Culture and the State

David Lloyd, Paul Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415911023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135219994
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the end of the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, a remarkable convergence takes place in Europe between theories of the modern state and theories of culture. Culture and the State explores that theoretical convergence in relation to the social functions of state and cultural institutions, showing how cultural education comes to play the role of forming citizens for the modern state. It critiques the way in which materialistic thinking has largely taken the concept of culture for granted and failed to grasp its relation to the idea of the state.

CHAPTER 1

The Culture of the Spectacle

[T]he more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him.

—Guy Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle

It has become a virtual commonplace of postmodernity that we inhabit a society of the spectacle. But if, in some analyses, the spectacularity of the public sphere that engages the modern subject is the sign of a new and unprecedented alienation of that subject from active participation in political life, it is important not to forget the extent to which the figure of the spectator has historically been the exemplary, even heroic, type of political subjectivity. That figure emerges as the moral or social as well as aesthetic critic of such journals as Addison's Spectator in the early eighteenth century.¹ But by the end of that century, and specifically in relation to the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant transformed the moral position of the spectator explicitly into a political relation, albeit to an ideal rather than an actual republic. As he argues in his essay “The Conflict of the Faculty of Philosophy with the Faculty of Law,” it is only the philosophical spectator who can derive the universally progressive meaning of so violent and potentially disastrous a political event as the recent revolution. That progressive meaning is the emergence of a disposition in humanity towards a republican constitution:

This moral cause inserting itself [in the course of events] is two-fold: first, that of the right, that a nation must not be hindered in providing itself with a civil constitution, which appears good to the people themselves; and second, that of the end (which is, at the same time, a duty), that that same national constitution alone be just and morally good in itself, created in such a way as to avoid, by its very nature, principles permitting offensive war. It can be no other than a republican constitution, republican at least in essence; it thus establishes the condition whereby war (the source of all evil and corruption of morals) is deterred; and, at least negatively, progress toward the better is assured humanity in spite of all its infirmity, for it is at least left undisturbed in its advance.²

As Hannah Arendt comments, in her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy,

The spectator, because he is not involved, can perceive this design of providence or nature, which is hidden from the actor. So we have the spectacle and the spectator on one side, the actors and all the single events and contingent, haphazard happenings on the other. In the context of the French Revolution, it seemed to Kant that the spectator's view carried the ultimate meaning of the event, although this view yielded no maxim for acting.³

The gradual transformation of the moral into the political censor in the century preceding Kant has been well plotted by Reinhart Koselleck in his Kritik und Krise, where he powerfully argues for the virtual inevitability of the process and its foundational nature for the emergence of bourgeois politics.⁴ Arendt grasps Kant's oblique engagement with political theory as critical, insofar as the disinterested spectator as judge (in the full sense in which the Third Critique relates judging and the ascription of ends) is split off from the subject as interested agent. The capacity to adjudge ends, and accordingly to grasp individual actions as parts of a totality, is what makes the subject not merely moral or tasteful, as in prior writings on aesthetics and sentiment, but fully ethical. This emergence of the political subject as in the first place ethical also grounds the universal claims of bourgeois politics at the same time as it defines that subject as an entirely formal entity. It is, in the terms of the Third Critique, a disposition of the subject rather than an individual and situated consciousness that is in play here.⁵

At this historical juncture, splitting the subject into agent and spectator is absolutely not problematic in the way it comes to be for Guy Debord. On the contrary, it supplies the conditions of possibility for claiming the universality and the disinterest of emergent bourgeois political institutions even as these necessarily sanction the practices of partisan politics. The paradox by which bourgeois states claim a disinterested transcendence of politics while in practice operating through the unceasing articulation of conflicting interests is resolved by this division in the subject. For if at one level what is represented to the state are the competing claims of antagonistic interests, at another, ethically superior level, what the state in its turn represents is the universal, spectating human subject. The state is neither simply a bundle of ad hoc institutions nor a purely disinterested idea; it is in effect the productive intersection of both. The contingencies of quotidian practice are regulated by a narrative that precisely moves from the irregularities of contingency to the “regulative idea” (in Kantian terms) of an asymptotically deferred harmony. We can map this narrative through the everyday assumption by which the elected representative who is sent to congress or parliament as the representative of interests and/or localities becomes in that very move from constituency to state a supposedly ethical subject who is expected to submit his or her will to that of the general will.

This brings us to the second point that is implied in Debord's remarks. Again, what Debord finds problematic at this moment seems to us conditional for bourgeois politics at an earlier point. We mean the emergence of a theory of political representation and, more specifically, of the procedures and institutions by which subjects become formed as subjects susceptible of and amenable to representation. The idea of representation is so fundamental to our political and indeed aesthetic culture as to seem virtually inescapably self-evident. So much so, in fact, that it is practically impossible to think outside those terms. Debord regards the inescapability in the postmodern era of “being represented” as an index of disempowering alienation. We will be arguing here and in the chapters that follow that for earlier thinkers, those who contributed to the formation of bourgeois political theory and institutions, to be capable of being represented was not merely to approach one's humanity more fully was but the very condition of political life. Learning to be represented guaranteed, if not empowerment, at least enfranchisement. Neither was it for them by any means a self-evident given of the culture but was rather a condition of political life that had to be produced, and produced by the difficult medium of an unprecedented pedagogical intervention in society. To permit oneself to be represented was by no means the natural and self-evident state of the human individual but the effect of an historically emergent culture. For thinkers like Kant, Schiller, Coleridge or Mill, the move from the condition of the subject in a more or less feudal state to that of a human and political subject was equivalent to the larger historical progress of humanity from savagery and barbarism to freedom and civilization. The very history of the usage of the word “subject” implies as much.

Given the difficulty of thinking from our historical perspective into a moment at which representation was not to all intents and purposes the mode of being in the (social) world, we will try to approach the issue theoretically as much as historically by regarding the French Revolution as a watershed between two thinkers whose attitudes to representation are crucially incompatible. We will focus on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's attack on the theater in his Letter to M. D'Alembert and Friedrich Schiller's two works, On the Aesthetic Education of Man and “On the Stage as Moral Institution.” Consideration of these thinkers will allow us to throw into relief the strange and novel discourse on representation that emerges in the moment of the French Revolution; the paradox is that what now seems strange will be Rousseau's antagonism to representation. Accordingly, we will be obliged to regard his writings as a kind of critical fiction rather than a positive blueprint for a “post-representational” society. Later, however, we will suggest the continuities between his understanding of the forms of social relation that ground a non-representational society and subsequent formulations that are similarly at odds with the imposition of state institutions through which representative government is to be grounded. For neither thinker, however, do we claim a direct influence on the specific formation of state institutions or on radical counter-institutions. There may have been in both cases just such an influence, but the object of this chapter is rather to throw into relief the meaning of the discourse on representation that, we believe, was far more contested in radical circles than has hitherto been supposed. In keeping with Gramsci's understanding of the sites in which hegemony and its subjects are constituted, we will reflect on the stage as a paradigmatic institution of the “ethical state.”

ROUSSEAU, TRANSPARENCY AND THE FATE OF THE FÊTE

[I]t is necessary to keep subjects apart. That is the first maxim of contemporary politics.

—J.-J. Rousseau,
“Essay on the Origin of Languages” (1754)

The term “transparency” signifies for Rousseau a mode of perception and communication among human beings that is free from all falsehood and deception. It refers not just to one Rousseauean idea among others; the goal of attaining to an utter transparency in human (i.e., social) relations stands as what we might call Rousseau's recuperative ideal—recuperative in the sense that the state of nature, where people “found their security in the ease of seeing through each other,”⁶ serves here as a kind of buried origin. All Rousseau's writings offer different strategies for the recovery of a lost, original, yet always already prior, transparency; even the Confessions, as Starobinski points out, propose to establish a kind of circuit of transparency between Rousseau as author and his readers.⁷ There is of course a paradox here, since Rousseau believed that while spontaneous gestures and reactions do not lie, language, which can and does do so, is in principle an obstacle and not a means to natural goodness. Language represents, it represents; the difference constitutive of it, between itself and that of which it speaks, makes possible deception, which is in turn linked to vice. Language's ambiguous capacities replace the illusion of communication with the practice of delusion, and this latter is far more difficult to counteract.

But counteract it we must, according to Rousseau, whatever the cost. The drastic measures called for in and by the moral emergency to which he wished to alert his contemporaries means that much more is involved in his Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater (1759), for instance, than the simple-minded indictment of cosmopolitanism and urban sophistication which that work is often taken to have proffered. In fact, the Letter is precisely an argument for the necessity of recovering transparency, an argument that sets up its claims in rigorously binary terms: people in Paris define themselves in, and can only properly see themselves through, the eyes of others; along the axis of their amour propre are strung out calculation, emulation, hypocrisy and deceit, all of which reinforce each other in the individuals's relation to their own consciousness as in their relation to others. By contrast, in Neufchâtel, Rousseau's doubtless-idealized village alternative, “each is everything for himself, no one is anything for another.”⁸ This is not a formula for selfishness, but for its transcendence. To know one's character as a self-contained moral unit is to be able to be accessible, and to gain access, to others. The open, honest, forthright self with nothing to hide is buried—implicit—in all of us, and only on the basis of its unmasking does the establishment of a communicative circuit among such selves become in the truest sense possible. The conditions for this appearance of honesty and transparency are, of course, not simply the moral nature of moral selves. They lie in economic and political arrangements inseparable from transparency: that is, a “republican” constitution in which no one is represented by another and economic relations in which the division of labor and therefore exchange are minimal. The phrase just quoted is at once political and economic in its reference, but stems from a social organization in which that division of spheres is as unthinkable as the division of labor: “Never did carpenter, locksmith, glazier, or turner enter this country; each is everything for himself, no one is anything for another” (p. 61).

It is in Paris, then, political and economic capital of France, and not in Neufchâtel, that people are obliged to dissemble simply in order to attain to sociability. Small wonder that the actor can find there so honored a place. He belongs, here, among people who play roles habitually—or, as with Rameau's nephew in Diderot, indiscriminately. The actor typifies society at large by counterfeiting himself in imitating others, or in presenting merely a version of (some aspect of) himself to others. His “disgraceful abasement … renders him fit for all sorts of roles except the noblest of all, man—which he abandons.”⁹ It is of the utmost importance that we recall at this point a cognate passage from the “First Discourse”: “we have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens.”¹⁰ In its emphasis on the division of laborer and self, Rousseau's sense of the “abandonment of man” will seem to resemble that which Schiller expresses slightly later. But as we shall see, where Schiller seeks “to restore by means of a higher Art the totality of our nature which the arts themselves have destroyed,”¹¹ Rousseau seeks the restoration of man without division—in effect, without art, artifice, or artificiality.

The abandonment of humanity and, what amounts for Rousseau to the same thing, of the possibility of citizenship, is of course not complete or utter. But it is severe. It involves a double loss: the loss of the capacity for spontaneous experience and for moral choice. What alone can counteract these tendencies is the kind of immediacy of self to others, and of the self to itself, that is involved in the idea of selfhood as Rousseau understood it. This is the antithesis of an educative ideal, particularly as promulgated by the nineteenth-century tradition of Bildung to which Schiller made so marked a contribution. It is a matter, here, not of accretion and growth, but of the removal or stripping away of layers. In the name of his recuperative ideal, Rousseau calls for an absolute unmasking, the elimination of personae, and, through this unmasking, the eradication of deceit, hypocrisy, duplicity, evasiveness, pride and pretense—in a word, of amour propre. Only with this eradication would selfhood become generalizable in the required sense, only then would it become the origin or principle of commonality, of what Hegel was to term Allgemeinheit. For a truly common ground cannot arise until we are capable of binding ourselves to others directly, self to self, or with as little mediation as possible. Achieving such immediacy may of course be a rather tall order; but what needs stressing here is that, as a personal and political desideratum, it is not something to be striven for through education (unless, that is, we espouse the extremely unorthdox kind of education to which young Emile is subjected). There is a sense, in fact, in which it is not to be striven for at all, since a self that neither requires nor performs any mediating functions is always-already there, implicit in all of us, awaiting its uncovering and resuscitation. If it is to emerge, we must learn to heed the lesson of its unlettered (i.e., untaught, natural) language, removing the falsehood layered over it and making, thereby, the latent manifest.

It follows from this that the fewer the layers needing to be removed, the easier the attainment of true selfhood and moral being becomes. Thus the revolutionary dynamite contained between the lines, as it were, of Emile: the crude, the unlettered, the coarse and unrefined are in principle more able to attain to the desired state than are the sophisticated, the learned, the cosmopolitan. At this level, there is no great mystery to Rousseau's enor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Culture and Society or Culture and the State?
• Chapter 1: The Culture of the Spectacle
• Chapter 2: Cultures of Representation
• Chapter 3: Capitalism vs. the Democracy
• Chapter 4: Facing the Ethical State
• Conclusion: The Future Imperfect
• Epilogue: Raymond Williams and George Orwell
• Notes
• Appendix I: The State and Education, 1818-1870
• Appendix II: The Principal Factory Acts, 1802-1901
• Bibliography
• Index