technology began with the pioneering work of Harold Innis
(1894–1952; Empire and Communications, 1950) and Marshall McLuhan
(1911–80; Understanding Media, 1964). They have been continued by Walter
J. Ong (1912–2003; Orality and Literacy, 1982) and others. These critics op-
erate within different scholarly traditions, most notably coming from
a social science background, and thus see no need to reflect on the more
specific problems of European hermeneutics. In France, philosophers and
sociologists like Jacques Ellul (1912–94; La technique, 1954) and Edgar
Morin (*1921; La méthode, 6 vols., 1977–2004) promoted an awareness
of technology and media as determinants of modern societies that require
innovative theoretical perspectives. Next to the better-known philo-
sophers of French poststructuralism (Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Fou-
cault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida), they offered alternative technolo-
gy- and media-based approaches to the study of cultural phenomena. In
the 1970s and 1980s, a number of German humanities scholars responded
to the challenges posed by media studies, anthropological perspectives and
poststructuralist deconstruction to more traditional methods of interpreta-
tion in literary and cultural studies.
One of these scholars whose work in literary theory paved the way for
media anthropology is Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007). From Iser’s perspec-
tive, literary texts can take on an important function in human sense-
making. In the later phase of his career, Iser developed a literary anthro-
pology and turned to the question why human beings need (literary) fic-
tion. His answer is twofold. Firstly, literary fiction allows for trial action in
virtual environments; secondly, and more importantly, it offers a unique
possibility for human self-interpretation and can thus feed back into the
real world. Both of these answers deserve some more detailed elaboration:
1. Trial action: literary fiction allows the reader to see everyday norms
and conventions, social habits of thought and feeling in a different light; it
also allows readers to explore the consequences of breaking and trans-
gressing norms without having to fear sanctions in real life. Iser (Das
Fiktive 443–68) draws an analogy between literary fiction and certain types
of games; today this analogy might well be extended to electronic games
as well. Through their recombination in a virtual environment, conven-
tions lose their validity and display their weaknesses. Iser also uses sys-
tems-theoretical terminology to describe the social settings of these
conventions: “Literature endeavors to counter the problems produced by
systems through focusing on their deficiencies, thus enabling us to con-
struct whatever was concealed or ignored by the dominant systems of the
day” (How to Do Theory 63). For instance, Shakespeare’s history plays reveal
the gaps in official interpretations of history in the Tudor period by sug-
gesting that political action is never sufficiently supported by norms but
can merely manipulate situations in a more or less convincing way. An-
other example of this exploratory function of literary texts is Laurence
Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1759–67), which demonstrates the inade-
quacies of eighteenth-century British empiricist philosophy to provide ori-
entation for human experience, human conduct and human notions of
individuality. In Iser’s own words:
The literary recodification of social and cultural norms thus has a dual function: it
enables contemporary readers to perceive what they normally cannot see in the
ordinary process of day-to-day living, and it enables subsequent generations of
readers to grasp a reality that was never their own. (How to Do Theory 63)
2. Human self-interpretation: literary fictions, which openly reveal their fic-
tionality, ‘bracket off’ real-life attitudes to the world they present (see Iser,
Das Fiktive 37). Their connection to the real world is established by an-
thropological dispositions, which Iser locates in the interplay of ‘the fic-
tive’ and ‘the imaginary.’ These basic dispositions should not be confused
with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the imaginary, even
though there may be some affinities. For Iser, the imaginary, which we
encounter in our everyday lives in the form of fantasies, daydreams and
projections, is unstable, unfixed and diffuse. The fictive mode translates
these unfixed and diffuse elements into a tangible, objectified form; they
are made accessible. Conversely, elements of reality are ‘derealised’ in the
virtual mode of fiction. Through the interplay between the fictive, the im-
aginary and real-life discourses, literature for Iser acquires a necessary
function for human self-interpretation—not in the sense of axiomatic def-
initions of what it means to be human but in the sense of presenting, in
ever-changing forms, the “plasticity” of human beings (Das Fiktive 14), i.e.
their capacity for unceasing self-transformation.
Iser privileges works of literature (in fact, a fairly traditional canon of

European literary works from Sir Philip Sidney to Samuel Beckett) as ‘me-
dia’ of human self-understanding. This perspective begs the question
whether the capacity for human self-interpretation is a quality of potential-
ly any literary text or one that only belongs to certain ‘great works’ and is
only available for a limited elite of (well-educated) readers. Another ques-
tion is whether the aesthetic and cognitive effects that Iser associates with
reading literary texts (usually connected with the medium of printed
books) cannot also be achieved elsewhere, in other types of media or in
different media constellations. For instance, Iser has little to say about the
performance dimensions of theatre, not to mention the complexities of
response made possible by film or advanced types of video games. The
images and soundscapes of film and electronic games are suggestive in
their aesthetic appeal, but conveying a referential, semantic meaning may
not be their principal function. Nor, conversely, is the purpose of every
literary text to facilitate human self-interpretation.
The first question about Iser’s approach has motivated empirical liter-
ary studies (as developed by Siegfried J. Schmidt) to investigate historical
literary systems without applying a pre-fabricated or traditional concept of
literature. The followers of this school maintain that interpretation should
not be considered as a scientific or scholarly activity. They argue—as does
Stanley E. Fish in his theory of ‘interpretive communities’—that interpre-
tation is merely the ascription of meaning that happens inevitably when-
ever readers engage with texts. Different interpretations can be observed
or collected; empiricists are concerned with establishing (historic or con-
temporary) systematic facts about the production and reception of litera-
ture. The new problem that arises, however, is that multi-perspectival
systems, drawing on history, economy, sociology and other disciplines,
cannot simply be observed but have to be constructed.
The second question—are Iserian aesthetics limited to literary
texts?—has challenged the media sensitivity of literary theory. It has
led scholars to realise that texts—including literary texts—can do more
than just convey or ‘deconstruct’ meaning(s). The second generation of
reader response critics, including Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig
Pfeiffer, therefore shifted their attention from hermeneutics, as an investi-
gation into problems of interpreting texts, to the material (i.e. media) con-
ditions of communication. From a literary anthropology, these critics
moved towards a much more wide-ranging cultural anthropology of media
and media formations (see Pfeiffer, Protoliterary), including the question of
“what meaning cannot convey” (see Gumbrecht). This question demands
a more intense exploration of modes of presence, authenticity, tangibility
and lived experience that traditionally remained outside the purview of
hermeneutics. These modes may, at times, be culturally more relevant than

those literary activities of sense-making that have been privileged in tradi-
tional literary criticism and reader-response theories.
As becomes clear even in this brief and necessarily superficial survey,
the relations between literary, cultural and media anthropology are com-
plex and subject to regional and disciplinary variation. They differ both in
their theoretical reference points and in their degrees of thematic, histori-
cal and systematic differentiation. Dissensus begins with the conceptual
and material grasp of the—notoriously elusive—term ‘media’ and does
not end with the disagreement about methods, precursors or models: in
Germany, for example, the polarities include Arnold Gehlen vs. Theodor
Adorno, Frankfurt School kritische Theorie vs. sociological systems theory,
and Jürgen Habermas vs. Niklas Luhmann. In the following, I can merely
touch upon the problem of defining media (as a transformative key con-
cept of media anthropology), trying to do so without engaging in undue
partisanship for any particular ‘school.’
One of the most influential modern definitions of media was pro-
posed by Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s: media as “ex-
tensions of man” (McLuhan 3). In a contemporary setting dominated by
questions of mechanisation and automation, McLuhan regards media, es-
pecially mass media like newspaper and television, as technological “ex-
tensions” of “our senses and our nerves” (ibid. 4). Rather prophetically,
McLuhan claims that “electric technology” has extended the human “cen-
tral nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and
time as far as our planet is concerned” (ibid. 3). Yet precisely how human
these technological “extensions of man” remain is a question over which
critics remain deeply divided. The divisions have been exacerbated since
German media studies, led by Friedrich Kittler, propagated “the expulsion
of the spirit from the humanities” (see Kittler). For Kittler, human beings
are extensions of media, not the other way around. Poststructuralist critics
like Friedrich Kittler, N. Katherine Hayles and Joseph Tabbi have ex-
panded the traditional humanist focus of media studies in the humanities
towards contemporary science and science studies, including the history
and philosophy of science as well as cybernetics and computer studies. In
Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory, underneath the theory of
modern mass media (see Luhmann, Realität), traces of an older phenome-
nological perception theory of media remain visible, derived from the
work of psychologist Fritz Heider in the 1920s. Following Heider’s lead,
Luhmann develops the fundamental distinction between the ‘loose’ and
‘strict’ coupling of elements, types of elementary organisation that corre-
spond to the terms ‘medium’ (loose) and ‘form’ (strict). The flexible dis-
tinction between medium and form, according to Luhmann, allows one to
formulate a concept of meaning without having to postulate any prior sys-

temic or ontological reference: the understanding of meaning itself as a
medium for the constitution of new forms (see Luhmann, Einführung 225–
36).
Similarly, the approach to ‘materialities of communication,’ as devel-
oped by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer in the late 1980s,
does not proceed from an objective givenness of so-called media. Forces
of material impact can vary considerably in their intensity. Thus media
anthropology has no aspiration to provide a definitive account of media
evolution or media revolutions in general, even though there is no denying
the existence of historical shifts from orality to literacy and the ‘technolo-
gising of the word’ (Walter J. Ong). The term ‘materialities’ includes phe-
nomena and conditions that are meaningful and suggestive insofar as they
contribute to the generation of meaning without themselves carrying any
definite meaning (see Pfeiffer, “Anarchie” 40). Its more recent develop-
ments emphasise the anthropological foundations of media as ‘extensions
of man’ without claiming to know exactly what ‘man’ is. Instead, media
anthropology understands media processes as “feedback loops between
media, and media technologies, and ever-changing and yet irreducible
forms of humanity” (ibid. 42). It takes its inspiration from anthropologists
like André Leroi-Gourhan, who—already in the 1960s—insisted on ana-
lysing the physical impact of media and technologies on the muscular and
visceral layers of the human ‘imaginary,’ and from biological systems theo-
rists like James Grier Miller, whose Living Systems (1978) describes inter-
actions between human beings and machines in the form of ‘coping
devices,’ technologies—like the answering machine—that help people to
cope with the negative effects of other technologies. Media anthropology
studies media, but also techniques and technologies of the body, and cor-
poreally based mental techniques, in ways that connect to Michel Fou-
cault’s late work on the history of subjectivity (The Care of the Self) and the
stylistics of existence. The need for such a stylistics, a need for cultures of
the self, appears to be an anthropological constant even in quickly chang-
ing and shifting discourse and media networks.
Such shifting media networks have been described as media upheav-
als—changes across media formations whose social impact only unfolds
after a significant period of latency. Technological and epistemological
innovations are followed by a wave of intense discussion about media
practice and design experiments. New technologies and practices chal-
lenge established expectations about perception and aesthetics. They
inspire a process of ‘medialisation,’ which can be defined as “the estab-
lishing of relations between self, society and world by means of images,
sounds and objects” (Glaubitz, “Verstärker” 64). The duality inherent in
the concept of medialisation, as succinctly described by Glaubitz, registers

both the departure from the hermeneutic tradition as well as its lasting
dependence on modes of sense-making:
Visual, acoustic and material phenomena, in more or less stable combinations (as
media), differentiate and stabilise cognitive acts (e.g. imagination) and constitute
meaning. But media can also de-differentiate existing meaning formations that
circulate in communication; they can, for example, set them free for new combi-
nations or mobilise affective potentials. (Ibid.; my translation)
3. Current Debates: From Media Anthropology to Media Ecology
Recent developments in literary and cultural studies emphasise the dynam-

ic exchanges between human forms of communication, institutions and
objects that occur in processes of medialisation. They are less dependent
on a (however flexible) definition of the human than on concepts of inter-
subjective, intersystemic networks of exchange and interaction. These ap-
proaches promise to expand media anthropology into a media ecology.
The term ‘media ecology’ requires a more detailed explanation. Both
the term ‘media’ and the term ‘ecology’ can carry multiple and heteroge-
neous meanings. From its established use in biology, e.g. in works on
plant succession, the term ‘ecology’ was quickly adapted in other disci-
plines. In the Chicago School, urbanists used the term ‘human ecology’
already in the 1920s. In modern sociology, the term ‘media ecology’ or
‘information ecology’ is sometimes used to describe data management and
workflow in organisations and interactions between information technol-
ogy and its users (see Nardi and O’Day). In a sense that is closer to the
environmentalist meaning of ecology, cultural anthropologists sometimes
use the term ‘media ecology’ to study human culture against the changing
background of technological media, from speech and writing (orality/
literacy) to audiovisual technologies, computers and the Internet. Critics
and scholars writing in this tradition include Harold Innis, Marshall
McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Walter J. Ong and Neil Postman (the ‘Toron-
to school’ and the ‘New York school’ of media ecology). In this view,
basic anthropological ‘drives’ remain more or less stable over very long
periods of time, whereas their cultural actualisations come and go with the
short-term innovations of technological media.
McLuhan’s extensions theorem may have been too narrowly focused
on a view of media as mere tools, rather than as formative (and potentially
total) environments in which human beings live. Nowadays, a globalised
media culture consists of many different layers of ‘mediality,’ and meta-
phors of the (actor/media) network or of media as environments are now
superseding earlier views of ‘man’ as the ‘tool-making animal.’ Men and

women may be, more than anything else, media-making and media-using
animals who are partly made and used by media. In a less human-centred
model of (techno-)culture, media are more likely to be analysed as net-
works, following a metaphor that applies both to the Internet and to the
human brain.
To take the step from media anthropology to media ecology is to
acknowledge the increasing relevance of spatial networks, locations and
patterns of mobility in media and cultural studies, as well as the im-
portance of the network concept with its origin in cybernetics and its im-
plications of multi-level interconnectedness. Following the pioneering
work of Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972), “life among
media” (Fuller 5) has to be considered in political, ethical and aesthetic
terms, linking mental, natural and social modes of ecology (see Guattari).
Matthew Fuller’s term ‘life among media’ may prove useful as a term that
evades techno-deterministic extremes and allows for variable modes of
including human and technological agencies and inter-activities in media
constellations. Following the lead of media anthropology, an ecology of
media can study media formations as interrelations between human beings
and their media environments in changing processes of medialisation or
‘the history of mediation’ (see Siskin and Warner). In this perspective,
terms like ‘medium,’ ‘mediation’ or ‘medialisation’ are travelling concepts
that form a fairly flexible semantic cluster, allowing for a range of estab-
lished and emerging, competing and communicating ideas, research strate-
gies and methodologies. Revising traditional views of representation and
sense-making, the concern of media ecology is to reveal hidden or previ-
ously ignored aspects of materiality and their formative role in literary his-
tory, book history and the study of culture. In a metaphorical, but also
quite concrete sense, media are a means of transportation that can take
one to unforeseen places, triggering unexpected forms of experience
(‘transport’ as a noun in English can also mean ‘rapture,’ a state of amaze-
ment or fascination). In this sense, media are actualised metaphors, or
metaphors in action.
Without privileging either human or technological agencies in an un-
warranted manner, media ecology can focus on the perceptive and experi-
ential dimension of media as environments we live in. Seeking a third way
between the extremes of technological determinism and traditional hu-
manism, Ursula Heise has suggested the concept of a “functional ecology”
(Heise 166) which allows one to “find ways of relating the global connect-
edness of virtual space back to the experiences of physical space that indi-
viduals and communities simultaneously undergo” (ibid. 168) and thus to
mediate between local and global forms of agency in natural and cultural
(or media) environments. Similarly, Bruno Latour, a representative of ‘ac-

tor-network theory,’ argues against the existence of pre-given, reified
terms like ‘society’ in the abstract. His aim is not a grand unified theory of
the social or of media, but a theoretical and methodological toolbox for
new explorations of unmapped territories (see Latour). Hence a unified
theory of media could be assumed as equally unworkable in a historically
oriented ecology of media or mediation, which is based on processes ra-
ther than objects. This is why an all-encompassing definition of media
may not be possible or even desirable.
A view of media as processes rather than things makes it possible to
avoid the pitfalls of an objectifying account of media, limited to mass me-
dia as concrete and more or less standardised objects (newspapers, TV,
cinema, the Internet, etc.) or “as a sustainable mode of economy and
nameable cultural presence” (Fuller 106). Instead, it enables a focus on
media configurations that are dynamic and flexible, and that can include
human beings as performers, producers or recipients in an actor-network.
Rather than being “fixed natural objects,” media come into view as “con-
structed complexes of habits, beliefs, and procedures embedded in elabo-
rate cultural codes of communication” (Marvin 8). Due to this focus,
scholars become interested in processes of ‘medialisation’ (see Pfeiffer,
“Schwellen”) or ‘mediation’ (see Siskin and Warner) rather than in media
as objects; in the question “which medial aspects of a so-called medium—
and not only those aspects that can be described in terms of form or con-
tent—have a tangible impact in the context of dynamic cultural media
configurations” (Pfeiffer, “Schwellen” 15).1
These ‘effects,’ ‘impacts’ or ‘affective potentials’ that media anthro-
pology and media ecology study are obviously related to the older human-
ist premises underlying traditional aesthetics as well as many more recent
theories of culture and the arts, including the well-known ‘aesthetics of
reception’ developed by the Constance School in the 1970s (which in
German is also known as Wirkungsästhetik, i.e. the aesthetics of effect). Yet
without simply falling back on the humanistic pathos of traditional aes-
thetics, media anthropology and media ecology leave room not only for
‘the implied reader’ (Iser) but also for a whole range of different forms of
involvement and agency in media production and reception. Media ecolo-
gy attempts to preserve this basic orientation while emphasising the mul-
tiple media networks that influence and co-determine human experiences.
1 In the German original: “welche medialen, nicht nur inhaltlich oder formal beschreibbaren
Aspekte eines so genannten Mediums spürbare Wirkungen im Kontext dynamischer kultu-
reller Medienkonfigurationen entfalten.”
It describes the ecological interconnections, natural as well as cultural or

social, technological and material, among which human beings live.
These media interconnections can also trigger ‘transports’ in the more
traditional sense of intense modes of presence and self-awareness. Such
forms of experience, triggered by the perception of certain objects in cer-
tain surroundings, used to be the domain of art; their elucidation used to
be the task of traditional aesthetics or the history and philosophy of art.
But the terminology with which art—especially contemporary art—is be-
ing discussed has arguably become both more complex and less elitist in
recent decades. Thus the historical vocabulary of aesthetics—from Hegel
to Adorno—no longer seems the most appropriate one for describing the
ways media environments are experienced and thought about. Today’s
media world calls for new approaches, ways of thinking ‘outside the box’
in which older semantics of art can be reappropriated (see, for example,
Manovich). Such approaches can also accommodate psychological and
neuro-physiological accounts of human awareness, and they can thus
combine body-related activities with technology-dependent operations
and mental processes. Human beings live among media, but they also live
with techniques and technologies of the body and body-related mental
techniques (see Pfeiffer, Protoliterary).
4. Persistence and Change: The Novel and Digital Technologies
A good example of the lasting appeal of anthropological orientations in

changing cultural and media constellations is the novel. From the perspec-
tive of media anthropology and ecology, the novel is a global literary form
that embodies the tenacity and longevity of a human need for extended
fictional narratives in combination with a sheer endless plasticity and
adaptability to changing social and media configurations, from ancient
Greece and classical China—to name but two examples—to contempo-
rary world literature, from the scroll and the book to electronic reading
devices and the Internet (for an ambitious survey of the global range of
the novel, see Moretti). The recent scholarly attention to the novel as a
global form, as well as its multiple relations to other media and other liter-
ary genres, has led to significant modifications to the older insular hypoth-
esis of a ‘rise’ of the novel, as claimed by Ian Watt in the 1950s to have
occurred in eighteenth-century England. As a global form, the novel is
open to multiple histories but simultaneously it has almost attained the
status of an anthropological constant: a form with multiple origins and
timelines that has survived massive social changes as well as technological
media upheavals, of which the recent shift or rupture from analogue to
digital media is merely the latest and currently most discussed example of
transformation.
As Roger Luckhurst has stated in a summary of late twentieth-century
developments, the novel (his perspective is limited to English literature
but could probably be expanded to other, including non-Western, litera-
tures) has responded to the technological shifts in various ways, from the
formal innovations of hypertext and network literature (both online and in
print) via participatory forms such as fan fiction and slash fiction (a sub-
type of fan fiction that involves established characters from popular cul-
ture, such as Captain Kirk and Mr Spock from Star Trek or Mulder and
Krycek from The X-Files in erotic and/or sexual situations) to sophisticat-
ed works that self-consciously reflect on the possibilities of novelistic dis-
course in the contemporary world. Recent novels that may come to mind
in this category include, among many others too numerous to mention,
Don De Lillo’s Underworld, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Roberto
Bolaño’s 2666 and Mo Yan’s Shengsi pilao (Life and Death Are Wearing Me
Out).
The novel is always news, and thus “is not a form likely to face demise
in any immediate future” (Luckhurst 805). This is particularly evident in
the way more recent criticism about digital media has shifted from down-
right optimistic or extremely pessimistic prophecies of a radical break with
the pre-digital era to more careful considerations of the coexistence of old
and new media, the “continued presence of older, less advanced storage
and communication technologies” (Tabbi and Wutz 9). Such considera-
tions bode well for established narrative forms like the novel, which—
according to Tabbi and Wutz—“remains the one medium that allows the
historical effects of media differentiation to be remarked” (ibid. 18). Fur-
thermore, in the increasingly streamlined and corporation-driven World
Wide Web with its cult of the ‘cloud,’ the anonymous ‘mash-up’ and the
collective ‘hive mind,’ the novel also remains a bastion of individual crea-
tivity, intelligence and resistance to the “uncontrolled expansiveness of a
technological system driven by inhuman global markets” (ibid. 20; original
emphasis). In whatever technological medium, novels embody a form of
creativity that remains connected to ‘human’ values, if only in the form of
an author’s ‘moral rights.’ It is certainly telling in this respect that a pio-
neer of the World Wide Web and the inventor of the term ‘virtual reality,’
Jaron Lanier, should now call for a reappraisal of individual judgement
(against what he calls “nerd reductionism,” the “wisdom of crowds” and
computer algorithms) and demand “a new digital humanism” (Lanier 23,
47, 55, 178). It is also striking in this context that some of those intellectu-
als (like the late Friedrich Kittler) who most vigorously preached the pri-
macy of technological media over hermeneutic practices of close reading,
which were regarded as epiphenomena of media hardware, should have

returned to reflections on ancient traditions and an exploration of the ori-
gins and continuities of aesthetics.
Ultimately, the persistence of ancient, even archaic cultural forms and
human practices in new media environments may be one of the best ar-
guments for pursuing media-ecological perspectives for the study of cul-
ture. As the tools of our research and the media used to access archival
material are increasingly transferred to digital environments, we may well
begin to arrive at a reappraisal of print culture and to value the original
over the copy in new ways; reportedly—with no statistics to back this
up—the possibility to access early modern prints in databases like Early
English Books Online does not lead to a reduction, but to an increase in
applications for archival work at institutions like the Huntington or the
Bodleian Library. Such enquiries and practices of research may well lead
scholars back to questions of hermeneutics and aesthetics within media
perspectives, to questions about human modes of experience, and even
back to the (special?) role of literature in the context of historical media
cultures.
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—. How To Do Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

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1–25.
Mass Media, Media Culture and Mediatisation
MARTIN ZIEROLD
1. Concepts of Media: An Ideal Case Study for Travelling Concepts?
It is no doubt a commonplace that media (in an abstract sense as well as

in the more concrete sense of the mass media) play a pivotal role in shap-
ing our culture and society—and that they have been playing this central
role for centuries. Thus, it is not surprising that a vast array of academic
fields should devote attention to concepts of media, mediality and the like,
as the example of media anthropology has already underlined (see Ber-
ensmayer in this volume).
Given that the idea of ‘media’ is centre stage in many disciplines, it
could be argued that this term might provide an ideal case study of a trav-
elling concept in the broader field of the study of culture. In a way, this
truly is the case—albeit primarily in order to demonstrate how seldom
some concepts really do travel well across disciplines and international
academic cultures, even when the terms put to use—e.g. ‘media,’ ‘media
culture,’ etc.—are similar.
In order to map some possible processes of travelling, of translations
and untranslatabilities, this contribution will first take a look at concepts
of media in various contexts, moving on to the more specific idea of ‘me-
dia culture’ and finally give an outlook on probably the most prominent
recent media-related concept, i.e. ‘mediatisation,’ which seems to have
embarked on a high-speed journey into a number of fields.
2. Media Matters – But How?

Travelling Concepts vs. Shared Concerns
While it is usually easy to agree that understanding media is important for

any researcher interested in modern and especially contemporary societies,
it is much harder to find scholars agreeing on most questions connected
to this general claim—especially what exactly the term ‘media’ is meant to
338 Martin Zierold
describe (i.e. a definition of the concept) and how exactly media are related
to cultures and societies, i.e. what kind of influence they actually have on
culture and society (and vice versa). To each of these questions, different
disciplines and different research traditions offer quite different answers.
The plethora of uses of the term lets it seem debatable whether ‘me-
dia’ is a travelling concept at all. If it were indeed a travelling concept, in
many instances it seems that more gets lost en route than remains in use.
For example, while most scholars in Communication Studies will, without
batting an eyelid, think about mass media and modern digital media when
they use the term ‘media,’ in some areas of philosophy uses of the term
prevail which focus on the rather abstract notion of the term as a means
of mediation or transmission between any two instances, which could just
as well be between God and His people as between a broadcasting institu-
tion and a television audience.1
In their introduction to the seminal collection of essays Was ist ein Me-
dium? (What is a Medium?), the editors Münker and Roesler provide an im-
pressive list of different items that have been described as ‘media’:
A chair, a bicycle, a mirror (McLuhan), a class at school, a football, an anteroom
(Flusser), the election system, the general strike, the street (Baudrillard), the
horse, the dromedary, the elephant (Virilio), the gramophone, the film, the type-
writer (Kittler), money, power and influence (Parsons), art, belief and love (Luh-
mann). (Münker and Roesler, “Vorwort” 11; my translation)
Following Münker and Roesler, the main challenge does not lie in the di-
versity of the uses of the term ‘media,’ but in the illusion, shared by many
scholars, that they actually refer to the same concept when they use the
term (see ibid.). Contemplating the above list, the idea of a ‘travelling con-
cept’ called ‘media’ hardly seems convincing. It would be next to impossi-
ble to construct a plausible ‘journey’ one concept could have taken to be
able to embrace all uses sketched above, even taking into account pro-
cesses of translation and transformation.
Rather, from this wide perspective, ‘media’ seems not to be a concept at
all—as opposed to, say, ‘memory’ or ‘narration’—but rather a label, which
different research traditions have given to one key aspect of their field.
One could argue that, on this level, the term ‘media’ at best identifies
some very abstract shared concerns with processes of mediation held by
quite different and mostly disconnected research traditions—which leads
to little more than a rather tautological definition of the potential concept
1 It is not by accident that the insightful media history published by literary scholar and me-
dia philosopher Jochen Hörisch had initially been labelled in the subtitle as spanning from
the ‘consecrated wafer’ to the ‘CD-ROM’ (even though more recent editions are being an-
nounced as ranging ‘from the Big Bang to the Internet’); see Hörisch.
Mass Media, Media Culture and Mediatisation 339
‘media.’ It is for this reason, that Stefan Rieger argues that the term ‘medi-
um’ today seems to be nothing but a passepartout, a ‘key’ which seems to fit
into every ‘keyhole of modernity,’ running the risk of becoming complete-
ly undistinguishable and, eventually, obsolete because of excessive use (see
Rieger 285–86). In order to look for a more coherent ‘travelling concept’
it is thus important to move to a more specific notion of ‘media.’
3. Travelling Concepts of Mass Media?
Turning from an abstract idea of ‘media,’ ‘mediation’ and ‘mediality’ to the

more concrete level of ‘mass media,’2 the terrain remains complex. Still, a
vast number of academic fields are devoted to the analysis of mass media,
ranging from Media Studies and Communication Studies to further social
sciences, from economics to psychology to literary studies, art history,
history, philosophy, and others—and many of these disciplines have ra-
ther distinct research traditions in different academic and national re-
search cultures.3 If in this context, ‘mass media’ was to be considered a
travelling concept, it would be extremely dynamic and in constant trans-
formation as a result of its multiple uses in different fields.
To better grasp the various shifts of foci the concept of ‘mass media’
continuously undergoes, it is necessary to introduce some further differen-
tiations. The cultural theorist Siegfried J. Schmidt suggests that when
scholars talk about ‘(mass) media’ they can have very different things
in mind. Indeed, according to Schmidt, ‘the media’ may refer to four
very different components of what might be called ‘mass mediality’ (see
Schmidt, Kalte Faszination 93ff.). These components do not ‘exist’ sepa-
rately from one another, but it is nevertheless important to heuristically
distinguish between them in order to better grasp the multi-faceted char-
acter of the concept. According to Schmidt, the four components, or di-
mensions, of mass media are:
1. Semiotic material, i.e. the semiotic dimension of mass media com-
munication realised by employing culturally established sign sys-
tems such as language, images, sounds, etc.
2 In spite of all its shortcomings (e.g. the implication of a somewhat homogeneous mass of
recipients instead of active media users), I use the term ‘mass media’ for lack of a more es-
tablished alternative to refer to media which distribute either collectively (i.e. (mass-)pro-
duced) and/or collectively (i.e. (mass-)received media products using technological devices,
e.g. the printing press, radio, TV, the Internet, etc.).
3 For an insightful comparison of the differences between German and French ‘Media Stud-
ies,’ see Viallon.
340 Martin Zierold
2. The technological dispositif, i.e. the technological dimension of mass

media, which privileges specific uses and disprivileges others. For
instance, television is particularly apt for non-textual visual con-
tent whereas print has for a long time been dominated by written
texts for technological reasons. Apart from content, the techno-
logical dispositif also has implications regarding spatial and tem-
poral dimensions like mobility/transferability and durability.
3. Social institutions, i.e. social settings and systems which formally or
informally organise the production, distribution, reception and
subsequent reprocessing of media products. Whereas the produc-
tion and distribution is often organised in professional contexts
such as broadcasting institutions, editorial departments of news-
papers, etc., the reception usually is not (apart from professional
media users like critics and some academics). However, media use
is also socially regulated in many ways: In some families, it may be
acceptable to read the paper at breakfast, but not at dinner; the
TV remote control may always be in the hands of the same per-
son, etc.
4. Specific media products, e.g. websites and their content, TV shows, a
novel, digital games, a radio play, a newspaper article, etc.
In a way, media products (4) can be seen as the results of the interplay of
the levels (1) to (3). This underlines how hard it is to really understand a
media product, without analysing the semiotic material used (1), the tech-
nological dispositif employed (2), and the social contexts of its produc-
tion, distribution, reception, and, possibly, subsequent reprocessing (e.g.
in samplings, collages, etc.) (4).
Traditionally however, specific academic approaches will more often
than not focus on merely one or two of these dimensions in their analyses.
Or, to put it in another way, as the concept ‘mass media’ travels, different
aspects will be highlighted while others remain in the background or may
even be neglected or forgotten.
For example, scholars in the tradition of the Toronto School of
Communication (e.g. Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan) or German
media philosophy (e.g. Friedrich Kittler) usually put a strong emphasis
on technological questions of mass media. McLuhan’s famous dictum
“The Medium is the Message” illustrates this well: He is not interested in
particular media products and their content or an alleged ‘message’ these
might have, nor does he think it to be worthwhile to study the institutions
which embed media use socially. For McLuhan, it is the technological im-
plications that explain the social and cultural impact a medium has (see
McLuhan).
This technological perspective can prove to be very insightful and

productive: A fundamental category of analysis was introduced early on in
media research by Canadian scholar Harold A. Innis, who established the
difference between ‘time-binding’ and ‘space-binding’ media. While time-
binding media are very stable over time (like stone tablets) yet rather im-
mobile, space-binding media are very mobile (like papyrus and paper) yet
comparatively much more prone to decay. For Innis, this distinction was
not only about media. In his view, the media technologies a society pre-
dominantly uses determine whether a community will be oriented more
towards spatial or temporal expansion. Today, the rise of digital media has
challenged this differentiation, leading to hopes (and fears) that digital
technologies might at the same time manage to be durable and mobile (see
Neumann and Zierold in this volume).
In contrast to the focus on technology in media, other research tradi-
tions have a strong investment in the social institutions of mass media.
Research in media economics, for example, seldom worries about the
philosophical implications of the technological dispositif or semiotic ma-
terialities, but is more interested in business models, structures for the or-
ganisation of media production and distribution and the like (for an
overview see Albarran, Chan-Olmsted, and Wirth). There is also a strong
tradition in the study of journalism that focuses very much on the socio-
cultural background of journalists, on the organisation of editorial pro-
cesses and publishing houses as social systems, but hardly considers the
technological details of mass media at all (for a recent perspective on this
tradition of journalism research see Deuze).
Yet another focus prevails in literary studies and more recent research
traditions with roots in literary studies, such as media or film studies.
These disciplines very often analyse specific media products, their con-
tents and the aesthetic forms of the semiotic material employed, while
quite commonly neglecting the social context of the production, e.g. the
specific publishing house of a novel, the economic framework of the rela-
tion of author and publisher, the advertising and distribution strategy (or
lack thereof), etc.
Obviously, this is not to say that any one of these approaches is ‘right’
while the others are ‘wrong.’ Clearly, all traditions have their benefits and
produce a specific knowledge about mass media. At the same time, these
examples show that the term ‘(mass) media’—although a shared concern
in all of these disciplines—is spelled out in quite different ways, with dif-
ferent aspects being promoted and others neglected.
Increasingly, disciplines with a strong focus on mass media, like media
and Communication Studies, have integrated a multiplicity of perspectives
from neighbouring fields. For example, a well-established department for
342 Martin Zierold
Media Studies might include professors of media economics, media psy-

chology and media technologies, thus spanning a much broader field of
research questions and methods under the umbrella of ‘Media Studies’
than the short sketch above suggests. This, for example, is the case in
larger media programmes at German universities such as Paderborn or
Siegen, as well as at many British and American universities. At the same
time, the expansion of these academic disciplines has also accelerated an
increasing internal differentiation, which in the end is likely to undo again
the integrative perspective the expansion had been trying to achieve.
A particularly strong movement towards research which tries to inte-
grate the different uses of the term ‘media’ into a coherent framework has
been initiated by the French philosopher Régis Debray, labelled ‘médiologie’
(see Debray). Médiologie particularly emphasises the importance for any
media-related research to fully embrace the complexity of media commu-
nication, as outlined by Schmidt, and to include a historical perspective
rather than being preoccupied with the contemporary as is often the case
in Media Studies.
In a word, the term médiologie has introduced a new concept to media
research and today is recognised as a research field in its own right in
France. At the same time, it is a good example for the extreme difficulties
media-related concepts face when travelling across cultural and discipli-
nary boundaries. Thomas Weber impressively reconstructs the many chal-
lenges and misunderstandings that have been involved in attempts to
introduce the idea of médiologie into the German academic discourse. He
suggests that the similarities in the labels ‘médiologie’ and ‘Media Studies’
have favoured misleading assumptions of parallels between both endeav-
ours, asking: “Could it be that the assumed similarities of ‘médiologie’ and
‘Media Studies’ [Medienwissenschaft] are a source for misunderstandings,
even a reason for the mutual lack of understanding, if not ignorance, that
has often enough characterised their reception in Germany and France?”
(Weber 123; my translation).
Thus, it could be argued that the reason media-related concepts might
sometimes not travel well is that scholars wrongly assume that what other
traditions are doing is more or less the same as what they themselves are
doing anyway. Obviously, sometimes there seems to be a lack of academic
curiosity in new concepts. As Weber suggests, new and innovative con-
cepts like ‘médiologie’ can appear to traditionalists to be no more than mere
variations of existing ones, or rather the ‘one’ (vast and mostly vague) no-
tion of ‘media.’ Sometimes, if a concept travels, it does not seem to stimu-
late innovation, but is rather taken as a mere confirmation for established
concepts.
If new concepts sometimes fail to travel and initiate transformation,

one might imagine that at least media change certainly does call for inno-
vation in media research and will eventually lead to the emergence of new
concepts (and methodologies), which in turn could travel across disci-
plines and research cultures. This is certainly the case in many instances,
such as, for example, in the development of concepts and methodologies
for ethnographic research on the Internet (sometiems dubbed ‘virtual eth-
nography’ or ‘netnography’) illustrates (for an introduction, see Hine). But
there are also strong examples for the persistence of established concepts
even in the light of massive media change.
The rapid advancement of digital games can serve as a telling case for
the conservatism in many areas of media research. For more than a dec-
ade, researchers in digital games have quarrelled about the specific medial-
ity of computer games: One side, mainly with a background in literary
studies, stresses the ‘narrative’ aspect of many games, thus trying to ana-
lyse computer games with methodologies and concepts derived from liter-
ary analysis. The other party, coming mostly from a technological
perspective, insists that digital games are profoundly different to literature
due to their ‘ludic’ (i.e. playful) nature, which integrates the player in very
different ways to those in which a reader is active in the process of read-
ing. It might seem strange to an outsider that the discourse about digital
games has not been able to reconcile these perspectives, which remain
very much in a stalemate situation.
Although clearly both sides have a convincing point to make and a
systematic dialogue would be the most promising way forward, there is
still a paucity of innovative concepts and methodologies that integrate and
transform the established concepts of literary scholars and technological-
ly-focussed media researchers. Both traditions seem to cling to their con-
cepts of what media are about, i.e. narrative structure of content vs.
technological setting of machine/interface/user.4
Thus, if we expect more from a ‘travelling concept’ than merely that a
label is used in different fields at the same time or in close temporal rela-
tion, the field of mass media—similarly to the broad field of abstract ‘me-
diality’—sometimes seems more to resemble a pool of varying and often
rather implicit concepts than a systematically theorised concept which
‘travels’ in some reconstructable way from one (or even multiple) ‘origins’
to other fields. It is only in an attempt at second-order observation of the
academic discourse that we are able to identify shared concerns in these
too often disconnected research strands. Schmidt’s suggestion of four di-
4 For an overview of the debate and a suggestion for an integrated perspective of analysis,
see Zierold.
344 Martin Zierold
mensions of mass mediality sketched above is an attempt at such a

meta-concept, which is able to embrace the different explicit and implicit
concepts of mediality. However, meta-concepts like these do not seem to
travel too well either, as so far there is no perceivable broader attempt to
develop a consensus on a meta-concept for media research.
4. Media Culture: A ‘Travelling Concept’ at Last?
As neither ‘media’ in a wide sense nor ‘mass media’ seem to qualify as

prototypical ‘travelling concepts,’ I will move on to a more concrete term
which has been widely used in the context of media research in the past
decade or so: ‘media culture.’ Again, it is much easier to map different
strands of research which employ the term than to try and delineate a
journey that a potentially travelling concept ‘media culture’ might have
taken.
Today, the term is quite prominent in German academic media re-
search and at least not uncommon in English contexts. The American
philosopher Douglas Kellner was among the first researchers to have used
the words ‘media’ and ‘culture’ together as a term in its own right, when
he published his monograph Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Poli-
tics Between the Modern and the Postmodern in 1995.5 For Kellner, ‘media cul-
ture’ is probably less a concept than a descriptive term or a social and
cultural diagnosis. He uses ‘media culture’ as an apt label for contempo-
rary culture: “A media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and
spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure
time, shaping political views and social behavior, and providing the mate-
rials out of which people forge their identities” (Kellner 1).
Thus, Kellner uses ‘media culture’ less as an academic concept than
as a term for a social and cultural reality, a development from ‘classical’
culture to ‘media culture’:
Culture in the broadest sense is a form of highly participatory activity, in which
people create their societies and identities. Culture shapes individuals, drawing
out and cultivating their potentialities and capacities for speech, action and crea-
tivity. Media culture is also involved in these processes, yet it is something new in
the human adventure. (Ibid. 2)
For Kellner, it is the business of Cultural Studies to acknowledge this fact
and to provide concepts and methodologies to “help provide an under-
5 For an earlier use of the term see Robert P. Snow’s Creating Media Culture from 1983, which
from today’s perspective looks like a very traditional approach to media research, analysing
different technologies separately and one by one.
standing of media culture and suggest ways that it can be understood,

used, and appreciated” (ibid.). Kellner stresses that his attempt to develop
a new approach to understand media culture is partly due to the inadequa-
cy of traditional concepts and theories, which “appear one-sided and blind
to important aspects of media culture” (ibid. 3).
However, Kellner does not develop a fully-fledged theory, as he be-
lieves media culture to be “highly complex” and resistant to “any adequate
general theorizations” (ibid.). Instead, he strives to further academic un-
derstanding through “specific studies of concrete phenomena contextual-
ized within the vicissitudes of contemporary society and history” (ibid.).
Kellner and a number of other scholars in the fields of Cultural Stud-
ies and Media Studies have continued to use the term to this day, resulting
in some notable publications like Jostein Gripsrud’s introduction to Media
Studies labelled—in a clear reference to McLuhan’s seminal Understanding
Media—Understanding Media Culture (see Gripsrud). It is however remark-
able that the term has not really caught on in English and American
discourse. Gripsrud, for example, is a Norwegian scholar based at the
University of Bergen. Similarly, a number of European universities offer
B.A. or M.A. programmes called “Media Culture,” though the majority
still stick to more traditional triads like “Media, Culture and Society,” sep-
arating the terms ‘media’ and ‘culture’ with a comma, rather than thinking
of them as indivisibly related and connected.
Around the time Kellner published his book on ‘media culture,’ the
equivalent term ‘Medienkultur’ also started to take on a career in German
media research. However, in the German context too, ‘media culture’ is
far from being a single concept with a widely accepted definition, and it is
usually rather unconnected to the international discourse: most German
writing on ‘Medienkultur’ has been preoccupied with the German tradition
of media research and cultural theory. As Reinhold Viehoff stresses, ‘me-
dia’ and ‘culture’ have been traditionally thought of as being in direct op-
position to each other in German academic discourse, particularly due to
the strong influence of the media-critical Frankfurt School (see Viehoff).
Against this backdrop, the boom of the term ‘media culture’ in Ger-
many, which probably started in the late 1990s and has continued until
today, seems to be an expression for a number of tendencies: Firstly, a
number of scholars have actively tried to reconcile concepts of ‘media’
and ‘culture,’ using the combination ‘media culture’ as an explicit symbol
for the productive and socially valuable entanglement of media and cul-
ture. Secondly, ‘media culture’ is often used by scholars in a rather matter-
of-fact style and without complex conceptualisations. Like Douglas
Kellner (though usually without reference to him), most scholars appro-
priate the term as a description of contemporary culture—and, possibly,
346 Martin Zierold
prefer it as the more fashionable term to the more traditional ‘media soci-
ety.’ Thirdly, the term is also increasingly popular in public discourse.
Viehoff notes that ‘media culture’ has been used inflationary in this con-
text in recent years, often trying to valorise any kind of media phenomena
with the normative term ‘culture’ (see Viehoff 226).
An example for the first category is a suggestion made by Siegfried J.
Schmidt in 2003. He has probably proposed the most specific definition
of the term, suggesting the development of a systematic ‘study of media
culture’ (Medienkulturwissenschaft), which is to be derived from explicit con-
cepts of media as well as culture (see Schmidt, “Medienkulturwissen-
schaft”). Schmidt’s theory is rooted in systems theory and radical
constructivism, while rewriting both traditions into a process-oriented cul-
tural theory (see Schmidt, Histories & Discourses). The refinement and
complexity of the theoretical conception might have been a blessing and a
curse at the same time: In a move which probably reveals his background
in German philosophy of science, Schmidt opposes casuistic approaches
like Kellner’s and insists on an explicit terminology and a systematically
constructed theory. This makes his concept of ‘media culture’ particularly
unlikely to travel well, because it is a convincing, yet quite hermetic system
which does not lend itself well to adaptations of single parts but calls for
use in its entirety—something not many scholars are likely to accept or
even find attractive.
Schmidt has developed his concepts in close dialogue with, among
others, a team of researchers at Münster University,6 which has put for-
ward a number of further contributions in the context of ‘media culture.’
Particularly relevant in our context is Christoph Jacke’s monograph on
Medien(sub)kultur (“media (sub)culture”), which is one of the very few ex-
plicit attempts to bridge the gap between British and U.S. Cultural Studies,
German critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, and sys-
tems theory and radical constructivism as represented by Schmidt (see
Jacke). Jacke’s concept of ‘media culture’ manages to integrate a dynamic
process of differentiation within media cultures into his concept, avoiding
the traditional ‘high’-vs.-‘low’ divide of classical cultural theory. This en-
ables analyses of the ongoing mechanisms of internal differentiation ac-
cording to categories of ‘main’- and ‘sub’-culture. Jacke is also one of the
very few German scholars to have actively used Douglas Kellner’s earlier
work on ‘media cultures,’ thus truly making his concept travel.
Probably the most prominent German strand of research employing
the ‘media culture’ label is a branch of Media Studies which embarked on
its journey most clearly from departments in Berlin and Weimar but which
6 The author was a part of this team from 2004–2006.

now has a much wider following. By publishing an edited collection Kurs-

buch Medienkultur (‘Media Culture Coursebook,’7 see Pias et al.) with basic
texts for Media Studies, a group of scholars including Claus Pias, Joseph
Vogl and Lorenz Engell compiled a tradition of research which fruitfully
integrated previously unconnected theories and concepts. The sources
they draw from to map the terrain for their Kursbuch ranges “from Brecht
to Baudrillard” as the subtitle of the book has it, but actually is even more
varied than that: The foundational opening chapter includes texts by Wal-
ter Benjamin, Talcott Parsons, Marshall McLuhan, Niklas Luhmann and
Régis Debray—stressing that this concept of a study of media culture sees
its roots in Critical Theory as much as in social sciences, in technology
studies as well as in French médiologie.
In this context, the term ‘media culture’ is not so much filled with an
explicit theoretical definition, but constructed in relation to a body of
foundational texts. It could be argued, that in this endeavour, the term
‘media culture’ itself does not really act as a travelling concept. Douglas
Kellner, who had promoted the term four years before the Kursbuch was
published in 1999, does not figure among the selected texts, and even Cul-
tural Studies in general—which would be the most likely source for ex-
plicit concepts of ‘media culture’ at the time—are only included with one
text on television, by John Fiske. It is clearly not the concept ‘media cul-
ture’ that travels here. On the contrary, quite a large number of concepts
coming from various research traditions are made to travel in order to
design a new research programme, which is then labelled ‘media culture.’
In Germany, where the term ‘Medienkultur’ remains quite popular, a
considerable number of researchers use the term frequently. However, the
usages often remain unconnected to one another, once more making it
hard to talk about an actual ‘travelling concept’ at all. On the one hand,
there seems to be a temporal connection, with the term emerging around
the mid 1990s in various contexts: Apart from Douglas Kellner’s mono-
graph (1995) and the Kursbuch (1999), an influential collection of essays by
media philosopher Vilém Flusser was published in 1997, titled simply Me-
dienkultur by the editor, Stefan Bollmann. Obviously, this term strikes a
chord at the time, but the choice of title does not come with a conceptual
explanation—especially since Flusser himself hardly ever uses it in his es-
says, favouring terms like ‘codified world,’ ‘techno code,’ or ‘telematics’
(see Flusser).
More recent German publications also use the term in the same mat-
ter-of-fact way as Kellner did a decade earlier. For example, in his insight-
7 The title is a play on words with the meaning ‘course book,’ i.e. textbook for a seminar, but
also the book compiling timetables for trains.
348 Martin Zierold
ful monograph on Globale Medienkultur (‘Global Media Culture’; my trans-

lation) Frank Hartmann confidently uses the term ‘Medienkultur’ with a
definite article in the singular, as if it were an actor in the world and not a
concept to be explained: “Modern media culture is an ambiguous move-
ment, leading from the transport of goods to communication, from
knowledge in books to information, from mass media to hyper media”
(Hartmann 10; my translation). Hartmann invests much more energy in
attempting to convince his readers of the idea of a global media culture
than of the notion of media culture itself (see ibid. 14ff.). In his analysis,
Hartmann shows that the multi-faceted approach to analysing media cul-
ture as suggested in the late 1990s by Pias et al. remains influential and
productive: Hartmann includes theoretical, historical and technological
arguments in his line of thought, developing a more integrated and
complex perspective on ‘global media culture’ than traditional one-
dimensional approaches of mass-media research would have allowed for.
As we have seen, although the term ‘media culture’ seems to be the
most narrow term in our investigation so far, it still does not figure as a
prototypical ‘travelling concept.’ It pops up here and there from the 1990s
onwards, but by and large the different uses of the term remain discon-
nected, and refer to one another neither across disciplines nor across in-
ternational research cultures. Even the style of academic prose differs
strongly between the various strands which embrace the term ‘media cul-
ture,’ ranging from theoretically explicit and at times even technical aca-
demic prose (like Schmidt’s) to a philosophical and essayistic style (like
Flusser’s). However, in the context of research on ‘media cultures,’ anoth-
er term has emerged in recent years, which actually bridges research on
media, culture and society across disciplines and internationally: the con-
cept of ‘mediatisation.’ As a final step in our own journey in search for
‘travelling concepts’ of media research, let us turn to this most recent ter-
minological innovation.
5. From ‘Media Culture’ to ‘Mediatisation’:

A Prototypical ‘Travelling Concept,’ at Last?
In fact, the term ‘mediatisation’ is not quite as new as suggested above.

However, its use as an internationally accepted research concept began
only very recently and its current use is rather disconnected from older
uses of the term, which often simply denote a transformation from direct
communication to indirect (mass) mediated communication. Today, the
concept ‘mediatisation’ is more sophisticated and linked directly to a spe-
cific perspective on contemporary culture and society. As Sonia Living-
stone has put it in her International Communication Association’s Presi-

dential Address:
It seems that we have moved from a social analysis in which the mass media
comprise one among many influential but independent institutions whose rela-
tions with the media can be usefully analyzed to a social analysis in which every-
thing is mediated, the consequence being that all influential institutions in society
have themselves been transformed, reconstituted, by contemporary processes of
mediation. (Livingstone, “On the Mediation” 2)
Media sociologists Tanja Thomas and Friedrich Krotz have reconstructed
the emergence of the term ‘mediatisation’ as a reaction to an insufficiency
of the term ‘media culture’: Although ‘media culture’ implies the notion
that contemporary culture is intricately entwined with media phenomena,
the static term does not allow for an analytical perspective on the processes
which have brought about the transformation from ‘classical culture’ to
contemporary ‘media culture.’ While the term ‘media culture’ is accepted
as an apt description of today’s culture and society, Thomas and Krotz
suggest that the term ‘mediatisation’ has successfully complemented the
term as its processual counterpart (see Thomas and Krotz 27ff.). In an-
other essay, Krotz suggests the following definition:
Mediatization should be defined as a historical, ongoing, long-term process in
which more and more media emerge and are institutionalized. Mediatization de-
scribes the process whereby communication refers to media and uses media so
that media in the long run increasingly become relevant for the social construc-
tion of everyday life, society, and culture as a whole. (Krotz 24; original emphasis)
This basic definition is further developed in the following, stressing par-
ticularly the idea of mediatisation as a meta-process: “[M]ediatization as a
meta-process should be understood as […] an ordering principle, which
helps us to think of specific events and developments as belonging to-
gether, as each one takes place in specific fields of culture and society and
then affects many other fields” (ibid. 25).
This rather abstract definition leaves the concept open for a number
of theoretical as well as empirical connections. While for example Krotz
names Habermas, Bourdieu and Elias as theoretical roots of the concept
(see ibid. 33ff.), Knut Lundby connects ‘mediatisation’ to such diverse
thinkers as Max Weber, Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Raymond
Williams, Jean Baudrillard , Joshua Meyrowitz and John B. Thompson, to
name but a few (see Lundby, “Introduction” 2ff.). This theoretical open-
ness is complemented by an empirical one: Krotz underlines that the term
is specifically designed to enable empirical research on a macro-, mezzo-
and micro-level and in various social contexts (see Krotz 31–32).
350 Martin Zierold
This concept has caught on extremely well on an international scale,

as British media researcher Sonia Livingstone emphasises:
Both society in general and scholars in particular have yet to come to terms with
the growing importance of media power. […] [I]n order to do so, scholars must
also come to terms with, indeed to embrace, the notion of ‘mediatization.’ Alt-
hough an awkward word in the English language, scholarship is now conducted
within a global, and therefore multilingual dialogue. (Livingstone, “Foreword” ix)
Numerous third-party-funded research projects and international publica-
tions testify to the success of the concept ‘mediatisation’ (for an overview,
see Lundby, Mediatisation). But what is it that makes the concept so attrac-
tive, and what has promoted its international and cross-disciplinary travel
where other concepts have struggled? It is probably too early to give an
authoritative answer to this question, as research in this field still seems to
be gaining momentum. It is surely its characteristic as a kind of meta-
concept which is process-oriented and explicitly open to conceptual and
empirical connections from various traditions and on different levels of
abstraction that has encouraged scholars globally to embrace the term.
Another reason may lie in exactly those processes implied by the con-
cept ‘mediatisation’ itself: an accelerating international communication
between scholars, but also an increasing globalisation of the research
‘market.’ Scholars today are quite often expected, institutionally, to con-
duct research collaboratively and across national and disciplinary bor-
ders—more so than one or two decades ago. As the concept explicitly
calls for interdisciplinary and international research in order to grasp glob-
al processes of transformation, ‘mediatisation’ as a concept has not only
been popular with media scholars but also with many national and inter-
national funding bodies. The German Research Council has devoted one
of its core funding areas to the concept, and a number of internationally
funded projects are also thriving, giving funding bodies what they are
looking for: international, collaborative, multi-disciplinary research with a
high rating in terms of social relevance.
So it seems that, finally, after decades in which concepts of media
hardly travelled across disciplines and international research cultures at all,
a concept has emerged which is of a cosmopolitan nature. Quite obvious-
ly, the route taken in this article was only one of a myriad of possible
journeys. We could also have taken very different courses, looking into
more specific concepts than the broad terms ‘media,’ ‘mass media’ or
‘media culture,’ which would have surely enabled us to find plenty of ex-
amples of productive travels of media-related concepts earlier on. On the
very abstract and general level however, it seems that ‘mediatisation’ is
among the first that have really triggered an international dialogue and an
international research agenda on a scale that has been hard to find in me-
dia research so far. It will be interesting to follow where this journey will
take media research in the future.
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Material Culture and Materiality
LEORA AUSLANDER
1. Defining the Concept
Any effort to define the concept ‘material culture’ necessarily starts from
the two component elements—material or materiality and culture. The
materiality in the term implies that objects belonging to the category ‘ma-
terial culture’ exist in real time and space, and have a direct relation to the
body. Material culture engages the senses, although not all equally: of the
five senses, those of touch and taste occupy a privileged space in the do-
main of material culture. One cannot hold an intangible in one’s hand nor
put it in one’s mouth. The materiality of such things is intrinsic to one’s
bodily experience of them. By contrast, some of the things that are visible,
smellable and audible are also material, but in many instances, their mate-
riality is sensorily secondary. For example, both computers and cinemas,
because they are tangible, touchable things, fit within the category of ma-
terial culture, whereas the film shown or text displayed within or upon
them do not. When one is in the movie theatre or looking at one’s com-
puter screen, one is, or hopes to be, largely unconscious of the media used
to bring the image into view. (There is no comparable distinction for a
chair or a piece of chocolate; neither is the support or carrier for some-
thing else, but rather they both exist for themselves.) Music provides a like
example; one may be acutely aware of the materiality of the instrument or
body producing a tune, but it may also emerge from a car’s dashboard or
an earphone that, in some sense, transmute it into abstract music. Smells
may be seen to emerge from a thing, but they can also invisibly waft to-
wards one’s nose. It is useful, in sum, to limit the category of ‘material cul-
ture’ to objects one can touch (and secondarily, taste).
From these physical qualities emerges another key defining character-
istic of the objects best categorised as material culture: they are mortal. All
material objects come into existence at a particular moment in time, sur-
vive for a period of very variable duration and eventually cease to exist.
While their ‘life spans’ can be very different than that of people, the fact
354 Leora Auslander
that they, too, are finite, puts them in a different relation to people than
those human-made entities whose temporality is potentially infinite (the
words contained in texts, the notes in a musical score).
The second element of the term, ‘culture,’ brings with it the idea that
objects of material culture are human-made and not raw products of na-
ture. The modifications may be enormous or very slight: an object pro-
duced of entirely artificial substances is an object of material culture as is a
lightly carved piece of wood. Although this may seem an obvious re-
striction on the definition, the primordial role of the discipline of archae-
ology in the history of the study of material culture means that it is not.
Archaeologists study the entire physical record, learning as much from
seeds as pottery shards, from bones as jewellery, often using the same
techniques to establish the ‘basic truths’ of the object—its date, content,
origin. But broadening the field of material culture to include the natural
world weakens its analytical power.
The goal of the study of material culture is primarily to understand
how people use the material world available to them. That necessarily im-
plies understanding something about the natural environment they inhab-
it—the kinds of clay available shape what pottery is made; and the
presence or absence of wheat what kind of bread baked. But it is what peo-
ple do with what is available that is the purview of students of material cul-
ture, while establishing the parameters of that natural world among the
labours of the environmental historian or archaeologist.
2. Theoretical Orientation
Thus the broadest usable definition of material culture is that it is a touch-

able object produced by human beings that exists in time and space. This
category of ‘thing in the world,’ and the concept derived from it, is useful
because of the nature of human perception and psychology. As the an-
thropologist Daniel Miller argued over two decades ago in his influential
book Material Culture and Mass Consumption, not all perception can be ex-
pressed linguistically and language is not a superior form of communica-
tion of thoughts, feelings or perceptions. The two boundaries that
scholarly production of the last generation has shown to be particularly
fraught are those between the material and the linguistic and the material
and the visual. In defending the salience of the former, the curator Susan
Pearce has demonstrated, “perceptions about colour, shape and decora-
tion are not part of our linguistic inheritance, but part of our material tra-
dition in the strict sense” (Pearce 23). And, as the archaeologist Roland
Fletcher argued in his essay in his colleague Ian Hodder’s volume on the
Materiality 355
meaning of things: “... it is clear that non-verbal signaling may possess its
own internal formal coherence and is not reducible to the ‘structures’ of
verbal meaning” (Hodder 35). People, in other words, use both things and
words to communicate, to remember and to express themselves, but both
the what and the how of words and things are different. A primary reason
to study material culture, then, is to gain access to the extra-linguistic
range of human meaning-making and communication. It should be noted,
however, that this is a highly contested position; some theorists argue that
this is not a viable distinction (see Ingold; Witmore).
Material culture’s embodiedness and close relation to the human body
is, I would argue, what gives it its particular meaning- and memory-
bearing capacities. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, poets and philosophers
have written reams on the importance of things throughout the lifespan
(see Bachelard; Heidegger; Winnicott; Wittgenstein). From the baby’s
transitional object, used to make parental absence tolerable, through wed-
ding rings, to the small things carried by refugees when they leave home,
to the destruction of the things possessed by a person by whom one has
been betrayed, to the cherished possessions of a beloved dead spouse,
people, across time and space, have put objects to work for them (see
Pappeti-Tisseron). That work is different than, and complementary to, the
work done by language. This work of memory, meaning-making, relation-
ship-constituting, and expression is one kind of labour done by concrete
things. People also use objects, of course, for much more pragmatic pur-
poses.
In the domain of the pragmatic (which always of course overlaps with
the symbolic) people have made things with which to acquire, prepare,
cook, serve and eat food. They have constructed shelters and things to lie
and sit upon within them. They have crafted things to keep them warm or
cool, or to protect the skin or the feet. They have built means of transpor-
tation and the tools needed to make all of these things. Some anthropolo-
gists and archaeologists argue, in fact, that it is tool-making, not language
that separates human beings from other species (see Schiffer). One may
debate the productivity of attempting to establish the priority of language
and tool-making, but the reality of the specificity of the material in relation
to the linguistic, and therefore the importance of its study, has been clearly
established (see Gibson and Ingold).
The boundary between the visual and the material has been less de-
bated than that between the linguistic and the material, in part because it is
often assumed to matter less. The basic differentiation between the visual
and the material is that between two dimensions and three. That is, even if
the attribute of two-dimensionality cannot be taken too literally—
paintings are three-dimensional and one could argue that images on a
356 Leora Auslander
computer screen do not fit into the conventional system of dimensionality

at all—two-dimensional objects are primarily encountered and perceived
with the eyes and not with the other senses. Scholars working on the
senses have demonstrated both the historical and cultural specificity of
their mobilisation and the consistent differentiation among them (see
Classen, Book of Touch, Worlds of Sense; Crary, Techniques of the Observer, Sus-
pensions of Perception; Jay, Downcast Eyes). In some societies and some peri-
ods, the training of the eye is given precedence over that of the skin, the
ears, the nose or the mouth; in others it is another sense that is dominant
or greater stress is put on their complementarity (see Chalier). A concept
that puts emphasis on studying the material, the touchable, is crucial to
our understanding these differential and complementary roles of these
senses. It is, however, through a turn first to the visual that the majority of
scholars currently working with the concept of material culture arrived
there.
3. History of the Concept Across the Disciplines
A couple of decades ago, in the wake of the development first of the field
of semiotics and then cinema and media studies, and an increasing dissat-
isfaction with the limits of the textual, many humanists and some social
scientists made a turn toward ‘the visual’ (see Dikovitskaya; Jay, State of
Visual Culture Studies; Mitchell). The first step, and one that has, perhaps,
remained dominant in literary studies and philosophy, was to study dis-
courses on the visual (see Bowlby). Scholars analysed how authors use de-
scriptions of things, things as actors, in their narratives. In the 1980s,
scholars working in other disciplines quickly followed suit: historians, so-
ciologists and anthropologists, in this case, enlarging their field of evi-
dence to include visual sources.
Rather than confining their sources to written texts, ethnographies,
and interviews, they started thinking seriously about images, whether still
or moving. In distinction to specialists in film and media studies, the object
of their research was not the visual itself, but rather they used visual
sources to learn more about their topic of investigation. Scholars attempt-
ing to grasp the dynamics of consumerism, for example, became attentive
to advertisements of all kinds: billboards, print images and television spots
(see Baudrillard; Breen; de Grazia and Furlough; Jones; Kuchta). The
boundary between studying how social actors mobilise the visual and the
visual as an object of research is, obviously, fluid. An example would be
the very substantial production by historians that attempts to historicise
the visual, that is to understand the historicity of the mobilisation of sight
Materiality 357
and the spectacle in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Crary,
Techniques of the Observer, Suspensions of Perception; Jay, State of Visual Studies;
Schwartz).
Feminists and critical race theorists likewise turned to advertisements,
but also to visual representations of gender and race in films, book illus-
trations and painting (see Bachollet et al.; Haug; hooks; Joyrich). The list
could be expanded to include specialists in virtually all areas of research.
While the field of visual culture drew its boundaries very widely, including
both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, mechanically- and hand-produced images,
multiple and individual works, durable and evanescent images (from fres-
cos to sky-writing), all were characterised by the functional two-dimen-
sionality of the objects and the fact that they were viewed.
Some scholars have used the techniques elaborated within the domain
of visual culture to attempt to address the objects represented in these
images. Some of the focus has been on the use of material culture in
painting, television and film (see Duits; Massey; McCarthy). Such methods
most often reduce the object to its representation. The work of Roland
Barthes on clothing as depicted in media is perhaps the most familiar of
these approaches. This strategy has been very productive, but has been
understood to be limited in its interpretive power by its neglect of the ma-
teriality of the objects represented. In the domain of food, cars, furniture
and clothing, for example, Barthes’ was very explicit that his work inter-
prets these objects as transformed in print (see Barthes, Semiology ch. 2). In
The Fashion System, for example, neither the production nor the consump-
tion of clothing is seriously considered, because its meanings are assumed
to be very largely, if not exclusively, established through the representa-
tional practices of the press (see Barthes, Fashion System). Much more re-
cently, scholars generally coming out of literary studies and philosophy
have relied largely on textual sources to analyse the cultural, political and
social work that things have done in the past. These analyses have the ca-
pacity to elucidate some of the meanings contemporaries attributed to
things, but may run the risk of reducing three-dimensional, sensorily com-
plex objects to their verbal representation.
Studies that emphasise the materiality of clothing itself, as well as both
the complex circuits of meaning-generation (among producers, distribu-
tors, advertisers and many different users) have demonstrated the limits of
this form of analysis. The uses to which clothes that originate in Europe
and North America when they travel as second-hand goods to Africa, for
example, bear little relationship to either the meanings attributed to them
by ‘Western’ consumers, or to those produced by the advertising industry.
Even more dramatically, in some sense, the refiguring of the fashion system
itself by young African men operating in a circuit among Paris, Brussels
358 Leora Auslander
and Congo (see Auslander, “Accommodation”; Gondola) following the

particular rules of a system known as the S.A.P.E., shows the dangers of
either assuming that the stability of meanings attributed to things by the
dominant culture and that things in use, as opposed or in addition to, on
the page change meaning radically.
Translations of linguistically-based theories into the material world
have, however, also proved to be very productive. For example, Austin’s
notion of the speech act—that is that in certain contexts, words actually
do things, act in the world (as in the marriage ceremony), may helpfully
elucidate why contemporary debates over the Muslim headscarf have so
often been “dialogues of the deaf” (see Austin; Costall and Dreier). Many
critics have argued that wearing the headscarf is a matter of choice, analo-
gous to other fashion statements. While that may be true for some of
those who cover their hair, it is clearly not true for all. For many ob-
servant Muslims, the embodied gestures of donning and wearing the scarf
are essential to their religious lives (see Fernando). Far from an ‘identity
marker’ then, or some other act of communication, covering one’s hair is,
in that case, a spiritual action. As long as critics fail to acknowledge that
purpose, the conversation about where and when one may cover one’s
head is unlikely to go very far. It has been with the realisation of the limits
of approaching the material through the textual, and the urgency of ana-
lysing practice as well as prescription, that scholars outside of the fields in
which the material has always been central have turned to them for inspi-
ration and expertise. Archaeologists, historians of art and architecture,
students of folklore, and curators, have long focused their attention on the
‘thingness’ of things; their disciplines in fact rest upon an assumption of
the communicative capacity of objects.
Archaeologists have been—by the nature of their discipline—at the
forefront of innovation in analysis of material culture. Many archaeolo-
gists have only remains, both natural and of human manufacture, with
which to work, but even those who work in more recent periods continue
to rely heavily on objects (see Dawdy; Frevel; Jäggi and Staecker). That
reliance on things, and often objects whose state when recovered makes
determining their very form, to say nothing of age, use and meaning, a real
challenge, has been a defining characteristic of archaeology. Some have
responded by turning to scientific methods of materials analysis to better
date and place their finds. Others have used the ambiguity and often pau-
city of the empirical evidence as an opportunity to both borrow from and
contribute to theoretical reflection on the nature of space and place, and
of the material itself in human life (see Hodder; Tilley; Witmore). While
scholars working in other fields appear to have little engaged the scientifi-
cally oriented, the last fifteen years have seen many edited volumes in
Materiality 359
which the work of theoretical archaeologists appears alongside that of his-

torians, art historians and scholars of cultural studies (see Batchelor and
Kaplan; Bennett and Joyce; Brown, A Sense of Things; Buchli). This dou-
bled heritage—a focus on material science on the one hand, and theoreti-
cal/philosophical reflection on the other—also characterises the other
disciplines in which objects lie at the heart: design history/history of the
decorative arts and the history of architecture.
The study of the decorative arts and architecture has a long history
within the discipline of art history. The domain of specialists in the deco-
rative arts has been research on furniture, the fabric arts, pottery and
porcelain, metal crafts and glassmaking, while historians of architecture
have focused on the built environment. Although generally working on
much more recent objects than most archaeologists, and therefore using
different scientific techniques, decorative arts scholars traditionally have
also relied on sophisticated (and to outsiders arcane) technical knowledge
in their efforts to precisely date and place their objects of study. The pri-
ority in many of these studies has been to establish the ‘truth’ of the ob-
ject, with less emphasis on the social meanings to be derived from it,
although some scholars have also sought to both understand why certain
objects took the forms they did and what one can understand about the
human world through them. The history of architecture, perhaps because
of the nature of the object studied, has more systematically engaged ques-
tions of the social, economic and political ramifications of the buildings
under investigation while remaining based in close examination of the ob-
ject itself (see Taylor; Vlach; van Zanten; Zeynep, Urban Forms). As is the
case in archaeology, there has been an ever-increasing level of interaction
among scholars of the decorative arts/design and architecture with those
working material culture from other disciplinary perspectives. That ex-
change has been very productive, although the fact that archaeologists and
art historians start from the object and social/cultural anthropologists,
historians and literary scholars often start either from a social formation,
historical puzzle or a text has sometimes made communication difficult.
Although material culture does not lie at the heart of the disciplines of
cultural and social anthropology as it does of archaeology, it has long had
its established place there. That centrality, in part, echoes the importance
given material culture in many of the societies analysed by anthropolo-
gists. These have, historically, been societies that, if literate, were often not
centred on the written word. By contrast, many had highly elaborated
dwellings, eating and cooking vessels, clothing, toys and tools, to say noth-
ing of objects of religious valence. Anthropologists have generally focused
on the meaning and communicative capacities of the material culture of
the societies they study, although the theoretical foundation of that analy-
360 Leora Auslander
sis has varied greatly (see Douglas and Isherwood). Structuralist approach-
es have emphasised looking beyond surface differences in material cultural
forms to find the human commonalities across cultures, while more his-
torically orientated anthropologists have emphasised the particularities of
each cultural formation. Unsurprisingly, the latter orientation has been
shared by those historians who have sought to broaden the source base of
their discipline.
Historians have traditionally been far more mistrustful of non-textual
sources than archaeologists, art historians or anthropologists, and little
interested in studying such objects for their own sake (see Auslander, “Be-
yond Words”; Grassby; Grier; Harvey; Schlereth). The discipline remains
logocentric and most historians lack the technical training to analyse mate-
rial culture and, perhaps as a result, argue that arguments based on materi-
al evidence are more subjective (and therefore weaker) than those based
on textual sources. Given, however, that for most of human history most
people have not left written traces of themselves, some historians have
turned to either objects, or written descriptions of objects, in order to gain
access to otherwise inaccessible lives and social formations. While the
lives of many women, servants, slaves or working class people are only
knowable through the words of others, they themselves often made sam-
plers, quilts, clothing, buildings, furniture, toys, cooking and serving im-
plements, and tools (see Auslander, Taste and Power; Batchelor and Kaplan;
Goggin and Tobin; Steedman; Vlach). Analysis of these objects, most of-
ten in combination with texts, therefore provides a different kind of in-
sight into their lives. Other historians have been persuaded of the
differential labour of the material and the linguistic and have thus been
motivated to analyse things (see Kamil). Historians of science, including
the social sciences, have also turned to material culture in their research.
Historians of science have followed three quite divergent paths in
their use of the material. They have explored museums, and the private
collections of both professional and amateur scientists in order to better
understand their systems of classification and display practices. These
studies traverse time, some focusing on the objects collected by scientists,
either in Renaissance or Early Modern periods in their cabinets de curiosités,
or analysing the natural history museums developed as part of the imperi-
alism of the nineteenth century and enduring into the present (see Barrin-
ger and Flynn; Coombes; Edwards, Gosden and Phillips; Findlen;
Stocking). These projects have been essential to furthering the histories of
certain disciplines—anthropology, botany and geology, but also art histo-
ry—as well as to developing the histories of colonialism and nation-
building.
Materiality 361
A very different conception of the object has emerged out of Science

Studies, perhaps best known through the work of Bruno Latour (see
Latour, Never Been Modern, Reassembling), Serres and Latour, and Michel
Serres (see Serres, Les cinq sens). This work emphasises the ‘agentful’ capac-
ities of what have conventionally been thought of as either basic forms of
animal life without volition or inanimate objects. The sea scallop or the
cells used in experiments thus are understood to shape much more pro-
foundly the outcomes of those experiments than heretofore imagined.
Likewise the communication system that forms a permeable barrier be-
tween client and clerk in a post office, city hall or visa office become ac-
tive mediators of the relation between the individual and the state. The
work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, on the concept of the ‘epistemic thing,’
has also put pressure on the boundary among the researcher, the object
researched, the apparatus mobilised for the experiment and the outcome.
Fundamental distinctions between subject and object, animate and inani-
mate, active and passive are thrown into question. Some scholars also use
this work to question the utility or legitimacy of the distinction between
the linguistic and the material (see above). This, very radical, rethinking of
materiality is thus the one of the most challenging to most other working
definitions of the concept of material culture.
Finally, while many, perhaps most, historians of science and technolo-
gy use the evidence of material culture in ways similar to other historians,
others are in closer company with some curators. Like curators, they seek
a privileged access to the past through the material, most often through
the reproduction of past experiments using equipment (most often re-
plicas) as close as possible to that used in the original (see Blondel and
Dörries; Sibum). They hope thereby to better understand the constraints
and possibilities of scientific knowledge in past time. Curators, particularly
those creating various kinds of experiential historical museums, also seek
to create the conditions of possibility for another kind of knowing. The
assumption, for example, behind Colonial Williamsburg, in Williamsburg,
Virginia, is that experiencing a townscape lit only by candlelight, eating
food prepared only with the ingredients and technological means available
in the eighteenth century, while sitting in a dwelling itself either a relic or a
reconstruction, will enable people to understand something different, and
perhaps something more, than they would from either reading a book, or
seeing eighteenth-century artifacts behind glass in cases. This approach to
the object has been reinforced by an increasing preoccupation among mu-
seum professionals and public historians with the problem of how to ef-
fectively transmit some sense of the extreme violence of which human
beings are capable. This has been most extensively discussed in the con-
362 Leora Auslander
text of the Shoah, but also concerning other genocides, colonialism, slav-
ery and war (see Karp; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; Lonetree; Young).
The dominant trope of the history of the concept of material culture
across the disciplines over the last half-century is a paradoxical one. On
the one hand, it is a story of convergence: the traditionally text-based
disciplines—history and literary studies—in their efforts to locate sources
that give better access to a broader segment of the population, to explore
the specificity of people’s relation to each of the senses and to adequately
address the increased importance of media other than the linguistic in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turned first to visual culture and then
to material culture. Scholars working in these disciplines quickly felt the
limits of their training and sought help from art historians, curators,
anthropologists and archaeologists. Likewise, many scholars working in
these traditionally object-based fields were feeling the limits of the positiv-
ism (in some cases) or universalising tendencies (in other cases) dominant
there and looked to philosophy, literary and critical studies and history for
guidance. The results have been highly productive in shaping the now al-
ways interdisciplinary and sometimes transdisciplinary concept ‘material
culture’ and field of material culture studies. On the other hand, as the
“Conversation on Material Culture” in the American Historical Review indi-
cates, the movement across disciplines has caused real stress and disso-
nance. The greatest lines of fracture are two: the first concerns materiality
itself. The second turns around the agentive definition of things. As noted
above, some scholars, largely in the fields of media and literary studies and
philosophy, but also some archaeologists and historians influenced by
them, argue that there is no justification for demarcating the linguistic and
the virtual from the material. Thus both language and the internet may
also be studied under the rubric of ‘material culture.’ The second challenge
to the definitions of the term as used by most historians, art historians,
archaeologists and anthropologists is that which presses the mediating and
agentful qualities of things. It provides an opportunity to further specify
what is particular about the material, what lends the material its power,
what differentiates it from other forms, thus adding to the robustness of
the concept. Material culture scholars may not all agree on how or why
scallops, germs or telescopes are active participants in the experiments in
which they play a part, but many have taken the theory behind such claims
and run with it, elaborating ideas of how a chair or a pencil or an automo-
bile not only reflects something about the society in which it was pro-
duced and used but actively shaped that society. The concept does not
limit its transgressions and movements to disciplinary domains, but also
national (and therefore often also linguistic) territories.
Materiality 363
4. Travelling Across National Boundaries
The stability of the nomenclature of the concept ‘material culture’ as it has

travelled through the scholarly world of the Americas and Europe is an
indication of its transnational intelligibility and utility. Material culture in
English translates quite literally into la culture matérielle in French and die
Materielle Kultur in German and other European languages possessing the
term. It is also a concept, unlike others, perhaps most notably ‘race’ and
‘gender,’ whose usage is quite stable from one national context to another.
The definition given above, for example would find support and contesta-
tion among scholars throughout Europe and the Americas without much
national variation. Discipline and theoretical orientation would be more
effective predictors of agreement or disagreement than nation. It has also
been used to investigate a similar range of topics: consumerism, identity
formation and expression (of gender, class, region), museums, nationalism
and religious practice. That said, there are different emphases and differ-
ent fields in which the concept is most often mobilised as one travels.
The history of each nation-state in which material culture is studied
has an impact, of course, on the political stakes of the concept and its
study. In the domain of the material culture of the far distant past, most
often studied by archaeologists, those stakes include establishing priori-
ty—which group occupied the land first (or for the longest time), and
thereby, by some lights, has the strongest claim. The Middle East provides
a classic case of present-day political conflict played out on the archaeo-
logical site (see Zerubavel). Precedence or continued residence is not the
only fraught issue, however, but marking the boundary of a national cul-
ture is as well. This may be clearly seen in France where archaeologists
have used material remains to definitively demonstrate the complexity of
population movements and settlements throughout French history, thus
providing conclusive proof of the heterogeneity of French culture; even
those French citizens who can trace their ancestry back for centuries, will
not often find the Gauls, made famous first in Republican history texts
and later in the beloved comic series, Astérix et Obelix, among them (see
Dietler). Finally, in the United States, where the heterogeneous nature of
the population is vaunted, rather than obscured, the material culture un-
covered and analysed by archaeologists has done other political work.
In the context of the United States, material culture has very often
been mobilised in arguments concerning the colonies’ culture in the pre-
national period. Were they analogous to provincial English regions, or did
the presence of Native Americans, Africans and other European immi-
grants create a distinctive North American culture? The stakes of this are
quite high: they include both the nature of the American Revolution and
364 Leora Auslander
the historical foundations of the American nation. If the American colo-

nies really were fundamentally English in the late eighteenth century, then
the Revolution should be conceptualised as a civil war (see Bushman). If a
distinctive American identity had already formed, then it bears a closer
relationship to a war of independence (see Butler). If there was no unitary
identity in the 1770s, but rather one was formed through the political pro-
cess that has yet other implications for how one should understand the
military mobilisation (see Fischer). Likewise, the degree to which the cul-
tural foundations of the United States were multiple, including strong Na-
tive American, African, French, German, Dutch, Scots, Irish and English
influences, or singular—English—has important ramifications for the im-
aginary of the nation (see Axtell; Ferguson) These are questions for which
research on material culture has proved essential. The work of archaeolo-
gists on both architectural and small material remains has brought im-
portant evidence to bear, as has that of specialists in textiles, silver and
furnishings.
The study of material culture in Britain, France and Germany of the
eighteenth through twentieth centuries has been focused on the one hand
on both ‘folk’ and ‘elite’ material culture traditions within each polity and
on each nation’s relation to far distant cultures (both each country’s erst-
while colonial possessions and others), on the other. In Germany, the field
of Volkskunde with its emphasis on preserving and analysing regional cul-
tural forms, the French ethnographic tradition associated with the Musée
des Arts et Traditions Populaires and local history societies in Britain have
been attentive to documenting variations within the national frame (see
Bendix; Segalen). Each country also has a very strong tradition of academ-
ic study of the decorative arts, and much work in material culture has oc-
curred in the context of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Musée des
Arts Décoratifs, and the many museums devoted to Wohnkultur in its vari-
ous forms and design, in Germany. Each country’s relation to the ‘exotic’
has also been approached from this perspective, with intense study of the
ethnographic museums and collections.
5. The Future of Material Culture Studies
If the number of journals devoted to the study of material culture and ma-
teriality, of handbooks and of conferences constitute a reasonable measure
of the presence and vitality of the concept and the interdisciplinary con-
figurations engaged in its use and study, then material culture is thriving
(see Attfield; Bennet and Joyce; Buchli; the journals Material Culture and
Design History). Both the dynamism of the concept and the greatest threats
Materiality 365
to it come from those who challenge its boundaries. Some scholars seek
to erode the distinction between language and thingness, while others be-
tween the material and the immaterial. Those who claim that the line be-
tween language and things should be effaced justify that argument by
saying that language in use is necessarily materialised. That is, that spoken
language emerges from one body and is heard by one or many others, ei-
ther in face-to-face interaction or with the help of various media. Written
language, they argue, is necessarily carried by a material support, whether
that be a manuscript on traced by hand on vellum, a blockprint carried by
a piece of linen or the fragile paper often used to produce books and
newspapers in the twentieth century, shown luminously on an iPad or
even tweeted. This is clearly true. I would argue, however, that this posi-
tion only reinforces the argument for the importance of taking materiality
and material culture seriously and studying them autonomously. The fact
that their meanings change when exactly the same words are spoken by
the same people using different media: face-to-face, over a conventional
telephone or over Skype, means that the materiality of the medium (and
of the body) is of prime importance. And, the fact that the same written
words carried by different material supports convey different meanings,
implies that the material support itself carries meaning that must be stud-
ied in order to be understood.
Efforts to extend the boundary of material culture, to include the nat-
ural world, that is to efface the ‘culture’ half of the term, seem to me also
misguided. While it is clear and obvious that plants and the landscape play
an absolutely central role in human existence, activities like agriculture
whose main purpose is to produce food, and not a landscape or forestry,
whose main purpose is management of the forest, are better studied with
another lens.
I also do not find the inclusion of the cultural goods that are defini-
tively material in their production, but only distantly so in their consump-
tion—notably music, video, computer images and film—useful. Part of
what is so interesting about these genres is precisely their immateriality or
transferability. Thus, music and images, like words, may be reproduced in
many forms and the forms will change the meaning. Analysing the differ-
ences in the same piece played live, recorded and transmitted by radio,
phonograph disk, television, tape, CD or download would fit within the
rubric of material culture. Likewise, the concept may be usefully applied to
phonograph players, radios, CD players, MP3 players, iPods, and so on.
Studying the transformation of the perception of colour from watercol-
our, to oil paint, to acrylic, to a plastic slide, to different forms of digital
images shown through different display technologies, too, productively
falls within the purview of the concept. But the music and the images
366 Leora Auslander
themselves are in a different relation to the material and the temporal than
the three-dimensional mortal objects that have been the focus of this es-
say.
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Transnational and Global Perspectives as
Travelling Concepts in the Study of Culture
FRANK BÖSCH and HUBERTUS BÜSCHEL
1. Introduction
The terms ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ have become important and fash-
ionable buzzwords in recent years. Both terms are used in different lan-
guages (see Saunier 1047) and stand for a relatively new perspective with a
huge impact—especially in countries like Germany, where the humanities
have had a strong national bias since the nineteenth century. As a matter
of fact, many of the recent ‘turns’ in the study of culture went hand in
hand with a “global turn” (Bachmann-Medick 395). Despite this promi-
nence, however, there is no well-defined framework which would indicate
what transnational and global analyses should mean exactly. Moreover,
there is no concise theoretical or methodological background to these per-
spectives (for overviews see Iriye and Saunier; Kahgram and Levitt;
Scheuerman; Stuchtey and Fuchs). Obviously these terms became buzz-
words because of their ability to cover a wide range of distinct political,
economic and cultural trends. Transnational and global analyses promise
heuristic, semantic and analytical frameworks in the sense of perspectives
in research, interpretation and narrative. These analyses encourage ex-
panding the sample of empiric material regarding space, variability and
media conditions (see Bösch). They also stress the need to think more
than usual about the colonial and material conditions of archives in a
broader sense of the term, like the collection of files, libraries or artefacts
(see Büschel), and to include new sources like the voices of subaltern
groups and non-governmental actors (see Manning 361).
At first glance, ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ share many similarities: both
refer to interactions and perceptions across frontiers and cultural bounda-
ries, and both perspectives help to deconstruct or avoid national or Euro-
centric perspectives in heuristic, methodological and theoretical fields.
Transnational and global perspectives originally tended to mix their re-
search subjects with theories of interpretation: scholars like the historians
372 Frank Bösch and Hubertus Büschel
Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye pointed out that transnational and global
histories were developed to demarcate a new research field focussing on
processes of transnationalisation and globalisation (see Hopkins; Mazlish
and Iriye; for literary studies see Reichardt; see also Geyer and Bright).
These research tools were invented, transformed or highlighted in meta-
phors like ‘networks’ or ‘entanglement’ (for the metaphors see Oster-
hammel and Petersson 10).
Nevertheless, there are also some clear differences between transna-
tional and global perspectives: In fact, each concept focuses on a different
subject. Transnational analyses are centred on interactions, connections,
and entanglements between persons, institutions or cultures across certain
nations. One can say that transnational perspectives mostly use ‘imagined’
nations or nationals only existing within political structures as the com-
mon basis of their analysis (see Anderson). Thus seen, the difference be-
tween ‘transnational’ and ‘international’ is often rather fuzzy or poorly
defined. Broadly speaking, ‘international’ refers much more to relations
between states and less on transfers and interactions between different
parts of their societies. The term ‘global’ points much more to interactions
beyond national boundaries, to a ‘global consciousness,’ and implies
worldwide interrelations or relations between great parts of the globe, es-
pecially between different cultures and different continents. As a conse-
quence, transnational methods are more closely related to comparisons of
national conditions or sections of national societies in transnational net-
works or relationships (see Kaelble; Werner and Zimmermann), whereas
global methods focus on the reconstruction of shared histories, on the
networks themselves or global flows (see Appadurai), and on something
the anthropologist Shalini Randeria terms ‘entanglement.’ But from a
global perspective (for example in global history), comparison is also a
dominant method alongside the method of pointing out connections (see
O’Brian 3). Global perspectives usually pay closer attention to so-called
subaltern cultural spaces of peoples in so-called poor countries in our
“global village” (Dallmayr). As Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed out, such
concepts also try to establish “cross-categorical translations” of the mainly
Eurocentric patterns of research, description and analysis in the study of
culture (see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe 85).
Yet there is a tension between the terms. The increasing academic use
of the term ‘transnational’ in the last decade is best understood as a reac-
tion to the academic and popular use of the word ‘global.’ ‘Transnational’
reflects the persistent role of nations and national identity even during the
current globalisation and the difficulties of pinpointing and analysing
global cultures. Furthermore, ‘transnational’ is an academic term which is
seldom used in public discourse. The German news magazine Der Spiegel,
Transnational and Global Perspectives as Travelling Concepts 373
for instance, used the word ‘transnational’ only 13 times in any of its arti-
cles over the last 60 years.
However, both perspectives can be discussed as ‘travelling concepts’
in reference to James Clifford, Edward Said and Mieke Bal (see Clifford;
Said, “Travelling Theory”; Bal). The terms travelled in five ways: between
different periods, with changing meanings since the nineteenth century;
between different regions, not only between Western countries, but with
impetus from other parts of the world; between disciplines, from the hu-
manities to law and economic studies to political sciences and back to the
humanities; between academic and public discourses; and, finally, the
terms’ political motivation travelled from utopian assumptions of a shared
common world to a critique of powerful institutions to a political critique
of the concept itself. It will be shown in the following that apart from the
differences mentioned above, both perspectives can be compared—
especially when it comes to the question: Can we really call transnational
and global perspectives ‘travelling concepts’ in the study of culture? We
will argue that both concepts can be regarded as ‘travelling concepts of
travelling’ par excellence, also in the critical debate on the terms.
2. Travelling Concepts of Travelling
In an interview in 1992, Stuart Hall said about cultural studies and globali-
sation: “Cultural studies today is not only about globalization: it is being
‘globalized,’ a very uneven and contradictory process, which is not just a
question of substituting one problematic for another and is one which we
are only just beginning to understand” (Hall 393). According to Hall, we
should have a closer look at the structure of this ‘globalisation’ and its
conceptual consequences for the study of culture when it comes to trans-
national and global analysis. How can this be achieved? When we use a
means of analysis which not only refers to the results of globalisation—as
it is the case in Hall’s work—we can work with the metaphor of travelling,
which can help us to show historical, political, disciplinary or spatial pow-
er relations. Finally, it can also help us to highlight the sometimes prob-
lematic background of transnational and global perspectives, problems
which are also caused by their consistency as travelling concepts. Basically,
we can say that transnational and global perspectives in the study of cul-
ture mostly reflect travelling in a broader sense as a cultural technique and
can be considered travelling concepts themselves at the same time.
On the level of theory, transnational and global perspectives use post-
colonial, trans-cultural, linguistic and economic approaches and refer to
different theorists like Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Marshall McLuhan,
Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha. In heuristics these perspectives travel

between languages, literature, media, archival sources and oral studies of
hegemonic and subaltern discourses. In terms of methods, these perspec-
tives rely on approaches from literary criticism such as discourse analysis,
interview studies or thick description in field studies. Why should we say
that these concepts are really travelling and not just extremely eclectic?
One answer could be that the more or less explicit programme and ideal
of scholars doing transnational and global studies is to let their views trav-
el around the emergence of a scholarly and also public transnational and
global consciousness, which simply means that all our differences exist
together on one globe—beyond the national state, and beyond national or
disciplinary academic communities. The goal is to establish a new sense of
the ‘self’ in cultural reflection, something like a more expanded ‘self,’ in a
more extended connection with ‘the other.’ In doing so, transnational and
global perspectives include a revision and questioning of the common un-
derstanding of disciplinary and cultural boundaries, time and space. They
focus on establishing travelling global cultural values within the study of
culture, values that open up and translate Western concepts within the
systems of research, analysis and narration of mainly so-called underprivi-
leged academic and public contexts. These are located in subaltern classes
in the US-American, Australian or European territories as well as in the
intellectual arenas of Southeast Asia, tropical Africa or Latin-America.
3. Travelling Between Time and Disciplines
Where has the talk and writing of such terms as ‘transnational’ and ‘global’
come from? One could say that the rise of transnational and global per-
spectives is part of the scholarly discourses in the study of culture as well
as in other, older disciplines like law, history, literary studies or economics.
These disciplines are interwoven with public discourses which inspired
scholars to use these terms (see Scholte, “Beyond the Buzzword”).
In its early usage the term ‘transnational’ travelled between several dis-
ciplines. Already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ger-
man researchers occasionally used the word to describe cultural or
economic practices. Its early use was quite often situated in the humani-
ties. The German linguist Georg Curtius spoke in his inaugural lecture in
1862 of the transnational roots of each language—“Eine jede Sprache ist
ihrer Grundlage nach etwas transnationales” (qtd. in Saunier 1047)—, and
other studies used the term to describe universal participation (transna-
tional meaning “die ganze Menschheit nimmt daran teil”; Hirsch 81) or to
describe common practices in different cultures (see Meyer 370). This
term was mainly taken up in the United States. In particular, the US-
American writer Randolph Bourne used the word ‘transnational’ in 1916
in his essay “Trans-National America” about migrants and relationships
between cultures, which predicted a mixture beyond nations and Europe-
an nationalism. Although some international corporations called them-
selves ‘transnational,’ the word was seldom used in public discourse in the
following decades. While some newspapers in the USA used it occasional-
ly, the British Times has started to use the word more often since 1969.
The public use of the far more-popular term ‘global’ also increased in the-
se years.
Since the 1960s, the term ‘transnational’ was established in two disci-
plines in particular. First, scholars of international law used the term to
analyse international treaties and laws and the practice of the United Na-
tions (see Saunier 1047). The Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (since
1964) and the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law (since 1967) were the
first journals to take up the term. Secondly, political scientists discovered
the term in their analyses of international political interactions, global poli-
tics such as that of the UN and contemporary social movements. Here, a
more critical use of the term and a left-wing view were established. While
transnational social protest movements were seen as positive transnational
examples, transnational corporations and ‘cultural imperialism’ were criti-
cised.
The word ‘global’ initially became one of the main labels to connote
scholarly efforts in conceptualising macroscopic economic transforma-
tions with visions transcending nation or Western-centred biases (for a
historical overview see Easterly). Until today the economic dimension of
the term is dominant. However, this term has also been discovered by
many other disciplines since the 1960s. ‘Global history,’ for instance, be-
came a new label, although such history has had a long tradition since the
eighteenth century (called ‘world history,’ Weltgeschichte). However, not
many modern empirical global historical studies were published up to the
1990s (see Conrad, Eckerta, and Freitag 9–12).
We can find traces of global approaches in US-American and British
cultural studies as early as the late 1970s when the novelty of the terms
was observed several times (see Modelski; Scheuerman). With regard to
the definition of concepts of cultural studies in the broader sense, we can
say that at that time, the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ mainly fulfilled
the function of a common discourse which focused more or less exclu-
sively on transnational and global research subjects. In the late 1970s, this
discourse emerged against the background of incipient debates about re-
search perspectives informed by postcolonial and postmodern theories, as
well as about the means to describe transnational and global phenomena
like transnationality and globality themselves. Today, transnational and

global perspectives have been introduced into several disciplines and
methods. In many cases, they are combined with other new approaches
that have emerged since the 1960s (see, for instance, journals like Global
Media and Communication), but they are also connected to traditional region-
al and area studies (see journals like the Journal of Transnational American
Studies).
On the level of academic spaces, transnational and global perspectives
were mostly brought into the world from the US, meaning that the pro-
cess by which both perspectives moved in the study of culture mirrors the
dichotomies between ‘the West and the rest.’ With respect to academic
practices and institutions, transnational as well as global perspectives are
developed in the US and fan out from there (see Patel; Sachsenmaier 2)—
just like the most important concepts in the study of culture. At this point,
local academic conditions and subjects of research are blended again: In
the US-American debates in cultural, economic and political studies, the
United States is usually seen as the example par excellence of a transna-
tional and globalised nation which has to be analysed from transnational
and global perspectives (see Thelen; Tyrell).
Another example of the connectedness and oscillation between local
academic conditions and research objects is the emergence of transnation-
al perspectives in the study of culture. One example is the histoire croisée,
which arose among French scholars in the late 1980s and was mainly used
to analyse cultural and political transfers from France to other European
countries (see Werner and Zimmermann).
4. Critical Perspectives
The rise of the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ is a reflection of changing

perceptions and experiences of phenomena such as the cultural flows of
knowledge, economics, ideas, etc. across national borders. In short, these
keywords relate to our phenomenological existence in our increasingly
transnational home countries and global world (for an excellent overview
of the history of globalisation see Osterhammel and Petersson; for defini-
tions see Beck; for the background of the term in academic discourse see
Scheuerman). This diagnosis and this analysis of globalisation also include
political positions against transnationalisation and globalisation (for over-
views see Giddens, Runaway World; Stiglitz).
Indeed, critical reflection on changing human experiences of time and
space is not the product of our transnational and global times. Long be-
fore terms like ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ found their way into common
debates and discourses, the compression of space and time in human ex-
perience was present. Already in the late nineteenth century, writings in
philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology shared the awareness
that the experience of space and time is transformed by the emergence of
new, faster forms of transportation (railroads), communication (telegraph
or telephone), archiving, and recording (gramophone records) (see Har-
vey, Postmodernity; Kern). Euphoria about these developments went hand
in hand with sceptical reflections on the consequences. In this context, the
following remark of the German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine uttered in
1834 is famous: “[S]pace is killed by the railways. I feel as if the mountains
and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can
smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against
my door” (qtd. in Schivelbusch 34). In 1848, Karl Marx ‘invented’ critical
political global perspectives for the analysis of the imperial structures of
the bourgeois economy when he wrote: “[They] nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, and establish connections everywhere” (Marx 476). Further-
more, he talked about “intercourse in every direction” and the “universal
interdependence of nations” (ibid.).
We also find a scholarly discourse on the effects of recent global tech-
nological trends in the philosophy and social theory of the 1920s. The his-
torian John Dewey reflected on the changing experience of time and space
and on the ways in which people live together. In 1927, he wrote that the
invention of steam, electricity and the telephone offered a formidable
challenge to relatively static and homogeneous ways of local
community life. Dewey held the “mania for motion and speed” of con-
temporary society responsible for society’s difficulties in identifying ob-
jects of common concern. He wondered: “How can a public be organized,
we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?” (Dewey 140). We
find this view again in the analysis of shifts in spatial and temporal con-
tours in the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Paul Virilio. According to
Virilio, the ability to cross distances at high speed and the temporal struc-
ture of modern warfare and weapons systems has enforced executive and
degraded representative legal practice.
Martin Heidegger was another scholar who contributed to debates on
globalisation in his times. He first described the “abolition of distance” of
time and space as an experience of cultural techniques in 1950 (see
Heidegger 165). Secondly, he pointed out the cultural effects of these
experiences: “Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film
as if they stood this very moment amidst today’s street traffic. […] The
peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by tele-
vision, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of
communication” (Heidegger 165). Thirdly, he reflected on the cultural
consequences of the aforementioned compression of time and space:

Heidegger developed the term “uniform distanceless” as a critical term of
time diagnosis (see Heidegger 166). According to him, the loss of any
meaningful distinction between ‘close’ and ‘far’ contributed to a reduction
of human experience to a more “monotonous and one-dimensional” sta-
tus (see Scheuerman).
Since the 1970s, more and more critical perspectives have been raised
against the power of transnational and global economic, political and cul-
tural processes. The concepts of transnationality and globality are used
both as an interwoven social movement and as a tool for research. The
terms ‘transnationalisation’ and ‘globalisation’ are often used interchange-
ably to denote phenomena like the pursuit of classical liberal policies in
world economies, the growing Western dominance in political, economic,
and cultural fields, and the proliferation of newer and faster information
or travel technologies. According to Marx and the so-called world-system
theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (for an overview see Wallerstein), transna-
tionalisation and globalisation were viewed critically as formations of capi-
talism which kept enlarging their global power and destroying economic,
political as well as cultural diversity. Since the mid-1980s, scholars from
the fields of anthropology and the social sciences like Anthony Giddens
have questioned the exclusive focus on economic factors in processes of
globalisation (see Giddens, Runaway World).
In recent years, some fundamental criticism of the concepts of trans-
national and global analysis in the study of economics, politics, sociology
and, last but not least, culture has arisen (for an overview see Mann 21–
22). This criticism also travelled through different disciplines. Scholars of
sociology and political science pointed out that transnationalisation, glob-
alisation and the nation state are not opposing concepts because nation
states have themselves been globalised and the rise of nationalism went
hand in hand with globalisation. Within a focus on transnational and glob-
al phenomena however, the power of this transformation inside the nation
state might be overseen or ignored (see Holton; Weiss). The variety and
variability of the nation state’s ‘infrastructural powers,’ which enable gov-
ernments to develop and negotiate on a national and transnational level, is
excluded from analysis (see Pieterse). This argument was also taken up by
historians (see Geyer and Bright). On a more cultural level, it was pointed
out that the metaphor of ‘time-space compression’ (David Harvey) implies
linear processes which can be identified exactly in terms of beginning and
end. These points are, however, far from being unequivocal. They are
mainly just created by interpretation and experience as well as negotiation.
Another point of criticism consists in the fact that the move of transna-
tional and global experiences to the fields of cultural analysis was mostly
seen as an apolitical process, whereas in fact it referred to some funda-

mentally controversial theoretical concepts of culture. In the study of cul-
ture we often forget the political implications of our cultural concepts.
However, talking and writing about transnational or global cultures always
perpetuate a problematic political view of comparable if not homogenous
spaces of culture which are constructed within well-defined borders.
For many scholars it is a declared goal to find new, more critical diag-
noses of modernity in our Western world (see Dirlik) and to rethink the
relationship between “metropolis and colony,” also in postcolonial times
(see Stoler and Cooper). Some of these scholars pointed out that each
manifestation of transnationalisation and globalisation generates distinct
conflicts and dislocations. A prominent contemporary example is Jean-
François Bayart, who observed in 2004 that global markets are mostly
connected to national fortresses: international financial and target markets
are globalised while labour markets are becoming less integrated. Even
though the labour markets in the EU are comparatively transparent and
allow for the employment of ‘cheap’ or ‘specially qualified’ workers from
non-European countries, the civil rights of these migrants remain restrict-
ed (see Bayart).
Besides these common political statements concerning observations in
our transnational and global world, there are some more intrinsic ones:
Reflections on human experience of time and space are central to public
debates. Experiences of faster ways of travelling, the crossing of longer
distances through communication and the world-wide power of econom-
ics, for example, are termed “time-space compression” by geographer Da-
vid Harvey (Postmodernity 240). This means that human experience mainly
measures spatial distances in terms of time. Likewise, Zygmunt Bauman
emphasises the transnational and global dimensions of fields of human
experiences like social and political movements, class, migration, or just
travelling. But he also insists on the interrelation of factors such as the
division of labour, finance, health regimes, new technologies and the ho-
mogenisation of culture and consumer markets. Perceptions of space and
time as well as critical theories of culture are seen as the effects of transna-
tional and global experience as well as the conditions of its status quo and
as a part of the process of the constitution of transnational or global expe-
rience. Bauman constitutes an in-between stage of interwoven temporal
and spatial experiences, which are polarised through social or cultural
techniques (see Bauman). But theories of transnational and global phe-
nomena also disagree on the concrete divisions between the spatial and
temporal categories of human experience (see Scheuerman). These theo-
ries mostly insist on actions such as the negotiation and appropriation of
time-space relationships within human experience. Nonetheless, they gen-
erally agree that these global and transnational experiences are seeking to
undermine the importance of local and even national cultural boundaries.
These phenomenological observations emerge in the arena of critical cul-
tural theories: “Time-space compression” is seen as one important impe-
tus for creating equally Western-centred “cultures of uniformity”
(Tomlinson 9). Authors both within and outside academic communities
demand that against the background of the far-reaching implications of
transnationalisation and globalisation for the human environment, we
constantly have to rethink key questions of global economic and political
structures as well as normative cultural strategies—like global human
rights (see Anghie on global law and financial conditions, for example) or
so-called liberal media strategies (see Sassen; Tomlinson, Culture Imperial-
ism, Globalization and Culture). On the level of observation, a change to local
conditions as one social result of the human experience of “time-space-
compression” is to be observed. By employing the term ‘deterritorialisa-
tion,’ scholars try to describe the growing variability and variety of peo-
ple’s discourses and practices of communication and travel irrespective of
their geographical locations. In this context, Jan Aart Scholte, for example,
wrote: “Global events can—via telecommunication, digital computers,
audiovisual media, rocketry and the like—occur almost simultaneously
anywhere and everywhere in the world” (Scholte, “Beyond the Buzzword”
45; see also Scheuerman). We can find this phenomenological assumption
of the ‘deterritorialisation’ of our global world in analytical metaphors like
‘flows,’ ‘shared culture,’ or ‘interconnectedness’ (see Appadurai; Randeria).
Transnationalisation as well as globalisation also refer to the distribution
of new forms of social activities (see Scheuerman; Scholte, “Beyond the
Buzzword,” Globalization). However, the perception of such global events
and interactions are usually connected to different national and cultural
interpretations which often create new spaces or even support traditional
cultural or national identities. Global events like 9/11 or the landing on
the moon went hand in hand with different national perceptions.
In critical studies, cultural processes and the status quo of global ‘de-
territorialisation’ were mostly regarded as a result and part of a global
power which was labelled ‘imperialistic’ (Padgen; as an overview to the
intertwining of globalisation and imperialism see Eckert and Randeria).
Various authors argue that transnationalisation and globalisation are simp-
ly other words for ‘imperialism,’ the civilising missions of the so-called
First World, or world-wide capitalist domination (see Conrad and
Randeria 17ff.; Harvey, New Imperialism; Magdoff). One main focus of the
pertinent studies is the global power of US foreign policy. In 2000, Mi-
chael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Book Empire, in which the authors re-
gard the ‘empire’ as a result of global capitalism rather than of US-
American power, became the ‘bible’ for enemies of globalisation. Accord-

ing to Hardt and Negri, possibilities for governance have been expanded
and multiplied away from the national level to the decentred and ‘deterri-
torialised’ global ‘empire’ that is subject to the conditions of globalisation
(see Hardt and Negri; for a critical assessment see Dean and Passavant;
Sen and Waterman). This view found its way into more classical scholarly
interpretations, for example into those of the historian Neill Ferguson,
who pointed out that the British colonial empire has to be seen as a model
for post-1945 US-American foreign policy (see Ferguson). Susan Strange,
for example, highlighted the power of globalisation to repress the power
of states, questioning the balance between states and economic markets
and adjusting this balance toward the markets (see Strange). Moreover,
scholars like Edward Said have pointed out that cultural phenomena are
also interconnected with political fields and can thus be regarded as forms
of imperialistic power (see Said, Culture).
A more positive (or more naïve) debate arose concerning the question
of whether transnationalisation and globalisation require and promote
democratic values and institutions and can help to fight poverty—an ar-
gument which was mainly raised by the British political scientist David
Held (see Held; see also Jones; Pogge). Just like Held, Jürgen Habermas
has tried to propagate the EU as a supranational means towards building
global democracy. Using the metaphor of declining governmental demo-
cracy, Habermas elaborated on the growing vulnerability of democracy
and demanded—of the EU—that it finds means to guarantee and protect
the civil, political, social and economic rights of all its inhabitants (see Ha-
bermas 58–113). The utopian and Eurocentric character of such proposals
provoked fundamental criticism (see, for example, Archibugi; Held). We
should think of the recent debate on the shadows of cosmopolitanism as
deriving from this criticism: African philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
wrote, for example, that so-called cosmopolitans can high-
light Western moral responsibilities and regimes towards people who live
faraway and with whom the West shares little in terms of cultural, political
and also economic conditions (see Appiah; see also Scheuerman; Zolo).
Some critics also point out that local, regional, and national forms of self-
government are being rapidly supplanted by insufficiently democratic
forms of global governance far removed from the needs of ordinary citi-
zens, whereas their defenders describe new forms of supranational legal
and political decision-making as indispensable forerunners of more inclu-
sive and advanced forms of self-government.
The semantic and analytical interweaving of transnational and global
perspectives in the study of culture entails some problematic limits which
can be called ‘analytical shadows.’ The metaphor of travelling always relies
more or less covertly on the assumption of separated and separable

cultural spaces. Especially when it comes to the question of cultural dom-
inance, both perspectives refer to older models of the mainly anthropo-
logical views of ‘acculturation’ and ‘transculturation.’ The term ‘ac-
culturation’ signifies the exchange of cultural features as a result of eco-
nomic, social and cultural contact between people from different cultural
spaces and backgrounds. In particular, the term implies a one-way export
from a dominant cultural context to its subaltern counterpart (see Her-
skovits, Redfield, and Linton, “Memorandum,” Acculturation). The model
of ‘transculturation’ was developed by the Cuban anthropologist Fernan-
do Ortiz in 1940 in opposition to ‘acculturation’ in order to find alter-
natives to its unilateral and unidirectional implications and to the Euro-
centric and colonial background of the older term (see Ortiz). Ortiz tried
to describe merging and converging cultures. ‘Transculturation’ does not
merely imply the acquisition of another culture to compensate for the loss
or uprooting of a previous culture. It carries the idea of the creation of
new cultures.
Even if scholars who favour the term ‘transculturation’ deny a ten-
dency to think in cultural dichotomies, we must not forget that ‘transcul-
turation’ as well as ‘acculturation’ imply relatively static spaces within the
borders of an allegedly definable localised culture. The analytical problem
of referring to these older models of cultural encounters, exchanges, and
transfers is the fading of local conditions, local experiences and the nego-
tiation of daily life, as well as individual protests. Since the early 1990s,
scholars of critical media studies have, for example, demanded that the
active aspect of subjects as recipients of global flows to be highlighted (for
an early example see Liebes and Katz). A similar point of criticism was
raised by anthropologists like Ulf Hannerz, who pointed out that from
transnational and global perspectives, studies of culture sometimes estab-
lish a rather normative critical discourse about cultural imperialism which
perpetuates the very Eurocentric analytical models they intended to de-
construct (see Hannerz).
5. Current Debates on Translation and Individuals

in Global and Transnational Contexts
As suggested by Hannerz, the following questions should be central to

current and future debates: How can we dissolve the motifs of the imagi-
nation of homogeneous cultural spaces which can be located in quite sep-
arate areas and spaces? And how can we deconstruct the normative (or
mechanistic and undifferentiated) conditions of transnational and global
analysis? Hannerz pointed out that future studies should concentrate more
on the so-called peripheries of our transnationalised and globalised world
in order to question the idea of active creators of dominant political, social
and cultural hegemony on the one side, and the recipients, on the other
side, who cannot be regarded as merely passive but also as active (see
Hannerz). This does not mean that we should deny or neglect asymme-
tries in the uneven distribution of economic, political, social and cultural
power. Within these asymmetries, however, cultural flows have to be
regarded as more than just one-sided exports. They should be analysed
as creative, flexible fields of current negotiations in their “glocal” condi-
tions (see Robertson), as phenomena the individual can resist, choose,
adopt and translate (see e.g. Hall 400). The diagnosis and analysis of the
so-called deterritorialising effect of transnational and global conditions in
territories overseas simplifies, for example, the fact that geographical loca-
tions and material situations remain crucial for human living conditions;
who would overlook the local conditions of a poor farmer in tropical
Africa in our globalised world? In general, one aim is to focus more on the
forms and nuances of the “multiple modernities” in our transnational and
global existence (see Eisenstadt).
In order to attain these important goals, further travels of transnation-
al and global perspectives in the study of culture will be necessary: On the
level of travelling between phenomenological areas and science we have to
consider the political dimensions on a much broader scale. Global per-
spectives should not only include analysis of the speed and discourses of
cultural flows but also their social activities and power. Deterritorialisation
or interconnectedness initially seem chiefly spatial in nature. But they are
tied to “the acceleration of social life, while social acceleration itself takes
many different forms” (Scheuerman n.pag.; see also Eriksen). The velocity
of flows, movements and interchanges across borders can vary to the
same extent as their magnitude, impact or regularity. Distinct assumptions
about space and time often have difficulty coexisting during a certain pe-
riod of time and create pressure (see Gurvitch). This pressure has to be
analysed, for example with regard to social activities like political propa-
ganda and social exclusion (see e.g. Musner 82). On the level of theories
and methods, analytical models for processes like translation and ‘hybridi-
sation’ will become more important in order to analyse the dynamics of
transnational and global appropriation as well as negotiation and re-
sistance (see Bhabha; Bronfen and Marius).
We should not, however, overestimate the openness and dialogical
structure of cultural exchanges. Instead, future studies should avoid and
deconstruct the romantic vision of a global world of liberal conditions of
acting and speaking, as it is often done in the reception of Bhabha’s in-
fluential metaphor of the ‘third space’ as an area ‘between cultures’ (see

Leggewie; for a concise critique see Ha 59–69). Bhabha himself wrote that
his conception of a
third space […] may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture,
based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or diversity of cultures […]. To
that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation
and negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of
culture. […] And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of po-
larity and emerge as the others of our selves. (Bhabha, Location 38–39; see also
Bhabha, “Cultures In-Between”)
This means that we should always look at the more or less hidden asym-
metries of economic, social, political, cultural, and—last but not least—
racial categories which are set by hegemonic power structures. As a form
of critical self-reflection, scholars in the field of cultural studies should
understand the transnational and global conditions of the study of culture
as a Western and Eurocentric rather than a global perspective. We should
therefore try to open our categories in the study of culture to translations
and negotiations from areas in Asia or Africa that are still mainly dominat-
ed by our Western cultural perspectives (see Hall 400; Gergen). These
should be the travels of the future.
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Conceptual Transfer: A Cognitive Approach to the
Construction, Re-Interpretation and
Re-Contextualisation of Academic Concepts
WOLFGANG HALLET
1. Implications of the Travel Metaphor
As has often been pointed out, the notion of concepts that travel is a met-
aphor that has taken on the status of meta-concept in the humanities and
the study of culture (see Neumann and Tygstrup). On the one hand, this
metaphor is of a descriptive nature, in that it aims at designating, describ-
ing and explaining the ways in which categories are shared and exchanged
across academic disciplines, how they add new perspectives to disciplinary
fields of research and how they may even shape new fields of research and
theory. On the other hand, this metaphor has also taken on a normative
status in that it is used purposefully to promote interdisciplinarity and
transdisciplinary approaches based on common theoretical and conceptual
grounds. Moreover, the notion of concepts that travel has turned out to
be a fruitful and powerful meta-concept which lends itself to conceptual
and theoretical awareness and self-reflection in terms of the tools, concep-
tualisations and theoretical contexts of research employed in the study of
culture.
However, metaphors are in themselves results of conceptual blending
and acts of conceptual transfer, linking two different semantic or cognitive
realms, transferring features from one semantic realm to the other and
blending originally distinct meanings and categorical features. For in-
stance, the metaphor of a travelling concept suggests that a ‘concept,’ very
much like a person or a vehicle, is a stable, almost autonomous entity, ca-
pable of moving and migrating from one place to another on its own. The
word ‘travel’ also suggests that there is an identifiable point of departure, a
point of arrival, a route, an itinerary and so forth. All of these are cultural
thought patterns which, according to James Clifford, are historically con-
nected with Western “connotations of middle class ‘literary,’ or recrea-
tional, journeying, spatial practices long associated with male experiences
390 Wolfgang Hallet
and virtues” (Clifford n.pag.). But there is also the question of agency and
subjectivity (which, as Mieke Bal demonstrates, is itself an ‘unstable,’ unre-
liable travelling concept in the study of culture; see Bal 5–6), of driving
forces and counterforces that may accelerate, decelerate or even inhibit
the traveller’s journey, and the issue of predictability, i.e. to what extent
journeys can be pre-determined and planned, or whether there may be
delays, deviations and adventurous, explorative routes, rather than linear,
well-mapped itineraries.
Therefore, as much as the journey is planned and made by the travel-
ler, it may well be that the journey also shapes and makes the traveller,
forces them to adapt to new worlds and environments, to find company
and travel mates, to bear and overcome communication problems and
misunderstandings, and to be mistrusted and observed with suspicion (as
often happens to newcomers who migrate into pre-inhabited realms—
phenomena with which we are well familiar from travel writing). Also, like
the traveller, concepts do not remain unchanged in the course of their
journey; they undergo permanent changes whenever they set foot on new
disciplinary territory, “continuously altering their shape as they traverse
distances from one academic context to another and being inflected by
the field in which they are used” (Neumann and Tygstrup 1). And finally it
is difficult, maybe even impossible to determine where a concept depart-
ed, what its destination may be, and where it actually ‘belongs’ in terms of
disciplinary contexts and theoretical origins.
From a less metaphorical perspective, it seems obvious that, on the
one hand, there is no single act of conceptual transfer that can establish a
concept in a different academic discourse or in a new disciplinary envi-
ronment. Since the success of conceptual transfer largely depends on its
ability to create a theoretical ground shared by others, transfer in this
sense is not an individual wilful act. Rather, it must be regarded as a pro-
posal made to an academic discourse community, a test case in terms of
the concept’s plausibility, acceptance and acclaim in a different discipli-
nary context. The concept emerges in a process of negotiation during
which it will be constantly reshaped and redefined, adapted and adopted,
modified and adjusted (see ibid. 3).
On the other hand, contributions to ongoing academic negotiations
and to theoretical or conceptual debates are always intentional: they are
authored by individuals who seek to influence and shape the directions in
which a certain research question is treated or which a whole disciplinary
approach is taking. Therefore, acts of conceptual transfer are also individ-
ual cognitive acts of applying, re-interpreting or creating conceptual tools
needed and used in academic problem-solving processes, authored by
identifiable voices in a discourse and by members of the academic com-
Conceptual Transfer 391
munity. This observation coincides with the metaphorical quality of the

meta-concept of travelling concepts discussed in the introductory part of
this essay: In order for concepts to travel, they require some sort of agent
to initiate their journey across disciplinary boundaries, such as an individ-
ual researcher or, in collaborative research contexts, a team of academic
thinkers, or some sort of institution (e.g. a ‘school’) that actively proposes
the use of a particular concept in a problem-solving research context and
for a specific research purpose: “Concepts rarely travel by themselves but
are typically transmitted, mediated and translated by social agents” (ibid.
5). Therefore, although concepts are communal by definition and thus
‘social,’ (because they are shared by a group of people, and are distinct, for
example, from individual ‘ideas’), they are also always cognitive tools. This
means that they are appropriated, processed and employed by individual
researchers attempting to describe, structure and conceptualise social and
cultural perceptions and observations in order to constitute their research
objectives. Concepts serve as epistemological tools, as much to an aca-
demic community as to the mind of the individual researcher.
It is therefore promising to study analogies between the cognitive and
the socio-academic construction of concepts and, if possible, to derive
from these connections strategies for the non-incidental, reliable transfer
of concepts across disciplinary boundaries. In such an approach, one of
the assumptions is that, in a sense, every act of applying a concept (both
in everyday and in academic or scientific contexts) can be regarded as an
act of (re-)construction. This is due to the fact that concepts are never
activated and applied in the very same context; rather, they are re-created
to meet the demands of the new context and situation. This is why Lenk
conceptualises every act of ‘applying’ a cognitive schema as an act of
(re-)creation or (re-)interpretation and generally designates the use of cog-
nitive schemata as ‘schema interpretation’ (see Lenk 71ff.).1
Another assumption is that the ‘situation,’ ‘environment’ or ‘context’ a
concept is employed and implemented in is crucial since the new ‘envi-
ronment’ determines its functionality regarding the needs and desiderata
that it is supposed to meet. Therefore, the conceptualisation of the feed-
back process, during which a concept takes on its shape in a ‘context’ or
‘environment,’ is pivotal. The question of how we can best conceive of a
particular concept’s ‘context’ or ‘environment’ is crucial in every single
attempt we make to describe its implementation in different fields of aca-
demic study and cultural research.
1 Translation from the German by Wolfgang Hallet, as with all following quotes and para-
phrases from Lenk.
392 Wolfgang Hallet
A third assumption refers to the fact that, according to Lenk’s neuro-

psychological and epistemological theory of schema interpretation, what
can be stated about everyday concepts also pertains to academic and sci-
entific concepts. This is why Lenk extends his cognitive theory into a full-
blown epistemology. First, ‘concepts’ in Lenk’s theory represent an ad-
vanced level of schema formation, a higher-order cognitive activity during
which schemata take on the form of verbal representation so that ‘lan-
guage’ and ‘recognition’ become one (level 3b: ‘representation through
linguistically standardized concepts’; Lenk 76; see fig. 1). Secondly, scien-
tific and academic concepts represent the three highest levels of schema
interpretation in an integrated epistemology. In Lenk’s model, these hier-
archically ordered levels are
- level 4: conscious acts of classifying and ordering;
- level 5: theorising acts of explanation, legitimisation, argumenta-
tion (‘meta-schemata’);
- level 6: methodological and epistemological meta-interpretations
of theories of the construction and (re-)interpretation of schema-
ta and concepts (such as, e.g., theories of conceptual transfer and
travelling concepts in the humanities as discussed in this volume).
Therefore, in order to be able to make statements about how the con-
struction and application of concepts can best be described, I borrow
descriptions of the generation of scientific concepts from cognitive psy-
chology (see Peschl) and from a cognitive approach in epistemological
philosophy (see Lenk), both of which are conceptual frameworks that ex-
plicitly claim and regularly draw upon the analogies of the cognitive and
academic/scientific construction of conceptual knowledge. Part 2 of this
essay is therefore devoted to outlining these analogies, an approach which
is in itself an act of conceptual transfer. In part 3, I will examine whether
and in what way some of the categories used in the models of concept
generation can be transferred to (or can ‘travel’ to) the study of culture,
and in part 4, in light of the parallels and similarities described in the pre-
ceding sections, I will propose some strategies for a transdisciplinary im-
plementation and transfer of concepts.
Level of Schema
Cognitive Activity
Interpretation
1 genetically determined (‘primary’) schematization
2 habitual pattern schematization
3 socially und culturally conventionalized schematization
3a pre-linguistic, standardized schema interpretation
3b representational, linguistically standardized concept
formation
4 conscious, categorizing interpretation (classification etc.)
5 explanatory, apprehensive, theoretically reasoning
interpretation
6 epistemological meta-interpretation
Fig. 1: Lenk’s levels of schema interpretation (see Lenk 75–76).
2. The Construction of Cognitive and of Scientific Concepts
In order better to understand the dynamics of how concepts are made,

shaped and changed, why and how they are embedded into new theoreti-
cal contexts, and how they may even constitute a paradigm shift, it may be
advisable to turn to those disciplines that concern themselves with the
features and functions of concepts. The natural sciences, and the neural
sciences and cognitive psychology since Piaget in particular, have been
trying to describe the adaptation, creation, function and effects of con-
cepts in terms of cognitive structures generated by the mind to cope with
the millions of signals it constantly perceives. The human mind has to
transform these perceptions into meaningful structures and units in order
to make sense out of them, and to enable human beings to survive in the
environments they inhabit. Neuroscientist Markus F. Peschl’s theory on
the formation of scientific concepts is based on the assumption that this is
a goal the individual and the sciences have in common and that, therefore,
the individual mind’s construction of concepts and the scientific methods
of generating and applying concepts are similar in various respects. First
and foremost, Peschl argues that “science is done by cognitive systems;
hence cognitive science could perhaps contribute its models to the inves-
tigation of the process of science” (Peschl 186). In such an approach, sci-
ence is not regarded as “some abstract and detached process, but it is
conducted by cognitive systems and it is based on the representational
capabilities and dynamics of one or a group of cognitive systems” (ibid.
394 Wolfgang Hallet
189). This cognitive perspective emphasises the role of (individual as well

as collective) cognitive agency in the construction of concepts.
Secondly, the cognitive and the scientific construction of concepts are
both driven by the same goal of apprehending and ultimately manipulating
various aspects of visible (perceived and experienced) reality through the
understanding of an ‘invisible’ reality:
(a) there is some “hidden reality” that is not directly accessible by our sensory
systems […], and (b) furthermore, (hidden) mechanisms in this “hidden reality”
are responsible for the regularities that can be observed in the accessible macro-
domain. In other words, these regularities are emergent phenomena of processes
occurring in the “hidden domain.” (Ibid. 190)
As a result of the construction and description of underlying invisible reg-
ularities and mechanisms, both the cognising individual and the sciences
can develop behavioural strategies and tools to help them cope with par-
ticular aspects of the sensually accessible, perceivable world.
Apart from this more or less obvious overarching interface between
the individual (scientific) mind and the development of scientific concepts
and theories, there are processual as well as strategic and functional analo-
gies between the cognitive and the scientific construction of concepts that
can be briefly described as follows:
The processual analogy: According to Peschl, both the cognitive and
the scientific construction of concepts consist of at least two steps,
“[c]onstructing the correlations” and “[c]onstructing a theory about the
‘hidden reality’” (ibid. 190–91). The structure of the cognitive representa-
tion system neither resembles nor attempts to imitate the environmental
structures it seeks to represent, but rather “constructs regularities accord-
ing to its own regularities” (ibid. 191). Therefore, as a first step, the cogni-
tive regularities have to be correlated with the structures, constraints and
dynamics of the environment that is observed, apprehended and de-
scribed. This process, Peschl contends, “applies to both the cognitive as
well as the scientific domain” (ibid.).
The goal of the second step is the recognition of pattern structures
and the theorisation of the ‘hidden reality’:
[A]s a result of the inaccessibility of the ‘hidden reality’ the cognitive system has
to construct a (common sense or scientific) theory about the mechanisms that gov-
ern this hidden domain and that lead to the observed phenomena and regulari-
ties. In other words, this representation has to account for the regularities by
providing (theoretical or abstract) mechanisms that are capable of explaining,
predicting, and/or generating the environmental phenomenon. This knowledge
(i.e. models, abstract mechanisms, etc.) has to fit into the dynamics of the envi-
ronment like a key fits into a lock. (Ibid.; original emphases)
The constructivist notion of ‘functional fitness’ (see von Glasersfeld) un-

derlying this lock-and-key metaphor implies that in both cases the viability
test (or: hypothetical application) of a concept does not lead to any truth-
claim, nor does it attempt to produce evidence of a ‘truthful’ representa-
tion of reality: “Empirical facts, from the constructivist perspective, are
constructs based on regularities in a subject’s experience. They are viable
if they maintain their usefulness and serve their purposes in the pursuit of
goals” (ibid. 128). The same applies to the construction of concepts in the
cognising mind and in the sciences:
[I]t can be shown that neither knowledge being represented in neural structures,
nor knowledge being represented in scientific theories, primarily represent or
map the world, but rather have to be seen as strategies for successfully coping and cou-
pling with the world. (Ibid. 192; original emphasis)
Therefore, the cognitive and the scientific field are also interconnected by
“an epistemological and a methodological link” (ibid. 186; original emphases),
i.e. by the ways in which the world is or can be represented in systemic
structures of the respective domain (epistemology), and the paths and
ways in which these structures are constructed, tested and evidenced
(methodology).
The epistemological analogy lies in the observation that cognitive rep-
resentational structures and scientific theories have similar goals and func-
tions since both of them “are interested in regularities in the environment,
i.e., science and cognitive systems are looking for environmental patterns
that occur on a regular basis in the spatial and/or temporal domain” (ibid.
189; original emphases):
Like in cognitive systems, the goal of scientific theories is to (a) find out, (b) de-
scribe, (c) predict, and (d) make use of functional relationships and regularities
which are found in or constructed from the environment. […] From an episte-
mological and constructivist perspective the difference between so-called scien-
tific theories and so-called common-sense knowledge seems to get blurred. […]
Both are structures that can be used to generate behavior functionally fitting into
the environment. (Ibid. 188)
The methodological link lies in the fact that the description of the cogni-
tive conceptual formation and the ‘explanatory and simulation methods’
that lead to a valid model of cognitive representation structures can also
be used as a ‘conceptual framework’ to explain and describe the construc-
tion of scientific concepts and theories: “The claim is that the method of
simulating cognitive systems provides conceptual tools that are not only
relevant for the understanding of cognitive systems and epistemological
questions, but also for a philosophy of science” (ibid. 189). As Peschl
demonstrates, both cognitive and scientific theories, models and concepts
396 Wolfgang Hallet
are the result (often of a series) of viability tests, as well as of a number of

transformations that concepts undergo in their confrontation with the
environment before they are deemed viable or believed ‘to fit’ (see fig. 2).
However, it must be noted that Peschl’s theory of similarities between
cognitive and scientific concept formation refers to the natural sciences
and neither mentions nor thematises similarities between the processes of
concept formation in the sciences and the humanities. For instance, it
seems obvious that the notion of ‘fitting into an environment’ cannot
easily be transferred from the world of physical, biological or chemical
phenomena to the sociocultural domain; the question of what constitutes
a sociocultural ‘environment’ and even whether something like that exists
would require clarification (see Zima 55ff.). Thus the question must be
raised as to whether and in what way epistemological analogies and meth-
odological commonalities between the sciences and the humanities (or the
study of culture) can be claimed. The following section therefore discusses
the construction and formation of concepts, as described by Peschl, in
light of the “specific character of cultural and social sciences” (ibid. 55).
Fig. 2: The validation of cognitive and scientific concepts (see Peschl 193).
3. The Construction and Implementation of

Concepts in the Study of Culture
As adumbrated above, Peschl’s model and theory raise a number of ques-

tions as soon as one attempts to transfer them to the study of culture and
to identify analogies and similarities between the epistemologies and
methodologies of the humanities and the social sciences. Therefore, at this

point it becomes necessary to scrutinise and discuss some of the corner-
stones of Peschl’s analogy theory as addressed in part 2 of this essay, es-
sentially the basic assumptions that are connected with the notions of
‘pattern recognition,’ ‘functional fitness’ or ‘feedback.’ In the following, I
will therefore examine some of the basic concepts in Peschl’s hypothesis
with regard to their applicability to a theory of the generation of concept-
based approaches in the study of culture. I will combine the brief descrip-
tion of the features of concepts in the study of culture with hypotheses
about their nature and epistemological functions. Each of the following
sub-sections is devoted to one these hypotheses (in italics).
3.1 Theory as Discourse

In the study of culture, the construction and implementation of concepts is an interac-
tional, discursive process. The ‘environment’ with which a concept interacts is a research
or theory discourse, which is itself embedded in other layers of discourse of an institu-
tional, communal, broader academic and cultural, political or other nature.
As figure 2 demonstrates, the assumption of an ‘environment’ and da-
ta which are ‘fed back’ into cognitive systems or the scientific domain re-
lies heavily on a (more or less) mechanistic or behaviourist belief that
concept formation processes are “dynamic feedback systems interacting
with the environment” (Peschl 192), and that ‘sensory input’ is (more or
less) directly transformed into a concept that leads to functional ‘behav-
iour,’ as the following quote contends:
Note that (in both the cognitive and the scientific domain) knowledge or theories
are never developed just per se or just for mapping or depicting the environment.
All efforts of learning, adaptation, evolution, or developing common sense
knowledge or representations as well as scientific theories finally aim at externalizing
some kind of behavior that is beneficial for the organism. (Ibid.; original emphases)
However, there are various assumptions underlying the notion of a feed-
back loop that require critical consideration in light of the cognitive, cul-
tural and communicative processes that constitute ‘feedback.’ Firstly,
‘feedback data’ cannot be treated as mechanistic, mono-directional ‘senso-
ry input,’ because data and signals are always interpreted in light of pre-
existing concepts and theories in connection with what is regarded as rel-
evant. The integration of ‘feedback data’ into existing concepts is an ac-
tive, interpretive process where the mind (or the researching subject)
assigns meaning to the incoming signals or data.
Secondly, the cognising mind is not autonomous and does not inde-
pendently construct concepts as meaningful cognitive structures simply on
the basis of incoming data. In theories of the symbolic form, data and sig-
398 Wolfgang Hallet
nals are never ‘raw,’ meaningless and non-symbolic. The mind’s percep-
tions are always pre-symbolised and re-interpreted in the perception
process (see Cassirer 88ff.); therefore, in academic contexts, data are al-
ways theoretically pre-conceptualised or, in Lenk’s terminology, pre-
schematised. This is why cognitive concepts are always socially and cultur-
ally pre-figured, and, reciprocally, why scientific and academic concepts
can be regarded as the cognitive building blocks of epistemologies and
knowledge cultures.
This intrinsic cultural dimension of concepts leads to the third as-
sumption on the social constructedness of concept and theory formation.
Acts of meaning-making and interpretation, like the assignment of mean-
ing to data and signals, are never purely individual activities. Rather, as
George H. Mead has argued, the interpretation of data as an act of signifi-
cation is always negotiated between the cognising mind and other social
agents as (real, possible or virtual) partners of interaction and communica-
tion (see Mead 68ff.). In other words: the individual construction of con-
cepts is always embedded in social and symbolic interaction, or discourse,
since it aims at an inter-subjective validity of the concept in question, a
‘significant symbol’ in Mead’s terms:
The significant gesture or symbol always presupposes for its significance the so-
cial process of experience and behavior in which it arises; or, as the logicians say,
a universe of discourse is always implied as the context in terms of which, or as
the field within which, significant gestures or symbols do in fact have signifi-
cance. (Ibid. 89)
In terms of theory formation in the humanities and in the social sciences,
one could say that the interpretation of data and concept formation
(which are basically identical processes, both at the level of everyday and
of academic concept formation) are guided by the respective research in-
terests, and driven by the purpose of shaping the theoretical discourse
into which a concept is introduced. The transfer and implementation of a
concept is therefore always a contribution to and a transformation of an
ongoing theory discourse.
Despite Wolfgang Iser’s sharp distinction between ‘theory’ as being
“explorative” and ‘discourse’ as being “deterministic” (Iser 12), it is exact-
ly those features that he assigns to ‘discourse’ that emphasise the discur-
sive quality of theory: discourse, Iser contends, “has a long history,” and
“organizes a realm of meaning, and their total sum patterns our world”
(ibid.). Exactly the same holds true for theory: it is an “interest-guided dis-
course” which “encompasses a lexical repertoire, a semantic and a narra-
tive syntax which jointly guarantee a certain amount of coherence” (Zima
14), all of which, like any other ‘language,’ can only emerge over time and
can only come into being if it is shared by a community of academic
thinkers. Therefore, the subject of a theory is never merely individual, but

rather a ‘thought collective’ that shares a communal ‘style of thinking,’ as
microbiologist Ludwik Fleck stated as early as in the 1930s in his theory of
the social constructedness of (so-called) scientific ‘facts’ (see Fleck 53ff.).
This is also the reason why every act of using a concept in a theoretical
context and of conceptual transfer requires a ‘meta-language,’ reflections
on the systemic (‘lexical’ and ‘syntactic’) effects by the researcher as a
“self-critical subject who is aware of the theory’s historical, social and lin-
guistic origins” (Zima 14).
However, these historical and cultural origins of theory, together with
the attribution of ‘interest’ as a driving force, also indicate that theory
cannot be conceived of as ‘discourse’ in the singular, as one language and
discursive representation of a system of cognitive and communal con-
cepts. Rather, the communal character of theory suggests that every theo-
ry discourse is surrounded, impregnated and infiltrated by a number of
other discourses, academic, social and cultural. Theoretical categories are
always, as Clifford puts it, “located” in “concrete situations” (Clifford
n.pag.). From this it follows that theory is
a matter of […] recognizing the various inscriptions, “places,” or “histories” that
both empower and inhibit the construction of theoretical categories like “Wom-
an,” “Patriarchy,” or “colonization,” categories essential to political action as well
as to serious comparative knowledge. (Ibid.)
Any act of conceptual transfer must therefore be accompanied by a meta-
reflection that accounts for the multiple layers of academic, institutional,
social, political and national as well as transnational discourse into which a
theoretical category is to be implemented, a reflection that reaches well
beyond the theoretical effects in the narrow sense and considers the cul-
tural and political implications of its endeavour: Every concept, created,
re-applied or transferred, is a re-interpretation not only of the theoretical
field in which it is implemented, but also of the broader socio-cultural and
political field in which it participates (see fig. 3).
Understood in this way, the notion that ‘feedback’ from the ‘environ-
ment’ leads to the accommodation and modification of concepts can in-
deed be transferred to concepts and theories generated in the study of
culture: Academic concepts emerge from the social interaction and sym-
bolic-discursive negotiations within a research community, but also from
discursive and cultural interactions beyond that academic field. Concepts
can therefore only be established if they are approved through interaction
with other agents in the academic and in the socio-cultural fields. In these
various layers of discourse, the shapes and meanings of concepts, as sub-
jective as they may be, are no longer determined by individual contribu-
tions or ‘minds’ or “particular theoretical subjects” (Zima 171); rather,
400 Wolfgang Hallet
they are in the broadest sense the result of some sort of intersubjective
agreement on their validity and ‘functional fitness’:
Agreement, it is suggested here, is of the essence. […] Knowledge can only be
shared if there is agreement as to the where, what and how of that which is being
shared. So while the philosopher may shudder at the complexities and uncertain-
ties of what it means to agree on something as simple as the colour of a flower, it
is a commonplace of everyday life that agreement exists. (Plotkin 117)
‘Shared meaning’ and the (implicit or explicit) discursive agreement on its
appropriateness and applicability are the decisive factors for establishing a
concept in a field of research and in the cultural domain, or for its emer-
gence as a theoretical tool and category that is more or less consensually
used, in the academic sphere and beyond.
Fig. 3: The multiple discursive contexts of academic concepts.
3.2 The Functional Fitness of Concepts

In the study of culture, the ‘behaviour’ exhibited by an applied concept equates to the
effect it produces in a research discourse and the associated cultural discourses, the way it
is deemed to ‘behave’ and ‘functionally fit’ in a new theoretical and socio-cultural discur-
sive context.
Peschl’s notion that observable ‘behaviour,’ even of theories, (see
Peschl 201ff.) is a result of a concept’s application and its interaction with
a given environment (or: as an element in the feedback loop) raises a
number of questions when transferred to research in the humanities and
the study of culture. Obviously, the ‘behaviour hypothesis’ stems from the
idea that cognitive concepts are not open to direct observation, nor is (the
‘hidden reality of‘) the formation and establishment of scientific concepts
observable in terms of reliable empirical data. The assumption in Peschl’s

theory, therefore, is that an individual’s understanding of concepts helps
produce behaviour that is ‘appropriate’ in everyday social situations, where
they must stand the test of experience/social judgement and that in scien-
tific theories experiments produce some sort of observable ‘behaviour’
that provides evidence of a concept’s validity (see fig. 2).
This behaviour hypothesis creates major problems, both for cognitive
and for scientific concepts, and especially when applied to the study
of culture. The first problem is caused by the fact that the observable ex-
ternalisation of a concept in an experiment or in a person’s behaviour
does not necessarily represent the shape and ‘content’ of the concept it-
self. A concept may be valid and appropriate, yet a person or scientist may
not be able to produce the appropriate ‘experimental’ behaviour or ‘per-
form’ according to the underlying conceptual disposition. This is due to
the fact that, as the term ‘experiment’ suggests, the setup of an experi-
ment, or a person’s behaviour, is always hypothetical and based on as-
sumptions about the possible meanings, effects and implications of a
concept. Externalised behaviour and scientific experiments are themselves
interpretations of concepts (or theoretical assumptions), not one-to-one
representations. The same applies to the work done by concepts in a par-
ticular theoretical field in the study of culture: a concept (or, in Bal’s
terms, a ‘mini theory’) may be deemed valid and fruitful, and still the study
of a specific case or ‘occurrence’ that it supposedly exemplifies may be
judged inappropriate or ‘misfitting.’
The second problem deals with this interpretive quality concerning all
ways of studying culture: There is no ‘reality’ as such with which a per-
son’s behaviour, a scientific experiment or a conceptual case study in the
humanities can interfere, nothing that ‘occurs’ independently of an ob-
server’s interpretative response:
“[O]ccurrences” or “series of occurrences” are narrative constructions which
each discourse will model differently (but not arbitrarily), because reality is always
ambiguous and hence can be interpreted in many different ways. This is why all
attempts to relate “occurrences” to theories in order to test or refute them are
doomed to failure. (Zima 69)
Instead, a reality-status is assigned to those interpretations to which a vast
majority of participants in a theoretical discourse and in a (non-academic)
cultural community implicitly or explicitly agree. ‘Reality’ is a conceptual,
theoretical assumption that is shared by most subjects of a discourse.
A third problem is elucidated by an insight concerning the symbolic
generation and function of concepts in social interaction. Concepts in
symbolic form enable human beings to anticipate the outcome of applying
a concept so that ‘behaviour’ may exist in symbolic, unobservable form
402 Wolfgang Hallet
only. In fact, the imagination and anticipation of future behaviour, of the

effects of applying a concept and of the possible outcomes of interaction
are all outstanding capabilities of the human mind which, for instance,
result in the production of all kinds of fiction and imaginary scenarios (see
Mead 117ff.). Therefore, the possible effects of the application of a con-
cept in a theoretical context can be anticipated and tested through imagi-
nation and speculation.
However, the ‘conduct’ of a concept in a theoretical field is rarely pre-
dictable, due to the fact that all concepts are part of a larger discursive,
ideological and linguistic field and that all subjects of a theoretical dis-
course are speakers of a particular theoretical ‘sociolect’:
Virtually all social and linguistic relations between individual subjects are at the
same time relations between groups and ideological or theoretical group languages
all of which give shape to individual subjectivity. In other words, individual sub-
jects cannot observe and argue neutrally, because they owe their subjectivity and
their language to specific sociolects which they keep changing by critical reflec-
tion. (Zima 67)
Therefore, possibly in contrast to the natural sciences and to human be-
haviour in specific concrete social situations, “the chance of bringing
about a swift refutation or ‘falsification’ diminishes dramatically” (ibid. 66)
in the study of culture: “We can only put forward views or arguments be-
cause we have been socialized in certain socio-linguistic contexts, because
we grow out of these contexts which we subsequently reflect on critically,
having occupied positions in new contexts” (ibid. 68).
It follows from this interpretive, cultural and political quality of all
conceptual work in the humanities that the application of a concept in a
theoretical discourse is always ‘experimental’ and of a hypothetical nature,
assuming that it will enrich and transform the respective theoretical field
and reach out into the broader cultural sphere to become part of a com-
mon-sense way of thinking, or a general way of looking at the world even
in everyday life and in political contexts. Since no claim to truth can be
made and since falsification is almost impossible in the study of culture,
these theoretical and cultural benefits constitute its ‘functional fitness’ in a
theoretical discourse. Regarding conceptual transfer, the notion of ‘func-
tional fitness’ also explains why, in terms of theoretical or systemic con-
sistency, a transfer may be considered a ‘displacement,’ and yet, often for
reasons far beyond theoretical discourses, the concept may still be recog-
nised as useful and productive because no other, more appropriate con-
ceptual tools are available.
3.3 Conceptual Transfer as Re-Interpretation

The processes of applying an established concept in a theoretical context and introducing
a new concept from a distant disciplinary context are only different in degree and can
both be regarded as acts of re-interpretation.
The relationship between a concept and a theoretical context as dis-
cussed in the preceding subsections takes us back to the question of con-
ceptual travel and transfer in a more narrow sense. As Lenk has shown,
every act of conceptualisation is an act of interpretation in a twofold
sense: on the one hand, data, signals and perceptions have to be struc-
tured, ordered and categorised, i.e. every perception is an act of interpreta-
tion; there is no predictable mechanism that accommodates a concept to
‘sensory input.’ On the other hand, the activation of an available cognitive
concept in connection with incoming data and perceptions is always an
act of its (re-)interpretation, of its accommodation according to functional
needs, interactional purposes and cognitive goals. It follows that every act
of constructing and applying a concept in an ‘environment’ is interpretive
and therefore, in a sense, experimental, anticipative and hypothetical, as-
suming that, in von Glasersfeld’s terms, it may prove ‘useful’ in the pur-
suit of one’s goals in a new situation. Therefore, the search for ‘useful’ and
‘appropriate’ concepts is a permanent mental activity in everyday life as
much as in the sciences and in the study of culture.
Since no situation and occurrence is ever identical with another or
previous one, it can be contended that, in essence, the re-application of an
available concept in a disciplinary theory and the introduction of a con-
cept from a different disciplinary context are basically the same cognitive
and discursive operations: an available concept is introduced into a theory
discourse where it takes on a particular shape and function, thus trans-
forming both its own meaning and the shape of the theory in which it is
implemented. It does not make much difference where a concept that is
(re-)activated or introduced originates. The difference between re-applying
a concept from within a given theoretical field and introducing it from an
originally alien context is only a matter of degree, since in either case the
cognitive and theoretical operations go hand in hand with a re-inter-
pretation of an available concept and a transformation of the theoretical
field itself. In more general terms one might say that both the re-
activation of a familiar concept and the introduction of a hitherto unap-
plied concept are interpretations of occurrences or perceptions, and re-
interpretations of available theory elements.
In any act of implementation and transfer, the re-conceptualised theo-
retical element is fed into a theory discourse and then available for further
theoretically transformative work. Therefore, the development of a theo-
404 Wolfgang Hallet
retical discourse can ultimately be described as a re-iterative, performative

and endless series of re-interpretations of available concepts. Figure 4, an
adaptation from the theory of multiliteracies (see The New London
Group 23), systematises the stages of the re-figuration of available con-
cepts and the respective theory discourse as a permanent process.
available concepts epistemological, theoretical and conceptual resources,

available theoretical designs and concepts
conceptualisation the work performed on or with available concepts in

epistemological processes and research
re-conceptualisation new theoretical approaches and theory ‘spaces’ that are

/ re-interpretation produced and transformed through the
of concepts re-interpretation of concepts, future available concepts
Fig. 4: The performativity of concept formation: Applying and

designing concepts as re-interpretation and re-conceptualisation.
It is worth noting, of course, that in a theoretical discourse the mere re-

application of disciplinary concepts is, as a rule, not regarded as innovative
or even unusual, whereas the introduction of a concept from a theoretical-
ly or disciplinarily more distant area is usually connected with increased
salience and can be expected to attract attention. The reason is that the
implementation of a theoretically distant concept often perturbs the con-
sistency of its new theoretical context and therefore is better suited to
constitute a more substantial transformation of the theory discourse. This
change results in the realignment of related concepts and in a revised
structure of a whole theoretical system. If conceptual transfer or travel
constitutes a paradigm shift, the concept which is transferred or which
travels opens up a new theory space, constituting a whole new system,
network or even an entire field of concepts that are then systemically in-
terconnected within this new field. In the latter case, conceptual transfer
constitutes a new field or paradigm, i.e. new objects of research and cate-
gories hitherto unreflected and un-researched in that area:
[N]ewly constructed and unexplored paradigms are based on completely new
concepts, basic assumptions, terminologies, and methods in most cases. This “ir-
rational” character suggests that the (cognitive) processes involved in generating
paradigmatic shifts might have evolutionary character: a new paradigm is brought
forth in a trial and error manner. It is even more hypothetical than the generation
of a new theory in the context of an already established theory space/paradigm.

(Peschl 206)
However, once again an important difference between the sciences and
the study of culture has to be acknowledged: whereas in the natural sci-
ences, according to Thomas S. Kuhn (1996), a paradigm can be defined as
“an interculturally recognized technical and non-ideological sociolect
which allows for intersubjectively and experimentally testable and applica-
ble solutions within a universal community of scientists” (Zima 74), a
merely ‘technical’ language is hardly conceivable in the humanities “be-
cause speakers of a particular sociolect tend to apply the criteria of this
sociolect to discourses of their own group and to those of competing
groups” (ibid.). As a result, it is difficult to see how a single concept could
turn into a new paradigm, i.e. a general theoretical assumption or model
that is shared universally by a research community. In the humanities, dis-
ciplinary and interdisciplinary research is “very rarely dominated by just
one sociolect” (ibid. 83), by one theory language, or by generally shared
and acknowledged categories. And moreover, as Doris Bachmann-Medick
has noted, in the age of interdisciplinary research across the humanities, it
is difficult to see how more or less coherent communities of researchers
could emerge that unanimously share a common basic concept, general
assumption or paradigm (see Bachmann-Medick 16ff.; Frank 63ff.; Zima
81ff.).
This is why interdisciplinary conceptual transfer is hardly ever uncon-
troversial; it often produces particularly alienating effects in the new dis-
course community, responses in which a distant concept is perceived as
‘misfitting,’ disturbing or displaced. This transfer is therefore often reject-
ed (or ignored), especially since whole established theoretical frameworks
and established categories are at stake. At the same time, “a totally new
potential theory space is created which has to be explored by the process
of ‘normal science’” (Peschl 206), a process that both potentially results in
a restructured research field and that questions established paradigms, in-
cluding the power positions of the respective authors and protagonists as
stakeholders.
4. Strategies of Conceptual Transfer
As has already been emphasised, every act of applying a concept, in ev-

eryday life, in the sciences and in the humanities alike, is evoked by the
cognitive and categorical challenges of a new, different situation. The in-
terpretation of perceptions and observations therefore always also re-
quires a reinterpretation of the concept itself, which again implies a more
406 Wolfgang Hallet
or less substantial transformation of the whole conceptual field or system

(or theory). Since no concept is ever used and applied in precisely the
same context or situation, every application of a concept in a problem-
solving process is an act of transfer. Every act of activating and applying a
concept requires an examination of its appropriateness in terms of coping
with or apprehending a given situation or of solving a problem. In either
case (the application of a familiar concept or the introduction of a distant
concept), a whole conceptual system is affected.
However, in cases of conceptual travel and transfer, two considerably
differing fields (or situations or theoretical ‘environments’) that are not
intrinsically connected by the use of the same set of concepts are blended.
‘Different’ environments and ‘theory spaces’ are distinctly separate before
they are interrelated by acts of conceptual transfer which thus bring them
together, creating interrelations across disciplines and theory discourses.
In light of these problematic discursive and interactional constella-
tions and effects, it seems advisable not to regard the travelling of
concepts as a ‘natural’ occurrence or an ‘event’ independent of the re-
searching subject or of the participants in the respective discourses (this
being the main reason why ‘travel’ as a metaphor was discussed critically
in the introductory section). Rather, conceptual transfer should be regard-
ed as a theoretically reflected act that observes and anticipates the system-
ic and discursive effects the transfer produces. There is, of course, no
single strategy that can guarantee the success of conceptual transfer, but it
is obvious that a well-reflected act of transfer that requires theoretical and
conceptual meta-reflection should be conceived along the following lines:
- The selection of concepts: A concept from a distant theory or disci-
pline that is selected for use in a new field must be well-
researched in the original context; possible relations and overlaps
between the old and the new theory discourse, research objects or
methodologies should be clear and plausible without the necessity
of sophisticated argumentations. The more obvious the interrela-
tions are, the more probable the acceptance of the concept in a
new field will be.
- Anticipation: It is important to anticipate wanted and unwanted ef-
fects of the conceptual transfer in every possible respect: for in-
stance, a promising new concept may collide with a different
concept of the same name in the discipline, the same matter may
be designated by a different name, or the use of a concept-name
may evoke unwanted or unexpected connotations due to the spe-
cific ‘language’ and semantics of the new discourse. The same ap-
plies to canonised cultural views of the world: a newly introduced
concept that challenges well-established ways of thinking within
academia and beyond must be aware of, thematise and reflect up-
on precisely these effects.
- Reference: Since most participants in the new theory discourse will
not be experts in the original theoretical context, it is important
that they familiarise themselves with and refer to the original dis-
ciplinary discourse. The function and position of the concept in
the original context must be elucidated in some detail. Further-
more, differences must be openly discussed in order to avoid im-
pressions and reproaches of ‘inadequacy’ or of ‘incompatibility’
between the original conceptual environment and the new one.
- Adaptation and re-definition: Due to the systemic and often paradig-
matic character of concepts, of theory discourses and of discipli-
nary languages (what Zima calls the “lexical repertoire, a semantic
and a narrative syntax,” 14), concepts are heavily loaded with
meanings and connotations that are closely connected to the orig-
inal context. On the one hand, this original, complex semantic
load may inhibit unproblematic ways of transferring concepts, yet
on the other hand, meanings and connotations that are irrelevant
or useless in the new context may be imported. Therefore, it is
advisable to explicitly reflect on the full semantic dimension of
the distant concept and to limit its transfer to exactly those parts
of its meaning that are expected to be productive, to fit function-
ally in the narrow theoretical and in the broader cultural sense,
and to most precisely serve the purpose of the transfer. In this
sense, every conceptual transfer needs to re-define the concept
and to explicate those elements of its semantic load that are actu-
ally used and applied.
- Re-contextualisation: Because the integration of a concept in a new
theoretical context and into a cultural field associated with the
theory causes certain systemic effects, it must be carefully re-
contextualised by explaining how and why it serves the intended
research goals, by explicating in what way it relates to established
concepts and how, more or less organically, it fits in the new dis-
ciplinary and socio-cultural context. Adjustments that have to be
made in the concept itself and in the theory discourse in order to
make them compatible with the new conceptual system have to
be reflected upon and openly addressed. Acts of conceptual
transfer are never self-explanatory.
- Demonstration: Apart from applying the concept when actually
conducting serious research, it may be useful, from a more or less
didactic perspective, to demonstrate how a concept works by pre-
senting one or two small case studies or examples to convince the
408 Wolfgang Hallet
new discourse community of its productivity and ‘functional fit-

ness.’
- Follow-up monitoring: It is, of course, crucial to a successful imple-
mentation to monitor the disciplinary, interdisciplinary and cul-
tural discourses that follow. This way, one can collect evidence of
the effects of the concept in the new discourses, the way the con-
cept re-shapes and re-maps the discipline (probably the impact
one has hoped for) and the cultural field, and to observe the
transformation of the concept itself in the course of its imple-
mentation.
- Self-reflexivity and meta-theoretical reflection: All of the propositions
made in the preceding paragraphs imply a need for thorough the-
oretical meta-reflection that should accompany all acts of concep-
tual transfer. This theoretical self-reflexivity of research in the
study of culture emphasises that ‘travel’ is an appropriate meta-
phor if the effects that emerge in the integration-process are ex-
plicitly addressed and if they are an integral part of the creation or
transfer of theoretical categories. No act of transfer can ever be
merely intentional, but precautions must be taken as much as
possible to avoid unwanted disturbances and to prepare the disci-
plinary and the socio-cultural ground for the integration and ap-
plication of a formerly distant and unfamiliar concept in a theory
discourse.
This last of a number of issues in a strategic approach emphasises that a
cognitive approach to conceptual transfer is not only a matter of analogy
or of models of concept construction. Rather, acts of decision-making,
rationales and reflections are themselves indispensable cognitive activities
of the researching mind. The discussion of the study of concept for-
mation in the neural and the natural sciences in this essay is therefore it-
self an act of conceptual transfer from the sciences to the humanities and
the study of culture. This discussion also proposes that the researcher’s
cognitive processes and decisions should be taken seriously and reflected
upon. This is a perspective that is often excluded from reflection and dis-
cussion, yet it should indeed be part of every cultural epistemology since it
constitutes in the very act of conceptualisation the highest level of recog-
nition and theoretical interpretation of a cultural reality. This epistemolog-
ical meta-interpretation, as Lenk (see 79–80) has termed it, should be part
and parcel of every concept that is made to travel, in an attempt to grasp
the patterns underneath the hidden cultural reality.
References
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Yale UP, 1955.
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Frank, Michael C. “Imaginative Geographies as a Travelling Concept.” European Jour-
nal of English Studies 13.1 (2009): 1–12.
Glasersfeld, Ernst von. Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London:
Falmer Press, 1995.
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Peschl, Markus F. “The Development of Scientific Concepts and Their Embodiment
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Plotkin, Henry. “Some Psychological Mechanisms of Culture.” The Nature of Concepts:
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Routledge, 1999. 115–27.
The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies Designing Social Futures.”
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Mary Kalantzis. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. 9–37.
Zima, Peter V. What is Theory? Cultural Theory as Discourse and Dialogue. London/New
York: Continuum, 2007.
Notes on Contributors
Leora Auslander is Professor of Modern European Social History and

founding Director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of
Chicago, where she is also a member of the Center for Jewish Studies. Her
publications at the intersection of politics and material culture include
Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (U of California P, 1996) and
Cultural Revolutions: Everyday life and Politics in Britain, North America and
France (U of California P, 2008). She has also published extensively on the
theme of material culture and religious practice, including: “Negotiating
Embodied Difference: Veils, Minarets, Kippas and Sukkot in Contempo-
rary Europe” (2011); “The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural
Practice Jewish?” (2009); and “Jews and Material Culture,” in Mitchell
Hart and Tony Michels (eds.), Cambridge Modern Jewish History (Cambridge
UP, 2012). She serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including
Clio, Histoire, femmes et sociétés.
Doris Bachmann-Medick is Permanent Senior Research Fellow at the

International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) of the
University of Giessen. She held numerous appointments as a visiting
professor, recently at the universities of Graz, Göttingen, Cincinnati and
the UC Irvine. Her publications include Die ästhetische Ordnung des Handelns.
Moralphilosophie und Ästhetik in der Popularphilosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts
(Metzler, 1989), the edited volumes Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder
Kulturen (Erich Schmidt, 1997), Kultur als Text. Die anthropologische Wende in
der Literaturwissenschaft (Francke, 2004 [1996]), the special issue “The
Translational Turn” of the journal Translation Studies (2009) and the
monograph Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften
(Rowohlt, 2010 [2006]). She serves on the editorial board of Translation
Studies (since 2008).
Ingo Berensmeyer is Professor of English and American Literature at

Justus Liebig University Giessen and Visiting Professor of English
Literature and Culture at Ghent University. After his doctoral dissertation
on John Banville in 1999 (Siegen University), he held research and
teaching positions at the Centre for Literary Studies, Berlin, the FU Berlin,
the University of California at Irvine, Siegen, and Ghent University. His
research interests are in Shakespeare and the early modern period, literary
theory and aesthetics, media and cultural ecology. His most recent
publications are: Angles of Contingency: Literarische Kultur im England des 17.
Jahrhunderts (Niemeyer, 2007); Shakespeare: Hamlet (Klett, 2007); Literary
412 Notes on Contributors
Theory: An Introduction to Approaches, Methods and Terms (Klett, 2009), and a

special issue of the ZAA on “Authorship as Cultural Performance” (with
Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor, 2012). He is a co-editor of the
electronic journal Authorship.
Frank Bösch is Professor of German and European History of the

Twentieth Century at the University of Potsdam and Director of the
Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF Potsdam). He is currently writing
a history of global events and changes in the late 1970s. His recent
publications include monographs on the transnational history of mass
media—Mediengeschichte. Vom asiatischen Buchdruck zum Fernsehen (Campus,
2011; English translation forthcoming)—and on the history of scandals in
Britain and Germany—Öffentliche Geheimnisse. Skandale, Politik und Medien in
Deutschland und Großbritannien, 1880–1914 (Oldenbourg, 2009). He is co-
editor of the journal Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History.
Hubertus Büschel is Junior Professor for Cultural History at Justus

Liebig University Giessen and the International Graduate Centre for the
Study of Culture (GCSC Giessen). He has just finished the manuscript of
his habilitation Hilf Dir selbst! Visionen, Akteure und Aporien west- und
ostdeutscher Entwicklungsarbeit in Tansania, Togo und Kamerun, 1960–1975.
With Daniel Speich he edited Entwicklungswelten. Globalgeschichte der
Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (Campus, 2009).
Alexander Friedrich studied philosophy, comparative literature and

sociology at the University of Technology Chemnitz. He is currently a
PhD student at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Cul-
ture at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In his doctoral thesis, he
approaches a theory of cultural key metaphors concerning the function
and history of the notion of network as a modern episteme. His pub-
lications include “Wie öffentlich ist das Feuilleton?” (with Jan Friedrich,
Karen Werner and Nils Kasper) in Was vom Tage bleibt. Das Feuilleton und die
Zukunft der kritischen Öffentlichkeit in Deutschland (ed. Thomas Steinfeld;
Fischer, 2004); “Metaphorology of Networks” in Metaphors Shaping Culture
and Theory. (eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning and Sibylle Baumbach;
Narr, 2009); and “Das Internet als Medium und Metapher. Medien-
metaphorologische Perspektiven” in Medien, Bilder, Schriftkultur (eds.
Annette Simonis and Berenike Schröder; Königshausen & Neumann,
2012).
Notes on Contributors 413
Stephan Günzel is Professor for Media Studies at the Berlin Technical

University of Arts and former Coordinator of the Digital Games Research
Centre at the University of Potsdam. His publications include Egoshooter.
Das Raumbild des Computerspiels (Campus, 2012), Raum/Bild. Zur Logik des
Medialen (Kadmos, 2012), Maurice Merleau-Ponty – Werk und Wirkung. Eine
Einführung (Turia & Kant, 2007), Geophilosophie. Nietzsches philosophische
Geographie (Oldenbourg, 2001) as well as the edited volumes KarthenWissen.
Territoriale Räume zwischen Bild und Diagramm (with Lars Nowak; Reichert,
2012), Lexikon der Raumphilosophie (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
2012), Raum. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Metzler, 2010), Raumwissen-
schaften (Suhrkamp, 2009), Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und
Medienwissenschaften (transcript, 2007) and Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus
Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (with Jörg Dünne; Suhrkamp, 2006).
Wolfgang Hallet is Professor for Teaching English Literature and

Culture, member of the Executive Board of the International Graduate
Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), and Head of its Teaching Centre
at Justus Liebig University Giessen. He is co-editor of a series of hand-
books on teaching literature and culture, of the Giessener Beiträge zur
Fremdsprachendidaktik (Narr, since 2009), the Giessen Contributions to the Study
of Culture (WVT, since 2008) and a major German bi-monthly journal on
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht
Englisch; Friedrich Verlag). His research and publications, including several
monographs, comprise the study of culture-based theories of teaching
literature and culture, cognition and literature, Content and Language
Integrated Learning, contemporary novels and narratology, and the spatial
turn in literary studies. Homepage: http://www.uni-giessen.de/cms/
hallet.
Silke Horstkotte is lecturer in Modern German Literature at the

University of Leipzig. Her publications include Nachbilder. Fotografie und
Gedächtnis in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Böhlau, 2009), the co-edited
volume Seeing Perception: Image – Body – Text (with Karin Leonhard;
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and a special issue of Poetics Today
on “Photography in Fiction” (with Nancy Pedri, 2008).
Wolfgang Müller-Funk is Professor of Cultural Studies at the

Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language
Studies, and Research Coordinator of the Faculty of Philology and
Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. He has supervised national
research projects on literature and culture in the Habsburg Empire, on
Romanticism in Austria; he was the second speaker of the PhD college

“Cultures of Difference” at the University of Vienna (2006–2010). He has
published monographs and has edited about twenty volumes including
Joseph Roth (C.H. Beck, 2012 [1989]), Erfahrung und Experiment (Olden-
bourg, 1995), Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden (with Cornelia Klinger; Fink,
2004), Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (Springer, 2008 [2002]), Kulturtheorie
(UTB, 2010 [2006]), Komplex Österreich (Sonderzahl, 2009), and The
Architecture of Modern Culture: Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory (de Gruyter,
2012). He is co-editor of the series Kultur – Herrschaft – Differenz (Francke,
since 2002). He is a member of different scientific boards including that of
the Sigmund Freud-Museum, Vienna.
Birgit Neumann is Professor of English Literature, Culture and Media at

the University of Passau. Her main fields of interest are British literary and
cultural history, postcolonial studies, media theory, cultural memory
studies and narratology. From 2006 to 2011 she has been Principal
Investigator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture
at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She was a visiting professor at the
University of Cornell, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She
has published widely on British literature, fictions of memory, the rhetoric
of nation in eighteenth-century media, constructions of empire in British
literature as well as on travelling concepts for the study of culture. Her
most recent book publications include Die Rhetorik der Nation in britischer
Literatur und anderen Medien des 18. Jahrhunderts (WVT, 2009), Raum und
Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn (ed.
with Wolfgang Hallet; transcript 2009); Travelling Concepts for the Study of
English (European Journal of English Studies; ed. with Frederick Tygstrup,
2009); Ways of Worldmaking: Theories, Narratives and Media (ed. with Ansgar
Nünning and Vera Nünning; de Gruyter, 2010); A Short History of English
Literature until 1900 (Klett, 2010); A History of British Drama: Genres –
Developments – Interpretations (ed. with Sibylle Baumbach and Ansgar
Nünning; WVT, 2011). Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general
editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004).
Ansgar Nünning has been Professor of English and American Literature

and Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen since 1996. He is the
founding director of the Giessen Graduate School for the Humanities
(GGK) and of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture
(GCSC) as well as the academic director of the International PhD
Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies.” In 2007, he was award-
ed the “Excellence-in-Teaching” Prize of the Ministry of Higher

Education, Research and the Arts of the state Hessen and the Hertie
Foundation. He has published widely on English and American literature,
cultures of memory, narratology, and literary and cultural theory. His most
recent publications include Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie
(Metzler, 42008), Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction (with Birgit
Neumann; Klett, 2008), Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften (ed. with Vera
Nünning; Metzler, 2003), Metzler Handbuch Promotion: Forschung – Förderung
– Finanzierung (ed. with Roy Sommer; Metzler, 2007), An Introduction to the
Study of English and American Literature (with Vera Nünning; Klett, 42007),
Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft (ed. with Roy Sommer; Narr,
2004), and Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies (ed. with Vera Nünning;
Metzler, 2004). He is editor of the series Uni Wissen Anglistik/
Amerikanistik, Uni Wissen Kernkompetenzen, WVT-Handbücher zum literature-
wissenschaftlichen Studium and ELCH: English Literary and Cultural History
(both with Vera Nünning), MCM: Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und
kulturelle Erinnerung (with Astrid Erll), and WVT-Handbücher zur Literatur-
und Kulturdidaktik (with Wolfgang Hallet).
Greta Olson is Professor of English and American Literature and

Cultural Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen and a general editor of
the European Journal of English Studies (EJES). She is the author of Reading
Eating Disorders (Peter Lang, 2003) and ‘Criminal Animals’ from Shakespeare to
Dickens: The History of a Biological, Legal, and Literary Prejudice (forthcoming in
2013). She has edited Current Trends in Narratology (de Gruyter, 2011) and
9/11 – Ten Years After (Friedrich, 2011) and co-edited (with Birte Christ;
Winter, 2012) Obama and the Paradigm Shift: Measuring Change as well as
(with Monika Fludernik) In the Grip of the Law (Peter Lang, 2004) and a
special issue of EJES on law, literature and language with Martin Kayman
(2007). Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include Law and
Literature/Culture, cultural politics, narratology, animal studies, and
feminist and intersectional studies.
Anita Traninger is Assistant Professor at the Department of Romance

Languages and Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of
research include the history of rhetoric and dialectics, literature and
discourses of knowledge in early modern Europe, the fact/fiction divide
and theories of the performative. She received her doctorate from the
University of Vienna for a study on the debate on universal methods of
gaining and feigning knowledge between 1500 and 1720 and her
habilitation from Freie Universität Berlin for an analysis of practices of
conflict and genres of debate shared and jointly shaped by scholasticism

and humanism. Her current research focuses on the genealogy of the
notion of impartiality. She serves on the editorial boards of several book
series, including Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture
(Brill, since 2011).
Hans Rudolf Velten is a scholar of Medieval German and European

Literature and Cultural Theory. He has completed his habilitation at
Humboldt University Berlin in 2009 and is currently temporary Professor
of German Philology at the University of Göttingen. His research
interests are anthropology, mediality and narratology of medieval and early
modern literature. His publications include Das selbst geschriebene Leben. Eine
Studie zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jh. (Winter, 1995), “Laughing at the
Body: Approaches to a Performative Theory of Humor” (Journal of Literary
Theory 2009) and the co-edited volumes Germanistik als Kulturwissenschaft.
Eine Einführung in neue Theoriekonzepte (with Claudia Benthien; Rowohlt,
2002), Lachgemeinschaften. Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von
Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (with Werner Röcke; de
Gruyter, 2005), Medialität der Prozession. Performanz ritueller Bewegung in Texten
und Bildern der Vormoderne. Médialité de la procession. Performance du mouvement
rituel en textes et en images à l’époque prémoderne (with Katja Gvozdeva ; Winter,
2011) and Scham und Schamlosigkeit. Grenzverletzungen in Literatur und Kultur
der Vormoderne (with Katja Gvozdeva; de Gruyter, 2011).
Caroline Welsh has recently completed her habilitation in German

literary studies on the interrelations between literature and science. She is
currently a lecturer of Modern German Literature at Friedrich Alexander
University Erlangen. Her publications include Hirnhöhlenpoetiken. Theorien
zur Wahrnehmung in Wissenschaft, Ästhetik und Literatur um 1800 (Rombach,
2003), “Euthanasie, Lebenswille, Patiententäuschung. Arthur Schnitzlers
literarische Reflexionen im Kontext zeitgenössischer Medizin und
Literatur” (2011) and the co-edited volumes Umwege des Lesens. Aus dem
Labor philologischer Neugierde (with Christoph Hoffmann; Parerga, 2006) and
“Interesse für bedingtes Wissen. Wechselbeziehungen zwischen den Wissenskulturen”
(with Stefan Willer; Fink, 2008).
Anna Veronika Wendland is researcher at the Herder Institute for

Central and East European Historical Research in Marburg and lecturer at
the Department of Eastern European History, Justus Liebig University
Giessen. She published on the transnational history of Eastern European
national movements, on urban and regional history and on technology
and environmental history. Her publications include Die Russophilen in

Galizien. Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Russland, 1848 – 1915
(Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001), Stadt
und Öffentlichkeit in Ostmitteleuropa (ed. with Andreas R. Hofmann; Franz
Steiner Verlag, 2002), “Imperiale, koloniale und postkoloniale Blicke auf
die Peripherien des Habsburgerreiches” (Campus, 2010) and “The
Ukrainian-Ruthenian Success-Failure Continuum in Austrian Galicia”
(Oxford UP, 2011). She is a member of the editorial board of the Zeitschrift
für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung and co-editor of the multi-volume project The
Russian Great War History.
Uwe Wirth is Chair for Modern German Literature and the Study of
Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen. From 2005–2007 he was
Scientific Coordinator at the Center for Advanced Studies in Literature
und Culture (ZFL), Berlin. His current research interests are the analysis
of the logic of the study of culture, questions of performativity, the
paratextual framing of narratives and the interrelation between the con-
cept of hybridity and the concept of grafting as models of culture. His
publications include Die Geburt des Autors aus dem Geist der Herausgeberfiktion.
Editoriale Rahmung im Roman um 1800: Wieland, Goethe, Brentano, Jean Paul
und E.T.A. Hoffmann (Fink, 2008); Kulturwissenschaft. Eine Auswahl
grundlegender Texte (ed.; Suhrkamp, 2008), Dilettantismus als Beruf. Professional
Dilettantism (ed. with Safia Azzouni; Kadmos, 2010), Impfen, Pfropfen,
Transplantieren (ed.; Kadmos, 2011). His book on ‘graftology’/grafting as a
model of culture is scheduled to appear in 2013.
Martin Zierold is the Academic Manager and a Principal Investigator of

the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at
Justus Liebig University Giessen. His areas of research include cultural
memory studies, media and communication theory, media history and
digital culture. Publications include Gesellschaftliche Erinnerung (de Gruyter,
2006) and a number of articles on digital media, media history and popular
culture and memory. He is co-editor of the book series Giessen Contributions
to the Study of Culture (WVT, since 2008) as well as Populäre Kultur und Medien
(Lit, since 2009). Homepage: www.martinzierold.de.

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Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture

Concepts for the Study of Culture

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

The study of culture has become an interdisciplinary and international

II. KEY CONCEPTS FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE

BIRGIT NEUMANN and ANSGAR NÜNNING

1. The Study of Culture:

of culture (see Nünning, “Transnational Approaches”; Rajan). As any

transfer processes “encounter pre-existing concepts, categories, institu-

used, appropriated, translated and kept up to date—over and over again

2. The Travels of Travelling Concepts

In exploring the potential of travelling concepts for organising the study

Secondly, in contrast to Said, Bal is not so much interested in the ways

3. Working with Travelling Concepts in the Study of Culture

identify the complex transformations which emerge through these pro-

in this increasingly international academic arena conduct their study, re-

contributions in this volume). Human (and scholarly) knowledge-

The concept of ‘travelling concepts’ as put forward by Said, Clifford and

Working with travelling concepts involves multiple and different forms of

among others) has emphatically stressed the broader cultural impact of

More research needs to be done on the relation between academic

5. Pitfalls and Potentials of Travelling Concepts as a

The complexity of theoretical and conceptual transfers also resides in the

centre of attention and the transfer begins anew, producing a different

6. The Design of This Book

The essays collected in this volume can be seen as contributions to the

and coordinate avenues for interdisciplinary and transnational exchange.

ing beyond normative concepts of culture, the study of culture is con-

It is no longer possible to ignore how crucial processes of cultural transla-

2. The Turn to ‘Translation’ – A ‘Translational Turn’?

If the horizon of translation is expanding and differentiating, does this

proaches begin to elaborate a more sophisticated and detailed translation

concept for social theory, action theory, cultural theory, microsociology,

3. Expanding the Horizons of the Translation Category

3.1 Translation as Contextualisation

of cultural contextualisation which helped a ‘translational turn’ take root

ence and hybridity and confounding tendencies towards homogenisation

3.2 Translation as Self-Translation and Transformation

impose translation and self-translation on subjects and agents in the

3.3 Culture as Translation – Cross-Cultural Translation

capitalism and distinctive forms of multiple modernities: no longer as the

4. Epistemological Dimensions of a ‘Translational Turn’

important processes of displacement and alienation, of distinction and

4.2 From Universalisation to Cross-Categorical Translation

whole “series of displacements of the original European term ‘the prole-

5. Humanities and Studies of Culture as “Translation Studies”

5.1 Translation Within Disciplines

all-encompassing transcultural worlds of media and images in which we

5.2 Translation Between Disciplines

5.3 Translation as a Model for the Transnational Study of Culture

ships in “global communication across cultures” would, in Mary Snell-

Carbonell i Cortés, Ovidi. Traducir al otro. Traducción, exotismo, poscolonialismo. Cuenca:

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “Transitions as Translations.” Transitions, Environments,

ANNA VERONIKA WENDLAND

I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities,

and incentives to carry them, or to make them move—on travelling hu-

describe the ‘Other,’ to rule over it or to convert it to Christianity (see

2. Precursor Concepts and Concept History

‘Transfer’ is a travelling concept in itself, which emerged in the specific

which had been shipped to Melanesia by European and American cargo

nineteenth century from a trans-European perspective. Such research was