“Doing Universality” – The Culture of the General as an Alternative?
Is the juxtaposition of hyperculture and cultural essentialism inevitable? Are there other possible models of culture in today’s society? These questions are urgent, and not only because cultural essentialism is obviously problematic and dangerous – which, from the perspective of Western liberals, is easy enough to see – but also because the model of hyperculture has deficiencies of its own and thus beckons, beyond the attacks from the International of cultural essentialists, justifiable critique.27
The two main deficiencies of hyperculture are the absence of a collective (in the strong sense), and the absence of any binding and normative notion of common cultural praxis. Hyperculture is built on an unlimited dynamic of the cultural, and the place where this dynamic is processed and appropriated is the self-actualizing individual with his or her “subjective culture.” At its extreme, this cultural model has no room for anything socially common or shared whose validity might transcend the boundaries between individuals (or the boundaries of self-selected lifestyle groups). One’s beliefs or convictions seem to be a private matter of “subjective culture,” and late-modern society as a whole should not interfere with that. Late-modern society cannot offer anything that is valuable in a binding way. It operates exclusively with abstract mechanisms: aside from general legal rules, which protect personal rights, it is in effect mostly governed by market mechanisms. On a case-by-case basis, negotiations over what is culturally valuable are ultimately handed over to market processes in the broad sense, which determine whether one element of culture or another deserves attention, status, and prestige.28
Acknowledging the inadequacies of Culturalization I is a necessary precondition for better understanding why Culturalization II has become so attractive. Of course, every version of cultural essentialism contains the incurable problem of demarcating the boundaries of collective identity in such a way that, in extreme cases, individuality is suppressed on the inside, and outsiders are devalued and excluded in order artificially to homogenize one’s “own” culture. And, of course, such cultural essentialism attracts followers because it provides an effective weapon to those who feel left behind by hypercultural late modernity. At the same time, however, things are more complicated. Cultural communitarianism can be interpreted as an understandable response to hyperculture’s lack of collectives and norms. By resisting norms and refusing to promote any common values and goals, hyperculture runs the risk of culminating in a social structure that amounts to nothing more than consumption-based individualism. Cultural communitarianism has responded to this by reestablishing cultural communities, which attempt to fill the normative vacuum of hyperculture by reviving the old model of homogeneous collectives.
How do things currently stand with an alternative, third form of culturalization? With a type of culturalization that is oriented toward collectives and yet, at the same time, is non-essentialistic (a type of culturalization addressing a collective that does not, in other words, necessitate the existence of a homogeneous community)? Both the British cultural theorist Terry Eagleton and the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien have pointed to just such a third model of culture, which one could call the model of cultural universality or culture as the general.29 This model has been present throughout Western modernity, but it is now on the defensive; under different conditions, however, a reappropriation of this tradition could be promising. Even if, at first glance, cultural universalism may seem obsolete or naïve, it could perhaps gain renewed currency in today’s radically pluralized late-modern societies.
If one contrasts cultural essentialism and hyperculture with cultural universality – which, again, is oriented toward collectives but is not essentialistic – a common feature of the first two models, which is otherwise easy to overlook, becomes especially apparent. In both models, what is considered culturally valuable is related to the particular and the unique – to the singular: on the one side, the particularity of communities, and on the other side, the uniqueness of cultural goods and the emphatic individuality of those seeking self-actualization. In a sense, cultural essentialism and hyperculture thus share a common Romantic heritage: the legacy of a culture of particularity and uniqueness, as it has developed since the time of Herder, Rousseau, and Schlegel. Both the hypercultural, individualistic model of culture and the essentialistic, collectivistic model can indeed be traced back to the discourses of Romanticism. The latter movement favored the self-development of the individual and the uniqueness of places, moments, and things. At the same time, it also “discovered” the idea of the Volk and the nation as cultural communities with unique values of their own. In both domains, culture was clearly associated with the particular and not with the general, for, in their critique of modern rationalism, the Romantics regarded the general as a deficiency.30
One should not forget, however, that the discourse of Romanticism was a countercurrent against the powerful river of the Enlightenment. The latter had formulated, especially during its early stages, a concept of culture that was largely based on the general. If culture denotes that which is regarded as valuable, then the concept espoused by European idealism was based on a common human culture, a “humane” culture. In this concept of culture, which is epitomized in Friedrich Schiller’s disquisition On the Aesthetic Education of Man, not only are aesthetics and ethics closely intertwined – beyond that, culture and civilization were not (yet) pitted against one another.31 The goal was to achieve a synthesis between the value of culture and the norms of sociality. During the past few decades, this cultural universalism has been discredited in political and cultural debates – and, at first, justifiably so. Among other things, it was shown to be elitist and ethnocentric. The universalism of culture was regarded as a conceited idea, in a dual sense. In short, the cultural standards and goods of a small group – the European bourgeoisie – had been exalted as the generally binding measure of things, and thus everything that deviated from it was classified as something inferior. The result was high culture’s arrogant disdain of popular culture, and the European or Western feeling of superiority over non-Western cultures.
Today, for good reason, such cultural universalism hardly has any institutional support. Like Eagleton and Jullien, however, I would like to propose that a critically applied and advanced orientation toward cultural universality might in fact represent a desideratum within the framework of a society of singularities. The transformation of the postwar era’s culturally homogeneous and socially egalitarian societies into multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies – not to mention their differentiation into socio-cultural classes – raises the question of what is, and should be, culturally valid for everyone. Over the course of this social transformation, it has become an urgent matter to ask what might serve as common reference points of value – whether in a city or a region, within a nation state or within supra-national contexts such as the European Union, and ultimately in global society as a whole. The question of what is culturally valuable for all people, regardless of their ethnic, religious, or socio-cultural affiliations and regardless of their individual lifestyle preferences, is, however, a question of the general.
It goes without saying that, even on the theoretical level, it is not exactly easy to model such a culture of the general within the framework of late-modern society. To do so, it would be necessary to reconcile the universal with the heterogeneous, and to regard the general not as something prescribed but rather as a process of working toward generality. Contrary to the bourgeois notion of cultural universalism, there “is” no a priori universal of culture; within the framework of a national society – in France, Great Britain, or Germany, for instance – there is, rather, a dynamic and open process of negotiating what should be recognized as commonly shared and binding for everyone in the country. The universal is not a given; instead, it consists of cultural practices and norms that are always in a state of change. It does not necessarily have to be negotiated on the level of global society. For the time being, it is more likely the case that smaller units such as nation states, or even individual cities and neighborhoods, will take the initiative to determine what should be culturally universal for their own residents. Here, the universal is limited to those who live in such places, for whom
