The structure of modern cultural theory

Thomas Osborne

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847797223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about the claims of Cultural Theory as a particular kind of intellectual ethos or discipline. The book argues that Cultural Theory is best seen, at least in its 'modern' form, as an ethical discipline. As such, it should be seen as a form of inquiry governed by the guiding idea of the cultivation of critical autonomy and, as such, is designed as much to change what we are in our relations to ourselves as to describe the world as it is in particular 'positive' ways. The content of the book develops this argument through critical readings of three canonical writers, namely Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. A final chapter contrasts the ethical idea of modern Cultural Theory developed here with its postmodern derivations, which, it is argued, have taken both a more positivist and even more moralistic form.

1

Culture – an antinomical view

Culturalisms – Truth – Enlightenment and autonomy – Reason – Norms of modernism – Culture, creativity and reflexivity – Institutionalisation versus reflexivity – Simmel: an excursus – The antinomy of culture

This chapter seeks to get clear of – if hardly to refute – various understandings of culture so as to make way for the conception of the scope of modern cultural theory which is to animate our treatment here. The first section – Culturalisms – is, then, largely about what modern cultural theory is not. It attempts only to lay the basic elements of some distinctions between modern cultural theory and other types of discourse such as cultural studies, cultural sociology and cultural anthropology; and also, more generally, to distinguish modern cultural theory from other ways of thinking about culture; the metatheoretical, the epochal or ‘culturological’, the anthropological, and the sociological. Then, reiterating some of the comments made in the introduction, we get on to our own sense of what modern cultural theory actually is, attempting – partly by way of Georg Simmel – to convey the antinomical idea of culture that is fundamental to it. (Readers wishing to avoid conceptual throat-clearing, however, may go to chapter two.)

Culturalisms

In trying to get free of some rival views of culture, let us start immediately with some scepticism. After all, what – at least when considering human and social existence – is not culture? What use can this concept be to the social and human sciences when it does not mark things out in a delimiting and usefully restrictive way? Surely, culture is everything, and hence the concept itself is more or less useless? It covers lots of cases, perhaps, but does very little work. So possibly we should do without the term altogether and find some other terminology.¹ This view is understandable yet harsh. If the term is so elastic as to be surely just about meaningless it still, none the less, has two broad uses. On the one hand – as will be argued over the course of this book in the context of modern cultural theory – the notion of culture can be narrowed usefully. On the other hand, it just seems inevitable that the notion of culture will continue to serve as a sort of metatheoretical background to certain kinds of intellectual work within the human and social sciences and philosophy.

To be convincing and to get away with using the notion of culture in this latter sense one needs the sort of erudition that necessarily eludes most of us. For Max Weber, for example, culture is – to paraphrase somewhat – the ascription of meaning and significance to a meaningless world, specifically from the particular standpoint of particular human beings.² Or in the usage of Weber’s contemporary Georg Simmel, culture is likewise more or less everywhere. It is the ‘subjective’ side of human endeavour, as materialised in institutions and artefacts.

I understand it to be that improvement of the soul which the latter attains not directly from within, as with the profundity that is the fruit of religion or with moral purity and primary creativity, but indirectly, by way of the intellectual achievements of the species, the products of its history: knowledge, lifestyles, art, the state, a man’s profession and experience of life – these constitute the path of culture by which the subjective spirit returns to itself in a higher improved state.³

For Simmel there is a theoretical distinction between objective culture and subjective culture. But not the least of his originality lay in his ability to use his metatheoretical stance on culture as a lever for a veritably empiricist cultural turn of attention – to investigate money, adornment, fashion, bridges and doors. He wanted to relate cultural forms, in all their complexity, to patterns of social organisation. He looked at culture, as it were, from the inside out, devoting himself to a series of close, careful and impressionistic studies of differing cultural forms. In contrast to this notion of culture, an even wider usage could simply be labelled ‘culturology’. This looks, so to speak, more from the outside in than from the inside out. Culture becomes an object of prognostication. Famous epochalising texts come to mind. Spengler’s monumental Decline of the West would be a good case in point, or Herbert Marcuse’s cult One-Dimensional Man, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death or even – to cite a more recent manifestation – Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilizations.

These are noteworthy, portentious tomes. Epochal culturology has many manifestations, and certainly not all of them are to be ruled out of court or simply written off as reactionary or vacuous. But they have little to do with the narrower view of (modern) cultural theory to be outlined here. But likewise, in fact, with those other ‘cultural’ disciplines – the anthropology of culture, the sociology of culture, cultural sociology, cultural studies – that have been so prominent as paradigms in the social and human sciences over the past few decades.

These latter areas of inquiry can be divided into two kinds of outlook: the anthropological and the sociological, whereby anthropologists take a viscous and sociologists a stratified view of culture. There are anthropologists and others (for, in spite of our terminology, the notion should not be reducible to this or that specific discipline) who invoke the notion of culture in a very broad sense. Clifford Geertz, doyen of cultural anthropology, is a useful guide. He invokes the notion of culture ‘not as complexes of concrete behaviour patterns – customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters – but as a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing of behaviour’.⁴ It is the totality of symbolic forms that do not just serve for purposes of human ‘expression’ but which orient humans in relation to the world:

Undirected by cultural patterns – organized systems of symbols – man’s behaviour would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but – the principal basis of its specificity – an essential condition for it.⁵

Anthropologists (and others) do not have too much trouble in understanding the concept of culture in this sense, and it has obviously been a useful concept to them. Cultural anthropologists study everything about tribal (and other) cultures – even the economy is ‘cultural’ in that sense. Matters are more problematic when we come on to those large, complex societies that are characteristic of the contemporary, post-traditional era. These, to adopt the sociological jargon, can be understood as being functionally stratified.⁶ That means that they are often understood to be characterised by different strata or levels of activity – the economy, politics, law, culture itself. Here, the level of culture is regarded as being increasingly sequestrated from other levels. This means that it is more difficult to think of culture in these contexts as a generally co-ordinating form of symbolic activity. Typically, culture comes to be understood as a particular ‘sphere’ of social existence in its own right. This is the stratified view of the sociology of culture and of much cultural sociology: forms of social science that typically take just one aspect of social organisation – ‘culture’ – as their demarcated object.

Whereas on the anthropological conception, culture is, so to speak, seamless and viscous, on the stratified, sociological conception, it is or is part of the ‘superstructure’. To do the sociology of culture or cultural sociology, then, is to examine those aspects of human existence that entail the production of symbolic forms.⁷ An influential example of this sort of analysis in the English-speaking world might be Raymond Williams.⁸ The thinkers dealt with in this book seem also to come close at times to this perspective – Adorno perhaps, or Bourdieu – but are hardly, as should hopefully become clear, reducible to it.

Equally, cultural studies implicitly adopts a variant on this sociological conception, with the focus on questions of popular culture, on the one hand, and media cultures and policies on the other. Again, there are overlaps with some of the concerns of modern cultural theory, especially with Adorno and Bourdieu. The aim here, in any case, is certainly not to oppose modern cultural theory to cultural studies in any antagonistic way.⁹ However, cultural studies as a discipline is not typically animated by the ethico-critical concerns of modern cultural theory, tending, rather, to code questions of critique and politics more directly on to cultural production and consumption in a manner obviously inherited from Marxism. In cultural studies, politics is not typically mediated by ethics, a point that will be made again in the conclusion to this book. This is not to dismiss cultural studies. Far from it. If cultural studies is beset with its own epistemological challenges and limits and if its differences from modern cultural theory are mentioned here it is only to isolate it as – precisely – a different and thereby legitimate form of enquiry, one with epistemic and critical norms of its own.

It might also be emphasised that the two versions are not exclusive to each other. For one thing, the superstructure can of course be important to the structural whole. Bourdieu and Raymond Williams certainly thought so, as do latter-day proponents of cultural sociology such as Jeffrey Alexander.¹⁰ There is no reason why anyone should lose too much sleep in holding to both the viscous view and the substantive view at the same time. Plenty of thinkers have done so, usually more implicitly than explicitly, and without necessarily finding themselves bogged down in horrendous contradictions. The aim here is not to dismiss any of these conceptions, only to distinguish them from something else – from modern cultural theory.

Not the least of the basic differences lies in the contention that what distinguishes modern cultural theory is that it is not straightforwardly an epistemic enterprise or form of ‘expertise’ at all, and does not have ‘positive’ or ‘scientific’ pretensions in quite the usual way. On the contrary, it has ethico-critical pretensions and, relatedly, tendencies to what we are calling educationality; in other words, a different relation to truth, perhaps, as compared to other kinds of cultural enquiry.

Truth

What unites some aspects of the work of thinkers such as Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu and what makes them, in spite of their substantive and ideological differences, modern cultural theorists as opposed to anything else, is a particular, critical relation to truth: that in their different ways they do not simply or only partake of a positive genre of discourse but are, rather, ultimately – if not always immediately – ethical thinkers.

This distinction can be developed rather schematically. The argument is that if a positive discourse seeks to tell the truth about a particular domain, and it seeks to do so in neutral terms – in other words, it does not really matter who its addressees are because the truth, according to this genre of truth-telling, is always the same – then modern cultural theory relates to the truth in a somewhat different way from such a positive discourse. It is not that it seeks not to tell the truth, or to tell lies, or even that it seeks to be interesting and (for example) provocatively Nietzschean; only that it relates to the truth specifically, and limitedly, with regard to a particular – ethical – interest. It is concerned with the fortunes of critical autonomy. More specifically, modern cultural theory is not just or only about stating some positive truth about the world, but is – critically speaking – about bringing us to recognition of the forces that work against our autonomy. So, paradoxically enough, and as noted earlier, it does not, typically, offer positive theories or particular hopes of autonomy at all. It tends to be critical or, rather, one might say, albeit cumbersomely, ‘counter-heteronomical’ in its outlook. Its interest often lies typically – as in Adorno’s and Bourdieu’s cases – in diagnosing the forces of heteronomy and – as in Foucault’s – in historicising varying cultures of subjectivity and self-constraint.

Here, then, truth is not neutral but particular; it works not, so to speak, simply in an ‘objective’ sense but on our senses of our selves, our subjectivity. This, by the way, is not least of what we are getting at with the notion of educationality. It might even be said – using what is these days rather discredited terminology – that modern cultural theory is ideological in orientation, or rather counter-ideological in so far as it seeks to have effects – often open-ended rather than specific – ‘in the realm of the subject’.¹¹ Modern cultural theory in other words is a means of working upon whom or what it is we think we are: a means of working critically upon ourselves, upon our judgement, our understanding. And it is in this context that modern cultural theory often functions as an antidote to something – tendencies, forces – that it counteracts. It seeks to disrupt particular ideological effects that make us conceive of ourselves in certain ways. It works with images of ourselves, images of fate, and seeks to counteract them. In being ethico-critical, it is also tactical, provisional.

It should be noted that the idea of educationality is intended to be an indicative term rather than a rigorous concept; albeit indicative only of the fact that there is a strong educational or performative element to all three thinkers considered here. As mentioned in the introduction, education in this usage is not mere pedagogy, teaching. In teaching, there is a clear distinction between the subject of knowledge and the object of knowledge. Not so with what we are calling educationality. Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu are more like educators than – or at least as much as – positive cultural experts; they are seeking subjective effects as much as contributions to knowledge. As observed earlier, Nietzsche said about his predecessor Schopenhauer that he was a great educator in something not too distant from this sense. The parallel should not be overdone. If Schopenhauer was an educator for Nietzsche, then this was not least in the sense that his work was, so far as Nietzsche was concerned, somewhat limited and that an aspect of its uses – for him, Nietzsche – was that it should be overcome, in other words by him, Nietzsche. In this book the notion of educationality is understood in a less romantic direction: to convey the sense that the works of writers such as Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu are there to be read, to have subjective effects, as monuments rather than just documents, as ethico-critical resources as well as sources of information; as sources of truthfulness as opposed to just truth.¹² If such distinctions are to make any sense at all, they can do so only under the umbrella of a certain minimally normative notion of what the aims of intellectual work are: a notion associated, here, with the idea of enlightenment, as derived loosely from some of the reflections of Michel Foucault on this matter.

Enlightenment and autonomy

There is enlightenment and there is the Enlightenment. The differences need not be too troubling. Foucault, anyway, distinguished between two kinds of thinking about the question.¹³

On the one hand, there was a certain positivist – perhaps scientistic, even dogmatic, no doubt rather moralistic – way of thinking about the Enlightenment. This manner of thinking stressed that the Enlightenment was a particular movement of ideas, rooted in eighteenth-century Europe, devoted to the ideals of secularism and freedom, and, above all, given over to the application of the idea of applying the powers of reason to human affairs. On this view, science has no limits – and not even society is immune. Humans live in societies; therefore we need an enlightened science of society to govern human relations, once and for all. This, then – to adopt Zygmunt Bauman’s influential terms – is the category of enlightenment as legislation.¹⁴ Reason is applied, as it were, from above.

On the other hand, there was – is – the ethico-critical conception of enlightenment. Here enlightenment is in the lower case and without the definite article – enlightenment in general, not the Enlightenment. This sort of enlightenment, is awkward, tentative, questioning, critical. Its differentia specifica is not least that we do not know what it is. For to have legislative ‘theories’ of enlightenment is to be dogmatic and moralising about it, to state what it is in advance – and so to undermine it. Those who speak ‘in the name of’ enlightenment, without reflexivity, expose themselves to the charge of becoming just another legislative priesthood; and so we would need another enlightenment to rid ourselves of them.

As Foucault reminds us, the philosopher Kant defined enlightenment as maturity: being able to use one’s own reason for oneself.¹⁵ Maturity is autonomy. And that is the basic principle of enlightenment – the ideal of autonomy. So to be ethical about enlightenment is quite different from the legislative option. It is to invoke an ethics of thought, a deliberate and no doubt delimited scepticism. This ethics would hold that we do not know what it is to be free. We must be perpetually alert to the forms of bondage that determine us, and even freedom itself – or its invocation – can be a form of bondage. Freedom can become totemic. This ethicocritical form of enlightenment has at its basis a horror of, to use a wrongly discredited term, the reification of f...