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Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues
Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues
Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues
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Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues

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The idea of "culture" has become central to intellectual debates since at least the end of the 1970s, with the reemergence of longstanding cultural issues becoming an indispensible part of moral and political critique. Additionally, the meaning of culture has expanded beyond its earlier, anthropological meaning to include issues of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation.

Whether informing arguments about a "clash of civilizations" or underscoring the importance of "mainstream multiculturalism," inflated notions of culture are ubiquitous, and their prevalence has generated new concerns. Criticism extends from the commodification of difference and the reification of identity to the further marginalization of outside voices. Refusing to reject the cultural shift in politics yet wholly aware of its potential dangers, the contributors to this volume propose innovative solutions and topical interventions. Seyla Benhabib conceptualizes culture as a hybrid and polyvocal system of action and signification. Nancy Fraser strives to solve the recognition/redistribution conundrum. Judith Butler deconstructs sexual and gender identities. Cornel West rejects Black Nationalism and racial reasoning in favor of a cultural democracy that unites various struggles for equality, and Axel Honneth details a normative account of social integration in terms of mutual recognition.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 14, 2012
ISBN9780231526364
Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues

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    Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique - Columbia University Press

    INTRODUCTION

    Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique

    Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller

    Mais, qu’est-ce que c’est donc un noir? et d’abord, c’est de quelle couleur?

    —Jean Genet

    THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

    The concept of culture has been subject to an unprecedented inflation in Anglophone moral and political philosophy since at least the end of the 1970s. The twilight of the cold war at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s appears to have fueled this conceptual inflation as both conservatives and progressives scrambled to make sense of what has sometimes been perceived as the reemergence of a set of long-standing cultural issues, which had been at least partially overshadowed by the block ideology of the preceding decades.¹ New social movements as well as the culture war and a series of intense debates on gender, race, sexual orientation, immigration, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, identity politics, and secularism have also surely contributed to the newly won prominence of the question of culture. It is arguable, as we will see, that this prominence expresses itself in an intensive and extensive conceptual inflation, insofar as the notion of culture has come to impress itself with increasing intensity at the same time that its meaning has been extended in unprecedented ways.

    As the anthropologist David Scott aptly explains, the notion of culture has become a nearly indispensable issue, if not the master-concept, in post-Rawlsian—or, rather, post–A Theory of Justice—moral and political theory:

    A large and growing number of Western political theorists now seem to feel compelled to take account of culture in order to pursue and sustain a critical reflection on liberalism and democracy. It now appears that fairness demands more than the neutrality offered by Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and that considerations of justice, freedom, citizenship, equality, and political community require respect for difference understood as cultural identity. Such concepts as cultural rights, multiculturalism, the claims of diversity, the politics of difference, the politics of recognition, and so on, mark the new preoccupation with culture among political theorists.²

    Nancy Fraser refers to this change as a shift in the grammar of political claims-making, and she argues that in the ‘postsocialist’ political imaginary the question of redistribution has been largely displaced by a cultural politics of recognition.³

    At the same time, the meaning of culture has been significantly extended to include an entire set of issues regarding the status of marginalized identities, ranging from ethnicity and race to religion, gender, sex, disability, and sexual orientation. "Culture," writes Seyla Benhabib in The Claims of Culture, "has become a ubiquitous synonym for identity, an identity marker and differentiator."⁴ The very notion of culture has been politically and morally distended in becoming a general concept linking together, under a single theoretical umbrella, various forms of oppression and the struggles against them, ranging from the legal battles for indigenous rights to the attempts to dismantle social stereotypes and fight against racial or religious discrimination. Benhabib summarizes this intensive and extensive inflation of the concept of culture when she writes:

    Since the late 1970s demands for the recognition of identities based on gender, race, language, ethnic background, and sexual orientation have been challenging the legitimacy of established constitutional democracies…. Whether we call the current movements struggles for recognition (Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth), identity/difference movements (Iris Young, William Connolly), or movements for cultural rights and multicultural citizenship (Will Kymlicka), they signal a new political imaginary that propels cultural identity issues in the broadest sense to the forefront of political discourse.

    Although it is difficult to determine the precise horizons of this intensive and extensive inflation of the concept of culture, which has now become part of the practical knowledge of participants in contemporary debates on moral and political philosophy, it can at least partially be indexed by the dramatic rise to fame—and infamy—of the concept of multiculturalism.⁶ To take a few pertinent examples, it is significant that the first two articles in the New York Times on multiculturalism date from the 1970s. Although fifteen articles appeared in the 1980s, it has primarily been since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that there has been a dramatic increase in the use of the term: 896 articles from 1990 through 2005.⁷ A similar trend can be found in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. Searches in Major World Publications on LexisNexis reveal the same basic tendency: 0 articles before 1970, 120 in the 1970s, 2,264 in the 1980s, and then a spectacular increase through the course of the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century.⁸ This rise to prominence is, moreover, not only visible in the press but also in book publications. Based on keyword searches, the Library of Congress includes 29 books published on multiculturalism from the 1970s, 120 from the 1980s, 995 from the 1990s, and 1,033 from 2000 to 2005. Similar trends can be confirmed through the catalogues of national libraries in Europe. Without overly conflating the quantitative success of the concept of multiculturalism with the cultural shift in politics, we can nonetheless use it as a partial index of the increasing concern with cultural issues since the 1970s.

    The rising importance of culture in politics and morality has met with numerous reactions. A number of authors have readily embraced the new use of the concept of culture as a useful notion for discussing contemporary society and politics. Generally speaking, they fall into two camps, which share in common a guiding principle: there are fundamental cultural differences that should be recognized. The conservatives maintain that it is important to acknowledge the existence of cultures as distinct entities and keep them separate in order to avoid the conflict that is inevitably produced by extensive interaction. The progressives argue for recognizing cultural difference in order to rectify patterns of discrimination based on the denigration or exclusion of underprivileged cultures. Outside these two dominant positions—which can be schematically opposed, following Benhabib, as the clash of civilizations versus mainstream multiculturalism—other authors have come to critically reflect on the newly won authority of the expanded notion of culture and the dangers inherent in the theoretical and practical framework that undergirds it. These dangers, as the following list illustrates, have often served as the basis for critiques of the idea of a clash of civilizations as well as of mainstream multiculturalism:

    •   the obfuscation of the very notion of culture due to its transformation into an imprecise—if not catch-all—concept

    •   the reification of cultural identities, which are treated as clearly delimited, natural givens rather than socially produced phenomena that are in constant mutation

    •   the evacuation of the historical dimension of cultures in favor of a myopic, presentist understanding of cultural relations

    •   the retreat of social and economic concerns in the face of the moral imperative of recognition, which does not necessarily require a structural or material transformation of society

    •   the exclusion of truly marginalized voices by an elitist, academic, and largely Anglophone or North American multicultural discourse that is so obsessed with the voice of the other that it ends up speaking in its place in order to make it heard

    •   the commodification of cultural difference in contemporary society and the risk of an underlying complicity between the politics of cultural recognition and the ideology of multinational capitalism.

    In some cases, these dangers have been used as a justification for rejecting wholeheartedly the cultural shift in politics. However, a number of thinkers have avoided such a reaction while nonetheless taking seriously various criticisms of the conceptual structures and strategies affiliated with the politics of culture. In other words, they have sought to progressively work through these problems in order to come up with more innovative and nuanced solutions, which include, but are not limited to Seyla Benhabib’s conceptualization of cultures as hybrid and polyvocal systems of action and signification, Nancy Fraser’s refusal to abandon the politics of redistribution and her stalwart dedication to solving the recognition/redistribution conundrum, Judith Butler’s deconstruction of gender and sexual identities, Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis of the social and historical formation of cultures as well as of the disciplines that study them, Cornel West’s rejection of black nationalism and racial reasoning in favor of a cultural democracy that unites various fronts in the fight for equality, Michael Sandel’s critique of the liberal conceptualization of the subject in favor of an understanding of the self as an anchored, social being, Will Kymlicka’s attempt to show the ways in which liberalism is not in fact antithetical to multiculturalism, and Axel Honneth’s partial continuation and deepening of Habermas’s communicational turn in critical theory via a detailed normative account of social integration in terms of mutual recognition.

    It is within this general framework of the critical juncture of cultural politics that we decided to organize a series of discussions with renowned intellectuals on the issues of politics, ethics, and current events. In each case we began by asking the authors to provide a retrospective account of their work to date, which serves both to introduce their writings to those who are unfamiliar with them and to provide an insider’s view of their research and its evolution for those who are. We then allowed the dialogues to unfold around a series of common themes—oppression, emancipation, recognition, culture, religion, ethics, critical theory, history, current events—with two primary goals in mind. First of all, we wanted to press the authors on their relative positions on ethics and politics, particularly regarding critical debates on the status of cultural issues. This allowed us to make the differences between the various participants in the dialogues readily apparent (which in some cases are extreme, ranging from liberalism to more or less radical forms of critical theory) in order to present the reader with a vast and motley array of positions rather than a set of minor variations rooted in a single theoretical and normative framework. Such an approach also provided us with an opportunity to question the authors on various features and implications of their work that they have yet to fully develop. Our second major goal was to have the participants in the dialogues give us a sense of their understanding of our current historical moment and the future of politics. This means that the discussions aim at being at once philosophical and topical, both intellectual and practical. It is our hope that there are both novel philosophic developments expressed by the authors interviewed and keen insights into the state of world affairs in this critical time for cultural politics.

    In order to frame the dialogues and develop our respective positions on the issues discussed, we added an opening dialogue. Our common concern with critical theory and its contribution to the issues discussed in the interviews provided the starting point for our discussion. We then structured the exchange around the major themes of the interviews in order to provide an introduction and clearly map out a number of the fundamental issues at stake. The opening dialogue also gave us the opportunity to intervene at length and develop our own set of arguments, which will help give the reader a better sense of the preoccupations at work behind many of the questions that are asked in the interviews. The central concern that emerges in the opening dialogue, and largely structures the ensuing discussions, is best framed in terms of a question: what is the role of critical theory in current debates on the politics of culture?

    THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THEORY

    The concept of culture is derived from the Latin cultura, and the term in English originally meant husbandry or the act of tending to the growth of crops or animals. As of the early sixteenth century, its meaning was extended to include human development, as illustrated by expressions such as the culture and manurance of minds (Bacon, 1605) or a culture of their minds (Hobbes, 1651).¹⁰ Through the course of an intricate and complicated evolution, it eventually came to be used as an independent noun without a complement to refer to an abstract process of development or the result thereof. Although it is impossible to give precise dates to this transformation, Raymond Williams asserts that culture as an independent noun, a process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C18 [the last period (third) of the eighteenth century] and is not common before mC19 [the middle period (third) of the nineteenth century].¹¹ A parallel but slightly staggered development is to be found in the evolution of the French term culture, whose figurative use in expressions like la culture de l’esprit dates from the mid-sixteenth century. As this use spread through the language of the Enlightenment via figures like Turgot, d’Alembert, Rousseau, and Condorcet, it came to mean not only a process of refinement and instruction but also the result of such a process. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the French began using the term as an independent noun, at approximately the same time as the emergence of the term civilization in English and civilisation in French. The French word culture was then borrowed into German around the end of the eighteenth century.

    According to the analysis provided by Philippe Bénéton, the concepts of culture and civilization had a universal status in the eighteenth century.¹² It was assumed that there was a single process of culture and civilization as well as one final state—distinct from barbarism—referred to as culture or civilization. This conception was directly linked to an important modification in Enlightenment thought. A historical spectrum of development largely replaced the ontological opposition between the savages and the civilized. The distinction was no longer based primarily on a difference of kind, but on a difference of degree: savages were simply at a primitive stage in the universal process of civilization. This historical conception, which is ultimately tied to what’s been called the modern regime of historicity,¹³ is directly related to the emergence of anthropology and ethnology, and it cannot be divorced from the process of colonization that the French would proudly refer to as a mission civilisatrice.¹⁴

    It has only been since approximately the end of the eighteenth century that cultures and civilizations have come to be spoken of in the plural. Herder’s unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) is an excellent example of this shift insofar as he attacks the idea of the development of civilization and culture as a universal, linear process leading toward a common end: European culture. This multiplication of cultures and civilizations went hand in hand with the early signs of nationalization, which according to Philippe Bénéton would intensify at the end of the nineteenth century. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias has provided a compelling analysis of this multiplication and the subsequent cultural variation in the very understanding of the concepts of culture and civilization. Moreover, he focuses on a group of authors who would later constitute one of the central theoretical reference points for Frankfurt School critical theory. He describes how the German intellectual bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries embraced and valorized the notion of Kultur—true intellectual and spiritual training or education—over and against the concept of Zivilisation, identified with the cold classicism and superficial refinement of the French aristocracy.¹⁵

    In retrospect this means that the modern concept of culture is only approximately two hundred years old. By the modern concept of culture, we mean the use of this term as an independent, abstract noun referring to a historical process, or the result thereof, which is largely identified with a national or ethnic group (which does not, of course, preclude attempts at universalizing particular cultures or civilizations). This means that rather than simply being a natural, pregiven reality, culture as an anthropological concept is in fact a social and historical product linked to what we would call modern European culture. The chronological and geographic specificity of this concept raises a myriad of crucial questions concerning the relationship between the reality of cultural practices and their perception qua cultural practices. Since addressing these questions would lead us far from our current concerns, let it suffice to say that the modern notion of culture cannot be divorced from the question of the cultures within which this notion was developed.

    With this in mind, we can now turn to one of the central concerns of this volume: the relationship between culture and the tradition of critical theory. Before exploring the various facets of this relationship, it is important to say a few words about the heritage of critical theory. It has become commonplace to identify critical theory with the Frankfurt School, and it is interesting to note in this regard that the early members of this school tended to trace the emergence of critical theory back to the nineteenth century and to intellectual developments closely tied to the conceptual evolution of culture and civilization that we have been discussing. Let us start, however, with the Frankfurt School, or more precisely with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). Officially founded on February 3, 1923, this financially autonomous institute was linked to the University of Frankfurt, which had itself been established in 1914.¹⁶ The original name of the institute, which was abandoned to avoid undue provocation, has the advantage of revealing the general orientation of its founders: Institut für Marxismus. Like Marx, the early members of the institute tended to reject idealism in the name of materialism and sought to develop a form of philosophically sophisticated social science aimed at transforming society in view of a generalized emancipation. However, this by no means necessitated accepting Marxism tel quel, but required an overall reassessment of the Marxist project.¹⁷ Since the members of the institute did not necessarily agree on all of the details of this assessment, perhaps the best way of understanding early critical theory is by outlining one of the central orientations of the intellectual leaders of this school insofar as it can be deduced from two key essays that were both published the same year (1937) in the journal serving as the hub of the institute’s activities from 1932 to 1941 (the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung): Traditional and Critical Theory by Max Horkheimer and Philosophy and Critical Theory by Herbert Marcuse.

    According to Horkheimer, who assumed the directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung in 1931, traditional theory dates from the time of Descartes and aims at establishing a universal, systematic science capable of organizing the totality of facts into a harmonious conceptual whole. It presupposes the dualism of subject and object, as well as the opposition between description and prescription, knowledge and action. This means that traditional theory purports to provide us with a neutral description of what is, thereby constituting a form of nearly immaterial knowledge divorced from action and practice. Furthermore, Horkheimer argues that this concept of theory has been naturalized to such an extent that there is little or no room for critical reflection on its own proper historicity and its inscription in the social field.¹⁸ Due to the success of the natural sciences, the underlying paradigm of traditional theory has, moreover, been adopted by the social and human sciences as the primary model for all theory. Against this overwhelming tendency, Horkheimer insists on the necessity of reinscribing traditional theory in history and revealing the ways in which the legitimation of scientific claims is ultimately rooted in the values of society. Rather than being neutral and autonomous, theory is bound up with the material development of society and its normative orientation. According to Horkheimer: The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.¹⁹ The perceived fact, Horkeimer goes on to write, is […] co-determined by human ideas and concepts, even before its conscious theoretical elaboration by the knowing individual.²⁰

    Critical theory, unlike traditional theory, comes to terms with historical inscription and denaturalizes ingrained assumptions regarding the supposed nature of theory. In particular, it dismantles two of the central dualisms of traditional theory. First of all, it jettisons the notion of an abstract subject distinct from its object of investigation:

    Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sum-total of individuals. Its subject is rather a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature. The subject is no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is the construction of the social present.²¹

    Secondly, critical theory rejects the idea of a neutral, universal truth and emphasizes the intertwining relationships between description and prescription, knowledge and action, theory and practice.²² This explains why Horkheimer ultimately identifies critical theory with an existential judgment grounded in a view of history with partial Marxist undertones:

    The critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment. To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.²³

    Herbert Marcuse had become a member of the institute in 1932, and his article Philosophy and Critical Theory shares much in common with Horkheimer’s flagship publication. He claims that the historical emergence of critical theory is linked to the development of economic materialism and the critique of philosophic idealism. Whereas philosophy had traditionally aimed at establishing the absolute foundations of being, Marcuse argues that critical theory studies the economic and political structures of specific historical conjunctures. This does not mean, however, that critical theory can be reduced to a form of positivism. On the contrary, Marcuse, like Horkheimer, rejects positivism, and he asserts that critical theory shares with philosophy the attempt to think beyond the given situation. If its utopian dimension is not entirely philosophical, it is because the conception of utopia operative in critical theory is bound to concrete material conditions rather than being linked to abstract ideas.²⁴ Critical theory, unlike abstract philosophy, ultimately seeks to make society rational by subordinating the economy to individual needs. Its fundamental objective is thus to transform the material conditions of society in view of liberating humanity.

    Based on these two outlines of critical theory, it is possible to delineate one of the central orientations of some of the key members of the early Frankfurt School. First of all, critical theory follows Marx in abandoning idealism in favor of materialism. Secondly, this materialism avoids the pitfalls of positivism by maintaining a utopian dimension and critically dismantling the naive opposition between subject and object. Thirdly, critical theory is in and of itself a practical undertaking that aims at transforming society in view of a generalized emancipation. In summary, critical theory is a materialist, utopian, and emancipatory project of social transformation that seeks to avoid the Scylla of idealism and the Charybdis of positivism by jettisoning the oppositional structuressubject/object, description/prescription, theory/practice, rationalism/empiricismupon which they depend in the name of a unique form of dialectical social science.

    This orientation—which is not a doctrine—of two of the leading members of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s cannot account for all of the work being done at that time or all of the subsequent developments of the school. However, it can serve as a valuable reference point for returning to our earlier discussion of the question of culture. It is clear, to begin with, that the first generation of the Frankfurt School partially inherited the use of the concept of Kultur that Elias analyzed in his study of the emergence of the concept in German toward the end of the eighteenth century. However, the strong normative opposition between Kultur and Zivilisation tended to be replaced by a dialectical understanding (undoubtedly due in part to the intellectual influence of the Marxist tradition as well as the ominous shadow cast by the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s) in which the deleterious effects of culture were emphasized,

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