Cultural vs. Social Theory: Methodological Considerations, with Reference to Kafka
Abstract:
This paper will explore the need for a distinctive methodological approach to interdisciplinary
inquiry in the cultural as distinct from the social sphere. The challenge of multidisciplinary
research within a complex nexus of fields requires clarity in methodological choices and
assumptions. Such methodological assumptions require viable models of the field of inquiry. On
the basis of two models borrowed from Adorno and Benjamin (force field and constellation), I
argue for a structural differentiation between the social and cultural domains of inquiry along the
lines of the difference between conceptual and figurative modeling. In accordance with the
inherently figurative structure of the cultural domain, I address questions regarding the
appropriate form of engagement with the cultural text. I use a short text by Kafka, “Before the
Law,” as a touchstone, taking issue with one of the more lucid engagements of Derrida with a
literary work, in an essay of the same title as Kafka’s short story. An alternative response to
Derrida’s, in the light of Kafka’s own commentary on the text, is offered, such that the peculiar
continuity is accented between the object and the mode of inquiry appropriate to the cultural text.
The general implications for methodology in cultural inquiry are drawn out by way of
conclusion.
Text:
In a contribution to the 2001 Blackwell Companion to Cultural Studies, Douglas Kellner, in an
article entitled “Cultural Studies and Philosophy: An Intervention,” contends that:
A postmodern turn in cultural studies has led to surrender of articulation of a
normative critical standpoint for cultural studies and has often substituted a
predominantly texutalist or ludic approach for the earlier activist political thrust
of cultural studies. (144)
Kellner looks to the Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research, as the model of an
interdisciplinary study of society and culture that is at the same time engaged in social and
political critique, and whose goal is not merely knowledge but rather what it understands to be
political and social emancipation. As a literary theorist with a special interest in philosophy and
aesthetics, I have been both attracted to and repelled by the paradigm of cultural studies as it has
contested and negotiated disciplinary status over the last several decades . . . attracted to its
attempt to see larger and also more implicated patterns across culture, society, the economy, the
media, and the university itself; repelled by exactly what Kellner describes as its tendency to
withdraw from early critical commitments and to shun mature theoretical elaboration. I would,
then, endorse Kellner’s call for greater theoretical reflection and methodological accountability in
cultural studies. As Kellner puts it:
I would argue for metatheoretical perspectives within cultural studies to
combine philosophy, critical social theory, political economy, and a variety of
methods of textual analysis and audience study to capture the full wealth of the
forms and effects of culture, ranging from high culture and modernism to media
culture and oppositional cultures. Philosophy would thus secure the metatheory
of cultural studies, question and defend its assumptions, articulate its values,
refine its concepts, and provide standpoints of critique. (144)
One of the primary tasks of such a theoretical foundation for cultural studies would be a
sufficiently coherent definition of the domain of culture itself. What is it that characterizes
culture and cultural phenomena in contradistinction, say, to that realm defined as most
proximate to and yet distinct from it: the domain of society?
In inter- or cross-disciplinary inquiry such as cultural studies, assumptions and
intentions should be articulated regarding the supposed relations on the one hand between the
integrity of the individual disciplinary domains, and on the other the wider field within which
they can be seen to cooperate. From Theodor Adorno, who himself borrows them from his fellow
Frankfurt School collaborator Walter Benjamin, I choose two metaphors that can function as
models for the potential integration of complex fields of study, the figures of the force-field and
of the constellation. The notion of force-field refers of course to that gravitational, magnetic
energy that organizes and structures a heterogeneous field of objects, often in various but
interdependent ways. For example, the delicate system of our own planet has intra- and extraplanetary gravitational fields that are clearly distinguishable and yet intricately interdependent.
Contrariwise, with the metaphor of constellation we have a representation of the contrast
between the nature of the stars in their relation to one another over against our mundane
perception of and perspective on them. A constellation is an observable pattern that allows us to
orient ourselves on the earth but which makes no claims, or at least not within the horizon of
secular modernity, of objective validity regarding the stars in their relation to one another.
The constructs “culture” and “society,” for instance, could themselves be said to be forcefield- and constellation-like. Political economy and systems analysis of the social field, for
instance, study the organization of productive and reproductive structures of human beings as
bodies and minds that cooperate, work, and procreate. While social acts certainly are acts
entailing thought, reflection, and interpretation, the study of culture, you could say, focuses on
the sphere generated by a specifically imaginal and reflexive kind of interpretation by human
beings of their social, productive, and interpretive activity. Society and culture are
distinguishable, and arguably, at least in certain ways, autonomous, spheres. The parallel
Marxian model of base and superstructure is an example of a similar metaphor that has given rise
to fruitful debate both over the relations of the modes of production and reproduction it
configures and over its own viability as a model . The nature of the gravitational pull that
structures the force-field society/culture is of course conceived in accordance with fundamental
assumptions along the characteristic subject/object divide in modernity, of liberal humanist
idealism on the one side and of natural and social scientific empiricism, materialist critique, and
hermeneutic of suspicion on the other. You could say that of the two metaphors, force-field is a
model more immediately congruent with the object-field of culture, whereas constellation, in its
figuration of the incommensurability between things-in-themselves and our perception of them,
is proportional to society as an eminently superstructural domain, marked by the problematic
disjuncture of social scientist and society, observer and observed.
In keeping with the structural difference of these two metaphors, if society as a construct
is determined by the question of the arguable relation between material forces and institutions on
the one hand and individual minds and persons on the other, the question of culture is
determined by its internally bifurcated, you could even say its allegorical, structure. Cultural acts
and artifacts and media are characterized as layered interpretation of the social realm. Culture is
society engaged in interpretation and representation of society, and at the same time with the
interpretation and representation of culture itself. If society is mysterious in relation to the
obscure roots of cause and effect as to modes of production and reproduction, then culture is
elusive and ephemeral because arising from incommensurable sources, of inherently even less
definition and an incrementally greater difficulty of delineation than is the notion of society.
To descend from abstraction to an instance, we will look for a moment at a cultural
artifact possessing the peculiar kind of reflexive awareness of itself that I mentioned as the
peculiar allegorical potency (and bifurcating limitation) of the artwork. Franz Kafka has
achieved canonical status as a modern, and indeed modernist, writer, and achieved it so
superlatively as to have contributed his name to a proverbial domain of modern experience, that
uncanny mirror-effect of the relation of the modern bourgeois individual to bureaucracy that we
have come to identify as the Kafkaesque. A short text by Kafka entitled “Before the Law” was
published by him both as a passage within the novel The Trial and also separately. Kafka
included “Before the Law” in a group of short texts that he styled parables. Parables of course
are short allegories used specifically for teaching purposes, as in the parables of the Gospels, texts
that Jesus was at times exasperated to have to interpret for his disciples. Kafka’s literary parables
are primarily secular, though the central construct of the Law in this particular parable does not
exclude identification with religious as well as natural and juridical, and for that matter cultural
and even literary law or canon.
The parable begins: “"Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper
comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the law.” All of the elements of the
story are present in these opening lines. There are the law and a doorkeeper, and so by
implication there is a door. And there is a man who comes from the country to request access to
the law. The law and the doorkeeper are apparently urban, the man from the country in the
relation of a rustic to the doorkeeper's apparent authority and air of entitlement. The law
remains throughout an abstract universal—and as an allegorical figure it becomes the very type
of abstract universals—its only specificity given by means of the expectations and assumptions of
the man from the country. The doorkeeper refuses his request for entry through the door of the
law, allowing him merely to peer into the precincts, at the same time warning him that there are
numerous doorkeepers, each more powerful and terrible than the one before. "These are
difficulties," the narrator tells us, "that the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he
thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone." The expectation on the part of
the man from the country of free, equal, universal access is a naive view that does not foresee the
doorkeeper and his mediation, which in terms familiar to us in Kafka peculiarly unites
bureaucratic with repressive power. The doorkeeper neatly combines in one figure both aspects
of Althusserian ideological apparatus, the repressive and the state forms. The tableau of man
from the country and doorkeeper also configures what Habermas identifies as two opposing
realms modernity: system and lifeworld. As with modern bureaucracy in Kafka, the system
instrumental character of modern technocratic practices have colonized the domain of the
lifeworld in which human beings attempt to coordinate communicative action generated by
discursive reason and informal logic.
Because of the frightening appearance and commanding manner of the doorkeeper, and
the assurance that, though he is not allowed in at present, he may be at some time in the future,
the man elects to wait outside the door to the law. He sacrifices all he possesses to bribe the
doorkeeper, waiting fruitlessly for years, diminishing steadily, until finally, with death
approaching, all his years of waiting, we are told, "gather themselves in his head to one point, a
question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. . . . 'Everyone strives to reach the law,' says the
man, 'so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has begged for
admittance?" The second of the man's assumptions regarding the law, then, is that everyone will
necessarily strive to reach the law as the goal of all his or her efforts. The doorkeeper sees that
the man from the country is dying and, in the concluding words of the story, finally gives a
straight answer to one of his questions: "'No one could ever be admitted here, since this gate was
made only for you. I am now going to shut it." With characteristic Kafkaesque implacability, the
text closes down on readers with the same finality as for the man from the country. The parable
is at once an effective allegory and a powerful performance of the drama and dilemma of
interpretation. Initially drawn to identify sympathetically with the man from the country and his
desire to gain access to what should be "accessible at all times and to everyone," by the end of the
story we are wearied of the man's submission to the doorkeeper and, if not sympathetic to the
latter's authority at least ready and willing to reach the conclusion of such an impasse. Both our
spontaneous appetite for ready access to the literary significance of the text and our urbane
awareness of its enigmatic, high cultural resonance, are effectively engaged and figured by these
archetypal figures of countryman and doorkeeper. In drawing us into the drama of reading and
then so emphatically shutting us out, the parable performs the dynamic it signifies and signifies
what it performs. We part from the text knowing, worldly readers sensing in the doorkeeper's
harsh ruling the inescapable singularity of our subject positions as readers who have bid for
admittance to the literary law of the text. As comes so readily to the tongues of students,
everyone has their own interpretation of a text, and we can make little headway with such a
debate stopper unless willing to affirm that they are perfectly, if only partially, right, . . . that the
idiomatic particularity of our perspective on the text, on any cultural artifact, makes it all the
more necessary to share the act of interpretation with others in the give and take of
communicative reason. As Habermas, to my mind, effectively argues, participation in debate
presumes that communication and understanding are rationally supportable and reasonably
possible, and this would be especially the case in the public arena of the university, where
students engage in debate for educative purposes. But to follow out the implications of our
allegory, what precisely is, then, the door of interpretation, such that it remains, as does the door
to the Law, both open and at the same time impassible?
In one of his most lucid discussions of a literary text, Jacques Derrida finds in Kaflka's
"Before the Law" a work that explores the undecidable relation between signified and signifier,
between the conceptual universality of the law and the singularity and individuality of the man
from the country. The man seeks access to the law because it is universal and applies to
everyone, and he is denied access because he is not everyone, but only himself and no one else.
The corporeality of the man's difference, that he is the body that he is, occupying the time and
space that only he occupies, becomes in the words of the doorkeeper the very door that closes
upon his dying awareness. "This gate was made only for you. I am now going to close it."
To convey some of the flavour of Derrida's engagement with Kafka's text, I will quote a
key passage in his argument in which he focuses on the allegorical range and performative
subtlety of the parable. Quoting the just cited final lines of the story, Derrida gives an allegorical
reading of the allegory:
And this is the final word, the conclusion or closure of the story.
The text would be the door, the entrance (Eingang), what the doorkeeper has just closed.
And to conclude, I shall start from this judgment, with this conclusion of the doorkeeper. As he
closes the object, he closes the text. Which, however, closes on nothing. The story Before the Law
does not tell or describe anything but itself as text. It does only this or does also this. Not within
an assured specular reflection of some self-referential transparency—and I must stress this
point—but in the unreadability of the text, if one understands by this the impossibility of
acceding to its proper significance and its possibly inconsistent content, which it jealously keeps
back. The text guards itself, maintains itself—like the law, speaking only of itself, that is to say, of
its non-identity with itself. It neither arrives nor lets anyone arrive. It is the law, makes the law
and leaves the reader before the law.
To be precise. We are before this text that, saying nothing definite and presenting no
identifiable content beyond the story itself, except an endless différance, till death, nonetheless
remains strictly intangible. Intangible: by this I understand inaccessible to contact, impregnable,
and ultimately ungraspable, incomprehensible. (210-211)
As Derrida emphasizes, “The text guards itself, maintains itself—like the law, speaking only of
itself” in an opacity that he calls its “unreadability,” its refusal to accede to transparent
hermeneutic resolution of the opposing terms of Law, doorkeeper, and author on the one hand
and man from the country and reader—and specifically of ourselves as individual readers—on
the other.
To gather the threads of my argument, I recall that my object in looking at Kafka’s text is
to explore a concrete instance of the notion of “constellation” as a figure for the kind of critical
integration one might, in the light of modern and postmodern critique of the classical model of
truth, be able constructively to offer in an interdisciplinary environment, directed as it will be
toward the complex integration of diverse, ostensibly incommensurate fields. I suggested that
“constellation” was a metaphor structurally congruent with the study of culture, whereas “forcefield” might be considered more readily proportionate to the problematics of the study of society,
grounded as they are in the empirical world of actually existing societies, institutions, and
productive forces. Culture on the other hand, though it has its empirical practices, media,
artifacts, and institutions, has the structure of allegory and of the allegorical figure, in particular,
of constellation, because of the intrinsically interpretational and perspectival relation to the
elusive matter being represented . . . elusive for both the artist-practitioner and the audiencecritic. The artwork is in the nature of what Kant termed, in a deliberately oxymoronic temper, a
“subjective universal,” that is to say a content that everyone who views it encounters in the
artwork but which is so overdetermined in its significance and resonance as to be irreducible to
merely linear, monological formulation and strictly rational categorization. We find in Kafka’s
“Before the Law” a text that configures the pursuit of canonical truth and meaning as an
irresolvable dilemma, as a structural aporia of access and interpretation. Derrida describes this
aporetic configuration with another metaphor, describing it in terms of what he calls the text’s
“unreadability.” While Derrida’s deconstructive strategy has its relevance and usefulness within
its hermeneutic domain, I suggest that there is another, arguably more generative approach to
Kafka’s text and to the problematic of interpretation it configures. In a manner congruent with
the structure of allegory that I have suggested is typical of culture and of its study and
interpretation, I will look to another short text by Kafka, a parable reflexively entitled “On
Parables.”
“On Parables” is presented as a parable about parables themselves, a deliberately
parabolic figuration of parables, performatively consistent with the dilemma of interpretation
that Kafka addresses in and by the allegorical pedagogy of his parables. I give the short text here
in full:
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no
use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he
does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could
do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder,
something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more
precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables
really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and
we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a
different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the
parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all
your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
The initial voice is that of the hardheaded realist, who argues that parables are useless in helping
us meet the challenge of real-world problems, of everyday life. The defender of parables
responds: “If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with
that rid of all your daily cares.” The nature of this advice, whether it is itself parabolic or a realworld solution, is then debated in suitably oblique terms. If the realist critic of parables is correct
in rejecting the usefulness of parables as a means to address real-world problems, might parables
be helpful at least in addressing the cultural dilemma of interpretation, for instance, in
understanding parables themselves? For example, can we apply the instructions in “On
Parables” to the aporia configured in the parable “Before the Law”? Can it help us understand
the dilemma of the man from the country, and figuratively, then, of ourselves as readers who
have come to the text requesting entry to its significance, through the door of a sufficiently
nuanced but still rationally defensible interpretation? I would argue that the instructions in “On
Parables” are fully pragmatic and heuristic in relation to the characteristic nature of the peculiar
object of interpretation at issue, a cultural artifact that exploits allegory in order to focus attention
on the act of cultural reception as itself allegorical. In order to defend this baroque formulation I
will be more specific in relation to our chosen task, an interpretative response to “Before the
Law” that does more than retire behind a gnomic “unreadability.”
To be concise, the parable draws our attention in the end to the question of the real
existence of the law. In the opening lines, the man from the country, we are told, comes to the
doorkeeper, “and prays for admittance to the Law.” He assumes the law is within and
permission of access is the doorkeeper's to give. However, as the man lapses into infirmity,
blindness, and death, the text tells us,
his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether it is really darker or his
eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance
that streams inextinguishably from the gateway of the Law.
If the man cannot tell if the darkness is real or an effect of his own vision, then it follows that the
gateway through which flows the radiance of the law may be either exterior or interior, objective
or subjective, actual or merely notional. This is analogous in principle to the figure of
“constellation,” in which the pattern that the viewer is able to see has no necessary or verifiable
relation to the real-world things-in-themselves, the stars, she is seeing. The door, made only for
the man from the country, that the doorkeeper claims to conclusively close is the door of the
man's failing perception. The only gate over which the doorkeeper has any power resides in the
assumptions of the man from the country, in and through the question asked of the doorkeeper.
The man defers to him and in doing so enacts his difference, his exclusion, from the law. The
doorkeeper's power arises from the man's assumption that the doorkeeper keeps something and
knows something that he, the man from the country, must search out, something that in his rustic
naiveté he thinks himself to lack. The law, the text, the cultural meaning truly is accessible at all
times and to everyone insofar as it is not, at least primarily, a material object, is not in anyone's
exclusive guardianship, is not closed upon itself, cannot entirely withhold itself and at the same
time achieve its significance as law, in a way appropriate to, and indeed constrained by, its
peculiar, non-empirical, superstructural virtuality. Unlike the man from the country, we as
readers can grasp our situation as subjects and students of culture. What we need to let go of is
that to which the man from the country clings, the assumption that the Law is empirical and
substantially other, that we need to seek it outside our ken, projecting its otherness in a peculiarly
cultural form of reification, in the very questions that we address to it, the way we conceive and
represent to ourselves the object and the terms of our desired comprehension, enlightenment, or
emancipation.
In Kafka’s words, we “become the parable” by recognizing the parabolic, allegorical
structure of our very relation to the objects of cultural study. In study of the natural or social
sciences, the dichotomy of the observer and the observed is configured in relation to things in
their measurable, or at least observable, verifiability. In the study of culture the objects studied
are in more immediate continuity with the activity itself of their study. Both cultural objects and
cultural inquiry are predominantly if by no means entirely ideational. There is a shared horizon
of the realm studied and the act of inquiry, itself a cultural activity. To achieve methodological
consistency, cultural study should theoretically encompass this subtle mirror-relation