The book's popularity could be said to correspond to post-structuralism's rise within the academy. You yourself came to the Humboldt in 1993. Like post-structuralism, cultural studies is on everyone's lips these days. What do you understand under 'cultural studies'?

The concept of 'cultural studies' is not as new as it may seem. There are, in fact, five such institutes for 'Kulturwissenschaften' in Germany; the one at the Humboldt has existed some thirty years. That was, of course, something else back then. I don't know what it was like. It's not our job to rehash and work through the past. We're not interested in deconstructing ourselves ad infinitum like some of the human sciences have been forced to do in recent years. We understand ourselves here in the Institute as an attempt to pose cultural-theoretical questions in the face of technology.

Does cultural studies still think of itself as a continuation of the socio-philologic based sciences, if one considers their division into disciplines such as English, French and German literatures, and so forth, to be obsolete?

Yes and no. I think we all understand that the movements away from the philologic basis can create monstrous problems. For example, I did a recent seminar, "Aesthetic of the Colonies," and it worked for the students as well as myself because we could automatically expect a certain philologic competency: everyone could speak the languages and had, for the most part, read the books. There has always been in the philologic disciplines a firm, that means mega-technologic, basis for work. In cultural studies every canon drifts away. There is no referential model, no standard and no curriculum. You're essentially free to do what you want, and you have to hope that the students also have the philologic basis which you yourself bring as a transition figure.