From Cultures to Cultural Practices and Back Again

Helmut Reimitz

THE AUTHOR OF THIS AFTERWORD must confess at the outset: he is actually an Austrian.¹ The difference may seem trivial to others, but to most people who grew up in Vienna after World War II, as I did, the distinction became immensely important. The determination to set apart an Austrian identity and culture distinct from Germany can hardly be exaggerated. Like every schoolchild, I was given a properly “Austrian” dictionary, though we barely used it, and I cannot remember ever looking up a single word in it once I got a little older. It functioned less as a tool of instruction than as one of several strategies of distinction with which Austrians coped with their national identity crisis after 1945. To transform the notion of a common German culture into a distinctively Austrian culture—language, conversation, cuisine, music, theater, history, and identity—was a pressing national project. The joke ran that the small Austrian nation had succeeded in convincing the world that Hitler, born in what is present-day Austria, was really a German and that Beethoven, born in Bonn, was really an Austrian—a relocation of culture that might amuse even one of its most eminent experts, Homi Bhabha.

One could say that this has little to do with the subject of this volume, Cultures in Motion. At first glance my observations may seem to instrumentalize culture by associating it with political strategy. They seem less a matter of culture and more a matter of Kulturpolitikskultur—as one of the most important German writers of the twentieth century, the Austrian Robert Musil, ironically called it.² Not coincidentally, Musil coined the term in the 1930s to criticize the cultural policy of the Austrofascist regime, in which some of the efforts to demarcate an Austrian culture from a German one had already begun to emerge. In a speech he made at a conference on the “Defense of Culture” in Paris in 1935, he remarked,

My Austrian homeland more or less expects its poets to be Austrian poets of the homeland, and there are engineers of cultural history (Kulturgeschichtskonstrukteure) who make a show of demonstrating that an Austrian poet had always been something different than a German one.³

Musil also knew that these forms of cultural appropriation were evident in other countries, too. Among vastly different political persuasions and nations, according to Musil, “the claims of the most dissimilar fatherlands and of their political and social conviction have overridden the concept of culture.”⁴ And he uneasily observed not only how single nations appropriated the concept of culture, but also how the very conference he was participating in was guilty of the same thing. He said that he did not know where to begin with the congress title “Defense of Culture,” except to defend the individual as culture’s source.⁵ The Austrian’s appeal to establish a political framework that would make individual cultural expression possible was what many might have seen a very un-German solution at the time. But the many concepts, versions, and drafts that Musil sketched for this speech show that he was not entirely satisfied with his proposal.⁶ He obviously recognized that the concept, with its enormous potential to be adjusted and appropriated, posed a problem. But in no version of the speech did he call the concept itself into question. As so often in his writings, he solved the problem with irony: Kulturpolitikskultur.

Musil’s ironic neologism can also draw our attention to a problem that is closely tied to the subject of this volume. As many of the contributions show, culture is not a set pool of ideas, concepts, and practices. Rather, it arises—as Musil already figured—as a possibility between social realities and their transformation. Most of the essays, and Daniel Rodgers’s introduction as well, concentrate on motion in space in order to explore how culture can be observed at the point when cultural practices break loose from their historical bondages, when their mutability becomes visible. But Musil’s irony, and its social and political context, might also help us make two additional remarks at the end of this volume. First, one should not forget that cultures in motion are not only movements in space but also movements over time. Second, Musil’s Kulturpolitikskultur suggests that the constant motion of complex “amalgams of cultural practices” (Dan Rodgers) can also be affected by the concept of culture itself, when “culture” becomes the focus of social strategies to give order and meaning to the social world. But it also shows that in such reflections, the concept of culture poses a problem of identity which the concept itself cannot solve.

It is hardly a coincidence that this aspect of culture became a particularly pressing issue in the first half of the twentieth century. But the tension between complex amalgams of cultural practices and their conceptualization as culture is much older. As we will see, it goes back to the establishment of the modern concept of culture in the course of the eighteenth century. Since the time of Musil this has been seen not only as a problem but also as an opportunity to explore and analyze cultural practices and processes. In particular William Sewell has suggested studying the tension between the concept of culture and cultural practices with the help of a distinction between “culture” in the singular, as an analytical practice that organizes difference, and cultures in the plural. “Cultural processes” are the result of the dialectic between this “nonpluralized form of culture” and “culture” in the singular. If cultural practices and products move incessantly between sites, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, they also include strategies of stabilization, differentiation, negotiation, and identity formation. As Sewell suggests, the concept of culture in the singular has always been an important instrument for such efforts to define and stabilize cultures. As most of the assembled essays also indicate, these efforts to stabilize and define cultural difference and practices in certain places and times constantly react or even counteract to the disturbing experience of cultures in motion. While the essays mainly focus on how movements of cultural practices constantly undermine the idea of established or dominant cultures, I would like to suggest looking at the concept of culture and its modern use as a blueprint of such processes. Such an analytic perspective on “culture as cultural practice” however challenges us to define the historical specifics of a cultural practice—that is, culture itself—more precisely.

In order to do this, we might turn to the conceptualization of culture that the German philosopher Niklas Luhmann proposed some years ago. Luhmann hardly thought of himself as a culture theorist, and his few experiments with a historical concept of culture should rather be understood in the broader context of his lifelong project to develop a “Theorie der Gesellschaft.”⁷ This may be one of the reasons why historical scholarship outside of Germany has to date not seriously considered what Luhmann proposed. Another reason could be that his perspective was linked to a conception of modernity that many historians may understandably find suspect. But I hope to be able to show that by translating, displacing, and disembedding Luhmann’s ideas we might overcome their limitations and put them to work in a broader historical perspective.

As Günther Burkert has shown, Luhmann devoted only a few sections of his entire oeuvre to the concept of culture.⁸ The first was an extensive consideration that appeared three years before his death, in the fourth volume of his Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik.⁹ Here Luhmann begins with the reminder that the term “culture” itself had its own place and time. It originated in Europe in the late eighteenth century, and its emergence marked the beginning of a new mode of comparison in the modern world.¹⁰ In order to study the development of this mode, he resorted to one of the theoretical concepts central to his study of modern societies: the difference between observations of the first and second order.¹¹ Whereas first-order observations are operations in which things are observed and differentiated, second-order observations are observations of those (first-order) observations. First-order observations create differences without considering the difference itself: the differentiated subjects that result from the observation are assumed to be definitive, without reflecting on the criteria for the distinction in the first place. One can, for instance, enjoy a Mozart concerto in the Viennese Konzerthaus, and appreciate it as a beautiful and well-performed piece of Mozart’s music. Second-order observation, however, means not only observing such acts of observation, but also observing how observers observe. It means reflecting upon the criteria by which Mozart’s music has been understood and evaluated in certain contexts—for instance, as part of the effort to forge an Austrian identity during the Austrofascist period, or after World War II, through a specifically Austrian musical tradition. Culture, Luhmann suggested, should be understood as such a form of second-order observation. In its modern sense, as he saw it, culture was not what you get when the world is divided into different entities or matters (Gegenstände). Culture was the very act of observing and reflecting about how these entities and matters were divided and differentiated.¹²

The shift of the concept of culture to second-order observations, however, raises the question of what form second-order observation then takes. To answer this, Luhmann linked the emergence of the modern concept of culture to the new interest in comparison that arose in an increasingly globalized Europe. Comparison introduced a new level of communication in which culture could be treated abstractly as one possible form among many other possible forms. New forms of life, other societies, the foreign, the esoteric, and the exotic could be reintegrated again and again. Comparison itself became a culture-generating operation. Luhmann did not develop a romanticized view in which European society opened itself up to alternative forms of culture through globalization and enlightenment. Instead he saw the thematicization of culture in the eighteenth century as a specifically European or even Eurocentric reaction to an emergent global society. Culture could be anywhere, and through the introduction of the modern concept of culture, it could be located geographically and historically, throughout time and in every part of the world. But reflection on it always had to occur at a specific point in time and in a specific place. And that first reflection took place in modern Europe, which affirmed itself through the very process of drawing comparisons.

As Luhmann remarks, however, there was a latent possibility that both the comparison and the results of the comparison could have gone a different way. That inherent contingency seems to have been what Luhmann found most interesting about the modern concept of culture. It was here that he saw a link to his theory of modern society, which he had studied through its processes of communication and concluded that the attempts to dismantle contingency in communication continually led to new communications and contingency.¹³

The contingency of the concept of culture has also been used in recent decades, independently of Luhmann’s ideas, to redefine culture and its use in the humanities. In the process, new approaches were developed that made it easier to analyze culture as a dynamic concept where efforts to manage the inherent contingencies of cultural definitions of the self and the other repeatedly engendered new reactions and new contingencies. Borrowing Luhmann’s terminology, one could say that the work of recent decades has shown us new ways to study the ongoing differentiation of social and cultural systems as open-ended processes. But these propositions also make clear that these processes by no means lead to the breakdown of cultural, social, and political differences and barriers. Rather, the second-order processes of observing and articulating culture invariably contribute to the demarcation of cultural difference. Even when contingency is especially visible in “middle grounds,” “hybrid cultures,” or “zones of cultural friction,” these points of contact are not mere by-products of larger hegemonic demands (whether from mighty Germany or tiny postwar Austria). Rather, they are necessary to designating and affirming a specific amalgam of practices in a state of transformation as a distinctive culture.

Andrew Sartori’s work on the global dissemination of the European concept of culture through the case of Bengal makes an important contribution in this regard.¹⁴ But it seems to me that recourse to Luhmann could go in yet a different direction. The focus would not just be on a comparison of possibilities and limits that arise through the appropriation and use of contingency. It would also consider the way in which contingency arose—and with it, culture—when society’s gaze shifted to alternative forms and possibilities.¹⁵ In this way, the historical investigation of culture could emancipate itself from its basically “modernist” conception. The question would therefore be less about which processes of communication were a product of attempts to deal with the contingency of the concept of culture, as people sought to manage, control, or use it in different places and times. Instead, the focus would be on the study of that cultural practice that introduces comparison as a level of communication, in which “culture” is treated abstractly and can be discussed as such, in order to determine a specific “amalgam of cultural practices” that makes culture.¹⁶ Second-order observation can itself be studied as the cultural practice of culture. One can, in short, move from cultures to cultural practices and back again.

Perhaps I can illustrate the possibilities I have raised with the help of some of the contributions to this volume. Celia Applegate’s essay illustrates the process by which second-order reflection on the cultural practice of culture established itself and what an enormous historical reaction it was capable of launching. Applegate’s history of musical movements in Europe begins before the establishment of the culture concept in the eighteenth century—and therefore also before the concept of music as culture in the modern sense. But she follows this history into the “Europe of Nations” of the nineteenth century. One might expect from such a history that musical culture would be increasingly monopolized by a flourishing nationalism. But Applegate draws a different picture. If we follow her history of musicians and their identities and identifications from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a different relationship between culture and nation seems to present itself. The idea of a musical culture loosened its protagonists more and more from their local ties and oriented them to the idea of a common culture; but for practical reasons, their identity could not be derived from music, nor—because of the modern conception of culture as a mode of comparison—from the culture concept itself. To differentiate itself in this comparison, musical culture increasingly resorted to regional and national differences, through which specific cultural practices and phenomena could be combined anew, as Applegate forcefully shows in the history of choral associations in the nineteenth century. What does not arise in her examination is evidence that a national (musical) culture emerged as a kind of by-product of nationalism. It is the modern concept of culture itself that continuously articulated a problem of identity, and in so doing operated as one of the main catalysts of national identity in modern Europe.¹⁷

Harold Cook’s and Pamela Smith’s contributions also guide us through the period before the establishment of the modern concept of culture. Both examine the flow of “cultural materials and practices” between Europe and Asia, but they arrive at different results. Whereas Smith emphasizes a relatively free cultural flow in Eurasia, Cook observes that some cultural materials overcame the “human boundaries that human communities have constructed” more easily than others. In his exploration of cultural processes of transfer and exchange in early modern medicine, Cook suggests a distinction between “material things that can move readily” and other “more sticky kinds.”

At first glance, this seems to fit well with Smith’s study of the color red. Through the complex manufacturing of red dye, cultural knowledges seem to have wandered far across Eurasia. But her observations suggest that the color red and its production were also associated, in each of its different contexts, with different social semantics, memories, and belief systems. And so the question arises, when does a material thing stop being a mere material thing? With the help of Luhmann’s insights, one might consider not simply differentiating between material things and less tangible objects but also linking such transfers with the different ways in which they were observed. Do cultural materials travel more easily if they are taken as they are, as cultural materials in first-order observations; and do they become “stickier” when they are integrated in a social praxis that objectifies them as part of an amalgam of cultural practices, objectified through second-order observations?

The methodological path, from cultures to cultural practices and back again, can also be applied to cultures in motion over time. Peter Brown’s contribution underlines this point by illustrating the complex instruments of reflection through which societies were created long before the modern concept of culture emerged. This essay is closely related to his extensive study of fundamental social transformation in which he analyzes the relationship between wealth and Christianity from late Roman to medieval society in the Latin West.¹⁸ He shows how Christian negotiations of property and wealth, and of their meaning and their function for the community, created social and political structures that would characterize Europe and the West for a long time. Beyond this, he also shows how this social transformation was made possible through extensive processes of reflection that developed a sense of a distinctive Christian culture in contrast to other cultures, above all as a counterculture to Roman society. Exegetical practice made it possible for Christian communities to define themselves as a new chosen people and, at the same time, to use this essentially Christian reinterpretation of the culture of biblical Israel to delineate themselves from the Roman world. This presupposes a substantial and complex tradition of social self-reflection and reflection on the other, which could be characterized perfectly as second-order observation.

Brown’s study is a striking example of how the mode of second-order observation should by no means be seen as originating in modernity (as Luhmann suggested). More importantly, the essay also shows what far-reaching consequences such processes of reflection about the social and political organization of society can have. Perhaps Brown’s essay can then also help the author of these lines to justify the relocation of Luhmannesque ideas to a premodern age, for it illustrates how new possibilities for the study of culture can be further developed, not just for European societies before the eighteenth century but also for societies beyond Europe that predate the globalization of the modern concept of culture.¹⁹ What forms of second-order observation were developed in different times and different regions of the world as the cultural practice of culture? Since antiquity, historiography might have had a comparable function to the modern concept of culture. One thinks of Plutarch’s sharp criticism of the cultural relativity of Herodotus, the father of historiography, or of the extensive reflections and reinterpretations of the Roman and classical world’s mythical-historical memories in Augustine’s De civitate Dei.²⁰ For the history of both Europe and other parts of the world, new applications of such an approach could lead to a deeper understanding of cultural processes and their role as catalysts of social transformation.

Such reflection of cultural processes extending backward past European modernity also raises new questions about the history of how the modern concept of culture was itself established in Europe. Given the potential diversity of cultural practices of culture, the issue of the concept’s historical formation raises questions not only about the convergence and compatibility of these practices, but also about the preconditions or older cultural practices in general that enabled it to be established in Europe in the eighteenth century. Here the student of the late antique and medieval West may observe that Peter Brown’s essay is closer to the other contributions than its chronological distance might make it seem at first. Certain institutions that developed in conjunction with the social restructuring of post-Roman Europe had a remarkably long history. Some of the poor houses that were founded in the sixth century were still around in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The house for the poor in Le Mans was in use until 1789, Trier’s even to the time of Napoleon.²¹ One could also take this as evidence that the cultural practices that made the founding of these institutions possible had an equally far-reaching history into the European future. This again raises the question of to what extent the establishment of the modern concept of culture built on modes of reflection that developed and redeveloped Christian forms of second-order observations over many centuries.

The contributions collected in this volume, however, remind us to be careful with such broad observations. They show what meticulous work and complex differentiations are necessary in thinking about a genealogy of culture in history. Academic formats that encourage experiments, essays, and case studies are all the more important, therefore, precisely because they do not aim for such a synthesis but instead seek to provide new impetus through the critical mass that their variety generates. The multiyear discussion of cultures in motion that this volume reflects is a good example of this. How useful the experiments, case studies, and reflections here are is something the reader must judge. But I hope that they, and this afterword, have made clear that without the numerous conversations, the collective experimentation with concepts, and the mutual exchange of historical contexts that took place in the two years of this project at the Davis Center, they would not have even been imaginable in the first place.