Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion I:		Sprachen, Wissenschaftsterminologien, Kulturwissenschaften
Section I:		Languages, Systematic Terminologies, Cultural Studies
Section I:		Langues, terminologies scientifiques, études culturelles

Gerhard Budin (Wien)

German

French

Language and Knowledge in Cultural Studies.
On the Dynamics and Complexity of their Terminologies

1  Language and Terminology, Scientific Knowledge, and Culture

The interactive, complex and dynamic relationship between language and knowledge has always been a basic problem of philosophy (not only of the philosophy of language) and essential to epistemology and philosophy of science. But the exact description of this relationship is different from one scientific discipline to the other. In the humanities and social sciences, where language is analyzed (as the object language, in the form of concrete discourse), language - in the form of a meta-language - is THE instrument of gaining new knowledge.

In the history of science there have been many attempts to ban 'natural' language or everyday language from science, since it was considered to be to vague and ambiguous for presenting scientific knowledge precisely enough. Language had to be replaced by formalized artificial 'language'. Leibniz, for instance, was neither the first nor the last to propose a language reform, in the quest for an ideal language, a mathematical language of science without vagueness and ambiguities. This attempt, however, had to fail as all the others, such as the philosophy of language of Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle, as Carnap and his colleagues tried to formalize the language of science according to the ideal of physics in order to eliminate all (so-called) metaphysical and (possibly) meaningless words from it.

This contradiction became more virulent due to the 'linguistic turn' of philosophy that sometimes ended in a radical-constructivist pan-linguisticism, according to which the whole world is nothing but discourse and science is nothing but linguistic action, while on the other hand the 'de-verbalization' of communication in the natural and technological sciences led to an increase in visualizations and multimedia representations of scientific knowledge, together with the consistent algorithimization of scientific theories.

It is obvious that such a simplifying polarization is not helpful, but how can we escape the epistemological abyss between these two 'cultures' (as Snow described them)?

What we need is a more sophisticated approach to science and scientific communication. The complexity, diversity and dynamics of scientific communication processes can hardly be over estimated. The increasing specialization of scientific knowledge is inseparably linked to the emergence of new special languages, in particular new terminologies. New terms are coined or existing terms are taken over ('borrowed') in a metaphorical process from other subject fields, thereby changing their meanings. Problems are mutual understanding are thus inherent in scientific communication that become even more virulent in interdisciplinary dialogues.

The situation is getting more complex when we include the concept of culture as an object of investigation as well as a necessary context of science: as in epistemology and philosophy of language, we see two extreme opposite positions:

• The universalist and neutralist hypothesis: languages, knowledge and scientific action are independent from culture, languages are completely and unambiguously intertranslatable, science and scientific knowledge is the same all over the world, cultural diversity is of secondary importance in comparison to universal features of all cultures, international understanding is not really a problem;
   
• The hypothesis of linguistic and cultural relativism: languages and cultures cannot be compared to each other, translation is basically impossible, cultural diversity is the most important feature that puts scientific universalism into question, science and knowledge are always culture-dependent, international understanding is not really possible.

In scientific practice we have to find a realistic compromise between these extremes, but this answer is always a little different in each scientific discipline, also because of different objects of investigation: while in physics the processes investigated (e.g. gravitation) are considered to be exactly the same in the whole universe (that is known to us), the differences between languages and cultures are so salient that we have to search from joint features that we can abstract and extract from observation and description. Maybe human cognition is the interface between universal validity and local diversity: while the biological basis of cognition, the brain, has more or less the same structure all over the world, cognitive processes in a concrete sense world and a social context may differ very much from each other and are determined by cultural conventions of meanings and norms of action. The analysis of this dialectic process between the individuality of cognition and communicative action on the one hand and the collectivity of standardization of symbol systems, action schemas and social knowledge that creates identities (Hansen 1995, Hitzler 1988) is a pre-requisite for understanding cultural processes.

2   Epistemological Problems of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies are subject to this dialectic process. As Habermas has shown for the social sciences (Habermas 1982), we have to be aware that in every cultural research activity the researchers are embedded themselves in a concrete cultural context that determine their ideas, approaches in scientific research that can never be completely separated from the life world of each researcher. What we have to do is to reflect about our own research interests, our own bias or prejudice in scientific communication.

Many different concepts and approaches have developed in cultural studies. This is true not only in the interlingual comparison, as the non-equivalence between 'cultural studies' and 'Kulturwissenschaften' already shows, but also inside a language. The theoretical, methodological and thus terminological pluralism has hardly been reflected in cultural studies.

Another problem of cultural studies is their monodisciplinary approach. At the same time we observe an inflationary use of the term 'cultural studies', probably in the hope for escaping the crisis of social sciences and humanities. But changing names of research institutes and university departments or faculties does not solve the problem, the scientific infrastructure should be changed.

In the case of Anglo-Saxon cultural studies, Douglas Kellner criticises their crisis and the absence of arts being an object in British cultural studies as well as a one-sided focus on 'popular culture' in American research traditions. He also asks for a transdisciplinary re-orientation of cultural studies.

Cultural studies often lack an international orientation. Local life worlds are confronted with global dynamics (Münch), which inevitably leads to new concepts of culture and new cultural identities (Breidenbach/Zukrigl). Transdisciplinary cultural studies should also include and integrate aspects of anthropology (Arizpe, Wolf, Knutsson, etc.), economics (Hofstede, Trompenaars, etc.), communication, media, cognition, and linguistics (Sperber, Kalverkämper, Veltman, Münch, etc.).

Dan Sperber's theory of culture is assuming a culture to emerge when groups of people start to share public (linguistic) and mental (cognitive) representations (opinions, meanings, norms of action, etc.). Such a concept of culture can be applied to any company and also to every special scientific or professional language. Cross-cultural management research studies corporate languages of companies as a manifestation of a company culture, conceptually and linguistically manifesting in in-house terminologies that differ from one company to the other.

With this diversification and description of the concept of culture we could escape the dangerous cultural relativism, since we are now able to describe contexts of discourse and to list parameters of investigation to be operationalized in empirical study, so that cultures are becoming truly comparable.

This terminological analysis and description allows us to conceptualize transculturality more precisely, on the object level as 'transcultural communication' (Reimann 1992). The term element 'trans' replaces 'inter' or 'cross'. Reimann's terminological distinction focuses on the international, global and interactive transcultural process and tries to reach a level of interaction beyond any particular culture, similarly to the distinction between transnational and international.

But transculturality is also important on the meta-level of cultural studies and their theories and methods. Yet we still are not able to escape our personal history of enculturation and development context, our scientific knowledge is still not 'objective'. Truly transcultural cultural studies can only emerge when we reflect on the diversity of concepts, theories, methods, histories, and discourses in different research traditions in international research networks.

3  Methodological Aspects of Innovating the Terminological Knowledge Organization of Cultural Studies

• The languages of cultural studies have to be reformed and changed: all efforts for finding a new terminology of cultural studies should be coordinated and analyzed, on interlingual, intercultural and interconceptual levels. What is also needed is the comparative historical reconstruction of concepts and terms in form of a diachronic conceptual analysis (Koselleck 1979). Such a historical study of terminology should be combined with synchronous and interlingual analyses.
   
• According to the schema 'intradisciplinary - multidisciplinary - interdisciplinary - transdisciplinary', the structures of theories and methods of cultural studies have to be analyed from the viewpoint of philosophy of science, in order to create a basis for consistently transdisciplinary cultural studies. Transdisciplinarity requires coherent conceptual structures and consistent abstractions and thus a new terminology.
   
• In the contradictory field between local life worlds and globalized processes (economy, science, mass media (incl. Internet), the culture industry, education, labour, politics, tourism, etc.) new concepts and approaches to cultural studies should be developed in order to find practical answers to complex problems in a relevant, focussed and sustainable way. The link to dynamic cultural diversity is strong in this case.

Mowlana has developed an approach in the ecology of culture for describing global communication, where he calls for an epistemological re-orientation by forming and defining new concepts. Methodologies and categorizations have to be changed (Mowlana 1996: 208ff).

What we need is truly transcultural cultural studies with a non-reductionist concept of science, based on the interaction between different cultural traditions in global research cooperation.

4  Literature

Arizpe, Lourdes: Scale and interaction in cultural processes: towards an anthropological perspective of global change. In: Arizpe, Lourdes (ed.). The cultural dimensions of global change. Paris: UNESCO, 1996, 89-108
Breidenbach, Joana; Zukrigl, Ina. Tanz der Kulturen. Kulturelle Identität in einer globalisierten Welt. München: Kunstmann, 1998
Gabriel, Norbert. Kulturwissenschaften und Neue Medien. Wissensvermittlung im digitalen Zeitalter. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1997
Habermas, Jürgen. Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982
Hansen, Klaus P. Kultur und Kulturwissenschaft. Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1995
Hitzler, Ronald. Sinnwelten: Ein Beitrag zum Verstehen von Kultur. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988
Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and Organizations: Software in the mind. London: McGraw Hill, 1991
Kalverkämper, Hartwig. Interkulturalität. In: Lundquist, Lita; Picht, Heribert, Qvistgaard, Jacques (eds.). LSP. Identity and Interface, Research, Knowledge and Society. Proceedings of the 11^th European LSP Symposium, Copenhagen, August 1997. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 1998, 69-99
Kellner, Douglas. The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies. The Missed Articulation. http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell16.htm
Knutsson, Karl-Eric. Social field and cultural constellations: reflections on some aspects of globalization. In: Arizpe, Lourdes (ed.). The cultural dimensions of global change. Paris: UNESCO, 1996, 109-134
Kosellek, Reinhart (Hrsg.). Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979
Mowlana, Hamid. Global Communication in Transition. The End of Diversity? London: Sage, 1996
Münch, Richard. Globale Dynamik, lokale Lebenswelten. Der schwierige Weg in die Weltgesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998
Reimann, Horst. Transkulturelle Kommunikation und Weltgesellschaft. In: Reimann, Horst (ed.). Transkulturelle Kommunikation und Weltgesellschaft. Theorie und Pragmatik globaler Interaktion. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992, 13-29
Sperber, Dan. Explaining Culture. A naturalistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996
Trompenaars, Fons. Riding the Waves of Culture. London: Brealey, 1994
Veltman, Kim. Why is Culture important?
Wolf, Eric R. Global perspectives in anthropology: problems and prospects. In: Arizpe, Lourdes (ed.). The cultural dimensions of global change. Paris: UNESCO, 1996, 31-44

		Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion I:		Sprachen, Wissenschaftsterminologien, Kulturwissenschaften
Section I:		Languages, Systematic Terminologies, Cultural Studies
Section I:		Langues, terminologies scientifiques, études culturelles