GRK 1601: The Problem of the Real in Modern Culture

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Over recent decades, debates in cultural studies have focussed on the effects of self-reference in texts, language and cultural symbolisation, the main concern here being to demonstrate the social and historical conditioning of semiotic processes and the resulting configuration of objects. This focus, which may be conceptualised as constructivism, comes at a price. First of all, it eclipses the object-reference dimension of semiotic systems. Second, it blurs the notion of a reality existing independently of the sphere of cultural symbols. And third, as a result it runs the risk of deepening the gulf between the sciences and humanities. With a closer look, it becomes apparent that what is at work in constructivism is not a specifically postmodern dilemma, but a dichotomy that has accompanied modernity in its entirety and in fact has roots reaching even further back. For modernitys signature is, precisely, a juxtaposition of its greatest success in practice with a deep-rooted skepticism regarding the perceptibility of things in themselves and human accessibility to nature. The cultural self-diagnoses of modernity are dominated by a narrative that, on the one hand, bears witness to the increasing autonomy of the self and to culture as a self-constructed, human realm of meaning; and, on the other hand, in its pessimistic counter-sense tells a tale - often in literary form - of the loss of reference, of the decay of closeness to things and of the de-realisation of experience. This split narrative also stamps modernitys concept of the real, something that can hardly be grasped otherwise than paradoxically: as an entity withdrawing in the very process of its appropriation, pressing for symbolisation and representation but always simultaneously obstructed by both. In short, the real is both the matrix of and an obstacle to the cultural production of meaning. Grounded in cultural semiotics, the Research Training Group will explore the question of how cultural reference is organised, and how it functions precisely through its paradoxes. The Research Training Group is meant to identify sites of the real and delineate their conceptual and metaphorical contents within the fields of epistemology, the history of science, cognitive history, aesthetics and literature.