186 RüdigerKunow
so because Humanities scholars from various disciplines seem to agree
that a central concern animating their work is to "combine the study of
symbolic forms and meanings with the study of power" (Hall,
"Interview" 24).^34 The foundational methodical gesture of the "cultural
turn" in the Humanities, namely that of displacing politics, the social
manifold,culture,identity,thebody—historicallyhotspotsofnormative
regulation—into the realm of the textual, invests textuality (and textual
constructions) with an enormous normative potential of their own. It
does so, I would argue, at the expense of losing sight of the material
effects, for example the unequal distribution of life chances which
clustersofnormativityproduceandsustain.
Overall, Habermasian discourse ethics allows us to understand the
processesthroughwhichnormsregulatethebiologyofhumanbeingsas
in essence cultural, and the imaginary grammar of normativities like
class,race,gender,sexuality,orabilityasrealizingitselfalwaysthrough
the conduits of cultural expression. In this view, cultural productions,
from poetry to TV series, can very well become crucial sites of what is
sometimes called (by John Fiske and others) the "micro-politics of
everydaylife"(Fiske172).Moreimportantly,andmorepoignantly,one
might suggest here that these cultural practices are nothing less than
normative ways of referring to and reproducing, norms in the life of
collectivities—something that I have tried to capture by the word
"grammar." In this context, the Habermasian view where the presence-
ingofnormsistheorizedassomanyactsofcommunicationwouldseem
to offer a more useful perspective for cultural critique than the
Foucauldian one because it resources an analytics in which
communicationisnotsimplysaturatedwithnormative powerbutwhere
the obverse is also true: normative power is to be understood as
essentiallyacommunicativepractice.
Atlantic Quarterly. Cf. also the incisive critique by Timothy Brennan, "The
ProblemwithPosthumanism,"esp.525-27,543-46.
(^34) Lawrence Grossberg's argument is in many ways paradigmatic for the
understanding of power which guides contemporary mainstream critique:
"Cultural studies is always interested in how power infiltrates, contaminates,
limits, and empowers the possibilities that people have to live their lives.. ."
(29); cf. also Baetens, Jan. "Cultural Studies After the Cultural Studies
Paradigm."CulturalStudies19.1(2005):1-13.Print.