Liberal Arts and Cultural Studies

Abstract

The cultural turn of the 1980s led to a kind of self-sociologicization in many areas of the former ‘liberal arts and humanities’ (Geisteswissenschaften) and, particularly, in the (ancient) philologies. The findings of the so-called cultural studies will, however, only be met with a weary smile by genuine sociologists. One superficial paradigm shift is followed by another, each producing new, arbitrary descriptions lacking any standard of relevance—descriptions whose regulatory idea is a vague notion of diversity. The corresponding self-inflicted marginalization of cultural studies can only be rectified by an epistemological break from the dominant, simplistic, symbolic-interactionist notion of culture. The hypocritical notion of critique in cultural studies must undergo a transcendental critique that undoes the dedifferentiation of the concepts ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. By this way, the futile ‘cultural studies’ will become a future ‘science of culture’.