Animals, Machines, and AI: On Human and Non-Human Emotions in Modern German Cultural History ed. by Erika Quinn and Holly Yanacek (review)

Abstract

While the study makes a strong case for the scholarly and pedagogical value of reading texts through the lens of interculturality, as eclectically and dynamically redefined by Coleman, some fundamental questions about this interpretive paradigm arise along the way. For one, we never get a clear argument for why a right to difference should be expressly codified in the discourse of human rights. Coleman’s investment in the attunement to difference, as an antidote to what she regards as a fixation on sameness in universalist discourse, leads her to overlook the ways in which the fuzzy legal persons of human rights law can already be grasped at the intersection of multiple, changing affiliations. What is juridically gained by an additional right to difference? In fact, insisting on a right to difference opens the door, as Coleman admits, to appropriation by those, such as right-wing political movements, who seek to legitimate a reductionist and discriminatory definition of group identity. Given Coleman’s repeated efforts to highlight the contingencies of cultural differences in her readings, the reader cannot help but wish for an account of how cultural differences come about. The term culture itself refers to the ancient practice of cultivating or settling land, an act of demarcation that set off a chain of signifying operations and semantic distinctions between inside/outside, own/foreign, nature/culture, civilization/barbarism, and so on. Cultural differences are not ontological, but are the result of technical interventions in the world that make a difference. Though Coleman’s discussion of soil in the chapter on expulsion points in this direction, her study runs the risk of hypostatizing cultural difference, an ahistorical tendency reinforced by the focus on twenty-first century texts. As a result, her model of intercultural competence, preoccupied with the statements of protagonists in novels, neglects the ways that cultural differences are also shaped by the medial practices through which distinctions are introduced, regulated, negotiated, and even undermined in efforts to create order in the world. Claims to the right to asylum, for instance, are inseparable from the daily operations of the passport system that is mediated by the issuing, bearing, and verifying of passports. The study of interculturality can also benefit from analysis of how literary texts explore the differences that technical media make in the world. Charlton Payne, Carl Zeiss AG