28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001
Issue No.514
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001 Issue No.514 |
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For every jet-setter, a neo-Nazi thug
Culture has always been both too wide and too narrow a word to be really useful. It is either exclusively aesthetic, meaning the arts, fine living and civilised values, or amorphously anthropological, meaning a specific way of life. Recently, the latter sense of culture as a form of corporate identity has been escalating wildly out of control: we now have beach culture, police culture, gun culture, deaf culture, Microsoft culture, gay culture, Zulu culture and so on. Culture here means belonging, identity, region, roots allegiance, custom, affinity, tradition.
What has happened in our era, quite dramatically, is that the conflict between these two meanings of culture, which once upon a time concerned only a few fairly harmless academics, has been projected on to a geopolitical axis. Culture versus cultures, universal civility versus specific ways of life, has now come ominously to mean something like the West against the Rest. This, needless to say, is a false antithesis for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, high culture is hardly the monopoly of the West; for another thing, the West is nowadays riddled from end to end with "cultures" in the corporate, identity-centred sense of the term.
But when the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson speaks sardonically of "NATO high culture," he means a lot more than Balzac and Beethoven. Since the collapse of communism, the West has set itself up as the custodian of universal civility -- as "Culture" with a thumpingly large C -- and the function of NATO high culture is to defend those values not so much against barbarism, but against cultures. Whether these cultures are within the citadel of Culture or outside it then hardly matters.
Note that Culture, in this view, is cultureless. It doesn't belong to any specific time or place, space or history; on the contrary, it is the set of criteria by which any particular place or history is certified as authentic in the first place. Or rather, confusingly, Culture is at once a particular culture -- the life-forms of the West -- and nothing of the kind, a purely transcendent notion which is homeless and stateless. Think of this, if you like, in terms of the Romantic imagination. The imagination is not bound by a specific time or place; on the contrary, it is simply the infinitely plastic capacity to enter into sympathetic possession of any time or place, knowing them better than they know themselves. The imagination, like God, is thus both everything and nothing: it has no identity of its own, since it lives only in its appropriation of some other identity; but since it can seize hold of all of such identities in turn, constrained by none of them, it is also in a sense omnipotent. It surely isn't hard to spot the affinities between this aesthetic doctrine and the politics of imperialism. Culture is the power of knowing other cultures, whereas what cultures know is themselves.
The battle, then, is between Culture (universal) and cultures (specific); and the problem is that from the standpoint of Culture, cultures are the very opposite of civilised. What they do, whether regional, sexual, national, ethnic, religious or whatever, is raise the historically contingent to the status of the universal, whereas Culture itself does something rather different: it raises the individual to the universal, forming a direct link between the two which doesn't have to pass through the mediation of the historical.
It would be far too simplistic simply to back one of these forms of culture against the other. Culture may be exclusivist and elitist, but in its time it had also harboured utopian, even revolutionary desires. A great deal in NATO high culture is well to the left of NATO. Homer was not, as far as we know, a liberal humanist; Shakespeare put in a word for radical egalitarianism; Balzac and Flaubert detested the middle classes; Tolstoy had little time for private property, and so on. Indeed, a lot of so-called high culture is a lot less reactionary than much of its mass counterpart. And if cultures include some enlightened forms of identity politics like gay and feminist ones, or the more progressive brands of revolutionary nationalism, they also encompass some fairly sinister forms of racism, neo-Nazism, communitarianism, religious fundamentalism and the like. These are the cultural forms of those who, feeling shut out from Culture as so-called universal civility, exhibit a pathological reaction to a pathological universality. And the name for that pathologised mode of universality is globalisation.
At present, each of these kinds of culture is busy painting the other into a corner, in a kind of stalled dialectic. The more culture comes to mean a vacuous cosmopolitanism for the privileged few, the more it comes to mean a militant particularism for the dispossessed. The more emptily global Culture waxes, the more virulently blind cultures grow. For every jet-setting intellectual, a neo-Nazi thug; for every transnational executive, a local patriot for whom the Other begins just beyond the mountains.
There are, however, three kinds of culture rather than just two. For the dominant culture of the globe is of course neither Mozart nor Mormonism but mass, postmodern, market-driven culture. And here we can observe a most interesting contradiction. The more this Western-based market culture penetrates the farthest crevices of the world, as the obedient shadow of the West's military and political hegemony, the more the West needs to claim some spiritual legitimation for this overweeningly ambitious global operation. The more, in other words, it needs to underwrite its own universal identity, which is traditionally what culture did for it. Indeed high culture is an enormously convenient way of rendering your culture portable, allowing you, so to speak, to tuck it in your back pocket wherever you go. But the more market culture proliferates, the more it undermines this traditional spiritual authority within the West itself. And the less possible it then is for the West to legitimate itself, at just the self-universalising moment when it most needs to. Within the West itself, Culture as universal civility is progressively eroded by culture as a hard-nosed, sceptical, self-consciously provisional, streetwise relativism.
And this, for the rulers of the West, is hardly good news, not least when they find themselves eyeball to eyeball with antagonists like Islam who seem far more spiritually self-assured. Western philosophy, in the ambit of the vastly influential Richard Rorty, is now resorting to neo-pragmatist legitimations of itself. Dropping bombs on Iraqi children is just part of its contingent way of life; and though the West can no longer lend such pragmatic customs the kind of buoyant metaphysical foundations which it could in the earlier, religious phase of capitalism, this need not matter too much. It need not matter because if no way of life can any longer be metaphysically foundational, you are no more able to justify your critique of the West than the West is able to justify itself. In a rather desperate strategy, then, neo-pragmatism, postmodernism, post-structuralism and the like pull the carpet out from under their opponent in the ironic knowledge that they are also yanking it out from beneath themselves.
But this won't really do. Purely pragmatic legitimations of the New World Order may sound persuasive enough in the University of Virginia, but they are scarcely sufficient when you have a country to run, not least such a full-bloodedly metaphysical country as the USA. American politicians still need to lard their speeches with high-toned allusions to the Almighty and his special regard for George W Bush, in ways that we more jaded Europeans find acutely embarrassing.
Pragmatism, anti-foundationalism and the like are absurdly feeble ways to ratify your activities when you are seeking such an ambitious global role. But the problem is that more traditional metaphysical rationales -- the White Man's Burden, the Will of Providence, the Destiny of the West, the Unfolding of the Zeitgeist -- are less and less convincing in a sceptical, post-metaphysical, post-historical era. Culture is thus lamely ineffectual at exactly the point where it is most urgently needed. The secularised West has been forced to use it as an ideological substitute for religion, and it simply refuses to be enlisted.
So where does this leave us? At the worst, it leave us, as Hegel might have phrased it, with a "bad" universalism confronting a "bad" particularism. It also leaves us with our (globalised) forms of politics increasingly out of kilter with our (specifying) forms of culture. And this is certainly alarming for our rulers, since no politics is effective in the long run unless it is rooted in culture, in the texture and flavour of everyday human lives. Nobody in the West, apart perhaps from a few grey Brussels bureaucrats, is likely to throw themselves on the barricades shouting "Long live the European Union!" The universal and the particular, for so long pinned together by the aesthetic artefact or the Romantic symbol, have drifted gradually apart. And this is partly because one classical way of reconciling them, the nation-state, has entered into crisis. The hyphen in "nation-state" used to be a vital connective between the unique particularity of a people (nation, culture) and the august universality of the political state. But that linkage, in a world which is simultaneously more global and more local than it used to be, is under increasing threat of being snapped.
The classical modern answer to this dilemma was known as socialism, not least in its Marxian variety. Marx was enough of an Enlightenment thinker to appreciate the emancipatory aspects of universality, but enough of a Romantic humanist to recognise the virtue of the sensuously particular too. He understood that the bourgeois Enlightenment were wrong to seek the universal by by-passing the specific -- that you could, in fact, arrive at it only in and through the concrete particular. If we are to be politically a great deal more than what we are locally or culturally, it must be as the local, limited, creaturely, cultural beings that we are. Or, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, we shall only have a just society when the freedom of each individual is the condition of the freedom of all. For Marx, universal community is the goal, one which capitalism above all ironically makes possible. But this must now happen at the level of the richly realised, fully developed individual of bourgeois society, not by some reversion to the tribe.
In one sense, intellectuals today make far too much fuss about culture. Men and women do not live by culture alone, even in the expanded sense of the term. Indeed, the problems which humanity faces on the brink of the new millennium -- war, famine, poverty, migration, armaments, crime, drugs and so on -- are not specifically cultural problems at all. Depressingly, they are pretty much the problems we faced on the brink of the first millennium, with a few new-fangled ones (drugs, nuclear warfare) thrown in just to show how creative and original we are.
On the other hand, culture now matters more than ever. In Belfast, Bosnia or the Basque country, culture is not just what you gaze at in the gallery or put on the CD player. Culture is what you are prepared to kill for. To those leftists who bemoan the elitist remoteness of culture, its disdainful distance from everyday life, one might riposte: would that it were! What typifies the three forms of political struggle which have sat at the top of the global agenda for some decades -- revolutionary nationalism, ethnic struggle and the women's movement -- is exactly that, in every case, culture is not just a bonus, but the very language in which political demands are shaped and articulated. Nationalism, as someone observed, was the invention of literary types. And this centrality of the cultural was much less true of the traditional class-struggle.
Even so, politics cannot be reduced to culture, as the postmodernists seem to imagine. In the island where I live, there are plenty of people who jaw on about cultural pluralism, heterogeneity, flexible identities, multi-ethnic affinities. They are the craftier kind of Unionist in Northern Ireland; and they use these arguments, picked up from the cultural studies manuals, to justify Northern Ireland being British. Terry Eagleton is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.
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