Culture And Critique

An Introduction To The Critical Discourses Of Cultural Studies

Jere Paul Surber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429980800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The subject of this book is the various explicit and particular critical conceptions of and articulations about culture that have influenced our common understanding of ourselves and our societies. It provides an introduction to cultural studies in terms of economic and political power.

1
The Critical Discourse of Liberal Humanism

The first modern critical discourse arose during the Enlightenment. In fact, one might say that the defining characteristic of Enlightenment thought was a new, self-consciously critical attitude toward prevailing cultural practices and institutions. Although the broadly liberal humanist basis for the Enlightenment’s cultural criticism has itself been attacked by virtually every subsequent critical discourse, we should not overlook its crucial role in initiating a project that has continued into our own time.

As we will see, the critical discourse that commenced in the Enlightenment involved several different strands. Still, the cultural critics of the Enlightenment all shared a number of important convictions; these permit us to refer to their collective orientation, despite their other differences, as that of liberal humanism. The first and most pervasive characteristic was a common opposition to any claim to truth or knowledge based solely on authority. At the beginning of the modern era, there were three major sources of authority of particular concern to Enlightenment thinkers: the church, the state, and Greco-Roman antiquity.

During the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church was the most important, pervasive, and powerful cultural institution. Although the universality of its influence had been seriously challenged in the early sixteenth century during the Reformation, the subsequent fragmentation of the Catholic church into various competing religious groups often resulted in an overall intensification rather than a waning of the influence of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions on culture. The bigotry, intolerance, and violence frequently resulting from adherence to opposed religious creeds provoked critical responses from early Enlightenment thinkers, who increasingly came to regard the institutionalized religions’ demands of faith on the part of their followers as diametrically opposed to reason, to the human being’s natural ability to adjudicate claims to truth for itself.

The Reformation was closely connected with the historical emergence of the modern nation-state, a geographical area with fixed boundaries under a single, centralized political authority. In many places in Europe, the nation-state first took the form of absolute monarchy, based on a theory of the divine right of kings, itself supported by the authority of religious doctrine. Again, while their concrete political views ranged over a wide spectrum, almost all Enlightenment critics agreed that the legitimate exercise of political authority was a secular question rather than a religious one and that in some form, the consent of the governed should play an important role in such considerations. Against the absolutist state as the primary locus of political right, the proponents of the Enlightenment came to assert the primacy of the individual as the ultimate bearer of political rights and the liberty of the individual as at least one of the aims of any legitimate state.

Both church and state often invoked the authority of antiquity to bolster their claims, especially in cases where scriptural authority was ambiguous or silent. Most influential were the Platonic doctrine of a natural political hierarchy and the Aristotelian view of a static cosmos articulated into eternally fixed genera and species. Enlightenment thinkers did not hesitate to cite antiquity for their own purposes, but they tended to shift emphasis from the more “primitive” Greeks to the more “civilized,” practical, and (to their minds) republican Romans as their historical and intellectual forebears. The undermining of Aristotelian natural philosophy by the new mathematical sciences and the growing sense of the political order as dynamic and subject to purposive human intervention combined to produce a new sense of history as constituting a field of open-ended and indefinite human progress.

Thus, the Enlightenment’s cultural critics tended to view their basic task as that of opposing one notion of culture—theocentric, authoritarian, and static—with the vision of another—anthropocentric, liberal, and progressive—which through their own intellectual and practical efforts should gradually replace the former. The strategies of cultural critique developed by the party of Enlightenment were, in turn, determined by this ubiquitous contrast between a barbaric culture of superstition, ignorance, and repression and the newly emergent civilized culture of well-grounded knowledge, individual liberty, and historical progress, the latter position fairly summed up in the phrase liberal humanism. The proponents of liberal humanism often tended to view themselves as a beleaguered band of civilized philosophes who firmly and optimistically believed that by spreading their gospel of Enlightenment primarily through their literary activities, they could gradually come to displace “medieval barbarism” with their own “modern civilization.”

Like some later critical discourses, that of liberal humanism involved a number of distinguishable strategies of cultural critique that, intertwined in various configurations, remain influential today.

Skepticism and the Origins of Modern Critique

Probably the earliest and most straightforward type of cultural critique was that of skepticism, which involved both a general critical attitude toward all claims to knowledge on the basis of authority and a more specific process of challenging particular claims case by case. Socrates practiced a form of skepticism in his insistent interrogation of the opinions of his interlocutors and his unwillingness to make any final claims on his own part. A bit later, during Hellenistic times, a recognized school of skeptical post-Platonic philosophy emerged, carrying forward this strand of Socratic-Platonic thought. However, most ancient forms of skepticism were relatively ad hoc and piecemeal. Modern skepticism differs from them in its attempt to provide a systematic framework for identifying the various ways of knowing or types of knowledge claims and the specific sorts of arguments or considerations that can be brought against each.

One of the first and most enduring presentations of skepticism can be found in the Novum Organum (1620) of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), which was part of his comprehensive attempt to replace the old Organon of Aristotle with a new configuration of human knowledge conducive to the emergence of the “new science.” However, Bacon’s Theory of the Idols (the name he gave to his particular form of skeptical critique) was more than just a set of challenges to particular prevailing ideas or a narrow treatise on epistemological themes. Rather, it must be read as a genuine document of modern cultural critique, oriented as it is toward examining the various sources of human delusion and the manners in which they are institutionalized in culture.

Bacon identified four main sources of human error and delusion, which he referred to as idols, deliberately suggesting the distinction between barbarism and civilization discussed above. Also characteristic of Bacon’s modern approach is his insistence that although the human capacity for self-delusion is natural, it must be seen as intimately connected with and reinforced by its institutionalization in cultural forms, which tend both to exaggerate and to perpetuate it. In his theory of the idols, Bacon offered an early example of what later thinkers would refer to as “ideological critique.”

The first major source of human error Bacon identified as the idols of the tribe. Such errors and delusions arise from the general manner in which the human understanding operates. On the one hand, we must rely on sensory data to know the world around us, but such data are imprecise and give us no idea of the real physical mechanisms at work in the substances with which we are acquainted. On the other, we tend to organize and filter our sensations through abstract concepts, which take us even further from the real material causes underlying the data of the senses. We are thus naturally led to take for reality what is actually a highly selective and abstracted picture of our own making.

Second, Bacon called our attention to what he referred to as idols of the cave. This phrase, of course, recalls Plato’s famous allegory in the sixth book of the Republic. As a natural development from the first idol, individuals will tend to favor one or another abstract picture of the world depending on their own peculiar abilities, prejudices, and propensities. Some individuals will excel at detailed analysis, others at broad synthesis, and each will favor a view of the world or a particular discipline that best fits those abilities and yields the greatest personal satisfaction. Our own individual idiosyncrasies thus will tend to be projected on the world and taken as an accurate picture of it.

Bacon noted that “the most troublesome of all” are the idols of the marketplace, which arise from “the alliances of words and names.” Bacon thus accorded language a pivotal place in the practice of cultural critique, arguing that language, while natural and indispensable to human cultural intercourse, nonetheless harbors the capacity for the greatest delusion. In particular, we must especially be on our guard in using language not only because the mere existence of a word can lead us to believe that something in reality corresponds to it, but also because language, being imprecise, leads us to the false assurance that the mere making of a distinction has captured the nature of the thing itself. Bacon thus identified language as the primary mechanism of an “ideological effect,” whereby a fictional but socially shared set of beliefs and prejudices is established and propagated.

Finally, Bacon referred to idols of the theater, roughly his equivalent for philosophical systems. These idols, in contrast to the others, are not innate in the human constitution and social existence but are deliberately circulated as total accounts of knowledge in the various intellectual and academic disciplines and their debates. Here, Bacon was particularly interested in the dominance that a particular conception of method can exercise over a whole field of human knowledge, and he calls to our attention, in an almost contemporary way, the importance of adopting a critical perspective with respect to any allegedly exclusive or privileged form of methodology.

How, then, are these idols to be overcome? The first step, of course, is to become and remain critically aware of their types, their sources, and the scope of their influence. Although Bacon’s skeptical doctrine of the idols provided a broad framework for cultural critique that has rarely been surpassed, like most Enlightenment thinkers he was not a thoroughgoing skeptic but ultimately invoked the empirical procedures of the new science as a general antidote to the reign of the idols, especially those drawn from antiquity and its appropriation by Christianity.

Bacon’s skepticism was, therefore, not an end in itself but only a starting point for a much broader project whereby the development of the sciences would come to replace the superstitions of the past with more accurate, scientific knowledge. Bacon was probably the first modern thinker to realize that knowledge is power, that from scientific knowledge followed the ability to control nature rather than merely adapt passively to it. However, he remained well within the ambit of Enlightenment thought, both in regarding skepticism as a merely preliminary stance and in stopping short of considering what might be the results of an application of the new science to the control of human affairs. Bacon was followed by others in a line running from René Descartes (1596-1650) through Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) and Voltaire (1694-1778), to the logical positivists of the twentieth century.

A new sort of skepticism that pointed beyond the Enlightenment emerged in the writings of the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-1776). Hume expanded the skeptical critique of the Enlightenment to include the sciences as well. According to Hume, the ultimate aim of scientific knowledge is to discover necessary and inalterable relations of cause and effect among observed natural events. However, all our ideas, whether scientific or not, have their origins in the welter of impressions provided us by the senses; if we wish to determine the actual meaning of an idea, we must trace it back to the impressions in which it originated. In the case of ideas of cause and effect, Hume argued, try as we might, we will never discover any discrete impression corresponding to either. Rather, the idea of causality is based simply on the past observation of one type of impression being followed by another, reinforced by the natural habit of expecting to see the same sequence of impressions repeated in the future. Of course, as Hume was quick to point out, there is no guarantee that our future expectations will be fulfilled, that future impressions will manifest the same patterns that past ones have.

The skeptical result, which directly challenged the faith in scientific reason of such enlighteners as Bacon and Descartes, was that science itself had no more right to claim the privilege of truth for its view of the world than did other areas of human endeavor. Hume was well aware of the practical advantages in precision, explanation, and prediction to which the sciences could fairly lay claim. However, what the sciences had no ground to claim, Hume’s critique indicated, was that their theoretical descriptions of the world amounted to any privileged or true picture of the world as it really is. And if this allegedly preeminent form of knowledge was open to skeptical objection, then any of the less rigorous forms of cultural discourse and practice would be all the more open to question.

Like Bacon’s views, Hume’s more radical skepticism generated its own tradition, which in the twentieth century led to views suspicious of existing cultural practices but equally critical of any allegedly scientific explanation of them. Repercussions of Hume’s skepticism can be seen in American pragmatism; in British ordinary language philosophy, which was derived from the later views of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951); and in various subsequent critiques of scientific claims to provide some privileged way of describing and explaining the world.

Moral Critique: Reason and Moral Sense

A second critical strategy employed in the discourse of liberal humanism, and one that proved in the long term more characteristic of it than skepticism, involved attempts to establish some natural basis for individual moral judgment regarding existing practices and institutions. The ancients had tended, with Aristotle, to see individual morality as an extension of political practice, and the Middle Ages had generally subordinated individual moral judgment to theological doctrine. Skeptical of both tendencies, Enlightenment thinkers looked to the individual as the only possible source from which a critique of existing cultural practices might emerge. Enlightenment thinkers relied on the natural capacity of the individual to see through corrupt institutions and call them to account. Whereas skeptical strategies tended to return to questions regarding the status of human knowledge, which many believed could be satisfactorily addressed by the sciences, strategies of moral critique were based on the affirmation of a capacity for moral judgment that must somehow reside in human nature itself. The critical discourse of liberal humanism traded heavily in moral condemnations of existing cultural practices, offering several justifications in support of such judgments.

The first justification, the notion of natural law, became prevalent in the seventeenth century. It emerged in its secularized form out of ancient and medieval thought, and its earliest variants held that natural law was derived from the will of a deity that had created both the natural and human orders and had endowed human beings with reason. Reason was defined in the natural law tradition as the innate human capacity to discover the inalterable laws of nature and to apprehend and institute other laws that could become equally binding on human affairs. Of course, as the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) observed toward the end of the century, this conception of natural law was beset in practice by numerous “inconveniences,” not the least of which was the fact that the putative laws governing human affairs were not nearly so clearly legible in the nature of things as were those governing material nature. The legitimacy of government based on the consent of the governed, for example, was clearly not of the same order as that of the universal law of gravitation, or it would not have been so highly contested and so rarely practiced throughout history.

More important to the subsequent fate of the natural law approach, however, was the emergence, also during the seventeenth century, of a new conception of reason, totally opposed to that of the ancient and medieval traditions. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in what is often regarded as the first treatise of modern political science, Leviathan (1651), presented a purely instrumental conception of reason. There he argued that like any other science, the science of politics must deal, first and foremost, with basic material forces. In the case of political science, which concerned relations among human beings, these were the elemental passions of attraction and repulsion. Rather than viewing reason as some deity-conferred human faculty that directly connected human beings with a natural law, Hobbes asserted that reason was merely an instrument of the passions. Our passions, that is, our basic desires, established the ends to be achieved by our actions and our reason functioned merely to help us discover the most efficient means of satisfying them. Reason, however, contained no natural ends in itself, and no moral law could be extracted from a capacity that was wholly subservient to natural passions.

While Hobbes’s critique of reason as a source of moral judgment did not immediately win the day, it did force a wide-ranging reconsideration of the connection between reason and moral judgment. Two lines of response to Hobbes’s views soon arose. One was that of John Locke, who attempted to grant the instrumental function of reason noted by Hobbes without restricting its operation solely to this function. Locke thus hoped to salvage a moral dimension for reason while stopping short of invoking some divinely decreed social order. According to Locke in his “Second Treatise on Government” (1690), human reason cannot be regarded merely as the slave of the passions because it is always capable of balancing short-term satisfaction against potential long-term effects. More specifically, “the natural light of human reason” informs us that if in satisfying our desires we harm or violate the person or property of other human beings, they will be inclined to do the same to us. Thus, human reason itself informs us of the advisability of exercising self-restraint in our dealings with others, on the basis of enlightened self-interest. According to Locke, the latter was sufficient to establish minimal moral principles for human action, which he went on to employ as the basis for his broader critique of political and cultural institutions.

A second response to Hobbes’s instrumental critique of reason was developed in the first half of the eighteenth century by the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746). Whereas Locke attempted to expand Hobbes’s notion of instrumental reason to include rationally self-interested moral constraints, these thinkers took the opposite path by asserting that among our passions (or “sentiments,” as they would say) there was one called the moral sense. Besides the passions of attraction and repulsion recognized by Hobbes, there was innate in human nature itself an irreducible feeling of pleasure attached to virtuous actions and of pain connected with vicious ones. Indeed, they went so far as to claim that under certain conditions and thanks to their moral sense, human beings were fully capable of recognizing the just claims of others and acting benevolently on their behalf, independently of the sort of self-interest required by Locke’s view.

Either the enlightened self-interes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theorizing Culture, Practicing Criticism
• 1 The Critical Discourse of Liberal Humanism
• 2 Hermeneutics: Interpretation and Critique
• 3 The Materialist Critique of Culture
• 4 Psychoanalysis and the Critique of Culture
• 5 The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School
• 6 Formalist, Structuralist, and Semiotic Analyses of Culture
• 7 Poststructuralist and Postmodernist Discourses
• 8 Contemporary Cultural Studies
• Conclusion: The Future of Critical Discourse
• Index