Culture, Modernity and Revolution

Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman

Richard Kilminster, Ian Varcoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134890439
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Culture, Modernity and Revolution a group of distinguished sociologists and social philosophers reflect upon the major concerns of Zygmunt Bauman. Their essays not only honour the man, but provide important contributions to the three interlinked themes that could be said to form the guiding threads of Bauman's life work: power, culture and modernity. Culture, Modernity and Revolution is both a remarkable sociological commentary on the problems facing East-Central Europe and an exposition of some of the key, hitherto neglected, features of the modern cultural universe.

1
CULTURAL POLICY STUDIES

Speak truth to power.

Seventeenth-century Quaker epithet

How does cultural studies relate to policy-oriented theorising and research? As an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, cultural studies has shown considerable interest in cultural politics, in the sense of aesthetic practices that challenge the mainstream. Practical engagement with a politics of culture, including policy analysis and policy formulation, however, has been restrained by comparison, due perhaps to an excessive critical purity and a suspicion of becoming involved with regulatory processes.¹ The hybrid of ‘cultural policy studies’, proposed by a school of thought inspired by Michel Foucault, is a bid to forge a much stronger relationship between critical analysis and policy orientation in cultural studies. This prospective agenda requires a careful consideration of the actual and potential meanings of cultural policy from the perspectives of social and cultural theory, two leading strands of which are discussed in this chapter. There is, on the one hand, Foucauldian theory, with its close connections to ‘the epistemic shift’ associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism; and there is, on the other hand, Habermasian theory, with its persistent commitment to ‘the unfinished project of modernity’, a perspective which has been influential in the critical analysis of communications policy. These rather different yet not necessarily incommensurate theoretical frameworks may be seen to illuminate urgent matters of culture and politics. Such theory also offers a means of clarifying how those most directly involved with formulating, implementing and contesting cultural policies understand what they are doing. Cultural policy studies, then, in both of the contrasting theorisations under discussion, presents new possibilities, not only to theorists and analysts of culture but also to agents of cultural policy.

This book is concerned with cultural policy in a sense much broader than is normally meant by the term within the professional discourses of arts management. The words ‘culture’ and ‘policy’ are not restricted to the arts and public administration respectively, although they certainly include those meanings. ‘Culture’, it is often remarked, has two general fields of referent: first, the arts and higher learning; and, second, ways of life. The second of these referential fields, the traditional object of anthropology, has tended increasingly to subsume and transform the first referential field, thereby, in effect, democratising how we think and talk about culture. However, this expanded notion of culture, in spite of its positive qualities, is not wholly satisfactory since it is too expansive for certain analytical and practical purposes. The anthropological concept of culture encompasses literally everything and, in so doing, obscures important and useful distinctions between that which is principally cultural and that which is not first and foremost about meaning and signification. For example, economic arrangements are cultural: they are human constructs and they are historically and geographically variable in form and operation. They are not, though, primarily to do with the production and circulation of meaning. Economic arrangements are fundamentally about the production and circulation of wealth, whatever is being produced, which is not to say they are without meaning.

Raymond Williams (1981:207) sought to overcome this dual problem of scope and delimitation with ‘the concept of culture as a realized signifying system’. From this point of view, ‘culture’ refers specifically to the practices and institutions that make meaning, practices and institutions where symbolic communication is usually, by definition, the main purpose and even an end in itself, like going to the cinema to see a feature film. Film-making and cinema-going are socio-economic activities but they are, none the less, distinguishable from the production and consumption of commodities specifically to sustain life, such as food, or products that function routinely as means rather than ends in themselves, such as transport systems. Food and transport are meaningful but, unlike cinema, that is not their main raison d’être. Of course, one can always bring to mind particular exceptions to a general rule of this kind, for example wolfing down a hamburger just before going on a roller-coaster ride, which may not be rational but is indeed cultural.

Because culture is so difficult to pin down, so hard to fix in a precise definition or unambiguous mode, the very idea of cultural policy, which seems to imply that something so fragile and indeterminate as a ‘realized signifying system’ can be consciously regulated, is, to say the very least, problematical. The problem is related to the etymological connection between ‘policy’ and ‘policing’. ‘Cultural policy’ has deeply entrenched connotations of ‘policing culture’, of treating culture as though it were a dangerous lawbreaker or, perhaps, a lost child.

POLICING CULTURE

The Old French word ‘police’ came into English usage during the sixteenth century to refer to government in general and eventually to policy. In 1732, Jonathan Swift could say, ‘Nothing is held more commendable in all great cities…than what the French call police; by which word is meant the government thereof (OED). By the end of the eighteenth century, the word was acquiring its modern and much narrower meaning: ‘The police of the town is managed by two constables’ (Aitkin, 1795, OED). Yet still it was possible for Young, following Adam Smith’s essay of 1776 on ‘The Police of Grain’, to advocate in 1792 ‘a good police of corn…a police that shall, by securing a high price to the farmer, encourage his culture enough to secure the people at the same time from famine’ (OED). Writing to her sister Cassanda in 1813, Jane Austen mentioned an essay she was reading on the ‘Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire’ in a way that blurred the modern distinction between governmental administration in general and the particular duties of a police force. In 1830, however, Lord Wellington was able to congratulate Robert Peel on his successful setting up of the Metropolitan Police in London, at which point the definitive specialisation of the term in English had occurred.

While English-speaking Britons forged ‘policy’ out of ‘police’, the French themselves came to use the word ‘politique’ to refer to both politics and policy (the word ‘Politik’ is similarly used in German). Incidentally, in French, the masculine form, ‘le politique’, refers to institutionalised politics, whereas the feminine form, ‘la politique’, refers to the science of politics and policy. It is significant that this later French alternative to policy as policing returns to the ancient Greek root of ‘polis’, the city state. The view of policy presented in this book emphasises the relationship of policy to politics as a field of contestation between rival discourses, ideologies and interests rather than confining it to the more technical, though hardly unpolitical, connotation of policy as policing. Cultural policy raises questions of regulation and control but its meaning should not be restricted to an ostensibly apolitical set of practical operations that are merely administered and policed by governmental officials.

Although there are still those who would prefer to keep politics out of culture entirely, to treat culture exclusively as, say, the polishing of personal sensibilities (another semantically available version of cultural policy), culture has always been political and shows no sign of escaping the ruses of power and public controversy. The political heat around culture has generally been greatest in societies where the state has played a manifest role in its regulation, often a manifestly oppressive role, most notably, under conditions of modernity, in communist states. Where culture is left to the market a cooler politics is usually displayed. It is curious, however, that just at the moment when European communism was disintegrating in the late 1980s, having failed amongst other things to ‘culturally enlighten’ its subjects (White, 1990), ‘culture wars’ broke out spectacularly in the land of free speech and of the free market, the United States of America. These culture wars, albeit generated by sheer ethnic diversity resulting from a complex history of immigration, were focused particularly upon two key issues: public subsidy of the arts and the university humanities curriculum.²

The trouble started with Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, his photograph of a cheap plastic crucifix immersed in a jar of the artist’s own urine. In May 1989, Republican Senator Alphonse D’Amato dramatically tore up a reproduction of the offending work and scattered its pieces on the floor of the US Senate. Serrano had been the recipient of a $15,000 prize from the South East Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem. The money came originally from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the American equivalent of the British Arts Council, founded by a Democratic presidency during the 1960s. Although the NEA had not directly rewarded Serrano for his ambivalent commentary on the status of Jesus Christ in a commercial culture, D’Amato drew the all-too-obvious conservative inference from the relationship, in his eyes, between such blasphemous obscenity and public funding of the arts.

During the following month, an anxious Corcoran Gallery administration in Washington cancelled its presentation of ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment’, a retrospective exhibition for the photographer, who had died of AIDs in spring that year. The exhibition, containing the notorious ‘X Portfolio’ from the late 1970s, had already been seen at other publicly subsidised galleries across the country. Mapplethorpe’s ‘X Portfolio’ consisted of photographs representing a series of homo-erotic images of male genitalia and the remarkable receptivity of human orifices. Amongst these photographs was Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait depicting him in devilish guise with a bull whip for a tail hanging from his rectum. In the circumstances it was bold and perhaps deliberately provocative of the Washington Project for the Arts to immediately put on the exhibition that had been dropped by the Corcoran.

Fast on the heels of the journalistic debate over public funding for the arts that followed these events, in July, Jesse Helms, the Republican Senator for North Carolina, proposed an amendment to the procurement bill for voting money to the NEA:

None of the funds authorized to be appropriated pursuant to this Act may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce—

1. obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or
2. material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or
3. material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin.

(Bolton, 1992: 73–74)

Although much modified when eventually legislated into existence in October 1989 by the inclusion of the standard artistic merit defence, Helms’s proposal epitomised, in the judgement of First Amendment liberals and cultural radicals on the Left, the conservative backlash against anything remotely offensive to virtually anyone. Moreover, as Robert Hughes (1993: 162) has observed shrewdly, it encapsulated the growing penchant for cultural policing and what he calls a ‘culture of complaint’ that was spreading across the entire political spectrum of American intellectual life: ‘The most obvious and curious feature of the Helms amendment was that, if it had not issued from a famously right-wing Republican senator, you could have mistaken it—especially in the last two clauses—for any ruling on campus speech limitations recently proposed by the nominally left-wing agitators for political correctness.’ The apparent convergence of sections of the Left with the moralising Right in ‘the culture of complaint’ is not to be taken, however, as an erasure of the actual differences in source and implication between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ positions on ‘political correctness’ and ‘multiculturalism’.

In spite of what appeared to Hughes as a striking consensus on the control of speech and representation, the right-wing political context for the attack on public funding of the arts in the USA must not be underestimated. There were at least three sometimes separate yet more often than not interconnected ideological discourses in play on the Right: cultural elitism, market populism and ethico-political reaction. The cultural elitist strand, which was also most prominent in the attack on ‘political correctness’ in academia, was enunciated particularly by the writers of the New Criterion magazine, such as Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman, who wished to defend the established canons of American and European art. The public attribution of artistic status to a piss-artist photographer like Andres Serrano was in itself offensive to their highlyrefined sensibilities. To an extent, however, that merely repeated the historical contest between cultural establishments and various self-styled avant gardes.

For populists it was also difficult to see quite how certain kinds of work could be deemed art. Their case rested rather more substantially on the issue of ‘tax dollars’, a key ideological figure in the debate. When accused of censorship, Helms and his allies denied the accusation by arguing the work from which they wanted to withdraw public subsidy should suffer the test of market forces. As Helms himself put it: ‘Artists who seek to shock and offend can still do so—but at their own expense’ (Bolton, 1992: 101). Why should the hard-pressed American taxpayer be expected to shield these enemies of the American Dream from the laws of supply and demand? But, again bringing sanity back into the debate, Robert Hughes (1993:200) has pointed out: ‘The American taxpayer contributes $0.68 to the support of the arts every year, compared to $27 in Germany and $32 in France.’ In effect, public subsidy for the arts in the USA functions as modest seedcorn to attract private patronage and corporate sponsorship to concert halls, galleries and theatres. The NEA annual budget was always much less than that of the British Arts Council, which has since the 1940s covered a population one-fifth the size of the USA.

The debate was not really about money at all, as the more sophisticated critics of the conservative backlash have argued. Richard Bolton (1992) and Carole Vance (1992) placed the attack on public arts subsidy within a much broader right-wing ethico-political agenda fostered by groups such as the American Family Association, an agenda which had hardly been marginalised by the Reagan and Bush administrations through the 1980s and into the 1990s. To quote Vance:

In the past ten years, conservative and fundamentalist groups have deployed and perfected techniques of grass-roots and mass mobilization around social issues, usually centred on sexuality, gender and religion. In these campaigns, symbols figure prominently, both as highly condensed statements of moral concern and as powerful spurs to emotion and action. In moral campaigns, fundamentalists select a negative symbol which is highly arousing to their own constituency and which is difficult or problematic for their opponents to defend. The symbol, often taken literally, out of context and always denying the possibility of irony or multiple interpretations, is waved like a red flag before their constituents. The arousing stimulus could be an ‘un-Christian’ passage from an evolution textbook, explicit information from a high school sex-education curriculum or ‘degrading’ pornography said to be available in the local adult bookshop. In the antiabortion campaign, activists favor images of late-term fetuses or better yet, dead babies, displayed in jars. Primed with names and addresses of relevant elected and appointed officials, fundamentalist troops fire off volleys of letters, which cowed politicians take to be the expression of popular sentiment. Right-wing politicians opportunistically ride the ground swell of outrage, while centrists feel anxious and disempowered to stop it—now a familar sight in the political landscape.

(1992:108)

This is a very astute account of how authoritarian embers are fanned into the flames of draconian cultural policing in a liberal democracy, detailing the manouevres that frequently catch libertarians by surprise and often too late in the process to respond effectively. Ethico-political reaction puts enlightened sections of the community on the defensive in such a way that the only realistic tactic in response is to try to reduce the full force of the backlash. Vance, in addition, identifies two comparatively novel aspects of this ethico-politically motivated reaction with regard to the campaign against the NEA. First, there is the assault on high culture as a valid experimental space and, second, there is the claim that the actual policies proposed do not constitute censorship, which involves ‘an artfully crafted distinction between absolute censorship and the denial of public funding’ (Vance, 1992:109) that is derived from a coalescence of authoritarianism and populism with free market ideology.

The way in which the issue of ‘political correctness’ in the academy burst into widespread public debate during the early 1990s was another feature of the conservative backlash against cultural leftism. Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 book Illiberal Education was written with a grant from the American Enterprise Institute and promoted with a grant from the Olin Foundation, both right-wing organizations explicitly committed to reversing the gains of ‘multiculturalism’ in American society (Graff, 1992: 166–167). D’Souza’s inaccurate claim that Shakespeare and other members of the pantheon of ‘dead white male’ cultural superstars were being expelled from the American university curriculum reiterated similarly ill-founded claims that had already been made during the 1980s, such as, for example, Christopher Clausen’s much quoted and thoroughly unsubstantiated observation that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was being taught more widely than all of Shakespeare’s plays put together. Inspired by Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a defence of absolute value enshrined in the great works of Western culture and an attack on its relativistic enemies were thus mounted. This was not only an assault on the study of popular culture, Afrocentrism, Marxist, feminist and gay writing and criticism, but a challenge to an apparently new kind of linguistic policing that put a premium on minding one’s ‘p’s and ‘q’s and which is based upon a set of assumptions concerning the relationship between ordinary language and various forms of social and cultural oppression.

Although at bottom deadly and even deadeningly earnest, there was a good deal of humour in the debate, initiated it must be said from the Right, which may be illustrated by the American Hyphen Society’s tongue-in-cheek definitions of both the ‘correct’ term, ‘multiculturalism’, and the ‘incorrect’ term, ‘politically correct’:

multiculturalism. A broad, pluralistic social movement that, through the celebration of ‘difference’, champions a more tolerant, diverse, inclusive and realistic view of America and (in the memorable words of the New York State Social Studies Review and Development Committee) ‘the peoples who person it’. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism’ encompasses virtually the entire spectrum of views that have come to be known, not always without irony, as ‘politically correct’. Unfortunately, since reactionary critics have co-opted the term in a none-too-subtle attempt to silence the multiculti, it is no longer ‘politically correct’ to say ‘politically correct’ …

politically correct. Culturally sensitive; multiculturally unexceptionable; appropriately inclusive. The term ‘politically correct’ co-opted by the white power elite as a tool for attacking multiculturalism is no longer ‘politically correct’.

(Beard and Cerf, 1992:40, 87)

Whereas trivialisation of important matters undoubtedly occurred on both sides of the debate, Edward Said (1993:389) is right (or is it ‘correct’?) to have observed that the issue, as it emerged in the wider arena of public discussion, was rather more the product of ‘a new conservative dogmatism claiming “political correctness” as its enemy’ than resulting directly from the excesses of the cultural Left. It is also necessary, though, to appreciate that there was no smoke without fire. A certain humourless and evangelical radicalism was indeed evident on many campuses. Of much deeper significance than this, however, is the tendency to transform and displace politics in general onto an exclusively academic and cultural terrain, a phenomenon that is probably symptomatic of the comparative powerlessness of oppositional forces in the USA, instead of manifesting their decisive incursions into the power structures. Gerald Graff (1992) remarks that, in North American universities, ‘cultural studies’, which was instrumental in heightening the politicisation of culture and has done much to theorise the intellectual opposition, has become something of a euphemism for ‘leftist studies’ and, no doubt, it has been marginalised as such. In his sardonic yet even-handed commentary on the American ‘culture wars’, Hughes (1993:76) also makes an acute observation regarding political displacement: ‘in the universities, what matters is the politics of culture, not the politics of the distribution of wealth and real events in the social sphere, like poverty, drug addiction and the rise of crime’.

BECOMING USEFUL

Cultural studies is vulnerable to both hostile and sympathetic questioning on several counts.³ From the sympathetic but policy-oriented points of view discussed in this chapter, the most serious deficiency is a gul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Cultural Policy Studies
• 2 Questions of Value
• 3 From State to Market
• 4 Cultural Industries
• 5 Urban Regeneration
• 6 National Heritage
• 7 Identity, ‘Race’ and Citizenship
• 8 Censorship and Moral Regulation
• 9 Culture and the Public Sphere
• Notes
• References