critique of culturalisation
In recent years political and social conflicts have increasingly been interpreted as cultural conflicts. "Culture" has thus become a central operational category of contemporary political discourses and decision-making. Cultural theories have most often contested this process only by stressing a different - albeit "dynamicized" or "translational" – concept of culture, thereby actually contributing to the ongoing culturalization of the political and the social, however, without investigating the discursive regularities and the immediate political implications of the notion of "culture" as such. In return, an in-depth investigation, both in a historical and contemporary perspective, of the political functionalities and societal "materializations" of the cultural dispositive can be described as the task of a critique of culturalization.
Stefan Nowotny
"Culture," wrote Raymond Williams in 1976, "is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts." Williams' remark holds a valuable suggestion for a critical examination of the concept of culture, specifically where he refers to the "use" of the term culture "for important concepts": it points to the operative character of this term.
Boris Buden
or: The Society that Mistook Culture for Politics
Can culture be translated? It is not often that we are confronted with a question that becomes all the more difficult, the easier it is to answer: no.

thematic strands

critique of culturalisation processes of social recomposition beyond postcolonialism: the production of the global common practices of multilinguality vs. national language-policies all texts...

other languages

English Deutsch Español Français Hrvatski Türkçe