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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.
3
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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