A post on culture based on this review

Francis Mulhern's central argument in his book Culture/Metaculture is that, although the tradition which he calls �Kulturkritik� (of which more in a moment) and the movement or discipline now called �Cultural Studies� may appear to be almost diametrically opposed in their aims and political affiliations, they in fact exhibit a fundamental continuity at the level of form. The form is that both are metadiscourses.

Mulheren argues that �Kulturkritik� and �Cultural Studies� each appeal to a (very different) notion of �culture� to �mediate a symbolic metapolitical resolution of the contradictions of capitalist modernity�. �Kulturkritik� attempts to �spiritualize� the notion as �the higher truth of humanity or the nation�, or as some transcendent locus of value. Cultural Studies attempts to both demystify this conception of culture and to �politicize� it as �the unregarded democracy of everyday life�.

The defining aim of Cultural Studies has been �to de-mystify the presumptive authority of Kulturkritik�, that as a movement (which in some ways it is better described as than as a �discipline�) its informing aspiration has been to contest the status of the kind of �culture� laid claim to by the older trad�ition. The desire in Cultural Studies is to � be politics�, to constantly assert that what one is doing is, somehow, political, indeed more �political� than conventional politics.

Kulturkritik� denotes the revulsion from �mass society� of a mandarin elite, the appeal to an inherited, if also largely intangible, way of life or �national spirit�, most lastingly embodied in the higher artistic forms, which is seen as threatened by democracy and the popularization of taste. The polarity between �minority culture� and �mass civilization� is constitutive of the critical position occupied by this tradition.

This is a conservative construction based on an appeal to a lost Eden and a form of social virtue which actually expresses an elitist disdain for ordinary life. 'Kulturkritik� is placed firmly to the past----the first half of the twentieth century--- and is treated as a wholly discredited enterprise. It is contrasted with a progressive postmodern culture studies.

Thsi is a misreading of 'Kulturkritik�, especially the European high Marxist tradition of Gramsci, Luk�cs and Adorno, in that it downplays the way the values of �culture� are oppositional to the values associated with the control exercised by wealth and power. �Culture� signifies an ethical move, whose cultural politics� places the creative artistic and intellectual activity in a critical relation to the activities of instrumental reason. It introduces into public discussion the kinds of considerations what the instrumental and present-driven world of purely economic/political discourse habitually underplays or neglects---the quality of a mode of life.

The ethical move signifies the process of critique that addresses the moment of meaning in social relations, or the sense-making element of our practices. Critique signifies a reflexivity on that sense making, an evaluation of that process of meaning in relation to whether it helps or hinders our efforts to make our mode of life better.

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Posted by: M. Verde | November 2, 2004 1:15 AM