Last friday, i had the opportunity to speak at the re:publica09 on the problem of the cultural representation of the public sphere in the web 2.0. The title of my talk was “A digital Rome? or What costume does the cultural shift of the net wear?” You may find the presentation on slideshare here (but it may be of little use without the accompanied talk…). It was concerned with visual ways, in which the event itself represented an offline public sphere of an online culture. In this paper, i traced out an argumention, which draws a distinction between images presenting the installment of a new culture and images presenting the preserving of a new culture. I want to inquire this problem further.
I call those moments acts or processes of “culture-making” and such of “culture-preserving”. This distinction is a modification of the catogories coined by Walter Benjamin in his essay ”On the Critique of Violence” (dt. “Zur Kritik der Gewalt) published 1921. Benjamin speaks of a “violence of law-making” and a “violence of law-preserving”. Both forms of violence are essential for the constitution of the modern state. Whereas law-making violence establishes a new order, the law- preserving violence works on the maintenance of the political order. If you take a look at the images of the French Revolution, you’ll find both violences represented: the revolutionary act itself as a law-making violence and the new post-revolutionary order as law-preserving violence. Just compare the “Storming of the Bastille” (law-making violence) with the pictures of the phase between the execution of Louis XVI and the enthroning of Napoleon (some nice pictures for this phase are printed in Richard Sennett’s “Flesh and Stone”), glorifying the revolutionary virtues, festivities and public performances, therefore depicting law-preserving violence. Benjamin refers to the double function of the police as an institution of a law-making as well as a law-preserving violence.
If you want to analyze, how a new culture is established, we can use this distinction, too. Sociology ususally tends to understand culture as a describable quality of any society or social form. Based on social anthropology and ethnology, culture is seen as a specific way to cope with universal existential problems. Think of death rituals, religious ceremonies, different family structures, patterns of consumption or changes in the media use etc. (typical for this approach is Clifford Geertz’s “thick descriptions”.) There is a second but similar concept, which identifies the central norms of a society, more or less fix stars for acceptable action. This functionalist perspective was prominently articulated by Talcott Parsons. If you take look at the current discussions on the amoral anomic behaviour of speculative investors leading to the current financial crisis or the claim for a mutual trust of the banks to cope with the crisis, you’ll usually find a cry for new moral values to base the economical regime on.
But culture is more than just different ways of doing this or doing that; and it’s definitly more than a moral framework. Culture nowadays is a social sphere on its own, which may be economically exploited, political governed, occupied by clubs or festivals, materialized in consumable and distinctive goods.
And therefore i think it is necessary to write a history or genealogy of culture. If culture is invented or imagined (terms used by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson) you may differentiate between culture-making and culture-preserving strategies. They may be coupled with violence (yes, there is a violence of culture: think of censorship or the guaranteed prominence of the churches in the Germany’s public television and radio, but also assimilation politics aimed at migrants etc.), but not necessarily. Culture making is therefore not identical with the concept of “doing culture” as conceptualized in the tradition of ethnomethodology or the Cultural Studies. Such a concept, although still in the clutch of the ethnological concept of culture, includes both culture-making and culture-preserving strategies. Culture-making, as i understand it, refers to actions, strategies, politics etc. which powerfully define culture. Culture-preserving strategies are hence such actions, which support and conserve specific definitions of culture already articulated.
I just want to sketch out two examples to illustrate both strategies.
In my corpus of texts I analyze for my dissertation, there is a speech of the Comissionar for Foreign Affairs of the European Union, Austrian Benita Ferrero-Waldner. She calls some central problems challenging the European Union as a body politic. Under the wings of globalization, terrorism, irregular migration and the inacceptance of the European Union by its citizens threatens the process of European integration. To cope with this critical processes, the comissionar calls for an invocation of the moral basics of European culture: She defines it as a culture of diversity, freedom, law, and conflict resolution as the main moral values. Furthermore she argues, those values are an heritage of the antique cultures of Athen, Rome and Jerusalem. In her statements, culture is both already present and in need of strenghtening. The definition of its substance, its coordinates is typical for culture-making. On the other hand, this strategy develops an historical trajectory, making the construction plausible via references to an selected past. These are two features amongst several, which establish a concept of culture. For those who are interested, a pretty good analytical framework for culture-making strategies may be found in the classic work on Orientalism by Edward Said.
The second type of strategies – culture preserving – may be found in the work of Dario Gaggio. He currently investigates the making of the ”landscape beautiful” in the case of rural Tuscany. In a paper presented last September at the International Forum of Sociology in Barcelona, he discusses the ways of iconicity and branding of this lanscape. He reconstructs not only the making of this landscape, but furthermore, how this landscape is turned into both an icon and a brand. Whereas icons are symbols able to preserve the presence of their origins, brands are able to accumulate a surplus on the market. Both iconization and branding are strategies to sustain a defined cultural value. Gaggio argues, that the iconization of the tuscan landscape works via the ongoing production and dissemination of an imagined relationship between a geographic morphology of the territory and its untouched rural civilization taken for truth. This strategy was then accompanied by conservating politics reacting on a cultural tourism interested in the local wines, the idyllic peasantry and its architecture. For example, a special law in the late seventies forbade the building of new houses and supported the restoration of unused ruins, which in return made high prices on the market, appreciated by foreign investors. The author concludes that the Val D’Orcia as the icon of tuscan landscape is the effect of a huge market of agro-tourism.
Further reading:
- Anderson, B. (1983): Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
- Benjamin, W. (1996): ‘Critique of Violence’, pp. 236-252 in M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (eds) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- Geertz, C. (1973): Thick Descriptions: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. New York: Basic Books.
- Hobsbawm, E. / T. Ranger (eds) (1983): The Invention of Tadition. Cambridge: Canto.
- Hoerning,. K. H. / J. Reuter (eds) (2004): Doing Culture: Neue Positionen zum Verhältnis von Kultur und Sozialer Praxis. Bielefeld: transcript.
- Parsons, T. (1964): Social Structure and Personality. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
- Roddey, R. (ed.) (2000): Doing Science + Culture. New York/London: Routledge.
- Said, E. W. (1994): Orientalism. New York: Vintage (25th Anniversary Ed.).
- Sennett, R. (1994): Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in the Western Civilization. New York: Norton.
