David Denby

Abstract

Writers on the intercultural often seem to believe that, like globalisation, negotiating boundaries between cultures is a new challenge, specific to our time. In the Introduction to one of the leading readers in intercultural communication, Milton J. Benn

Writers on the intercultural often seem to believe that, like globalisation, negotiating boundaries between cultures is a new challenge, specific to our time. In the Introduction to one of the leading readers in intercultural communication, Milton J. Bennett states that the question «How do people understand one another when they do not share a common cultural experience?» was, in the past, one asked mainly by «diplomats, expatriates, and the occasional international traveller. Today, living in multicultural societies within a global village, we all face the question every day».1 The sense of an unprecedented break in human history is made explicit in his much-quoted essay Towards ethnorelativism: a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, which opens with the following statement: «Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. The continuation of this pattern in today’s world of unimagined interdependence is not just immoral or unprofitable – it is self-destructive. Yet in seeking a different way, we inherit no model from history to guide us». Bennett goes on to say that developing methods of intercultural training and education is «an approach to changing our “natural” behaviour», a way of inviting learners to transcend “traditional ethnocentrism”.2 Dean Barnlund paints a similar picture. It is true that he speaks of a gradual «stretching of human sensitivity and loyalty from the family to the tribe, the city-state and the nation», but he still argues that we are now faced with a «quantum leap from the mutual suspicion and hostility that have marked the past relations between peoples into a world in which mutual comprehension and respect are requisite».3
It is clearly true that recent years have seen intensification of intercultural dialogue and of discourse about it, and it may be that, as with globalisation, late modernity has indeed seen a qualitative transformation in relation to previous ages in human history. Nevertheless, a number of recent writers have been critical of the assumptions which underlie this position. The first important component of this critique is an insistence on the fact that human societies have always been mobile, have always been based on migration, conquest, and trade. Eric Wolf, the world-system theorist, speaks in this regard of the limitations of a configurational model of cultures: «The concept of the autonomous, self-regulating and self-justifying society and culture has trapped anthropology inside the bounds of its own definitions. (...) It has been rightly said that anthropology is an offspring of imperialism. (...) The tacit anthropological supposition that people like these are people without history amounts to the erasure of 500 years of confrontation, killing, resurrection, and accommodation. (...) Alexander Lesser asked years ago that we “adopt as a working hypothesis the universality of human contact and influence”, that we “think of human societies – prehistoric, primitive or modern – not as closed systems, but as open systems”, that we see them as “inextricably involved with other aggregates, near and far, in weblike, netlike connections”».4 
In their work on the discourse of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren quote Richard Lewontin to similar effect: «The most striking feature of global human history is the incessant and widespread migration and fusion of groups from different regions. Wholesale migration is not a recent phenomenon brought about by the development of airplanes and ships; it has been an economic necessity at all times».5  For Blommaert and Verschueren, the discourse of multiculturalism, which identifies minority cultural groups within a society and seeks to devise ways of facilitating relations between these groups and the majority, operates on the ground defined by nationalist “homogeneism”, and a key component of that ideology is to deny that migration and diversity are essential facts of human history. This denial serves to buttress a view that cultural homogeneity is a natural social state. Blommaert and Verschueren go on to show how the «culture gap logic views “cultures” as bounded entities separated by differences which are dangerous». Multiculturalist discourse, in their view, refuses to see the cultural dynamics at work in migrant communities: they are seen as defined by the culture which they have left, and no account is given of migration as itself a form of cultural change, except perhaps in cultural oppositions between first and second-generation migrants (p. 98).  They reject the singling out of cultural differences over any other «society-structuring type of difference (gender, age, class, profession, world view and religion, political conviction)». Cultural differences should not be highlighted, and should not form the basis of any kind of normativeness, either in the sense of seeking cultural homogenisation, or in the sense of cultivating separate identities. For Blommaert and Verschueren, the individual rather than the cultural group is the only valid site of diversity, and the individual is the unit which discourses of justice should seek to defend.
Blommaert and Verschueren thus introduce the second element of critique of contemporary discourses about interculturality: as well as being marked historically by the fact of mobility, human cultures are fundamentally dynamic entities and evolve as a function of social change, power relations, etc. The critique here bears most importantly on the tendency to hypostatise the cultural at the expense of the social, the economic and the political. According to Gavan Titley, «culture remains significantly accented in static and essentialist terms… In our societies, ideas of culture as the more or less immutable and bounded ways of life of racialised national and ethnic groups persist». Such a definition of culture «marginalises intersections of gender, class, sexuality and the realities of multiple identities and allegiances».6 Titley argues for a discursive understanding of culture and identity, in which signifiers of difference are «ascribed particular meanings in historical contexts where uneven power relations produce consequences from processes of demarcation and classification».7 «Cultural identity is dialogically sustained in relationships with others… cultural existence is to varying, situated extents fluid, adaptive and syncretic, whereas culture, as a mode of managing meanings and articulating group identity, assumes coherence and requires politically expedient homogeneity».8
The political theorist Seyla Benhabib argues a substantially similar position in The Claims of Culture: she criticises the «reductive sociology of culture» which sees cultures as delineable wholes congruent with population groups, and argues that this “faulty epistemology” leads to serious political consequences in the way in which multiculturalist discourse confronts the task of arbitrating between value systems in liberal societies.9 The ultimate logic of viewing cultures as bounded and determining is to relinquish all universalist arguments in favour of a context-transcending morality. Moreover, many of the situations in which the rights of culture are invoked as a legal defence or as the basis for derogations to unitary legal arrangements, concern the rights of women and children, which might well be less well protected if greater power in the private sphere is granted to the custodians of traditional cultures.10 For these reasons, Benhabib counters an essentialising and static culturalist view with the claim that «we should view human cultures as constant creations, recreations and negotiations of imaginary boundaries», and she draws on Habermasian discourse ethics to develop the view that «the task of democratic equality is to create impartial institutions in the public sphere where this struggle for the recognition of cultural differences and the contestation of cultural narratives can take place without domination».
To summarise, I am suggesting that discourses about interculturalism should avoid two related errors: thinking that cultural contact is new, and imagining cultures as fixed, bounded and determining of the life of individuals. I further want to suggest, although I do not substantiate this claim here, that both of these errors of perspective may well be largely the result of the impact of nationalism (together with its principal offspring colonialism) on our intellectual frames of reference. If that is the case, it makes sense to explore the following question: can we use a historical perspective to get back beyond a view of culture which is fatally marked by nationalism? Of course, if nationalism, as most historians agree, is an invention of the last two or three centuries, this leaves a very broad field of human history in which one might search for pre-national modes of imagining relations between cultures. But my interest is specifically in the Enlightenment, a period which seems to sit on the cusp of the modern period, often appearing to us now as an age which resembles our own, an age where the features of our own world are beginning to emerge, but where these adumbrations are not yet fixed or frozen. In particular, crucial components of modernity such as nationalism, colonialism, and discourses about culture are in formation at this time, but often seem to contain potentialities which history has discarded. It is often argued that the beginning of the 19th century is a crucial watershed: before then, European thought about intercultural exchange is characterised by a certain openness, but the forms of colonialism which emerge in the 19th century begin to close down opportunities for dialogue. William Dalrymple points out in his introduction to White Mughals that the kind of reciprocal intercultural relations which were possible between British and Indian in the late 18th century subsequently became impossible as Victorian imperial attitudes became set in stone.11  Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau make a similar point when they say that European attitudes to the exotic are marked by a “moment of equilibrium” in the eighteenth century, when Europe has not yet come to hold sway over the great empires of the East, and the peaceful peoples who were being discovered in the Pacific seemed to offer a model of living to the European explorer. «It was also a moment when, because of the power of Enlightenment pens, Europe itself was sufficiently self-critical and free from bigotry to be able to confront other cultures, admittedly not as equals, nor even necessarily on their own terms, but at least as alternative versions of living – for a brief moment before the logic of the white man’s burden required that they be subordinated, eviscerated and destroyed. There was the arrival of a version of cultural maturity no previous century could have vaunted».12
A thorough investigation of the European Enlightenment’s attitude to cultural difference would be a major enterprise. I want to be much more modest here. I begin by looking at some Enlightenment views of tolerance; and this leads me to consider the restrictions which are placed on the role of the cultural or the symbolic in two different but related areas of Enlightenment thinking about the social body.

Enlightenment notions of tolerance
What strikes me most forcibly about Enlightenment discourses of tolerance is the way in which they minimise the cultural and the symbolic. This is evident, for instance in a resolution made by a meeting of the Irish Volunteers in Belfast on 4 October 1791, seeking to overcome the religious divisions which were already plaguing Irish political life: «Differing in our religion… but resembling each other in the great features of humanity; let us unite to vindicate the rights of our common nature; let the decisive and unanimous voice of the society at large, of the body of the People, the mighty and irresistible whole – be heard».13  But the most sustained source of this kind of discourse is Voltaire’s writings on tolerance. «Tu ne nous as point donné un coeur pour nous haïr, et des mains pour nous égorger (…) que les petites différences entre les vêtements qui couvrent nos débiles corps, entre tous nos langages insuffisants, entre tous nos usages ridicules, entre toutes nos lois imparfaites, entre toutes nos opinions insensées (…) que toutes ces petites nuances qui distinguent les atomes appelés hommes ne soient pas des signaux de haine et de persécution».14 Tolerance is envisaged in this discourse as an ability to rise above the symbolic and constructed differences which are the stock in trade of contemporary culturalism: distinctions created by humans are minimized in order to bring to the surface a shared humanity. Stylistically, there are a number of occasions where it becomes clear that this procedure is quite close to satire. Voltaire frequently employs what appears to be a materialist or proto-materialist rejection of symbolic construction; in this view, the local is rendered arbitrary and insubstantial by the fact of being decribed in a flat, externalising way which strips it of all claims to seriousness: «Que ceux qui allument des cierges en plein midi pour te célébrer supportent ceux qui se contentent de la lumière de ton soleil! Que ceux qui couvrent leur robe d’une toile blanche pour dire qu’il faut t’aimer ne détestent pas ceux qui disent la même chose sous un manteau de laine noire; qu’il soit égal de t’adorer dans un jargon formé d’une langue ancienne, ou dans un jargon plus nouveau; que ceux dont l’habit est teint en rouge ou en violet, qui dominent sur une petite parcelle d’un petit tas de boue de ce monde, et qui possèdent quelques fragments arrondis d’un certain métal, jouissent sans orgueil de ce qu’ils appellent grandeur et richesse, et que les autres les voient sans envie; car tu sais qu’il n’y a dans ces vanités ni de quoi envier, ni de quoi s’enorgueillir».15 Rousseau will similarly describe, in the Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité, those great cosmopolitan souls who «franchissent les barrières imaginaires qui séparent les Peuples, et qui, à l’exemple de l’être souverain qui les a créés, embrassent tout le Genre-humain dans leur bienveillance».16 Similarly, the Vicaire savoyard will argue in Emile that the fundamental distinction is between the external forms of religion, which are of course different, and the similarity of intent underlying all religious practice, which has to do with «the cult of the heart». So, in different ways, the important issue here is about the proper treatment of a boundary between the public and the private, the external and the internal. Where we today find ourselves celebrating and indeed fetishising cultural differences, the Enlightenment discourse of tolerance encourages us to minimise those differences. Contemporary culturalism is too concerned to penetrate into the interiority of everyone’s culture, to perceive and celebrate the symbolic systems of the other. Perhaps, to use Richard Sennett’s terminology, we should grant greater public opacity to others, and let culture do more of its work in the private sphere.
So, in the area of tolerance, the Enlightenment seems able to do what a number of contemporary critics are calling for: to place limits on the role of the symbolic, the local, what we now call the cultural. If we try to relate this to broader features of Enlightenment thinking about human diversity, it seems to me that we have to go in two related but distinct directions: the period’s universalism, and its concern with what Ronald Meek calls “stadial theories” of social development.

Thinking about diversity: relative and universal
«Il résulte de ce tableau que tout ce qui tient intimement à la nature humaine se ressemble d’un bout de l’univers à l’autre; que tout ce qui peut dépendre de la coutume est différent, et que c’est un hasard s’il se ressemble. L’espace de la coutume est bien plus vaste que celui de la nature; il s’étend sur les moeurs, sur tous les usages; il répand la variété sur la scène de l’univers; la nature y répand l’unité; elle établit partout un petit nombre de principes invariables; ainsi le fonds est partout le même; et la culture produit des fruits divers.» Voltaire is speaking here towards the end of his vast historical survey, the Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations,17 and his interpretation of the relations between nature and custom (only later will we learn to call this culture), between the universal and the particular, is a fair representation of the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with both sides of this polarity. Enlightenment thinkers devoured the travel accounts which had been accumulating in European libraries since the great discoveries of the 16th century, and yet their preoccupation with accounts of the particular forms of human society which were to be found scattered over the planet was more often than not oriented towards a general or universal understanding of how human societies function. According to Robert Wokler, anthropology was not just a nineteenth-century reaction to Enlightenment abstraction: its eighteenth-century roots have to do precisely with the realization at that time that «the study of human nature in general and empirical investigations of savage societies in particular, form precisely the same field».18 Enlightenment anthropology remains quite firmly rooted in a monogeneticist view that human diversity is fundamentally an effect of the combined effects of climatic influence and human custom, even if the period is marked by the beginnings of the racial taxonomies which will allow physical anthropology in the 19th  century to contribute to a colonial discourse about the natural superiority of Europeans.19 
Secondly, as far as the Enlightenment understanding of society was concerned, relativism or relativity performed a very different function from the kind of cultural relativism which is an established part of our contemporary discourse about culture. Speaking of the kind of relativising spirit exemplified by Montesquieu’s famous text Les Lettres persanes (1721), Paul Valéry describes the intellectual procedure in the following terms: «Entrer chez les gens pour déconcerter leurs idées, leur faire la surprise d’être surpris de ce qu’ils font, de ce qu’ils pensent, et qu’ils n’ont jamais conçu différent, c’est, au moyen d’une ingénuité feinte ou réelle, donner à ressentir toute la relativité d’une civilisation, d’une confiance habituelle dans l’Ordre établi».20 The opening move of Enlightenment relativisation, especially in contexts where Enlightenment thinkers are operating in opposition to the status quo, is to subvert the belief that local custom is the natural, universal and absolute truth. But beyond that, the function of relativisation is to peel away the arbitrary in an attempt to reveal an underlying bedrock of human universality. Thus Rousseau will write in Emile: «Il est vrai que je n’ai pas renfermé mes expériences dans l’enceinte d’une ville ni dans un seul ordre de gens; mais, après avoir comparé tout autant de rangs et de peuples que j’en ai pu voir dans une vie passée à les observer, j’ai retranché comme artificiel ce qui était d’un peuple et non pas d’un autre, d’un état et non pas d’un autre, et n’ai regardé comme appartenant incontestablement à l’homme, que ce qui était commun à tous,  à quelque âge, dans quelque rang, et quelque nation que ce fût».21 This takes us back to the conflicting claims of cultural relativism and moral universalism mentioned earlier. The kind of universals referred to by Rousseau are the historic basis for the tradition of political liberalism, enshrined in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its defence of the individual (supported, as we saw earlier, by critics of culturalism like Blommaert and Verschueren).

«In the beginning, all the world was America»: stadial theory
Limits are placed on the symbolic (cultural) realm in another, related domain of Enlightenment thought. Particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, a conviction takes hold that all societies pass through a more or less necessary series of developmental stages, beginning as hunter-gather societies, passing through pastoral and agrarian stages and evolving towards the developed commercial and industrial societies of modernity.22 For the eighteenth century consumer of travel accounts, it was a civilisation’s relationship to its environment and its overall position in the chain of development which was fascinating. When Locke read about the North American Indians, what he saw was not the irreducible originality of their culture, their right to be different: he saw a society operating in a mode long since abandoned by more developed nations, but nonetheless representing a stage through which all societies must pass. «In the beginning, all was America».23 It is interesting to observe that such ideas play a role in the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder, who in the 19th century came to be read as a prophet of cultural nationalism not only in his native Germany but also by Lithuanian and Czech nationalists, and who today is frequently quoted as one of the first thinkers to challenge the universalist steamroller of Enlightenment in the name of cultural diversity. While much of this accepted image of Herder is true – he is a fierce critic of the colonialist hybris implicit in uncritical notions of stadial development and progress – he remains more of a universalist than is often thought. Whatever contemporary translations may suggest, he does not use the word Kultur in the plural, since for him it refers to a seamless process of development which transcends the division of society into nations or societies.
In that sense, Kultur and Aufklärung (“culture” and “Enlightenment”) can be synonymous. Herder has a transformative view of the development of humanity which is comparable to that of the great French naturalist Buffon, and that process of transformation involves the development of trade and commerce. Nor is a certain, circumscribed notion of progress absent from his thought: societies must remain open to learning from others, as the Germans themselves have. «We Germans would, like the Indians of North America, still be living contentedly in our forests, waging cruel wars as heroes, if the chain of foreign cultures [singular in German: die Kette der fremden Kultur] had not pressed in upon us and, with the impact of centuries, had not forced us to join in (...) This chain extends from its first link to the last and will one day encircle perhaps the whole earth». (That encirclement is perhaps what we see today, and call globalisation). Herder thus has a vision of culture as a web of exchange and influence of planetary dimensions, not so far removed as is sometimes suggested from the French notion of  civilisation.24
Stadial theory does not speak of “modes of production”, but the basic stages which are identified are fundamentally to do with modes of exploitation of natural resources, and the effects which these modes of economic exploitation have on social and political organisation. These French and Scottish theorists were undoubtedly an important source for Marx’s ideas. But the historical legacy of these ideas is more complex than that: when American pioneers pushed West, destroying native American cultures as they went, or when the French colonialists proclaimed their mission civilisatrice, their self-assuredness was based on the supposed scientific certainty of the notion that all humanity shared a single historical destination. Here is an ancestor of modernisation theory, which has had a very rough ride at the hands of  critics who defend the right of the non-Western world to follow its own independently chosen route to development. Furthermore, in the context of the so-called “Enlightenment debate”, this faith in an objective developmental destiny for all humanity, in which the nations of Europe represent the pinnacle of historical achievement, closely related as it is to the ideology of progress, has been one of the targets for those who believe that the historical legacy of the Enlightenment has been one of imperialism, domination, genocide, and environmental destruction.
While I am relatively confident in arguing, in terms of political liberalism, that a threshold exists beyond which the rights of the individual should trump the discourse of cultural respect and diversity, it seems much harder to defend the Enlightenment’s faith in unidirectional social and economic development, a forerunner of the economic liberalism which finds expression in a globalised economy unfettered by state interventions. Certainly it is true that advanced anti-colonial Enlightenment intellectuals like Diderot continued to have an unshakeable faith in the benefits of commerce; but history has moved on, and colonial exploitation combined with environmental disaster does not look like a good record. But it does seem to me that taking seriously the tension in Enlightenment thinking between culture and stadial theory forces us to ask some pertinent questions about the relationship between globalisation and the discourse of interculturalism today. Firstly, Herder’s position should oblige us never to forget that culture (in our modern sense) exists within a social and economic frame, and that the social and economic are in an important sense context-transcending universals. Secondly, if globalisation today is delivering mobility and mixing, should an intercultural agenda limit itself to an uncritical acceptance of those consequences, which it would see as its job simply to manage? Or, more ambitiously, should it seek to inflect the economic model of globalisation? Interculturalism and altermondialisation: même combat?

David Denby teaches French and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. He is the author of Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760-1820. He has published internationally on the Enlightenment, on 19th century interpretations of Enlightenment, and on the intersection between the history of ideas and contemporary debates

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Notes
1 - M.J. Bennett (ed.), Basic concepts of intercultural communication, Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, Maine 1998, pp. 1-2.
2 - M.J. Bennett, Towards ethnorelativism: a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity in R.M. Paige (ed.), Education for the Intercultural experience, Intercultural Press Yarmouth, Maine 1993, p. 21.
3 - D. Barnlund, Communication in a global village, in M.J. Bennett, Basic concepts of intercultural communication, Intercultural Press Yarmouth, Maine 1998, pp. 35-6.
4 - R. Eric, Europe and the People without history, University of California Press, Berkeley 1982, 2nd ed., pp. 18-19.
5 - R. Lewontin, Human Diversity, Scientific American Library, New York 1982, p. 113, quoted in J. Blommaert and J. Verschueren, Debating Diversity. Analysing the discourse of tolerance, Routledge, New York 1998, p. 14.
6 - G. Titley, Resituating culture: an introduction, in G. Titley (ed.), Resituating culture, Council of Europe, Strasbourg 2004, p. 9.
7 - Ibid., p. 12.
8 - G. Titley, Everything Moves? Beyond culture and multiculturalism in Irish public discourse, in «Irish Review», n. 31, Spring-Summer 2004, p. 23.
9 - S. Benhabib, The claims of culture. Equality and diversity in the global era, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford 2002, pp. 4-8.
10 - Issues of cultural relativity, gender and universalism are discussed extensively in S.M. Okin, Is Multiculturalism bad for women?, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1999, especially pp. 9-24. See also Benhabib, chapter 4.
11 - W. Dalrymple, White Moghals, Harper Perennial, London 2004, pp. XLVI-XLVIII.
12 - G.S. Rousseau, R. Porter (eds.), Exoticism in the Enlightenment, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York 1990, pp. 14-15.
13 - M. Elliott, Wolfe Tone. Prophet of Irish Indep