Making Culture, Changing Society

Tony Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415688840
• eBook ISBN: 9781136596179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Making Culture, Changing Society proposes a challenging new account of the relations between culture and society focused on how particular forms of cultural knowledge and expertise work on, order and transform society. Examining these forms of culture's action on the social as aspects of a historically distinctive ensemble of cultural institutions, it considers the diverse ways in which culture has been produced and mobilised as a resource for governing populations.

These concerns are illustrated in detailed case studies of how anthropological conceptions of the relations between race and culture have shaped – and been shaped by – the relationships between museums, fieldwork and governmental programmes in early twentieth-century France and Australia. These are complemented by a closely argued account of the relations between aesthetics and governance that, in contrast to conventional approaches, interprets the historical emergence of the autonomy of the aesthetic as vastly expanding the range of art's social uses.

In pursuing these concerns, particular attention is given to the role that the cultural disciplines have played in making up and distributing the freedoms through which modern forms of liberal government operate. An examination of the place that has been accorded habit as a route into the regulation of conduct within liberal social, cultural and political thought brings these questions into sharp focus. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, history, art history and cultural policy studies.

Part 1

Culture: veridical, material and compositional perspectives

1 After culture?

I am by no means the first to ask whether the concept of culture might have outlived its usefulness. Its value has been queried from a number of different perspectives. Adam Kuper, noting the multiplication of its uses, recommends abandoning the concept in favour of a range of more specific terms: belief, art, custom, tradition (Kuper 1999: x). This reflects a widespread tendency within contemporary anthropology to eschew the term, not least because of its relations to the entangled histories of anthropology and colonialism. Niklas Luhmann takes a similar tack, suggesting that, from the point of view of understanding the dynamics of the modern art system, culture has proved to be ‘one of the most detrimental concepts ever invented’ (Luhmann 2000: 247). Richie Nimmo (2010), stressing the entanglements between the concept and the species-centrism of Western humanism, similarly urges that we should now put it to one side if we are to respond adequately to the ecological imperative of better understanding the relations between human and non-human actors. James Clifford's assessment is more equivocal. While conceding that the concept of culture might have served its time, he also urges that whatever concept finally transcends it should preserve its ‘differential and relativist functions’ while avoiding ‘the positing of cosmopolitan essentialisms and human common denominators’ (Clifford 1988: 274–5).

I take a somewhat different approach. It is perfectly clear that there are now ways of engaging analytically with the practices that have conventionally been brought under the heading of culture that do not have much space for a concept of culture as such. This is true of the varied branches of assemblage theory and actor-network theory. These have undoubtedly stimulated new approaches to the social entanglements of cultural practices.¹ Yet none of these has had much to say specifically about culture as a general concept. More to the point, these traditions have been significant points of reference for many of those who have suggested that we jettison the concept entirely. This is true of those post-humanist theorists who, via Deleuze, claim an affiliation to what Jane Bennett calls the ‘vital materiality’ derived from Henri Bergson's work (Bennett 2010: v11). I draw strategically on these traditions in what follows. I do so, though, with a view to suggesting ways in which they might contribute to a critically renovated concept of culture that, in limiting its application to a specific set of historical processes, will sharpen its analytical purchase.

I pursue these concerns by exploring the interfaces between intellectual traditions in which the concept of culture has played a pivotal role and those more recent traditions, briefly identified above, which have been either indifferent or hostile to it. So far as the former are concerned, I focus mainly on Anglophone cultural studies and on cultural sociology as represented by Pierre Bourdieu and the work that has developed in his wake. There are significant differences between these traditions.² From the perspective of my concerns here, however, both describe a critical orbit around Kantian conceptions of culture, constantly seeking to pull away from it but without ever escaping its gravitational pull.³ That pull is exercised through different way stations: Matthew Arnold and English in the case of cultural studies, Émile Durkheim and sociology in the case of Bourdieu. Recent work has considerably weakened the hold that Kant's work has exercised over the social and cultural sciences,⁴ and I will draw on this to show how key aspects of both these traditions remain in thrall to the conception of culture as a process of collective human fulfilment that Kant proposed. For it is this aspect of the Kantian legacy that is now most in question.

There are, of course, already vast literatures exploring the relations between these cultural and ‘a-cultural’ analytical territories. Deleuze has long figured as a force for critical renovation within cultural studies and cultural sociology,⁵ yet often in ways that align his concerns with long-standing vocabularies of culture and society. Larry Grossberg, for example, argues a case for forging strong connections between Deleuze's concepts and those of cultural studies as represented by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall: between Hall's concept of conjuncture and Deleuze's concepts of milieu, territory and diagram, for example (Grossberg 2010). In sociology, by contrast, post-Deleuzeian developments in assemblage and actor-network theory have attempted to rethink the social in ways that will detach it from its Durkheimian–Bourdieusian lineage.⁶ My interests tend more in this second direction in the sense that I am less concerned to explore areas of possible rapprochement than those of dissonance between such post-Deleuzian traditions and those formulations of the relations between ‘culture’ and ‘society’ associated with cultural studies and cultural sociology.

The place from which I conduct this work is, broadly speaking, that provided by Michel Foucault's perspective of governmentality. This has been drawn on in what is now a quite extensive literature to examine how culture has come to constitute, in George Yúdice's telling phrase, an expedient resource for the governance of contemporary populations (Yúdice 2003). I develop this aspect of Foucault's work by interpreting what little Foucault had to say directly about the concept of culture in the light of his more general methodological precepts. These will provide two key building blocks for the approaches to the interpretation and analysis of culture I shall propose. The first of these derives from what Thomas Osborne calls the ‘“veridical” twist’ that Foucault brings to the concept of culture (Osborne 2008: 70). Insofar as it comprises a set of resources involved in the governance of populations, culture operates through the distinctive regimes of truth and forms of expertise that it instantiates. The second building block derives from the methods Foucault deploys in historicising objects of analysis that are commonly taken to be universal. By aligning these two perspectives I shall suggest that culture is best interpreted as a historically bounded set of truth practices that are implicated in regulating the ‘conduct of conduct’ in specific ways through their operations as parts of assemblages that are differentiated from, and ordered in specific relations to, the social and the economy. I shall, though, want to part company with Foucault so far as his accounts of Kant and the Enlightenment, and their implications for his understanding of the relations between culture and critique, are concerned. In his susceptibility to the legacy of post-Kantian aesthetics, Foucault sometimes remained caught within the ‘machinery of culture’ rather than providing a critical purchase on that machinery.

These are matters that I pursue in greater depth in due course. My more immediate concern is to amplify the veridical perspective I derive from Foucault and to identify its relationship to his procedures for historicising objects of analysis. I shall then return to elaborate more fully why the concept of culture now seems to be increasingly ‘unhinged’, in the sense of being unable to meet the conditions required to secure its coherence, and to outline the ways in which I propose to address these conditions.

Historicising culture

I have already noted that the concept of culture does not figure prominently in Foucault's theoretical vocabulary. There is, indeed, only one place where he accords the concept serious attention, and even then he is wary of it. While ‘having trouble with the word and putting it in inverted commas’, Foucault allows, in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, that it might be possible to speak of ‘culture’ provided that four conditions are met. First, there has to be a set of values ‘with a minimum degree of coordination, subordination and hierarchy’ and, second, these values have to be ‘given both as universal but also as only accessible to a few’ so as to produce ‘a mechanism of selection and exclusion’. The third condition is that ‘a number of precise and regular forms of conduct are necessary for individuals to be able to reach these values’, and the fourth – the ‘veridical twist’ that Osborne identifies – is that the techniques for acquiring those values have to be taught, transmitted and validated as parts of the operation of a ‘field of knowledge’ (Foucault 2005: 179).

This is quite an extensive definition capable of spanning, for example, the exclusionary logic of the ‘spiritual exercises’ of Greek, Hellenestic, Roman and medieval Christian philosophies that Foucault addresses in this lecture series and, later, in The Care of the Self (Foucault 1988). It can also encompass Max Weber's concern with the relations between Calvinism and the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (Weber 2001) and Pierre Bourdieu's account of the role played by institutions of cultural legitimation in validating and selectively transmitting those techniques of appreciation that permit only selective access to the ‘universal’ values of the Kantian aesthetic (Bourdieu 1984). It is, however, the role of culture in distributing the capacity for certain forms of self-governance unequally across different sections of the population, rather than its role in producing a specific ethic of economic conduct or in organising class divisions, that gives Foucault's concept of culture its analytical and political coherence. For it is the capacity for self-governance that qualifies those who (claim to) possess it to govern those whom they judge to lack it.

Of course, these concerns come together at crucial junctures, and I shall explore these at appropriate points in my discussion. Nonetheless, Foucault's point of entry into them is distinct insofar as the relations between governors and governed do not turn on the single axis of economic divisions but, depending on the circumstances, may revolve primarily around divisions of age, gender, sexuality, coloniser/colonised or status (freeman/slave, for example). This has considerable advantages over those concepts of culture (like Bourdieu's), which, having identified its role in terms of a primary articulation across economic or class relations, are then obliged to account for its operation across other relations – of gender or ethnicity, for example – in accordance with the logic of the ‘sociological supplement’ in which other considerations are tacked on as added ‘variables’. Foucault's approach does not suppose, look for or require a primary axis of differentiation for the exercise of power. His formulations also have advantages over Jacques Rancière's assessment of the role that philosophical and aesthetic practices play in organising distinctions between governors and the governed (Rancière 2003). For they do not, as does Rancière, limit the operation of those practices to the social division between occupations – a limitation whose significance I consider in Chapter 7. Nor do they limit the sphere of culture to that of the aesthetic. They clearly include it, but only if understood as one amongst many forms of cultural expertise.

I do not, though, think that Foucault's brief comments on the subject constitute a ready-made peg on which to hang a theory of culture. To the contrary, while a useful point of departure for such a theory, they also stand in the way of its development. They do so, moreover, precisely because of what might, at first sight, seem to be their chief advantage. This consists in their pliability in seemingly offering the basis for a general account of how knowledge practices connect with social processes that might be aligned with post-Durkheimian interpretations of culture as a set of trans-historical and trans-societal processes focused on the role played by the symbolic in the organisation of social life. Yet this would be to transform Foucault's work into a sociology, which it is surely not. To the contrary, we can hear in Foucault's hesitancy to embrace the concept of culture and, equally, in his failure to ever engage with Bourdieu's work,⁷ his reluctance to get tangled up in the Durkheim–Bourdieu lineage that, at the time he was writing, defined the intellectual trajectory of French cultural sociology.⁸ For it is precisely the universalism of the Durkheimian conception of the symbolic that runs against the grain of what I take to be the more valuable legacy of Foucault's work: the radical historicality of his methodological perspective.

He insists on this quite trenchantly in his course of lectures on the birth of biopolitics where he takes issue with the kind of procedure informing his later – and as we have seen, tentative – definition of culture. Rather than start from universals like the state, the people, subjects, sovereignty or civil society as ‘an obligatory grid of intelligibility’ for the analysis of concrete governmental practices, Foucault argues, analysis should start with such practices and, ‘as it were, pass these universals through the grid of these practices’ (Foucault, 2008: 3) rather than vice versa. Distinguishing his procedures from those of sociology, history and political philosophy, Foucault takes issue with the ways in which the relations between historically concrete governmental practices and conceptual universals are usually understood within these disciplines. Bringing their methods together under the heading of ‘historicism’, which he interprets as an intellectual practice that takes such universals as a given and sets out to see how history variably inflects or alters them, he urges an inversion of the methodological orientations this involves:

Historicism starts from the universal and, as it were, puts it through the grinder of history. My problem is exactly the opposite. I start from the theoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying: Let's suppose that universals do not exist. And I then put the question to history and historians: How can you write history if you do not accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign and subjects?

(3)

Foucault gives an example of how to answer this question when, in the final lecture in the series, he disputes the intelligibility of the political–philosophical conception of civil society as ‘a primary and immediate reality’ or as ‘an historical-natural given’ that always functions ‘in some way as both the foundation of and source of opposition to the state or political institutions’ (297). It is, to the contrary, Foucault argues, a product of modern governmental technologies. This does not mean that its ontological status is in any way diminished; it is not, Foucault insists, a mere construct. Its status is rather that of a ‘transactional reality’: that is, a reality that, far from constituting at any particular historical moment the variable form of a set of institutions and practices that are external to the state, is a product of those specifically self-limiting forms of modern liberal government that produce civil society as a historically novel interface in the relations between governors and governed.

Culture is not among the universals Foucault suggests should be historicised in this way. My point, though, is that it should be. For its emergence, as a concept and as a set of historically operative realities, is coeval with those that he does name – the state, the people, subjects, sovereignty, civil society – and, is moreover, clearly tangled up with these as well as with the emergence of another set of ‘conceptual universals’: nature, economy and society. I propose, then, to treat it in the same way: that is as a historically specific ‘transactional reality’ that has its locus in specific governmental practices and technologies and which has to be considered in terms of its relations to a similar historical specification of these other ‘universals’ if its modus operandi, spheres of action and effects are to be properly understood.

It is from this perspective that I want to look now at the key difficulties that currently beset the concept of culture. To dwell on these, though, might seem a little paradoxical at a time when culture is increasingly invoked as a key connecting term across the social sciences and humanities while also figuring increasingly prominently in public, policy and political discourses: the endless urging of the need for ‘cultural’ solutions to be sought where social divisions seem intractable, the importance of the ‘cultural economy’ and so on. The difficulties I am concerned with, however, operate at a different level and derive, ultimately, from culture's relationship to the other ‘conceptual universals’ it has been most closely connected to. We are now accustomed to the project of a ‘sociology without society’ (Urry 2000) as the sociological concept of society has increasingly been replaced by variant formulations of the social as a historical effect of regulatory and governmental practices (Joyce 2002) or as the outcome of specific processes of assembling (Latour 2005). The economy is similarly increasingly understood as a product of relatively recent processes of ‘economisation’ (Caliskan and Callon 2009, 2010) while Bruno Latour has identified the challenge of what it might mean to govern the world ‘now that Nature as an organising concept (or, rather, conceit) is gone’ (Latour 2010: 479). What are we now to make of the concept of culture when the key terms in relation to which its distinguishing qualities have typically been defined are increasingly interpreted as the outcomes of historical processes of assembling that have called their earlier universal status into question?

There are, viewed in this light, three crucial suppositions that have underlain the concept of culture that these developments call into question by dismantling the intellectual coordinates that have informed its definition. The first consists in the supposition that culture might be identified as a specific realm of practices, which is distinct from both the social and the economy and which acts on these in terms of the properties that distinguish it from them. The second is that specific forms of cultural practice might be distinguished from others to provide the basis for a distinctive cultural politics that depends on the production of particular kinds of free and self-conscious subjectivities. The third supposition is that culture is to be defined in terms that restrict it to – indeed, are constitutive of – a uniquely human set of practices, thus distinguishing it from nature and, more generally, effecting a division between human and non-human actors. I shall, then, look more closely at each of these suppositions. In doing so I also indicate how the veridical and historical perspectives that I have briefly outlined might serve to refashion a more viable interpretation of the concept of culture.

Culture in question (i): after representation

The first assumption, to restate it briefly, holds that culture might be identified in terms of properties that distinguish it from economic and social practices. This is the assumption of the tradition of French cultural sociology, running from Durkheim through to Bourdieu, whose central concern is with the role of the symbolic in the organisation of social life.⁹ It is also the assumption of the Anglophone traditions of cultural studies in which culture is defined as the realm of meaning-making practices to be considered in terms of their conditioning by, and consequences for, the conduct of economic and social practices. It is finally, and more generally, the logic underlying the ‘cultural turn’ that has drawn on both of these traditions to propose an active role for culture in the construction of social and economic life. This role is exercised through the influence that cultural representations exert on how social and economic agents view and interpret their own actions, identities and relations to one another.

These variant formulations are called into question by the challenge that has been posted by ‘post-representational’ perspectives to the very enterprise of defining culture as a reality of a particular type (made up of the symbolic, meanings, representations) that is distinct from economic or social realities. Following in the wake of Foucault's work, particularly his concept of the dispositif, and seeking a counter-heritage in the work of Gabriel Tarde, the traditions of actor-network a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• Part 1: Culture: Veridical, material and compositional perspectives
• Part 2: Anthropological assemblages
• Part 3: Governing through freedom: Aesthetics and liberal governance
• Part 4: Habit and the architecture of the person
• Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Index