Suppose that the future of the humanities is to be found either in the myth of a full grasp of language and the arts or the desire to have such a grasp, or else in the myth that one may have none – against the privileged claim of possessing the truth and the autonomy of the object in the arts. How would it be possible for future generations of scholars in the humanities to work with artists? Can we find a common ground between the two that does justice to both of their raisons d’être? Through the meetings and discussions I organized as the project leader of the research project Degree Zero of Sound and Image, c. 1000–1800, I have become more aware of the fragility of these questions – and their importance.

From the very first meetings of this project, I have counted on the encouragement of Rokus de Groot, Bernard Jussen, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, and Irene Zwiep, who have always supported my intellectual bravado. Only a few people know how much Burcht Pranger’s not-so-silent voice in this volume means: the company of an extraordinary and graceful soul.

The meetings preceding the volume were part of the Internationalization for the Humanities Grant funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The beautiful surroundings of the dunes and the North Sea at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar created an ideal place to start the project in 2013. The Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris was very hospitable in helping to organize the meeting in 2014. Pierre Monnet, director of the Institut Franco-Allemand/Sciences Historiques et Sociales in Frankfurt, offered us good times and Gemütlichkeit at his institute in 2015. The Mediävistenverband in Bonn provided us with the facilities to be able to organize two sessions in the spring of 2017.

Should we say again that nothing is created out of nothing? Or is creation out of nothing (ex nihilo), from the white of the canvas or the silence that precedes sound, the freedom of the work from bondage to a preordained state? Imagining such a disenchanted condition is the triumph of critical realism today – that state of the world without authority or tradition, in which each has to find his or her way, and where nature has collapsed into social structures. The creation out of nothing was very different for modernist artists and thinkers, however, who tried to understand the meaning of form by taking its essence as something existential, which meant that their lives depended on writing, painting, or composing music. Even if the eye is staring down the ‘indifference of white paper’, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty’s essay on painting, the nature of its virginal blankness has to be imagined too. The modernist experience is at its most intense not in the presence of an image or a sound, but in the reduction of form or its absence, hence the use of the term ‘degree zero’. The notion of degree zero is best known in French theory; it is borrowed from Roland Barthes's Le degré zéro de l’écriture (published in 1953). This volume uses the phrase ‘degree zero’ as a hermeneutical tool to grasp sources of creative possibility as they present themselves in artistic objects. All the essays are concerned with the same fundamental question of degree zero as not either historical or personal, but as both at the same time – what I would call the ‘and also’. While the notion of ex nihilo often functions as a precise point in time, the degree zero tends to be circular and constantly developing. It has a life of its own and is not fully explainable or ‘confinable’ to a single point in time; it is not an event, but rather a type or a force. It lends significance to the disorder of the present, hence the title of my introduction, ‘between past and future’. Degree zero can be considered as a liminal state too and therefore never represents something absolute. This notion of liminality also implies that, ultimately, the meaning of degree zero is not without a sense of border. It represents the dawn of something that is entirely new.

To understand a non-Western perspective on culture as a research field, we must first take a few steps back in history. Why, after all, should ‘non- Western’ be a category at all when researching culture? Doesn't such a question directly assume the superiority of Western culture because of the sharp dichotomy that the word connotes? Yet this dichotomy was exactly what the Western white man wanted to convey at the end of the nineteenth century. An example of this attitude is reflected in the poem written in 1899 by English poet Rudyard Kipling entitled The White Man's Burden:

The poem, written on the occasion of the diamond jubilee year of Queen Victoria of the British Commonwealth, is seen as a typical example of the colonial, racist, and imperialist attitude of the West.

The way in which the extreme lack of reflection on the exploitation of the colonies was linked as a matter of course to the racist premise of ‘the White Man’ is also evident in the telling advertisement for Pears’ Soap from the 1890s. Yet even back then, there was significant criticism of this work. More generally, it was around this time that a growing public outcry against how the West treated the colonies started to materialise. Although this criticism gradually increased in strength, it was to take almost half a century before the colonial system crumbled worldwide, and some scholars still doubt whether it has completely disappeared. We will return to this point in the next chapter. The intense and often violent processes of decolonisation in India, Asia, and Africa in the decades after the World War II had a far-reaching impact on the way culture is studied, for understandable reasons. Postcolonial studies has left its definitive mark and is still ongoing; it continues to have an impact on cultural studies.

In the previous chapter, we briefly raised the problem of polyphony in the representation of the cultural past, and we also mentioned Bakhtin's heteroglossia. He also wrote a dissertation on Rabelais, the Renaissance writer we already encountered in our discussion of Febvre and his take on the problem of unbelief and outillage mental. While Russian and French intellectuals have always heavily inspired each other, Bakhtin approached the French writer Rabelais in a very different way than Febvre. History sometimes progresses in a bitter manner: Bakhtin's dissertation almost did not see the light of day because the contents were considered controversial and even unscientific at the time, while the book is now considered one of the most important works from his oeuvre. What was so controversial about it? In his dissertation on Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages, renamed in a 1965 translation as Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin stated that Rabelais’ salacious novel The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel had for centuries been misinterpreted. Whole passages from this novel were simply ignored due to their alleged obscenity or blasphemy. Bakhtin began to ponder the status of ‘openness’ within the culture that had produced this novel — and in this, he comes close to Febvre's attempt to reconstruct the outillage mental of Rabelais’ time; only for Bakhtin, it was not about an intellectual ‘conceptual framework,’ but about two other things.

First, he wanted a number of passages to be restored from The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (a collection of comic stories) that had been completely ignored or suppressed. Next, he incorporated the social system of the Renaissance in his analysis, considering what kind of language was allowed and what was not. By pointing out two types of subtexts (‘authorised’ language and ‘forbidden’ language), he arrives at a carnivalesque description of sixteenth-century social reality on the one hand and grotesque realism as a literary style on the other. By emphasising an underlying layer within the text — a second voice, as it were — Bakhtin was able to establish that there was an interaction between social conventions and literary freedom.

Bakhtin also stressed the importance of humour as part of cultural studies in locating power within a culture. He posited that laughing was therapeutic and liberating. And by resisting hypocrisy, the smiling truth exposes the gravity of power.

In all the examples we have reviewed, from the subconscious in the case of Freud and Lacan, to the problem of language and the question of hybridity in the case of Bhabha and Spivak, the question of what culture does in practice to people remains. After all, the social aspect comes to the fore straightaway from the moment there are people conducting activities — often called agents in the literature — that focus on the representation of culture as a whole. It is a social game with codes that can only be understood when we know the rules, just as with understanding the rules of football, knowing the traffic laws, or being able to read a musical score. It is all about the interpretation of an act (‘agency’ literally means ‘capacity to act’). And because agency is a key concept within cultural studies, it is important to understand exactly what is meant by it.

In the previous chapters, we dwelled on the question of how to represent the culture of a group when no clear traces of that group remain. Even if a group is not clearly represented in the cultural past, we can still reflect on its presence. This is what the concept of agency is about. It stems from traditional Marxist theory which focused on the issue of where one could find the working class’ capacity for autonomous action in the sources. Given the amount of labour carried out by the working class, there should be at least something of their own identity visible in history. As for workers, it would appear that almost nothing of their everyday lives has been preserved in museums or archives. Occasionally we know how much wages workers earned in the nineteenth century, giving us some insight into their spending power. With a small and seemingly unimportant document as a paycheck, we can gain some insight into the possibilities this group had and didn't have. From buying food to visiting the cinema, being able to pay the doctor to check up your sick daughter, or paying for her wedding ‘with all the trimmings’: it's all culture.

Culture as a Societal Function

As we have seen, agency represents the essence of man as a creature of action. People are subjects of history who actively participate in shaping culture itself.

The social sciences have contributed in various ways to the analysis of culture. We already mentioned psychology and anthropology, but the development of new disciplines of economics and sociology in the early twentieth century also left their mark on the concept of cultures. The emergence of the working class and a new social awareness in society in which the establishment no longer reigned supreme made researchers aware of the question of whether culture can be studied from the angle of the position of the (political) elite in relation to a multi-layered society. Workers, artisans, statesmen, and intellectuals, women, and social outcasts: all were part of economic business cycles, political discord, and religious changes. Seen in this way, the position of the individual has always been caught up in some kind of social network. When factory workers did not organise themselves into an active labour movement (something Marx had predicted), there had to be a social explanation for this.

Some cultural specialists considered this emphasis on utilitarianism — that is, the focus on the utility and practical materialism of social change — to be limited. Did people seek nothing more in life than wealth, power, and status? It turned out that seemingly fixed social categories — such as artisans, merchants, women, and slaves — varied depending on the place and time period. In short, a purely social explanation for changes in culture, with a strict focus on material evidence, gradually became less accepted. Since the 1980s, the research question has conclusively shifted to culture, and numerous studies have been conducted on symbols, rituals, language, and social practices. This paradigm shift, in which the status of language served as a starting point, made frequent use of anthropology. Because of the emphasis on language, this movement in the 1980s has also been called the linguistic turn, with strong roots in structuralism and post-structuralism (or ‘postmodernism’), for by its very nature, language involves structure.

Structuralism

The first thing to mention about the word ‘structure’ is that it does not necessarily indicate an activity. You may not necessarily be engaged in structuralist activity when you study the structure of a building to see if it has been built solidly.