Critique of Culturalism

Kultur galt seit Jahrzehnten als Gegenbegriff zu Rasse, doch der Begriff geriet infolge der Hinwendung zu kulturalistischen Konzepten in die Krise. Vor diesem Hintergrund geht der Artikel dem wissensgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang von Rasse und Kultur nach. Der Artikel argumentiert, dass dieser Zusammenhang im deterministischen und kollektivistischen Denken liegt und im Geburtsfehler des antirassistischen Kulturbegriffs in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zu finden ist. Damals erschütterte eine Gruppe von Anthropologen um Franz Boas das rassistische Paradigma, indem sie nachwiesen, dass die körperliche Varianz kulturell determiniert ist. In ihrem wissenschaftlich untermauerten Antirassismus übernahmen sie aber das in der Rassenanthropologie virulente deterministische und kollektivistische Denken. Ausgehend von Taguieffs Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Rassismus und Antirassismus sowie Adornos Vernunftkritik wird schließlich eine Selbstkritik des antirassistischen Denkens skizziert, die das Individuum zentriert.

This dissertation seeks to comprehensively refocus the analytical frameworks dealing with black modern subjectivity through an in-depth examination of “Culturalism,” or the regime of meaning-making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. Cold War liberalism institutionalized the hegemony of cultural politics and Culturalism by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative diasporic cultures. As the Cold War instantiated the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, the African diaspora as an analytical framework became reduced to its cultural aspects. It essentially framed connections among African descendants in terms of culture; asserted Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructed culture as the domain of struggle. Culturalism divorced Blackness and the African diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies.

The hegemony of Culturalism in contemporary theories of the Black condition and the African diaspora diverge significantly from those of the Black radical structure of feeling that conceptualized Diaspora (thought not explicitly named at this time) through a nexus that included political economy, cultural formations, and nationalism. Conditions of Black abjection were seen to permeate both the base and the superstructure such that mobilization on both fronts was necessary to combat white supremacy. The result has been a turn away from the political economy/structural critique that, in the interwar period, provided a theoretical framework to challenge American antiblack statist discourse. The marginalization of Black radicalism and political economy produced the politicization of culture as the dominant mode of organizing for Black equality, and the primary intellectual focus in African diaspora studies.
Anticommunism entrenched this move away from structural critique by criminalizing and disciplining critiques that opposed the racialized social order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of challenging their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources, Black people in the United States began to mobilize around cultural specification, for inclusion based on liberal civil rights discourse, and/or to assert international linkages based on mutually recognized cultural enunciations of blackness. In other words, the Cold War curtailed the possibilities of challenging the state in terms of the political economy of exploitation, thus Blackness came to be understood in nationalist and cultural terms of exclusion. At the same time, decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system asserted their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism.

Culturalism is thus a function of antiradical and antiblack statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of radical political economic critique in the theorizing of the black global condition, the disciplining of Black radicalism, and the cultural specification of African diaspora studies examined in the dissertation. The cultural specification of blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of black radical critique.

'Cultural studies: two paradigms' is an article written by Stuart Hall in which the two paradigms of cultural studies are explored critically. What follows is a response to this. The two paradigms, namely the culturalist and the structuralist modes of thinking have emerged at two different points of time in the realm of cultural studies. It throws light to the fact that the way culture has been conceptualized has undergone tremendous changes in the discipline of cultural studies. Both these paradigms, which mark a thorough departure from the conventional ways of looking at culture, have contributed substantially to the growth and development of cultural studies as an institutionalized discipline and as an analytical project.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

Multiculturalism represents an unjustified shift from “individualism” to “community-centrism”. For multiculturalism, community is an eternal structure that
exists prior to and beyond the activities of its constituting members. It is a transcendental form, an ideally proposed frame independent of real, actual human beings. Consequently, multiculturalism attributes essential properties to tradition and culture, romanticizes the past and particular cultural and traditional practices regardless of their content. It not only produces and reproduces social, economic, and political inequalities and injustices but also, by attributing a permanent essence to such human products as culture and tradition, eternalizes “racial,’ “national,” “ethnic,” “tribal,” “religious,” and “sectarian” differences as perpetual identities, ghettoizes the society and justifies its
“Iraqization.” Hence, it emerges as a new form of essentialist ideology when it comes to
resolving the question of human identity.

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

The aim of this paper is to make a contribution to the old but still vivid
discussion on free verse Swahili poems and to suggest a textual approach that avoids culturalism. This approach is based on the ideas of Euphrase Kezilahabi and Ebrahim Hussein, who accuse critics of placing too much emphasis on cultural aspects or context. Kezilahabi and Hussein suggest a more holistic approach based on the aesthetics of the text. The dispute over free verse started in the late 1960s and still continues not only in academic writings, but also in harsh comments made by poets who write in a “traditional way” or scholars that I have had occasion to hear at conferences or during my fieldwork in Dar es Salaam.

In the following article we will illustrate some of the most actual and fertile tendencies in the study of Italian fascism and of its relationship to culture. We will start off from the viewpoint that fascism in Italy succeeded in obtaining a high degree of popular support. Following Renzo De Felice, it could be argued that mass consenso (consensus) was crucial to Mussolini’s survival. Presenting itself as the only choice for the new Italy, fascism did thus in a very real sense reach a certain degree of –albeit unstable- gramscian egemonia (hegemony). The latter was in its turn the consequence not only of the use of force, but also of a careful orchestration of public life and, on a higher level, of aesthetics, of culture. Hence, in a second part of our study, we will turn to some of the most interesting, so-called ‘culturalist’, studies of fascist, mostly visual, culture. We will conclude with an analysis of Italian fascism as a form of secular myth, as a political religion in which the mentioned fascist aesthetics also played a crucial role.

This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focus-ing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the 'Islam debate' , itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of local governance about the meaning of secularism. Whereas the public and political debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a 'culturalist' or 'nativist' form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a 'constitutional secularism' that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Thus, in its practical application, constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the genealogical study and the deconstructivist critique of secularism by such authors as Talal Asad and Wendy Brown, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoiding monolithic text-based understandings of the secular as inherently dominating the religious.

Popular Italian culture has grown ever more interested in the interpene-tration between organized crime, state activities and transnational economic processes. However, while these narratives productively analyse-and denounce-the macroeconomic processes underscoring illegal and harmful practices, they also often complement such economic analyses by perpetuating stereotypical characterizations of the people involved in the crimes. In this article, I analyse popular music across five decades, in order to assess the ways in which the denunciation of state crime is persistently connected with clichéd representations of the modes of existence that allegedly characterize Southern Italian populations. Focussing on acclaimed political songs by Northern and Central Italian acts, namely I Giganti, Fabrizio De André, Litfiba, Frankie Hi-NRG and Fabrizio Moro, the article identifies the textual, musical and extra-musical elements that resort to stereotyping Southern Ital-ians in order to make a point about state-driven illegality. I argue that this type of ethnically biased narrative may paradoxically result in a symbolic absolution of the State, in a way that all responsibility for illicit and harmful practices is attributed to Southern communities.

Interventionists usually blame cultural factors and traditional attitudes for non-compliance of target populations, a framework Didier Fassin terms as culturalism. Despite their efforts, what the Roll Back Malaria employees find in southeastern Nigeria is a 'troubling' nonchalance towards the programme because target populations' perceptions of malaria differ from the donor/programme perspective. The RBM employees cast the local attitude as culturalism, accordingly framing their exhortations in terms of this discourse. How the Roll Back Malaria employees deployed culturalism to fit with the neoliberal individualizing framework of current international health practices is one more nuanced analytical perspective the article brings to intervention literature.

Τα τελευταία χρόνια ιδιαίτερη διάδοση απέκτησε η αντίληψη ότι η  πολυπολιτισμική κοινωνία διαμορφώθηκε υπό την επίδραση των σύγχρονων μεταναστευτικών ρευμάτων, τα οποία  έθεσαν σε δοκιμασία τον «μονοπολιτισμικό» χαρακτήρα των εθνικών εκπαιδευτικών συστημάτων.
Στην παρούσα εργασία ασκείται κριτική ανάλυση της κουλτουραλιστικής προσέγγισης της ετερότητας, της μονοδιάστατης προβολής των εθνικών (και εθνοτικών) πολιτισμών ως στατικών, ομοιογενών μορφωμάτων  και της υποτίμησης των κοινωνικών διαφοροποιήσεών και ιεραρχήσεων, που εμπεριέχουν. Επίσης, εξετάζονται οι κοινωνικές και παιδαγωγικές διαστάσεις του κουλτουραλισμού στο παράδειγμα της εφαρμογής της διαπολιτισμικής εκπαίδευσης στην  Ελλάδα.

El artículo recoge conclusiones parciales de un proyecto en curso, financiado por Fondecyt (nº11140804) y Becas-Chile, y patrocinado por la Universidad de Chile, Universidad de Sao Paulo, y Universidad de La Frontera. Tiene como objetivo analizar el discurso educativo intercultural en contextos de violencia, tomando como foco específico de estudio, la función que la escuela intercultural cumple al interior del conflicto armado que el Estado chileno mantiene con el pueblo mapuche en la región de la Araucanía. La perspectiva teóricometodológica utilizada es el Análisis del Discurso desde las contribuciones y posibilidades abiertas por el filósofo Michel Foucault, tomando como archivo de análisis dos tipos de muestras: documentales y etnográficas; las primeras, recopiladas desde los años 1990-2016; y las segundas, adquiridas en el transcurso de los último dos años (2015-2016). En la primera parte, intentaré visibilizar aquellas prácticas no-discursivas implicadas en la desestabilización del modelo extractivista y monoexportador en Chile, y de sus efectos en la militarización de la región de la Araucanía. Luego, describiré brevemente las características de la racionalidad etnogubernamental que opera en los discursos y prácticas multiculturales en post-dictadura, para después mostrar el modo en que funcionan los procesos de etnicidad en los programas educativos sobre interculturalidad. En la última parte, a modo de conclusión, formularé algunas reflexiones que pretenden establecer vínculos entre los programas de educación intercultural, culturalismo o racismo cultural, gubernamentalización del Estado, y estrategias securitarias de percepción y construcción del enemigo interno.

Our investigation identifies ways in which the transition from traditional social and cultural cognition based on real-world and real-time verbal interactions to digitalized interactions in virtual spaces takes place. We claim that the transition might induce serious concerns for traditional learning theories but promises to open new opportunities for novel and complex learning processes. Our study argues for the usefulness of linguistics for both neighboring fields in the humanities and in educational processes in order to understand how the mind works in learning and in social and cultural cognition. The paper discusses the difference between computationalism and culturalism which represent different assumptions for meaning creation. We also claim that digital culture has evoked worries for traditional learning theories and developmental psychology with reference to attention, memory, motivation, explanation, analytic mode of analysis and reasoning, text processing and information...

Our investigation identifies ways in which the transition from traditional social and cultural cognition based on real-world and real-time verbal interactions to digitalized interactions in virtual spaces takes place. We claim that the transition might induce serious concerns for traditional learning theories but promises to open new opportunities for novel and complex learning processes. Our study argues for the usefulness of linguistics for both neighboring fields in the humanities and in educational processes in order to understand how the mind works in learning and in social and cultural cognition. The paper discusses the difference between computationalism and culturalism which represent different assumptions for meaning creation. We also claim that digital culture has evoked worries for traditional learning theories and developmental psychology with reference to attention, memory, motivation, explanation, analytic mode of analysis and reasoning, text processing and information...

Notes for Panel 16: Great Refusals: Refusing One Dimensionality Today

The Dialectics of Liberation in an Age of Neoliberal Capitalism
International Herbert Marcuse Society

Seventh Biennial Conference, 26-28 October 2017, York University

https://marcuseconference.wordpress.com/

En aquest llibre l’autor qüestiona dos paradigmes en torn als conflictes al voltant dels llocs de culte musulmà: un de tipus analític, i l’altre de tipus polític-tècnic. L’autor argumenta que tots dos interpreten els conflictes com a conflictes culturals/ religiosos/ de convivència, és a dir com a conflictes que s’originen sobretot en l’àmbit simbòlic/psicològic. Tot i que és un aspecte important, mitjançant l’estudi etnogràfic d’un cas paradigmàtic -el conflicte arran de la mesquita a Premià de Mar-, mostra que, darrere d’aquesta representació, hi ha altres conflictes dels quals les raons del tipus econòmic, en el cas que s’analitza, són de summa importància per la seva comprensió. Així el treball és una investigació antropològica sobre l’encreuament de processos local-globals del capitalisme contemporani, on s’emfatitza les dinàmiques socio-espacials d’aquest tipus de conflictes, dinàmiques que sovint queden relegades a un segon pla −si no directament ignorades− en les anàlisis científiques.

Panel 30: Great Refusals: Refusing One Dimensionality Today

The Dialectics of Liberation in an Age of Neoliberal Capitalism

International Herbert Marcuse Society

Seventh Biennial Conference

26-28 October 2017

York University

https://marcuseconference.wordpress.com/

Las culturas no existen. Las diferencias sí. Pero no se puede
defender la diversidad partiendo de la idea de que existen
diferencias, las culturales, que son esenciales y que deben ser
salvadas, resguardadas del capitalismo, junto con las personas
que las habitan, o incluso que nuestra lucha antiglobalización
debe proceder precisamente de la necesidad de salvar estas
entidades culturales, estén en extinción o no. Pretender salvar
la diversidad cultural en un contexto globalizado reivindicando
su presencia eterna, es hacerle el juego precisamente al capi-
talismo que subvierte, convirtiéndola en producto de consumo,
cualquier forma de vida. La resistencia solo puede construirse
negando carácter esencial a las diferencias, apostando por la
capacidad de las personas de vivir en diversidad asumiendo que
la vida es cambiante, de fronteras mal delimitadas y en cons-
tante movimiento.

Die Rechte von Frauen und Homosexuellen werden teilweise als Argumente gegen MigrantInnen genutzt, denen pauschal unterstellt wird, sie seien homophober oder frauenfeindlicher als die weiße Mehrheitsgesellschaft. Der Artikel untersucht jedoch gerade die andere Seite dieses Problems: Auch die Gegenargumentation – für die in Deutschland Judith Butler zur Symbolfigur wurde – bleibt teilweise der Logik von Ethnisierung und Kulturalismus verhaftet. Der Artikel soll eine Intervention darstellen, um den Kreislauf von scheinbar berechtigten Vorurteilen und scheinbar berechtigter Kritikabwehr zu durchbrechen und stattdessen zu eben jener Diskussion über Islam und Homophobie zu gelangen, die sowohl unter MuslimInnen als auch in der Mehrheitsgesellschaft dringend benötigt wird.

Some people sah that the Documenta éclat in June 2022 was due to the fact that activism had triumphed over art. One can see it that way. But this juxtaposition is coarse-grained. Activism and propaganda are not synonymous. What is at issue is the quality of activist artworks and art practices or their backwardness. It is time to discuss the relationship between political and aesthetic judgment. – Häufig ist zu lesen, der Documenta-Eklat im Juni 2022 sei darauf zurückzuführen, dass der Aktivismus über die Kunst gesiegt habe. Das kann man so sehen. Aber diese Gegenüberstellung ist recht grobkörnig. Aktivismus und Propaganda sind nicht gleichzusetzen. Was zur Debatte steht, ist die Qualität aktivistischer Kunstwerke und Kunstpraxen. Oder ihre Rückständigkeit. Es wird Zeit, über das Verhältnis von politischer und ästhetischer Urteilskraft zu diskutieren.

Ethnicities 1(3): 367-91

In this article, I take issue with a particular kind of liberal approach to self-determination which I refer to as culturalism. Encompassing both supporters and opponents of the right to self-determination, culturalism assumes that a normative defence of the right to self-determination stands or falls on the question of its instrumental importance to the preservation of a nation's distinctive culture. My argument, in contrast, is that in normative terms self-determination most fundamentally embodies a democratic claim. It is a nation's right to determine its own future as free as possible from external interference or domination by an external power. This is an expression of the political principle that legitimacy flows from the consent of the governed which, in this particular context, means that nations claim the right to choose how and by whom they will be governed, regardless of their cultural distinctiveness. My intention is not to construct a defence of the right to self-determination, but instead to show how culturalists obscure crucial aspects of the claim, thereby reducing our capacity to address the challenge of nationalism in a just and effective manner.

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

Our investigation identifies ways in which the transition from traditional social and cultural cognition based on real-world and real-time verbal interactions to digitalized interactions in virtual spaces takes place. We claim that the transition might induce serious concerns for traditional learning theories but promises to open new opportunities for novel and complex learning processes. Our study argues for the usefulness of linguistics for both neighboring fields in the humanities and in educational processes in order to understand how the mind works in learning and in social and cultural cognition. The paper discusses the difference between computationalism and culturalism which represent different assumptions for meaning creation. We also claim that digital culture has evoked worries for traditional learning theories and developmental psychology with reference to attention, memory, motivation, explanation, analytic mode of analysis and reasoning, text processing and information...