Christoph Reinfandt

Power, poetics and the popular: American reactions to 9/11 and the discourse of redemptionism

On September 11, 2001, a well-organized group of terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and managed to crash three of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Whatever this unprecedented attack will turn out to have effected in addition to the suffering of those who died in the rubble and those who were left behind, it was read first and foremost as an attack on the American way of life and on the position of the United States in an increasingly globalized world. Accordingly, the innocence and idealism or, as some would have it, the complacency of Americas national identity have been severely affected by the highly symbolic destruction of two highly symbolic targets, a destruction which could be witnessed on innumerable TV screens all over the world. What is more, the Islamist affiliations and motivations of the terrorists made the prominent religious component of Americas national identity stand out in even sharper relief, a component which seems at present to enjoy an astonishing resurgence that is, however, accompanied by symptoms of crisis. In what follows I will focus on this persistent but, as recent research has emphasized, at times rather disruptive dimension of the ongoing discursive Negotiations of Americas National Identity. Taking my cue from the sociologist Will Herbergs observation in the 1950s that “American religiosity is that of a society in an acute stage of secularization” and from recent research into the “modernism of Puritan thought and its legacy”, I will analyze political, poetical and popular reactions to the events of September 11, 2001 against the backdrop of the mixture of religion and politics that has been the hallmark of the discursive construction of American national identity from the very beginning.

Interlude I: The Cultures of Reflexivity

One of the programmatic key quotes of the emergent modern culture of reflexivity can be found in the preface to the first edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781): ‘Our age is, to a special degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit’ (Kant 9). While this observation has frequently been acknowledged as ‘the foundation of modern philosophy’ (cf. Hoffe), its ambiguity rests at the heart of all theoretical enterprises which were to follow (including Kant’s own): On the one hand, the formula implies a new understanding of theory predicated on establishing models, systems, schools of thought, or theories by means of questioning the world in order to ascertain unquestionable truth (or at least valid and workable descriptions). In this mould, criticism leads to construction. On the other hand, the formula acknowledges the potential inconclusiveness of the persistent questioning that is at the heart of the critical method. In this dimension, criticism implies perspective and relativity, and theory emerges (in the singular) as an attitude of persistent reflection and (eventually) deconstruction. Modern reflexivity accordingly manifests itself in two modes: a constructive one ultimately aiming at applicability and viability (cf. von Glasersfeld), and an ultimately deconstructive one which acknowledges the intractable surplus of complexity in the world. As these two modes are to a certain extent mutually exclusive, they generate an inherently ambiguous understanding of theory which in turn generates a wide spectrum of cultural practices, so much so in fact that one could speak of distinct cultures of reflexivity in different discursive realms of modern culture.

‘Putting Things up against Each Other’: Media History and Modernization in Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton

Abstract This article examines Adam Thorpe’s novel Ulverton (1992) as a prime example of what literature can achieve from its increasingly marginalized position in an unfolding media culture. It traces in detail how the novel combines a thematic focus on the history of the fictional village of Ulverton from the 17th century to the present with a formal staging of unfolding conditions of mediality which are in turn utilized as a medium of narrative progression. The novel’s self-reflexive engagement with the interrelation between media history and modernization is based on a flexible post-modernist poetics of “putting things up against each other” which establishes the genre of fiction as a kind of ‘meta-medium’ for storing and communicating information as well as for processing cultural relativity.

Luhmann in da Contact Zone: Towards a Postcolonial Critique of Sociological Systems Theory

Thgis chapter reads the works of German sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann in the context of spaces of transcultural encounter where ‘global designs and local histories’ (Mignolo) interact and thus make the question of inclusion into or exclusion from ‘world society’ (Luhmann) particularly pressing. The title of this contribution, ‘Luhmann in da Contact Zone’, is deliberately ambiguous: On the one hand, the authors of course use ‘Luhmann’ metonymically, as representative of a highly complex theoretical design. They cursorily outline this design with a special focus on the notion of a singular, modern ‘world society’, only to confront it with the epistemic challenges of the contact zone. On the other hand, this critique will also involve the close observation of Niklas Luhmann as a human observer (a category which within the logic of systems theory actually does not exist) who increasingly transpires in his later writings on exclusion in the global South. By following this dual strategy, the authors wish to trace an increasing fracture between Luhmann and his theory, between abstract theoretical design and personalized testimony. It is by exploring and measuring this fracture that they hope to eventually be able to map out the potential of a possibly more productive encounter between systems theory and specific strands of postcolonial theory for a pluritopic reading of global modernity.

Interlude III: On Interpretation

The essays in Part III of this volume indicate to what extent critical theory draws on resources from beyond the realm of literary and cultural theory in the narrower sense, such as ecological thinking (Zapf), ethics (Attridge, Domsch, and Middeke), or complexity science (Walsh). While doing so, all contributions insisted on the particular cultural productivity of literature, which in turn inspires theoretical reflections. All contributions in Part III thus provide good examples for the ‘dispositional, as well as institutional, anchorage’ (Brubaker 216) of literary and cultural theory highlighted at the end of Interlude II. The medium for this particular cultural productivity of literature is, of course, the text, just as it is, albeit with different rules, the medium for the particular cultural productivity of literary and cultural theory itself. If there is a unique selling point for the expertise accumulated in the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, it should be just this: that there is a long and very sophisticated tradition of reflection on the role of texts in modern culture in terms of the features that can be described under the rubrics of philological comparison, rhetoric, form, or structure, in terms of the shapes and functions that texts can assume in different media environments (writing, print, electronic media), and in terms of the reading protocols that may be desirable (hermeneutics, hermeneutics of suspicion, deconstruction, analysis, …). The essays in Part IV illuminate various aspects of this centrality. After introductory reflections on ‘The Fate of Texts under Changing Theory’ (Grabes), the remaining contributions address the potential residing in the isomorphism of literature and theory (Alworth), the role of the mediality and materiality of texts for reading processes (Reinfandt), and the long-standing relation between form and textuality (Chaudhuri).

Introduction: The Place of Theory Today

Taking stock of the ‘history and current condition of theory’ for teaching purposes in 2011, Richard Bradford diagnosed ‘the ongoing, curious—though apparently not atrophied—condition of After Theory’ for the disciplines of literary and cultural studies (Bradford 1–2). While there is certainly a lot of theoretical thinking being done, there seems to be no unifying paradigm which could serve as a platform for dialogue between the various theoretical interests that can be identified, such as, for example, the renewed interest in the phenomenological side of reading processes that figures the (reading of a) text as an event (see Attridge; Felski 2008; Wiemann), the increased acknowledgement of the foundational importance of media history for all cultural (and that includes theoretical) practices and formations (see, for example, Siskin and Warner), the impact of cognitive approaches on a variety of fields in the humanities (see Zunshine), the turn towards notions of a cultural ecology in the larger context of complexity thinking (chaos theory, systems theory, self-organization, posthumanism; see, for example, Morton; Wolfe), or the longing for ‘new sociologies of literature’ (Felski and English) and other hotspots of theoretical debate identified by the journal New Literary History under Rita Felski’s editorship.

Coda: Theory Matters

It would perhaps be too much of a good thing and counter-productive altogether to expect a truly common denominator at the end of a collaborative effort dedicated to the allocation of the place of theory in literary and cultural studies today. Rather than artificially synthesizing or neatly typologizing the current state of affairs in the light of the contributions to this volume, our diagnosis highlights difference, plurality, creativity, unpredictability, performativity, a dialogic interdisciplinarity, complexity, and, after all, the acceptance of contingency at the heart of theoretical discourse in the humanities today.

Interlude II: Ideologies of Habitus

Differentiation, we argued at the end of Interlude I, provides opportunities for mutual observation both within theory and between theory and other discourses. While metatheory has a tendency to absorb these differences into subtle discussions of epistemological problems, cultural theory addresses the frictions between different cultures of reflexivity much more explicitly, moving from, for example, an acknowledgement of ‘The Literariness of Theory’ (Sedlmayr in Part I) to an acknowledgement of what literature can do that theory cannot (Hotz-Davies’s ‘When Theory Is Not Enough’ in Part II), or from a discussion of ‘the construction of ‘Latourian literary studies” (Noys in Part I) to ‘The ‘Literary Turn’ in Organization Studies’ (Glaubitz in Part II). Less philosophical and more pragmatic, cultural theory is marked by a more explicit political awareness (cf. Hotz-Davies, Eckstein and Reinfandt, and Wiemann in Part II) and thus adds a different dimension to the cultural capital accrued by metatheory with its emphasis on epistemology: It is not only about ‘knowing’, but also about ‘doing’, as it were, and the question is how the ‘knowing’ based on ‘inward’ processes of making sense relates to the ‘outward’ cultural realms of ‘doing’. As doing theory is a cultural practice as well, the effects of ‘outward’ culture on ‘inward’ processes of making sense would also have to be addressed within the remit of reflexivity.

Das Wissen der Systeme

Der deutsche Soziologe Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) begann seine akademische Laufbahn mit Verspatung und als Seiteneinsteiger. Geboren als Sohn eines Brauereibesitzers in Luneburg studierte Luhmann nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zunachst Jura an der Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau, wo er 1949 zum Dr. jur. promoviert wurde. Er absolvierte anschliesend die Referendarsausbildung in Luneburg, trat 1953 mit 26 Jahren in den hoheren Verwaltungsdienst ein und wurde 1955 Landtagsreferent des niedersachsischen Kultusministeriums in Hannover, wo er bis 1962 blieb, zuletzt im Range eines Oberregierungsrats. Im Ministerium verspurte Luhmann jedoch, wie er spater zu Protokoll gab, „eine gewisse Monotonie der Tatigkeit“; da zudem „eine weitere Karriere nur in Verbindung mit einer Partei moglich“ war (Breuer 1996: 170), ergriff er 1960 die Gelegenheit einer uber seinen Tisch laufenden Stipendienausschreibung und lies sich fur einen Studienaufenthalt in Harvard beurlauben. Dieser Aufenthalt bei Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), dem damals profiliertesten Vertreter einer systemtheoretisch orientierten Soziologie, leitete den Wechsel in die Wissenschaft ein. Nach dem Ausscheiden aus dem Ministerium arbeitete Luhmann zunachst bis 1965 als Referent am Forschungsinstitut der Hochschule fur Verwaltungswissenschaften in Speyer und wechselte dann auf Einladung des Soziologen Helmut Schelsky (1912–1984) an die Sozialforschungsstelle der Universitat Munster in Dortmund. Schelsky ermoglichte Luhmann in dieser Zeit auch seine „Nachqualifikation“ als Soziologe, die er 1966 an der Universitat Munster mit Promotion und Habilitation erfolgreich abschloss.

Voice and Perception in Transcultural Realities: The Case of India.

In the wake of Gerard Genette’s influential analysis of Narrative Discourse (1980 1972), the distinction of ‘voice’ and ‘perception’ – or, as Genette has it, between ‘narration’ (who speaks?) and ‘focalisation’ (who perceives, sees, hears, smells?) – has long been acknowledged as marking two distinct but interrelated basic functions of narrative which can be traced in the formal features of verbal and even nonverbal narrative texts (cf. Mellmann 2010, 135-8). At the same time, and on a more general note, cultural studies and postcolonial studies have frequently taken recourse to ‘voice’ and ‘perception’ when addressing questions of authority and (dis-)empowerment on the one hand and residual personal experience in the face of overwhelming social and cultural forces on the other. It is this wider view that the present special issue of ZAA seeks to adopt while insisting on the analytical advantage of ‘voice’ and ‘perception’ as formal categories in order to gain a more specific access to cultural processes. The works under discussion here often adopt already existing literary voices and traditions and use them to create novel impressions and perceptions of ‘Indian culture.’ This volume’s focus on India is a step into the direction of ‘localising’ literary traditions and their impact on the perception of the particular place and cultural milieu that they are concerned with. In fact, the articles share an interest in the re-workings of inherited – at times colonial – literary models that Indian poets, novelists and dramatists appropriate and use to counter preconceived perceptions of Indian culture and society. Our contributors have identified perceptions of Indian culture on the one hand, and Indian readings of Western culture on the other, in a variety of texts over a range of literary periods. One look at the colonial period in Indian history undoubtedly reveals that literature was involved in creating authoritative images of the ‘other’ culture, images consumed by British and Indian readerships alike. However, it is our contention here, that it is not only Orientalism (Said 1978) that told narratives of the East and influenced Western perceptions of India, but that Indian understandings of Western culture need to be foregrounded, too. Today, Indian ways of perception such as, for example, disseminated by the Bollywood film industry but also by the popular genre of the Indian novel in English, have entered the global mainstream.