Cornell-Giessen Workshop:

Transnational Approaches to the Study of Culture

In opening remarks conference organizer Leslie A. Adelson (Cornell University) introduced the distinguished speakers and highlighted an intellectual encounter guided by work in progress. The central questions of this encounter revolved around the identification and critique of trends, keywords, and concepts in transnational studies and cultural studies, with the goal of interrogating a new transnational analytic of cultural phenomena and the revision of current definitions. Distinguishing current trends from previous concepts centered on nation-states, or even on globalization and an inadequate notion of hybridity, Adelson emphasized the pressing contemporary need for more refined definitions of transnationalism adequate to global networks, but also to the movements, ties, and interactions between people across the borders of nation-states as such. From this perspective, transnational models of analysis would have to take into account both national and global formations. One of the most suggestive articulations of culture as an analytical point of reference comes from Arjun Appadurai, who defines culture in an “unmarked” sense as all differences, while culture that is “marked,” according to the anthropologist of globalization, designates only those differences “mobilized to articulate the boundary of difference.”
(Arina Rotaru)

Panel I
INSTITUTIONS AND EXPERIENCE
Brett de Bary (Cornell University), associate editor of TRACES, focused her talk on her own introduction to a forthcoming issue of that journal entitled “Universities in Translation: The Mental Labor of Globalization,” which has at its center an experimental approach to the idea of the university and exchange, as it is engaged from an Asian and international perspective rather than the customary North American critical theoretical angle. In an epoch of precariousness, crisis, and transformation of institutional practices, the publication brought scholars together from cities as diverse as Seoul, Hong Kong and Tokyo as well as Moscow, Giessen and Merida, and invited them to talk about university reform in the context of global discourses, of knowledge production and governmental investment in higher education from the perspective of a unified academic system. The resulting discussions of the development of the university under the sign of neoliberalism and of the restratification of global labor applied a nuanced approach to possible totalitarian administrative impulses such as the erasure of boundaries between the university and the economy on the one hand, and the creation of university corporations to respond in a determined way to institutional uniformity on the other. The globalization of mental labor is linked to national productivity, neo-liberal economies, and the “mental labor of globalization.” New work is needed, de Bary concluded, to assess the global scope of restructuring in higher education.
(Arina Rotaru)

In her talk, entitled “Experiencing Experience: The Transnational Self as Cultural Iteration,” Mabel Berezin (Cornell University) focused on conceptualizing “events” and “experience” as core elements for a sociological analysis of political culture. She began her talk by discussing Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate in June of 1987, arguing that even if there is no direct causal relation between the speech and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a political event, the former engaged collective imagination and altered public perception, making the possibility of the Fall visible. Berezin defined events as “templates of possibility.” They are politically and sociologically important because they render visible a nexus of relations which pertain to the broader macro and micro level of social processes and offer variants of paths, even if those paths are not pursued. In contrast to historical institutionalism, she argued that events make manifest what might happen rather than predict what will happen. Experience, the second pivotal concept, was defined as a way in which collectivities process events; it functions both on an individual as well as on a collective level, it has an emotional and cognitive dimension and it is both conservative and transformative. As a temporal cognitive phenomenon it draws on the past to access the future, creating a tension between imagined possibilities and perceptions of constraint. What allows for the reformulation of events and their experience in historic and analytic terms is collective evaluation. In discussing several examples of political events in an attempt to map out a “topology of events” that matter – inasmuch as they changed collective cultural and political perception – Berezin argued for a comparative analysis.
(Andreea Mascan)

Panel II
HYBRIDITY AND TRANSLATION

Doris Bachmann-Medick (Sr. Research Fellow, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen) opened the workshop’s second panel, “Hybridity and Translation,” with her paper, “From Hybridity to Translation: Reflections on ‘Travelling Concepts.’” Bachmann-Medick’s central premise concerned the study of culture as the study of travel, or as “trans-lation” conceived in its broader etymological sense. Bachmann-Medick’s paper drew on the work of cultural historians Edward Said and James Clifford, asking how “travelling concepts” might be reevaluated in a way that allows for the reintroduction of history into globalized situations, and whether the study of culture as travel might lead to a sort of “nomadic criticism.” However, noting that concepts and theories are also generated through a type of physical travel, she proposed that the study of culture as a whole could be productively understood instead in terms of “travelling relations.” The notion of the study of culture as translation, as a series of transformations, detours, and displacements led her to posit the study of culture as “translation or translocation studies” rather than merely as travelling concepts. Departing from Said, she emphasized that in this process a type of historical grounding in contextualization is necessary, that a kind of spatial specificity is required to replace the “worn out concept of hybridity in the manifestation of travelling theory.” In this way, Bachmann-Medick hoped that historical subjects would become more visible and that marginal voices will be figured in dominant discourses. She warned against the “placelessness” of hybridity and argued that we need to move away from theories such as Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, holding that hybridity as a theoretical concept must be liberated in a manner that would lead “travelling theories” through a process of translation that reclaims the centrality of historical concepts. This would also entail a process whereby “metaphors” are “made accessible through practices of translation” and would moreover call for an “interdisciplinary translation turn in the humanities” which emphasizes a “poetics of location” and a “situation of concepts.”

Naoki Sakai (Cornell University) joined in the second panel’s discussion with a paper entitled “Image and the Unity of a Language: Translation and the Indeterminacy of National Language.” Sakai took as his point of departure an essay by Yoko Tawada, the Writer-in-Residence at the Institute for German Cultural Studies during the spring semester. Sakai reads Tawada’s essay as looking at the imposition of an optic on the trope of the gate and locating the position of the translator as “me vs. you.” He suggested that in Tawada’s essay, she locates a transitory movement rather than a stationary position, symbolizing a “situation of refraction” via the trope of the gate and the “choreographic potentiality” of a graphic phoneme. Sakai went on to discuss the grapheme’s particular capacity to enable multiple constructions of other characters through its components, while not necessarily sharing the same meaning or even connotations. He tied this in to the problem of translation, particularly in connection with the move from graphemes to phonemes, noting that because of the inherent double register of exclusion and inclusion, in Japanese ideography in particular “the translator must recognize what was already unrecognizable in the original.” Sakai drew on these particular aspects of Tawada’s essay in order to ask “what is in accord or discord with a proper national language” such as Japanese where there are ambiguities in meaning due to the coexistence of foreign and native elements which frame the basic structure of the language’s syntax. He further asked whether the “ideography serves to order and classify the confusing Japanese syntax” and to illustrate that it is impossible to define what is Japanese without “foreignness.” Sakai then returned to Tawada’s example of the gate trope in order to clarify his idea of the indeterminacy of national languages, that “it is impossible to find unity of language just in words; you have to look at syntax” and that the “belonging of a word to a specific language has to be found in upper levels of syntax.” He emphasized that the unity of national language is “fabricated while still remaining part and parcel of cultural contexts.” It cannot be an “empirical unity” and this has “implications for other categories such as translation.”
(Grace Gemmell)

Panel III
LITERATURE AND LETTERS

The ICGS Writer-In-Residence for 2009 Yoko Tawada delivered the Cornell Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics as part of the Cornell-Giessen workshop. In her lecture, called “The Letter as Literature’s Political and Poetic Body,” Tawada contemplated the relationship of script and textual form to the manner in which a text is received and read. Common visual practice is altered in response to the presentation of textual media and conversely, text, as it is produced and distributed, is often also refashioned in response to developments in visual habits. Tawada presented a narrative of the historical development of Japanese textual media, considering the spectrum of reading and seeing involved in the consumption of each form. The lecture began with depictions of recent developments in Japanese print culture, along with the consideration of contemporary reading habits that accompanied their inception. The prominent example was a comparison of two translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, the first from 1927 and the second a recent release. Tawada considered the contribution of manga, Japanese illustrated books with a tradition reaching back into the 18th century, to the development of reading habits. Intergenerational differences in textual reception include such factors as reading speed and the degree of freedom of imagination that the reader is given in various textual forms and the types of reading or seeing that they promote. Examples from other national histories and languages expanded the political stakes for the practices of reading and seeing in relation to various textual traditions. Some political movements construct a hierarchy of scripts or alphabets, favoring the Latin alphabet over the Cyrillic alphabet, or vice versa. The use of a writing style can identify sympathizers of a political persuasion even when the content of the text is not understood, as was the case with the shorthand used in 1955 by those sympathetic to the government of the New People’s Republic of China. The political connotations of scripts sometimes lead to the imposition of one script over another, complementing or contradicting the organic development of languages, or resulting in the awkward transcription of a phonetic language in an inappropriate script. Such dictates may also eliminate the freedom of choice of textual or scriptural style employed for subjective expression. Tawada ended her presentations with examples from her own poetic work in which she experiments with the presentation of text in order to encourage innovative modes of seeing, reading, and the construction of meaning in the consumption of text.
(Miyako Hayakawa)

Panel IV
EUROPE AND IMAGINATION

Andreas Langenohl (Universität Konstanz) began the panel “Europe and Imagination” with a paper on transnational imaginaries in Europe entitled “The Imagination of Europe: Rethinking Political Culture in the European Union.” Langenohl set out to examine the collective perceptions of community in Europe, balancing a theoretical analysis of the imaginary of a transnational political culture in Europe with a more “hands on” approach that included helping sell Glühwein at a Christmas Market. Langenohl began his presentation with a critique of certain methods of research into political culture, such as surveys. Drawing on Charles Taylor, Langenohl defined the “imaginary” as an implicit understanding of the moral nature of society embodied in common practices which in turn reinforce said imaginary. The notion of the imaginary combines the idea from modernization theory that modernity carries collective notions of representation as well as the notion that these have something imagined about them. The imaginary of a transnational political culture could therefore be useful in shedding light on social practices as well as collectivities, such as the nation, or, in the case of the E.U., the supra-national. He applied this definition to the practice of sister cities, looking particularly at the partnership between a town in Hesse and a town in Italy. This partnership involved a circulation of goods and delegates, establishing a circulation of social and cultural capital. Langenohl ended his talk by pointing out that despite the transnational political imaginary embodied and reinforced by this partnership, exemplified in a speech given by the vice-mayor of the Hessian town in the Italian partner town on the circulation of food within the E.U., this particular imaginary nevertheless helps construct a transnationalism with certain limits. The list of foods was notable as much for what it left out as for what it included, leading Langenohl to conclude that the event, in spite of its international theme, hinted at barriers between both E.U. members and possible future members, thereby legitimizing exclusion.

Leslie A. Adelson (Cornell University), the second speaker of the panel, introduced a new project she is currently developing with the title “Experiment Mars and Turkish Migration: Imaginative Ethnoscapes and a New Futurism in Contemporary German Literature?” Pointing out that the literature of migration does not always fulfill the implicit expectation of a preservationist project in which the possible loss of idioms, stories, etc. in migration might be stopped, Adelson examined an orientation towards the future, rather than the past, in the works of Alexander Kluge, Berkan Karpat, and Zafer Şenocak. By examining the works of Kluge, Karpat, and Şenocak through a lens of futurity, Adelson found that resonances between the aesthetic projects of all three began to appear. Adelson discussed futurity in open-ended terms of a range of literary forms and investments pointedly concerned with the future in some way. Referring to works by Kluge, Karpat, and Şenocak, she stressed literary forms of labor concerned with a new future constituted from disaggregated bits and pieces of the past. In these cases stylistic features and thematic motifs that may suggest a new futurism entail both distinct allusions to the futurism of the historical avant-garde in its Russian and Italian variants on the one hand, and significant differences from these historical precedents on the other. If communities cohere on shared remembrances, as proposed by Max Weber, who underscored subjective perceptions in the construction of “ethnos,” Adelson asked what would happen if the ties that bind hinged not on remembrances, but on possible futures? Adelson then turned her attention to Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish writer heavily influenced by the Futurist movement, one whose influence on Karpat and Şenocak is apparent in broken quotations in their own works. Here the voice of human suffering registers not as a memory in Karpat and Şenocak, but rather as leftover material recycled in their own works.
(Alexander Phillips)

Panel V
CULTURE AND MEDIA

Patrizia McBride (Cornell University) focused on the use of montage techniques as the media of transmission of knowledge about other cultures in her paper, “The Virtues of Resemblance: Negotiating Cultural Difference in Weimar-Era Photography.” McBride began with a brief introduction to issues of truthfulness based on resemblance in photography through Siegfried Kracauer’s On Photography, in which Kracauer demonstrates how the repetition of images through the media can allow the image, regardless of content, to replace other memories – he takes one’s grandmother as his example – and become elevated as truths. As opposed to notions that the value of photography lies in the fidelity of the representation to an outside referent, photobooks such as those of László Maholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch exploit the similarity of visual patterns to defamiliarize typical ways of viewing photography and produce unconventional ways of seeing. Turning first to Maholy-Nagy’s photobook Malerei Fotographie Film, McBride demonstrated how the manipulation of scale and temporal and spatial planes in pairs of images reorganizes the structure of the visual field. Furthermore, using montage techniques, Moholy-Nagy is able to foreground the moment of the work’s construction and enhance the narrative depth of the ‘instant’ moment in the photographs. Having demonstrated what is at stake in an aesthetics of resemblance, McBride focused on close readings of two spreads from Höch’s photobook to demonstrate how the juxtaposition of photographs and their obvious construction inspires unsuspected relationships across images that are grounded in analogy rather than resemblance. As such, the truthful potential of the photograph no longer lies in its equivalence to a particular referent, but rather its provocation of a manifold analogy. Discussions of photography often revolve around the issue of how one should orient oneself in a world of mechanically produced images. Montage, considered as a response to this question, is a technique that can be used to train a type of seeing no longer bound to the recognition of a photograph’s referent, but rather receptive to a different type of meaning.

Peter Gilgen (Cornell University) framed his discussion of the need to consider the specificity of aesthetic judgment in his paper entitled “Contemporary Aesthetics and Its Discontents” by noting a return of/to aesthetics in cultural theory in the developing influences between continental philosophy and cultural studies. In the 1980s and 90s a trend against aesthetics erupted among figures such as Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu, through a scientific response to Kant’s third critique, dismissed aesthetic judgment as an ideological category. Judgments of taste, according to Bourdieu, have social origins that strongly correlate with factors such as social class and educational level. Other cultural and literary theorists have found different relationships among aesthetic or sensual, bodily judgments that are not necessarily rational or culturally-inflected phenomena. Here Gilgen cited Tony Bennett’s institutional view of literature and Terry Eagleton’s recognition of the body as an absolute limit to any system or theory. The increasing ambiguity of “culture” and “aesthetics” proceeds in tandem. At stake in all of these discussions is the extent to which aesthetic judgment can be considered an autonomous system. Is aesthetics purely in the dominion of the body – as in Baumgarten’s reasoning, which distinguishes judgments made on the grounds of the senses and those on the grounds of the intellect – or does it also involve a psychic savoring of art that would be prone to socialization? To shed some light on the terminological ambiguity, Gilgen suggested a return to Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgment in the third critique. According to systems theory, which can examine claims of autonomy for an aesthetic system by understanding its operation with respect to the other systems within which it is embedded, there is no consistent judgment between what is beautiful and what is agreeable. The key to Kant’s aesthetics lies in his discussion of how the merely agreeable relates to taste. Pleasure being incommunicable, both a bodily and a rational component are necessary to perceive aesthetics. Gilgen concluded by returning to Luhmann’s attempt to better articulate the importance of communicability to aesthetic judgment and emphasized the need to first think aesthetic judgment in its specificity before bringing it to bear on social and political practices.
(Katrina Nousek)

Panel VI
MEDIA AND EVENT

Friedrich Lenger of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen presented a paper entitled “Transnational Media Events from 1848 to 1914.” Lenger defined a transnational media event as an event which sparked intensive discussion beyond one nation’s borders, while not necessarily sparking a global discussion. Iconization, when a series of events is brought together in a single image (the burning towers of September 11, 2001 being a prime example), often plays an important role in such events. Lenger placed the rise in transnational media events in the context of social and technological changes occurring after the Revolution of 1848. When the revolution broke out in Paris, for example, the news, carried largely by pigeons and by rail, took several days to reach Cologne. By the time of the Crimean War, newspaper reporting was still hindered by technological limitations, in spite of development. Photographs were available, but long exposure times made action shots impossible, while the inability to print photographs forced newspapers to rely on woodcuts. However, according to Lenger, by the 1880s the newspaper landscape was shifting, as improvements in printing technology allowed for papers to be printed in larger numbers, giving rise to a press seeking profit rather than the advancement of a certain political agenda. This meant a turn towards local news and sensationalism in many newspapers. Lenger then discussed two case studies of transnational media events: the case of Jack the Ripper and the sinking of the Titanic. The contemporary press sensationalized both the brutal mutilations and the police’s failure to identify the killer, thus increasing circulation, as the fascination with the murders crossed national boundaries and elevated the killings to a transnational media event. Similar sensationalism was behind much of the reporting on the sinking of the Titanic, according to Lenger. The excesses of the first-class passengers reinforced class-based narratives in left-wing papers. National stereotypes also colored the reporting of the event. In reporting on how Italians donned women’s clothing to escape the sinking ship, for instance, newspapers mixed gender aspects with negative stereotypes of other nations.
(Alexander Phillips)

In his presentation entitled “Transnational Media Scandals,” Martin Zierold (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) explored scandals as indicators and catalysts of cultural change. He thus challenged the predominant notion that scandals are signs of declining moral values and argued instead that scandals have socializing as well as destructive effects. Zierold suggested that scandals do not pre-exist to be “found,” but are “made/constructed in the process of successful scandalization.” Drawing on Jacob Burkhardt’s model of a “scandal clock,” Zierold explored the climaxes and normalizations in the process of scandalization, where implicit and invisible norms become observable in explicit discourse. According to Zierold, transnational media scandals are cultural seismographs that both offer possibilities of productive socialization, and enable us to understand and compare different cultures. Zierold then performed a qualitative discourse-analysis of two contemporary transnational media scandals: the Muhammad caricature scandal and the international release of German-English author Charlotte Roche’s book Wetlands in order to illustrate how the study of scandals can contribute to transnational approaches to the study of culture. According to Zierold, these two scandals both presented opportunities to reflect upon cultural and national reputations and particularities, upon stereotypes, and upon interculturality and integration.
(Gizem Arslan)