Section: 5. Identities in process: multiculturalism, miscegenation, hybridity. Duki, Davor University of Zagreb ddukic@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 20 th century is joined with the early Vlkerpsychologie, though the former completely renounces the whole German Vlkerpsychologie 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.

2. Imagology The eminent French comparatist Marius-Franois Guyard published in 1951 the textbook of comparative literature La Littrature compare. In Chapter VIII of this book whose authors are Guyard and his teacher Jean-Marie Carr, 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 Carr have seen the future of comparative literature. The ideas of M.F. Guyard and J.M. Carr were immediately attacked by Ren 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 Carr, 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 Carr. 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 (culturalhistoric) 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 (strende Anwesenheit) of such images in literary scholarship and literary criticism (Dyserinck 1966:119).

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-Westflische 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 (heteroimage) 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.

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 Leerssens 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

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 Vlkerpsychologie The term early Vlkerpsychologie 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 fr Vlkerpsychologie 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 Lazaruss 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 mans material and spiritual production (Khnke 2001). In the early Vlkerpsychologie we can recognize the discipline that was the first to have put the everyday life into the field of its

research interest; in some histories of cultural theories it figures as the first step of their modern development (Bhme; Matussek; Mller 2000). The modernity of early Vlkerpsychologie 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 innernational 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 Vlkerpsychologie 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

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 Vlkerpsychologie 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 ones 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 Vlkerpsychologie 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

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 Vlkerpsychologie 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 Herbarts static psychology, yet as a positive feature more recently they have pointed out its interdisciplinary/trans-disciplinary characteristic (Eckardt 1997). The rehabilitation of early Vlkerpsychologie 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 Vlkerpsychologie 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 Herbarts 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

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

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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- Dyserinck, Hugo. 1982. Komparatistische Imagologie jenseits von Werkimmanenz und Werktranszendenz. Synthesis. IX (1982), 27-40. - Dyserinck, Hugo; Syndram, Karl Ulrich (Ed.). 1987. Europa und das nationale Selbstverstndnis: Imagologische Probleme in Literatur, Kunst und Kultur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Bonn: Bouvier. (Aachener Beitrge zur Komparatistik, Band 8) - Dyserinck, Hugo; Syndram, Karl Ulrich (Ed.). 1992. Komparatistik und Europaforschung: Perspektiven vergleichender Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft . Bonn: Bouvier. (Aachener Beitrge zur Komparatistik, Band 9) - Eckardt, Georg (Ed.). 1997. Vlkerpsychologie Versuch einer Neuentdeckung: Texte von Lazarus, Steinthal und Wundt. Weinheim: Beltz Psychologie Verlags Union. Fischer, Manfred S. 1981. Nationale Images als Gegenstand Vergleichender Literaturgeschichte: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der Komparatistischen Imagologie . Bonn: Bouvier. (Aachener Beitrge zur Komparatistik, Band 6) - Guyard, Marius-Franois; Carr, Jean-Marie. 1951. L'tranger tel qu'on le voit. In: La littratura compare. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. 110-119. - Kalmar, Ivan. 1987. Lazarus, Steinthal, and Culture. Journal of History of Ideas XLVIII (1987), 4, 671-690. - Khnke, Klaus Christian. 2001. Der Kulturbegriff von Moritz Lazarus oder: die wissenschaftliche Aneignung des Alltglichen. In: Herbarts Kultursystem: Perspektiven der

Transdisziplinaritt im 19. Jahrhundert. Hoeschen, Andreas; Schneider, Lothar (Ed..). Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann. 39-50.
- Khnke, Klaus Christian (Ed.). 2003. Moritz Lazarus: Grundzge der Vlkerpsychologie und Kulturwissenschaft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. - Lazarus, Moritz. 1851. ber den Begriff und die Mglichkeit einer Vlkerpsychologie. Deutsches Museum: Zeitschrift fr Literatur, Kunst und ffentliches Leben. 1/1851., 112-126. [In: Khnke 2003:3-25] - Lazarus, Moritz. 1862a. ber das Verhltnis des Einzelnen zur Gesamtheit. ZVpSw 2/1862., 393-453. [In: Khnke 2003:39-129] - Lazarus, Moritz. 1862b. Verdichtung des Denkens in der Geschichte. Ein Fragment. ZVpSw 2/1862., 54-62. [In: Khnke 2003:27-38] - Lazarus, Moritz. 1865a. Einige synthetische Gedanken zur Vlkerpsychologie. ZVpSw 3/1865., 1-94. [In: Khnke 2003:131-274] - Lazarus, Moritz. 1865b. ber die Ideen in der Geschichte. ZVpSw 3/1865., 385-486.

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- Lazarus, Moritz; Steinthal, Hajim. 1860. Einleitende Gedanken ber Vlkerpsychologie, als Einladung zu einer Zeitschrift fr Vlkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. ZVpSw 1/1860., 1-73. [In Eckardt 1997:125-202] - Leerssen, Joep. 2000. The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey. Poetics Today 21 (2000), 2, 267-292. - Syndram, Karl Ulrich. 1991. The Aesthetics of Alterity: Literature and the Imagological Approach. Yearbook of European Studies. 4 (1991). Amsterdam Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 177191. - Wellek, Ren. 1953. The Concept of Comparative Literature. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, II (1953), 1-5.

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