GRK 1601: The Problem of the Real in Modern Culture

近几十年来，文化研究中的争论集中在文本、语言和文化符号化中的自我指涉的影响上，这里主要关注的是证明符号学过程的社会和历史条件以及由此产生的对象配置。这种可能被概念化为建构主义的关注是有代价的。首先，它掩盖了符号系统的对象参照维度。其次，它模糊了独立于文化符号领域而存在的现实的概念。第三，它有可能加深科学与人文之间的鸿沟。仔细一看，很明显，在建构主义中起作用的并不是一个特定的后现代困境，而是一种伴随着现代性整体的二分法，事实上，它的根源甚至可以追溯到更远的地方。因为现代性的特征恰恰是，它在实践中取得的最大成功与对事物本身的可感知性和人类对自然的可接近性的根深蒂固的怀疑并置。现代性的文化自我诊断被一种叙事所主导，这种叙事一方面见证了自我日益增长的自主性，也见证了文化作为一种自我构建的人类意义领域；另一方面，在悲观的反义词中，它讲述了一个故事——通常以文学形式——关于参照物的丧失，与事物的亲密关系的衰减以及经验的去实现。这种分裂的叙事也烙印了现代性对真实的概念，这是一种很难理解的东西，除非是矛盾的：作为一个实体，在其占有的过程中退缩，迫切需要象征和表现，但总是同时受到两者的阻碍。简而言之，现实既是意义文化生产的母体，又是文化生产的障碍。以文化符号学为基础，研究培训小组将探讨文化参考是如何组织的问题，以及它如何通过其悖论精确地发挥作用。研究训练组的目的是在认识论、科学史、认知史、美学和文学等领域内确定真实的地点并描绘其概念和隐喻内容。

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.