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January 9, 2007
Okay, I've taken the quote below from Terry Eagleton's The Crisis of Contemporary Culture; his inaugural lecture as Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature delivered in Oxford back in 1992. It's relevant to what is happening now--what many call the culture wars --in a background way.
If you recall, traditionally culture was the preserve of the elite (ruling class to use an old Marxist term) whilst vocationalism (often without jobs) was the preserve of the people, and more particularly the working class. The concept of culture functioned as harmonization of our various squabbles and conflicts, including those of class; it was the terrain on which our differences could be reconciled in a transcendent unity. Culture was the very antithesis of power and the liberal university was free from the tainted discourse of politics and ideology. This traditional cultural formation is what has being undermined since the late 1960s, with the humanities in the West providing the arena of intensive political contestation.
This contestation is often interpreted as the crisis of culture which tradtionalists, as custodians of the good old days, who frame it in terms of the erosion of cultural standards, which they usually blame on the liberal-left, who have adopted deconstruction and postmodernism, rejected the “correspondence theory of truth”, politicized the univerity, and embraced nihilism as their basic philosophy.
Isn' the university meant to be an argument culture as Gerald Graf argued? Aren't students taught to argue about the issues of culture? Don't relations of power exist in a university? Shouldn't students debate the sharp conceptual division between politics and culture held by the cultural conservatives? The questions about culture cannot be abstracted from questions regarding economics and politics.
What then causes the upheaval in culture and the humanities that we have been experiencing? Eagleton's answer is different from that given by the cultural conservatives.
Eagleton says:
What is subverting traditional culture, however, is not the Left but the Right----not the critics of the system, but the custodians of it. As Bertolt Brecht once remarked, it is capitalism that is radical, not communism. Revolution, his colleague Walter Benjamin added, is not a runaway train but the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which pitches every value into question, dissolves familiar life forms, melts all that is solid into air or soap opera; but it cannot easily withstand the human anxiety, nostalgia and deracination which such perpetual revolution brings in its wake, and has need of something called culture, which it has just been busy undermining, to take care of it. It is in the logic of late capitalism to breed a more fragmentary, eclectic, demotic, cosmopolitan culture.
Advanced liberal capitalist system has come steadily to undermine its own metaphysical rationales that were grounded on its Arnoldian premises of a national culture based on Australianness. Eagleton adds:
So it is that the intellectuals of the New Right, having actively colluded with forms of politics which drain purpose and value from social life, then turn their horror-stricken countenances on the very devastated social landscape they themselves have helped to create, and mourn the loss of absolute value.
Since then we have had the conservative attack on culture as a site of pedagogical and political struggle by traditionalists (Harold Bloom and Lynn Cheney in the US, Keith Windshuttle in Australia) pointing the gun at the language of power, politics, and multiculturalism. They say that literary criticism has been replaced in the academy by cultural politics and the result is nothing less than the renunciation of the search for truth and beauty that once defined universalistic and impartial scholarship. The decline of standards and cultural collapse, the cultural conservatives say, is seen in the way that literature that has been marginalized in the university by the degrading forms of popular culture.
These cultural conservatives have no time contempt for the cultural politics of an education that fosters a new cultural "literacy" through teaching students to be critical of dominant forms of authority both within and outside of the university; and crirtical of the authority of those cultural tradtions that sanction what counts as theory, legitimate knowledge and public memory.
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Gary. Some quotes from a new essay by my favourite "philosopher".
The "modern" world is a fragmented world--full of individuals who regard their own presumed separateness and independence as "absolute", who demonstrate no profundity, and who are not moved by profundity.
In this "modern" world, human beings are becoming progressively more and more preoccupied with "self", and with all the "whatevers" than can be pursued within the reductionist framework of egoity and worldlness.
In the "modern" world, people are obsessively interested in what is "out there"--what they do with one another in the common world. If that is your disposition, you remain involved in MERE exchages of words--socializing with one another, and relating to the other aspects of the common world with which you are associated. In that case, you either refuse all involvement with religion, or else you merely make token (and,inevitably, self-involved) gestures in the direction of religion. Such is the institutionalized exotericism of what is conventionally called "religion".
The exclusive preoccupation with what is "out there" is a dispostion that is now manifested everywhere on Earth--with dreadful results. Listen to the global "daily news" of terrible violence and threats. Look at the absolute emptiness of "consumer egoity".It is madness." .....
... Mind is "artificial intelligence". Mind is the first "robot" that human beings ever made. In the usual discussion of such matters, artificial intelligence is presumed to be something generated by computers. In actuality,however, LANGUAGE is the first form of artificial intelligence created by human beings.
There is no mind. Mind is a myth. There is language--which is programmed by brains, and which, in turn, progams brains. However, there is no tangible existence to "mind" itself--absolutely none. Nevertheless, human beings identify with the "mind" AS "self", and thereby invent destiny for themselves.
Mind is an interior projection of a language-program that, in its imaginative elaboration of itself, conceives of purposes and ideas (in the realm of illusion) for which there are no corresponding physical data. Human beings are all living in a "virtual world" of mind. Human beings are, characteristically, self-identified with a "robot" of artificial intelligence.
REAL INTELLIGENCE is tacit (or intrinsically wordless) living existence......
The human mind is a facsimile machine. This "machine" merely replicates language-forms in the illusion of mind. The "machine" feeds lnguage into the computer of the illusion of mind with which people identify themselves. That illusion is who they mean when they refer to themselves--the body-mind complex, the mortal bio-form associated with the "artificial intelligence" of talk, of space-and-time "point of view", of ego-"I" constructs, of language, of language based brain, and, altogether, of ego-based and brain-based psycho-physical ideas and perceptual memories"
Where is the mind? The mind has no substantial existence. The mind is simply stored language-bits (or patterns of language and remembered perceptions) in the brain. When a particular brain dies, other replicating machines carry on the language-mind---continuing it on from one generation to the next in a beginningless and endless mummery."
Meanwhile we currently witnessing the deadly, fight to the death, wars of mind being dramatised on to the world stage. Most often being done and justified in the name of some murderous tribal, ethnic or nationalistic "god" idea.
By the way I consider the author of the second reference in your post to be utterly empty of any profundity or spiritual depth.
Look at the company he keeps.
Quadrant and the CIS.The CIS being a full on apologist for the one dimensional "culture" described in the first three paragraphs of my comment.