Section: 5. Identities in process: multiculturalism, miscegenation, hybridity.

Dukić, Davor – University of Zagrebddukic@ffzg.hr

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL IMAGERY

1. Introduction: Conceptual eclecticism

The establishment of the theoretic concept for the systematic research of various forms of

evaluating ideas, appearing in a certain culture within shorter time periods, is one of the

tasks of the project “Imagological research of the 16 th-19th century Croatian literature”

that I am engaged in at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Zagreb University. I identified

this concept rather generally with the notion cultural imagery and this text is a kind of

report about the first steps in building it up.

The approach that forms the concept of cultural imagery can be identified by the

syntagm conceptual eclecticism: theoretical thinking about cultural identities from the

beginning of the 19th century up to the present have been analysed without prejudice,

radically open. Thus, in this text the otherwise separate is joined together: the imagology

of the second half of the 20th century is joined with the early Völkerpsychologie, though

the former completely renounces the whole German Völkerpsychologie as an obvious

example of the 19th century essentialist perception of national character. The conceptual

eclecticism as a principle of systematizing series of theoretical presuppositions for the

research of the history of literature and culture should not, therefore, be a search for the

confirmation of the existent research concept but a search for inspiration for its

permanent additional construction.

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2. Imagology

The eminent French comparatist Marius-François Guyard published in 1951 the text-

book of comparative literature La Littérature comparée. In Chapter VIII of this book

whose authors are Guyard and his teacher Jean-Marie Carré, it goes for the research of

images about foreign peoples and cultures in French literature, specifically about

Germany and Great Britain. In these researches of images and myths (“image and

“mirage”) about foreign peoples Guyard and Carré have seen the future of comparative

literature.

The ideas of M.F. Guyard and J.M. Carré were immediately attacked by René

Wellek. He recognized here the unnecessary spreading of research interest of literary

scholarship onto the subject that should be in charge of other disciplines, first and

foremost of sociology and psychology. Being focused not only on one aspect of literary

subject matters Wellek, in the investigations suggested by Guyard and Carré, saw the

continuation of tradition of old-fashioned 19th century Stoffgeschichte (Wellek 1953).

The Belgian comparatist Hugo Dyserinck turned down Wellek's criticism of French

comparative literature and rehabilitated the ideas of Guyard and Carré. Dyserinck chose

three reasons for including 'mirage' und 'image'-Forschung in the frame of literary

scholarship: 1) the presence of such images in some literary works; 2) the (cultural-

historic) meanings that images about some national culture have when they are created on

the basis of the expanding of its literature into other national areas, be it in translations or

the original form; 3) the unsettling presence (störende Anwesenheit) of such images in

literary scholarship and literary criticism (Dyserinck 1966:119).

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The following year Dyserinck started to put his ideas from his 1966 programme text

into deeds: in 1967 he was named the first professor of the recently established

comparative literature study course at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische

Hochschule (RWTH) in Aachen. In the research and study programme of the Aachen

comparative literature course the central place was given to Imagologie, the branch of

comparative literature that studies images about peoples.

The main task of imagology is the analysis of stereotype images about others (hetero-

image) and about oneself (self-image). At the beginning the analytic material was

exclusively fictional literature but very soon the range of sources spread to film and

publicist literature.

Imagology was through all this time considered to be a research branch of

comparative literature and not part of a specific national philology. This was implied by

the principle of the “supranational standpoint” (supranationaler Standort). In harmony

with this a certain image of something foreign should not be researched isolated within

the associated individual/national culture but its multinational function and multinational

context should be considered, always respecting the opposite national perspective

(Dyserinck 1982:33).

The fundamental theoretic/ideaistic hypothesis of imagology is the denial or at least

the ignoring of the ethnic/national essentialism. For imagology, stereotype images about

nations are only discursive formations and the task of this discipline is the reconstruction

of conditions and reasons of their creation, the analysis of their forms and mechanisms of

expanding and modification.

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Imagology has never concealed its political mission: it was frequently pointed out that

imagologic research should contribute to a better knowledge and understanding of

nations. For all that, the critical analysis of negative stereotypes was frequently kept in

mind. The political connotations of imagology were particularly obvious in the 1990s,

when imagology, considered as one of the disciplines within the European studies,

seemed to wish to supply the European project of political unification with an adequate

cultural acknowledgement (Dyserinck; Syndram 1992).

Some principled criticism could be addressed to the traditional imagological

paradigm. First of all, the imagologic researches so far have as a rule been linked to an

imageme, i.e. to an object of stereo-typization: whether it goes for self-imaging or about

the image of the European national Other, or about the image of the non-European

confessional, racial and generally cultural Other. The principles of J. Leerssen that in the

deep semantic structure of the imageme there lie binary oppositions (he quotes

North/South, strong/weak and central/peripheral), and that in the diachronic perspective it

is determined by a value ambivalence that is compared to Janus’ face (Janus-faced

ambivalence), where in a certain period one side of the face prevails while the other

remains only as a potential that could be activated at any moment, seem to me

paradigmatic for the contemporary imagological thought (Leerssen 2000). Despite

Leerssen’s convincing argumentation, the very concentration on the specific imageme

and not on its imaginative context, on the structural connection with other imagemes of

the same culture, i.e. cultural imagery, seem to me as being the essential shortcoming of

the imagologic paradigm so far. Equally so, the imagologic principle of the

“supranational standpoint” has on the one hand been rarely applied in practice so far, on

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the other hand it has also closed the view on the imaginative potential of an individual

culture in a certain period, for a research of whose potential, the cultural imagery, this

paper is pleading for.

3. Early Völkerpsychologie

The term early Völkerpsychologie stands for the discipline that was founded in the middle

of the 19th century by the German scientists of Jewish origin, the philosopher and

psychologist Moritz Lazarus (1824 – 1903) and the linguist Hajim Steinthal (1823 –

1899) which had the goal of investigating the national spirit (Volksgeist) by applying

psychological methods. Lazarus published the first programmatic text in 1851, and in

1860 he and Steinthal put in motion the journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und

Sprachwissenschaft (further in the text ZVpSw), that would be published in 20 issues up

to the year 1890. Lazarus had written the chief programmatic texts of the new discipline

in the 1860s and kept signing himself as co-editor of the ZVpSw, but starting from issue

No 5 (1868) he stopped publishing in it. On the other hand, Steinthal published his texts

about language, literature and folklore in which he followed Lazarus’s fundamental

principles continuously in the course of all the 30 years of the publishing of the ZVpSw.

In the last twenty years Lazarus and Steinthal have acquired the status of inaugurators

of the modern anthropologic, pluralistic understanding of culture (Kalmar 1987:674), i.e.

such an understanding that equates culture with civilization, with the overall man’s

material and spiritual production (Köhnke 2001). In the early Völkerpsychologie we can

recognize the discipline that was the first to have put the everyday life into the field of its

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research interest; in some histories of cultural theories it figures as the first step of their

modern development (Böhme; Matussek; Müller 2000).

The modernity of early Völkerpsychologie can be observed in the subjective

understanding of identity: the nation (Volk) means simply “multitude of people who

recognize themselves as being one people” (Lazarus – Steinthal 1860:35). Nation is

understood as being historically most important, “natural and everlasting” but not the

only bearer of the collective, objective spirit (objektiver Geist); in several places inner-

national and multinational communities are mentioned, who also build up their identity

and possess their own objective spirit (Lazarus 1862a). The establishment of such a

common, objective spirit is a prerequisite of constituting each and every collective

entity/identity – Volksgeist is “just what simply makes the multitude of individuals a

nation; it is the link, principle, idea of a nation; it builds up its union” (Lazarus

1851:118). The Volksgeist is primarily expressed by the language by which it forms “all

the wealth of images and notions” of a certain nation, also in its mythology, religion, folk

poetry, literature, art, science, customs, business and family life (Lazarus 1851:119;

Lazarus – Steinthal 1860:40-60).

Every objective spirit is manifested in the individual consciousness so that one of the

fundamental tasks of Völkerpsychologie is to investigate the relation between the general

and individual. This relation is in principle determined as a mutual effect

(Wechselwirkung); each act of an individual spirit draws its roots from the associated

general, objective spirit but simultaneously participates in its strengthening and

construction (Lazarus 1851:119-120). The same principle of the relation between the

individual and general is also valid at the lower levels; every image of an individual spirit

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comes from the general circle of images (allgemeiner Vorstellungskreis) that limits the

spiritual activity of the individual; his/her freedom lies only in the appropriation of what

was given in the national spirit” (Aneignung des im Volksgeiste Gegebenen). The power

of this appropriation is different with different individuals, and it is only some who are

capable of reaching “the second step of freedom” and enrich the national spirit by “the

analysis and combination of the given” (Lazarus 1851:121).

From what was said above can be deduced that early Völkerpsychologie determines

man as a social being. However, beside the companionship as a horizontal connection of

an individual with the community there is also a vertical connecting line with the

ancestors – man is also a historic being. With the help of languages and customs, via the

institutional education and by one’s own spiritual activity he/she will in a relatively short

time acquire the knowledge that the human race has been gathering for centuries (Lazarus

– Steinthal 1860:3-4). This process of gradual acquisition of notions and images by which

man perceives the world around him/her is what Lazarus, in harmony with the

psychological teaching of the German psychologist, pedagogue and philosopher Johann

Friedrich Herbart (1776 – 1841), calls condensing of thinking (Verdichtung des Denkens)

(Lazarus 1862b:54-55).

From Herbart's individual psychology the early Völkerpsychologie takes over and

applies upon the national spirit the notion of apperception (Apperzeption – conscious

perception), according to which the phenomena present in the senses do not enter directly

into the consciousness but are being processed with the existent group of images

(Vorstellungsmasse) given to consciousness. In the Herbartian tradition there is also the

notion narrowed condition of the spirit (Enge des Geistes), which denotes the appearance

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that in the human spirit only a limited number of images can be restored to consciousness

at a certain moment. Lazarus discovers an analogous appearance in the national spirit and

defines it with the notion consciousness of time (Zeitbewusstsein): at a certain historical

period the consciousness of the nation is occupied by only one side of its spirit while the

other sides (series of images) remain undisclosed (Lazarus 1851:125).

Early Völkerpsychologie was chiefly forgotten in the greater part of the 20th century.

The historians of psychology criticized it first of all declaring that it had taken over the

then already old-fashioned Herbart’s “static” psychology, yet as a positive feature more

recently they have pointed out its interdisciplinary/trans-disciplinary characteristic

(Eckardt 1997). The rehabilitation of early Völkerpsychologie in the more recent cultural

anthropology, Kulturwissenschaft and Kulturphilosophie over-emphasizes its conceptual

character. Namely, one tends to forget that Lazarus and Steinthal always pointed out as

their fundamental task the revealing of the pattern of development of national spirit, with

the aim of its preservation and enhancement. However, for the research concept of the

cultural imagery neither the proclaimed nomothetic approach nor do practical ideological

goals of early Völkerpsychologie have any importance; what is important is the

applicability or at least the inspirational quality of its Herbartian psychological heritage,

the teaching about images and notions, liberated, naturally, from Herbart’s futile attempts

to mathematically present the mechanics of images (Vorstellungsmechanik).

4. Concept of cultural imagery

Cultural imagery can be generally defined as a group (not as an ordered system) of

characteristic imagemes of an individual culture in a period. As an individual culture

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every community can be observed that is unified according to some integrative criterion

that its members accept as an essential component of self-determination; this integrative

criterion can be supranational, national, ethnic, confessional, social, gendered, ideological

and the like. The notion of individual culture as the bearer of a particular cultural imagery

is analogous to the notion of objective spirit. The uniformity of the individual culture

cannot be prescribed beforehand; it can be contradictory in itself, put together from a

larger number, sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting subcultures, i.e.

other “lesser” objective spirits.

The period whose cultural imagery is being analyzed/reconstructed has the status of a

synchronic cross-section, a relatively static time unit. However, imagemes are the result

of a historical process: they are historically condensed images (verdichtete

Vorstellungen). Imagemes can be, as mentioned by J. Leerssen, built from different, often

even contradictory images. For instance, in the Croatian cultural imagery in the 1830s

there coexist the new, positive image about the Ottoman Empire as the state that is taking

speedy steps to become modernized/Europeanized, and the old, negative image about the

Turks as unorthodox, cruel invaders from the East.

The cultural imagery of a certain period consists of a relatively limited number of

relevant imagemes: it never covers the whole of the existing world. This opinion is

analogous to the Herbartian principle of the narrowed condition of the spirit (Enge des

Geistes). What is it that determines which imageme is, in a certain period, going to be in

the centre and which one on the periphery of the cultural imagery? The laconic reply

could run as follows: the system of values of the relevant culture in the observed period.

Behind every imageme there stands an ideologeme – had in the Croatian culture of the

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1830s not been present the affirmative attitude to the modernization processes, the

modernization of the Ottoman Empire at the time of Sultan Mahmud II would not have

been perceived. Imagemes always presuppose value-coloured images; it is only with

objects that invite an affective relationship of the contemporaries that culturally relevant

imagemes can be formed. Such a status, for example, in the Croatian cultural imagery in

the 1830, have the imagemes “Ottoman Empire” and “Northern America”, but not

“China” or “Latin America”. The domestic seaside landscape in the Croatian culture of

that time possesses no significant imagological potential; a hundred and thirty years later,

at the time of the tourist boom, it has already become a mythic space with connotations of

leisure, adventure and pleasure.

The context in which an individual imageme is understood is not only, as it was

considered by classic imagology, exclusively the history of its appearance, expansion and

modification, nor congenial or contrary imagemes of other cultures, but first and foremost

other relevant surrounding imagemes and corresponding ideologemes of the culture to

which the observed imageme belongs. The concept of cultural imagery should help the

description of the complex structure of self-images and hetero-images of a particular

culture, thus prevailing over the binarism of classic imagology founded on the analysis of

isolated imagemes.

The cultural imagery is an ideal construct that does not exist as a whole in any

individual consciousness; it is simply a group of relevant imaginational possibilities of a

culture at some time period. The individual imagery, (e.g. the imagery constructed from

the opus of some writer) relates to the corresponding cultural imagery as, according to the

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opinions of Lazarus and Steinthal, the individual spirit relates to the corresponding

objective spirit.

The concept of cultural imagery is adjusted to the research of relatively small cultures

in relatively short time periods which make the simultaneous application of qualitative

and quantitative methods possible. This is the model for the synthetic representation of

the history of culture as the history of ideas (ideologemes and imagemes) of a period.

Of great importance for the research of early modern cultural imageries are the

historiography of that time as well as travelogues, textbooks and fiction, first of all epic

and drama. In the 19th century it was journalism that competed with the literary canon and

textbooks; some specific newspapers were often the most important source for the

reconstruction of the imagery of a certain social group.

The research/reconstruction of cultural imageries presupposes the analyses of a huge

material and team work. In such research ventures even the 19-centuries-long positivist

paradigm of collecting material and facts with the perspective of subsequent synthesis

seems not to deserve contempt as it was usually customary in the 20th century.

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