„To know about the giggle loop is to become part of the giggle loop!‟
– Coupling, episode 3, series 1, BBC
Introduction
As follows from the discussion of culture in the previous chapter, to devise a concise, parsimonious and all-encompassing theoretical framework for the analysis of culture in the context of IR and politics is not only extremely difficult, but also counterproductive (cf. Chabal and Daloz 2006). If anything, a deeper look into the issues and processes associated with culture brings out discontinuities, „ruptures‟ and incongruities in our understanding of not only how culture, but the related fields, such as the political, operates. Therefore, the value of a theoretical framework for cultural analysis of peacebuilding, I would argue, would be not in presenting a consistent and coherent picture of culture as it features or should feature in connection with peacebuilding, but in its ability to expose these points of rupture (see Foucault 2002a) and contradiction in our understanding of culture and its workings, and in exploring their implications for conflict and peacebuilding. In doing so, this chapter presents a conceptualisation of culture that is both critical in highlighting the problematic sides of the concept, and constructive in outlining the analytical and functional versatility of „culture‟ (including its problematic aspects). The intention is, however, not to gloss over the imperfections of culture in an attempt to construct a grand methodological narrative, but rather to draw attention to the mechanisms of operation of the „seductive‟ attraction of this concept, which can be helpful in unravelling the idealised visions of culture (e.g. EC 2007) and keep in check the scope of conclusions and regularities established in this work.
Consequently, the framework offered here does not aim to provide a fail-safe inventory of different aspects to consider with regard to culture and its treatment in peacebuilding (in general and with regard to individual case studies), as is the general trend in policy documents (e.g. EC s.a.; UNDP 2004a), but rather to illuminate the complexity of the issue of culture as a starting point for an inductive analysis. Nor does the presented consideration of culture offer salvation from the „imperfections‟ of peacebuilding in the sense of resolving its dilemmas; rather, the ambition is to elucidate the dilemmas and responsibility involved in any event of intervention. Hence the labelling of the presented analytical approach as „embedded cultural enquiry,‟ since the analysis will always be carried out from a perspective that is already unavoidably cultural, stymieing any ambition of reaching a „culturally-objective‟ standpoint. Of course, the opinions regarding the degree of cultural „determinism‟ this entails vary from the recognition of deep-seated, unaccountable influences which „filter‟ one‟s perception of reality (cf. Chabal and
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Daloz 2006: 71; Kapoor 2008: 21) to the view of cultural conditioning as „avoidable‟ (Fetherston and Nordstrom 1995). While resolving this debate is beyond the means or objectives of this study, it is helpful in drawing attention to the role that cultural self-awareness and reflexivity play in establishing the parameters of „the cultural‟ in research and analysis. Despite its potential for bringing out patterns and regularities of broader relevance (and notwithstanding the phenomenological assumptions of „publicness‟ of mental processes and operations), a cultural enquiry is bound to remain an essentially individual enterprise, borne of questioning one‟s assumptions and the environment that is impossible to uniformalise in a single „usable methodology.‟ Yet to deny its utility on these grounds would be tantamount to questioning the very possibility of situated knowledge – which, arguably, is the only kind available to us (cf. George 1994; Toulmin 1992, 2001).
Premises and limitations of embedded cultural enquiry
It is tempting to follow Chabal and Daloz in their inductive approach to culture and concentrate on „the interpretation of meaning‟ – of what „makes sense‟ in a given context (2006: 30, 60; cf. Geertz 1973). However, there are certain limitations as to what could be achieved with this approach. „Interpretation‟ is an honest term to use in that it hints at the individual, „subjective‟ nature of conclusions reached in the course of an inductive enquiry (which is not in itself a drawback, according to some recent thinking on methodology in IR and social sciences (e.g. Bleiker 2001; Sylvester 2001; Tickner 2005; cf. Denzin and Lincoln 2000). What it does not convey to the full extent, however, is the unfinished, fluid, and unfixed character of meanings themselves (cf. Douglas 2004: 88), which acquire a more stable form not least through the process of interpretation (cf. Bauman 1978: 180-95). Neither does it make clear that this process of arrival at fixed meanings (as well as its outcome) is a political phenomenon as much as it is a semiotic process: the assertion of meanings as „real,‟ „solid,‟ and „complete‟ is part of their discursive representation (cf. Hansen 2007). Therefore, it seems more appropriate to focus on the processes through which meanings are produced – i.e. not (just) the interpretation but
generation, constitution of meanings – as well as contested. As will be shown below, this process may be seen as constitutive of many forms and effects of the „operation‟ of culture, and this common „architectonic moment‟ (Bakhtin 1993[1986], 1994b: 51) unites what may otherwise appear as „disjoint‟ areas of relevance to cultural analysis. The advantage of this perspective is also in that it allows for illuminating culture‟s inherent relations with power and the political, without (as it often happens) eclipsing the relevance of the concept of culture in the process.
Needless to say, in exploring these avenues I am not treading an entirely virgin terrain. The focus on the production of meaning, naturally, demands engaging with works of semioticians that have addressed this aspect in conjunction with an interest in culture (such as Lotman, his Tartu-Moscow contemporaries and subsequent commentators (e.g. Schönle 2006)), as well as thinkers that have sought to demonstrate the application of semiotic and literary insights in the realms of the social and political (such as Laclau (e.g. 2000) and many other figures associated with the French post-structuralism). In particular, I draw on Lotman‟s notion of tropological meaning-generation (1990) coupled with Laclau‟s tropological
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movement and hegemonic closure (2000; cf. Selg and Ventsel 2008). Among other key inspirations, Bauman‟s analysis of „culture as praxis‟ (1999) opened up the possibility of approaching culture with a focus on the production of meaning, and his analysis of cultural conditioning of human lived realities served as an avenue for developing the culture-power nexus below, and for linking the meaning-generation problematic to disparate anthropological insights into the cultural ordering of violence (such as Bowman 2001).
Apart from bringing together very diverse sources of insight into an interdisciplinary framework for analysis, the present work can claim other innovations. That individual meanings are mutable and unstable, and contingent upon their differentiation from other meanings, is scarcely a novel idea (e.g. de Saussure 1931; Barth 1969; Todorov 1998), and the attention of IR scholars has logically been focused on the processes by which they acquire stability (such as discursive articulation) (e.g. Campbell 1992; Bhabha 1994; Hansen 2006). The larger frameworks in which meanings are produced and articulated – such as „language‟ or „culture‟ – have also received coverage, but mainly in the light of their stabilising effects on meanings (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Bauman 1999)). What is less apparent (and what the following discussion will seek to illuminate) is that such broader „frameworks of meanings‟ themselves (most topically, culture) can partake of the instability usually associated with individual meanings, and are also subject to all the vagaries of meaning-making. This is particularly relevant in view of the application of the developed framework to the analysis of conflict, which is often claimed to have a destabilising effect on culture (see Chapter 2). Furthermore, such „isomorphous‟ involvement in meaning-generation (cf. Lotman 1990) collapses the neat separation into the „object-language‟ of culture and meta-language of cultural theory or critique (which greatly contributes to the notoriety of culture as an „inconvenient‟ object for scholarly study (cf. Wuthnow et al. 1984)). As noted by Geertz, the attempts to „make sense‟ of their own culture occupy the same discursive plane as the „stuff‟ of culture conveyed by the informants, which makes the boundary between culture as the „mode of representation and [its] substantive content‟ rather ephemeral (1973: 15-6). In this chapter I try to demonstrate that the processes and effects of meaning-generation not only occur at every „order of discourse‟ (Gunnell 1998) but also account for the noted fusion between them (cf. Pechey 1989).
It may appear that a treatment of culture based on the examination of processes and effects of meaning-generation constitutes yet another example of „evasion tactics‟ described in the Introduction, whereby discussion of culture is reduced to some easier definable aspect (e.g. identity) or to a select set of terms that on the face of it may even appear tangential to culture. Such a charge would not be totally unfounded. However, while the focus on meaning-generation is not the only one possible, or most direct, way of approaching a discussion of culture, it is not altogether arbitrary, since references to „meanings‟ feature in most definitions of culture (see e.g. Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 81-90). Yet, meaning-generation can (as shown by generations of linguists and semioticians) also be discussed without reference to culture (e.g. as a „technical‟ aspect of language). In this sense, the focus on meaning-generation offers flexible terms of engagement with the problematic of
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culture, since it can be placed – heuristically – both within and outside what is considered „culture,‟ which provides a useful angle from which to examine the problematic of delimitation of culture as such. With respect to the topic of culture, such flexibility, coupled with full awareness of the „embedded‟ position of the researcher, appears more fruitful than (unattainable) methodological rigour.
In a practical sense, the offered framework has both an advantage and a disadvantage with respect to its possible applications. Advantage, because it does not in any way restrict the relevant material for analysis, and does not involve its implicit pre-selection in the way that general classificatory frameworks do (such as Douglas‟ grid-group theory (1970, 2004)). Its disadvantage consists in that the open- endedness coded into any inductive approach may appear intimidating to less critically inclined researchers, and certainly to practitioners attempting „schematic‟ conflict analyses with a cultural „twist.‟ However, one of the contentions behind the present approach is that cultural analysis of conflict and peacebuilding is fruitless (if not counterproductive) if conducted within the confines of pre-conceived categories which severely limit what is perceived as the relevant material for study (cf. Chabal and Daloz 2006), and that engagement with culture cannot be successfully accommodated within the dominant „project-management‟ approach to peacebuilding (MacGinty 2003) with its language of „objectives‟ and „milestones‟ and proliferation of guidelines, checklists and inventories (e.g. EC s.a.; UNDP 2004a). An important ambition of this thesis is to provide a framework that would not in itself fix the terms of discussion about culture, but would offer tools for exposing the means used to „stabilise‟ the debate in accord with one or another set of interests.
Aspects of cultural analysis (of conflict and peacebuilding)
The aspects of culture formulated below (with a heuristic purpose in mind, rather than following „natural‟ analytical distinctions) is an attempt to unpack the logic of meaning-generation and world-making, which some analysts (e.g. Bauman 1999; Lotman 1990; cf. Demerath 2002) view as the „prime‟ cultural activity. The first aspect refers to the isolation and production of particular meanings: „culture as signification.‟ The second aspect covers the political dimension of this (i.e. emphasising and de-emphasising possibilities, selecting meanings as opposed to de- selecting and de-legitimising other possibilities of meaning): „culture as politics.‟ The third aspect is that of a dynamic relation of the above to the processes and effects of change (setting the scene for a discussion of problems such as how to conceptualise and evaluate cultural change, the impact of cross-cultural communication, amalgamation etc.) and to the expressive dimension of culture: „culture as rhetoric.2‟ In a sense, this proposed division into „culture as‟3
is
2
„Rhetoric‟ here should not be understood narrowly as a reference to the toolkit of literary „embellishment,‟ but as a general „tropological‟ property of language and text explored in post- structuralist and semiotic works (Lotman 1990; Laclau 2000, 2006; Jakobson 1971) that refer to the impossibility of „pure‟ meanings and their unproblematic communication, and uncover instead the inherent „contagiousness‟ of meanings borne out of tension and „violence‟ of their production.
3 Although the tripartite „culture as …‟ classification is reminiscent of Bauman‟s (1999), it does not
explicitly seek to replicate or enhance it, and focuses mainly on issues raised by Bauman‟s third perspective on culture „as praxis‟.
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somewhat artificial, since each of the above aspects – meaning-making, power, and rhetorical „contagiousness‟ – is a necessary prerequisite for the possibility of any of the others, so the justification for this sub-division is only in the degree of emphasis. Neither does this division strictly follow the areas of application. Contrary to the possible initial perception, the first aspect does not strictly refer to the micro-level of semiotics: meanings are created, and re-negotiated in daily life, as well as in high (and bureaucratic) politics, through a variety of means and avenues, from everyday practices and transactions to the separate and „elevated‟ spheres of existence (art, philosophy, science, etc.). Similarly, the two other aspects affect both the production of micro-level, „linguistic‟ meanings and the social-level discourses and practices. The remainder of this section will briefly introduce the issues which fall under the outlined three aspects of cultural analysis, while the more in-depth consideration of each of these in turn will follow in the subsequent sections of the chapter.
(i) ‘Culture as signification’
This aspect refers to the process of constitution of meaning through selection of particular meanings from the wider array of possible meanings and their
naturalisation as part of „incontestable‟ social reality. Such ‘ordering’ of reality, to use Bauman‟s term (1999), occurs on many levels, from the (micro-level) (re- )production of meanings that make up the „stuff‟ of culture, to the delineation of „culture‟ in general (as well as particular „cultures‟) at the macro-pole of this continuum. The construction and production of identity – individual and collective – also fall under this category. Another way of referring to this aspect of culture would be through the problem of definition and delineation, taken broadly. While some aspects of this problem, concerning the difficulties of defining the concept of culture, have been outlined above, other problematic aspects include difficulties of grasping the limitations arising from being immersed in a particular culture, as well as the general mechanism of boundary-drawing which, as many theorists claim, is one of the fundamental principles of operation of „culture‟ (e.g. Lotman 1992b; Bauman 1999). Since the delimitation serves to constitute the „self‟ vis-à-vis „other(s),‟ the issue of transgression of the borders of identity and alterity at many levels, including inter-cultural communication and understanding, also needs considering here, although it is more fully explored in relation to the third, „rhetorical‟ aspect of cultural meaning-generation. The ordering/reality-making implications of casting the outlined problematic in terms of culture also form the subject of discussion in this section, since the isolation of a specifically „cultural‟ domain and its delimitation constitute a case of meaning-generation. Although many of the noted issues can – and have been – addressed from the perspective of discourse analysis (e.g. George 1994; Said 1978; Kapoor 2008), references to discourse often have the effect of subsuming the array of underlying significational dynamics, rather than explicating them. For this reason, I largely leave „discourse‟ out of the conceptual apparatus used here, other than in references to textual practices, as in „discourses of liberal peacebuilding.‟
With regard to conflict and peacebuilding, the relevance of the processes and effects of meaning-generation is manifold. Although the processes of meaning-generation underlie even the traditional terms of discussion of conflict and peace, they are seldom explicated (the symbolic-interactionist treatment of conflict and negotiation
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being one of the rare exceptions (see Väyrynen 2001)). Yet, the very possibility of conflict rests on a curious mixture of agreement and disagreement over certain meanings and on the expansion and alteration of habitual channels for their expression and communication. Peacebuilding, in turn, can be seen not only as a vehicle for communicating specific meanings and interpretations, but also as a wider framework for their legitimation and stabilisation (and, as such, a culture with the accompanying traits and effects of reality-making). Through the inclusion (and exclusion) of practices, actors, concepts and ideas in the domain of „liberal peace,‟ peacebuilding participates in the „ordering of reality,‟ i.e. enabling some and disabling other terms of organising human affairs and articulating their ends. This „ordering‟ has very real disciplinary connotations (in the Foucauldian sense), in terms of de/legitimising particular types of behaviour, instilling particular sets of values (while condemning others), and putting in place the mechanisms enabling surveillance and compliance with the established „rules‟ (Kapoor 2008: 19-20, 25-8; DfID 2000b: 53).
Meaning-generation offers an interesting vantage point for examining the conceptualisations of peacebuilding (i.e. the ends and means of pursuing the liberal peace) from „within‟ and „without‟ the dominant discourse, which can help grasp not only how particular terms of discussing conflict and peace are enabled or disabled, but also how that shapes the construction of liberal actors and the production of identities „compatible‟ with liberal peace (e.g. through delegitimising „malignant nationalisms‟ (see Luoma-Aho 2002)). Liberal peacebuilding‟s „mute‟ attitude towards culture (see Chapter 4), stemming from a self-image of a „technical‟ fix which is outside and beyond culture, also presents an interesting issue for consideration in connection with meaning-generation: Quite apart from the blindness towards its own „cultural‟ characteristics, what liberal peacebuilding defines as pertaining to „local culture‟ and what it places outside it can say a great deal about liberal peacebuilding itself, from beliefs regarding the possibility (and plausibility) of influencing culture to culture‟s place on the conceptual horizon of liberal mentality. The reverse relationship (i.e. local reception of liberal peacebuilding and understanding of what it tries to achieve) is, of course, also highly relevant, as are ideas that local actors may have about the possibility of influencing the terms of created peace and interacting with peacebuilding actors. The theoretical grounds for analysing these aspects of liberal peacebuilding will be set out in this chapter, and applied to the relationship between the liberal peace and „local culture,‟ and explicating the „culture‟ of liberal peace itself, in the two chapters to follow (respectively, 5 and 4).
(ii) ‘Culture as politics’
Not wholly distinct from the above, this section introduces an explicit emphasis on the power dimension of culture and (cultural) constitution of the political, through a focus on the selection and naturalisation of meanings and the related dynamics of totalisation and fragmentation (observable both on the conceptual plane – as separation or fusion of conceptual categories and spaces – and empirically, in the dynamics of commonality and societal boundary-drawing). A focus on the power dimension of culture highlights the meaning-generation and societal dynamics as two interrelated aspects of the cultural „production‟ of reality, albeit taking place at