THE CRITICAL ACCOMPLICE: CONTRADICTION IN CULTURAL POLITICS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Jason Toynbee
In this piece I focus on anthropology’s close ally in the contemporary social sciences, cultural studies. I argue that its core concepts and drives – some increasingly shared by anthropologists – are in need of serious critique. What’s at stake is a contradiction: while cultural studies professes to have a critical politics, in fact its central ideas parallel those of neo-liberalism and may even have helped, in a small way, to sustain this phase of capitalism. The current economic and political crisis makes that easier to see. Still, it’s actually a long standing problem. So what I want to do is examine the history and dimensions of the contradiction, and then suggest how cultural studies might be re-oriented in order to overcome it, and once again provide useful resources in the struggle for emancipation. We’re certainly going to need them in the tough times ahead.
From the British perspective, in the 1970s there were two broad approaches to politics as cultural studies took off. One was critical. Best represented by Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, Roberts 1978), the book took a conjunctural approach to the issue of ‘mugging’. The argument went that in the first instance it was government, police and judiciary who promoted the idea that street robbery, perpetrated by blacks, had become a serious threat to everyday life. The media then developed this proposition and made it popular. As a result deep seated causes of social conflict, chiefly inequality, were obscured and the problem of the legitimacy of capitalism was turned into one of a moral and legal struggle against mindless violence arising from the essentially pathological condition of black/working class youth.
Although, this kind of critical work continued into the 80s (Paul Gilroy’s (1987)There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack was an excellent late example) an increasingly important trend was in a different direction, towards what I’m calling redemptive cultural studies. It has its origins at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 70s, this time in the work on youth subcultures, notably by Phil Cohen and Paul Willis. What is at stake here is the discovery of creativity in popular culture. I use ‘redemptive’ to suggest a quasi-religious notion of deliverance from damnation. But rather than through god’s mediation, in cultural studies people are delivered from oppressive social relations via their own, autonomous cultural practices. By the mid-1980s, as Gramsci is dumped and the French poststructuralists brought in, redemptive cultural studies becomes the dominant approach. Work on consumption is particularly important – the proposal being that consumption is active, creative, even liberatory.
What dimensions of redemption can we identify? First off it is achieved in the present. Cultural practices generate an autonomous zone in the here and now, which makes the notion of radical change in the future beside the point. Second, redemptive cultural politics necessarily spurns political politics (what Francis Mulhern (2000) calls ‘politics proper’) to the extant that the latter involves mobilising masses of people, and confronting the state and corporations. Culture, however, has the potential to save you from the sovereign power of these structures, and therefore from the need to struggle for control of them too. In an important sense, then, cultural studies is strongly aligned with libertarianism. The enemy is always authority per se. Third, and related to this, redemptive cultural studies privileges subjectivity and agency such that objective social structures are effaced, and the individual and what’s in her head take centre stage. Fourthly, and as a consequence of the preceding factors, cultural studies tends to be quiescent and consensual. Faced with conflict and disagreement the imperative is to recognise the value of the other’s position, arising as it always does in a redemptive cultural practice.
Crucially, there are marked parallels between these dimensions of cultural studies’ politics of redemption and the ideology of neo-liberalism:
1. The presentism of cultural studies is matched by that found in neo-liberalism which repudiates planning for the future in favour of the immediacy of the market.
2. Both are libertarian; if the enemy is (state) authority, the desideratum is maximal free choice via respectively culture and the market.
3. Each takes the individual/subject as central; for cultural studies it is a creative and autonomous subject, whereas for neolibs it is the rational choice maker in the marketplace – the two get blended in some discourses.
4. While neo-liberalism might not always appear consensual, in an important sense it thrives on agreeing to differ. Multiculturalism, for instance, fits very well into the neo-liberal agenda. So, of course, does economic difference between rich and poor.
To be clear, I’m not saying that these parallels imply bad faith on the part of cultural studies academics. There’s no question of their being closet neo-liberals themselves, and the great majority would be disgusted by that thought. But cultural studies has nevertheless become an unwitting accomplice, a critical accomplice of neo-liberal ideology. The fact that it identifies as critical matters, because in so doing cultural studies exempts itself from properly political analysis and action. By now hundreds of thousands of its students have learnt that nothing else really needs to be done because it is already being done – through the emancipatory mediation of culture, or even in cultural studies itself. By what intellectual means has such a shift taken place though?
The first theoretical move was irrealism, in other words the notion that the social world is constructed merely through discourse and culture, and that it has no independent existence. This was part of the so-called turn to language which influenced other fields of course, but which cultural studies took up with special zeal. The move did not occur straight away. In the early days cultural studies had a notion of the social which emphasised representation, but which extended beyond it. Policing the Crisis, for instance, shows the immense significance of mediation in the making of ‘mugging’. Yet the authors nevertheless pose a social world that includes structures and forces which are neither discursive, nor given to immediate experience.
However during the 80s a more thorough-going constructionism came in quite quickly, aided by English translations of the French postructuralists. These theorists provided ideas and legitimacy for the development of irrealism in cultural studies. Most commit what Roy Bhaskar (2008: 36) calls the epistemic fallacy; the reduction of questions of being to questions of knowing. One well-known formulation of this is Foucault’s (1980) ‘regime of truth’ which treats knowledge as a truth-maker, and reality as an effect of that regime. The idea that things exist apart from regimes of truth, or that science can find out about existence, disappears. With a different emphasis, but to similar effect, Derrida attacks the notion of presence, in other words the existence of subjects such that other subjects might apprehend their reality through communication. As Derrida (1991) has it, language (or what he calls ‘writing’) infinitely defers presence, rendering it as an eternal myth.
The second theoretical wrong turn was anti-essentialism. Derrida contributes to this too. His critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ is also a critique of an essential authentic subject present to itself. Meanwhile the work of Deleuze can be seen as a sustained attack on notions of permanence. Consisting as it does in singularities and assemblages everything is contingent and unstable. Thought flows across arbitrary, rhizomatic networks which constantly ‘deterritorialise’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004). In cultural studies, such ideas take on the status of a quasi-ontological position (to the extent that there is being it’s unstable, and categories are contingent), but also a crypto-normative position (flux is a good thing – although we don’t like to use normative terms like ‘good’).
Together irrealism and anti-essentialism have disabled the politics of cultural studies. Irrealism has made critique difficult because there is nothing to which culture can refer outside itself, while anti-essentialism has diverted attention away from issues of social justice, economic exploitation and inequality towards themes of fixed-ness, control (especially by the state) and identity.
We have been looking at how cultural studies ended up with such intellectual liabilities; but clearly the why question is also begged. Two conjunctural tendencies are key here. One is the rise of what Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) call the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism. This is a critique of alienation and domination to which are counter-posed creative expression and autonomy. It is represented by situationism, autonomism, and more prosaically the values of the 60s and 70s counter-culture. Boltanski and Chiapello show how the ‘artistic critique’ is absorbed by capitalism in management discourse and the labour process. But clearly it is also taken up by an emergent cultural studies, often through the mediation of the postructuralists, some of whom played an active role in the events of ’68. Here, then, we have the genealogy of those parallels between neo-liberal ideology and cultural studies which I sketched earlier on.
The other conjunctural factor which has impacted on the field is the defeat of traditional left politics, first in ’68 but then much more decisively in the 1980s when neo-liberalism effectively broke the back of the labour movement in the advanced capitalist countries. Deregulation of the corporations, repression of industrial action, together with unemployment created by high interest rates and a tight money supply damaged the ability of the labour movement to fight back. Meanwhile a new global division of labour and niche consumerism fragmented the working class as a whole, to a significant extent dissolving class consciousness. The point here is that for many left leaning intellectuals this apparent collapse of the old politics reinforced the shift toward the artistic critique and culturalism. These now promised the redemption of political defeat.
Then came the Crunch of 2008. The new crisis of capitalism shows that neo-liberalism not only isn’t working, but hasn’t been working. Most importantly, perhaps, the TINA doctrine (There Is No Alternative) suddenly gets washed away by a tidal wave of state intervention. Virtual nationalisation of the banking sector in Britain, never even mooted in the heady days of the 1945-51 Labour government, takes place with the agreement of all the mainstream, capitalist parties. In the US the first black president is elected on a mildly distributionist and dirigiste ticket in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse. And all the while the economy contracts or stagnates so that for the working class cultures of consumption are now frantically being re-written as strategies for survival. All this poses a number of challenges for cultural studies. They are not necessarily new, but they are much harder to ignore now.
Firstly, the crisis shows that cultural studies’ out and out constructionism is simply unequal to the task of analysing the present conjuncture. What we need is a workable, realist theory of the social (see for instance Bhaskar 1998 and Sayer 2000). The crisis poses a depth ontology, in that it exists not only at the level of discourse and experience, or even at the level of actual events. Crucially, it is generated at a structural level by mechanisms which cannot be immediately apprehended. The most pertinent of these structures consists in social relations of production, i.e. capitalism. You can’t see, feel, or measure these relations yet they’re real enough in their devastating consequences, as we see day by day.
Clearly causality is central to this critical realist approach. But this does not mean a reductive account which explains by regress why things happen only in terms of more basic causes – ultimately natural ones. Rather critical realism argues for causality as multiple and working in conjunction so that causes at any given historical moment tend to reinforce, refract or cancel out one another. Causal powers should also be seen as emergent in that, singly or conjointly, mechanisms can generate outcomes which are qualitatively different in kind from the mechanism itself. There are countless examples: consciousness emerging from the physiology of the brain; recognition that the system needs to be changed arising from the perception of a crisis in that system. It seems to me that something like this account of causality and emergence is going to be essential for cultural studies if it’s to rise to the challenge of the crisis, and address the questions of why it’s happening and what we can do about it.
The ontological challenge then raises the problem of epistemology. With any kind of realism there are two potential traps. One is the naïve assumption that reality makes itself apparent immediately, foreclosing knowledge as a cultural and social process. On this view the crisis just bludgeons its way into our consciousness. The other trap is absolutism, whereby I assert my certain knowledge of what reality consists in on the grounds of its perfected epistemology – as in positivism.
In this case, though, I’m not certain that the crunch has been caused by capitalist relations of production. I think it’s very likely, but I also think there are other, more properly cultural factors at work, and that in general terms the present conjuncture is marked by acute instability. I think I’m likely to find out more, and change my understanding as the crisis unfurls. For such reasons critical realists point out that a corollary to ontological realism is epistemological relativism – recognition that what we know tends to change over time and space.
This is where a reconciliation with cultural studies becomes possible. Epistemological relativism is related to theories about standpoint and situated knowledge. In other words, what and how you know things does depend on where and when you are, such that you adopt a particular frame, and get insights, according to your subject position. Often this can give your knowledge a critical edge, for example, in the way suggested by Donna Haraway (1988) in relation to feminist epistemology. Still, such privileged forms of knowledge are not guaranteed. For given the existence of reality there will always be more or less satisfactory accounts of it. Knowledge is fallible. The challenge then is to seek the best possible accounts using situated knowledge to be sure, but also universal methodologies like scientific methods and logic. In all cases the slogan should be, ‘try to make the best rational judgments about how far the knowledge represents the reality’.
I’ve posed some ontological and epistemological challenges for cultural studies. But there’s yet another big theoretical challenge which the present crisis presents – a normative one. How should we know what’s wrong and what we should be struggling for? First off, any talk of crisis shows the limits of a redemptive culturalism that is contained within relatively autonomous worlds of consumption and everyday life. Crisis forces back on to the agenda work, exploitation, the labour movement, class struggle and the issue of inequality. That’s not to say that the objects of the cultural critique disappear – namely domination, alienation, and false essentialism. Far from it. But crisis does pose the need to run the two critiques, cultural and social, together. Indeed, we surely need to pursue their complex interrelationship once again.
In what might that interrelationship consist though? If the present moment of systemic crisis has helped to produce a sense of outrage and common cause, the question is, can we find a normative theory which will serve in the longer term, and serve cultural studies as well as political movements for emancipation outside the academy. Of course such theory will be need to be assimilated to properly historical analysis. But it should also be universal in its aspirations if it’s to avoid moral relativism, and have any purchase beyond the immediate time-place.
Among the contenders there is the work of social philosophers Martha Nussbaum (2006) and Axel Honneth (2007). Both (though from quite different intellectual traditions) pose the idea that human beings essentially deserve dignity and respect, and that any social and political critique worthy of the name ought to have as its goal human flourishing. Nussbaum and Honneth are part of a larger revival of interest in theories of normativity in social theory, a tendency which cultural studies could certainly contribute to in important ways. For cultural studies also has at its core the norm of recognition, even if this is a somewhat buried norm. I mean that its politics of identity depend on the proposition that human beings ought to be recognised for what they are. A big step forward would surely be to bring this normative principle out much more explicitly, and use it to examine how politics of cultural difference and common welfare could work together.
I began this piece with a critique – a strong critique – of cultural studies, then moved on to suggest how cultural studies might respond to the challenges of the crisis with a better ontology, epistemology and normative theory. But in these last few steps I’ve also been trying to show how there are important points of rapprochement between cultural studies on the one hand, and critical realism and left-liberal social thought on the other.
I became an academic at the age of forty after being a mature student in cultural studies. The work I did back then, getting to understand the immense political significance of the popular culture I loved, was both a revelation and a homecoming. I’ve been in cultural studies ever since, and I really don’t want to alienate colleagues whose ideas have been so important for my own intellectual development. Still, in the interest of human emancipation I’m going to be blunt:
‘Relinquish the role of accomplice, cultural studies! Wake up to reality, and open out towards ideas that will help with the task of studying culture so that we might change the world. Either that, or stop pretending that you have any politics worth the name’.
REFERENCES
Bhaskar, R. (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism,
Bhaskar, R. 2008. a Realist Theory of Science,
Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso
Deleuze, J. and Guattari, F. (2004) A Thousand Plateaus,
Derrida, J. (1991) ‘Signature/Event/Context’, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds,
Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and Power’, Power/Knowledge, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf.
Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack,
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., Roberts, B. 1978. Policing the Crisis,
Harraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14/3.
Honneth, A. (2007) Disrespect: the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity.
Mulhern, F. 2000. Culture/metaculture, London: Routledge.
Nussabum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership,
Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science, London: Sage
